Understanding Working Memory to Improve Scaffolding

 

In Chapter 4 of Rigor by Design, Not Chance, Karin Hess talks about the use of scaffolds to support students as they engage with complex learning tasks and texts.  Hess makes it clear that scaffolds are not the same as differentiation, an important distinction because I think that many educators use the terms interchangeably. While differentiation is about offering students a different task to show their learning, scaffolding “doesn’t change the rigor of the task, but it can reduce the demands on students’ working memory during learning” (Hess, 2023, p. 72).

Scaffolding can be done in many ways; importantly, high-quality scaffolds are also good teaching practices, such as encouraging peer to peer discourse or breaking complex tasks into smaller bits. Hess identifies four ways a teacher might scaffold a rigorous task. These include

·         Teacher and peer scaffolding. These can be understood as intentional times for learners to hear from and gather “help” from teacher or peers. This might include working in small groups, referring to a teacher’s word wall or experiencing a teacher’s think aloud. What matters here is that the student can access what I often call the “brain trust” of the classroom – that is, benefit from the thinking of others. (By the way, I remind students they have to make deposits sometimes too!).

·         Content Scaffolding. In this scaffold, the content is shared in a more accessible form before students are asked to grapple with its full complexity. Text sets are a great example; a teacher may introduce a simple video about the new learning before asking students to engage with the text.

·         Task scaffolding. In this scaffold, complex tasks and related skills are broken down to allow students to move through them in a purposeful sequence designed to prepare them for the complex task. I think about the best practice for teaching writing as a process and the number of times I have seen ELA teachers have students begin first with an outline or a writing thesis statement.

·         Materials scaffolding. This allows students to see predictable patterns. Teachers may use graphic organizers, for instance, to make explicit to the students the pattern of a poem or the structure of a speech.

In the section “What scaffolds to use?” really asks important questions, because teachers need to be clear about the scaffolds they use, as well as their purpose. In many districts with struggling student achievement scores, the teachers often provide scaffolds that are inappropriate because they fundamentally remove the rigor from the task, which means that the scaffolds become differentiation. Teachers need to consider where the challenges in a lesson may lie and build scaffolds to address those challenges.

I think one important idea here is that all students can benefit from scaffolds. While some students struggle more with working memory than others, the fact remains that complex tasks might tax even students with strong skills and capacity. I once taught at a private school that seemed to think that “more is more” when it comes to rigor; that is, they saw rigor as asking students to perform more tasks, and often with less support. I found that it made learning unnecessarily stressful for these students and might hide the potential of some students. For instance, I had a student with a documented working memory disorder, and many teachers did not want him to be enrolled in the advanced coursework. I insisted that was an inappropriate criterion for placement. While the student needed accommodation for his challenges (extra time on the AP exam), he actually scored a 4 on the national exam. Looking back on this, I wonder how many students end up in similar circumstances without parents who could advocate for them or educators who might see past the “more is more” myth of rigor.

In its Factsheet “Working Memory: The Engine for Learning,” the International Dyslexia Association reported that working memory is “crucial for learning and refers to the ability to hold and manipulate information over short periods of time” (IDA, 2020). Working memory relies on many components, including verbal and visual-spatial memory “stores” that hold information. The working memory helps us resist distractions and remain focused on the task at hand. Importantly, the working memory is tasked with managing, manipulating, and transforming information from short-term to long-term memory, serving as the go-between as students dive into a task.

A weak working memory offers incredible challenges for learners. For example, children with math learning disorders often have pervasive weaknesses across memory components, causing errors such as lagging in their ability to “store and retrieve number combinations and facts” (IDA, 2020). Weak memory also contributes to reading difficulties, such as poor decoding and encoding.

Importantly, while we cannot necessarily speed up one’s working memory, teachers can create learning situations that reduce the demands on it, supporting learning and achievement of all learners. Scaffolds become an important way to build those learning contexts.

Returning to Hess’ work, I am led to consider the reasons she gives for scaffolds. These include:

·         Deepening content knowledge and big ideas

·         Facilitating executive function and applications of skills and processes.

·         Supporting language and vocabulary development.

In reading these reasons from Hess and considering the IDA article, I am led to consider the importance of being precise in what rigorous tasks may ask of our students. Without scaffolds, the rigor is not about the content knowledge or big ideas, but a students’ gaps in vocabulary or language development or poor executive functioning. In the end, without meaningful scaffolds, teachers are ultimately assessing components of a students’ cognitive profile that have absolutely nothing to do with what we want them to learn.

 

Hess, K. (2023). Rigor by Design, Not Chance. ASCD.

International Dyslexia Association. (2020). Fact Sheet: Working Memory: The Engine for Learning. Dyslexia.org. https://dyslexiaida.org/working-memory-the-engine-for-learning/