It's Not Scaffolding, If You Never Take It Down
by Jack Farrell
Consultant Teacher
Conejo Valley Unified School District
[Editor's note: I wrote this article in 2004 after the realization, based on dozens of hours of observation, that the scaffolds erected in most classrooms were permanent in nature.]
One particular term in educational jargon has received wide circulation of late, especially in discussions of reading and reading strategies. The literature is replete with references to scaffolding the learning, as in building a support system for learners that will facilitate the mastery of a particular skill, often related to reading and reading comprehension. I am intrigued by the term and its metaphorical origin and possible implications. I have encountered it in oral and written contexts for the past several years, and have been told that it was popularized by Vygotsky in his research on learning. However, scaffolding, in a metaphorical sense, has a long history, which I have been able to trace back to the New Criticism and its labor of love with T.S. Eliot’s inscrutable “Wasteland,” a poem which never seems to fully exhaust the mental faculties of any graduate seminar in American literature.
In his article entitled “The Poetry of T.S. Eliot,” first published as part of the Principles of Literary Criticism in 1926, I.A. Richards, by way of an attempt to explain the absence “of any coherent intellectual thread upon which the items of the poem are strung,” makes the following argument:
"The only intellectual activity required takes place in the realisation of the separate items. We can, of course, make a ‘rationalisation’ of the whole experience, as we can of any experience. If we do, we are adding something which does not belong to the poem. Such a logical scheme is, at best, a scaffolding that vanishes when the poem is constructed. But we have so built into our nervous systems a demand for intellectual coherence, even in poetry, that we find a difficulty in doing without it. " (North, pp. 170-171)
Richards’ use of the term here, a temporary structure, perhaps a rationalization, external to the poem, but necessary to intellectually grasp it, is completely consistent with its contemporary educational usage and quite instructive for our purposes. The use of a scaffold to facilitate learning is consistent with the didactic nature of instruction and appears an unavoidable pedagogical tool, which our brains are hard-wired to employ in order to make sense of difficult and abstract ideas.
Miriam Webster gives us the following definition on its website:
Main Entry: scaf·fold
Pronunciation: 'ska-f&ld also -"fOld
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Old North French escafaut, modification of (assumed) Vulgar Latin catafalicum, from Greek kata- cata- + Latin fala siege tower
Date: 14th century
1 a : a temporary or movable platform for workers (as bricklayers, painters, or miners) to stand or sit on when working at a height above the floor or ground b : a platform on which a criminal is executed (as by hanging or beheading) c : a platform at a height above ground or floor level
2 : a supporting framework
The etymology from the Latin and Greek, a “siege tower,” and, certainly definition 1b: “a platform on which a criminal is executed (as by hanging or beheading),” are a bit terrifying, but even these definitions point toward the creation of a structure for temporary use, which is consistent with the main definition, “a temporary or movable platform for workers,” and the secondary definition: “a supporting framework.” In the classroom, the workers are the learners, and the teachers design and erect scaffolds for temporary student use. But therein lies the problem!
As a consultant teacher I have spent countless hours observing the practice of beginning teachers in my district, most of whom are products of the latest educational theories and quite adept at scaffolding learning and talking knowledgeably about it. I have also scheduled observation days where my beginning teachers witness veteran teachers in their own version of scaffolding learning and the results have been much the same. The scaffolding is erected, but it is never taken down. To continue with the metaphor, a building is constructed with the scaffolding permanently attached. Educators build supports systems for learning, but they never take them down.
At some point, you have to ask what the end result of education is. I would posit that the end result is an independent learner, who has the skill to know where, and how, to locate the answers to his questions, and who is also a self-starter. If this is indeed the end result, then all pedagogy should point this direction. I would further posit that the end result of permanent scaffolding is a dependent learner who must be externally started and who will seek a teacher or surrogate to answer all his questions.
A decade after I. A. Richards, Cleanth Brooks, in his own attempt to solve the mysteries of the Wasteland, updated slightly this sense of scaffolding to unlock the puzzles of poetry:
"I prefer not to raise here the question of how important it is for the reader of the poem to have an explicit intellectual account of the various symbols, and a logical account of their relationships. It may well be that such rationalization is not more than a scaffolding to be got out of the way before we contemplate the poem itself as a poem. But many readers (including myself) find the erection of such a scaffolding valuable – if not absolutely necessary – and if some readers will be tempted to lay more stress on the scaffolding than they properly should, there are perhaps more readers who will be prevented from getting at the poem at all without the help of such a scaffolding." (North, p. 185)
Brooks here acknowledges that the scaffolding is not only necessary for some readers, but may, in fact, be perpetually necessary to make any sense of the poem at all. At this point, of course, it ceases to be scaffolding, and simply takes the place of the poem; the criticism replaces the art. If the scaffolding becomes permanent, for some at the graduate level, for a work of art as complex as Eliot’s Wasteland, then might it also become mortared to the building it erects for primary and secondary students in multiple disciplines representing myriad concepts? And is there a danger in that?
In his Poetics, Aristotle, rather inductively, examined the extant drama and generated a description of the elements he saw common to these plays. The results were both his well-known theory of tragedy, with its high-born hero undergoing a fall through a tragic flaw which simultaneously instills in the audience a sense of pity and fear, as well as his three unities, of time and place and action. Over the centuries, his description of Greek drama became a prescription for future western dramaturgy, leading to the ridiculous constraints of the well-made play. The action must take place in real time [in the manner of the Fox television show “24 Hours”] in a place one could travel to in 2 hours, with a corresponding unity of plot. And it was not until the 20th century that Arthur Miller, in his preface to Death of a Salesman, was able to expand the boundaries of the tragic hero, to add Willy Loman, a poor traveling salesman, to a list which, heretofore, contained only the likes of Oedipus, Macbeth, Othello and Hamlet. Aristotle’s observations became western dogma, to the detriment of drama for some 2,000 years. What transpired with Aristotle’s theories becomes an object lesson for current pedagogy. A good idea is offered somewhat descriptively, perhaps even tentatively, and soon is written prescriptively. Pedagogy becomes dogma and the quiver, which should contain many arrows, becomes restricted to a few which must be shot first.
I use this example not to indict western literary scholarship; on the contrary, the path from innovation to dogma is a well-worn one. I use it as an object lesson. We should be on-guard against institutionalizing any attractive theory, especially in education, where continuous assessment of the needs of the learner should drive instructional decisions. There should be no default strategies. To return to the metaphor: all scaffolding should be temporary. Never erect a platform for learning without a simultaneous strategy for dismantling it as soon as the learner can stand on his own. Assess relentlessly for independence.
I would like to offer up some examples of permanent scaffolding. Madeline Hunter is often credited with formulating the 7-step lesson plan. I would assert that any lesson plan design is a piece of scaffolding whose purpose is to support the beginning teacher in embedding the cognitive steps in conceiving of, and presenting, such a lesson. But in many areas of the educational world, this lesson design has been canonized, offered an imprimatur by the educational establishment. Is there any value in a secondary student being subjected to an anticipatory set 6 hours in a row times 180 days of school? The 7-step lesson is one possible design, out of many, and will work well occasionally, especially when it creates a nice fit between the needs of the student and the content of the learning. The master teacher, having embedded the cognitive steps in multiple lesson conceptions, should certainly be free to craft a lesson which fits no particular design. The lesson may, in fact, be a singularity.
Another piece of scaffolding mortared permanently to the building is the day’s agenda posted on the front board. There are administrators who will write up a teacher who does not have his daily agenda up on the day of his observation. While posting an agenda serves well for many meetings and lessons, as an advance organizer to cognitively prepare for and guide the learning, it is as well a scaffold that should be designed for temporary use. It does not work in all situations, especially when the lesson design calls for a more inductive approach. An inquiry lesson can be utterly spoiled by the steps involved being posted in advance. Some teachers relish the students not knowing exactly where they are going during a given class period. The absence of an agenda, in this particular case, perfectly suits the learner’s needs.
A wonderful example of this problem is a language arts lesson dealing with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130. This sonnet demands an inductive approach. For Shakespeare to achieve his effect, which is really the point, and for the teacher to meet his goal, which is a happy confluence of needs, the students must see the sonnet first and wrestle with its fascinating imagery and notions, without the teacher, or the textbook, “connecting to his prior knowledge,” or an agenda forecasting the nature of the learning. This sonnet is discovery learning at its best in language arts.
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 is as follows:
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red.
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun,
If hairs be wires, then black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks.
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound.
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by Heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
Nearly all students have some conception of Shakespeare as a poet or dramatist. Calling on this prior knowledge, which normally consists of overblown language from emotion racked characters, and something to do with tortured lovers, most students are stunned, bewildered, appalled, or, quite commonly, a mixture of these and other emotions, in response to this poem. Since the imagery is so stark and accessible, few students have any difficulty understanding what Shakespeare is saying. A good question to start them writing or thinking is, “what does Shakespeare’s mistress look like?” The better follow-up question is “Is Shakespeare’s mistress beautiful, homely, or something in-between?” This question moves them from recounting specific details in the poem to generalizing off these details. Invariably a small cadre within the class concludes that she is homely on the outside, but beautiful on the inside, and they try to feel good about this interpretation, although most females admit they would not like their boyfriends to think of them in this way and would certainly not like to receive such a poem. It often takes considerable questioning from the teacher and intense focus on the ending couplet to turn the sonnet on its head by exposing its ironic tone. And it is certainly better if the students can move there on their own. But, even if they cannot, they should have to do the hard thinking, even if it stalls and leaves them lost.
This is an assignment in British Literature, normally found in 11th or 12th grade textbooks, and eventually, a student or two might postulate that the target of the sonnet is not Shakespeare’s mistress at all, but his rival, or fellow, poets, who Shakespeare cleverly accuses of hyperbole by countering with his own gritty realism. No matter how much in love with your girlfriend you are, she walks upon the ground. She does not really float through the air like a goddess. The ardent passion of Francesco Petrarch and Dante Alighieri, who popularized the courtly love sonnet, had become so conventionalized by the English Renaissance that Shakespeare felt the need to mock it with the whimsy of this anti-Petrarchan sonnet. The better students begin to realize that there may not even have been a girl in Shakespeare’s mind when he wrote this piece of mockery, just as there may not have been a girl in mind for the sonneteers he mocks. It is really the conventions that are under assault and Shakespeare wants to impress his fellow poets with his wit and not anger them with his malice. After 129 sonnets, Shakespeare was taking a break to have a little fun with the form.
With the right class and a little luck, this can be one of the best discovery lessons of the year. The reason I detail it here is that the latest textbook writers, heeding the call to scaffold learning and connect to students’ prior knowledge, have front-loaded all the necessary information to spoil any chance for intellectual discovery on the part of the student. They have always spoiled things with the questions they write at the end of literary pieces. Now they have moved this pernicious material in front of the poem or story or essay. Here is the way Sonnet 130 is introduced in the newest version of the Holt, Rinehart, Winston series:
"This sonnet ridicules the fashionable, exaggerated metaphors some of Shakespeare’s fellow poets were using to describe the women they loved: Your eyes are suns that set me on fire, your cheeks are roses, your breasts are snowballs. Such metaphors, known as conceits, are traceable to Petrarch, but by 1600 they had become, through overuse, tiresome or laughable. (Note that the word mistress in this poem simply meant “girlfriend” in the Renaissance.)" (Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1997, p. 229)
Let me re-iterate. This passage, supplied by the editors of the textbook, PRECEDES the poem. On the surface this should be evidence of a contempt on the part of textbook writers for the intelligence, curiosity and ingenuity of high-school upper-classmen, if it is necessary to front-load such crucial information. But, sadly, it is not contempt that motivates them. They are merely responding to the latest prescriptive educational theory that calls for the activation of prior knowledge. The paragraph that precedes the poem then becomes the prior knowledge the student will link to while reading the poem. This is educational theory run amuck and scaffolding which should never have been erected.
I will offer one final example of permanent scaffolding. One of the hottest strategies in use concerning reading comprehension is what is termed the “read-aloud.” Typically, the teacher reads to the class from material the students do not have in front of them and which is written at the instructional level for the class, that is, the majority of the class could not read this material with satisfactory comprehension without the support of a teacher, or aide or parent. There is strong research about the efficacy of this strategy. It models good reading habits, especially if it is paired with another strategy called a “think-aloud”, wherein the teacher pauses to discuss the thought process attendant to reading comprehension, for instance questioning the text or predicting where the text will go. One strong argument in favor of the read-aloud is that the teacher can move through challenging material and, over the course of the year, read perhaps as many as 6-8 books to students that they would not have read on their own. But there are drawbacks to this strategy. Often this material is not in front of the students. They are not following along with the teacher in their own text. While they may enjoy the books and retain essential information, the actual growth in their own reading skill is minimal, especially the longer the strategy is employed. I am not arguing that you cannot learn this way; the oral model is deeply ingrained in the western educational system. I am arguing that the pay-off in independent reading skill is rather minimal. There are likely to be a number of students in any given class who could master this material independently. How much more valuable would it be for these students to do so, rather than to be passively read to?
I would further argue that the read-aloud is a scaffolding device and, as such, should be a targeted strategy, the result of a needs assessment, and should be for temporary student use. Use the read-aloud the way you should use any other scaffold, to temporarily support student learning. Test constantly for independence and remove the scaffold as soon as you can. Since it is a targeted strategy, it may not be necessary to ever use it with the entire class, since reading levels differ as markedly in the classroom as any other testable skill. If it is used with the whole class, it should be done sparingly, to begin a chapter or unit, for instance. The students should be reading independently as soon as possible. Continue to support those who cannot.
The read-aloud is a worthwhile scaffold, but its popularity has made it permanent in many classrooms where teachers read to their students daily for the entire school year. The scaffold is erected, but never taken down. It has become another prescribed educational strategy, and it violates what I posited as the goal of education, to produce independent learners who are self-starters. In order to promote independence, the scaffold must come down in a timely way.
The teacher training programs have multiple methods classes. Student teachers are exposed to a variety of classroom strategies. There is current research, based on meta-analysis, about which strategies show the largest gain in student achievement. Even veteran teachers travel to weekend workshops and summer institutes in search of the latest strategies. Education does not suffer from a dearth of strategies. But there is a problem, which is two-fold. Most beginning teachers and many veteran teachers are weak on entry-level assessment, where the student’s level of mastery can be evaluated and particular strategies chosen for targeted use. The second half of the problem deals with the strategies themselves. Most are scaffolds which should be chosen for targeted and temporary use. They too often become default strategies and a permanent part of the way a given class learns. And this brings to mind the image of the siege tower from the origin of the word scaffold. Strategies are used for siege learning and rotated as necessary to re-engage and re-focus students drifting from task. Many of the strategies assume a disengaged and reluctant clientele and are employed more to seduce the bored than to scaffold the concept.
And this brings us finally to definition “1b : a platform on which a criminal is executed (as by hanging or beheading).” Why would a platform used for public execution be called a scaffold? In small towns throughout Europe and America, a public execution was an infrequent event. The platform was a scaffold because it was built specifically for each execution and then taken down. It was only when cities became larger and crime proliferated that the platforms became permanent. They no longer were scaffolds in the true sense, though the name lived on. In somewhat of a metaphorical leap, educational scaffolds have become permanent and the name has stuck as well. We still refer to them as scaffolding, even when we never take them down. Does it stretch the metaphor too far to see students, intellectually dead, hanging from these permanent platforms?
REFERENCES
From Principles of Literary Criticism (1926; rpt. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), pp. 289-95, as reprinted in The Wasteland, T. S. Eliot, ed. Michael North, A Norton Critical Edition, 2001, pp. 170-171
North, Michael, ed., The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot, A Norton Critical Edition, 2001, reprinted from Principles of Literary Criticism (1926; rpt. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), pp. 289-95
Elements of Literature, Sixth Course, Literature of Britain, Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1997, p. 229
© Jack Farrell, Conejo Valley Unified School District, 2004
One particular term in educational jargon has received wide circulation of late, especially in discussions of reading and reading strategies. The literature is replete with references to scaffolding the learning, as in building a support system for learners that will facilitate the mastery of a particular skill, often related to reading and reading comprehension. I am intrigued by the term and its metaphorical origin and possible implications. I have encountered it in oral and written contexts for the past several years, and have been told that it was popularized by Vygotsky in his research on learning. However, scaffolding, in a metaphorical sense, has a long history, which I have been able to trace back to the New Criticism and its labor of love with T.S. Eliot’s inscrutable “Wasteland,” a poem which never seems to fully exhaust the mental faculties of any graduate seminar in American literature.
In his article entitled “The Poetry of T.S. Eliot,” first published as part of the Principles of Literary Criticism in 1926, I.A. Richards, by way of an attempt to explain the absence “of any coherent intellectual thread upon which the items of the poem are strung,” makes the following argument:
"The only intellectual activity required takes place in the realisation of the separate items. We can, of course, make a ‘rationalisation’ of the whole experience, as we can of any experience. If we do, we are adding something which does not belong to the poem. Such a logical scheme is, at best, a scaffolding that vanishes when the poem is constructed. But we have so built into our nervous systems a demand for intellectual coherence, even in poetry, that we find a difficulty in doing without it. " (North, pp. 170-171)
Richards’ use of the term here, a temporary structure, perhaps a rationalization, external to the poem, but necessary to intellectually grasp it, is completely consistent with its contemporary educational usage and quite instructive for our purposes. The use of a scaffold to facilitate learning is consistent with the didactic nature of instruction and appears an unavoidable pedagogical tool, which our brains are hard-wired to employ in order to make sense of difficult and abstract ideas.
Miriam Webster gives us the following definition on its website:
Main Entry: scaf·fold
Pronunciation: 'ska-f&ld also -"fOld
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Old North French escafaut, modification of (assumed) Vulgar Latin catafalicum, from Greek kata- cata- + Latin fala siege tower
Date: 14th century
1 a : a temporary or movable platform for workers (as bricklayers, painters, or miners) to stand or sit on when working at a height above the floor or ground b : a platform on which a criminal is executed (as by hanging or beheading) c : a platform at a height above ground or floor level
2 : a supporting framework
The etymology from the Latin and Greek, a “siege tower,” and, certainly definition 1b: “a platform on which a criminal is executed (as by hanging or beheading),” are a bit terrifying, but even these definitions point toward the creation of a structure for temporary use, which is consistent with the main definition, “a temporary or movable platform for workers,” and the secondary definition: “a supporting framework.” In the classroom, the workers are the learners, and the teachers design and erect scaffolds for temporary student use. But therein lies the problem!
As a consultant teacher I have spent countless hours observing the practice of beginning teachers in my district, most of whom are products of the latest educational theories and quite adept at scaffolding learning and talking knowledgeably about it. I have also scheduled observation days where my beginning teachers witness veteran teachers in their own version of scaffolding learning and the results have been much the same. The scaffolding is erected, but it is never taken down. To continue with the metaphor, a building is constructed with the scaffolding permanently attached. Educators build supports systems for learning, but they never take them down.
At some point, you have to ask what the end result of education is. I would posit that the end result is an independent learner, who has the skill to know where, and how, to locate the answers to his questions, and who is also a self-starter. If this is indeed the end result, then all pedagogy should point this direction. I would further posit that the end result of permanent scaffolding is a dependent learner who must be externally started and who will seek a teacher or surrogate to answer all his questions.
A decade after I. A. Richards, Cleanth Brooks, in his own attempt to solve the mysteries of the Wasteland, updated slightly this sense of scaffolding to unlock the puzzles of poetry:
"I prefer not to raise here the question of how important it is for the reader of the poem to have an explicit intellectual account of the various symbols, and a logical account of their relationships. It may well be that such rationalization is not more than a scaffolding to be got out of the way before we contemplate the poem itself as a poem. But many readers (including myself) find the erection of such a scaffolding valuable – if not absolutely necessary – and if some readers will be tempted to lay more stress on the scaffolding than they properly should, there are perhaps more readers who will be prevented from getting at the poem at all without the help of such a scaffolding." (North, p. 185)
Brooks here acknowledges that the scaffolding is not only necessary for some readers, but may, in fact, be perpetually necessary to make any sense of the poem at all. At this point, of course, it ceases to be scaffolding, and simply takes the place of the poem; the criticism replaces the art. If the scaffolding becomes permanent, for some at the graduate level, for a work of art as complex as Eliot’s Wasteland, then might it also become mortared to the building it erects for primary and secondary students in multiple disciplines representing myriad concepts? And is there a danger in that?
In his Poetics, Aristotle, rather inductively, examined the extant drama and generated a description of the elements he saw common to these plays. The results were both his well-known theory of tragedy, with its high-born hero undergoing a fall through a tragic flaw which simultaneously instills in the audience a sense of pity and fear, as well as his three unities, of time and place and action. Over the centuries, his description of Greek drama became a prescription for future western dramaturgy, leading to the ridiculous constraints of the well-made play. The action must take place in real time [in the manner of the Fox television show “24 Hours”] in a place one could travel to in 2 hours, with a corresponding unity of plot. And it was not until the 20th century that Arthur Miller, in his preface to Death of a Salesman, was able to expand the boundaries of the tragic hero, to add Willy Loman, a poor traveling salesman, to a list which, heretofore, contained only the likes of Oedipus, Macbeth, Othello and Hamlet. Aristotle’s observations became western dogma, to the detriment of drama for some 2,000 years. What transpired with Aristotle’s theories becomes an object lesson for current pedagogy. A good idea is offered somewhat descriptively, perhaps even tentatively, and soon is written prescriptively. Pedagogy becomes dogma and the quiver, which should contain many arrows, becomes restricted to a few which must be shot first.
I use this example not to indict western literary scholarship; on the contrary, the path from innovation to dogma is a well-worn one. I use it as an object lesson. We should be on-guard against institutionalizing any attractive theory, especially in education, where continuous assessment of the needs of the learner should drive instructional decisions. There should be no default strategies. To return to the metaphor: all scaffolding should be temporary. Never erect a platform for learning without a simultaneous strategy for dismantling it as soon as the learner can stand on his own. Assess relentlessly for independence.
I would like to offer up some examples of permanent scaffolding. Madeline Hunter is often credited with formulating the 7-step lesson plan. I would assert that any lesson plan design is a piece of scaffolding whose purpose is to support the beginning teacher in embedding the cognitive steps in conceiving of, and presenting, such a lesson. But in many areas of the educational world, this lesson design has been canonized, offered an imprimatur by the educational establishment. Is there any value in a secondary student being subjected to an anticipatory set 6 hours in a row times 180 days of school? The 7-step lesson is one possible design, out of many, and will work well occasionally, especially when it creates a nice fit between the needs of the student and the content of the learning. The master teacher, having embedded the cognitive steps in multiple lesson conceptions, should certainly be free to craft a lesson which fits no particular design. The lesson may, in fact, be a singularity.
Another piece of scaffolding mortared permanently to the building is the day’s agenda posted on the front board. There are administrators who will write up a teacher who does not have his daily agenda up on the day of his observation. While posting an agenda serves well for many meetings and lessons, as an advance organizer to cognitively prepare for and guide the learning, it is as well a scaffold that should be designed for temporary use. It does not work in all situations, especially when the lesson design calls for a more inductive approach. An inquiry lesson can be utterly spoiled by the steps involved being posted in advance. Some teachers relish the students not knowing exactly where they are going during a given class period. The absence of an agenda, in this particular case, perfectly suits the learner’s needs.
A wonderful example of this problem is a language arts lesson dealing with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130. This sonnet demands an inductive approach. For Shakespeare to achieve his effect, which is really the point, and for the teacher to meet his goal, which is a happy confluence of needs, the students must see the sonnet first and wrestle with its fascinating imagery and notions, without the teacher, or the textbook, “connecting to his prior knowledge,” or an agenda forecasting the nature of the learning. This sonnet is discovery learning at its best in language arts.
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 is as follows:
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red.
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun,
If hairs be wires, then black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks.
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound.
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by Heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
Nearly all students have some conception of Shakespeare as a poet or dramatist. Calling on this prior knowledge, which normally consists of overblown language from emotion racked characters, and something to do with tortured lovers, most students are stunned, bewildered, appalled, or, quite commonly, a mixture of these and other emotions, in response to this poem. Since the imagery is so stark and accessible, few students have any difficulty understanding what Shakespeare is saying. A good question to start them writing or thinking is, “what does Shakespeare’s mistress look like?” The better follow-up question is “Is Shakespeare’s mistress beautiful, homely, or something in-between?” This question moves them from recounting specific details in the poem to generalizing off these details. Invariably a small cadre within the class concludes that she is homely on the outside, but beautiful on the inside, and they try to feel good about this interpretation, although most females admit they would not like their boyfriends to think of them in this way and would certainly not like to receive such a poem. It often takes considerable questioning from the teacher and intense focus on the ending couplet to turn the sonnet on its head by exposing its ironic tone. And it is certainly better if the students can move there on their own. But, even if they cannot, they should have to do the hard thinking, even if it stalls and leaves them lost.
This is an assignment in British Literature, normally found in 11th or 12th grade textbooks, and eventually, a student or two might postulate that the target of the sonnet is not Shakespeare’s mistress at all, but his rival, or fellow, poets, who Shakespeare cleverly accuses of hyperbole by countering with his own gritty realism. No matter how much in love with your girlfriend you are, she walks upon the ground. She does not really float through the air like a goddess. The ardent passion of Francesco Petrarch and Dante Alighieri, who popularized the courtly love sonnet, had become so conventionalized by the English Renaissance that Shakespeare felt the need to mock it with the whimsy of this anti-Petrarchan sonnet. The better students begin to realize that there may not even have been a girl in Shakespeare’s mind when he wrote this piece of mockery, just as there may not have been a girl in mind for the sonneteers he mocks. It is really the conventions that are under assault and Shakespeare wants to impress his fellow poets with his wit and not anger them with his malice. After 129 sonnets, Shakespeare was taking a break to have a little fun with the form.
With the right class and a little luck, this can be one of the best discovery lessons of the year. The reason I detail it here is that the latest textbook writers, heeding the call to scaffold learning and connect to students’ prior knowledge, have front-loaded all the necessary information to spoil any chance for intellectual discovery on the part of the student. They have always spoiled things with the questions they write at the end of literary pieces. Now they have moved this pernicious material in front of the poem or story or essay. Here is the way Sonnet 130 is introduced in the newest version of the Holt, Rinehart, Winston series:
"This sonnet ridicules the fashionable, exaggerated metaphors some of Shakespeare’s fellow poets were using to describe the women they loved: Your eyes are suns that set me on fire, your cheeks are roses, your breasts are snowballs. Such metaphors, known as conceits, are traceable to Petrarch, but by 1600 they had become, through overuse, tiresome or laughable. (Note that the word mistress in this poem simply meant “girlfriend” in the Renaissance.)" (Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1997, p. 229)
Let me re-iterate. This passage, supplied by the editors of the textbook, PRECEDES the poem. On the surface this should be evidence of a contempt on the part of textbook writers for the intelligence, curiosity and ingenuity of high-school upper-classmen, if it is necessary to front-load such crucial information. But, sadly, it is not contempt that motivates them. They are merely responding to the latest prescriptive educational theory that calls for the activation of prior knowledge. The paragraph that precedes the poem then becomes the prior knowledge the student will link to while reading the poem. This is educational theory run amuck and scaffolding which should never have been erected.
I will offer one final example of permanent scaffolding. One of the hottest strategies in use concerning reading comprehension is what is termed the “read-aloud.” Typically, the teacher reads to the class from material the students do not have in front of them and which is written at the instructional level for the class, that is, the majority of the class could not read this material with satisfactory comprehension without the support of a teacher, or aide or parent. There is strong research about the efficacy of this strategy. It models good reading habits, especially if it is paired with another strategy called a “think-aloud”, wherein the teacher pauses to discuss the thought process attendant to reading comprehension, for instance questioning the text or predicting where the text will go. One strong argument in favor of the read-aloud is that the teacher can move through challenging material and, over the course of the year, read perhaps as many as 6-8 books to students that they would not have read on their own. But there are drawbacks to this strategy. Often this material is not in front of the students. They are not following along with the teacher in their own text. While they may enjoy the books and retain essential information, the actual growth in their own reading skill is minimal, especially the longer the strategy is employed. I am not arguing that you cannot learn this way; the oral model is deeply ingrained in the western educational system. I am arguing that the pay-off in independent reading skill is rather minimal. There are likely to be a number of students in any given class who could master this material independently. How much more valuable would it be for these students to do so, rather than to be passively read to?
I would further argue that the read-aloud is a scaffolding device and, as such, should be a targeted strategy, the result of a needs assessment, and should be for temporary student use. Use the read-aloud the way you should use any other scaffold, to temporarily support student learning. Test constantly for independence and remove the scaffold as soon as you can. Since it is a targeted strategy, it may not be necessary to ever use it with the entire class, since reading levels differ as markedly in the classroom as any other testable skill. If it is used with the whole class, it should be done sparingly, to begin a chapter or unit, for instance. The students should be reading independently as soon as possible. Continue to support those who cannot.
The read-aloud is a worthwhile scaffold, but its popularity has made it permanent in many classrooms where teachers read to their students daily for the entire school year. The scaffold is erected, but never taken down. It has become another prescribed educational strategy, and it violates what I posited as the goal of education, to produce independent learners who are self-starters. In order to promote independence, the scaffold must come down in a timely way.
The teacher training programs have multiple methods classes. Student teachers are exposed to a variety of classroom strategies. There is current research, based on meta-analysis, about which strategies show the largest gain in student achievement. Even veteran teachers travel to weekend workshops and summer institutes in search of the latest strategies. Education does not suffer from a dearth of strategies. But there is a problem, which is two-fold. Most beginning teachers and many veteran teachers are weak on entry-level assessment, where the student’s level of mastery can be evaluated and particular strategies chosen for targeted use. The second half of the problem deals with the strategies themselves. Most are scaffolds which should be chosen for targeted and temporary use. They too often become default strategies and a permanent part of the way a given class learns. And this brings to mind the image of the siege tower from the origin of the word scaffold. Strategies are used for siege learning and rotated as necessary to re-engage and re-focus students drifting from task. Many of the strategies assume a disengaged and reluctant clientele and are employed more to seduce the bored than to scaffold the concept.
And this brings us finally to definition “1b : a platform on which a criminal is executed (as by hanging or beheading).” Why would a platform used for public execution be called a scaffold? In small towns throughout Europe and America, a public execution was an infrequent event. The platform was a scaffold because it was built specifically for each execution and then taken down. It was only when cities became larger and crime proliferated that the platforms became permanent. They no longer were scaffolds in the true sense, though the name lived on. In somewhat of a metaphorical leap, educational scaffolds have become permanent and the name has stuck as well. We still refer to them as scaffolding, even when we never take them down. Does it stretch the metaphor too far to see students, intellectually dead, hanging from these permanent platforms?
REFERENCES
From Principles of Literary Criticism (1926; rpt. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), pp. 289-95, as reprinted in The Wasteland, T. S. Eliot, ed. Michael North, A Norton Critical Edition, 2001, pp. 170-171
North, Michael, ed., The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot, A Norton Critical Edition, 2001, reprinted from Principles of Literary Criticism (1926; rpt. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), pp. 289-95
Elements of Literature, Sixth Course, Literature of Britain, Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1997, p. 229
© Jack Farrell, Conejo Valley Unified School District, 2004