Scaffolding The Writing Task Itself

In my previous blog, I discussed the importance of scaffolding leading up to the writing task itself, focusing on techniques like rehearsal of content, wait time, and notetaking.

These strategies help students prepare mentally and organisationally for writing. However, once students are ready to write, we then face a new challenge – guiding the them through the actual writing process.

Despite the fact that our students may now have ideas and notes through our pre-writing scaffolds, they may still struggle to transform this thinking into coherent, structured writing.

Students often struggle with organising their thinking and maintaining a clear focus for their writing. This stage of writing can be particularly challenging for students who lack confidence or have limited experience with extended writing tasks (i.e. KS1).

To tackle these issues, supporting pupils with the structure of writing is immensely beneficial. A scaffolded structure helps break down a writing task into more manageable steps, providing clear guidance at each step.

By providing this structure, it not only helps pupils to organise their thinking, but to understand the overall structure of their writing.

A scaffolded structure reduces the cognitive load associated with managing multiple aspects of writing simultaneously. Consequently, pupils are more likely to produce coherent and well-developed written work.

Let’s consider what these scaffolds for structure and organisation could like:

1. Modelling

Modelling is the instructional strategy where we demonstrate a task to students, showing them exactly how to complete it successfully.

Demonstrate each stage of the writing process by showing modelled examples. Show students how to approach each phase and the kinds of questions to ask themselves. This can be done by thinking aloud as you model an example yourself.

Be conscious that you are an expert and pupils are novices – make sure not to skip steps that you yourself have automated (e.g. using a capital letter, using conjunctive adverbs).

• Graphic Organisers

A graphic organiser is a visual tool that helps students organise and structure their ideas in a clear and logical manner.

Crucially, graphic organisers help pupils to visualise how pieces of knowledge link together. This helps them to organise their thinking and, indirectly, their writing.

For example, if pupils are doing a piece of writing to compare how the NUWSS and WSPU campaigned for suffrage, a Venn diagram can be used to show similarities and differences between them.

When children are then tasked with writing a comparison of their approaches, they have seen how this information can be organised: through similarities and differences.

• Writing Frames

A writing frame is a scaffold that provides a clear framework for writing. It offers a predetermined organisational structure and reduces cognitive load for the learner – they no longer need to think about structure and can instead focus on the content itself.

For learners who struggle to organise their thinking or who have not yet learned writing conventions, writing frames are particularly useful.

In addition to providing a structure, a writing frame also helps to break information learnt into more manageable chunks.

What a writing frame looks like is contingent on the type of writing the learner is being tasked with, but the thing that all writing frames should have in common is how to make the structure of a specific type of writing explicit.

• Sentence Stems

A sentence stem provides the learner with the beginning of a sentence to help them construct their writing.

The idea behind them is that it guides student thinking in the right direction.

For example, if we stick with the Suffragettes example above, we could use something like this:

‘The NUWSS campaigned differently by _______________________’

This helps the learner to include contrasting information. Using the Venn diagram they have seen earlier, they know they need to pick a piece of information that was not in the overlapping part of the circles.

It is paramount that these scaffolds are gradually removed as pupils become more competent and independent at writing – if we continue to use them again and again, pupils become reliant on them and will not be thinking independently.