An Exercise In Scaffolding: The Early Application of a Method Continuously Proven Effective

Scaffolding is a term originally reserved only for construction, meaning the temporary wooden structure used to give workers access to higher floors when building. In education, the word refers to a more show-and-learn type process. In this blog specifically, I will expand on its use as a tool that uses prior knowledge to illuminate new concepts.

Effective use of the English language is all around us. Specific concepts with foreign names make it seem as if only intellectuals are privy to rhetorical tools, when in reality they are as abundant as music or a simple argument between friends. That lyric where your favorite band reversed the order of the words in the preceding line? That's chiasmus. The way your buddy just used his broken wrist to convince you to hold his books? An apparently effective appeal to pathos. Do these people know that they are implementing higher level language devices with ease? Perhaps, but it is probably safe to say they do not know there is some complicated term learned in a college English course to describe it. Even the average person is, to some extent, a master of the language they speak. They have an arsenal of lingual weapons, just not the awareness to use them whenever effective - only sometimes. So when my professor stepped up to our first class of the year and made us do a seemingly simple exercise, I knew there had to be another motive.

Much of rhetoric includes understanding how different words and word combinations produce effects on people. Calling somebody fun rather than enjoyable can completely shift the assumed perspective towards the person. The group exercise I participated in class had us assigning adjectives to different people, and then later trying to guess the type of person the adjectives described. As people who have long since learned and practiced the English language, we could pluck words from our mind without being fully conscious of the effect that each word had. Once that became more obvious to us, it was simple to identify rhetoric and how we were already effective users of it. Seeing teaching like this assures me of a fortunate future in the class; this form of scaffolding has time and time again been shown to be successful, and, with yet another tally in the win column, I am sure we are about to see it many more times throughout the year.