Instructional Scaffolds

     When you were learning to read do you remember the teacher asking you questions like, does that make sense? Or, maybe you remember them reminding you to look at the pictures and the words together.  Well these types of questions and comments are all important instructional scaffolds that teachers use to help their students expand their learning.
     Four of the most useful scaffolds, according to Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher are:
1. Questioning to check for understanding- by asking elicitation, elaboration, clarification, divergent, heuristic, and inventive questions
2. Prompting cognitive and metacognitive work- by prompting background knowledge; process or procedural knowledge; using models, templates, or frames; and reflective knowledge
3. Cueing student's attention- by visual cues, verbal cues, gestural cues, physical cues, and environmental cues
4. Providing direct explanations and modeling- when the student still does not understand or needs more help after trying the other scaffolds

     When I first started reading about these different types of scaffolds I thought that there would be no way that I would be able to use all of these in trying to teach a lesson, but after learning more about the different scaffolds I found that they are actually things that are very easy to incorporate into a lesson and some of them are natural questions that you would ask students even if you did not know they were part of an instructional scaffold.  For example, asking a student who the main character of a story was is a natural question to ask a student when you are having them tell you about something that they read, and that question also falls under the first scaffold.

Do you think these scaffolds would be easy to incorporate into a lesson?
Would you use these scaffolds while you are teaching?