What if we don’t need to reinvent the wheel?
If you’ve spent much time in the pedagogy world, you’ve likely heard talk of “scaffolding” major assignments. The idea can feel a bit worn out, something on the back of everyone’s mind but not at the forefront of our emerging challenges.
I want to suggest otherwise.
Small-scale, low-stakes, sequenced activities allow students to build gradually toward large requirements, and to receive instructor feedback along the way. It’s a basic strategy, but in my view, it has a great deal to offer contemporary conversations in higher education.
Why Scaffold Now?
For one thing, scaffolding can target skills, practices, and habits that we want students to learn for themselves rather than outsourcing to AI.
Proponents of AI integration insist that it will not replace critical thinking, independent problem-solving, and embodied learning, and that these remain essential to responsible use. But this can only be the case if we now redouble our efforts to teach those unaided skills.
If everyone assumes students will pick them up on their own—or in someone else’s class—can we really expect this form of intellectual activity to be reproduced indefinitely?
Moreover, highly structured courses can foster a greater sense of belonging through more equitable learning outcomes. Research shows that “distributing” learning across different times and contexts improves all students’ performance, while having disproportionate impacts on first-generation students and underrepresented groups.1
How to Scaffold Now?
Here are just a couple examples, shared with permission, of Notre Dame faculty using high-structure activities to help students discover and implement the tools they need for success.
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Elizabeth Capdevielle in the University Writing Program spends a day of class on a project management activity to help first-year writing students complete a research paper on time. Students are often overwhelmed by competing deadlines at the end of the semester, and many have never written such an involved piece.
Capdevielle presents a shared Google Doc on a screen in front of the class with a column for “What I need to do” and one for “What needs to happen in my life.” Students first identify tasks like “annotate two more sources” or “revise my conclusion paragraph” and then record strategies like “read between lab and dinner” or “go to the gym an hour earlier so I can write tonight.” These are organizational skills that graduate students and faculty have internalized but many undergraduates need to acquire.
They are also writing skills, so why not spend time teaching them in a writing class? I adapted this activity for my own students, and several confirmed that it helped to salvage their papers.
- Faculty in the First-Year Engineering Program assign a semester-long project with multiple milestones, including different design iterations and multiple drafts of the final report. Program Director Andrew Bartolini says that structures like this often emerge from a kind of reverse-engineering, with faculty analyzing their own workflow and turning those steps into a course design.
This class is an exemplary case of distributed learning. It helps students understand that successful designs and reports in real-world contexts are iterative and responsive to feedback. Scaffolding also allows faculty to assign more challenging projects, as Bartolini notes, supporting the idea of structure as more than an “intervention” for students who struggle—it’s a practice that improves academic outcomes across the board.
- I, too, incorporate as much scaffolding as possible to help my first-year students distribute the writing process across different media and environments. Borrowing from the rubber duck debugging common in software development, I have them record themselves “talking out” their ideas to a pet, a toy, etc., without notes, and submit their audio file to me. Several students discovered their thesis statement in real time; as one put it in her third take, “Okay, I think I finally figured out what I am trying to say!”
There is no replacing the satisfaction and even joy of that kind of breakthrough. We owe our students opportunities to engage their minds and bodies in the process of genuine learning.
Faculty like Capdevielle and Bartolini have brought home to me that good scaffolding is achievable and beneficial for students across many classroom contexts. This is as true in today’s higher education as it has ever been.
Kyler Schubkegel is a graduate associate at Notre Dame Learning’s Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence and is pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University.
1 Hogan, Kelly A. and Viji Sathy. Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom. West Virginia University Press, 2022.