In the video clip, Dan Nicholls, Year Five teacher at The Park School, demonstrates how carefully planned visual, verbal, and written scaffolds support learning for all pupils, but particularly those with SEND and those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Tom Colquhoun, Director of Somerset Research School, explains how this practice exemplifies one of the EEF’s ‘five-a-day principles’ for high-quality teaching, with a spotlight on scaffolding.
The video shows how collaborative planning can enable teachers and teaching assistants to:
- Reduce cognitive load
- Provide small, manageable steps for pupils who need it
- Support language development
- Develop independence.
But scaffolding is not just for pupils, teachers need it too. Habit change in teaching is complex. A research synthesis by Sims et al. (2020) highlights how teacher behaviours become automatic over time, habitual, especially under pressure. This makes deliberate change difficult without structured support.
This is where the EEF’s Effective Professional development guidance report provides support. The report highlights the importance of building knowledge, motivating staff, developing teaching techniques and embedding practice so that new, more impactful practices become ‘just what we do’. This clip offers just that: modelling in context, opportunities for reflection and prompts to plan next steps.
It’s a scaffold for developing your scaffolding.
Find out more:
Hobbiss, M., Sims, S., & Allen, R. (2020). Habit formation limits growth in teacher effectiveness: A review of converging evidence from neuroscience and social science. Review of Education, 9(1), pp. 3 – 23. Available at: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10112132/1/Habit%20formation%20limits%20teacher%20effectiveness_accepted.pdf