Scaffolding

Students, faculty, and business partners eager to participate in PBCB learning environments often need support in taking on a new approach to the teaching and learning process. We have discovered in our PBCB implementations a number of supports needed by these learning communities. Central to supporting PBCB environments is the concept of scaffolding.

Taken from Vygotsky's concept of intellectual development (1978), scaffolding is the support a learner might receive from a more capable peer or adult that allows the learner to achieve a higher level of skill or understanding than would be possible for the learner to achieve alone. Scaffolding is support that is contingent on where the learner is on some developmental progression (developing content understanding, developing collaboration skills, developing presentation and communication skills, etc.).

Scaffolding can take many forms. The form taken should be contingent on what the learner needs in order to move forward and achieve a higher level of skill, with that support and until the next level is internalized by the learner and can be enacted without support. When a skill is emerging, scaffolding may need to be intensive. Actually guiding the learner through an entire skill sequence may be needed and can be achieved by guided participation; modeling the skill; making explicit each step and why it is needed; making the cognitive activity and reasoning explicit; etc. When the learning is less fragile, a simple prompt may be all that is needed to go to the next level of performance. Such prompts may be verbal reminders or contextual reinstatetments. Again, the learner's particular place on some continuum will determine which is appropriate.

In both intensive and simple scaffolding, helping the learner know what to notice is implied. Between simple and more intensive scaffolding also lies a continuum of possible scaffolding tools.

We have started a list of support needed for each of the following: students, faculty, business partners, and a community engaged in PBCB approaches.

WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED - COP:

• Adopt communication tools to establish support information with others working to reform IT education
• Continually build the relationshipbetween educators and the business partners to heighten the support for educational reform
• Develop a system of CSS projects as a guide path for future partnerships
• Pursue the creation of on-line forums for CSS story-sharing and brainstorming
• Enlist learning researchers to enhance evaluation efforts, information gathering, and focus for the community of practice

• Recognize the IT businesscommunity for participation in the CSS partnership; in helping support educational reform; and in enlisting other business partners
• Encourage faculty who recognize needed changes in teaching and learning practices to address IT industry expectations
• Provide innovative professional development opportunities for faculty seeking to enhance their effectiveness in preparing IT professionals
• Formally recognize faculty achievements in CSS projects
  
• Support structural development efforts and systemic change needed to enhance an infra structure that supports CSS and the development of adaptive expertise

• Produce a systematic plan for development of assessment tools for instructors for both content learning and problem solving capabilities, and for learning research purposes to reveal the nature of the learning found in CSS classrooms
• Generate a set of assessment practices to describe learning of complex cognitive and interpersonal skills
• Develop formative assessment tools for pacing and monitoring learning
• Utilize all CSS project participants in the assessment process
• Develop tools to measure adaptive expertise

• Continue to refine and identify issues to make the business partnership beneficial to all
• Integrate student technical skill and business skills in the IT curriculum
• Develop a plan to manage skills learning across courses and across time
• Collaborate with the business partners to develop best practices for navigating the CSS problem
• Recognize that evidence of learning will serve both business and
  CSS goals