Teaching assistants can play a vital role in supporting teachers and helping every pupil to succeed.
However, when they are deployed to work with pupils who are struggling the most, the support they provide can sometimes be counterproductive.
If pupils become reliant on the help of a teaching assistant, this can inadvertently create dependence, rather than fostering the independence needed to tackle challenging classroom tasks.
It’s for this reason that the new Education Endowment Foundation recommends that TAs work to “scaffold learning and to develop pupils’ independence”. This might seem obvious, but it’s not easy to do consistently well.
There will be occasions when pupils need rescuing from the deep water of a difficult task. In these cases, rather than acting like lifeguards, we want teaching assistants to play the role of the swimming instructor, building the confidence and skill that will allow pupils to struggle less often.
Steps to better scaffolding
So, what does this look like? Take the example of students writing an essay in history. If they get stuck, a teaching assistant acting in “lifeguard mode“ might offer them an answer, or quickly rewrite a sentence, to help them keep pace with the rest of the class.
Although well meaning, this type of assistance is not helping students to work things out for themselves and contributes to a sense of “learned helplessness”. It teaches students already at risk of struggling to simply give up and allow the TA to do the hard thinking for them.
The EEF guidance provides an alternative approach: a ”scaffolding framework” that I have routinely observed TAs use to make the subtle but vital shift from encouraging dependence to fostering independence. This framework outlines three strategies that can make all the difference:
1. Clueing
Hint in the right direction but resist telling students the answer. For example, in geography, asking ”what biome with low rainfall did we talk about earlier?”
2. Prompting
Provide encouragement to draw upon a useful strategy. For example, for a pupil writing an essay, prompt them to look back at their plan to find ideas that will help them to continue writing.
3. Modelling
Demonstrate effective independent learning strategies for pupils who don’t have enough knowledge to simply be reminded of one. For example, in Year 1 maths, model answering a similar multiplication task by grabbing counters or cubes and grouping them into equal sets.
These steps may seem simple, but the key is to use them consistently. This is actually easier said than done; it’s natural for a TA to jump in and help, so it can go unnoticed by the teacher, and even the TA themselves.
Offering professional development time to allow teachers and TAs to work collaboratively to embed new routines will likely be beneficial here. Happily, small tweaks to practice can shift behaviour in big ways. For instance, practising how to prompt and then step away for a short time can help to build a new habit for the TA, the teacher and the pupil, too.
In the long term, more clueing, prompting and modelling will ensure fewer pupils drift into deep waters and struggle.
Focusing on reducing support for struggling pupils may appear paradoxical but if it is managed with care, this can build the all-important independence that all learners need to thrive.
Alex Quigley is the author of Why Learning Fails (And What To Do About It)
