[Week 8] Scaffolding

Scaffolding is of particular interest to me because it seems, to an extent, to be very similar to my primary method of instruction in the classroom. As an instrumental music teacher, the learner task is exceedingly complex, and requires the connection of physical motor skills to aural processing and identification, which then must both connect to intellectual reasoning. Failure rate of tasks is 100%, no person succeeds on their first attempt. But ultimately, the goal is to fade the highly detailed, direct instruction into scaffolding, and, hopefully, to fade the scaffolding altogether. "My goal," I used to tell my students, "is to make it so that you don't need me."

Looking over the reading, I see that I did not spend much time on meta-cognitive scaffolding, but heavily used the other three. I'm not entirely sure that my instruction would count as scaffolding, since I never set out to make my classroom a place for inquiry based learning. This begs a question - to what extent should scaffolding be different from direct instruction? My initial thought is that the scaffolding seems to be less oriented to success/failure and more toward 'what you don't know'/'what you need to know.'

What do you think? How does scaffolding compare with detailed instruction for physical tasks?