Text Strategies for Human-Centered Scaffolding

Scaffolding in education is a powerful instructional strategy that supports students as they progress through learning new concepts, much like physical scaffolds support construction workers. Emphasizing human connection and agency within the scaffolding structure may increase motivation and help students understand appropriate AI use.

Incorporate Peer Interaction into Assignments

Peer interactions facilitate active learning and connections that can humanize the learning process, bolster engagement, and invite students to bring their humanity into their learning.

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Look for opportunities like social annotation, discussions, and peer feedback that can spark authentic conversation about course concepts as well as peer-to-peer accountability. Consider creating assignment structures that reward engagement throughout the learning process.

Use AI as a Collaborator

Sample Prompt: Please help me create some scaffolding for this assignment in my Introduction to Humanities course. I am especially interested in low-stakes opportunities for students to connect with one another to humanize the assignment.

Provide Formative Feedback at Multiple Steps

Specific, individualized, and encouraging feedback can help you build trusting relationships with students, encourage them to persevere, and create buy-in for assignments.

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Use formative feedback to create personalized learning pathways. Try embedding feedback from previous assignments to create instructions uniquely suited to each student's learning journey. Alternatively, you can have students select areas for improvement based on previous feedback.

Use AI as a Collaborator

Sample Prompt: Please personalize this assignment for a student who has struggled with professional presentation in previous assignments.

Encourage Reflection and Meta-Cognition

Incorporating reflective activities at various points can help students connect to the purpose of learning (and their own effort) as well as the learning process. Teaching students to think about their thinking and learning can be a powerful way to encourage their agency.

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Encourage students to make personal connections to the course material and to use reflective activities to demonstrate self-awareness and awareness of the learning process.

Use AI as a Collaborator

Upload an assigned article or video to an LLM like ChatGPT or Claude and ask it to suggest relevant reflection questions for your student population.

Your Reimagine Roadmap

If you plan to use one of the activities above, make a note under Using Human-Centered Scaffolding. You can also use this space to brainstorm other ideas or make note of questions for yourself.

Resources

Scaffolding Learning in the Online Classroom