The English Teacher's Scaffolding Toolkit | 50 Scaffolds for Secondary English

How do you keep every student working on the same challenging text without making easier versions of the work? This 131-page toolkit gives you 50 scaffolds for the English classroom. It covers what each one is, which students it helps most and how to use it, and how to fade it so students become independent.

Written by Clare Madden, a secondary English teacher with 15 years' experience, author of the Touchstones Junior Cycle English series, with a special interest in how students learn.

The approach: teach to the top, scaffold up, then fade it

Every student works on the same task. Instead of making easier versions, you find the points where a task is likely to overload working memory, put a scaffold there, and remove it step by step as students succeed.

What's included

• 10 additional needs explainers: ADHD, autism (ASD), dyslexia, dyspraxia/DCD, MGLD, DLD, anxiety/SEBD, hearing impairment, visual impairment and EAL. Each one-page explainer covers what the need is in simple terms, what students may find hard in English, what you might notice in class, what to avoid, what strengths they bring, and which scaffolds in the toolkit help.
• 50 scaffolds, each with:
• A visual page: the scaffold in use, taken or redrawn from real classroom resources
• Why, who and how: why it works as a scaffold, who it helps most, how it helps them, and how to fade it
• Using AI effectively: a ready-to-adapt prompt for making the scaffold for your own unit, and what to check
• What does the research say?: three or more studies or books behind the scaffold, each summarised in one line

The 50 scaffolds are grouped into 10 parts

1. Find out what students already know
2. Build vocabulary
3. Explain new concepts clearly
4. Read closely
5. Organise knowledge of a text
6. Make notes and remember
7. Talk it through
8. Learn from models
9. Write sentences and paragraphs
10. Plan, draft and redraft

They include word diagrams, chunked spelling, live drawing of a difficult line, annotation pathways, theme wheels, character arc graphs, Cornell notes, sketchnoting, retrieval practice routines, I do/we do/you do, the analytical sentence formula, the iceberg paragraph, essay outlines, success criteria and marksheets.

Why teachers use it

• Practical support for mixed-ability and inclusive classrooms, organised by what you're trying to do in the lesson
• Helps you plan for students with additional needs without singling anyone out: almost every scaffold helps the whole class
• Grounded in research, with sources for every scaffold
• Useful for Junior Cycle and Leaving Cert, for subject departments, SEN and learning support teams, NQTs and student teachers

Format: print-ready PDF, 131 landscape pages