I’ve left many small group reading lessons feeling like I’ve exhausted every teacher move in my toolbox. You know that feeling — you prompted, you modeled, you gestured back to the chart… and somehow, you’re still doing most of the heavy lifting. While it could be easy to feel defeated in these moments, they offer an opportunity to reflect on whether our support is truly building independence.
Let’s explore how a closer look at our scaffolding might just unlock independence in our emergent readers.
Setting the Scene
“When teachers value struggle and persistence, students learn that difficulty is not a signal of weakness but a step toward mastery.”
– Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Educators and caregivers innately want to help their students succeed. Yet, with great scaffolding power comes great responsibility—because not every move helps students move forward. While scaffolding and support are critical for developing foundational reading skills, specifically with our students with differentiated learning goals, excessive support can create a reliance on the teacher. Young readers need space and time to fumble. In moments of struggle, adults can actually observe valuable information about their readers’ behavior. When we intercept and rescue our readers, we unintentionally interrupt their perseverance and ability to find solutions independently.
Shifting Our Thinking
Like the scaffolding on a building or home undergoing renovations, scaffolding in reading is meant to be temporary! By definition, scaffolds are purposeful supports put in place to meet structural needs AND are intended to taper off as the original foundation strengthens.
So let’s begin by inviting ourselves to reflect on common scaffolds and support we provide our readers with on a daily basis. In How Scaffolding Works: A Playbook for Supporting and Releasing Responsibility to Students, Frey, Fisher, and Almarode highlight six common reasons why we scaffold:
- To establish student interest
- To simplify the task
- To promote focus and engagement
- To spotlight learning and decision-making
- To manage frustration
- To support reader replication of the skill(s)
It’s very likely that your reasons for providing specific support to your readers shifts from one group to the next, and even from one day to the next. However, if we frequently maintain too much ownership over the text work, students’ perseverance and risk-taking decline.
Who’s Doing the Work?
Let’s continue our support intake by sorting common reading scaffolds by level of student ownership. When we talk about ownership in relation to scaffolds, we mean how much of the thinking and work the student is doing versus the adult.
Low Ownership: If a student relies heavily on us to prompt, model, or redirect through a text, their ownership is low (less independent).
High Ownership: If a student is doing most of the cognitive work, there’s more independence. The adult might set the conditions for success, but the reader is the one problem-solving, self-monitoring, and making meaning.
| Low Ownership Examples | High Ownership Examples |
| Modeling or Demonstration
Pre-Teaching Tricky Words Echo Reading |
Bookmarks with Prompts
Strategy Chart Partnership Discussion |
The key distinction is not whether a scaffold is good or bad, but whether it is moving the student closer to independence or quietly doing the work for them. The most skillful support happens in that intentional shift from high support to high ownership. When we are thoughtful about which scaffolds we reach for and when, we send our readers a powerful message that we believe they are capable of doing the thinking themselves.
Making Space for Struggle
“Perhaps we rush in to rescue learners because the world seems fraught; we want to help our students reach the safety of academic success. Our intentions are good, but it’s time to step back, gradually and purposefully, and let them pilot their own learning.
-Nancy Frey, Douglas Fisher, John Taylor Almarode
When the text gets hard, we want to smooth the path forward. Those intentions are genuine and rooted in care, but they can quietly work against the very goal we are reaching for. In that moment it feels like support, but over time it teaches students that when things get hard, the adult will step in. That expectation can become a barrier to independence without either of us realizing it.
This is exactly why sorting our scaffolds by level of student ownership matters so much. It helps us see our support not just as a response to productive struggle, but as a long term plan for releasing responsibility. The goal was never to be the most helpful person in the room. The goal is to work ourselves out of a job, gradually and purposefully, until our readers are confident enough to pilot their own learning without us beside them.
The Work is Ongoing
The next time you walk away from a small group lesson feeling like you did most of the work, let that feeling be useful. Not as a sign that you failed, but as an invitation to look more closely at which scaffolds you reached for and who they were really serving. Independence is not built in a single lesson. It is built in the slow, intentional practice of letting go.
When we shift from asking “how can I help this reader right now” to “how can I help this reader need me less,” everything about the way we plan and deliver our scaffolds begins to change.
Here is a great resource to continue implementing scaffolding for your readers!
How Scaffolding Works: A Playbook for Supporting and Releasing Responsibility to Students
