S4 E29 BONUS: Coaching, Teaching, & Classroom Management Strategies Sparked From My Conversation with Juliana Tapper (❤️Olivia Wahl)

3 Ways Just-In-Time Scaffolding Helps Struggling Math Students

Learn how Just-In-Time Scaffolding can support struggling math students in this video. Discover three effective ways to provide math intervention for students who need extra help in understanding mathematical concepts.

In this S4E29 bonus episode, I unpack the critical differences between "just-in-time" and "just-in-case" scaffolding. Discover why timing is everything when supporting struggling math students and how traditional intervention models often fail at the secondary level. 

Learn practical strategies for maintaining cognitive demand while providing appropriate support, ensuring equity in mathematics education, and balancing academic intervention with social-emotional awareness. 

This episode offers invaluable insights for educators seeking to transform their approach to supporting striving students in grades 6-12, with research-backed methods that preserve productive struggle while providing targeted assistance.

Episode Mentions:

• Just-in-Time vs. Just-in-Case Scaffolding: How to Foster Productive Perseverance by Dr. Juli K. Dixon 
• How to Implement Response to Intervention at the Secondary Level by  PJ Caposey

00:00 Introduction and Episode Overview 
01:00 Introducing the Bonus Episode Focus 
02:00 Understanding Just In Time vs Just In Case Scaffolding 
04:00 How Premature Scaffolding Reduces Cognitive Demand 
06:00 Maintaining Learning Goals While Scaffolding 
07:00 Real-World Example: Holocaust Unit Scaffolding 
08:00 Challenges with RTI at the Secondary Level 
10:00 Team Concepts and Student-Centered Approaches 
11:00 Proactive Intervention: Catching Students Early 
13:00 Rethinking the RTI Triangle Model 
14:00 Social-Emotional Support in Intervention 
15:00 Closing Thoughts and Call to Action

#MathIntervention #JustInTimeScaffolding #ProductiveStruggle #EquityInEducation #BreakItMath #TeacherPD #SecondaryEducation #MathTeaching #RTImodels #DifferentiatedInstruction

Want to learn more about  Juliana 's B.R.E.A.K. it Math Intervention Framework™? Check out my full S4E29 interview with her (https://youtu.be/Nvb8ePouHbA).

When coaches, teachers, administrators, and families work hand in hand, it fosters a school atmosphere where everyone is inspired, and every student is fully engaged in their learning journey.

New episodes are released every Monday, with a bonus solo episode on Fridays featuring research-backed coaching and teaching strategies you can apply right away to better serve the children in your care.

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When coaches, teachers, administrators, and families work hand in hand, it fosters a school atmosphere where everyone is inspired and every student is fully engaged in their learning journey.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hi there. I'm so glad you're here. Your time is precious, and because of that, I want to let you know right away what you'll gain by listening to the very last second of this episode, my conversation with Juliana Tapper, focused on her break it math intervention framework. This framework offers a transformative approach to teaching mathematics, to striving students.

In this bonus episode, I highlight how just in time scaffolding empowers students by providing support only when demonstrated need arises, how it preserves cognitive demand and promoting productive struggle, while just in case scaffolding risks, diminishing task complexity, and creates equity issues by denying students access to rigorous learning.

You'll learn why timing is critical when it comes to scaffolding. Why traditional RTI models often fail at the secondary level and why? Effective interventions must balance academic support with social [00:01:00] emotional awareness. Stay with me. I'm so happy to have you as a listener today. This is Schoolutions: Coaching and Teaching Strategies, the podcast that extends education beyond the classroom.

A show that offers educators and caregivers strategies to try right away and ensure every student receives the inspiration and support they need to thrive. I am Olivia Wahl, and this is a bonus episode. It's an accompaniment to season four, episode 29 with Juliana Tapper and our conversation focused on math intervention for grade 6 through 12.

For this bonus episode, I'm going to focus on intervention and the idea of scaffolding. I really appreciated Juliana highlighting the difference between just in time scaffolding and just in case scaffolding. As she said, this concept is coined by Dr. Juli Dixon. So I [00:02:00] wanted to make sure to uplift Juli's blog around just in time versus just in case.

I will put a link to the blog in the show notes. Um, it's entitled Just In Time versus just In Case Scaffolding, How to Foster Productive Perseverance. So that's where I wanted to start this conversation. Juli begins the blog post by defining what scaffolding actually is. She says, in education, scaffolding describes supports provided to students to assist them in meeting a learning goal.

And then she poses the question, what does scaffolding have to do with supporting students who struggle? And the key factor that Juliana pointed out, but also Juli points out is that when scaffolding happens, and it's not based on the students demonstrating the need for the scaffolding, that's where we lean more toward the just in case approach.

The scaffolding we provide is only as good as it being the appropriate time for that [00:03:00] scaffolding support, and that's where just in time scaffolding is so much more effective. Juli explains the difference. She says, when you provide scaffolding just in case students need it, rather than just in time, for example, when students demonstrate the need, you are short changing learning process and failing to provide the rigor that today's standards demand.

And then she goes on to explain why. She says just in case scaffolding, which is like providing hints and supports to all students, even when they have not demonstrated the need for it, it creates issues on both access and equity. And this is huge because think of how many of us in our classrooms always, I'm going to use the word forced kids, to use specific graphic organizers or specific writing structures.

Thinking we were being helpful. And what Juli says is when we provide [00:04:00] scaffolding to students before they have the opportunity to make sense of a challenging task on their own without the extra help, they are inhibited from developing productive perseverance, sometimes referred to as productive struggle.

All too often. So much support is provided through the initial scaffolding that the cognitive demand of the task is significantly decreased. That's research from Boston and Wilhelm in 2015. Juli says, if this sort of scaffolding is provided upfront for students who struggle, then these same students are denied access to cognitively demanding tasks.

When access is denied, equity becomes an issue, and I have not stopped talking about just in time intervention or scaffolding since interviewing Juliana. I have talked about it with administrators, with middle school teachers across all content areas with interventionists, and the main two key [00:05:00] points are that timing and degree are critical.

So Juli explains that we can still deliver differentiated instruction through appropriate scaffolding. And she goes on to say. The key is to provide the scaffolding just in time rather than just in case students need it just in time. Scaffolding helps to develop productive perseverance by allowing students to engage in demanding tasks on their own and then assisting them in maintaining the engagement when they struggle by using teacher questioning as the means of support.

She gives a beautiful example in the blog. And the example offers almost a cautionary tale of her explaining when she observes teachers using tasks like a word problem, for example, with learners who are striving, she sees them scaffolding in the form of unpacking word problems to the point that the problem becomes a simple exercise, which in [00:06:00] turn diminishes the task with all of the scaffolding.

So that's a question. As a coach, I think I'm going to tuck in my pocket when I'm speaking with teachers, looking at tasks that we're asking students to do that are at grade level expectation. I think it would be fascinating to ask ourselves, what types of scaffolding would the student need to reengage without lowering the cognitive demand of the task that we're asking them to do?

Juliana offered an example of this in our conversation as well. In order to do this though, we have to keep the learning goal and student engagement at the foreground of our planning, and Juli points that out, and we have to also critically analyze our instructional decisions and structures. This would be beautiful PLC work.

I was having a conversation with a colleague and she was saying that she's beginning. A unit around the Holocaust and that the students she was working with had very, [00:07:00] very little background knowledge, their writing memoirs, as well as studying the historical context. And she realized today, after serving her students for their background knowledge, that there were large gaps in learning.

And she explained after doing a KWL chart with the kids, what do you know about a topic? What do you want to know and what you've learned? In the end, she was completing the K and the W with the kids and she realized that she needed just in time to look at what they're, what they want to know and fill in some of those gaps.

And I said to her, that's such a perfect example of just in time scaffolding. She didn't assume what they know or don't know going into the study without talking to the kids first, and also having them do a little bit of reading and realizing that they really didn't have the historical context or the background knowledge to access the richness of the text that they were reading, as well as the understanding of [00:08:00] writing memoir.

The other conversation I had this week that is still bouncing around in my mind was with an intervention teacher in the middle school, and we were talking about how critical it is that our roles are clearly developed. And this conversation with the interventionist made me want to dive a little bit deeper to ask, you know, what does RTI or AIS or MTSS look like at the secondary level. And I came upon an article with Edutopia, it's called How to Implement Response to Intervention at the Secondary Level. And it's written by PJ Cap. Um, it's an older piece. It's from September 8th, 2011. But a lot of the nuances of the writing are still very valid today, which is interesting.

We haven't figured this out. And PJ Cautions that RTI originally was [00:09:00] designed to improve core curriculum and the interventions given to students whose needs are not being met by the core curriculum, but that it's been transformed into a cookie cutter three-tiered system. And PJ goes on to explain that while the canned RTI model may correlate to school improvement at the primary and middle levels, it does not do so at the secondary level.

What I appreciate about this piece is that PJ offers specific examples of what needs to happen at the secondary level to make an RTI model effective. The first offering is fixed core curriculum. Robert Marzano's book, what Works In Schools is referred to, and that again, a guaranteed and viable curriculum, that's a catchphrase term we hear often has the most significant impact on student achievement and PJ Cautions because if the original product was not meeting the needs of the students because it was a poor product, then changing instruction to have students match that, [00:10:00] it doesn't make a better situation.

Instead, we need to make sure that any curricula option that we're using is aligned to standards, has high expectations, and that we monitor the curriculum as being responsive educators. Frequently, PJ says, high school curriculum is far too often driven by content and not skills. We also need to think about vertical and horizontal alignment.

And so the curricula taught in buildings, it's aligned to standards without gaps and also without redundancies. Another way to make an intervention model effective at the high school level is to embrace the team concept That could be through PLC work. But we have to be careful because in PJ's words, in most secondary schools, teams are often driven by common subject matter, not common students.

And what PJ explains is that department and subject level teams are [00:11:00] not enough. Schools teach students, not subjects. Common teachers need to share common students, especially at ninth grade level. Education leaders must use creative scheduling to give ninth grade team common planning time. Even in small high schools, a leader has enough flexibility in scheduling to implement something that will truly impact student learning.

And I like the examples PJ offers. For instance, one team meeting can focus on a particular student's social emotional status. The next might be a longitudinal data analysis of student achievement. A third offering catch students before they fail. PJ says, as educators we know, or more importantly, have the ability to know which students may struggle in high school well before the doors open each fall, it's too late to make the decision to provide intervention or support any time later than the second semester of a student's eighth grade year.

Identified students should receive mentoring and [00:12:00] intervention to ease the transition process. Academic interventions should be built into their schedule from day one on campus. And the reason this isn't easy is because if there's not a rapport or relationship between the middle schools that feed into the high school, then identifying kids and needs will be very, very challenging.

So what has to happen? PJ says, this includes leaders providing release time for teachers to meet and the creation of a rubric to guide the selection process. The rubric needs to address local needs, the rubric they use. It would include teacher and counselor recommendations, focusing on social emotional issues in conjunction with student achievement and attendance data.

And I thought this was interesting that using this simple formula, it's allowed them to identify the 10% of the population that needs the most attention. And then they observe students once they arrive at the [00:13:00] site, and that's allowed them to tweak the selection process from year to year to best fit the local needs.

This also struck me a fourth suggestion is forget the triangle. How often have we heard about the RTI Triangle? PJ says that a triangle shaped program with predetermined numbers in each tier, commonly 80, 15, and five, it won't maximize its impact for any school. The suggestion is that an effective RTI process can be described as a diamond with locally determined and frequently changing numbers in each section.

This RTI model allows for schools to provide a change in instruction for all kids whose needs are not met by the core curriculum. So again, forget the triangle and find ways to support all learners whose needs are not met by the core curriculum. We can focus our [00:14:00] time and energy on providing enrichment activities to support learners whose needs are not being satisfied, and create opportunities that extend the curriculum through local creativity and innovation.

This really reminds me of the different critical questions with the PLC process. So first question, what do we need students to know and be able to do? Second question, how will we know that they are getting there? What's their level of understanding? Third question, what do we do for the students that are not meeting the grade level criteria or expectations?

And the fourth question, what do we do for the kids that came in already knowing it? How will we help the kids that are already thriving at the beginning? We also have to consider social emotional awareness and support, and this is important to keep in mind. PJ asks us, is secondary RTI all about the ninth grade?

No. But a quality program should divert the majority of their resources to that end. [00:15:00] And so with that said, intervention can only be provided in these cases if local data is monitored regularly. Adequate staffing exists to provide the intervention and staff communication is outstanding. All of this comes down to communication.

And most importantly, all of this work go for just in time scaffolding, just in time intervention after you offer children time to process and to struggle productively with the content that you're learning together. Thank you to Juliana for teaching me of the difference between just in case and just in time intervention.

And thank you to Dr. Juli Dixon for. Illuminating this work. I think it makes so much sense. Thanks for tuning in. I can't wait to see you on Monday. Take care out there. Schoolutions: Coaching and Teaching Strategies is created, produced and edited by me. [00:16:00] Olivia Wahl. Thank you to my older son Benjamin, who created the music playing in the background.

You can follow and listen to solutions wherever you get your podcasts. Or subscribe to never miss an episode and watch on YouTube. Now, I'd love to hear from you. Send me an email at schoolutionspodcast@gmail.com. Let me know how your school or district approaches intervention, especially at the middle and high school levels.

Tune in every Monday for the best research, back coaching and teaching strategies you can apply right away to better the lives of the children in your care. And stay tuned for my bonus episodes every Friday where I'll reflect and share connections to what I learned from the guest that week. See you then.