A brilliant way to teach advanced English

Many teachers use something called scaffolding to make complex material more accessible. Like scaffolding on a building, instructional scaffolding gives students easy footholds to ascend challenging ideas.

This teacher has taken literary scaffolding to a new level. She teaches the most advanced English classes as her extremely academic high school, but she begins the year with children’s books. She told us that this innovation that she devised to introduce advanced literary concepts showed good results when they analyzed how students performed at the end of the year.