Every teacher has an unmitigated responsibility to help students become more literate.
Students come into the classroom with different degrees of prior knowledge, or schema, and this is their most powerful resource to apply meaning to unfamiliar concepts. This schema allows the reader to seek and select information, organize this text information, and elaborate on this information encountered in the texts. Instructional scaffolding is the support provided by the teacher that helps the students connect new information to what they already know. It supports readers efforts to construct meaning from the text while showing them how to use strategies that will, over time, lead to independent study and learning. The teacher plays a critical role in helping the students learn from the text.