Adjusting the support offered during a teacher session to fit a child's current level of performance; offer just enough support to help students get to the next level.

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Providing targeted, temporary support that fits a student’s current performance and helping them reach the next level is scaffolding. This approach rests on the idea that learners can tackle tougher tasks when guidance is tailored to what they can do with help, and that this support is faded away as independence grows. In practice, scaffolding looks like modeling how to approach a problem, offering prompts or hints, breaking a task into smaller steps, providing supports such as graphic organizers or sentence frames, and then gradually withdrawing these supports as the child gains skill. The goal is to keep the task challenging yet achievable, guiding the student along the continuum from assistance to independence. The other options describe materials or activities rather than the instructional method of adjusting support, so they don’t capture the essence of providing and fading help to move a learner forward.