Emotional scaffolding as a strategy to support children’s engagement in instruction

Abstract

Consideration of children’s emotions in a classroom provides more opportunities for improvement in children’s engagement.
However, the literature about emotional scaffolding in early childhood settings is underdeveloped. This qualitative case study
focuses on the construction and implementation of strategies of scaffolding emotions by two early childhood educators in a
public elementary school. The data consist of participant observations, interviews, and documents. The analysis highlights
three major themes: The participants’ beliefs about self-identity, their understandings of students’ emotions, and their
feelings of school expectations and academic pressures. The findings show the way that beliefs, knowledge, and other
contextual factors interact to produce emotional scaffolding strategies. This study discusses several points of difference that
reveal the uniqueness for emotional scaffolding in early childhood contexts. This study finds that emotional scaffolding is a
critical pedagogical tool that could help teachers reach developmentally appropriate practices for early childhood education
in an age of accountability.
Keywords: Emotional scaffolding, engagement, emotion, early childhood education.