Inclusive Learning and Educational Equity 5

The Use of a Knowledge Organiser and Scaffolding for the Construction of One’s 
Own Knowledge and Reflection
The UDL context created in a targeted way 
encourages children to think of and strategically use methods of abstracting features 
of compared objects from provided practical examples. This is illustrated by the 
situation described further. The students were learning to write a formal and an 
informal letter. The teacher introduced a challenge to the children: ‘Today, we are 
going to analyse examples
[letters] as scientists and to fill in a table ... We are going 
to clarify the differences between a formal and an informal letter
’. The children 
worked in groups. In the beginning, Kotryna, Vaida and Just
ė had a chaotic discus-
sion, but Vaida found a strategic way of working on the assignment and explained it 
to the other girls: ‘In the beginning, I read what is written in the letter. And then I 
chose words to describe it. Or I write an example
’ (Observation, 11). Vaida under-
stood how one could consistently compare the letters and abstract their features: by 
reading the beginnings of the letters, thinking about how an informal and a formal 
letter start, reading the content and finding the words to characterise the language of 
the text, reading the endings and reflecting on the differences. Reflecting on his own 
learning, Vaida positively evaluated the benefit of the knowledge organiser—the 
comparative table ‘Informal letter–formal letter’. According to the Vaida, the two 
adjacent columns helped to more clearly distinguish the differences and abstract the 
features: ‘That table. We wrote one thing [in one column], we wrote the other thing 
[in the other column] and then you see everything’ (Reflection with students, 11). 
The presented example shows that a learning situation which directs students to 
independent work through scaffolds (in this case, a useful table promoting chil-
dren’s thinking) facilitates children’s independent development of new thinking 
strategies and deepens their understanding.