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form of cognitive strategies (Morine‐Dershimer & Kent, 1999) or social
support (Rasmussen, 2001) for students to anchor learning. These
scaffolds are temporary supports to reduce the difficulty of the task
while students acquire the necessary skills and understanding to
operate independently. Nonetheless, some empirical studies (e.g.
Myhill & Warren, 2005) reveal that this move to independent learning
rarely occurs since scaffolding has been used as a device to enable
students to complete a task successfully, rather than a learning support
mechanism. This happens when teachers follow their planned
objectives as a teaching agenda instead of a learning agenda, rush to
cover the curriculum content in a lesson, and thus insensitive to the
needs and responses of their students. Overwhelmed by the need to
get a predetermined answer, teachers then miss the opportunities to
gain information or clues from students about their prior knowledge or
understanding. As a consequence, despite scaffolding in an
issue‐enquiry, it would be likely for tensions to emerge during teacher
construction of syntactic knowledge as long as learning is regarded as
product‐oriented rather than process‐oriented.

An alternative approach to enhance students’ capabilities for future
learning is to engage students in more effective thinking about the
subject matter. For this, Joyce, Weil & Showers (1992) provide a variety
of teaching models associated with varied instructional goals for
teachers to plan or arrange instructional procedures. First, models in
the Social Family have won the esteem of those who regard
constructivist learning as essentially social in nature. As previously
mentioned, they support the notion that interpersonal learning
environments enable students to co‐construct knowledge. Cooperative
learning (Slavin, 1990), role‐playing, and jurisprudential inquiry are
some of the popular instructional strategies applied by Liberal Studies
teachers in Hong Kong. Second, models in the Information‐Processing
Family emphasize ways to “improve capabilities for acquiring and
organizing information, identifying and solving problems, and forming

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