Does the Scaffolding Hold Up to Inquiry?

In the few years I have worked with city college students, I have learned from more qualified and experienced teachers than I that the best method for providing a student agency over their writing and inquisitiveness in their work is to back off from teaching writing as a skill with dozens of procedural steps and allow the student to organically discover her own path through the hedge of composition. As I read Smagorinsky's instruction on scaffolding, I cringed to think of barraging one of my students with such a lengthy exercise of modeling and following, even if it was to be supported as Smagorinsky suggests with judgement and evaluation of student need. I don't necessarily disagree with his idea of scaffolding, but his example lesson on response logs strikes me as burdensome for a student's creativity in handling an inquiry in a way that is compatible with her method of learning.

In one sense, Smagorinsky contradicts his own idea of the benefit of scaffolding by illustrating his point with the analogy of the carpenter. The carpenter allows his apprentice to be self-sufficient in a way that we don't see when Smagorinsky turns to the classroom. Is apprenticeship therefore a different style of teaching than scaffolding?

Despite my challenge to Smagorinsky's scaffold, he retains an ethos that I can agree with: writing is a tool used to discover what you have to say. When teaching concepts and critical reading, allow the student to be independent in thought and not rely on the teacher for interpretation. This idea stirs in me a question that I hope to answer for myself in the coming months of this program: What is the compromise between teaching a need-to-know style as opposed to commando style? By need-to-know I mean providing a student with only enough information to get through the task at hand (however I am not sure if the intent is to ease the burden of too much information [which seems condescending] or to allow for their own inquiry to develop). Commando is the point of view that the teacher equips the student with more information than she needs, to be used if and when she encounters a problem or feels courageous enough to explore something they have never tried (like a spy or MacGyver type who is trained to handle multiple situations or improvise to complete a task). It's a question that I has troubled me in the past, and I hope that through inquiry I can answer it, or possibly even discard it as inapplicable.

In any case, I know that modeling works in the classroom, and it is required as part of the apprenticeship model. I am also aware that I have much to learn and explore before I am a qualified college teacher; therefore, I should give more thought to Smagorinsky as part of the conversation. How does scaffolding differ from modeling? When might scaffolding be appropriate for a lesson and how do we retain and encourage a student's independent work?