In our teaching, we repeatedly bump up against limitations of the directive/nondirective binary when applied to the on-the-ground realities of clinical teaching. Many of the best teaching choices don’t fit well into either of those two discrete options. Clinical teachers can benefit from a more capacious framework—one that helps us support our students as individual learners, meet them where they are, and help them maximize their growth in clinic. Educational scaffolding offers this kind of alternative framework. Conceptualizing our role as providing scaffolding helps us more easily and effectively identify the supports a student may—or may not—need, given a particular task or where the student is in the arc of the semester. These supports, like the physical scaffolding used in construction, can be gradually reduced as students gain proficiency. Educational scaffolding provides useful theoretical grounding for a wide range of entry points for supervision as well as ways to assess how and when to turn over more of the locus of learning to students. In this session, we will ground participants in scaffolding as an alternative to nondirectiveness, and work together to consider how scaffolding can be a tool that keeps students in the educational “stretch zone,” while keeping them out of the “panic zone.” Participants will gain theoretical grounding for when, how, and why to intervene as teachers, as well as concrete strategies for supporting students with a wide range of capacities, across varying learning contexts and challenges.