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Common Errors of Classroom Practicesource:
- activities equal content
- "hard" teacher questions promote student understanding
- review and reteaching promote student understanding
- "active" teaching promotes high student engagement and understanding
- students learn by asking teachers questions about things they don't understand
Instructional Improvement in (Nominally) High-Performing School Systems
by Richard F. Elmore
Graduate School of Education
Harvard University
Fall 2004
I don't entirely understand this list.
I believe it, but I don't understand it. Not well enough.
The one point I completely get but can't explain well is the last: students learn by asking teachers questions about things they don't understand.
That's the Extra Help doesn't help principle.
8 comments:
I think, "students learn by asking teachers questions about things they don't understand" is an error because kids often simply don't know what they don't understand. To see the gaps, you have to understand the whole. But if you don't understand the whole, you can't ask about the gaps. If that makes sense.
You're right, Dawn.
A student gets something wrong; they could ask for help to do it right, or they could ask why their way didn't work, or they could ask what the right answer is. They have no idea why what they did is wrong or didn't work. They aren't going to suddenly know when the teacher does it "the right way"--because for some reason, that "right way" didn't make sense or stick in their minds the first time. They are not suddenly going to say "oh, the stuff those neurons remember is wrong; better eradicate that and replace it with this"--that's simply not how our brains work. Unless the teacher goes to the effort to find out what the student DOES understand, and where the mistake got embedded in his mind, and then, do everything possible to fix the mistake in the child's head without reinforcing it, and while taking power away from it, the teacher will not help the student learn.
Failure doesn't help students learn. Properly guided solutions after failure can--but only narrowly tailored, carefully controlled.
That's why review and reteaching are usually disasters, too. If the teacher was unclear the first time, now they have just repeated the confusions, stuffed them farther into the brains of the students. Reviews aren't making more connections to the right things, just creating ruts in the mind--if those ruts go the wrong way, that's too bad.
Unless reteaching is actively adapted to fix the places where the kids got lost in the first place, it will be creating more misunderstandings.
I have no idea what "active" teaching means--I hope not to find out it means foldables!
I think that is why direct instruction emphasizes immediate corrections. Kumon follows the same principles in that they ask parents to correct their children's work as soon as it's completed for the same reason. If there is a misunderstanding, it should be addressed as soon as feasible so the student remembers the information or process correctly-- the right stuff gets embedded instead of the wrong information being recorded and subsequently repeated. It's like Vince Lombardi said, "Perfect practice makes perfect."
Here are my guesses, just based on how these apply to my personal experience:
>>activities equal content<<
Most people could complete an activity or worksheet with little problem, especially if they are given a model to follow. Most of my students are so "practiced" in this that they don't even bother reading the directions - they just look for the model or example and go to town. (We learn a few frustrating, but illuminating lessons about this at the beginning of every year in my class, actually.) Most people could, for (a silly) example, complete a crossword whose subject was "Epis and Epigrams," and get many of the answers right by guessing, but at the end know no more about epis or epigrams than when we began.
I would venture to guess this goes to the nature of the activities, and the idea that because students are able to figure out the cues and clues they learn at every stage, they can succeed at the task, but not at the objective.
>>"hard" teacher questions promote student understanding<<
I wonder if this doesn't have to do with "hard" teacher questions being purposely "tricky" questions. Because the teacher knows the answer s/he expects, they expect the student to be able to make the leap between the lesson and what the teacher knows they want the answer to be, thus requiring the student to, in their perception, "read the teacher's mind."
>>review and reteaching promote student understanding<<
Perhaps because it doesn't help to review or reteach what wasn't understood in the first place?
>>"active" teaching promotes high student engagement and understanding<<
I'm a little stumped by this one, unless, maybe, "active" means gimmicky or performance-oriented? This might refer to the idea that engagement = fun, rather than engagement = engaging?
>>students learn by asking teachers questions about things they don't understand<<
Ditto this one to other comments. They can't ask questions about what they don't know they don't know.
To see the gaps, you have to understand the whole. But if you don't understand the whole, you can't ask about the gaps.
Absolutely - I wish I could remember the various things I've read over the years about the "prerequisites" for asking good questions.
I remember in college hearing a lot about how difficult it is to formulate a research question.
One way I thought of this was: suppose I set out to learn Bayesian statistics by "asking questions."
It would be a mess.
That's why review and reteaching are usually disasters, too. If the teacher was unclear the first time, now they have just repeated the confusions, stuffed them farther into the brains of the students.
I bet that's what he means.
Reteaching, especially, should be a trouble sign -- of course, I don't know how to factor in the many different skill levels in the same class issue...
But if you're having to do lots of reteaching as opposed to spaced repetition & distributed practice, that's a sign.
I'm SO tired of scrambling to keep up with the jargon.
What the eff is "active teaching"????
"Hard questions" probably means teaching over students' heads.
You know, "challenging" kids instead of teaching them.
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