Tag Archives: causing learning

Slow Down, Enjoy the Aha Moments

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“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it” Ferris Bueller told us this truth. He is right about life in general and, as much as the movie mocked high school, he is right about schooling.

There is a baked-in pace to teaching and learning like the gear-locked speed of a roller coaster. The pace is firm and regulated on the uphill and then accelerates on the downhill. Riders are thrilled by the speed and the turns and loops. There is an instant “wow” before the pace automatically returns to slow and regulated for the next uphill. There is no time for a rider to enjoy the thrill. So, it is with teaching and learning. There is no time after the thrill of successful learning for “looking around” and enjoying the moment. We can do better because we know better.

What do we know?

In all successful learning there is a moment of insight when the brain understands a resolution of a problem or a question. Consider the “aha!” moment when a child’s face lights up or they “whoop!” with excitement or seem to collapse from the exertion into a happy place. That is the “aha!” of the physical effect of the brain making sense of disparate pieces of information or problematic steps in a sequence or seeing how the threads in a story fall into place and make sense. It is not simply that the child got to a right answer. It is the reality that she knows the process of getting there and can repeat it with confidence. It is “AHA!”

This is the moment teaching tries to achieve – aha! learning. It happens every day in every school and in all classrooms. However, many teachers may not recognize an “aha.” It is as if the teacher is so focused on teaching that she is head down and keeps putting tension upon the child to learn without seeing the “aha! when it happens. Sometimes we must remind ourselves what “aha” looks like, to recognize its characteristics, and then to stop when we see it, and enjoy the moment with and for the child.

Technically successful learning is an epistemic curiosity resolution. In short, “aha!” For a child, it looks like these –

  • Going quiet. A child who was anxious and fidgety about while working a problem or a storyline suddenly goes quiet and still. Instead of looking around wondering, she intensely focuses on her conclusion. She sees the success.
  • Gazing eyes snap into focus. A child is looking out the windows or at the ceiling seemingly unfocused on anything when suddenly her eyes snap back to work with a wide grinning smile.
  • Big eyes. Physiologically the eyes dilate as the brain realizes a breakthrough idea. The eyes say “wow!” It is the dopamine reward.
  • Got it! A child verbally erupts shouting “I get it now!” There is a dopamine squirt that comes with “aha! that sounds like joy and many children cannot help being loud when they “get it.”

What really happens in the “aha!” is a mental structural reorganization of thinking. It is pattern recognition. It is seeing what seemed disorganized and messy to be orderly and neat. It is finding the right words to explain what has happened. It is putting a solution into words and telling another a person “this is how it works.” It is the release of mental tension and frustration like the second you realize a headache stopped hurting.

What to do?

Value the struggle. Working through mental problem solving resembles building muscles. It is challenging work. It is fatiguing. It is frustrating. However, these are prerequisites to getting to “aha!” Tell children that they are on the right track. Help them to know what they know and what they do not know. Clue them in to finding connections to prior knowledge and to look for patterns and sequences.

Look at attempts positively. A child at a potter’s wheel trying to form a vase from a lump of clay is a good example of finding success through trials. That child must learn the technique and feel in the hands and fingers to successfully pull clay vertically with enough wall structure to hold a shape. There will be many failures before there is a success.

Use questions without providing answers. Ask – “At what point does this move from I understand into something that is hard or into the area of I do not know?” “What is this like? How is this similar to …?” “If you tried again, what would you do differently?” Say – “Let’s look at what you have and peel it back to where your answers were correct?” “If you asked a classmate for help, who would you ask? And what would you ask that person?” Asking questions keeps the struggle moving forward. Giving answers deprives a child of the dopamine that comes with their reaching a successful conclusion.

Then, when the child finally gets to “aha!” stop to enjoy the moment. Celebrate with and for the child. And quietly use the moment to reinforce your teaching skills that caused a child to learn.

The Big Duh!

Look at the children you are teaching. Remember that success begets success. In the years ahead, they will remember their “ahas!” and the teacher who helped them get to “aha!” And they will remember how the successes you caused gave them the steppingstones to many more successes. Taking the time to stop the speed of teaching and learning and celebrate an “aha!” moment is a lesson in living not just in learning.

The Value and Power of the Teacher’s Lane

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Contradictions are interesting. I see faces grimace or erupt in surprise when life contradicts their expectations. I see their eyes become furtive with side looks of uncertainty. And in response I hear them say “That is not my business. I need to stay in my lane.” I wonder if their looks and words express a fear of a wild world or an understanding of the safety of their prescribed lane. Life is not simple. Much like driving on a multi-lane, urban belt line highway when so many other drivers speed past us and swerve dramatically from one lane to another, being mindful of the lanes in our daily lives is important. We, all teachers, have a lane in this world that we need to value because it is a powerful lane.

What do we know?

We cause children to learn and, in their learning, to think and to ask questions and to inform their lives by what they learn. This is our lane. Many of us consider our teaching license to be our lane – “I teach 1st grade” or “I teach Algebra” or “… art.” However, a license only defines a subject or the grade level of children we teach. In truth, we teach children to learn, to think and to ask questions, and to apply what they learn to their living using the curriculum we are licensed to teach. We are pedagogues, first and foremost. If not, we teachers are only cloners of children in our own content knowledge images.

Teachers are masters of their teaching strategies. Our contracts narrow the subjects we teach; our pedagogy expands how we teach and cause children to learn. We are masters in using direct instruction to create knowledge, and inquiry and problem-based instruction to create context and personalization of each child’s understanding and application of knowledge. We use Bloom’s description of analysis and evaluation to teach children to dissect knowledge and better know its critical attributes. And we use Bloom’s final goal of synthesis to show children how to use their learning to create their own thinking pathways forward.

This is our lane. We teach children to think. Someday I would love to hear a colleague recognized as a wonderful pedagogue rather than a wonderful middle school teacher. We are teachers not teachers of.

What should we know about this? Teaching strategies are increasingly important.

I am mindful of a teacher’s lane these days when politics try to curtail what we teach and to define the outcomes of our public education. I read, more than is healthy to read, how political leaders and their followers display small-mindedness in calling out or suing or firing educators who do not follow their script. I see teachers at all levels, PK-12 and higher, under explicit and implicit attack personally and institutionally in attempts to narrow the scope and effects of teaching and learning. And it is appalling and it is wrong.

What they do not or cannot understand is that our professional lane is not to teach a particular point of view but to teach all children to understand point of view, to think about and evaluate point of view, and to establish their own informed point of view. We use teaching strategies based upon pure inquiry not biased inquiry. Life and its events will shape a child’s thinking and perspective. Our mission is met when children know how to apply thinking skills not in ensuring the prescribed results of their thinking. Those who would constrain public teaching try to constrain public thinking.

The Big Duh!

Public education has been and continues to be America’s best invention for building an informed citizenry. Our national Forefathers created Bill of Rights’ guardrails and due processes to protect freedoms of speech, assembly, and press. These are essential for a thinking populace. Further, they made public education a function of the states not the federal government. I appreciate this lane they created for public educators and encourage all teachers to value and pursue the wonderful opportunity the teaching lane gives us to cause all children to learn and think. Thinking children are our future’s hedge against the small-minded.

Knowledge, Like Water, Will Slip Between Our Fingers Unless.

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When you cup your hands and use them to scoop up a drink of water, how long can you hold the water before it seeps between your fingers and out of your hands? Some can hold onto the water longer than others, but eventually the water slips from everyone’s hands. So, it is with our memory. We hear a name or phone number or read a story and for a bit of time we remember these. However, after a bit of time, that length of time varies with the person, recall of the name and phone number and the details of the story slip from our memory like water between our fingers. Short-term memory is only that, good for a bit of time. If we want to remember things for a longer stretch of time, we need to build long-term memory. We can build memories if we choose to do so.

What do we know?

We consider memory to be a natural phenomenon for keeping track of things. In everyday life, we have hundreds of micro experiences every day. These are things we see, and hear, and do as part of daily living. Yet we remember very few, because they were insignificant and occurred quickly and without reason to become longer memory. Our brains are not intended to remember everything we see, or hear, or do because there are thousands of these minutiae every day. Consider what it would be like inside your head if your brain were constantly trying to make sense of every detail in every second of your life. Happily, no one knows what your head would be like because this does not happen naturally. Instead, our brain sheds the minutiae in short order. Forgetting is as natural as remembering. Unless we actively work to build memory.

Being a student in school may build many memories but schooling itself does a poor job of teaching students how to remember. Our curricular program for every grade level and every course is industrial in nature. A teacher organizes units of instruction and teaches them one after the other. Sadly, schooling is assembly line instruction, and the conveyor belt only stops at graduation. The daisy chain organization of curriculum assumes that some of what a child learns at an earlier age will relate to or be applied in a later age. Certainly, a child’s developing skill sets in phonics-based reading and use of arithmetic skills are used throughout school and later life. However, what the child reads in fourth grade or the math work the child did in sixth grade are stand-alone assignments. 

Case in point – why do children in the United States typically study US history in grades 5, 8, and 10? The casual answer is that by teaching it again in 8th and 10th grade children develop a deeper understanding of their national story. If that were true, why do so many children have trouble on tests of US history? It is the most repeated curriculum in PK-12 yet ask any adult the name of the 8th US President or the relationship between the American Revolution and the War of 1812 or the effect of the Smoot-Hawley Act and you will wait a long time for answers. Are these important to remember? Maybe not, but they are indicative of how we treat this three-peat taught curriculum. Most American adults cannot pass the Immigration Service civics test. We are illiterate about our national story. So much for teaching children how to remember.

Being smart in school by remembering what you learn should not be a secret – help every child to be as smart as they can be. We need to teach children all the “secrets.”

Long ago and before the Internet’s instant access to information, knowledge was power. People who knew things and could do use their knowledge had advantages over people who did not know. Sadly, schools and teaching were a matter of “teachers know and children do not know – and only the smartest children learn what teachers know.” Too many of us experienced this in school.

Today our teachers’ job is to cause all children to learn what teachers know. A first-grade teacher’s job is to cause all first-grade children to learn the first-grade curriculum. A chemistry teacher’s job is to cause chemistry students to learn chemistry. This is teaching with an “I will do everything in my ethical abilities to teach my children what they need to know and do.”

Memory work is not easy, and it is not intuitive for all children. If a child has natural memorization ability, great! For children who need help memorizing, teach them how to remember. This mandate and constantly needs adaptive practice in every PK-12 classroom. We do not teach how to study and remember in elementary school and never again in middle and high school. We teach and practice these abilities in every classroom.

What to do better.

Start by acknowledging the current state of learning and remembering. We do not teach for long term memory. We do not teach children how to build long term memory, and our classroom practices do not build memory for the long-term. We talk about the importance of building, recalling, and using background knowledge but do not teach children how to recall and use what they have been taught.

Be intentional. Building recall does not take as much time and effort as reteaching what children have forgotten. “Children, we are going to learn how to improve our memory.”

  • Use recall events. Tell children “Before the next chapter or unit test, we are going to do things to help you remember what you are learning. These small activities will strengthen your memory of what you are learning before our usual tests.” Every several days have children “Tell me about the story we have been reading? I want to hear what you recall and your thoughts about the main characters, the plot, and where you think this story is going.” At the start, be non-evaluative and over time expect children to develop correct details. Have children tell each other about steps they have been taught to use in checking their multiplication problems. Do not just do the steps but explain why each step is mathematically important. Have children hum the song they are learning or restate the safety rules for using a turning wheel for pottery. Work on recalling the essential things in the current chapter or unit or story or class activity. Then, do it again next week.
  • Use non-graded retesting. Tell children “Frequent review of what you learned and was in a recent test helps you to remember what you learned. So, we will have several follow-up tests of that same information. The follow-up tests will not be graded, because we are taking these tests to build memory of what you already were tested on.”
  • Use flash cards. Have children make their own flash cards. This applies to all K-12 children in all subjects. Cards can be created to build recall for vocabulary and definitions, events with dates and names, series of steps in a process, and to explain significance. The practice of creating flash cards alone builds memory; the use of flash cards builds stronger memory.

No child is too old for flash cards! At age 77 I am relearning French language and flash cards are part of the routine.

  • Use intermittent review. Students tend to cram for tests. Tell children “Better practice is scheduled or intermittent review over time. Do not leave studying for a test until the last night before test day.” The recall events described above practice intermittent study. Use intermittent for end of course and end-of-year tests. Next month do a review of essential content and skills taught the previous month. Run through last month’s flash cards. Three months hence do it again. The reason is this – background knowledge, like water in your cupped hands, eventually will slip away if you do review/refill it.
  • Use memory organizers. Tell children “It is okay to create your own ways of remembering what you don’t want to forget.” Teach them how to draw a concept map linking ideas together as supporting details. Teach them associations to link new learning to what they know. Teach them how to create a rhyming word phrase so that each word reminds them of ideas and strings of ideas they want to remember. Teach them to use a simple sentence where each word reminds them of an idea or string of ideas they want to remember.

The Big Duh!

Return to a variation of Cartesian logic. “If I taught something to children and they did not learn it, did I really teach them anything?” Possibly. Instead posit, “If I taught children and did not teach them how to remember what I taught them, did I really teach anything?” Indeed, not. If you expect children to remember what you taught them, teach them how to remember.

The Art of Breathing and Teaching

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Breathing is an autonomic body function and is essential for human life. A healthy person breathes without thinking about it. When teaching children, knowing when to pause and take another breath to let learning unfold is a conscious act of breath control. Effective teachers know the art of breathing.

What do we know?

As a child, I was told to pinch my nose, jump into the deep end of the pool and swim. “Take a deep breath, hold it, and jump!” “Oh, and do not open your mouth to breath until you must. You will know when!”

As a student teacher, I learned to prepare an objectives-based lesson with a Madeline Hunter lesson design. When all students were seated and I had their attention, I took a deep breath and jumped into the lesson. Once I had connected the day’s lesson to yesterday’s lesson, I taught/swam hard moving through my lesson plan. My college supervised advised, “Once you have children’s attention, do not lose that connection until the lesson is finished. It is easier to keep them with you than it is to regain the attention of children you lost.” That mantra served me well until I looked up and around. Like a swimmer who has held his breath and come up for air, I was teacher in the middle of a lesson without knowing much about the children I was teaching. Their learning was secondary to my teaching.

Experience can teach us, and informed experience teaches us to create better experiences. I learned that I did not need to pinch my nostrils and hold my breath like a balloon under water. Diving headfirst was both more efficient and more exhilarating. I learned shallow racing dives and to hold a for four flutter kicks then to begin my stroke count and breath as planned. Informed practices created better experiences.

So, it is with teaching. Breathing may be autonomic, but effective teachers know how to pause, breathe, and let learning catch up with their teaching.

Intellectual breathing.

Hunter taught us to check for cognitive understanding. Checking is taking a breath from teaching finding the extent to which children are learning from your teaching.

Strategies for intellectual breathing include the following:

  • Cold calling. Do not ask for volunteers, but call in your “bell weather” students, the students who if they understand then most other students also will understand.
  • Think-pair-share. Students write quick responses to your question, share their response with another student, discuss and modify their mutual response, and report orally to the class.
  • Roll a question around. Ask a question requiring more than recall, one that causes a child to connect new learning with prior learning or provide a new context. Then ask another child to either agree, disagree, or add to the response. Continue with five or six students to push their thinking.
  • Quick quiz/ticket. Ask students to respond in writing to name the main points of the lesson so far, or to explain a concept in the first instruction, or formulate questions they have about what they have learned.
  • Use a visual fist to five. This strategy checks each child’s security with what they have learned. A five-finger wave says the child believes she has a high level of understanding, and a fist says, “I am confused.”

These are formative strategies that tell a teacher “Success. Keep teaching.” Or “Whoa, you need to reteach, correct, clarify, and reinforce what children know before going on,”

Emotional breathing.

Teaching usually is focused on what children think and know. Take a breath and pause to allow children to consider how they feel about what they have learned. “Aw, this is soft. Feelings do not help students on their statewide assessments.” Wrong!

Unlike the factual nature of checking for cognitive understanding, taking an emotional breath is observational and attitudinal. As children progress through a lesson or unit, their executive skills, social awareness, relationship skills, and ethical well-being are equal to their cognitive understanding.

Can or are all students able to –

  • Initiate and use a new skill independently? Can they self-start or are they dependent on their teacher?
  • Aware of the social context of what they have learned? Do they know that different economic, socio-political, cultural, or linguistic groups have a different take on the topic? Can they accept such diverse thinking? How do they feel about this?
  • Work with all other children in the class to extend their new learning. What groupings will help understanding? What needs to be done to improve child-to-child relationships?
  • See ethical and responsible decision-making issues in what they are learning? Can children self-regulate based on their ethical integrity?

Emotional breath taking relies on a teacher’s observational and perceptional acuity. First, a teacher must be self-aware of each of these. Second, a teacher needs to be aware of indicators of SEL indicators that children give off in their classroom experiences. Third, a teacher needs to be prepared to convert observation into planned instructions. If children are lacking in executive functions, teach them. If students are socially unaware, teach them. If children do not see ethical issues, teach them.

Taking a breath of emotional checking assures that teaching and learning are not mechanical but also humane.

Self-awareness.

Breathe also for yourself. Like the swimmer coming up for air, take a pause to help yourself adjust within the lesson. Stop teaching. Take a sip of water. Look around and breathe. Take time to see where you are in the classroom. As a mentor told me, “Pull your socks back up. You have been going at it strong.” I have seen teachers so “into their teaching” they are not aware that they have walked themselves into a corner of the room where the whiteboard hits the wall. One or two kept on teaching through the passing bell and when they turned around a new class of children was seated in their classroom wondering what they should do.

With experience, most teachers know when lessons are working successfully and when they are not. Perceptive teachers know when a lesson that is faltering lies in their preparation and when it is with them in the moment. They can take a breath and adjust themselves and their teaching.

At the same time, ineffective teachers do know how to breathe. They plow ahead in their ineffective lessons with ineffective practices.

The Big Duh!

Teaching is a human endeavor exercising the art and science of causing children to learn. Because we are human, we need to use our natural instincts to inform our uses of the arts and sciences. Effective teachers know how to stop teaching, take a breath, use the pause to monitor and adjust themselves and their instruction, and with new insights go forward.

Lastly, and most importantly, while you pause for breath look around at children engaged in learning. It is a most wonderful sight. And know that your pause for breath also is instruction and reinforcement to children that they also need to pause and breathe.

Master Teachers Know How to Correct Errors in Student Learning

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“What, Romeo and Juliet die! They were young and in love. Did I miss something?”

Teaching and learning are not a linear transaction – a teacher speaks, and students do not always learn what the teacher wants them to learn. There are too many variables that intrude between the teacher and the children being taught. The eyes and ears and brains of children are not constantly connected to what the teacher is saying, doing, demonstrating, and explaining. In a child’s head, it does not take much, just an errant thought about a recent conversation with a friend, a side glance out the classroom window, a rethinking of a text the child read on the way to school, or an anticipation of after school doings, and whatever the teacher said, did, or showed was missed or received incorrectly. Or a child may get tired of reading and not finish the rest of the story. Or a child may rely upon what their small group mates tell them what they should know and not upon their own study. In these moments, correct learning lurches, and incorrect learning takes its place.

Best practice teaching also requires the pedagogic ability to clear up and clean up errors in student learning.

Identify errors in learning early.

A teacher must have ears that clang whenever she hears incorrectness. The clang occurs when a child says “2 + 2 = 5” or “Me and my friend …”, or “George Washington was President during the Civil War” or “Newton’s first law says objects are independent and move randomly.” CLANG!

Each clang requires correction. The issues for a teacher become when and how to make the necessary correction. “Do I stop everything, stop the lesson I am teaching, or the small group I am leading to correct a single student on a single point of misinformation?” Or “does every incorrect thing a child says need correction? If it does, I will never be able to teach anything new because there are so many little incorrect things children say or do.”

Yep, teachers need to plan how to correct errors, now or later. Identify and correct errors when they occur or as quickly as you can after you identify them. Student reality is that errors in their learning are reinforced and are used to distort subsequent learning the longer you wait to correct them.

No fault insurance – learning is what matters.

When correcting student learning, don’t place blame or fault on what caused the incorrect learning. Fault finding is a lonely and dangerous road. Use a “your fault, my fault, or anybody’s fault – I don’t care. We are going to correct this now” mindset. You want to correct learning and not focus children on faults.

If 100 children hear something that a teacher says, statistically only a fraction of them truly comprehend and internalize it accurately. The variables in attention, interpretation, and understanding mean that not all children are in sync with the instruction at hand. This discrepancy highlights the critical need for the teacher to hear the clangs of incorrect learning and make corrections. Given this, there is no time for fault finding; only correcting errors in learning and then moving forward.

The decision is either to make the correction now or at the end of the lesson or, if more than several students demonstrate the same error, to form a tier 2 small group for corrective teaching. Just do it.

Isolate the incorrect – replace with the correct.

Once the decision of when to correct errors in student learning is made, the steps for correction are similar.

  • Explain to students that you and they are going to correct errors in their knowledge content, or conceptualization, or skills they have learned because the error in learning will cause them to have learning problems in the future.
  • State the error in what they learned. “The idea that Romeo and Juliet do not die but live happily ever-after is an error. They die. Their deaths are what makes Romeo and Juliet and tragic love story.”
  • State the corrected learning. “Due to a tragic misunderstanding, Romeo kills himself with poison and Juliet uses Romeo’s knife to kill herself.” Romeo and Juliet die. No need to be graphic, just exact.
  • Give the students the context for their corrected learning by reviewing the family feud between the Montagues and the Capulets that prevented Romeo and Juliet from marrying, the friar’s plan to resolve the feud by faking Juliet’s death, and the scene when Romeo finds Juliet lying death-like but not dead. This review need not take long, just enough to give context to the conclusion – Romeo and Juliet die.
  • Have the students retell this conclusion and the summary of its context. It may seem like overdoing, but if there is a small group of students in this corrective, require each student to make a correct statement and summary of the context. Stating the corrected learning replaces the error with the correction.
  • Conclude by restating the importance of correcting and clarifying what students learn if we know it was not correct. And thank them for doing so.

The Big Duh!

I turn wood on a lathe to make a variety of products. Like any craftsman, my work is not always perfect. Flaws in my use of a bowl gouge combined with unanticipated changes in the wood cause mistakes. Craftsmen are not always error-free 100% of the time, but 100% of the time craftsmen know how to clean up their errors. Cleaning up takes time, effort, and technique. It is the correcting of errors that defines craftsmanship.

So, it is with teaching and learning. Teachers are craftsmen in causing children to learn. Teachers do not need to be effective 100% of the time in their instruction, but 100% of the time teachers need to correct errors in student learning.

We would rather a teacher use the time and effort to identify and correct errors in student learning and not teach everything in a year’s curriculum than teach every lesson in a year’s curriculum even though children have many errors in their learning. Errors in learning, like potholes in winter streets, only grow to cause major disruption later in the student’s life.