Tag Archives: Madeline Hunter

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.

The Tension of High Expectations

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Tension.  Anxiety.  Investment.  These are tangibles most of us want to diminish in our daily lives.  Tension, anxiety, and pressure can be aggravants and we see them as undesirable for our general well-being.  Yet, without degrees of tension, anxiety, and an investment to move forward, it is hard to cause learning.  Highly effective teachers know how to use positive attributes of external tension, anxiety, and investment to raise a child’s internal motivation to learn and keep learning. 

Primary schooling for most children begins with excitement.  School is new and exciting for a 4K or K student.  It is a new place with lots of children who will become friends and new things to do.  The blaze of early social excitement wears off with time.  While some children rise every morning with a “I can’t wait to get to school”, most need our assistance in answering the school bell every day.  Motivational theory helps us to keep children from sinking into the drudgery of compulsory education, the grind of getting through school.

Madeline Hunter taught us how components of tension assists motivation that leads to successful student learning.  (Hunter’s name and teaching reverberate in many discussions of teaching and learning.)  Motivation starts with a teacher setting a positive yet challenging feeling tone about learning.  A feeling tone has a friendly edge to it; an edge like a tool that is constantly pushed into new information and skills to be learned and the tension of that pushing causes learning.  That edge is a tension that the teacher sets and controls over time.  It is a friendly edge because effective teachers coat it with more Hunterisms – personal interest, challenge, the rewards of success, and how what is learned is useful in a child’s future.

Motivation is jump started by a teacher’s understanding of each child’s readiness to learn and beginning point for learning and adjusting initial instruction for early, meaningful success.  Motivational tension is enhanced when the challenge of what comes next is “just beyond the current reach” of student knowledge and skills yet within a student’s grasp with guided work.  There is a tension in that distance between what a child knows and can do now and what she needs to know and do next.  Effective teachers make this a positive tension because it results in success.

Bill Spady taught us that “successful learning begets more successful learning”.  When he laid out the outcomes to be taught and learned, he relied upon sound instructional practices to cause learning.  Students become invested when the outcomes set by the teacher are important and meaningful.  The drive to achieve important outcomes carries an element of anxiety to succeed.  Teachers monitor each student’s sense of internal anxiety knowing that too much causes a student to shut down or make poor decisions.  Just the right amount of anxiety keeps a student properly and positively pointed toward learning success.

All children need to see that what they learn is beneficial to them personally.  They need to see and feel personal gain or improvement in order to invest themselves in school assignments.  If a child does not feel personal interest and connection to a curriculum, it is easy to see school assignments as just a long line of work assigned by teachers and required to pass to the next grade.  Drudgery.  When this is a child’s mindset, any distraction or other thing to do moves a child’s interest from learning to something more immediately rewarding or fun to do.  Gaming and other Internet links are perfect and available for distracted and disillusioned students who have no personal investment in their school education.  A child may not see herself in every assignment, but there has to be enough and frequent enough personal interest to keep her invested.

Effective teachers purposefully tell students that “what comes next” holds special interests for aspiring artists and musicians, or is very hands-on for students needing tactile learning, or is necessary for students who see themselves in a medical profession.  Good teaching tells them then shows them.  Investment in the future is a wonderful subliminal tag for any new subject or skill set.

Teaching and learning carry many caveats, some more meaningful than others.  One of the most potent is “low expectations are connected to low achievements and higher expectations to higher achievements.”  Raising expectations is more than just declaring them or sending them in an e-mail.  Higher expectations are built by teachers with rigorous instruction of knowledge, skills, and dispositions AND by students who elevate their work, their commitment, and their performance.  There is a lot of “doing” in teaching and learning to higher expectations.  Higher achievements are a continuous push-pull between teachers and students.

Tension, anxiety, and investment are used by effective teachers in setting the right tone and providing rigorous teaching toward the knowledge and skills learning children need to learn.  Expectations won’t rise on their own – they are constructed on sound principles of motivation and instruction.  Constructive use of tension is a necessary component for teachers and students to achieve successful teaching and learning.

Listening, Speaking and Arithmetic

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The ability to read and write proficiently has been one of the twin measures of an educated person for centuries. Facility in mathematics is the twin measure. Contemporary K-12 education is geared by a child’s facility with reading and writing. More than grade level promotion, gpa and access to advanced curricula, the ability to read and write shapes a child’s self-esteem and social-emotional well-being. What happens, then, when reading and writing no longer are the gold standard of education? How does the industry of education adjust to a new standard – perhaps, speaking and listening? If the trend of evolving generations holds, oral communication skills are more important than written communication skills. Boomers read and write. Millennials and Gen Z listen, see and speak. Seismic? Yes!

Take Away

My grandchildren do not read literature or biographies or informational texts as we did in earlier generations. They do not read newspapers or news journals. They do not write and share letter writing with relatives and friends. They do not worry out a grammatically correct sentence. Say, what? To learn something new, they do not refer to texts or tomes. They would rather not attend class to learn if there is an option. When I illustrate a daily comment with Shakespeare or Twain or even Stephen King, they do not show any recognition. I cannot even comment, “It is Greek to them” and believe that they know what I mean. They and their generation are oral, aural and visual. They communicate with sound and the texted sound bite and visual imaging. And, my grandchildren are just representative of their generation. I confirmed this generalization in conversations with local middle school children and their teachers. Today’s children prefer listening and talking to reading and writing.

For the proverbial English major, listening to daily conversation has become an aural anguish. So many of the conventions drummed into the Boomer generation have been abandoned by Millennials and Gen Z. Subject and predicate agreement no longer matters. Beginning an oral statement with “So, …” and liberally splashing “… you know…” and “…like…” and “…I mean…” throughout lengthy run-on sentence-statements is now common conversation. They do not know the difference between “he and I” and “him and me” and do not care. Across the conversational English of their generation, this unconventional usage is becoming standardized. If this is the future, what are educators called to do?

If the learning and working language preferences and practices of Gen Z, now becoming our most populated generation, are indicative of the learning preferences and language practices of the generations to come, how should public education respond in terms of teaching and learning?

What do we know?

Historically, school has been the source of reading, writing and arithmetic. Taken at a larger measure, schools were built to teach children to read and write. Books and other printed material were housed in classrooms and libraries. Paper and pencil and pen, long the given medium, gave way to computers and printers, but the functions remained the same. The educational goal was to read fluently and with comprehension and to write succinctly in well-crafted paragraphs. Reading and writing as tools for learning opened all the other subjects of school – the social studies and sciences, art and music, technical arts and technology, even drivers education – to children and their future lives.

Also, historically, education has slowly evolved to meet new realities. Public education is not on the cutting edge of change. In fact, public education often is justifiably criticized for being too slow to change and is an impediment to many needed changes in our world. Will this be true of our recognition of changing generational learning and language preferences and practices?

Why Is this Thus?

Education is designed by the adults in the room not the children. Picture Greatest Generation and Baby Boomers educators and politicians when you look at most school buildings, school curricula, and school organization. Think about the needs of late 20th century business and economy when you consider the educational outcomes of a high school education. Education supplied traditional business models requiring men and women who could fulfill roles in accounting and business, sales and marketing, engineering of all types, law, and medicine. Reading and writing were essential skills for success up to and into the 21st century. Reading and writing proficiency and fluency were symbols of success for those generations.

Millennials and Gen Z are different breeds of cats compared to the Greatest and the Boomers. They are mentally, socially and culturally wired differently. Add to their being different this reality – The American Dream shifted. For all prior generations, young adults believed that their standard of living would exceed that of their parents. Steady advances in personal income would continue for them as it had in the past. Horatio Alger stories of bootstrapping oneself to economic and social prosperity were rewritten. Millennials sweat paying off student debt and out-of-reach home mortgages and Gen Z eschew four-year degrees and are more cautious about long-term commitments. Young adults dream differently than the Greatest and the Boomers and engage in life differently, as well. Their learning preferences and language usages are just tokens of these differences. I engage in some stereotyping of Millennials and Gen Z, but in contrast to the Greatest and Boomers, not much.

To Do

The science of teaching provides us with our clues for tuning education to the preferences of our Gen Z children and beyond. The best practices of good teaching need to be everyday practices for children who are oral, aural and visual learners.

• Say it then write it. Madeline Hunter taught us that children hear faster than they can read. Saying it first allows a child time to hear and begin processing what you want them to learn. Saying it and pronouncing it allays guess work if the child must read an unknown word before hearing it. All of this is left-brain processing work. Then write it. The pause between saying and writing or displaying the word allows short term memory to begin working.

• Keep it simple. Use Hunter’s concepts of critical attributes to identify the important vocabulary, key words, and essential facts. Once these are presented and affirmed in short-term memory, they can be elaborated. And, do not crowd in more and more information. Erase words or take away digital displays when new words and concepts are “said and written”. Overcrowding causes confusion.

• Use visuals and models. It is all about multi-sensory learning. Saying it is aural. Writing it is verbal. Seeing it is visual. Envisioning it in a model provides a definition or model. Gen Z children are more 3D and a physical modeling helps them to mentally play with the information.

The next points are huge.

• Explain it, discuss it, question it. Children who prefer oral and aural learning experiences need to talk about their learning. They need to “think aloud” and hear other’s thinking. Discussion is their form of reinforcement. It provides clarification and repetition. Questions demand that they put it into their own words. Asking questions or being asked questions within their discussion is their way of “proving it”.

• Get all children involved in the discussion. Like all children in prior generations, Gen Z kids can be shy. But, given their proclivity for oral discussion over writing out their thinking, they will talk. Ask children “What do you think?” and then ask other children to agree, disagree or expand and add to what has been said. Oral discussion should become larger in time and scope and importance in instructional design.

• Elaborate and extend it with reading. Once a new idea or concept or model is introduced, oral/aural learners are ready to read about it. Reading makes sense to them when it meaningfully builds upon what they are learning. They would say that the oral/aural gives them a meaningful structure to which they can attach their subsequent reading.

Madeline Hunter, Mastery Learning, Corwin Press, 1982.

The big Duh

Best practices are required for teaching to consistently cause learning. The schools created by and for the Greatest Generation, Boomers, and perhaps Gen X emphasized educational outcomes through reading and writing. Millennials and Gen Z children show preferences for oral and aural learning experiences to achieve the needed educational outcomes for their future world. This fairly seismic shift does not mean that reading and writing are out and listening and speaking are in. Best practices in teaching remain the keys to generational success. Educator’s are constantly called to clinically adapt and use best practices geared to each generation and their learning needs.

Plan For Listening If You Want To Be Heard

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Descartes opined that when no one is in the woods to hear a tree fall there is no proof that the tree actually fell.  Applied to causing learning, if a teacher is talking/teaching in a classroom and no students are listening, is teaching actually occurring?

Let’s add another question to this point.  A teacher gives oral direction to a class of twenty children.  To what extent does each child hear the same direction?

These two questions are real.  Talking and the expectation of being listened to is an assumption.  Directing and the expectation that others will understand the direction is a second assumption.  These two assumptions are made every day in classrooms and they lead us to the Cartesian conclusion:  if children are not listening and paying attention to what is being said, there is no proof that teaching and direction actually occurred.

The remedy is that we must shelve our assumptions and gather evidence.  To follow Madeline Hunter, we must teach the critical attributes of listening and we must check for understanding of what has been heard.  And, we must practice these critical attributes and checking for understanding until they are fully embedded in our teaching/learning routines.  Then, we must check them intermittently to assure that we do not fall victim to our assumptions once again.

Critical attributes of effective listening begin with the teacher.  Is the teaching and direction constructed in ways that promote attentive listening?  Are they personalized so that children can relate to the words spoken?  If a child does not know that she is expected to listen and that her success as a student is within the teaching/direction, she will not commit her attention.  Is the teaching/directing concise and without the distraction of “bird walks” of irrelevant information?  We all listen in “snippets”.  Effective teaching in five- to ten-minute bursts are consumable for attentive listening.  Directions that include three or four “to do” points are understandable for attentive listening.  Story telling and rambling and anecdotal directing cause a student to tune out and long lists of things to do are confusing.  Teachers who plan to be listened to will be heard.

Checking for understanding is child accountability.  Why would a person take their car in for a repair and not road test the car afterward to assure the repair was actually made?  We need to road test children for what they hear and understand.  Checking is requiring a child or children to demonstrate – to give evidence of what they heard and understood.  Asking a child to paraphrase an instructional snippet verbally or in writing, to connect the instructional snippet to a previous snippet, or to provide the conclusions she has reached after considering the snippet are good checking strategies.  When children know that they will be required to demonstrate their listening and understanding, they become more attentive listeners and learners.  Over time, they become more effective and interactive in their self-accountability for learning and listening.

There are many more techniques and strategies for assuring that teaching/learning and directing/listening occur in classrooms.  To prevent a Cartesian problem, it is essential that a teacher purposefully practices any of these techniques to create the evidence that children are listening and learning.  If this is not done, a teacher might as well hold class in the stillness of the woods where there is no proof that a tree actually fell.