Tag Archives: Madeline Hunter

Theory into Practice: Feedback Feeds Teaching and Learning

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What should a teacher tell a student about how she is doing? About her academic work? About her classroom personality and behavior? About how she is making progress this year? Should it be praise? Critique? Reinforcement? Correction? Should it be what a student wants to hear or what a learner needs to know? Feedback is not simple.

In simple terms, at the end of the assignment or unit a teacher and the children being taught want to wind up at the same point – successful teaching causing successful learning. As a teacher gives feedback to children, the same processes of assessment pertain to the teacher’s progress in meeting teaching goals. A master teacher uses feedback to improve her own teaching.

In his highly informative study of how teacher and school behaviors affect student achievement, John Hattie assigns feedback to students a score of .79. As the average effect size is .40, feedback is one of the more powerful strategies teachers can use to move the needle of student achievement. The right feedback delivered at the right time in the right way makes a difference. If not, not so much.

John Hattie – Effect Size Study

Hattie, however, also notes that 89% of the talk in a classroom is teacher talk. He admonishes teachers to talk less and listen more. And this is a key to providing effective feedback. Listen to and watch for the moment to give a student the most effective information to affect her learning.

What is feedback?

Interestingly, there are two definitions of the word feedback that a teacher should know. The first definition is – helpful information that is given to someone to say what can be done to improve a performance or a product or their work. Feedback is relevant information. The second definition is technical yet truly fits school – an annoying and unwanted sound caused by signals being returned to an electronic sound system. Other feedback is disruptive noise.

Hattie listened to and surveyed students about feedback. His study said that 80% of the feedback a student receives comes from other students. As we consider Hattie’s findings, we nod in agreement that student-to-student talk categorized as feedback is social commentary, praise, complaint or just talk. This means that 80% of the feedback a student receives is not relevant information related to their learning achievement. It is the 20% feedback from a teacher to a student that has a potential for positively helping a student to learn.

What do we know about feedback?

In this discussion, we will consider feedback as information from a teacher to a student(s).

Feedback is categorized as either formative or summative.

  • Formative feedback is given during the learning process. Formative feedback while children are engaged in their learning should be given frequently. This is forward looking feedback. When given within their engagement, children can apply the feedback immediately.
  • Summative feedback is given after the learning process has been completed. This is backward looking feedback, usually after evaluation and a grade has been assigned. Sometimes summative feedback can help motivate a student for the next learning, but usually it is a “post-game recap.”

Feedback that feeds learning answers three questions.

  1. What is the goal and is the goal clearly understood? Once a child is engaged in the assignment, the goal often gets lost in the doing of the assignment. For example, a second-grade child may be fully engaged in completing 10 multiplication problems but not in understanding the process and logic of multiplication. Formative feedback from the teacher focuses a child on learning from the assignment not just doing the assignment. Children of all ages face this dilemma; they focus on doing all the assignments rather than what the assignment teaches them.
  2. How is the child doing in achieving the goal(s)? Feedback that confirms that a child is understanding the goal of the assignment powerfully reinforces the progression of learning. In writing a five-paragraph essay, a teacher can give feedback about the quality of the introductory paragraph that reinforces that step and sets a positive beginning for the next step. Being told that she is on the right track motivates a child to keep working.
  3. What action should the child engage in next? “Next” feedback is often a well-phrased question. “Have your considered …?” asks by asking the child to stop and think? The pause suggests there are several options. Or “Take another look at the goal and the steps in the process” alerts a child that their process is incomplete and allows a correction before ending the assignment.

Feedback is about the learning process not the details within the process. For example, a teacher may see child needs assistance organizing a written assignment and at the same time see mistakes in spelling or capitalization in the written answer. Feedback should focus on key issues before minor issues. Corrective feedback should address the bigger issue of organization before addressing the smaller issue of mechanics.

Feedback is learning goal-oriented and praise is person-oriented. Constructive feedback always is information that focuses on the learning goal and assignments to achieve the goals. Praise or criticism is usually not academic but personal. “You are really smart today” or “… looking good today” is nice for a child to hear but does not inform their learning.

Lastly, feedback is like fertilizer on a lawn – applied at the right time, it causes growth. But overly applied, it can burn out the grass. Children need time to process teacher feedback. Give it and then listen and watch for its effects.

Feedback fed right.

Madeline Hunter told us that teaching is a million decisions about what to do, why to do it, and how to do it to cause learning. Giving feedback is one of those decisions, because if teacher talk is not purposeful it falls into that category of classroom noise.

As a checklist, consider these points in your feedback strategy. Remember, feedback feeds what a child needs to hear to be a successful learner and is not what a teacher just wants to say to a child.

  • Is it goal-oriented?
  • Does it lead to student action?
  • Is it process not person focused?
  • Does it provide reinforcement as well as clarification/correction?
  • Is it timely in the learning process?
  • Is it chunked and not too much or too little?
  • Is it formative or summative?
  • Is it proximal to the child’s learning curve?
  • Will it make a difference in learning outcomes?
  • Does it lead the child to be self-assessing in the future?

If you have affirmative checks on any or some of these, give the feedback.

Feedback is targeted to what a child needs to hear not what a class needs to hear. When a teacher decides that the entire class or a large group of students need the same feedback. Whole class or large group information is a lesson or a tier-two intervention not feedback.

And now that you know what feedback, you also know that feedback is not delivered with a red pen.

The Big Duh!

Feedback is part of a teacher’s total instructional design. Once a teacher launches a lesson, the teacher is not an impartial observer. As a shepherd herds sheep toward home, a teacher uses feedback to ensure that all children reach their learning destination successfully. Every child engaged in the process of a lesson can profit from a teacher’s feedback, not just the lost sheep. Some feedback causes a child to succeed in the lesson and other feedback causes a child to really succeed – all children can use a teacher’s good feedback.

Theory to Practice: Teach for Retention or Forget Teaching It. Your Students Will.

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I said it. Students heard it. Students will remember it. Not really. Educators assume or expect students to remember, but assumptions are not facts. Remembering what a teacher said is a struggle between working memory and brain dumping. If there is not an overt effort to retain what is heard, seen, or perceived, the working brain will dump what was heard, seen, or perceived within 30 seconds. That is a fact. A teacher who wants children to remember what they have been taught must know and practice principles of retention theory. If not, teaching is a wind that blows through children’s minds leaving little that was learned.

What do we know?

Retention is the unspoken assumption in everything we do in school. We want children to remember what we teach them. We test the heck out of students as an assurance that they remember their instruction. We reward children with high test scores and create tiers of intervention and remediation for children with low test scores. Test scores have become our measurement of retained memory. In fact, this pathway almost ensures that instructed learning will not be retained. It is based on false principles and practices.

Let us remember what we know about remembering.

  • The brain is bombarded with thousands of words, images, sounds, and perceptions every hour. The brain is not designed to and will not remember every input it receives.
  • If the brain does not consider/mentally repeat a word, image, sound, or perception it is lost within 30 seconds. The 30-Second Rule is reality.
  • The brain considers to seven to ten bits of information at a time – there is a constant pass through of information in immediate recall. The 30-second rule constantly moves the brain to “next” and “next.”
  • The Forgetting Curve also is a natural function of the brain’s need to be moving on to what is next in life. We forget 50% of received information within one hour and 70% within 24 hours without overt actions to reinforce the retention of that information.

Humans innately forget. If we want to students to remember, we must overtly use practices that cause them to remember. Retention theory must be embedded in every instructional lesson and unit.

Retention Theory

Madeline Hunter named five principles that cause students to remember instruction.

Meaning. One way to combat the 30-Second Rule is to make unfamiliar information meaningful. Brain retention improves when it knows that unfamiliar information connects to what a student already knows or the student’s personal interests. Personal interest is huge in reinforcing memory. She called these connections “anticipatory sets” or ways to overtly move the student toward a positive anticipation about a new lesson. This prepares the brain for memory.

Feeling Tone. Every classroom involves emotional theater, and teachers set the positive, negative, or neutral vibe in which teaching and learning happens. A teacher who has skills of affective and behavioral empathies creates a warm, inviting, and positive atmosphere. The lack empathetic skills and teacher-dominated class time builds hesitant, non-participative student responses in a negative climate. Positive and negative feeling tones are real – teachers know it when they are in one or the other, but do not always know their causations. A neutral feeling tone arises when there is a perceived indifference to whether children learn or not.

Degree and accuracy of Initial Learning. Both correct and incorrect learning lead to memory. Correct learning can be reinforced leading to long-term memory. However, incorrect learning needs to be identified, eliminated, and replaced with correct learning. Although interventions are required, they cloud reinforcement as the brain processes incorrect information out and correct information in. Therefore, when teachers take time to ensure all children achieve high levels of understanding of new instruction before moving to independent practice, teachers are enhancing memory work and retention.

Practice Schedule. Practice does not make perfection, it makes permanence. Theories show that massed practice or “cramming” is effective for fast learning that leads to quick forgetting. In contrast, distributed practice episodes are the key to long-term retention. Practice in retrieving remembered information builds memory muscle and intervals between practice sessions build permanence.

Transfer. The goal of teaching and learning is knowing things that are worth knowing and that can be applied in various new ways, places, and times. Retention of prior learning is reinforced when it is recalled and used in new contexts, and new learning is better understood and remembered when new memories are extensions of older, successful memories. Transfer that connects learning connects memories.

What to do. Each of the following describes a strategy for building and reinforcing retention based upon retention theory.

  • Make information “sticky” and easier to remember. Information is not created equally. Some seems slippery and is hard to remember while other information, like tree sap that clings to fingers, seems sticky and is easier to remember. These strategies make information sticky.

Chunk it. Individual bits of information are hard to remember, but easier when chunked in meaningful groups or sequences or patterns. Chunking means remembering all the individual bits as one – it is easier to remember.

Show it. Research shows that human memory of images is better than memory of independent text or audio. A picture, a video, or a graphic gives the brain another dimension of unfamiliar information. The student sees the word and an image of the word or picks up a representation of the word. Things that can be handled and made tangible, are very memorable.

Add emotional or novelty context. The easiest emotions to embed in new learning are surprise, happiness, and fear. Children love things that go “bang” or have surprise endings. They associate the surprise and the information. All learners appreciate novelty – new things to experience. Just saying “You are the first students to …” makes whatever it is they do “sticky” in their memory.

Do it. Motor skills and experiences are stored in different areas of the brain from information. Teaching about graphing coordinates in math class creates information. Creating a grid on a soccer field and placing/locating things by their coordinates creates a know it/do it combination that is very sticky.

Conversely, there are ways to make information slippery and hard to remember. Avoid or eliminate slippery practices, like giving students lists of random numbers or facts to remember without any context for their memory, allowing passive listening without note taking or required verbal engagement, or giving students information that is highly similar/almost identical to prior information.

  • Use active not passive retrieval of information. Memory requires mental activity and working the information until it avoids the brain dump, becomes short-term memory, then long-term memory, and is transferred to give meaning and context to other information. Passive retrieval relies on a student’s initial interaction with the information and rereading or repeating the same initial interaction. Passive retrieval yields low grade memory retention and leads to very quick forgetting.

What Did You Miss? After first instruction, ask students to write all they know about what they learned. Allow ten minutes. This on-demand retrieval exposes what the student remembers and, when compared with the totality of the first instruction, what is missing.

Discriminating Retrieval. Give students an explanation of the first instruction but one that is missing some information. Ask students to fill in the missing information. This retrieval requires to brain to “work” to clinically retrieve, consider, and identify the parts of the information.

Practice testing and retesting. The strategy of pre-testing and post-testing most often are used to inform and assess instruction. Pre-testing and subsequent testing also work to build and reinforce memory. In any test, students reinforce what they correctly remember. Testing strengthens successful memory retrieval.

Feedback loops. Testing also provides feedback about what students do not know. Focused work on improved reading, listening, seeing, and experiencing of unknown or non-secured information builds new memories. The active work needed to correct misinformation and learn correct information mentally strengthens memorization of what is learned.

Mental refinement/teach back (Feynman Technique). One of the most active is also the strongest retrieval strategy. When students teach what they learned to others, they must consolidate and refine the information they know, construct it in their own words, and deliver the information in ways the others can learn. We often hear that the best way to learn something is to teach it; that also applies to memorization.

  • Spacing. The term “spacing” tells us that productive, active retrieval must is purposefully distributed not massed.       

Intervals. Research suggests these intervals for moving new information into short-term memory and short-term memory into long-term. First review = 24 hours after first instruction. Remember: Without active retrieval, 70% of first instruction is forgotten in 24 hours. Second review = one week later. Third review = one month later. Fourth review = 3-6 months later.

10-30% Rule. Research recommends the optimal gap between retrieval/practice sessions should be 10-30% of the time you want students to remember the information. If the final test is in one month, use practice exercises every 3 to 6 days. If the final test or performance is in one year, practice once each month. For classroom rules that cover a school year, test/practice every month of the school year.

Interleaving. Do not practice the same information/skill at every practice session. Test/practice just a part of the same information at one session and other parts at subsequent sessions. And include different types of information in each session. This requires students to mentally sort through the memory, mine that information, and retrieve specific memories.

Leitner or Box Method. Everyday include a brief retrieval of new information and things students are having difficulty remembering. Every 3 days include a retrieval of things students are shaky on in their memory. Once every week practice information all students can retrieve easily.

  • Layered mastery. Best practice is not the constant use of one active retrieval strategy. Like physical exercise, using one strategy repeatedly only makes that one type of memory stronger. Layered mastery creates a multi-month schedule of intervals for brain dumping, testing, teaching to others that causes students to retrieve information repeatedly, analyze the information, apply the information, evaluate the reliability and validity of information, and synthesize the information into new configurations. When teachers use Bloom’s Taxonomy to guide their use retention theory, they cause students to build their own retrieval systems.

The Big Duh!

The industrial model of teaching and learning in the United States makes curriculum a conveyor belt of information that teachers teach, and students try to learn. The high demands and constancy of our K-12 curriculum delivery do not include time and resources for meaningful information retention. We teach and test then teach and test something new. If we want students to know what they learn for more than one day or until the next quiz, we must understand and use retention theory and its research-based practices. If we do not teach students to build memory building and retrieval, we truly institutionalize forgetting.

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.