High-Leverage Practice 20: Instruction

I am going to discuss High-Leverage Practices as mentioned on the CEC website organized around four aspects of practice. I hope you will join in the conversation!

HLP20 Provide intensive instruction.

There are ways to intensify instruction that should be taken into consideration. Here are some examples of ways to do this so that students can be more successful in the classroom.

Give additional instructional time. It may take longer for students to grasp the material. Don’t try to rush them to get to the next concept. Make sure that they fully understand and can master the concept that they are working on.

Move student to smaller small group size. If the smallest group size of two isn’t working, the student may need more one on one instruction.

Duration of instruction refers to the amount of time each day the instruction is provided, the frequency with which instructional sessions are delivered, and the number of weeks the intervention lasts.  The student may need more minutes per day of instruction in order to have enough time to process new information.  Getting this instruction more often may also be necessary. Instead of three times a week, the student may need help daily. Instead of just four weeks of instruction, the student may need to have eight or twelve weeks of instruction. This duration of time can be adjusted as needed.

  

Individualizing instruction to meet the student’s need may need to be done. By giving a pretest, I can see what skills my student may be weak in. If the student is having trouble with foundational skills, I can’t expect him to work on more complex skills that build on that foundation. Even if the rest of the class has moved on, I may need to individualize instruction for one or two students. This is why Universal Design for Learning is so important. Taking into account different learning styles and needs, instruction can be designed to help the student be more successful.

What other ways would you intensify instruction? Please share.

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High-Leverage Practice 16: Instruction

I am going to discuss High-Leverage Practices as mentioned on the CEC website organized around four aspects of practice. I hope you will join in the conversation!

HLP16 Use explicit instruction.

Explicit instruction is highly interactive. This does not mean lecturing and telling students what to do.

It might involve a lot of questioning which helps the students stay engaged because they might be called upon to answer the question. This also helps the teacher check for understanding.

This type of instruction follows the model of “I do, we do, you do.” First the teacher models exactly what the students would do. Then some students can model or the whole class can model together. Next becomes the independent work where the student does it on his own.

I also feel that explicit instruction breaks down the goal into every single task that is necessary to achieve this goal. I don’t take anything for granted.

Once I was teaching students how to write a check and record it into the checkbook. I took it for granted that the students knew what a check and a checkbook was. This was a major flaw on my part! Many had no idea what a check register was, so I had to start from the very beginning. The way I did this was to  write down every step that a person needed to do in order to write a check. Sometimes it is easier for me to pretend that the person has a limited English vocabulary so that I don’t assume anything when I’m listing the steps. I practiced with my husband and told him not to do anything unless I specifically gave him an instruction to do it. I was very surprised at how many steps I still missed because of my assumptions!

What are some suggestions you have for using explicit instruction? Please share.

Photo by Providence Doucet on Unsplash

My Perspective on Differentiated Instruction

In Why I Don’t Like Differentiated Instruction from Education On The Plate by Deven Black, he states

“Instruction focuses on what the teacher provides or what the teacher tells the student and differentiation merely postulates that teachers need to provide a variety of materials and tell in a variety of ways.”

At first when I read this post, I disagree with it because I think differentiated instruction is vital to a student’s success. Then when I read the statement I mentioned above, I realized that the success actually depends on the teacher’s perspective on differentiated instruction. According to this post, differentiated instruction just means giving different materials and teaching differently. If this is how a teacher perceives differentiated instruction, then I wouldn’t like it either, not as a teacher and definitely not as a student.

I believe that differentiated instruction deals more with how the student learns and what works best to achieve the objectives. Instruction is focused more on the different student rather than different materials and teaching styles. It also should include the students’ learning styles or it just won’t work.

If a student is an auditory learner, by all means, I would give oral instruction but also back it up with visual instruction. Just because a student is strong in one area, doesn’t mean I should limit my instruction to one area. By teaching both ways, I can reach more students. I believe that it doesn’t matter what type of learner they are if I can’t show them how relevant the lesson is to their own lives. Sure, to make learning interesting, I use a variety of tools, and activities because if it gets boring for me, it obviously will put students into a snooze!

Teaching new skills should involve different materials and teaching styles but should also include the student’s learning styles. If a student learns best by using his hands, then I need to find a way for this student to learn by using his hands. When I was teaching about the battles of the Revolutionary War, I let some students make a diorama of the specific battle. They used small soldiers and created the scene on their own. This helped understanding in a much better way than just reading about it in the textbook. My auditory learners researched about the conditions that soldiers had to exist in and did audio interviews with “soldiers” as if they were reporters during that time period. There are so many ways to teach lessons and encourage the student’s strengths if I can think outside the box. Instead of teaching the way I was taught, I need to teach in ways that I wish I was taught.

In the same respect, I need to see how students can show me that they can master a skill or achieve an objective in order to properly assess the learning. Assessment should not be a “one size fits all” activity. Before a lesson occurs, I need to decide the ways that I can evaluate and measure achievement. The best way for me has been to allow the students to create something new with their knowledge that they learned. This allows the student to be creative and also diminishes the temptation for some to cheat. Whenever we start a new lesson, I tell the students how they will be assessed. I share with them 5 possible projects for them to do at the end. This allows them to be thinking about it as they go through the learning. Their final creation from their learning can be part of their assessment that they turn in. Critiquing other projects using a rubric I created, can also be part of their assessment because it makes them look at the other student’s projects and use their knowledge learned in order to complete the rubric.

Sometimes I will even allow students to give input into the assessment. Over the years, I have developed a list of projects and pull from this list for different lessons. Students are allowed to pick 1 out of 5 choices for their assessment. If they have a suggestion that is not on the list, they are allowed to submit a proposal. They need to tell me what they want to do and how it will show me that they have mastered the objective. Sometimes the students come up with great ideas and by allowing their input, they feel they have some control over their learning and tend to be more engaged in the lesson.

It ends up being a win-win situation for everyone. The teacher has a successful lesson and the students are successful in achieving a goal and learning something that is relevant to their future.

How do you feel about differentiated instruction? What is your perspective?

Posted on the Successful Teaching Blog by loonyhiker (successfulteaching at gmail dot com).

Image: 'the redcoats were bastards'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/48105870@N00/1464592814

Individualized Instruction: Good or Bad?

In Is individualized instruction a bad thing? from Dangerously Irrelevant, Scott McLeod mentions a comment from Diana Senechal that she left on a Wall Street Journal article about computers’ burgeoning ability to individualize student learning:

“While "individualized instruction" seems an unequivocal good, perhaps it is not. There is something to be said for asking students to pay attention to something that does not immediately interest them, something they may not immediately understand.”

Then Scott asks, “What do you think of Diana’s comment? Is individualized instruction and/or learning a bad thing?”

I thought about this for a long time and then couldn’t resist answering this question.

I think individualized instruction is important for all learners. Individualized instruction does not mean that all rules and expectations need to be individualized. In life, some people may ride a bicycle, drive a car, or walk to work, but we all follow basic traffic rules and expectations. The same thing applies to individualized instruction. I think behavior is being confused with instruction.

Too many times we have tried to make all students fit into the same mold causing many to fall by the way side. How many times have we heard about inventors who were poor students but were able to invent something that we just can’t live without?

I think it is important to teach students to know what ways work best for them. Students need to learn to be their own self advocates. Teachers can give individualized instruction but first they need to know what works best for the individual student.

When I taught students who had trouble passing the exit exam in order to receive a high school diploma, I noticed that the students were at all different levels of skills. There was no way to reach all of them by teaching one lesson per day to all of them. Using pretests, I was able to find out what skills each student needed to work on and move forward from there. Since they also learned at different rates, many of them did not need the same amount of time to learn the same skill. So, each student had their own individualized instruction and I had very little behavior problems during the year.

Even though each student may have been learning individual skills, they still were expected to follow basic rules of the classroom. Each student was expected to finish their assignments, do their homework, raise their hand, be respectful, and come prepared for class. Many basic expectations do not need to be individualized.

As an adult, I know what my learning style is and try not to put myself into situations that may conflict with this if possible. I also have found that if I have to be in certain situations, I find ways to make the situation easier for me. I really do not learn if I have to sit and listen to a lecture but I have found that if I can do something with my hands, I am able to focus on the lecture more easily. Since I took up knitting, I usually bring my knitting with me and this really helps me focus. If I am in a small room with a lecturer, I usually let the person know what I’m doing so that I don’t appear rude. Unless we let students explore and learn how to do this, they will be unable to make these decisions for themselves later in life. Isn’t this part of preparing them for life?

So, I guess my bottom line is that individualized instruction is not only a good thing but I feel it is extremely important to all students.

What do you think? Do you agree or disagree and why?

Posted on the Successful Teaching Blog by loonyhiker (successfulteaching at gmail dot com).

Original image: 'Ever have the feeling that you just don't quite fit in?'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/61779926@N00/3925965984 by: Steve Wall