Rethinking Common Core by Jensen John;

Author:Jensen, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4086301
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated

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How You Can Apply the Solution

Besides gathering information as they do already (input), students also need to express it like you do (output): Talk more, enable others to understand, and infuse knowledge with feelings. Beyond piggybacking on others’ remarks, like you they must call up the field itself from their own mental stores, organize it so it makes sense to them, and help someone else understand it.

But how could your classroom accommodate this? You already have too little time, so how could you shoehorn in so much student talk?

Remember that you and the whole class together are not the only listener. Instead students build skills and relationships if you pair them up (or arrange small groups), and teach them to listen to each other.

From third grade on, students who by now are reading to learn can do this, although the principles apply as well to younger children—a need that has some urgency. Enormous numbers of them enter school with a word deficit, just not hearing and saying enough of them at home. If you want them to learn words fast and remedy the deficit, arrange for all of them to talk about their learning all day. If you have not thought about how to accomplish this (parents should have done it, right?), go to Effective Classroom Turnaround: Practice Makes Permanent, Rowman & Littlefield (2012), chapter 5, section 34, Primary Grades. Outlined there is a format enabling first graders and kindergarteners, even the reticent, to talk about what they learn.

We can arrange instruction in four steps:

1. First is that students understand the lesson. To help you with this, you have curricular materials, direct instruction, individual tutoring, and peer help. Track carefully how every child forms their initial grasp. Subsequent steps become possible only after that. Consider not explaining anything to a student yourself that another student can explain. You have a whole class of aspiring teachers to put to work.

Many teachers end instruction once they believe students understand a lesson. They are not committed to all students’ permanent retention of it.

Come again? Not committed to students’ permanent retention of their learning? You take students on to the next lesson once they understand this one, and that means you are not committed to its retention? Maybe you protest, “Me!? Of course I’m committed to . . .”

Let me wave a caution flag. We can explain this point step by step, but if there is a deficit in your approach, you probably don’t want to hear it, just like the rest of us. None of us like acknowledging a flaw in our actions.

So let’s guess. First you present some material, but, hey, Andrew is drawing a picture for his girlfriend, Carl is half asleep, Jennifer is talking to Sophia about her hair, but you persevere. You corral the distracted, ask a few prompting questions, explain some more, and finally either run out of time or declare, “They get it!” They all understand the point you make although you know their attention ranges from dim to good.

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