As the summer ends, many of you may be reflecting on conferences, professional learning opportunities, research and planning that you crammed into your two months of "vacation". Most of us know the feeling of walking out of a three day conference, or even the back to school meetings and having our heads spin.
There is a lot packed into expectations, new knowledge and personal goals. Now as we enter the classroom, how do we unpack all of that information and then apply it to our year? It normally takes me weeks to fully comprehend information that I crammed from the summer preperation. Our students feel this way every day. They move through seven class periods and take in tons of information, and they do it every day for the entire year.
When I first started taking yoga, my teacher would explain about philosophy, postures, and traditional hisotry of the practice. I found myself a few years later sometimes finally udnerstanding things I heard her say in some of my first classes. My brain just wasn't ready to go there at the time of first hearing some of the content of yoga. I think our students are that way. As teachers, we have to remember what it was like to be a student so that we can become better teachers.
January of 2016, I was teaching sophomore English. The movie "Inside Out" had just come out that fall. I was doing an introductory lesson on rhetorical analysis. After class it occurred to me that our students do not see the process of the lesson the way we do. They do not understand an introductory lesson will have follow up. They do not have the blue print of learning unless we provide it for them. Therefore, they think everything we say might be the first and last time they hear it. A student came up to me and said, "Mrs. Stephenson, I don't fully understand this skill yet."
To which I replied, " You are not supposed to yet." He did not realize I was leading him somewhere. A good teacher should have students that see where they are going and the purpose to where they have been. I had not done that with this lesson. When I began to show him how I constructed the lesson to be recursive in the skills, he was relieved.
He compared his learning to the movie that was released that fall. "So, this is not a core memory yet? It will become a core memory later?"
"Yes, that is right. I will have you retrieve the memory of the skill several times before it becomes a core memory," I reassured him.
Teachers should start to allow our students to see the blue print of our instruction. Help them to see the process. By doing this we can help them anticipate where they are going and understand the purpose to where they have been in our classrooms. We need to let them know they should not be mastering skills the first time through. As teachers, we should intertwine our skills and require purposeful retrieval that is periodic. This will help our students move the skills from short term to long term memory. That is afterall the goal, correct? To have our students remember and retain what we teach them? Make it Stick written by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Reodiger III and Mark A. McDaniel discusses the science behind how we all learn and how to implement strategies when we present information to our students.
After we present new information to students, they need time to process. Processing time is informal and ungraded. Processing time can look different for each teacher, but the basic idea is that students are allowed time to "unpack" the concepts and skills; the same way that teachers need to "unpack" ideas after a long week at a conference or professional development.
Processing time for students develops a deeper understanding of what we are teaching. Students can be given time to write, discuss, connect, create, or read articles that deepen their knowledge. All of these things help students to process what we are teaching. Ultimately, processing leads them to learning.
There is a lot packed into expectations, new knowledge and personal goals. Now as we enter the classroom, how do we unpack all of that information and then apply it to our year? It normally takes me weeks to fully comprehend information that I crammed from the summer preperation. Our students feel this way every day. They move through seven class periods and take in tons of information, and they do it every day for the entire year.
When I first started taking yoga, my teacher would explain about philosophy, postures, and traditional hisotry of the practice. I found myself a few years later sometimes finally udnerstanding things I heard her say in some of my first classes. My brain just wasn't ready to go there at the time of first hearing some of the content of yoga. I think our students are that way. As teachers, we have to remember what it was like to be a student so that we can become better teachers.
January of 2016, I was teaching sophomore English. The movie "Inside Out" had just come out that fall. I was doing an introductory lesson on rhetorical analysis. After class it occurred to me that our students do not see the process of the lesson the way we do. They do not understand an introductory lesson will have follow up. They do not have the blue print of learning unless we provide it for them. Therefore, they think everything we say might be the first and last time they hear it. A student came up to me and said, "Mrs. Stephenson, I don't fully understand this skill yet."
To which I replied, " You are not supposed to yet." He did not realize I was leading him somewhere. A good teacher should have students that see where they are going and the purpose to where they have been. I had not done that with this lesson. When I began to show him how I constructed the lesson to be recursive in the skills, he was relieved.
He compared his learning to the movie that was released that fall. "So, this is not a core memory yet? It will become a core memory later?"
"Yes, that is right. I will have you retrieve the memory of the skill several times before it becomes a core memory," I reassured him.
Teachers should start to allow our students to see the blue print of our instruction. Help them to see the process. By doing this we can help them anticipate where they are going and understand the purpose to where they have been in our classrooms. We need to let them know they should not be mastering skills the first time through. As teachers, we should intertwine our skills and require purposeful retrieval that is periodic. This will help our students move the skills from short term to long term memory. That is afterall the goal, correct? To have our students remember and retain what we teach them? Make it Stick written by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Reodiger III and Mark A. McDaniel discusses the science behind how we all learn and how to implement strategies when we present information to our students.
After we present new information to students, they need time to process. Processing time is informal and ungraded. Processing time can look different for each teacher, but the basic idea is that students are allowed time to "unpack" the concepts and skills; the same way that teachers need to "unpack" ideas after a long week at a conference or professional development.
Processing time for students develops a deeper understanding of what we are teaching. Students can be given time to write, discuss, connect, create, or read articles that deepen their knowledge. All of these things help students to process what we are teaching. Ultimately, processing leads them to learning.