Give ‘em a Choice

A speaker that I heard, early in my teaching career, made an argument to give kids choices.  His idea was that if you frame the choices so that whatever the child chose, you’d be delighted.  Later, I heard the same advice from Love and Logic’s Jim Fay:  give a child two choices, either of which you’d be thrilled for them to choose.  I think that there’s immense power in that idea.

When I taught, reading was the homework assignment of choice… my choice.  Armed with my training in Accelerated Reader (A.R.), students had access to a seemingly endless source of books (5 or 6 bookshelves in my classroom) at their diagnosed reading levels.  In addition, I encouraged a little work in Accelerated Math (A. Math), but didn’t strictly hold students accountable for that as I did for the reading.  For the most part, my students made huge strides as readers in both the volume of reading done and the increasing reading levels they achieved over the school year.  I was proud of my homework assignment because it asked of every students something that they could do at their diagnosed ability level, something that could not be said for the day’s math lesson or the spelling workbook.

Something I read today made me rethink that a bit.  In Daniel Willingham’s Raising Kids Who Read, he makes the point that turning kids into readers requires, among several conditions, reading being a desirable choice to the child.  Children of all ages have many things that they may choose to do with their times, many of them electronic and easy.  Reading, even if it’s at a child’s diagnosed reading level can often require greater intellectual effort than playing on their X-Box.  

So what I’m thinking is that, in assigning homework, teachers might offer a choice of homework, say, using my old assignments, A. Math or A.R.  From the students’ perspectives, they might “feel” more like doing one or the other on any particular evening.  Either one would be skill-building but unlikely to need a great deal of external support to complete, with the bonus that supervision would be easy.  Although A.R and A. Math were tools of choice for me, there are an abundance of other online tools available which would be appropriate to assign and monitor.

What if a child loves to read and always chooses reading?  Is that so bad?  That child will likely use those language skills throughout life.  The same could be said for that child who prefers to do math in the evening.  Perhaps that child is a budding scientist or engineer?  In class, of course, the normal curriculum would move forward with all students being instructed in Language Arts and Math however the teacher determined.  Although it might be likely that a student would always or nearly-always choose one over the other, the important factor would be that the child is choosing to practice a skill that will benefit their development.  It may just be that having a choice might keep the child choosing to do homework instead of choosing to avoid it?

Learn Like a Baby III

If you’ve already read the immediately preceding posts, you’re aware that I’m focused on what I’ll call “natural” learning, that is, learning that takes place, stimulated by experience, rather than isolated tasks meant to be memorized.  Today, I’d like to throw out an idea that brings together the concept of “learn like a baby” with some of the ideas I’ve discussed with how the brain learns.

It seems to me that it would be wonderful if, beside language arts instruction and math instruction, there was a serious commitment to what I’ll call “general education” in the school.  General education, here, is meant to expand students general background skills and knowledge.  Topics that appeal to me are formal music instruction, applied science, cooking, applied history, computer programming, and construction.  Specific topics would be age-appropriate, and there’s no reason to think that some topics might be eventually dropped in favor of areas more suitable for older children.  Mine is just an “off the top of my head” list.  No doubt you could provide others.  Notice the word applied in a couple of the topics.  What I’m looking for is to engage students minds by engaging their hands.

I’m thinking month-long units, perhaps eight a year, that give students hands-on, in-depth experience developing skills and knowledge which would allow them to reach adulthood with a fuller tool bag of skills and experiences, broadening their ability to function as a grown-up.  Each unit would represent a potential jumping-off point for further independent learning throughout that student’s life.  The suggestion of month long classes is just that, as suggestion.  Formal music instruction might take six to eight weeks, cooking only two.  Over a number of school years, the goal would be to give students foundational skills from which they could go off on their own and explore further.  

One unit that I didn’t mention earlier but with which I am quite familiar is drama.  I produce 8 - 10 student musicals each year on a volunteer basis.  When in the classroom, my classes did three or four musicals a year, though only two went to full production and performance.  When I first tried a classroom musical, my purpose was reader’s theater.  I simply wanted to give my students more experience reading expressively and the music was sort of “candy” on the side.  Quite quickly, it became obvious that the musicals gave my students more than expressive reading skills.  They learned how to memorize a fundamental learning skill.  They developed confidence speaking, and singing, in front of an audience.  Most were willing to challenge themselves in ways that they never did in math class.  To this day, I still see all of that in the musicals I produce.  In eight or nine rehearsals with very little coaching from me, and a lot of personal work by the students themselves, they achieve something that they could not have imagined… and they love it!  In the future, if asked to memorize something or to speak to an audience, they will have the recollection of their previous experience upon which to build confidence.

Learn Like a Baby II

Let’s go on.  I’d like to continue exploring the idea of learning like a baby, this time, using writing as the content area.  During my teaching career, writing was an area of great interest to me.  I’m not too sure why.  Certainly my high school English teachers would never have predicted that.

When I taught fourth grade, the State expected us to teach students to write summaries, which might be the task on the State writing test at year’s end.  So, teach summaries, I did.  The problem was that what I was teaching, and what my students were producing, were two distinctly different things.  Student summaries typically began with a huge amount of detail about the characters, setting, and beginning events.  Then, students ran out of steam.  Seldom did a summary mention the story’s problem, attempts to solve the problem, or the resolution, the meat of the story.  They just didn’t “get” summary.

My solution:  simplify.  I started giving students three slips of paper and the task of writing one sentence about the beginning of the story, one about the middle, and one about the ending.  We did this repeatedly.  After students developed some skill at this, I asked them to read their three sentences and write a beginning sentence which told what the whole story was about… in one sentence. After they mastered that, I asked them to add a sentence at the end that said what the “point” or “moral” of the story was.  Some students complained that three sentences wasn’t enough to explain what happened in the story.  To those students I gave permission to explain a bit more.  Over time, my students learned how to write a summary.

Brain research tells us that we can only juggle about four things in our working memory at one time.  Fortunately for us adults, thanks to what scientists call “chunking,” many individual things eventually become understood as one to our brain, allowing us to accomplish increasingly complex tasks.  An easy example of a chunk is a telephone prefix.  Where I live, most land lines begin with the prefix “265” and many cell prefixes begin with “477”.  Our brains, knowing the way prefixes are assigned, learn the three-digit prefixes as a single “chunk,” easing the burden of remembering 7-digit phone numbers.  Such is the value of experience.

Babies learn by repeating actions until the routines become known and reliable.  That knowledge, then, becomes foundational for greater learning.  When we ask too great an intellectual load in our assignments, we may produce students who become more adept at following directions, but not necessarily students who are learning or expanding their skills.  We need to allow students time to consolidate experiences into skills at their pace.  Repetition is the mother of learning, I’ve heard.  If we do that, we will develop students who ask to do more… just as soon as they’re ready.

Learn Like a Baby

Learn Like a Baby

Discuss education with me and you’re not going to have to wait long to hear me talk about Accelerated Reader.  Typically, I’m not one to go out of my way to endorse products, but my advocacy of A.R. comes from both personal experience with the program, both in my classroom and as a trainer,  and what I’ve learned about learning through years of professional reading.  Note that I highlighted the words “product” and “program” in the last sentence.  I don’t endorse products, but a program that works for students will get my enthusiastic support.

It’s sad to me that less and less teachers are formally trained in the A.R. program.  So many have been taught second hand, at best, from teachers who may or may not have had formal training in the elements of the program and how those elements fit together to benefit students.  Although I think the most important part of the program is that students read books that are at their diagnosed reading level, I’d like to comment on another feature of the program today:  self-choice.

I’ve known a lot of teachers who’ve given a great deal of thought to selecting and assigning so called “class books” for their students.  Typically, the stories are rich with great characters and content.  They’re the kind of books that the teacher can read annually and for which they can maintain their passion.  There’s just one problem.  The books are seldom at the diagnosed reading level of most of the students in the class.  Consequently, armed with insufficient background knowledge, vocabulary, or working memory to decode complex construction, students drag through the text with low comprehension and likely lower enthusiasm.  What might make a terrific read-aloud book becomes a burden as a class assignment. 

You may be wondering about the title of this piece.  I’m getting there.  Babies are programmed to learn.  They learn with all their senses.  They listen, look, touch, smell, and taste just about everything in their environment.  They throw all they have at each new object and experience.  By the time a child arrives at about third grade, they can decode with some level of reliability and given the opportunity, can experience some the world through books.  Given the opportunity, they can, like the baby, throw all that they have at gaining experience through books.  Clearly, some children have more background knowledge and can read more challenging text, some have more modest reading skills and background.  A.R. helps the child and teacher approximate the child’s ability level, and the teacher must use A.R. reports to make sure that interest doesn’t over-reach ability.  Only the child can decide what is captivating enough to make the effort worthwhile.  Like the baby, the precondition is interest, personal interest.  With the teacher making sure that the child has the ability and the child deciding what is of interest, the child is in a perfect place to learn.

Were the classroom just a little bit more dedicated to children pursuing their learning and a bit less dedicated to teaching to the dictates of whole-class materials, I think students would take more from their school day on a regular basis.