If you are ready and prepared to do something important, the doing is much easier and the result is much more likely to be exactly what you anticipated it would be. Readiness points a person toward success!
We can learn a lot about the importance of preparation by looking at real world examples of readiness. President Kennedy announced in 1960 that the United States would put a man on the moon by the end of that decade. It took nine years between JFK’s announcement and Neil Armstrong’s moon walk. Each aspect of every minute task was rehearsed hundreds of times. In the photo below, astronauts wearing full gear in a training center on Earth practiced unloading their equipment, using tongs and scoops to collect samples from a simulated moonscape, bagging and sealing the samples, tagging and labeling the samples, and storing the sample bags in the practice model of the lunar module. NASA pre-thought the incremental steps of every activity the astronauts might need to make related to a landing on the moon and rehearsed each step over and over again.
Many surgeons prepare for surgery by interviewing their patient and studying their records. However, surgeons who warm up for a surgery by going through the hand motions of the procedure prior to beginning surgery had eighty percent fewer errors than surgeons who did not rehearse their hand motions. http://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/how-your-surgeon-prepare-operation/
Tiger Woods hits 500 or more golf balls on the range every day in preparation for a round of golf when he wants to make fewer than 72 golf shots.
Olympic athletes can be seen rehearsing the body mechanics of a dive off the high platform or the landing from the balance beam or the configurations of how they will navigate the downhill slalom on the ski hill. Using video, they isolate how they move their arms and their legs, how they tuck into aerial flips, and the timing of each physical movement. From take-off to landing, they have a clear visual in their mind of every aspect of what they need to do.
A child learning to write a poem or do long division or play the flute or weld a leg onto a metal stand needs to be ready for success just like an astronaut and surgeon and world-class athlete.
How do we make children ready to learn?
Preparing a child for learning is our moonwalk. Remarkably, there are hundreds of decisions that pertain to a child’s successful learning. In most instructional designs, however, we are concerned with three very straight-forward readiness targets.
One – Do we understand the critical attributes of what is to be learned so that a sequence of instruction can be accomplished? Having a clear map of what must be learned and the order of instruction is essential if instruction is to cause learning. Effective learning cannot begin halfway through a sequence of ten attributes, but must build successful step upon successful step. When children know that the teacher is following a clear map of instruction, they can confidently give their full effort to learning.
This stage of readiness should be accomplished well in advance of initial instruction. Identifying and staging the critical attributes of a learning task is a complex process and cannot be efficiently performed in a prep period an hour before children are to begin new learning. A graphic organizer is a valuable tool in seeing the map of learning a child must complete in order to successfully learn new content, skills and thinking processes.
Two – Is the child aligned with the first of these critical attributes? This step engages and questions the quality of each child’s prior learning. If the critical attributes require that a child knows, can do and thinks in a prescribed manner, we need to be sure that each child is confident in these three areas. If they are not, we need to pre-teach the background content, skills and thinking process before we begin the new instruction.
Historically, teachers may have generalized their observations that children in their class were confident in the prior knowledge required for new learning. Bell-weather children often were checked; if the middle achievers of the class were ready, then the more competent children were undoubtedly ready and special assistance would meet the needs low achievers. This may have met historic measures of accountability, but it will not meet the needs of our reformed mandates – not by half.
Three – Is the child motivated to begin new learning? We need to pre-think our strategy for engaging each child with a “hook” that personalizes, challenges them with a doable unknown, and engages their curiosity. The same strategy seldom works for each child in a class, so multiple strategies must be exercised so that all children in a class are motivated to learn.
Getting ready for success is only a first step. Readiness alone doesn’t guarantee that everything will be perfect. However, without readiness, successful learning is left to chance and chance is not an adequate predictor of future achievement in the era of educational reform.