At some time in a teaching career, a veteran mentor says something that causes you to pause, think, smile and remember. It happens many times, but each time is a new experience because each time gives you a new pearl to cherish. The greater the smiles, the more frequently the mentor’s words return to illuminate the work that we do.
Mildred Middleton was the English/language arts consultant for the Cedar Rapids (IA) schools for several decades. When I was an elementary student, exemplary writing assignments somehow found their way from the 18 elementary schools to Miss Middleton’s desk and she would show up in the classroom to bestow unbelievably encouraging words and a smile to die for.
Twenty years later in that Iowa district, I was an 8th grade social studies teacher. Miss Middleton met with almost all teachers to talk about the importance of reading and writing skills and good language usage in our varied disciplines. It was humbling to talk with Miss Middleton; she could never be Mildred or Millie to me. I still seemed to look up at her from my second grade desk even though we were talking about vocabulary development for 8th graders. As the years passed, the conversations became more clinical in her mentoring of my teaching.
“You are allowed to use the 4 Ms,” she taught me. “The challenges of what your children need to learn will not only change every year but almost every day depending upon the new learning you are introducing and the instruction you are trying to strengthen. In fact, given a single new concept to be taught to twenty children, you may need to contemplate more than a dozen ways of teaching that concept so that all children learn it.” This was long before the age of the Common Core, but her words are all the more relevant today.
“One of the greatest fallacies of teaching is the idea that a teacher, even a highly skilled veteran, knows intuitively and without error how to teach to the disparate needs of a classroom of children. We just can’t do that every day, day in and day out. Some days, we just don’t know or what we think we know doesn’t work as we think it should.
You must feel free to rely in the 4 Ms. Muddle. Meddle. Model. Monitor. The first three of these words roll off the tongue and fourth clanks, but it is the 4th M that makes the first three work.”
She taught me that muddling is the act of acknowledging that you are not clear about how to teach to a certain student or group of children. You may choose any of a number of instructional methods, but at the moment are not sure how effectively these will cause each child to learn. Muddling is the active process of considering the best initial instruction and the best instruction after that.
Meddling is another active process. Meddling is the act of trying out the instruction you have considered, adjusting your instruction, trying another method of instruction, and then considering a chain of instruction that will cause the outcomes your children need. In order to cause a particular child to learn, we may have to modify instruction for that child only while the initial strategy works for all other students. Meddling is adjusting on the fly. If we don’t meddle, then we are stuck with using the first instruction that comes to mind or the outcome of our muddle and nothing else. Often, muddling and meddling are exercised simultaneously to help us create an effective instructional design.
Once a best instructional scenario is apparent, we are obligated to model it to our children with integrity. Modeling is telling, showing, demonstrating, and illuminating what the child is to learn so that he has a clear image of what his own telling, showing, demonstrating or illuminating might look like. Then, modeling becomes sub-modeling as you teach the critical attributes that define the learning. Once a child has clear understanding of the critical attributes, the child will be able to transfer this learning to other situations where one or more of the attributes are present.
Too often, Miss Middleton would say, we just model without examining if what or how we are modeling is appropriate to the outcomes to be learned. Muddling and meddling are how we check ourselves so that we can select the best way to model new learning.
Finally, Miss Middleton taught me about the need to monitor. “You can’t wait to test. Waiting until the test only assures that you will have things to unteach if children do not connect with your instruction.”
Monitoring is looking and listening after you ask a child to show and tell you about their learning. Monitoring is passive – you look and listen to determine the accuracy of the child’s representation of what has been learned. The asking takes place immediately after modeling and throughout the duration of guided and independent practice. Whenever you see or hear evidence that the child has learned an accurate representation of the outcomes you have instructed, reinforce that learning. Whenever the evidence is not an accurate representation, stop. It is time to meddle a bit, model a bit and then monitor again.
“Don’t test until your monitoring tells you that all children have learned an accurate representation of your instruction,” Miss Middleton said.
I smile a lot when I think about Miss Middleton.