“What, Romeo and Juliet die! They were young and in love. Did I miss something?”
Teaching and learning are not a linear transaction – a teacher speaks, and students do not always learn what the teacher wants them to learn. There are too many variables that intrude between the teacher and the children being taught. The eyes and ears and brains of children are not constantly connected to what the teacher is saying, doing, demonstrating, and explaining. In a child’s head, it does not take much, just an errant thought about a recent conversation with a friend, a side glance out the classroom window, a rethinking of a text the child read on the way to school, or an anticipation of after school doings, and whatever the teacher said, did, or showed was missed or received incorrectly. Or a child may get tired of reading and not finish the rest of the story. Or a child may rely upon what their small group mates tell them what they should know and not upon their own study. In these moments, correct learning lurches, and incorrect learning takes its place.
Best practice teaching also requires the pedagogic ability to clear up and clean up errors in student learning.
Identify errors in learning early.
A teacher must have ears that clang whenever she hears incorrectness. The clang occurs when a child says “2 + 2 = 5” or “Me and my friend …”, or “George Washington was President during the Civil War” or “Newton’s first law says objects are independent and move randomly.” CLANG!
Each clang requires correction. The issues for a teacher become when and how to make the necessary correction. “Do I stop everything, stop the lesson I am teaching, or the small group I am leading to correct a single student on a single point of misinformation?” Or “does every incorrect thing a child says need correction? If it does, I will never be able to teach anything new because there are so many little incorrect things children say or do.”
Yep, teachers need to plan how to correct errors, now or later. Identify and correct errors when they occur or as quickly as you can after you identify them. Student reality is that errors in their learning are reinforced and are used to distort subsequent learning the longer you wait to correct them.
No fault insurance – learning is what matters.
When correcting student learning, don’t place blame or fault on what caused the incorrect learning. Fault finding is a lonely and dangerous road. Use a “your fault, my fault, or anybody’s fault – I don’t care. We are going to correct this now” mindset. You want to correct learning and not focus children on faults.
If 100 children hear something that a teacher says, statistically only a fraction of them truly comprehend and internalize it accurately. The variables in attention, interpretation, and understanding mean that not all children are in sync with the instruction at hand. This discrepancy highlights the critical need for the teacher to hear the clangs of incorrect learning and make corrections. Given this, there is no time for fault finding; only correcting errors in learning and then moving forward.
The decision is either to make the correction now or at the end of the lesson or, if more than several students demonstrate the same error, to form a tier 2 small group for corrective teaching. Just do it.
Isolate the incorrect – replace with the correct.
Once the decision of when to correct errors in student learning is made, the steps for correction are similar.
- Explain to students that you and they are going to correct errors in their knowledge content, or conceptualization, or skills they have learned because the error in learning will cause them to have learning problems in the future.
- State the error in what they learned. “The idea that Romeo and Juliet do not die but live happily ever-after is an error. They die. Their deaths are what makes Romeo and Juliet and tragic love story.”
- State the corrected learning. “Due to a tragic misunderstanding, Romeo kills himself with poison and Juliet uses Romeo’s knife to kill herself.” Romeo and Juliet die. No need to be graphic, just exact.
- Give the students the context for their corrected learning by reviewing the family feud between the Montagues and the Capulets that prevented Romeo and Juliet from marrying, the friar’s plan to resolve the feud by faking Juliet’s death, and the scene when Romeo finds Juliet lying death-like but not dead. This review need not take long, just enough to give context to the conclusion – Romeo and Juliet die.
- Have the students retell this conclusion and the summary of its context. It may seem like overdoing, but if there is a small group of students in this corrective, require each student to make a correct statement and summary of the context. Stating the corrected learning replaces the error with the correction.
- Conclude by restating the importance of correcting and clarifying what students learn if we know it was not correct. And thank them for doing so.
The Big Duh!
I turn wood on a lathe to make a variety of products. Like any craftsman, my work is not always perfect. Flaws in my use of a bowl gouge combined with unanticipated changes in the wood cause mistakes. Craftsmen are not always error-free 100% of the time, but 100% of the time craftsmen know how to clean up their errors. Cleaning up takes time, effort, and technique. It is the correcting of errors that defines craftsmanship.
So, it is with teaching and learning. Teachers are craftsmen in causing children to learn. Teachers do not need to be effective 100% of the time in their instruction, but 100% of the time teachers need to correct errors in student learning.
We would rather a teacher use the time and effort to identify and correct errors in student learning and not teach everything in a year’s curriculum than teach every lesson in a year’s curriculum even though children have many errors in their learning. Errors in learning, like potholes in winter streets, only grow to cause major disruption later in the student’s life.