Teachers and Tiger Woods face the same challenges as professionals. When Woods returned to the PGA tour after time away his game was not what it once was. When precision skills are not used frequently enough to remain honed, they develop rust. Summer vacations and time in general have the same effect on teaching skills. Before re-entering the teaching season this fall, all teachers need to sharpen their teaching tools to get rid of summer rust.
What do we know?
Summer is a cherished time for teachers as well as children. Ten weeks or so away from the classroom is exactly what it is – an absence away and a setting aside of the teaching skills used in classroom work. As teachers decompress from the stress of daily teaching in the nine months of school, the mental acuities of teaching slumber during the summer weeks. This has been an aspect of the nine months on and three months off in an educational calendar for decades. It is one of the reasons school leaders schedule professional development days before the first day of school. Like their riding a bike, teachers don’t forget how to teach over a summer’s vacation, but they do profit from time back on the pedals before children enter their classrooms.
Getting ready for the first day of school is not just arranging a classroom to receive children. Getting ready also is shaking loose the summer slumber/rust by clinically considering how a teacher will teach the first curricular units of the year.
Explicit Instruction
One of the most frequently used instructional strategies is explicit teaching, a step-by-step approach that purposefully connects teaching strategies with learning outcomes for children. Direct instruction is one of the primary methods in explicit teaching. Direct instruction teaches a chunk of content or skills, checks for student understanding and accuracy, and then teaches a next chunk. Explicit teaching also entails an examination of the critical attributes of the content and skills to be learned, scaffolding those attributes into a sequence that leads to student proficiency with the content and skills, the use of formative and summative assessments of student learning, and the ability to reteach what students did not learn correctly. And explicit instruction focuses on the children as learners, understanding that every group of children arrives with differing learning backgrounds and learning needs.
While it is possible for a teacher to walk into a classroom on the first day of school and begin teaching from the rote memory of their first day one year ago, it is better practice for a teacher to review and consider all the steps and processes of instruction before day one. Getting the rust off means a teacher expends the time and effort to reconsider the first curricular units of the new school year in terms of what the teacher needs to do each class session to cause all children to learn. Reconsidering the uses of explicit instruction is a good way to rub off the rust.
Key questions:
What do children already know? The purpose of direct instruction is not “how to tell students what they are to learn”, but determining what students already know, what they need to learn, and the best way to deliver that new learning. Decisions about telling, demonstrating, inquiring about, or experiencing individually or in groups come after determining what needs to be learned.
Who are these children? What are their strengths and challenges as learners? Which children are new to our school and need social acclimation as well as instruction? What assumptions about these children can a teacher make with confidence?
How will new learning be chunked into teaching/learning in small enough amounts so that all children can successfully process their instruction?
How much engagement time is needed for all children to successfully learn a chunk of instruction? This is pacing. Most teachers and students want to “get at it” quickly in the first days of school. Pacing new learning is essential to assure that getting at it creates successful learning.
How will I know that all children are proficient in their new learning? Much of formative assessment is observational – seeing and hearing children in the processes of their learning. Some of formative assessment is quizzing. Getting the rust off is rebalancing a teacher’s confidence in observing students at work to know if they are being successful or need reteaching or different teaching to be successful.
The Practice of Rehearsal
We rehearse many things consciously and unconsciously. I would not make a golf shot without taking several practice swings to understand the terrain of the ground, the lie of the ball, the bottom of my swing arc, and the way I want to hit the ball. I mentally phrase many responses to questions prior to speaking or writing to ensure I am focused on the question, have facts to support what I say or write, and can deliver my words in a tone that fits the occasion. Rehearsals, physical, cognitive, and emotional, provide assurance that what is to be done or said is targeted and purposeful.
The theory of rehearsal says that when a person reviews what is needed and preliminarily practices a delivery of what is needed, the delivery may not be perfect, but it will be a faithful representation of the best the person can deliver. And that is what getting the rust of teaching skills is all about.
Last school year I stood in a classroom doorway watching an elementary teacher prepare for teaching a lesson. She talked aloud but softly as she told herself the objectives of the lesson, what she and her students had done the days before, and the new instruction she would teach this day. She checked her laptop to assure the presentation of new information was queued up. She checked a stack of handouts she would give to students. She repeated the outcomes she would look for by the end of the lesson. Lastly, she said the names of two students she needed to check frequently and give more assistance. She was in a rehearsal zone and unaware she was being watched. At the end, she smiled; she was ready.
I have observed chemistry teachers laying out a lab, writing teachers keying in on a complete versus incomplete sentence structures, PE teachers rehearsing the flexibility exercises they would teach, and math teachers reviewing problem solutions on a screen – each one practicing purposeful rehearsals before students arrived for instruction.
The Big Duh!
As it is true that we get what we settle for, the quality of student learning we get is a direct reflection of the quality of teaching we provide. Teachers are professional educators with the skills to deliver high quality lessons. Rehearsing instructional skills prior to teaching better ensures the opportunity to use very sharp teaching skills.