Tag Archives: mastery learning

Teach Less Well In the Time of COVID

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Panic sets in easily in the Time of COVID.  Or, the denial of panic.  They almost are interchangeable when pandemic causes extreme anxieties.  In the schoolhouse, a rising panic concerns the availability of enough direct instructional time and opportunity for all children to make the academic growth in the 2020-21 school they need to make for their educational future.  We acknowledge that a solid academic education requires direct instruction, professional monitoring and adjustment of instruction, strategic assessment leading to corrected learning, and enough time for guided and independent practice for learning to be mastered and ingrained.  Panic can be separated into mini-panics.  A first panic is a belief that school closures last spring prevented children from completing that full academic year.  They begin 2020-21 behind in their learning.  The second panic, with children either learning at-home or in hybrids of in-person and at-home learning, is a belief that all children will not or cannot achieve a full academic year this year.  The mix of in-person and at-home is the prohibitive factor.  Finally, the third panic is an aggregated panic that this generation of children in school will not be adequately prepared over time for their futures in a higher education and careers.  The pandemic has robbed them of their time to learn.  Hence, what will we, what can we do about it!

As an aside, it is about time that people in and out of education are panicked regarding children who do not achieve a full year of academic growth.  For too long, our culture accepted a sub-class of studenthood, those who gradually and steadily underachieve.  Perhaps, COVID will shake this antipathy loose.

Are there work arounds that can improve academic achievement when instruction for children is disrupted by something as significant as the pandemic?  You bet there are.

Take Away

The science of teaching gives us many tools that are not time- or condition-bound.  They are time- and condition-tested.  They work effectively in the best and worst of times, in- school and out-of-school.  As often is the case, panic causes people to lose a grip on what they know and seemingly re-invent or re-tool what they think they need in the moments of panic.  The key here is – don’t panic.  The science of teaching will cause children to learn, even now.

Teaching is teaching whether it is in-person with children in the classroom or remote from the classroom to children learning at-home.  Best teaching practices don’t change because a teacher is in front of a camera instead of in front of a classroom of child faces.  And, teacher-child relationships do not change because of distance.  A caring and nurturing teacher can be just as effective without proximity. 

Our task is to provide each child with a full academic year of instruction and apply all that we know about good teaching to that instruction.  Children will learn. 

Worry scatters thoughts and thinking.  Don’t let that happen.  Focus on essential learning and get after it.

What do we know?

Teach less well.  Take that apart.  Our curricular shelves are heavy with stuff.  We do not need to teach every thing in the collection.  Publishers and vendors provide more and more each year.  Teach less.  Teach what have been labeled “enduring” or “mastery” content, concepts, skills, and disposition.  Then, teach what you teach so that every child learns what you teach.

Teach less.  Time is not on our side this year.  180 days of 7 hours per day exist on a paper calendar but they do not exist in real time.  Real time is contact time when a teacher and children are actively engaged.  Today, real time is three to four hours per day and often less.  Real time is when the Internet connections are working.  Real time is when no one, teacher or child, is ill or no one in the home where the child is learning is ill.  Real time is when children at home have adult assistance.  Real time forces us to teach less this year than we usually would teach if everyone was in the classroom.  We need to teach less stuff because we have less real time to teach.

Teach well.  Best teaching practices always, please.  Take enough time in every lesson to assure student mastery of the content, skills and dispositions.  Set a clear lesson objective.  Attach the new learning to what children already know.  Provide impactful initial instruction.  Model and clarify the new learning with strong examples.  Check EACH child’s understanding of what is being learned.  Give enough time for guided and independent practice of the new learning.  Assess.  If necessary, unteach what is wrong in what children learned and research so that all children get it right.  There always is enough time for best teaching practices.

The basics of teaching well sound and feel like Education 101, because they are.  They focus on effectiveness and efficiency.  Good and compact units of instruction.  Good and compact daily instruction.  Good and precise assessment.  Good and necessary reteaching to ensure all children learn.  Good to go to next.

Teach less well.  Huh?  Read it again but read it like this.  If you are going to teach children, teach then what they need to know, teach them so that they learn it and remember it, and teach it so they can use it for further learning.  The Time of COVID is not a time to worry about quantity of learning and covering every topic a child might learn in the best of times.  The Time is a time to assure that everything a child learns is purposeful and is taught so well that what is taught is solidly learned.

Why is this thus?

There is truth in what we fear.  Teaching and learning take time and we did not have adequate real time in the spring of 2020 to complete that academic year.  Remote education was an emergency process and less than adequate.  Now, unless we teach differently in 2020-21, we will not have enough real time to completely teach this academic year’s curricula.  If we don’t work differently, children will fall significantly in their academic learning.

We will not get a “do over”.  Children will not repeat last year’s incomplete curricula this year and they will not repeat this year’s incomplete curricular next year.  Children will not be held back in their grade levels or be prevented from graduating.  There are no “school do overs” in education.  (Hypocrisy – we retain children for not performing, but we do not retain promotions when schools do not perform.)

We will not do an industrial recall.  If education was a manufacturing industry, we would issue a recall of 2019-20 and 2020-21 learning, retool it, make it better, and then release it as an improved model.  There are no recalls in education.

We are called to make all children complete in their 2020-21 academic year of learning.  To do this, we need to teach less well.

To do

Modify assessments of learning to match modified curricular instruction.  Administrators and teachers must be on the same page regarding what will will be taught and what will be measured.  Everyone in school must be telling the same story.  It does make sense to maintain full curricular assessments when children will not receive full curricular instruction.  Align teaching less with measuring less.

Pace lessons by teaching them well.  Don’t pile on lessons.  Don’t hammer children with so much work that they become panicked or angry.  When we teach less, we have enough time to teach it well and well takes the time we have.  This reinforces our need to cull out the non-essential stuff of our curricula.  Learning takes time.  We have enough time for children to learn by pacing what we teach well.

Differentiate who delivers instruction and who supports learning.  Now, more than ever, the delivery of initial instruction is essential for teaching well.  If a grade level or departmental team recognizes that one teacher has more expertise in teaching a unit or lesson, let that teacher become the “face” of that instruction and other teachers the supporters of that learning.  This applies well to in-person as well as at-home learning.  Take the pressure from some teacher of daily presentations in front of the camera and replace it with chat groups for precise modeling, checking for understanding, guided practice and formative assessments.

Synchronous and asynchronous on-line teaching allows us to capture an “expert” delivery and provide it to all children.  A child who misses the beginning of the lesson can view it when ready.  A child who does not understand the initial teaching can see it again and again.  With one teacher only giving the initial instruction, a grade level or subject team assures that every on-line segment is highest quality instruction.

Constantly monitor student engagement – all of the time.  Understand that engagement for at-home learners looks different than engagement for in-school learners.  Know the differences.  Monitoring is not browbeating; it just means knowing.  Monitoring will show some children who are engaged in-person or at-home all the time and doing well.  It will show children who look to as if they are engaged all the time but not doing well.  Likewise, some children may not look engaged but will do very well in demonstrating their learning.  And, monitoring will highlight children who are not engaged when they should be.  Use the monitoring information to shape a child’s attention and attention span.  Each child can find an effective and efficient use of in-person and at-home time.

Manipulate the logistics of immediate and precise feedback.  Instead of kneeling next to a child’s desk, make a telephone call.  Most at-home learners will have a cell phone near their screen.  A private phone call treats the child with respect yet is directly to the point. 

Constant contact.  Every child every day.  Sadly, we know that some children in-school in normal times pass through a school day without a single personalized contact with a teacher.  In the Time of COVID, every child needs a personal contact – called in a zoom lesson, talked with in a zoom chat, shared e-mail, or a phone call – everyday.

If parents are able to create earning pods of supervised children, make the most of these small groups.  Regardless of the parents’ reason for forming a pod, grouped children give a teacher renewed opportunities for small group work, collaborative projects, peer editing, and socializing for children.  Done safely, pods are a great way for groups of families to provide supervised learning when individual families cannot.

The big duh!

Don’t panic even though there are many reasons for panicking.  The science of teaching, best practices, culling the curricula and teaching less well will cause children to complete a full academic year in 2020-21.

Whose Learning Needle Must Move? Every Child’s Learning Needle

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What we say and what we do matters. If we believe that all children can and must learn, say it aloud and often and then cause it to happen.

Imagine walking into a school classroom on Monday morning, looking at the faces of children sitting and looking at you, their teacher, and saying, “This week I will improve the reading skills of five children. Although all of you will join me in reading groups, I am only interested in improving the reading skills of five children.” Or, saying to children in an Algebra class, “This week you will learn about quadratic equations. However, by Friday I expect only three of you to be able to balance an equation.”

In looking at test scores in elementary reading and middle school math, the paragraph above too often reflects student achievement following classroom instruction. The distribution of achievement staircases children from those who demonstrated advanced understanding and skills to those who minimally understand and demonstrate little to no skill. In this proverbial week, some children improved their reading skills and some children learned to resolve quadratic equations. Some children did not. In reverse, what we caused to happen we certainly would not have announced. We allowed the learning needle (how we measure learning achievement) for some children to be stagnant or recede while we advanced the learning needle for others.

The issue is clear. Whose learning needle needs to move? Every child’s. Which learning needle needs to move? The needle that measures the educational attribute receiving our current focus. Causing learning is a purposeful instructional attention focused on every child that does not cease until every child’s needle is moved.

Enlarge the scope of this proposition. Imagine your band or choir director giving focused and measured instruction only to the brass instruments or the sopranos while giving unfocused attention to the remainder of the band or choir. Or, the home construction teacher giving focused instruction only to the carpenters and less attention to students learning the electrical and plumbing trades. In these two examples, we hear and see the results of attending only to the learning needles of some children and not all. Music performances at band and choir concerts will cause patrons to lose all confidence in the school music instruction. The learning needles of all band and choir members need equal attention to create a quality ensemble performance. Realtors trying to sell the school-built home will stop showing the property. The learning needles of all members of the construction crew contribute the quality of the build.

This is true also of the quality of a school’s academic program. The learning needles of all children need to move in every grade level and every subject. Quality academic programs don’t just have high achievers. They concentrate on moving the learning needles of every child, on increasing every child’s understanding, skills and problem-solving, and closing the measured gaps between the learning needles. Instead of an achievement distribution with children languishing as minimal performers, quality academic programs give concentrated instructional focus to cause every child to reach proficiency in their understanding, skill sets, and ability to resolve challenging problems.

Imagine walking into a school classroom on Monday, looking at the face of every child and saying, “This week we will cause each of you to look for periods in your reading and to take a breath after a period before starting the next sentence. At the end of the week, each of you will know how a period works in a sentence and you will improve your reading using periods as stops between sentences.” And, then cause it to happen.

There were regrettable politics and distorted practices associated with the words “No Child Left Behind.” Yet, those words clearly express the intent and necessary actions for moving every child’s learning needle. Be clear in telling each child, “We are going to move your learning needle today (this week, this month) and this is what your new needle will cause you to know, do and be.” Then, cause it to happen.

Stop Coddling the Hare; Tend to the Tortoise

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Aesop spun a fable about a race between the tortoise and the hare. The tortoise won! However, that was just a fable and not likely in real life where tortoises are what they are – slow and late to the finish line. Aesop aside, most races are dominated by the hares. The daily news is replete with stories of hares and scant mention of tortoises. A banner runs at the bottom of the TV screen with scores of games – winners in bold. Social media texts the day’s stock market activity – gains before losses. As Billy Bean said in Money Ball, “Nobody remembers who came in second in the World Series.” Winners matter and they get the attention; but, there are a lot more tortoises in the world than hares and the quality of the world’s life is shaped by the status of the tortoise not the bling of the hare.

Hares in most races are the genetically gifted, the economically advantaged, and the lucky-in-birth who most often are at the head of the pack from start to finish in every race, game and contest. Most people don’t choose to be hares; they are born with quick twitch muscles, funds for training, and into the cultivation of their winning ways. Although there are real-life “boot strap” kids who blaze like comets out of poverty and disadvantage, seldom do tortoises become hares. The hares win at the Olympics, in pro sports, and in the general elections. They also win in school races, on school tests, at spelling bees, and whenever school work is graded. This is where our real story begins. We can abide the hare winning at most things, but we must not abide the tortoise losing in education.

It is up to us to make Aesop’s fable into a new reality in which tortoises, more common and greatly more numerous than hares, win in school. And, win with regularity. This is exceedingly hard to do in a contemporary culture that adores winners and cradles every newborn in the hope that he or she will be a star. But, absent star power, what will it take to create school winners of all the tortoises?

Surprisingly, not much – just two things. Let the hares run.  Stop coddling them.  And, calmly tend to the tortoises.

Let the hares run is easy. Star students most often are self-directed and self-starting. The greatest dilemma they face in school is not being allowed to run. So, let them. “I see you completed today’s assignment and did well, as always. What would you like to do now? Great, what do you need?” Say and do no more, because the hares will run happily and they will learn and grow and succeed. In fact, the more you tend to their needs, the less and the slower they run.

Interestingly and politically, parents of the hares have made schools feel guilty when their hare-children are not receiving constant attention. Stop feeding the speed frenzy of the speedy. Just say, “If your hare really is one of the special children, they don’t need someone else telling them what, when, or how to learn.  We’ll point them and let them run.” Attending to hares who run fast and in many directions is a never-ending commitment. Stop with the endlessness.

Calmly tend to the plodding tortoises. Sit beside each tortoise, they won’t run away from you, and frequently make this single, simple inquiry. “Let’s see where you are now on this assignment. Tell me (show me).” And, follow their reply with instruction that causes them to continuously advance their work until the assignment is successfully completed. It should not surprise us that most tortoises fail in school not because they cannot understand and complete the assignment, but because they run out of time. When the hares finish the same assignment that the tortoises work on slowly, time runs out for everyone and the entire class moves to the next assignment. There is a long trail of uncompleted assignments behind every tortoise, assignments they could and should have completed if the race was not all about the hares.

An educational system focused on student learning success, not student speed in learning, will let the hares run and tend to the tortoises until all, hares and tortoises, have crossed the finish line.