It's simple, really. In order:
- Motivation. A teacher must create motivation in the students as their first and primary job. The cheapest way of doing this is by having a large personality that gets students excited about learning. Every movie on good teaching centers on this point, but no one talks about it. Teaching is primarily about motivation. Secondarily, it's about anything else. ASIDE: Almost all of the very best teachers I've seen have been sports coaches first. Motivation wins...and sports coaching helps to teach motivation. OTOH, many teacher-coaches (in my experience) don't care about the topic they're teaching, and don't exert the same coaching skills to motivate their econ students as their football players.
- Practice. A teacher must give students a chance to DO. Teacher talk is not worth the paper it's printed on. At this point, I'm wondering if I could teach high school math for a year without speaking. Practice is hard. My experience, both in the schools and in the corporate education world, is that practice is really poorly designed. If I were God, teachers certificates would be 70% about designing effective practice. The thing that Montessori, and then later Englemann did that is so cool is that they designed effective practice.
- Feedback. A teacher is responsible for not only allowing students to do, but also ensuring that as the students do, they get feedback about how they're doing. American schools used to be merely bad at this, now they're atrocious. Feedback has several dimensions, but topical and timely are the top 2. You missed 3/20 problems is not as good as This problem that you just did is not as good. Assessment is a form of feedback.
- Adjustment. If you're a teacher, your lesson plan is wrong for most of the students. Too much time, too little time, too many topics, too few, too many examples, too few...etc. Teaching requires constant adjustment to the actual needs of the students in the classroom. Anyone following a plan instead of adjusting to the reality on the ground is either having a lucky day, or not teaching most of the folks.
- Clearing Confusions. Sometimes, students practicing find that something does not make sense. This sometimes requires teacher assistance. The most complete assistance is guided discovery, but that's sometimes not efficient. #2 reason, in my experience, that people stop learning in a direction is that it's "too hard". Really, that usually means that they hit a snag, and no one helped them through it.
- Other Issues. Teacher is an authority figure. This means they get to deal with all sorts of crap that has NOTHING to do with education at all. General competence as a human being, and a caring one (many issues are social/emotional) is important here.
- Instruction. (aka Explanation) This is what everyone thinks teaching is about, but mostly it's a side issue. The person who figures out how to capitalize on this feature of education wins. This is why Khan Academy is profitable, interesting, well taught, and mostly useless. When you know stuff that you just "learned" from the discovery channel an hour after the show closes, we'll talk. It's placebo against the fact that learning is about DOING, and sometimes about practice, and only septenarily about instruction.
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9 comments:
Time for me to do my characteristic arguing~
What is your evidence for 7?
Proving a negative is like this is difficult...but is there lots of data saying that just varying instruction doesn't alter outcomes?
Even if you muster such data, all that tells you is that you haven't discovered how to alter instruction to make a difference.
But I still argue other people (DI folk in particular) have got data saying they can alter just the instruction (I think here you mean presentation) side of a feedback loop and improve the outcome by 2x or more.
Example a common mistake with low income kids is assuming a vocabulary that they don't have.. a inexperienced col ledge educated teacher walks in and starts giving instruction using words and concepts the kids just don't know and then wonders why they aren't following instructions. Yes a feedback look could help, but the feedback needs to be used to ... alter the instruction!!!
How do you do feedback without a instruction segment that says what went wrong and how to correct it? Or spells out what the task is to begin with?
There are certain things like walking that have a evolutionary feedback cycle built it, talking as well... but that does not seem to extend to reading, or gymnastics etc.
I am also not persuaded by the argument that paleolithic children learned what they needed by just being around their parents. It follows that all the skills they were (or could arise in such a situation) are those that could be passed on in this manner. Its not clear that a significant percentage of people can do this in a modern technological society. Even if kids were allowed near most work environments which they are not.. it would also strongly limit what disciplines the kids could learn.
Rob,
2 answers.
The data I've seen (from you) says that order of practice matters. Don't try to banana a soccer ball into the net until you can kick it that far. I had actually changed one of my recent posts in order to include that datum. However, as far as I know the only thing the DI folks have said is that expecting a kid to practice using information they don't have is a good way to fail.
2, My evidence is (a) personal experience, and (b) the nature of ordinality. Motivation (#1) kicks the crap out of ALL other factors, and Practice is next(#2). Practice (as you point out) includes relevance, quality, and quantity. DI is a MASSIVE stacking on the quantity part, and lots of experiment on the relevance/ordering part of practice. Anyone who can read can learn from a book...and it's usually non-linear reading of the book too...but the reason we have classes instead of books is so that the teacher can give feedback(#3), and then adjust the lesson (#4) or #5 clear the concfusion. #6 job is to handle Timmy having had no breakfast and having no lunch either. Clearly, every one of those things dominates teaching for learning importance. FINALLY, there's one massive factor hanging over the system. Practice and Presentation are complementary goods. More of one means less of the other. Since practice is far more important...every bit of time focussed on instruction is time focussed away from practice. And that is bad. My corporate training classes moved from 50/50 lecture lab to 20/80 lecture lab, and that's because I'm stuck with materials that I didn't build with labs that are too long. Homeschool pre-algebra class has a 20/80 lecture/practice mix...and 15 of that 20 is spent on motivational talk/entertainment, not presentation.
3. The issue I have with your paleo-society topics are:
(A) you seem to be assuming needs that I don't think are needs.
(B) The reason no one learns the "skills of today" is that no one actually uses those skills in their work...so of course they can't osmose.
(C) You don't seem to have the background with unschooled kids that I do. Only thing most unschooled kids need is motivation. Teachers are purely fluff, for when they don't want to read.
What is interesting about Motivation is that I would be careful how you define it. I don't think it's purely about charisma. I think there are specific techniques that teachers are using to motivate.
I'm reading a great book, actually because you linked to an article indirectly about it, called "Teach Like a Champion." Doug Lemov uses lots of data, both quantitative and qualitative to determine what techniques teachers use that work. He's come up with 49 of them.
I like his arguments and his supporting data.
Both he and other groups have found out that a teacher that seems charismatic does not actually do better than other teachers. Hence my emphasis are truly teasing what you mean by Motivation.
And, of course, I've looked closely on Zig's stuff on sequencing of information in how it is presented and then practiced. The two are intertwined. They have also looked at simplifying explanation and predicting common mistakes/misunderstandings. These things turn out to be terribly important. Not only does Zig's data support this, but Lemov's data shows that really effective teacher's do this in their lesson planning.
So I think intruction (presentation) matter a fair bit more than you do. In fact, I would would put practice, feedback and intruction on equal par. There is some much back and forth between that ties them together. In fact, feedback is a form of presentation!
Star,
What impresses me most about DI is the extent to which they've gutted instruction. Normal teaching is somewhere between 3:1 teach:do activity. If DI is as high as 1:3 teach:do, I'll be surprised. Zig's reading book certainly has a system wherein I "teach" 1 thing every 2 days, explaining for <10 seconds...and the other 10 minutes on reading each day is ALL the 4yo DOING, and NO OTHER EXPLANATION besides: "do this now".
AFAICT, Zig's position on instruction is, in practice, the same as mine: don't. Or decrease the amount of instruction by a factor of 10 as a start-point for discussion.
If you want to argue that in educational systems, 6% instruction, 94% practice is better than the 3%/97% that I'm targetting...then we have something to talk about. If you want to argue that 50% instruction and 50% activity is good, then you're insane. :-)
As I see it, Zig/DI doesn't do instruction as anyone in the world besides them understand it AT ALL. how many 5-minute sessions of explanation should a DI-instructor have? NONE. NEVER. DI says that a teacher who hasn't had the kids DOING something inside 30 seconds is effectively negligent. Incidentally, that's not true the other way around. Teacher not talking much is not a failure.
There's a big difference between "Do this now" which constitutes 90% of the DI method...and "let me explain".
Star,
Motivation:
Motivation is getting kid to want to learn. My experience says very strongly...kid who wants to learn and isn't stopped beats school learning 100/100 times (after they've learned to not be school-limited). Since a kid's desire to learn on their own beats everything else that schooling can do put together...I find that encouraging motivation...usually via sports-coaching techique...is the biggest thing you can manage. Military motivators and Drama folks seem also likely to succeed.
Motivation -- use what you can to make the student WANT to practice/learn. Everything else is a side-issue that matters primarily after you fail on your primary task.
Practicing an incorrect behavior can make it harder to learn a correct behavior by as much as 3x. If all you do is keep telling them they do it wrong, without being able to do the presentation part of how to do it correctly lots of de-motivating frustration will result. So instruction can improve what is practiced. Lets move away from DI to Montessori, they are rather particular about how they present each of the materials.
I am definitely not of the opinion that the standard 50min lecture is a good idea I think we can bash that together! Personalty I would much rather learn most content from a book, like you I spent a few years learning a weeks worth of material just before a class to teach it.. and I hated when they tried to send me to another persons class to learn it.
However my understanding of the research on lectures is that they should be a max 20min's if the goal is comprehension. But if done well the comprehension is similar for the bulk of people to the same time spent reading, and preferable for about a third of the population.
I guess I don't see the value in ordering things in the way that you are, and trying to imagine the relative importance of them. There are different factors, and you have a differing amount of control over each one. Each one should be optimized. What can be done to optimize each one?
It may be that motivation is more important but much harder to control or alter. Or that after you have done what you can that better instruction can still get a 2x improvement over poor instruction. One thing to consider is just how bad most presentation is! I am not so concerned with the order, as much as the inclination you seem to have to be negative on the very idea of presentation. (*also I am mostly focused on education for my kids and who are below the boot strap can read everything they need to learn stage... also the quality of the book and its writing seems to count as instruction/presentation )
Back to the DI folks a major part of their criticism of most instruction is that it has a low signal to noise ratio.. that basically people talk way to much! So I am all good with lowering the amount of time spent on presentation!
On Paleo kids:
I have no idea what you mean by A or B. Can take electrical engineer, soccer player, and lawyer as examples of basically highly specialized fields?
Other note: I don't have a number of hours spent near un-schooled kids in my head, but I have spent a significant amount of time around them. From one day a week at a home school families house for a year plus, to a handful of park-day and birthday events. Perhaps not as much, but far from zero.
For my taste way to much is being based on intuition from personal experience and way to little from experiment. Is that really the Laplacian way to go?
Now after all that.. i would be very interested to hear more about what can be done in the area of motivation!!
1. 2nd rule of coaching. Practicing the WRONG thing is worse than not practicing at all. I agree.
However, more talk is almost monotonic bad. AFAICT, you and I are arguing over the proper ratio of presentation to practice between 1:30 (me) and 1:10 (you), while normal classrooms have rations in the 2:1/3:1 range.
How's this: Presentation is SO SO SO overdone right now that we should start by cutting it to 1/20 of it's normal rate, and then we can argue importance again. Now that we've achieved a conservative ratio of 1 part instruction to 10 parts practice.
Montessori: Very careful about their presentation...but they present once (or twice) in 5 minutes, and then the kids play with it for hours or tens of hours. Practice is the whole deal. And montessori's presentation can be parsed very easily as doing NOTHING except showing correct practice. I'm inclined to say that if they had an attention-magnet apart from speech, they could teach without talking.
I'm far more radical than you on lecture. I think 5 minutes of lecture is almost universally bad learning. More than 5 is simply nuts, constrained by a bad system (lecture-based classes). 50 is Joker-level crazy-bad.
Ordering them how I'm doing is essential for thinking about education. Where do you put your limited energy? If you can improve motivation, do that first. Slam dunk, made of win.
If you can't improve motivation, improve practice quality if they're practicing lots, and improve practice quantity if they're not.
Rob,
Sorry, too quick publish button.
The ordering beyond motivation and practice is less obvious.
A book is equivalent to an instructor for presentation, except often better and more edited. However, what a book cannot do is (a) feedback, (b) adjusting to THESE students (c) correcting confusions, (d) dealing with the people. Since the other alternative methods of learning CAN'T do this, this becomes the value-add for a teacher. Instruction/presentation is a weak-sauce thing that can often/usually be done better by books, videos, etc.
Furthermore...the current general thought process has instruction SO high up on the importance scale that it's essential for anyone relatively new to the education thought process to knock it down SEVERAL ranks.
If you couldn't do DI/something that was functionally identical to DI, what would you do at a school? What's the minimum possible movement to make substantial improvements?
Aretae says: Shift focus from presentation to practice. Presentation is ONLY useful as an warm-up for practice...and often can be skipped almost entirely.
And as I've suggested before, EVERY SINGLE success in the education system, be it DI, HCZ, or whatever, has succeeded substantially by increasing the quantity and quality of practice. Athletics, martial arts, math, programming, writing, and every other subject I've taken or taught... It's all practice, all the time that gets the learning. This leads me to believe that practice dominates other factors.
Poorly controlled experiments that I've run are more convincing to me than narrow-topic experiments that other folks have run.
One last thing.
It may be that we're not saying much different.
My line on instruction is: show how to do quickly, practice, get fast feedback. Correct. Practice again.
Normal presentation talks a lot, and not about how to do. If we simply remove from presentation ALL discussion that isn't about how to do...we might not be too far apart on this.
Clearly it's then roughly a 10:1 practice:presentation ratio...and it's founded 100% on practice.
But until you do those 2 things, it's not even worth talking about instruction as a relevant factor.
If you took DI, and required 20-50 minute lectures between student activity, how effective would it be?
If you took DI, and simply gave the teachers the sequence of the exercises, but no verbiage, and no "how to correct"...how effective would it be?
My claim...the first version loses 100% of the value of DI...and the second version loses 10%(?) of the value of DI. Practice is the core, other stuff are simply tiny supporting pieces.
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