Teachers shouldn't teach, their education professors tell them. "Teacher talk" is bad. Instead, teachers should get students to do the talking and the thinking, ideally by "creating self-directed learning activities." Explanation is a last resort.
It doesn't work very well, especially for students who haven't been taught fundamentals at home, says instructional coach Zach Groshell in a conversation with "Bell Ringer" Holly Korbey. His book, Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching, comes out this week.
In his first five years as a teacher, Groshell tried to teach via projects and posters, the way he'd been taught in ed school. He tried to make learning fun.
"We’d be reading The Life of Pi and we're all doing a boat race, or some big scheme where everybody needs to think, so we’d put a bunch of posters on the ground, have kids use their markers."
Then he thought: "Who's holding the marker?"
Who's the kid actually doing the work? . . . they are thinking aloud, they're kind of self-explaining and doing all the things we want all the students to do. Everyone else is laying low or copying them or humoring the teacher, or worse. Why are you guys not working? Why aren't you trying? Why aren't you helping out? The answer is that they can't. The answer is that they do not know enough to be able to do it.
They haven't been taught.
The most effective way to teach is to provide information, just a few sentences, and then pause to ask students to repeat the information or to check for understanding, says Groshell, who hosts the Progressively Incorrect podcast. Use analogies, examples and visuals. Start with a fully worked example, then a partial example, then "prompts and hints" before asking students to work independently.
Asking students to play "Guess What's in My Head" isn't fair, he says. "Give the kids, every single kid, an equitable shot at understanding the content by giving that information to them in a really clear and succinct way."
Then the teacher can ask questions. "You may even start asking questions like, what do you think about this? Evaluate it. Give your opinion of this. You can get them to critical thinking and evaluation and synthesis, the higher order thinking skills, so much faster if you give them something to think with if you end the 'Guess What's In My Head' sequence and tell them what they need to know."
"Education" comes for the Latin word for "drawing out," my teacher told us 60-odd years ago. (I didn't have to figure it out for myself.) But, actually, that's a drawn-out myth, writes Pocket Quintilian. The word comes from "educare," which means to nourish or feed.