By Susanne Dunn
When you walk around an elementary school, you regularly see students practicing lining up properly, transitioning from rug time to desk time, responding to questions, and moving through classroom stations. Teachers create songs, mnemonics, and hand signals to help students remember routines and procedures. In my experience evaluating secondary teachers, many educators feel that such practices are either childish or that students should already have internalized these practices and should be able to handle just following simple directions when called upon to do so. Students at this age, however, need structure and routine just as much as small children, if not more so, as middle school and beyond bring their own unique potential for chaos. Singing songs and storytimes might not be developmentally appropriate for middle and high school students, but the need for structure and routine certainly is.
Whenever I meet with a teacher who says, “These students can’t…” or, “These students won’t…” or, “I can’t get them to…”, my first question is always, What routines or procedures do you have in place, that you practice regularly, to ensure that the curriculum can be implemented effectively? This question forces teachers to reflect on and evaluate how their choices and actions contributed to the success or difficulty with implementing a lesson or unit rather than placing the blame solely on the students. We should expect that young adolescents without structure or routine will act as young adolescents do in the wild, so to speak. They certainly bear responsibility for their own actions, but we do them a disservice if we don’t provide them with an conducive learning environment. Students need to internalize routines so that they can build their own agency and skills for self-direction.
Harry Wong suggests the method of Teach, Reinforce, Rehearse (Wong & Wong, 2014) for students of all ages. Let’s consider a common secondary classroom scenario. When I observe secondary teachers having students do a turn and talk, it is frequently unstructured. Usually a teacher just says, “Turn and talk to a neighbor about…” They don’t offer much prior practice in conducting a turn-and-talk, or suggest language to use when doing so. Not to mention that learning and applying the language of a collegial discussion can be crucial to advancing the English language skills of multilingual learners. I see the same thing with whole-class or small-group discussions and group work.
Practice for both small- and large-scale discussions should be both procedural (transitioning into groups, getting started, defining roles, ensuring participation of all group members) and academic (what language to use, asking and responding to probing questions, politely challenging group members). Most importantly, young adolescents most enjoy practice of procedure when it is fun, so start your practice with low-stakes discussion topics that are either silly (Is a hot dog a sandwich?) or highly relevant to them (Should teachers be replaced by computers? Should community service be mandatory for high school students?). They learn procedure and best practices for academic discussion with something enjoyable, and then apply it to a more challenging topic.
Cited in Ralph Fletcher’s book Writing Workshop.
The second set of questions I ask teachers who say students struggle with more complex independent tasks is, Did the lesson use best practices for developmentally appropriate instruction?
- Are students given any choice?
- Are students working collaboratively?
- Are students discussing highly engaging and relevant topics?
- Are students using technology in a purposeful way?
- Are students receiving regular feedback?
- Are students given short chunks of information at a time (Kansky, 2021)?
- In short, is it reasonable, given their developmental level, to expect them to be able to accomplish the task you have given them?
In my experience, secondary teachers struggle themselves with transitioning from teacher to teacher-facilitator, or from deliverer of content to facilitator of critical thinking and skill. A teacher-facilitator teaches mini-lessons followed by guided practice, discussion, conferencing, and performance tasks. In this type of classroom, students have power, agency, and choice, and are able to achieve transfer goals. No wonder students can’t work independently, when we haven’t taken off the training wheels and run alongside them as they fly down the street and eventually disappear from view. The key to independence is the letting-go. They might fall off the first few times—it might not all go smoothly—but we pick them up, dust them off, give them responsive advice and encouragement, and get them back on the bike.
I’ve been known to say to students that the weirdest thing about my job is that my goal, like parenting, is to create conditions in which you don’t need me anymore, where you can thrive independently out in the world. We sometimes describe parents who hover and protect their children as helicopter, lawnmower, and snowplow parents, but how often do teachers do the same thing by over-scaffolding? If we expect students to be ready for what follows high school, whether it be college, employment, or even a gap-year backpacking around Europe, we need to give them countless opportunities to practice independence. Socrates said, “To find yourself, think for yourself.”
Dr. Dunn taught middle school Reading, English, and Social Studies for 13 years and high school English for three years. She has been a curriculum coordinator and evaluator of teachers for the last five years. She holds a Doctorate from Northeastern University in Curriculum and Instruction and a Masters in Literacy Education from the University of New England.
References
Fletcher, R., & Portalupi, J. (2001). Writing workshop: The essential guide. Heinemann, 88 Post Road West, PO Box 5007, Westport, CT 06881.
Kansky, Kathy. “Leveraging the Science behind the Middle School Brain in Your Teaching Strategies.” AMLE, 5 Apr. 2021.
Wong, Harry and Rosemary. “Harry Wong: A Master Teacher of Teachers.” Teachers.Net, The Gazette, Feb. 2014.