Teaching Vignette #1
It was late on a Thursday afternoon when our IB coordinator (International Baccalaureate is an internationally recognized program focussed on teaching students to think critically and independently) called and asked if I would be willing to have a visitor to my class on Friday (of course she wasn’t sure what time or for how long they would be visiting). The International Baccalaureate program was sending a representative that wanted to “see” how the IB program was being implemented at our school.
I told her “not a problem, just come on in whenever”. I hoped they would come early because my last class of the day was always unpredictable. I taught 8th grade science and our middle school was on an alternating block schedule. I had students for 90 minutes every other day. It also happened that year that my 7th hour class was very diverse. We had 38 students in a room built for 28 and 17 of the students were special needs. Within the class were a few gifted students and the rest were your typical 8th graders. There was also a special education teacher that co-taught with me.
No luck. Late on Friday afternoon, my overloaded class was visited by our IB coordinator and a representative of the IB program. That day we were working on Earth’s history of rock formations (a totally exhilarating topic for middle schoolers!). Earlier in the week we had learned about Steno’s Principles (a series of geologic laws that describe patterns of how rock layers form). This particular day I was starting to teach the students how to look at a cliff face such as you would see at the Grand Canyon and sequence the various events that occurred in order for the cliff face to form.
I never was a teacher that changed what I was doing in my classroom to accommodate an administrator or visitor. People were welcome to come and observe, but they were going to see everyday learning taking place in my classroom. I placed the students into groups of four, gave them a picture of a rock formation with the layers labeled, reviewed Steno’s three principles that they would be using and challenged them to figure out how the rock layers formed.
After about 80 minutes the IB representative came up to me and asked, “How did you do it?”
“Do what?” I had been running around from group to group, answering questions, asking questions and encouraging them to keep trying – but never giving them the answer to the sequencing challenge. Basically, what a science teacher does on a daily basis.
“These kids have been working for almost an hour and a half, students of varying abilities and that are free to talk to each other. The students have stayed on task and are showing no signs of fatigue. In fact, a few are frustrated that the bell is about to ring and they want to continue!”
Lowering Student Fatigue
The secret was in the way the lesson was designed and how students had been trained to learn in my room. I used a relative dating assignment that I had developed through the years.
- The activity begins with a description of the skills that are being developed and how the students are going to be using those skills (clearly identified learning target)
- Students previously learned a piece of science content (Steno’s Principles) that they were going to apply (reason for the content)
- The assignment was presented as a challenge – students had to make sense of the material to answer the question (engaging and fun)
- Like Goldilocks, the challenge was just right (not too hard and not too easy)
- There was no “grade” attached to the learning activity (students knew they would be graded at a later date once they felt comfortable that they had learned the skill)
Popular belief is that students can only focus for 15 minutes at a time on learning before their attention strays and eventually student fatigue sets in. Making learning safe (I am not being judged if I make a mistake), challenging students to use their knowledge and skills in a real world manner and giving them freedom within the task to communicate with other students reduces student fatigue when they are asked to perform rigorous tasks over an extended period of time.