Teachers, Make Room for Metacognition

July is here and depending on where you are, you are probably either getting close to finishing up a term before a school break or you are approaching a nice long summer vacation. Either way, the future is just around the corner. This is a perfect time to think back and think forward.

Grow Spectacular Readers: Read Aloud & Think Aloud

Many of you who are early-grade teachers are familiar with the practice of reading aloud and thinking aloud. However, unless you approach reading and thinking aloud with your students as you would approach watering your flowers in summer – regularly and responsively – the result will not be as spectacular as it could be. What does a spectacular reader do? When they read they want to “get it”. They know what they need to do to get it. If they don’t get it, they have good ideas for how to fix it. They engage – they ask questions, fill in the gaps, make connections, and grow all kinds of new ideas. They can do all this without the direction of their teacher.

Tackling the Reading Comprehension Conundrum

In my last blog, The Reading Comprehension Conundrum, I wrote about factors, often not identified, that negatively impact comprehension instruction, particularly in developing countries. This blog will focus on one pivotal way to tackle the comprehension conundrum by making an alteration to the trajectory of teacher preparation.

The Reading Comprehension Conundrum

The blogs I will be posting will share teaching practices that have had a high-impact on teachers and their early grade literacy learners in Kenyan and Ethiopian low-resource schools. More specifically, I will focus on the critical space between teacher and student; the space where the magic happens or not. There are issues, however, that call for a lens adjustment – a wider lens for a broader perspective. This blog addresses one of those issues.

Thinking of 21st Century Education as a Double Helix* (*Two parallel lines that twist around their axis)

Reading the Brookings education blog, Education systems need alignment for teaching and learning 21st-century skills, left me wondering if the challenges it defines, encompass or omit the challenges that, I would submit, are equally impactful on the successful implementation of 21st-century education. The Brookings blog explains that assessment, curriculum, and pedagogy have to be aligned to bring about this new agenda that emphasizes critical and creative thinking, problem-solving, self-direction, effective communication and collaboration. Clearly, a piecemeal fix will not do. And yes, educators have lots to learn about what to teach, how to teach it and what evidence of students’ understanding teachers need to look for. However, when we watch teachers and students working with a 21st-century paradigm in mind, we realize there is another substratum at play that is crucial to the success of that undertaking.

Lessons from the Field, Part 1

Starting Out
As I surveyed my overweight luggage before snapping the locks shut, I congratulated myself for my eleventh-hour stroke of forethought and subsequent Amazon purchase of a Coleman solar shower. I was leaving for an extended visit to the Kimuka Primary School in the Rift Valley of Kenya at the request of the Village Chief. We met through a mutual friend and he was eager for me to share my many years of experience as a literacy specialist with his Kindergarten, first, second and third-grade teachers.

4 Questions That Set The Stage For Vital Teaching

Why should teaching the processes of learning be on the front burner this year in your classroom? I think this familiar proverb answers that question best, “If a man is hungry and you give him a fish, he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." The paramount goal of education today is to make students nimble, lifelong, confident learners, capable of acquiring the knowledge they need when they collaborate, problem solve and create. While purposely selected static or declarative knowledge (e.g., facts, principles, concepts) that adds to a student's depth of understanding and sense of context is an essential part of a broad education, procedural or dynamic knowledge (e.g., strategies, metacognition, habits of mind) is the enduring basis of autonomy, creativity and problem solving.

Incomprehensible

I began a unique teacher education project last August in Maasailand, Kenya. This blog focuses on one of the complex challenges that was evident in the classrooms and a major obstacle to providing quality education in schools across the developing world. Future blogs will talk about other key issues in the quality of education crisis and what I have learned from my first hand experiences in Kenya and Ethiopia. 

Kindergarten Kimuka Primary School, Maasailand, Kenya 

Picture this. You are five or six years old. You could be living in a rural part of Kenya or in any other country in the developing world.  Your mother tells you today is the day you are going to start school. As she gives you the shirt, sweater and skirt that your older sister wore when she started school, she tells you, “You will have a teacher. You will learn. School is very, very important.”

The Way to School

You walk out into the chilly morning air with your mother and follow her as she deftly makes her way around the slippery craters created by last night’s down pour. Once at the road, your Mother points and tells you, “This is the way to go. Follow the road until you see the big house I showed you.” You do as you are told. If you are frightened you do not show it. Your pace is slow but you are serious about reaching your destination and eventually the unfamiliar shoes binding your feet carry you 8 rough kilometers (4.9 miles) to the place called “school”.

 

The way to School

Your long, throat-parching walk had been exceedingly solitary save for the grazing goats, plodding cows and the occasional motor scooter that, most days, will blanket you in a thick cloud of dust as it zooms by. However, when you arrive at the tall iron school gate you are dazzled by the sea of children on the other side, more children then you have ever seen. Waves of them are flowing towards doors where teachers are stationed outside. Swept up, you land in a bare room with walls the color of milk. The teacher starts speaking in words, many of which, you have not heard before. You take in all the clues your young mind can comprehend. The other students are squeezing their bottoms into the rows of benches. You squish in too. 

The way to school

The teacher makes white marks on the blackish wall. She points at them, speaks, points again, no one knows what to do. The teacher speaks again, points again, you can tell from her face she is waiting for the children to repeat what she says. They finally do. You and the others follow her lead and do this many times. You don’t know it but your teacher wants you to learn the names of colors although they are not the names you have heard at home and there are no colors in sight.

As I write, the vivid image of a five-year old girl is as still fresh in my mind as if it were one of the mornings when my car driver stopped his Toyota in the midst of our jaw-jarring ride to Kimuka Village Primary School in the Rift Valley. On the days that our coordinates converged, the sweater-clad, runny-nosed Kindergartener, making her way to the same destination, stops, looks and recognizes the cheerful man behind the wheel and the Mzungu (Kswahili for white-skinned person) in the backseat. She waits for the signal to climb in.

The way to school

The little girl’s solitary hike to and from school each day, looking like a speck against a vast and rugged landscape, was and still is, incomprehensible to me - the walk is extremely strenuous and rife with serious hazards. The child, so unprotected! My mind is crowded with clashing images of my own children, at that age, blithely hopping on their school bus. My concept of a five-year old comes into question. Then my thoughts lurch and I’m stunned by a bigger picture. I’ve been working with the teachers in this child’s school. I have visited her classroom everyday for weeks now and I know that the hopes of the mother and the obedience and effort of the child are invested in a young woman with an eighth-grade education, equipped to provide little more for her students than good intentions. I know the consequences of that disconnect are enormous. 

The way to school

The way to school

The education that hopes are pinned on in the developing world is the education that is leaving 2.5 million children, who do get to go to school, without being able to read a single word by the end of third grade. (There are 58 million children worldwide who are out of school.) The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is responding to this crisis that is key to a better life and stronger economies, by planning to support up to $1 billion in activities over five years. The “Advanced Basic Education: All Children Reading” contract concentrates on improving student reading for children in grades 1 - 3.

5 year old girl at classroom door

The causes for the failure in basic education are complex and numerous and correction will require some heavy lifting. Governments will have to distribute its funds equitably to all segments of society. Teachers in developing countries will have to be paid a living wage. Beginning reading books written in the many mother-tongue languages will have to be available to all school children. Infrastructures for connectivity will have to be in place. Those are just a few of the challenges. However, a correction that is at hand is providing teachers, preferably at the preparatory level, with the models for teaching students to be thoughtful, competent readers, writers and self-guided learners. College partnerships, online interactive programs, and projects such as the one I brought to Kenya are just a few viable options for connecting and educating school leaders and school teachers.

To read more about the learning crisis in the developing world, I recommend Lant Pritchett’s, powerful book The Rebirth of Education: educating ain’t learning. 

The How and Why of Teaching the Reader and the Reading

When it comes to planning reading comprehension instruction that will result in metacognitive, self-guided, (oh well, I’ll use the term) deep readers, it is not uncommon to be stymied by an assortment of barriers. Two related questions teachers grapple with were cited in the research reported in Grant Wiggin's blog series on teaching comprehension:

• Is there a necessity for emphasizing specific strategies if the goal is reading as an active search for meaning?
• How can teachers teach strategies without subordinating the content?

This blog will attempt to remove the doubts those questions imply. The conclusions and observations I am about to share with you about explicit strategy instruction and its effect on students' reading comprehension, are based on my experience mediating the literacy learning of primary and intermediate at-risk students. Working with many of my students over multiple years, I was able to observe the cumulative effect of embedding my literature-based program with procedural knowledge. Facilitating reading and writing workshops in classrooms and working with students on all levels of academic ability, provided more grist for the mill.

I first plunged into teaching strategies by reading aloud and thinking aloud to my fourth grade students. I told them I was going to let them in on the things I do inside my head when I read  - things that help me understand and remember. It was my show and tell. After reading, we did a retelling of my responses and we labeled those behaviors (e.g. questioned, predicted, fixed-up confusion, inferred). After following this format for a few days, my normally passive readers were jumping out of their skin. They wanted their predictions, questions and inferences heard too. Those responsive reading behaviors were the prelude to gradually releasing control and the beginning of student-guided book discussions that became the norm.

Once the language around reading strategies was embedded in our conversations, I felt the time was right for launching my first explicit strategy lesson. High on my list of priorities was wanting to clarify what students could do when they were stuck on an inference question. However, I had reservations; I didn't know if they would get it and there was the issue of taking time away from covering content but the train had left the station. My students did get it and to say they were highly engaged is an understatement. That explicit strategy lesson never needed to be retaught. From then on when they were challenged to infer what was not stated, they were aware of what was required of them. Instead of declaring, “It doesn’t say” they moved into problem solving mode using the process they had learned and practiced. 

I realized that as long as I made teaching the reader central to my agenda, it became very natural to move back and forth between conversations about behaviors of learning and the content of the curriculum. Teaching process and product, it turned out, is a symbiotic not a dichotomous paradigm. Content is the indispensable conduit for process instruction. Before, during and after reading, we are mining text for information, ideas, concepts, author’s craft and message. The reading (content) is the focus. While in pursuit of making meaning, we learn where students’ understanding breaks down. I prefer to address those obstacles (teaching the reader) with on-going metacognitive dialogue at the point of use and then present clarifying strategy lessons during a designated time and for designated students. 

If, for example, some of your students demonstrate very poor reading recall and you are confident they are not on overload because of readability, concepts or vocabulary (easy to check), the problem could be inadequate attention to the text. A student who cannot paraphrase one or two sentences immediately after reading them needs strategies for improving his or her engagement while reading. Those strategies can be taught separately and explicitly during a mini-lesson. I start by telling  my students, "When you are reading with purpose, have a pencil in your hand. If you are not paying attention your page will be blank." Then I model a variety of ways to respond to text. Some of those responses are: 

• Draw what you visualize
• Draw a stick figure for each character, "collect" or infer describing words for each
• Build a graphic organizer while you are reading
• Jot down questions and predictions
• Answer the questions and check the predictions
• Chunk information 

If the recall problem is a result of perceiving the words on the page as just so many trees and students never see the forest, they need to be shown how organizing things helps us understand, remember, and locate what we want to find. Then demonstrate the strategy for chunking information using a hierarchy map (main topic, subtopics and details). It is the footprint for a paragraph or a chapter.

So here is a snapshot of  instruction that starts by teaching the reader and moves back to teaching the reading:

• At a time set aside for explicit strategy instruction, tell the children, “I noticed you are having difficulty remembering what you read and isn’t that a bummer. Nobody wants to have to read everything 2 or 3 times. I can show you a way to fix that.” The students  tune in because the lesson will have an impact on them that they can appreciate.
• Model the strategy for organizing while thinking aloud. Use manipulatives first, such as assorted blocks and then move to using text that is not challenging.
• Provide guided practice with the whole group.
• Students then continue to practice using the strategy with a buddy and being coached as needed.
• Move back to the reading. Apply the organizing strategy using the text students find challenging to recall.
• Students evaluate how or if using the strategy was beneficial.

The research has not been conclusive regarding how teaching students to use self-monitoring behaviors and comprehension strategies switch to auto-pilot or if, indeed, they do. However, because of my students' demonstrations of understanding, their metacognitve dialogue and the feedback received from their classroom teachers, I propose that the following teaching behaviors are  key to the transfer and application of strategy learning: 

• Explicit intention: Don’t keep it a secret. You want students to know how to help themselves when they don’t know. You want them grow their intelligence. Let them know that in addition to all the other neat things they are going to learn, you are going to teach them those things too.
• Thinking aloud and clarifying demonstrations: Always tell what you are doing and why you are doing it. Make the strategy lessons enjoyable, memorable and engaging. Using concrete objects increases attention and brain activity. Among the materials in my “tool box” are: blocks, Play Doh, puzzle pieces, a bag of dry garbage and fake money for a treasure hunt. These lessons stick. They create the kind of clarity that leads to control and autonomy.
• Keep the processes of reading in plain sight: The same strategies will resurface over and over, subject to subject. We want students to see that many strategies are being used recursively as we read. Keep the dialectic conversation going between process and product.
• Non-directive prompts: You’ve taught your students with intentionality, which you shared with them. You’ve supported them in their practice and application. It’s time to stop telling them what to do. Instead of directing students to organize the material they are reading, use an open prompt - “While you are searching your source material today to locate information for your project, what do you plan to do to help yourself understand and remember what you read?”
• Reading response journals: These are journals where students exercise choice. They select the strategies and the modalities that work for them. The journals reflect their independent reading processes. They provide a lens into each child’s growing repertoire for processing text and meeting challenges that can be viewed by teachers, parents and very importantly, themselves.

It cannot be stated too strongly, incorporating explicit strategy lessons for understanding the Habits of Mind used by people who are highly successful at what they do, are key to cultivating success in reading. More often than not, deficits, particularly in flexibility, thoroughness, accuracy and persistence, are the underlying reason for a wide array of difficulties students face. Children can demonstrate great comprehension when speaking spontaneously about their reading but fail miserably when responding to questions and other tasks because they are impulsive or unable to work through challenges.

We have a history in education of thinking higher-level thinking behaviors belong to the high achievers. It’s important to remember, the behaviors that have been identified over the last 35 years as the essential work of reading (e.g. questioning, inferring, summarizing, synthesizing the message, and fixing up confusion) are naturally occurring mental processes. (With the exception of summarizing. Primary grade children list events, they don’t categorize them.) Walk into a Kindergarten room. The students are asking questions about the stories, asking questions about things they do not understand, inferring and getting the story message. I’ve never met a Kindergartener who didn’t synthesize the message of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

While the explicit teaching of strategies, in this paradigm, is a response to demonstrated need, strong readers should have the benefit of consciously knowing the steps of the strategies they usually use without conscious effort. That way they have a backup when they are challenged by text. They can know what to do when they don’t know. Regardless of the capabilities of the students, the strategy mini-lessons and the weaving of process into content discussions does not in any way interfere with thorough and memorable explorations of books. You can read more in my book Learning For Keeps: Teaching the Strategies Essential for Creating Independent Learners

The “X” Factors

I’m back at home now. I returned from my travels one month ago today. As anyone who has been to Africa or any developing country would know, going through customs is not the real re-entry process. It is a period of time during which everything old feels new - driving a car, drinking water coming out of a faucet, recorded TV programs, our beds.

I spent the week before last with Joe Balog, the young man who came with me to Maasailand. He took pictures and videos in and around the work at Kimuka Village School. We culled the considerable collection and distilled 6 four-minute videos from them. A whole week out of young Joe’s life, sitting side by side with me, missing Halloween in New York City - so we could tell the story.

As we clicked and dragged the pictures and screen shots, I had a sense of malaise that I slowly recognized as a tinge of homesickness. How was it that I would miss a place that was:

• so harsh with its inhospitable rock-strewn roads, dust-filled air, starving cattle desperately licking leaf-bare thorny acacia trees;
• so worrisome with its unavoidable and potentially disease carrying water, food and mosquitos;
• so challenging with its primitive pit latrines, absence of harnessed electrons and all that they deliver, and cold showers that required something close to heroism.

No, it was not about the place. It was about the people. It was a complex relationship we forged. That is a story in itself but what held up through the challenges we had was a strong appreciation and affection for each other. I was captivated by our workmates richness of spirit evident in their good humor and expressed aspirations in the context of extreme scarcity.

Those qualities came through early on. When we were just about to start the full week of workshops, the last week of June, we interviewed each person working on the project. I asked them to speak about what they hoped they would get out of the inservice training. I asked them what concerns they had. Those interviews were videotaped so you can listen to them too. (See video) You will not hear anyone mention or bemoan the absence of chalk, pencils, paper, crayons, or books. In one way or another, each spoke about the needs of their students and their concern over meeting those needs. 

As the days ticked by and bundled themselves into weeks, I was pricked with a sense of cognitive dissonance. The teachers and I had completed the week of workshops in which I rolled out the six-part model for daily instruction. I demonstrated, we practiced. Everything was new. The teachers were never taught about reading and writing. They were expected to read and write. Teaching reading and writing strategies was unheard of. (You can hear Chief Joseph talk about that on the video) However, everything we did was grounded in the proverb: “If a man is hungry and you give him a fish he will eat for a day. If a man is hungry and you teach him to fish, he will eat for the rest of his life.” Those words, that concept, resonated with everyone.

Only slightly tentative, each teacher took her turn in the morning, picture book in hand, to read aloud and think aloud by stopping to tell what she was wondering, tell what she thought was going to happen next or explain why she thought something in the story did happen. Each was practicing what she would do in her classroom to teach her children what good readers do. Not only would they talk about the story being read, they would teach how to read anything, anytime - teaching their students “to fish”.

What was that cognitive dissonance I was experiencing? Given the newness and strangeness of the methods, why wasn’t the work a struggle for these women? Instead of furrowed brows and awkward silence there was laughter, bright eyes and probing questions. When they finally stepped in front of their students for the reading hour everyday, each teacher unpacked what she had practiced and OMG they owned everything they had learned. Their students were right there with each of them. Start a question with the words, “What do you think...” and a sea of hands shot up on outstretched arms, fingers snapping, voices begging, “teecha, teecha, teecha”.

I did, for one brief moment, reach around and pat my back. It was the structure, the modeling, the clear explanations, the ample time to practice each day, the encouragement, the safe environment, I reasoned. But after all my years of experience working with teachers I could easily envision providing all of those things and still not lighting everyone’s fire. There was clearly something else at work - something I could not have taught for or planned for. It took some time, re-entry and some unforced reflection but I think I nailed the X factors. Needs were being met in Kimuka Village School which might not necessarily be felt so keenly back home.

There was an opportunity for these teachers in rural Kenya to fill a gap in their skills, an opportunity which they saw as a once in a lifetime opportunity. Then too, the teachers had expressed their fundamental, abiding desire to help “the little ones”. That is a powerful desire, as many of us know. And ultimately there is the joy the accompanies expansion, the inner excitement of becoming more of what you know you are meant to be.

Just as I had overlooked these forces that would be at play when I was worrying through the planning stages, others working to improve education in under-resourced communities need to realize the teachers bring their own power and potential to the table. The teachers we partner with in such places as Maasailand do not need propping up with scripted lessons, they need the opportunity to learn how to “fish.”

Saturday Meeting

Saturday Introductions

Saturday was my idea. A nice big meet and greet for the teachers and community members. A lunch. I knew rituals and celebrations are woven into the fabric of African life in general and the Maasai were no exception - whether it is the Ethiopian coffee ceremony or the serving of Chi in Maasailand. Chief Joseph was very pleased with my idea. “Oh, this will be very good!”, he beamed when I made the suggestion during one of our many planning conversations.

So a little more one day after touching down in Nairobi and after our first hectic, disorienting night in our guest house bunk beds, indoor toilet without plumbing, no running water, navigating a strange house in the absence of electric light, no mirrors or a hook to hang a thing on, Michelle, Joe and I and the Chief were off to Kimuka Village School bright and early.

The school was 20 exceedingly bumpy minutes from the house. We pulled up to the padlocked security gate which need unlocking. We were the first to arrive. To wait for the key bearer and the guests we were shepherded down the road to Floricana, a small eatery.

Brain talk.

Kimuka Village Schoolyard

There we met Samson and his 2 children. Samson, a teacher at the school, has a smile and a kinetic energy that reconfigures the molecular space he occupies like heat on ice. Before the end of the day we would have the measure of the man as well and found that too to be impressive.

The school is a right angle of continuous classrooms facing onto a wide expanse of dusty soil, save for a few good sized cactus, a circle of rocks around a flag pole and one lone tree. We were led to one of the rooms. I was asked how I would like the furniture arranged. Then we stepped outside while the floor was swept of the layer of brown dust that had accumulated during the August school break and tables and chairs were recruited from other rooms to form a big rectangle in the center. (I had learned in Ethiopia the idea of setting up ahead of time just doesn’t make African sense. When it’s time you do what has to be done.)

Michelle's talk

Sitting around the table were the principal, the KIMUKA School teachers who would be in the Pilot Project: Rebecca, Lucy, Mercy and Mary the 2 prospective coaches (Samson and Jackie) 3 teachers from other primary schools and a school district administrator (Steven).

Reading Aloud, The Giving Tree

I was disappointed to learn the representative from the Ministry of Education, Joseph said would be invited, was not there. His absence, according to Joseph, was due to washed out roads from the previous day’s downpour.
I had given a great deal of thought to crafting this first meeting. More accurately, I agonized over what to say. Everything from the correct greeting (gender, number, formality of the occasion) to the briefest possible explanations of the key points about the project and its contents to finding visuals that would make a lasting impression.

Saturday group photo, sans Joe.

Once we were settled in the computer room, in name only, it was a foregone conclusion that our meeting would be shortened and I had some quick editing decisions. But once The Chief’s announcements, the principal’s welcoming words and the prayer was lead, I had about one hour to make my case for the pilot project. I didn’t know I would actually be preaching to the choir.

Wander We Must

The proverbial handwriting was on the airport wall. The night of my arrival in Nairobi Kenyatta Airport was (or could have been) a signal to my 15 hour sleep deprived brain that the mundane was going to be in stiff competition with the mission. The mission – start up my one-year pilot project on the teaching of thoughtful reading and writing in an under- sourced rural community

And so it has been. Retrieving my two large and one medium sized suitcases banded in bright colors for easy identification, was the first flag. Hopeful watching of the “It’s a Small World After All” ride of packaged humanity was futile. Unfortunately, that was not known to me until 3:30 AM, 3 hours after our 3 hour late arrival.

After a few hours sleep at our old friend, The Sarova Stanely Hotel in the heart of Nairobi’s business district, we were in the lobby giving elated, 2 cheek air kisses to Chief Joseph, wife Cecilia and in short time, Joseph Nderitu, the young man Howard and I are sponsoring for a diploma in Hotel Management and Hospitality from a Nairobi college.
  

Not long after we packed ourselves into the hired car Chief Joseph came in, we were on our way to his village in Maasailand. (Young Joseph would join us on the following Wed.) On the the trip from urban Nairobi to the rural you pass intermittent roadside stretches of furniture and other wares for sale. About 20 minutes into our trip, Imperative Kswahili instructions were followed by an abrupt pull over. Chief Joseph, dressed for NY creds but for the red plaid wrap draped over his shoulder, left the van and returned some minutes later bearing a hospitality gift for his visitors – a brand new shellacked, wooden commode!

At first he wedged the gleaming wooden box with the flip top between Cecilia and the baggage in the rear of the van but the road was bumpy (didn’t know how bumpy till we left the paved part of thetrip) so after the third time I nagged about the potential injuries to Cecilia, Chief Joseph repositioned the piece between his own knees where it stayed for the hour or so it took to reach our new home away from home.

 
The Guest House met our eyes with a combination of relief and wonder. During the last 40 minutes of our trip from Nairobi, the road turned downright nasty. Joseph explained that the government started making a road into the interior of Maasailand but then decided they had done enough. They did return to remove some of the major rocks but what remained can only be good news for Good Year and Toyota. Tires and suspension parts have about a 6 month life span on that terrain. The locals traveled either by foot or motor scooter. When it rains, and when it rains it dumps water, the gullies we passed fill to over flowing and the roads are impassible.


So much for the relief we (our backs particularly) felt when we arrived. You can imagine the wonder of seeing a large western structure standing out on the otherwise vast, flat, parched land. Anything else of a vertical nature would be cows, Maasai people walking, small tin-roofed dwellings and the ubiquitous Acacia trees. (Having never seen one really up close and perhaps not in the dry season when they are without any folliage, I never knew that they all thorns.) I am sure we were all thinking the same thing as we spotted a large house off in the distance, OK this will be a piece of cake!

 We soldiered on for 2 weeks at the guest house. Intermittent solar light, no running water, no success with the use of thumb drive modems for WiFi connections, and really tight sleeping space (Michelle and I shared a bunk bed and a closet- well part of a closet) required full-time logistics planning and management.

The curtained house entrance

Chi (tea with milk and some spice) is served to the family and guests in the living room

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I developed a deep understanding for the part our surroundings play in our sense of groundedness and well-being. When nothing can be taken for granted – not brushing your teeth and washing your face, not flushing the toilet (we did have a toilet in the house but flushing required asking a lovely young woman named Christine to lug a very large bucket of water from the cistern outside) and not having any food item that requires refrigeration.

Once the opening Saturday meeting and lunch was done and the week of workshops for the teachers was over, Michelle, Joe and I realized the impossibility of getting any of the communications work done while living at the Guest House. In order to get connected we had to get to Ngong where there are internet cafes. The car trip was arduous and the cost, round trip – $60. Nobody was cutting us any breaks.

Living room

Entrance to living room

Living Room

Kitchen and Joe

Samson’s intrepid Toyota

A dear woman who I met in Nairobi in 2010, owns a car service business. I called Maggy and told her we needed to find lodging. Despite all good intentions, our next move was something out of “The Griswalds Family Vacation” minus the vacation and the humor. This Guest House also looked good enough from the outside, we arrived baggage in tow feeling kind of desperate and dirty. We were envisioning the hot shower, the flushing toilet, comfortable beds, refrigeration, a mirror, a closet or a hook perhaps… and internet.

Well we did get internet. At the end of night 2 Michelle was checking Airbnb and came up with a great find. So now I am in a very reasonable rental house in Karen. (Many nice houses behind gates in Karen.) Two shopping malls within 5 to 10 minutes. House help on the premises. And I for one, have no illusions about the distinction between wanting to share what I know with people who want to know it with going Peace Corps. I signed on for the former.

The Compelling Case for Explicit Strategy Instruction

Case #1 -What experience has to teach us

 Like many of you I am a teacher who wants to know what good research has to say. I regard statistically significant results the same way I regard the word “Sunkist” on my oranges or the word “prime” on my meat. But be that as it may, I also want to hear the ring of truth in the theories supported by research  and the practices those studies lead to. It is those two criteria, sound research and inner knowing, that has steered my teaching and made explicit strategy instruction, which I found to be essential for developing self-directed learners, the anchor of my work. Experiences like the one I relate in Learning for Keeps: Teaching the Strategies Essential for Independent Learners taught me the value of explicit instruction.

Taking my first word-processing course was my Waterloo. It was of no small consequence that I lacked confidence in my ability to tame the computer beast, I was devoid of essential prior knowledge and was unable to comprehend a large percentage of computer terminology – a scenario not at all dissimilar to what inexperienced learners may encounter in our classrooms.

Then there was the manner in which I was being taught. Keys were hit, a mouse was clicked, words were spoken and in the end I was no more able to perform the operations I was trying to learn than before I began. What was wrong with that picture? What did I need from my teacher? What would have served me better? My instructor was modeling the process for me, which was a good thing but the pace was too fast. I could not differentiate the parts of the new procedure; no sooner had one step been taken than the next one was under way.

No attempt was made to check in with me to see how I was processing the demonstration while it was in progress. It was assumed my brief exposure to the way things were done would suffice. I was not given an opportunity to practice what was taught; the instructor stayed in the driver's seat. When the demonstration was over, I had no more clarity or ability than when it began.

As for research, we have decades of research affirming that teaching strategies improves achievement and self-direction, I would like to think that the information in A. Wade Boykin’s and Pedro Noguera’s recently published ASCD book Creating the Opportunity to Learn: Moving From Research to Practice to Close the Achievement Gap will invigorate conversation regarding direct or explicit instruction and self-regulated learning.  My next post will talk about the case that research makes for using direct strategy instruction in any classroom where the teacher is dedicated to the proposition that all children can and should be able to initiate and use the strategies necessary for a high level of reading, writing, and problem solving.

For readers who know of direct or explicit instruction and think it sounds like a good idea but need to know more about its value, conceptual basis and practical application, these blogs are for you. However, the label “direct” as it pertains to teaching means different things to different people. There are degrees of explicitness just as there are degrees of strength. A teacher could, for example:

       (Name the strategy) Teacher to students: “Answer these inference questions.”

       (Talk about the strategy) Teacher to students: “When you can’t find an answer in the text, you may have to infer the answer from what you have read.”

       (Model the strategy) Teacher to students reading and thinking aloud: “I infer the boy is angry at his friend because I read that he refused to speak to him. Our experience teaches us that not speaking to someone you know is evidence of anger. ”

The degree of explicitness that is transformative begins with naming, talking about and modeling strategies but does not end there. The explicit teaching we are talking about is articulated, long-term, planned instruction that ultimately empowers students to respond to obstacles with confidence and self-direction. It is teaching that provides enough practice for important cognitive behaviors to be internalized. It is conceiving of teaching strategies as a long-term developmental process. Here is an abridged, edited and excerpted portion of my book that provides an overview of this kind of explicit instruction. 

To teach strategic behaviors explicitly, the teacher begins by building students’ awareness of a needed strategy. Working with conscious intent, which she shares with her students, the teacher introduces and models the strategy as follows:

1. Name the strategy.
2. Explain the importance of the strategy to the students.
3. Relate the new strategy and concept to the students’ prior knowledge  and experience.
4. Model the use of the strategy.
5. Verbalize her thought processes not just the thoughts.
6. Engage students in reflection and processing of new learning. 

If, however, instruction ends with the teacher-directed strategy lesson it would, most likely, not produce the behaviors that are necessary for developing expertise. Proficient readers and writers do not use strategies one at a time, nor do they use them simply when under strong instructional control.

Teaching continues with a transactional approach once the strategy is named, introduced, and modeled. The teacher moves on to the problem-solving, interactive phase of mediation in which she coaches her students as they put the strategy to work. The selection and use of strategies becomes part of the dialogue surrounding any engaging activity. The curriculum takes on a duel agenda of teaching for process and product. In effect the teacher invites the strategies to the table and makes them part of the content of learning. 

The kind of approach outlined here is not widely practiced. Eminent educational researchers like Michael Pressley, Barak Rosenshine and indeed Boykin and Noguera have noted this and urge that this be rectified.