By Sara Finegan
One of the hardest things I have had to learn how to do as a teacher is to dissect skills that I do automatically or very well. It’s crucial to be able to do it, because that is the primary way in which we investigate how to provide instruction.
Only if I know exactly how I make meaning in text when it is difficult to comprehend will I be able to teach my kids how to understand what they read.
This act of teasing out the different skills and concepts I use in academic and intellectual activities is much easier when it involves subjects I have myself struggled with.
Figuring out how to teach math skills is a relative piece of cake for me, because math has never come easily to me and I do not work as fluently with numbers as I do with words. Piecing out the individual strategies I use when I read was one of the most difficult activities I’ve worked on over a period of years, and I’m still making discoveries. And we will not even begin to talk about the writing process, which for me is a natural one and oh, so difficult to break down.
But it must be done.
That which is automatic to us is usually a struggle for our students. They can get to the point of ease with many tasks, but we have to teach each skill separately from beginning to end, and give them multiple, repeated, ongoing opportunities to practice. Again and again. <grin> Only then can we start putting the skills back together to form a whole action.
Be aware that this is very different from the dumming down process, where we make the mistake of lowering our expectations for the final project and do half of the work for our students instead of prompting them to take intellectual risks.
The fact that a student cannot write a paragraph using complete sentences, or cannot yet make inferences as she reads, or is not able, just yet, to use the order of operations to solve a math problem doesn’t mean that we should not expect them to be able, at the end of the year, to write a three-paragraph essay, or understand text close to grade level, or solve this expression: 3(6 x 9) – (2 +4) – 16.
And it’s certainly not cause to keep the student doing simple addition and subtraction problems , or having the kids work on fill-in-the-blank worksheets, or letting them deal only with the literal meaning of text.
No, what a demanding classroom does is provide intensive instruction and opportunities for practice with gradual release of responsibility back to the student in ever-increasing levels of work.
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You may be starting out with sentence practice, but you will be moving quickly from simple sentences to more complex ones, and adding powerful vocabulary quite soon.
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You might just have the kids practice solving the parts of the problem in parenthesis first, ignoring the rest of the problem for days on end, but the time will come soon when they’ll be using more and more of the order of ops.
It’s our job to tear the skill set apart, teach it, and paste it back together. The kids will do the rest of the sewing, if we let them, push them, challenge them, demand it of them.
demanding classroom · high expectations · learning disabled · lesson planning · rigor · rigorous instruction · Sara Finegan · special education · standards
