Don't Just Practice the Thing
Break it down: maybe the most important skill in teaching
Juggling
I can juggle. It’s a fun little skill to pull out from time to time. Most years I try to teach students the basics of juggling at some point, maybe during homeroom or when we have some free time after state testing or something like that. Usually leads to some goofy fun.
Students often think that to learn how to juggle, they should try juggling with three balls right away. They always want to grab three, and start trying to keep them all in the air.
The actual best way to learn to juggle is to start with one ball. Practice throwing from both hands so the ball reaches about the top of your head (experienced jugglers will keep their tosses lower, but head height is good for beginners). After some practice with one ball, move to two balls. Toss one, then toss the other. The goal is for the two tosses to look a bit like the McDonald’s arches: about the same height, offset horizontally. Here it’s important to practice for a while. Get better at that exchange — tossing the second ball while that hand prepares to catch the first ball. Start with both the right hand and the left hand. Make sure the tosses stay the same distance from your body and don’t creep forward. Make sure they’re the same height. Only after a lot of practice with two balls is it time to go to three.
Break It Down
I don’t take teaching juggling too seriously. It’s a fun activity to kill a bit of time with students. But juggling is a good illustration of a broader principle: the best way to learn skill X often isn’t to practice skill X. The best way to learn is often to break skill X into sub-skills A, B, C, and so on, then practice A, B, and C, and work your way up to X.
Here are a bunch of education examples:
To help students get better at word problems, don’t just give students lots of word problems.
To help students get better at taking standardized tests, don’t just give students lots of mock standardized tests.
To help students become better readers, don’t just ask students to read lots of books.
To help students get better at math fact fluency, don’t just give students lots of math fact practice.
To help students write better essays, don’t just ask them to write lots of essays.
To help students write better explanations, don’t just ask them to write lots of explanations.
To help students improve their problem-solving, don’t just give students lots of challenging problems.
To help students get better at note-taking, don’t just ask them to take notes all the time.
To help students get better at collaboration, don’t just assign lots of group projects.
I think every teacher has been guilty of this type of thinking. I know I have.
Juggling isn’t the best example here. I don’t think I’ve met a middle schooler who already knows how to juggle. Students start on a pretty level playing field. But that’s not the case for academic learning. If I’m teaching word problems, some students already have pretty strong word problem skills. Others really struggle. The students who already have strong skills will probably benefit from some broad practice where I throw a bunch of random word problems together and say “practice your word problem skills.” But others will flounder unless that skill is broken down into smaller pieces.
Helpful For All, Harmful For None, Crucial For Some
There’s a nice quote about teaching phonics from Snow & Juel: phonics is “helpful for all children, harmful for none, and crucial for some.” Phonics is just one example of breaking a complex skill down into small pieces. And the tricky thing about this type of teaching is that not all students need it. But for some students it’s absolutely essential. The reasons for that difference are beyond the scope of this post, but the consequences are straightforward. Teaching without breaking learning down into small, manageable steps will work for some students, but not for others. Breaking learning into small steps is the best strategy to help all students make progress. It might be intuitive that, if I want to help students write better explanations for their mathematical thinking, I should ask them to explain their reasoning all the time. It’s also an easy way out: ask for lots of explanations, watch some students write great explanations, pat myself on the back, and call it a day. Much harder is to figure out the component parts of writing a great explanation, teach them one at a time, and help many more students develop a new skill they struggled with before.
The toughest part here is figuring out the components of these skills. They’re not obvious. Unfortunately, that’s how the human mind works: as we become proficient with a skill, the little pieces of that skill melt away and become invisible to us. One of the most important challenges of teaching is finding new ways to break skills down into smaller, more manageable pieces. It never ends. Every year I find new ways to break things down, to figure out which pieces are tough for students, to connect those pieces back together into a larger whole. That’s some of the most important and most challenging intellectual work of teaching. The better I get at seeing the hidden elements of learning, the more students I can help find success in math class.