Ask Catlin - Are We Expecting Independence Before We’ve Taught It?

Question one is, how do I prepare all of these processing activities ahead of time for when I'm chunking whole group instruction.

So this first question came from a history teacher who was thinking about how to break up a longer whole group instructional session into smaller instructional chunks with opportunities for students to pause and process in between each instructional chunk or segment.

So the question was essentially, how do I possibly prepare all of these different processing activities ahead of time? And I think the first thing I want to clarify is that these do not need to be separate, elaborate activities that happen in the pauses or the space between the instructional segments.

When I encourage teachers to break up whole group instruction into smaller chunks and give students time to pause, think about the information they just heard.

begin to process it between those instructional chunks, I'm not suggesting that you deliver five minutes of instruction and then launch students into a big activity that you had to design and prepare ahead of time.

That would be absolutely exhausting for teachers.

And it might even make the lesson feel kind of disjointed, bouncing between like instruction and an elaborate activity.

Instead, I want teachers to think about the pause and the process as a short opportunity for students to do something with the information they just received.

So before you teach a chunk of information, ask yourself, what is the most important idea here? What do I really want students to understand, remember, or be able to explain? Then your processing prompt can align with that, the kind of that goal you have for for that instructional segment.

And it can be really simple.

So if I'm teaching history, maybe I've just explained a particular event.

I might ask students to put that event in their own words without looking at their notes.

Maybe I want them to think about a cause and effect relationship.

So I ask them to identify one cause and one effect from the instruction that they just heard.

Or maybe we just covered three events in three separate instructional chunks.

And now I want them to pause and think about the sequence or the relationships.

So I asked them to kind of add those three events to a quick timeline in their notes and add kind of a brief explanation of how they connect.

Or maybe we've been looking at two groups or policies, different perspectives or events, and maybe I'm asking students to compare and contrast, right? Identifying one important similarity and one difference.

So it could be making connections.

It could be putting a term in their own words or explaining something in their own words.

It could be having them sketch out kind of like parts of a quick timeline.

So none of these are really requiring a ton of design time.

They're really meant to be processing prompts.

And I think that's the real distinction that's important.

The goal is to get students cognitively kind of actively engaged with the information that is being presented.