Methods of Encoding - Explanations

Despite all of the fads encouraging "guide on the side rather than sage on the stage," the most common form of instruction remains good, old fashioned explanations.  

Why?  

Because the most effective, efficient, and straightforward way of getting information from the head of someone knowledge to the head of someone without it is to tell them.  We know it works from research, but even if we didn't, we would know it works from the thousands of years of history in which oral tradition was the only option available (perhaps paired with a drawing on a cave wall, but we'll talk about that next week).

So, most of the encoding that happens in schools is done through explanation.  That means, we should invest a lot of our professional development time on getting explanations right.  Anyone who has ever helped their dad with a home repair, only to misunderstand and mess up the project, knows that explanations aren't all created equal. 

Good explanations engage listeners through hooks, brisk pacing, frequent checks for understanding, analogies, and clear sequencing.  

Hooks:

Think of the best sermon, stand up comedy routine, or TED talk you have ever heard.  Chances are, you remember how it started more than any other part of it.  And that's likely because excellent speakers start with something to get your attention.  Sometimes, it's a quote or especially interesting fact, but more often than not, it's a story.  Better yet, it is the first half of a story that they will finish later in the speech.  People who want you to keep listening are wise to pique your curiosity and make you want to know more.  Teachers, pay attention to the world around you, and you will see myriads of opportunities to connect something you have seen to your content.  "Last week, I saw a bird fly into a window, and it made me wonder, 'What makes glass transparent?'" will draw students in far more than, "Today, we will talk about what make glass transparent."  An English teacher can tell a story about an argument they overheard as the lead in to a discussion on literary conflict.  Even in math, there is a way to turn a variable into a character.  Check out this TED talk from Tyler DeWitt on using story telling in his science classes to help his kids care about what they are learning.  The point, if you don't grab their attention early, you don't stand a chance of keeping them engaged when the lesson gets harder.

Brisk Pacing:

I confess that I had not thought much about pacing (other than my own need to fit the whole lesson into a class period) before reading Zach Groshell's book Just Tell Them.  In his role as instructional coach and consultant, Zach has observed hundreds of lessons and says that one of the things he has noticed most is pacing that is too slow.  He's not advising that teachers speak at lightning speed and blow past checks for understanding (far from it if you have ever seen him present).  He is simply advising that we not dwell forever on one point if it isn't needed and eliminate things that aren't necessary for learning.  I'll add that a lot of classroom management issues could be pre-empted with faster pacing as well and free up time for retrieval practice at the end of the period.

Checks for Understanding:

No matter how good an explainer you are, there will be misconceptions in the minds of your students.  They miss an important word that changes the meaning of a sentence.  They activate some partially relevant piece of prior knowledge and make an inappropriate connection to it.  Their lack of background knowledge or vocabulary makes them have only a partial understanding.  There are lots of ways misconceptions can sneak in to your excellent lesson.  And misconceptions are like weeds; they grow out of control alongside the good information.  And, they are easier to uproot if you catch them early.  For that reason, your explanations should include frequent checks for understanding from as many of your students as possible.  Don't just call on the kid with his hand up.  He only raised his hand because he was confident, so he's almost always going to be right; and that is almost always going to mislead you into believing that everyone understands.  You can whiteboards, paper, choral response, cold calling, or digital tools, but you must ask them to answer questions that show their thinking.

Analogies, Metaphors, and Similes:

The best way to understand something is to connect it something else that you already understand.  Using analogies in your explanations help content to stick.  Chemistry teachers, make the reactants and products of a chemical reaction people at homecoming trying to find the right dance partners.  

Algebra teachers - "Think of the variable like a loner.  He just wants to be by himself.  He's trying to get everyone to go away by doing the opposite of what they want to do."  Kids understand that a lot more than "To isolate a variable, employ the opposite operation of those terms already connected to the variable."

You do have to be careful with analogies.  Because they are so powerful, they are sometimes the part of your explanation that sticks the best.  I used to describe dissociation (the process of ionic compounds dissolving in water) with the analogy, "It's like a married couple going to a party.  They wife goes one direction and the husband goes another to mingle during the party.  But, they aren't divorced (to make the point that chemical decomposition has not happened) because they come back together at the end of the party.  One the next test they had, several students gave me a detailed answer to the question, "Describe the process of dissociation" without ever mentioning ions or polar molecules.  They told me a lot about mingling at parties.  That was a good reminder for me to constantly circle back to the content to prevent only encoding the analogy.  

Sequencing:

Perhaps the most under-appreciated part of explanations is the sequencing of information.  I think that is because most of us plan it rather unconsciously.  But it is worth taking a few minutes to think about as you plan your lessons.  Will "A" make sense if I teach it before I teach "B"?  If not, re-sequence.  

There are time when this is difficult, especially as students get older and the content becomes more complex and self referencing.  I often found myself saying, "But we'll talk more about that next semester."  The key then is to explain what they NEEED to know in order to understand what you are teaching them today.  It's okay to say, "There will be more on this later" without trying to teach all of the coming concept.  In fact, I found that my especially curious students were excited to know that things would connect up later.  I also really liked making that explicit when we got there.  "Hey, remember that thing from two weeks ago?  See how it all comes together now?  Isn't it cool how everything depends on everything else?"  Once a student made the connection for me.  I was teaching Net Ionic Equations, and a student said,"Man, this one thing has stuff from like four different chapters."  I had not recognized that yet, but he was right.  If I had tried to teach those too early in the year, it would have been an absolute mess. 

Explanations may be the most straightforward way to teach, but it takes time to plan effectively.  I recommend two books to help with this process.  The first one is one I already mentioned - Zach Groshell's Just Tell Them.  Zach practices what he preaches, so it is a short book that is practical, to the point, and leaves out the fluff.  

If you have a little more time and you want to deep dive into the science behind explanations, I recommend How to Explain Absolutely Anything to Absolutely Anyone by Andy Tharby.  It is a little more dense than Zach's, but it is chock full of great connections to cognitives science research.  Together, these two books will up your explanation game in a huge ways.

An Illustration of How Inquiry Learning (Doesn't) Work

Let's start with a definition - According to Wikipedia, "Inquiry-based learning is a form of active learning that starts by posing questions, problems or scenarios."  Ten years ago, you could not attend a conference without being told it was the future of education and would help our students learn more deeply.  Having experienced an inquiry-based calculus class, I knew this wasn't true, but as a teacher of lab sciences, I am expected to think of inquiry as the end-all-be-all of instructional methods by people who have never experienced teaching that way.  Every lab experience my students have requires a lot of direct instruction both before and after the lab experience.  Otherwise, they just observe phenomena (which people had been doing for millennia before the scientific method); they do not learn from them.  Here's a recent personal example.

In December, my students review the learning of the semester with a song.  I like to give them the lyrics in the form of a booklet, but I don't really know how to make a booklet on the copy machine.  There are people in our school who make programs for events, so I had asked a few times in prior years for someone to teach me.  Kind folk that they are, they would just do it for me.  While I appreciated it, I wanted to know how.

This December, on the day I wanted to make them, the person who knows how to do it had not arrived at the building yet.  I decided I would try to figure it out myself.  For forty minutes, I tried things that proved unsuccessful.  I googled how to make booklets, but the initial results used programs and copy machines that didn't match mine.  At one point, I thought I had found it, but when I looked at my computer, I didn't have the buttons shown in the instructions.  I finally realized it was in Adobe Reader while I was in Preview (not quite the same thing).  When I got into there, I found the right buttons, but the printed result was missing two pages and, for reasons I still cannot explain, ended on the 3rd page of the original.  I kept trying things and changing settings until it finally came out right and made the 81 copies I needed.

For supporters of Inquiry Learning, you are saying, "See - you were motivated, active in your learning, used your tools, and you will remember it longer than if someone had just told you how to do it."  Here's the thing, though.  I don't.  Someone asked me last week how to make a booklet, and I could not tell them.  Here are some issues with my experience:

1. Wasted time - It would have taken someone about five minutes to explicitly teach me how to do it.  I spent over an hour "figuring it out."  My motivation was waning and would not have lasted much longer.
2. Wasted resources - The amount of paper and ink that went in the trash can during my failed attempts would make Greta Thunberg cry.  Once, it printed on 11 x 17 paper, and I don't know why.  Since the original document is 9 pages long, each failed attempt wasted that much.  By the way, had this been chemistry rather than paperwork, misuse of those resources could have also been dangerous.
3. Wasted energy - By the time I finished, I had used a lot of motivational energy.  What might I have done instead?  We'll never know.
4. No permanence - As I said earlier, this did not result in deep learning.  It did not result in permanent learning.  I still don't know how to do it.  The reason is that I never engaged in the sequence from beginning to end while I was "figuring it out."  If I tried to do it now, I might stumble my way into it again or recognize some of the buttons when I saw them again, but I would have no confidence in doing so.  Had someone walked me through it step by step, and then I did it with their feedback, I might know how to do it today.

Students need guidance in learning and the more important and/or complex the skill, the more they need us.  As novice learners, they have only surface-level questions about their observations while we want them to learn the internal structure.  Google can give them information; it cannot give them insight (and I haven't even addressed that many sources they find are unreliable).  Students need our expertise to teach them explicitly or create activities that guide them through the learning process.  They do not have the ability to do it on their own, and they certainly would not achieve the standards we have in our curriculum.  Even if inquiry learning could teach all of those things, it would be inefficient and wasteful.  

Teach your students.  Don't assume they'll learn calculus without help.