In the publishing of the book Show Your Work: Teaching Smarter With the Science of Learning, I'm learning a lot about the writing and publishing processes. I'm learning even more about the re-writing process. Two weeks ago, I got back all of my copyedited pages and had to accept or reject them and answer questions.
Copy editors do not play, y'all. The form they sent me said it had had a "medium" amount of editing. Then, each chapter I opened had anywhere between 75 and 175 changes or queries, leaving me to wonder what a heavy amount of editing would look like. Most of the edits were small - removing a space, adding a comma, or changing a capital letter to a lowercase one. Some were citations I had forgotten to include or changes made to fit their publishing style (the MLA I learned in high school is less useful than I was led to believe).
The edits that made me laugh the most were the ones that asked if I would like to "use the expanded version for clarity." This was the automatic note any time there was an acronym. For the most part, that makes sense. Jargon isn't accessible to most people, so if you are referencing a study done at the NIH or by the APA, it is obviously better to spell out National Institute of Health and American Psychological Association. It helps people determine the credibility of the source.
But, there are exceptions. When I was asked if I wanted to use the expanded version of SAT, I had to respond that I didn't think it would be clearer if I said Scholastic Aptitude Test as most people walk around with a vision of the SAT easily accessible in their minds and would actually have to take a beat to translate the expanded version back into the acronym for it to make sense to them. So we left that one alone. The same went for an interview I did with a biology teacher in which he talked about a question he asks students about ATP, the energy carrying molecules produced during cellular respiration. If you remember this from biology at all, you definitely only remember it as ATP. So, when asked if I wanted to use the expanded version for clarity, I had to reply, "No, I think referring to it as adenosine triphosphate will make it less clear, so let's leave that one."
My point is not about publishing or acronyms. It's about making things clear. Our jobs as teachers is to take something that isn't easy to grasp and put it within reach. When a student first looks at the periodic table, it is just a jumble of letters and numbers arranged into a strange shape, but when they leave my 8th grade classroom, they should be able to interpret things like number of protons and number of neutrons from the numbers in the square as well as things like number of energy levels and number of valence electrons from the location on the table. My teaching about the periodic table should make the information clearer.
But much like the publishing discussion, there is often a way that seems right but ultimately is not. Explicit teaching vs. discovery learning gives us as an example of that. The theory behind discovery learning seems logical - students will remember things better if they figure it out themselves. And wouldn't it be lovely if that was how our brains actually worked? But they don't. Asking a student to compare the causes of the French and American revolutions when they haven't learned anything about them yet (but have access to Google) doesn't result in deeper learning about either revolution or the larger concept of revolutionary causes. Our working memories are too limited for that. (I'm not saying you shouldn't have projects or labs; I am a science teacher and had many of both - but it should come after students have learned a concept, not as a replacement for it.)
One of the things that makes teaching hard is that we often can't have one way of doing things. Some material will be clearer if reveal it one step at a time while other material may be clearer if we first show an entire worked example, giving students the broad view before the details. We cannot just choose one method and hope all content will fit that method.
Even trickier, it is not always immediately evident when you have chosen correctly. Sometimes, it is immediately obvious if you have chosen incorrectly. I once thought it would be good for my students to see the broad picture of bond types before we began learning about them. I drew a spectrum on the board with "small electronegativity difference" on one left and "large electronegativity difference" on the right. I then proceeded to place covalent bonds, ionic bonds on the right, and polar covalent bonds in the middle along with their broad definitions and some examples. My students left that day completely overwhelmed and totally lost. The next day, I reassured them that I was going to teach each type individually and not to worry. But my hope that seeing the big picture would help them understand how the pieces fit together was not realized. The next year, I taught each type on its own and used my little spectrum drawing as a review/retrieval tool. "Where would covalent bonds go?" I asked, and they correctly answered that they would be where the electronegativity difference was small. This way was obviously clearer, but I might not have known that if I hadn't tried it the other way.
So, sometimes, we are dealing with a process of trial and error. Sometimes, you can benefit from another teacher's experience. And sometimes, you just have to use your best professional judgment and hope to be right.
Give yourself a break. The best way to make things clear is often not clear itself.
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