What could I have done differently?

This piece was initially published on Adam Boxer's blog, A Chemical Orthodoxy, in January here.

Pete’s PE class are learning about controlling a hockey puck and shooting it from a pass. They are beginning a drill exercise in pairs. One student runs towards the other student, who passes the puck to the first student as soon as they reach a cone. The first student then needs to control the puck, dribble to the next cone and shoot in the goal. Pete gives his instructions and models what he wants to see. He then lets students begin to practise, but it quickly becomes evident that students are not doing the dribble step. They are controlling the puck and then immediately shooting. Pete stops the group and reminds them of what they are supposed to do. Things improve a bit, but it keeps happening and Pete gets frustrated and tells the class off for not listening properly.

***

Fariha’s sociology classes are comparing different approaches to studying families. Fariha explains what she wants students to do in the essay, and Sam puts his hand up and asks “do we need to give similarities and differences of each approach or just similarities?” Fariha says, “Yes, Sam we need both, I literally just said that.”

***

Luka is giving his students a geography task. On one sheet are a number of scenarios and case studies about coastal protection arranged in a grid. On a second sheet there is another grid on which students are expected to place and categorise the scenarios by the type of protection being offered and the advantages and disadvantages that are found in each scenario. Luka wants students to work together, but as he circulates most of the discussion he hears is about how to do the sheet in a procedural sense – “Do we just use the numbers or do we write the whole thing?” “Can one thing go in two boxes?” “Are these all supposed to match up?” – rather than about the actual geography content. He helps out a few students but as he is doing so it really starts to get quite noisy in the room. He turns around and says, “If you can’t work together quietly then I will make you work by yourselves!” 

***

Teachers get frustrated with their students. It happens a lot, and it happens to all of us. Many of us might have a long-term sense of frustration built up due to the state of the system writ-large, but we also habitually move through peaks and troughs of frustration across the course of a day. We are trying to get students to learn stuff, and learning is a difficult business. There are only so many times we can be exposed to that difficulty without getting a little bit frustrated. 

It’s normal, and it’s natural. 

Each of the scenarios above are common ones, and in each one the teacher is either getting frustrated. I imagine many of the scenarios will be familiar to you, and you might see yourself reflected in some of the teachers – I know I do. When students “don’t get it” and “I’ve been over this so many times!” I get frustrated and annoyed. It’s a weird kind of frustration, it’s not the same kind of frustration I feel at bad behaviour; after all, these students aren’t deliberately getting it wrong. They aren’t being rude or disruptive, they just aren’t doing what I want them to do or learning what I want them to learn. And I get frustrated. 

Normal, and natural.

However, just because something is “normal and natural” doesn’t mean it’s “good.” It can be understandable, and still non-ideal. It can be explainable and predictable and still something we should try to avoid. 

I think there are two good reasons to try and avoid it, and I think the first is obvious (and not particularly exciting) whereas the second is much less obvious, but much more important for teaching.

The first reason to try and avoid this kind of frustration is that it’s probably a non-healthy way for us to feel and to interact with students. We need to constantly show serenity and boundless patience if students are to trust us, follow our leads and feel safe enough to ask us questions. I think this is true, but also truthy – it’s the kind of feedback I used to get early in my career: “be more patient.” Right, but how? I like things that are concrete, and relate to specific actions or techniques I can use in an actual classroom. So whilst it’s true that feeling a genuine frustration about whether a 12 year old underlines the title or not probably isn’t all that healthy, it also isn’t all that exciting as a blog topic. 

I think the second reason is more exciting. It starts with the fact that the four scenarios above are all ones from real lessons I have observed over the last few weeks. I’m going to update three of the scenarios to add an extra layer: 

Pete’s PE class are learning about controlling a hockey puck and shooting it from a pass. They are beginning a drill exercise in pairs. One student runs towards the other student, who passes the puck to the first student as soon as they reach a cone. The first student then needs to control the puck, dribble to the next cone and shoot in the goal. Pete gives his instructions and models what he wants to see. I noticed that there was no Check for Understanding. Pete did not verbally check that students knew what to do, nor did he physically check that students could do the component parts of the wider skill. I therefore hypothesised that students would make a lot of errors. He then lets students begin to practise, but it quickly becomes evident that students are not doing the dribble step. They are controlling the puck and then immediately shooting. Pete stops the group and reminds them of what they are supposed to do. I thought it was good he did this as a group, but again there was no Check for Understanding (CfU). I hypothesised it would keep happening, and eventually Pete would get annoyed. Things improve a bit, but it keeps happening and Pete gets frustrated and tells the class off for not listening properly.

***

Fariha’s sociology classes are comparing different approaches to studying families. Fariha explains what she wants students to do in the essay, Fariha’s instructions were clear, but she did not do a CfU to make sure students knew what to do. There were also a lot of instructions about the essay and its construction, and she did not write those instructions down anywhere (like on the board). I therefore hypothesised that there would be ‘procedural’ questions and mistakes – ones that relate not to the content (i.e. the sociology) and more to the prosaic procedure of how to execute the task and Sam puts his hand up and asks “do we need to give similarities and differences of each approach or just similarities?” Fariha says, "Yes, Sam we need both, I literally just said that.”

***

Luka is giving his students a geography task. On one sheet are a number of scenarios and case studies about coastal protection arranged in a grid. On a second sheet there is another grid on which students are expected to place and categorise the scenarios by the type of protection being offered and the advantages and disadvantages that are found. I felt quite unsure about exactly what students were supposed to be doing, there was a lot of verbal talk, no CfU on the instructions, no teacher modelling of actually doing one of the questions and nowhere were the complex instructions written down or concretised. I hypothesised that students wouldn’t be sure what to do and would have a lot of procedural questions that they would ask their neighbours, who either wouldn’t know, or would ask a student further away from them spatially, adding noise into the room. I thought a lot of students would put their hand up and wait for Luka to come to them, and if they had to wait long enough would start chatting to their neighbour. I thought all of this extra noise would cause a bubbling up in the classroom to a point which Luka wasn’t comfortable with.  Luka wants students to work together, but as he circulates most of the discussion he hears is about how to do the sheet in a procedural sense – “Do we just use the numbers or do we write the whole thing?” “Can one thing go in two boxes?” “Are these all supposed to match up?” – rather than about the actual geography content. He helps out a few students but as he is doing so it really starts to get quite noisy in the room. He turns around and says “if you can’t work together quietly then I will make you work by yourselves!” 

***

The additions might shed a bit of light. Regular readers will know that I am always trying to figure out how specific teacher actions influence student behaviour – for good or ill. I do this partly by trying to read around and get others’ ideas, and partly by making hypotheses in the classroom like I did in these scenarios. It’s meant that over time I’ve got more precise and reliable with my predictions, and though I’m not always right (I got a prediction wrong in a computer science lesson I observed today*), I’m now right much more often than I am wrong. Scenarios like the above come up the whole time: teacher gives instructions, instructions aren’t clear or are convoluted, there’s no adequate Check for Understanding, students don’t know what to do, teacher gets annoyed. It happens so often that I basically never get hypotheses wrong in these kinds of case, and can often even predict the specific questions students will ask. 

A bit like the Unexpected Answer, there’s a giveaway here, too: if students are asking procedural questions then nine times out of ten the instructions were not clear enough for the particular task. With some things that students get wrong it’s hard to figure out what’s led them to that error, but with procedural issues it’s pretty much always about instructions. 

So you’ve noticed some procedural issues – what do you do? In the moment, you have two possible responses:

Response 1: “Guys come on I’ve said this like three times now! Why are you still not doing [insert thing here]”

Response 2: [Thinks to self] ah right. Lots of procedural questions. I imagine my instructions weren’t clear enough. “OK everyone eyes up here please…[check, wait]…lovely thanks. Lots of people not doing this how I wanted so clearly my instructions weren’t good enough – sorry about that – let’s try again…”

I’ll leave you to guess which response I see more often and which response I think is better. No prizes for the right answers though – too obvious.

Let’s put it all into some kind of system:

Level 1: give the instructions
Level 2: notice that there are lots of procedural issues
Level 3: pull the class back, re-explain

I’d say classroom craft like this is pretty good, but we need to add a level 4 which is even more important:

Level 4: what was it about my initial instructions that meant there were procedural issues? How do I learn from this next time?

If the issues are predictable, then they must be preventable. 

Let’s fix our scenarios to prevent those issues: 

Pete’s PE class are learning about controlling a hockey puck and shooting it from a pass. They are beginning a drill exercise in pairs. One student runs towards the other student, who passes the puck to the first student as soon as they reach a cone. The first student then needs to control the puck, dribble to the next cone and shoot in the goal. Pete gets a student [Dave] to be his “second.” He tells the class that he is going to run to Dave who will pass to him when he reaches the cone. He says, “When is Dave going to pass to me…[name]” to check understanding. He runs up to the cone, and Dave passes to him. He turns and says, “Did Dave do what he was supposed to…[name 2]…Yup, can you explain why…[name 3]…” He then models the next part of the process and continues his questioning. He then asks a couple of students to do various steps, and asks the other students whether they did a good job and why. He then models the whole thing and tells students he will be verbally asking them to give him the steps back. He follows through on that. He then tells them he is going to do it again but will make some mistakes, and he wants them to spot the mistakes. Following this, he asks a couple more students about the mistakes and then lets them practise. 

***

Fariha’s sociology classes are comparing different approaches to studying families. Fariha puts the essay title on the board and asks students to quietly read it. She Cold Calls a student to ask what they think should go in the first paragraph, and then writes that on the board. Through questioning, she adds a couple of bulletpoints, and then expands for the rest of the essay. Following this, she tells students that she is going to question them on the structure, so rubs off the board and has them fetch miniwhiteboards. She repeats the exercise paragraph by paragraph to check that students know what is going to go in each part of the essay. There are a couple of small bits she wants them to do after the essay, so writes a quick list on the board, and then asks them to start. 

***

Luka is giving his students a geography task. He prepares one sheet that has a scenario about coastal defences at the top. Following the scenario, there are a number of questions on it, and then another scenario with some more questions. He gives out the sheet and asks students to just read the first scenario. He then gets their attention and uses miniwhiteboards to check that students understand the first scenario. Once he is satisfied, he tells them to start the questions. 

I’d imagine all of those lessons would go better. I’d imagine that fixing the scenarios like this would mean there are fewer procedural questions, fewer procedural errors and a smaller chance of teachers getting frustrated. Of course, these aren’t the only ways to fix these scenarios. There are lots of different ways to effectively give instructions, I just happen to think these ones would work in these lessons. 

Even though we’ve fixed these scenarios, this isn’t really a blog about giving instructions (see also here or here), this is a blog about us as teachers and “reflective practitioners.” If something goes wrong in the room, learn from it. Change the nature of the task to make it less procedurally complex. Change your instructions – maybe slow them down, break them down further, write them up, model exactly what you want to do or verbally ask students to say them back to you. Whatever it is, instead of getting annoyed or frustrated, constantly think to yourself, what could I have done differently to prevent this?

Keen readers may spot the similarity here to previous blogs about attention – if students aren’t paying attention, what could I have done differently to prevent this? If you haven’t done anything to gather or maintain their attention, don’t bother getting annoyed or frustrated, just look in the mirror and say what could I have done differently? You don’t have to beat yourself up about it or feel bad – we’re all human and it happens to all of us – just learn from it and make sure that next time you do something differently. 

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* I wrote most of this blog last week, not on Sunday

Adam Boxer teaches Chemistry in a secondary school in London and blogs, writes, and trains on science education and pedagogy.