When Tag returned home after his first full week of 4th grade, he flung his backpack on the ground and slumped onto the couch. “I don’t think I’m smart enough for 4th grade.”
What? I sat next to him on the couch.
“My teacher told us he’s gonna keep making it more challenging and he’s gonna give us more and more responsibility. I’m pretty sure I’m not smart enough for 4th grade.”
When did my kid decide smart was a status? How did I miss instilling that all important
lesson about the brain being shaped by hard work and grit? I started replaying all of the conversations I had with my son where I called him smart or told him he could work it out because he was smart. I guess he got the message.
Deliberate Practice
In Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, he reminds us the people we often define as geniuses in their fields weren’t born that way. Instead, he claims 10,000 hours of deliberate practice are largely responsible for their success. While his argument has sparked some controversy, the basic premise is a powerful message for our own children and the children we teach.
Hattie echoes Gladwell’s thinking and further defines deliberate practice and persistence in the classroom (Visible Learning for Teachers, 2012).
He asserts all practice is not the same, and practice that leads to mastery often has similar qualities. Deliberate practice:
- establishes an understanding of the goals of practice
- provides choice in practice tasks
- varies in developing the skills
- repeats practice with rapid formative feedback (p.108).
This deliberate practice should lead to students learning to monitor, control, and regulate their own learning.
Persistence
Persistence, or being able to concentrate on a task in spite of distractions, is the other required skill for learning, according to Hattie. And, while novices learn better with fewer distractions, we need not remove their smart phones, iPads, and televisions to help them learn. Instead, Hattie suggests the power of deliberately attempting to focus students on the task by designing tasks that are initially outside their range of dependable performance (p.110).
Feedback
Some might equate feedback with praise (You’re a great student!), but Hattie warns praise might actually dilute the impact of meaningful feedback on task and product, process, and the ability to self-regulate (p.121).
Instead, teachers should aim to provide student feedback based on these questions (Hattie, 2012):
- Where am I going? What are my goals?
- How am I going? What progress is being made toward my goals?
- Where to next? What activities need to be undertaken next to make better progress?
Beyond Smart
Helping our children and students see beyond labels to the value of hard work is daunting but necessary. “Smart” or “not-so smart,” these labels diminish the effect of our daily work, and they impact the mindset of our students.
Classrooms at KHS
How have you designed learning around the concepts of deliberate practice and persistence in your classrooms?
With your feedback, how do you help students determine where they are going, how they are going, and where they need to go next?
My most differentiated unit is my biochemistry unit and one I am the most proud of. I use my moodle website to start all of the students at the same place and then their performance and progress takes each on a different route in their journey until mastery is met. Similarly, I like giving frequent quizzes through moodle. Students receive their scores immediately and often make a plan right then for new learning opportunities and retakes.
Thanks, Mandy. Students making their own plan for where to go next is a powerful step in their journey to autonomy. I like the option of a new learning opportunity or a retake when they receive results, and I would love to hear more about the design of those learning opportunities.
As I’m teaching literary analysis paragraph writing, I’m moving much more toward challenge and choice as we work toward clearly stated goals (for a day, for a unit). Instead of everyone writing the same paragraph, or using the same article, after the first one I’m challenging them (or going to in the next week) to find their own articles, to learn from those in the field to see how they’re making writing choices, and to soon be able to make their own choices about where they want/need to work in terms of writing.
This year I also started teaching writing using non-ficition articles instead of short stories. I’ve found that that was a challenge in itself for the kids because they a) are not as well versed in nonfiction and its structure/elements/etc., and b) it requires them to lean less on how they feel and lean more toward what the text says and how the author did the writing. It’s been neat for all of us as we work through this challenge.
Thanks for sharing, Katie! In their deliberate practice, your students have an understanding of the goals of practice (your learning goals for the unit/lesson),
have choice in practice tasks (various articles), and have
repeated practice. I would love to learn more about the formative feedback you are giving as they learn since that has the power to shape their progression toward the goals.
I always make use short, strictly focused, performance events for my assessments. I give these assessments frequently (at least three times each) at points throughout the unit. I use the results of these assessments to provide activities tailored to students who are at three different levels of mastery: the “I got it”, “I’m getting it” and “I’m lost” groups may end up doing completely different activities.
A vital part of this system is the fact that, in almost every case, I grade tests and provide feedback to students in a face-to-face conference at my desk. As soon as a student is finished with a test, they bring it up to me and I score it on the spot. This is powerful becuase of the conversation I can have at the moment about where the student is and how we can improve. This human connection is incredibly valuable because it allows me to create positive relationships with students who are struggling greatly with the course.
Thanks for sharing, Mike. This sounds like powerful formative feedback for your students, and I can only imagine how difficult it is to carve out time for those individual conferences in class! What strategies can you share for keeping other students engaged while they await their one-to-one conferences or after they have received theirs? How do they know “where to go next”?
Many times I’ll use Barry Lane’s (1992) recursive processes in teaching revision. Students choose a favorite sentence from their initial draft, then use it as a starting sentence for their next draft. They then pick a specific detail from this 2nd draft and use that expanded detail as the basis for their 3rd draft. This way their last draft usually bears little resemblance to their 1st. IN this manner, I try to hammer down that true revision is literally a “re-seeing” of their initial draft, and that they have to persistently write away in order to make any progress.
Thanks for your response, Simon! In their deliberate practice, your students gain a deep understanding of the goals of revision,
have choice in selecting their best work to complete the practice tasks,
and develop their skills of revision with
repeated practice. That idea of “re-seeing” becomes much more clear through this process. What kinds of feedback do students receive on these various drafts? Are peers involved in this feedback or is it mainly teacher and author who work together?
I am using poetry and non fiction to teach reading strategies; students need to show evidence of their learning and comprehension. I model the strategy with guided practice, set a purpose, and clarify a learning goal. They collaborate and then show independent practice…..much like Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde mention in Best Practice……..gradual release of responsibility.
Thanks, Donna! In their deliberate practice, your students establish an understanding of the goals of practice (your learning goals for poetry and non-fic)and they
repeat the practice collaboratively and independently. How do you weave in formative feedback along the way, particularly with the collaborative approach to reading with their peers, to help readers figure out “where to next”?
Kerry, thanks so much for this tremendously researched and developed set of resources and exemplars for us. This year, students in Reading Focus will select an election topic, draw a visual metaphor, research, use Toulmin and reader response for articles they find, and share information with an authentic audience of their choice (e.g. parent, administrator, teacher, peer, class, etc.) and use iPads to tape themselves sharing their research. The goal: expand their global awareness outside of their own community.