I’m not going to lie, if Structured Teaching (ST) was introduced to me as a pre-service teacher I think it would have served me way better than the seven page documents I had to write in order to teach one class.
ST distills down exactly what Master Teachers do (see my previous post about this topic) and what students need to be successful. What will we learn, what do we know, watch me do it, let’s try it, what did we learn, let’s do more. That’s it. That’s all.
What will we learn - it is so important to set the target, otherwise we wander aimlessly in the wilderness.
What do we know - assessing prior knowledge - need I say more?
Watch me do it - I think this could be the most important step - model how the topic is done - and talk about your thinking as you complete the question. This is key - let the students know what the thinking process is in order to complete this. So many students can't articulate this - well I just did it in my head - yes, but what did you do? By talking about our thinking we will get our students thinking about their thinking - metacognition.
Let’s try it - we all work on examples in a zero stakes environment.
What did we learn - re-group and talk about the learning we just did - make any corrections at this stage.
Let’s do more - only now are students ready to work independently.
That’s it - students will be successful if we can follow this model for all of our lessons.
Simple. Concise. Managable.
That’s My View from the 86th Pew,
Michelle
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