Trees and Woodchips

It is very hard for a grandmother to refrain from talking about those grandbabies, but you have to admit, toddlers really do say the cutest things.  Our 2 year old Liam has been providing constant narration of his own life for at least 6 months.   (Liam is pretty fluent in toddler French as well as English, thanks to my sister, his babysitter.)  He is constantly repeating and rehearsing what he hears, so we get to observe what is going on as far as his thinking is concerned.  And a healthy, nurtured toddler is a learning machine. Often, Liam’s seemingly logical, but erroneous conclusions are pretty funny.

Liam is fascinated with wood chips.  They are all over “his” park and he loves to move his hands through them, pile them up, flatten the piles and then re-pile them, and of course, to his mother’s chagrin, throw them around.  We were having some trees cut down last week, and on Friday, they left a tree half done.  So over the weekend, we had a 40 foot, 2 foot diameter pine tree trunk with no branches left on it.  (It was actually pretty cool looking, and some daring artist might have seen the makings of a totem pole or something.)  Anyway, I was explaining to Liam that the “worker guys” were going to come back soon and turn the trunk into wood chips.  Liam immediately wanted to share this new knowledge with his aunt. “Auntie Emily, come here.  You see that big stick?  It’s made out of wood chips.”

I am pretty sure Liam thought we could reassemble wood chips into a 40 ft. living tree, but maybe he just got his syntax, not his thinking, wrong. 

As I have been thinking about designing instruction both in this course and in my concurrent course, EDU623, I have been hearing all about the parts of instruction.  Some of the pieces are lecture, literature, discussion, questions, collaborative activities, media, assessment, objectives, practice, modeling, feedback, and correction, etc.  Most of these are frequently used tools in my kit as a seasoned K-12 teacher.  But you can’t just put the parts together and make something that is alive, the way a good lesson is.  A good lesson can grow something that reproduces.  It can help make the learner into a competent practitioner or even a teacher/trainer of others. 

Precious few of my lessons have been “memorable”.  Far more have been something like wood chips tossed around a park. I want to have effective lessons and the things I am learning this summer are helping me to understand instruction and lesson design on a deeper, more synthesized level.  For example, I am studying Robert Gagne’s Nine Events for learning from our EDU623 text.  (Gagne, Wagner, Golas, & Keller, 2005) 

Gagne says the nine pieces to a good lesson are: 

Gain Attention

Inform Learner of Objective

Stimulate Recall of Prerequisites

Present Stimulus Material

Provide Learning Guidance

Elicit Performance

Provide Feedback

Assess Performance

Enhance Retention and Transfer.

When these pieces are done well within a meaningful lesson or course structure, a lesson can come to life and even cause growth.

I don’t necessarily want my students to remember much about me, though I want them to remember having a sense that I cared about them, and did my job well.   I do want my students to remember what I taught them.  Sometimes when I run into one of my hundreds of former third grade students, I ask them, “Quick, 6 X 7.”  If they answer 42, I say, “I taught you that.”  More than the stuff I teach them, though, I want my students to be able to use mathematical thinking, follow steps, and plan their work, and to understand data that is presented to them in future courses and materials a little better because of my teaching. And I want the pieces of my courses to come together, to come alive, and cause true growth in my students.

Gagne, R., Wagner, W., Golas, K., & Keller, J. (2005). Principles of Instructional Design 5th Edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.