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Student Centered Lesson Design: Teach The Way They Want To Learn

October 11, 2017 / Oskar Cymerman

One day I was in class and my teacher was giving us a long lecture while we took notes. There was not much interaction so I started to doze off. Eventually, I fell asleep. I was awoken by the teacher repeatedly saying my name and everyone laughing at me. I also missed the notes so I became stressed at home. I have never felt so humiliated.

If you want to know how to help someone do something, ask.

But don't just ask. Let students figure out what they really want and need first. Then, let them tell you. Take a few days. It could go something like this...

Encourage students to interview each other about the obstacles to learning they experience so they can develop Empathy.
Devise time for them to Define obstacles to learning most students experience.
Inspire them to Ideate solutions to these obstacles and problems.
Plan a day for your students to Prototype these solutions.
Transform their learning and your teaching by Testing your students' solutions.

During the first week of school, I set out to show my high school students how the Design Thinking process works, by having them design their learning experience. The problem posed was that 4 out of 5 high schoolers are stressed and two-thirds are bored by school. As a teacher, I want to do much better than that. And who better to help me than my students?

So I asked them and...

It. Was. Awesome.

The challenge I presented them with was to Create an Ideal Lesson, a 50-minute learning experience that's meaningful, fun, and memorable. A lesson that does not look like the one a student described above that put him to sleep. That same student just got an A on the first chemistry test. Clearly, he is not a kid who takes school lightly.

For the project, students took 3 days interviewing each other about their best and worst learning experiences, brainstorming ideas to fix bad teaching, and creating an ideal lesson plan. On day four, they tested their product before an audience of peers.

It was loud. Students were on their phones a lot. Some seem distracted and off task. I experienced a few instances of doubt wondering if I am doing the right thing. I was worried they will just get the assignment done and give me a bunch of superficial crap.

I was wrong. They crushed the challenge. Just take a look...

Common Classroom Instructional Problems Students Identified

Too much talking or instruction by the teacher
No time to practice what they were fed during direct instruction
Long lectures without any physical activities that stimulate
Excessive homework
Minimal interaction between students and teacher leads to boredom

Solving The Classroom Boredom

Each group of students created its own ideal lesson plan, but a few solutions were universal

A flexible learning environment with open seating. Students can choose where to sit and who to work with at least some of the time.
Add more interactive games, movie clips, songs, motivational videos
Organized teacher: agenda and objectives given at the beginning of class.

What A Better Lesson Could Look Like

Again, each group came up with its own ideal lesson plan, but below is one example (with a few mix-it-up) alternatives of what class could look like.

1. Start with something fun or interesting

It could be a story, a quick video, an interesting fact; something novel or exciting. This will set the tone for the lesson, letting the students relax and engage.

2. Review Concepts

Do a quick review of the information covered the day before and allow students to ask questions. Personally, I believe in this as it provides spaced repetition, helps clarify misconceptions, and allows students to connect the past (yesterday's) and the new (today's) learning.

3. Direct Instruction

Make it quick and interactive and it will be more effective. This is what many of my students suggested and they may be onto something. As the human mind can pay attention for about 10 minutes before it hits the slow or no more brain processing capacity wall, keep the talk to about 10 minutes. If you need to go a little bit longer, design your lessons to include some form of activity after the initial 10 minutes. It could be a quick pair and share or discuss in a group or even a stand up and stretch break. And for the love of reason, do not extend direct instruction past the 20-minute mark!

4. Brain Break

My students did not call it a brain break specifically, but this is what they meant. If you've heard of the productivity hack called the pomodoro technique you know that the 25-minute chunk of time reserved for it is not random. It supports and validates the fact that the human brain gets tired and when it does our focus and productivity suffers. A 5-minute break that follows an intense processing session refreshes the mind so it can focus and produce at a high level once again.

5. Work Time

This could be time to solve problems or complete activities that support the concepts introduced during direct instruction. It borders educational malpractice not to allow such time in math and science classes that require heavy doses of analytical thinking and problem-solving. Teacher modeling is important, but it is not enough. Rather than cover the next concept or a type of problem, allow your students to practice the first type first. Otherwise, you will find yourself once again wondering why many students don't get it.

Same goes for other classes. Instruct on 1 to 3 key topics and allow students to create meaning, understandings, and memories through activities that ask them to apply these concepts. This also allows you to walk around and help students, and to collect feedback on how well they are understanding the ideas previously discussed. It also builds relationships.

Summary

Design Thinking and Student-Centered Teaching are a match made in heaven. Is the above lesson template ideal? Of course not. It isn't always practical either, so changing things up while always including elements students identify to be effective is the key to teaching success. Teaching is about helping students learn, not molding them to be a certain way.

As teachers, we sometimes worry about not having enough time for fun, or repetitive review of concepts, or allowing plenty of class time for problem-solving, but I think slowing down in this way relieves some stress and leads to deeper learning, so is worth it regardless of how it affects the curriculum timetable.

Too many projects are too structured stifling student creativity. Promoting an open educational environment helps students feel comfortable in sharing their thoughts and motivates them to put effort into projects in ways they feel comfortable with, resulting in higher quality work, and much higher variety of projects.

As I was walking around and talking to different groups about the project, I started saying that I want to steal their mojo and the mojos of the best teacher's that taught them in the past. The truth was that my students used their own experiences in designing their lessons. This means that they used their own ideas of what works best (is most interesting, fun, effective, and memorable) and those of their best teachers. That's major mojo theft, that benefits students and grows teachers. I say steal away.

The power of design thinking is in ownership of the learning. You can help your students learn Design Thinking as they are using Design Thinking to come up with solutions to a common problem. You help them own their learning because they're creating it themselves.

You have the power to change lives. Use it often.

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Hi! I'm Oskar.

I teach, write, speak, rant to make the world better.

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categories / Teaching
tags / focus, deep work, productivity, teaching teens, parenting teens

Why Do I Have To Learn This? How To Help Your Students Become More Open Minded

October 07, 2017 / Oskar Cymerman

If you are an open-minded person chances are you do not mind being corrected by others. You embrace it and look forward to learning from their experience. However, it is difficult to be open-minded all the time.

This is because of automatic negative thoughts all of us experience. Automatic Negative Thoughts or ANTs are an evolutionary remnant from the time when humans were inferior creatures dominated in their environment by other, bigger predators. The ancient fact we were once food manifests itself in present-day situations as self-doubt, lack of confidence, and fear, and results in our brain's tendency to stay safe and resist change.

This is why we don't like being corrected about things we thought we were right about. That would involve changing beliefs. Can you think of a time when someone enlightened you in this way? For years you thought you knew only to find out you were wrong all along. How did you feel?

ANTs, especially when we're not aware of them, can lead to close-mindedness. As teachers, we see this in our students all the time. If a student believes one thing, she will resist believing otherwise despite the hard facts she might be facing. Another example of this is evidenced by questions such as Why do I have to learn this? While in some cases such a question is asked in earnest, in others it's a direct result of ANTs associated with the subject.

And while you can't make your students like you, the subject you teach, or the topics you talk about, you can help them understand their Automatic Negative Thoughts. In fact, you can do more than that. You can teach them to kill ANTs by using what I call the FAR approach. You can help your students Find, Accept, and Reframe their ANTs, so they can be more successful in school and life.

The infographic below will show you how.

Awareness and action bring success. You can use the infographic to help students understand where their negative thoughts come from and how they can replace them with growth-oriented thoughts; ones that help them view obstacles as opportunities.

Kill ANTs. Go FAR.

You have the power to change lives. Use it often.

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Hi! I'm Oskar.

I teach, write, speak, rant to make the world better.

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categories / Teaching
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Why Students Learn Better When They Teach (+ 4 Activities)

October 01, 2017 / Oskar Cymerman

“When You Teach Something You Get To Learn It Twice”

— Jim Kwik

Cameron, a former student of mine, who is now in college, commented on my recent post about efficient and effective learning titled Too Much What, Not Enough How. Here's what he wrote on Facebook:

As a student who graduated with a GPA well above 4.0, I completely agree specifically with the point about students teaching subject-matter. Most of what made me successful was not studying - I rarely did that - but teaching other students, and in doing so, closing gaps in and solidifying what I knew. I tutored other students in almost every single class I took throughout my high school career, especially the science courses. That was my secret to success and I didn't even realize it until senior year. The feeling you get when you help someone grasp an idea they struggled with is an awesome feeling, too.

But Why Is Teaching Such An Effective Learning Strategy?

If you closely analyze and dissect Cameron's comment you can identify at least 4 aspects that made his strategy of teaching others to learn it yourself super effective. They are Active Learning, Deeper Learning, Efficient Learning, and Emotional Learning.

Active Learning

Active learning is about engaging the mind in processing and making meaning from the information you're trying to encode. When teaching, the student has to figure out how to explain the concept to others. While that planning might take seconds, it is an active process. Moreover, it might take multiple approaches to teach someone who thinks differently than the student-teacher. This equates to multiple ways of processing the information. If you're a teacher, a trainer, or someone who has spent time explaining new ideas to people, you get this.

Deeper Learning

When teaching, the student has to pass his understanding of the concept on to someone else and as a result, he reprocesses the learned information multiple times. This leads to an even deeper understanding of the concepts learned/taught. The reason for this is that new association happen and new neural connections form in the brain as the existing ones keep strengthening. Light bulb moments make you a lit learner. Deep, huh?

Efficient Learning

Teaching concepts is one of the most efficient ways to learn because it requires students to present information to peers in an understandable way. This requires looking at the information from different perspectives and strategizing on how to pass it on best. There's so much brain activity and processing going on in the student-teacher brain that he remembers the information through and through in a short period of time. In addition, as the student struggles to come up with ways to explain difficult concepts, his hippocampus perceives them as important, which supercharges encoding and helps storage of information.

Emotional Learning

There are emotions and then there are emotions... When learning is accompanied by strong emotions it is memorable. While Cameron mentioned the "awesome feeling" as a side note, he might not have realized that those feelings associated with satisfaction of helping others, led to the release of dopamine in his brain, which helped memory and retrieval of information. As a teacher, you undoubtedly experienced breakthrough moments when a student you've been working with suddenly got it. If you can think of a past event like this right now, you can relive it. If I'm right, you just got a small kick of dopamine. Pretty cool, huh?

4 Activities To Bring Out The Teacher In Your Students

Many teachers reading this have has had their students create slideshow presentations and present to peers. This strategy, if done right, can be a way to have students teach their peers. And while it may not always be effective for the audience receiving the information, if the presenter takes the project seriously she learns the topic well because as she prepares, she does it with the intention to teach and to be more expert in it than her peers.

Thus, teaching benefits the teacher most. And that's precisely the point.

Here are 4 easy ways to engage students in teaching I use in my classroom.

Short Instructional Videos

Recently, I asked my chemistry students to create videos explaining how to calculate atomic mass of an element. I introduced the concept the day before and students did a few practice problems in groups. The next day, I asked them to find a partner and to make a Flipgrid video. Here are the exact directions I posted in Google Classroom:

Find a problem online you can solve to demo how to calculate atomic mass.
Solve it and discuss the steps needed for the solution to like totally understand it!
Write a script, practice it, and record the vid.

You don't have to use Flipgrid, but it is free and allows you to streamline the process. Videos are easy for students to submit and teachers to watch.

Dry Erase Board Drawings

I am lucky to have a flexible seating classroom and student tables painted with dry erase paint. Perhaps one day I will write an article on how much of a game changer the dry erase tables are but for the purpose of this post, I want to describe how my students use them to teach each other.

I frequently ask students to represent concepts they are learning visually. They draw diagrams showing concepts, with labels and descriptions that will allow viewers to learn about the topics they represent. It is important to make sure students consider the possibility that the audience knows little about the concepts. Such approach forces students to think like teachers. The idea is to create a product that helps others learn some concept and in the process, the diagram makers learn it more intimately. A unique Twitter hashtag is useful for capturing and sharing images of the visuals.

Spontaneously, my students often use the tables to help their group members understand the concepts better or to walk those struggling through problem-solving.

I realize not every teacher has dry erase tables. In the past, I used melamine boards sold at hardware stores. I bought two 8' x 4' boards and had each one cut into eight 2' x 2' pieces, which gave me 16 boards my students used in small groups of 2-4 students. Alternatively, students can draw on large sheets of paper.

Infographics

Using Piktochart, Canva, or Google Draw/Slides to make infographics is another way to take advantage of our visual processing power. Combining images with text to represent an idea is powerful. Going digital is not as efficient as drawing on dry-erase surfaces and Tweeting, but nevertheless effective and students learn useful design and presentation tools. If you can fit infographic making in, I highly recommend it. Check out this post I wrote for more on the benefits of using infographics in the classroom.

Paper Slide Videos

Paper slide videos marry old school posters with the digital world of smartphone video recording. In a nutshell, students research and organize information, write a script, create the slides, practice, and record a short movie in which images and speech are used more extensively than text. The process of preparing and practicing the show leads to increased expertise. Here's a video that gives more details on how to make paper slide videos.

When Students Teach They Develop Mad Skills

Call them 21st-century, future-ready, or mad skills they'll need, it is hard to argue with the fact that collaboration, communication, creativity, critical thinking, and leadership will help your students be more successful in academics and beyond. You can speed up the development of these and other skills by utilizing the Teach It strategy in your classroom.

I talk about the Teach It and other learning strategies on my blog, teach them to my students, and describe them in my Crush School Book Series because I want all students to have these skills now.

Big thanks to Cameron for allowing me to share his story and a shout out to my sister from another mister Janet, a California teacher, for pushing me to write this post. I hope many teachers find it helpful in their practice. Thanks for reading and remember:

You have the power to change lives. Use it often.

Hi! I'm Oskar.

I teach, write, speak, rant to make the world better.

BOOKS & TOOLS

Buy on Amazon

CONTACT ME

BLOG ARCHIVE:

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categories / Teaching
tags / focus, deep work, productivity, teaching teens, parenting teens