Technique 2: Plan for error - Lesson preparation

Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021

Technique 2: Plan for error
Lesson preparation

In Chapter One I discussed Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons' observations about inattentional blindness, our frequent tendency simply not to see what is right before our eyes. The one proven way to eliminate it, they write, is to “make the unexpected object or event less unexpected.”4 A critical step in preparing to teach is recognizing that in a complex visual environment, what we have prepared ourselves to look for is what we are likely to notice. This means that anticipating specific mistakes we think we're likely to see from students can be as valuable as exemplar planning. One of the most productive questions you can ask yourself is: What will they get wrong? Or perhaps What will they misunderstand?

Asking and answering such questions has profound effects.

First, if you have thought through the question (or task or problem) from the students' point of view and thought about what they may misunderstand, you are more likely to spot those misunderstandings when they occur. This will not only help prevent inattentional blindness—that is, students make mistakes, but you don't notice it—but it will also help you to take more productive action in at least two ways if you do observe misunderstandings.

Thinking through likely student errors in advance helps you to avoid “burying the data.” Let's say you're teaching the subtly crafted scene in The Giver where the narrator, Jonas, sees color for the first time but, because he doesn't understand what color is, remains confused. The scene is written to merely suggest what's happened to Jonas. It describes the flashes of red he sees from an uncomprehending point of view. It ends unresolved. Students often remain confused as well.

A teacher would want to anticipate that students might not understand this scene or its importance. But merely noticing that students get this wrong is not enough. Teachers frequently “bury the data”—that is, they recognize that students are making an error or are struggling with a misunderstanding but they fail to address it, perhaps hoping that it will resolve itself. Perhaps sometimes it will, but more often the misunderstanding compounds. Students read several chapters without realizing that they should be very attentive to the changes in Jonas's vision.

Why do we sometimes ignore the data in this way, recognizing a misunderstanding but not doing anything about it? Honestly, there are lots of reasons. Acting on the data means tearing up your lesson plan in front of thirty seventh-graders and planning an alternative on the spur of the moment. If it works, you return to your original plan but with the timings all a mess. If it fails, well, then you're really stuck. But if you've anticipated the likely errors you're going to see you can also plan what you'd do about them. And planning that response—building some if/then contingency into your lesson (if X happens, then I will do Y) makes you more likely to take action. You've removed the disincentive of improvising live in front of thirty students.

So by planning for error you're more likely to see the error if it happens and you're more likely to act on it. To do the things teachers do successfully in the Check for Understanding chapter, that is, teachers must prepare for mistakes.

A second way planning for error helps you take more productive action is that it helps you to treat your observations like data—another topic discussed more fully in the chapter on Check for Understanding. Watch again the moment 44 seconds into the clip Denarius Frazier, Remainder when Denarius makes a tiny hash mark on his clipboard in response to a student's struggle to find the remainder. Denarius does not take the time to write down “remainders” or “struggling to use remainder theorem.” Why? He is able to make a hash mark because he has already written that phrase down before the lesson. On his clipboard Denarius has a list of possible errors. Now he can merely begin quantifying them when and if he sees them. There are six hash marks next to “struggling to use remainder theorem.” Denarius might have planned three potential errors his students could make. His planning allows him to see quickly which ones they're actually making and how often. Planning for errors in advance makes it much easier to turn observations into data during a lesson.

Anticipating errors in the passage from The Giver in which Jonas sees color reveals something else about planning for error: There are decisions to be made. Yes, the scene intimates subtly that Jonas can see color. I might want my students to focus on that. But I might decide that it's more important for them to see how disorienting what's happening is to Jonas. Something is wrong, mysterious, unexplained for the first time in his life. He repeatedly attempts to “test” his vision. He breaks the rules to take the apple home and examine it. There are two aspects of the passage that might easily be missed. It might be that students don't need to fully understand that Jonas sees color as long as they recognize how troubling and confusing whatever was happening to Jonas is.

The question of how much to emphasize each of two things students might not understand in a difficult passage might seem arcane to all but English teachers or fellow The Giver enthusiasts, but there is a larger point about process that's relevant to all teachers here: I realized that those were two different potential misreadings and two approaches to teaching the passage because I was trying to think about the errors students might make. The process of planning for error caused me to better understand the book through a student's eyes. The more I do this, the better I get at understanding the types and causes of student misunderstandings, and the better I get at designing my teaching with that in mind the first time around. It almost doesn't matter if you guess correctly about the mistakes students will make. By predicting them and then noticing whether they occur, you'll get better at seeing your lessons through a student's eyes.

But planning for error is not just identifying the mistakes that might occur. It's planning what you'd do about it too. In my example from The Giver, I might go back to the line: “Then [the apple] was in his hand, and he looked at it carefully, but it was the same apple. Unchanged. The same size and shape: a perfect sphere. The same nondescript shade, about the same shade as his own tunic.”

I might first draw students' attention to the words “nondescript shade.” Why those words for the apple's color? What did it imply? Were apples usually noted for being nondescript in color? Why were they throwing an apple, by the way? Why not a ball? Could there be something symbolic there?

Or, depending on the group, or how much time I had, I might say, “This passage implies that Jonas is seeing color for the first time, but he doesn't know what it is because he's never seen it. Let's go back and reread this scene and I want you to tell me how Lowry communicates both the fact that he could see color but also his confusion.”

Now I've developed two possible responses. I can read the room and my students and make a decision about which way to go. But in the moment I decide I won't be starting from scratch and choosing a lesson path I have considered only on the spur of the moment.

To review what we've discussed so far, planning for error means predicting errors and planning how you will respond, intentionally thinking through (and writing down) what students will misunderstand about key questions in the lesson and then planning potential corrective actions should those misunderstandings occur.

This is potentially a time-consuming process, so I think it's important to be realistic about it. Should you do it for every question you ask? I would argue not. The goal is to build a manageable and sustainable habit. Again how much depends on teacher and context: New or experienced teacher? New or familiar content? Challenging topic? As a starting point I might recommend doing it for the most important question or two in every lesson.

Throughout this book I talk about the critical nature of perception. Teaching is a decision-making endeavor and to make the right decisions we have to approach the work in a way that maximizes our ability to see and understand what we are seeing. Planning for error increases the likelihood that we will see misunderstandings and be able to make sound decisions about what steps to use to adjust our lesson plan. And, frankly, the likelihood that we will be brave enough to act on them under duress.

But there's another aspect of perception at work here, too. Teachers are experts in their domain and this means they perceive differently from their students, who are novices. A study by Chi, Glaser, and Feltovich revealed how novices and experts perceive differently. Studying novices and experts solving physics problems, they noted that “whereas novices categorize problems by the surface structure of the problem,” experts saw “deep structure” to categorize and solve them.5 Novices might observe that two problems involved moving objects and try to solve them similarly, Carl Hendrick and Paul Kirschner note in discussing the study, but experts would quickly see that one was an acceleration problem and the other a constant velocity problem. “What you know determines what you see,” Hendrick and Kirschner conclude, and this represents a double challenge. First, novices don't know as much and so don't perceive things as well as experts and, second, experts are not often aware of this or at least cannot easily unsee what they notice as a result of their expertise. It takes practice to see what people who know less about a topic will not understand. The discipline of planning for error and testing those predictions is the process of investing in your ability to see beyond this expert—novice divide and into the cognitive lives of your students.

There's one final benefit to planning for error. If you practice anticipating what students will struggle with during your planning, you are also internalizing the assumption that there will be misunderstanding and mistakes. There is a presumption now of their inevitability, which means you are far less likely to get frustrated with students when mistakes emerge. You're less likely to blame learning gaps on students or see their struggles as signs of some flaw. When errors are inevitable and the challenge is predicting and reacting to them teaching becomes a problem-solving challenge more than a question of assigning blame, and this will help to preserve students’ trust in you.