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

Technique 27: Change the pace
Pacing

I recently observed Sadie McCleary's Chemistry lesson at West Guilford High School in Greensboro, North Carolina. (You can see footage of Sadie's lesson in the video Sadie McCleary: Keystone.) Her topic was particle motion, pressure, and the compound gas law and the lesson was bursting with focused, productive energy. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes raced by as Sadie engaged the whole room in rigorous, thoughtful work that in another classroom might have felt like a slog.

As a timer went off signifying the end of the Do Now, students finished writing and Sadie began a quick review, via Cold Call, reminding students that they should know relationships between volume, pressure, and temperature by heart. Students who were called on were ready right on cue and those not called on checked and corrected their answers. Her language was clear and precise: “You should have gotten 120 liters. Give me a thumbs-up if you've got that. Great.”

She transitioned seamlessly into a Turn and Talk, asking students to explain what happened to the pressure of a gas as temperature increased in a fixed container. After ending the Turn and Talk warmly and crisply (“Pause where you are”) she Cold Called Sterling, whose response was clear, concise, and accurate. “Beautiful,” said Sadie. “That was excellently said.”

Next, she gave students a new problem to consider: How would temperature and volume change when pressure increased in an elastic container? “Tell your partner. Go!” she said. Students immediately began discussing in pairs, and Sadie listened in on a conversation at the front table.

As the energy of discussion showed its first signs of ebbing, she paused the class and Cold Called one student then another to explain the answer. After a succinct and well-stated response (complete with “shine” for both students from their peers), Sadie moved on to a new question. Students shared once again with their partners.

Students then quickly took out their notebooks for notes on a new topic: the Combined Gas Law.

The rest of the lesson was of a piece. Students constantly engaged in rigorous thinking in a variety of formats: taking notes, chatting with a partner, answering questions from Sadie as she checked for understanding. The activities changed with some frequency but tasks were always clear, and always clearly distinguishable from the task before. There was energy and momentum: change and novelty in how students engaged, but consistent focus on the lesson topic.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term “flow” to refer to a mental state in which a person performing an activity is so immersed in it that they begin to lose their sense of time. We've all had that happen: You look up and suddenly class (or practice or rehearsal) is almost over. You'd thought it had just begun! Flow states happen most often when people are highly absorbed in a task that involves a significant degree of ongoing mental stimulation. Discussions of the theory of flow often note the happiness it brings participants. To lose yourself in the work of some task is not just productive, it's gratifying.

This offers a reminder that people mostly want to be positively and productively engaged, and that students are often frustrated when they enter a classroom and realize it will not be that way. Csikszentmihalyi's chosen name for this state, flow, underscores that it is connected somehow to a perception of motion, of steady forward momentum, and this is something you could feel keenly that day in Sadie's classroom.

Teachers frequently use the term pacing to describe the aspects of Sadie's lesson that gave it forward motion, but the underlying idea is difficult to pin down. It has something to do with momentum, but pacing can't just be a synonym for how fast you go through content. While Sadie moved quickly from one question to the next, the class never felt rushed; in fact, while it seemed like things were always changing, Sadie stayed focused on just one or two topics.

There's something ironic there. The work of teaching and learning can feel fast when you're moving slowly—and it can feel slow when you're moving fast. Sometimes you're working on problem after problem, for example, determining the slope of a line or deep-reading just a few paragraphs of To Kill a Mockingbird, but there's energy crackling in the air. Sometimes you're discussing three chapters on the American Revolution, but the minutes tick slowly away, and students stare blankly. We sometimes assume that a plodding lesson results from our overall choice of methodology: “You shouldn't lead the review; you should let them review!” But the desperate slowing of the classroom clock can just as likely happen in a less traditional setting. Who hasn't found themselves fanning barely smoldering interest during a “student-led discussion” they had assumed would excite students?

So pacing is different from the speed at which you cover content and it's not necessarily about methodology. It's more like your students' perception of progress as you teach, that is, the illusion of speed. A teacher with strong pacing creates a perception of rapid progress when they want students to feel as though they are “moving.” And they balance that with times when they'd prefer a pace that feels slower and more reflective.

The architecture of the human brain is full of paradoxes, many of them created by tens of thousands of years of evolutionary refinement for an environment not quite like the one we currently live in. We know that attention and staying on task yield long-term learning, for example. “The big rewards,” cognitively speaking, accrue from “sustained, focused effort,” notes McGill University cognitive psychologist Daniel J. Levitin. And yet our brains are also wired for “novelty bias,” and are “easily hijacked by something new.”¹ “Humans will work just as hard to obtain a novel experience as we will to get a meal or a mate,”² Levitin writes. Gratifying the “novelty-seeking portion of the brain” induces a “feeling of pleasure.”³ We are drawn to distraction because it was often critical to survival, Maryanne Wolf points out in Reader, Come Home. In the long arc of pre-history, attending to a new stimulus right away meant you were ready when something burst out of the thicket, teeth bared. We evolved accordingly. Novelty bias is the term for the special attention we give to what is new.

And novelty bias, many readers will know, is the design principle behind the smartphone's hold over all of us, but Sadie's teaching harnesses it in a beneficial and balanced way. Her students are always focused on the content, but her ability to achieve the right rate of novelty at the same time draws students in and engages them. She creates strategic novelty; new and ever-changing ways of engaging that keep the focus on the same material all the way through the lesson. When you peer behind the curtain, the first ten minutes are just a series of pressure, temperature, and volume problems, but shifting the format of the way students interact with the problems at just the right rate—from Turn and Talk to Cold Call to (later) note-taking—maximizes engagement and attention. Perhaps the optimal balance of these things is the source of “flow.”

The keys to pacing, then, often lie in mastering both students' perception of time and the tension between attention and novelty. Sadie's switches between activities (from writing to Turn and Talk, say) were invariably crisp, so students never lost focus. A long and highly narrated transition might disrupt the ideas they were holding in working memory, but careful attention to the transitions ensures that important ideas are sustained in working memory even when activities change. Clear, bright lines between activities contribute in other ways, too. Because the end of one activity and the beginning of the next are so distinct, it makes novelty, the introduction of a new activity, easier to see. And what's more, students can sense their own progress as they move from one task to another. This, too, is motivating. Here's an analogy: driving your car at 60 miles per hour on the interstate does not feel fast. Your experience is one of continued sameness—a smudge of trees or houses in the distance and the consistency of an unbroken stretch of guardrail. But drive at that rate on a narrow road or in a settled neighborhood and you suddenly feel like you are racing along. The smudge of houses in the distance becomes, in fact, one house and then another and then another. When you distinguish them each whipping past, they become like mileposts that indicate to you that something has come and gone. They create an illusion that multiplies your perception of your own progress. A teacher like Sadie often does something similar: the more she creates mileposts, the more her students realize a new task has come and gone, and she uses this to enhance the influence of novelty bias.

In this chapter, I'll discuss ways to capture and manage the kind of momentum you can see in Sadie's class. Because you sometimes need to stick with an activity for a longer period of time, I'll also describe some tools to frame activities (slow or fast) so that you can be more effective at helping students get lost in rigorous work (and lose track of the passage of time), regardless of how long you actually spend on an activity.

The tools of pacing can be broken into two groups. The first involves varying the types of activities your students engage in during a lesson, the goal being to cause dynamic changes in student thinking and participation by engaging them in different ways. The second set of skills involves managing activities and the transitions between them to ensure clear, decisive, and noticeable shifts—the illusion of speed. Many of these tools deal in perception—managing the illusion of speed, maximizing mileposts by making beginnings and endings visible so that students are more aware of the changes around them.

A final note: Generally, speed is exciting and change is interesting, but as with most good things it's best in moderation and balance, so it's useful also to think of the limits of speed. My colleague Chi Tschang once mentioned that too much passivity wasn't the only way students could get distracted. “If there are two (or three) highly active kinesthetic activities in a row, the class's energy level can shoot off the charts, and kids can lose focus.” Too much speed can be as problematic as not enough. The goal is balance. And the good news is that the tools of pacing can often make what you choose to do feel dynamic and engaging, even when at its core, it's reflective, deliberate, methodical, and even slow.

Technique 27: Change the pace

One of the keys to Sadie's success is her decision-making about switching activities. Students keep thinking about the same idea, but they engage it in different ways. I call this idea Change the Pace. It helps to achieve the proper balance of “fast” and “slow,” flow and focus, momentum and attention.

Changing Activity Types

At the risk of oversimplifying a complex topic, Let me suggest six types of activities we can ask students to participate in. Each requires students to think and engage in a different way. They are:

1. Assimilating knowledge directly from sources, such as direct teacher instruction or reading a text

2. Participating in guided practice

3. Executing skills without teacher support, as in independent practice

4. Discussing ideas with classmates

5. Reflecting independently on an idea—thinking quietly and deeply, often in writing

6. Reviewing previously mastered material to encode it in long-term memory (i.e. Retrieval Practice)

All six activity types are important, and students should engage in all of them frequently so they get a well-rounded mental workout.

A couple of caveats in thinking about these activity types:

All six types of activity are important for students to engage in regularly, but choosing among them requires consideration of more than just what feels right in a given moment. How and when you use one type of activity affects how well others will work. Knowledge assimilation, for example is probably the most important activity type, if not in its own right then because of its importance in making the others function well. The cognitive science on this is clear: the other activities, which we often think of, sometimes accurately, sometimes not, as more analytical and “higher order,” are more productive when students have strong background knowledge to support them. Pause now, for example, and reflect for two and a half minutes on the decisions of Napoleon and Lee to attack at Waterloo and Gettysburg respectively. Were they wise? Did the decisions reflect the dominance of personality over tactics?

That's a higher-order thinking activity if you know a lot about the requisite topics, but if you don't know enough about military history, there's not much higher order in your thinking. In fact, there's not much thinking. Let me quote Daniel Willingham again here: “Thinking well requires knowing facts, and that's true not simply because you need something to think about. The very processes that teachers care about most—critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem-solving—are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is in long-term memory (not just found in the environment).”

And here's the National Research Council on the topic: “Over a century of research on transfer has yielded little evidence that teaching can develop general cognitive competencies that are transferable to any new discipline, problem or context.”⁴ Cognition is not a transferable skill and is always context specific and knowledge dependent. Guided practice, discussion, and reflection are all ways to help students think deeply and in higher-order ways, but only if they are preceded by a strong investment in knowledge, directly taught.

In his research Barak Rosenshine provides an excellent description of this. “In a study of mathematics instruction, … less effective teachers gave much shorter presentations and explanations and then … told students to solve problems. The less successful teachers were then observed going from student to student and having to explain the material again.”⁵

Second, as I will discuss in a moment, switching among activity types is often necessary to effective instruction. Your lesson would probably be less successful if you chose one activity type for the whole lesson and more successful if you used two or three and asked yourself, for example: when is discussion ideal and for how long and what different activity after it will create the greatest synergy? You can sense that in Sadie's class—her lesson seamlessly incorporates Direct Instruction (via students' note-taking), discussion with Turn and Talk partners, and guided practice.

There's no formula, of course. You won't use the same approach every time. Each lesson will require something different; each teacher's style and approach will shape the progression. The goal is to create a feeling of flow, but in fact there are feelings of flow—some faster, some slower, some louder, some quieter.

With that in mind, here's a bit more about those six activity types.

Activity 1: Direct Instruction/Knowledge Assimilation

When students are presented with new information while they listen, read, or take notes, they are engaged in Direct Instruction/Knowledge Assimilation (KA). This could involve a class reading a text (silently or aloud, by teacher or students) or a teacher lecturing, modeling a problem, or sharing a presentation (with or without occasional questioning of students).

The idea of Direct Instruction might at first feel antithetical to pacing, but that is only if you imagine it in caricature—like the teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off droning on to a room of half-asleep students. When Direct Instruction is implemented well, it not only has important effects on student understanding, but can be energetic and contribute positively to pacing. And the key to implementing it well? As Barak Rosenshine points out, Direct Instruction, like all methods, must respond to the limitations on working memory. “Presenting too much material at once may confuse students because their working memory may be unable to process it… . More effective teachers do not overwhelm their students by presenting too much material at once. Rather these teachers present only small amounts of new material at any time, and then assist the students as they practice this material.”⁶

This may sound at first like it contradicts Rosenshine's observation about the importance of investing heavily in background knowledge first, before engaging students in more interactive forms of processing, but that's not the case. You could imagine how Sadie McCleary might accomplish both. She might spend a few minutes explaining a new concept with students taking notes. Then they might pause: “Discuss how this might apply to X with your partner. Go.” Then perhaps a bit of Cold Call to make sure students understood. Then she might spend a few minutes explaining a bit more about the concept. Then a different activity to engage and give working memory time to process. “Take a minute to summarize what we've done so far in writing. Go.” Then she might ask a few students who've written insightful things to share. They might then discuss briefly. Then to the board again. Slides on. Taking notes as she explains a bit more about the concept. Switching from explicit teaching or other forms of knowledge assimilation to short reflective activities and back is the key to both engaging the strengths of working memory and overcoming its limitations. Doing that requires strong pacing skills in terms of activity design and in terms of your ability to make shifts efficient and energizing and your instructional choices strike the balance between novelty and focus.

The first portion of Christine Torres's lesson where she is introducing new vocabulary words is a perfect example of this, especially because teaching new vocabulary words is, for many teachers, such a notoriously low-energy activity: “Here are our new words, please copy down the definitions.” Many teachers respond to this challenge by making the activity independent: “Go look up these words.” This can result in poorer understanding of the words and can take more time. But look at Christine's approach (you can watch this segment of her lesson a little over two minutes into the video in Christine Torres: Keystone). Her steps are:

· Identify the word and ask students to repeat it.

· Provide a definition.

· Ask students to read a situation involving the word (in this case “caustic.” (What might a judge in American Idol have said if they made a caustic remark?)

· Ask students to Turn and Talk about the example.

· Briefly Cold Call to hear a few answers.

· Show a picture: “How does this image demonstrate the word ’caustic’?” Turn and Talk again.

· Cold Call to hear answers.

The knowledge is disseminated via Direct Instruction and is followed by a different activity type (usually discussion in pairs) but the cycles are very short so the energy is impressively high and Christine's students learn new knowledge in a joyful flow-like setting.

Activity 2: Guided Practice/Guided Questioning

When students engage in activities that involve more extensive back-and-forth with the teacher, practicing the use or application of knowledge, they are engaged in guided practice/guided questioning. Rosenshine emphasizes the importance of this stage for working examples and releasing autonomy gradually to students. Guided practice might involve executing the steps in solving a problem, with the teacher asking questions to remind students what step to take next, or it might involve explication of a text passage with the teacher consistently providing new and more targeted questions to unlock understanding. It is usually used before students have independent mastery. Some examples:

After asking her students what would happen to the pressure in a fixed container if temperature increased, Sadie asks, “OK, why would the pressure increase?”

A student says: “Because there are more collisions.”

“But why are there more collisions?” Sadie asks.

“Because the particles are moving faster.”

“OK, what if the container was flexible? Then what?”

A class solves a problem involving systems of equations together, with the teacher asking various students to explain the steps, identify the next step or solve the calculations required in a given step.

During a close reading burst, a teacher asks his students to annotate each reference to the sun in the opening pages of Grapes of Wrath. Through a series of questions (some written, some oral), the class unpacks the way Steinbeck reveals the devastating impact of the sun on the land and its people.

To maximize the benefits of novelty bias with guided practice, a teacher would typically unbundle questions, that is, break questions down into smaller pieces so that she could ask them more quickly of a greater number of students, thus maximizing the perception of mileposts. Cold Calling participants for each step might also create more of a sense of momentum and flow. On the other hand, a risk of moving more rapidly is that some students could struggle to keep up with or process what they'd seen, so capping a bit of guided practice off with a slower opportunity for note-taking or reflection might be beneficial, as in, “OK, take 90 seconds to make sure you've got each step down in your notes and then make a note to yourself about your takeaways for solving this kind of problem.” Independent practice—“OK, now try one on your own; you have three minutes and then we'll check in”—is also a good way to let students absorb what they've learned during guided practice.

Activity 3: Independent Practice

When students complete work that they know how to do on their own, they are engaged in independent practice (IP). IP is usually done without significant support from the teacher; it's often done silently. But just because work is silent and independent does not make it IP. For example, silent reading is often knowledge assimilation, and reflecting on or brainstorming solutions to questions students don't know how to solve is reflection and idea generation, the next topic in this section. By way of distinguishing, IP implies autonomous execution of a skill or application of a knowledge base that students are in the final stages of mastering. Some examples:

· Students apply what they've learned about “showing, not telling” by writing three sentences about the experience of a character named Jonas as he rides a roller coaster (without ever saying he rode a roller coaster).

· Students independently solve a set of problems involving systems of equations.

· Students write a summary of the important ways daily life in eighteenth-century America was different from today.

Independent practice is often assigned in large chunks and at the end of the lesson in the “you have till the end of class to get started on this” variety. That's not wrong, but it can also be allocated in smaller pieces, mid-lesson. Imagine Christine Torres adding a bit of it at the end of her vocabulary lesson: “Take three minutes to write a series of sentences, each one using one of these three new vocabulary words correctly.” Or Sadie McCleary in the middle of notes: “Tonight you'll have a set of problems to do for homework, but see if you can set this problem up on your own now. You don't have to solve it, just set it up correctly. One minute. Go.”

Shifting into IP is also a great way to slow things down while you are maintaining flow. That is, the tension between attention and novelty is captured in the idea of shifting (change) into independent practice (highly focused).

Activity 4: Reflection and Idea Generation

Reflection often looks like IP, but it serves a different purpose. In IP, students execute work they know how to do on their own. In reflection, students are given time to think in a more open-ended fashion about things they are in the midst of learning or do not yet understand. Reflection is often silent, and frequently involves writing. When the task involves brainstorming potential solutions, it is idea generation. Some examples:

· A teacher asks students to reflect in writing on how differences in daily life in the eighteenth century might have caused people to understand the role of family differently from how we do today.

· A teacher asks students to reflect on an author's stylistic choices and why she might have used a repeated image.

· A teacher asks students to make notes to themselves on the keys to solving a difficult type of problem after solving a few as a group.

Reflection activities are independent, so they function much like IP, but they tend to feel a bit slower as they are open-ended and more formative. Thus they can bring a sense of slowness back to a lesson even in small pieces. They are also important to include because students who, outside of school, are constantly stimulated by their smartphones, increasingly spend less and less time reflecting and letting their minds wander. There may be some value in causing that to happen in school.

Activity 5: Discussion

Activities in which students develop ideas and answers by talking directly to one another, in small groups or as a class are called Discussion. This might involve a Turn and Talk (as we saw in Sadie's class) or using Habits of Discussion (see technique 44), which are to make a larger discussion productive and efficient. In some cases, you might insert batches of discussion during guided practice or questioning to ensure that students Batch Process (technique 45)—that is, make a certain number of comments without mediation from you. We call this “playing volleyball, not tennis.” Some examples:

· A teacher asks students to share their opinions about the ethics of genetically modifying food and organisms. She takes three or four student comments in a row and then returns to her presentation on the topic.

· A teacher asks students to participate in a ten-minute whole-class discussion of the impact of corruption on American politics in the 1890s.

· A teacher asks students to Turn and Talk (technique 43) with a partner to identify where a peer made a mistake in adding two fractions with unlike denominators.

While whole-class discussions are great, they tend to have a higher transaction cost—it takes time to set them up and to give multiple people a chance to talk. Balancing larger discussions with pair discussions can allow you to include it more frequently and in shorter intervals, especially because a Turn and Talk can so easily be made into a routine that students begin quickly and easily, thus preserving ideas in working memory. You can see both Sadie and Christine doing this throughout their lessons.

Activity 6: Review/Retrieval Practice

Retrieval Practice is reviewing previously mastered content to ensure its encoding in long-term memory and to facilitate its easy retrieval. Including review is not only beneficial from a learning perspective. John Sweller reminds teachers that “the major function of instruction is to allow learners to accumulate critical information in long-term memory.” Sadie is doing this at the beginning of her lesson, as students solve problems they learned how to do earlier in the week.

Because it is so important to learning and so easily overlooked—and sometimes dismissed by educators who haven't read the research—Retrieval Practice is its own technique. But since the discussion here is about shifting among and between activities to create a dynamic flow in your lesson, it's worth noting here how helpful inserting short batches of retrieval practice in the midst of other activities can be from a pacing perspective. It's often fast and energetic; it can be done in short doses; it often makes students feel successful.

Let's take a closer look at how the different activity types can come together in a lesson—in this case, one taught by Jessica Bracey, of North Star Academy Vailsburg Middle School (see the video Jessica Bracey: Keystone). Consider the activities Jessica shifts between: As class begins, Jessica asks her students to summarize what happened in the previous chapter of the novel they are reading. As her students comment, she steps in to ask for clarification or steer the next question to a given student: “Yes, Angel's bracelet was stolen. What else is going on?” This is guided questioning. Jessica's students spend about two minutes engaging in it and she “unbundles” her questions, spreading the work of summarizing across multiple students. Then she shifts into FASE Reading, continuing the story from the prior day, before asking students to pause and respond to a question in their reading response journals. After students write independently, she leads a whole-class discussion in which students respond to one another's thinking.

We often try to keep class interesting by doing “new” things with students, but what makes Jessica's class interesting is doing familiar activities. By shifting between activities that students know how to do well, Jessica creates a feeling of flow. Students are constantly engaged but often in new ways. They shift from reading to writing in their reading response journals in a matter of seconds, because they've done it so many times. Stopping to explain a new activity they hadn't done before—for example, “We're going to do a new kind of writing today; let me explain how it works …”—would result in a lot of downtime while she explained all the details and while her students internalized the process, using valuable working memory capacity to follow a new set of directions. Even though it might seem as though a new activity would be more interesting, it would be as likely to have the opposite effect. (You can read more about the power of academic systems and routines in Chapter Ten.)

After a minute or two of discussion, Jessica's students go back to reading. In fact, Jessica repeats the same cycle again: students read, write in their reflection journals, and discuss throughout the class, with the cycles getting longer and the questions getting harder over time.

At a recent workshop, teachers shared that the shorter recurring cycle of read-write-discuss was different from what they tended to do in their classes. They did the same three activities, but in long, “nonrecurring” chunks. For example, in a typical class, they might read for fifteen to twenty minutes, write for five to ten minutes, and discuss for another ten to fifteen minutes, before tackling an Exit Ticket and wrapping up. As Jessica demonstrates, you can bring energy and engagement to your class merely by breaking those chunks into shorter cycles of the same activities.