Technique 37: Break it down - Building ratio through questioning

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

Technique 37: Break it down
Building ratio through questioning

Break It Down is a powerful teaching tool, but it can be challenging to use because it is primarily a reactive strategy. It's useful immediately after an incorrect or insufficient answer.

How to respond effectively and efficiently in those situations is one of teaching's ongoing challenges. We know that repeating the question a little slower or louder isn't likely to help, but what do you do instead?

With Break It Down, the goal is to ask a question or present a piece of new information that will help the student answer correctly and will still cause the student to do as much of the thinking as possible. In the simplest terms, you want to provide the smallest viable hint, helping the student activate what he or she does know to get the correct answer.

In the video Narlene Pacheco: Keystone, you can see an example that shows both Narlene's skill and the challenges of the technique. Her kindergarteners are segmenting words—“bat” in this case—but one of her students has the letters out of order. She has b-t-a. “Segment bat for me,” Narlene says, carefully managing her tell (see technique 12, Culture of Error). When her young scholar does this correctly, she points at her paper: “What did you write?” It's an ideal Break It Down since Narlene hasn't provided any new information. She's just asked her student to review her work with heightened attentiveness. If her scholar was able to get it right now it would be based entirely on a self-correction. But she does not yet see her mistake.

“Read what you have,” Narlene now says, her second effort to Break It Down, but again it's not enough so Narlene goes a step further. “What's the first sound? Do you have that?” she asks. Her tone is impeccable: supportive, without a hint of frustration or judgment. “What's the second sound?” she continues. “Tuh” her student replies. She's narrowing her focus to a specific part of the work that's challenging. “What's the word?” Narlene now asks. “Buh-ah-tuh,” her student says and in so doing catches her error and fixes it. Narlene has helped her student solve while doing as much of the work as she can, and her students is happy: She’s figured it out rather than simply being told.

Smallest Viable Hint

A teacher never really knows what knowledge a given student has, nor exactly how big the gap is between what the student knows and what he needs to know to succeed. Because the ideal is to cause a student to apply what he knows to the greatest degree possible, it's useful to try to provide the smallest (successful) hint possible.

Providing a minimal hint gets at the tension in Break It Down. Whereas one goal is to break things down to the least degree possible, another is to do it quickly, thus managing time and pace. Meticulously adding a thin slice of knowledge to each previous hint would be the perfect means of causing students to do the greatest amount of cognitive work, but would derail instruction in a series of exercises that destroyed your pacing and led to rapid frustration on your students' part.

Sometimes, in the face of a wrong answer, you'll have to move on to something else. So while your long-term goal is to maximize the cognitive work that students do, you'll also have to balance those long-term goals with practical short-term realities. The good news is that the more you use Break it Down, the better (and faster) your students will get at their half of the equation.

How Break It Down Works

When you ask a questions and the answer is not sufficient to be considered correct, your first goal is to get the student to the correct answer. Your second goal is to keep your Break It Down rigorous by providing the smallest viable cue.

Take a look at the following figure. If you can provide a cue like A that makes the student fill in most of the gap, your student is likely to learn and remember more than if you use a cue like C. “Memory is the residue of thought,” Daniel Willingham tells us. There's more thinking to remember in A.

Both are more challenging than D, which solves the problem without any Break It Down (by giving the answer or having another student give the answer). Again, you want the smallest cue that will work in consideration of pacing, timing, rigor, and so on. A is desirable if you can, but you won't always be able to. You'll have to use D sometimes, too.

Schematic illustration of the answer for the question about the story set.

Planning for Break It Down

One of the best ways to succeed with Break It Down is to prepare for it: with Plan for Error and Exemplar Planning (see Chapter Two), even if you don't predict the precise error students make, over time you'll get better at anticipating the kinds of things that students get wrong and the responses that help. You do an exercise like this, in other words, as part of a long-term investment in your own understanding.

As you plan to Break It Down—or even when you use the technique without planning—there are benefits to building your “range,” the types of prompts you're comfortable using. We all tend to be creatures of habit; over time, our hints become predictable. Using a variety of ways to offer hints to students can help you connect with more kinds of thinkers, as well as provide a wider and more flexible array of help.

Provide an Example

If you got a blank stare when you asked for the definition of a prime number, you might say, “Seven is one” or “Seven is one, and so is eleven.” If you wanted to Break It Down further, you could cue: “Seven is one, but eight is not.” You could then potentially take it a step further by observing, “Eight's factors include two and four.” You can also provide additional examples if the question stumping the student was originally based on a category. For example, a student in Jaimie Brillante's fifth-grade writing class struggled to identify the part of speech of the word owner. Jaimie cued: “Well, owner would logically be the same part of speech as other words that end in -er. Dancer, swimmer, singer. What are those?” she asked. “They're people,” the student replied. Jaimie prompted, “And people have to be …,” as the student chimed in, “Nouns!”

Provide a Rule

In Christy Huelskamp's sixth-grade reading class at Williamsburg Collegiate in Brooklyn, a student guessed incorrectly that indiscriminate was a verb when used in the sentence, “James was an indiscriminate reader; he would pick up any book from the library and read it cover to cover.” Christy replied with a rule: “A verb is an action or a state of being. Is ’indiscriminate’ an action?” The student quickly recognized that it was modifying a noun. “It's an adjective,” she said.

Provide the Missing (or First) Step

When a student in her fifth-grade math class was unable to explain what was wrong with writing the number fifteen-sixths, Kelli Ragin cued: “Well, what do we always do when the numerator is larger than the denominator?” Instantly the student caught on. “Oh, we need to make a mixed number. So I divide six into fifteen.”

Roll-Back

Sometimes it's sufficient to repeat a student's answer back to him or her. Many of us instantly recognize our errors when they're played back for us, as if on tape. You can see a great example of this in the video Jessica Bracey: What You Said Is.

Jessica is reading a novel called Circle of Gold with her fifth graders. She calls on a student, Gavin, to analyze the character Toni's actions. His first answer is solid and he observes correctly that Toni is a sneaky character and that she is trying to trick Angel and Charlene into revealing their dishonesty, so Jessica follows up with another: “Why is that important?” Gavin does well here, too. It's important because if Toni tricks them, she'll reveal the truth about a stolen bracelet and defend her friend Mattie's honor. Now Jessica follows up again: “And what does that reveal about Toni as a friend?” This time however, Gavin gets stuck. He freezes and can't answer. To some degree this is inevitable … if we follow up good answers with further questions—be they Stretch It or Right Is Right—we are at some point going to get to the limits of what a student can answer at the moment. What then? How do we get the most out of them and foster success?

Jessica's response is simple and elegant. She uses a roll-back, simply repeating Gavin's words back to him: “So, Gavin, what you said is that Toni is sneaky and that she's a tricky person and that she's doing this because she is trying to get to the truth about who stole Angel's bracelet. Why is that important and what does that reveal about Toni as a friend?”

From there Gavin picks it up easily and closes out his analysis: this reveals that Toni is a helpful and good friend. She's trying to exonerate Mattie. He even uses the word “meticulous.”

It's a great moment. Instead of being “stuck” and not only possibly feeling like he'd failed, Gavin persists and does another layer of analysis. He closes it out with success, doing the cognitive work himself.

A Couple of Finer Points

Notice Jessica's affect, which is neutral and emotionally constant as she re-asks the question. She's not annoyed with Gavin. There's no negativity in the roll-back but there's also no sticky-sweet to it, either. She knows he can get it. So she is steady at the helm.

She also avoids “tipping” (see technique 32, Phrasing Fundamentals). That is, she's careful not to give too much away with her inflection. To understand how that might have happened, consider a roll-back in this situation:

You're studying the water cycle and you ask for an explanation of what happens to water vapor when it reaches the atmosphere. A student replies, “You get evaporation—water vapor forming droplets that become clouds.” This is wrong, of course. He has confused evaporation with condensation.

Saying “You said, ’You get evaporation—water vapor forming droplets that become clouds,’” without discernible emphasis on any word makes your roll-back much more rigorous than if you said something like: “You said ’You get evaporation—water vapor forming droplets that become clouds.’ ” Emphasis on the word “evaporation” points the student to the fact that it is the error and he can much more easily make the correction. So managing inflection as Jessica does in the video builds rigor.

To be fair, if your student still couldn't answer your evaporation question, your next move might be to add some emphasis, but you'd want to start with the least hint possible because you want your student to do as much of the analysis as he can.

Jessica then wraps it up with another nice move. She reinforces Gavin's work positively—“That was really strong thinking” and then asks for positive reinforcement from the class.

Eliminate Choices

When Jaimie Brillante's student struggled to recognize that owner was a noun, Jaimie could have eliminated some false choices as follows: “Well, let's go through some of the options. If it were a verb, it would be an action. Can you or I owner? Well, what about an adjective? Is it telling me what kind or how many of something?” Narlene also did this with her young scholar when she helped her to establish that her first sound had been segmented correctly.

Fighting Rigor Collapse

Rigor collapse refers to what happens when you ask a hard question that students can't answer and progressively Break It Down until the big question is a question that now lacks the rigor of the original.

Scaling down the question gradually and cautiously so that students do as much of the cognitive work as possible is generally a good thing, but how do you achieve that without having a class consisting of simple, or even simplistic, questions?

In a lesson my team and I recently observed, a class was reading The Outsiders, and the teacher had asked students about the following exchange between Cherry, a “Soc” (that is, someone in a higher socioeconomic class) and Ponyboy, a “Greaser” (of a lower socioeconomic class):

“You read a lot, don't you, Ponyboy?” Cherry asked.

I was startled. “Yeah. Why?”

She kind of shrugged. “I could just tell. I'll bet you watch sunsets, too. I used to watch sunsets, before I got so busy. I miss it.”

The teacher asked what Cherry meant by “before I got so busy.” Cherry was the sort of person who was likely “busy” doing things like schoolwork and activities, the sorts of things on her side of the class divide, whereas Ponyboy was not. They could have been kindred spirits—watchers of sunsets—but class and caste expectations (at least partly) put them in different places.

The kids didn't get this. When asked, students postulated that the sorts of things Cherry was doing included “going shopping and hanging out with friends.” Because hanging out with friends was what Ponyboy would do, the teacher tried to break the complexity down a bit. “Can anyone connect this to the phrase ’the rat race’?” (They had discussed earlier Ponyboy’s use of the term to disparage trying to succeed and cross the class divide.) Again students struggled to make the connection. So the teacher tried to break down the misunderstanding even further, hoping students would recognize the differences in how the two characters spent their time. Who was more likely to take music lessons? she asked. Cherry or Ponyboy? Why? Ponyboy didn't have parents to supervise him. If this was one sort of thing she might be doing when she was “busy,” what were some others?

The good news is that the teacher uncovered and addressed the fundamental misunderstanding among her class, but the result was also that a rigorous, metaphorical conversation with implications about socioeconomic class had been replaced by a literal one. The sequence ended with a small and narrow inference about who was more likely to take music lessons and never got back to implications about character or class: rigor collapse.

After winnowing questions, then, it's often important to make broader sense of the answer students gave. Imagine, for example, if the teacher were to say something like, “Good; now connect that to one of the themes we've discussed from the book,” or “Good; now connect that to our discussion of class divide.”

If Breaking It Down takes a broad question and narrows it, a last move of connecting the narrow to a broader point is sometimes necessary.