Technique 52: What to do - High behavioral expectations

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

Technique 52: What to do
High behavioral expectations

A classroom must be orderly for learning to take place.

Some educators will take exception with that statement.

“Not at all,” they might say. “Learning is messy, chaotic, loud, and unpredictable. Disorder is part of education.”

But what they'd mean by disorder would be a classroom in which, after forty minutes of the frenetic building of suspension bridges with toothpicks and gumdrops, everyone cleaned up nicely and the teacher had a few moments to ask with a puckish grin: “Well, class, what have we learned?”

They'd mean a class where young people enthusiastically engaged in a ramshackle discussion with lively disagreement—about a book that everyone had read and had a copy of at the ready.

They wouldn't mean a classroom where it would take them ten minutes to get students to hear and follow directions for the bridge building or a classroom where students who raised their hand during the discussion risked violating powerful, unspoken social norms. Or where a student muttered and smirked every time the two girls in front of him spoke out loud. Or where they had to wonder what that student was saying under his breath to the girls.

What they would mean by disorderly would be just the right amount of untidiness and unpredictability when they'd chosen it, designed it, and delegated it. Order, in other words.

One of the core challenges of teaching is that it is very, very hard to create classrooms reliably characterized by psychological safety and where students encourage the best from one another; where, when necessary, students can think deeply amidst quiet and develop their capacity to pay attention; where some students' desire to pursue learning assiduously is honored and supported, even when others don't really feel like it.

It's far easier to say that order doesn't matter, or is counterproductive. It's easier to claim that a teacher's responsibility to be able to judiciously enforce quiet is the same as a craven desire to suppress student voices. It's easier to argue that the exercise of benevolent and necessary authority is a form of authoritarianism and to conflate those similar sounding but very different words. Establishing orderly classrooms is an ideal place for the Band-Aid Paradox.1

Democracy, in a classroom, is problematic when twenty-eight people want to learn chemistry and two want to persist in making hilarious burping noises. The twenty-eight do not require a mere majority to proceed. They need unanimity. One or two students' freedom to make those clever noises or to say no to the idea of listening and following directions is often a de facto decision for everyone else in the room. The lesson will not proceed as planned.

This is an age-old challenge but also one that is increasingly difficult to bridge. Our society is the most individualistic on the planet (adapting to its individualism is one of the biggest challenges for students who come here from other cultures) and it is growing more so by the moment. There are precious few times and places where people will accept that they must be willing to constrain their own behaviors and desires for the common good. This used to be taken for granted; people were proud to do their part and raised their children to expect to as well, but no more. The refusal of some individuals to wear masks to help mitigate an epidemic, for example, underscores how hard it is to socialize such actions in our society. And yet schools are among the last institutions that ask for and depend on this increasingly unfamiliar behavior—where a greater common good (learning and knowledge for all) is achieved through small personal sacrifice (show, or perhaps even feign interest in what your classmates are saying even on days when you don't really feel like it).

At any given moment, the students in your classroom will be a mix of the stoic and the impulsive; the selfless and the selfish; the virtuous and the thoughtless; the wise and the silly.2 Hopefully more virtuous and wise than thoughtless and silly, but surely some of both. And in that mixture, the rights of those who dream of atoms and cell structure or insight into Grant's mindset as dawn broke over Vicksburg are fragile. They require protection. The more virtue and wisdom among the majority of your young people, the more imperative that you protect their right to learn in an optimal setting. And let me say a word here for the silly—of which I can say I was often one. Part of teaching is graciously and humanely preventing the puckishness of the child inclined to occasional silliness from becoming a bar to their own and others' learning. Short-sighted decisions by young people are to be expected. Everyone chooses hilarity over chemistry at some point. That such inclinations are natural and common does not mean that we should indiscriminately allow them, or that constraining them need be cruel or harsh—the opposite, in fact, and with skill such actions can feel like (and be) a form of caring. There is plenty of room for laughter at the right time.

The video Emily Bisso: Write What I Write tells a version of that story. Emily's class is taking notes. Except Joshua. He's distracted and wants Emily's attention and is going to miss out on the learning. I'll unpack the details of her lovely interaction to get him back to learning later in the chapter, but it's not just her tone that expresses love and caring. It's the action itself. It will matter that Joshua learn the content of this lesson and learn to be a scholar if he is to thrive. To care about him is to get him back on track.

“It is not possible for everyone's desires to be met at the same time as everyone else's,” Tom Bennett reminds us in Running the Room. “At times individual wants will be balanced with the greater good of the community… . It is impossible for everyone to behave as they please.” This is to say that you cannot be a teacher and not be prepared to ask or require some students to sometimes do what they are not inclined to do. Doing so is the exercise of the responsibility we are entrusted with, not the abuse of authority.

And—here comes a summary of what this chapter is about—most of the tasks required of us to ensure the right kind and amount of order can be done warmly and graciously, in a caring manner and often with a smile. With skill they can be made less visible (in fact one of the main skills I try to point out in technique 55, Least Invasive Intervention, is making them as invisible as you can) and can be stripped of caustic emotions (technique 56, Firm, Calm Finesse). Or, even better, moments of conflict can be headed off and prevented before they even happen. Or many of them can. We cannot all achieve Emily Bisso's state of grace in the Joshua interaction; not every interaction can be solved quite so simply and happily. But the goal is to remember what Emily is telling us as much as what she is telling Joshua: I do this because I care and in being attentive to my technique I am most able to do it in ways that help students thrive. In fact, Emily's success is as much a result of her mastery of “quiet presence,” “economy of language,” and “live in the now” (elements of Strong Voice I discuss later in the chapter, and of Positive Framing, which I discuss in the next chapter) as it is of her intention to be caring. Nobody takes this job because they want to shout at young people and have caustic interactions with them. But teachers by the thousand do so every day. They do so because the situations we are placed in as teachers are immensely challenging. They require more than good intentions to resolve optimally. They require technique. The grace that a teacher like Emily shows, we should all understand, is at least in part technique in disguise.

But before we go to technique it is necessary to establish that to excuse (or worse, justify) disorderly classrooms is to allow precious opportunity to be stolen from young people—usually the most vulnerable. Teachers are invested with authority to ensure that certain rights are protected precisely because those rights are preciously important and require everyone's cooperation to sustain. And teachers for the most part are insufficiently trained and prepared for this small but critical part of the job.

This is no small failing. A recent national survey of teachers3 found that more than three quarters (77 percent) believed that “most students suffered” because a few students were persistently disruptive. But of course, school problems, like everything else, are not evenly distributed in society. In schools with more than 75 percent of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, more than half of teachers4 went further and said that “student behavior problems contributed to a disorderly or unsafe environment that made it difficult for many students to learn.” For those who might be wondering, the authors also disaggregated the results by race of teacher and found few differences. On the question of whether student behavior “contributed to a disorderly or unsafe environment that made it difficult for many students to learn,” for example, Black teachers said yes at roughly the same rate as White teachers: 60 percent for Black teachers to 57 percent for White teachers. The issue, in other words, does not appear to be White teachers seeing harmless behavior among kids of color and reading danger and defiance where none exists, although, of course, we should always be aware that this is a risk. The data suggest that the issue is that almost every student assigned to a school not characterized by economic privilege is consigned to spend a significant portion of their learning years in classrooms where a lack of order makes it difficult for them to learn.

That is the norm.

Additionally, students themselves feel unsafe much of the time in school. A 2018 study by the United Negro College Fund reported that fewer than half of African American students (43 percent) feel safe at school.5 Think for a moment about the enormity of that finding—feeling unsafe is normal—it is how the average Black student feels in school, according to the survey. And those data are not disaggregated to show the disparate impact on Black students in high poverty schools, specifically.

Parents, not surprisingly, worry too. Another report by UNCF found that parents prioritized a safe, secure, and violence-free environment as the most important single factor when choosing a school for their child.6

Given that effective schools are the single most important vehicle in society for ensuring equality of and access to opportunity, these data represent a massive and regressive tax on families of poverty. But it is not just egregious behavior that is a problem. Low-level disruptions are chronic in many classrooms and result in not only lost learning time but disruption of student focus. A report by the UK Government in 2013—2014 found such behaviors as calling out without permission, talking unnecessarily while the teacher was teaching, being slow to start work or follow directions, showing lack of respect for peers or teacher, not arriving to class with necessary materials, and using mobile devices to be chronic problems in many classrooms. “The findings in this report are deeply worrying,” Her Majesty's Chief Inspectorate wrote, “not because pupils' safety is at risk … but because this type of behavior has a detrimental impact on the life chances of too many pupils. It can also drive away hard-working teachers from the profession.”7

And yet, there is still more to the story. Unnecessary suspensions are a chronic problem in schools and they, too, can have cascading consequences for students who are suspended—they miss class and fall further behind; they are then more likely to drop out of school or become further disengaged. That said, permitting the behaviors that lead to suspension should not be an option, for reasons reflected in the data mentioned earlier. At least two steps are central—and often overlooked—in addressing this challenge. The first is that schools must become more inclined to use teaching as a response when students are disruptive. To that end, my colleague Hilary Lewis has developed a Dean of Students' curriculum, for example. It offers robust and productive lessons that provide replacement behaviors and opportunities for developing knowledge and sustaining reflection in place of mere punishment when students behave in a disruptive or counterproductive manner.8 The other step is for teachers to develop the capacity to prevent issues from escalating to the point where students require such disciplinary measures. Calmly and efficiently resolving the natural tensions that arise in the classroom is a core skill of a master teacher. Prevention and deescalation are almost always preferable to a post-event response, no matter how good.

There is a tendency among some educators to equate orderly classrooms with higher rates of suspension and other harsh disciplinary consequences, but in fact the opposite is the case. Norms are the most pervasive influence on the behaviors of individuals. Students are more likely to engage in more extreme behaviors in environments in which those behaviors appear plausible or even common, where things spiral quickly out of control, where there is little learning going on, where there is peer pressure to test limits, and where the culture does little to check this impulse. Sadly, when this is the case, students often feel tacit pressure to engage in behaviors they don't especially want to do and know are wrong. Every principal will tell you that some portion of suspensions are of young people who lack a positive and productive relationship to school, and some portion are of kids who like school and want to succeed there and nonetheless do something dangerous, stupid, or mean-spirited in a way that seems utterly out of character. A teacher who can use the tools in this chapter to establish a warm, caring, and humane learning environment that offers consistent limits is engaged in the work of preventing suspensions.

There is a final element to an orderly classroom that is also easily overlooked. “Self-discipline, self-regulation, hard work, [and] patience,” Tom Bennett writes in Running the Room, are all “enormously important characteristics of successful people in a variety of contexts… . Everything of value you can conceive of was acquired through sustained effort, practice, and delayed gratification.” An orderly classroom builds these habits—you want to speak but you discipline yourself to listen first; you are tired some days but complete your tasks regardless.

Productive and positive behavior, in other words, is part of an invisible curriculum in schools that reinforces executive functioning skills and allows students to thrive. Students learn to understand how to work within the parameters of a group or organization. Young people who are rude to teachers and classmates and who talk back and struggle to embrace common goals “are not going to magically transform themselves into prime candidates for the best jobs” or into collaborative members of the project team, observes Jo Facer in Simplicity Rules. To learn those things is to be ready to start your own business, raise children, or be the sort of valued colleague who brings greatness to a team or project.

And just because we teach students to understand how to work within the parameters of a group or organization “does not mean they cannot push back intellectually,” Facer continues. Learning to be a productive member of a group does not prevent you from taking political or social action in the face of unjust broader societal norms. Students who have been in well-run classrooms have not been “socialized to be compliant.” I do not buy the argument that if you call out in class and don't follow your teacher's direction you are learning independent thought and a commitment to justice. Or that co-opting productive meetings and being inattentive to the needs of the group is preparing for leadership. Conflating schools without rules as crucibles of liberation proposes a fairly unrealistic vision of what civil disobedience and organized dissent entail. There are actually a fairly large number of meetings required to organize groups and clarify goals. Better to have learned to clearly express your ideas, to learn how to work within group norms. Such students remain empowered to stand up to injustice when doing so is warranted and in fact have more tools to do so when required—a good education teaches students many things, including the history and tools of resistance to injustice.

This causes me to return to the phrase “productive and positive” behavior, which I used previously. That phrase reminds us that the purpose of these techniques is not so much to forestall negative behavior as it is to socialize positive and productive behaviors that help young people thrive in all the settings of their lives. Our goal is to create something good, and one outcome will be the prevention of the negative behaviors along the way.

Technique 52: What to do

Giving directions is one of the most overlooked aspects of teaching both because of its mundanity and its familiarity. We are forever doing it but it feels about as profound as ordering a sandwich.

But poor directions—those that are unclear or meandering (which is to say unclear and compounded by length and repetition)—have consequences that are far-reaching. For example:

· My directions aren't clear, so some students don't follow through on them and we waste time.

· My directions aren't clear, so some students do the task incorrectly and are confused.

· My directions aren't clear, so some students are confused, and I get mad at them for not doing what I wanted. They feel my sense of frustration and are frustrated in return.

· My directions aren't clear, so students assume I'm flustered or not prepared or am not really all that clear on what I want.

· My directions aren't clear, so some enterprising student takes advantage of the gray area and pretends to misunderstand by doing something else entirely. Wouldn't that be funny!

Turns out giving effective directions is one of teaching’s core competencies and What to Do is the art of giving directions effectively. It is a case study in little things with big consequences.

The most basic version of poor directions occurs when teachers tell students what not to do. Let me offer a few examples:

· “Kevin, you shouldn't be looking out the window.”

· “Cheryl, don't get distracted.”

· “Class, don't hand me messy disorganized work.”

Now let me rewrite them to show how they might be different (acknowledging that a master teacher would probably make them far better):

· “Kevin, make sure you're getting everything on the board into your notes.”

· “Cheryl, please turn to Carly and share your thoughts about the beginning of Chapter Two.”

· “Class, make sure your decimals are lined up, you write neatly, and circle your final answer.”

In each of these cases, the revision is likely to help students be successful because it describes specific, concrete, and observable actions. When there are multiple steps, they are in a clear sequence.

Specific Directions. Effective directions break down larger tasks into manageable steps that students can take. I could have corrected “don't hand me messy or disorganized work” with “make sure your work is neat and organized,” for example. That might be fine. But it's a bit of an assumption that students know what it means to do neat and organized work. And even if they do, a reminder always helps. So breaking the task apart into more specific steps is, in a sense, teaching students the component steps of organization.

You can get a sense for how clear and specific directions help students succeed and engage productively in the work of class in the video Denarius Frazier: Check in with Your Neighbor. The incipient sense of flow, the way Denarius is building a sense of uninterrupted focus and momentum, derives from his simple clear directions coming out of the Do Now—“Pencils down and track me”—and to start the Turn and Talk: “Go ahead and check in with your neighbor. You have thirty seconds. Go.” Crisp and clear and all but impossible to misinterpret. Or watch the moment at the beginning of the video Gabby Woolf: Keystone. “We're going to be reading the beginning of Chapter Four,” Gabby notes and students look placidly back at her. Then she adds a clear and specific direction: “Have your text in front of you, please.” Notice how many students suddenly swing into action and get their books. Notice how many students didn't think to have their books ready and how much unproductive learning time has been avoided by the simple clarity of that small phrase inserted at the outset of the activity.

Concrete Directions. Effective directions involve, when possible, clear, actionable tasks that students know how to execute. It's not just that the direction about neat and organized work breaks it into clear and manageable steps but that the steps are concrete enough to be hard to misinterpret. They refer to things like lining up decimals rather than “carefully presented work.” The former is much more concrete and ideally, I'd have taught students to line up decimals, so they knew exactly what I meant and were likely to be successful. Same for my direction to Cheryl, who, let's assume, is missing out on a Turn and Talk and is distracted or perhaps turned around and trying to get the attention of someone else in class. Cheryl, please start the Turn and Talk would tell her what to do, but it's vague. In other words, what do I mean by that? Cheryl might misunderstand. Though many readers will probably come up with even better examples, I've tried to “shrink the change” as Chip and Dan Heath describe it in Switch. I've made the first step easier to follow by making it clearer and smaller.

You can see how Sadie McCleary's specific and concrete directions to her chemistry class help every student to get ready simply and easily in the video Sadie McCleary: Notes for Today. Sadie has taught students how to head a paper to take notes on so when she says, “Today is lesson 14,” they understand that this is what they should write at the top of their notes under the phrase “Unit 2: Matter,” which they've already written at the top. Notice how specific she is even about what exactly they should write. In addition to ensuring they are ready to take notes, this signals her own careful preparation to students.

Sequential Directions. I mentioned earlier that effective directions should describe a sequence of concrete, specific actions. This allows you to pace them: If there are a series of steps and a student is inclined to distraction, you might parse them out more slowly or even one by one, checking for completion or at least progress on one before naming the next. I learned this as a parent when my children were small. There might be days when I could say: OK, towel off, get your jammies on, and brush those teeth successfully. There were also days when that many directions at once would end in disaster. If one of my kids was getting out of the tub and feeling giddy or distracted, I would pace the directions. I'd start: OK. Get your towel and dry off. When that was done, I'd say: Great. Now get into your jammies. When that was done, I'd say, Good, now over to the sink to brush your teeth. So you might pace your directions to Cheryl if you weren't sure of her mindset and the likelihood of her follow-through. Cheryl, turn and face Carly. Good, please give her a bit of eye contact so she knows you're listening. OK, now share your thought or ask her what she thought.

Jason Brewer does a really nice job of pacing his sequential What to Do directions for a different reason in the video Jason Brewer: Pencils Are Down. He wants to give students time to finish each task in his directions well, without rushing, so he parses them one by one with lots of space in between and with a calm and easy voice.

Observable Directions. The more observable you make a direction the more you can assess follow-through and, if necessary, reinforce accountability for a student who's confused, distracted, or not especially inclined to follow through at the moment. Telling a student to “pay attention” is the classic counterexample. It's non-observable. So if I tell Caleb to pay attention and in my estimation he does not improve and I say, “Caleb, I asked you to pay attention,” he would likely reply, “But I was paying attention,” either because he believed he was or because he was seeking to avoid responsibility. But if my directions were observable: “Caleb, pick up your pencil and take notes in the space at the top of your paper,” and Caleb continued to struggle, I could first say, “Caleb, pick up your pencil please,” and watch for his follow-through, pacing my further directions from there based on his response. It's much harder to sustain an “I did pick up my pencil” argument when your pencil is not in your hand than it is to sustain an “I was paying attention” argument. Now Caleb's lack of follow-through is clear and unambiguous so if I must respond with a consequence of some sort, it will be clear—to me and to him—that it is justified.

In the video Arielle Hoo: Eyes Up Here, Arielle's What to Do directions—impeccable, clear, warm, and gracious—always start with an observable direction: “Eyes up here” or “Track up here.” This allows her to scan for follow-through and attention and make sure students hear all the math. She combines her WTD directions with several exceptional examples of technique 53, Radar and Be Seen Looking.

Keys to Effective Delivery with What to Do

· Economy of Language: Maybe the most useful piece of advice for making What to Do directions effective is to use as few words as possible. More words often make the necessary task less clear or more ambiguous. You might think economy of language would make you sound stern, but of course crispness can be done with grace and warmth, as the clip Tamesha McGuire: Baseline beautifully demonstrates. Tamesha's directions are: “Tuck your chairs,” “Pencils up,” and Write your name.” The longest has three words, which helps her kindergartners to get happily to work and gives her lots of time to circulate and share the warmth instead of offering repeated reminders. This is especially important with your first direction. You can see that play out in Denarius Frazier: Try That Grid, in which Denarius's directions sound much like Tamesha's: “In pairs.” “Two minutes.” “You do one.” “Try that grid, fill in all the blanks that you can.” The crispness and clarity of the first two directions earns students' attention and focus.

A second key to success is to use Emotional Constancy, that is to deliver directions and corrections in an even tone, even if you are feeling a little frazzled or frustrated, so students focus on and respond to your words, not your emotions. That's pretty evident in all the examples we've seen so far. There's no tension to distract students from the task at hand.

· Consistent What to Do: Use consistent language as often as you can so the directions themselves are a sort of routine in and of themselves. For example, always saying “Pencils in the tray” often works better than an unpredictable combination of “Pencils in your trays,” “Pencils in their homes,” “Pencils down,” “Put your pencils down,” “Let's put those pencils away,” and so on. You don't have to be obsessive about it but increasing the consistency of the language in your directions allows you to make the direction more like a habit. This frees you up to focus on your lesson and makes it easier for students to do what you've asked. Part of the reason Denarius's class starts so smoothly is that he is consistent about the phrase he uses to close the Do Now nearly every day. It's almost always “Pencils down and eyes up here” or something very similar. If there are moments when you most want follow-through, use the most familiar version of the direction.

Giving a What to Do Out Front, that is, in advance of a cue to begin, is a great way to make sure students hear all of your directions and aren't distracted as you give them. For example, saying, “When I say ’go,’ please turn to your partner and discuss your observations about the beginning of the chapter,” gives you the opportunity to make sure everyone has heard the direction and is attentive and to add further detail—“I'll ask a few of you to share your partner's observation”—before students rush off to Turn and Talk. If your class is especially enthusiastic and it's a task they're excited to do, you might even say, “When I say ’go,’ but not before I say ’go,’ please turn to your partner and discuss your observations …” This also, by the way, makes a crisper and more visible start to the Turn and Talk, and norms that are more visible are more likely to become universal quickly.

On the other hand, you may notice the directions in Arielle Hoo: Eyes Up Here, where she says, “Eyes up here in four … three … two …” She's given her What to Do but also given a countdown to students before the cue so they have a bit of time and space and can finish what they are writing.

Simplified What to Do

If a student does not respond to your What to Do direction, simplify it, either by removing words, requesting an even more concrete action, or reducing the number of steps you've asked the student to follow through on. For example, if you say to a student, “Pick up your pencil and take notes at the top of the page,” and she doesn't do it, you might say, “Pick up your pencil, please.” If you still don't get follow-through, you might point to the pencil. “Pencil in your hand, please, Roberta.” Breaking down directions makes it easier to teach and reinforce your expectations for how students should complete a task.

What about when your direction is explicitly in response to a student who needs redirection? Adapting What to Do to the type of situation—and your assessment of its possible causes—can help ensure success in terms of both the task getting done and relationships being preserved.

· Standard: The cause of poor follow-through is unclear and could plausibly be benign, such as distraction or confusion:

o Assume the Best: “Hmm, I must not have been clear. When we are in ’Learner's Position,’ that means our voices are off.”

o Act As If: After delivering a What to Do correction, glance away as if you're sure that they'll follow through. Then use a confirmation glance as needed to monitor.

· Ambiguous: The cause of poor follow-through is unclear, but it has been persistent or seems like it could include some taking advantage of gray area.

o Simplify: Remove words, choose just one step.

o Emotional Constancy: Double-check that you are calm and steady; remove emotional variables.

· Challenging: The cause of poor follow-through appears to be deliberate or limit-testing. Behavior is repeated or the situation is especially challenging.

o Shrink the Change: Break the next step down into the smallest possible task. For example, you say to a student, “Stand up at your desk and walk to the door, please,” but she doesn't do it. You say, “Stand up at your desk, please.” She still doesn't do it. You say, “Push your chair back. Good. Now stand up. Thank you.”

o Insert Careful Acknowledgments: When a student is in a negative cycle, help them perceive each productive step back toward the path to success by acknowledging it in a muted tone. For example, a dean of students dealing with an upset student might say: “Please sit in this chair” very calmly and then add “thank you” (with very little affect) when the student has done it. Then perhaps: “Please turn and face me so I know you're ready to discuss this.” As soon as it happens, the dean might acknowledge that the student is making an effort: “That’s much better. Thank you.” Then he or she might try, “Now when you're ready to talk, please give me a nod.” Again you might acknowledge with, “Thank you,” perhaps adding “I appreciate you showing me you’re ready to talk about this. I appreciate that.”

Online Lessons: Remote What to Do

The importance of directions is critical—and critically overlooked—in most settings. Teaching remotely caused many of us to confront the challenges of clarity in this new setting. With glitchy Internet and an increased potential for distractions, with the difficulty of pairing nonverbal cues with directions and the fact that teachers’ directions suddenly were given in a tiny voice emanating from a window in the corner of a screen, it was many times easier for students to miss a direction online. And of course the safety net that has existed for students for time immemorial—if you don't know what to do, look at what the people next to you are doing—also disappears when you are sitting alone at your kitchen table.

Under such conditions teachers learned a thing or two about giving directions.

One of our favorite videos was this one of Alonzo Hall's “orientation screen” at the beginning of his lesson. His verbal directions are also given visually, with absolute clarity and absolute simplicity so they are much harder to miss or misunderstand. Here's what to do, they say, with the most important parts highlighted in yellow.

Photo depicts Alonzo Hall's “orientation screen” at the beginnging of a lesson.

And here's Eric Snider making the directions for independent work both visual and oral and leaving a version of them up for students to reference throughout the activity so they can always reorient.

Independent Work until 1:30

□ 1.Read pages 195-199. It's finally the girls' time to perform! Find out what happens and be ready for… a plot twist.

□ 2. Answer questions 4-6 in classwork.

□ 3. Take Socrative Quiz.

□ 4. Make sure ALL questions are answered then → “Turn In” Classwork.

□ 5. Begin IR for your reading log. We will come back together at 1:30

What Alonzo and Eric are doing ties in to cognitive science. “Spoken words disappear,” Oliver Caviglioli points out in his book on the science of visuals, Dual Coding. This is called the Transient Information Effect and it reminds us that anything that is exclusively verbal is harder to study and remember and often exerts a heavy load on working memory. This has instructional implications but also cultural ones: we should put reminders everywhere if we want people to remember.

But our reminders should be simple! Limiting extraneous information is another piece of advice Caviglioli provides about visuals. Graphics are most useful when spare and focused: simple and without extraneous info; for example, fewer colors are better and line drawings are often better than photos if we want people to focus on the content and process the key ideas.