S6 E11 - The Trap Inside the Teachable Moment

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 Why? Hello there. Welcome to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast. My name is Jocelyn, and I am so happy to have you here.

Picture this. You've introduced a nonfiction text to your students in preparation for a text-based unit. Students are engaging, well, they're reading with a partner, responding to your queries, and then you hit a part of the text that they find interesting.

Their eyes light up. They sit up straight, and hands shoot up across the classroom. Aha. You think here's a teachable moment. In your excitement to have engaged the students, you add your own anecdote, interesting fact or wondering, further engaging the students in rich discussion with a satisfied smile.

You send the students off to recess, feeling good after all. Isn't this why you became a teacher? To get students to be intellectually curious, and if you've been teaching for a while, you'll know the satisfaction of moments like these. They're the best. One of the things we're encouraged to do as teachers is to identify the teachable moments and harness their power.

It's a real skill and a strength, but all strengths overused become a weakness, and that is what today's episode is all about. The scenario I just shared with you is exactly what I observed on a recent school visit. And not only did the classroom teacher fall into the trap of the teachable moment, but, and I have to confess my part here, I helped. Chiming in with my own contribution to the discussion.

And to the fun. At the conclusion of the lesson, we looked at the student reflections and saw exactly what we had done. While some students had made the connections that were the point of the lesson, others had gotten completely carried away, bringing in their own existing knowledge and interest. Isn't that a good thing?

I hear you asking. It might be if the point of the lesson was to make a text-to-self connection. But it wasn't; the point of the lesson was to build domain-specific knowledge for a deeper understanding of the text-based unit. The point of the lesson was to build domain-specific knowledge to build a deeper understanding of the text in the text-based unit.

And for context, the unit was our Velvete rabbit unit from the resource room. And the background knowledge text was about the experiences of children in England at the turn of the 20th century. The one thing that students needed to walk away with was an understanding of how affluent children were raised, because that's the context of the text.

What they hooked onto was the experience of the poor children. So while they did walk away with greater awareness, it wasn't focused on the concept that would assist comprehension of the target text. As I looked at the student responses, I could have kicked myself. I know better. I spend most of my time thinking about how to harness attention and make learning stick.

I had even identified the paragraph most important to the lesson and worked with the teacher to write a query to focus student attention on that. And still I got carried away in the moment. Now, it could be a mistake sharing this with you, but I want to demonstrate that even experienced teachers who understand the cognitive sciences can make rookie mistakes.

So what does this mean for the teachable moment for us in our classrooms? Should we ignore them? Should we only do what we've planned in advance? No, I think that would be a great shame. We all know that some of our best work happens in the moment. Teaching without that opportunity would be soulless. When an opportunity for connection building arises, we need to pause and think. Will this connection-building take our students deeper into the one thing that is the purpose of the task or lesson at hand? Or will it distract from the goal we are trying to achieve? Are we creating schema, or are we creating extraneous load, the next time you encounter the opportunity for a teachable moment?

Pause and decide if you should prompt and pursue or park it on the I Wonder Board to come back to another time. And if you've not heard me speak about an I Wonder Board, it's an idea that I came up with when I had a very curious group of preschoolers I was teaching, and they had so many questions that we simply could not address.

And so that we didn't derail everything we did. I had an I Wonder board. And when an idea would come up or a question would be asked that I couldn't answer in the moment, and sometimes didn't know how to answer, I would simply say, My, what a wonderful idea. Let's put it on the I Wonder Board and come back to it later.

It's so important to hold space for student engagement and curiosity; without that, learning is a series of box-ticking exercises. But we can't do this at the expense of focusing student attention on the one thing they need to learn to build strong schema. So the next time you come to a particularly interesting topic in your classroom that was not on the plan, remember, am I going to prompt and pursue or will I park it, prompt it or park it?

That's the decision to make. And if you need to write. Prompt or park on your board in your classroom to help you stay on track, and in fact, perhaps tattoo it on your forehead as I clearly needed to do that day. Then go ahead and do that. And now let's talk about why this matters at all. It's really tempting to dismiss what I've said and focus on the fact that students are engaged in conversation and they're interested.

If that was the whole goal, it would be fine. But the reason we need to think about comes back to how humans learn. One of the ways that we support students' working memory to make it easier for them to engage with new content, and in this case with a new text, the Velvet Teen Rabbit, is to help them activate existing schema, activate existing background knowledge.

This means that when they encounter the new material, everything is a little easier because they have something established to hook the new learning onto. In the example I shared with you of my rookie mistake, the end result was that some of the students had encoded the information about impoverished children, and some possibly and probably hadn't.

So in not being tight in the intent of that background knowledge text and making sure that all students walked out of the lesson with the focus on the experience of the impoverished children I had, and the classroom teacher had inadvertently created an inequitable situation when it came to first encountering the target text for the text-based unit.

Because some children had existing schema, and some won't. So, all of this focusing on one thing, what is the purpose? What do we wanna get out of it is not just about being able to tick a box on. I focused on one thing. The goal of this is to make sure that we are creating and engineering. Cumulative successful students.

That leads us to the end point, which is as anyone who has written a text-based unit with me in your school, as we've done this coaching, all roads lead to the summative task. That's where the student will demonstrate their learning. So if what we are doing doesn't build a step or a bridge to that summative task, it's likely it's a distraction.

While we know that there is variation between how long it takes different children to learn the same content, because they had need different numbers of repetitions to make things stick, to be able to retain new information in their memory, to then recall and use later. The way we learn is remarkably similar because our brain architecture is remarkably similar.

We need to focus student attention. We need to engage them in thinking about the point of the lesson. We need to provide opportunities to practice and rehearse. That's how you create schema. That means when the schema is created and you know the schema exists, you can activate background knowledge to support new learning in a future task unit or subject.

We do way too much assuming when it comes to schema, and I will ask teachers very often, do your students know this? And very often the answer is, well, they should because they did it last year. That's not an answer, that's an assumption. So within our own classes, we don't want to leave things to chance.

We don't want to assume that the students have gotten out of the lesson what we hoped they would, because hope is not a strategy. So when you encounter the teachable moment, be really careful, really intentional, and really strategic. Because in those moments that feel so good, we can be having a wonderful experience, or we can be distracting students from the learning at hand.

Just a quick one this week. That's all for me, everyone. Until I see you next time, happy teaching.

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