As students progress in their academic career moving from elementary to middle to high school, there is a significant increase in the amount of instruction that is delivered through teacher lecture.
This common instructional format is typically comprised of a teacher standing in front of the classroom alongside visual elements (e.g., powerpoint) verbally discussing content for the duration of the class period/block. The students are writing notes capturing what the teacher is saying along with what is being visually displayed on the board or screen.
Though the over-reliance of teacher lecture is problematic, there are ways to keep the students engaged in learning during this common instructional practice. The simplest and most meaningful is to incorporate high-leverage practices (HLPs) that increase the number of learning trials for all students throughout the lecture.
Understand the Learning Trial
Learning trials have explicit and sometimes complex meanings in the intensive student intervention arena, but a simplified explanation for the typical instructional setting consists of 3 components:
Prompt: An oral or written question that is presented to one or more students indicating the need for a response based on this question.
Response: The student(s) verbal, written, or digitally submitted answer to the prompt.
Feedback: The students being made aware if their response is correct or incorrect.
Why This Matters
In the typical lecture-based class, the teacher primarily delivers content and the students take notes on the content. It is a one-way, send and receive, experience with little to no learning trials. There are very few prompt - response - feedback loops during the 45, 60, or 90-minute lecture. If questions are asked by the teacher, it is often met with silence (no responses) or the same 1 - 2 students answer the question while the majority of the students remain quiet.
This is problematic because:
a) during lecture alone, most of the students are not being provided the opportunity to respond and the learning experience is limited by their ability to capture and retain the verbal and displayed teacher content. The more opportunities students have to respond to teacher prompts and receive feedback on their responses, the greater the opportunity for learning to occur.
b) the students may be learning the content incorrectly based on a misperception, misunderstanding, or missing what was said in the lecture. Due to time constraints and the pressure to cover all of the required content, the teacher may not become aware of this issue until the students are given a quiz or test at a later date.
c) behavior problems may escalate as students who are not actively engaged in learning are more likely to engage in off-task behavior. When this occurs a teacher may use a content-focused question to target a specific student as a behavior intervention response. Forcing the student to respond to a question they may not know because they were off task may set the stage for the student to shut down to avoid peer ridicule for not knowing the answer or act out causing the teacher to escalate his/her response to the student.
Use Choral Responding
One HLP to use during lecture that quickly increases learning trials is choral responding. This strategy requires minimal preparation and follows the three components of a learning trial.
Prompt (ask):
Ask the class aloud a question that can be answered in a specific 1, 2, or 3 word response. Open-ended questions typically do not work well with the variability of correct student answer options. Many possible answers to a single questions makes it difficult for the students to answer in unison.
Response (signal):
Students respond to the teacher question in unison. If a student does not know the answer, he/she can remain quiet and will not be singled out by peers. A unison response typically does not allow the students to decipher who answers and who does not.
Feedback (interpret):
Consider what you heard, interpret what that means about their learning, and give feedback to the students based on the whole class response. Here are some typical response patterns.
Loud and together response. This indicates the answer to the question is well-known by a majority of the class. So if they are incorrect, they are all on the same page.
Soft and timid response. This suggests that the answer to the questions is NOT well-known by the majority of the class or they are not confident in the answer they do know.
Unintelligable (Jumbled up) response. This suggests that there is significant variability in what a majority of the students believe is the correct answer.
Try it!
Here's a simple example:
Teacher: What is 3 x 3?
Answers please!
Students: 9 (in unison)
Teacher: That is correct!
3 x 3 is 9
The power of choral responding is that you don't need any supplies to increase the number of learning trials in the lesson and it can be done anywhere with minimal preparation. When on a field trip, extending the lesson in an outdoor environment on campus, or during teacher lecture, ramp up student learning by incorporating this simple instructional strategy.
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