Teach Effectively!

Ok. I’m a reluctant blogger but I’m going to take the plunge. I’ve read the posts on Teach Effectively and want to add my two cents (or perhaps 25 cents).

I am a former special educator at the middle and high school levels. I’ve worked with students with learning disabilities, emotional/behavioral disorders, traumatic brain injury, and Attention Deficit Disorder. I’ve worked in almost every special education environment: co-taught classrooms, resource rooms, self-contained classrooms, and a special school. I am completely convinced (by both anecdotal and empirical evidence) that good instruction and quality teachers make a difference.

In the last four years, I have had two children. Watching them learn, both incidentally and through planned activities, has made me understand how well-planned, quality instruction is vital to a child’s or an adult’s learning. I define well-planned (as many others before me) as instruction that is a series of progressive steps toward a goal. For example, one of the goals for my daughter (she’s almost 4) is for her to be able to write all of her letters correctly. Her teachers have helped her learn to accurately trace shapes that contain all of the lines used to make letters. She colors in those shapes to improve her fine motor skills. She has completed many other activities to hone the skills necessary to write letters. She has practiced each one of these skills over and over again. She can now write any letter you ask her to write—and they are all “in the lines.”

Why am I telling you this? Because this is a perfect example of TASK ANALYSIS. These teachers (or someone involved in developing these activities) have broken the task of writing into its basic components, taught those components, and therefore, the child has achieved the goal of writing letters. The art of task analysis is a lost skill, particularly at the secondary level. Complex tasks such as reading comprehension must be broken down into component steps in order for students to be taught. You can find a very thorough description of how to do a task analysis here

Once completed, a task analysis leads a teacher from instruction to evaluation—did the student achieve the goal? Where are the problems? What does my instruction need to address?
To me, the linking of learning goal, instruction, and evaluation is the only way to teach effectively.