How to present a Learning Objective

At the end of one lesson, a principal asked her third graders why they liked the lesson.  Here are some of their replies:

Jenny – I liked it because we learned new words.
Diego – I liked the lesson because we learned more.
Daniel – I learned bigger words.
Johnny – I learned about homophones.

Some students felt that they had learned new information that they would like to pass on to others.  Maybe some of these students are future teachers!

Justice – We are learning words we can teach our brothers and sisters at home.
Arnel – I learned things I can teach someone else.

When the teacher asked her next question, I whispered to her, “Ask your students to pair share first before you select a student to respond.”

She turned to the class and said, “Students explain to your neighbor the difference between superlative and comparative.”

 Wow! The change in the class was dramatic.  All of a sudden, all the students were energized and interacting academically…listening, speaking, and thinking. 

 She went on to call on three random non-volunteers…but, the the amazing thing was that every single student in the class answered the question during the pair share!

When I train teachers how to enhance initial, whole class instruction I always tell them to use pair shares.  It immediately improves student interaction, student engagement, student learning, and ultimately student achievement.

Can I teach a lesson I have never taught

to students I have never seen

in a country I have never been to?

I recently taught a DataWORKS-designed Explicit Direct Instruction^® lesson at Royal School in Costa Rica. This is the same campus where we are going to house our university to train Costa Rican teachers. (Refer to other articles for a description of the university.)

The lesson worked really well. It’s amazing that with Explicit Direct Instruction, I can walk into any class, even in a far away country, and students learn. That’s because the components of a well-crafted lesson are universal and don’t change: Learning Objective, Activate (or provide) Prior Knowledge, Concept Development, Skill Development, Lesson Importance, Guided Practice, and Closure.

Lesson delivery strategies are universal too: continuous Checking for Understanding, Active Participation, Differentiation (reducing sub-skill when necessary), Cognitive Strategies (so students remember), Content Area Literacy Strategies (to support learning from text), and English Learner Strategies (to make English easier to understand and to promote continuous English Language Development).

Can I teach a lesson I have never taught…to students I have never seen… in a country I have never been to?

Before starting the lesson, I handed out the whiteboards that I brought with me; then I had all the students practice by writing their names on the boards. This also checks that all the erasable pens are working.

Now I have started the lesson. If you look carefully at my hands, you can see that I am starting to pull a number out of my plastic bag to select a random student to answer a Checking for Understanding question. Using Explicit Direct instruction, I always include two or three student interactions per minute. Interactions can include pair shares, answering Checking for Understanding questions, using whiteboards, having students read or write important information from the lesson, and so forth. The adults in the back are watching my strategies.

For this biology lesson, I define and give examples of food chains and food webs. The students follow along with their own copy of the exact same information I have on the slides.

One of the main concepts in this lesson is that energy is lost as it moves up a food chain. Here I’m using an energy pyramid to show the energy loss. During Lesson Importance, I explain how a nation that can just barely grow enough food for its people to eat cannot convert to a meat diet because of the energy loss when animals eat plants.

Students write on their whiteboards why it is important to understand food chains, food webs, and the energy pyramid. In a few seconds, I will have students hold up their whiteboards, and I’ll call on several of them to read their answers.

The lesson’s over now and students are starting to pack up. It was a great success. I believe that with Explicit Direct Instruction, I can walk into any class anywhere and successfully teach a lesson I have never taught before to students I have never seen before. Here’s why:

I know to start every lesson by telling my students the Learning Objective. I know that I need bulletproof definitions of the concepts taught. I always include Checking for Understanding questions every few minutes. Before the lesson is over I will work problems along with my students during Guided Practice. I always ask some Closure questions to make they are ready for independent practice.

Royal School

Students from pre-kindergarten to 11^th grade (the final year of high school in Costa Rica) attend Royal School. Located in a suburb of San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, the campus will house our new teacher training university. We will train the school staff in Explicit Direct Instruction. Then they will become the mentor teachers as our student teachers practice in their classrooms. (See additional articles for a description of our new university in Costa Rica.)

Dr. Silvia Ybarra and John Hollingsworth, founders of DataWORKS, with students at Royal School in San Jose, Costa Rica

We were surprised to see him silently watching his students while copied definitions from the glossary of their textbooks. He quickly ran up to us to say that his students had misbehaved with a substitute teacher the day before, and now they were being “punished” by having to copy definitions of words.

After school the most amazing thing happened. He walked into the principal’s office with a 3 foot by 3 foot petition signed by all his students. Please go back to Explicit Direct instruction they requested. It’s better and more interesting.

Students can recognize effective instruction, and after they know it, they don’t want to go back.

Another teacher in 5th grade said to me, “I now know how to TAPPLE [a DataWORKS Checking for Understanding strategy] effectively and to include cognitive strategies so students remember.”

When I walked out of the third grade class, several students walked past me saying, “Mr. Federico, that was a fun class. I never learned so much.” Other students said that “we were so busy that we didn’t have time to be bored.” One student asked me if I could come back and teach again because “I asked a lot of good questions”.

One teacher told me that when I randomly selected an English Learner student to answer a question, she was amazed that he answered his first ever question in English.  Previously, he was so shy that he only whispered his answers in Spanish to the aide.  When he was selected a second time, he also answered correctly in English.

John, I had the opportunity to see your presentation on instructional strategies for English language Learners at the Ed Trust-West conference a couple of weeks ago. It was by far the most specific, practical presentation I’ve ever seen on the topic, and according to their evaluations, the rest of the session attendees agreed with that assessment. Almost everyone in the session gave it the highest possible marks, and said they would put the practices you shared to use right away.

Thank you, Daria.

 I talk with Kati Haycock from the Educational Trust

Much of this conference focused on data analyzing the achievement gap between English learners and minority groups versus white students. During my presentation, I addressed what effective English Learner strategies look like when implemented in the classroom so English Learners learn more. Some attendees stated that my presentation was one of the best of the conference.

I am ready for my presentation on “How to Implement English Learner

Strategies in the Classroom.”