Automatic

The estimated time for reading this post is 1 minute.

I read an interesting quote this week, from a book called Peak, that said,

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Once a person reaches that level of "acceptable" performance and automaticity, the additional years of "practice" don't lead to improvement. If anything, the doctor or the teacher or the driver who's been at it for twenty years is likely to be a bit worse than the one who's been doing it for only five, and the reason is that these automated abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate effort to improve (Ericsson and Poole, p. 13).

Ouch! This is my 18th year in education and I assumed that my “additional years of ‘practice’” in the classroom automatically equated to improved teaching. This quote made me start asking myself, What is an “acceptable” level of automaticity as a teacher?

Certainly, there are things that should become automatic over time such as setting up the classroom, routine responses to typical questions, training students on classroom procedures, etc. (I had hoped that taking attendance would have become be one of those automatic things for me, but to the dismay of every attendance clerk I’ve every worked with, not yet...) Miriam-Webster defines automatic as "happening or done without deliberate thought or effort."

Automaticity may imply that we are doing things more efficiently, and efficiency is a great asset to the classroom. It frees up precious time for more important tasks. However, there are aspects to the classroom that require “deliberate thought or effort” and, if executed with automaticity, could easily result in complacency. If my goal is to make everything “automatic” and “acceptable”, there is a danger of losing my passion for excellence. I must be intentional with my thoughts, my choices, and my questions in order to provide the best learning environment for my students.

So, by reflecting on the following: (1)What aspects of my teaching should be automatic? and (2)What aspects require deliberate thought and effort?,  I can facilitate the “deliberate effort to improve” and be assured that my additional years of teaching lead to continued improvement.

Time to Process

The estimated time for reading this post is 1.5 minutes.

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We have been walking through math classrooms for a couple of weeks now.  It has been great to see all the things students are doing in RUSD classrooms.  We walked into one classroom last week, just as the teacher was telling the students they had 5 minutes of quiet time to work on the task alone before they could discuss in their group.  The teacher came to me and sounded apologetic that we weren’t going to see some great 5 minutes of teaching.  I assured her that this was AWESOME!  I stayed to observe the groups, and with one minute of quiet time still left on the clock, I could see a few pairs begin to whisper about the task.  It was great to see students excited about the task.

Students need time to interact with the task on their own.  When we give students high cognitive demand tasks, they need time to process.  During that time, students will create unique and different ways to attack the task.  This will generate group discussions that are much more robust.  If you find the group conversations are being monopolized by a few strong students with firm beliefs, try allowing ALL students time to process before they come together as a group to discuss the task.