Strategies to Stretch Learners
We often sell our learners a lie that says learning should be fun and easy. In reality, anything that stretches our brain is more likely to be challenging and potentially frustrating than fun and easy! That doesn’t mean it won’t be worthwhile, inviting or engaging – just that it will probably annoy us at some stage. This is life in the learning zone!
The learning zone can be a place of exploration, challenge, playing with ideas, questions, frustration, discovery, failure, mistakes, success, joy, meaning-making and so much more. This is a much more exciting place for our brain than the comfort zone, which is more like sitting on the couch watching telly eating Tim-Tams. That’s a nice place to be and chill out, but not one where we develop and grow. So, what is learning, and how do we know it is happening? That’s what this article is about.
In teaching, it often feels that we spend a lot of time hoping that the skills and knowledge our learners need gets caught rather than taught. We want our learners to head into this learning zone where they can stretch and grow with confidence, knowing that they will be faced with challenges. How often do we give them a map to get there? How often do we give them the skills and knowledge to make sure they can thrive?
One of the skills we can give our learners is knowing how to acquire knowledge, which is vital to use when in the learning zone. We don’t know what we don’t know and our job as teachers is to create opportunities to bridge this gap for our learners. Gretchen Wegner describes a study cycle in the following way:
Step 1: Encoding (input) – Learn.
Step 2: Retrieval (output) Test – Find out what you can and can’t recall.
Step 3: Encode (Re-learn) – Learn the items you didn’t know in a new and different way.
I think this can be used in all classrooms to support learners as they acquire skills and knowledge. I see that we can teach surface skills and knowledge explicitly, which is encoding, in order for our learners to go deeper and then transfer their learning to new situations with confidence.
Some of the skills we can teach explicitly that could be helpful for preparing our learners to venture into the learning zone might be:
• How to ask questions
• How to search for information
• Strategies they can use when faced with frustration or confusion
• How their brain learns
• The conditions that they prefer to learn in
Retrieval is where we evaluate what has been learned and what needs to be relearned. This doesn’t have to be drill and kill – in fact, drill and kill strategy will bore the brain and that’s not a great way to make things stick! Here are a few ideas to practice retrieval, both during and
after explicit teaching:
• Using the Think-Pair-Share technique.
• Plan what you will tell someone at home, where teachers communicate with families to let them know that their child will be telling them something about xxx tonight so they can support this.
• Write the three most important things – draw pictures.
• Tell three different people a different thing you have learned.
• Talk to a partner then share what your partner said to another person.
• Use bubble maps, brainstorm and other graphic organisers.
• Use thinking routines that support retrieval such as “Headlines,” “I Used to Think – Now I Know” or the “+1 Routine.”
• Make a short video explaining your new learning that can be shared in an online journal.
• Complete a quiz face-to-face or using an online tool like Kahoot!
Once we know what we don’t know, then we can set about relearning the bits we missed in a new way.
My ambition as a teacher is that my learners are challenged and have opportunities to dig deep, explore their interests and feel success. I see that part of my job is to help provide a map for them to do this, so being aware of skills and knowledge my learners need and planning carefully to explicitly teach these as efficiently as possible is vital. It is not easy work, but then that is part of being in the learning zone, right?