“A teacher should be a guide on the side rather than a sage on the stage.”
This common saying is one of the most useless pieces of advice that teachers receive from their education professors. Many learning opportunities are, in fact, lost when teachers try to minimize the amount of direct instruction they provide to students.
The evidence is clear that students benefit when teachers clearly explain new concepts, provide plenty of opportunity to practice, and quickly correct student errors. To do this effectively, not only do teachers need to know their subject matter well, but they also need to be able to communicate it to their students.
Fortunately, a new book is available filled with plenty of practical tips for teachers. Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching by Zach Groshell is only about 100 pages long, but its suggestions are worth more than the hundreds of pages of academic gobbledygook that teachers are typically forced to read in their education courses.
Like many teachers, Groshell started his career by trying to implement the theories passed on to him by his professors. At first, Groshell avoided putting desks in rows, kept direct instruction to a minimum, and designed plenty of open-ended tasks and projects for his students.
In the end, the only students who benefited from this discovery approach were those who already knew the material quite well. Everyone else was left to flounder, and they did. That is when Groshell realized that he needed to provide clear and direct explanations if he wanted his students to learn the material.
Simply put, Groshell’s students needed a sage on the stage; a competent teacher focusing on student learning and not on the inane theories taught in faculties of education. And that is what he became.
One of the most important parts of Groshell’s book is where he notes that while long-term memory is apparently limitless, working memory is easily overwhelmed. That is why we struggle to remember the names of new acquaintances but have no problem reciting the names of everyone in our immediate family—and all sorts of other personal details about them.
Because working memory is limited, we must always be mindful of cognitive load. If students don’t transfer concepts into their long-term memory, they are pushed to use their working memory all the time. This creates a learning bottleneck.
That is why, for example, it is so crucial for students to memorize the multiplication times table and practice until the table becomes part of their long term memory. Students will be equipped to tackle more advanced math problems with basic mathematical facts memorized.
Groshell provides plenty of suggestions for how teachers can reduce cognitive load. For example, he recommends keeping classroom decorations to a minimum so that students aren’t distracted during a lesson.
In addition, Groshell gives plenty of tips for how to ensure that explanations are effective. From cutting out unnecessary words to avoiding topics that distract from the lesson at hand, there are plenty of simple things that teachers can do to improve student learning.
Anyone who wants to become a better teacher will benefit from Groshell’s book. Get a copy to see what you can do to help your students learn better.
Michael Zwaagstra is a public high school teacher and a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
