Lesson sequencing for teaching science (Part 2 - lesson types in the sequence)

epcritmo (25)in #teaching • 6 years ago (edited)

Click here to see other posts in this series:
The background context
Part 1 of how I sequence my lessons (time and interleaving)
Part 2 (this page)
Part 3 of how I sequence my lessons (Guided application and linking knowledge)
Part 4 of how I sequence my lessons (Application of knowledge)

What lesson types should I use in a sequence?

As I explained in the first post, I think all teachers are trying to get their students from inflexible to flexible knowledge. In my spectrum below, we are trying to push our students towards the right.

I explained in the background context that attempting to do this in one lesson is a ridiculous idea. Consider the lesson structure below, this was how I used to structure lessons:

So here every lesson begins with implicit instruction in which the teacher skillfully explains a new concept through carefully planned images and examples. After, the teacher sets about giving the students deliberate practice, which could involve practicing the core content of the lesson using the carefully planned "core questions". So far so good, but there isn't that much time left in the lesson and the teacher (or observer) wants to see some hard core science thinking skills. The next stage is to give students extended thinking questions, often requiring long answers. Here the teacher (as I once did) wants to push the kids to have flexible knowledge as soon as possible. But there is no short cut to expertise. First, as detailed in Part 1, the students will need time to pass this knew knowledge to the long term memory.

How about a two lesson format?

Here, I can focus the learning of new content in one style of lesson that involves implicit instruction and lots of deliberate practice of the exact knowledge I want students to memorise, and the use or retrieval practice using core questions. Then, after some of these lessons, and after enough content has been covered, and enough time has been give to learn this content, I could put the students in for a lesson on pure application of knowledge questions. With intervleaving it the lesson sequence may look like this:

But, the students still struggle. Except for the fastest students, the struggle is too much, and the students don't learn as much as they should, and they don't get the valuable practice for applying their knowledge to new contexts. I think you simply can't skip from one end of our knowledge spectrum to the other, there needs to be some work done in the middle.

So, the core knowledge is accessible, but the intrinsic load is still too high for application questions

There are two things that a student must do when faced with an “application” question:

Firstly, they must identify what knowledge they will need to retrieve from their long-term memory
Secondly, apply it to the new context.

So, I suggest that the bit in the middle of the spectrum requires scaffolded practice of both:

Recognizing what knowledge is useful for a current problem.
Linking the knowledge they have to that context

The lack of practice in this area will add too much load to the working memory, especially for slower students, and they will probably become overloaded and will not benefit at all from the questions. What I think students need before they get to full application of knowledge questions, is to have a half-way house, what I call "guided application questions". Therefore I have three lesson types, this approach streamlines my planning: