Every Student Learns … Every Day!

There was a period in my teaching when the core principle was “deep assessment”. This “Deep Assessment” idea was that every key outcome within a test would be assessed three times BEFORE the test for each student, in class … at the intro level when starting the topic, at an intermediate level after the first usage, and at a higher level as part of the review for the test. I would tell my colleagues that I assessed the important ideas 3 times, and they seemed to think this was good … and so did I, until I thought about my observations.

Sure, it helps students to have multiple opportunities (assessments) on key ideas and get instructor feedback. I would spend considerable time grading these assessments, and writing feedback. This very logical structure did, in fact, work for a portion of my students. As I thought about this, however, most of the students who benefited were doing fairly well before my class. You know, they were mostly reviewing stuff they once knew well.

However, the ‘deep assessment’ strategy missed some of the students in the middle (of need), and missed almost all of the students with the greatest need. Do our classes exist to serve just some students, or all? Hopefully, you think about that question on a regular basis. There are direct connections between that question and the posts made recently about equity Policy based on Correlation: Institutionalizing Inequity.

My current guiding principle is “everybody learns every day”. I seek to provide some benefit to all students.

Many readers are going to be thinking … “What’s so different about that? Don’t we provide the opportunity to benefit every student in each class?”

Nope, we don’t. Think about this … “learning” depends upon readiness and engagement, combined with communication. We fail to address the readiness almost all of the time. By this I am not referring to course prerequisites or placement tests; those are gross measures of overall abilities, and have very little to do with learning.

I’m referring to a thorough analysis of specific knowledge and understanding needed to learn a certain topic. Let’s look at “basic function ideas” as you might cover in an intermediate algebra or college algebra course. Learning basic function ideas (notation, interpretation, points) at an introductory level. The readiness includes:

input versus output
simplifying expressions
substituting values
horizontal and vertical number lines
ordered pair notation and meaning
point plotting as opposed to slope

The image above shows ‘puzzle pieces’ between the person and the learning. Vygotsky used a phrase “zone of proximal development”, which is related to what I am talking about. [Vygotsky was primarily a developmental psychologist, so his results are indirectly related to current learning sciences.]

The ‘ready to learn’ criteria is always there. If we ignore it, we only serve part of the students. On the other hand, if we tell students that they need to ‘review’ something before the new stuff, we expect the weakest students to do the more complicated process without our direct support and advice.

I’m teaching developmental math, not ‘college level’, so my dive into this is really intense. Every class day, we start with a team activity which both checks on the readiness and begins the process of learning today’s stuff. We might spend 20 minutes doing the activity, followed by 10 minutes of reviewing it as a class; my goal is to get everybody ready, and have everybody learn every day. Small teams (3 to 5) does a pretty good job of keeping everybody involved, and making sure that everybody is learning.

In a college level course, we could still use a team activity on readiness. Depending on the topic, we might only need 10 minutes doing it, and 5 minutes reviewing it. In other cases, the ‘readiness to learn’ activity might occupy the majority of the class time.

I can’t tell you that my ‘plan’ is perfect; that’s a unreasonably high standard (even for me 🙂 ). However, I can tell you that this “everybody learns everyday” approach does wonders for attendance and participation. My students with the greatest need still have gaps, but they are smaller. The ‘middle’ students tend to look more like the high-quality (reviewing) students.

We know that ‘attendance’ is highly correlated with success in mathematics. Students with greater learning needs get easily discouraged when our classes do not provide them with much learning — either due to lack of readiness (at the detailed level) OR due to our class structure not engaging every learner. “Everybody learns everyday” minimizes this systemic risk, without harming the higher achieving students.

Developmental Mathematics Revival!

Bringing a new vitality to college mathematics 2011 to 2019