Ignite 2.

0 : Clarity: WS3 Research: Skillful : Aug 2019

INTRODUCTION TO CLARITY:
Clear teachers do far more than speak or lecture in an organized and easily comprehensible way, though
that is not irrelevant to student understanding. These teachers guide student thinking in deliberate ways
along a structured route engineered for thinking and learning. This is the scientific part of teaching. We
can use what we know from a century of cognitive science to maximize the chances of students’
assimilating, integrating, remembering, and being able to use concepts and skills. No content expert
comes into teaching equipped to accomplish this skill- intensive job.
Clarity means to cause mental acts within students’ heads that will result in their understanding or being
able to do something. It’s what happens inside the students’ heads that matters, not what the teacher is
doing. Fortunately, what teachers do has a great deal to do with what goes on in students’ heads if they
use the knowledge base of cognitive science well. Unfortunately, as Graham Nuthall (2005) points out, it
is possible to have a smoothly functioning, lively classroom where all the students appear happily
occupied with worthwhile tasks and yet no mental acts conducive to learning are taking place.

There are lots of teacher behaviours that fall under clarity. One of the most prominent one is Framing the
learning

FRAMING THE BIG PICTURE:

This group of behaviors clusters around the mission of framing the big picture. It is composed of
behaviors that help students place new information in a larger framework of meaning in the beginning of
a lesson. The teacher can do this by doing one or all of these:
● Communicating the objective: what the students will know or be able to do at the end of the
upcoming instruction
● Giving students the itinerary, that is, the list of activities or sequence of events they’ll be doing
● Reminding students of the big idea or essential question of which this lesson is part
● Explaining the reason for an activity—that is, how it helps meet the objective
● Explaining why the learning is worthwhile, why it might matter to learn this material
● Identifying criteria for success when a product or performance is involved

Research shows consistent correlation between these behaviors and improved student learning. We do not
yet know with numerical accuracy the proportional role each plays in the ocean of factors that bear on
student learning, but we do know that each matters and that there are a variety of ways to accomplish each
of them.

Let’s explore a few of these in some detail:

1) Communicating objective:
 a) Most of us have been taught how to say and write behavioral objectives. Through this,
students are directed toward what they’re supposed to focus on while viewing and know
at the end of the lesson. Such statements frame the big picture, giving an overall
orientation to what is to follow to help students attend to what is important and to make
sense of subsequent activities. The main point in communicating objectives is to
introduce lesson activities with something that casts them within a bigger frame, purpose,
or objective, so that the students know what they’re going to learn and what to focus on
when they read, lis- ten, or watch during instruction.
b) We have found that many schools now require teachers to write a daily objective on the
board for students. That’s a useful practice so that students have something to refer back
to, but posting it is nowhere near sufficient. It has to be accompanied by making sure
students know what it is and what it means. The point is that learning is empowered when
students understand what they are aim- ing to learn, and something has to happen beyond
posting the objective on the board to assure that student understanding.

2) Communicating the importance of the objective:

a) Communicating to students why the objective is worthwhile is the “Who cares?”
question. For some students, understanding the usefulness or relevance of a learning
objective makes a big difference in their investment in the lesson. Writing about
“quadrant one learners” in her description of different learning styles, McCarthy (1987)
makes the point that all learners need reasons for why they are studying what their
teachers are asking them to learn. But knowing the reason is more than nice, it’s essential
for imaginative learners. She says that many teachers erroneously assume that students
buy into learning because they see their teachers as experts who know what should be
learned. “Students need reasons of their own. Giving them a reason, a need of their own
for proceeding, is so simple and fundamental that one can only marvel that it is not done”
(McCarthy, 1987, pp. 92, 94). We think, parenthetically, that this same generalization
applies to all adult learning as well, whether it be in college courses, staff seminars, or
professional development offerings. For all learners, it will be useful to know why the
topic is important to learn, and for a segment of each audience it will be essential.
b) Giving reasons for learning doesn’t necessarily happen with every lesson. Many lessons
are taking students one increment further or developing their skill one degree higher on a
particular objective. At the beginning of new units or topics, however, giving reasons for
our objectives can be particularly appropriate. And it never hurts to remind students from
time to time why something is important.

3) Giving students an itenary:

a) An itinerary is like an agenda or road map. It lists or delineates the sequence of steps that
will occur over the course of an activity or period. It tells what activities will take place
and in what order. For example, it is common to hear a teacher say, “This morning we’ll
be going over your homework answers and then looking at the material in the new
chapter. Then we’ll do some group work on your projects.” This useful information gives
 students a mental sequence to follow and lets them know what to expect. Learners with
sequential learning styles are particularly responsive to the practice of posting itineraries
in a visible place.
b) Giving students an itinerary serves as a complement to the objective but doesn’t replace
communicating the objective itself. The objective specifies the learning outcome for
students (the destination); the itinerary tells them how they will get there. An itinerary
affords students the opportunity to keep track of what has happened, what is currently
happening, and what’s left to come. The true test of whether students have understood the
objective of a lesson might be whether they can explain the connection between the
events on the itinerary and what they are expected to know or be able to do when they
have reached the end of the journey or the destination (the objective)