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October 2009 | Volume 67 | Number 2 Developing School Leaders Pages 86-87
Robert J. Marzano
During the course of a typical lesson or unit of study, teachers regularly present students with new information. Sometimes the information is peripheral—even if students do not understand it, they can still grasp the overall goal of the lesson or unit. However, sometimes the information is essential—without it, students will have little chance of comprehending the overall goal.
To help students process information that is essential to understanding specific content, teachers can use an effective strategy that involves the following five elements.
Chunking means presenting new information in small, digestible bites. This requires carefully examining the manner in which students will experience new content. If the teacher intends to present content in the form of a lecture, he or she needs to determine the crucial points at which to pause so students can interact with one another about the new information.
For example, for a lecture on the topic of theoretical probability, the teacher might decide to make her first stop after she has discussed some basic differences between theoretical and experimental probability. If she's using a videotape or a video clip she's downloaded from the Internet, she might decide to stop the video about two minutes into the discussion of how theoretical probability is used in games of chance. This idea of stopping so that students can digest the information also holds true for demonstrations, exhibitions, guest speakers, reading content in a textbook, and the like.
Whereas chunking involves the size of the bites for new content, scaffolding involves the content of the bites and their logical order. To illustrate, let's say that a teacher is showing students a strategy for editing a composition for overall organizational logic. The teacher might organize the steps in that strategy into three chunks. The first chunk would involve steps that deal with determining whether the composition has good transitions from paragraph to paragraph. The second chunk would involve steps that deal with determining whether the major sections of the composition (that is, its beginning, middle, and end) logically flow into one another. The third chunk would involve steps that deal with determining whether the composition as a whole sends a unified message. Each chunk logically sets up the next chunk.
Interacting refers to how students process the information in each chunk. One common way to facilitate processing is to organize students in groups and ask each group to summarize the content in the chunk, identify what was confusing, try to clear up the confusion, and predict what information might be found in the next chunk.
It's important that as many students as possible respond. Teachers can increase the response rate to questions in several ways. One technique, response chaining, involves having students respond to the answers of other students. Students can agree with, disagree with, or add to a response. Another technique is to use the voting technologies that frequently come with interactive white boards. These allow students to electronically cast their vote regarding the correct answer to a question. Their responses are immediately displayed on a pie chart or bar graph, enabling teacher and students to discuss the different perceptions of the correct answer. If voting technologies are not available, students can record their responses on inexpensive slates.
As its name implies, pacing involves the extent to which a teacher moves through chunks at an appropriate pace—not too fast and not too slow. The teacher will need to slow down if students do not understand the content in a particular chunk or speed up when student engagement in a chunk begins to wane.
Monitoring involves continually checking for student understanding. If students do not understand the content in a particular chunk, the teacher revisits or reteaches that information before moving on to another chunk.
This information-processing strategy comprises a set of component strategies, each of which has its own research support (Good & Brophy, 2003; Marzano, 2007; Mayer, 2003). Simply executing the strategy in the basic sequence described is effective in and of itself. However, research studies I conducted in 85 elementary, middle school, and high school classrooms, each of which was videotaped and analyzed regarding the relationship between teacher behaviors and student achievement (Marzano & Haystead, 2009), reveals nuances regarding how best to use this strategy:
When executed well, this process dramatically increases students' understanding of new information across content areas and at every grade level, which makes it a strategy that all teachers can use to great benefit.
Good, T. L., & Brophy, J. E. (2003). Looking in classrooms (9th ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Marzano, R. J. (2007). The art and science of teaching: A comprehensive framework for effective teaching. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Marzano, R. J., & Haystead, M. (2009). Final report on the evaluation of the Promethean technology. Englewood, CO: Marzano Research Laboratory.
Mayer, R. E. (2003). Learning and instruction. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill, Prentice Hall.
Robert J. Marzano is Cofounder and CEO of Marzano Research Laboratory in Denver, Colorado. He is the author of The Art and Science of Teaching (ASCD, 2007) and coauthor, with Mark W. Haystead, of Making Standards Useful in the Classroom (ASCD, 2008). To contact Marzano or participate in a study regarding a specific instructional strategy, visit www.marzanoresearch.com.
October 2009Developing School Leaders
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