Guide Student Practice

Guide student practice: 

Successful teachers spend more time guiding students’ practice of new material. 

Research findings:

It is not enough simply to present students with new material because the material will be forgotten unless there is sufficient rehearsal. An important finding from information-processing research is that students need to spend additional time rephrasing, elaborating, and summarizing new material in order to store this material in their long-term memory. When there has been sufficient rehearsal, the students are able to retrieve this material easily. They thus are able to make use of this material to foster new learning and aid in problem-solving. However, when the rehearsal time is too short, students are less able to store, remember, or use the material. As we know, it is relatively easy to place something in a filing cabinet, but it can be very difficult to recall where exactly we filed it. Rehearsal helps us remember where we filed it so we can access it with ease when needed.

A teacher can facilitate this rehearsal process by asking questions; good questions require students to process and rehearse the material. Rehearsal is also enhanced when students are asked to summarize the main points and when they are supervised as they practice new steps in a skill. The quality of storage in long-term memory will be weak if students only skim the material and do not engage in it. It is also important that all students process the new material and receive feedback so they do not inadvertently store partial information or a misconception in long-term memory. 

In the classroom:

In one study, the more successful teachers of mathematics spent more time presenting new material and guiding practice. The more successful teachers used this extra time to provide additional explanations, give many examples, check for student understanding, and provide sufficient instruction so that the students could learn to work independently without difficulty. In contrast, the less successful teachers gave much shorter presentations and explanations, and then they passed out worksheets and told students to work on the problems. Under these conditions, the students made too many errors and had to retake the lesson. 

The most successful teachers presented only small amounts of material at a time. After this short presentation, these teachers then guided student practice. This guidance often consisted of the teacher working the first problems at the blackboard and explaining the reason for each step, which served as a model for the students. The guidance also included asking students to come to the blackboard to work out problems and discuss their procedures. Through this process, the students seated in the classroom saw additional models. 

Although most teachers provided some guided practice, the most successful teachers spent more time in guided practice, more time asking questions, more time checking for understanding, more time correcting errors, and more time having students work out problems with teacher guidance. 

Teachers who spent more time in guided practice and had higher success rates also had students who were more engaged during individual work at their desks. This finding suggests that when teachers provided sufficient instruction during guided practice, the students were better prepared for independent practice (e.g., seatwork and homework activities). Still, when the guided practice was too short, the students were not prepared for the seatwork and made more errors during independent practice.