Set high expectations in your classroom by never excepting part of an answer.
Right Is Right is about the difference between partially right and all-the-way right—between pretty good and 100 percent. The job of the teacher is to set a high standard for correctness: 100 percent. The likelihood is strong that students will stop striving when they hear the word right (or yes or some other proxy), so there’s a real risk to naming as right that which is not truly and completely right. When you sign off and tell a student she is right, she must not be betrayed into thinking she can do something that she cannot.
Many teachers respond to almost-correct answers their students give in class by rounding up. That is they’ll affirm the student’s answer and repeat it, adding some detail of their own to make it fully correct even though the student didn’t provide (and may not recognize) the differentiating factor.
1. Hold out for all the way. Great teachers praise students for their effort but never confuse effort with mastery. A right answer includes the negative sign if a negative sign is warranted. There no such thing as “Right! Except you need a negative sign.” When you ask for the definition of a noun and get “a person, place, or thing,” don’t do students the disservice of overlooking the fact that the answer is incomplete: a noun is a person, place, thing, or idea.
Simple, positive language to express your appreciation for what a student has done and your expectation that he or she will now march the last few yards is often the best way to address such a situation and retain positive tone in your classroom. Here are some phrases to do that:
“I like what you’ve done. Can you get us the rest of the way?”
“We’re almost there. Can you find the last piece?”
“I like most of that. . .”
“Can you develop that further?”
“Okay, but, there’s a bit more to it than that.”
“Kim just knocked a base hit. Who can bring her home?”
Another effective response is to repeat the student’s words back to him or her, placing emphasis on incomplete parts if necessary:
“A peninsula is water indenting into land?”
“You just said that a noun is a person, place, or thing . . . ”
“You just said that a noun is a person, place, or thing, but freedom is a noun, and it’s not exactly any of those three.”
“You just said that first you would solve the exponent and then you’d solve what’s in parentheses.”
2. Answer the question. Students learn quickly in school that when you don’t know the right answer to a question, you can usually get by if you answer a different one, especially if you say something true and heartfelt about the wider world. Can’t identify the setting in the story? Offer an observation about the theme of injustice in the novel instead: “This reminds me of something from my neighborhood.” Most teachers can’t pass up a student’s taking on issues of justice and fairness, even if what they asked about was the setting. Over time, students come to recognize this.