A Mile Wide, or a Mile Deep?
IN the last couple days, several commentors have been talking about instruction, and about curriculum and content. Our focus here has been high school science, but the questions ring in my head when I work on my dissertation.
This post about science in SHS sparked a debate over the integrated, wholistic design of the science courses--with emphasis on activities--versus more traditional, discipline-focused courses in the other schools.
That raised several discussions, including one about breadth versus depth, about coverage, as Chris Correa said. I don't want to have that debate again here. Instead, I want to move the notion of breadth and depth into another area--4th grade reading instruction.
My dissertation is about 4th grade language arts instruction. I have data from about 600 classrooms, across the nation in mostly high-poverty schools. These classrooms are divided among four interventions: America's Choice (AC), SFA, ASP, and a group of schools withoout one of these interventions for comparison (comp). Teachers in these classrooms completed daily surveys asking about the lang arts instruction in detail. I have about 12,000 days of instruction captured on these surveys, which we call logs.
There are 12 different reading skills that could be taught on any given day, or several taught as part of the same day. Some are simple, like asking students to answer questions--either aloud or some other way--that have the answers in the text. Other skills are more difficult, like having students compare and contrast two different texts. Most logs show that teachers teach more than one skill per day, not surprisingly.
SFA teachers check, on average, more skills per log than teachers in any other intervention. So imagine a classroom in SFA, where a teacher is moving students through several skills, or repeateing a group of skills, over a 90 minute period. This would contrast with an ASP school, where teachers are introducing fewer skills in the same period and possibly spending lots of time on the same skill.
So I wonder...is there a question to be considered here about width versus depth? For fourth graders, is it better to focus on a single school for a whole lesson? Or would it be better to teach the same skill repeatedly, over many days, embedded in work with other skills too?
Unlike the high school science problem, I think that there's merit in the breadth approach here. These skills are not content knowledge--they're tools for working on understanding text. And I think that practice over days and weeks makes the tools easier to manage. I wonder if this would introduce a new idea, like density. Perhaps ELA lessons for elementary school should be dense with skill instruction, meaning lots of skills get taught everyday, and repeated over weeks and months.
Anyway, that's what I'm thinking about now, in my dissertation work. I'm doing lots of other things as well. But this is one of them.
This post about science in SHS sparked a debate over the integrated, wholistic design of the science courses--with emphasis on activities--versus more traditional, discipline-focused courses in the other schools.
That raised several discussions, including one about breadth versus depth, about coverage, as Chris Correa said. I don't want to have that debate again here. Instead, I want to move the notion of breadth and depth into another area--4th grade reading instruction.
My dissertation is about 4th grade language arts instruction. I have data from about 600 classrooms, across the nation in mostly high-poverty schools. These classrooms are divided among four interventions: America's Choice (AC), SFA, ASP, and a group of schools withoout one of these interventions for comparison (comp). Teachers in these classrooms completed daily surveys asking about the lang arts instruction in detail. I have about 12,000 days of instruction captured on these surveys, which we call logs.
There are 12 different reading skills that could be taught on any given day, or several taught as part of the same day. Some are simple, like asking students to answer questions--either aloud or some other way--that have the answers in the text. Other skills are more difficult, like having students compare and contrast two different texts. Most logs show that teachers teach more than one skill per day, not surprisingly.
SFA teachers check, on average, more skills per log than teachers in any other intervention. So imagine a classroom in SFA, where a teacher is moving students through several skills, or repeateing a group of skills, over a 90 minute period. This would contrast with an ASP school, where teachers are introducing fewer skills in the same period and possibly spending lots of time on the same skill.
So I wonder...is there a question to be considered here about width versus depth? For fourth graders, is it better to focus on a single school for a whole lesson? Or would it be better to teach the same skill repeatedly, over many days, embedded in work with other skills too?
Unlike the high school science problem, I think that there's merit in the breadth approach here. These skills are not content knowledge--they're tools for working on understanding text. And I think that practice over days and weeks makes the tools easier to manage. I wonder if this would introduce a new idea, like density. Perhaps ELA lessons for elementary school should be dense with skill instruction, meaning lots of skills get taught everyday, and repeated over weeks and months.
Anyway, that's what I'm thinking about now, in my dissertation work. I'm doing lots of other things as well. But this is one of them.
posted by Jenny D. at 8:18 AM
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