A Learners’ View (ALV) Is Of Choices On The Shortest And Fastest Path To Learning, The Oxygen Of Social Life.
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WHENEVER LEARNING OCCURS FROM A LESSON, teachers used ALV (a learners’ view), either deliberately or by chance. By using ALV to shape lessons, scientists have shown that 8 or more out of 10 learners can learn those lessons. ALV as used here, is a proof of concept, not a guess, personal view, theory, model, hypothetical, hermeneutic or other speculative statement.
Teachers can use ALV is a tool. By using it, teachers may accelerate, increase, and deepen (AID) learning promptly and sometimes dramatically. ALV describes a series (a path) of probabilities of choices learners will likely make while learning. For purposes of uses of ALV, probabilities consist of more facts than of speculation of those choices.
The ALV Path identifies five points in a sequence where learners make choices while learning. Teachers choose whether or not to match each of their choices at these five points.
These matches guide expression of heartfelt empathy and purpose through the art of teaching. Matches are part of the craft of teaching as are mixing colors and stroking brushes part of the craft of being a portrait artist or of a surgeon guiding the stroke of her scalpel, removing the object of the surgery as well as sponges, etc., and then stitching together that incision.
Fundamentals for Using ALV
From ALV of teaching, a lesson is a gamble, a bet by teachers that learners will gain more than they loose by learning the instructed lesson, especially that teachers’ efforts are worthy of learners’ time which they cannot recover, as well as of attention, effort, and their other personal resources, including loss of learning to do something else during that time in or out of school.
1. By their presence in class, learners agree (more or less) for teachers to give them an edge, to show them how to win learners’ part in that gamble.
2. Teachers choose whether or not learners will learn each lesson. Each choice made while building that lesson is a separate bet with a foreseeable risk (a gamble). Teachers who use ALV as a guide for selecting those choices can reduce that risk.
3. Learning is connecting dots in ways that solve problems. The more dots the lower the likelihood learners will learn that lesson. Teachers choose in lessons how to show ways to solve problems that are concrete, easy, familiar, simple, and specific, or their opposites.
4. Learners will more likely connect (a) something concrete with something abstract, (b) something easy with something hard, (c) something familiar (known) with something unfamiliar (unknown), (d) something simple with something complex, and (e) something specific with something general (CEKSS).
5. To complete one of these connections, learners make choices from among at least 15 options across 5 choice points.
6. An ALV Lesson consists of showing how to make one connection, solve one problem. As people commonly use the word lesson, it consists of a string of ALV Lessons.
7. Dots to connect in lessons consist of vocabulary (such as words, sounds, motions, muscle movements, etc.), logic of relationships among vocabulary, and relative values of these in society. In lessons, teachers identify and sort vocabulary into logical/empirical relationships that informed people accept as solutions to problems.
Prepare to Design a Lesson
This list is based on observing and on self-reports of what people have done to prepare and then have offered 1.0 Lessons consistently. Through trial-and-error with one or more colleagues, they refined (edited) lessons as best they could before instructing it. They:
1. Identified specific behavior patterns they expect learners to demonstrate at the end of the lesson.
2. Demonstrated or described each lesson, then edited out any words, motions, etc., including favorite examples and stories, not crucial for promptly connecting the dots of the lesson.
3. Reviewed each other’s lessons after instructing them and again refined them further in order to increase the pace and amount of learning.
They worked with these resources, sometimes from common background, sometimes in writing (such as for Common Core State Standards). Lists:
1. Of expectations, such as Common Core State Standards, translated into observable (measurable) academic performances.
2. Expected academic performances analyzed into a hierarchy of the minimum performances learners must demonstrate to meet those standards.
3. Each teacher keeps these lists handy in order to design lessons that meet expectations examined during audits conducted by third party evaluators, such as through State required testing and reporting of student academic performances.
4. Schedules of sufficient time, initially daily after classes, to assess and refine the adequacy of each lesson.
Suggestions for extending uses of the ALV Path based on observing and using it. Use these as reference points to choose priorities for an instructional schedule, especially for choosing how much time you plan to spend on each lesson. Tip: On average, the shorter time spent designing and testing a lesson, the longer the lesson and the fewer learners will learn that lesson.
1. Calculate the number of seconds assigned in the formal school schedule for you to have “contact” with students. For example, a 50 minute class period has 3,000 seconds x 180 day academic year = 540,000 seconds per academic year per scheduled 50 minute class.
2. Estimate the number of “facts” and “manipulations” a learner must demonstrate to score 100% on the state required test (arguably an audit of your teaching) for your classes. Keep and update that list. Divide the list into subject areas, such as primary grade subjects of reading, writing, math, etc. or secondary school part of subject matter, such as scientific properties of chemical elements, chemical processes, etc. according to what you are teaching.
3. You can also use these numbers with reimbursement rates per student your state pays your school to calculate dollar-costs and benefits, such as what does it cost for learners to learn one of the expected facts and manipulations. Possibly your school district administrators, state education administrators, political watch groups as well as unions and other advocacy groups do such calculations for you.
Begin Designing a Lesson at Its End
A secret, not a magic bullet, while designing a 1.0 lesson is to begin at the end of the lesson (with your objective, the punch line of the joke, the key in which you plan to sing, the molecular weight you want learners to calculate) and work backwards to the start of the lesson. This way, you can adjust what you say and do to fit the amount of time you plan to allot to the lesson.
Based on what you know about learners in this class, choose:
1. Will you offer an ALV Lesson, a string of ALV Lessons, or a common lesson without distinguishing among its parts? How many seconds have you consumed preparing this lesson?
2. How many seconds do you plan for this lesson to consume?
3. How many out of each set of 10 students do you expect to learn it? If you guess less than 9, then adjust your lesson to one that will likely yield at least 9 out of each 10.
4. Which generic problem will your lesson show how to connect easy, familiar specific dots to solve it, What is it? What is like it? What is not like it? What comes next? What is missing?
5. What could you do to consume fewer seconds in your lesson next time? To clarify the dots and their relationships? For more learners to learn the lesson?
6. What ratio of lesson preparation to measured learning do you find most beneficial to learners? Will an independent outside auditor find your ratio acceptable when viewed as a cost-benefit analysis?
Weave Three Threads into a Triple-Helix
Each lesson consists of a Triple-Helix of three sets of choices a teacher makes from three sources and then chooses how to match them to form one lesson. Teachers choose:
1. When to use ALV principles of learning, for example, whether to start with a show/demonstration of a simple familiar task to complete a complex task or whether to just talk about the subject matter of the day.
2. What parts of which subject matter to offer in which order, for example, will you have learners recite the ABCs before showing them how to read a sentence such as The rat sat on the mat by Pat the cat.
3. How to match ALV to content and then to instruct it. For example, when to apply ALV, throughout the designing/planning of a lesson, during a follow-up effort during instruction as when learners do not respond appropriately to instruction, to ignore it, or at the most leave it as a way to assess a lesson sometime after class.
Related Reading
- Quick Tips
- 20 Second Lesson
- 1.0 Lesson Plan
- 1.0 Lesson
- 1.0 Instruction
- Triple-Helix of Learning
- Wish List Lesson (WLL)
- ALV Tips for Teaching
- NESI TIPSheets
- Memorable Teaching