In Defense of Fussy Teaching

Someone's gotta defend it

Academic research, even when correct and insightful, is also a little bit silly. Take this article, “Classroom Strategies to Enhance Academic Engaged Time.” It’s good. One of its main “theoretical” points is that kids learn more if they spend more time thinking about the content. This is obvious, almost trivial. Yet they devote almost a whole page to a flowchart explaining where the time goes.

As if we didn’t know! But there is something of significance here anyway, in this weird waterfall/sieve. The goal is engaged academic time. Sometimes that comes easily. But other times it feels like a daily battle to get a group to focus on anything even remotely related to the thing we’re supposed to be teaching. The question is, is there anything we can do about this?

I think we can. The general principles are:

• Ask students to do less, more frequently.

• Every student answers every question.

• Teacher controls the pace.

• Switch modes often.

What it means to teach this way, in practice, is that lessons get fussier. Here’s an example of the sort of fussy teaching that I mean:

Geometry students enter and are told to start on an area worksheet, which is review. Gathering the group, I offer a brief explanation of how to solve a problem, asking the entire class at points to respond to prompts all together, chorally. Then I distribute a worksheet and tell students to try the first three questions on their own—even if they have to guess. After sharing answers, I ask everyone to try the next three. After completing the worksheet, I distribute mini-whiteboards and ask students to solve review problems one at a time as I write them on the board.

That’s pretty fussy. If your eyes glossed over in that too-dense paragraph, the teacher (me) carefully controlled the pace. Questions came pretty frequently; when they did, every student was supposed to answer them at the same time. (There was a tiny bit of independent time at the start of the lesson.) There were four different modes: (1) independent worksheet, (2) choral response, (3) three-at-a-time worksheet work and (4) mini-whiteboards.

Contrast this with an unfussy lesson:

I ask my Calculus students to take out their homework, going over any questions. I then explain the Product Rule to the class, frequently pausing to ask questions. I give a clear example of how to solve a problem using the Product Rule and distribute a practice worksheet that they work on with partners.

Here’s an entirely different sort of unfussy lesson:

I display a pair of staircases and ask students to decide which is steeper. I then distribute a collection of lines and ask the class to work in pairs to rank them from least to most steep. After ten minutes, I bring the group together to share ideas. During the discussion I highlight mathematical ideas that relate to the concept of “slope.”

These lesson sketches are each fine. But the unfussy lessons have big blocks of time when students are supposed to be doing stuff. Stuff like: “keeping focused” and “asking for help” or “not talking about the dumb thing your friend Becky said.” If kids are supposed to work on a worksheet for ten minutes, that’s ten minutes of self-management. A lot of the time, that’s totally fine. But, to put it bluntly, some kids are just awful at that sort of stuff.

Some of it is situational. At the start of a new topic, when the math is less famliar, kids might have a harder time maintaining stamina on a set of problems. Or maybe, in a block schedule, there’s that one day during the week when kids just seem unable to stick with a task for five minutes. Or it’s a very immature 6th Grade. Or it’s that one group of kids that just…they just...sigh.

I remember, in my first year of teaching, there was a class that was giving me trouble. I felt like I couldn’t get through an explanation at the board without interruption. My reaction was: OK, so no more explanations at the start of class. I labored over making engaging problem sets that they could work on with pairs while I circulated and helped. I tried to make my lessons even less fussy. (Forcing me to make the assignments far more fussy, ironically.) It was inefficient, but felt like improvement.

These days, in that exact same situation, I pull out the fussy teaching playbook. I tell kids do this, do that. I ask lots of questions, and everyone has to answer each one—no, you can’t sit this one out. It’s harder, I’ll admit. But the upside is that expectations are clear, feedback is constant. Engagement, I believe, is often way higher.

This sort of teaching, as Dylan notes, often is seen as anti-lecture. Well, it is. But it also doesn’t fit easily into the main ideological categories through which we talk about teaching. It’s certainly nothing like inquiry. It also doesn’t seem right to call this an explanation-heavy style of teaching. Noticing, wondering, listening, discussing, practicing, discovering—the particular activity doesn’t matter for fussy teaching. It’s all fair game, as long as kids only spend a few minutes at a time doing it.

I wish there was a catchy ideological formula for this style of teaching. “Active” comes close, I guess. “Direct Instruction,” if you look at the official capital-D, capital-I description, is in fact calling for something like this. “Fussy” is a transparently awful title, and I’ve always been bad at naming things. (Reyzl took the lead on naming our children, thank God.)

Someone smarter than me at selling things needs to tackle this. Or maybe it’s unsellable. Maybe the pedagogy of being really on top of things is too non-ideological to really spread on its own. Maybe it’s too basic, in a way too obvious for teachers to get excited about.