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The Clarity of Instructions and Explanations

In this section, I will be reflecting on the clarity of instructions and explanations. Clarity here means the quality of being clear and easy to understand. It is extremely important for teachers to provide a clear set of instructions and explanation during the process of teaching and learning.

 

 

For students truly to be able to take responsibility for their learning, both teacher and students need to be very clear about what is being learned, and how they should go about it. When learning and the path towards it are clear, research shows that there a number of important shifts for students. Their motivation improves, they stay on-task, their behavior improves and they are able to take more responsibility for their learning (Absolum, 2006).

 

 

I was assigned to Pn. Hafni’s class the most; hence, I learned quite a number of things observing her teaching. In giving instructions, she is precise and uses as little words as possible. The students’ in her class are not fluent in their English making it more difficult for her to teach English. Unlike other classes I had been in where the teacher speaks Bahasa Malaysia almost throughout the whole English lesson, Pn. Hafni makes sure that she speaks English most of the time. Since the students are not fluent in English, she has to give short instructions such as “today we will talk about spending wisely”. If seen clearly, the best-fit word in that instruction would be ‘discuss’ but this was changed because the students do not know the meaning of it. If time is spent on every big word used in class, there will not be enough time to carry out the planned lesson.

 

 

When elaborating on a point, the explanation that comes along also has to be clear in order for the students to understand what the teacher is talking about. I did observe this during my placement. Pn. Hafni will always get questions from the students about uncertainties and she would take her time and explain it well to the students even if she has to repeat herself several times. What I had gathered from observing how the teachers in this school give clear instructions and explanation is that we need ample of patience when doing so, especially, if you are working with students that are of low ability. They need more time to process the given information, hence, more time is needed and probably longer explanations are needed by them.

 

 

Similarly said in A3 my mentor had an activity where she needed the students to rearrange a few segments to a story, match a picture to each part of it and finally to read the whole passage together as a class. When instructing the students to this she used a step by step approach where she said “first we will read each of this segment”, “second I want each of you to quietly think which of this six comes first” and “third, without shouting out the answer, raise your hands and I will pick one of you to come to the front and point it out”. This continued until all six was arranged in the correct sequence. Logical sequencing of content refers to the appropriate order of information delivery. According to Wilson and Cole (1996), teachers should "present instruction in an ordering from simple to complex, with increasing diversity, and global before local skills" (p. 606). In other words, "instruction should take steps to control the complexity of assigned tasks," use "variety in examples and practice contexts," and help "learners acquire a mental model of the problem space at very early stages of learning" (p. 607).

 

 

Rearranging segment of a passage based on the given pictures

The essential components of clarity instructions and explanations are:

  • Learning objectives

  • Relevance

  • Examples and modeling

  • Success criteria

  • Checking for understanding

 

 

Hattie defines teacher clarity quoting the (unpublished) work of Fendick (1990) as “organization, explanation, examples and guided practice, and assessment of student learning — such that clarity of speech was a prerequisite of teacher clarity.” (Hattie 2009, 126)  One of the main points of Hattie’s books about Visible Learning is the importance to clearly communicate the intentions of the lessons and the success criteria. Clear learning intentions describe the skills, knowledge, attitudes and values that the student needs to learn. Teachers need to know the goals and success criteria of their lessons, know how well all students in their class are progressing and know where to go next.

 

 

There are a few things that can be achieved when there is clarity in the classroom. Both the teacher and students will be able to describe how the learning objectives relates to the “big ideas”, how the learning is relevant, how students will go about the learning and how students will know it has been learned by using success criteria with reference to examples and modeling. When these are in place, what exists is a partnership between teacher and students, within which learning intentions capture the depth of learning at an appropriate level for each student and the teacher has sufficient depth of understanding of the specified curriculum and its progressions of learning to work with any student to identify his or her next learning step.

 

 

Reference

 

Absolum, M. (2006). Clarity in the classroom. Auckland: Hodder Education. pp 76-95.

 

Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement.

 

Wilson, B. G. & Cole, P. (1996). Cognitive teaching models. In D. H. Jonassen (ed.), Handbook of research for educational communications and technology. New York: Simon and Schuster MacMillan.

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