John Walkup

A trip into a classroom last year reminded me of an important ingredient of quality teaching. My memory is fuzzy, but I recall the grade level of the children as fifth grade. I remember the lesson quite well, however. The teacher was developing the concepts of median, mean, and mode and teaching the students how to perform the computations. The teacher was, for the most part, using a lot of research-based strategies during her lesson, which is what I was primarily seeking and measuring. However, many of the students were barely paying attention, and one of the students (I will call him “Thor”) was not only off-task but was pestering nearby students.

I sidled up to the teacher and told her that I was curious if students had a preference for one of the three statistical measures over the others. Which of the three – mean, median, or mode – do they consider the easiest to calculate, and why? (Naturally, the next question would be, “Which is the hardest, and why?”) I asked her if she would mind asking the question and putting the students into small peer groups to discuss their answers.

The results were magical. Even Thor dived into the discussion. “Pick the mode, Stupid! All you have to do is look for the number that shows up the most!” Although noisy, the class was filled with discussions on academic content. Furthermore, many students were re-reading their notes.

The key to classroom engagement and differentiating instruction is Bloom’s Taxonomy. By asking a higher-order (evaluation-level) question and prompting students to work in small groups, the teacher was able to engage every student in the class on lesson content. Gifted students were given a chance to lead the small-group discussions; weaker students learned the material by discussing it with their peers.

In my opinion, insufficient number of questions and activities centered on higher-order thinking skills is the most significant cause for low student achievement and classroom management problems.