S6 E11 - The Trap Inside the Teachable Moment

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We must be strategic about harnessing teachable moments to ensure they enhance rather than distract from our learning objectives. Even experienced educators can get swept up in exciting classroom discussions that inadvertently create inequitable learning environments.

• The satisfaction of engaging students in rich, spontaneous discussions can sometimes lead us away from our lesson objectives
• Developing a "prompt or park" decision framework helps manage student curiosity without sacrificing focus
• An "I Wonder Board" provides space to acknowledge student questions while staying on track with lesson goals
• Creating schema requires focused attention on the "one thing" students need to learn
• When we allow discussions to drift, we create inequitable situations where some students walk away with necessary background knowledge while others don't
• All learning should build toward summative tasks, so distractions that don't serve this purpose should be parked
• Assuming students have background knowledge because "they learned it last year" is risky—hope is not a strategy

Be intentional about teachable moments because in those wonderful engaging experiences, we might be distracting students from essential learning. Until next time, happy teaching!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Why?
Hello there.
Welcome to this episode of theStructured Literacy Podcast.
My name is Jocelyn and I am sohappy to have you here.
Picture this You've introduced anon-fiction text to your
students in preparation for atext-based unit.
Students are engaging well,they're reading with a partner

(00:20):
responding to your queries, andthen you hit a part of the text
that they find interesting.
Their eyes light up, they situp straight and hands shoot up
across the classroom.
Aha, you think here's ateachable moment.
In your excitement to haveengaged the students, you add

(00:41):
your own anecdote interestingfact.
Or wondering further engagingthe students, you add your own
anecdote interesting fact, orwondering further, engaging the
students in rich discussion.
With a satisfied smile, yousend the students off to recess
feeling good.
After all, isn't this why youbecame a teacher?
To get students to beintellectually curious.
And if you've been teaching fora while, you'll know the

(01:04):
satisfaction of moments likethese.
They're the best.
One of the things we'reencouraged to do as teachers is
to identify the teachablemoments and harness their power.
It's a real skill and astrength, but all strengths,
overused, become a weakness, andthat is what today's episode is

(01:26):
all about.
The scenario I just shared withyou is exactly what I observed
on a recent school visit, andnot only did the classroom
teacher fall into the trap ofthe teachable moment, but and I
have to confess my part here Ihelped, chiming in with my own

(01:46):
contribution to the discussionand to the fun.
At the conclusion of the lessonwe looked at the student
reflections and saw exactly whatwe had done.
While some students had madethe connections that were the
point of the lesson, others hadgotten completely carried away,
bringing in their own existingknowledge and interests.

(02:06):
Isn't that a good thing, I hearyou asking.
It might be if the point of thelesson was to make a
text-to-self connection, but itwasn't.
The point of the lesson was tobuild domain-specific knowledge
for a deeper understanding ofthe text-based unit.
The point of the lesson was tobuild domain-specific knowledge,

(02:29):
to build a deeper understandingof the text in the text-based
unit and for context, the unitwas our Velveteen Rabbit unit
from the resource room, and thebackground knowledge text was
about the experiences ofchildren in England at the turn
of the 20th century.
The one thing that studentsneeded to walk away with was an

(02:51):
understanding of how affluentchildren were raised, because
that's the context of the text.
What they hooked onto was theexperience of the poor children.
So while they did walk awaywith greater awareness, it
wasn't focused on the conceptthat would assist comprehension
of the target text.

(03:12):
As I looked at the studentresponses, I could have kicked
myself.
I know better.
I spend most of my timethinking about how to harness
attention and make learningstick.
I had even identified theparagraph most important to the
lesson and worked with theteacher to write a query to

(03:33):
focus student attention on that,and still I got carried away in
the moment.
Now it could be a mistakesharing this with you, but I
want to demonstrate that evenexperienced teachers who
understand the cognitivesciences can make rookie
mistakes.
So what does this mean for theteachable moment for us in our

(03:56):
classrooms?
Should we ignore them?
Should we only do what we'veplanned in advance?
I think that would be a greatshame.
We all know that some of ourbest work happens in the moment.
Teaching without thatopportunity would be soulless.
When an opportunity forconnection building arises, we

(04:16):
need to pause and think.
Will this connection buildingtake our students deeper into
the one thing that is, thepurpose of the task or lesson at
hand, or will it distract fromthe goal we are trying to
achieve?
Are we creating schema or arewe creating extraneous load?

(04:39):
The next time you encounter theopportunity for a teachable
moment, pause and decide if youshould prompt and pursue or park
it on the I wonder board tocome back to another time.
And if you've not heard mespeak about an I wonder board,
it's an idea that I came up withwhen I had a very curious group

(05:00):
of preschoolers I was teachingand they had so many questions
that we simply could not address, and so that we didn't derail
everything we did, I had an IWonder Board, and when an idea
would come up or a questionwould be asked that I couldn't
answer in the moment andsometimes didn't know how to
answer, I would simply say my,what a wonderful idea.

(05:21):
Let's put it on the I wonderboard and come back to it later.
It's so important to hold spacefor student engagement and
curiosity.
Without that, learning is aseries of box ticking exercises,
but we can't do this at theexpense of focusing student

(05:41):
attention on the one thing theyneed to learn to build strong
schema.
So the next time you come to aparticularly interesting topic
in your classroom that was noton the plan, remember am I going
to prompt and pursue, or will Ipark it?
Prompt it or park it?

(06:01):
That's the decision to make,and if you need to write, prompt
or park on your board in yourclassroom to help you stay on
track and in fact, perhapstattoo it on your forehead, as I
clearly needed to do that day,then go ahead and do that.
And now let's talk about whythis matters at all.

(06:23):
It's really tempting to dismisswhat I've said and focus on the
fact that students are engagedin conversation and they're
interested, and if that was thewhole goal, it would be fine.
But the reason we need to thinkcomes back to how humans learn.
One of the ways that we supportstudent working memory to make

(06:46):
it easier for them to engagewith new content and in this
case, with a new text theVelveteen Rabbit is to help them
activate existing schema,activate existing background
knowledge.
This means that when theyencounter the new material,

(07:06):
everything is a little easierbecause they have something
established to hook the newlearning onto.
In the example I shared withyou of my rookie mistake, the
end result was that some of thestudents had encoded the
information about impoverishedchildren and some possibly and

(07:29):
probably hadn't.
So, in not being tight in theintent of that background
knowledge text and making surethat all students walked out of
the lesson with the focus on theexperience of the impoverished
children.
I had and the classroom teacherhad inadvertently created an

(07:52):
inequitable situation when itcame to first encountering the
target text for the text-basedunit, because some children had
existing schema and some won't.
So all of this focusing on onething what is the purpose?
What do we want to get out of?

(08:13):
It is not just about being ableto tick a box on.
I focused on one thing the goalof this is to make sure that we
are creating and engineeringcumulative, successful students.
That leads us to the end point,which is, as anyone who has

(08:33):
written a text-based unit withme in your school, as we've done
this coaching all roads lead tothe summative task.
That's where the student willdemonstrate their learning.
So if what we're doing doesn'tbuild a step or a bridge to that
summative task, it's likelyit's a distraction, while we

(08:53):
know that there is variationbetween how long it takes
different children to learn thesame content, because they need
different numbers of repetitionsto make things stick, to be
able to retain new informationin their memory, to then recall
and use later.
The way we learn is remarkablysimilar because our brain

(09:18):
architecture is remarkablysimilar.
We need to focus studentattention.
We need to engage them thinkingabout the point of the lesson.
We need to provideopportunities to practice and
rehearse.
That's how you create schema.
That means when the schema iscreated and you know the schema

(09:41):
exists, you can activatebackground knowledge to support
new learning in a future task,unit or subject.
We do way too much assuming whenit comes to schema and I will
ask teachers very often do yourstudents know this?
And very often the answer iswell, they should, because they

(10:04):
did it last year.
That's not an answer, that's anassumption.
So within our own classes, wedon't want to leave things to
chance.
We don't want to assume thatthe students have gotten out of
the lesson what we hoped theywould, because hope is not a
strategy.
So, when you encounter theteachable moment, be really

(10:25):
careful, really intentional andreally strategic, because in
those moments that feel so good,we can be having a wonderful
experience or we can bedistracting students from the
learning at hand.
Just a quick one this week.
That's all from me.
Everyone, until I see you nexttime, happy teaching.