How to Help Children Achieve the “Ah ha” Moment in Learning.

What is the ultimate goal for a teacher? For me, it is watching a student have an “ah ha” moment when they finally can do whatever it is they are trying to do independently! Those moments make all the hard work worth it. There is nothing better than watching a child succeed. Please notice that word independently. We are going to come back to that in a bit.

As a teacher that has spent the majority of my career working with struggling readers, those moments are not as frequent but often so much sweeter when they happen. When you work with students that struggle you learn to be a keen observer and to notice the smallest of accomplishments. It is these moments that you want to capitalize on and can have a huge impact on a child’s confidence. As a teacher, you become a cheerleader of sorts. It is important to note, that the praise has to be genuine for it to have the desired impact.

Confidence — a feeling or consciousness of one’s powers or of reliance on one’s circumstances

When I am doing a teacher training, I often ask the group to think of a time they learned something new. I ask them to think specifically about something in their personal life. Stop right now and try to think of something new that you have learned to do recently. Were you able to come up with something? What I noticed in my trainings, for most people, it has been a long time since they have learned anything new. Here are some guiding questions to help you reflect on that experience:

• When was the last time you were willing to be uncomfortable and learn something new?
• How did you feel as you were trying that new thing?
• Were you comfortable?
• Was it easy? If it was easy, what made it easy?
• Did someone model or show you how to do it?
• If it was difficult, how did you feel?
• If you kept trying and you still failed, how did that make you feel?
• If you failed, did you give up?

As teachers, we ask our students to do this every day. To be a risk-taker and do it willingly. Often we are surprised that children resist and don’t want to. Now imagine if school is difficult for you and every new task is challenging and often met with failure. Would you want to try new things? Would you have the confidence to try and try and then have to keep trying some more? Of course not, but this is where we need to develop trust with our students. If children know they can trust you they will give it a try.

One of the hardest lessons I had to learn as a teacher was to prompt students instead of tell them the answer. Believe me, I am not the only one that struggles with this. For the past ten years I have spent an extraordinary amount of time in classrooms observing teacher and student behavior. As teachers, we hate to have students struggle. The last thing we want is for a student to get so frustrated that they cry. We are afraid of productive struggle for our students. The Law of The Rubber Band states that “Growth Stops When You Lose the Tension Between Where You Are and Where You Could Be.” According to this principle, we need tension and discomfort to grow.

Teaching Reading Recovery was one of the best jobs I ever had, second only to being a National Literacy Consultant. I LOVED everything about teaching Reading Recovery. I got stretched and challenged daily and learned so much about literacy. If you don’t know anything about Reading Recovery training, you need to know this one thing. Every month two people bring a student to class and teach “behind the glass!” It’s one way glass where the class sits on the other side and watches your lesson and every teaching move you make with your student and critiques you. After the lesson, you have to debrief and discuss the lesson and what you did and why. That was definitely one of the most nerve wracking experiences of my life. I am grateful, after being stretched, every observation since has paled in comparison. I guess you could say it helped me develop confidence in myself and my abilities! Isn’t that our goal?

Reading Recovery teachers work with students one on one for a half hour each day. In a setting like this it is very easy to be too supportive and helpful. In fact this was so difficult for me early on in my career that I had a sign posted right in front of my eyes that I looked at EVERY day. It said, “the person that does the work, does the learning!” In other words, STOP helping so much Mary! This is when I learned to prompt students. Below you will see a photo of a prompting guide I made. Each section flips up when prompting for a particular reading behavior. The other thing I learned, was to sit on my hands and back away from the table. This prevented me from getting in and doing the work for the student.

Remember, the ultimate goal for students is INDEPENDENCE. Here are a couple questions to help you develop this skill. It is important to reflect on your teaching moves all day long and ask yourself, “who did the work in that moment?” Did I help build their confidence or hinder it? I heard a presenter say, if you’re going home exhausted at the end of the day and your students still have unlimited energy, you did all the work!

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”

― Frederick Douglass

The joy is in the journey!

Mary

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