Now that you have observed typical student responses…
What did your classroom data show you about the use directives to elicit student responses at your school or district?
During your observations, did you see teachers asking students questions or providing directives for them to complete?
Based on our work with thousands of teachers in classrooms, here is what you likely learned:
Most teachers ask questions that start with who, what, when or where.
Some teachers are mindful to also ask questions that begin with how or why.
Students typically respond to these types of questions with short, clipped answers. In many cases, you probably heard student responses of five words or less.
Students rarely encounter directives in their everyday instruction. When asked to respond to an academic directive, you may have seen students look quizzically at the teacher, or wonder if this is a new game or aberration from their normal classroom language use.
You probably saw students, when confronted with a directive, take far more time to formulate their responses, which were likely to have been in longer, more academic-sounding sentences.
The key implication from our own extensive data is that students who have few opportunities during regular instruction to respond orally and in writing to directives struggle on assessments that feature this language form and structure. In short, the language structures of the test create barriers to students’ ability to express their content knowledge.