I’ve been reconsidering good ways to begin lessons and share objectives. Looking beyond writing objectives on the board (and perhaps copying them into books), Rob Phillips (2001) suggests using Initial Stimulus Material. He argues that stimuli such as stories, images or problems can help us outline objectives in “a clever, meaningful way”, posing hypotheses and establishing lines of enquiry. We can stimulate curiosity while introducing key terms and ideas for future lessons.
The three examples below seek to move away from ‘starters’ and nearer ‘Initial Stimulus Material’. (If you believe we shouldn’t be sharing objectives with students, it might be worth starting here instead though).
Version 1: The settler
We could use a word search or an intriguing image to get students concentrating from the outset. We might ask them, for example, to count the squares (or corners) in the picture above. This provides students with an immediate task, perhaps helping them settle into the lesson while requiring limited teacher explanation. If the activity does not lead students to begin considering the content of the lesson however, there are probably better ways the time can be used – and we are doing nothing to share our goals.
Version 2: The starter
We could ask students to make inferences from a picture, or about a book from its cover: “What can you tell about Henry VII from this painting?” I’d describe this as a classic starter activity: it certainly has its place, although examples like this can be restrictive, relying, as they do, on students’ guesswork and often limited prior knowledge. Without careful questioning (and perhaps a richer stimulus) however, such starters will do little to set out the lesson’s goals: simply moving on to the main body of the lesson with a “Now we’ll find out which of your guesses were true,” is probably insufficient.
Version 3: Initial Stimulus Material
‘A Court for King Cholera’ has proved a productive stimulus to introduce the study of public health during the Industrial Revolution. This is partly because the cartoon is incredibly rich, but carefully-planned questions are needed to help us set out our objectives. We can begin with questions relating to the details of the image and life at the time:
- How busy does the scene seem?
- What is the child in the foreground holding?
- What is the lady in the front-left doing?
This is merely a prelude to help students begin exploring the image however: we can then consider what this suggests about the era and the questions it poses:
- What size is the coffin being carried on the right of the picture? How much notice is everyone taking of it? What does that suggest about death rates?
- Why would the streets be so filthy? Who do we rely on to keep things clean? What impression of government action does this image give?
- Given the signs for lodgings for travellers, what does this suggest about movement of people at the time? What kind of houses are they living in? How does this connect to what we know about the Industrial Revolution?
Through this discussion we can introduce (or revise) knowledge of key features of the Industrial Revolution and link them to public health. Alongside this, we have posed questions which future lessons will address, such as ‘Why were governments so slow to improve public health?’ All of this has been achieved through a vivid, concrete example, which will be highly memorable (and can be reintroduced in future lessons – “Remind me what the cartoon suggested about government action… Today we’re going to examine why the government were so slow to react.”
Initial Stimulus Material is a powerful way to share goals while provoking thought and curiosity. It also reflects relatively well-evidenced principles of cognitive science: the usefulness of introducing new topics with pre-questions, and the value of integrating concrete representations – such as a cartoon of messy streets – with abstract ones, such as discussion of laissez-faire Victorian government (Pashler et al., 2007). What I’ve been struggling to establish is exactly how Initial Stimulus Material would look and work outside history. A few ideas occur, but I would love to see examples which have worked:
English – Offering a passage of text describing a character and using it to introduce a chapter (or a study of descriptive language)
Maths – Showing a maths problem, asking how we might solve it, what techniques we might use and how it is similar or different to past problems.
Science – Showing an image – of a skydiver for example – and asking what forces are at work, which direction the skydiver will go in, how their suit will affect this. Using this as a way to surface existing student (mis)conceptions and identify what we need to learn to understand forces.
Further reading
Why does sharing learning objectives matter?
How can we share learning objectives effectively?
How I’ve tried to share learning objectives better
How can I start a lesson well?
References
Pashler, H., Bain, P., Bottge, B., Graesser, A., Koedinger, K., McDaniel, M., and Metcalfe, J. (2007) Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning (NCER 2007-2004). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Research, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.
Phillips, R. (2001) Making history curious: Using Initial Stimulus Material (ISM) to promote enquiry, thinking and literacy. Teaching History 105 (19-25)
Hi Harry, this is right up my street.
I’m going to try and find the time to blog, but here are just a few quick thoughts:
1. Version 2: The starter – You criticise the opening question: “What can you tell about Henry VII from this painting?” as restrictive because it relies on students’ guess-work and limited prior knowledge. This is true, unless of course they have been studying HVII or the Tudors, then it would be quite an interesting assessment question. I think a better starter question (one I use all the time) would be, “What do you notice?” I like this question because it doesn’t require any prior knowledge, it’s ‘open’, and asks the students to look rather than guess. Once they’ve had the chance to really look and discuss their thoughts I would then start telling them about who he is, why he was important, what happened (the Battle of Bosworth Fields, the War the Roses, etc.) with this background knowledge the students would be in a much better place to interpret the picture – “Now you know a little about him, what does this painting tell us about Henry VII?”
2. Version 3: Initial Stimulus Material – This painting would be a great starter on the Industrial Revolution. I agree with the use of some carefully-planned questions, but I’m not keen on asking closed questions (for inquiries) – “How busy does the scene seem? What is the child in foreground holding?” They tend to ask for obvious answers, “Busy.” “A brush.” My preference is again to ask the students to look and see what they notice: “What can you see? Take a bit of time, there’s a lot going on. Maybe make a note of something that catches your eye, we’ll talk about these things in a minute.” Once they start to give some feedback, I’d ask them to start reasoning, “The coffin, yes. I can’t make out what size it is, what do you think? And they’re just carrying it through the street, no one seems at all bothered. I wonder why?” “It might be it’s on the way to a funeral or maybe there’s a child body inside. Did you notice the name of the picture? One thing to remember is nothing in art happens by accident, so the artist chose the name and drew the coffin for a reason. What might it be? And what other things in the picture tell us what the artist wanted us to know?”
I want to write some more, but have to go! Will do some more thinking.
Re: closed questions, I agree with you, but here – “What is the child in foreground holding?” “A brush” – we’re looking at different children I think. I always ask this question, but about the child holding the rat, because 90% of students get it wrong and it elicits a significant response when I correct it: sometimes they come out to the board to have a better look. So, sometimes, I think closed questions have their place in a starter activity like this.
Chris Culpin did a great critique of this cartoon at an SHP conference once, pointing out the features suggest racism towards Irish immigrants. Sometimes I also take the discussion that way, depending on the focus.
Hi Sally,
I was going for the ‘rat’ too! I had missed the racism angle, but now you mention it… just goes to show how much there is in each of these images.
Hi Tim,
Thanks for the thoughtful comment and the blog on the same theme. I agree with you about a lot of this. I think my explanation has come adrift in trying to convey a couple of ideas.
I’ve deliberately tried to contrast the questions for Versions 2 and 3 to show that questions need to be carefully planned to explore the depths of a picture if we want the activity to establish questions which we will pursue in subsequent lessons. This is a draft section for the book I’m writing, and one of the things I want to show is the difference between ‘nearly’ doing something and getting it right. To do so I’ve chosen a deliberately limited question for Version 2, but I should perhaps have made this clear. I agree we can get a lot out of the portrait of Henry VII, as your blog makes clear – although I think ‘A Court for King Cholera’ lends itself to this even better.
‘What do you notice (relating to X…)?’ is my preferred opening gambit for examining almost any picture (and sometimes texts and artefacts too). I would then scaffold onwards in a similar way to what you show. Where I might use the closed questions is to begin such a chain of questions on aspects of the picture students had missed – in such rich images, there are almost always things that get overlooked.
Overall my aim would always be to scaffold questions in the way I’ve described here – https://improvingteaching.co.uk/2014/05/17/why-do-i-rely-on-lollipop-sticks/ – I think our goals are pretty similar here.
Thanks again for the comments and the thoughts. If you have any ideas on how to clarify a concept by showing examples and near-misses while avoiding over-simplification, I’m all ears.
Hi Harry,
Thanks for the clarification. I understand your thinking, my blog wasn’t a critique of yours, more a ‘riff’ I didn’t really know where I was going when I started looking at the portrait and had intended to spend most of my blog talking about King Cholera, but the more I studied it, the more I found in the portrait. As is often the way with art.
I agree King Cholera is probably more accessible to students and contains more overt information of the time. I guess this is primarily because the artist was making a social commentary.
I completely missed the boy holding the rat! Haha, just goes to show what happens if you rush to interpretation without taking the time to really look. *Makes note to self*
I agree I think goals our very similar, especially after reading your ‘lollipop’ blog. Those scaffolding questions are great.
I’d like to help with your request, but I don’t really understand the question. I suspect you’re thinking about it much more deeply than I have.
Once again thank you for the original blog, really got me thinking. I’m planning to do some work on it.
Reblogged this on The Echo Chamber.
This reminded me of my HS teacher, who whenever notices us being bored in class, would then approach us and give us illustrations like on your Version 1. I would say that this method on keeping the students’ brains active is definitely effective.
Thanks for sharing this! Cheers!
Classes A-Z UK
I found this very interesting, including and perhaps even more so, the discussion in the comments below.
I wonder whether there is still a sharp distinction to be drawn between ‘the starter’ and ‘the ISM’. I can see where Tim is coming from in that, theoretically, both images could be used in the same way though obviously, the richer the image the more that can be extracted from it.
Is the distinction that we are trying to draw that a ‘starter’ activity is just that, a way of beginning a lesson that might nudge students in the general direction of what will be covered in that lesson. Where as, with ISM it is not “starting a lesson” as in the title of your blog but “starting a sequence of lessons” that begin the construction of an enquiry?