I’m good at helping students climb.  At activity centres, every group includes a student who’s terrified of heights.  Partway up a climbing wall they freeze, unable to go higher, unsure whether to return.  And then, I have something to offer – two things in fact.  I’m scared of heights too, so I can guess what they’re feeling: attention shrinking to focus on the handholds, to which they cling more tightly; greater awareness of the flimsiness of the wooden wall.  I also know what students need to hear.  Their peers often shout support: “Go on”, “You can do it”, “You’re half way there.”  It’s well-intentioned, but it doesn’t help: the climber is marooned, unsure what to do.

Instead, I give them simple, concrete guidance, one step at a time:

  • Take your right hand and reach up to the hold by your head.
  • Now bring your right leg up, to the big round foothold by your knee.
  • Stand up on your right leg and reach for the next hold with your left hand.

I know this helps me, and I’ve seen it work for numerous students too.  In the moment, generic encouragement is neither helpful nor credible.  Breaking the task into small steps makes it manageable, makes it less terrifying, allows the student to make steady progress and, usually, gets them to the top.  Then they believe they can do it.

This has broader applications.  I’ve suggested four principles from behavioural psychology in making an action easier for students (here); this post looks at one: breaking big goals into smaller steps.  It makes sense that it’s easier to do something step by step: this post explains why, and what it may look like in the classroom.

1) Making it mentally manageable

Breaking a goal into smaller steps makes it mentally manageable.  Working memory is limited: we cannot think about several things at once.  Students trying to ‘write an essay’ or ‘solve an equation’ may be overwhelmed by partially-remembered ideas which they struggle to sequence (or, later, recall).  We need to break it down, as Craig Barton (2018) did solving simultaneous equations:

  1. Decide if the equations are in the correct form.
  2. Decide if we need to manipulate one or both equations.
  3. Decide if we need to add or subtract [and another six steps… p.263].

This allows Barton to help students master each step, including those which are easily overlooked, like deciding how to approach a problem.  It allows students to concentrate on one challenge at a time – less taxing for working memory.  This applies just as much to modelling and explanation as to tasks: we can explain part of the model, check students’ understanding, then move to the next step.  Breaking goals into smaller steps makes them easier for students to comprehend; it has other advantages too.

2) Making it less daunting

A big task – ‘Climb this wall’ – may be daunting; the first step, ‘Put your left leg on that foothold’, is less so.  Writing an essay may be daunting, but we may just want students to write three main paragraphs.  So, students can:

  1. Identify the three most important points to make in answering the question.
  2. Phrase each as a ‘point sentence’.
  3. Identify three powerful pieces of evidence to support teach point.

Rapidly, what felt like a huge challenge has become a series of steps, each within students’ capacity.  If we’ve pitched the steps appropriately it’s hard for students to say, “I can’t”.  Understanding Hamlet may seem impossible; summarising what happens in Act I, Scene 1 much less so.

3) Tightening the feedback loop

Small steps create urgency.  An exam next year might as well be a decade away; a ten-question quiz next week is more immediate.  It’s easier for students to prioritise a small step which feels immediate than a distant deadline.  It’s harder for them to take refuge in optimism that the challenge will disappear or they’ll start working in a few months’ time.  Whenever the deadline, people act as it approaches; small steps promote action by creating nearer deadlines.

Not only do small steps seem more urgent, they allow us to assess students sooner, and respond accordingly.  We can check whether students have completed each step, and know whether they are on track, rather than waiting optimistically until the end.  This means we can pinpoint gaps in their understanding to a specific step.  And, if the steps are well-judged, we can recognise students who are on track, and they can gain confidence they are succeeding rapidly (making it easier to overcome subsequent challenges).

How can we break tasks down?

Even if we want to break tasks down, it remains hard.  Experts automate their actions (Larkin et al., 1980); experience means we lose sight of the small steps we are taking.  We no longer think about releasing the clutch, engaging gear or checking the mirror; they become fluid actions within the bigger task: ‘drive to work’.  This helps us drive (we can concentrate on other drivers, not using the clutch), but it hinders our teaching: we suffer the ‘curse of knowledge’, no longer recognising the difficulty of the action or the steps we took to master it.  Teaching someone to drive requires that we break our own fluent actions into the small steps of a learner: clutch, gear, accelerator.

Likewise, breaking learning down in the classroom is hard for teachers, whether it’s a task, a model or an explanation: if we’re good at solving quadratic equations, we can’t see the steps we take.  To help break a task down, we could:

  • Complete the task ourselves, attending to the steps we’re taking (and alert for automatic actions).
  • Ask a student to complete the task and describe their thinking aloud.
  • Watch in lessons for the points at which students get stuck.
  • Practise our explanations and include pauses and checks for understanding at transitions within them.
  • Create rules of thumb: ‘I’ll pause every time that I move to a new paragraph’; ‘I’ll stop to check with students every time we move to a new line of working’.
  • Record the steps we identify as checklists and ask colleagues to review them.

For example – I’ve written previously about using checklists in essays (more here).  This was my first attempt, faltering steps to break down something I’d spent a decade practising myself:

Conclusion

Breaking climbing into small parts made it easier and allowed students to go further than they’d have done otherwise.  Breaking essay-writing into parts allowed me to demystify a sophisticated and challenging goal.  Breaking tasks, ideas or models into chunks doesn’t mean dumbing down: we still want students to reach the same point.  It means providing the footholds students need.  As they improve, they will gain fluency: with experience they will stop thinking ‘clutch, gear, accelerator’.  But whenever our students are struggling with a task, an idea, or the next foothold, we need to break the goal into manageable, achievable, urgent sections.

My next post addresses the next challenge: having broken the goal down, how can we make it easy for students to take the first step…  A future post will address limits to this approach.

This is a draft excerpt from Habits of success: getting every student learning.  It’s available from Amazon & Routledge.

If you found this interesting, you might also like…

A description of my changing understanding of behaviour, here.

The underlying evidence for making it easy, here.

The framework I’ve developed for getting every student learning.

References

Barton, C. (2018). How I wish I’d taught maths: lessons learned from research, conversations with experts, and 12 years of mistakes. Woodbridge: John Catt.

Larkin, J., McDermott, J., Simon, D., Simon, H. (1980) Expert and Novice Performance in Solving Physics Problems. Science 208(4450):1335-42