In emergency or crisis contexts, schools often have to take volunteers, like older teens, who are new to teaching and who have no preparation in teaching. In many cases, induction and professional development may be impossible, and infrastructure unavailable for many types of distance learning. So how can we help these new unprepared teachers to learn how to teach?

There is certainly no substitute for good pre-service or in-service training, but one option might be to use checklists.

But before talking about checklists, let’s talk about good teaching.

The bricks and mortar of good teaching

“Good teaching” is often elusive to define, but we know it when we see it. Educational research is pretty clear on what good teaching involves—content knowledge, the ability to use a variety of instructional and assessment activities to enact and measure learning outcomes, an understanding of how children learn, etc. This is the “big stuff”—the “bricks”— of teaching and it is the focus of most pre- and in-service teacher training. Taken together, this set of knowledge and skills is what makes teaching well so complex and why so many teaching-related initiatives are hard to scale and routinize.

However, good teaching also involves smaller, critically important, behaviors that are discrete, fairly straightforward, and that don’t involve lots of professional development, support or scaffolding (like our “bricks” above). These behaviors—often involving communication, organization and interaction— are the “mortar” of good teaching—and when enacted, they can improve education delivery, efficiency, and student learning. They are behaviors that can be replicated and routinized using something as simple as a checklist.

Checklist manifesto

Before Atul Gawande made checklists famous for surgeons (“Wash your hands… Remove the scalpel from the patient.”), teachers were using checklists to communicate to students what was important about an assignment; to simplify complex tasks; to keep students on task; and for self-assessment and accountability purposes. Checklists for teachers, especially those new to and overwhelmed by the intricacies of teaching, serve a similar purpose.

I have used checklists for years with teachers, as coaching supports, as part of teacher self-assessment, and increasingly, in cases where I lack continued access to teachers (because of security issues, a lack of technology or budget for follow-up). I’ve used them to help these same teachers deconstruct complex instructional activities into discrete, simple, actionable steps. My highly unscientific and completely anecdotal research suggests that many teachers find checklists helpful for the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph. Below is a checklist of discrete behaviors that introduce basic teaching practices to new teachers in difficult contexts.

1. Tell students what they will learn

This gives a purpose and direction to the class and to the topic of study.

• What they are studying/doing
• Why they are doing what they are doing
• What you expect to see happen

2. Develop routines

Routines help students understand expectations, manage workflow, and minimize wasted time (for example in transitioning from one activity to the next). They make classroom management easier and increase time on task (See #8) and the structure and predictability routines are often very helpful for students who have experienced chaos or trauma.

• Have activities that you do every day, the same way, in the same order
• For example, as you are taking attendance or class is getting started, have something that students should do so you maximize learning time (for example, a question on chalkboard that they must answer—like an “entrance ticket.”).
• Another routine: Start class with a quiz, followed by 10-minute lecture, then group work, then assessment.

3. Make sure students can hear

Students cannot learn if they can’t hear the teacher (especially if the teacher doesn’t move from the front of the room). The classrooms in which many teachers work may be bare concrete (if they are lucky) with lots of reverberation so the teacher’s voice quickly fades from the front to the back of the room.

• Speak loudly and clearly
• Walk around the room
• Don’t speak while writing on the chalkboard
• Ask students to signal when they cannot hear

4. Make sure students can see

Ditto for vision. Many students have vision issues. For more information on capitalizing on chalkboards, read how Japanese teachers use chalkboards.

• Write in large, clear script on the chalkboard
• Use different colored chalk if possible for different concepts
• Walk to the back of the room and make sure you can see what you wrote
• Let students move closer to the board if they can’t see

5. Walk around the room

Better known as “observation by walking around,” this connects the teacher with students and is helpful for shy students who are more likely to ask questions when the teacher is nearby (provided there is enough space to walk around).

• Move beyond the teacher “T”—walking across the front of the room and maybe down a middle row
• Stand at the back and at the sides
• If students are being disruptive or not paying attention, stand by them (they will soon stop whatever they are doing).

6. Wait!

Wait time is critical because human beings need time to process thoughts. Longer wait time produces higher levels of cognitive processing (Rowe, 1974).

• After asking a question, count slowly to 15
• Yes, it is really uncomfortable…so walk to a window and look outside
• If students do not answer, tell them you will wait and then ask the question in a different way. (This convinces students that you are serious and expect an answer.)

7. Ask students first!

Questions promote engagement and mentally active learning, especially open-ended clarifying and probing questions.

• Before introducing a new topic, ask students wat they know about the topic
• Before answering a student question, ask another student to answer it
• After students give an answer, ask them why they believe their answer is correct
• (And call on students randomly… and wait…..)

8. Maximize instructional time

The goal of class time is to devote as much of it as possible to student being engaged in learning activities (versus non-learning activities). This is “time-on-task.”

• Do things simultaneously vs. sequentially (e.g., pass out papers and tell students what they will be learning today
• Build in instructional routines (see #2).

9. Tell stories

All human beings are hard-wired to love stories. When we embed content in stories, our brain builds patterns and meaning to make content stick. I’ll overplay the building metaphor again to say that stories are the “mortar” that connect what may appear to be often seemingly unrelated “bricks” of knowledge into a meaningful narrative (Rose, 2011).

• Tell a story about a math concept or letters of the alphabet
• If you do not feel comfortable creating stories about a topic, your students will!
• (Okay, this can be hard!)

10. Believe in your students

We know that when teachers have high expectations for their students and communicate these expectations, student learning outcomes improve (Ferguson et al. 2015).

• Tell them that you know they can learn and succeed…then act like it.

11. Tell students what they’ve learned

A summary puts into concise form the most important information or ideas of a lesson. It helps the learner focus on the main points of the lesson while eliminating concepts of lesser importance.

• Before concluding the lesson, ask students what they have learned
• Then summarize (or better still ask students to summarize) what students have learned.

Teacher-generated checklists

The above list is derived from teacher observations (and I am sure can be found in the research on good teaching). In 2007, while doing classroom observations in India, I began to develop lists of behaviors I saw that signaled good teaching. Over the years, I have kept adding to “my list” as I have observed teachers across a range of geographic regions, types of schools and socioeconomic backgrounds. I have shared this list of behaviors, in checklist format, with teachers from the elementary level to university instructors. Teachers could certainly create their own.

Conclusion

Checklists outlining desired specific, non-complex teacher behaviors can be an important component of teacher coaching, monitoring and support. Like checklists for students and surgeons, checklists for new, untrained teachers make explicit the most important behaviors that they can follow and enact. Checklists break complex tasks into more basic, discrete and doable procedures. They help teachers stay on task and assess their performance against the checklist.

Checklists are not a substitute for quality professional development or support; but where new teachers in emergencies lack access to professional development or technology or a “more knowledgeable other,” they may be a helpful intervention. Indeed, they may be the only intervention.

References

Ferguson, R. (2015, October). The influence of teaching beyond standardized test scores: Engagement, mindsets, and agency: A study of 16,000 sixth through ninth grade classrooms. Retrieved from http://www.agi.harvard.edu/projects/TeachingandAgency.pdf

Rose, F. (2011, March 8). The art of immersion: Why do we tell stories? Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2011/03/why-do-we-tell-stories/

Rowe, M.B. (1974). Relation of wait time and rewards to the development of language, logic and fate control. Journal of Research in Science and Teaching, 11 (4) 291-308.