Lazy Law #3 Teach Your Students to Fish – Virtually I’mPossible Presents: Lazy Learning Land Teacher Podcast
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Teach your students to fish is clearly a spin-off of a classic quote. “If you teach a man to fish, he can eat forever, if you give a man a fish, he will soon die.” You got me, I may have butchered the word for word aspect but I feel I did well enough for you get the gist.
Allow me to bring this into the realm of education. If you teach your students how to think, they will thrive, If you tell your students the answer, they will bother you forever. Well, note essentially forever, just the duration of that current school year. They will always have the urge to bother you for help with every problem they have to solve, that they feel the slightest anxiety over. Translation, you will never get a moment of peace because you would have raised hundreds of needy anti-independent teenage students.
When Your Students Need Help
I like to use this concept of teach your students to fish, when it comes to helping them self-advocate. It also comes in handy when you need to teach them how to properly give others assistance. The number one question my students ask each other when they need help is, “You know how to do this?” Even my highest performing students will give the knee jerk reaction of, “No.” Crazy part about it is, they actually have it correct on their paper. For some psychological reason, the response that is going to come from that question is going to be, “No.”
How do you teach your students to ask for help properly? You have to give them question stems to help start them in the right direction. Directly above my SMART Board in my classroom, I have a Hello, I need Help section. There are several stapled question stems I typed and printed. Whenever a student needs to ask for help, or I catch them improperly asking for help, I direct their attention to the stapled stems. If you would like a free copy of my question stems, click here and read my post, Replace “You Know How to Do This?” With These More Effective Questions.
Teach Your Students to Fish Question Stems
These teach your students to fish question stems are geared towards a math classroom. However, you can take what applies and adjust what does not apply for your content area.
- Can you help me with the first step?
- Can we work together to solve this?
- Can you help me to understand what I do next?
- I did not get what you have, can you help me understand what you did instead?
- I get everything up to this point, can you help me with the rest?
- What does ____ mean?
- I have this example in my notes, can you help me use it on this new problem?
- Could you help me to understand where I went wrong?
This is a way for the struggling students to get help without feeling, “dumb.” When it comes to the higher performing students, they will usually be the one’s doing most of the helping. You will have to train them on how to teach their classmates to fish also. Otherwise, they will simply allow the student that is asking for help to copy their paper, or say, “write this, write that, turn this into a 1, and you got the answer.” Yet again handicapping the student that needs to program their brain to think their way through the process.
Student Philosophers
My students who are helping others (not the ones who are working together to figure it out), are usually the ones that have a good handle on how to complete the problem. They are given specific instructions how how to assist others. I inform them, that they have now stepped into the role of a philosopher.
What is a philosopher? I think of them very similarly to the philosophers that we all know. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle etc. Philosophers asked a lot of questions. When my students are helping/explaining to another student, that is all they are allowed to do. Ask questions. They must ask their classmate questions to get them to tell the philosopher, what they already know is correct. I do not allow them to tell the other student anything. Questioning with questions, until they reach the final destination. In a way, gaslighting them. Be sure to read this article for more insight on How to train your students to be philosophers of math.
Conclusion
Once your students can properly ask for help, they start to feel more confident going to their classmates. This is a major help because their classmates start to become their go-to for help. Instead of always needing the tender love and care from their teacher. Also, when you students are well versed in helping their classmates think their way to a solution, the overall level of independence of your students increases. You will start to hear yours students say they are going to try to figure it out first. Which always makes me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside.
After learning how to fish/think through a question. That student now has more tools and more confidence to try to tackle the next question. If all of your students are fishing, then there is a tiny chance that anyone will actually starve. All of which is great when you are trying to foster a growth mindset in your classroom culture.
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