Knowing When to Let Go: Teacher vs. Student-Directed Activities

REFLECTIONS ON:
Teacher-Directed and Student-Directed Assignments

Information for this reflection was taken from Classroom Instruction That Works by Marzano, Pickering & Pollock

These teacher and student directed activities help students to focus on similarities and differences with the teacher-based instruction resulting in a more homogenous conclusion with the students and the student-directed activities having more varying outcomes in conclusions. So, the approach should change based on what the teacher wants the outcome to be: more direct or more diverse.

For activities in which students are comparing things, a teacher-directed activity would identify what is to be compared and the characteristics used to compare them. If it is student directed, it will be less structured and the students will pick what ‘A’ and ‘B’ are to be compared.

This can be applied in the same way to classifications, metaphors, and analogies.
These differences between teacher and student directed assignments can also vary from simply comparing and contrasting things. My classroom teacher intermixes the two ways constantly, using the more structured teacher-directed process to provide students with a given direction and then moves into a more student directed atmosphere.

For example, in a grammar lesson we did last week with appositives and prepositional phrases, her overhead notes of explanation had the definition of the new terms completely written out, for facts that were being reviewed, she left blanks for the students to fill in as the lesson progressed. Also, when she handed out a worksheet, it was a completely teacher-directed assignment because the sentences were already written and all the students had to do was circle the correct answer. However, the next day in order to review, they had to create their own sentences and demonstrate specific parts of speech within them.

Her class lessons seem to progress from teacher-directed to student directed, but they typically involve both ways.
I think that the students’ achievement level benefits from doing both simultaneously. Having teacher directed assignments helps set them on the right path as far as expectations and having someone show them directly first how it works, and then students are allowed to be more creative and put more of themselves into an assignment which helps them achieve more in knowing they can do something on their own with less guidance.

A last example my 8th grade classroom is the activity we did with poetry writing. Each student had to write a poem, a daunting task for many. So they divided the paper into three sections: verbs, adverbs and metaphors for the verbal phrase. The teacher did an example on the overhead, but left the choice of subject and words up to the student, so it was a mixture of both approaches and the activity was amazingly successful.

(Refer to "The Art of Poetry" for more details on the assignment)

The diagram on the left shows an example of a student-directed activty in which sudents can choose the letters to put in the box in the center and create their own mystery word, or if the teacher chooses to include the letters, it immediately changes to a teacher-directed activty. For more templates like this one, click on the picture and explore more links and print outs from Classroom Instruction That Works!