Automaticity does not mean that teachers become automatons – glorified robots just walking through their classes. No, automaticity means that teaching skills have been learned so well, they have become so ingrained, that they are automatic. Just like when we learned to drive a car, the first attempts were focused on details and we had lots of jerking and quick stops. But now, our brains have created a pathway of expertise so we can drive smoothly while hardly thinking about it. We have learned to drive to a level of automaticity.
The same thing needs to happen for any new skills that we adopt for delivering lessons in the classroom. We have to practice them to the point where our brains have built the pathways to make our teaching automatic. This is like the athlete who has practiced so much that he or she can perform any move with ease and fluidity. That is the goal for automaticity for teachers – to teach so smoothly it looks easy and effortless.
What are the prerequisites for gaining this ability?
- We have to know exactly what strategies we are learning and why;
- We have to be willing to make mistakes, or at least not be very smooth at first. That’s the only way to get better.
What is the best professional development?
To that end, teachers are offered professional development by their districts. But the problem is that not all professional development is created equal. There are many kinds of professional development. These include consultation, coaching, communities of practice, lesson study, mentoring, reflective supervision, and technical assistance. The most effective for building automaticity, according to the 1987 research by Joyce and Showers, is in-situation coaching.
They showed that implementation of new skills is:
- 5 percent with learning by theory,
- 10 percent with theory and demonstration,
- 20 percent with demonstration and practice,
- 25 percent with theory, demonstration, practice and corrective feedback, but
- 90 percent with theory, demonstration, practice, feedback, and in-situation coaching.
What in EDI needs to be automatic?
The Explicit Direct Instruction model of teaching asks teachers to upgrade their delivery of lessons to make them more effective – based on solid research. Let’s look at the major “deliverables” in an EDI lesson. In an EDI lesson, there are three structural delivery strategies that are critical, and four additional delivery strategies that are refinements to better meet the needs of the students. As we’ll see, the structural strategies are best learned while actually teaching a lesson; they are dynamic. The refinement strategies can be practiced and added a little bit at a time. Because they are more situation-dependent (on content, on student needs, etc.), the refinement strategies are hard to practice in every lesson. Thus, a teacher can concentrate on the big three during the lesson, achieve some degree of smoothness, and then add the others as time goes on.
Automaticity is the result of fine-tuning our teaching skills. We can always get better, but we have to focus. New York Times bestselling author Daniel Coyle in his book The Talent Code describes this process of achieving excellence as one of “deep practice.” We focus and repeat and feel what it’s like to be performing at an excellent level. We are building up the neural circuits that give us an “unconscious competence” or what we would call automaticity. Coyle says, “Struggle is not optional – struggle is required. To get a circuit to fire optimally, you must fire the circuit as well as possible for you, inevitably making mistakes and tending to those mistakes, slowly but surely correcting and honing the circuit.”
We have to put ourselves in learning mode in order to perform at higher levels of excellence. As teachers, we can never become so complacent that we don’t learn anymore. We have to keep those brain circuits firing. The result is more effective learning for all our students – and more satisfaction in our teaching.
