How to Teach Students to Not Guess the Teacher’s Password?

Petruchio

As a teacher, I wonder if it is possible to instill this skill into students the skills of rationality and critical thinking. I teach the third grade, and it is not immediately apparent how to apply this with my own class.

The problems I foresee are as follows:

Young children often do not know the basics on the subject which they are learning, be it math, science, art, religion, literature etc.
Many children are very shy, and try to give as short of an answer as doable to a verbal prompt.
Written prompts are arduous, straining the attention span and writing capabilities of the students. This is not a bad thing, but it presents difficulties in the economy of time and material to be presented.
Attention spans in general are very short.
Experiments can be very infrequent, and nigh impossible with certain subjects.
Children, at this age, are likely to take the words of a parent or teacher at face value, and naturally parrot it back. This may be a hard habit to break.

In the sequences, it is suggested teachers should drill into students words don't count, only anticipation-controllers. How practical is this for an elementary school level? Also appreciated would be any ideas or experiences on how to do this, or how to combat the above problems. Hearing from other teachers would be excellent especially.

The problems I foresee are as follows:

Young children often do not know the basics on the subject which they are learning, be it math, science, art, religion, literature etc.
Many children are very shy, and try to give as short of an answer as doable to a verbal prompt.
Written prompts are arduous, straining the attention span and writing capabilities of the students. This is not a bad thing, but it presents difficulties in the economy of time and material to be presented.
Attention spans in general are very short.
Experiments can be very infrequent, and nigh impossible with certain subjects.
Children, at this age, are likely to take the words of a parent or teacher at face value, and naturally parrot it back. This may be a hard habit to break.

Another way to get students to accept critizism would be to let each student rewrite his text after the feedback and then grade the revised version.

But this runs into the problem I mentioned before, that some students will have plenty of correction to offer others' work, but little correction to receive from their peers. So instead of "everyone needs to learn to accept correction gracefully," you risk teaching them "regular/stupid people need to learn to accept correction from smart people."

If I had been put through such activities at that age, I suspect it would have amplified the arrogance that I was already developing at that time. In third grade, I tested as having a twelfth grade reading level; it's highly probable that no student in my class at the time could have offered any useful critique on my work, whereas I could have offered critique on all of theirs.

It was already hard enough to unlearn the habits of thought that sort of disparity cultivated in me without participating in class activities which reinforced it.

So instead of "everyone needs to learn to accept correction gracefully," you risk teaching them "regular/stupid people need to learn to accept correction from smart people."

Which is a good and useful thing for stupid people to learn.

0ChristianKl14y

There's a corollary: "Smart people need to learn to give feedback in a way that doesn't annoy stupid people but let stupid people accept their feedback." You probably would have profit from learning that skill in third grade.

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How to Teach Students to Not Guess the Teacher’s Password?

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How to Teach Students to Not Guess the Teacher’s Password?

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