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.

Better than their thinking they don't need to accept correction at all, but then, if you don't teach them measures for determining whether "corrections" are actually correct, they're liable to get their heads filled up with garbage.

And teaching the stupid students to learn to accept correction gracefully from smart students is a lot less good and useful than teaching all the students to accept correction gracefully from their peers whenever they're mistaken and receive it.

Well of course, if after hearing an explanation they realize they were wrong and why, then they should accept that correction no matter where it came from. And they should be open to listening to such proposed corrections from all sources.

But often even after the error is pointed out and explained, they still don't understand why they were wrong. The one correcting them needs to know more than the minimum to be able to teach others, and needs to invest the time to explain it. There's a long way from "remember correctly the right answer" to "... (read more)

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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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