selfadvocacy

Audience… It’s Complicated

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linerule

201-Airplane-quotes
202-Airplane-quotes

A hospital? What is it?

Watching that scene from Airplane, it’s pretty clear to most folks that Elaine knows what a hospital is. When she asks, What is it? she means something like What’s the matter with the woman who needs to go to the hospital? Dr. Rumack assumes What is it? refers to what a hospital is… but of course she knows! That’s what makes this scene funny.

But generally, how can you be sure of what your audience knows and doesn’t know? This exchange between Rumack and Elaine is a funny example of when someone assumes another person doesn’t have knowledge about something they clearly do.

So when you’re having a conversation, just how do you figure out how much detail to go into? You might explain too much, like Dr. Rumack, and give information that your audience already knows. Or you might not explain enough and talk over their head.

Self-advocate Kirsten Lindsmith has a good post about the impact of this dilemma on her social interactions.

If I don’t stop to explain, I inevitably say something that my audience doesn’t understand, and I lose their interest, or worse, seem rude. But when I over-explain, I come off as annoying and condescending!

via The Little Professor is Compensating for Something: Theory of Mind and Pedantic Speech | The Artism Spectrum

Balance Explain & Skim

It’s important to explain your ideas to people who may not know—they don’t have all the same knowledge that you do.

Yet it’s also important to not go into too much detail—you can’t explain every single detail.

How do you do both? Strike a balance!

explain-skim

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Teacher Balance—Support and Independence

/ Aaron / 1 Comment

linerule

hands upA student raises her hand.
Teachers: What do you do?

Do you run over to help immediately, carefully taking time to walk her through every part of what she’s working on?

Or do you tell her, “No questions – try it yourself first”?

As with most questions, the best and most accurate answer is: it depends.

Teachers want to provide support to students when they’re confused, but they also want to encourage independence so they develop skills to problem solve themselves. How does one do both? First let’s look at the dangers of the extremes—if you only do one or the other:

Only Providing Support

It’s crucial to provide support for students, especially when they are learning new content, or when a particular student is struggling.

support

Providing Support

So should you run over to help students at the first sign of a question? Not necessarily…

If a teacher provides too much support, students can become reliant on them. They can develop a dependency on your help and not develop the skills to tackle challenging work on their own.

For this reason, you may want to be careful about situations like this:

  • If you help students every single time they ask for it – they may never learn to problem-solve
  • If you give third, and fourth… and fifth chances when not handing in homework – they may never learn to take responsibility
  • If you swoop in at the first sign of disagreement and solve the group’s problem – they may never learn to resolve peer conflicts

To avoid enabling students, teachers shouldn’t solve their every problem in every instance. Sometimes you need to foster independence. Let’s look at this more closely.

Only Encouraging Independence

So we’ve learned it’s crucial to encourage students to be independent. Have we found the answer to the hand-raising problem: just let them figure it out themselves? Not so fast.

independence

Encouraging Independence

If you expect too much independence—and don’t provide support to achieve it—students don’t learn how to become independent. They can flounder in their confusion or frustration, not knowing where to start or what to do next.

So you can’t always expect students to figure our problems on their own. Think twice about things like this:

  • If you refuse to answer questions – students won’t know you’re there to help them when they’re genuinely stuck
  • If you give directions once and only once – you leave out students who need more time to process, and your directions just may not have been clear in the first place!
  • If you expect students to organize everything on their own – they lack models of essay outlines and notebook sections to know what organization can even look like

So we don’t just throw students into the deep end of the pool, as they may flail—and fail—without appropriate support. Let’s now look at a balanced approach.

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