This week I would like to share another of my favorite teaching strategies with you. I have used it for units on independent living, on globalism, on themes in Hamlet, and on teacher professionalism. The Anticipation Guide is a strategy that will work whenever you have course components that call for rich and nuanced understandings. What is it? The Anticipation Guide (Herber, 1978) is a simple strategy that can lead to some very complex and involved thought and discussion. This strategy challenges each student to access prior knowledge, set a purpose for learning, and find evidence to justify or disprove controversial statements. It follows the TPS (think/pair/share) format but gives more structure. You can use this strategy when you start a new unit, when you assign an especially important (and insightful) reading or viewing, or when you want to explore some of the central themes in the course program. With an Anticipation Guide, learners respond to five, six or seven interesting statements. These statements should reflect some of the upcoming themes and issues in a lesson or unit. For instance, imagine asking learners to agree or disagree with the following statements about our current Covid situation and to be prepared to explain their choices:
As you can see, the statements need to be “juicy”. They need to elicit anticipation, discussion and debate. Moreover, if you are using the Anticipation Guide to get at central themes in a unit, the statements might probe at understandings and misconceptions around key learning outcomes. So your first step is to carefully consider what it is you want to highlight and then come up with some statements that are true, false or very debatable. How do you use it? Once you have come up with your five to seven statements, you should put them in an organizer such as the one shown below. The students need a place to capture their thinking so they can re-visit their perceptions at the end of the lesson or unit and see if they have changed in their viewpoints and understanding. This organizer could be a shard document on a Google or Sharepoint drive or it could be something you have uploaded to your LMS (Moodle course).
When you use an Anticipation Guide, you need to give learners enough time to think about each question and respond. It helps if at least a couple of the statements you construct cause learners to reflect and consider alternative viewpoints. Moreover, asking the learners to agree or disagree forces learners not to “fence sit” and to consider the implications of their choice. This part of the process could take from 3-10 minutes depending on the group you are teaching and the quality of statements you construct. Some instructors also ask learners to write down their reasons for their stance in a short justification. The next step is to ask learners to share their responses with a partner and to explain their reasoning. If you teach online, it would require setting up breakout rooms for two or three students. Ideally, you do not want to have learners share their responses with too large a group. Each student needs to feel safe and heard. That often does not happen when you put students in too large of a group. When they are ready for it, you might ask the learners to share some of their discussion with the whole class. This is made a little easier because they have already had time to negotiate ideas and viewpoints in pairs or triples and would only have to volunteer what they felt comfortable sharing. This sharing and discussion can sometimes take a lot of class time, but it is very valuable. The learners will have chewed on some very important ideas, they will have had to consider their own views and background knowledge and they will be ready to hear and explore a variety of perspectives and ideas. The pump will have been primed and the learning engine should be firing on all cylinders! Finally, at the end of the lesson or unit you might have the learners revisit their initial responses. Have they changed their stance? Why? What did they learn from reflecting, responding, discussing, reading or listening and then reflecting once again? Some instructors ask their learners to write out their conclusions or relate page and paragraph numbers that support their re-evaluated stance. Herber, H.L., & Herber, J.N. (1993). Teaching in Content Areas with Reading, Writing and Reasoning, Allyn & Bacon
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AuthorJeff Kuntz Ph.D. ImagesExcept where indicated, images used in the blog posts are personal photos, images from NorQuest College or images from Pixabay. Pixabay is a vibrant community of creatives, sharing copyright free images, videos and music. https://pixabay.com/ Archives
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