The Golden Fifteen Minutes In Education

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Editorial - Classroom Best Practices

Written by Harry Tuttle

Friday, 27 March 2009 01:40

Medical experts realize the critical nature of the Golden Hour: A person's chances of survival are the greatest if the person who has a major trauma receives operating treatment within sixty minutes. In education, students do not have a Golden Hour, they have a Golden Fifteen Minutes.

Learners have these few critical minutes between when they get back their paper, receive formative feedback, and begin to make the change. For example, when social studies students receive back a paper analyzing recent government actions, they have about fifteen minutes between the “what can I do to improve” stage to the “I don't care” stage. If their teachers have written formative comments that can help the students to improve, returned those papers and then immediately provided students time to act on those improvements, the likelihood of success is very high. As students begin to implement the new strategies, the teachers -- or peers -- can help them confirm that they are progressing. Conversely, if the teachers do not give the students time to improve, then the likelihood of success goes down. Ask students to make changes at home and the chance of achievement lessens greatly. At home, the students cannot receive the same feedback. They do not have an immediacy of the change.

Teachers can maximum these golden fifteen minutes through the use of technology. If most of the class has the same difficulty with one specific concept, the educator can do a whole class re-teach in another style. Drop thaty previous lecture for a YouTube instructional video, such as “How to Write a 5 Paragraph Essay;” after the video, the students directly apply the new strategy to their papers. If the whole class does not have the same learning gap, then try small group activities for just those struggling learners. One group can go to a Web site where they learn some information and a new strategy, practice with topic sentences, and receive feedback on the sentences. Next, those students rewrite their topic sentences in their essays. Another group might use the class wiki to read several exemplars, analyze the exemplars, look at the teachers' analysis, and then rewrite their papers using the writing patterns in the exemplars. Yet another group can go through interactive Power Point made by students who have been successful in using transitions. This multimedia presentation presents the struggling students with a list of transition words, shows them the transition words in sentences, has students select transition words for the blanks in several paragraphs, shows and explains the answers, and has them write a paragraph using transition words. Next, these students add transitions into their own essays. Similarly, a group of students who have a learning gap in the area of a lack of details can listen to a podcast in which they hear strong details, identify sentences with strong and weak details, and change weak details into strong ones; after listening to the podcast, they change the weak details in their essay to strong ones.

All of these re-learnings happen when the students are the most receptive -- immediately after recognizing they have a learning gap. Present them immediately with a new strategy to overcome that gap.

During the students' critical Golden Fifteen Minutes, after they receive back their work with comments, provide formative feedback. Instructors can transform students from traumatized near-educational-death learners to healthy successful students with new strategies.

Dr. Harry Grover Tuttle focuses on assessing and improving student learning through low- and high-tech tools.