Where's Africa?" The Single Concept Your Students Are Missing (And How to Fix It) - Episode 46
00:00:00 Jon Bergmann: What do you do when your students come unprepared to understand some of the basics in your class? Welcome to the Reach Every Student podcast with me, your host, Jon Bergman. That is the topic of today.
00:00:19 Jon Bergmann: Recently I had like a terrible aha moment when I was working with my geology students that they didn't understand basic geography. Right. I was talking about, well, in South America, where the Andes Mountains are, there's this type of feature. There's these mountains, the Andes Mountains, and they're caused by, this type of a plate tectonic motion. This is where you find volcanoes. And I had my students, for example. They were cutting. This was the moment they were cutting out, different continents to kind of show that there was once a once a supercontinent called Pangaea. And one young lady said, Where's Africa? And I thought, wait a second, she doesn't know what the shape of Africa is. And then as I dug deeper, not just with that student, with with some other students, I thought, oh my gosh, I'm going to be spending an entire year teaching them about geologic concepts. And we're going to talk about different places on the Earth where you see a particular geologic concept, and they don't have a basic understanding of geography. They don't know where Africa is. They don't know where North America, some of them oh my gosh. And so I said, what do I need to do? Because I need to just totally backpedal and redo what I've done. So what did I do. I said, all right, Welcome to my class. You guys have just learned that you're going to have to do a geography test. So I sat down and found a world map online. This took forever, by the way. World map. And I then said, here are fifty one places that you need to know on the earth. Kind of important geological things. And also just, I think things they just should know, like, you know, where is Colombia and Brazil and South Africa and India and Japan and Australia and Indonesia and all these places and bodies of water, the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, the Caspian Sea, the North Sea, all these places. And they had to then take a mastery test. So here was the test. And they were, oh my gosh, did they win? So I said, you are going, I'm going to give you a map with a bunch of numbers on it, and you're going to literally write old school, no computerized number. You're going to write down the names of each of these places. And they said, well, Mr. Bergman, I need a word bank. I need a word bank. I said, no, no word bank. And to top it off. All right, this is the crazy thing I said. You have to get at least a ninety five percent. So they had to get, you know, fifty point question test, whatever they I said you can only miss three, which is a bit of a fudge. It's really two and a half. But so I said you could only miss three. If you miss four, you take it over and over and over again a mastery test because they really can't proceed if they don't just go cold where these places are. And there's been an interesting development in the world of AI, or there was a paper written some time ago, and in that paper they talked about just the value of memorization and knowing stuff, and how a de-emphasis on knowing lots of facts, diminish the chances that a student really could, you know, cognitively move on. It's, you know, when I was a kid again, I'm an old, old teacher, right? Sixty one years old. When I was a kid, I had to memorize all these places on the map. I had to memorize my my times tables as we said it, and I think we've lost some of that by not insisting that our students memorize certain sort of foundational facts so that it is just their quick recall in their head. And so I've pivoted, and now I've realized that there's this gap in my students knowledge, and I'm going to fix it as much as I can. you know, combat ignorance. And that's, that's that's what I'm doing. And so they are now taking their test over some of them over and over again. By the way, I was very encouraged by a number of the students. I would say two thirds of my students on their first attempt only missed three. That was great. Now, if students doing the retake and, slowly, we're working with the students who struggle to help them know where things are on a map. And that's working. In fact, one thing I'm going to do, again, a mastery tip, big tip for you guys is I'm going to test this over and over again. So whenever I have a test, my tests are done on computer. I've talked about this previously in the podcast where it pulls random questions from test banks. And so I created a fifty one point question. It's actually fifty one, I think, fifty one question bank. And on the next test, which is next week, that they take their mastery test, they're going to get pitched five random ones. Now one kid might get number one, number five, number twenty, and number fifty one. And another kid is going to get a different set of those places. So that means they have to know all their places throughout the year. And if I would have been thoughtful, more thoughtful. And actually I've done this since then, I told them there's these fifty one places. And then I began to say, wait, I think there's still a few more they need to know. For example, I didn't ask them, where is the Andes Mountains and where are the Himalayan mountains? Because I just did India and Brazil and Peru, which are kind of where they are close to. And I thought, oh, I need to expand my list. So for next year, I have expanded the list to seventy five places. They need to understand because it's, again, foundational knowledge. And I know this. I should know this. I'm an old teacher. I should know that there's the background Knowledge is so important when they walk into the class. And maybe that's something. Maybe you're a math teacher and there's like you're teaching algebra and there's a certain concept in arithmetic that they don't understand. And how do you make sure they have that. And so I think there's this constant if there's a few key things that, you know, they have to know, then just continually holding them accountable is going to really help. We did this in my chemistry class. There's a certain foundational concept about naming. if you're not a chemistry teacher, this is going to be like big fancy words, nomenclature of common chemicals. And it's a difficult concept for kids to understand. And so once we've taught it, it was like unit two or something like that. What we would do is we would give them a test. And in every test, regardless of the topic, they'd get two or three questions on that topic so that it would just continually reinforce those key foundational concepts that it's just it really it's just easy memorization stuff, but they have to just know this cold to speak the language, right? If we're going to talk the language of geology, they need to have a working knowledge of geography. And I'm not sure what that is in your class. What is it in your class? That's that foundational knowledge that you need to continually to retest and retest. but I bet there's something that you just know they need to know. And so my tip for you today is to continually retest those things throughout the course of your course. And for my case, throughout the course of the year. So, hey, I hope you, uh, learned from my mistakes, because, yeah, you'd think I'd have learned it after forty years. I did not, and I needed to. And, so this podcast is about pivoting to enhance student learning.
00:07:16 Jon Bergmann: I hope this helps you. Please, if you like this podcast, share it with your friends and, do subscribe thing. Have a great day and go out and reach every student.
