To Rime, or Not to Rime?

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

After posting my last piece extolling the virtues of rime, I’ve been forwarded critiques suggesting rime awareness is in actuality not all that useful, with links to corresponding research, from a few critical friends on Twitter. Thank you, critical friends!

Like I said in my last post, I’m no reading specialist, just an educator trying to figure this stuff out as best I can so I can better serve and support the Bronx teachers and schools I work with. The schools I mostly work with are the ones with the lowest ELA proficiency rates in the city, and the highest concentrations of students in poverty. The students in my schools need their teachers to teach them how to read the most. The situation is dire, and urgent, and massive. So when I hear challenges to the way I’m developing my understanding of reading, I take them very seriously, because I need to get this right.

Also I want to give a little more context about where I’m coming from: I work with some elementary schools, but the majority of my schools are middle schools, and my background is special education, so my guiding focus tends to be: how do I help students who are struggling the most and who are way, way behind? So the lens I tend to use is looking backward, rather than forward from a preventative preK – 2 stance. This may complicate some of the way I also present what I’m learning. One of the reasons I got so excited about rime is that it seemed like a potential way to begin intervention for students way behind with phonological awareness and orthographic mapping.

One other thing before we look at the critiques: I have been relying heavily on David Kilpatrick’s Equipped for Reading Success manual as a guide, and I don’t want to misrepresent his presentation of the science. He in no way suggests that onset-rime teaching is sufficient — he outlines the importance of letter-sound proficiency and basic phonological awareness before beginning word study activities, and he stress the importance of phonemic awareness as the basis for strong reading throughout. He also notes that his program should be taught alongside of a phonics program.

The Claims Against Rime

OK, let’s get to the criticisms of rime, in order of the published date of the research. First off is a 1997 study, “Phonemic segmentation, not onset-rime segmentation, predicts early reading and spelling skills.” This was shared with me by Jo-Anne Gross, who has warned me against an onset-rime focus since I first tweeted mention of it:

@AFletcherDOE @mandercorn
This is a crucial junction! I praise Dr. Kilpatrick for much, the letters are of significant imp. during PA training and I despise onset rime-you can always e mail Dr. Ehri in NY.Though retired,she will reply!Do your PA training after u show the sound.

— Jo-Anne Gross (@JoAnneGross1) December 21, 2019

This critique, as in the next study we’ll look at, argues specifically against a theory proposed in the early 1990s by Goswami and Bryant, in which they seemed to echo very strongly the ideas I proposed in my last post:

According to their view, most children are aware of onsets and rimes (e.g., train (/tr/ – /ein/) before they are able to analyse and manipulate words at the level of the phoneme, and awareness of onset and rime is crucial to the very earliest stages of literacy acquisition. Goswami and Bryant argued that children who are able to recognise and categorise words that rhyme are sensitive to the phonological rime unit and this awareness, in turn, phonologically underpins early reading in that it allows children to map between sound and spelling at the level of the rime unit (Goswami, 1993).

Nation, Kate & Hulme, Charles. (1997). Phonemic segmentation, not onset-rime segmentation, predicts early reading and spelling skills

But in this study, they fail to find any correlation between onset-rime segmentation and reading or spelling ability, whereas they found a strong correlation with phonemic segmentation. This suggests that time spent on instruction is best spent on phonemes, rather than on rime units.

I received a similar piece from Miriam Fein that also critiques Goswami and Bryan’s stress on onset-rime importance, this one a meta-analysis from 2002, “Rhyme and reading: a critical review of the research methodology.”

Interesting post! I think there are different ways of thinking about this. There's a prevalent idea abt progression of phonological awareness w/rhyme/onset-rime being a 'route to phonemes', but some have questioned this. This may be an interesting read: https://t.co/tPDr9FPC8r

— Miriam Fein (@MiriamFein) December 20, 2019

Their review looked for evidence of 3 claims: 1) rhyme awareness is not only related to, but is predictive of reading ability, 2) rhyme awareness affects or determines reading ability, and 3) rhyme awareness leads to phoneme awareness.

It is claim 3 that is most relevant to my last post, since the theory I proposed was that an understanding of rime supports development to the further abstraction of individual phonemes. The author, Macmillan, lays out a few different studies that directly contradict that theory, and much like the conclusion drawn by the 1997 study above, they argue that time is better spent on individual phonemes, rather than rimes.

“Much of this evidence suggests that it is letter-sound teaching, not rhyme or rime instruction, which is responsible for producing phoneme awareness. . . there is no reliable evidence to date that teaching children how to link spoken rhyme segments with printed rime units, or how to use a rime analogy strategy will speed early reading progress over other forms of instruction.”

Macmillan, Bonnie. (2002). Rhyme and reading: a critical review of the research methodology.

The Wind Is Let Out of My Sails . . . BUT

Man. I was so excited to think I was gaining a deeper understanding of phonological awareness, and these two papers really blew a hole in my sail!

Yet. . . that last study was 2002. And there’s a few things still holding me up from jumping on the teaching and assessing onset-rime is a complete waste of time bandwagon just yet.

1. The PAST assessment of phonological awareness moves from syllable-level, to onset-rime-level, to phoneme-level, and in the assessments I’ve administered thus far, I can witness a clear progression in difficulty as students move up the levels. So if onset-rime awareness isn’t indicative of reading ability, while phonemic awareness is, it still seems to make sense that onset-rime awareness is a progression towards phonemic awareness.
2. Goswami and Bryant, the originators of the theory on the importance of onset-rime awareness, are still kicking it, and in a 2017 chapter of Reading Acquisition, they state: “Three longitudinal studies have shown a striking relationship between children’s early rhyming skills and their later progress in reading.” (Update 1/1/2020: Sarah Glaser corrected me and noted that this is actually a chapter from 1992, it was just an updated edition. Goswami does have more current stuff, which is fascinating in and of itself, but Tiffany Peltier has also forwarded a long piece by Goswami and Ziegler in 2005 that actually addresses Hulme’s 2002 critique and goes quite in depth. It lays out a theory called “psycholinguistic grain size theory” that is relevant to rime and everything else discussed here. More to come!)
3. A chapter on spelling instruction and intervention provides an overview of linguistic strategies that seem very closely aligned with David Kilpatrick’s outline in Equipped for Reading Success, and also notes some more recent studies that seem to present some benefit for rime unit instruction when implemented in a specific manner:

This chapter from the 2013 Handbook of Language and Literacy was forwarded to me by Sarah Glaser:

For discussion re:rime units see "Spelling Instruction and Intervention Frameworks" p. 607 Handbook of Language and Literacy, 2nd Ed. Talks about use of rime units to spell and read new words; application of MGR of rime unit- improved spelling and reading

— Sarah Glaser (@SarahGlaser9) December 22, 2019

This chapter is available online at ResearchGate. There’s a lot of good stuff in there on the importance of teaching morphology and word study activities that allow students to problem-solve and apply their reading and spelling skills.

They refer to a concept new to me, “mental graphemic representations,” (MGRs) which sounds in their first description disturbingly similar to the idea of “sight words” as whole word memorization. But they then outline a specific form of MGR formation, termed the analogy method, that sounds very closely related to orthographic mapping and the word study strategies Kilpatrick describes. The analogy method:

“. . . is a strategic method for memory of letter combinations within words is the analogy method. This method can be generalized to words that students have not directly memorized and refers to the process of applying MGRs of familiar words to an unknown word that has a similar rime unit. . . . Although this strategy of using analogies requires some phonological awareness in that the rime unit is blended with the onset, the main focus is on the application of the MGR spelling of the rime unit.”

Wolter, Julie & Squires, Katie. (2013). Spelling: Instructional and intervention frameworks.

I also did a quick Google Scholar search for “rime reading” since 2002, and I can say that it looks like there is still healthy debate ongoing between researchers about this.

So I’m not going to rule out the magic of the rime just yet, folks! I’m certainly open to it, and those two aforementioned studies seemed to clearly poke major holes in the way I laid it out, but I’m beginning to think I may have just laid it out too simplistically.

Let me test out another way of saying where the teaching of rime units can fit in:

• Students need proficiency with letter-sounds
• Then they need proficiency with basic phonological skills
• As they begin deepening their phonemic awareness, teach explicit rime units and engage them in word study activities that support their ability to recognize and map those rime units into spelling (analogy method)
• Work with rime units in this way can support the statistical learning and orthographic mapping process as they encounter new words on their own

OK, that’s where I’m going to leave this for now. I can see myself going down a rabbit hole, so will open it up to other practitioners and any experts who can share their expertise. Please continue to push my thinking, share relevant research, and help me get this clear so I can support clarity in the thinking of others!

And wishing you all a very happy new year, filled with new learning on the science of reading.

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UPDATE: Student Grouping: What is effective?

This is an updated version of an earlier post, based on new research I included. The decision-tree has been updated! You can find a Google Doc version of this here.

Student Grouping: What is Effective?

How do we leverage student grouping to best promote achievement?

This is a question teachers and administrators ask themselves almost daily. Unfortunately, there are few clear or easy answers. But we can draw out a few general principles from recent research and other sources of knowledge that may help to inform our instructional practice.

It’s important to acknowledge there’s often a steady pressure on teachers to utilize group work. And for some teachers, grouping students by ability can make serving a wide disparity of different levels of students more manageable.

But there’s an often unstated assumption: group work is inherently superior to whole class or independent learning. But is group work always better than other modes of learning?

Tom Bennett, a British behavioral specialist, argues in an article in American Educator, “Group Work for the Good,” that there is little research to suggest group work is better for academic learning. Bennett cautions teachers to only “use group work when you feel it is appropriate to the task you want your students to achieve, and at no other time.”

OK, but what are the times when group work is appropriate?

When I first investigated this, a particular passage from Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey, in their book, Guided Instruction: How to Develop Confident and Successful Learners, struck me:

“. . . an understanding of memory systems has profound implications for instruction, which include creating systematic and intentional scaffolds of students’ understanding rather than leaving them alone to discover information independently. That’s not to say that students should not work together in collaborative learning; they should. We have argued for productive group work in which students interact with one another and generate ideas to produce individual works (Frey et al., 2009). But this work must center on the consolidation and application of content that students already know. It’s neither the time nor the place to introduce new information. Doing so would overload the working memory system and fail to ensure learning” (Bold added).

In other words, Fisher and Frey suggest that new concepts and information should not be introduced during group work. Group work should instead be used for reinforcing, consolidating, and applying information students have already been exposed to.

But I later came across another study by Paul Kirschner, John Sweller, Femke Kirschner, and Jimmy Zambrano, “From Cognitive Load Theory to Collaborative Cognitive Load Theory,” that contradicts this. Instead, Kirschner et al. suggest that working as a group creates a collective working memory, and that therefore group tasks should be more complex.

They state, “… learning in a team is more effective than individual learning if the complexity of the to-be-learned material is so high that it exceeds the limits of each individual learner’s working memory.” They furthermore suggest that greater complexity will make the task more engaging for the group: “Collaboration will occur when the task is complex enough to justify the extra time and effort involved in collaborating with others.”

Therefore when assigning group work, ensure that the task is complex enough to warrant collaborative effort.

So we’re engaging groups of kids in complex tasks. Now how do we ensure students are productive during the times when they do work as a group? Here it can be instructive to look at some of the analysis coming out of the business sector. Fostering productive teams, after all, is critical to the success or failure of many modern businesses.

One finding from the business realm that will make immediate sense to educators is that creating a context that fosters shared identity promotes productivity. You can read more about this research in “Spaces the Signal Identity Improve Workplace Productivity,” in the Journal of Personnel Psychology. We know that giving our students a sense of belonging and recognizing who they are and what they bring is critical to fostering a positive school community. But it’s good to know that it also can improve group performance.

Another finding is that how a team communicates is what determines its effectiveness. As presented in an article, “The New Science of Building Great Teams” in Harvard Business Review, effective teams communicate more equitably and with higher engagement. And even more critically for consideration in a school context, socialization outside of formal meeting time has a huge influence on team effectiveness. What this means for educators is that fostering effective group work requires time and training. Furthermore, as described in a passage “Group Dynamics for Teams” by Daniel Levi, this training requires norming, socialization, and building cooperative skills. Educators know that many of our students struggle with social skills and working productively together. These skills must be taught and developed.

Similarly, moving into research from higher education, in “What makes a ‘good group’? Exploring the characteristics and performance of undergraduate student groups” the authors argue that if “team working skills” are “important as a learning outcome, they must be assessed directly alongside the task output.” In other words, if a teacher is going to utilize group work for a task, they must establish explicit learning objectives for the skills practiced in the group work itself, not only for the content of the task. This again reinforces the idea that when we do use group work, we must do so strategically.

This builds off of Robert Slavin’s review of educational research, as outlined in an ACSD article, “Cooperative Learning and Student Achievement,” which suggests that not only must effective group work have group goals and rewards, but also must hold each individual accountable for their contribution. Group work which incorporates only one aspect of those two critical components (group goals and individual accountability) demonstrates little benefit to learning, whereas group learning which incorporates both is far more effective.

Even adult research teams require training and practice to develop intrapersonal awareness, foster shared norms, and to understand that conflict is normal, as suggested by a paper “Creating and maintaining high-performing collaborative research teams: the importance of diversity and interpersonal skills.” The authors further suggest that fostering diverse teams is essential to productivity.

This latter insight, that diverse teams are more productive, may be one of the most useful within a classroom context. Various studies, as presented in an article on Harvard Business Review, “Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter” by David Rock and Heidi Grant, suggest that ethnic and racial diversity makes for more effective, deliberative, and innovative teams. This is an important consideration for teachers when forming groups.

A recent study by P. Karen Murphy et al., “Exploring the influence of homogeneous versus heterogeneous grouping on students’ text-based discussions and comprehension” provides useful guidance for teachers in deciding between homogenous vs. heterogenous grouping:

“. . . teachers’ goals and expectations for small-group discussions should guide their decision to compose the groups homogeneously or heterogeneously. For example, if teachers desire to focus on enhancing students’ basic comprehension or if they desire to support students’ engagement in the discussion, they may find that grouping the students homogeneously is more advantageous for low-ability students. Alternatively, teachers should employ heterogeneous ability grouping if their focus is on building students’ high-level comprehension of the text.”

In other words, group homogeneously to engage low-skilled students; group heterogeneously to deepen comprehension.

However, it’s important to note that research on homogeneous vs. heterogeneous grouping is mostly unclear. Ultimately, how a teacher chooses to group students must be strategic and based on the task and learning outcomes. But overall findings seem to suggest that our default should be mixing students of different backgrounds and ability.

A synthesis of findings on effective group work

Ok, so we’ve reviewed a fair amount of information on grouping. Let’s summarize what we have so far:

 

• Use group work only when it is necessary to achieve the task you are planning

• When assigning group work, ensure that the task is complex enough to warrant collaborative effort.

• Create a classroom and school environment that fosters a shared identity

• Provide norming, time for socialization, and training in the cooperative skills students will require to work productively as a team

• Set explicit learning targets for group work skills when engaging in a group task, while holding each individual student accountable for their work within the group

• Group students heterogeneously to promote greater critical thinking and creativity

 

Sources

Bennett, T. (2015). Group Work for the Good. American Educator. Retrieved from http://www.aft.org/ae/spring2015/bennett

Channon, S.B. (2017). What makes a ‘good group’? Exploring the characteristics and performance of undergraduate student groups. SpringerLink. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10459-016-9680-y

Cheruvelil, K. S., Soranno, P. A., Weathers, K. C., Hanson, P. C., Goring, S. J., Filstrup, C. T. and Read, E. K. (2014), Creating and maintaining high-performing collaborative research teams: the importance of diversity and interpersonal skills. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. 12: 31–38. doi:10.1890/130001. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/130001/abstract

Greenaway, K.H., Hannibal A. Thai, S. Haslam, A., and Murphy, S.C. (2016). Spaces That Signal Identity Improve Workplace Productivity. Journal of Personnel Psychology. 15(1), 35–43. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301277968_Spaces_That_Signal_Identity_Improve_Workplace_Productivity

Fisher, D. & Frey, N. (2010). Scaffolds for Learning: The Key to Guided Instruction. ASCD. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/111017/chapters/Scaffolds-for-Learning@-The-Key-to-Guided-Instruction.aspx

Kirschner, P.A., Sweller, J., Kirschner, F., and Zambrano, J. (2018). From Cognitive Load Theory to Collaborative Cognitive Load Theory. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11412-018-9277-y

Levi, D. (2001). Group Dynamics for Teams. Sage Publications, 322 pp. Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.840.9487&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Murphy, P.K., Greene, J.A., Firetto, C.M., Li, M., Lobczowski, N.G., Duke, R.F., Wei, L., Croninger, R.M.V. (2017). Exploring the influence of homogeneous versus heterogeneous grouping on students’ text-based discussions and comprehension. Contemporary Educational Psychology. 51, 336-355 Retrieved from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361476X17302540

Pentland, A.S. (2012). The New Science of Building Great Teams. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2012/04/the-new-science-of-building-great-teams

Rock, D. and Grant, H. (2016.). Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter

Slavin, R. (1988). Cooperative Learning and Student Achievement. ASCD. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el_198810_slavin.pdf

Wang, Z. (2013). Effects of heterogenous and homogenous grouping on student learning. Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/indexablecontent/uuid:ac391807-1cca-447e-801d-d65183945ad0

Yee, V. (2013.). Grouping Students by Ability Regains Favor With Educators. NY Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/education/grouping-students-by-ability-regains-favor-with-educators.html

Group Work Decision Tree

Student Grouping: What is Effective? by Mark Anderson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Smorgasbord: It’s Been A While

I know, I’ve mostly stopped posting. A conflux of being-really-busy at work, getting-really-sick (turns out I’m allergic to a certain type of antibiotic), and being-overwhelmed-with-information (I get way too many newsletters) and needing to just kind of hit the pause button on everything. And winter.

I guess there’s some kind of game going on, but I’m not a football person, so I’m posting this instead. So here you go:

• We’re discovering that the hippocampus is the seat of our spatial awareness, generating an internal map, and hence, perhaps the locus of memory as well. Aeon: https://aeon.co/essays/how-cognitive-maps-help-animals-navigate-the-world
• Speaking of maps, we’re getting better at mapping out the rainforest. Greg Asner mapped out the Peruvian Amazon, discovering 36 distinct types of forest, which can be crucial to monitoring for strategic interventions to conserve biodiversity. Asner wants to put his mapping machine into orbit, where “we can map the changing biodiversity of the planet every month. That’s what we need to manage our extinction crisis.” The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/01/how-a-scientist-mapped-the-chemistry-of-the-entire-peruvian-amazon-by-plane/514478/
• Let’s keep going with this mapping motif. Here’s a map of what the United States would look like if we divided our states by economic geography. RealClearScience: http://www.realclearscience.com/quick_and_clear_science/2017/01/27/what_if_us_states_were_shaped_according_to_economics.html
• Former Secretary of Education John King is moving to CEO of Education Trust. But before doing so, his federal office created a great guide to increasing student diversity: Improving Outcomes for All Students: Strategies and Considerations to Increase Student Diversity. NCSD: http://school-diversity.org/pdf/improving-outcomes-diversity.pdf
• As an accompaniment to this federal guide, for New York state-specific strategies for increasing school diversity, refer to my own suggestions from my policy fellowship with America Achieves: http://educatorvoicefellowship.org/increasing-diversity-in-new-york-schools
• I’ve always felt like we have a tendency in the world of education to over-emphasize differences between kids rather than focus on what is relatively similar. Similarly, in the world of science there’s often an outsized focus on gender differences. A recent book pushes against this narrative and stresses the social, environmental, contextual impact on creating those differences: “It’s the social circumstances that the fish find themselves in that sculpt their anatomies and their behaviors.” NPR: http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/01/26/511734926/the-science-of-gender-no-men-arent-from-mars-and-women-from-venus
• This accomplished scientist became a politician. Let’s hope more are inspired to do the same. “I think the public is ready for a more bottom-up, evidence-based approach to decision-making.” The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/02/the-climate-scientist-who-became-a-politician/515328/
• Think you have what it takes to be a “superforecaster”? Put yourself to the test on Good Judgement: https://www.gjopen.com
• I wonder sometimes whether I and other ELA teachers have been teaching “argumentative” writing all wrong. We teach our kids to base their arguments purely upon evidence, as if that will be convincing to a general audience. Yet recent studies seem to strongly suggest that we will most likely shift other’s thinking by speaking to their values, rather than to objective facts. The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/02/the-simple-psychological-trick-to-political-persuasion/515181/
• So if you want to truly understand what the “other side” thinks, try this exercise. (Could be really interesting to modify and apply in a classroom). FastCompany: https://www.fastcompany.com/3066609/try-this-exercise-in-radical-empathy-to-minimize-conflict
• And while it’s easy to think most of the United States is progressive-minded, the reality is that those minds are largely confined to cities. And states and rural areas will continue to wield political power over cities. The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/red-state-blue-city/513857/
• Charter advocates like to say that charters cut through the quagmire of bureaucracy that traditional school districts are saddled with. But recent findings from charter-full NOLA suggest au contraire, charter increases administrative costs due to the loss of “economies of scale.” In other words, the monopoly that current school districts have may actually be more efficient. Hechinger Report: http://hechingerreport.org/study-says-new-orleans-schools-spend-administration-less-teaching-charter-transformation/
• Notice I’m deliberately not sharing links explicitly about Trump? I think we’re all getting our fill of his nonsense. But here’s a few meta-level items worth reading regarding he-who-shall-not-be-named. Pacific Standard: “Executive Privilege; American Peril”. The Atlantic: “A Clarifying Moment in American History”. The Atlantic: “How to Build an Autocracy”

 

Research: A School is More Than the Sum of Its Parts

“When aspects of the school context—for example, a principal who is an ineffective instructional leader, a school that lacks a consistent disciplinary code—are partly, or largely to blame for poor performance, efforts to measure and strengthen individual teacher effectiveness are unlikely to be adequate remedies in themselves”

—Gillian Kiley, “School environment key to retaining teachers, promoting student achievement, study finds” on Phys.org

Check out the study linked to above, which uses NYC school survey data. Certainly confirms everything this blog is premised upon.

Mental Practice Just as Important as Physical Practice

There is now compelling evidence that motor imagery promotes motor learning. . . . It turns out that 20 minutes is the optimal amount of time for a mental practice session, according to a meta-analysis of many physical activities.

—Jim Davies, “Just Imagining a Workout Can Make You Stronger,” in Nautil.us

Honnold keeps a detailed climbing journal, in which he revisits his climbs and makes note of what he can do better. For his most challenging solos, he also puts a lot of time into preparation: rehearsing the moves and, later, picturing each movement in perfect execution. To get ready for one 1,200-foot-high ascent at the cutting edge of free soloing, he even visualized everything that could possibly go wrong—including “losing it,” falling off, and bleeding out on the rock below—to come to terms with those possibilities before he left the ground.

. . . “It’s better over time if you can put yourself in a situation where you experience some fear, but you overcome it, and you do it again and again and again,” Monfils says. “It’s hard, and it’s a big investment, but it becomes easier.”

—J.B. Mackinnon, “The Strange Brain of the World’s Greatest Solo Climber” in Nautil.us, about free solo rock climber Alex Honnold

Much of deliberate practice involves developing ever more efficient mental representations that you can use in whatever activity you are practicing.

. . . What sets expert performers apart from everyone else is the quality and quantity of their mental representations. Through years of practice, they develop highly complex and sophisticated representations of the various situations they are likely to encounter in their fields.

—Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

As these various quotes demonstrate, mental practice can be just as critical to performance as physical practice. This type of practice is therefore important to consider in terms of classroom teaching and learning.

This past winter, I was starting to feel set in my ways, so I decided to begin learning a new instrument and began taking tabla lessons. Tabla, in case you are unfamiliar with it, is a drum used in classical Indian music.

Tabla

It has a long tradition and is accompanied with a syllabic language (“bols”) that signify each type of sound. My teacher constantly stresses the importance in rehearsing compositions mentally as a part of daily practice. His advice makes a lot of sense in light of the research.

One of the best classroom teachers I know prepares by mentally and verbally rehearsing the day’s lesson in the morning.

How can we assist our students in developing the skills necessary to engage in this kind of practice? While it’s pretty clear how this type of practice can accompany a performance, such as sports, dance, music, or theater, I wonder how mental rehearsal could accompany practice in specific academic domains, such as writing, math, or science? How could mental rehearsal be beneficial in related service areas for students with Individualized Education Programs, such as physical therapy, occupational therapy, and counseling?