Students aren’t mind readers. They can’t hope to understand what I’m looking for in homework, classwork, or group work unless I help them. I’ve received some funny homeworks when I haven’t made my expectations clean; mostly tiny amounts of work that a student thinks is the minimum they can get away with. For example, a sentence when I was expecting a paragraph, or one calculation when I was expecting a whole page. And who can blame them, if they don’t know what to do or why they should do it.
A colleague lent me a booklet of photocopied articles he’s reading about student motivation. “Teachers should spend more time explaining,” one of the articles expounds, “explaining why we teach what we do, and why the topic or approach or activity is important and interesting and worthwhile.” This reminds me of the advice of Paul Muir, one of my first teaching mentors: always “expose the scaffolding”. Make clear to your students why you are doing what you do. For example, he advised me to explain my marking strategies. Or to say why you are giving homework and what purpose it will serve. Explain where the course is going or how today’s work will fit in. Paul said this over and over again–it has been engraved into my memory now.
If we let students in on our planning and organising secrets, they are more likely to complete tasks well. They will know what is expected of them and more often hit the target. And they will catch some of our enthusiasm when we talk about maths.