A few posts ago, I talked about how teaching procedural knowledge was important. As I was assessing my students today, I realized that I failed to scaffold the procedural knowledge part with visuals, lists, and modeling. By the end of my third time teaching that lesson, my board was covered with instructions and models to help my students become more familiar with the expectations; but it still wasn’t enough.
This led me on a 2 hour YouTube binge where I procrastinated until stumbling upon a eureka moment. There are a lot of things that we can learn from professional YouTubers when it comes to procedural knowledge. Once I realized that procedural knowledge teaching is basically making a tutorial, I started taking notes on the best tutorials I could find to see what I could learn. This is what I found.
The first thing I noticed is that YouTube has a huge advantage over teachers in that in videos you can scrub back and forth if you miss something or don’t understand. This is super important for our kids. I can’t even tell you how many times I have heard and said that I am only going to give an instruction once. Thinking back to repairing the headlight on my car, I must have re-watched that video 10 – 20 times just to twist two wires together. Like the video, we can have the instructions written down and posted somewhere, but at the elementary level we often read our instructions out the first time. Knowing that, how can we ensure our students are able to listen or watch again? How can we create a similar scaffold of “scrubbing” without losing our voices?
This led me on a 2 hour YouTube binge where I procrastinated until stumbling upon a eureka moment. There are a lot of things that we can learn from professional YouTubers when it comes to procedural knowledge. Once I realized that procedural knowledge teaching is basically making a tutorial, I started taking notes on the best tutorials I could find to see what I could learn. This is what I found.
The first thing I noticed is that YouTube has a huge advantage over teachers in that in videos you can scrub back and forth if you miss something or don’t understand. This is super important for our kids. I can’t even tell you how many times I have heard and said that I am only going to give an instruction once. Thinking back to repairing the headlight on my car, I must have re-watched that video 10 – 20 times just to twist two wires together. Like the video, we can have the instructions written down and posted somewhere, but at the elementary level we often read our instructions out the first time. Knowing that, how can we ensure our students are able to listen or watch again? How can we create a similar scaffold of “scrubbing” without losing our voices?
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