Teacher Training: Praise, Prompt, and Leave

Posted: November 12th, 2014 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | No Comments »

This is our awesome teacher training team, at work in Nakuru.

Question:

When kids are working independently, what should the teacher do? There’s lots of gravitational pull for the teacher to stay at the desk. Nope. Much better to walk the aisles, to “Circulate.”

But what do you do while circulating? It’s tempting to give a mini-lecture or explanation. But that’s not usually the right move. Better to “Praise, Prompt, and Leave.” As Sara writes:

The goal is to train teachers on these very short, highly effective quick prompts that will help pupils do the thinking, help pupils realize the error, help pupils go from wrong to right this time and get it right next time.

We are not training teachers to get better at explaining and re-explaining things to pupils. That is not the goal. However, in order to apply these coaching strategies, teachers will need to be able to quickly and silently, look over a child’s shoulder and quickly figure out what’s going on so that they can provide feedback fast and move on to another pupil.