The Problem of Pacing
You have it all planned out. Your schedule for the next 4 weeks. The entire unit. You even have your daily lessons planed.
Then, as you're delivering your daily lesson you find yourself going over time on one of your activities. Then you start going over on your next activity. By the end you're wondering if you have to push the missing content to the next day...or next week.
What to do? 🤷
Resource Investigation
Simmons defines pacing as, "the rate at which instructional activities occur or at which specific 'learning trials' are presented to the student." Too slow and students become bored and disengaged. Too fast and students may become confused and discouraged. He identifies teacher behaviors as one of the primary culprits of pacing problems.
Not all instructional time is created equal
Simmons cites a six year study deconstructing academic learning time into several variables, three of which are:
- Allocated time
- Instructional time
- Engaged time
Simmons argues Engaged time, where students are putting forth cognitive effort and actively participating, should be maximized for optimal learning.
Allocation of time
Simmons identifies that written time allocations for propsed activies is often lacking, but critially important to gauge the true amount of time for a lesson. When a good estimate of the true amount of time is identified, identifying the primary Learning Target is next. A primary Learning Target clearly describes what you want students to know and be able to do by the end of the lesson. Allocating time to activities that are most aligned with the lesson's primary learning target is the most important because it informs the educator on which activities should be prioritized and placed earlier in the lesson with enough time preferentially allocated.
Careful Questioning
Simmons points out that poorly scripted questions are a common cause of lost time in a lesson. Verbose, ambiguous, or nebulous questions introduce the possibility for time loss as the teacher tries to refine questions during instruction.
Assessments over Volume
Overloading a lesson at the cost of formative assesments is a big mistake according to Simmons. It undermines the importance of the primary learning objective by prioritizing time to less important objectives.
Best Practices
I thought of 3 general solution strategies to handle pacing problems
Problem Handling: Read your Audience and Adjust
Simmons highlights the importance of paying close attention to student behavior during the lesson for clues as to whether the pacing is too fast or too slow. If a teacher notices that students look confused, seem inattentive, or preoccupied, it is a sign that the pacing is not right and the teacher should adjust. Pacing that is too fast is usually correlated with instruction outside of a student's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), which is where students are able to learn most effectively.
Minimization: Front-Loading
Simmons claims that identifying the lesson's primary learning target is the most important because it informs the educator on which activities should be prioritized. This means that the most important concepts and activities should be placed earlier in the lesson so if pacing problems do arise, they will not critically impact the main goal of the lesson.
Prevention: Chunking to Reduce Cognitive Load
When the primary learning target-aligned activities are determined, the lesson can be assessed for possible chunking so that the learning objects can be understood more readily while also fitting into the allotted time. The practice of chunking, or breaking down larger concepts into smaller components, connects with cognitive load theory, which states that large, complex topics are difficult to retain because of limited working memory.
Prevention and Minimization: Cognitive Load and Lesson Volume
Rather than overloading a lesson with content and risk exceeding a student's cognitive load, Simmons recommends including time in the lesson plan for formative assessments to check for understanding. This can help with pacing indirectly by capturing student thinking early on in the lesson and giving the educator the opportunity to refocus student learning if necessary. Without periodic checks for understanding, student confusion can grow, making the educator's task to reestablish understanding much larger and time consuming.