Have you ever sat in a meeting and then realised you are not sure what is being discussed? That feeling of “hang on, a minute ago we were talking about attendance and now we seem to have switched to next weeks meeting schedule”. Having a good working knowledge and wealth of experience you can quickly catch up. But what if its CPD and you are not an expert in the topic? Perhaps it takes longer and you feel anxious because the presenter might ask you something obvious and you won’t know the answer because you can’t quite determine the message, the big picture or how this links to what you were doing a moment ago, when you understood.
It probably won’t surprise you that students spend a lot of time feeling the same. How can we help to alleviate this anxiety and make sure our students stay on the same page as us? The answer: Narrate the transitions. This means explaining what you are doing and why, just as you would when narrating your thinking during modelling or explaining.
This isn’t a new or unfamiliar idea, in fact we narrate the biggest transitions, start and end of our lessons, all the time, we might talk through a short list of objectives or talk about a big question that students will be able to answer with the new knowledge they will acquire. We might also be aiming to start and end every lesson with reference to the big picture, by zooming out to talk about the topic we are on or we might discuss how this learning links to previous learning. All this gives context and helps students know what they are doing and why, it also reassures them that their teacher has a plan, and that even if they don’t know how all this links together yet, their teacher does and will guide them.
All this normally happens in the first few minutes of a lesson, and the limitations of the working memory dictate that this information is quickly lost if not attended. In fact, it could be lost in as little as 15 to 20 seconds. So in reality students could have forgotten it before its finished being said!
Therefore, our understanding of the limitations of working memory needs to inform how we proceed. We need to acknowledge how the well documented finite capacity of the working memory may affect students’ ability to stay on the same page as us. Students are constantly bombarded with new information throughout a lesson and often students do not know when to stop thinking about the last thing we were doing to free up space in their working memory for what we are doing next. This is where the “transition” becomes important.
A transition is a change from one activity to the next, stopping all students and signalling an end to the current task and the start of a new one. Due to the innate individuality of learners each student will be at a different point in their understanding and the activity, therefore, the transition is an opportunity to bring everyone back together before moving on. It needs to be a clear and distinct fragment of the lesson where the last activity is “closed” and the new activity is “opened”. It benefits from being entirely teacher led as the necessity to bring all learners back together can be confused or elongated unnecessarily by questioning or voluntary student input. The idea being to keep it clear and concise so that it does not overwhelm students working memory.
Closing the current activity is essential, as students can struggle to drop focus from a task or activity which has not been “completed” in their opinion, even if you as the teacher rightly judge the learning to be complete. How can we ensure students have dropped focus from the previous task and are ready to move on? Firstly, a simple countdown and time warnings allow them to finish the sentence, calculation, round, match etc. This means although they have not completed the whole task, they can choose a suitable place to round off. Secondly, once the students have stopped, acknowledge the different finishing points and reassure them that this is exactly what you intended. The reassurance is critical here, students need to know the teacher is aware of where they are up to and then can trust that the decision to move on is the right one. Narrating examples of where they could have got to can often help, e.g. some of you will have reached …. Whilst others may have completed up to ….. but everyone has ….. therefore, we are ready to move on to the next part of the lesson.
When “opening” a new activity there are two main types of transition, and although there is certainly a grey scale in between, it is useful to approach the two ends of the scale a bit differently.
Firstly, is the blended transition, this is when the content of the last part of the lesson is still relevant, and students will be building on that prior knowledge. In this instance it is important to summarise the main points students will take forward and this can be as detailed or as simplified as your students can attend to in their working memory, and this is affected by where they are on the novice to expert scale with the content of the lesson. It helps to be very explicit and narrate to the students how the learning will evolve in the new task and outline the key things they need to carry forward,. It is also helpful to keep this short and succinct to ensure that this awareness of the connection stays with them as they embark on the next phase of learning. For student’s who are quite novice it helps to reference material that they can look back on, for example the keyword definitions that were rehearsed during the starter.
Secondly is the blunt transition. In this type of transition students can become lost despite the concepts being well within their capabilities. It’s akin to a conversation that moves from one topic to the next and you are left asking “what are we talking about?” Student’s need explicitly signposting to the fact that this is a total switch of topic. Explain to them why this is the case for example "this is a revision lesson so we have now completed ….. from Unit 1 and we need to move to look at ….. from Unit 3", or it might be that the lesson has two quite separate strands of understanding which then lead into a common concept, for example "we just looked at ….. and now we need to learn about ……. before we can see how they link together". Well narrated blunt transitions cue to students that they must empty their working memory, this means they no longer need to actively hold onto information they were using for a previous part of the lesson and can clear space for new information, allowing them to encode the next piece of learning more efficiently.
Transitions may, in terms of time, only make up a small proportion of any lesson, however their importance can’t be overestimated. A smooth, well narrated, and subsequently well understood transition equips students with the understanding of where they are in the lesson, and avoids working memory being overloaded. It also prevents confusion about how the new task links to the bigger picture and avoids students hanging to bits of information in their working memory which are no longer needed.
Transitions like everything in teaching take practice, and we should plan and train for them a bit like a sports person training for a triathlon. As teachers we should rehearse with the aim to improve our transitions just like we do the bits in-between. In fact, when was the last time a colleague gave you feedback on the effectiveness of a transition? Or you had a professional conversation about how to link sections of a lesson seamlessly? Perhaps just like we practice and improve our modelling and explaining of concepts, we should also be practising and improving our narration of transitions to help our students stay with us, on the same page.
Cat Rushton
@CatherineRusht2