This lesson’s goal was to teach students to avoid sentence fragments and run-ons, a central language arts curricular topic.

I do not have a class currently, so I taught my son and some of his friends, all seniors. I encouraged the students to reflect verbally on the lesson, and the meta-conversation that resulted revealed that the students saw school as an effort to find the most effective, least effortful method of producing what the teacher wants. They were so focused on this definition of school that, despite my efforts to create a more constructivist learning atmosphere, the lesson became almost entirely behaviorist.

After I explained that this lesson was for my class assignment, the students immediately brainstormed how I could complete my assignment while minimizing time and effort. Learning – and accurately representing our mock lesson – were not priorities for them. They focused on meeting the lesson criteria as fast as possible, even if it meant making up the details.

This experience exemplified two points from our Module 6 Lesson. First, individuals can manage only so much cognitive load. If asked to take on too much, they will either perform badly or cut corners – “off-load” – somehow. I suspect that we ask high schoolers to do so much as a result of the college admissions arms race that they are constantly overloaded, and therefore, used to cutting corners. Second, people develop strategies that balance the need for speed and for accuracy. In this case, the students saw speed as much more important than accuracy. They were giving up their precious time to help me out, and how would my professor know what I did or did not do?

I protested that we had to actually do the lesson, and we did. Nonetheless, the students’ extremely pragmatic attitude permeated the lesson.

I had believed that the two on-line resources I offered to students, the Grammar Girl podcast and blog and the Purdue University Online Writing Lab, were so easily understandable as to be self-evident. The students, though, avoided these resources, seeing them as too complex and time-consuming.

Rather than making use of these resources, students scanned my instructions to determine the fastest way to produce what they perceived I wanted: an error-free final writing sample. They wanted to immediately write the sample and be done. I had asked them all to bring rough drafts of college essays, and I pointed out that these drafts contained a number of fragments and run-ons. Still, they did not see a need for further writing instruction. Their logic was, “I already know how to avoid run-ons and fragments. I don’t need to learn anything more. I just need to be more careful when I write the final sample.”

Students only went back and listened to the podcasts and read the OWL material after I insisted. I entreated them to understand that “this is about learning!” not just about producing an acceptable assignment for my class.

The students eventually – reluctantly and superficially – worked through the online activities. Surprisingly, though, when I let them at last create final writing samples, these were much better than their initial samples, containing far fewer run-ons and fragments.  Perhaps simply drawing their attention to fragments and run-ons improved their writing, or perhaps even the quick review resulted in improvement.

So what did I learn from this experience and how would I run the lesson in a real classroom?

Mainly, I learned that students are even more ruthlessly focused on teacher-pleasing than I had imagined. I happened to use successful students with high grades, and perhaps this type of student is especially invested in the behaviorist model of learning, where the highest reward comes from producing exactly what the teacher wants while conserving as much time and energy as possible.  

Here are ways I could improve this lesson by taking this insight into account:

1)    Carefully sort out the students who truly do not understand run-ons and fragments and those who understand the concepts and just aren’t bothering to apply them. Focus instruction on the students who really don’t understand the grammar.

2)    Anticipate students’ desire to short-cut the activities and set up the lesson so they can’t skip any material I consider essential. Retain the element of choice, especially important to adolescents, while adding structure by asking students to commit to a selection from a menu of activities. Each of these activities would contribute to a grade, and therefore students would be less likely to leap-frog crucial activities.