Teachers Provide Technical Support in School

I listened today to Lora giving technical support to someone over the telephone. Yes, giving support. I wonder sometimes why she can satisfy so many callers for support. If teachers use some of the same procedures, would that help students increase learning rates more?

People call. Lora talks. They follow her instructions. She tells someone what to do to accomplish a task. Eventually, each computer works appropriately.

I have heard her in this mode during thousands of hours over almost eight years of describing to individuals how to make his or her computer work as each person wants.

She started this practice while in high school. I may have been her first client: Lora, what do I do now? I’d yell across the house at all hours of the day and night. She still helps me.

She has helpd many other teachers one on one and in small aggregates learn to use a Tablet PC or Ultra Mobile PC at conferences as well as on technical support lines. Maybe she has helped you.

As does an Emergency Room physician, Lora starts with a general diagnostic question, then narrows the scope of responses she gets with increasingly refined questions.

First, she asks the caller (yeller in my case) to describe the problem. What happened? she’d ask me. Usually, these descriptions involve non-relevant finger taps and computer functions. She sorts out the relevant descriptions without necessarily commenting about them to the caller.

Second, she asks the caller to describe what he or she did immediately before the problem started.

She usually figures out how to fix each problem within one or two steps, but seldom goes beyond five or six questions.

Listening to Lora reminded me of an informal experiment conducted by Roger at the Institute for Research on Exceptional Children, University of Illinois.

Roger rigged a cigar box to open only after a mother told her child how to open it as she described a series of manipulations of colored and variously sized sticks. The box was like a combination lock of wood.

The results were interesting, but I don’t think published. All mothers were part of a cohort identified by public school teachers as having preschool children likely to fail later in school. (Yes, you read that correctly. Teachers made judgments based on experience with siblings about students they had not yet met.)

Parent behavior patterns separated themselves into two groups.

Each mother in one group used elaborate, compound sentence structures with many words to tell her child what to do. Some mothers and children squabbled about not giving clear instructions and not following instructions. All of these pairs took more minutes to open the box than members of the other group.

Each mother in the second group gave clearer, more concise instructions with fewer words and fewer minutes to meet criterion.

Over the years since that experiment, I’ve noted that we teachers use too many words and unnecessarily complex sentences. And, standard textbooks use too many words. Let’s edit ourselves more closely.

Teachers matter. We know we can address matters more efficiently with students. We know how to do so. We also can increase student learning with fewer words while presenting the same information and intellectual skills.

Let’s edit our instruction more closely. Let’s increase our instructional efficiency measurably during AY 2006-2007.

And thanks, Lora and Roger (wherever you are today) for your insights.

(Note: Roger was a bright, energetic teacher in the emerging Direct Instruction program developed by Carl Bereiter and Siegfried (Zig) Engelmann.)