The FAST in the title stands for Focused Adaptable Structured Teaching. The book contains some interesting ideas. One of the things it doeasn’t agree with is when learning objectives are put on the screen at the start of the lesson, in the form “Students will be able to…” — though for different reasons from myself. The author writes:
“It is distracting to students when this information is presented at the beginning of the lesson. It does not add anything. Who do we think will be doing the work?”
When I was observing a lesson once the teacher displayed:
“By the end of this lesson, some of you will have achieved X, Y and Z, some of you will achieve X and Y, and some of you will achieve X.”
As I said to the teacher afterwards, I don’t think that sort of formulation is helpful because some students, perhaps even most of them, will think they’re probably going to be in the least-achieved category, and that lack of self-confidence will probably end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Let’s put it this way. I am trying to lern how to play the saxophone at the moment, and I am pretty sure that if the teacher began the lesson by stating that some of us will be able to play the F#Major scale and some won’t, most of us will think we are going to be the failures!
This book is full of useful techniques, logically set out, but in my experience there needs to be a certain degree of flexibility. For example, telling students that for the next 5 minutes they must be absolutely silent while you explain or demonstrate something is an excellent idea — but what do you do when it doesn’t quite work out that way.
The author recommends chunking: breaking up concepts into smaller learning objectives. That sounds like common sense, but how does a new teacher know or work out how small the chunks should be? This is one of the objections I have to Cognitive Load Theory.
The author also distinguishes between declarative and procedural lessons. I had not come across these terms before. Apparently, the former focus on learning a new concept while the latter focus on learning a new skill. There is a table showing the differences between these in practial terms.
There are plenty of diagrams to help the reader understand the concepts introduced. There is also a lot of focus on the nitty gritty, even down to details such as how students should hold up their individual whiteboards.
There are many good ideas here, and it would be worth using this book as a means of adding to your teacher toolkit, so to speak.
