How Many Reps?

In strength train­ing, so the com­mon wis­dom goes, if you want to tone the mus­cles you have, use mod­er­ate weight and many rep­e­ti­tions of the same exer­cise. If, on the other hand, you want to bulk up and build more mus­cle, higher weight and few reps will do the trick. I’m no exer­cise phys­i­ol­o­gist, so I can’t tell you whether this is actu­ally true, but I’ve been think­ing lately about how the prin­ci­ple should be applied to learn­ing new skills in school.

Think about the typ­i­cal class­room math les­son: intro­duce a skill, model it, walk the class through an exam­ple or two, then a set of eight or ten prob­lems to prac­tice the skill. This is not arbi­trary or sim­ply tra­di­tional. For the aver­age stu­dent, it takes at least five to seven cor­rect rep­e­ti­tions of a new skill before it begins to become auto­matic. Most stu­dents in your class­room, then, need to be guided through this process each time a skill is taught. And we need to use the same process each time a new vari­a­tion in the skill is added. (Think sub­tract­ing with­out regroup­ing, then with regroup­ing, then regroup­ing across zeroes, for example.)

There are stu­dents in your class for whom this approach is inad­e­quate, how­ever. Some will need more prac­tice before they begin to mas­ter the skill—these are the ones who you pull aside for extra help from time to time. We often for­get, though, that there are stu­dents in the class who not only got it the first time they tried it, they are already extrap­o­lat­ing the vari­a­tions you’re going to teach for the next three days.

So what hap­pens to these kids in a typ­i­cal les­son? They start the class­work before they’re instructed, they fin­ish their home­work before it’s assigned, and they start to day­dream because they’ve already fin­ished the thought that you haven’t fin­ished explain­ing yet. And typ­i­cally we treat this as mis­be­hav­ior: stu­dents who aren’t on task, aren’t fol­low­ing direc­tions, and are dis­rupt­ing the flow of the les­son and the learn­ing of the stu­dents around them.

The real­ity, though, is that these kids are ready to move on and do some­thing new, and being asked to con­tin­u­ally repeat over and over what they already under­stand is actu­ally dis­re­spect­ful. Here are two strate­gies that can help you address these kids’ needs with­out undue stress and extra work on your part:

Stay With Me or Go Free

A col­league of mine recently explained this strat­egy she uses with her class. After intro­duc­ing a skill to the class, she will pause before start­ing the prac­tice ses­sion and tell the kids, “You can stay with me, or go free.” Stu­dents who feel con­fi­dent with the con­cept may choose to use the time for other work. Of course, she has already estab­lished rou­tines in the class­room which are con­ducive to this, such as wait-​​time fold­ers and exten­sion menus with chal­leng­ing activ­i­ties for the stu­dents who can han­dle them.

Most Difficult First

This strat­egy, described by Susan Wine­bren­ner in her book, Teach­ing Gifted Kids in the Reg­u­lar Class­room, is appro­pri­ate for sit­u­a­tions where you need more account­abil­ity for the stu­dents. When plan­ning an assign­ment, iden­tify the four or five most dif­fi­cult prob­lems in the set. When it is time for inde­pen­dent prac­tice, any stu­dents who feel ready may opt to do the most dif­fi­cult ones first. If they are all cor­rect, the stu­dents are excused from the rest of that assign­ment and also are given a reduced home­work set.

When you see stu­dents who are off task, work­ing ahead, or seem to be day­dream­ing, con­sider the pos­si­bil­ity that they may already get what you’re work­ing on. What are some other things you do for stu­dents who are able to fin­ish quickly and move ahead? Share your ideas in the comments.