Sequencing: Taking one step at a time
Through this article, I intend to explain the concept of activity sequencing in a classroom. I believe that it’s similar to the sequencing methodology used in my field of work, and I will try and relate both by explaining applications in my work first and then discuss the educational context. I think it’s incredible to find ideas from two entirely different fields converging towards a common theme, and one field can probably pick up some values and tricks from the other, which I will discuss in the concluding part of the article.
I’m a mechanical engineer who, in the past two years of experience, has learnt the hard way that time management is as necessary a skill to use in engineering as the technical knowledge of the domain is, if not more.
Time holds a lot of value in my industry, and taking more time to complete the task than expected can become a cause of concern as it leads to loss in productivity and increased cost per product. On top of that, companies are rigorously working towards reducing time for completing tasks which are already taking the expected amount. Which is why, they (and the industry in general) have come up with a variety of ways to maintain and optimize tasks for different activities.
This has several benefits. To optimize a task, one has to look into the steps required to complete a task, and the sequence of those steps. If the steps themselves cannot be changed or modified in any way, the sequence of a process/operation becomes consequential to achieving optimization. The following factors are involved in deciding a sequence that takes the least amount of time:
- All the resources and tools for the completion of each step are easily accessible to the operator/worker.
- The operator should feel the least amount of fatigue while completing a step. This means that all body movements should be as natural as possible and require least effort.
- The description of each step should be as clear and concise as possible so that operators/workers can identify their role and responsibility as a part of the process, and supervisors can observe the process. Since writing and describing each detail consumes a lot of time and effort (and my industry is obsessed with reducing time 😝), symbols are used to indicate steps which constitute the process. Following are the symbols used in an Operation Process Chart, which is used to depict an operation in its entirety as accurately as possible.
A couple months ago, I decided to take a look at the points mentioned above with a different idea in mind: teaching and learning.
Classroom learning is an elaborate process in itself that requires a great amount of patience for successful communication of knowledge from the teacher to the student. Teachers use a variety of strategies to improve the process, and I found that the aforementioned ideas have a role to play in a class as well. This is through a technique called activity sequencing in which “instructional tasks and requests are ordered in such a way that promotes learning and encourages appropriate behavior.”(“Effective Classroom Practices”, n.d., para. 1).
A student shall be able to take part in task completion when they find out that the task is achievable. This means that if the student is presented with an assignment or an activity which they have no idea about, they are less likely to enjoy the task. But, since new concepts are to be learned through each activity, students can be provided a mix of concepts that students have already mastered as well as concepts which they are still in the process of learning. Logan and Skinner (1998) believe that up to 30% of new concepts in an assignment or an activity are preferable to students and not more. This figure can be increased eventually as students engage more with the activity, which is attainable through flow and fluency in the same. Finally, all concepts that have been completely mastered by the students can be eliminated from the assignments, allowing students to take up a challenge each time they engage with them. This is called Task Interspersal.
Another idea related to activity sequencing is Behavioral Momentum. Activity sequencing has a significant impact on the behavior of a student in a classroom. When students are able to choose the sequence in which they complete the activities which they have been assigned, students are less likely to be involved in problem behaviors like irritability and frustration. (Kern & State, 2009, p. 5). A choice makes all the difference.
It’s important to make a student comfortable with the activity. Once a student is content with his work, he can be given more tasks which they would be willing to pursue. This means that the comfort zone of a student while they exhibit a cooperative behavior will be expanded as a result of handing them slightly more responsibility. As a student proceeds with completing these tasks, they must be motivated to take up more complex tasks and eventually, the easier tasks should be reduced.
Implementing Scaffolding in Sequencing
I felt that both ideas related to sequencing, i.e., Task Interspersal and Behavior Momentum can find more acceptance among students if a teacher is involved just as much as the students are. Moving from easier to complicated problems that require brainstorming and the willingness to move forward from one concept to another with increasing complexity is also a part of a previously discussed concept on A Teacher’s Hat called scaffolding.
Learning can be divided into two zones: the zone of actual development and the zone of proximal development. The zone of actual development is the one in which students apply techniques and skills they already know and are successfully able to complete tasks. The zone of proximal development is when help from a more knowledgeable person allows the students to master a new skill and learn through guidance and encouragement (Khare, 2018, para. 6).
As mentioned in the article on Scaffolding, the zone of proximal development involves someone who can help students in their path to learn something they either don’t know or know little about. In a classroom, the most easily accessible human resource is a teacher, who would have to play this role for their students.
Since Task Interspersal is a gradual process of presenting students with activities which become harder and harder to complete, a teacher can efficiently implement the concept of scaffolding along with sequencing to aid learning. While students can develop a sequence which remains true to engagement, scaffolding can further attract students to take up activities and freely pursue topics they may have never touched before. With the presence of a teacher, Behavior Momentum shall be ensured as students would be able to directly interact and solve problems with the teacher instead of finding their comfort zone with varying difficulty.
My ideas on Sequencing
As I discussed in the introduction to this article, my industry tries to optimize sequences by making the worker/operator of a task as comfortable as possible. In a classroom, the aim of activity sequencing is to engage the student by tapping into their mastered skills.
Any subject/topic that has been mastered by the student would automatically fall in the comfort zone of the student, which means that the subject shall come naturally to them when they are faced with a problem for the domain. I believe that activity sequencing can be implemented to physical and interactive teaching activities through the following ways:
- The most valuable resource in the classroom is a teacher. Activities can be designed in such a manner that they require minimum involvement of any other resource that cannot be easily procured by a school or a teacher. Instead, the simplest of tools and hobbies, such as origami or art and crafts in general can be used to drive home a variety of theories. This is particularly useful in math classrooms where too much emphasis may have been laid on textbook learning in the past, and obtaining actual demonstrative tools for math theorems is troublesome.
- Sequencing can apply to classrooms that do not exist within the four walls. It can be taken outside, into an environment where students are free to explore and ask questions, with an organization of a set of activities that motivates them to approach the occurrences around them in new light, relating each happening with a simple or a more advanced theoretical or practical problem.
- Symbols! I feel that those are one of the biggest takeaways from my industry. Students can feel more content with the amount of work they have completed with a lower amount of effort if they are able to remember a limited set of symbols which serve as visual triggers for their brain to match the right kind of activity with the right kind of problem solving technique. Just as abbreviations help in remembering the first 20 elements of the periodic table or the colors in a rainbow, symbols can be useful in storing and retrieving methods and solutions.
Editor’s Note:
We are all students as well as teachers. Each role that we play in life, whether as readers, writers, parents, siblings,… each role teaches us something. As educators involved in the profession of education, these insights are invaluable. It is always fascinating to me when we can take away something from another profession and incorporate it into ours.
References:
Effective Classroom Practices. (n. d.). Retrieved from http://www.pbl.schools.nsw.edu.au/documents/63147034/63148109/Activitysequencingandchoice_factsheet.pdf
Kern, L. & State, T. M. (2009). Incorporating Choice and Preferred Activities into Classwide Instruction. Beyond Behavior, 3–11.
Khare, K. (2018). Contextualizing learning using scaffolding. Retrieved from https://medium.com/a-teachers-hat/contextualizing-learning-using-scaffolding-a6046434fc88
Logan, P. & Skinner, C. H. (1998). Improving students’ perceptions of a mathematics assignment by increasing problem completion rates: Is problem completion a reinforcing event? School Psychology Quarterly, 13, 322–331.
