- Planning instruction
Guided practice, independent practice, and homework
So far, we have focused on bridging the goals or content of a curriculum to events, beliefs, and ideas from
students’ lives. In studying human growth in a health class, for example, a teacher might ask students to bring
photos of themselves as a much younger child. In this case a concept from the curriculum—human growth—then is
related to a personal event, being photographed as a youngster, that the student finds meaningful.
But teachers can also create bridges between curriculum and students’ experiences in another way, by relating
the process of learning in school with the process of learning outside of school. Much of this task involves helping
students to make the transition from supervised learning to self-regulated learning—or put differently, from
practice that is relatively guided to practice that is relatively independent.
Guided practice
When students first learn a new skill or a new set of ideas, they are especially likely to encounter problems and
make mistakes that interfere with the very process of learning. In figuring out how to use a new software program,
for example, a student may unknowingly press a wrong button that prevents further functioning of the program. In
translating sentences from Spanish into English in language class, for another example, a student might
misinterpret one particular word or grammatical feature. This one mistake may cause many sentences to be
translated incorrectly, and so on. So students initially need guided practice—opportunities to work somewhat
independently, but with a teacher or other expert close at hand prevent or fix difficulties when they occur. In
general, educational research has found that guided practice helps all learners, but especially those who are
struggling (Bryan & Burstein, 2004: Woodward, 2004). A first-grade child has difficulty in decoding printed words,
for example, benefits from guidance more than one who can decode easily. But both students benefit in the initial
stages of learning, since both may make more mistakes then. Guided practice, by its nature, sends a dual message to
students: it is important to learn new material well, but it is also important to become able to use learning without
assistance, beyond the lesson where it is learned and even beyond the classroom.
Guided practice is much like the concepts of the zone of proximal development (or ZPD) and instructional
scaffolding that we discussed in Chapter 2 in connection with Vygotsky’s theory of learning. In essence, during
guided practice the teacher creates a ZPD or scaffold (or framework) in which the student can accomplish more
with partial knowledge or skill than the student could accomplish alone. But whatever its name—guided practice, a
ZPD, or a scaffold—insuring success of guidance depends on several key elements: focusing on the task at hand,
asking questions that break the task into manageable parts, reframing or restating the task so that it becomes more
understandable, and giving frequent feedback about the student’s progress (Rogoff, 2003). Combining the elements
appropriately takes sensitivity and improvisational skill—even artfulness—but these very challenges are among the
true joys of teaching.
Independent practice
As students gain facility with a new skill or new knowledge, they tend to need less guidance and more time to
consolidate (or strengthen) their new knowledge with additional practice. Since they are less likely to encounter
mistakes or problems at this point, they begin to benefit from independent practice—opportunities to review
and repeat their knowledge at their own pace and with fewer interruptions. At this point, therefore, guided practice
may feel less like help than like an interruption, even if it is well-intentioned. A student who already knows how to