Instructional Nourishment

What was the last meal you had? What all did it consist of?
Better yet, can you give an account for the last three meals you've had (breakfast, lunch and dinner)?

I'm hoping your breakfast was full of protein, oats and fruit! Typically, lunch might not be as wholesome. Perhaps some seafood, salad, maybe a sandwich and chips with some veggies on the side. And for dinner...lets say you make a nice thick piece of beef or chicken with a starch like scalloped potatoes, a green leaf like a salad or spinach and some bread. Okay so you thoughtfully attempted to balance your meal with doses of the proper nutrients and minerals to give your body the nourishment it requires to help you function. Let's even go so far to say you're a health nut and you enjoy preparing very balanced, high in (insert nutrient here) with just the right number of calories to help you with your personal weight goals.

What you don't do is fill your refrigerator and pantry with vitamins and mineral supplements with the intention of tossing a Vitamin C pill into a hot skillet and cooking it sunny side up. Nor do you empty a half bottle of Fish oil capsules in between two slices of bread to get your dosage of meat for lunch. And you certainly don't place an arrangement of various sizes and colors of supplemental vitamin pills into the sectionals of your dinner plate, pull out a fork and knife and dig in!

How silly, right!? Because supplements are meant to take up for where the planned, well-balanced meals might fall short in terms of nutrients. They're the back up plan when your Plan A happens to be missing some critical components. And even in their use, they're not intended to be consumed continuously in place of food, unless you're physically unable to intake the foods that contain those essential nutrients.

Teachers, a guaranteed viable curriculum is the critical component in Tier 1 or Initial instruction for students. A guaranteed viable curriculum is comprised of a healthy knowledge (depth and breadth) of the standards and content you are tasked with facilitating learning around. It involves a healthy balance of backwards design in planning out lesson approaches (rigorous formative assessments), low floor, high ceiling tasks that engage and hook students and peak their interests, hands-on math tasks that encourage exploration and evoke questions while promoting visual stimulation. It's a class full of peer to peer discourse and movement, students testing their theories and learning from their mistakes. It's students receiving small group support or one-on-one conferencing to adjust their goals. It's students eagerly anticipating the stations their teacher has so diligently prepared so they can independently or collectively explore their own ideals about math. When a teacher takes this type of approach to their initial instruction, they are providing a well-balanced instructional meal to their students.

The textbooks are simply a supplement. They serve the purpose of supporting the well-balanced healthy instruction that occurs initially, in the areas where the student didn't get enough of the nutrients from the initial lesson. They are created to take up the slack, just like a supplemental vitamin. Now, if you're the novice teacher and more specifically, you're dealing with little to no supports from a district or infrastructure, the textbook might account for a larger percentage of your initial instruction meal for a while. But nothing a few trips to a local professional development won't cure. Investing in PD can knock the crutch of depending on the textbook "to teach" from under you and get you to walking the right path soon enough. But the general idea here is that as we (teachers) move from the keeper of the knowledge to the facilitator of the knowledge/guide in helping students find the information; our job is to prepare the well balanced meal in such a way that we can guide students to the correct information and guide their uncovering of the appropriate learning. We do this rather than shove textbooks in front of them (like pills down someone's throat). After all we can't call ourselves educators when textbooks and worksheets eat up our instructional minutes anymore than we can fill our dinner plates with Omega-3 and potassium pills and say we had a hot meal for dinner.

Let's nourish our students by showing them we are willing to plan out instructional meals that will make them want to feast at the table of learning and leave the supplements on the shelves.