Opportunities to Respond: A Key of Effective Instruction 1

Teachers are very creative with how they construct lessons, relevant activities, and

questions for formative assessment. Despite these well thought out procedures however,

sometimes the students do not respond. This is because each student has a varied way of learning

or understanding, thus the teacher would resort to trial and error to address each need. Such route

could be frustrating for teachers as it could lead to negative teacher and challenging student

behavior in the process. (Conroy, Sutherland, Snyder, & Marsh, 2008; Gunter, & Coutinho,

1997; Scott, Nelson & Lupasin, 2001)

This article written by Todd Haydon, Ashley Macsuga-Gage, Brandi Simonsen and Renee

Hawkins address this problem. They claim that the principal of classroom management is the

effective delivery of instruction and recognizes the problem of the lack of learning or response

from the students. The article defines effective instruction as maximized likelihood of student

participation, active responding, and correct responding while minimizing errors. (Haydon,

Macsuga-Gage, Simonsen, & Hawkins, 2012, p. 1)

The article then narrows down to one focus in classroom management which is

opportunities to respond or OTR. (Haydon, et al., 2012, p. 1) Opportunities to respond help

students increase desired social behavior, on task behavior, academic performance, and reduce

disruptive behavior in the classroom. There are three types of OTRs that are presented in this

article, the first being Teacher-Directed Individual Responding. (Haydon, et al., 2012, p. 1)

Teacher-Directed Individual Responding involves the teacher asking for volunteers to answer

the question. The second is Teacher-Directed Unison Responding in which the teacher requests a

verbal, gestural, or written response to the question in unison. Finally, Class Peer Tutoring where

the students are engaged in learning together as a group either through discussion or peer

reviews.
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Understanding OTRs are vital for teachers to understand and implement in a way that

they may be able to apply the right OTR with the appropriate subject within the curriculum they

are in. Moreover, varied OTRs prompts students to actively participate in the lesson as they are

given the liberty to respond to the teacher. (Haydon, et al., 2012, p. 1)

These findings and suggestions challenges teachers and I as an aspiring teacher to

consider differentiation in a broader manner by being able to address each need of the student

seeing as each learn or respond differently from the other. Applying OTRs in my future

classroom will be able to assist me in knowing how far my students understand and more

importantly, listen to their opinions. I believe that OTR is also a way of edifying the student by

reason that the students feel you value their opinions and answers. OTRs need to be implemented

more in the classroom due to the fact that many teachers assume that students are unintelligent

and just need to solely listen and absorb from the teacher. This kind of idea goes against Gods

design of mans rational thinking abilities. Therefore, I believe that OTR is a redemptive way to

teach students for it encourages them to voice out their ideas.

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References.

HAYDON, T., MACSUGA-GAGE, A. S., SIMONSEN, B., & HAWKINS, R. (2012).

Opportunities to Respond: A Key Component of Effective Instruction. Beyond

Behavior, 22(1), 1-12.