A Mile in Their Shoes

Hello readers!
I just stumbled across a decently cool video that really got me thinking. The video is from Burr and Burton Academy, a high school in Vermont, and it documents the reflections of several staff members who took on the life of a student at their school for one day. Walking a mile in their students' shoes was primarily conducted as part of an ongoing study by the staff on the effectiveness of their school day schedule, but I think this kind of social experiment offers endless possibilities for what we as educators can learn about the experience of school.

Check out the video here, and then I'll share with you my own take-aways:

• I thought it was a great touch to have the students-for-a-day actually do the assigned homework for all the classes they'd be attending. The teachers in the video don't discuss this in depth, but I think it would be fascinating to really experience what this is like: how difficult is it, how much time does it take, how do you balance it with other after-school activities and responsibilities, etc.
• The teachers mostly seemed to agree that, as the school day went on, it became more and more difficult for them to remain focused. I think this is something we all inherently understand, but perhaps actually experiencing it the way a student does would illuminate it even further . . . maybe it would help us think of what would work well for a student towards the latter half of the school day.
• Something I found really interesting was that one of the teachers said he had had a great day and had found himself fascinated by all the subjects. But some of the other teachers admitted to not connecting well with some of the subjects, which made those classes feel very long to them. I think this is pretty reflective of what our students experience. Sure, there are some kids who love every subject. But there are many others who, for many reasons, don't. How do we engage those students?
• A huge take-away for me as a former ELA high school teacher was the reflection shared by several of the teachers that it was an intense experience bouncing from one subject to the next. One of the teachers said it was difficult because he was processing "what I had done in science class and just a few minutes later -- Boom! -- you're into this totally different, new, intense" subject area. Another teacher commented that "there was no unwinding . . . it was stay wound and go from this to that." My work over the past year and a half in a K-12 position has helped me to learn a lot from elementary teachers about this sort of thing. Because they teach numerous subject areas, I've observed lots of elementary teachers who really get the need to transition from one "intense" area to the next. I know that when I taught high school, it was sometimes easy for me to forget that my students had already had 3 or 4 classes before they walked into mine and that their brains weren't necessarily already primed for ELA like mine was (because ELA was the only subject area I had to focus on).

I don't have all the answers to some of the questions I began to pose in these take-aways. But I do think this social experiment is a very valid one that the staff at any grade level could really learn from. The key is to really try and do something with what people learn from the experience. Are there some new instructional moves teachers can make with the student perspective in mind? Is there a need to try something different? What's working? What's not?


And finally, readers, Happy Holidays! My blogging will resume with the new year, so I want to take this opportunity to wish you all a lovely and well-deserved break. Enjoy!

A Cool Tech Tip

I'm usually not the go-to person for cool tech tips, but -- surprise! -- I've got one for you this week.

I just finished reading a teacher's blog that you can access here. In it, she shares a great idea for making rubrics more interactive. (Okay, okay, so it's not really my tech tip . . . I'm borrowing it from this blogger. But I still get some credit, right?)

The idea is to include QR codes on a rubric. QR codes, if you don't know, are those little things popping up everywhere that look like this:

You can scan a QR code with your smart phone and -- voila! -- it will bring you right to a particular website. It's technology magic!

It's pretty easy to do, too -- just visit any of the number of available sites that allow you to create a QR code for free, like this one.

Once you've got the knack for creating a QR code, you can paste it onto any document. For an interactive rubric (such as the one from the blog I referred you to above), simply paste the QR code alongside one of your rubric's items. This particular teacher knew her students were struggling with correctly integrating quotes into their essays. So, she placed a QR code on her rubric in the "Quotation Integration" column to help them out -- once this QR code was scanned, it would take students to a video this teacher found on YouTube all about properly integrating quotations. 

QR codes can be a helpful way to flip your classroom a bit. And we don't have to stop at rubrics. QR codes could be placed on a homework assignment sheet or even on something students might be working on during class (if you allow them to use devices like smart phones for learning purposes in your classroom). QR codes could be used to take your students to a tutorial video as described above, or to online quizzes, websites, articles, surveys you wish your students to complete, images . . . the possibilities are endless!

Ensuring Equity with Differentiated Assessments

So, you're coming up on the end of a unit and you've decided to mix it up a bit with your final assessment. You'd like to give your students some choices in order to differentiate based on their interests and possibly also their learning styles.

The only problem is, you're concerned about equity. How can you provide a variety of choices while still being fair? How can you ensure certain options aren't perceived as "easier" or "harder" than others?

Here's my suggestion. It all comes down to the objective -- what's the purpose of the assessment? What is the skill and/or knowledge mastery it's supposed to be assessing?

You need to answer these questions first. If you're having difficulty, revisit your essential questions for the unit. What's the big picture? What are the big take-aways for students?

Once you've decided upon what you want to assess  -- what do students know and/or are able to do? -- you need to commit to this for each option you provide to students. In this way, what varies is not the objective of the assessment, but the product -- the way the student demonstrates their mastery of this objective.

For example, you may decide that what you really want to assess is the student's ability to answer a particular essential question of the unit and to include evidence to support his or her points. With this in mind, you can provide all kinds of choices to your student: an essay, a powerpoint, a poster, a formal debate, a RAFT, a video, a newspaper article, etc., etc., etc. The key is to establish the common criteria for any of these options -- regardless of what the student chooses, he or she must provide an acceptable answer to the essential question and must include evidence to support his or her points (with some of the more visually-based options, you can always require the student to include a separate written explanation of their piece that meets this criteria). What students come up with is going to look different, but it is still going to allow you to assess everyone based on universal criteria. It's only when you don't establish this kind of common criteria, when you don't ensure that you're measuring the mastery of the same objective, that inequity can creep in -- you might end up with lots of cool projects, but you run the risk of this collection of cool projects actually measuring all sorts of different objectives. That's not overly "fair," and, more importantly, it doesn't give you data on how all of your students are performing within a particular standard or objective.

A Thankful Educator

What's the week of Thanksgiving if not an opportunity to think about what we're thankful for? As educators, there's lots that can bring stress to our lives: a new educator evaluation system that feels overwhelming at times, standardized tests, frustrations about how to best teach each student. It's important to make ourselves stop, breathe, shake off the things we can't control, and focus on what can be so wonderful about this field.

Here are some things I am thankful for as an educator:

• The curiosity and drive of first graders, striving passionately to become the best readers and writers they can be
• The wonderful blend of serious and goofy that is a 7th grade classroom
• The inquisitiveness of high school chemistry students, bravely asking questions, determined to master the subject's demands
• The teachers I coach, who are dedicated to learning, growing, and reflecting
• The opportunity to continue learning through professional development, through my interactions with colleagues, through my own research
• The moment I am privileged to witness -- when a lightbulb goes off above a learner's head, when everything suddenly clicks
• The gift of working in a profession that allows me time off during holidays to spend with my family and friends, relaxing and recharging
• The beauty of knowing I work in a field that has a tremendous impact on people's lives

Happy Thanksgiving, readers! Enjoy the break, and take some time to reflect on what you're thankful for as an educator.
See you in December!

Multiple Choice Doesn't Have to be Boring

Interested in providing your students with an opportunity to clear up misunderstandings and misconceptions, to collaborate with their peers, and to develop critical thinking skills? (And who isn't?) Then this is the post for you!

I'm not a huge fan of multiple choice assessments; I just never felt like they told me the whole story of what my students understood and didn't understand. But, I often had multiple choice assessments lying around, whether they were sample AP, SAT, or MCAS exams or standardized multiple-choice exams that came with the published study guides accompanying a novel or a textbook. And these assessments did come in handy for the following task for my students.

Placing my students into heterogeneous groups of 3 or 4 students (usually chosen at random), I'd give each group a copy of the same multiple choice assessment (sometimes with the aim of reviewing at the end of a lesson or unit, sometimes with the aim of targeting the use of a particular skill, etc.). First, I'd require all students to complete the multiple choice questions independently. Their next step was to share their answers within just their small group and not stop until they had reached consensus on each answer. This requires a lot of collaborative skill and higher-order thinking, as students would engage in some debate with one another, and would delve back into their notes or their text in order to provide support for which answer they felt was correct. They really had to get good at justifying their claims with evidence. (This doesn't happen overnight -- I was sure to teach and discuss collaborative skills with my students, and also teach and discuss how best to debate, to justify your answers, etc.)

The final step, once each small group had reached consensus, was to open the debate up to the entire class. Now, their job was for each group to share their answers and to eventually reach consensus as a whole class. Once again, those skills of being able to justify their claims with evidence started to come in handy.

[Often, I'd stipulate that they could not stop until the entire class had reached consensus on every single answer -- this is the only way they'd earn a grade on the assignment. Sometimes, though, certain answers would be debated seemingly endlessly, and I'd have to table the discussion on those items and accept individual answers.]

What was great about this exercise was the development of collaborative skills and critical thinking skills. But, as a teacher, it was also a fantastic opportunity for me to assess students' current understandings and skill levels, leading to my own informed instruction. (Plus, it's a nice way to jazz up the use of multiple choice questions -- they really don't have to be boring!)

A Few Tips for Tiering

I've been thinking a LOT about tiered instruction lately since I'm working with a few teachers who are venturing bravely into that particular type of differentiation. I say "bravely" not because anyone should be terrified of tiering, but because starting anything new or changing up your practices and getting a bit outside your comfort zone is always scary.

Managing your class when groups of students are working on different tasks from one another can seem overwhelming. This post will outline a few very practical suggestions for managing the time and space structures of your classroom when tiering (hopefully making it all seem a bit less scary).

First of all, try to reduce the amount of time (and noise!) it can take for students to get into groups. Post a seating chart on your board all filled out with students' names and the locations they need to report to. This way, as students enter the room (before the bell has even rung!), they can make their way to their assigned spot for the day. No need to spend class time getting everyone to where they need to be!

Here's another thing you can take care of ahead of time: at each table or group of desks where groups will meet, place a folder with copies of that particular group's assignment and any other materials they may need. Once again, this saves you from spending class time getting each assignment to each group, and it also allows students to get started right away.

Speaking of students getting started right away, here comes my final tip for today: be explicit! A huge part of ensuring that tiered instruction will be successful is giving students the tools they need to be able to work independently. If the assignment and its accompanying directions and instructions is explicit, detailed, specific, in student-friendly language, and contains models of what students will be doing, then I promise you students will be able to get right down to business without you (I can make this promise because I have seen it happen, my friends!).

There's more to tiering your instruction than what this brief post has covered, but thinking of effective and easy ways to manage the time and space of your classroom is a wonderful starting place for being able to envision how this can all work . . . and work well!

Happy Tiering!

The Whip-Around

I just finished discussing ideas for checking for student understanding with a teacher I'm coaching and, of course, found myself bringing up one of my all-time favorites: the Whip-Around. I believe I blogged about this particular strategy last year, so it may sound familiar to those of you who are loyal readers. But, trust me -- it bears repeating. The Whip-Around is a great way to quickly and easily check for understanding (and you know how much I love CFU) and use that check to inform instruction.

[I must give credit where credit is due: I first learned about this strategy while reading Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey's awesome book, Checking for Understanding: Formative Assessment Techniques for Your Classroom -- I highly recommend it!]

Here's how it works:

1. Ask students to write down 3-5 things (the amount will probably depend on where you're at in the lesson) in response to a particular question. For example, if I'm teaching Lord of the Flies and we're on chapter 4, I might ask students to list 5 attributes of William Golding's writing style (especially if analyzing writing style is an objective of the unit).
2. Once students have completed their list, ask all students to stand. 
3. Now, call on a student randomly (or not randomly -- you may have certain students you want to make sure you touch base with directly). Ask the student to share one item from his/her list. 
4. Once this student has shared his/her one item, ask the rest of the class to check to see if they had the same item on their list. If they did, they should place a check mark beside it. If they did not, they should add it to their list.
5. Proceed in this fashion. Once all the items on a student's list have been shared (either by that student or by another), that student may sit down.
6. Continue to call on students until all students are seated.

A couple really important things have happened here. One -- students have had a chance to self-monitor their understanding a bit; they were able to add to their list items that they initially had not included. Two --you've had a great opportunity to check for understanding and to potentially adjust your instruction accordingly. As you were listening to students share their list items with the class, you may have realized that there were 2 or 3 things that no one brought up that you feel are really important for students to understand. Now, you can address those things with the whole class -- and maybe even check for understanding again, with a different method (I told you I loved CFU!!).

The Whip-Around works great as a summarizer to a lesson, but it can also be an effective activator when used to review as a class something learned the day before. You can even use it as a way to check for understanding during class -- perhaps 15 minutes into a content-heavy power point presentation.

Try it out and let me know how it goes!
(Watch out -- you might love it so much you get whiplash . . .)
(Sorry, that was a pretty bad joke.)

Face Value -- Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

Do you have students who accept everything they read in a newspaper or in a magazine or see on the Internet at face value? I'm willing to bet you do. (I'm even willing to bet you know some adults who are too often guilty of this!) This is a dangerous way, Kelly Gallagher (author of Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts and my latest in a long line of academic crushes) warns, "to read your way through life" (2004, p. 84).  And, regardless of content area, we want our students to dig around beneath the surface of the information they're encountering, to think about what's not being said.

A great way to get into this with students, according to Gallagher, is by examining tables, charts, and graphs. Here's a chart Gallagher shares with his students (p. 83):

Influenza-related deaths have increased dramatically since the 1970s.

Influenza Deaths                                       Influenza Deaths

1977                                                           1999

Approximately 18,000                      Approximately 65,000

Gallagher asks students to fill in the left side of a t-chart by listing everything the chart tells them. They might list the following: influenza deaths rose dramatically between 1977 and 1999; in 1977, there were approximately 18,000 deaths; in 1999, there were approximately 65,000 deaths.

Next, it's time to encourage students to dig a little deeper -- what's not being said in the chart? Students use the right side of their t-charts to brainstorm everything this chart may be leaving out, a list that might include: what caused this dramatic rise in influenza deaths?; where were these deaths? in the U.S.? elsewhere?; who is the source of this information?

Finally, Gallagher asks his students to think about this question: What might have caused such a dramatic rise in flu-related deaths? He records their inferences on the board (such inferences might include: there were more strains of the flu in 1999 than in 1977; people in 1999 had worse medical care than in 1977; flu vaccines stopped working; there were more people in 1999 than in 1977). Gallagher is "train[ing his] students not only to notice what is said, but also to infer what is left unsaid . . . [He] want[s] them to realize that every time something is said, something remains unsaid, and that every time something is written, something remains unwritten" (p. 84).

Bonus: I think this would make a wonderful pre-reading activity if students are about to read a piece of text that includes charts, graphs, and/or tables. Doing this exercise with a graph that's about to appear in the reading students will later do can provide students with an interesting purpose to read -- perhaps they will learn more through reading the entire text, and, if they don't, what will this tell them about this particular source? Students could even be encouraged to conduct further research (a lovely extension activity!).

CFU -- My Favorite Educational Acronym

Alternate title #1: One Great Way to Use a Whiteboard
Alternate title #2: Can I Have an Academic Crush on an Object?

Hi there, readers!

I'm taking a break from my series on Kelly Gallagher's ah-may-zing reading instruction ideas to divulge to you a little secret: I have yet another academic crush, and this time it's on an object. I know what you're thinking . . . after all, this is the fifth or sixth (losing track doesn't make it worse, does it?) academic crush I've written about and now I'm confessing to crushing on, of all things, a mini-whiteboard (but did I mention it comes with its own marker and adorable mini-eraser?). Rest assured, readers, my marriage is healthy and intact despite these academic crushes. Even those on objects. But you can't judge me too harshly for this one -- mini-whiteboards are so fun and great. AND here's the kicker -- they are so useful to CFU.

(Gasp! You're not familiar with mini-whiteboards? Here's a link to the website for The Markerboard People, which is where I got mine: http://www.dryerase.com/.)

Because what the education world needs right now is another acronym, I thought I'd tell you about my personal favorite (yes, I have academic crushes and favorite acronyms, but who doesn't?). CFU stands for Check for Understanding. And since I'm obsessed with ways to informally and formally assess student understanding (especially those opportunities to assess mid-way through a lesson), I find myself talking about, thinking about, and writing about checking for understanding so often that I just had to abbreviate it to its lovely acronym.

Here's where my two loves, CFU and the lovely mini-whiteboard, intersect. Mini-whiteboards offer an amazingly simple and effective way to check for understanding during a lesson.
Here's an example:

I've been coaching a teacher lately on finding more ways to CFU during a lesson. This way he doesn't have to wait until the very end of a lesson to see if students have been following him and understanding what's being taught. This teacher is lucky enough to be blessed with a class set of mini-whiteboards (and markers and mini-erasers . . . have I mentioned how adorable the mini-erasers are?), so I was psyched to show him how he could use these to CFU.

Yesterday, we tried it out. After a certain portion of the lesson during which a new term had been explored, we wanted to know if students really understood the meaning of the term. So, we posed a multiple choice question to them with four options defining the term. We asked students to write their letter choice (A, B, C, or D) on their boards (they keep these boards under their seats -- markers and erasers are also kept under their seats in pencil cases) and to hold them up on the count of 3. At 3, all students held up their boards and we were able to see that all but 2 of the students chose the correct answer. This let us know that the majority of the class could move right along with the next task -- some practice with partners on the topic being taught -- while the teacher could work with the 2 struggling students until they fully understood the term's meaning, at which point they could rejoin their classmates in working on the next task.

You can also do this kind of CFU with a Smartboard as long as you have those fancy clickers (that's the correct technical term, right?) handy. It doesn't matter which you use, really . . . the really important piece of this is that you've found a way to quickly and informally CFU. This doesn't have to only happen during a lesson as in the above example, either. Use the mini-whiteboard as a way to pre-assess before a lesson begins, or as a way to CFU at the end of a lesson during a summarizer.

My biggest practical tip involving this strategy? Only use the mini-whiteboards as a CFU tool if you can ask students something that requires a very short answer (such as a multiple choice question for which they only have to write their letter choice on the board). With very short answers, you can easily and quickly scan all the boards as they are raised and determine where students are at with their understanding. Longer answers are harder to quickly scan -- you may need to think of another CFU tool to use if this is the case. But don't worry -- there are so many great CFU tools -- I've got a million of 'em! (Hyperbole alert -- I don't really have a million CFU tools, but I do have a decent amount.)

Have you joined the mini-whiteboard fan club yet? I hope so. As president, we're always looking for new members.
Happy Checking for Understanding!

Put a Frame Around That Learning!

If you’ve been reading my blog, you know I am currently obsessed with my latest academic crush, Mr. Kelly Gallagher. This week, I want to share with you some tips from his 2004 book, Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts 4-12, that address how to effectively frame reading for students in order to ensure comprehension and engagement.

Although Gallagher’s book and suggestions zero in on reading, I’m going to take it one step further – while the following ideas can frame reading for students, they can also frame lessons or even whole units of study. 

Let’s get into it!

Framing a lesson (or a unit, or a reading) means that you’re putting some scaffolds and supports in place right at the beginning, usually to build necessary background knowledge and/or provide students with a purpose for learning/for reading. If we just dive into a piece of reading, or the core of a lesson, we might lose a bunch of our students who were not ready; their brains were not primed for these tasks. These students will most likely end up “checking out” of the lesson or of the reading pretty early on, giving up because they don’t have enough background knowledge to help them understand the reading/the lesson, or they don’t know what their purpose for learning is.

Here are some framing ideas from Gallagher (2004):

·      Assign a web search at the beginning of a unit or before students read a text. Specify for them what key ideas/terms/concepts/words/pictures/videos they should be looking for. Determine how students should synthesize what they find, and how they will share with others.

·      Use anticipation guides as a way to frame major ideas/themes in an upcoming unit or text. Provide students with a list of statements to either agree or disagree with (when I taught the Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451, I came up with statements that would connect to themes or big ideas in the book, such as “Ignorance is bliss” or “Modern technology drastically reduces our ability to communicate with one another”). Students use a Likert scale (strongly disagree, somewhat disagree, somewhat agree, strongly agree) to rate their disagreement or agreement with each statement. This can spark some interesting discussions, especially if there’s no real “right” or “wrong” – the statements should fall into that lovely gray area. What I MOST love about anticipation guides is that you can give students the same statements at the end of the reading/lesson/unit and have them once again rate their agreements and disagreements. It’s interesting to see whether their minds were changed over the recent course of study, and why.

·      Try out a spin on an old classic, the KWL chart. Gallagher recommends a KWLR chart. At the beginning of the unit/lesson/reading, students list what they already know about a given topic under K, and then list everything they want to know or have questions about under W. It’s a great idea to fill in this chart as a whole class and to post the chart somewhere in the classroom so that it can continue to be filled in over the course of the unit/lesson/reading (if posted, it also serves as a constant reminder of a purpose for learning – to get those questions under W answered!). As students learn answers to their questions in the W column, they list these under L. And finally, at the end of the reading/lesson/unit, students look to see which questions in the W column are still left unanswered; they also add any new questions that have arisen for them during the recent course of study. With this list of questions (those that are still unanswered and those that are new), students are ready for some further research. These newly discovered research topics are listed under R and serve as great extension activities that engage students – they are, after all, based on the students’ own questions!

There are a bunch of other ways you can frame a reading/lesson/unit for your students, and also a bunch of ways you can frame during a reading/lesson/unit (instead of only at the beginning). If you’re interested in incorporating framing into your lessons and units and want help getting started, send me an email and we’ll frame together!

Instructional Coaching in Action

Since the role of instructional coach is still quite new in the district where I work, I'm hoping this post serves to paint a picture of what the collaboration between a teacher and an instructional coach can look like (it's also a decent look at what some formative assessment practices can consist of).

I’ve been coaching a teacher towards a goal of using formative assessment practices in his classroom. This week, we were both able to see just how simple, effective, and eye-opening formative assessment can often be.

I met with this teacher (let’s be mysterious and call him “Mr. X”) late last week to talk about an upcoming lesson that would be fairly content-heavy. We discussed what he felt the major take-aways for students should be, and quickly decided on using an exit ticket (or ticket-to-leave) as a way to check for understanding of these take-aways. The exit ticket we designed had two parts to it: the first asked for a definition of a major concept that would be covered during class that day and would be essential for student understanding throughout the unit; the second asked for three causes and three effects of the particular movement in history introduced in class that day.

Mr. X and I next met up after school on the day he had collected these exit tickets from students. Together, we quickly skimmed the students’ responses and discovered they fell into one of 3 categories: five students were in the Didn’t Get It category (responses were missing most or all of the information and/or contained misunderstandings); nine students were in the Yes! category (responses indicated a level of understanding that indicated the student was ready to continue with this unit of study); and six students were in the Halfway There category (students were able to list the causes and effects, but had difficulty with the definition on the first part of the exit ticket).

Skimming through these exit tickets and categorizing them took us probably about ten minutes. We didn’t grade the exit tickets or assign any points; we didn’t even lift a pen to write on them. We were solely interested in determining where all the students were with their understanding. And there was a major revelation (this is my favorite part of formative assessment!): Mr. X told me that, before looking at the exit tickets, he assumed students would all breeze through the definition portion, but have difficulties with the cause and effect. It wasn’t until we collected and analyzed the exit ticket data that he realized the opposite had happened with about half of his students. Does this mean the teacher failed? NO. Mr. X succeeded because he chose to check for understanding in this way, which enabled him to see at a glance that there was a need to go over this concept again.  Without such a check for understanding, he would only have had his assumptions to go by, and this would not have been enough.

It was time to make a plan for the next lesson – formative assessment is only truly formative if it informs our future instructional moves. Since 50% of the class struggled with the definition portion of the exit ticket, we decided it would be best to begin class all together. Mr. X would let the class know he was concerned that they didn’t all fully understand this particular concept yet. Then he would call on a few of the students that he knew (again, based on the exit tickets) had a good grasp on it, and ask them to share how they defined the concept. The teacher would reiterate each aspect that was brought up, reinforcing these ideas with the whole class.

Feeling confident now that the majority of students had grasped this concept, the teacher would then move on to a group activity. While getting students into groups of four and disseminating instructions on the work they were to do, Mr. X would pull aside the five students who fell into our Didn’t Get It category, letting them know he had looked at their exit tickets and was concerned about their understanding of yesterday’s lesson. He would tell them that he wanted them to be successful with the rest of the unit, but that depended on them having a good understanding of the major concepts addressed yesterday, and so he’d like to spend some time reviewing those with them now. Once Mr. X feels satisfied that these students have grasped the concepts, he’ll release them to join a group and jump into the group activity currently underway.

I observed this lesson plan in action the next day in Mr. X’s classroom. Later, we met up to discuss what we felt had gone well, and what we may do differently next time.

Using formative assessment can (and usually should) be quick, simple, and, sometimes, surprisingly effective! It doesn’t always have to look like the above scenario. Sometimes, based on checking for understanding, a teacher may realize the whole class (or a vast majority of it) needs to step back and review. Or he may realize that there is a wide range of understanding or skill level and that he needs to plan for tiered instruction in his next lesson.

It can be really helpful to have someone to discuss what the check for understanding should look like; to have another set of eyes to analyze this data together; to have someone help you brainstorm and plan for what your instruction should look like the next day based on this data; to have someone come on in during that next day’s lesson and model a teaching strategy you may not be comfortable with yet or co-teach a portion of the lesson together; or even just to observe and meet up with you later on to discuss how it went, and to make future plans. Guess what? I’m that someone! This is a good picture of what instructional coaching can be all about!

Digging Below the Surface

Let’s have some fun with reading today! I’ve borrowed the following passage from Kelly Gallagher’s Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4-12 (I’ll be writing a series of blog posts based on this text in the upcoming weeks that will fall under the umbrella of Reading Across the Content Areas – you can see the first blog post here). Read through the passage, and then answer the following 4 questions (also from Gallagher).

Go ahead . . . I’ll wait . . .

How to Bartle Puzballs

There are tork gooboos of puzballs, including laplies, mushos, and fushos. Even if you bartle the puzballs that tovo inny and onny of the pern, they do not grunto any lipples. In order to geemee a puzball that gruntos lipples, you should bartle the fusho who has rarckled the parshtootoos after her humply fluflu.

1.     How many gooboos of puzballs are there?

2.     What are laplies, mushos, and fushos?

3.     Even if you bartle the puzballs that tovo inny and onny of the pern, they will not what?

4.     How can you geemee a puzball that gruntos lipples?

How’d you do? Here’s the answer key:

1.     There are tork gooboos of puzballs.

2.     Laplies, mushos, and fushos are tork gooboos of puzballs.

3.     They will not grunto any lipples.

4.     You should bartle the fusho who has rarckled her parshtootoos after her humply fluflu (Gallagher, 2004, p. 4).

I’m willing to bet you got all or most of those questions correct. But I’m also willing to bet that you don’t know what gooboos, puzballs, or mushos are and that you don’t have a clue about what you just read in that passage (I know this because Gallagher used nonsense words and made it all up).

This exercise translates right into what we want to avoid in our classrooms when assigning reading. Sure, we can assign reading and ask students to answer questions based on that reading. And our students might get all the questions correct. But do they really understand what they’ve read?

If the questions we ask don’t require higher-order thinking skills (like evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing), then they run the risk of remaining so much on the surface that students can answer them without even understanding what they’ve read (probably similar to the way you were able to answer those questions on gooboos and lipples). This ends up telling us very little to nothing about our students’ understanding, when we need to be striving to effectively check for understanding throughout our lessons and units in order to best help our students grow as learners.

We don’t want our students to be reading in our content areas at a “puzball-level” (Gallagher, 2004, p. 5). We want them to be looking below the surface. We want them to be using higher-order thinking skills.

Try keeping a copy of good old Bloom’s taxonomy where you write your lesson plans and your assessments so that you can easily refer to it. Or run your questions by a colleague (or your district’s friendly instructional coach, wink wink) to get another perspective on them.

Reading is the First R

You may remember my academic crushes on Lucy Calkins, Rick Wormeli, and Carol Tomlinson. Well, I’ve got another to add to my list. Don’t tell my husband, but I’m currently academically crushing on Mr. Kelly Gallagher. Gallagher writes a lot of books to his intended audience of secondary ELA teachers, but I think a lot of what he says applies to us all. After all, don’t most of us teach subject areas that require some reading from our students? And wouldn’t most of our students, regardless of content area, perform better in our classes if we were able to help them improve their reading? Don't forget that reading is the first R in the age-old reading, writing, 'rithmetic equation.

I’ve been reading Gallagher’s (2004) Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4 – 12. I find myself stopping every few pages or so and thinking, how could this apply to content areas other than ELA? What would this look like in a science classroom, for example? And so, now that I’m over halfway through the text, my brain is teeming with thoughts and ideas for all of us to help our students grow as readers across the content areas. I’ll be dedicating a bunch of upcoming posts to this topic, but, for today, let’s get started with a baseball metaphor, adapted from Mr. Gallagher himself (he writes a great baseball metaphor about experiencing the game with his daughters; for the purposes of this post, I’ll extend this metaphor to myself – and to my own inexperience with the game).

This summer, I went to a Red Sox game with a friend of mine who really knows baseball. FYI, I really don’t know baseball. We were the Odd Couple of Fenway that day.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’ve got the basics down. I know the batter is going to try to hit a pitch. If he does, he’ll run like crazy to as many bases as he can. The other guys will try to catch the ball and throw it to get this guy out. If he makes it all the way around the bases, his team scores a point. Three outs per team per inning, nine innings. Whoever scores the most, wins.

As Gallagher (p. 2) points out, “it could be said that at a certain level [I] ‘understood’ the game. But did [I]?” My friend sitting next to me saw things going on that I was totally oblivious to. He could watch the interaction between the catcher and the pitcher and he could spot the center fielder realizing what kind of pitch the catcher was setting up for and getting ready for it. My friend could see base runners looking to base coaches for permission to try to steal a base. And so many other intricacies!

To paraphrase Gallagher (p. 3), I watched and “understood” the game on a surface level while my friend watched and understood the game on a much deeper level; “we watched, and yet did not watch, the same game.”

Our students are sometimes reading complicated text the same way I was “reading” that baseball game. They stay on the surface, missing a lot of the more complex meaning of the text. “They can read and ‘comprehend,’ but they do so almost exclusively on a surface level. They miss much of the deeper beauty of the game” (p. 3).

If I wanted to get better at watching baseball, I would never be able to do it alone. My friend would definitely need to teach me how to watch the game more expertly. It’s the same with our students and reading. Simply assigning reading is not going to result in our students improving as readers. We need to teach them how to the read the texts of our content areas in more expert ways so that they get as much understanding and knowledge as they can from them.

How do we teach this? I’m glad you asked! Be on the lookout for upcoming posts with specific strategies and ideas for teaching reading across the content areas!

What's The Message?

There’s an important lesson I learned while taking a Research for Better Teaching Course. RBT (which heads up The Skillful Teacher course – highly recommended if you’ve never taken it!) believes there are a few key messages we must deliver to our students:

This is important.

You can do this.

I’m not giving up on you.

Sounds simple, right? But so, so powerful.

A couple weeks ago, my husband and I were listening to some TED talks on NPR centered around education (yes, I’ve turned my husband into an education junkie like myself – he was the one who actually suggested we listen!). Two of these stories in particular really struck me because they reminded me of the above messages and just how powerful they can be.

Here’s a summary of the first:

An education scholar in India was conducting a study on just how much children will teach themselves when presented with a challenge (you’re going to have to forgive my lack of specifics here – we listened to this in the car, and I only had a napkin to jot my notes down on!). After he plunked down a computer in the middle of a remote Indian village and discovered that children were teaching themselves English just to be able to use the computer, he began adding challenges. At one point, he asked the children (we’re talking elementary school-aged) to research and make some conclusions about some pretty complicated aspects of DNA (and trust me, he was not “dumbing” anything down; he was using what seemed to me to be college-level language and questions with these kids). Once he presented them with this challenge, they were on their own. After seeing that they immediately dug in, he soon asked a local 20 year old girl – with no background or interest in DNA – to just hang out with them while they worked on their research. She wasn’t to guide or teach them in anyway, but was to act, as the scholar put it, as “the Granny” – simply standing behind or beside the children and making statements like, “Wow! You know how to do that?,” “You can do that type of research on this computer?,” “I’m so impressed,” etc. What the scholar found was that this worked! Although she wasn’t able to provide any sort of instruction or help, just her words of praise and encouragement allowed the children to move further along with their research and findings.

[Note: In NO WAY I am suggesting that students don’t need us to teach them. I’m merely pointing out what a long way certain messages can go to help our students achieve.]

Here’s story #2:

You may have seen video footage of this TED talk before. A beautifully sweet, instantly likeable, grandmotherly teacher speaks about some of her approaches in the classroom through her years in education, the message always that she is not giving up on her students and will not allow them to give up on themselves.

My favorite part of her talk is when she describes how she marks a grade on a 20 question quiz. One of her students got 18 of the 20 questions wrong. But, on his paper, instead of writing -18, she wrote +2. Why?

Because -18 is insurmountable. Any student looking at that would instantly feel hopeless and may very likely just give up. But +2 gives some hope. At least that student is now presented with something positive; at least the focus is now on the fact that he got 2 right.

She describes how the student would ask, “Is this an F?,” to which she would reply that yes, it was. But her ability to get the student to focus on the +2 as a starting place for improvement instead of on the -18 as a starting place for giving up is noteworthy. And, I’d say, effective.

As educators, we hold a lot of power. What we say, how we say it, what we write on students’ papers and quizzes and tests – all of this can have a huge impact on our students. We need to consider our messages carefully, and be sure they have a positive impact on the growth of our students and their learning.

TEACH!

 Last Friday night, CBS aired a special documentary called TEACH, following the classrooms of four teachers through some triumphs and through some struggles. There has been some controversy surrounding the film (it was made by some of the same people involved with Waiting for Superman, which has its own controversy surrounding it; some felt there should have been more of a variety of content areas and teacher ages represented in the film; some felt it was an advertisement for Khan Academy; etc.), but I won’t be delving into those areas. In fact, as a disclaimer to this post, I’ll let you know right now: I loved it. I thought it was a genuine depiction of the realities of teaching – the pressures we face, the obstacles we have to strive to overcome, however insurmountable. And this post details what I loved most about the piece: teacher reflection and growth.

[SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t seen TEACH yet and you’re planning on it, you may want to postpone reading this post! TEACH just became available on iTunes, I believe, so you can check it out there.]

The four teachers depicted in the documentary were real teachers. And real teachers make mistakes. (Yes, let’s admit it. We do make mistakes from time to time.) And these teachers made mistakes. But the great, inspiring take-away was that these four teachers, often with the help of a mentor, reflected on their practices and on their mistakes, grew from the experience, changed some things around, and ended up with some great results for their students.

Keeping the Class Student-Centered

One of the teachers in the film was a high school AP history teacher. Much loved by his students, who seemingly clamored to enroll in his class, he learned the hard way (during a class that was being observed by his graduate school education professor, no less!) that his class was too teacher-centered. Numerous times throughout the lesson (which was largely lecture-based) he asked the class some variation of the question, “Does everyone get this?” Each time, he was met by crickets. And each time, he proceeded along with the content of his lesson, presumably taking his students’ silence for a “Yes, we get this.” It’s easy to fall into this trap, especially when we feel we have to keep moving on with our lesson. But we should never take a class’ silence for understanding (nor should we take one student’s “Yes” as the answer for “Does everyone get this?”). In working with his graduate school professor, this teacher realized his lessons needed to be more student-centered in order to get them more involved and to aid in checking for understanding. Soon, he was having his students work in groups to brainstorm, problem solve, and create. A plethora of voices filled the air of his classroom, and you could see the learning taking place.

The 360 Degree Classroom

A secondary math teacher shown in the film struggled with a range of student abilities present in her class. Even more so, she struggled with not being able to easily watch her students in action, to observe them doing math in the moment. Working with the assistant principal, she took on the challenge of trying out a 360 degree classroom. Whiteboards were installed across all four of the walls of the classroom. Students were handed a marker and an eraser as they entered the room. And, (presumably after a whole class mini-lesson) students left their desks behind as they each found a place at one of the four wall-length white boards. The teacher left the front of the room behind, and stood directly in the middle of the room, where she could pivot and turn, watching her students work through a math problem. This helped her identify to whom she needed to go first with support, and who was progressing along independently. Once again, the learning was visible and the students engaged.

Tapping Into High-Interest

A third teacher portrayed in the film was an elementary teacher struggling with reading instruction. Some of his students were grade levels behind where they needed to be. It was even harder to motivate some of these students not only due to their low reading skills, but because these difficulties had made them dislike reading so much. During a post-observation conference with his principal, she simply asked him, “When you were a kid, what would make you want to read?” In the next segment of the film, we hear this teacher asking his students what their hobbies are, what their lives are like, what they want to be when they grow up. And we then see him scouring through books in the library, later bringing a stack of books into the classroom. Standing amongst his students, holding up book after book and quickly describing it (“Who has trouble with their friends? Who wants to be a chef when they grow up?”), he is pelted with excited shrieks and raised hands. Everyone was thrilled to begin reading these high-interest books. It was certainly one huge step in the right direction.

The Flipped Classroom

The fourth teacher shown in TEACH was a math teacher (if memory serves, middle school or upper elementary) from Idaho, which is piloting the use of Khan Academy in some of its classrooms statewide. Khan Academy is a tool for flipping your classroom – instead of conducting the lesson in front of all your students, students access the material from the (free!) Khan Academy resources online. The class time is now freed up for small group work, intervention groups, etc. But it may not be as easy as it seems, as this teacher at first experienced. By the end of her first month with the program, she was ready to give up. She missed her place at the front of the room, she wasn’t sure what her role was now, and students were not improving their math skills. I wish she had had someone in her building or district who could have coached her through this (as we see in the above stories). But, luckily, she did reach out to a Khan Academy mentor, who helped her to look at her student data from the program the night before the next class, so she could see in advance who was struggling and she could plan to meet with certain groups of students to intervene. Her relief to understand the benefits of the program better was evident, and her class began to soar. Some students were even accessing Khan Academy when it wasn’t assigned, just to do some extra work on their own!

The amount of honest reflection, the help from a mentor, the willingness to try something new, the ability to grow as a professional: these are the qualities that most impressed me about the teachers in TEACH and the qualities that most impress me about all good teachers. I’m thrilled to be working as an instructional coach because it gives me the opportunity to help teachers do the hard work of the reflective practitioner.

The First Days Are Critical

“The First Days Are Critical.” This is a chapter subtitle from Harry K. Wong and Rosemary T. Wong’s famous The First Days of School (2005), a book that every new teacher was handed in the first district I ever taught in. While in retrospect I calmly agree with this advice, when I first saw it in print as a brand new teacher, I was horrified. Horrified because I didn’t read that particular chapter until the second week of school, and I thought for sure all hope was lost.

I said that in retrospect I agree with the advice, and I do. However, I also think we need to pay attention to the book’s title, The First Days of School, emphasis on days. Plural. Now, as I type this it is officially the fourth day of school in the district where I’m an instructional coach. So, my advice is – don’t despair. Don’t despair if you haven’t set up all your expectations, procedures, and routines just yet. Believe it or not, we are still within the first days of school. Now is the time to dive in to some critical work that will help shape up how your classroom runs for the entire school year.

(Note: Sometimes we don’t get off to a wonderful start with our procedures, routines, and expectations. I’m here to tell you that, although it is honestly much easier to begin such work at the very beginning of the school year, you can establish such things at any time during the school year. But that’s a story for another blog post.)

So, what types of things should we be focused on establishing during these first, critical days of school?

Procedures & Routines

Now is the time to establish with your students how they will pass in homework, where they will sit – or stand – during certain portions of class or of the school day, how transitions during a lesson or between lessons will function, how they should interact with one another and with you, how they should participate in class….

But my biggest piece of advice is not what your procedures and routines are, but how you teach them to your students. Yes, I think you need to teach these to your class, not just tell your class about them. This means you need to discuss the purpose of routines and procedures with your students, model behaviors for them, practice (and practice, and practice, and practice) using a gradual release of responsibility structure. All too often, we tell our students what the routines and procedures are, and then briskly move on to the content we’ll be teaching, expecting that they all understand the routines and procedures and can follow them perfectly. We wouldn’t expect this kind of super-quick mastery of content knowledge, so why do we expect it in other areas such as this?

Discipline

I’m going to let you in on a secret: if you establish really strong procedures and routines, you’ll deal far less with discipline issues. The same goes for having strong, detailed lesson planning: if you’ve thought out your lesson, ensuring that, within it, students have opportunities to actively engage with the material and if you’ve anticipated any potential bumps along the road, you’ll again deal far less with discipline issues.

But even in the most ideal of classrooms, every now and then a discipline issue may crop up. If it does, it will behoove you to discover ways to deal with consequences without stopping the instruction and learning that’s occurring in the classroom. Often when dealing with a discipline issue with one student, a teacher can lose focus on the lesson, and can find him- or herself losing precious time engaging with this one misbehaving student. Finding ways to avoid this trap are key. Are there non-verbal cues or signs you can give to this student? Can you use teacher tools like proximity to send a message without stopping your instruction?

Consistency is Key

With procedures and routines, and with discipline when it pops up, we must be consistent. Sometimes this is easier said than done. Sometimes being consistent requires a lot of effort and attention to detail on our parts, and some days it just feels easier or more manageable to slide away from the systems we’ve created. Avoid this temptation! Our students need to experience consistent procedures and routines, or they will very quickly get the message that these structures are not really all that important and they’ll begin to stop adhering to them. Which will most likely bring up some discipline issues, or at the very least, waste some of our precious classroom time.

The Structure of Lessons

Establishing a structure to your lessons that both you and your students can depend upon can really enhance the learning that occurs in the classroom. Will there always (or, at least, quite often) be an activator that will either review previous learning or that will scaffold students towards new learning? A summarizer that will help both you and students assess their comprehension of that day’s lesson? A workshop structure for particular parts of the day that will always allow time for direct instruction, gradual release, work time, and debriefing?

None of these suggestions are made with the intent of a stale classroom where everything is the same, day in and day out. Mixing things up can often engage our students’ minds and interest levels. But there’s a LOT to be said for consistency within the structure of our lessons. It can keep us teachers on our toes, determined to stick to a structure we know works, and it can be very helpful for students to know what to expect and to establish a pattern for learning. Rather than “mixing up” the entire structure of a lesson in order to allow for some variety (it is the spice of life, after all!), try instead, for example, to vary the types of activators and summarizers you use (don’t get too stuck in the “ticket to leave” rut, but explore some other options).

All of the above suggestions are really quite broad, aren’t they? 

If you’re looking for more detail on any of the above, including specific examples and suggestions, let me know. I’m happy to dedicate future blog posts to this, or to provide one-on-one coaching in these areas.

Enjoy these first days of school!