Tuesday, November 26, 2013

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!

Friday, November 22, 2013

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!)

Thursday, November 14, 2013

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!

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

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.)




Friday, November 1, 2013

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!).