It's Not Over 'Til It's Over

Yup. It's mid-May. State-testing is just about wrapped up. Educator evaluations are being finalized. June, and, with it, the end of the school year, is literally right around the corner.

It can be hard to stay motivated and engaged at this time of the year, for students and teachers both. But we must, mustn't we? After all, there are still weeks and weeks left of learning (don't shoot me; I'm just the messenger, y'all!).

If you're having difficulty holding onto a feeling of excitement for the classroom right about now, maybe it's time to throw caution to the wind and try something new. It might be just the thing to give you that burst of energy and enthusiasm to carry you forward until that last bell rings.

The great thing about trying something new now is that you know your students SO well at this point. It can be tricky to "experiment" earlier in the year, especially when you're just getting a handle on who's who in your classroom. But if you try something out now, with students you know well, you may feel comfortable enough with it in the fall to begin the year with it!

So, if you're interested, think about the following possibilities:

• Maybe you've never felt quite comfortable with -- or never even tried -- a workshop format with your students. Why not try it out now?
• Perhaps you know you should use formative assessments more often to inform your instruction, but the day-to-day life of a teacher has slowed you down and distracted you from this. Now could be a great time to play around with it a little more.
• Maybe you find yourself using the same ol' activators and summarizers you always use -- or maybe you find yourself having strayed away from these valuable tools. Now could be the time to learn about some new strategies to use at the beginning and/or the ending of a lesson.
• You've always thought about trying to tier a lesson, but you're just not sure how. Now's a great time to learn more about this, especially with your knowledge of your students!

The possibilities are endless! If you'd like some guidance and collaboration, you can always contact your district's friendly instructional coach. *wink, wink.*

The Exit Ticket of the 21st Century

I love exit tickets. I think they are a simple, quick way to check for student understanding during or at the end of a lesson, and, through some simple, quick analysis, can inform further instruction. So, please know that in no way I am advocating we say good-bye to the exit ticket.

Instead, I'd like to offer up a new way of thinking about exit tickets, in case you want to tap into some technology and mix it up a bit. I often recommend teachers vary their ways of checking for understanding and their activators and summarizers, because I think variety can keep students engaged and invested. So, "modernizing" the exit ticket is just one more tool to add to the ol' toolkit. 

I can't take any credit for this idea -- I stumbled across it via the following blog from Edutopia. Check it out by clicking here. Heads-up: you may or may not agree with everything this blogger states (check out some of the post's comments for some interesting debate and extensions to the ideas). But, the ideas included about using some digital exit tickets are worth some thought. If you've got the digital means and access, why not try some out and see how it goes? I'd love to hear from anyone who's either interested in doing this OR who tries it out and can report back on how it went.

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.)

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!