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.