It's That Time of Year!

Happy almost May, readers! It's graduation season, and tomorrow I get to be part of the festivities at Northeastern University.  I have the honor of being the guest speaker at the pinning ceremony for NEU's undergraduate education majors.

Since I've been hacking away at my speech this week (it has to be ten minutes long!!!), I thought I'd do myself a favor and double dip here on my blog. So, if you'd like to read some sappy inspiration, I share with you my speech (sorry -- it's kind of long -- did I mention it has to be ten minutes?!!?):

"Good morning. I’d like to thank Dean Caron for the opportunity to speak at today’s ceremony. It is a true honor.

Congratulations to all of you. Certainly, congratulations on graduating and on earning your degrees. The completion of an academic milestone such as this deserves a lot of praise. But I’d also like to congratulate you on your choice to pursue the field of education. In my fully biased opinion, it is the best field out there. Working in education will provide you with challenges large and small; if you let them, these challenges will motivate you, inspire you, and fuel your passion for making a difference in the lives of your students and, perhaps, for making a difference in the field of education at large.

When I first began my educational career in September of 2000, I had a lot of expectations. And I was right about a few things – teaching was going to be awesome, and it was. I would love my students, and I did. But there were boatloads of things I never saw coming, situations that my incessant watching and re-watching of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society and Michelle Pfieffer in Dangerous Minds couldn’t prepare me for. So, today, I’d like to share with you a few things to expect as you enter this wonderful profession.

First, what to expect from the students.

Sometimes, your students will be smarter than you. I’ve taught high school students who have had insights on literature that I would have killed to have come up with. And I’ve worked with first graders who have devised routines and structures for how the classroom should best operate that were way more effective than the teacher’s original plan had been. Don’t let this throw you. Invite your students’ voices in. Expect to learn as much from your students as you hope they will learn from you.

Some of your students will hate school. Don’t take this personally. Some of them will be struggling against a structure of schooling that doesn’t work with their learning style, or with where they are developmentally. Invite these students to become learners. Discover what kind of learning environment will work best for them – do they need the freedom to be able to move around a bit?; Find out what they get excited about – is there a way to work basketball into an upcoming math lesson? Expect your students to learn in different ways from one another and to be interested in different things – learn from these differences and allow them to make you a stronger teacher, someone who can teach all children, not just those who thrive within a traditional classroom setting.

Some of your students will have accomplished amazing feats just by making it to school in the morning. Some are dealing with unimaginable home lives, some are working part-time or even almost full-time hours to help support their family, some are struggling through substance abuse and addictions. Expect to be needed desperately by these students – expect them to need compassion, expect them to need a hug, or the occasional granola bar for breakfast. Most of all, expect them to need you to believe in them, to need you to give them important work to do and important things to strive for.

And here’s something I can promise you to expect from ALL of your students. They all want to succeed. It doesn’t matter if they act like it or not. It doesn’t matter if they’re acting up in class for a multitude of reasons, reasons that can sometimes be seen, but are often unseen. No child comes to school hoping to fail that day. Help them to succeed.

There are a few things you should expect from adults, too.

Expect lots of advice and expert opinions (even from those who have never stepped foot in a classroom as an educator). You may or may not have noticed that I’m five months pregnant. And as a woman who is in the middle of her first pregnancy, I now consider myself a bit of an expert on getting a lot of advice thrown my way, often unsolicited. And most of that advice seems to be designed to scare the living daylights out of me.

It’s not all that different from the amount of unsolicited advice and opinions that come your way as an educator.

I’m not always sure why so many people prefer to focus on the negative. But, oh, they are out there. You’ll find them in the staff room among your fellow educators, and you’ll find them on social media among your Facebook friends. There seems to be a lot of negativity floating around out there – there are some people and some sources that will want to fill your mind with all the perceived barriers to being a good teacher. They’ll tell you you can’t teach effectively these days because of the Common Core, or because of standardized testing, or because of a certain school’s discipline policies.

And I won’t sugar coat it – these things can get in your way at times. They can be frustrating. But they do not have to limit your effectiveness as a teacher. I work with teachers every day who teach engaging lessons, who find ways to motivate and challenge all students. They find ways to do this because they have kept their eyes on the prize. The students themselves.

You’re in education to shape young minds. You don’t have to let anything stand in your way of this. You can start, in big and small ways, to break down some of the barriers that traditional structures of education have put in place. You can encourage girls to pursue studies of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. You can inspire them to be leaders. And the young boys? I’ll be the mother of a young boy in about four or four-and-a-half months. You can encourage him to love learning. You can provide structures in his elementary school classroom that are developmentally appropriate for a seven or eight year old boy. You can make it possible that learning doesn’t have to be about sitting still and quietly listening for 45 minutes.

I’m here to tell you that this is possible. Maybe you’ll work in a non-traditional school that’s finding exciting and new ways for classrooms and for learning to function. Maybe you’ll work in a public school that is committed to the Common Core and to standardized testing. I’m here to tell you that, in either setting, you can be an effective educator.

How? First, take a lesson from my pregnancy and don’t listen to the naysayers. They’re going to be out there. Avoid them. Surround yourself with strong mentors. And I’m not talking about just your first year or so of teaching, here. Surround yourself with strong mentors throughout your career. I’m 14 years in, and I still meet up regularly with positive, strong educational influences.

And don’t stop there. Insist on being a lifelong learner. Continue your education, formally or informally. Read, read, read. Read stuff by people who are on the same page as you. And read stuff by people who stand for things you think you may disagree with. Be open to having your mind changed. Go to workshops. Take classes. You can be the positive voice the field of education needs now. More importantly, you can be the positive voice our students need now.

Thank you, and, again, congratulations."

Thanks to all the educators in my current and past school districts for teaching me about a lot of what I included in this speech -- that there are effective, wonderful educators in this world doing great things and changing students' lives!!

Take Some Time to Relax

Let the countdown begin! There are mere hours left between us and April vacation.

I suspect that most teachers will use at least some portion of their vacation time getting some grading or lesson planning done. But my wish is that you all take some well-earned time to relax and reset. After all, once April vacation is over, we'll be in the "home stretch" -- filled with beautiful days, spring flowers (and showers, most likely), and lots more learning to do!

Here's a one-minute video to start your vacation off with a chuckle -- how do students think we teachers relax?

Enjoy!

Flipping the Flipped Classroom

Lots of teachers are interested in the flipped classroom model, but are concerned about a few issues:

• What happens if/when some of my students don't watch the online tutorial or lecture in preparation for class the next day?
• What about my students who may not have access to the Internet at home?

While there are several ways to address these valid concerns, in this post I'll share one education blogger's solution -- to actually flip the idea of the flipped classroom so that the flipping still occurs within the walls of the classroom.

Since the word "flip" and its variations made too many appearances in that last sentence and I've now probably left you with more questions than answers, please take a look at this Edutopia blog post by Jennifer Gonzalez. While she admits there are pros and cons to her method as well as to the traditional flipped classroom method, she provides good food-for-thought in examining how to solve the above concerns.

Interested in flipping your classroom, either the traditional way or via Gonzalez's approach? Give me a holler -- I'd love to help you out!

Scaffolding for Reading Comprehension

Let's face it: at times, we ask our students to read some pretty sophisticated stuff. Some of our students are advanced readers; they don't need our support. Others really struggle with reading challenging texts, and may need a framework designed to guide their comprehension. Eventually, this framework can be altered as students need it less and less -- the teacher can scaffold the support so that she gradually releases responsibility to the student.

What follows is a fiction example using Romeo & Juliet that I'm borrowing from Kelly Gallagher's (2004) Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4-12. But, I truly think this type of scaffolding could also be quite impactful for non-fiction texts as well, across the content areas.

The Romeo & Juliet example:

As they begin reading this challenging play, students are given outlines of the upcoming scene, but the outline has some gaps in it. For example, for Act I scene i, students might be given the following outline:

• Sampson and Gregory, two of Capulet's servants, fight with Abram and Baltazar, who are servants from the rival house of Montague.
• Tybalt, a quick-tempered Capulet, enters the fight.
• 
  
• The Prince enters and, enraged, stops the fight.
• The Montagues express concern about their son, Romeo.
• Romeo confesses to Benvolio that he is in love with a girl who is indifferent to him.

Here, Gallagher has only left the third bullet blank for students to complete.

As students become more familiar with their study of Shakespeare's work, provide fewer bulleted details on the given outline, requiring students to provide more and more plot points. For example, for Act III scene i, students might be given the following outline:

• 
  
• Tybalt and other rivals arrive. Tybalt wants to find Romeo.
• Romeo arrives. Tybalt calls him a "villain."
• The Prince enters and, enraged, stops the fight.
• Romeo says he now "loves" Tybalt.
• 
  
• 
  
• 
  

By Act V, students are much more proficient at reading Shakespeare, so they may be asked to provide all of the bulleted statements. Remember, you may be differentiating for readiness, so not all students in your class would opt to use such scaffolded supports.

Again, don't limit reading instruction to the ELA classroom. This same kind of outline scaffolding could easily work with a chapter from a challenging textbook for a social studies or science course.

April is National Formative Assessment Month!

Okay, I lied. April is not officially National Formative Assessment Month. But you can't blame a girl for dreaming.

How about we make it happen anyway? If you'd like to focus more on formative assessment, make it your April goal (could help pass the time until school vacation, at any rate).

Want to increase how often you check for student understanding? Want to think about and try out some ways to quickly analyze some student data? How often do you find yourself using student data to inform your teaching, either that same day or for the next lesson? Want to increase how often you're able to do this?


Trust me -- there are ways to do this without adding an enormous amount of work to your already busy plates. It's amazing the information you can get from flipping through a stack of tickets-to-leave. Assessing a longer piece of student work? Try out an error analysis. Or you can use student self-assessments in formative ways. You could even try out on-the-spot formative assessment -- talk about quick and easy!!

Once you've done your pain-free analysis, you may or may not see the need for differentiated instruction. If you do, your options are many: you could split the class in half, you could decide on small groups, a tiered lesson, partner work, etc., etc., etc.

If you're interested, let me know. Let's make this National Formative Assessment Month thing happen -- maybe we'll be responsible for the start of a movement!  :)

Happy Spring (again, a girl can dream)!

Think Pair Share

I know this is an oldie-but-a-goodie. Think Pair Share, also popularly known as Turn & Talk. But, do you ever find, like me, that, though this is a "tried and true" task, it works better in some classes than others? Here's why (at least according to me!):

There are some students who don't need a lot of structure to Turn & Talk. We ask them to do it, and they just swivel right around and start sharing ideas with a partner, while also listening to and remembering their partner's ideas. But there are other students who don't share much of anything with their partner, and tune out while their partner shares with them. We ask these students later to share with the class, and are met with blank stares. Have a class with a lot of students who fall under the latter category, and Turn & Talk is suddenly not so "tried and true" anymore. Want a solution?

Don't hate me for this, but consider ceasing with the Turn & Talk lingo. This implies that students can just immediately jump into a conversation about a topic or a question. Rather, I'd go with Think Pair Share. This task requires students to do some independent thinking before sharing with a partner and later with the whole class. Let's go one step further . . . I hate to add more photocopying and prep to your lives, but I really think students who struggle with Turn & Talk (or who simply do not participate in it) could benefit from having a template that scaffolds their work on this kind of task.

Below, I've included a template I have used in the past -- it's yielded great results from students who are reluctant or non-participatory with Turn & Talk. They are first required to independently jot down three ideas in response to a question or prompt of some sort you pose. Only then do they share with a partner. Then, they are asked to note which ideas of theirs were the same or similar to ideas shared by their partner AND they are also asked to jot down ideas their partner shared that were different than their own. This really scaffolds the partner work for students who may otherwise zone out during this task. Finally, students are asked to jot down some ideas from other classmates during the whole class share. This kind of structure provides students with some very clear expectations for what turning and talking should entail. Perhaps eventually this scaffold could even be removed once students have mastered it and are ready to participate without it.

If you'd like a copy of this template, just let me know -- I'm happy to share! (After I've thought and paired, naturally.  Sorry -- couldn't resist!)



[I should mention this particular template comes from Thinkquiry Toolkit I: Strategies to Improve Reading Comprehension and Vocabulary Development Across the Content Areas (2011), edited by Julie Meltzer and Dennis Jackson and published by Public Consulting Group. There are others like it out there, but this one has worked well for me!]

Rubrics: More Than Just a Post-Assessment Tool

When most of us think about rubrics, we automatically picture ourselves filling them out as we grade a summative assessment, circling and highlighting and jotting down notes. This is certainly a valid and effective use of rubrics -- they can help us provide important feedback for student growth. But they can do more, too . . .

Here's an idea from Quate and McDermott's Clock Watchers: Six Steps to Motivating and Engaging Disengaged Students Across Content Areas (2009). Consider using your rubrics as an opportunity for student self-assessment and for pre-assessment of skills. Give students the rubric nice and early -- well before the assignment is due. Ask students to read the skills listed on the rubric, and to think about whether or not they could teach someone how to do that skill (i.e., they feel they've mastered that skill). If so, students should highlight it in yellow. If they come across skills on the rubric they have no idea about and feel they cannot do at the moment, they should highlight those in a different color.

Once this fairly quick and easy self-assessment is complete, the student and the teacher have a lot of useful data. We now know what areas this student is going to need teacher support in in order to meet success and master skills. We can differentiate our instruction leading up to the final completion of the assignment, providing scaffolding for some students, meeting others in small groups. We may also learn that, for some students, the assignment really isn't offering much of a challenge. We may want to think about providing some sort of extension to these students.

You've already put all that time into creating that rubric -- might as well make as much use out of it as possible!!