The Danger of Strategies

“We’re an AVID school, so we use AVID strategies.”

“My staff has been trained in Kagan strategies, so when I walk into a classroom, I want to see Kagan structures in use.”

“I want to make sure my principal sees that I’m doing Costa’s Levels of Thinking.”

“Our students are 21st century digital learners; therefore, our teachers implement technology in all their lessons.”

There's danger lurking within the above sentences you might hear at Anyschool, USA.

Teachers are bombarded with strategies in trainings. Principals introduce strategies as campus initiatives. Districts and campuses adopt programs that bring with them their own sets of strategies. Attending a workshop or convention provides teachers with a host of new strategies they can’t wait to try back in their classrooms.

I’m a huge fan of new teaching strategies. There’s nothing I find more professionally exciting than learning something new I can apply to help engage students and stretch them as learners.  New strategies can revitalize a classroom or a campus, but there’s something a little dangerous about working with strategies, old or new.

Sometimes, we get so mesmerised by employing new strategies--and so proud of ourselves for trying them--that we lose sight of the purpose behind the strategies. Using strategies for the sake of using strategies is like getting all dressed up in an elaborate trick-or-treat costume for Halloween and then staying home by yourself and watching Full House reruns on the sofa. It’s fun, but what was the point of going to all that trouble?

The purpose of using any educational strategy should be to achieve a student learning outcome.  If our purpose of using a strategy becomes to use the strategy, we’ve missed the point. Strategies without learning attached to them may be engaging, but they won’t push our kids any closer to where we want them to go.

Television is a childcare strategy familiar to many parents. There’s no doubt that plopping a child in front of a TV and letting her sit there slack-jawed is one way to keep her mesmerised for hours and out of your hair. If the parent has a learning goal for the child--to learn the alphabet, for instance--television can be an effective strategy if it’s employed correctly. A child watching hours of Sesame Street is likely to come away with greater alphabet mastery. There are, of course, other strategies a parent could use to achieve that goal, but there’s no denying that watching Sesame Street has a positive effect on childhood learning (at least it did for me). This is an example of a strategy successfully paired with a learning outcome.

In the classroom, teachers employ specific strategies to achieve specific goals. Sometimes, however, we lose sight of that goal (or never establish the goal in the first place), and the strategy becomes merely something to do.   

Let’s take technology as an example. In the last few years, technology professional development has been all the rage. “Twenty-First Century Learning” has become a buzzphrase in the world of education. Teachers have been bombarded with numerous apps, websites, and programs to “meet our students where they live.”  This technology has trickled out to campuses with varied results.

Here’s an example: Teacher A and Teacher B both attend a training on using technology to increase student engagement. Both teachers are excited to learn about a website called Kahoot that allows students to race one another to correctly answer multiple-choice questions in hopes of landing at the top of the leaderboard; the teachers hasten back to their classrooms eager to try this new technology miracle.

Teacher A uses Kahoot the next day in geography. Since they are learning about landforms, she searches Kahoot and finds a ready-made game to test vocabulary knowledge. She explains to her students how to log on and play the game, and the fun begins! The students are a little bit giddy as each question pops onto the screen. They guess the answers and wait until the results pop up to cheer their brilliance or hang their heads in defeat. Fifteen questions flash onto the screen in 8 minutes’ time, and the teacher feels delighted that her students are so elated to be learning geography. The principal pops her head in and is thrilled to see the students actively participating and using technology.

Teacher B sees the potential for using Kahoot as a learning tool, and she analyzes recent quizzes to identify the terms that appear to be causing her students the most difficulty. She pinpoints the places where confusion exists, and she creates her own Kahoot with questions about her students’ points of confusion. She deliberately includes incorrect answers she thinks some of her students are likely to choose based on what she’s seen from her formative assessments in class. As the students play the game and experience the same level of engagement answering the questions Teacher A’s students showed, the teacher pauses after each question to debrief. She asks students in pairs to discuss the answers they gave and why they gave them. Then, she solicits a few responses from her students to help clarify the trouble spots. She directly teaches the topics which remain unclear. The game becomes, then, a formative assessment that allows her to see what her students understand and where they still need some reinforcement.

Both Teacher A and Teacher B are achieving the aim of student engagement by using Kahoot. Teacher A’s students, however, are engaged in the way my little brother was enthralled with the game Space Invaders on his Atari. Though he played for hours with nary a break, he was responding to stimuli and not substantially learning. Teacher B, on the other hand, realizes the strengths and limitations of Kahoot. She knows that the type of learning Kahoot encourages is Level 1 of Costa’s Levels of Thinking: checking to see whether or not students know facts, definitions, terms, etc. While Level 1 thinking is important, it’s not the end goal of learning for her students, so she uses the game to check for understanding and clarify misconceptions. Through her discussions and questioning between rounds, Teacher B extends the learning beyond the literal level.She is also clear in her aim to use Kahoot as an informal assessment to guide future instruction. Teacher B gets it; Teacher A has a bit of growing to do in her implementation of technology as a tool for learning. Teacher A has student engagement; Teacher B has students engaged in learning.

As a  fan of AVID, I’m a champion of the WICOR strategies. But these, too are not foolproof. Just because students are writing on Cornell Note paper doesn’t necessarily mean they are using the notes as a tool to deepen and strengthen their understanding of the content they’re taking notes on. Students believing they’re using the AVID Critical Reading process may be  arbitrarily circling and underlining words in an article without growing as readers or even increasing their comprehension of a text. A One-Pager isn’t a learning tool if it’s little more than a pretty picture with some words written nearby. Socratic Seminars may not result in authentic dialogue and exploration of ideas if the teacher doesn’t understand and communicate the why and the how of the strategy. In other words, things that look like worthwhile AVID strategies may be masquerading as learning when in reality they’re simply tasks for students to complete. AVID strategies are powerful and transformational but only if they’re used with intentionality.

Teachers who set out to use strategies of whatever type without considering why they’re using them and how the strategies will result in a specific student learning outcome are missing opportunities to harness the intended power of these strategies.

You may be asking yourself, “How do I do this?” I think there are two best ways:

1. Start with the outcome and select the most appropriate strategy. This one is probably the better route. Think about what you want your students to be able to do, and then dig through your bag of tricks to choose the best strategy for the job. If you have a goal in mind but don’t have a strategy to make it happen, talk to your teacher friends or call upon an Instructional Specialist to help.
2. Begin with the strategy and determine how it best fits into your curriculum. This one is a little trickier, but it’s possible if you remain focused on your learning objectives. Consider what student outcomes are most likely to result from using the strategy, and identify a place in the curriculum where such an outcome would be desirable or appropriate. If you’ve just been to a training and are itching to apply what you learned,  this is the approach you may end up trying. Just don’t forget that behind every good strategy is a better student outcome.

This might be a great time to crowdsource some ideas to help you along in your increasingly effective use of teaching strategies. I’d love to get some ideas from you about how you use your favorite strategies to achieve specific learning outcomes. If you have a moment, visit this Google Form. It offers the opportunity for you to share a strategy and the student learning outcome you desire when you choose to use it. I’ll incorporate your responses in a future post so all can benefit from the collective experience of those who had the stamina to read all the way to the end of this lengthy diatribe.

In the meantime, I wish you all the best in your successful use of instructional strategies to help your students soar.

2016: The Year of...

Did I ever tell you about the time I thought I was cooking quinoa but instead mixed up a big batch of boiled chia seeds?  It was an honest mistake. I had scooped quinoa and chia seeds that afternoon into separate bulk bags at Sprouts, written down the code (but not the name of the item) on each twist tie so the checker could charge me correctly, and brought home my healthy purchase to cook. Wanting a delicious and healthful savory side dish to go with my meal, I looked up the instructions online for cooking quinoa (1 cup quinoa, 2 cups water; boil 20 minutes) and started making dinner.

Unbeknownst to me, I inadvertently scooped out a heaping cup of chia seeds instead of quinoa.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the culinary experience of chia seeds. In the last several years, they’ve been moved from growing green “fur” on ceramic pets (Ch-ch-ch-Chia!) to being praised by Dr. Oz and other health food gurus for their nutritional value: high fiber, protein, calcium, antioxidants, and more. In their uncooked form, the seeds look like, well, grey-colored quinoa grains. When you mix them with liquid, however, they begin to form what scientists have best been able to describe as “sludge.” Most websites recommend adding a teaspoon or two to your protein shakes, soups, or snacks. I boiled an entire cup.

As soon as I noticed the gelatinous pan-full of chia goop and realized my mistake, I had two options: 1.  I could throw the chia away and start over, or, 2. I could try to do something with my creation.

Option 1 seemed like the best choice at first. After all, I had failed at my attempt to cook quinoa to accompany the chicken breast that was baking in the oven. I did not come up with the correct response, and there was no way to turn this into a palatable savory side. No one wants to eat chicken with chia phlegm for dinner. But if I abandoned my creation, how would I dispose of it? I didn’t trust that my not-Hefty kitchen trash bags would safely contain the mass all the way to the dumpster, and any attempt to wash this glop down the sink would surely end with an expensive visit from a plumber.

Option 2 presented some fun challenges. I recalled vaguely seeing Chia Seed Pudding on the dessert menu at a restaurant, and I wondered if I could make something similar. What might happen if I tried to turn this accident into a not-so-bad-for-me after-dinner treat? I added a little milk, some sugar, and some vanilla and continued to boil. The mixture thickened even more to a lovely puddinglike consistency. I removed the pan from the heat, scooped the pudding into dishes, and cooled it in the fridge.  And you know what?  It was delicious, so much so that I made it again later on purpose.

In our classrooms, I’m afraid we often create students whose only choice  when faced with a challenge is Option 1.  In their minds, there’s a right answer, a correct result, one path to a solution, a single definitive interpretation. If they don’t come up with the lone answer the teacher is seeking, then they’ve failed. They can start over or simply give up.

What if we helped students embrace Option 2? Education, after all, should be about a search for knowledge and understanding. Students should cultivate a playful curiosity.

In fact, I’m decreeing that in my world 2016 is “The Year of Playful Curiosity.” I hope the students and teachers I work with open their minds, banish their insecurities, and wonder “what if?” along with me.

Imagine what would happen in English classes if students trusted their own ideas and didn’t feel compelled to run to the internet to find out what The Scarlet Letter really means. What if they got excited by examining a sentence or paragraph from a book they were reading just to explore what the author was doing with words? They might even try playing with words in similar ways in their own writing.

What if classes raised more questions than answers? What if teachers didn’t predetermine the “right” answer to the essay or discussion question beforehand but only decided what criteria would demonstrate a successful response? What if students grew accustomed to playing around with ingredients, with numbers, with ideas, and with concepts in a safe and exciting environment?

The Understanding By Design framework our district uses for unit planning (Wiggins and McTighe) stresses real-world application, experiential learning, meaningful performance expectations, variety of experience and methods, and creation of meaning rather than accumulation of knowledge. Unit planners determine an acceptable outcome to measure learning and then design the learning experiences students need to reach that outcome. The best units won’t move students in a lockstep fashion to a uniform result; they will allow students to explore, grapple with concepts, play around with ideas, try them on for size, return to the drawing board, and wrestle their way to an acceptable solution. There’s ample room for playful curiosity in these UbD units.

When I think of playful curiosity, I think of one of my favorite English professors from my Southwestern University undergrad days, Dr. Debbie Ellis. Clad in Birkenstocks and sporting an unruly cascade of blond hair so long she could sit on it, Dr. Ellis loved to pose playful questions. I recall with delight answering essay questions on tests (that’s right; her tests were actually fun) in her intro to literature, Chaucer, and Shakespeare classes:  “Who was the most villainous character in all the short stories we read?” “How would the plays have been different if Shakespeare had switched the fool, Feste, in Twelfth Night with the fool, Touchstone, from As You Like It?”  Dr. Ellis didn’t have a correct answer in mind. In fact, she celebrated the unexpected and well-defended unusual response. After each test, she compiled a handout with excerpts from her favorite responses; seeing your answer made the handout was a mark of accomplishment and a source of pride.       

Our world today makes achieving a state of playful curiosity a struggle. When you can google any factoid you seek, watch a video instantly of someone performing most any task, ask a question online and get a response, and cut and paste someone else’s idea and try to pass it off as your own, taking the time to wonder, to play, to try, to fail, to revise, to retry, and to explore seems almost wasteful. But isn’t this where the real learning occurs?

If we’re going to make this playful curiosity thing happen in 2016, we’re going to have to unprogram our students. We are going to have to change their mindsets about school, and, in many cases, we’re going to have to change some of our own mindsets and break old habits.

I invite you to jump on my bandwagon, to embrace the idea of playful curiosity, and to re-envision what your classroom will be like in 2016. I don’t have all the answers about how to do this, but I’m curious to see what they might be. Let’s play around and figure it out. We might end up with sludge, or we might end up with something new and awesome!

Thank You Notes

Thank You Notes

I’ve never been very good at writing thank you notes. I don’t have an acceptable excuse for this shortcoming; I simply forget to take the time to formally acknowledge my gratitude. I’ve been working on this for a while now, and I’m getting better. At this time of the year, I’m especially mindful of the need to thank teachers for all the wonderful things you do each day.

Thank you for the time you spend—during the school day and frequently beyond—preparing lessons, grading papers, meeting with parents, learning new things professionally, and attending extracurricular activities.

Thank you for making your classroom a student-centered environment where the kids do the thinking and the talking, even when it would be easier and faster just to tell them what you know yourself.

Thank you for taking risks with technology because you know that students in today’s world engage actively when you let them connect online.

Thank you for believing in your students. You may be the only one in their lives who does.

Thank you for having high expectations for yourself and your students.

Thank you, also, for being flexible and merciful. They are, after all, kids, and kids make mistakes and do stupid things sometimes. It’s part of growing up.  

Thank you for spending time teaching your students the “hidden curriculum” of school. Thanks for realizing that there may not be someone at home who knows how to navigate the world of education and that your guidance can help someone sail farther than they would have ever anticipated.

Thank you for making your classroom a safe space for students to struggle.

Thank you for bringing joy to your classroom because a classroom without joy is a dreary place to try to learn.

Thank you for understanding that not all students learn in the same way. Thanks for incorporating WICOR (Writing, Inquiry, Collaboration, Organization, and Reading) into your lessons so that all students have the opportunity to grow in vital learning realms and to strengthen skills in areas of weakness.

Thank you for taking time to pause and let your students reflect on their learning.

Thank you for realizing that rigor doesn’t mean more work or more punitive grading; it means work at a higher cognitive level.

Thank you for praising your students, even when it’s hard to find something to praise.

Thank you for adopting a growth mindset in your classroom and for helping your students develop one.

Thank you for having a sense of humor. It makes the day more pleasant for you, for your students, and for your co-workers.

Speaking of your co-workers, thanks for being a team player. Teaching is hard work, but it’s not a competition. There’s no reason each of us needs to do all the work ourselves.

Thank you for being vulnerable, for apologizing when you make a mistake, for admitting you’re not perfect, and for letting your students know that it’s better to take a risk and fail than not to try at all.

Thank you for viewing assessment as an opportunity for learning, not as an endpoint, a punishment, a “gotcha,” or a means for sorting or ranking students. Thanks for realizing that the most important assessment is daily formative assessment and may alter the path of your instruction.  

Thank you for making good use of your students’ time. Having a well-planned class each day and only thoughtful, meaningful, necessary work outside of class shows them you value their time and aren’t intending to waste it.   

Thank you for keeping up-to-date professionally. Thanks for realizing that we can’t keep teaching the same way because it worked in the past. Times are changing. Students are changing. Our school populations may be changing. We should be changing in response.

Thanks for being a reflective practitioner, for constantly asking yourself how a lesson or assignment went and how it can be better next time. Thank you for asking questions and seeking help when you need it.

Thank you for taking time for yourself to recharge. I hope you find more of that time over the holidays.

Have a wonderful, restful, and well-deserved break. I am thankful for the work you do.

The WICOR of Reading: Reading and Writing

Writing is an essential component of WICOR and a good way to reinforce the skills we're trying to teach our students who encounter struggles with reading.

This week, I turn my attention to the relationship between reading and writing and showcase a few ready-to-use strategies that can help you achieve success with challenging texts in your classroom. 

1.  Cornell Notes:  Cornell Notes are a cornerstone of the AVID classroom, not because there's anything magical about the two-column notes themselves but because they help students understand the kind of thinking required for learning. When you ask your students to take notes in the right column of Cornell Notes, you want them to record the main ideas and supporting points in the text. This aids with meaning-making; students have to sort through the text to sift the main points out of all those words and succinctly summarize them in note form. The most helpful teachers will provide students with an Essential Question to guide their reading or even a reading prompt. After the note taking occurs, ask students to enter the note making phase of the Cornell Note-taking process in which they revisit their notes, highlighting, underlining, or circling main points and key terms, crossing out information that turned out to be irrelevant or unnecessary, and chunking the notes into sections. Then, ask them to write some questions in the left margin, preferably higher-level thinking questions using Costa's Levels of Thinking or your taxonomy of choice. Students can spend some time discussing those questions in pairs or small groups or using the questions to guide a full-class discussion or Socratic Seminar. Finally, conclude the process by asking students to synthesize their thinking at the bottom of the page in a summary that answers the Essential Question. This multi-step process requires students to revisit the text at different cognitive levels and helps the learning stick. By jumping through these hoops, students have made friends with the text and can use their new-found learning for whatever the next part of your curriculum requires. 

2.  Metacognitive Reflection:  In my last post, I addressed the idea of explicitly teaching students the things that good readers do. One way to make these processes become routine practices for your students is to ask them to reflect on the thinking that went into their reading of a text. How did they approach the process? Where did they encounter difficulties?  What did they do when they realized that understanding was breaking down? Asking students to reflect in writing about the process of the reading itself is challenging for them but can lead to fruitful discussion--full-class or one-on-one--on the "how" of reading. By making students aware of their thinking, you can cause real change in their reading behaviors, and perhaps the next reading assignment will seem less daunting.  

3.  Quickwrites:  I'm a big fan of using ungraded quickwrites at every stage of the reading process. Sometimes, I find it's useful to have students write about what they already know or want to know about a topic before they read. Or pose a question that piques their interest on the topic and whets their anticipation to know more. I've also used quickwrites during reading, asking students to stop in the middle of an article, chapter, or fictional text to write about what they already know, what questions they have, and what they anticipate they will discover as they continue reading. After reading, quickwrites are a handy tool to help students clarify their thinking about a topic before discussing it with others. As the name implies, these writings should only take a few minutes, and grammar, spelling, and all those other English teacher concerns aren't important. The purpose of the quickwrite is to generate thinking and get students' ideas down on paper. I've also found that routine quickwriting helps students get used to writing on demand; consequently, the ideas flow much more easily later on when they're asked to share their thoughts in writing on a standardized test or other on-demand essay later on.

4.  Annotation: Teaching students how to annotate a text--whether informational or literary--requires the students to write. Frequently, students think that marking a text only requires underlining, highlighting, or circling words and phrases. The teacher who wants to make big strides helps the students understand that the real power of annotation lies in the comments, questions, and thoughts you jot in the margins as you read. Teach your students how to annotate thoughtfully, and you will see their comprehension skills soar.

5.  Gist Summaries:  Summarizing is a notoriously difficult skill for learners. Ask any fifth grader to tell you about a movie she just watched, and you'll likely hear a scene-by-scene rehashing rather than the succinct summary you hoped for. One method I've found helpful is the Gist Summary. After reading, ask students--individually or in pairs--to sum up the main idea of the text in 25 words or fewer. Sometimes, it's helpful to brainstorm key words as a class prior to writing the summary to give struggling students a word bank of important points to add to the summary. 

6.  Learning Logs:  Learning logs combine summary and reflection. After reading, ask students to explain what they've learned, how they learned it, and why it's important. It's a more formalized version of the quickwrite or metacognitive reflection mentioned above. I've seen two-column learning logs with "what I learned" and "what I thought about it" on the two sides. I've also seen logs that look like journal entries. The format is up to you. The thinking is what's important. 

7.  Exit Cards:  Formative assessments like exit cards allow you to monitor effectively whether your students are "getting" the reading you're asking them to do. If students are spending class reading, ask them to write a three-sentence summary or a gist statement as a ticket out of class when the bell rings. You can stand at the door and collect them. It'll only take a moment to flip through the exit cards to determine whether students understand the reading or whether more discussion and debriefing is needed tomorrow. 

8.  KWL:  One more prior-to-reading strategy for informational texts is to create a three-column chart called a KWL.  In the left column, students write what they already Know about the topic. The middle column is where they write what they Want to know about the topic. And the right column is where they will write what they Learned about the subject from the reading. I recently saw a variation on this: a two-column chart with "Know" on the left and "Questions I have about the topic" on the right. Both types of charts help students activate prior knowledge, develop anticipation for the reading, and prepare them to dive into the text with a learning mindset.   

From the list above, just a smattering of many possibilities, you can see that writing can be one of your best allies in helping your students process challenging text.

Next time, I'll examine how inquiry (the I in WICOR) can be equally helpful.

The WICOR of Reading: Reading and Organization

In my last post, I examined some of teachers’ frustrations and the causes of students’ inability to read effectively or their reluctance to do so. I promised that this week’s follow-up would include some AVID-approved strategies for addressing the issue. Instead of writing one enormous e-mail that you’d take one look at and delete, I’m breaking this into four chunks--pairing Reading with the remaining letters of WICOR (Writing, Inquiry, Collaboration, and Organization).  I’ll begin at what seems to be a sensible jumping-off point:  Reading and Organization.

 

The WICOR of Reading: Part 1--Reading and Organization

 

Things go more smoothly when there’s an organizational scheme. I tell myself that every time I open my Google Drive or hunt for an important item I received in the mail at my house and put somewhere I'd be able to find it later. It’s true about reading, too. By employing strategies associated with the “Organization” component of WICOR, teachers can coach their students to reading success.

 

Organization can refer to helping students develop structures and procedures for managing time and materials, but it can also refer to providing students with strategies for tackling the tasks and surmounting the challenges they will encounter in school and in real life.

 

Here are a few strategies and thoughts about the relationship between reading and organization:

 

1. Throw Out the Worksheets and Equip Students with Real-World Reading Skills:  One way teachers strive to “help” their students read is to provide them with worksheets and study guides that direct them to the most important take-aways from whatever they have been asked to read. I’ve yet to see any research study or reading guru who thinks this is an effective practice. This attempt at organization may allow students to locate a handful of facts in a text, but it does nothing to teach students to look for the main idea, to sift facts from opinions, to make inferences about an author’s claim, to determine the meaning of words or terminology in context, or to follow a flow of ideas in a text. Teachers who force their students to read text on their own may encounter resistance from students at first, but this is only because you’re asking them to do something difficult. You’re like a physical therapist asking your client to perform a painful muscular movement that is essential for recovery and progress; your client will curse you as you do what you have to do to make him better.

 

2. Talk to Students About What Effective Readers Do:  I’m an effective reader. Most of you are, too. Sometimes, we forget that the things that seem to come naturally to us aren’t always second nature to our students.  They don’t know that effective readers expect text to make sense, adjust their reading rate in response to the difficulty of the text, reread when comprehension breaks down, summarize, form mental pictures, and use context clues to sleuth out the meaning of unfamiliar words. It’s okay to talk with students about what you’re doing as you read--even to do a “Read Aloud/Think Aloud”--or to make them practice the skills more overtly as they read until the skills become automatic.

 

3.  Marking the Text: Marking the text while reading is one way to provide some structure for your students. Ask the students to underline key points, to circle important characters or terms, to write annotations--gist statements, questions, predictions, connections--in the margins as they read. Don’t go overboard; you don’t want the complexity of the text marking strategy to get in the way of comprehension.

 

4. Provide a Reading Prompt: We often assign writing using prompts that direct student work and state our expectations.  Seldom do we think about providing a reading prompt to do the same thing. A reading prompt establishes a purpose for reading and informs students what to focus on as they read. With a reading prompt, students don’t have to be psychic as they try to guess what the teacher wants them to get out of the reading.

 

5.  Consider Text Structures:  Textbooks, articles, editorials, poems, stories, and even novels have organizing patterns.  Asking students to pay attention to and analyze the organization schema writers use will not only help them learn to make meaning from texts but may also cause them to be more deliberate about creating effective organization in their own writing and thinking.

 

6.  Make Time for Reading:  What you make time for is an indication of what you value. If you want to communicate to students that reading is important, make time for reading during class. Daily is best. Or at least several times a week in English classes. In my experiences visiting English and reading classes in the district, the most cheerful and enthusiastic student readers are in classes where the teacher asks them to read daily and reads and talks about reading with them.

 

Stay tuned for Part 2. . . . Coming up next week, I will examine the connection between writing and reading.

 

Secrets, Secrets Are No Fun...

I don't like Starbucks. There! I said it.

It's just not my kind of store. First off, I'm not a coffee drinker, so my menu choices are somewhat limited. I'm fairly adept at brewing my own tea at home or on the go and, if given a choice, prefer water. Tap is fine. So the idea of paying a big chunk of change for someone to make a beverage for me isn't my cup of tea, literally.

But those are not the real reasons I don't like Starbucks. In truth, I'm uncomfortable going there because I don't know how to "do" the Starbucks thing. In some stores, I don't even know where I'm supposed to stand to place an order. Then, when it comes to making a decision, I have to choose from sizes that don't make sense to me (Why is "tall" only slightly larger than a Dixie Cup?) and employ a whole vocabulary of terms that somehow everyone else seems to know but me. I have to decide what sort of milk I want, how frothy I want it, how many shots of caffeine I need, whether I prefer room left at the top to add goodies of my own, and whether I want flavorings, sweeteners, or toppings. There's an entire article on WikiHow explaining the ins and outs of this process, with baffling insider tips like this one:  "A tall typically comes with a single shot of espresso, a grande comes with a double shot, and a venti also comes with a double shot, unless it is a venti iced drink, in which [case] it comes with a triple shot of espresso." When I order at Starbucks, I feel like a stranger who doesn't know the language or the local customs.

You know what else? I don't see what's the big deal about In-N-Out Burger. I realize them's fightin' words to some of my West Coast friends, but, really, this fast food joint doesn't dazzle a guy raised with Whataburger and Braum's nearby.  On a trip to Sacramento years ago, some locals said, "You must try an In-N-Out Burger while you're here." I did. Fortunately for me, I didn't have to ask, "Which burger should I order?" The In-N-Out menu only offers three options:  a hamburger, a cheeseburger, and a "Double-Double," which is apparently a registered trademark term. The sole side order option is fries (not much of an option, is it?), and the adventurous may select from three flavors of milkshakes. During my taste test, burgers and fries were fresh and tasty but nothing special. Due to the simplicity of the menu (Their website even says, "Ordering is as easy as 1."), In-N-Out avoids the mind-boggling complexity of Starbucks.  Or so I thought....

Imagine my surprise when I learned that for years In-N-Out Burger has had a "Secret Menu" that only those in-the-know order from. You can get your burger "Animal Style" (which includes a mustard-cooked patty and grilled onions), enjoy your meat nestled in a lettuce wrap instead of a carb-filled bun, or appreciate the simple beauty of a grilled cheese sandwich if you know about this hidden menu. It might have been helpful to have this info while I was in line.

Once again, like Starbucks, In-N-Out has become a place that only people with a knowledge of unwritten or hard-to-find secrets can navigate successfully.

I wonder how many similar secrets we keep from our students in the daily operation of our classrooms.

Do we make our expectations specific and clear? Are we transparent about why we are doing a particular activity? Are policies and procedures spelled out and easy to follow, even for the uninitiated? Could a person walking into our classrooms off the street (after passing the interrogation and identity check at the reception desk) tell what our students are supposed to be doing and why? Do our students feel that sense of panic that I feel as I inch to the front of the line in Starbucks or the jealousy and sense of helplessness I feel when I watch the guy at the next table at In-N-Out devour a sandwich I couldn't find on the menu?

Recently, I discovered that some of our cherished educational practices may inadvertently be "members only" experiences for our students. An article in the New York Times last week revealed that the traditional college practice of lecture-only instruction was biased toward white male students from wealthy, educated families. Every student benefited more from active learning strategies than from lectures, and the students who saw the most positive effects from active learning (and were the least successful at learning during our lectures) were women, minorities, low-income students, and first-generation college goers. This is a powerful reminder that the sit-and-get methods of "instruction" are largely unsuccessful for the majority of the kids we teach.

So what can we do to divulge those secrets and let all our students in on the workings of our classrooms so all can benefit? Here's a list of a few ideas:

• Post daily objectives (learning targets, essential questions, or whatever you want to call them) in kid-friendly language and point them out to our students before the learning begins.
• Engage our students in experiences that enable them to immerse themselves in the learning, struggle with the concepts, and figure out things for themselves. 
• Utilize word walls for academic and content vocabulary that may be unfamiliar to some. 
• Establish clear procedures for what students should do when they enter and exit the classroom, how they should keep track of their learning, what they ought to do when they miss class, and what you expect of them.
• Provide rubrics for assignments ahead of time, and help students make sense of them before and during the time they're working. 
• Conference with students (even for tiny amounts of time) to make sure they understand what's going on. 
• Let students in on the "why" of the lesson by establishing a practical reason for what you're teaching them or asking them to do. 
• Explain specifically what you mean when you say "study for the test." Give students concrete activities or processes so they'll know what "studying" means. 
• Communicate with students and parents (via e-mail blasts, a class blog--Blogger is extremely easy to figure out and links with your Google login at school--, or whatever method you prefer) to let them know what's going on, what's coming up, and how they can seek extra help if they need it. 

Here's a quick example:

Earlier this week I visited several middle school language arts classrooms that did an especially effective job of taking the mystery out of expectations and procedures. In one, a clear objective was posted prominently for all to see, a word wall let me know what vocabulary words and roots they had studied so far this semester, a display informed me of what the teacher was reading and what she had finished reading, and the teacher gave crystal-clear instructions and then followed up with students individually as they worked to make sure they knew what they were supposed to be doing. In the other, the teacher opened class with a slide on the screen that contained an objective, a list of activities on the day's agenda, a photograph of the items the students would need to have on their desk to begin class (writer's notebook, a pen, and a highlighter), and--this made my AVID heart happy--the letters WICOR with the elements of the acronym highlighted to show the students that during class they would be using inquiry, collaboration, organization, and reading. In both classrooms, I had no doubt that the students felt equipped for success.

None of the items on the above list are difficult to implement. And why not do all you can to make your students comfortable and confident when they enter your classroom?

After all, grabbing a cup of coffee, ordering a burger, and participating in school shouldn't be stress-filled activities shrouded in mystery.

Thank you for all you do to help your students find their way. 

Craig

   

Why Can’t the Whole Year Be Like the First Day of School?

Why Can’t the Whole Year Be Like the First Day of School?

Two weeks ago, I started a new position as an English Language Arts Instructional Specialist after years of teaching English, Humanities, and/or AVID at Shepton High School. Consequently, Monday was the first first day of school since 1993 that I was not standing up in front of a roomful of teenagers with whom I would spend the next 180 or so days.  Instead, I spent most of the day visiting five middle or high schools around the district, meeting some teachers, and tracking down everyone I’m supposed to support at those schools.

As I stepped in and out of classrooms and walked through the halls, I noticed a few things that seem to be generally true about middle school and high school students and teachers on the first day of school:

• Nearly everyone looks excited to be there.
• Students are eager to please, want to succeed, and are willing to make an effort.
• Teachers are polite, patient, and well-rested.
• Students don’t mind asking adults for help, and the adults don’t seem to mind being helpful.
• The teachers are prepared and organized. So are the students.
• The classrooms are full, but the hallways aren’t.
• No one is failing.

Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, if most or all of these things were still true in May? I realize that is a Pollyannaish idea, but it’s worth considering. Here are a few thoughts about what teachers might do to make this “schooltopia” a reality:

Nearly everyone looks excited to be there.

My buzzword for the school year is “joy”—so much so that my coworkers keep jokingly asking me “Where’s the joy?” if they happen to catch me with a furrowed brow. I’ve been urging teachers at back-to-school inservices to make their classrooms joyful places for students. “How do I do this?” you may ask: Share your love for your subject. Enjoy the exploration with your students. Laugh. Play. If you’re not having fun, I’m pretty sure your students aren’t either. Find the joy in what you have to teach, and it’ll make coming to class easier for you and for the students.

Students are eager to please, want to succeed, and are willing to make an effort.

In an inspirational and hilarious TED Talk, Rita Pierson said, “Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.” They will, however, keep working for a teacher who likes them and believes in them, even when the work gets more challenging.  Although Machiavelli in The Prince suggests that an effective leader strive to be feared rather than loved, I’m not sure that’s the best advice for teachers. Though students may work in a classroom with a climate of fear, they won’t be excited to be there, and they won’t do anything more than required. You can’t make teenagers like you, but you can let them know you like them, which makes it much harder to dislike you in return.    

Teachers are prepared and organized.  So are the students.

Even Pigpen from the Peanuts comic strip had an organized binder and a clutter-free backpack on the first day of class. When students have their time and materials organized, they are primed for success. Help your students with organization, the O in WICOR, by providing them with structures for calendaring and keeping up with assignments and classwork. When teachers are prepared and organized, the classes run more smoothly, more learning occurs, teachers are calmer, and there are fewer disciplinary issues because lessons move seamlessly from one activity to the next, giving students no down time to cause trouble or get bored. Also, calm teachers are happy teachers, which makes them infinitely more tolerant and patient. 

Teachers are polite, patient, and well-rested.

You may be the only adult in a student’s life who reacts to the world in an adult manner. Show students how to treat others through your actions. Handle conflicts and disciplinary issues with logic and maturity. Take care of yourself. Get plenty of rest. Breathe more often than you think you need to.  When we get stressed and overwhelmed, we become less patient and pleasant. Remember that your students are not fully-formed adults, so they will do things that will test your every last ounce of self-restraint. Be the adult who responds calmly and pleasantly.

Students don’t mind asking adults for help, and the adults don’t seem to mind being helpful.

Is your classroom a place where students can ask questions safely? Do you encourage students to take risks? Is a struggling student an opportunity or an imposition? When a student comes in with a question, do you stop what you’re doing and help? Making your classroom a safe place to learn, to mess up, to explore, to get frustrated, and to ask for help is a key to making learning happen. 

The classrooms are full, but the hallways aren’t.

After years of seeing students wandering the halls without a sense of purpose or urgency, I have concluded that most of the students in the halls don’t really have to go to the restroom.  They’re just bored and restless.  Make your classroom a fun place to be so they’ll want to stay there. Ensure that they feel the time spent in your room is worthwhile and that they’ll miss something important if they aren’t there. And utilize state changes and activities that involve movement frequently so they can get the wiggles out in your room and not have to roam. 

No one is failing.

Isn’t it great when students feel successful? The beginning of the semester offers hope to all. As our gradebooks fill up, however, we chip away at the self-esteem of some of our students as they find themselves unsuccessful and increasingly see the futility of trying to dig their way out of the hole. I think, though, that if teachers work on the other six items on this list, they will create an environment that makes failure less desirable, encourages students to work harder and seek help when their efforts aren’t paying off, and maximizes success for all students.

I can already hear the naysayers telling me that these things could never happen. I concede that they’re probably right.  But isn’t it worth making an effort to make things perfect even if we don’t quite achieve perfection?

Thanks for the work you’re doing and will continue doing to help shape the future positively.

Have a wonderful new school year!

Craig

The Value of Looking Back

Recently, my Facebook feed has been littered with posts from people about things that occurred one, two, or more years prior. “On this day one year ago” photos pop up, accompanied by comments like, “Hard to believe this was just one year ago,” “I forgot about this, “ “Wow, we’ve all changed so much,” “I was such an idiot then,” or, “Can you believe we were so concerned about that?” 

People are drawn to moments from their past that contrast to their present selves. “Throwback Thursday” photos often have the added purpose of highlighting the fashion and style atrocities of yesteryear with the implicit idea that we all look so much better now that we have the sense not to wear those parachute pants or style our hair in that once-fashionable mullet. 

The end of an academic year is an ideal time to have a Throwback Thursday of our own, to ask our students to project themselves back nine months into the past to see how they’ve grown and changed as a result of being in our classes. What do you know now that you didn’t know in September? What can you do now that you couldn’t do at the beginning of the school year? If you had it to do over again, what might you do differently?

This type of reflection belongs in the review weeks at the end of the school year. Ask students to create a graffiti wall displaying what they’ve learned. Have them compare a sample of recent work to a similar assignment from the beginning of school. Brainstorm a list of everything they wouldn’t know if they hadn’t taken your class. Let them reflect in writing about how far they’ve come, the obstacles they encountered along the way, and how they dealt with them. Encourage them to make some notes for themselves for next year so they don’t drive into any of the same potholes later.

Goal setting is a key aspect of instruction in our AVID classes as it should be in all our classes. Equally important is the time to look back at where we’ve been, celebrate our progress, and redirect our focus to the future.    

Like the Roman god Janus with two faces—one looking forward and one looking back—we  use our past experiences to steer ourselves successfully toward what is to come.

Thanks for all you do to help your AVID kids (and all your kids) make impressive strides on the road to success. 

Craig

Rubrics! Who Needs Them? You and Your Students

When I first started teaching English back in the day of dot matrix printers, I had never heard of that thing we call a rubric. Sure, we had criteria for assessing student work. but it was mostly in our heads. We viewed the product and, in our all-knowing English teacher wisdom, bestowed the grade the work deserved. I'd scrawl comments in the margins (mostly ones I would have to later interpret for a handful of conscientious students who couldn't read my red-penmanship) and hand the papers back. The great and powerful McKinney had spoken!

Fortunately, I've come a long way in 20 or so years. I now believe in the power of the rubric. I've written before about the importance of sharing rubrics with students before the assignment is completed and helping them to use rubrics to inform their work, but I've recently come to value to an equal degree the use of rubrics after assessment to guide their future efforts. 

In my humanities class, I have a recurring assignment called a Humanities Arts Experience, colloquially referred to by the pronounceable acronym HAE. In a nutshell, students venture into the real world for an arts experience at a theatre, museum, gallery, or concert hall and compose a newspaper-style review of their experiences. The rubric I've used for years is holistic, combining a number of skills and criteria for each grading designation. A "B paper," for instance, is more general than specific, relies more on summary than analysis, and contains errors in conventions that cause some minor difficulty for the reader. 

On the most recent essay,however, I developed a more detailed rubric. This one had eight criteria, and each criterion was detailed in a spreadsheet with descriptors for exemplary, proficient, acceptable, needs improvement, and unacceptable work.  

Here's a bit of technical stuff. Skip this paragraph if you're a technophobe. Students submitted their essays online on a Doc via Google Classroom, and I used the apps and extensions Doctopus and Goobric to attach my rubric electronically to each essay. All I had to do was "digest" the spreadsheet rubric using Doctopus, open the rubric on Goobric, select the tab for each criterion, click the appropriate descriptor in each category, type comments in the box, and press submit. Goobric pasted the entire rubric into the student's document, which I then returned to the student electronically. (Really, this is the easiest thing in the world. If technology appeals to you and you're tired of killing trees, grading mounds of physical papers, and listening to "my printer didn't work" excuses, you need to give this a try.)

Tomorrow in class, I will ask my students to open their documents and reflect on the rubric. If I deemed their introduction "acceptable" or told them their analysis "needs improvement," they can view my rubric's written explanation of what an exemplary product looks like in each of those categories, and they have something concrete to work on to improve next time. With eight categories to look at, the students will receive ample guidance to help their next HAE rival this one.   

Life was certainly easier for me when the great and powerful McKinney could bestow a grade on sight. What didn't occur to me then, though, was that the grade was not the most important thing. Student learning was. If it's my job to take these students in whatever condition they arrive in my classroom and lead them to where they need to be when they leave, I owe it to them to provide feedback and concrete steps for improvement. Students aren't naturally reflective, and many of them see the grade as the endpoint, but forcing them to spend some time thinking critically about their previous work and establishing a plan for improvement will help them develop the growth mindset and the tools they need to become exemplary.