We All Deserve a Break

I don’t know who is more excited about Spring Break bring right around the corner: the students or the teachers. We all need and deserve a break. 

The spring semester is relentless. After the tease of a not-quite-two-week winter vacation, January hits with a vengeance. There’s no adjustment period like there is at the beginning of school. We hit the ground running and charge into February, the shortest month with the most stuff crammed into it. Add to that the perils of flu season and all the turmoil that accompanies avoiding getting sick, actually being sick, recovering from  actually being sick, trying to catch up all you missed while you were sick, and helping everyone else catch up from the school days they missed because they were sick. The sun goes on an extended holiday. Days are cold, and those that aren’t cold are dreary in other ways. Grades have been accumulating for weeks, and the day of reckoning is near. Meanwhile, students think summer is a lot closer than it is and haven’t realized the consequences of shutting down early with months remaining in the year. We definitely need a week off. 

Breaks are important, and not just the ones that involve spending time away from school. Taking breaks within the class period keeps students fresh and vibrant so they can keep going strong as we ask them to do the hard work of learning. I’ve written before about brain breaks. These tiny pauses in instruction re-energize students and allow them to reset before diving back into the tasks at hand.  

While I continue to support the idea of providing regular brain breaks, my thinking on what these breaks should look like has evolved over time. In a classroom where every minute is precious and so many objectives must be met over the course of a unit, a semester, or a year, I suggest we stop thinking about brain breaks and start considering how to incorporate more state changes into our lessons. 

Breaks imply the need to get away from what we are doing. Breaks are escapes. Breaks don’t involve work. We need breaks from things we find grueling, tedious, and miserable. If I say, “Let’s take a break because you guys have been writing for the last 30 minutes,” I am acknowledging that writing is a terrible task, one you’d be a fool to enjoy doing (which is not the truth, though some of you are nodding your heads in agreement). If the subsequent break has nothing whatsoever to do with writing or English, I not only send the message that there’s nothing fun about the subject I teach but I also cause students who were in the zone to lose their momentum. After our raucous rock, paper, scissors tournament, getting students to settle back down and write for the remainder of the period might be an impossibility. The brain break I gave my students was an enjoyable mini-vacation, and now they have to return to the workhouse with a sense of Monday morning dread. 

State changes, on the other hand, don’t have to be departures from the curriculum. Think of them as variations on how the work is being done. If the students have been silent for a while, let them talk. If they’ve been stationary, get them up and moving. If they’ve been reading, let them write, speak, or draw. State changes are the crux of good teaching, whether you are working with kids or adults. Doing the same thing in the same way for too long creates the educational equivalent of bedsores.  

If I were teaching a class where students had been hard at work writing for half an hour, a state change would allow them to reset their brains. In this writing class scenario, a state change might look like one of these:

• Stand up and talk with your neighbor about what you’re writing. Neighbor, your job is to ask one question to get your partner to think more deeply about what he or she is writing.
• Go back to the beginning of your paper and read it aloud to yourself in a whisper. 
• Get out of your chair, paper in hand. Read your writing aloud to yourself. Every time you begin a new paragraph, turn 90 degrees clockwise. (This reminds students of the importance of paragraphing and makes them think more deliberately about the organization of their writing.)
• Switch papers with a neighbor. Read your neighbor’s paper. Find one thing the writer did that you love and one thing you have a question about. Be prepared to share them with the writer.
• Think about a goal you’d like to work on for the remainder of the writing period today. Write it down on a sticky note. Stand and share your goal with someone sitting nearby. Now place that sticky note on the corner of your desk so I will know what you’re working on and can conference with you about it if needed.  
• Roll your head around in a circle and think about the main idea of your essay. Roll it the other direction and consider how you are communicating that main idea to the reader. Massage your writing hand with your other hand and contemplate the words you might be using repeatedly in your writing and brainstorm other words you can use to keep your writing varied and interesting. Roll your shoulders forward in circles and think about how you are linking your ideas together in your writing. Roll your shoulders backward and visualize what comes next in your paper. Now get back to writing. 

Each of these state changes allows students to think more deeply about their writing while doing something different to give their brain a rest from the actual act of writing. Each of these supports my goals as an educator. Each one prepares the students to continue to work productively on their writing for the remainder of class. 

State changes can also be an excellent time to review content and connect learning. In a math class, I might ask the students to pause for a mental math break, having them calculate a running total in their heads as I give them instructions: “Multiply 7 and 6. Divide that total in half. Add four.  Divide by five. Multiply by 12.” I might ask students to explain a definition or a process to another student. If students had been taking notes, I could ask them to stop and summarize their notes orally, to sketch a picture representing what they just learned, or to pose a question about the notes. 

Allegedly, adults have attention spans of 10 to 20 minutes. Children and teens have shorter ones. State changes acknowledge this reality and accomodate for it. Like readjusting your car seat in the midst of a long drive or changing the radio station to a different style of music, state changes awaken the brain, keep you alert, and allow you to keep going. 

State changes make the time in class more tolerable so that full-scale breaks aren’t needed as frequently. If you’re not already doing so, take a look at your daily lessons and consider how you can build in frequent state changes to refocus your students and allow them to approach learning in many ways. Writing, inquiry, collaboration, organization, and reading—the five key components of AVID’s WICOR acronym—inspire options for state changes that will reinvigorate your students after the break so they can keep going until the end of the year.   

Sometimes, however, like right now, people like you need more than just a state change. You need a vacation. Enjoy your hard-earned break, and make the most of it. You and your students deserve it. 

The One-Week WICOR Challenge

One of the best ways to take AVID schoolwide and promote top-quality learning for every student in every classroom is to pay attention to the strategies you’re using to engage your students. By taking my One-Week WICOR Challenge, you can become aware of how frequently and consistently you’re using AVID’s five components of instruction (writing, inquiry, collaboration, organization, and reading) with your students.

How do I take the One-Week WICOR Challenge?

I’m glad you asked. Simply make a chart, one for each prep you teach, with the days of the week and the five parts of WICOR on it (or you can use mine here). As you go through your week, take note of when and how you address each of the five areas.

For instance, if your students read an article, discuss it with a partner, and then write a summary of what they discussed, you’ve just used reading, collaboration, and writing. Write what you did on your chart.

This link will take you to a printable handout listing many aspects of WICOR, just in case you want some clarification of the types of strategies that fall under each category.

What do I do with this once I’m finished?

You don’t have to do anything with it. The AVID police aren’t going to storm your classroom to ask for verification of your WICOR activity. What I’d suggest, however, is that you use the chart as a self-diagnostic to guide you in planning for your class.

Good instruction addresses all areas of WICOR, but some teachers have a hard time including all of them in their lessons. If you notice that you’ve had two days in a row with no student collaboration, perhaps it’s time to work in an activity--big or small--that allows students to talk with a partner or trio. If you discover that students seldom write in your class, consider asking students to write a few sentences to summarize what they’re learning and hand it in as an exit card. When test time rolls around, if you’re not doing it already, think about helping students understand how to study for your course--an act that involves organization of time, materials, and content as well as inquiry.

If you discover that you’re using a balance of  WICOR strategies routinely in your class, pat yourself on the back and know that you’re helping campus efforts to take AVID schoolwide. Your students and your AVID Site Team will thank you!

Whose Team Are You On?

Inquiring Minds Want to Know: Whose Team Are You On?

When I first started teaching, it was me against the kids every day. We were on two separate teams. Sometimes, we drew battle lines over disciplinary issues: would I manage to get them to sit down, shut up, and do their work, or would they take over the classroom and derail learning completely? At other times, we were on opposing academic teams. I set traps, built walls for them to climb, threw obstacles in their way, and bombarded them with tricky questions and daunting challenges to see whether the students could master the content I was trying to teach them. Some of them managed to learn in spite of my efforts to frustrate and thwart them.

I thought I was doing the right thing, that it was the teacher’s job to present challenges for his students. I believed that making my class more rigorous--which I defined as being excruciatingly difficult and exhausting--was the hallmark of my excellence as an instructor. I reveled in my ability to find flaws in student work to justify bestowing a less-than-perfect grade. I told my students things like, “I don’t give 100s on essays because no piece of writing is ever perfect,” and I believed I was being motivational rather than kind of a jerk.

Nowadays, I’m embarrassed by the Me vs. Them mindset I promoted during my early years in the classroom, and I apologize to any former student reading this for the damage I may have unintentionally inflicted on your developing psyche.

In the world of education, we should be on the same team.

We all want the same things, right? Student success. Learning. Growth. Preparedness for the future, whatever that may entail. Those are lofty aspirations, and I think students deserve not to have to play on a team by themselves to reach them. Life certainly provides plenty of obstacles without teachers throwing more into the path. Why wouldn’t I want everyone to succeed? Why would I be delighted that only a few, if any, were able to rise to my high standards?

When I worked on abandoning the adversarial approach, I found that the result was a classroom where inquiry was at the center. I strove to cultivate a curiosity along with my students--to wonder, to ponder, to explore, to examine, to dissect, to question, and to try things out. I stopped being the guy with all the answers and started trying to be the one who guided students to ask questions instead.

My approach became a bit conspiratorial. There was a mission to be accomplished, and we were going to work together to figure out how to do it.  No longer was I the enemy. I was inviting my students to join me as we tried to escape the wiles of others:  John Donne,  William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, the guy who wrote the AP World History textbook, the creators of the AP test, the many ancestors who cobbled together the insanely tricky English language, artists who created works of art without telling us what they mean, and the State Board of Education.  This shift in attitude--from opponent to teammate-- changed the entire tone of my classroom, turning it from a hive of agitated bees to a learning community working together cooperatively to succeed. We developed a true growth mindset.

Often, we even learned for the sake of learning, rather than for a grade.  Here’s an example to clarify this shift:

ADVERSARIAL CRAIG:  We’re about to have a graded discussion over the novel we have finished. I am going to be grading each time you speak. I will rate the quality of each response, and write your score on my chart. You’ll earn points each time you speak. If it’s an insightful response accompanied by a specific quotation and page reference from this 416-page book, you will receive more points than if you offer an answer with no support. If you don’t speak at all, you’ll receive a zero for this major assignment. Any questions? No? Begin! (maniacal laughter like a cartoon villain)

REFORMING CRAIG:  Since we are going to be writing some interpretive essays later over this novel. I thought it would be a good idea for us to talk about our different interpretations of the text. I often find that I understand things better when I talk about them with other people. You came up with some questions about the novel yesterday in groups, and I want to use those questions as the basis for the discussion. You may find that the questions you prepared lead to other questions as you begin to explore the answers. I encourage you to go back into the text whenever possible because that’s the only place where we can get an idea of what the author was thinking, and unsupported opinions are like untested hypotheses in science. They need more investigation. You’re going to want to take notes in your Writer’s Notebook about what people say because you’ll probably find some ideas that will help you when it comes time to write the essay later. Make sure you listen more than you speak and that you make others comfortable sharing their ideas.    

I always try to provide a “why” for anything I’m asking students to do so that they’ll see a tangible benefit to participating in the activity. In the above case, the “why” justifies my not taking a grade on this. We are discussing to learn, and while we are learning, we may not be ready to be assessed. In fact, I think in this instance that assessment would only add pressure to the discussion and would cause students to focus on their own contributions rather than working as a class to wrestle with the ideas in the text.

My reforming view of what a classroom should look like involves the teacher in the role of a coach or mentor. Sometimes, I break from an activity to have a huddle to discuss strategy. We debrief often. We review past performance. And we set future goals.

I wish I could tell you that this was an easy shift to make. Unfortunately, many years of schooling and my natural pickiness and perfectionism (some would blame it on my being a Virgo) have made it hard to unlearn my hard-nosed teaching practices. I have had to be intentional about my team realignment, but noticing the change in my students’ dispositions has helped me in my struggle.

When I work with teachers on AVID’s WICOR strategies, I find that the I, inquiry, is a little different than the other four letters of the acronym. While we might “do” writing, collaboration, organization, and reading, inquiry is more of a philosophy than a strategy. We don’t “do” inquiry; it’s how we do everything.

Abandoning the me vs. them approach helped establish a culture of  inquiry in my classroom. The students and I are on the same team, and we are always questioning ourselves, the thoughts of others, the ideas, and the world around us to make sense of things.

Class should be a pep rally, and we should all look forward to a winning season where we can celebrate our many victories together.

Socratic Seminar FAQs

Conducting your first Socratic Seminar can be a scary endeavor.  Like the first time you tried to clear a hurdle in track, play a piano sonata, cook a soufflé, program a VCR (remember those?), fold a fitted sheet, stand in the tree pose in yoga, or knit a scarf, there’s always potential for disaster and room for improvement.  I’ve assembled a few Frequently Asked Questions about Socratic Seminars to help ease you into the idea and encourage you to try this with your students soon!

Q.  What’s a Socratic Seminar?

A. Good question! I’ll give you the short answer and let you do some exploring on your own if you want to know more. A Socratic Seminar is a student-led discussion—usually about a text—with the goal of deepening the collective understanding of the participants. It gets its name from Socrates, the Greek philosopher who was put to death for corrupting the minds of Athenian youth by making them think. Socrates also asked questions, which is something students do during the seminar; they question the text and one another to explore the topic more deeply. Typical Socratic Seminars take place with the class in one giant circle, but variations exist, such as the Fishbowl (two concentric circles), Pilot-Copilot Formation (discussed later), and several smaller Socratic Seminars simultaneously taking place in one classroom. It’s important to distinguish the Socratic Seminar from a debate; there are no sides, and this isn’t a place for arguing. Cheesy as it sounds, everyone’s a winner in a Socratic Seminar if they come out knowing more than they did before they began.

Q.  What do I do with students who are shy or don’t have anything to say?

A.  Ideally, all students will participate in the discussion.  In reality, some students are terrified to share their ideas with others or to speak aloud in class.  The first solution is to do whatever you can to make sure your classroom is a supportive environment where all students feel safe contributing.  Another is to make sure students are prepared prior to the Socratic Seminar.  Spend some time with the text, giving the students clear guidelines for annotation and text marking.  Have them prepare questions ahead of time.  The more familiar they are with the piece, the more likely they will be to contribute.  When selecting a format for your Socratic Seminar, consider a Pilot-Copilot formation, which allows all students to participate as you pause to have each “cockpit crew” chat with one another about the topic at various times during the discussion.  Also, selecting an engaging text will encourage students to speak up because they’ll have an opinion and will want to be heard.  Giving students a chance to do a brief reflection or exit card at the end of the seminar will allow a reluctant student to share his or her ideas with you; if you talk individually with that student later and praise the ideas, you’ll build some confidence that may result in participation next time. 

Q.  Do I have to grade the Socratic Seminar?

A.  No.  I am a big advocate for reinforcing learning for the sake of learning.  When you ramp up the pressure by grading the number and/or quality of students’ participation, you’ll find that you lose the collaborative nature of the Socratic Seminar.  Students will quit listening to one another and will think only of themselves and their grade.  You know your students have missed the point of the Socratic Seminar when they rush up to you after class with a look of desperation to ask whether they spoke enough times and what grade they made.  Also, if you don’t have to worry about tracking and assessing comments for every student in the discussion, you can enjoy and appreciate the discussion yourself—it’s much more rewarding for everyone involved. 

     

Q.  If I don't grade the discussion as you suggested, then how do I keep the kids accountable?

A.  If you must attach a grade to the seminar, consider grading their pre-work (text marking and question preparation) and a reflection they complete after the seminar.  The post-discussion reflection could contain thoughts about the content of the discussion, the quality of the discussion itself, areas for improvement in the future, comments that the student was unable to make during the discussion, or whatever you deem important.  Participation can be a factor in your grade, but also consider adherence to the norms of discussion, nonverbal behavior, and other factors.   

Q.  I teach _____, and my kids won’t ever be able to do a Socratic Seminar because…

A.  You're right.  As long as you believe your kids won't be able to do it, they probably won’t.  But if you change your mind, I can tell you that Socratic Seminar works with all subjects and all levels of kids.  The level of student talk may not always rise to your standard of excellence at first, but with some coaching, practice, and debriefing, they'll improve.  If your students need more scaffolding, consider providing them with some discussion starter stems, possible ways to begin a comment in an academic discussion.  Spend some time afterward praising the things your students did well.  Offer tips and specific targets for improvement before each Socratic Seminar.  When Socratic Seminars become something you do frequently rather than just being a one-time special occasion event, you'll find that the students love them and will begin to talk like scholars.  (Oh, and, by the way, your question wasn't a question.)

Q.  Does the Socratic Seminar have to be a culminating activity at the end of a unit?

A.  Not at all.  This is a great way to have students examine a text or other material in detail before a writing assignment or activity.  I have a colleague in social studies who has her students participate in a Socratic Seminar to discuss a set of documents prior to writing an AP document-based question (DBQ).  This kind of discussion can ensure the students have thought about all aspects of a poem or short story before writing an essay on it in a literature class.  If you become accustomed to the idea of a Socratic Seminar’s purpose being to help the group come to a deeper shared understanding of the meaning of something, it’s logical to use this strategy at various points in a lesson cycle.  I find they're even useful as a preparatory activity for a unit to build anticipation and interest (like the time I brought in the world’s most hideous vase—four feet tall, chartreuse, fuzzy velour—and had a discussion about how we determine whether something is art).   

Q. What kinds of works are suitable to discuss in a Socratic Seminar?

A.  You name it, and it can probably be discussed.  I've seen (or heard people tell of) successful seminars over films, artworks, political cartoons, novels, documentaries, political debates, television commercials, videos of a sports competition, websites, math problems, sets of statistics, maps, editorials, poems, plays, websites, musical performances, songs, music videos, and short stories.       

Q.  What’s the biggest mistake you've made with Socratic Seminars?

A.  My students were reading the 59-chapter, 450-page opus Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, and we had—as a culminating assessment—a Socratic Seminar over the entire novel.  Our great expectation was that students answered one another’s questions while supplying relevant textual evidence from the novel (ie. direct quotations).  I spent a painful 90-minute block schedule period watching my hapless students dig desperately through that giant book they'd (allegedly) read once to find a quote to back up their ideas.  The pressure was immense, and only a few students with prodigious memories or incredible annotation skills emerged from the great quotation hunt unscathed.  The tension was palpable; tears were shed. I learned from that experience that choosing a text of a more manageable size allows everyone to be (literally) on the same page and participate in the discussion at a deeper, more thoughtful level.      

Q.  Do you have any final bits of advice?

A. Leave time to debrief the discussion and the process.  Allow students to talk about what flew and what flopped.  If you used an inner-outer circle (fishbowl) arrangement, solicit feedback from those in the outer circle about what went well and how things could have been better.  And even if your first Socratic Seminar is a disaster, try it again.  Let go of the reins and let the students talk.  You'll be surprised at how brilliant they can be.   

If you let them, they will talk…and they will say smart things. 

The WICOR of Reading: Reading and Inquiry

Peanut butter and jelly. John and Yoko. Hayrides and Claritin. Reading and inquiry. Some things just go together well.

Effective readers practice inquiry all the time, perhaps not even aware they're doing so. We make predictions. We pose questions in our heads. We challenge an author's basic assumptions. We examine the validity of claims. We judge based on self-created standards of good and bad or effective and ineffective. We connect our reading to our own lives, to the world around us, and to other things we have read.

Students who struggle with reading often accept what they read at face value and don't dare to engage with the text at a higher level. It's our job as teachers to hold their hands as they wade into the waters of inquiry so they can eventually swim on their own.

Inquiry connects to the act of reading before, during, and after the reading itself occurs.

Before reading, teachers can pose an open-ended question or scenario for students to discuss to make their minds and/or hearts receptive to what they're about to read:

What would happen if you had to leave your family and survive on your own?
Which is better: a life without stress or a life with some stress? Why?
What makes a good scary story?
What are all the things in your possession that are made from plants?
How important are material possessions in achieving popularity?

Questions like these get students thinking about a topic and prepare them for some reading that connects in some way to the subject.

During the reading itself, students can be encouraged to interact with the text by writing their own questions in the margins or on sticky notes. Or ask them to keep track of the thinking they're doing as they read and share that with the class afterwards. Your students may also benefit from hearing you do a Read-Aloud/Think-Aloud in which you read the text to them and comment aloud about the things you're thinking and questioning as you read. Letting them witness a model of what's going on in an effective reader's head helps your students fill their toolboxes with strategies they can use as they read independently.

After reading, your options for inquiry are plentiful. I'm always a champion for using Costa's Levels of Thinking to compose questions for further discussion. Your students will quickly find that Level One questions (the ones with right answers) don't generate much discussion, but they may be essential questions to ask to check for literal understanding. Also, I like to remind students that if a discussion is boring after they wrote the questions, that's their fault. Next time, they should work to come up with some questions worth discussing. For optimal pairing with the reading, remind students to write questions that require revisiting the text to support an answer.

I have had good luck asking students to write questions they'd like to ask the author of the text. If the author is alive and reachable via social media or e-mail, you might have fun selecting the best questions from your class and asking the author directly. Getting a response from a living writer makes the learning come alive and prompts student interest in the text. To "tech up" your classroom, consider using a website like Tricider to allow students to comment or vote on one another's questions to select the best ones.

For general inquiry-based discussions after reading, try circling up the chairs for a Socratic Seminar over the text using student-generated questions. You can find scads of resources to help you conduct Socratic Seminars on the internet, the AVID website, and YouTube. Remember that the purpose of a Socratic Seminar is to foster genuine collaborative discussion to deepen the class's understanding of what they read. If the topic of the reading lends itself to a debate format, consider a Philosophical Chairs discussion instead. Whatever you do, make sure you leave time to debrief the process of the discussion itself at the end; that's the only way to improve the quality of future discussions.

One of the top skills employers seek in management-level employees is the ability to ask questions. By bringing inquiry to the forefront of your classroom, you're not only preparing your students for the rigors of the work world but you're also handing them the key to increased reading effectiveness and the ability to learn on their own. What could be more important than that?

How We Do It All Day Long

At the end of the second of five class periods, the guest speaker turned to me with a look of exhaustion and asked, "How do you do this all day long?"

By the end of sixth period, she was, as they say, "phoning it in." A glazed expression in her eyes, she continued to click through her PowerPoint slides and deliver the same art history lesson with the same inflections, the same pauses, and the same practiced information. My students sat there dutifully taking notes, some of them occasionally jolting back to semi-alertness after nodding off momentarily.

Early in the day the speaker told me she didn't have much experience with high schoolers, that she aspired to teach college students so that she could lecture and they could take notes.

Please note that I'm not trying to disparage this brave guest speaker who spent a long day sharing some valuable and interesting knowledge about the art of the Tang and Song Dynasties. Clearly, she knew her stuff and had prepared carefully for her day with my students.

But as I sat and watched her deliver the same lecture five times throughout the day, I had ample time to ponder her question: "How do you do this all day long?"

By the end of the day, the answer became clear. It's not about the content; it's about the students.

Though I like to fancy myself a pretty interesting public speaker who can deliver a 50-minute lecture with witty anecdotes, intriguing nuggets of trivia, abundant humor, and powerful visuals to accompany my ideas, the reality is that if I get too engrossed in my own knowledge-spewing, my students are passive and bored to tears.

The secret to surviving an entire day of teaching the same thing one period after another is to focus on the students. Involve them. Allow them to talk and question. Let them generate knowledge. Permit them to reflect and digest.

One of the many things I love about AVID is its instructional emphasis on WICOR: writing, inquiry, collaboration, organization, and reading. Even a "lecture day" provides opportunity for at least three of these: writing, inquiry, and collaboration.

The average person (and teenagers sometimes don't perform at average-person capacity) can only pay attention to a speaker for about ten minutes. Most of us drift off more quickly than that and begin making mental shopping lists, thinking about relatives who deserve a call, or dreaming about things beyond the parameters of the lecture hall or classroom.

The easy fix for this is to follow the 10-2-2 model. Lecture for a maximum of ten minutes; allow the students to write, revise, and reflect on their notes for two minutes; and ask the students to share their thoughts, questions, understandings, and reflections with a partner for two minutes. After that opportunity to interact on paper and with others, the students' brains are recharged and ready for another ten minutes of teacher talk.

An even better solution is to ask the students to do something creative with their learning--a quick presentation, a drawing, a bumper sticker slogan, a tiny poem, a monologue, a skit--and to share their products with the class. I assure you that what the students will have to say is a billion times more interesting and more memorable than anything you've got stored up in your well-practiced lecture.

The added bonus of allowing this type of interaction is that each class period is different. Though the content remains the same, the student input keeps it fresh for the teacher. The day is a lot less repetitive when you, the teacher, get to hear from the authentic voices of students.

So in answer to the guest speaker's question, "How do you do this all day long?", my response it that I do my best to focus on the students. I enjoy their unique personalities, laugh at their jokes, listen to their stories and personal connections, welcome their questions, clarify their confusion, and remember that they're the ones who are supposed to be getting something from the time they spend in my classroom.

That's how I've done it for 22 years, and I hope that's how I continue to do it until they wheel me out of my classroom someday in the distant future.