The Art of Framing a Lesson

I had to cancel my cable television because of the the Food Network. I admit it. I am addicted to TV cooking shows. I could spend an entire day watching Alton, Giada, Ina, Ree, and Guy cook and talk about cooking. Even if they are preparing something I know I will never make in my own kitchen, those culinary celebrities convince me that their efforts are worth a half an hour of my undivided attention.

The same thing happens in classrooms of effective teachers. Top educators frame lessons in a way that motivates students to want to engage, even if the topic being studied isn’t intrinsically interesting to the learners. TV cooks have something to teach us about what we could (and probably should) be doing in our classrooms.

Obtaining student buy-in is an art. It’s part of personalizing a lesson, figuring out what you as an individual teacher bring to the lesson plan. The worst way to frame a lesson is to just launch into the learning. “Take out a sheet of paper and take notes.” “Open up your book and let’s start reading.” You’d never see a Food Network host cook open up the show and start cooking without a preamble. In my time spent with TV cooks,  I’ve observed three effective strategies for framing a lesson that occur regularly on cooking shows to entice disinterested viewers to become learners.

Strategy One:   Establish a Need

“When you’re as busy as I am, you don’t have the time or energy to spend hours in the kitchen after work making dinner. If you’re watching your waistline or your wallet, you probably want to avoid expensive, high-calorie meals in restaurants, too. Today, I’m going to show you three easy recipes you can make at home to prepare a healthy meal for your family without spending hours in the kitchen or breaking your bank account.”

TV chefs, as well as master teachers, give their learners a reason to pay attention when they frame a lesson by establishing a need. They circumvent the “Why do I need to know this?” question by answering it before it’s asked. “You need to know this because it’s on the test,” is one reason which only motivates a handful of students. If that’s the only purpose for learning a teacher can provide, I can’t blame kids for zoning out. Offering a compelling, real-world purpose for the learning that’s about to happen doesn’t guarantee student buy-in, but providing no reason probably does guarantee that many learners will zone out. An English teacher who says, “Today we are going to write a persuasive essay, which you need to be able to do to pass the STAAR,” will have to work a lot harder to engage learners than the one who opens class by saying, “Today you are going to learn some techniques you can use to convince nearly everyone you disagree with that you are right. With what you learn today, you will increase your chances of winning almost any argument by appealing to your opponent’s logic, ethics, and emotions.” That’s a need that will hook any teenager.

Strategy Two:  Describe a Desired Outcome

“The perfect chocolate cookie is a blend of chewy and crispy. Lightly browned on the bottom and golden on top, the cookie should melt in the mouth without falling apart when you pick it up. Today, we are going to learn how to bake a cookie that meets that hard-to-achieve balance. Showcasing a few simple tricks of the trade, this recipe will soon become your go-to favorite for baking irresistible treats that’ll please the pickiest cookie connoisseur.”

Beginning class with the end in mind helps students know where they are headed. Unless teachers have a particular reason for concealing the goal (and I can’t at the moment think of what that would be), providing students with a desired outcome gives them something to aim for and establishes a clear idea of the direction they’re supposed to be headed. This also lets them know which parts of the lesson are the most important. The desired outcome can also take on an anticipatory feel as students curiously await the discovery the teacher claims will take place during class. “We are going to be reading several essays in the next few days because I want you to observe how powerful language can engage a reader. You’re going to witness techniques of some of the greatest writers of the past century, and then you’re going to try your hand at using some of those techniques to craft an essay on a topic important to you and to convey your enthusiasm to your reader with powerful word choice, purposeful use of sound devices, unexpected but effective figurative language, and anecdotes that elevate your writing from ordinary to extraordinary.” Students in this class now understand the purpose behind the reading of the essays and the techniques the teacher hopes they will attempt to write brilliant essays of their own. Unfortunately, many teachers would just hand out essays and start reading. Later, they would be surprised and disgruntled that the students didn’t use any techniques from the essays in their writing.

Strategy Three:  Tell a Personal Story

“My grandpa loved to cook. He also loved to make food for other people. When I was a little boy, I used to stand in the kitchen and watch as my grandpa made sugared peanuts. I’d watch with anticipation as the sugary mixture melted in the electric skillet and then hardened on cookie sheets in the oven. Grandpa warned me and my brother to stay out of the way so we didn’t burn ourselves, so we followed his every move from a distance as the kitchen filled with the aroma of golden, sugary deliciousness. Now that Grandpa is no longer with us, we keep the tradition alive by making our own batches of sugared peanuts and—just like Grandpa did—filling ziplock baggies with them to take to friends and coworkers at the holidays.”   

By appealing to an audience’s love of family, food, and tradition, a TV chef would have viewers glued to the screen during after telling this heartwarming story about his grandfather. A personal story helps people connect to the storyteller and the topic whether on television or at school. A well-placed, purposeful story or anecdote can provide the beginning of a memorable lesson. Framing a lesson by telling a story appeals to the affective needs of students, establishes classroom community, and has the power to make a dry lesson less dull. My students of yesteryear have since told me that they remember my introduction to using online databases for research: a personal tale about the joys of using the paperback Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature to find actual print articles in magazines at the Richardson Public Library (they had a better selection of periodicals than the Plano library) back when I was their age. I once introduced a lesson about a poem with a tongue-in-cheek descriptive story: “Back when I was a kid, there used to be this thing called ‘playing outside.’” My story not only gave my students a chuckle and informed them about a piece of lost Americana, but it also gave them a framework for connecting to one of the characters in the poem in later discussion.

Without a frame, a picture on a wall looks incomplete  So is a lesson without a frame. Making the effort to frame a lesson with a hook to engage learners can transform a mundane class period into something memorable. Turn on the Food Network and see how they do it. And invite me over since I can no longer watch the TV chefs at my home.

Guilty!

We’ve all done it. Each one of us is guilty. And some of us don’t even know what we are guilty of.

Here’s an example of a time I was unknowingly guilty:  My English students were in the midst of a study of Romeo and Juliet. My main goals during the unit were to familiarize my students with the language of Shakespeare and equip them with the reading strategies they could use to analyze difficult poetic text. In a planning meeting, our team came up with an assignment we thought our students would enjoy completing. We provided four options students could choose from:  

• working with a group to rewrite a scene into more contemporary language and perform their modernized scene for the class
• illustrating a scene from the play in a comic-book-style format
• writing diary entries from the perspective of Romeo or Juliet about the events taking place during the play
• watching or reading a contemporary adaptation of the play and writing an essay about parallels with Shakespeare’s original text

We gave the assignment, the students chose their options, and they set out to work. We crafted a generic rubric that would apply to all four options and awaited the student creativity.

What we were guilty of, even though we had the very best of intentions, was not aligning our assessments with the instructional goals. The goals, as I stated earlier, related to students’ abilities to comprehend Shakespearean poetic language independently. The assessments, depending on what students selected, measured a variety of things. Acting out a modern scene in a group assessed the ability of one person in a group to be able to rewrite a scene from the play and for all the members of the group to perform the script effectively. The comic book tested a student’s ability to draw but not necessarily to have a keen understanding of what the language means, especially if the student paid attention to the scenes from the film I’d showed in class and could render them on paper. The diary required insight into character, an understanding of the plot, and some writing ability. The modern adaptation analysis assessed whether a student could write a compare/contrast essay (or, perhaps, the student’s Google skills).

None of the options we gave our students was terrible. They simply had little to do with the objectives of the unit and were thus not an accurate assessment of student learning. Furthermore, the four assessments didn’t even assess the same skills. A student could strategically select an option that played to his or her strengths and never have to demonstrate actual learning of a curricular objective.  

Every teacher has had a planning brainstorm about something that would engage students and has inserted it into the curriculum without spending the time to think about how the new idea fits with unit objectives. WIth more deliberate planning, however, we can make sure we never commit this instructional crime again.

Two questions developed by WIggins and McTighe in The Understanding By Design Guide to Creating High-Quality Units help me think about how assessments align with unit goals:

1. Could students do the proposed assignment(s) well but not really have mastered or understood the content in question?
2. Could students do poorly on the specific assessment(s) but really have mastery of the content in question? (p. 53)

In the case of my Romeo and Juliet assignment explained above, I can answer yes to both questions, which isn’t a good thing.  

Yes, a student could give a convincing and impressive performance of a modernized scene from the play without knowing anything about how to read and interpret Shakespearean verse.

Yes, a learner who knows how to read Shakespeare could make a C if she didn’t have the art skills to draw a comprehensible comic book rendering of a scene.

Yes, a student could write an awesome diary from Juliet’s perspective with only knowledge gained from watching the film or reading the Sparknotes online.

Yes, a kid could analyze West Side Story as a Romeo and Juliet adaptation without reading a word of Shakespeare.  

It’s clear that when we were planning this assignment, we were thinking a lot more about activities than we were thinking about understandings. Though our Romeo and Juliet project gave the students choices of several potentially interesting activities, the activities we designed weren’t valid measures of the student outcomes we claimed to be seeking.  

When we string a bunch of activities together to create a unit, we often commit the crime of not having activities line up with unit objectives. Another crime we could be charged for at the same time is lining up activities that do not work together to ensure student success on the final assessment. In an effectively-designed unit, the activities the students do are carefully planned and sequenced to prepare learners to transfer their learning to the final authentic assessment. Anything that is incongruous with the end goal should probably be avoided.  

When we realize we are guilty of misaligned activities, we have to make some hard, sad decisions to say goodbye to some beloved old friends.

I’d have to say goodbye to that AVID assignment where students researched various colleges and worked in teams to create a scrapbook that showcased their findings and “memories” of their fictional first year in college. In reality, a group could get a good grade for putting together an attractive scrapbook and have learned little about college itself; conversely, a group lacking scrapbooking skills could know a lot and not be able to show it.

I would have to sever ties with that day the kids loved when they brought in Greek food while we were reading Homer’s Odyssey because how does making (or buying) a pan of baklava demonstrate any understanding of Greek epic poetry?

I’d bid a tearful farewell to any quiz or test where I asked the students to recall the speaker of a quotation from a novel, short story, or play because I never taught any unit where the learning objective was, “Memorize a text you read once, maybe twice.”

I’d realize I had to let go of most of my artworks depicting scenes from books, artistic vocabulary posters, anything involving paper mache or a trip to Hobby Lobby, and all other activities and assignments that don’t measure skills I have taught or help students develop skills necessary to be successful on an assessment of their skills and understandings.

People who disagree with me on this are probably thinking, “This buzzkill thinks we need to get rid of everything that is actually fun and enjoyable to the kids!” That’s not the case. I’m a firm believer that fun and authentic learning are not mutually exclusive terms. There is fun in discovering a new book, reading it, and engaging in worthwhile conversation about it with another reader. There is fun in exploring a topic in depth, posing student-derived questions about the learning, and seeking the answers. There is fun in learning how to do something you couldn’t do before and using that new skill to solve a real-world problem. There is fun in debating a topic and using logical support to buoy your argument. With careful planning and attention to learning goals and outcomes, you can make learning fun and engaging.

The next time you are planning for instruction, ask yourself those guiding questions to make sure you’re not guilty of a goal/assignment mismatch. Your instructional coaches will be happy to do our best to help you remain crime-free...at least in terms of curriculum and instruction.  

Your Hidden Objectives: Are You Accomplishing Them?

What are you teaching tomorrow? If I asked you that, you might respond in several ways:

“Cellular respiration.”

“Pythagorean Theorem.”  

“Act II of Romeo and Juliet.”

“The French Revolution and the American Revolution.”

“I don’t know yet. I have to make it through today first.”

Maybe answering a question like that makes you uncomfortable. In many cases—perhaps most—we gauge our classroom experiences not by what we are teaching but by what our students are learning or doing. Teachers who want to make the learning clear to students do so by informing them of the learning objectives for a particular lesson or for a unit as a whole. Students like to be told what they’re supposed to be learning or doing so they can figure out whether it’s happening.

When we shift our thinking to what our students are doing, we come up with more thoughtful objectives, and sometimes we see where the weaknesses in our instructional plans lie. Your students might be explaining how their cells extract energy from the foods they consume, determining the length of the third side of a right triangle when they know the lengths of the other two, or comparing and contrasting the French and American Revolutions and using their discoveries to determine features common to all revolutions.

If you discover that all you can say is that tomorrow your students are learning what happens in Act II of Romeo and Juliet, you might consider how you’re teaching it and what you might change to make that learning more meaningful. Perhaps your students could debate whether Shakespeare’s portrayal of the blossoming love between the teens is convincing or ridiculous. Or your students could analyze how Shakespeare uses figurative language to communicate the feelings of the young lovers to the audience and discuss how figurative language might strengthen their own writing.

     

Whatever your stated objective is, I also invite you to consider something bigger, something I like to call the Hidden Objective.

The Hidden Objective is the overarching transformation you hope will occur in your students because they took your class. It’s the life-altering difference you hope to make in them that will benefit them even if they never take another course in your subject area. It’s something you would probably never overtly tell your students, but it’s something that you would be completely delighted sometime in the future to discover has taken place and that you played a part in it.

Here are some of my own Hidden Objectives from my own teaching of English, humanities, and the AVID Elective:    

• My students will read for pleasure and will share their love of reading with others.
• My students will feel confident as communicators who can speak and write powerfully for a variety of audiences and in any situation.
• My students will be able to form an opinion of their own, back it up, and share it with others in a way that makes others consider it.
• My students appreciate the arts as a means for understanding others, understanding the world around them, and understanding themselves.
• My students seek out arts experiences of their own to add value to their lives.    
• My students use their talents and abilities to make the world a better place for someone other than just themselves.
• My students will realize that learning doesn’t always have a quantifiable outcome and that the best learning is learning for its own sake.
• My students will take charge of their lives, advocate for themselves, and not just let life happen to them.

Considering your Hidden Objectives gives you life and direction as an educator. The objectives become a part of your mission, the driving force that propels all your other efforts. Reminding yourself of these objectives and checking in on your progress not only keeps you on track but also gives meaning to the work you do.

If you’re lucky, you’ll run into one of your former students years later, and, in thanking you, that student will let you know what impact you’ve made on his or her life.

It’s not likely that the former student will say, “Thank you so much for being my teacher. Because of you, I know what happened in Act II of Romeo and Juliet.”  The former student probably won’t say, “Because of your class, I can analyze the effect of figurative language on a reader. That has taken me far in life.”

Perhaps—and this will warm your heart when it happens—you’ll hear your former student say, “I write all the time for my job, and I think that I’m good at it because you taught me the importance of always considering how the audience will respond to what you write. I choose words carefully, reread my writing for clarity, and anticipate my readers’ reactions in advance. Thank you for teaching me that.”

Unfortunately, we don’t always get to know about the impact our work has on students. Rest assured, though, that because of our collective efforts and the many Hidden Objectives that drive our interactions with students, we have made and will continue to make differences in the ways they view themselves as thinkers, citizens, community members, readers, writers, problem solvers, mathematicians, historians, scientists, leaders, athletes, performers, scholars, family members, students, employees, team members, listeners, speakers, partners, innovators, caretakers, creators, planners, hosts, guests, producers, and people.

I’m interested in hearing about your Hidden Objectives. If you’d care to share yours, add them to my Google Form here. If I get enough responses, I will share them in a future post. There’s power in seeing the impact we are each making and how it affects the big picture of our students’ experiences.

Today's Question

How do I create a daily guiding question for my students, and why should I consider doing it?

One of the things we know we are “supposed” to do as teachers is to post our learning objectives on the board. Maybe we are doing it because our principal told us to. Perhaps we are hoping our students will read them and have a more secure grasp on what they are supposed to get from the day’s lesson. Or it’s just something we do without thinking; at the beginning of the unit we create a poster or reserve a spot on the board where we dutifully copy a bunch of educational jargon so that it’ll be there if anyone chooses to look at it.

The problem with learning objectives is that they’re often written for teachers, not for students.

How can I expect students to use a statement like this (one of many I could have pulled from the English I TEKS) to guide their learning when I don’t even want to read it myself?

“Students understand, make inferences and draw conclusions about the structure and elements of fiction and provide evidence from text to support their understanding. Students are expected to analyze how authors develop complex yet believable characters in works of fiction through a range of literary devices, including character foils.”

Not only is it so wordy that I’d get a hand cramp writing that on the board with dry-erase markers, but it also makes it sound as if the student is about to have to sit through the most tedious lesson imaginable, right?

Sometimes we take a giant Essential Question for an entire unit (like this) and post it on the board:  

“What deliberate decisions do authors make as they write to influence their readers?”

Sure, this is the big idea we want our students to ponder throughout the unit, but it’s unlikely they’ll be exploring that in depth every day while they should be having learning experiences that lead them to the eventual answer to that question. I think it’s a great idea to have the Essential Questions posted somewhere in the room so you can refer to them and the students can continue to ponder them, but I think they’re not the best way to help students focus on what they’re supposed to be taking away from any particular class period.

What I always found to be most helpful for me and my students was to compose a separate question for each day’s lesson. Sometimes, I’d create my question first to help focus my planning and preparation. Other times, when I already had an idea of what I was intending to do that day, I’d write the question at the end of planning in an effort to tie everything together and make sure my lesson made cohesive sense.

My guiding goal for making the question was to make sure the question was in student-friendly language and was something the students should be able to answer at the end of the class period:

What is a dramatic foil, and why does Shakespeare create them?

That’s the question I’d create for that unwieldy learning objective I shared with you earlier. Here are some other samples so you can get the gist:

What are the characteristics that reappear in Romantic art?

What were the main causes that led up to World War I?

How do I use percentages to determine what I will pay for an item on sale?

How is meiosis similar to and different from mitosis?

How can using poetic devices spice up my writing?

Once you get a little practice, you’ll find that writing these questions is easy and fairly painless. Once you start using them on a daily basis, you’ll see their benefits:

1. You’ll have a better idea of what your goal is during the lesson. Consequently, your lessons will be more focused and will have renewed purpose and direction.
2. Your students will know what they’re supposed to learn during your class. It’s important, of course, that you pause at the beginning of class to alert your students to the question and to let them know that they should be able to answer that question at the end of the period. If you’re feeling really crazy, you can have your students write down the question at the top of their notes or in a notebook. Then, when it comes time to study for the test, they’ll have a clear reminder of what they were supposed to have learned during the unit.
3. You can use the question at the end of the class to check for understanding. Try using the question as the prompt for an exit card. You can collect them at the door as students leave and, after flipping through them, you will have a clear picture of how well the class as a whole and particular students mastered the day’s objective. Then you’ll know what kind of reteaching, if any, is necessary.
4. Your students can use the question as a self-test to measure their own understanding of the lesson. This will give them a better idea of where and when they need to seek further help.

Your daily guiding question was the first sentence of this article. Look back at it and see if you can answer it now. If not, let me know, and I’ll be happy to help.

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.

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