Dress Rehearsals

My friend Megan is getting married this Saturday. On Friday evening the members of the wedding party will convene for a rehearsal. They’ll run though the wedding service so everyone knows where to stand, where and how to walk, what to say, and how to hand off things like rings and bouquets to other people at appropriate moments in the wedding. Running through  the logistics of a wedding beforehand is standard practice; no one would think twice about having a run-through before the big day. A dress rehearsal helps ensure that the wedding runs smoothly, minimizes anxiety for the bride and groom so they won’t make fretful faces in the wedding photos, and keeps the Man of Honor from embarrassing himself during the ceremony. Practice, as they say, makes the wedding perfect.

Teachers sometimes forget the importance of rehearsing as part of their planning for instruction. We look over a lesson plan and then wing it when the kids show up. Sometimes we can pull that off; other times, our lack of prior practice results in misconstrued instructions, awkward transitions, logistical confusion, and unclear explanations.

All too often, our planning looks like this:  “Okay, so. . . the students will do the opener quickwrite and then move into the Socratic Seminar. After that, they’ll fill out the exit ticket if there’s time.”  

Sketchy “planning” of this nature leaves so many unanswered questions. What are you going to do to hook the students at the beginning of the period? How long should the quickwrite take? Are students going to share or process the quickwrite in any way? How will you transition to the Socratic Seminar, including moving furniture and humans? What kind of instructions will the students need before starting the seminar? What will your role be during the discussion? What happens if the Socratic Seminar runs off track?  How much time will you allow for the discussion so that you have time for the exit ticket? Will you do any kind of debrief on the Socratic Seminar itself to encourage future improvement in student academic conversations? How will you reset the room at the end of the discussion? Will that happen before or after the instructions for the exit ticket? What do you need to say about the exit ticket?  How will students turn in their exit cards? What will you do with the exit cards after you collect them? What kind of preview of tomorrow’s lesson will pique your students’ curiosity?

Leaving these questions to chance means there may be some less-than-stellar moments in what could be an outstanding, highly effective lesson. Talking and walking through the lesson can improve the likelihood that you’ll say and do the right things to achieve the results you desire.

Asking two big dress rehearsal questions when you are planning can set you up for success:  

1.  What will this lesson look like? Asking this question prompts you to consider the many visual and logistical factors that are a part of any well-planned lesson. Before kids come into the room, it’s wise to rehearse—or at least talk through—these things:

• Materials you’ll need and how they’ll be distributed
• Written information your students will see:  learning objectives, learning targets, or focusing questions; daily agenda; handouts; other print materials; audio-visual components
• Room setup
• Student movement and interactions
• Transitions from one activity to the next
• Use of technology and multimedia (The middle of class shouldn’t be the first time you click on a link to see if it works.)
• Approximate times for each component of the lesson
• How students will be grouped
• What successful participation by students will look like

2.  What will this lesson sound like?  Have you ever thought you understood something and only realized the gaps in your understanding when you attempted to explain it to someone else? Rehearsing what you’re going to say decreases the odds that you’re going to flub your explanation. Teachers who consider what their lesson will sound like practice many things:

• Giving instructions
• Explaining concepts or terms
• Building anticipation or buy-in for a lesson
• Telling a story with an instructional purpose
• Asking effective questions
• Promoting student talk
• Providing verbal feedback
• Conferencing with students
• Opening and closing class effectively
• Correcting students
• Responding calmly and consistently to student misbehaviors

When teachers consider what a lesson will sound like, they think through other aspects:

• The desired noise level at various points in the lesson
• The quantity of student talk vs teacher talk
• What student talk should sound like
• Ways to get the desired outcomes for student talk

Effective team planning can involve rehearsing and discussing all these things. We grow better by learning from one another. You will often find that someone else’s idea is better than your own. Hearing colleagues explain a concept, introduce a lesson, or model an effective teacher-student conference can help you prepare for your own instruction, perhaps incorporating elements of their delivery into yours. Teams can troubleshoot  by thinking together about what a lesson that exists on a curriculum document will look like and sound like in an actual classroom. Rather than assuming that every member of the team has the same vision of what the written lesson should look and sound like, making sure everyone is on the same page by rehearsing together increases every teacher’s success, which increases every student’s success.

And speaking of success, Megan, I hope your wedding is all you’ve dreamed it will be. Enjoy your special day (and your rehearsal before that).

Planning to Seem Unplanned

Besides the Fletcher’s Corny Dog stand, the “Birds of the World” show was my favorite part of the Texas State Fair. Alas, as of 2013, the bird show is no more, but I spent many a memorable hour sitting in the band shell and marveling as Groucho the parrot sang a pitchy rendition of “How Much is That Doggie in the Window;” laughing as the red-legged seriema, Sluggo, slammed a rubber lizard, Mr. Bill, repeatedly on a rock to demonstrate how these birds tenderize their dinner; and ducking when the Harris’s hawk grazed the heads of the audience in its beeline from the top of the Texas Star Ferris wheel to the treat-holding trainer below.

One of the best moments in the show was when they pulled a volunteer out of the audience and put her in the perfect position to get a photo of the 10-foot wingspan of a California condor as it soared toward her from the back of the amphitheater. Just as the enormous bird was approaching, another bird on the stage escaped its enclosure, causing confusion which ended in the volunteer’s falling backward into a pool of water, soaking her clothes and hair. Half of the audience howled with laughter while the other half grimaced in sympathy at this poor soul whose day and expensive camera were ruined by this soggy mishap.

The host of the show expressed sympathy through suppressed laughter as he called one of the trainers to take the volunteer backstage and get her cleaned up. The hapless volunteer later reappeared on the stage on the way back to her seat, only to be startled by a runaway bird who chased her back into hiding. By the end of the show, of course, the “volunteer” took a bow with the rest of the cast and then began drying her hair and clothes to get ready for the next show that day.       

This shtick was a part of the “Birds of the World” show for probably the last five years of its 15-year residency, and it never got old. Of course, after the first year, the rabid fans like me were in on the joke, but it was fun to watch the reactions of the audience and the feigned surprise of the host and other show personnel. They had obviously planned carefully to make this stunt look completely unplanned.

This moment of faux mayhem required a cast member in disguise who had to blend in as a convincing member of the audience and act realistically frightened, two trained birds behaving as instructed, a latch that appeared to malfunction on cue, the proper placement of a person by an onstage water feature, a crew who would respond to the “accident” as if it were truly unexpected, and a host who could all of this orchestrate this and look believably surprised and horrified without breaking character. Planning and preparation were crucial to pull this off.  

I feel like we can learn something about teaching from the bird show’s antics. The best teachers plan to make aspects of their class appear unplanned. There’s a difference between “unplanned” and “chaotic,” however. What I think we should aim for is a degree of spontaneity so we ensure that our instruction has a feeling of improvised curiosity.  

There’s a big difference, for instance, between saying to your class, “As I was reading this last night, I found this sentence that I thought was interesting; let’s look at it,” and handing out a worksheet of sentences for students analyze grammatically. It seems more spontaneous to say, “I wonder what would happen if we played around with the word order here,” than it does to display a PowerPoint slide with sentences to reword. Reading a text aloud yourself seems more authentic than listening to a recording of someone else reading. Asking students what they wondered as they were reading the article is more genuine than providing them with a pre-printed page of questions. Soliciting ideas from students and modeling the writing of a draft of a paper is more engaging than displaying an already-written essay on the screen, especially one written by some other teacher. The read-aloud poem you share with your students becomes more interesting when you say, “I found this poem I think is really great,” than when you introduce it by saying, “Turn to page 12 in your poetry packet, and let’s find today’s Poem of the Day.” And allowing students to share the words they found challenging in a reading assignment and then to decide which ones are useful enough to put on a class word wall will increase buy-in better than giving them a list of important vocabulary words to memorize because the word wall is their list, not yours.  

I remember chemistry labs in high school where we were simply following a series of instructions to reach a predetermined outcome. I recall many Q&A sessions in school where the teacher clearly knew all the right answers already and was waiting for someone to respond to her predetermined specifications so that she could feign excitement as she said, “Exactly right! That is the theme of the story!” Though I know they were abundant,  I don’t remember any worksheets. . . because no one remembers worksheets. Ditto for study questions. None of these things seemed at all spontaneous or interesting to me (the student) or to the teacher, who (as I saw it) must have the world’s most boring job.   

The most memorable moments in school—not coincidentally, also the ones where the most learning occurred and stuck—were the ones where the teacher exhibited curiosity along with us, where the outcome didn’t seem predestined, and where the classroom seemed like a community of learners and discoverers.

Spontaneous teaching like this takes preparation and planning. Even the most experienced teachers flop more often than they soar when they try to wing it. Plan your questions carefully. Rehearse your instructions and explanations. Carefully orchestrate your openings, transitions, segues, and conclusions. But do what you can to make all of these things seem fresh and alive to your students—as if you are experiencing fresh curiosity right along with them as they learn.

Introducing the phrase “I wonder. . .” into your lessons is one way to begin

That host of the bird show did the same soggy volunteer routine four times a day throughout the run of the State Fair year after year, and he never let it become stale. Each new audience experienced it as if it were an entirely unplanned accident, which is what made it so brilliant. In the same way, we can create these brilliant moments of spontaneity in our classrooms with careful planning and consideration for what the learning experience looks like through the eyes of the learners.       

Take the Brush Out of Your Hand

I couldn’t get the tree to look right.

I was taking an art class—a painting class, to be more precise—and I couldn’t get the tree to look the way it did in the photograph. My art teacher, who may not have had the utmost faith in my art skills, hovered over me as I futzed with the branches and leaves. I expressed some frustration and asked for advice. In response, she snatched the brush out of my hand, dabbed it in the paint, and produced an exquisite tree on my canvas in no time. “That’s how you do it,” she said. “Thanks,” I muttered. I didn’t know any more about how to paint a tree than I did when I asked for help, and I was suddenly very unproud of my painting as a whole since the most difficult part wasn’t something I could claim responsibility for. How easy is it for us as teachers to take the brush away from our students and complete the painting ourselves, figuratively or literally? Seeing students struggle is hard. Wait time requires patience on our part and perseverance on theirs. Oftentimes it’s easier for us to do it ourselves, to tell them the right answer, to do the heavy lifting. We become like helicopter moms, hovering over our students and rescuing them before they have a chance to make mistakes and figure it out on their own. We have to become more comfortable at watching our students struggle. We have to become better at guiding rather than doing the work ourselves. We have to become encouragers, prompters, questioners, and coaches.

I love when my friends who are parents post videos of their babies working at taking their first steps. Watching the little ones prop themselves up, wobble and catch themselves, reach a moment of balance, and then take the first tentative and precarious step is so exciting and gives me such hope because I know that baby will soon be walking confidently, running, skipping, dancing, riding a bike, and, eventually, navigating the adult world. Along the way, parents, teachers, and other adults will offer guidance, praise, and encouragement, but ultimately the work will be done by that child. There will be times when parents will swoop in to rescue their child. That’s inevitable. But good parents know that people learn by doing, by experimenting, by troubleshooting, and by making mistakes. The college freshman whose mom did his laundry until the moment he left to live in the dorm is going to be walking around with pink socks, pink undershirts, and tighty no-longer-whities unless he finds someone willing to teach him how to wash his own clothes. In my own classroom, I have been completely guilty of metaphorically taking the paint brush away from my students and doing the work myself. I have rewritten their awkward sentences, explained what students should have been getting from something they’ve been reading, told them the “correct” theme of novels and short stories, and provided my own expert analysis of works both artistic and literary rather than letting my students write, interpret, or analyze themselves. I’ve clarified extremely vague student responses by putting words into their mouths rather than asking probing questions to help them state their answers in more complete or articulate fashion. Students in my class learned that they didn’t have to listen to each other because Mr. McKinney would eventually tell them what they needed to take away from the class discussion. Recently, I have also noticed that students have a hard time watching one another struggle. Their patience for wait time may be less than most teachers’. Their camaraderie and esprit de corps cause them to want to rescue one another. This I’ve-got-your-back mentality makes them lousy coaches. I watched some students in a class earlier this week who were supposed to be coaching one another as they attempted to place commas in some commaless sentences. One student made some pretty significant errors. His partner, rather than helping him understand or coaching him through the process, took the pencil away and repunctuated the sentences correctly. The struggling student learned nothing about how to use commas today from his partner, which was not the goal of the paired coaching experience. It’s important that we help students understand something we ourselves often struggle to understand: when you don’t do something for someone, you are doing that person a favor. In other words, it’s better to ask questions than to provide the correct answer. It’s better to let that person do it on their own than to do it for them, but it’s best if you do it alongside them. Don’t grab the pencil and work the problem yourself. Take the paintbrush out of your hand. Provide feedback. Show them how to do a similar example. Ask questions. Help them locate and work through their points of confusion. Peer coaching isn’t answer-giving. AVID students become adept at this type of peer coaching during their in-class Socratic tutorials. The idea is that the members of the tutorial group help one of their members work through a self-identified point of confusion by asking questions rather than by telling them the answer. AVID students know that we learn by doing our own thinking, not by having someone do the thinking for us. We become better at doing things by doing them, not by watching others do them. And once we learn how to do those things ourselves, we can be deservedly proud of our accomplishments. If you’ve never seen an AVID tutorial in action, I encourage you to seek one out. It’s an impressive experience. In the coaching work I do with teachers, I’m working to—as Michael Bungay Stanier says— “tame the advice monster.” It’s so easy to do the thinking for others that it becomes the default practice for many of us. What we know about learning, though, is that true learning happens when the learner does the thinking, not the teacher. I’m trying not to always have the right answer, and I want to work with students to help them understand that often it’s best not to have the right answer and instead to help someone else find the right answer. If that art teacher had let me keep the brush in my hand, if she had explained what to do, offered some suggestions, or even showed me the technique on a separate canvas, I might have liked that painting enough to keep it. Instead, she painted the tree for me. And I still don’t know how to paint one myself.