Thank You Notes

Thank You Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can Costa's Levels of Thinking Make Me a Better Teacher?

For years I've used Costa’s Levels of Thinking in my AVID, English, and Humanities classrooms to help my students push themselves to higher levels of cognition and to assist them in analyzing their own thinking on assignments and assessments. When going over the results a test, I've asked students to identify the levels of thinking required by the questions that have posed a challenge for them. Knowing what kind of thinking is tripping them up has allowed them to refine their study skills for continued growth. We've written questions together and dissected the questions of others. Costa’s Levels of Thinking have made a world of difference in the way my students learn.  

Recently, I had an epiphany. Not only can Costa’s increase student success, but improvement-minded teachers can use Costa’s to shape and guide their own instructional efforts.  

Costa’s Level 1 refers to the information-gathering stage of thinking. This is the realm of right and wrong answers. Level 1 thinkers simply need to know facts and ideas that others thought of first. Level 1 knowledge is essential for every teacher. Not only must teachers know the nuts and bolts of their subject matter, but they also must understand the state’s essential elements or standards, the district’s curriculum (if such a thing exists), and the rules and policies of the school. Spending time studying lessons on the curriculum database, reading instructional materials, boning up on content, discussing curriculum maps, familiarizing yourself with the textbook, and perusing the TEKS involves necessary Level 1 thinking. Teachers should also be aware of student data: What are the specific strengths and weaknesses of my students, as a class and as individuals?

Effective teachers can’t stop with Level 1 knowledge, though. Level 2 thinking--the kind where you do something with the Level 1 knowledge by applying and analyzing what you know--must take place so teachers can bring instruction to life.

Level 2 thinking for teachers involves customizing the curriculum and standards for their individual campus situations. Teachers consider the needs of their students to determine what instruction needs to look like. Classrooms with multiple ability levels or multiple levels of understanding suggest opportunities for differentiation. In other words, the Level 2 thinking forces teachers to consider how to most effectively implement instruction. It also requires teachers to connect the dots between the elements so that instruction is seamless and has a recognizable direction. Level 2 is the problem-solving stage. It’s all about putting what you know into action.  

More importantly, Level 2 thinking also requires teachers to ask themselves, “Why?” Why am I teaching this content? Why is this skill necessary for my students to learn? Why is the curriculum written the way it is?  What is the thinking behind this curriculum document? When a teacher can articulate the “why” behind the subject matter and curriculum, students will understand the “so what” for the things they’re asked to do.    

Level 3 thinking occurs during and after the lessons are taught. Teachers view their instruction through an evaluative lens. What went well? What didn’t? Why? What do I need to do differently next time? Did my students perform to expectation? If not, how will I need to adjust to remediate or reteach?  Often, I find that as teachers we rush from one activity or assessment to the next and don’t allow ample time for reflection and growth. Level 3 of Costa’s reminds us of the importance of evaluation; it’s how we get better at what we do. The best teachers--like great athletes--are always self-assessing and making microadjustments as they teach, sometimes even in the middle of lessons.

Sometimes, teaching also provides the satisfying Level 3 task of creating. Teachers--individually or on campus or district curriculum teams--take everything they know about learning, content, standards, and students and synthesize all that knowledge to produce thoughtful curriculum units and lessons to engage students and meet their needs. It’s a monumental task that requires the teacher to be simultaneously detailed and visionary.  

I encourage my teacher friends to join me in some metacognition about Costa’s and their own journeys in education. Take stock of the thinking you’re doing and consider what you can do to strengthen any areas of weakness. Let Costa’s Levels of Thinking guide you toward continual improvement. It’s what we’d expect from our students, so I think it’s worth expecting of ourselves.

  

WICOR and Exam Reviews

It's everyone's favorite time of the year: the time when we soon get to put aside new learning and focus our efforts on helping the students get prepared for the joy that is better known as final exam week.  In our haste to finish the semester, we should, of course, never forget the importance of WICOR (writing, inquiry, collaboration, organization, and reading), so I am compiling a little list to help you plan your review activities:

11 Ways to Infuse Your Final Exam Reviews with WICOR

1.  Teach your students how to read multiple choice questions and essay prompts effectively.  Spending some time talking about the language used in testing in your subject area will help them become more effective test takers.

2.  Write your own exam questions.  One good study technique is to ask students to predict questions they might encounter on their exams by writing questions--multiple choice or short answer--of their own.  Writing multiple choice questions might also give students some insight into how questions are written, which could translate to greater insight on exam day.

3.  Have students form in-class study groups.  Give each person in each group a job (scribe, task-manager, researcher, questioner, etc.), and spend some time beforehand talking about how effective study groups work.  You could give each group a topic to review and present their findings with the class.  The students will find this collaborative review a welcome break from the sit-and-get they'll have in most of their classes during review week.

4.  Levels of Questions:  Using Costa's or Bloom's, discuss the various levels of questions on the exam.  Have a class discussion to brainstorm the various ways to prepare for different types of questions they may see on the exam.

5.  Ask your kids to write explanations about what they have learned in your class.  If it's a history class, they can write a monologue from a famous person they've studied.  In biology, they can write a dialogue between an onion cell and a cheek cell.  In math, they can write an explanation of how to simplify a polynomial.   Share the students' writings with the class.  You might even be able to turn this into a "who am I?" game where the class has to guess the topic after the student reads his or her paper.

6.  Help students think about the material on their exam in a variety of ways by creating graphic organizers or analogies.  This is a great group assignment.   Give each group a broad topic (ie. figurative language, mercantilism, symbiosis, reactions) and a large piece of paper (or a computer with PowerPoint) and ask them to come up with a visual organizer or metaphor to explain the topic to the class.

7.  Matching Card Sets:  I've used this before with material that required Level I knowledge (lists of terms, vocabulary, people, events, etc.).  One day in class, I put the students into groups and gave each group a pile of small squares of paper or cardstock (about half the size of an index card).  On one half of the cards, the students wrote the term, person, event, etc.  Then, they created a second set of cards by writing clues or definitions leading to each word on the other set.  On the back of each pair, they put a number or letter to signify that the two should go together.  After the entire set was complete, the students could lay the cards out on the floor, face up, and match the pairs.  They could check their answers by looking at the backs of the cards.  I had the students leave their sets in the classroom so that all students could use them for independent review before or after school during exam week.

8.  Skimming the text can be a great way to remind oneself of the content of a book prior to an exam.  Teach this skill to your students so they can learn how to reread quickly, searching for key ideas and reviewing major concepts while not getting bogged down in picky details.

9.  Create a quiz show.  Split the class into several teams.  Distribute note cards to the students, and ask them to write review questions (and provide answers) for students on other teams to answer during a review game.  Tell them the questions should not be too easy or the other team will get all the points.  Also, you might want to make a rule that if the question is too hard, you--as the head judge of all that is reasonable for students to answer--could penalize the team that created the question.  Use the questions to conduct a game in any manner you prefer.

10.  Another collaborative review game my students enjoy is the tag-team review.  Split the class into two teams.  Then, split each team into pairs of students who will work together to answer a question in front of the class.   [Before class begins, make a set of cards containing broad topics to discuss or essay-type questions, ones that require a longer explanation rather than one precise answer.  Ex.  "What was the Columbian Exchange, and how did it affect Europe?" "Characteristics of Romanticism," or "How to Plot a Point on a Graph."]    Begin with a pair from team A.  Ask them to draw one topic from your set of cards. Give them one minute to huddle and then one minute to stand in front of the class and answer that question or explain that topic together.  (I usually let a pair from the other team draw their topic and have their huddle time while the first group is explaining to keep things moving).  After the minute is up, award the team anywhere from 0-5 points based on the quality of the explanation or response.  Sometimes, I add unpredictable bonuses based on speaking ability (ex. the first group not to begin speaking by saying "Okay" gets a 5-point bonus). The tag-team review is a fun (albeit a bit pressure-filled) way to review big-picture ideas and concepts before the exam.

11.  Talk with your students about time management, prioritizing study tasks, creating a tutorial schedule, and all the other organizational things that will help them succeed as they prepare for exams.

I hope some of these WICOR tips help make your upcoming review week interesting and productive for you and your students.  Hang in there.