Surprise!

Surprises can be fun, like when a big chocolate cake is delivered to your workplace on your birthday by a former coworker, when kids fix Mom breakfast in bed on Mother’s Day, when teachers receive an e-mail from a former student who, years later, decides to say thanks for making a difference, or when you turn on the tv on a lazy Saturday afternoon and stumble upon a back-to-back showing of Grease and Grease 2.

Other surprises are less delightful: seeing the cop car as you round the bend and realize you’re doing 45 in a school zone, receiving your electric bill for the hottest month of the summer, finding out that you owe way more than you planned on your income tax, receiving a call from your teenager informing you that your new car he borrowed is totaled, or arriving home after a long weekend getaway to discover your hot water heater has leaked and flooded the house. Surprise!

No one likes an unpleasant surprise they could have done something about if they had been aware ahead of time. This statement is especially relevant this week, the week when students’ midterm report cards arrive. As educators, it’s important for us to grade ourselves on how often we surprise our students.

Back in the days before online gradebooks, it was highly likely that the first time a student saw his average was on a report card. Surprises were frequent, and teachers kept their pen-and-ink gradebooks under lock and key. As a student during that era, I don’t recall ever really knowing how I was doing in classes, nor could I tell you what was expected to make a certain grade. Grades just appeared on assignments and projects, determined by some intangible “teacher expertise” scale. I’ve heard teachers since then say things like, “I just know what an A is,” as if that were sufficient criteria to bestow an evaluative grade. It’s a good thing they “just know” because their students don’t.  

Certainly, grade surprises are ones that should be—and, now that we have gradebooks that can be accessed remotely 24/7 even on our smart watches, could be—avoided, but I think the most crucial surprises to avoid are the ones where students are unaware of their levels of proficiency in a course. The grade on the test shouldn’t be a student’s first indication that he doesn’t know how to factor a polynomial, explain the theme of a short story, or trace the path of a potato chip as it passes through the digestive system. At frequent spots along the way to the final grade, the student should have had opportunities to receive crystal-clear feedback about how he is doing. He should understand what mastery entails and where he stands on the ladder to reach that level.   

I’ve found that many teenagers are acutely unaware of themselves academically. Left to their own devices, most students have no idea what they don’t know or when their understanding is sketchy or precarious. They confuse time and effort with mastery (“I studied for six hours. How could I make a grade that low?”). Unless their teachers are explicit in their low-stakes formative assessments and are strategic about how those assessments provide just-in-time feedback and and an action plan for students to improve, students will remain in the fog of self-delusion that leads for future surprises.

Questions like these are worth discussing with colleagues and teammates as you shape your formative assessment and feedback plans:

• How do I communicate what proficiency entails to my students and their parents?
• Does my gradebook provide useful feedback with grades that reflect mastery of curricular objectives or learning targets rather than non-academic factors?
• Do my rubrics and proficiency scales offer descriptive criteria that are used to instruct and offer feedback to students, not to justify a grade?
• Am I grading against end-of-the-year mastery criteria at the beginning of the year, or am I allowing my students to experience success in learning that is tiered with increasing expectations as students progress in their proficiency?
• What am I doing to help my students see themselves as learners, not performers, and to give them guidance about the next step to take, wherever they are on the road to mastery?
• Do I see my students as learners who can improve throughout the year, or do I view some students with a fixed mindset that suggests progress is unlikely?
• How often do I give formative feedback that is not linked to a grade?
• How long do students have to wait to learn how they are doing?
• Do my students know what to do to improve?
• Is the path to improvement for struggling students only available to those students who are willing and able to come in for extra help outside class time?
• Are there daily grades in my gradebook that provide an idea of how well students have mastered the content or skills measured on each major assessment?

For some of us, the answers to these questions reveal some uncomfortable truths about practices we’ve held onto for years. The answers aren’t easy, but the discussion that follows can be a rich opportunity for transformation of your teams, departments, and campuses, which will lead to greater student achievement and so many fewer surprises.

Thanks for all you do to minimize the unwelcome kind of surprises for your students. 

Thinking Aloud While Reading Aloud

This week's post focuses on one of my favorite topics: READING! Many of our students are proficient decoders of text (they can read the words in a paragraph) but are at a loss when it comes to making meaning of what they read. You may not consider yourself a reading teacher, but you’ve done more reading than anyone else in your room and are therefore the expert. In whatever class you teach, modeling the thinking a proficient reader can help your students understand the work that good readers do. By practicing these deliberate strategies to interact with the text, students can begin to develop habits that will make them more effective readers. I'll call this strategy Read Aloud/Think Aloud!

As you read a story, and article, or a chapter from your textbook with your students, tell them you are going to read the text to them and say aloud the thinking you are doing as you read. Below are two examples of what you might read and what you might say in doing this activity. The first example comes from a 10th grade World History textbook; the second is the opening of a classic short story. I've italicized the "think aloud" portions of the teacher script; the other parts come from the texts themselves:  

An Agricultural Revolution  "Revolution" means "change," so based on the title of this section, I predict I'll be reading about some sort of change in farming methods.

     By 1000, Europe's economic recovery was well underway. The year 1000 is about midway through the time period of the Middle Ages we've been reading about. I recall that we read in an earlier chapter about the feudal system and the manor economy, which was based around serfs and farming. Feudalism, I already learned, was a factor that began the recovery the book refers to.  It had begun in the countryside, where peasants adapted new farming technologies that made their fields more productive. The result was an agricultural revolution that transformed Europe.  

    New Technologies:  I don't usually think of technology as something they had in the medieval times. I wonder what things the book is calling "new technologies."  By the 800s, peasants were using new iron plows that carved deep into the heavy soil of northern Europe. These plots were a big improvement over the old wooden plows, which had been designed for the light soils of the Mediterranean region.  The book makes lots of distinctions between different sections of Europe; here it talks about the different farming tools needed for different regions. The northern part of Europe at this time in history seemed to lag behind the southern, Mediterranean region. Perhaps that's because of the power of the Church in Rome.   Also, a new kind of harness allowed peasants to use horses rather than oxen to pull the plows. Because faster-moving horses could plow more land in a day than could oxen, peasants were able to enlarge their fields and plant more crops.  I'll bet horses also eat less than oxen since they are smaller. That had to save some money for farmers.

    A peasant might look up and see another new device, a windmill, turning slowly against the sky. Where there were no fast-moving streams to turn a water mill, the power of the wind had been harnessed to grind the peasants' grain into flour.  So. . .to summarize, the three technologies they mention in this section are iron plows, horse harnesses, and windmills. If I'm taking notes on this section, I'd want to list those three main points under the heading "new technologies."

                                              (Prentice Hall World History 197)

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An example from literature:

She was one of those pretty, charming girls, born, as if by an accident of fate, into a family of clerks. First of all, I think it's interesting that the author begins this short story with "she," not even telling us the name of the woman the entire paragraph—and perhaps the entire story—is about. Second, he describes her and mentions that she was born "as if by an accident of fate." I wonder if that's her opinion of herself or the author's opinion of her. And I assume that a family of clerks is not a wealthy family, which might be the problem.   With no dowry, — The footnote says that a dowry is money or property a woman brings to her husband at the start of marriage; that confirms my suspicion that a family of clerks is poor. —no prospects, no way of any kind of being met, understood, loved, and married by a man both prosperous and famous, she was finally married to a minor clerk in the Ministry of Education.  That’s a long and somewhat confusing sentence; I think I need to read it again to make sure I can put the pieces together. With no dowry, no prospects, no way of any kind of being met, understood, loved, and married by a man both prosperous and famous, she was finally married to a minor clerk in the Ministry of Education. Reading it a second time really helped. At the end of the first paragraph, I get a pretty good idea of the mental state of this character. She's sad because she didn't get to marry a rich guy. And he works for the Department of Education. They'll never have any money. And money seems to be the thing she thinks will buy her love and happiness. Since the story is called "The Necklace," I predict it's going to have something to do with an expensive necklace the woman wants.  

    She dressed plainly because she could not afford fine clothes, but was as unhappy as a woman who has come down in the world; for women have no family rank or social class.  Family rank and social class seem like things people were more concerned with in the past. Today, I think people care more about how famous you are, and wealth doesn’t necessarily mean you have any class at all. I remember in the author's note in the textbook that this story is taking place in France in the 1800s, when someone might be concerned with her own family rank. With them, beauty, grace, and charm take the place of birth and breeding. Their natural poise, their instinctive good taste, and their mental cleverness are the sole guiding principles which make daughters of the common people the equals of ladies in high society.  The author seems to have a high opinion of women if he's going to say that their beauty and intelligence make them able to go beyond any kind of social rank. So he thinks her unhappiness and worry should be all for nothing. We'll see how that turns out. . .

                                    ("The Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant)

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Obviously, this is a little overkill, but it helps the students understand that reading is an active process. We're not necessarily "reading" when we let the words flow past our eyeballs; reading involves predicting, summarizing, connecting, and questioning. By showing the students overtly what we do when we read, they can begin to internalize these processes that will make them better students and better readers in the years ahead.  

If you want to read more about this idea, take a look at Kylene Beers's book When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do. Many schools have copies in their professional library. It's the most practical book I've ever read for any teacher who wants to know the various troubles facing our kids when we assign things for them to read.

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.