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.