Don’t Forget the L

Social-Emotional Learning, or SEL, is all the rage these days. It seems we have realized that we can’t just stand in the front of our classrooms and teach, heedless of the fact that there are human beings in our classrooms who have emotional baggage they lug with them to school each day.

The anxiety, interpersonal conflicts, insecurities, fears, abuse, stress, sadness, peer influences, grief, drama, and trauma that weigh down the lives of even the most seemingly well-adjusted kids impede students’ abilities to focus on the business of school. What we now know about the brain is that any kind of stress triggers the brain’s fight-or-flight response, which overrides the rational, thinking part of the brain. Students who enter our classrooms having experienced trauma (or even just a really bad morning) are unable to learn until the amygdala relinquishes control of brain activity and allows the student’s brain to return to normal functioning.

It’s no surprise, then, that the education world has jumped on the bandwagon of Social-Emotional Learning. SEL reminds us that building relationships is crucial. Students need to feel comfortable in our classrooms. They need to trust the teacher and their peers. They need to know that the classroom and the campus are safe spaces, physically and emotionally. They need to develop positive dispositions about themselves and about school. 

Positive reinforcements, praise, chants, cheers, claps, “atta boys,” classroom meetings, and affirmations abound in schools today, and we pat ourselves on the back because our students feel great about themselves. Teachers have filled their students’ social-emotional buckets so full that school has become a happy place for most—and certainly for many who traditionally disengage from classroom connections.

My concern in all of this is that we sometimes forget about the L in SEL. The important thing about Social-Emotional Learning is the learning that results from all of our community building and connecting. We can never lose sight of the SO THAT.

The SO THAT is the reason behind the things we do, the impact our efforts have on student learning.

I make sure my students feel safe in my classroom SO THAT they are comfortable taking risks when I ask them to engage in classroom discussions and think about things that are hard for them. 

I let my students see that failure is a part of learning and provide many low-risk learning activities SO THAT students can push themselves to experiment as thinkers and writers without worrying about a grade being attached to it.

I get to know my students’ as people SO THAT they know I care about them as more than just a number in my gradebook because I am planning to push them to do things they may not believe they can do and I want them to know I’ve got their best interests in mind and that they can trust me when it gets precarious.

I talk with my students about things other than school SO THAT when it comes time to talk about academic things they will pay attention to that, too. 

I ensure my students connect with others in the class SO THAT they have a network of support to rely on as they learn because students learn from one another better than they learn from me.  

I try to make students feel comfortable talking with me SO THAT they aren’t afraid to approach me for help when they face struggles with the rigorous content in my course. 

There are so many worthwhile SO THATs that come from paying attention to our students’ social and emotional needs, but we need to make sure that community building and feel-good strategies are not ends in themselves. Social-Emotional Learning without the Learning is not the goal of school. School needs to be a safe, joyful place because we’ve got big plans to meet students where they are and take them to where they need to be. 

Don’t forget the L.

Fix-It Strategies

Stuff breaks.

It’s an unfortunate part of life, but we have to deal with cars that won’t start, computers stuck on the Blue Screen of Death, ice makers that don’t make ice, and cell phones that won’t hold a charge.

Sometimes, when we read, comprehension breaks down, too. We encounter a paragraph with dozens of words we don’t know. A piece of text is too technical for our know-how. We find ourselves at the end of a page and have no idea what we just read.

For many of our students, this happens all the time. We give them texts, ask them to read them, and watch them run into roadblocks. Comprehension breaks down, and they don’t know how to fix it. What do we do in response? How do we help them? Sometimes, we ask them to underline, circle, or highlight unfamiliar vocabulary and other things they don’t understand. That’s a start, but it’s not enough.

Imagine you are having a really bad hair day. You look in the mirror and recoil in horror at what’s atop your head. Your hairstyle is a disaster, and you can’t leave the house looking like this. What do you do? Just point to the problem area? Circle what’s wrong? Merely identifying the problem isn’t going to fix your heinous hairdo.

You promptly take measures to alleviate the problem. Perhaps you apply a different product, take out the blow dryer or the curling iron, splash a little water on it, trim a bit with your shears, or—if none of that works—hop back in the shower and start all over.

You have go-to fix-it strategies when you find yourself having a hair crisis.

You also have fix-it strategies you use when you encounter difficult text.

When a word baffles you, you may look for context clues to determine the meaning, decide how crucial that word is to your overall understanding, look up a definition of the word if you need to, and reread the sentence, substituting that newfound definition for the word you didn’t know.

If you get to the end of sentence and go, “Huh?”, you may return to the start of the sentence and reread more carefully, put it into your own words, identify the most important elements, look at how the sentence relates to what comes before and after it, and read the words aloud in order to hear what it’s saying.    

         

At various times, you might jot notes in the margin, underline to emphasize the most important ideas, scribble a question beside a paragraph, sketch a visual or simple graphic organizer to help you make sense of some ideas, or talk with a friend about the text.

Your toolbox of fix-it strategies is a valuable resource for your students. Merely telling them to circle unfamiliar words or read a confusing passage again leads to frustration. “Look how many words I don’t know. Now what?” “I read it once and didn’t get it. How is reading it again going to help?”

We must talk with students about when to know whether a word is worth looking up and what to do after they look up a definition of an unfamiliar word. We must show them how to reread with a new intention to clear up confusion. We have to provide them with as many strategies as possible and help them to determine when each one is useful. Having strategic talks with students about reading builds stronger readers. Filling in the meaning for them doesn’t help them build skills of their own; they’ll be helpless when their comprehension breaks down without a teacher in sight.

Fix-it strategies aren’t confined to the literacy realm. We have math strategies, problem-solving strategies, critical thinking strategies, decision-making strategies, and study strategies—just to name a few—our students can benefit from.

Don’t leave your students stranded without a plan to fix their broken-down learning. Stuff breaks. Make sure your students understand that difficulty is a normal part of learning, but provide them with some tools to help them steer their way back onto the road to success. 

Far-Away Results

Where will your students be in 15 years?  What will they be doing? What will the world expect of them? How will the things you are doing in your class right now prepare them for that far-away result? 

In 15 years, my former students won’t be writing DBQs, but they will be taking in information, evaluating its content and credibility, and communicating their own conclusions about what to do with that information.   

In 15 years, they won’t be engaging in a Socratic Seminar about themes in Romeo and Juliet, but they will be in situations that require them to speak articulately to advance an argument, communicate clearly, organize their thoughts logically, disagree without attacking, support their conclusions with evidence, listen and respond to others, and connect ideas to the “real world.” 

In 15 years, you won’t find many of them working with a partner to stage and perform a duet acting scene from a play, but most will be collaborating with others, considering the visual and emotional impact of stylistic choices, preparing for a presentation, speaking in front of a group with poise and confidence, analyzing the motives of others,  and communicating to achieve a desired effect. 

In 15 years, most former orchestra students won’t be rehearsing Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, but the discipline, persistence, attention to detail, teamwork, patience, troubleshooting, concentration, focus, and direction-following they practiced will serve them well in their work and leisure pursuits. 

In 15 years, they won’t be solving a math problem, working on a coding assignment, or collecting data for a biology lab, but they will use logic, reasoning, problem solving, and analysis as they solve real-world problems as parents, employees, public servants, leaders, doctors, lawyers, programmers, and educators.

In 15 years, most won’t be playing flag football in P.E.class, but they will need to exhibit good sportspersonship, work on teams, develop “plays” and strategies, learn how to win and lose, exercise to remain healthy, and move with purpose and coordination. 

Even in the best project-based learning situation, the tasks students are doing right now in school aren’t the things most people do in the real world. Even so, what we ask them to do as students ought to develop the skills and dispositions they need to thrive in the world beyond school. If not, these don’t seem like worthwhile pursuits. 

As you are thinking about what you teach and how you teach it, ask yourself this key question: What transferable skills and dispositions does this require of my students, and how am I deliberately teaching students to develop them? 

This question has two important components:

1.  Transferable Skills and Dispositions: When planning instruction, great teachers ascribe to the adage, “Begin with the end in mind.” Unfortunately, we sometimes are a little short-sighted when we think about what “the end” is. The “end” shouldn’t lie in the course the student is currently taking. If the end is a unit test, a performance assessment, a product, or a standardized test, we are merely preparing students for a hurdle they have to get over to reach whatever is next. For some teachers, the end lies in a class the students will be taking down the road  (“I’m teaching you this because you’re going to need to do this in AP next year” or “You will have to do this in college.”). I’d argue that preparing students for the next level of academia, though helpful, is still a goal that matters more to us than it probably matters to them. Transferable skills—the ones we should focus on—are the ones necessary for success in life, that students will need to develop so they can go as far as they choose to go on the road to career and life success. Along with those skills are dispositions, habits of the mind and heart, that will accompany those skills. Teamwork, persistence, patience, empathy, tolerance, altruism, self-confidence, self-reflection, impulse control, and curiosity are among the dispositions we should help our students develop. Before we teach or assign anything, we should identify the transferable skills and dispositions involved; if these elements aren’t evident, we may want to reconsider what we are teaching and why.           

2.  Deliberate Teaching:  It’s not enough to provide tasks and activities for students that allow them to develop transferable skills and dispositions that will help them achieve far-away results. We have to be intentional and strategic about teaching students those skills. Asking students to reason through a problem won’t help the student who doesn’t know how to read the problem, take it apart, analyze its components, apply prior knowledge, choose the best tools for the job, work through a solution, and evaluate the solution’s effectiveness. Each of those transferable skills needs to be taught, probably not to every student but definitely to many. Skills don’t develop by accident, and they don’t improve without some metacognitive reflection. 

A few examples might help clarify these components. 

Note-taking is a skill students need to master to be successful in school that they also need in the real world. In life, however, no one tells people what kind of notes to take, when and how to format them, and what they should write down. The transferable skills inherent in note-taking include recording important information, organizing ideas, evaluating the relative importance of ideas or details, summarizing, and more. If I make those decisions for my students (by providing a format, telling them what to write down, allowing them to copy my notes, and showing them how they should organize them), I haven’t taught my students how to do anything on their own. If, however, I teach my students to use various formats of notes, allow them to consider the best format for this particular situation, ask them questions about how they plan to organize their notes, provide time for them to compare their notes with a partner, and ask them to  evaluate the effectiveness of their own note-taking efforts, I’m teaching skills they can transfer throughout their lives. 

An English teacher requiring students to self-select books and read during daily silent reading time in class has the opportunity to teach numerous transferable skills and dispositions: developing a “reading life,” monitoring comprehension, building reading stamina, finding value and enjoyment in reading, knowing what to do when comprehension breaks down, evaluating what they read, thinking critically, setting goals, monitoring progress and growth, and responding to a text and to other readers. Most of these skills aren’t going to happen on their own, though. Merely letting students read unbothered isn’t going to grow these skills in students; the teacher’s intentional instruction matters. With strategic use of mini-lessons and conferences with students, teachers can identify what skills each student needs to strengthen, offer just-in-time instruction to build that skill, and monitor growth and progress. 

Asking and answering that key question—What transferable skills and dispositions does this require of my students, and how am I deliberately teaching students to develop them? —is the best way I know to turn good teaching into transformative teaching. Educators who become strategic about building transferable skills and dispositions in their classrooms are the ones who make a difference in the long run. Their students succeed now and are ready to achieve far-away results throughout their lives.

11 Reasons to Love Sentence Frames and Stems

Sentence frames and stems are versatile, adaptable, and powerful. In case you are unfamiliar with the concept, here are some examples:

Sentence frames are _____ because they not only ______ but they also _______.

One reason I think sentence stems are useful is. . .

Although I usually use sentence frames for _______, I could also use them for ______.

You may not love these like I do. . . yet. I hope you will after you read this list of 11 reasons to love sentence frames and stems:

1.  Sentence stems can turn a question into a complete answer. You can ask a question, flip it into a statement, and give it to your students as a prompt to get them accustomed to providing complete responses to your questions. (Ex.  Why are sentence frames helpful?  Sentence frames are helpful because. . .).

2.  Sentence frames encourage students to write increasingly complicated sentences. By providing students with a framework for linking several ideas together like mature writers do, students can see their ideas come to life in sophisticated ways. With repeated practice, these patterns will become more natural.

3.  English language learners and native speakers with developing language skills can see how the words they know fit together in sentences. Learning a bunch of vocabulary words isn’t useful until you can use those words in grammatically correct sentences. If I were learning Spanish, a sentence frame such as “Me gustan _______ pero no me gusta ______” could help me like and dislike all kinds of things until I could form sentences of my own without support. .

4.  Teachers can build their students’ academic vocabulary by providing stems and frames that use words they want their students to use. A stem like “The thing I like best about the book is. . . “ can be beefed up with spicier vocabulary: “The most outstanding aspect of the novel is. .  .” or “A noteworthy characteristic of this novel is. . . .”

5.  Sentence frames are phenomenal discussion starters. Students who might be reluctant to speak in a group or in front of the class may have more courage to try if they have a frame or stem to guide their speaking, and they’ll be impressed at how smart they sound.

6.  Using stems and frames for speaking improves academic language usage, and when students become more adept at using words they see across content areas and discipline-specific vocabulary, they begin writing and speaking like scholars.

7. Students who are more comfortable using academic language (see #6 above) know and can use the words they see on standardized tests without having to take mind-numbing practice tests or doing tedious test-prep packets.

8. Writing, reading, and speaking are inextricably linked. As students practice writing and speaking using stems, they acquire building blocks of language that will help them be more skilled readers.

9.  Students will quit speaking and writing in fragments and simple sentences.

10.  They are a technique for differentiation. Sentence frames are like training wheels for writing and speaking. Students who need them can use them to practice, and once they can communicate effectively without them, they no longer have to use them.

11. Agreeing, disagreeing, asking a follow-up question, introducing a new idea, offering an alternative perspective, and building on another’s idea are all important aspects of college- and career communication that are challenging for students. Having a handy list of stems categorized by their function gives students the framework they need to incorporate these elements into class discussions. You may even find that students start linking ideas together more smoothly in their writing.

Whatever level of learners you work with, sentence frames and stems can be useful in jump-starting conversation, upping the quality of language usage, and helping people express their ideas. If you haven’t used them, give them a try. It doesn’t have to be a big production or ordeal; simply put the stem or frame you want students to learn on the screen or board for all to see. Consider giving students several options of stems to choose from.

Pretty soon, you’ll discover that sentence stems and frames have made your students _________  ____________, ___________  _________, and _______  _______!