Your Summer Reading Assignment

If you’re like me, you can’t wait for summer to begin so that you can turn off the alarm clock, take a break from workday worries, and relax with a good book. Of course, if you’re like me, then you’re a reader. Reading is a vital part of your life. It’s who you are. You’ve got a long list of books you’ve been planning to read for a while. You have a book recommendation at the ready whenever a friend, acquaintance, or total stranger is in need of something to read. 

Maybe you’re not one of those people who has a pile of books on the nightstand and gets a little nervous when you don’t know what you’re going to read next. Don’t stop reading this. What I have to say is for you, too.  

I’ve been going to the same dentist since I was four. Marilyn cleaned my teeth for 40 years until she retired a few years ago. (Fun fact: I was her patient on her first day of work at that office.) One of the best things about my twice-yearly visit to Marilyn was that she always asked me what I’d been reading, jotted down my book recommendations, and reported back to me six months later to let me know which ones she liked the best. The receptionist and office manager were also readers who also enjoyed my little book talks. We had a wonderful ongoing dialogue about what we had enjoyed reading. It actually made me look forward to going to the dentist.

Working with teens has shown me that the two most powerful ways to get reluctant readers to read are to recommend the perfect book to them and to have a peer recommend a book to them. Even students I have never met before perk up their attention when I ask them what sort of stories they like (usually, I ask what their favorite movies and tv shows are) and then give them a quick book talk about a book or two I know they will enjoy.

My friend Christine tells about her brother, who struggled in school and never willingly read anything until a teacher handed him a Stephen King book and said he might like it. He not only read that book but clamored for anything else King had written.   

There is power in a personalized book recommendation. I think there’s even more power in a book recommendation from someone who is not your English teacher. English teachers are supposed to like reading. But my orchestra director, math teacher, coach, and principal?  If they like it, maybe it’s worth looking at. . .

My summer reading challenge to you is to read some books you can talk with your students about. I have six suggestions for your summer reading:

1.  Read a book recommended to you by one of your students. Or poll the class as a whole to see what you ought to read.

2.  Read a young adult or middle grade book in a genre that you don’t normally read. If you gravitate toward realistic fiction, explore a popular new release in sci-fi or fantasy. If you’re a romance reader, read a sports book. If you like escapism, read something that is grittily realistic.  

3.  Read a book written for adults that you could recommend to a teenager. Some reluctant young readers who don’t gravitate to books targeted to teens find unexpected delight in a book written for a more mature audience.  

4.  Read a graphic novel. Most adults don’t even know these are a thing, yet teenagers flock to the graphic novel shelves in libraries. Search online for the best graphic novels or ask a librarian or bookseller for a recommendation. If you’re one of those teachers who has been telling kids they can’t read these because they aren’t “real books,” it’s time to enter the 21st century.   

5.  Read a young adult novel about a character or by an author whose life experience or background is not the same as yours but that might be similar to some of your students’. One of the best ways to connect with others is to experience life from their perspective. And a great way to connect with a student who may see you as someone who can’t possibly understand them is to talk with them about a book you enjoyed that might relate to their experiences. (Be careful, though, not to assume too much about a student’s experiences. The Hate U Give doesn’t tell the story of every African-American teenager; not every transgender student can relate to Lily and Dunkin; Amy Tan and Marie Lu don’t speak for every Asian-American; and many white, suburban high schoolers’ lives are not like those of the characters in John Green novels.)    

6.  Read an award-winning YA or middle-grade book. Some popular award lists include the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Maverick Awards (graphic novels), the Lone Star Awards (middle-grade), TAYSHAS List (young adult), Printz Awards (YA), and the William C. Morris Award (YA by a debut author).  

Enjoy your summer reading. I hope it gives you the opportunity to initiate a few conversations next year with your students. If you’ve never read YA before (or haven’t read it in decades), I think you may be pleasantly surprised by what you find.

By the way, I’m always looking for recommendations, so if you read something you like, tell me about it. I will add it to the pile.  

Make Coaching Part of Your Professional Development Plan

During these final days of school, many of you are having end-of-year conferences with your evaluating administrator and are receiving accolades and areas of growth based on their observations, your progress toward goals, and your professional learning for the year. Evaluations like these are no one’s favorite thing, neither for the evaluated or the evaluator, but the best meetings of this type conclude with both parties having an idea of what strengths have been reinforced and of what the next step is in the educator’s growth as a professional. If we are educators with growth mindsets, we don’t see appraisals as reflections of our worth as human beings but instead as opportunities to continue to hone our craft in what is an extremely challenging profession—one that no one ever really masters because there’s always room for improvement.

The hardest thing about any feedback—and something we need to be mindful of as we provide comments on our students’ learning—is that we tend to fixate on the negative. Thirty accolades can be undone by one “recommendation for growth.” That’s human nature. Do your best to conquer the monster of your negative inner voice and instead try to be objective. Force yourself to see that less-than-stellar mark as a guide to help you direct your improvement efforts next year. Turn those marks of “developing” and “improvement needed” into invitations to become “accomplished or distinguished.”

An instructional coach can be a valuable ally in your improvement. We don’t work for your principal; we work for you. And, unlike most every other kind of professional development, we bring the learning into your classroom and personalize it to your individual needs.

Here’s how:

1.  You identify an area of growth and contact a coach to help you. Or you contact a coach first, meet to talk about your situation and ideas, and let the coach help you determine an area of growth.

2.  Set a measurable goal along with the coach, determine what you need to learn to help you achieve that goal, and learn all you can with the guidance of the coach. Instructional coaches have experience with research-supported best practices and can provide you with resources to facilitate your learning. Because we know you’re busy, we can distill some of the learning and come to your campus to share it with you at a time that fits into your schedule.

3.  At some point, you could choose for the coach to observe your class to collect data. Even better, the coach could video your lesson so you can watch yourself and/or your students to get a clear idea of what is going on. Collecting data before and after the learning is a fantastic opportunity for you to document your progress toward your goal.

4. Part of the learning could involve observing someone else teach, watching the coach model part of a lesson, co-teaching with the coach, or rehearsing a lesson with the coach.

5.  Implement your new learning and collect data to see how it worked.

6.  High-fives all around if you met your goal. You can now continue working on another aspect of the same goal, begin a new goal cycle, or decide you’re going to just revel in your success. If you didn’t meet your goal, that’s okay, too. Your coach can help you implement Plan B (or C or D or E) until you see results.

That’s instructional coaching in its purest form, but it doesn’t always look like that. Sometimes, coaches help teams or individuals plan lessons, work on ways to implement differentiation strategies, set up classroom management routines, and turn other professional learning into action.

You’re free to share with your administrator that you’re working with a coach, or you can choose to keep it quiet. The coaching relationship is a partnership. What happens in a coaching relationship stays in that coaching relationship. Your boss will only know what you choose to share.

Instructional coaches can help with any of the four domains on T-TESS:  planning, instruction, learning environment, and professional practices.

Here are a few areas from the T-TESS where a coach would be happy to assist you:

• Unpacking lessons from the curriculum and tailoring them to the needs of your students and your teaching style
• Communicating daily learning goals clearly to your students
• Integrating technology in a meaningful way to enhance student mastery of goals
• Using formative assessments to get a clear picture of student learning and to communicate that to students and parents
• Collecting data to measure student progress and adjusting instruction in response
• Framing lessons to engage and connect with students
• Providing opportunities for students to individualize their learning
• Promote authentic questioning and student inquiry
• Increase student ownership in their learning
• Plan for collaboration that maximizes student participation and accountability
• Promote high-level student achievement through goal setting, metacognition, and self-monitoring.
• Increasing your own content expertise in your subject area
• Sequencing instruction appropriately
• Using effective questioning techniques so that all students can access learning at an appropriately sophisticated level
• Adapting lessons to meet the needs of all students by using appropriate differentiation strategies
• Gathering input from students to evaluate the effectiveness of instruction and adjust if needed
• Creating a safe, efficient, welcoming classroom environment that promotes student leadership and high-level learning
• Establishing, communicating, and maintaining clear expectations for student behavior
• Developing rapport with and among students
• Reflecting on your practice to implement changes that result in improvement in student performance

Consider including a coach in your professional development plans for next year, and be prepared for powerful, personalized professional learning that can transform your classroom to increase student success.

With the end of school only days away, next year is probably the last thing on your mind, but in case you are interested, feel free to reach out to a coach now, especially if you’d like to meet during that back-to-school week in August. We can help you start the semester so that the year goes smoothly as you implement your powerful student-centered learning goal. We look forward to partnering with you.  

Left to Their Own Devices

First there was the transistor radio. Then, the boombox. The Walkman followed, along with its next generation offspring, the Discman. iPods and tiny MP3 players, as well as smartphones, are more recent gadgets that allow music—piped into the ears via headphones or earbuds, wired or bluetooth—to be the 24/7 accompaniment to each of our lives The sound of silence has been replaced by the sound of whatever your streaming music subscription is playing at the moment.     

In so many classrooms today, students are “working” with one or more earbuds in their ears. Their smartphones are supplying the soundtrack to their school day as they read, write, take notes, watch their teachers teach, and collaborate with peers. Teachers who support leaving students to their own devices for background music say that their students are quieter and better behaved when they listen to music while reading and/or writing. They subscribe to the misquoted adage from playwright William Congreve: “Music soothes the savage beast.” (The actual quotation, I discovered, is, “Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast.” Who knew?) Other teachers ignore the earbuds, perhaps believing that the student is unplugged or the music is paused, though I almost always eventually see that student reach into a hoodie pocket to skip a song that shuffled onto their playlist or make a new music selection.

When left to their own devices, teenagers will choose music over silence, and most will justify that preference by saying that it helps them concentrate and that they are more productive when music is playing. Research, however, shows that in most cases, student-selected music interferes with cognitive tasks in academic subject areas. Here are a few nuggets of information teachers can use to shape their in-class listening policies and respond to teenagers who disagree with them:

• The consensus among education researchers is that music has a negative effect on tasks relying on linguistic comprehension, writing, and memory.
• The exceptions to this are creative production (like working on an artwork), productivity (like mindless assembly line work), and perhaps exercises that involve spatial manipulation (you know, useful things like folding up a piece of paper, punching some holes in it, and predicting what it will look like when it is unfolded). The so-called Mozart Effect that had parents rushing to purchase classical music CDs to make their babies smarter is a little more limited than originally reported, and there’s nothing magical about Mozart.
• Music with lyrics is bad for learning. One study (discussed in this article) showed that university students who listened to music with lyrics while reviewing for a test scored more than 60% worse than their peers who studied in silence. Students listening to music with no lyrics did better than those who studied with lyrics, but the no-music students performed the best.   
• Silence increases reading comprehension, too.
• Introverts are more adversely affected by background music while reading and studying. While music had a negative effect on reading comprehension and memory for introverts, their classmates who were extraverts did not see a notable decline in memory, only in comprehension, said a 1997 report by Furnham and Bradley.    
• “Fast and loud” music disrupts reading comprehension the most, according to a 2011 study by Thompson, Schellenberg, and Letnic.
• Musicians’ brains seem to be wired differently. Listening to music has a more severely negative effect on language comprehension for trained musicians than for non-musicians. Language and music appear to be processed by the same neural networks in the brain. Visualspatial test results were the same for musicians and non-musicians. This article explains further.   
• A 2010 study by Anderson and Fuller showed that not only does reading comprehension performance decline significantly when junior high students are listening to music, but it declines more significantly for those who say they prefer listening to music while they read. In other words, the kids who protest the most when you tell them to take out their earbuds are the ones who benefit the most from your asking them to do so.   
• Writing is affected negatively by music, too, even if the writer is not paying attention to it. According to a 2001 study by Ransdell and Gilroy, college students who had music playing while they were writing expository essays using a word processing program had more difficulty with word fluency. They generated fewer words per minute and had to delete more prior to their final drafts.   
• Music can improve one’s mood, so maybe there’s some usefulness when you’re dealing with surly teenagers.  
• There's abundant research about the myth of multitasking and how we can't simultaneously focus on texting, tending to social media, and doing cognitive tasks, but today I'm sticking to the topic of background music. 

I remember a department head of mine who would have team meetings with classical music quietly playing in the background. I left every meeting with Vivaldi stuck in my head no clue about the content of the meeting.

Apparently, I’m not alone in having these challenges.

If we aim to make our classrooms places where students engage in rich reading experiences, produce thoughtful writing, think deeply, and talk about their learning, the research is overwhelmingly in support of banning the earbuds and turning off the background music. Most young people who are literally left to the own devices aren’t going to make decisions that are best for their learning. Stretching students to become uncomfortable with silence and to be alone with their thoughts might be doing them a favor in the long run.  

The only trick is going to be convincing them of that. . . .

Teaching: An Appreciation

Starbucks gift cards and two-for-one Chipotle burrito bowls are nifty, but they don’t do enough to give teachers the thanks and appreciation they deserve not only during Teacher Appreciation Week but all during the year. The outside world that views teaching as a profession that enjoys three-months of lazy summer vacation and 8-to-4 workdays hasn’t spent much time with teachers to see the reality. I’m preaching to the choir here, but teaching is hard, and teachers are superheroes. 

Indulge me, if you will, in a little appreciation of America’s most important profession and allow me to thank you for what you frequently thanklessly do. 

Thank you for opening your classroom doors and welcoming every student who walks in, even the ones who don’t wear deodorant, the ones who don’t want to be there and make that very clear by their every action, the ones who don’t get a lot of love elsewhere and seek attention in inappropriate ways, the ones who need help with things other kids their age don’t, the ones who can’t stay in their seats, the ones who challenge everything you say, the one who think it’s cool to complain, the ones who know which buttons to push to get a rise out of your, the ones who come with pages of daily paperwork requirements, and the ones whose parents demand a large chunk of your time and attention. 

Thank you for spending time planning and preparing for engaging instruction because—unlike many other professions—teaching isn’t one where you can show up without extensive prior preparation for the day. Thanks for conferring with colleagues and coaches, studying standards, and consulting curriculum to craft carefully-constructed educational experiences that not only take students where they need to go but get them pumped up about getting there. Thank you for knowing that teaching isn’t one-size-fits-all and for tailoring lessons to meet the variety of needs in your classroom. 

Thank you for teaching more than just content. Thanks for teaching young people how to get along with one another, to self-regulate, to set goals, to advocate for themselves, to organize their time and materials, to make smart choices, to “act right,” to question things, to treat others with respect, to solve problems, to stand up to injustice, to take responsibility for their own actions, to participate actively and appropriately in the wider community, and to pay attention to the world around them. Thanks for tying shoelaces on the playground, tying neckties on game day, and forging ties among students in your classroom.  

I appreciate your commitment to learning, personally and professionally. Teachers realize that we have never completely figured it out and that we must continue to grow as professionals, so we read books to improve our craft, attend trainings throughout the year and often during our summer “vacation,” engage in educational chats on Twitter, and form professional learning communities with colleagues. Most of that is without pay. A thank you isn’t really payment, but it’s what I can give you. 

The best teachers plant seeds that sprout during the year but don’t reach their full growth until much later. Thank you for having the vision to plant your garden and for the time and attention needed to water each seed, to provide the much-needed light, to support seedlings, to shape and redirect growth, and to continue to feed each one until it blooms. Thanks for the patience you show when it looks like a seed won’t sprout and for continuing to tend the garden until it does. 

Thank you for remembering what it’s like to be young. Teenagers are wonderful works in progress. Thank you for your patience, your grace, your humor, your coaxing, your flexibility—did I mention your patience?—your enthusiasm, your amnesty, and your kindness. 

Thank you for putting up with an ever-growing load of policies, procedures, paperwork,  requirements, hoops to jump through, forms to complete, expectations, hurdles, and initiatives that take you away from the work you want and need to be doing with your students. Thanks for realizing that these are put in place by well-meaning people who also want the best for kids but may have forgotten what is most important. Or maybe they didn’t realize that they aren’t the only one adding to your pile of things to do. At any rate, thank you for putting kids first and not letting the paperwork drive you out of the profession.   

Thank you for being the grown-up in the room. You may be the only one your students encounter routinely. 

Thank you for believing that a student’s experience out of the classroom is as important as what they do in the classroom. Thanks for the time you spend sponsoring clubs, attending games and performances, and taking part in students’ extracurricular lives. This often means extending your workday and adding to your to-do list, but students take notice. And it does make a difference. 

Thank you for every instruction you have patiently repeated, every parent phone call you have made, every positive note you’ve sent home, every second chance you’ve given, every third chance you’ve given, every word of encouragement you’ve provided for a student (or colleague) who has lost hope, every misbehavior you’ve redirected without losing it, every broken pencil and paper scrap you’ve picked up off the floor, every left-behind notebook you’ve placed on the whiteboard tray for later retrieval, every student handwriting sample you’ve matched to determine which of the two nameless papers belonged to which kid, every minute you’ve spent on hold with the help desk to reset a forgotten student login, every lengthy “guess what I did over the weekend” story you’ve listened to, and every constructive comment you’ve written on a paper when every part of you wanted to write something snarky and sarcastic.    

Thanks for coming early, staying late, working weekends, responding to e-mails at weird hours, and giving up your tiny lunch break to get everything done. Maybe you’re one of the super-efficient ones who can get it all done during the school day. Even if you’re not one of those, know that you are appreciated for your time and effort. 

Thank you for being a nurse, life coach, maid, babysitter, researcher, therapist, nutritionist, actor, director, mediator, politician, librarian, accountant, statistician, police officer, visionary, manager, salesperson, writer, publicist, diplomat, security guard, judge, event planner, curator, flight attendant, comedian, cat wrangler, long-distance athlete, computer technician, troubleshooter, consultant, parenting expert, juggler, advice columnist, surrogate parent, reporter, attorney, and motivational speaker. . .because that’s what teachers are.  

Have a stellar Teacher Appreciation Week.   

Three Things You Should Probably Know

Three Things You Probably Should Know at this Point in the Year About Every Student You Teach

or

Fun While Test Proctoring

Research tells us that teacher-student relationships are the key to teaching, especially for reaching those students who are guarded, distant, and prickly. At this point in the year, when you can count the weeks remaining on one hand, it’s useful to think about how well you know the students you are teaching. I’ve devised a little game that could be a fun* way to pass the time while you are actively monitoring during upcoming high-stakes testing.      

Here’s how to play:  

Use a copy of your seating charts or roll sheets to access the names of all your students. Go down the list, student-by-student, and ask yourself these three questions:

1. What is this student proud of?
2. How does this student struggle in my class, or what would be the most beneficial way this student could grow in my subject?
3. What is something outside of my class that is important to this young person?

The way to win is to be able to answer each of these questions for every student in your classes.

This is a game I would have had a hard time winning when I was a classroom teacher. I could have answered all of these questions without hesitation for some of my students, but for most, I would have had one or more blanks. There were students I didn’t get to know—the quiet ones who didn’t call attention to themselves and therefore didn’t receive much, the defensive ones who walked in on day one with a permanent chip on their shoulders, the compliant ones who came to school to “cooperate and graduate” but who didn’t earn extra attention from me because they were doing fine. In retrospect, I probably didn’t make all the breakthroughs possible for those students whom I didn’t get to know as people and as learners.

Most middle school teachers and high school elective teachers seem to have figured this whole relationship thing out. In high school content-area classes, however, I think high scores on the Relationship Game are more scarce.

There are a number of factors to explain this. As students get older, they become more guarded and private about whom they will allow access to their trusted circle. Also, high school classes are more difficult and more content-heavy, so teachers at that level may tend to favor the curriculum over the humans who are there to learn it. Let’s face it: some high school English teachers gravitate to teaching English because they love Gatsby, Holden, and Romeo. Nearly every seventh grade English teacher I know teaches seventh grade English because they love seventh graders. The same is probably true for math, science, and social studies.

I’m not trying to say that high school teachers don’t love the students they teach; I am admitting, though, that our attention to content and our unwavering focus on preparing our students for college and “the real world” sometimes takes priority over getting to really know our students as human beings.  

The purpose of my little game isn’t to make you feel like a failure if you don’t have answers for all the questions. Instead, it’s a reality check.

At this point in the year, you likely know most of your students as well as you are going to know them this year. If you aren’t happy with your score, what will you do next year to change that?   

___________________________

* If you know me well at all, you know that the word “fun” was written with a great deal of sarcasm accompanying it because I’d be foolish to try to describe anything done during active monitoring as at all enjoyable.