I Put on Clothes for This?

Here I go again, sounding like an old person. . .

Back in the days before the Internet, curious scholars who wanted to learn from a wise expert enrolled in classes to listen to lecturers pontificate about their areas of knowledge. I have fond memories of many of my college professors (and some of my high school teachers) regaling  (mostly) eager students with lectures while we furiously took notes to capture as many brilliant ideas as we could.

In today’s world, we can find lectures in many places. A simple Google search will yield numerous videos, podcasts, and presentations on nearly any topic featuring eminent scholars from around the globe. Students can now receive a better-than-average traditional education for free with only a smartphone and a pair of earbuds.

It would be vain for any of us to believe that our lecturing abilities surpass those of everyone who has ever made a TED Talk or YouTube video, so if we are relying on the one-way transmission of information during our classes as our sole mode of instruction, we are replicating (probably less effectively) an experience students can get elsewhere. Similarly, if we spend class time showing videos or movies, we are asking students to come to school to do something they could do just as effectively at home without having to change out of their jammies.

The advent of learning management systems, such as Google Classroom, and the trend toward 1-to-1 access to technology have made it all too easy for instructors to post an assignment and sit back while the students work quietly on it on their Chromebooks, laptops, or tablets. In many cases, these online assignments are the electronic equivalent of worksheets, with students filling in blanks and boxes as they answer teacher-created questions or complete online charts and tables. Many students come to school and spend most of their day sitting silently in front of screens, providing the information asked for, with little to no interaction with their instructor or peers. It’s really no different than if they had stayed at home taking an online course, except, of course, they had to put on clothes to come to school.   

If physical schools and colleges are going to remain viable in the present and future, they must provide an education that is different and better from what students can receive at home online. Real school has to be different from e-school.* There has to be substantial value in making the effort to get dressed and come to class beyond just hanging out with friends in the halls and cafeteria.

Additionally, if teachers want to remain in actual classrooms with students and to push back on politicians who try to increase class sizes, we have to show that our physical presence in proximity to our learners makes a difference. We can’t follow the example of “Ditto,” the character from the 1984 movie Teachers, whose students are so accustomed to filling in worksheets without any interaction that no one notices the teacher has dropped dead at his desk until  they run out of mimeographed worksheets to complete. We must put into practice the things that distinguish live instruction from e-learning.

One benefit to being a student in a classroom with an actual, living teacher is the opportunity to receive live, in-person, in-the-moment verbal feedback from the instructor. We know that the most effective feedback is the kind that occurs when learners actually need it, at the point when they can improve what they are working on. Telling students what they should have done after the fact doesn’t have the same impact as coaching students along the way. As students are reading, writing, or creating, teachers could hold quick check-in conferences with individuals or small groups to clear up confusion, redirect those who are heading off track, offer suggestions for growth, ask questions to promote self-reflection, or nudge students to the next level.

The teacher isn’t the only source of valuable feedback in a face-to-face classroom. Some of the most transformative feedback comes from peers. When we teach students to give and receive feedback from one another, everyone becomes more skilled and accomplished. Establishing structures and procedures for providing feedback in class on one another’s work is a worthwhile step toward making the most of the learning options available in traditional classroom settings.

Differentiation is another opportunity that is seized more easily in an in-person teaching situation. A savvy teacher figures out where each student is and offers next steps that are responsive to each student’s needs. If we are marching all our students in unison through a one-size-fits-all series of experiences, we are missing out on the opportunity to grow all our students to their fullest capacity. Teachers who make the biggest differences with students have a sequence of clear goals in mind and are able to put each student at the right point on the continuum to move them closer to the target. They also have an idea of how to challenge at a deeper level any student who has reached mastery.

Perhaps the most significant bonus of coming to school and learning in classrooms is the chance to have conversations in real time about what we are learning. The art of verbal discourse is limping along in our emoji-driven society. When the only communication students have with other humans is through Snapchat pics and abbreviated text messages, they don’t get better at speaking. Yet those who can effectively express themselves verbally get what they want in life. What better place is there to practice speaking than in a classroom where there are others with whom to converse and a teacher to offer feedback for improvement? Classroom conversations—whether in informal pair-share situations, structured discussions (such as Socratic Seminars or Philosophical Chairs debates), collaborative study groups, or small work groups—bring the learning to life. Students aren’t just sitting there slack-jawed in front of screens; they are engaged with one another, defending positions, trying out new ideas, clarifying their thinking, and questioning themselves and each other. This is where the learning happens. This is when the effort of coming to class becomes worth it.

As we plan for instruction, it’s not a bad idea to look critically at how we are teaching. If every day of class involves something students could do just as effectively at home in isolation, it’s time to change it up. We need to rethink the role of the teacher and the role of the student in schools. When we see the teacher as a valuable source of feedback, individualized coaching, and inspiration and the students as active participants in a community of learners, school will once again become something worth putting on clothes for.

* I mean no disparagement to those who are doing important work developing online courses and electronic learning experiences for students. There’s a growing demand for e-school classes, and I’m impressed by the efforts to make online learning increasingly interactive, open-ended, and responsive to student needs. I wonder whether the demand for e-school classes is partly due to the fact that so many traditional schools are still teaching like it’s 1985.  

Learning to Notice (or Noticing to Learn)

“Oblivious” is a word I’ve heard many a parent use to describe their teenager. Sometimes it feels like kids stumble through life completely unaware of what’s going on around them. If you’ve ever followed a freshman through the halls of a high school and have been whacked in the face by a backpack as he whips around to talk to a friend or have been stuck behind a clog of congregating teenagers in the middle of a hallway thoroughfare, you know what I mean. Teens will overlook a pile of trash they left on a lunch table as they wander off, distracted by the next shiny object that catches their eye.  

We live in a world where we are bombarded with stimuli. Noises, images, smells, and sensations assault our senses from the moment we awake until we try to turn everything off so we can get some sleep. The barrage of sensory information is so overwhelming that we struggle to discern what’s essential and what’s extraneous. We speed through our days without pausing to examine our surroundings, rush through tasks just to have the satisfaction of checking something off our growing to-do lists, and multitask 24/7.

The result of all of this is that we have forgotten the importance of noticing—of pausing for a while to pay focused attention to something, of looking and listening intently, of sifting through the clutter to turn our gaze to one thing and to give the details time to sink in. The endangered art of noticing is something that can and should be taught and practiced in every classroom. Teaching students how to increase their awareness and their stamina for observing will sharpen skills that will help them in all facets of their lives.

My brother, a musician, listens to music in a different way than I do. Kevin hears how the instruments work together in a composition to create the listener’s experience: the nuances of the bass line, the harmonies, the chord progressions, the choice of key, the meter, and elements I don’t even know enough about to include on this list. These are things I, too, could learn to hear and appreciate in music if (1) someone guided me at first to teach me how to listen like a musician and (2) I shut up, quit humming along, and paid focused attention. With guidance, I could learn to listen like a musician.

The act of noticing takes different forms in every subject area. Visual artists don’t look at a painting of a tree and only see a tree. They notice positive and negative space, shading, tone, line, color, texture, and more. Athletes and dancers possess an awareness of their own bodies that goes far beyond “Ouch, that hurts” and “Boy, am I out of shape,” and this allows them to make adjustments, respond to cues given by their bodies, and repeat motions and postures that increase their success or effectiveness. A sociologist, a historian, a psychologist, an economist, and a political scientist would all notice different things if they watched the same political debate. Mathematicians and scientists both hone keen skills of observation to solve problems and collect data, yet the things they notice differ. Neither one succeeds if they rush into solving or drawing conclusions without spending some time taking in all the details.

Proficient readers in every subject area notice the clues and cues authors leave for them to guide them through the text, assist them in comprehension and reflection, deepen their thinking about the topic, and signal what is to come. Once students know what to look for and practice awareness as they read, looking for these common signposts becomes second nature, but until then it takes practice and guidance. Kylene Beers and Bob Probst share their expertise to help teachers orchestrate noticing-while-reading in Notice and Note, Reading Nonfiction, and Disrupting Thinking, three outstanding texts I recommend to any teacher.    

As educators, we have to teach our students what noticing looks like in our subject areas and coach them so they can learn and practice. To do that, we must have a clear vision of what noticing means to us; we have to practice that noticing ourselves. Then, we have to develop open-ended prompts or questions that elicit responses from our students. Allow them time to look, listen, feel, smell, and/or taste (depending on what they’re noticing, of course). Let them jot down their observations; thinking on paper helps students collect their thoughts. Then, let them share, preferably in pairs or small groups so that everyone gets the chance to practice before they share with the entire room. Resist the temptation to conclude with the “correct” answer of what they should have noticed. If we must share something, we should consider limiting our response to one or two observations and frame our comments with a sentence stem such as, “Something I noticed this time was. . . ,” which reinforces the idea that with more time and repeated observations, people notice new things.

We could even make this into something resembling a game. Challenge students to notice things they think others won’t, and play “Did You Notice?” Students can take turns in pairs, triads, or table groups asking each other “Did you notice. . .?” in an attempt to point out something others didn’t catch. Students can add others’ ideas to their own notes to compile a more comprehensive list of details and observations.

Describing something in detail—adding adjectives—is a strategy Dr. Ed Burger suggests in his new book Making Up Your Own Mind: Thinking Effectively Through Creative Puzzle-Solving. Burger advocates approaching any problem (real-world or academic) by observing carefully and listing as many descriptors as possible. As students brainstorm words to describe the problem or situation, they may accidentally stumble on a clue that could unlock a solution or open an unexpected avenue of thinking about the topic.

Noticing can be a key element in learning to do things in a more professional way. Anyone can become a writing teacher by getting students to notice how real-world writers write. Teach students how to use texts as writing mentors: Notice what the writer did and try it yourself. Want to write better poetry? Find some poets you admire, notice what they do, and attempt it. Need to write a resume? Gather a few from the internet, notice their features, draft a list of desired traits or elements, and write your own. Unsure of how to write a science report? Read several published exemplars. Notice how the writer structures the report, what is included and not included, the type of language used, and how the report is formatted. Let the good examples show you how it’s done.

This same strategy would work in so many other fields from decorating a cake to sketching a portrait to throwing a javelin to making a website. Notice how the pros do it. Break down their technique into steps or strategies, and start practicing them.

Metacognition, or awareness of what is going on in your head when you do or think about something, is another way of noticing that has immense value to students. Prompting students to notice what they did to successfully (or unsuccessfully) navigate the learning, solve a problem, create a product, or complete a task reinforces and clarifies best practices and sheds light on what to avoid next time. Better self-reflection leads to ongoing growth and improvement. It’s a habit that benefits us in every aspect of our lives, from job performance to interpersonal relationships.

There is so much power in noticing. It’s up to us, as people who care about the future lives of the students we teach, to help them recognize the value of taking the time and making the effort to pay attention. If we can help them hone their skills at observing and convince them to carve out space for noticing, there’s no telling what they might be able to do.

How MASTER Teachers Close Class

What happens during the last five minutes of your class? Do students pack up early and form a line at the door like they’re waiting to board a Southwest Airlines flight? Does the bell ring mid-activity as you shout out some final reminders and students sprint toward the door?

If you’re not using the last few minutes of class to its fullest potential, you’re missing out on some opportunities for powerful learning. MASTER teachers can use this handy acronym to plan intentionally to end class powerfully. 

Metacognition

Wrapping up class with a metacognitive reflection—whole-class or individual—can help students reflect on what they learned and how they learned it.  When students explain their thinking, they reinforce strategies for success. For instance, after a lesson during which students struggled together to solve a tricky problem or to work their way through a piece of challenging text, you could call a quick class meeting to debrief the day’s lesson by having the class brainstorm the strategies they used to overcome the difficulty. The resulting list of how to approach a complex problem or decipher a dense piece of writing can become an anchor chart on display for future reference. Students can look over to the anchor chart for some tips when they next encounter challenges.   

Assess

It only takes a few minutes at the end of class to collect a bit of formative data that can help drive future instruction and interactions with your students Ask students to answer a question or two on an exit ticket and hand it to you on the way out the door. Give them a quick quiz using your favorite digital tool to see what they know. See if students can explain a key idea from the lesson or—better yet—answer the day’s Essential Question in a few sentences. Collecting tiny bits of info from each student allows you to see which students have mastery and who needs more help. You can also design a formative assessment that gives students immediate feedback on their own learning; that way, you won’t be the only one who knows whether some reteaching or further practice is called for.    

Summarize

Recapping the major ideas from the lesson reinforces the main points, providing the kind of repetition that makes learning stick. Research shows that summarizing is one of the most powerful strategies in helping student learn. A 25-word GIST statement about the day’s lesson, a two- or three-sentence summary on a notecard, or an oral summary on a digital tool such as Flipgrid makes students separate the important ideas from the minutia. Pro tip: Though it’s much easier and quicker to summarize learning for your students, having them summarize themselves yields a bigger payoff. I’m a big fan of a paired summary: turn and explain the main ideas of today’s lesson to your neighbor. Then call on some neighbors to recap what they heard for the entire class.  

Teaser

I know I’m late to the game, but I’m currently listening to the Serial podcast. Each episode ends with an exciting hint about what new aspects of the mystery will be uncovered in the next installment. Fortunately, I don’t have to wait a week like the original listeners did because after I hear the teaser, my appetite is eager for what comes next. Savvy teachers know the power of the provocative preview. Tempting students with a bit of trivia, a cliffhanging question, or the promise of something exciting in tomorrow’s lesson will tap into their natural curiosity and have them thinking about your subject after they leave the room. Who knows? Some may even do a little reading ahead or research on their own to find out more before they return to class.    

Emphasize

Talk show host Jerry Springer always took a moment at the end of the insanity of each show to address the audience with a final thought, a piece of wisdom that gave a “so what” to whatever madness his viewers had endured for the preceding hour. Emphasizing a takeaway was Springer’s way of sending his viewers off with something they could use in their lives. The same strategy can be an effective part of your class closure routine. With so much intense learning happening in your room, some students may have a hard time discerning the difference between the nice-to-know and the need-to-know. The final moments of class give you the opportunity to draw attention to big takeaways from the lesson, to clarify points of confusion, and to send your students forth into the world with a significant idea to remember.  

Reflect

How do we improve if we never stop to think about how to improve? Self-reflection is one of the most important and most overlooked aspects of education. Most students, after leaving your classroom, won’t give your subject a second thought until they see you next time. They certainly aren’t going to look up from their game of Fortnite and think, “You know, I didn’t revise my essay very well thoroughly today in English class, so tomorrow I will probably want to devote some time to look at sentence variety in my paper.” The last few minutes of class is the perfect time to switch gears and shift into reflective mode. I love the Plus/Delta Reflection: students reflect on what they know or did well from the learning experience (that’s the plus) and then on how they need to grow or change going forward (the Delta). You could also ask students to set a short-term goal for next class, write down what they did well and one thing they want to work on, answer specific questions about how they learned or performed, give themselves a numerical rating, write a note to the teacher about what’s going well and where they need help, or complete a sentence stem that asks them to reflect on their progress. Revisiting the reflection the next day is a perfect way to begin a new day of learning. 

Stop wasting the waning moments of class. Wring every drop of learning out of your lessons by incorporating effective lesson closure. A little prior planning (and remembering to set a reminder alarm) is all it takes to add an extra step that makes the learning sizzle rather than fizzle.

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. 

Rethinking Planning: Asking the Right Questions

I used to think that planning for instruction meant sitting the team down with a blank calendar and a three-ring binder full of lessons from past years and fitting the old activities onto the new calendar, perhaps replacing some activities we’d grown tired of with new ones. After that, we’d delegate duties (who will write the test? photocopy the handouts? count the supplies? reserve computer labs?) and set a meeting date to plan for the next unit. Perhaps we’d have casual conversations from time to time about an upcoming lesson--sometimes one that was coming up next period!--but overall we didn’t have much curricular team talk after the planning meeting.   

We certainly never discussed why we were teaching what we were teaching and how our students would show understanding of unit objectives. In fact, our learning objectives seldom ventured out of the lowest levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, and there wasn’t an overarching “so what?” to our units.  In English, we taught novels which were ends in themselves (with accompanying character lists, study guides, author background lectures, teacher-provided term lists, and Scantron tests).  The “objective” was to study Of Mice and Men, not to use the novel to teach some concept or skill that had any real-world relevance beyond the walls of the ninth grade English classroom. In the adult world, no one really cares if you can recall the names of the characters in the novel unless you’re on a competitive trivia team.  

I’m not trying to trivialize what we were doing. We had the best of intentions, and our students certainly left our classrooms with more knowledge than they had when they entered. But the world of education has changed since the days when I first started teaching (when Beanie Babies were a new fad, the Spin Doctors were a big thing, and America had not yet become infatuated with Ross, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Joey, and Phoebe). What I believe about instruction today is that students need to learn how to think, how to connect their learning to the world, and how to perform the kinds of skills that will allow them to adapt to a world that is changing rapidly. The content I teach and the texts my students read are merely vehicles to help students uncover what curriculum gurus Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe call “Enduring Understandings.” My lessons, then, should not be a series of isolated activities but a carefully constructed sequence of experiences leading to a final student product that provides evidence of student understanding.         

With that end in mind, I’ve come up with a list of questions that I would use to plan lessons individually or with a team. The questions work equally well whether I’m a teacher following a district curriculum or crafting one of my own.

Why am I teaching this lesson? What are the goals of this lesson?  

This question presupposes there’s already a unit plan in place that is focused on Essential Questions and Enduring Understandings that are relevant, meaningful, and have a degree of complexity. The unit itself will have Learning Targets that are measured by some kind of CAP (Culminating Assessment Product) that requires students to transfer their learning to a new, preferably real-world context.  Once all of that is in place, it’s important for the teacher to examine each specific lesson to see how it contributes to the overarching goals of the unit. If the teacher doesn’t know the overall purpose of the lesson, the lessons will have less meaning and direction for the students and might feel like (or actually be) a series of isolated activities with no end in mind.

How am I going to make the purpose clear to the students?

No matter how well the teacher knows what’s going on, the lesson lacks relevance if the students are left in the dark about how it fits into the bigger scheme of things. Don’t be afraid to let your students know the why behind the lesson. What skills and knowledge are they gathering, and why will this knowledge be useful down the road?

What are the kids going to be doing?

The teacher has probably mastered the content and skills already. The most important thing is to let the students wrestle with the skills and concepts in a safe environment. The kids should be doing most of the thinking and most of the work. This, however, doesn’t happen by accident. The well-prepared teacher preplans questions, collaborative learning opportunities, and deliberate student-focused experiences to assist students in uncovering the Enduring Understandings of the unit. If the teacher has to tell the students what the EUs are and what they should be thinking about them, that pretty much defeats the purpose. If the answer to the question, “What are the kids going to be doing?” is, “Listening and copying down what I say or what is on the PowerPoint,” I’d wager that the teacher is going to be disappointed at the students’ performance of the CAP at the end of the unit.   

How am I going to pull this off smoothly?

Like planning a party, a well-prepared teacher has thought through every aspect of the class period before the bell rings. How will I manage materials effectively? How will I move from one activity to the next? What problems can I foresee, and can I prevent them? What will students do when/if they finish before others? What will I do for students who will need further challenge or enrichment? How can I provide additional scaffolding for struggling students? What types of  movement and state changes can I incorporate to keep my students alert and engaged? Where can I add some AVID WICOR strategies? What examples and models do I need to provide to help students understand expectations? Where are places in the lesson cycle where I need to pause for some reflection or discussion on how the learning is going and how it can improve? Questions like these embody the real art of instruction, and they are well worth the time teachers invest in examining them during planning.

How will I know whether students get it?

The CAP should not be the first moment when you know whether a student knows what’s going on. And students shouldn’t be surprised to discover at the end of the unit that they didn’t understand what they were supposed to have learned. Informal assessments along the way can help you and the students know what they understand and what they need help with. These can be as simple as a thumbs up/thumbs down signal, an exit card, or a quickwrite. Effective formative assessment is a high-impact strategy that can help the teacher know where the instruction needs to go next. Also, make sure your assessments are congruent with your unit goals. There’s no need to give a picky plot-recall test on A Tale of Two Cities if you’re using the novel with the end goal of examining archetypes. It confuses the students because it muddies (or ignores completely) the stated learning targets.

As you’re planning and preparing for lessons with your team or individually, try out these questions and see what difference they make. Our district has instructional coaches in many content areas. Don’t hesitate to call on us for assistance with planning.  It’s part of our job, and we enjoy helping you and your students see results.

If you want to read more about unit planning, I recommend getting your hands on a copy of The Understanding by Design Guide to Creating High-Quality Units by Wiggins and McTighe. It’ll help you understand the “why” behind the district’s curriculum design process. There are copies floating around your campus.  

I wish you the best as you maximize your planning to foster the most productive student learning possible.