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. 

Face-to-Face (or Side-by-Side) in a One-to-One World

Kids today (I say in my crotchety old man voice) are really good at staring at screens. I guess that’s not a totally new thing. I have photos of me and my brother sitting slack-jawed in front of the television watching Scooby Doo cartoons in our pajamas. My brother spent countless hours playing Atari games while I tuned into every game show our rabbit-ears antenna picked up (Big bucks, no whammies! ... I”ll take Paul Lynde to block.... Survey says…!). 

Screens today are ubiquitous, though. You can’t escape them. Now they fit in your pocket, so there’s no excuse to be away from your electronic device. Teens no longer phone one another; the hours spent tying up the family landline while switching back and forth between two friends on call waiting have been replaced with chats, snaps, tweets, and insta-whatevers with numerous friends and acquaintances around the globe. In many ways, young people are more social now than they ever were. 

But they don’t do a lot of speaking. 

In fact, when given the opportunity to have free time, I’ve found that groups of high schoolers will sit in a circle staring at their phones in silence rather than engage in live, in-person conversation. 

There’s a tiny part of my English teacher self that is pleased that teens are spending more time than ever composing written text for others to read. So much written communication has to have some positive impact on writing skills, right? There’s probably something to that theory, though the flipside is probably just as valid: students’ abilities to write a “correct” sentence are declining. (Incidentally, I recently learned that it’s now considered rude and offensive in the world of teenage electronic communication to punctuate the ends of sentences. A colleague’s fifteen-year-old son informed her that every time she put a period at the end of text it was like she was stabbing him, and another friend’s college-aged son asked her why she was angry when she sent a reply of “Yes.” This is completely off the topic, but I wanted my readers who communicate with their offspring to be aware of their unintentional electronic microaggressions.)  

More alarming to me than the decline in traditional conventions of written English is the dip in spoken interactions among screencentric people. As education moves to an increase in instructional technology in classrooms, teachers need to be mindful not to forget the importance of face-to-face verbal communication. 

Before you dismiss this as the angry rant of a technophobe, let me assure you that I’m no Luddite. Technology opens up so many possibilities to transform the factory model of traditional education by engaging students in authentic writing and inquiry in ways we never would have imagined several decades ago. Collaboration can occur within a classroom, across class periods, and even across the globe. Teachers who know AVID strategies can WICORize traditional lessons with thoughtful technology applications. As many campuses shift to one-to-one environments where every student has a laptop, Chromebook, or other device handy at all times, teachers can harness the power of technology to extend student learning to new frontiers. 

At the same time, teachers run the risk of creating classrooms where digital communication completely replaces speaking. On a technology-rich campus, students could conceivably spend their entire school day sitting in chairs and staring at screens, with all communication occurring electronically. 

I don’t think this is ideal. Students still need to talk to one another. Students still need to get up and out of their seats. Teachers need to plan deliberately to include both of those. 

I’ve often said that the ability to write well gives a person an edge in life. A well-written essay can get you into college. An effective cover letter can land you an interview for a competitive job. A compelling persuasive e-mail can get others to listen to what you have to say. 

It’s also true that the ability to speak clearly gives a person an advantage. Someone who can speak articulately and powerfully can ace an interview, move a crowd to action, convince coworkers to listen to a new idea, and get what they want. A person who is comfortable speaking to another, who makes eye contact, who employs effective body language, and who has a command of spoken language can succeed in higher education and in the workplace. As educators, we have the responsibility to provide our students with every opportunity to hone oral language skills as one of the “basics” along with reading and writing. 

If you’re working on a campus with abundant access to technology, please embrace those powerful tools for reaching students and helping them learn in 21st century ways. At the same time, intentionally build in opportunities for students to talk to one another—in pairs, in small groups, and in more formal larger groupings. Allow them to collaborate as they work on their devices, and not just by sharing a document and typing away in silence. Provide turn-and-talk breaks for students to share what they are learning, strategize about their next moves, offer constructive feedback, and question one another. Explore options for having students communicate orally using technology applications such as video chats and recordings (both video and audio). Don’t forget, though, that speaking at a camera isn’t the same thing as learning to express oneself in front of another human being who can respond in the moment. Developing comfort, poise, and fluency in oral communication will serve our students in so many ways. 

Medical experts have become especially vocal recently about the dangers of sitting. Combining speaking and movement—like asking students to walk and talk with a partner about something they are learning—keeps our classrooms from becoming silent deathtraps. An abundance of  technology in the classroom makes it easy for students to sit; teachers, too, can sit at their desks and monitor student work from their own screens. Be aware that though this may be a learning preference for some, others need to process orally, interact with others, and get their blood flowing through movement. 

Technology is wonderful. So are speaking and movement. Making room for all three turns the 21st century classroom into a brain-based happy place where students can thrive and develop the skills they need to succeed wherever the road of life takes them.