Teacher Tricks

When I was a classroom teacher, I knew a lot of great teacher tricks. 

I would show up to English class as the guest speaker, Evinrude the Poetry Dude. Dressed in a black turtleneck and beret and sporting beatnik sunglasses, I spoke entirely in rhyming couplets while I introduced our study of poetry to my freshmen. 

Another of my tricks involved spending hours transforming my room into Dante’s Inferno, with creepy lighting, diabolical music, and nine circles of hell. I was Virgil, the tour guide, who would explain the layout, share some background info about the author and the time period, and introduce my students to some of the medieval celebrities inhabiting this unpleasant version of the afterlife. 

Another of my teacher-trick disguises was the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift. I’d slip out of my humanities class while students were answering some boring questions and return in a powdered wig, spectacles, and 18th century clothing to read my latest work, “A Modest Proposal,” which—to my students’ horror—seemed to advocate the selling of small children to be used as food as a solution to the problem of overpopulation. 

Speaking of reading, that was definitely one of my better tricks. For years, I performed Great Expectations five times a day, trying to embody every character as I read nearly all of that dickens of a novel to aloud my English students who “couldn’t read it themselves.”  I also received rave reviews for my in-class performances as Iago in Othello, the title role in Tartuffe, and nearly every character in Romeo and Juliet. 

Over the years I stuffed fortune cookies and balloons with writing prompts, staged a full-out Renaissance festival, hosted the Academy Awards of Literature, recreated a medieval monastery, and led sing-along renditions of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” in Latin. I created videos, PowerPoints, webpages, lectures, mnemonic songs, review sheets, and elaborate bulletin board displays.

My teacher tricks were numerous, and I received ample praise and recognition for performing them. 

I’m proud of some of my teacher tricks, but, in hindsight, I’m not proud of others. You see, I was working hard— entertaining, creating, emoting, performing, decorating, crafting, producing— while many times my students weren’t doing much at all. Many of my teacher tricks were about me, not about my students’ learning. I confused engagement with learning, and I failed to build capacity in my students to do the thinking, reading, performing, and creating themselves. 

It’s weird and a little awkward now when I run into former students who praise me for one of my teacher tricks but don’t mention anything about what they remember doing or learning in my class. I don’t dislike that they have fond memories of the time spent in my classroom; however, I do hope they can look back and say that they are better at learning, thinking, reading, writing, and communicating because of something they did, not something I did for them.           

I don’t want to put a damper on teacher enthusiasm and creativity. Not all teacher tricks are undesirable. A teacher who goes the extra mile to engage students and who puts forth effort to cultivate a memorable classroom experience sets the stage for some high-powered learning. Looking back, I missed some opportunities to shift more of the work to my students. At times I could have redirected my energy to facilitate more student thinking instead of focusing on how I could deliver my thinking to them. 

I wish teachers would receive less recognition for what they do and more for what their students are doing. Teacher tricks are great as long as they teach students to devise some tricks of their own. 

Stifling the "Gotcha" Monster

Wile E. Coyote and I have a lot in common.

I’m not sure what it says about me that I used to hope that the Roadrunner would finally be caught by his lovable arch-rival. As a child, I sat glued to the set each Saturday morning yearning for the moment when my Warner Brothers anti-hero would finally find the perfect Acme device to give that smug little bird what he deserved. 

When I grew up and became a teacher, I took a little bit of Wile E. Coyote with me. 

Maybe I have a heightened sense of justice. I want hard work to be rewarded. I’m devastated when I hear the news that people took shortcuts that paid off and that hardworking people didn’t win. When watching Law and Order: SVU, I’m outraged when Olivia Benson and her crime-fighting partner du jour don’t catch the perp or when the clearly-guilty bad guy is found innocent due to some glitch in the legal system. 

In the classroom, this crusade for justice manifests itself in the “gotcha.” Like the coyote, I have toiled relentlessly to reward only the students who completed their homework, who read the assigned passage, who studied for the test, and who showed up to my class prepared. I’ve even set tricky traps for them: diabolically difficult quiz questions, endless hoops to jump through, and crafty assessments. Justice, after all, must be served, right?

Here’s just one of many examples from my own life. Back in a previous decade, we made all the freshmen in English read my favorite novel, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Some of you reading this, no doubt, shudder at the thought of that experience, which is challenging even to the most stalwart readers. The vocabulary is tough, the sentences unwieldy, and the plot labyrinthine, involving an enormous cast of characters. I knew that students were flocking to the Cliff’s Notes in droves, and I was convinced that many students weren’t really reading the book, updating their character list, recording unfamiliar vocabulary words (with definitions, the sentence Dickens wrote, and a sentence of their own) in their notebooks, and writing summaries of the book’s 59 chapters. To keep my students accountable, I crafted daily reading-check quizzes. 

By the time we got to Chapter 29, my coyote-esque behaviors had spiraled out of control. On the reading quiz for that chapter, I included a question asking the name of the servant Pip hires to work for him in London. The character, Pepper, is only mentioned by name once, and he is referred to maybe three times in total in the novel. He was not, however, mentioned in the Cliff’s Notes, so that made him a perfect candidate for a “gotcha” question on the quiz. 

The result: Most of my students got the question wrong, vindication for my theory that they weren’t reading the book carefully. I had separated the readers from the not-readers!

The other results were more damaging than a simple ten points off on a daily grade. Conscientious students flipped into panic mode and began reading and rereading, focusing on minute details instead of seeing the big picture and enjoying the plot. Students who were struggling to read but were giving it their best effort gave up hope because their work was not being rewarded. And some otherwise-honest students resorted to full-fledged cheating to get the answers from classmates because they saw no other path to success. Cutting corners became a necessary survival strategy for many.


I had unwittingly delivered the message that the most important goal in reading a novel was to memorize every tiny facet. I had reduced the reading experience to a trivia game. And many students became disheartened, discouraged, and resentful. 

Through the years, the “gotcha” monster showed up in many contexts. In reader’s workshop in my English class, I lost sight of the goal--to foster a lifelong love of reading in my students--because I was too worried about catching the hooligans who were trying to trick me into thinking they were reading their self-selected books each day. I wasn’t going to be that clueless teacher who let them gloat about pulling one over on me. Consequently, what should have been a joyful exploration of literacy became a drudgery for them and a source of stress for me. Buried beneath mounds of reading logs, journal entries, and vocabulary lists, my students and I turned reading into a torture.


Instead of being Wile E. Coyote, perhaps I should have tried to be like Tom Sawyer with his famous whitewashed fence, kicking back and enjoying myself while convincing my students to do the tough work I wanted them to do. Surely I should’ve taken some consolation that many of my students finally found the fun in reading rather than punishing them by setting up roadblocks and traps.


I wish I could tell you that I banished the “gotcha” monster completely. If I told you that, I’m sure my students would resoundingly disagree. I think a challenge is important, and I want my class to be rigorous. But I keep coming back to this idea: Rigor doesn’t mean more work.  

Middle school and high school are not college. Students are learning how to learn. They are challenging themselves and being challenged. They are growing as learners and thinkers as their brains continue to develop. While I should reward their efforts and applaud their progress, I’ve realized that I need to question whether my assignments and assessments intentionally or inadvertently stand in the way of their growth and discourage them from going further.


I’m particularly mindful of this in the world of honors and AP classes. Though these classes are designed to make students college-ready and, in the case of AP, actually to expose them to college-level work, I have to remember that I’m still teaching teenagers. Each trap I set may deter a student from attempting the challenge of my class.


That’s the thing I love about AVID. As we open our classroom doors to introduce more students to rigorous coursework and encourage them to challenge themselves, we retain the mindset that it’s important to scaffold the learning. We provide the necessary support and encouragement to help them succeed, and as they develop the skills, we gradually remove the scaffolding. The AVID strategies provide multiple pathways for students to experience their learning through writing, inquiry, collaboration, organization, and reading. Using these strategies and developing a growth mindset along with my students turns me into a cheerleader for their learning rather than a nemesis.


Instead of expending energy on catching every student misstep like some diabolical game of educational Whac-a-Mole, I’ve tried to focus on providing the best experience for the majority of the students. Making my classroom a safe and fun place to learn has become a top priority. I constantly have to check myself to make sure my inner coyote hasn’t taken over.


Having 28 students reading, writing, thinking, and enjoying themselves while doing it seems much more important than catching the two who aren’t. And maybe the experience will become so contagious that the less engaged students will pick up a brush and start whitewashing the fence along with the rest of us.

The WICOR of Reading: Reading and Writing

Writing is an essential component of WICOR and a good way to reinforce the skills we're trying to teach our students who encounter struggles with reading.

This week, I turn my attention to the relationship between reading and writing and showcase a few ready-to-use strategies that can help you achieve success with challenging texts in your classroom. 

1.  Cornell Notes:  Cornell Notes are a cornerstone of the AVID classroom, not because there's anything magical about the two-column notes themselves but because they help students understand the kind of thinking required for learning. When you ask your students to take notes in the right column of Cornell Notes, you want them to record the main ideas and supporting points in the text. This aids with meaning-making; students have to sort through the text to sift the main points out of all those words and succinctly summarize them in note form. The most helpful teachers will provide students with an Essential Question to guide their reading or even a reading prompt. After the note taking occurs, ask students to enter the note making phase of the Cornell Note-taking process in which they revisit their notes, highlighting, underlining, or circling main points and key terms, crossing out information that turned out to be irrelevant or unnecessary, and chunking the notes into sections. Then, ask them to write some questions in the left margin, preferably higher-level thinking questions using Costa's Levels of Thinking or your taxonomy of choice. Students can spend some time discussing those questions in pairs or small groups or using the questions to guide a full-class discussion or Socratic Seminar. Finally, conclude the process by asking students to synthesize their thinking at the bottom of the page in a summary that answers the Essential Question. This multi-step process requires students to revisit the text at different cognitive levels and helps the learning stick. By jumping through these hoops, students have made friends with the text and can use their new-found learning for whatever the next part of your curriculum requires. 

2.  Metacognitive Reflection:  In my last post, I addressed the idea of explicitly teaching students the things that good readers do. One way to make these processes become routine practices for your students is to ask them to reflect on the thinking that went into their reading of a text. How did they approach the process? Where did they encounter difficulties?  What did they do when they realized that understanding was breaking down? Asking students to reflect in writing about the process of the reading itself is challenging for them but can lead to fruitful discussion--full-class or one-on-one--on the "how" of reading. By making students aware of their thinking, you can cause real change in their reading behaviors, and perhaps the next reading assignment will seem less daunting.  

3.  Quickwrites:  I'm a big fan of using ungraded quickwrites at every stage of the reading process. Sometimes, I find it's useful to have students write about what they already know or want to know about a topic before they read. Or pose a question that piques their interest on the topic and whets their anticipation to know more. I've also used quickwrites during reading, asking students to stop in the middle of an article, chapter, or fictional text to write about what they already know, what questions they have, and what they anticipate they will discover as they continue reading. After reading, quickwrites are a handy tool to help students clarify their thinking about a topic before discussing it with others. As the name implies, these writings should only take a few minutes, and grammar, spelling, and all those other English teacher concerns aren't important. The purpose of the quickwrite is to generate thinking and get students' ideas down on paper. I've also found that routine quickwriting helps students get used to writing on demand; consequently, the ideas flow much more easily later on when they're asked to share their thoughts in writing on a standardized test or other on-demand essay later on.

4.  Annotation: Teaching students how to annotate a text--whether informational or literary--requires the students to write. Frequently, students think that marking a text only requires underlining, highlighting, or circling words and phrases. The teacher who wants to make big strides helps the students understand that the real power of annotation lies in the comments, questions, and thoughts you jot in the margins as you read. Teach your students how to annotate thoughtfully, and you will see their comprehension skills soar.

5.  Gist Summaries:  Summarizing is a notoriously difficult skill for learners. Ask any fifth grader to tell you about a movie she just watched, and you'll likely hear a scene-by-scene rehashing rather than the succinct summary you hoped for. One method I've found helpful is the Gist Summary. After reading, ask students--individually or in pairs--to sum up the main idea of the text in 25 words or fewer. Sometimes, it's helpful to brainstorm key words as a class prior to writing the summary to give struggling students a word bank of important points to add to the summary. 

6.  Learning Logs:  Learning logs combine summary and reflection. After reading, ask students to explain what they've learned, how they learned it, and why it's important. It's a more formalized version of the quickwrite or metacognitive reflection mentioned above. I've seen two-column learning logs with "what I learned" and "what I thought about it" on the two sides. I've also seen logs that look like journal entries. The format is up to you. The thinking is what's important. 

7.  Exit Cards:  Formative assessments like exit cards allow you to monitor effectively whether your students are "getting" the reading you're asking them to do. If students are spending class reading, ask them to write a three-sentence summary or a gist statement as a ticket out of class when the bell rings. You can stand at the door and collect them. It'll only take a moment to flip through the exit cards to determine whether students understand the reading or whether more discussion and debriefing is needed tomorrow. 

8.  KWL:  One more prior-to-reading strategy for informational texts is to create a three-column chart called a KWL.  In the left column, students write what they already Know about the topic. The middle column is where they write what they Want to know about the topic. And the right column is where they will write what they Learned about the subject from the reading. I recently saw a variation on this: a two-column chart with "Know" on the left and "Questions I have about the topic" on the right. Both types of charts help students activate prior knowledge, develop anticipation for the reading, and prepare them to dive into the text with a learning mindset.   

From the list above, just a smattering of many possibilities, you can see that writing can be one of your best allies in helping your students process challenging text.

Next time, I'll examine how inquiry (the I in WICOR) can be equally helpful.