Cause for Celebration

We’ve reached the point where you can count the days remaining in the school year on the average person’s fingers. Exhaustion, fatigue, and perhaps delirium have set in. You and the students are racing one another out the door each day. Congratulations on making it through another year.

Before you roll down the windows and blast “School’s Out for Summer” on your stereo, take a moment to think back to August, when you first encountered this year’s crop of students. Think about what they were like back then. You looked at them and thought to yourself, “These kids will never be able to [insert name of thing you were supposed to teach them to do].” Now think about them today, about all the skills, abilities, knowledge, and competencies they have now that they didn’t possess at the beginning of the school year. You’ve got a lot to celebrate.

Don’t keep your celebration to yourself, though. Make sure your students know how far they’ve come. As students creep through the school year day-by-day, they may not realize all they’ve learned during that time. It’s like dieting (so I’m told); if you weigh yourself every day, you may not notice much change, but when someone sees you after being away for a while and comments on how much weight you’ve lost, it feels really good.

In the same way, students need us to point out to them how much they’ve grown during the time they’ve spent in our classes. Or at least they need us to prompt some reflection on their own progress. Maybe you’ve kept a beginning-of-the-year writing sample that they can compare to their current work. Perhaps you can show them a “hard” test from the first of school that they now find ridiculously simple. Making a list of all the new learning from throughout the year can bring about a satisfying sense of accomplishment.

Celebrating successes, big and small, ought to be happening all year long; it’s a key to motivation. At the end of the year, though, celebrating growth can plant a seed that will lead to continued growth and curiosity in your subject area. Leave students feeling successful, and they will hunger for future success.

What If Every Student Wrote in Every Class Every Day?

Sometimes I like to dream big dreams. I revel in “What if?” scenarios. What if everyone on the planet got along? What if teachers got paid according to how difficult their job actually is? What if I had a dollar for every time a kid asked to borrow a pencil and then didn’t return it?

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what might happen in schools if every student wrote every day in every class. I know. It’s a crazy idea. But, as I said, I like to dream big dreams. If teachers in all subject areas—math, science, social studies, English, fine arts, LOTE, physical education, career and technical education—made it their mission to insert just a little bit of writing into their daily lesson plans, the results would be astonishing.

If every student wrote every day in every class, here’s what might happen:

Students would become more confident writers. Writing— like most things that are worth doing well—takes practice, and the more you do it, the better you get. Students don’t have to write formal papers (which, let’s face it, should be special-occasion experiences) in order to improve as writers. Quickwrites, short answers, explanatory paragraphs, summaries, and letters to the teacher (or other students) are all ways of practicing writing within academic disciplines. The simple act of stringing words together to make sentences and adding additional sentences until something emerges that makes sense builds confidence and self-efficacy.

Teachers would have a better idea of what students know and don’t know. Asking students to explain something in writing gives a glimpse into their understanding in a way that is more complete and nuanced than a multiple choice question or thumbs-up/thumbs-down or fist-to-five physical response. Writing is an easy-to-implement formative assessment tool at any point in the lesson cycle. Having students write what they already know about a topic prior to instruction can give teachers an idea of where to begin teaching the entire class or which students will need differentiation, either enrichment or remediation. Pausing mid-lesson to allow students to explain how they reached a solution or solved a problem can provide insight into their thought processes and help the teacher diagnose gaps in understanding. An exit ticket summarizing the day’s essential question on a notecard provides instantaneous feedback about whether students “got it” so teachers will know whether to move on or revisit the concept tomorrow.

Blank pages and blank stares would become things of the past. Like a car that’s been sitting undriven for a few months, many student writers have trouble getting started when they are asked to write. Once students start writing every day in every class, their batteries remain fully charged, and the ideas emerge much more readily. This is especially true when frequent writing activities are low-stakes, ones in which getting ideas down on paper doesn’t come with the “gotcha” of a grade attached. Writing in a fearful state is paralyzing. Writing (sans pressure) to explore what you think about a topic is freeing. Not every idea that comes out of your pen (or shows up on your screen) is going to be brilliant, but putting ideas into the world every day increases the odds that you’ll produce something worth saying.

Classroom conversations would be better. Writing before talking helps us generate ideas and clarify our thinking. How often, before a difficult conversation, do we write out and rehearse what we have to say to increase the chances of it coming out as intended? Similarly, allowing students to write a response to a question before a classroom discussion has several advantages. First, it provides every student a chance to wrestle with the thinking instead of sitting back and waiting for the loudmouth in the room to answer the question orally, freeing them from any obligation to think for themselves. Second, it gives students a chance to try out their ideas, to have some “think time,” and to organize their response before being asked to share it aloud. Whether or not the student is called on to respond, the student has done some thinking, and that’s what’s most important in an educational setting.

The quality of student writing would improve, which means, among other things, that writing test scores would increase. The more you write, the better you write. If you write every day, throughout the day, you’re bound to get better. Instead of complaining that “these kids can’t write” and focusing on inadequacies, teachers should consider providing numerous opportunities for writing and offering encouragement to reinforce what’s good. Praise-hungry students will latch onto the traits that receive positive feedback, and, eventually, their writing will get better. When the quality and quantity of student writing improves and anxiety about writing withers, the writing they’re asked to produce on-demand for standardized tests will seem less daunting. It’s just another thing we’re asked to write, right? No big deal. What will be a big deal is the amount of time educators can spend focusing on exploring meaningful content rather than tedious test preparation.  

The school will develop a culture of literacy. Where the written word is valued, learning thrives. When students see that all teachers—not just the English teachers—care about writing, they’ll care more, too. Soon, you’ll hear discussions about what writing looks like in various content areas, how writing in science looks different than writing in social studies or English. Disciplinary literacy will shape students to become more thoughtful, purposeful writers and more curious readers. Students will write for real-world audiences and will be eager to let their powerful voices be heard. Building a culture of literacy sets all students up for real-world success in whatever the future holds for them because those who can read perceptively and write with precision have the power to influence others, to get what they want, and to achieve whatever they dream.   

Teachers would spend more time grading. Wait! That’s not true. The kind of writing I’m talking about is mostly ungraded and doesn’t require out-of-class teacher feedback. When students write daily in school, they’re mostly engaging in writing to learn (also known as learning through writing), which is about acquiring the knowledge and skills, not being assessed as right or wrong. It’s more about doing the writing (and the associated thinking) rather than receiving a reward for correctness or compliance. And there’s a likelihood that students will write down some incorrect or misguided ideas on their pathways to mastery, which shouldn’t be penalized because making mistakes is a healthy part of learning. Students should be writing more than we could possibly read anyway. Shifting the audience away from the teacher gives students a more potent motivation for writing well and communicating clearly. When, and if, teachers grade and comment on writing, many other readers should have seen and provided constructive feedback on that piece previously. Content-area teachers who fear being unqualified to assess student writing should free themselves from some of that pressure. It’s not your job to be a copy editor and fix every grammatical error. Focus on what makes sense. Question what doesn’t. When you focus on meaning, any time you spend reading and responding to student writing will be more pleasurable; it will be a conversation between you and your students about what they think about their learning. And that is fascinating.

I realize that asking teachers to add a bit of writing to their lessons is encouraging risk-taking and stepping outside of comfort zones. I acknowledge that my dream isn’t likely to come true on most campuses. I know, however, that students don’t write enough in school, and I’ve seen how learning-through-writing strategies can transform classrooms into active, vibrant, student-centered communities of scholars. You probably don’t have the power to control what goes on in others’ classrooms, but you have control over what goes on in yours. Any bit of writing you add is more than your students would have done without you.  Help me make my big dream come true.

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. 

Restroom Equity

Many of the schools I visit have a restroom equity problem. I’m not talking about that issue at public venues like conference centers, performance halls, and sporting arenas where there are clearly not enough women’s toilets and their line snakes out the door while the men zip in and out of their restroom. The equity gap I most frequently observe is race-related.

I’m just going to say it. In many schools, a disproportionate number of students wandering around the halls with bathroom passes during class are not white or Asian, and more of them are male than female. I have no idea whether they ever actually go to the restroom or not. What I mostly see in the halls are black and Latino male students strolling with no sense of urgency individually, in pairs, or in larger groups during the times while (I assume) instruction is taking place in their classes.  

Here’s why I think this is an equity issue worth exploring. Equity issues in schools crop up whenever an outcome exists that that doesn’t mirror the demographics of the campus. Whether it’s enrollment in AP and honors classes, participation in extracurriculars, placement in disciplinary programs, or failure rates, if there’s a discrepancy between observable reality and campus demographics, that issue merits a closer look. If, for instance, 60% of students on a campus are white, then 60% of the students in the hallways during class should be white if we have true hall pass equity. If 90% of failures in a course appear on the report cards of male students, while males comprise 51% of the population enrolled in the class, there’s a gender-related equity problem. The roaming-in-the-hallways population I observe on many campuses doesn’t match those campuses’ demographics.    

It’s easy for us to make excuses, place blame, and point fingers to explain what’s happening, but as far as I can tell from a quick internet search (one that has no doubt sullied my Google search history and will lead to all kinds of weird shopping recommendations the next time I open Facebook or Amazon), bladder size doesn’t vary significantly according to race. It’s tempting to ask what it is about those kids that makes them not stay in class, but the conclusions that develop from conversations like that always sound racist to me. Blaming the students is easy, but it’s not productive because we can’t force students to change. We have to look at our own role in this.     

The better question to ask is this: “What is it that these students’ teachers are doing or not doing that is causing some students to want to leave class while others are staying put?”

As I see it, students ask to leave class for five (legal) reasons:

1.  They are bored.

2.  They hope to rendezvous with their friends.  

3.  They are restless and need to move around.

4.  They don’t feel like the time spent in class is valuable.

5.  They actually have to use the restroom.

Let’s explore these and the role we play as teachers in each:

1. Boredom.  When class gets boring, minds wander, which leads to kids wanting to wander, too. Keeping kids interested may be the key to keeping more kids in the room.  We can’t avoid the reality that some concepts we have to teach are more intrinsically exciting than others, but we can control the method of delivery, the pacing, and the way we “sell” the lesson. Framing the lesson in an engaging manner that links the content to students’ experiences, interests, life goals, and opinions helps ensure buy-in. Our own excitement about the learning matters, too, as apathy is contagious. Find something in every class period to be genuinely excited about and communicate that enthusiasm sincerely. Vary the mode of delivery and the activities, and keep the pace moving from bell to bell. Avoid lags and downtime by being extra prepared and by teaching with a sense of casual urgency. Spice up a routine with something unexpected. Students won’t want to be gone from your room for fear of missing out.

2. Social Opportunities.  News flash: Not every student comes to school for the learning. For many students—and particularly those in poverty, according to Eric Jensen in the fantastic book Poor Students, Rich Teaching—the opportunity to spend time with friends is the driving force behind school attendance. If social needs aren’t being met in class, students will seek peer interaction elsewhere (ie. in the hallways). Classrooms that rely on sit-and-get models of instruction, that demand student silence, and that fail to build community lack the social motivator for students to remain in class. I wonder if many of our classes, especially in schools where minority groups are truly in the minority, are segregated by race and class, with some students feeling like insiders and others feeling like they don’t belong. If white teachers (most of whom enjoyed school growing up) teach primarily to students who are like them in background and attitudes and don’t make special efforts to build relationships with the students who are most unlike them, the class divides into the “in” group and the “out” group. Classes where students know, appreciate, and interact with one another are ones that fulfill every student’s social and emotional needs. These are the classes where students feel they belong, and when a community exists, students don’t try to escape into the hall to find their pals.

3. The Need to Wiggle.  Classrooms where students stay put in their seats all period cater only to the compliant students with extreme attention spans. Many students, particularly adolescent boys, grow restless when they sit too long. If the teacher doesn’t build in opportunities to squirm and get some energy out, the logical recourse for restless students is to feign a bladder emergency so they can walk for a few minutes. Teachers who understand kids’ desire to wiggle incorporate movement into lessons, giving them chances to stand, walk, change their position, respond with physical movements, and do things besides quietly sitting and listening.

4. Lack of Value. Some things we do in school seem like a waste of time to students. When I was in fourth grade, my teacher (a sweet woman who, bless her heart, was not a dynamic oral reader) made us listen to her read aloud Jack London’s long and boring novel White Fang every day after recess for weeks. Nothing about this experience seemed pleasant or worthwhile at the time; I could have read the book on my own if I had cared anything about a dog in Alaska, which I didn’t. My solution was to figure out how to give myself the hiccups so that I could be excused to get a drink of water in hopes that the hiccuping would cease—and I was one of those kids who actually liked school. When class isn’t worthwhile, students can think of many places they’d rather be. These days, watching a full-length video (when every kid nowadays has immediate access to millions of videos in his or her pocket) seems like an excuse for the teacher not feeling like teaching that day. Being given way-too-much time to complete a not-that-challenging task takes away any sense of urgency to spend the class time working. Time to work independently and silently without in-the-moment feedback from someone else seems wasteful. It’s hard to work in isolation in school—the place where your friends are—rather than saving it for home (or not doing it at all). Having to do many repetitions of a skill they’ve already mastered is tedious and pointless. Using grades as a motivator only works with students who are particularly concerned about grades, so we have to think of other ways to make the learning matter to the other students. Make every minute count so that students won’t want to roam.  

5. Legitimate Need. Sometimes you actually need to pee.        

When we identify issues of equity, we have two choices. One is to accept the situation the way it is, which means that we are okay with inequality, with differences determined by race and class, and with some students receiving better opportunities and experiences than others. The other choice is to figure out what is wrong with our system and fix it. The education system in the United States was created at a time when denying opportunities to some sectors of society was not something the people in power seemed concerned about. Many aspects of that system have remained in place for over a century. Isn’t it time we started identifying places where equity gaps exist and figuring out what we need to do differently to fix them?

Stepping Up Your Note-Teaching Game

Taking notes is hard. It’s a skill that takes a lifetime to master. Unfortunately for students all over the world, note-taking is frequently expected but seldom taught.

Educators can play a key role in helping students become proficient, independent note-takers and studiers with some careful planning and instruction in the art of note-taking. We can’t just ask our students to take notes; we have to teach them how.

Here are a few simple strategies tips any teacher can employ to improve at teaching and using note-taking in the classroom.

Have (and communicate) a purpose for note-taking. Taking notes is a worthwhile pursuit if the notes are going to be useful somewhere down the road. If you’re planning to give a review worksheet later that prepares kids for exactly what’s on the test, why should the students take notes at all? The same is true if you plan to give them a copy of the “real” notes later or (worse) if you are only making them take notes to keep them occupied so they don’t throw things and run amok. Before asking students to take notes, consider how those notes will be used and communicate that purpose. Better yet, provide students with an essential question that focuses their note-taking. By encapsulating in one question what you want them to take away from the lecture, reading, video, or whatever, you’re giving students some direction and encouraging them to become discerning learners who can sift through masses of details to figure out what’s important.

Teach your students a variety of note-taking forms and styles. Everyone learns a little differently, and good notes don’t necessarily look the same. The days of rigidly forcing every student to take Cornell Notes have come and gone. And copying teacher-written notes off a PowerPoint is so 1990s it might as well be flannel and grunge. Our students are learners, not medieval monks in the scriptorium. While students are developing note-taking proficiency, it’s not a bad idea to ask them to try out suggested formats or styles. Perhaps a particular type of two- or three-column notes is particularly suited one-day’s note-taking task while tomorrow’s note-taking purpose might lend itself to a mind map or sketchnotes. Filling the students’ toolboxes with a variety of ways to take notes gives them options to meet the purpose and their personal preferences.

Build into your lessons ways for students to interact with their notes. Brain research shows that in order for learning to stick, we have to engage with the content in a variety of ways over time. Assuming students will interact with their notes on their own is like believing that a full box of donuts left in the teacher’s lounge will still be there an hour later. Knowing that, wise teachers incorporate interaction opportunities into their lesson plans. They stop after 10 minutes of lecturing and ask their students to compare their notes side-by-side with a classmate, adding to and clarifying the information. They ask students to write questions about their notes for homework and begin class with an activity in which the questions are shared and discussed. They have students underline main ideas, circle key terms, and chunk their notes prior to a discussion or class activity where the notes are the key to success. On the day before the test, they ask students to mine their notes for key ideas and predict the test questions they will see on the test. As students become accustomed to interacting with their notes in class, they eventually realize the value of processing their thinking and returning to the content multiple times. Ideally, they will soon start practicing note-interaction on their own.

Model your own note-taking. Remember that old tv show where the guy paints a picture in 30 minutes right in front of your very eyes while you attempt to replicate it at home? Aspiring artists can learn techniques and develop skills by observing other artists working and explaining what they are doing. In the same way, teachers can model note-taking for their students while thinking aloud about what they are writing down and how they are doing it. Making the deliberate decisions underlying your note-taking visible to the students builds their capacity to make those decisions themselves. Students may not realize how much is going on inside the head of a proficient note-taker. If students are taking notes on a video or text, take your own notes. When you stop to process, display your notes and allow students to compare theirs with yours. Or project your notes onto a screen as you take them, explaining the thinking behind the note-taking.

Reflect on the notes. We don’t get better at doing something unless we think about what we did and how to improve. If we want our students to improve as note-takers, we have to give them time to reflect on their note-taking: What’s working? What’s not working? How do I plan to improve? My high school humanities freshmen had a notoriously difficult time taking notes on their reading in the college-level AP World History textbook used in the course. Part of my job as the teacher became helping these students—many of whom had never experienced difficulty doing school-related tasks—learn to take effective notes that aided their comprehension and helped them study the content for the class. I developed a note-taking self-quiz with 20 questions students could use to compare their own note-taking and study techniques with those of skilled note-takers. The quiz became a jumping-off point for discussions with the students about refining their practices and setting personal goals for improvement.

Consider what good notes look like in your discipline. The notes I take while reading a novel in English don’t look the same as the ones I take in the same class when I gather information during research. Useful math notes aren’t exactly like useful history notes. We often talk about the idea of standardizing practices across a campus, and that can be a good idea at times. What I think is more useful, however, is for educators to be overt in discussions of disciplinary literacy—to acknowledge that different disciplines have different expectations for reading, writing, and learning. As you are teaching students to read and write like mathematicians, historians, and scientists, also instruct them on how to become effective note-takers in each of those disciplines. Rather than trying to homogenize and streamline everything to make it easier for the students, coach them to become aware of the different learning demands across your campus. Becoming better at discerning what matters in each discipline will make your students more thoughtful readers, more confident and adaptable writers, and more successful independent learners.    

Use your available resources. For those of you who have an AVID account, the new book AVID Writing for Disciplinary Literacy has an entire chapter devoted to implementing Focused Note-Taking with your students, whether you teach at the elementary, secondary, or higher-ed level. It’s a free download on the curriculum page for a limited time. Get your free copy today if you haven’t already.

The time we spend teaching note-taking isn’t a waste. Note-taking is an essential skill for success in college and in the world beyond, and proficiency won’t happen overnight. The investment we make now in equipping our students with lifelong learning skills will pay off down the road as students are able to reach new destinations and steer themselves successfully around the curves and bumps life and learning will put in their way.

While You Were Paying Attention to the Strugglers. . .

When we dive deeply into our student data, we learn so much about the kids we teach. It’s fascinating to put together the clues of a student’s assessment history. We notice trends in performance, uncover weaknesses, and make plans to rescue those who are struggling the most. We develop remediation plans. We target specific standards to emphasize and reteach. We identify the objectives most missed by our students and redesign entire lessons to make sure our kids learn what they don’t know. We become that guy from the sappy little parable, walking along the shoreline and frantically flinging starfish from the beach back into the water, determined to save as many as we can.

Meanwhile, the gifted kids in our classrooms often go unacknowledged, ignored, and unchallenged.

Helping struggling students grow is one of the most important things teachers do, but every student deserves to make at least one year’s progress during one year of school. While we are scrambling help our neediest, what are we doing to meet the needs of the kids who already get it?

Education has no finish line where kids get to stop and rest, satisfied that they know all there is to know and have learned everything. When we cap off instruction, putting a ceiling over our students, growth is stifled. Bright students become disengaged, bored, and apathetic. Some of them turn their attention to mischief-making and become your worst classroom management problems because gifted kids who want to cause trouble are often very skilled at doing so.

Gifted education guru Carol Ann Tomlinson says that differentiation, ultimately, is an act of empathy. Educators put themselves in the position of each student in the classroom and figure out what everyone needs. Then, they try their hardest to take care of each one, not because they are told to do so but because they know it's the right thing to do. 

It’s not easy to meet the needs of every student in a mixed-ability classroom, and secondary educators tend to be much less accommodating to diverse learners than our friends in elementary. Traditionally, secondary classrooms are a one-size-fits-all model, where every student receives the same instruction and does identical assignments. One popular solution to this—though not one I think very highly of—is to always have some extension work for students who finish early. This solves the problem of keeping every kids occupied, but the extra work seems more like a punishment than a blessing to the high school gifted student who soon figures out the way to keep from having to do more is to work more slowly. When the extension work is a meaningless diversion unconnected to the curriculum (puzzle pages, logic problems, crosswords, etc.), the purpose is clearly babysitting rather than growing learners. Elementary teachers understand that good teaching sometimes looks like a three-ring circus, with the teacher checking in on everyone and providing appropriate attention at just the right time to keep everyone progressing.

One of the ways I prefer to think about providing appropriate experiences for gifted learners is to consider depth and complexity:  How can this content, skill, or subject be viewed more deeply and in more complex ways?

Depth and complexity can appear in many guises, some of which can be uncovered by asking yourself questions like these:

• What does this look like when the experts do it?
• What’s the next step or the next level in producing a more advanced product or thinking about the topic?
• What do people who study this professionally argue or discuss?
• What moral or ethical issues are associated with this topic?
• What is ambiguous about this subject?
• What words do experts use to talk about this topic? 
• Are there exceptions to the rule, plausible non-examples, or variations you didn’t teach to the entire class but that are worth exploring?
• Who are some of the important thinkers, doers, or innovators in this field?
• What are some articles, books, or primary sources that would provide interesting additional understanding of the topic?
• What do your students wonder about this topic that could be explored more deeply?
• What does this topic look like in another locale, in a later time period, in a different situation, of from a different perspective?
• What influenced this? What did this influence?
• What’s the counter-argument, point of disagreement, or opposite viewpoint?
• How does this topic connect to other topics you’ve studied, to other subjects, or to the wider world?

Sometimes, differentiation for gifted learners is as simple as offering some choices that intrigue the students and pointing them in the direction of the right resources. The option to explore at a level that provides a worthwhile challenge—not more work but different work—might hook some of your gifted learners. Who knows? Some of your struggling learners might take up the challenge, too.

By all means, take care of your special ed kids, your English language learners, your at-risk students, and your underserved populations. Just don’t forget to also take care of your gifted and talented students. As much as anyone in your classroom, they need you to push them and motivate them to keep growing as learners.

Dress Rehearsals

My friend Megan is getting married this Saturday. On Friday evening the members of the wedding party will convene for a rehearsal. They’ll run though the wedding service so everyone knows where to stand, where and how to walk, what to say, and how to hand off things like rings and bouquets to other people at appropriate moments in the wedding. Running through  the logistics of a wedding beforehand is standard practice; no one would think twice about having a run-through before the big day. A dress rehearsal helps ensure that the wedding runs smoothly, minimizes anxiety for the bride and groom so they won’t make fretful faces in the wedding photos, and keeps the Man of Honor from embarrassing himself during the ceremony. Practice, as they say, makes the wedding perfect.

Teachers sometimes forget the importance of rehearsing as part of their planning for instruction. We look over a lesson plan and then wing it when the kids show up. Sometimes we can pull that off; other times, our lack of prior practice results in misconstrued instructions, awkward transitions, logistical confusion, and unclear explanations.

All too often, our planning looks like this:  “Okay, so. . . the students will do the opener quickwrite and then move into the Socratic Seminar. After that, they’ll fill out the exit ticket if there’s time.”  

Sketchy “planning” of this nature leaves so many unanswered questions. What are you going to do to hook the students at the beginning of the period? How long should the quickwrite take? Are students going to share or process the quickwrite in any way? How will you transition to the Socratic Seminar, including moving furniture and humans? What kind of instructions will the students need before starting the seminar? What will your role be during the discussion? What happens if the Socratic Seminar runs off track?  How much time will you allow for the discussion so that you have time for the exit ticket? Will you do any kind of debrief on the Socratic Seminar itself to encourage future improvement in student academic conversations? How will you reset the room at the end of the discussion? Will that happen before or after the instructions for the exit ticket? What do you need to say about the exit ticket?  How will students turn in their exit cards? What will you do with the exit cards after you collect them? What kind of preview of tomorrow’s lesson will pique your students’ curiosity?

Leaving these questions to chance means there may be some less-than-stellar moments in what could be an outstanding, highly effective lesson. Talking and walking through the lesson can improve the likelihood that you’ll say and do the right things to achieve the results you desire.

Asking two big dress rehearsal questions when you are planning can set you up for success:  

1.  What will this lesson look like? Asking this question prompts you to consider the many visual and logistical factors that are a part of any well-planned lesson. Before kids come into the room, it’s wise to rehearse—or at least talk through—these things:

• Materials you’ll need and how they’ll be distributed
• Written information your students will see:  learning objectives, learning targets, or focusing questions; daily agenda; handouts; other print materials; audio-visual components
• Room setup
• Student movement and interactions
• Transitions from one activity to the next
• Use of technology and multimedia (The middle of class shouldn’t be the first time you click on a link to see if it works.)
• Approximate times for each component of the lesson
• How students will be grouped
• What successful participation by students will look like

2.  What will this lesson sound like?  Have you ever thought you understood something and only realized the gaps in your understanding when you attempted to explain it to someone else? Rehearsing what you’re going to say decreases the odds that you’re going to flub your explanation. Teachers who consider what their lesson will sound like practice many things:

• Giving instructions
• Explaining concepts or terms
• Building anticipation or buy-in for a lesson
• Telling a story with an instructional purpose
• Asking effective questions
• Promoting student talk
• Providing verbal feedback
• Conferencing with students
• Opening and closing class effectively
• Correcting students
• Responding calmly and consistently to student misbehaviors

When teachers consider what a lesson will sound like, they think through other aspects:

• The desired noise level at various points in the lesson
• The quantity of student talk vs teacher talk
• What student talk should sound like
• Ways to get the desired outcomes for student talk

Effective team planning can involve rehearsing and discussing all these things. We grow better by learning from one another. You will often find that someone else’s idea is better than your own. Hearing colleagues explain a concept, introduce a lesson, or model an effective teacher-student conference can help you prepare for your own instruction, perhaps incorporating elements of their delivery into yours. Teams can troubleshoot  by thinking together about what a lesson that exists on a curriculum document will look like and sound like in an actual classroom. Rather than assuming that every member of the team has the same vision of what the written lesson should look and sound like, making sure everyone is on the same page by rehearsing together increases every teacher’s success, which increases every student’s success.

And speaking of success, Megan, I hope your wedding is all you’ve dreamed it will be. Enjoy your special day (and your rehearsal before that).

Outsourcing Discipline

We’ve all taught that kid that knows how to push your buttons and that, after the first few days of school, is on strike two before ever entering the room. This is the kid who makes your stomach get a little queasy each day before class starts, the one who haunts your dreams at night and turns your days into living nightmares. The one who makes you pray, “Please, please, please, please let him be sick today,” as you are driving to school in the morning. 

For me, that student was Horton (For the sake of anonymity, I’m using a name of no student I ever actually taught). Horton was in my English class, and he was trouble from day one. As soon as I had an inkling he was going to be difficult (probably day two), I promptly called home to establish a relationship with his parent early on. The next day Horton showed up in class more unpleasant than ever and announced belligerently, “You called my mom last night.” He then proceeded to make my day even more miserable. Frustratedly, I pulled Horton into the hall and, in the heat of anger, gave him a big ol’ adult lecture, which made absolutely no difference when we re-entered the classroom and he had to save face in front of his peers. I gave him a warning, followed by a second warning, followed by a detention. 

He failed to show up for the detention, much to my delight, because that meant a double detention, which I immediately issued, and which was also unserved. Good, I thought to myself. This is out of my hands now. I get to send him to Saturday School and make this kid someone else’s problem.  Before the first month of school had ended, Horton had been assigned two Saturday Schools and had received three or four office referrals. He even got to spend a few days out of my class in in-school suspension, but the ISS only served to give me a day or two of rest and to make sure Horton fell impossibly behind, which made him even more of a problem when he returned to class. 

I wish I could tell you that I executed some phenomenal teacher move that got Horton back on my side and that he ended up being my star student by the end of the year. Unfortunately, Horton and I spent an entire semester antagonizing one another, his mom and I became BFFs over the phone, and I finally convinced the counselor to move Horton to another teacher at the semester so “he could get a fresh start.” I passed him off to a colleague and then commiserated with her from time to time about the challenges of dealing with this unruly miscreant, all the while thinking to myself, “Better you than me!”  In hindsight, I was the worst in so many ways. 

For some reason, I had forgotten something taught to me by a very wise Assistant Principal my first year of teaching, Scott Potter. Mr. Potter insisted that we not outsource our discipline, not send our students away to detention halls, not assign Saturday School sessions, and not write stacks of office referrals. When a student was having a problem in our class, it was our responsibility to schedule a detention with that student. The detention wasn’t meant to be a punishment—no scraping gum off desks or pounding erasers. Instead, we were supposed to spend some quality time, one on one, with the student, talking about the problem and thinking together about ways to remedy it.  

As a young teacher, I thought this was a ridiculous torture designed to make me have to spend an agonizing 30 extra minutes with someone I didn’t even want to see during the time I had to see him in class each day. Now that I’m older and perhaps a little wiser, I see the brilliance in this approach. 

Teaching is all about relationships. So is discipline. If a student doesn’t have a relationship with the teacher and feels antagonized, adversarial, or unsafe, the student has little incentive to cooperate in class. Yes, it’s uncomfortable to sit down with a teenager who dislikes you and your class and try to break the ice, but over time, when you put down the authority persona and adopt the ally stance instead, the student eventually learns that you’re on the same side and that you want him or her to succeed. Punishment does little to improve behaviors; building a relationship with a student leads to positive change.

Students know when you don’t like them. They sometime even assume you don’t like them, even when you do. Sitting down in a one-to-one with a student gives you a chance to find things you like about that student and discover ways to make positive connections with him or her. 

Misbehavior happens for a reason. Most often, a student is seeking attention—from you or from peers—and doesn’t do it in ways that are in sync with your lesson plans. Frequently, a student walks into your class carrying excess emotional baggage from home, from parents, from peers, and from other teachers. If you’re just one more angry adult adding to the noise in that student’s life, you can’t expect cooperation or engagement. Your tête-à-tête with that student may allow you to find ways to give that student positive attention and to help that student learn to deal with the baggage. 

When you spend time with students individually and empathize with them, they become more receptive to what you want them to know. Life is hard. Growing up is tough. Being a teenager is pretty terrible sometimes, or at least it feels that way for many. Let your students know that you know that; it may surprise some of them who believe no one understands them or knows what they are going through. Resisting your impulse to lecture, just listen to them. You may be the only one who does, and that listening might be a breakthrough. 

Adult brains are more developed than teenagers’ brains. We are also presumably more skilled at regulating our emotions, adapting our behaviors to various situations, navigating social norms, and solving problems. To expect kids to think and reason like adults is extremely short sighted. Students who come from difficult backgrounds may be even less equipped to handle the emotional and behavioral demands of school. The best teachers are the ones who understand this and are willing to teach problem solving, emotional intelligence, and self-regulation to their students. If we teach students what is expected in our classrooms, how to respond in difficult situations, and which techniques can be used to level things out when their emotions get out of whack, we are giving them tools they can use forever. But they won’t learn them when we lecture, issue consequences, and stack punishment on top of punishment. 

So when you’re faced with your own Hortons and your first inclination is to get them as far away from you as possible and make them someone else’s problem, consider a different approach. Transform detentions from punishment to productivity. Take the difficult steps to form a relationship with that student, become an ally rather than an adversary, and teach the problem-solving and social skills to help Horton handle the stressors that life will hurl at him.  

I heard from another former student—not Horton—the other day. He’s an adult now and doing quite well, traveling the world and writing. When he was a high school freshman, I suspect some of his teachers had their doubts because he couldn’t sit still, was prone to blurt things out, asked incessant questions, lacked impulse control, didn’t pick up on social cues, and always seemed to be talking when it was time to be quiet. He was also incredibly bright, though sometimes his behaviors masked that intelligence. He is a student I didn’t let frustrate me. Instead, I did what I could to build a relationship. In his note to me, he wrote, “Having a teacher who could joke with me, but also point out my shortcomings and how to fix them, but also endeavor to understand what I was all about, but also inspire me to grow bigger than that, etc….super valuable.” I’m glad I took the time to know this young person because he’s become an adult who inspires me with what he’s done. 

Giving your students ways to fix their shortcomings and grow bigger than what they are all about right now—that’s the hidden curriculum that may be more important than the content the state tells us we have to teach. If we outsource our discipline, we are leaving those most essential lessons untaught. 

If I Had a Hammer

A hammer is a useful thing to know how to use. If you gave me a claw hammer and taught me to use it, I could do a lot of things: hang a picture, nail together a couple of boards, pry a nail out of something. Once I learned how to use a claw hammer, I might be able to figure out how to use other types of hammers—ball peen hammers, club hammers, sledge hammers—which would enable me to accomplish many more tasks.

As I added hammers to my toolbox, it would be useful to know what each is used for, its strengths and weaknesses, so if a hammering task arose, I could select the best hammer for the job.

But what if I needed to cut a 2x4 in half?

A hammer won’t be of any use in this situation. I would also need access to and understanding of saws—miter, jig, band, hack, hand, circular—so I would know which one would best meet my need.

A toolbox with only one tool in it isn’t much use. Having many tools but no knowledge of how and when to use them is equally useless. Likewise, if I never build anything myself, what’s the use of having tools at all?

These three points relate to much of what we do in the classroom. As we try to equip our students with what they need to accomplish our learning objectives, we have to consider these truths. 

A toolbox with only one tool in it isn’t much use. Sometimes we give our students a tool or strategy, hoping to help them but inadvertently limiting them. In writing, for instance, we might give students an organizational structure or template for writing an essay. When reading, we might provide them with a set of steps for annotating a text. For note-taking, we might teach them a format—Cornell Notes, for instance. Each of these tools is useful and worthwhile in some situations, but when we try to force every student to use the same tool in all circumstances, problems arise. A far better idea is to provide students with several strategies, multiple tools for their academic toolbox. There are many acceptable ways to organize almost any essay. Good readers use a number of annotation strategies to make sense of what they read. And sometimes two- or three-column notes, sketchnotes, graphic organizers, and traditional outlines are more useful than Cornell Notes for certain purposes.  

Having many tools but no knowledge of how and when to use them is equally useless. Suppose we fill our students’ toolboxes with strategies but don’t teach them what to do with them. Suppose we make all the decisions—use this tool for this and this one for this—rather than asking our students to select among a variety of tools and defend their decision. We should share with students the pros and cons of each tool as we introduce it and later let the students decide which to use for whatever task is at hand. I’m a believer that classrooms need to be full of strategic discussions: developing plans, testing hypotheses, creating blueprints for learning, and debriefing often. The teacher can’t be the one doing all the strategizing, though. When students develop the autonomy to determine which organizational structure matches what they have to say in their essay, which annotation method will work best for the type of text and purpose for reading, and which note-taking format will help them achieve their objective for taking notes, they have become independent learners who can handle whatever challenges the world of college or career throws at them. They are master craftsmen and craftswomen who can take charge of their own learning.  

If I never build anything myself, what’s the use of having tools at all? It’s sad when kids know how to take notes but never need to take them. It’s equally unfortunate to have reading skills but nothing to read, writing skills with no opportunity to try them out on real-world audiences. We need to make sure the tools we give our students are going to be used. With the best of intentions, we often circumvent the actual development of students’ skills by shouldering most of the cognitive work ourselves. We provide fill-in-the-blank essay templates for students who don’t need them. Or we decide not to assign writing at all. We summarize reading instead of asking students to work their way through it; equally shameful, we give study questions and reading guides that students can answer without having to actually read the text. We ask students to take notes for the sake of taking notes rather than taking notes that are necessary to accomplish a learning objective. It’s our obligation to provide students with reasons to use the tools we teach them, to give them something to build with those tools.

With some deliberate planning, we can become educators who equip our students with the right tools, teach them how and when to use them, and then give them reasons to dig into their toolboxes. Before we know it, our students will become handy in ways we never imagined, thinking of new things to build and collecting additional tools on their own to help them build them.