Teaching Hacks, The Look, and Monitoring

Teaching Hacks, The Look, and Monitoring

Y’all know that I love Teaching Hacks! You know what I mean? Those Pinterest-y ideas for quick fixes in the classroom?

Here are a few of my faves ...

1. Turn and Talks. All day, every day. Makes kids process learning and therefore RETAIN learning
2. Having kids use Whiteboard markers to write ON the desks. And then baby wipes to remove. (so much more fun than paper!)
3. Using Plickers to formatively assess in under 2 minutes. Because time is EVERYTHING to teachers. (except today they introduced a pay system?)
4. Bathroom pass on a lanyard (because, ewww, where does the pass go when they’re using the facilities?)
5. Written directions for everythingeverythingeverything. Every activity, assignment, everything with written directions on the board or screen. Helps ESE kids, ESOL kids, kids who have auditory processing issues, kids who just weren’t listening, kids who are flakey, and kids who are all over the place. If you write the directions down, half your management improves!

Ok, I’d like to add a new Teaching Hack to your list.

It’s so simple, but so rarely used.

It’s called “Read student work WHILE they’re working”

No, really. Stay with me!

Kids will trick you all the time. They can’t help it. They’re kids.  One favorite trick of most students is The Look.

This is different from the Teacher Look, the Mom Look or  The Administrator Look.

The Student Look is an “I’m innocent look”, maybe an “I’m thinking deeply look”, or even an “I am on task” look.

They use it all the time

Kids are great at looking busy. I used to happily walk around my classroom and monitor my students. I loved to walk around and do what  I THOUGHT was monitoring.

“Thanks for being on task, Destiny!”

“Let’s start our work, Carlos!”

“Brittany, you don’t have any work done! What have you been doing?”

“You’re almost done, Austin! Great job!”

What was wrong with those? I was monitoring for compliance, not for comprehension.

What’s the difference? I used to monitor to see if my kids were DOING their work, not if they were LEARNING what I wanted them to learn!

A kid can write stuff on paper all day but have no idea what we’re learning. They can be compliant by copying their friends’ words, they can be compliant by copying some things out of the book/packet, or they can be compliant just staying quiet and making wild guesses.

Kids can be tricksy. They can definitely LOOK busy but be missing the point.

I was constantly surprised AFTER students turned in their work and it was waaayyyy off, super wrong, or missed the point of the assignment/question entirely!

So how can we monitor for LEARNING? What’s the Teaching Hack here?

It’s so easy. Just read what they write WHILE they’re writing it.

I know we think we’re all already doing it. And maybe it was just me. But I see and hear lots of teachers monitoring around the room talking to kids about DOING work, not about WHAT they’re writing.

As you walk around the classroom, read what they write WHILE they are writing. Are they on point? Are their answers aligned to your question or are they off in left field? Do their answers read EXACTLY like the answers of the kid next to them? Are they wildly making stuff up? Are they copying some sort of answer out of the book without actually understanding it? Are they jotting down “IDK” for every third question?

And then -- when you see them on task but OFF-TRACK (not understanding), STOP and help them right then.

Don’t wait until kids turn in their work. Help them fix it right away, in the moment.

This takes EXACTLY as much effort as your monitoring for compliance does. You DO have to get up and walk around, just the same amount of steps. But it pays out waaayyyy more in student learning.

Totally worth it. Do mostly the same thing you are already doing but make it work better for you and your kids. Don’t get fooled by “The Student Look”. Monitor for LEARNING not for compliance.

Now that’s a Teaching Hack!!

Thoughts? Questions? Email me at newmantr@pcsb.org

If The Kids Can't Read

BTW -- today’s email is NOT for reading teachers. Reading people, you already do al lthis stuff. So feel free to avoid me today.

The Social Studies teachers, though? Today is for US!!

There’s an old joke that a man sees a musician get out of a taxi in New York and asks “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” The musician answers “Practice, practice, practice”

It’s old and it’s dumb, but it has truth. If you want to get better at anything, you have to practice.

So, what do we do when so many teachers tell me that their kids “can’t read”?

We have those kids practice, practice, practice.

Seriously, if a kid wants to be an NBA star or a concert violinist or the next Jay-Z or a comic book illustrator or a videogame designer or the inventor of the next Tesla, there’s only one real strategy.

Practice, practice, practice

So, if our kids want to become better readers (or, maybe more accurately, if WE want OUR KIDS to become better readers), they need to practice. Every day that they are in our class, they need to practice.

“But Tracy”, you protest, “They can’t read!”

I’d like to call “BS” on the majority of those that you think “can’t read”.

Maybe they aren’t strong readers. Maybe they aren’t fluent readers. Maybe they aren’t confident readers. Maybe they aren’t on-grade-level readers. Maybe they aren’t voluntary readers. Maybe they aren’t engaged readers.

But very, very  few of them can’t sound out words and get some meaning from many of those words. That’s literally all they do all day for 2/3 of the elementary school and a good chunk of the middle and high school day. ESPECIALLY if they’re in an additional reading class during their day.

They CAN read, some.

So, let’s stop saying they “can’t read”. There’s a pretty huge continuum between can’t-sound-out-letters and voluntarily-reading-college-level-material. There’s a million shades of grey between the two polar opposites. Let’s look at which shade of grey we’re talking about.

Now, let’s go back to Carnegie Hall. If kids aren’t strong readers, how to they become strong readers? There are a million scaffolds and strategies, but it all comes down to this:

Practice, practice, practice.

If you have low readers in your classroom, they need to practice reading Every. Dang. Day. IN YOUR CONTENT AREA (not just in reading class)

Here is what they don’t need:

• They don’t need the reading broken down for them in bullet points on the screen.
• They don’t need to be “spared” from reading (even of they don’t love it)
• They don’t need you to lecture instead of making them read.
• They don’t need to read ONLY in reading class.

Here is what they DO need:

• Reading. Every. Single. Day.
• in Every. Single. Class.
• Time in front of text.
• Gradual release
• Your patience.
• Think alouds

If your kids “can’t” comprehend your social studies text (or science text or health text or art text), then they need practice in that type of text.

Here’s the easiest way to help with literacy IN YOUR CONTENT AREA.

Gradual release it.

And chunk it.

If kids are struggling readers, start with something small. Start with a paragraph. Heck, if it’s a tough primary source, start with a sentence or two.

Then, model how you read and think aloud and gain meaning from the text.

Then, give them the next sentence or paragraph. Have them work on gaining meaning from the text.

It’s okay if they aren’t AS good at it as you are. Remember, you have a college degree and they don’t, so they won’t do as well as you do. That’s ok.

Chunk the text.

Start small and gradually give them more text until you build their skill and confidence and stamina.

After a week or two, move up to a larger paragraph. Then two paragraphs next month.

Especially with strugglers,  it’s appropriate to start in manageable bites and then gradually challenge them more and more.

Don’t expect them to become better readers by NOT reading. Help them become better readers by having them read something (even small) every day.

What do you have them read daily? How do you move your struggling readers up a level or two? As always, I love to hear from you! Email me at newmantr@pcsb.org

How Do I Increase My Rigor?

So, your administrator is asking about the rigor in your class? And Marzano asks that students “engage in cognitively complex tasks”. And those ISM walk-throughs are checking for the “level of rigor” on their walk through forms.

And, honestly, you know as well as I do that nobody cares if kids know a whole lot of lower-level facts when they grow up. We all know that kids using those facts, information, and skills is a more frequently used part of academics.

Rigor is king of a big deal

I recently had a colleague tell me about lesson plan and ask me how I would increase the rigor of it.

OMG!!! WHAT A FABULOUS QUESTION!!!!

For a long time, I hadn’t found a solid, consistent definition of rigor. And then I found this: Rigor is the higher level thinking a student can do on his or her own.

Now, rigor can ABSOLUTELY include scaffolding. (pleasepleaseplease use scaffolding! Don’t skip the scaffolding!!!!)

But then, the kids need  to be doing higher level thinking without the teacher doing it for them.

Check out this visual to help it make sense -->

Meaning, lead them up to the higher order thinking but then take off their training wheels and let them try it on their own.

(Actually, HOT thinking is likely to fall apart into disaster if you DON’T lead them up and give them scaffolding. But that’s another conversation for another day.

Do you know  my friend, the DOK Wheel? The DOK Wheel isn’t actually my favorite, but it’s the one the FLDOE uses to describe benchmarks and EOC questions, so we can go with it.

So let’s back that up. How can we increase higher level thinking without making kids’ (and teachers’) brains explode?

1. Don’t let kids off the hook. They will pretend to be stupid. They will pretend to “only” be able to give you the “right there” answer. Use wait time and probing questions to get them to think at higher levels. Don’t accept “I can’t” (or “I don’t know”) for an answer.
2. We slowly increase the rigor through the lesson. We sometimes call this “Spiraling questions”. OF COURSE we start with “right there” tasks! “Where was?” “What was?” “When was?” Then we move to putting pieces together, summarizing multiple parts, apply knowledge  to another topic/time/term.
3. Then, we raise the questioning up to level three and sometimes 4 of DOK. Here are some quick and easy HOT (Higher Order Thinking) question stems. Choose ones that match what you’re teaching.  https://www.saydel.k12.ia.us/cms_files/resources/general%20hots%20question%20stems%20and%20processing%20activities.pdf

Ok, Tracy, I think I’ve got WHAT Higher Order Thinking actually IS. But what does that actually look like? What does rigorous learning look like?

Here are a few quick ideas to start to introduce more rigor in small, manageable ways in your classroom.

• HOT Question Turn and Talks: The quickest and easiest (and most natural-feeling) way to incorporate rigor is to incorporate it into quick turn and talks. Talk/read/watch about some lower-level stuff and the ask the kids to turn and talk about it with higher-level stuff. That’s a quick and easy way to include rigor.
• HOT quickwrites: Not feeling the turn and talk ideas? Use the same questions as above but pose one or two as a quick write. Bam. Kids are thinking and you have both blissful peace and quiet AND evidence of their rigorous thinking (or what you need to work on tomorrow...)
• HOT Plickers: Don’t have a lot of time? Throw a HOT multiple choice question up on the board and use Plickers (Paper+Clickers) to have kids answer a quick higher-level multiple choice question in less than a minute. Bonus -- now you have DATA on that rigor stuff...
• HOT Focused Notes: Taking Focused Notes? When students make connections (not YOU making the connections for them, but them making their OWN connections), that’s more rigorous. When students take notes and reflect on them and add some Higher Order THinking
• HOT Benchmark Reflection: Don’t have anything prepared -- but you DO have your  Learning Goal (aka Benchmark) posted on the board? Turn it into a question and ask the kids to reflect on it. Here are a few examples ...
• SS.6.W.2.5 “Summarize important achievements of Egyptian civilization.”
• Describe two important achievements of Egyptian civilization AND connect how they impacted Egyptian Civilization.
• 
  SS.7.C.2.11 “Examine the impact of media, individuals, and interest groups on
• monitoring and influencing the government”
• How do the media, individuals and interest groups (pick one or two) monitor the government?How does that work? Give an example.
• SS.912.A.3.4 “Compare the first and second Industrial Revolutions in the United States.”
• What’s the same between the first and second Industrial Revolution? What’s different? Why are they more same or more different?

There are hundreds of ways to increase your rigor in the classroom. But there’s no reason you can’t start small.

Let’s start small and grow from there! Questions? Email me at newmantr@pcsb.org