Let It Show! A Testing Holiday Remix

I’ve been shopping, therefore my brain is full of retail remixes of holiday songs. Here is my reflection on this week’s midterm/dd-EOC experiences remixed with holiday music, for funsies. Enjoy!

Oh the testing in here is frightful

But my lessons were so delightful

And since we’ve learned all we know

Let it show! Let it show! Let it show!

Oh, tests don’t show signs of stopping

And my students’ energy is dropping

High level questions and low

Let it show! Let it show! Let it show!

When we finally get items right

How I’ll hate to see any wrong

But if my lessons did engage and excite

Despite mistakes, scores will be strong!

Now the kids are really trying

and it looks like no one’s crying

But as long as we learned all we know

Let it show! Let it show! Let it show!

I hope that despite some glitches and confusion, your testing went as smoothly as possible and that it reflects all your hard work this semester. Have a wonderful, restful, joyful vacation!

-Tracy

Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lecturn

Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lectern*

*To be sung to the tune of Paul Simon’s “Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover”

The problem is all inside their heads

She said to me

The answer is easy if you

Take it logically

I'd like to help you in your struggle

To be free

There must be fifty ways

To leave your lectern

You just turn and chat, Pat

Try a journal write, Dwight

You don’t need to just talk, Doc,

Just listen to me

Don’t make a fuss, Gus

You might need to discuss much

Pull up a chair, Blair

And set your kids free

So I am a lousy lecture student. I am not an auditory learner and I have trouble listening. And paying attention. And taking decent notes without a book in front of me.

I am grateful that I went to a small college for undergrad and was in a small grad school program where I wasn’t one of thousands in a class. I’m pretty sure I would have failed any class where my teacher didn't stop and breathe every few minutes.

We often think we are preparing our kids for the next level (middle school kids for high school; high school kids for college) by teaching them how to learn through lecture. We lecture with the promise that they will thank us in college when they are good lecture-learners

So imagine my pleasant surprise when I found a wonderful book last year called “50 Ways To Leave Your Lectern” by Constance Staley. What surprised me is that this is a book for college professors. This book is full of ways to break up lectures and help college professors move away from the long lecture mode and into small chunks and other teaching methods.

So if *some* college professors are trying to lecture less, that should lessen the pressure on us as middle and high school teachers, to do as much preparation for lecture-style learning. We can take one thing off our gigantic “to-do” lists and spend a little less time worrying if our kids will be good in traditional style college classes.

I read a recent article in Science magazine about a University of Washington, Seattle meta-analysis of 225 different studies of undergraduate teaching methods. “A new study finds that undergraduate students in classes with traditional stand-and-deliver lectures are 1.5 times more likely to fail than students in classes that use more stimulating, so-called active learning methods.”

Teaching approaches that turned students into active participants reduced failure rates and boosted scores on exams by almost one-half a standard deviation. Um, I haven’t taken stats in a while, but that’s HUGE!!!!

So how can we adapt our lectures? The best way is to mix it up every ten minutes. Set a timer and when it goes off, switch gears. Turn and talk. Do some reading, some writing, some discussion. Let kids move their bodies, use their brains, be active.

I’m not sure I can give you fifty ways to leave your lectern without completely plagiarizing that book, but how about....

FIFTEEN Ways to Leave Your Lectern! (set reasonable goals, right?)

1.    Turn and clarify, Mai

2.    Quick write, Dwight

3.    Thumbs up/thumbs down, Brown

4.    Draw a picture, Fisher

5.    Analyze a doc, Jacques

6.    Analyze a practice test item, Tyson

7.    Answer the benchmark, Clark

8.    Turn and ask a pal, Sal

9.    Gimme five, Clive

10.  Quick debate, Nate

11.  Gallery Walk, John Locke

12.  Graphic Organize, Guys

13.  Annotate, Kate

14.  Write a recap, Chap

15.  Elaborate, Tait

I double-dog dare you to try TWO or THREE of these this week consistently. Train your students how to build these into your short lectures and let me know how it goes!

As always, I love to hear from you! Let me know how it goes!

-Tracy

'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy

Have you ever mis-heard something and you had to listen to it again to better understand it? There are books and websites dedicated to the hilarity of misheard lyrics. My all-time best misheard song lyric is Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”. The misheard lyric is “‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy”. The REAL lyric is “‘Scuse me while I kiss THE SKY”.

I love misheard lyrics. They usually make me giggle out loud like a kid. Partly because I mishear lyrics all the time, partly because they’re so silly and funny, partly because they make you listen to the song again. I sung “rock the cash box” instead of “rock the casbah” until well into adulthood!

Here are some of my other favorite misheard lyrics

Dancing Queen by Abba

Original: See that girl, watch that scene, dig in the dancing queen

Misheard:See that girl, watch her scream, kicking the dancing queen
(Ouch!)

Tiny Dancer by Elton John

Original: Hold me closer, tiny dancer

Misheard: Hold me closer, Tony Danza

(Right. Who’s the boss?)

Rock and Roll by KISS

Original: I want to rock and roll all night and party every day

Misheard: I want to rock and roll all day and part of every day

(So much more practical)

Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival

Original: There’s a bad moon on the rise

Misheard: There’s a bathroom on the right

(good to know!)

All this silliness is to help us remember that sometimes, you just need to relisten and reread to get it right.  Sometimes, you need to listen to Elton John’s song a few bijillion times. Sometimes, you need to sing along with the KISS song.

And sometimes, in class, you need to read a text more than once. Sometimes you need to read it two or three times.

Ugh.

I admit that even as the literacy-in-social studies coach, I have pushed back a little against this read-it-more-than-once trend. I rolled my eyes. I thought I didn’t have time. I thought my kids “got it” the first time. I thought I had too much content to teach to stop and reread something.

The eye-rolling was even more recent than I would like to admit.

And then, I spent a half of class period on a document from Industrial Revolution mill workers only to be asked what the Industrial Revolution was and what a mill was immediately. My choice at that point was to either reteach it or grumble about ‘these kids” and move on without them learning it.

I chose to have them reread and I’m glad I did.

If you are having your kids read primary source documents (or more challenging secondary sources), the chances are pretty good that your kids will get tripped up at some point. It’s natural. It’s normal. Kids don’t always have the vocabulary, background knowledge, or reading level to deeply understand every primary source document you put in front of them.

If they could do it by themselves, you wouldn’t have to teach it!

Common Core and the new Florida Standards ask our kids to read complex text deeply. Nobody gets it right the first time. That’s why they call it complex. And that’s okay. That’s why second (and third) tries were invented!

First -- make sure your document is manageable. If it’s super long, pull out a smaller excerpt. If the vocab is way above them, annotate it a bit by defining a couple of words in the margins that are necessary to the understanding of the document (ex. industrial, mill)

Second -- come up with two or three separate reasons to read your document. Here are some examples, but JUST USE two or three

• Overview read -- read the document silently or teacher read aloud to get the overall idea.
• Text Marking Read -- have kids use a (?) for parts where they are confused, an (!) for an important piece of info, an underline for patterns or things that come up repeatedly, and an --> (arrow) for connecting one piece of text to another.
• Vocabulary -- have kids read specifically to find meaning for vocabulary terms (either ones selected by you or by them)
• Reading Strategy -- have kids read another time to use your reading strategy (Venn Diagram, for example)
• Essential Question -- have the kids circle words or phrases that will help answer the Essential Question of the day.

There are a ton of different “types” of reads, or different purposes for reading. That’s okay.

PLEASE DON’T... have kids read it five times (too much!). PLEASE DON’T have kids do these on a long piece of text (it will take forever).

Instead,  choose two or three of the ones above and guide your kids through a close reading in which they read the document more than once.

We all have to read things more than once. It’s why millions of books or sermons are written on the same pieces of holy writings. It’s why people can read Shakespeare (or even their favorite novels) again and again. It’s why every time I look at a great work of art, I see something I missed last time.

I recently got a piece of furniture from IKEA. Even though the directions are pictorial and not textual, I still had to “read” the directions multiple times to get it right. And I’m a visual-learning, masters’ degree-holding, adult who has EXPERIENCE and LIKES putting IKEA furniture together. If I needed to read the directions more than once, why shouldn’t a kid who may or may not have background knowledge or confidence reading documents?

There’s no shame in rereading. It’s not just for lower-level kids. There’s honor and pride and rigor in multiple reads -- or IKEA directions or song lyrics or (hopefully) in primary and secondary documents.

It’s important to read important or complex texts more than once. There are several ways to do that. So, will you try it? Start with something complex but brief -- something like a short  letter or the Preamble or a paragraph from a historian.

Please drop me a line and let me know how it goes. And, please, hold me closer, Tony Danza!

-Tracy