Earlier this summer I finished reading the book The Innovators Mindset by George Couros (@gcouros). One of the things that I loved about the book was his use of his website and blog as a way of linking to important information that tied to the chapter you had just completed. On his website you find a page dedicated to each chapter of the book. It has a brief overview as well as links to additional reading (typically blog posts or new articles), as well as video resources. One of the links led me to the video below titled “An Open Letter to Educators.” Take a moment to watch the video:
A few thoughts after watching:
If a strong education is the key to success, what does that education look like in this day and age?
Does the current institution of education get our students prepared for a successful future?
How has “free” information changed your life? How might it continue to change the lives of your students?
If, as Dan Brown says “education isn’t about teaching facts, it’s about stoking creativity and new ideas” and one of your primary goals should be to “empower students to change the world for the better” then I wonder what our classrooms need to look like? What are we getting right? What aren’t we getting quite right yet?
For me, I see collaboration, student choice and student voice, authentic and meaningful learning, inquiry based activities, and opportunities for our students to apply their learning beyond the classroom as keys to help meet these needs for our students.
What do you see as the keys to success for your students? How is your classroom currently meeting the needs of your students? In what ways is your classroom still falling short on meeting those needs of your students? Share your thoughts in the comments below! If you’re looking for ideas and inspiration, I highly recommend The Innovators Mindset as a way to help you find opportunities for innovation!
It’s a refrain that seems to come up quite often in education. You might have just left a professional development talking with a colleague and you feel excited to try something that you learned only to hear “I don’t have time for that” in response. Or maybe you shared an article with a friend that you have used to help in your classroom, and the only response you get is “I don’t have time for that.”
Or even worse, maybe you’re the one saying “I don’t have time for that” to your colleague, administrator, or friend. My immediate response, knowing that we work primarily in a learning environment, is “You don’t have time to learn?” Would you allow your students to say that? Would that be an acceptable response in your classroom?
I would challenge you to shift your mindset. Reading a recent post from the blog Principal of Change, George Couros makes a suggestion of what we can say instead of saying “I don’t have time for that.”
How will my students benefit from this practice?
I am not seeing the relevance of this for teaching and learning…could you give me specifics of how this would impact my practice?
How would you suggest incorporating what you are suggesting into my position?
What has been the biggest benefit for your own practice?
If I was to do this, what would it replace that I am doing now?
How many times have we all tried things, thinking that they wouldn’t be valuable, or we wouldn’t like them, only to realize a few days (or weeks, or months) into the new thing that we couldn’t imagine not doing things this way?
So what can we learn from those moments? My hope is that we would come to the realization that it is important to be open to learning and trying new things. Just because you feel as though you “don’t have the time” you can’t just dismiss something out of hand. Take the moment to ask the questions above. If the answers are satisfactory, then that should show that you need to make the time to learn a little more, to try it out, and hopefully create a better learning environment for our students.
Remember that we are the ultimate models of learning for our students. If we never try something new, if we never exit our comfort zone, if we never do things differently than the way we’ve done something in the past, then we are saying to our students that it’s ok for them to be the same way.
What are some things you tried, not knowing quite how they would work out, only to be pleasantly surprised by how great it really was? Let us know in the comments below!
At the end of every school year, one of my favorite things to do is to take some time to reflect on the year – what worked well? What didn’t work so well? What are the things I want to improve upon? And conversely, what are the things I want to just forget ever happened?
As you are wrapping up your year, keep in mind that moments of reflection can be one of the most powerful pieces of the learning puzzle. After you have finished cleaning your classroom, preparing for summer break, finishing student grades, and the multitude of other things that the end of the year will bring, take a little quiet time by yourself to just reflect.
You might choose to look back at your lesson plans from the year, you might look at samples of student work that you hung onto, or you might have another method that works for you to remind yourself of all that happened in your room during the last 180 student days. Whatever method you choose, ask yourself some questions:
What are the things that happened this year that were awesome, and you can’t imagine not doing again? How will you make sure not to forget by next year?
What are the things that you were excited about that maybe your students didn’t enjoy as much as you thought they would? What could you add to get the students more excited about that topic? (If you’re looking for some ideas to hook your students into a lesson, check out Teach Like a Pirate by Dave Burgess – tons of great hooks that can build interest, excitement, and engagement)
What did you feel was the single most effective thing you did in your classroom this year? What ideas can you take from that activity to make other activities more effective?
As you reflect, also take some time to think about things you wish to learn more about. Make a list of those things that you wish to learn more about. Write it down so you don’t forget. If you’re anything like me, the first few days of summer break will be just that, a break. At some point, you’ll get the itch to think a little more about the things that will help you grow as an educator. At that time, go back to your list and use some of your free time to grow as an educator!
Many of us also love to have an accountability partner so that we don’t get to the end of the summer and feel like we didn’t accomplish any of the things we wanted to do. Share the things that you are interested in with your colleagues at the beginning of summer – your teammate, your PLC, others with similar interests – and then reach out to them from time to time. Share what you are learning, a great book you’re reading, a blog post you loved, or something else that fits with your topic. For those of us on Twitter – use the hashtag #RSISummerLearning (clicking the link will take you directly to a search of that hashtag on Twitter) to share what you’re up to. Even if you don’t post to Twitter, you can go to that search anytime to see what others may have shared. The more we all share, the more we all can learn from one another! Next August we’ll all be able to bring that learning back to school to support our students and do even more amazing things!
Most of all, enjoy your summer time! I know that I’m looking forward to my summer for some relaxation, a Cubs game or two, time with family and friends, and time to do some of the things that I never seem to have time for during the school year. Have a great summer!
So what can we do? I’m sure that all of you have noticed these patterns in our own classroom, but knowing the pattern is only part of the task of finding a solution. In last week’s post I shared the work of two college professors. Going back to their work, I hope to share a couple ways we might be able to help fight anxiety and lack of engagement.
Peter Gray, the psychology professor from Boston college, feels that the key to learning and growth for our students is free play:
Children today are less free than they have ever been. And that lack of freedom has exacted a dramatic toll. My hypothesis is that the generational increases in externality, extrinsic goals, anxiety, and depression are all caused largely by decline, over that same period, in opportunities for free play and the increased time given to schooling.
So as a school, what does play look like? For one it means we have to be sure to value recess/physical activities during the school day. There is clear research that one of the benefits of physical activity is increased student engagement. Think about your classroom on an afternoon where we did not have outdoor recess due to weather. What are the engagement levels like?
Several recent research studies have looked into increased free play time in the school day, and the results suggest that students with regular recess behave better, are physically healthier and exhibit stronger social and emotional development.
Knowing these facts, does that lead you to think about changing what you do when you return to the classroom on a day when we are unable to go outdoors for recess? Hopefully you can think about finding a way to squeeze in some free play on those days. If not free play, then a few short brain break activities to get the kids out of their seat and moving.
And what about the days that students already get their recess? Does that mean we don’t need to look for other opportunities for play? Many of our teachers have been doing outdoor activities here at school this week. I’m sure that they would share that the students are loving the activities they’ve been doing – they are active, engaged, and empowered in this learning environment. My question though: Do we only save activities like this for the end of the school year? Or do we try to integrate play into our lessons throughout the year? How can we make use of our outdoor space, our small and large group instruction rooms, or even just the hallway to get the kids up and playing as they are learning?
The student sees the activity as personally meaningful.
The student’s level of interest is sufficiently high that he/she persists in the face of difficulty.
The student finds the task sufficiently challenging that she believes she will accomplish something of worth by doing it.
The student’s emphasis is on optimum performance and on “getting it right.”
Is it engagement when we work hard to get students into content that we have selected for them? You may be able to get their attention, but if it’s based on extrinsic goals (like a grade) the motivation may not last. So here are some ways you might be able to increase motivation in your classroom:
Students are more motivated academically when they have a positive relationship with their teacher.
Choice is a powerful motivator in most educational contexts.
For complex tasks that require creativity and persistence, extrinsic rewards and consequences actually hamper motivation.
To stay motivated to persist at any task, students must believe they can improve in that task.
Students are motivated to learn things that have relevance to their lives.
HSE21 Best Practice Model
As you spend time thinking about bringing more inquiry into your classroom, as you work to better incorporated the HSE21 Best Practice Model, you will begin to notice increases in your student engagement. When we provide our students with challenges, with activities that are relevant to their lives, when learning is rigorous and based on inquiry-driven study, when students are able to apply their learning in collaborative ways, when we work to incorporate more of the HSE21 Best Practice Model we will see increases in student engagement. In fact, if we work towards truly relevant and rigorous study students will not only be engaged, but actually will be empowered to take their learning to levels that we can’t possibly imagine!
As we approach the end of the year, take some time to reflect on things you have tried that have been new. What activities have led to increased levels of engagement? What ways have you been able to get a kid truly excited about what they are learning? Now, think ahead – how can you take the things that have been successful and expand on them for next school year? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. ~John F. Kennedy
This year at RSI we all read the book The Price of Privilege. I know from follow up conversations with many of you that we see some of the issues that were described by Dr. Levine. I don’t want to go through everything that she shared once again, but one of the things that jumps out at me from that book has to do with the level of anxiety in our kids.
Recently I also read a paper written by Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University. In the study she looks at the mental health of kids just like those you would find in just about any school in the country.
In her paper, Twenge looks at four studies covering 7 million people ranging from teens to young adults in the US. Among her finding: high school students in the 2010s were twice as likely to see a professional for mental health issues than those in the 1980s; more teens struggled to remember things in 2010-2012 compared to the earlier period; and 73% more reported trouble sleeping compared to their peers in the 1980s. These so-called “somatic” or “of-the-body” symptoms strongly predict depression (for more on this study, click here)
In fact, the growth in mental health support in the form of services or medication in the 6-18 age group is somewhat shocking:
I think the writing of Peter Gray, a psychologist and professor at Boston College, sums it up this way:
We would like to think of history as progress, but if progress is measured in the mental health and happiness of our young people, then we have been going backward at least since the early 1950s. (to see the whole article, click here)
I know that mental health is something that we have been talking a lot about in our community and our school. In further reading of the research from both articles, there are differing opinions of the why, but you may notice some similarities.
Twenge has seen a noticeable shift away from internal, or intrinsic goals, which one can control, toward extrinsic ones, which are set by the world and are increasingly unforgiving. On the other hand, Gray believes kids aren’t learning critical life-coping skills because they never get to play anymore.
We have all had the students who had to have the right clothes, the right phone, the right video game in order to feel as though they could fit in. We have also seen students who cannot, without adult mediation, play a game at recess that doesn’t end in a fight.
I’m going to let those charts sink in for a bit, and leave you here with 3 thoughts. Next week we’ll come back to this topic:
Mental health concerns in our students are rising.
Levels of engagement decline as our students grow older.
Even with increased focus on standards, performance on standardized testing has remained stagnant.
What have you noticed in your classroom? Is there a connection between anxiety and engagement? What strategies have you tried to help students feel less anxious or more engaged in your classroom? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
What’s the last thing that you “consumed”? Maybe it’s a new series on Netflix, or a great book, or maybe you listened to a playlist of songs you love. All of those could be examples of consumption. Our students are experts at consumption! Playing a game while listening to music, and with something on the TV. I know that often in our classrooms we are seeking to help our students to create something for the world. In your ELA class you might expect them to create a presentation to go with their persuasive research paper. In science it could be creating an experiment that shows some of the scientific properties that you have been studying. In math you might ask them to create a model of some of the geometric shapes you have been learning about. This list could go on.
Oftentimes we think of consumption as fairly low level thinking, while creating is higher level thinking. But I want to challenge that a bit today with certain types of consumption. Recently my family decided that we wanted to have a vegetable garden in our back yard, but didn’t know exactly what that might entail. I consumed information from websites and blog posts to think about where we should put it, and how we would create it. After looking at a variety of options, we decided that we were going to do a raised bed in the back yard.
Next we had to come up with a design. Again, I consumed resources. I jumped on Pinterest and looked at pictures of examples of raised bed gardens. Did we want to use stone or lumber? Once we decided on wood, then it was a question of what kind. My searches on Pinterest took me to various websites that talked about the advantage of cedar compared to redwood compared to treated lumber. The options (and the opinions) seemed endless. Eventually we decided to go with treated lumber. Check out the pictures below documenting some of our process!
We have out supplies and tools!
The raised bed is complete.
We placed it in the backyard where there would be plenty of sunshine.
Brody helped me fill it with dirt.
Creating a garden plan (we went a little overboard here! )
We’ve got plants and seeds! Let’s plant a garden!
Lainey was a huge help on planting day!
It’s all growing! 2 weeks after planting day and we can already see changes.
I guess what I’m getting at is that all of us have to consume from time to time, and so do our students. Part of 21st Century Learning requires consumption, but I think we would all agree that there is a difference in consumption of a series on Netflix or a book that we are reading for enjoyment as compared to the type of consumption that we do when we want to learn about a new teaching strategy or a project that we want to do at home. That’s where we come in – through guiding our students in how to consume information, we can help make sure that consumption is for the purpose of learning and creation.
What strategies have been successful to guide your students to meaningful consumption? What things have you consumed that have led to additional learning? As lifelong learners, it’s important to verbalize what we are still learning about! That’s part of what I am documenting in these weekly posts, my own learning! Share with us in the comments below things that you have taken in that have led you to create something – for your students, your classroom, your family, or just for you. Or share with us some of the things you students have created!
If you find the idea of creation and consumption interesting and would like to dig a little bit deeper, check out the Ted Talk by Larry Lessig titled Laws that choke creativity. It might lead you to think about consumption a little bit differently!
“Nobody else can make anybody else learn anything. You don’t make the flowers grow. You don’t sit there and stick the petals on and put the leaves on and paint it. You don’t do that. The flower grows itself. Your job, if you are any good at it, is to provide the optimum conditions for it to do that, to allow it to grow.”
I love the quote above from Sir Ken Robinson. It goes with the old saying of “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t force him to drink.” Recently I was sitting in a meeting with a wise member of our district curriculum team who pointed out that it’s true you can’t make the horse drink, but you can make sure they are thirsty. Sometime getting our students to learn is a bit like selling them something, and that something is the content you are trying to get your students to learn.
A few weeks ago I shared a TED Talk from Daniel Pink, and now I’m going to use some of the ideas from Daniel Pink’s book To Sell Is Human. Think about how you might take his messages on his career in sales and translate it into selling content to your students.
Let them tell you why they agree with you. If your students are able to find a connection between your message and their own life, they will take whatever you have to offer. Set up your lesson so that students have no choice but to agree with you.
Decide whether to pitch with facts or questions. How do you persuade someone to agree with your opinions? Most of us have figured out that basic persuasion typically requires a combination of facts and opinions.
Remember that your digital audience is wider than ever. Think about the last great lesson you did – if your students were excited about it, you probably had a teammate or colleague asking about it. Word of mouth spreads it from your students to other students, to colleagues, parents, and administrators. And in a digital age those activities can easily go viral. If you have an audience excited to see what’s happening next, they’ll be thirsty for whatever you have to offer.
Be a servant leader. Relationships! You know it works. Did you have a good experience the last time you bought a car? Some of that experience is because the salesman was able to build report with you, and then followed up on your needs. Students will feel the same way – if they feel there is a relationship with you, they will listen to more of what you have to offer.
Help people find their needs. One of your jobs as a teacher in this new age is to identify problems for your students to solve that cannot be solved by going to Google. If your students trust you to help them find the problems that need to be solved, they’ll listen to you when you help them learn how to evaluate solutions.
I know that most of us didn’t go into education to be able to “sell” our students information. We want our students to have a desire to learn. But just as we can’t force the horse to take a drink, we have no way to force our students to learn. In addition to the sales techniques listed below, the HSE21 best practice model is a good guide for creating the conditions in our classrooms and the learning environments that will cause our students to be thirsty for the knowledge we have to offer. Work to include the core pieces of the best practice model in your classroom everyday – don’t reinvent your lessons, just find ways to remodel them to bring the aspects that will sell our students on our content.
HSE21 Best Practice Model
How have you sold knowledge to your students? What strategies have you used that made your students excited to learn whatever you had to share with them? Share some of your successes in the comments below!
Many of you may know that one of my personal passions is cooking. I learned to cook basic things when I was in elementary school. When I was in 4-H I had multiple county fair champions, and sent a few things to the State Fair. In our house now I do most of the cooking because it’s something I enjoy doing. Over the years I have developed my “favorite” meals that I have found out there and adjusted to suit my tastes, or the tastes of my family. Last fall however, I noticed that I had a series of 10-12 things that we were just cycling through. It was hard to choose anything to cook because I was getting bored with the options I had. I needed something new. Then, I happened to be listening to an interview of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, the author of The Food Lab, and I knew I had to get his cookbook. The guy was a self-described science nerd who became a chef and uses the scientific method to perfect his recipes – sign me up!
The book is almost 1000 pages, includes awesome step by step pictures and instructions for hundreds of recipes, along with scientific descriptions of what happens during the cooking process, explanations of experiments to find the best option in preparing certain dishes, and suggestions for home cooks to be able to carry out techniques that normally are reserved for professional kitchens. In the several months that I have had the book, we have upgraded our meals in the Behrman household. The only complaint? I think I need to run a few extra miles every week with the food we’ve been eating (it’s been hard not to have a second serving with most of these meals!).
Now, some of you may be wondering what this has with a PLN, but I promise, I’m going to try to make it connect. When you think about what you need to grow as an educator, what comes to mind? Jot down the top 3 things that you think of. Really… Take a moment to jot down those top 3. This post will still be here when you get it done.
Now, if I were to poll you, there would be a massive variety of choices that would make it impossible for any administrator to come up with a school PD plan that would meet the needs of all of you. Instead, here’s what I suggest– think about your passions, your areas of continued growth, and get learning! You could talk to your colleagues about things you’re interested in. There are tons of experts within your building and throughout your district. If you’re looking for someone to help you in a specific area, ask around. Maybe your administrator can point you in the right direction. By sharing our knowledge and sharing our curiosities, we can become an environment that encourages lifelong learning.
You know when you find something exciting! You know when you have an idea that you just have to try out! Just like I became excited about new cooking with The Food Lab cookbook, you can find your own ways to grow as an educator, and hopefully the rest of this post will help with that!
A couple weeks ago I shared links to some education hashtags for Twitter (click here to go back to that post). See if there are any that tie to your 3 things you jotted down earlier – want to learn more about standards based learning? #SblChat might be perfect for you! Interested in educational technology? Check out #edtech! For things specific to your grade level, you might want to check out #5thchat (5th grade chat) or #6thchat (6th grade chat). If Twitter isn’t your thing, you might try a search on Pinterest (yes, even I have an account!). You can also search Facebook, and often you can find great videos on YouTube that may help you learn.
If you aren’t quite sure what you want to learn about, then you might have to take some other steps to find a path – you could ask your students what you should learn next. Find out what interests them, what learning methods work for them, or what they’d be excited to do. You could also check the blogosphere. You’ve heard me reference blogs in the past – blogs like Edutopia, A.J. Juliani, Cult of Pedagogy, and The Cornerstone for Teachers are a few that I like. Most of the blogs I have found have been through links from blogs I already followed. If you find a blog you like, subscribe, or use Feedly as a single place to keep track of them all!
I know that some of you may be thinking that it’s the end of the year and you don’t want to mix anything up. Think about it though – wouldn’t it be better to try something totally new with a group of students you already know, as opposed to trying it with a new group of students you don’t know yet? Isn’t it easier to make adjustments to your teaching when one of the variables – students – is a known quantity? Don’t put the pressure of learning something new on your future self! There is no better time to try something new than right now!
Finally, one suggestion that might make some of us a little uncomfortable – seek out people with beliefs that might be different than you. Being brave enough to learn from those who challenge you can be one key to your continued growth. Find someone who challenges you and talk with them with the purpose of understanding their thinking, not getting it to line up with yours – you might learn from them, and they might learn from you.
What things have you learned through your professional learning network? Share with us in the comments below! We’d love to hear about it!
Last week I shared the following question for us to think about: Should we be worried about whether the kids are ready for the school, or should we be worried about whether the school is ready for the kids? Today I am going to share my experiences visiting a few elementary classrooms here in HSE a few weeks ago. I share these not as a way of saying that our classrooms need to mirror these classrooms, but rather to get us thinking about the learning environments that our students will be coming to us from, and in turn thinking about how the changes at elementary schools might change our practices.
A couple weeks ago I had the privilege to visit FCE and see 2 of the kindergarten classrooms that have transitioned to a Reggio Emilia approach (if you don’t know what that is, click here to learn a little more). A few of the things that stood out to me while I was there: there were no typical student desks or tables, instead there was a large picnic table (that almost the whole class could sit at) as well as a couple of coffee tables, end tables and in one of the rooms, an old dining room table; seating was flexible, there were chairs, stools, benches, tree stumps, and the floor; everything on the wall was student created, the numbers chart, the alphabet, a color chart with labels, and of course student work, I didn’t see a single thing that you would buy at “a teacher store”; all around the room there were stations with questions to get kids thinking, one allowed students to build their own birds nest, another had a mixture of various items in a pan and they could write about their thoughts; this list could go on! We were there right at the beginning of the school day, and when the students came in they put their things away and then began to explore the room. In the time that we were there, we saw high levels of engagement, and almost only heard the student voice in the classroom. I can hear some of you right now – but that was a kindergarten classroom! I agree, but are there aspects of that classroom that could translate to what we know about the developmental stages of our 5th and 6th graders?
Kindergartners explaining their mathematical thinking.
Unique seating, exploring the room, and you may notice an open door to the garden outside.
Student created patterns, and pictures of things students have noticed that include a pattern.
Unique seating choices existed all over the room, you can see a couple of the options here.
Post-it notes from an activity on things that can be built – even the chart paper is written by students.
The next stop was BSE to visit a 4th grade classroom. When we walked in, students were in the process of coming up with the essential questions for their unit on the Civil War – let me reiterate, Studentswere coming up with the essential questions. They had been provided copies of various primary source documents and artwork from the Civil War. In addition to the primary source documents, the teacher had also created a Symbaloo (if you’ve never used Symbaloo, click here to see what that is) students could use to navigate to preselected safe websites to research additional Civil War information. As I walked around, students were completely engaged in their work. As they came up with a question they were interested in, they would share with a neighbor. Eventually some of these questions would be written on a post-it and added to the essential questions chart paper at the front of the room. The role of the teacher in this classroom was one of a guide who hopped from group to group checking in to see what they were coming up with and thinking about, and at times asking questions to get them to think deeper.
Both of these classrooms were great examples of HSE21 Best Practices in action.The learning was student centered, highly rigorous, collaborative, and inclusive. So often as teachers at the intermediate level we build our expectations for our students based on where the students need to get to. Intermediate schools in HSE were not originally created to be mini junior highs, and in many districts 5th and 6th graders are still in the elementary school. Again, I’m not saying that we’re doing something wrong, or we need to imitate the examples above, but based on what we know about the developmental stages of our students, what aspects of these classrooms might be beneficial to our students?
What ideas do you take away from the descriptions of these classrooms? Are there things you could see translating to your own classroom? What might it be? How might the physical appearance of your classroom change as you think about the students that will be joining us? How might teaching and learning look different in your classroom based on these descriptions? Are any of you interested in thinking about what a Reggio approach might look like in an intermediate setting? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
What do you see as the keys to success for your students? How is your classroom currently meeting the needs of your students? In what ways is your classroom still falling short on meeting those needs of your students? Share your thoughts in the comments below! If you’re looking for ideas and inspiration, I highly recommend The Innovators Mindset as a way to help you find opportunities for innovation!
The View from 518 
