How many times when talking with others in our school do you hear the phrase “We have to get them ready for ____”? You can fill in the blank with all kinds of different phrases – things like 6th grade, junior high, ISTEP, or any one of the other things we are trying to get our students prepared for. It is a valid thing to think about because we do have to prepare our students for the future. However…
This is how some of the students in HSE are starting their experiences in our kindergarten classrooms.
How often do you hear the words “We have to be ready for the students that are coming to us.”? In most schools, the environment of the school is set up for one specific developmental stage. I know through conversations with many of you that we have at least a cursory understanding of the fact that our 10, 11, and 12 year old students fall all over the developmental spectrum. It’s one of the things I love about working with 5th and 6th grade students, but it can also be one of the greatest challenges. While not being intentional, sometimes schools set up a system that expect all students to fit within a certain box, and when they don’t fit, it creates struggles for students, teachers, and parents. So the question begs to be asked, is our system set up to meet our students wherever they are in terms of developmental needs?
Think about this for a moment: 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?
Next week’s post will share with you my recent experiences visiting a few elementary classrooms. I am sharing these not to say that we need to try to mirror their methods or strategies, but to help us understand the types of classrooms our students will be coming to us from. One of the things that I feel sometimes happens in education is that teachers of older grades sometimes “look down upon” the teachers of younger grades. I think there can be great value in learning from the ways that teachers in grades below us meet the developmental needs of their students.
As we move forward, let’s work towards building our expectations for our students based on where they are when they get to us. We can still strive to move them to where they need to be, but we need to be open to the fact that some of our students do not fit in the box that we have created for them. Some of those outliers may need us to provide extra support, while others may just need us to get out of the way and let them learn.
What strategies and methods do you use to meet the needs of the student who walks into your classroom on a daily basis? Are there methods that seem to help your students who are less mature than the rest of your class? Or, on the other end of the spectrum, what do you do with the students that are much more mature than the others in your classroom? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
As most of you know, HSE21 has been a multi-year project in which administrators, teachers, parents, and students have been looking at how best to create a 21st century learning experience for our students. Through the program the Best Practice Model was developed, and in time the decision was made to transition to a 1:1 environment as a way to enhance the Best Practice Model. These decisions were made as a result of the changing world around us. As teachers we have all seen more of our students, and possibly more of our own lives, occurring in a digital world.
HSE21 Best Practice Model
For most of us, if we see that a child is engaged in a particular activity, we find ways to try to encourage that skill. If your child is coloring on the wall, you may initially be upset, but you may also be tempted to put up a chalkboard, or get an easel that they can use to encourage that skill. Who knows, that kid that started out painting on the wall may turn into the next Picasso or Van Gogh. In your classroom that may mean allowing students to choose what product would best represent their learning.
Now think of our students. The second they walk out of the building they are bombarded with digital options. Smart-phones, tablets, computers, apps, websites, and more are competing for their attention. If we don’t notice that and innovate towards that, we will lose some of our students. The way I see it, more and more, technology is a right for our students in their learning. Are there moments when it may not fit, or they may not use it? Yes! But it’s also important that we all recognize that devices and digital tools are becoming interconnected with our lives and with education.
I have had many conversations with teachers who fear that we aren’t “preparing students for the real world.” How can we accurately predict what that world will look like for our students? I struggle to predict what next week might look like, let alone predicting what the world will be like in 10 years when our students either have entered, or are entering the workforce. One thing I feel confident in telling you: they will need to know is how to use technology in appropriate and responsible ways. If our only solution for poor decisions with technology is to try to permanently take technology away from our students, we are doing them a disservice. Remember, our kids are 10, 11, and 12 year olds, and they are going to make mistakes, but going to the nuclear option of “you can’t use this anymore” doesn’t teach a child anything. However, taking the device away for a period of time, and then having a conversation about the repercussions of their actions creates a learning opportunity for a child.
Sometimes drastic measures need to be taken to maintain the kind of classroom experiences that our students need – things like a temporary ban on technology – but we have to go back to the fundamentals. To be relevant for our student we must use the best tools at our disposal. By avoiding the technology permanently we are missing out on amazing teachable moments.
Thinking about your classroom, where are successes that you have had that would not have been possible without technology? Have there been times that taking the technology out of a lesson has led to better engagement and learning? Share with us some of your opinions!
Last week I received an email from one of my favorite blogs directing me to a post titled “What Teachers Can Learn About Failure From Elon Musk” (you can click on the link if you’d like to see the original post). The gist of the post is that as teachers and learners, we have to fail, and be willing to share those failures, as part of the learning process. I thought of the saying “Fail Forward” as I read one of the early paragraphs.
The post then talked a lot about Elon Musk. This is a guy I had heard of – I’ve seen his TED Talk, Tesla makes some pretty cool cars, and as a self described nerd, I have watched multiple SpaceX launches and attempts at landing with interest. So as I was reading about Musk, I was curious to be directed to a series of posts about Elon Musk from the blog Wait But Why (Check it out here: Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man). After going deep into some background on the history of fossil fuels, automotives, space travel, and a few other topics, I also walked away with a newfound interest in Elon Musk, as well as an understanding of why Tim Urban, the author of Wait But Why, describes Musk as such a rad dude.
As a college student what were you thinking about? When Musk was in college, he asked himself “What will most affect the future of humanity?” His list contained 5 things: “The internet; sustainable energy; space exploration with a goal of life beyond Earth; artificial intelligence; and reprogramming the human genetic code.” I can tell you that as a college student, this is most certainly not what I was thinking about!
So here’s a brief rundown of Musk’s career:
1995 – starts Zip2 – think Yelp and Google Maps in a pre-smartphone era – in 1999 at the age of 27 Zip2 sells for $307 million, and Musk’s take was $22 million.
1999 – Musk takes three quarters of his personal net worth to start X.com – an online bank (before those really existed). X.com merged with Confinity to create a money-transfer service that we now know of as PayPal.
2000 – Musk is replaced as CEO of PayPal, but stays on the team in a senior role.
2002 – eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion, and Musk walked away this time with $180 million. He was 34 years old.
Also in 2002 – Musk begins researching rocket technology and after the finalization of the sale of PayPal, he invests $100 million of his own money in a rocket company called SpaceX. The stated goal of the company was to revolutionize the cost of space travel in order to make humans a multi-planetary species by colonizing Mars with at least a million people over the next century.
Let that sink in for a minute… In the span of 7 years he went from dropping out of a Stanford PhD program to starting SpaceX.
And he wasn’t done yet…
2004 – still in the middle of the SpaceX experiment, Musk personally invested $70 million into an electric car company called Tesla. The last successful US car startup was Chrysler in 1925.
2006 – invests $10 million to found another company – SolarCity with the goal of revolutionizing energy production by creating a large distributed utility that would install solar panel systems on millions of people’s homes and reducing their consumption of fossil fuel generated electricity. Because, I mean, what else did he have to do?!!
Side note: As I was reading through this, especially in reading about what Musk has done since 2002, I couldn’t help thinking of someone winning the PowerBall and deciding that they are going to use their money to feed the people of Africa, only to go bankrupt before they send anything across the Atlantic! I wonder what I would have done if I was in his shoes when PayPal sold to eBay – it would be so tempting to take that money and go live on a tropical island for the rest of my days!
So, what does this have to do with failing forward you might ask. Looking over the list of accomplishments above, it might be hard to find the failure. During a 2005 interview with Fast Company, Musk was quoted as saying “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” He was speaking about the culture of business at SpaceX.
Let’s look at some of the failures in his time at SpaceX:
I’ll admit – this isn’t a picture of one of the failed launches, but look at it! How cool is that???
2006: First launch – failure
2007: Second launch – failure
2008: Third launch – failure
At this point, it was easy to have doubts in the likelihood of success for SpaceX. They had yet to prove that they had the ability to be successful. And yet, those who worked at SpaceX, Musk included, were supremely confident. With each of the failures, that had been livestreamed to the world, the company had learned and made improvements. The engineers and scientists at SpaceX would go back to the drawing board and try to improve.
In the fall of 2008 SpaceX only had enough money to try one more launch. Failure here would mean failure to the entire company. But on the fourth launch they achieved complete success. With it came new funding in the form of funds from NASA to make multiple deliveries to the International Space Station. So what does this have to do with education?
In reading about SpaceX, Tesla, and other companies that Musk has been involved in, the key to their success is the feedback that the company seeks from it’s failure. They are working in fields where there has been little to no success, so there isn’t a blueprint of how to succeed. Failure is part of the process, whether they are building a rocket, a car, a battery for the car, or some other component in the process.
We can all agree that failure is an important part of the learning process. But for it to be a learning experience, failure can’t be the end point for our students. We can’t just put a failing grade in the grade book and move on. Instead we mark that section at ‘needs improvement’ and we get back to work through meaningful feedback. At SpaceX and Tesla, that feedback is an important part of the process to innovate.
Check out this video of a launch in June of this year. It will pick up about 10 seconds before launch. If you watch until about 2 minutes after lift-off, you’ll see the result:
As you can see, SpaceX still has failure. But those failures continue to result in innovation!
We need to be providing that same type of feedback for our students. There should be a two-way feedback loop between a teacher and student. You have to provide your students feedback on the work that they are submitting. It must be specific and lead to action that your students can take in their learning. At the same time, your students have to be able to provide you feedback about their learning. They need opportunities to make choices – in what they are learning, how they are learning it, how they are showing their learning.
Students can feel defeated when they try something new and things don’t go as they hope. We have to continue to help them to understand that the journey is just as important, if not more so, than the end point. We all learn from our failures, and getting up and trying it again shows that we are truly working for something better.
And just to show that success in one place doesn’t mean an endpoint, it’s important to think about what Musk and SpaceX are up to now. They’ve shown they can successfully launch a rocket a get a payload to the ISS, but now they are trying to learn how to land a rocket that has just been in orbit onto a landing pad in the ocean. Because, duh! Why not???
So far, no success. All four attempts have been failures. But think back to Musk’s earlier quote – failure is an option. I’m guessing that before too long, we’ll see a successful landing by SpaceX on a launch pad in the middle of the ocean. When you see that landing, remember that it didn’t just happen. It took tons of man-hours to get the feedback necessary to learn and adapt. In the same way, our students need our feedback in order to continue to learn and grow.
Think back to a time that you learned something from a failure. What steps did you take to improve? Did you eventually find success? Share with us in the comments below. Or share your own example of a person who has show you what it means to “fail forward.”
Every time that I moved to a new subject area, I relied on the teachers around me who had already been in the subject to help me figure out where to get started. There are some of you in this building that I borrowed (or maybe stole) to the benefit of my students. More important than taking in is the willingness to share out. With Office 365 and Blackboard, I know that many of you are already sharing within the building, however as you build connections with the world beyond these 4 walls, you can share them out with others.
In Ditch that Textbook, Matt Miller says “The one thing that teachers can do to make this unprecedented collaborative community more powerful is to share.” Some of you may have your doubts about this – you may think you don’t have anything to share, you don’t know how to best share, and most of all you don’t have time. I would suggest picking a way that works for you – Twitter is easy to start using and make quick connections through the use of hashtags. We all have different perspectives based on our own experiences, and any of us can talk about our experiences, content, success, failure, etc. As for time, start small – a short blog post once a week about your classroom successes, and a Twitter account to follow a few educators that you can check for 5 minutes a day. Instead of taking the time to come up with an excuse, you could find a way to share.
The two easiest way to share:
Pass your best ideas around with colleagues – each time you come up with something new, share it with your PLC, your teammates, or the whole school. If you gain something at a conference, pass it on. Inspiration is infectious!
Start a blog – basically a blog is like an online journal. You can post your ideas, and others can read and comment on them. I love WordPress.com, and set my blog up in about 5 minutes. Write about what you know. The time you take writing causes you to reflect on what you are doing
How have you benefitted from the things others have shared with you? What have you shared in the past that others have benefitted from? Share in the comments below!
A couple weeks ago I was in a meeting with all the secondary assistant principals in our district. While we spent the first half of the meeting discussing things that are normally within the realm of the AP (school safety, student assistance and support, student attendance, etc.), we spent the second half of the meeting with our Director of Secondary Education. One of the things we looked at during that meeting was a list of 10 Things to Tell Students About the Redesigned SAT. While the students in my building are not taking the SAT, there were some great takeaways that could apply to teaching and learning at all levels. This list comes from a presentation that Laurie Ferry of CIESC gave to some of the secondary teachers in our district. Hopefully this list will allow you to think about the skills and needs that our students will have in the future as we prepare them to move forward in their education.
10 Things About the SAT:
Register/Sign-up for Khan Academy – The College Board has teamed up with Khan Academy to offer SAT practice with the new exam, and the best part – it’s Free!!! If your students are not yet taking the SAT, that may not sound valuable, there are some other cool things that Khan could offer you. In the NWEA support section there is a series of documents that have been correlations between MAP sub-goals and RIT ranges to Khan Academy exercises. If you don’t know much about Khan, ask around – many teachers have dipped their toes into the water with it. Check out the correlations here: MAP to Khan Academy.
Use evidence to support your arguments – Many of us work on this strategy in class, but we must keep working on it, especially in nonfiction reading. Always encourage your students to go back to the text and think about where they found the information to support their thinking.
Build your reading stamina – The only way to grow reading stamina is to spend time reading. One of the important things about building stamina – the text needs to be self selected and high interest. As you get to know your students, you will be able to help them select reading that is not only appropriate, but also interesting for them.
Always analyze the informational graphics – When you are doing nonfiction reading in class, do you have text with lots of informational graphics? The new test does, and questions will relate to information shared in those graphics. Make sure you are taking the time in your class to analyze those graphics. Don’t have a lot of text with informational graphics? Start looking for some! USA Today could be a great teaching tools. If you haven’t picked it up in a while, you may not know this, but it is full of great informational graphics to go with the articles you find.
Get excited about the U.S. Founding Documents – On the College Board website, it says “The Evidence-Based Reading and Writing section of the newly redesigned SAT embodies the College Board’s firm commitment to the idea that all students should be asked routinely to engage with texts worthy of close attention and careful analysis… nowhere it is more evident than in the Reading Test’s inclusion of U.S. founding documents and texts from the Great Global Conversation.” Even at younger levels, be looking for ways to integrate readings of primary source documents into your instruction. The sooner we begin analyzing text like this, the more successful students will become.
Practice editing – On the new SAT in the writing and language portion, students will look at a passage of writing to consider how they might revise the piece to improve the expression of ideas. In other questions, you may have to edit to correct errors in sentence structure, usage, or punctuation.
Put away the calculators (some of the time) – This has a two part purpose. First, students need to become adept at figuring out when the math is simple enough that the calculator is not actually necessary, thereby decreasing the time spent on the problem. Students will need to be able to analyze the question to understand how much effort actually needs to go into the question. Second, the new tests limit the use of calculators on the math portion of the test, which means our students will need to be able to solve a variety of problems without the help of a calculator.
Check your answers – Students need to take the time to analyze their work and be certain that the answer they have provided actually answers the questions asked. Encourage your students to review their work to be sure that they are correct.
Answer every question on the test – This is not just about finishing, but about time management. Part of the test will actually challenge our students to analyze a question and decide how much time actually needs to be spent on it. There will be problems and questions with really dense text, but the problem or question at the end will be really simple to answer. Students can’t spend long periods of time on the “simple” questions.
Take the SAT – With tests like the SAT, the more times you take it, the better you are likely to do. Start integrating sample questions and problems from these types of tests as a problem of the day or problem of the week so that students can see they types of questions that will appear. This will allow our students to learn how to attack the types of problems they are likely to see on the test. Think how excited your younger students would be to have “solved” a problem from a test that high school kids will be taking.
Obviously, this is just a list of thoughts and ideas based on the thoughts of others and my understanding. As you gain understandings and insights on this, let us know about your thinking. Share with us the insights you have made while reading this post in the comments below. If these ideas have challenged, changed, of confirmed your thinking, let us know that too!
In last week’s post I shared a little about the value that connectedness can provide to educators. This week I want to share some of the ways that you can use social media for personalized PD. As I shared last week, online educator communities provide you with 24/7 access to people, ideas, resources, philosophies, and opportunities that can expand your world (and the world of our students). So here are some of the reasons I get excited to connect online:
Inspiration: Many of the new things that I try here at school are because of something I have learned through a tweet, blog post, or somewhere online.
Motivation: Several of the twitter accounts I follow are educators who love to tweet out pictures and quotes that motivate me to try to be better. That little bit of motivation can be such an awesome help!
Challenge: I intentionally follow some people because they have different opinions than me. I do this because I want to have a full background. Every once in a while something that someone shares truly challenges my thinking in a way that makes me reflect on my beliefs.
Camaraderie: I have been able to find connections with many other teachers and administrators all over the country/world!
Apps: You can use your digital connections to learn about new apps for a specific purpose, or ideas for better ways to use the apps you already have.
Humor: Just like our Friday funnies, there are funny things that happen in schools every day. Some of those things show up in my timeline and give me the opportunity to laugh.
Collaboration: Through online connections you can work with almost anyone in the world. You can find teachers all over the world teaching the same material, and create connections that allow you to learn from them, and they can learn from you.
So how do we connect? And how do we find the time? That’s total up to you, but there are a couple of options that you could try, and the amount of effort you put into them is totally up to you!
Social Media: For me, this is the best way to connect. Twitter is my favorite choice, but Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest are good ones as well. My favorite thing about Twitter is that every post is 140 characters or less. It’s amazing how much info can be packed into such a short amount of space. The biggest thing to know on Twitter is how to use a hashtag. A couple of my favorites are #edchat and #edtech. Tons of great ideas get shared, and if you post something with one of those hashtags, you will get a ton of people to see your post. (For more education hashtags, take a look at the links in last week’s post)
Blogs: There are thousands of blogs about education out there! Most of my favorite blogs that I follow are because of connections I have made on Twitter. I use Feedly.com as an RSS aggregator that keeps all my blogs in one place. Each time a new blog that I follow posts, it shows up in my feed. When I have time, I’ll peek at it. If my day is too busy, I’ll skip it. Feedly can also help you find other blogs based on topics you are interested in. In addition to reading blogs, you can also start writing a blog. Share the things you know – creation is one of the highest levels of thinking. It can also be a huge time commitment – these posts don’t write themselves! Some post daily, some are a few days a week, some are less regular than that.
Being a connected educator will make it easier to transform education in your classroom. You will find new ideas, you will be able to ask questions, and you will be able to share your own thinking and give back to the community! Invest the time that makes sense to you. There are days I don’t get on Twitter at all, and there are days where I have extra time and might spend an hour or two reading, adding, and building connections.
What tools have allowed you to connect and change the way you teach? Share with the rest of us below!
In this week’s post, I would like to build upon the ideas of a post from before winter break titled Choosing to Cheat. The concept of that post was built on the idea that we don’t have an unlimited amount of time in our days to be able to fulfill all of our priorities. Feel free to go back to that post if you would like.
For some of us it is difficult thing to think about cheating at anything. We might think “If I skimp here, my students might not get it.” Or we might say “If it doesn’t look pretty and perfect, I won’t feel as proud of it.” There are a lot of people who spend a lot of time in this school building. They are all effective or highly effective teachers. Sometimes it’s hard to leave the building knowing that there is more that could be done. But for all the teachers who put in long hours, there are others who do not spend that amount of time in the building. Does that mean that the teachers who spend less time are less effective? Or is there something more to the story?
In order to be more effective in our time management, we have to think about the concept of the minimum effective dose (MED). Tim Ferriss, the author of The 4-Hour Workweek, defines the MED as:
“the smallest dose that will produce the desired outcome. Anything beyond the MED is wasteful. To boil water, the MED is 212 degrees Fahrenheit at standard air pressure. Boiled is boiled. Higher temperatures will not make it more boiled. High temperatures will just consume more resources that could be used for something more productive.”
There are lots of examples out there of people who have cut back the amount of time spent, only to find that it actually improved their outcome. As a runner I always taper the amount I run in the last couple of weeks leading up to a big event so that I will feel fresh on the day of the race. Every year at the end of the NFL season you hear analysts arguing about whether a certain team should rest their star players prior to the playoffs. I follow a couple of blogs that post daily, but rarely do I have time to read them every day. On the days I miss a post, I feel as though I am missing something that could be important. If the authors of those blogs cut back to 3 posts a week, I wouldn’t be upset. I might actually be able to read everything they post!
Ultimately, we have to remember that our audience are the kids sitting in our classroom. No matter how hard we work, they are only going to take in as much as they think is necessary to be able to complete your upcoming performance task. So think, are you trying to over boil the water in your classroom? Remember, water temp can’t go over 212 degrees, no matter how much energy you put in. At the same time, no amount of overwork will cram more info into your students’ heads if they can’t absorb it. Keep your focus on your goals and what you want to accomplish. Try to reduce the wasteful or ineffective things we do, and ultimately we will use our time in more valuable ways! In the Choosing to Cheat post, I shared the chart below. Focus on placing your energy in the activities that we believe will help our students grow.
Use this to help guide your thinking and the areas where you may choose to cheat.
As for how much time to spend at school, I can’t say that there is a correct answer to that questions. At different phases in my life there have been different amounts of time spent. I feel that through appropriate time management, we can all do our job to the best of our ability, and meet the needs of our students in a reasonable amount of time.
Have you ever tried to over boil the water? What are some of the things you cut when your realized you were doing more than you actually had to? Share in the comments below!
It’s the beginning of class, and you are checking to see what students came to class prepared, and you get to “that” student (admit it, a name just came to your mind!), and of course, they are not prepared for class today. This is the third time this week, and who knows how many times this month…
All of us have been there at one time or another. It can be so hard not to take it personally. In your mind you may think about the amount of time you have invested in that student, or the help that you provided yesterday to make sure that student was organized and prepared to be able to finish the homework, or maybe you think of the assurances you had from the parents who told you they would help make sure work was being completed. How can we not take it personally?
Of course, the reality is that for the vast majority of our students, they are not doing this purposely (although on the day I am writing this, I did see a student with a t-shirt that said “I’m just here to annoy you!”). In fact, you are probably the furthest thing from their mind when a student does not complete his work. Instead, the lack of completion could be for a lot of reasons (maybe they didn’t understand how to do the assignment, maybe they didn’t want to do it, maybe they thought it was boring, or maybe there was nobody at home to make sure they did it – you get the idea, there are lots of possible reasons). I think logically all of us understand that students are not intentionally coming to class unprepared in an effort to drive us crazy, and yet we can’t help but feel that way.
One of the great beliefs I have about education is that relationships are one of the keys to success for our students. I know that many of you feel the same way. We take the time to build relationships with all our students. We feel invested in each of them. We can’t help but believe that the feeling is mutual. Unfortunately, our students don’t always feel the same way. Sometimes even with our best effort, it is hard to help all our students to feel connected here at school.
When “that” student comes to class unprepared, the simple solution is often to get angry or frustrated. It is much more difficult to figure out the answer to the key question – why?
Finding the answer to the question of why is not easy. The answers that students will give run the gamut – I forgot, I had a basketball game last night, my parents couldn’t help me, etc. A lot of time we see these answers as excuses. Instead, maybe we should look at them as clues. If they say they forgot, are they disorganized? Do they need additional support so that they won’t forget in the future? Could you help them set an alert on the iPad or phone to go off in the evening to remind them of the work they have to do tonight? If they say that they had another activity, can we assess what they do have done to see if they understood the concept? Do they need more work time here at school? We can’t control how their time is scheduled outside of school hours, but we can help control how that student uses their time here at school. If they say they didn’t have a parent to help them, then do they need to have the concept retaught to them? If a student needs a parent’s help to be able to complete a homework assignment, then they don’t really understand the material.
In last week’s post we discussed growth mindset in teachers. An argument could be made that situations like the one described at the beginning of this post could be the perfect opportunity to use some of what we learned about having a growth mindset. Instead of taking it personally when a student isn’t prepared for class, look at it as a puzzle to be solved. Try to understand why the student isn’t prepared. Once you understand the why, it will be much more likely that we can approach a solution. If you don’t have an idea of how to help the student, talk to your colleagues, counselors, or administrators to see what ideas they may have (collaboration = more opportunities for growth!).
If you’re still struggling to come up with a way to motivate the student, come at the problem from a PBIS perspective. Most of our kids who struggle simply want attention of some kind. Getting negative attention is easy, but when given a choice between a positive and a negative consequence, most kids will choose the positive (it’s amazing what I used to get kids to do for a sticker or a jolly rancher!). And if you show them that it is possible to earn that positive consequence, then they find success. Once they show a pattern of success, you can make it more difficult to earn that positive feedback, and hopefully the student will begin to learn that the feeling of success from a job well done is a good enough reward (I know that this process takes longer than we like, but it does work!).
Instead of looking at the unprepared student as the enemy, spend some time thinking about them as a puzzle. If you don’t know what will motivate him, spend some time to get to know him (2 for 10 strategy). Look back on one of our earlier posts: Know your kids – Love you kids for a little more on how a 2 minute conversation can help you learn about your kids.
What success have you had in motivating the unmotivated or reaching the unreachable? Spread the wealth! Share some of your experiences in the comments below.
To set the scene, imagine that you are in your classroom. You are getting the kids started on one of your standing assignments that everyone in the room knows will come each week:
You: All right, let’s all get started on (insert that assignment that your students hate to do).
Class: Collective groaning. From the back you can hear one student say “Why do we always have to do this?”
You find yourself wondering why the reaction is like this – you might think to yourself “they loved doing this earlier in the year!” Fast forward to the due date. As you are collecting the assignment, you see that the students who play school well completed the assignment, but it’s clear that they put forth the minimum amount of effort possible. You also notice that some of your students did not complete the assignment, and no amount of effort from you is going to get them to finish the task – you could have them work in the hall, take away recess, call parents, etc. – nothing is going to make a difference for those students.
As a teacher we have all experienced this. So here’s the question – why do we keep asking our students to complete assignments that they hate? Why do we keep giving assignments that students don’t put forth much effort, or simply don’t do the assignment at all? Why do we keep giving assignments that put the effort on us to run down the missing assignments when the students are putting no effort into the assignment?
HSE21 Best Practice Model
When I was writing last week’s post, I inserted the HSE21 Best Practice Model. As I put it into the post, something jumped out to me in a different way than ever before. Look at the Best Practice Model above – in this blog I have spent a lot of time talking about the boxes on the outside: Student-Centered Approaches; Cognitive Curriculum; Fundamental Classroom Conditions; and Transfer of Learning. Last week for some reason, the purple circle that connects them all jumped out at me – in particular the word at the top “Reflection.” Given that New Year’s Day is approaching, I would guess that a lot of us are taking time to reflect on the last year, and many of us think first of our personal life, however reflection is an important aspect of teaching as well. What better time to take a few moments for reflection than to do so over the 2 week winter break?
Think about how your year has gone so far. What’s working well? What isn’t? Do you often have situations like the one that I referenced at the top? How could you adjust your assignments so that they don’t get stale? Even the most engaging activity today may get old and stale to our students if we do the same thing every day or every week over a long period of time. Find some ways to mix up what you are doing in your classroom to increase student engagement. For me, an important part of reflection is also getting feedback and ideas from my colleagues. If you have an activity that has gotten stale, talk with your colleagues – see if anyone has an idea of how you could spice up that activity and make it more engaging to your students. Or maybe you will just decide to let that activity go for a while – replace it with something else that might serve the same purpose.
If you never take the time to reflect, you may miss out on opportunities for growth as a teacher, as well as opportunities to help your students grow. As I reflect on this school year, one of the things I am most disappointed in is the amount of time I have had to spend in my office rather than out and about during the school day. One of my resolutions for the new school year is to spend more time out in our classrooms seeing the awesome things that you all do on a daily basis with our students. Please help hold me accountable to this goal!
What resolutions have you set for yourself? Personal or professional, share them in the comments below. We can all help hold each other accountable to our goals and resolutions.
A couple weeks ago I had a post on how to influence students (click here to see it again). This weekend I was reading a post by A.J. Juliani on his blog titled “The Future of Learning” and I saw an article that related to my previous post, but he looked at things from a slightly different perspective.
What are the best ways to give feedback to our students?
Through reading Juliani’s blog, I ended up reading a research paper written by a team of psychologists from Stanford, Yale, Columbia, and several other well known schools to look at the type of feedback that is given to students. In this study the authors were testing to see if the type of feedback given on an essay written by 7th graders could result in greater effort (as measured by an increased number of revisions), and improved quality of final drafts.
While there have been many studies on how to provide praise to our students, there has been limited research in how to provide meaningful criticism that will result in improvements for students. Many of us place our criticism in the format of 3 stars and a wish (or something of this nature) to boost self-esteem before delivering the criticism.
The reality is, self-esteem is not the key to being able to hear criticism, but rather trust is the key. Boosting self-esteem will not always boost trust. When trust exists, we are able to see criticism as information to help us improve.
In the experiment, some students received “wise feedback” while other students received “neutral feedback” on their papers. Simply through the type of feedback that was given to a student, there was a marked improvement in students choosing to revise their paper (a 40% increase in student effort) and improvement in overall performance on the final paper (you can see the study here).
So, what was the magical feedback that led to such extreme improvements? What note was written on the top of each paper with similar feedback below? The experimental phrase was:
“I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.”
That’s right – 19 words written on the top of the paper. In other aspects of the study, these words helped develop greater trust between the student and the teacher, which in turn provided students with a sense of belonging and connection.
For the students who were in the control group, the note at the top of the page looked very different. It simply said “I’m giving you these comments so that you’ll have feedback on your paper.”
Remember that feedback tells us about the relationship that we hold together. Feedback like what you see in bold above gives the students some clear messages: you’re part of this group; we have high standards; and I believe you can reach those standards. So what lessons can we as teachers take away from this? In the post from Juliani that led me to this research study, he referenced an article by Daniel Coyle, the author of The Talent Code. His lessons from this study are as follows:
Connect: As John Wooden said, they can’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
Highlight the group: Seek ways (traditions, mantras, fun little rituals) to show what it meas to belong in your crew.
Don’t soft-pedal high standards: Don’t pretend that it’s easy – do the opposite. Emphasize the toughness of the task, and your belief that they have what it takes!
Have you found success in sharing feedback in this manner? If so, share with us how you let students know that they are part of the group, the group has high standards, and your belief that the students can reach those standards.
The View from 518 