Samantha Mosher, Author at Samantha Mosher

My New Classroom Design

When I started my job a year ago, I went to look at my room–which is tiny and has no windows to the outside–and saw six student desks with chairs piled in the middle of the room, a giant teacher’s desk, one wall that felt like it was made of cardboard that was covered in deep scratches, the box for an active board, the cords for the yet-to-be-installed projector dangling from the ceiling, and what I now affectionately refer to as my “window to nowhere”. I’m not ashamed to admit it–I burst into tears. Ordering appropriate furniture, I was told, was out of the question. Thankfully, I had some wonderful colleagues who scavenged bookshelves and better furniture for me from around the school while I was in new staff orientation. I worked with what I had. I made it better, but never really succeeded in finding something I was happy with. Part of it is the size of the room, part of it is the furniture, and part of it was having trouble figuring out what I wanted learning support to look like for me and my students. And, if I’m totally honest, part of it was being overwhelmed by being new and frustrated with what I had. Classroom design was the furthest thing from my mind most of the year.

This year I decided to start setting up the Friday before staff had to be back. I started by trying to track down the IKEA cube shelf that I had ordered for manipulative storage. Nope. Never ordered. I found some boxes to pack the materials in and then got started on fixing the window to nowhere. Last year one of my adorable M1s suggested that I put up a poster of the Brooklyn Bridge so I could have a view just like Ms. Other Learning Specialist. While it was an adorable suggestion, I could see how it could maybe, possibly, be misconstrued by adults and might seem passive aggressive. Just a bit, right?

So I turned this:

My window to nowhere. Complete with a sequined bracelet, lost eternally behind all of the lockers.

Into this:

I decided that black and white letters would really pop on my newly pained, extremely bright green door. So I picked these up from Staples. And voila!

Classroom design: My new door — My new classroom door

I covered my icky wall in purple paper and set up sections for Essential Questions, Problem Solving, and Writing.

Here’s a close up of my EQs:

A trip to the Container Store and I had storage bins for manipulatives–I can’t recommend these bins highly enough. They have smaller containers inside where I was able to sort things by type. If I had manipulatives for more that my groups of 5 or 6, I would probably use the trays to make sets of just enough per table and have students come up and take a tray back to their group.

I also decided the solution to my lack of shelving for storage lay in my magnetic walls–the magnetic pencil holders that kids use in their lockers. And I printed out some cute labels from TPT that continued the green, purple, chevrons & polkadots theme. I need to pick up a few more this weekend. I’m hoping to have bins for highlighers, pencils, pens, markers, scissors, and Expo markers. For the Expo markers I’m going to pick up one of the divided containers so I can put the markers and eraser in the same bin.

IMG_20140829_074821 — Obviously, I need a better way to affix these…magnets?

I also got a few of the same magnetic containers I use to store my spices and turned them into storage for paper clips, tacks, and…something else…not sure what goes in the middle one yet.

As far as furniture goes, after much consideration, I decided to pass my comfy red chair along to one of my colleagues in the English department who has more space, and is looking into setting up an independent reading program for her 7th graders. As much as I love the idea of having a comfortable space for students to do independent work, who got to sit in the chair became a constant source of argument amongst the students–even when I set a schedule for who got to sit in the chair when. And for many of the students, this was the first time in middle school that they had a chair like that to sit in, so it was really difficult to shift their thinking from “this is a place to relax” to “this is a comfortable place to do work”.

After much shifting of tables and staring at the room hoping that a good plan would reveal itself, I finally decided to put the tables along the wall, and one desk opposite. The students would be able to do both independent and collaborative work at the tables, and I could use the desk for either a student who needed some extra space around her to focus or to work with students 1:1. The one comfy touch I kept were the cube footstools that students often sit on to do work. They’re soft enough to be a bit bouncy for kids that need to fidget, but just the right height to put at the tables or the desk. They’re also great for sitting on when using laptops, a small whiteboard, or writing on a clipboard.

How did you set up your room this year? For those of you who do intervention, what types of furniture/configuration have you found best for working with students?

It’s Better to Light One Candle…

Photo by Djruhavi S. via Flicker. Creative Commons 2.0 — Photo by Dhruvaraj S. via Flickr. Creative Commons 2.0

I’ve been trying and failing for a week to write a post about Ferguson and racism and our role as educators in discussing it, or about the need to teach digital citizenship in the wake of incidents like what happened to Zelda Williams on Twitter. But the truth is, I feel helpless and ill-equipped. Deep down, I know that’s not true. My mantra since my days as an over-zealous, left-leaning high school freshman in my school’s Amnesty International group has been “It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.” I can do something, even if it seems small. I have the theoretical and pedagogical knowledge I need to to talk about these things. I’ve read the right books. I have a computer with internet access, and so thousands of resources at my fingertips, and the critical thinking skills and background knowledge to weed through it all. So why should I feel helpless? As I’ve been trying to write I’ve come to the conclusion (that as a veteran teacher I’m slightly ashamed of) that while I can discuss these things academically, I really don’t know how to talk about them with kids.

Sure, I nodded my head and was inspired in Social Foundations of Education where we read Beverly Daniel Tatum and Ruby Payne, and all of these ideas have served me well in my career. And yes, I’ve been in situations that have opened my eyes to the privilege that exists in being a white, straight, able-bodied person with a college education and a job that puts me solidly in the middle class, even if there are other aspects of my self that aren’t as privileged. And that understanding has helped shape my interactions with students of color, students with disabilities, students who identify as a part of the LGBT community and at least try to be aware of how my own privilege might color my perceptions. I’ve taught in communities where being profiled by police and store owners was (and probably still is) a common occurrence for my students, and I’ve had serious conversations with these students about their experiences. But the kids I don’t know how to talk to are economically advantaged students I teach now–mostly the white students, but not always–about these things.

That all said I’ve been thinking a lot this week about how I am going to counter racist, sexist, and homophobic comments in my own classroom. And I’m still not sure. I tend to address things head on with my students, but as I said above, it’s been a challenge.

What do I say to the white student who accuses his teachers of being racist against him (possibly because he doesn’t really have the words to express that he thinks his teachers are treating him unfairly because he learns differently)? Last year after several failed attempts to explain that (1) that’s a really serious allegation in our school, (2) I don’t think you really understand what racism is…let’s talk about that, and (3) perhaps your non-white classmates don’t appreciate it when you say that, I ended up giving up and ignoring. Not the best choice. I’m not sure how to help this student see that racism is a huge problem in our society and something that, in all likelihood, neither he nor I have actually experienced. Like I said, I have plenty of academic sounding language (it probably includes the word “hegemony”) to discuss these ideas with adults, but is that really going to make sense to a 12 year old?

I didn’t have to have these conversations with my students at my previous school, because, well, they knew, and it was my role to listen and reflect. I’ve had many other encounters of this sort–where that phrase I hate, “check your privilege”, seems almost the best response. I don’t want you to think it happens all of the time. It doesn’t. But those few incidents add up.

Part of my issue is that in a skills-based intervention course, there’s not often time to sit and have these deeper discussions, and I need to find ways to make space for it. Often when we’re working on expository reading or writing, I’ll highlight a current event, especially something that will spark that sort of deeper discussion. And I’m going to continue to do that, and try to create more space for that sort of discussion. But part of the issues is that I didn’t anticipate having these issues. I probably should have. But I didn’t. And now that I know I can change things at the start of this year. What I do know for sure:

Set clear expectations about how we treat each other and what kinds of language is acceptable is important.
Look to find more ways to link my reading and writing intervention work to the concepts being taught in the social justice and service learning curriculum that some of our Humanities teams are trying to add to the curriculum.
Don’t ignore, but don’t get into a power struggle either.
Address things when they happen.
Figure out how to talk like a normal human being on subjects like racism, sexism, and homophobia, rather than like an academic (have you guessed that I’m really bad at this? If you’ve read some of my blog entries you already know I have trouble letting go of my academic voice)

I’m hopeful that I can put these things in place and light my one small candle. Any advice? How do you deal with these things when they occur in your classroom?

Gut Feelings Versus Data

I was struck by the feedback that one participant gave Pooja Patel and I on our workshop last week:

Please do another workshop on that is on data. A lot of teachers around me reacted negatively when you talk about data. They said they “just know” what their students need and don’t need the data. I think a lot of teachers don’t understand why it is important.

I would love to do another workshop about data–both qualitative and quantitative–and how we really use it in the classroom. Not because I’m into” big data”, and not because I think we need to quantify everything a student does. In fact, I generally find qualitative data to be a much more powerful tool–Matt Renwick did a great post on that here. I want to do a workshop because data-driven instruction is a really powerful method that we as teachers have in our teaching toolbox, and I get annoyed that this has become synonymous with quantifying everything (although–full disclosure: I work at an international school, so many of the the testing and quantitative data pressures faced by my public school colleagues aren’t things that I have to deal with). Formative assessment, on-going diagnostic assessment, little tiny observations we make during the day and put together to create a big picture of a student’s progress–they all help teachers to make informed decisions about instruction. Also I’ve heard from a lot of teachers, both at school, in my graduate course, and at the workshop that they rely on “gut feelings” to decide on a groupings, next steps, and interventions. But are our guts the best way to make decisions like these?

Let’s deconstruct this idea of a “gut feeling”. Sometimes when I’m first articulating ideas about what a student needs or how she should be grouped in the classroom, I’ve made all sorts of informal observations here and there, I’ve looked at some work samples, but I haven’t really fully analyzed anything yet. I might have a “gut feeling” about what’s going on with that student–probably because I’m an experienced teacher and diagnostician and I’m already starting to make sense of the qualitative data that I’ve gathered, but I can’t really put it into a coherent statement with specific examples or data to support my “feeling”. And, in my experience, this is what a lot of experienced teachers mean when they say that they “just know” or that their “gut tells” them. But here’s the thing about my gut feeling–it’s not a fully articulated plan or idea. It’s not fleshed out, and, generally, as I begin to explore that feeling it starts to become more nuanced, and sometimes it ends up being the complete opposite of what my feeling was initially. And sometimes I was completely on target. Which is awesome. But it’s certainly not all the time. I’m probably right just as much as I’m wrong.

That said, sometimes my feeling is much less about the bits and pieces of qualitative data that I’m beginning to make sense of, and more about my preconceived notions about a student. Sometimes it’s the Halo Effect and sometimes it’s something else. It’s not really right, and it’s not really good practice, but it happens. It’s happened to me and sometimes it still happens (and, no, I’m not proud of it, just trying to be honest), and it’s probably happened to you too. We’re human. And that’s OK. But we do need to acknowledge that sometimes these other things that aren’t data about student performance to influence these feelings, and that those other things might not bring us to what’s best for a student. That is why we can’t just stop at a gut feeling. We need to really look at all of the sources of that feeling and turn it into a strong idea that’s supported with evidence.

So how do we coach teachers into moving from “feeling” to “thinking”? I’m really not sure. I think some of it is becoming more educated–especially at the middle level–about qualitative data (more on that next week). What is it? How do we analyze it? And remembering that teaching is a craft and a skill. As teachers, we don’t need to immediately know what’s going on with kids from some sort of magical intuition. If it comes down to our gut feelings versus data, we need to look at both. Sometimes that feeling means something else needs to be explored, but it shouldn’t be the only way we make decisions.

Self-Regulation Strategies in the Classroom

Self-regulation strategies: Positive self-talk — Positive self-talk, and important part of self-regulation. Source

One of my goals for this summer that I wrote about in my first post was to look for ways to expand my use of self-regulation strategies in my classroom next year. This summer I’ve been doing a bit of reading and exploring about that topic and thinking about how to include more of it in my class. And, as I discussed in last week’s post, I think that confusion and struggle with material can be productive, but only if we have really taught our students how to work through that confusion. Teaching self-regulation strategies is a good way to do this.

What is Self-Regulation?

Self-regulation is our ability to manage ourselves: our bodies, our emotions, our focus and our attention. When reading about self-regulation, the first thing that usually pops into my head is “This sounds like executive functioning”, and they are related. In order to self-regulate, we need to rely on and coordinate a number of executive functioning skills. Self-regulation is how we actively control our behaviors and our emotions. I wanted to get a better idea of what teaching self-regulation entails outside of reading and writing, so I read the book Self-Regulated Learning for Academic Success by Carrie Germeroth and Crystal Day-Hess, which I picked up at ASCD in March. It’s a good, quick read (only 45 pages) that gives a great overview of self-regulated learning and provides usable strategies.

SRSD for Reading and Writing

When I talk about self-regulation, I’m generally talking about Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD). I have been using these strategies for writing since graduate school. I’m a big believer in the power of SRSD. I’ve seen how well they work with students of all ability levels. It’s also a strategy that’s been researched quite well. I even include it as a part of my graduate course for reading teachers. I don’t have the time or the space here to give SRSD it’s due in explaining it, but check out Think SRSD for a full explanation and free resources or the book Powerful Writing Strategies for All Students. There are two components of the program that I really want to discuss: goal setting and positive self talk, because these are the aspects of SRSD that I want to try to pull into other parts of my teaching practice.

Goal Setting

Goal setting is a key component for SRSD and something that Germeroth and Day-Hess focus on as an important skill to teach to middle and high school students. When student are trying something new or working on something that is difficult for them, goal setting helps to break tasks down into manageable chunks and helps them focus their attention on one area in need of improvement (it also helps the rest of us in every day life, from work related tasks, to things we do for pleasure). When we set goals and reflect on our progress toward them, we are able to create action plans to help us achieve these goals. If we use SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound), we can even graph our progress toward a goal.

With my M1 (grade 5) group last year I had students with a number of different writing needs. I could rarely teach whole group lessons. So I had them self-assess their writing (with frequent modeling and scaffolding from me), and then set one goal for themselves helped me to teach them appropriate strategies and develop interventions to help them reach their goals. When I created graphic organizers for them based on our SRSD mnemonics, I always included a line for a goal, I always asked them to rewrite it at the top of their rough draft, and there was always a line for their goal on the revising and editing checklists that we used, so the goal was always in mind. They tracked their progress both through graphing progress–we decided together what a strong example of what they were trying to do would look like, an “almost there”, and a “keep trying” so they could rate their own performance–and through an online writing portfolio that we created using Google Sites, where they reflected on their progress and then created new goals. This worked really well, and I’d like to do this again if I have a group that needs writing intervention. What was key, though, was explicitly teaching them the learning skills that they needed, or helping to teach the missing skills they needed in order to achieve these goals. Making the process of achieving the goal transparent is what made the learning relevant and what helped teach them why it was important to set goals.

I’d like to spend more time with goal setting this year and use it for areas other than writing. I think it will help students to understand the purpose of the interventions we do and take more ownership of their learning. While we set goals last year, I think aside from that M1 group, I didn’t do a good enough job of keeping the goals at the forefront of what we were doing–we discussed them at the beginning of the school year, and maybe set new ones at the midpoint, but we didn’t really go back and revisit as often as we should. I’d like to use more goal setting sheets like these. And perhaps make a classroom display about goal setting where we could share our goals. I think I’d like to keep progress personal though. Otherwise it feels too much like a data wall to me. I also want to publicly acknowledge when students have made progress. It’s a tricky spot and I’m still working through it.

Positive Self-Talk

Part of the goal of any special education program should be teaching for independence and generalization of strategies. I’ve noticed in the past year that I’ve been at my school that most of the students I teach have a lot of trouble with positive self-talk and without positive self-talk, it’s hard to get through those times where we’re stuck working toward our goal or when something is just difficult or confusing. They do well when taking tests in my room when I can remind them that they have the strategies to tackle a tough math question, but they have difficulty with that internal monologue that successful problem solvers have–positive self-talk. That positive self-talk is what helps to get students through to their goal–what they need to say to themselves to remind themselves to use the strategies they’re learning. I really liked the idea below that was tweeted by someone participating in an SRSD workshop with Think SRSD in Tennessee.

I’m wondering if this is a better way to go–rather than publicly tracking progress toward the goal, maybe we can surround the posted goal with speech bubbles filled with the positive self-talk the student needs to engage in to help achieve the goal. I like that it helps to focus the students on the process of achieving a goal. The outcome is important, but what I’m really trying to teach them is how to set a goal, create a plan to achieve it, apply strategies, and then persevere to achieve the goal. I could even apply technology…maybe use Aurasma to connect their goal to video or audio clips of the student or someone that they consider a cheerleader or supporter in their life reminding them of their positive self-statements. That way the positive self-statements that connect with the goal aren’t static things on my wall, but living things they can take with them.

Doing more to really teach and model how to engage in positive self-talk to get through tricky spots in reading and writing, through difficult math problems, or while test taking is going to be one of my teaching goals for next year. It’s so important and I have such a hard time doing it. Modeling it often feels fake to me, and I’m not sure why. I use positive self-talk all the time. When I’m at work, at the gym, knitting, trying to execute the perfect lattice-top for a pie. I think the times I was most successful in doing this last year was when before I modeled using positive self-talk in academic settings, I talked about how I use it outside of school. We talked about planks. (Somehow, I always come back to Pilates, don’t I?)

Planks are hard, but the only time they’re impossible is if you spend the entire time telling yourself that you can’t do it. I talked about doing plank, why it was hard, and how it became easier when I stopped focusing on what I couldn’t do, and focused on telling myself that I could do it, and if I fell down, I told myself it was OK and that I could try again. Then we all did it. For most of my students, the idea that we need to be kind to ourselves when we’re doing something difficult and that positivity well help us to persevere really stuck. There are others that I still need to figure out how to reach. Even with the explicit connection to how we all use positive self-talk outside of school–“Do you always do every trick in skateboarding perfectly the first time? What do you do when you fall?”–they’re still not making the connection. These are the kids I’m still working on figuring out how to reach.

What’s Next?

I spent the some time this summer looking at other ways to include self-regulation strategies, particularly positive self-talk and goal setting, in other areas of my instruction. I just finished reading an article by Bell & Pape published in Middle School Journal (2013) that’s all about using self-regulation strategies in the math classroom. I’d really like to start using it more with the students I’m working with in math, and I’m hoping to convince some of the math teachers to integrate it into their classrooms too. We’re using Bridges in M1 math this year, and they actually have posters with problem solving questions to ask when you’re stuck. I love that idea, and would like to put those in my room too. I think that both goal setting and positive self-talk will be really beneficial for the students that I work with in math. Most of them have experienced so much failure and have such a negative view of themselves as math students, that small successes and little bursts of positivity can have a huge effect.

The real struggle, however, is getting other teachers on board. Teaching kids these strategies in the bubble of my intervention room is fine, but if I want them to apply the strategies elsewhere with any sort of consistency, I need other teachers to see the value of the work I’m doing with these kids. To encourage them to use their positive self-statements, to understand the goals these kids are working toward and really celebrate their progress. But how to do that? It can be overwhelming for a classroom teacher with little experience dealing with students with disabilities to keep all of this in mind, and I want to be a supporter rather than piling one more thing on their plates. We all want the best for our students and I need to figure out a way to make it easy for teachers to incorporate these ideas and support the students I work with.

How do you incorporate goal setting and positive self-talk into your classrooms? Any advice for coaching/consulting in these tough situations?

Is Confusion Productive?

Two weeks ago when I was at CGC Miami, we had a couple of conversations where the idea of confusion came up. One was when we discussed what happens in one’s brain when learning happens–not fMRI scans or anything, just feelings, attitudes, etc. Then we had another discussion about what learning looked like in a classroom. The word “confusion” came up in both contexts. A woman who was sitting at my table was taken aback when several of us mentioned confusion as something that we expect to see in our classrooms when learning is happening.

“It’s like yesterday,” she said (clearly, I’m paraphrasing from my memory for dramatic effect). “All of the words people use to describe learning are so negative. Learning is positive. We should be using positive words.”

Many of us began to defend confusion as an essential and productive part of the learning process. We were not, however, successful in convincing her, and ended up leaving it off of our chart, though two other groups ended up including it. It led me to the question: Is confusion always negative? Can confusion be productive in the classroom? If so, how do we coach students through confusion and through to deeper learning and understanding?

What does learning mean and how does it relate to confusion?

I think a big part of whether or not we, as teachers or as learners, are comfortable with confusion has a lot to do with how we define learning. If we define learning as remembering a series of facts, then confusion is unacceptable. It means that we as teachers are not being clear and we need to find a better way to present the content. However, if we are defining learning as making connections, developing concepts, exploring dilemmas, and adding the skills necessary to do all of this to our repertoire. When we define learning this way, confusion is inevitable. In this definition we are making sense on concepts and ideas. We’re working in an area that might not be comfortable for us, but once we work our way through the confusion, we know and understand so much more than we did before.

I have a favorite quotation about this kind of learning. I wrote it out neatly and put it on the front of the binder I had in grad school (yes, when I went to grad school people still took notes on paper and put handouts into binders). I hung up a copy in my first classroom/office, and have continued to hang it on the wall of every classroom I’ve had since. I even include it in the first Power Point slide for my grad students on their first day of literacy intervention practicum. (PS–If my crafty sister is reading this blog, I would love a pretty cross-stitched version of this to hang in my intervention room for my birthday…hint, hint)

Generally, we touch on many apparent irrelevancies, and learning implies that at most times we are at least partially confused. Just as one cannot think one’s way into growth, there are times when we are not aware, indeed cannot be aware, that what one is doing is providing the basis for significant growth and discoveries. – John Miller Chernoff (1979)

This quotation is not from an education book. It’s from an ethnomusicology book called African Rhythm and African Sensibility that I bought for a college course called “Political Economy of the Music of the African Diaspora” (yes, I went to a hippie, artsy college. What of it?). Because of this one sentence, I have moved a book that I probably won’t reread, that has margins full of the pretentious notes of a college senior (most of which seem to be about Todorov’s Double Bind), from place to place, apartment to apartment, for over ten years.

I have found this quotation both relevant and inspiring to me on my journey as an educator (how many veteran teachers remember at some point during their first year of teaching how all sorts of seemingly disconnected ideas from student teaching and education coursework suddenly came together in an ah-ha! moment?), and relevant and inspiring to the students I teach. I originally hung this quotation up in my room as a reminder to me that being confused and being uncomfortable (which I often was during my first year of teaching) meant that I was probably laying the groundwork for learning, growth, and discoveries. I didn’t intend it to be inspiring to students–it seemed too long and too complex. But when I had a student ask me about it, and then ask if she could copy it into her notebook, I knew that (1) I had underestimated my 6th graders, and (2) that it is important to let students know that being confused sometimes is OK and that learning is all about working one’s way through confusion and out to the other side.

For confusion to be productive, we need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable

A big part of letting students know that it is OK to be confused is helping them get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Without this, it is almost impossible for confusion to be a productive part of the learning process. But how do we get students comfortable with this?

For starters we need to create a safe learning environment where it’s OK to fail. Learning needs to be seen as a process that we’re all working through at our own pace. I think standards-based grading and letting students have do overs, retakes, etc, also takes us toward this. I have definitely seen anxiety about grades keep students from diving in to something that they’re not necessarily comfortable with or stopping them from grappling with a difficult topic and jumping right into “Can you help me?” or “What do I do next?” This is a challenge that I see not only with my middle school students, but with my graduate students as well. If students are constantly worried about getting the wrong answer and thus a bad grade, how can they work through confusion and into growth?

Students need tools to work through confusion

I really agree with CGC that we need to teach students how to learn, and for me part of that is teaching students about problem solving, perseverance, and resilience. I don’t want to get into a discussion of “grit” (for some reason, the term really annoys me), but I do want to start a conversation about teaching these skills. It’s something I’ve always found tricky, especially since in the past I’ve worked with kids classified as EBD (having emotional or behavioral disorders) that had a really low tolerance for frustration. Teaching them these skills was a much different, and much slower process (and it sometimes involved calling in the crisis para…)

There are some things that I’m absolutely sure about. In order for a student to learn these skills we need to embed them into our general curriculum. As teachers, we need to model these skills repeatedly, and think aloud about how we use positive self-talk in order to get ourselves unstuck when we’re confused or have a problem. In reading, teaching things like self-monitoring and fix-up strategies, and in math giving them tools for each of the process standards. The good people at The Math Learning Center who did our training this past June had some great ideas about hanging questions up on the wall that students can ask themselves while working through problems. There’s also a great post here with some ideas. And next week, I’ll be following up on these ideas with a post on self-regulation and Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD), which is something I’ve been doing a lot of reading about this summer.

But what about more complex problems? Or times when the information we’re taking in doesn’t make sense because it conflicts with something we know or believe to be true? How can we help our students, as the professor of the aforementioned class put it, “enter the contact zone” so learning and knowledge transformation happen? I think we need to make all of these areas come together: comfort with being uncomfortable, a focus on the learning process, a de-emphasis of grades, and explicitly teaching how to work through problems.

What do you think? Is confusion productive in the classroom? What tools have you given your students to work through confusion on their own?

Deadlines

I have a self-imposed deadline for completing posts for this blog (as suggested by Kristy when she did my blog design). The idea is that I work on a post throughout the week, revise and edit them over the weekend, and then publish bright and early Monday morning. Clearly, that didn’t happen this week. I have what I hope is a great post that I’ve been working on. But haven’t really found the time to get it done. Why? Deadlines.

It’s summer, but I feel like I have so many deadlines. They’re everywhere. They’re looming. And most of them are self-imposed, yet somehow firm. And then it’s nearly August. Summer is almost done…What? I have so much left to do! Books to read, classroom design to finalize, a closet to reorganize…And all of the things with real deadlines.

Not self-imposed (or not entirely): I have to finish the handouts and slides for the workshop I’m doing next week. Which is sold out. We were worried there was no way we’d get the minimum 25. Technically, everything is done. But, in my typical fashion, I’m obsessing about it not being perfect. Especially since people I know have told me they’re coming. I know not working on the last few things, which will take a half hour at the most, is not helpful. And I’ll do it. But even though there are exactly three things I need to do, I feel a bit like this (warning: the cartoon is just a graph, but it does use some bad language). I’ve become even more detail focused because people I know keep telling me they’re coming. Why are friends watching your presentation more stressful than strangers?
Last week, after I got back from Miami, I decided that I was going to make a dress to wear to Kate’s wedding, which is this weekend. This is also almost done. But I’m really not sure why I decided that this would be a good idea. Granted, this is a soft deadline. If I don’t finish, I pick up a sundress on my way to Grand Central on Friday and that’s that. The wedding is on a farm. But if someone wants to come over and help with alterations (hard to do when you live alone and don’t sew quite enough to justify a dress form), let me know.
Speaking of Kate’s wedding, most of my weekend and the early part of the week was spent being stressed about how I would get there (deadline: figure out how to get to Kate’s wedding before you actually need to be there). Most of the people I know who are going to the wedding have moved out of NYC, so catching a ride with someone wasn’t working. And apparently every rental car agency in Brooklyn or in the Hudson Valley is closed on Sundays for the summer. Really? It did all work out. Enterprise in Poughkeepsie has a kiosk at the Metro-North station. OK…that one’s checked off, but definitely a deadline that affected the others.
Summer Throw Down. It was supposed to be fun to set goals and read books. But I’ve read five (due to a couple books that I thought would be good, but ended up being a bit of a struggle to get through). And my goal was 10. And July is almost done. Sigh.
Baby shower gifts. Everyone is pregnant. Slight hyperbole. I know three people who are expecting. And, of course, I feel like I need to knit gifts for all of them.
The CSA vegetables. They’re starting to feel like a deadline (you’ve got to eat or freeze them before they go bad). Especially the zucchini…
All of these things.

I should probably stop writing this (which is well past its deadline and probably more a means to procrastinate than actually productive) and get to editing, pinning, sewing, reading, emailing, sweeping up all of the fabric scraps, getting new vacuum cleaner bags so I can get all of the little bits the broom misses…You get the idea.

How do you deal with deadlines? Do they stress you out or do they motivate you?

If as an adult with fairly well-developed coping skills I feel this way about deadlines, how must our students feel? What can we do to help them develop the skills they need?

(And I’m seriously excited for a weekend of celebrating on a farm, whatever I happen to be wearing for that celebration–clearly, I need a break.)

Mapping Our Common Ground

Everybody Learns--Common Ground Collaborative — Image from The CGC website

Last week I was privileged to be able to spend three days with a group of passionate, dedicated, international school educators in Miami to talk about a new curriculum initiative, the Common Ground Collaborative. As you saw last week, there was homework and reflection that happened beforehand, and now I’m trying to wrap my head around all of the things that I learned and to figure out what all of my take-aways are.

The Common Ground Collaborative is the closest thing to a grass-roots curriculum movement that I’ve ever had experience with. It’s a group of educators who saw a need for changing the way teaching and learning happens, and set to work to make that change. I was really struck by how the standards and curriculum framework value all learners and values learners as whole people. Students engage in critical thinking, problem solving (or tackling dilemmas, as Kevin asked us to think of it), and delve deeply into concepts, while simultaneously learning how to learn, and connecting all of this to character development and common ideas and themes that are relevant to all people, called Human Commonalities.

Over the course of three days, we listened to Kevin Bartlett and Simon Gillespie explain the curriculum, engaged in activities and discussions with other educators, both about the theory behind the CGC curriculum, how we can convince our colleagues to get on board, and how, exactly, one makes change happen in a school. We wrote, we talked, we tweeted (although, apparently our hashtag is shared by a Christian youth rally…so you may have to scan through a bit). It was invigorating, intellectually stimulating, and exhausting. I’m so glad to have gone.

As I’ve been thinking through all of this I keep coming back to a couple of key ideas: reframing how we teach, the difference between an authoritative curriculum and an authoritarian curriculum, and, just generally, that change is hard.

Reframing Teaching and Learning

The Triple Helix--Common Ground Collaborative — The Triple Helix. Image Source.

One of the biggest things we discussed was a shift in teaching and learning. The CGC curriculum is a model that says all students can and will learn. This is something I am very passionate about. This is accomplished through defining learning before we design our curriculum. Schools need to have a common understanding of what learning means before we can decide what to teach and how to teach it. CGC defines learning with eight principles (see my responses to those here) and those principles can be distilled into CGC’s tagline: Everyone Learns. I find these principles to be the perfect map for an inclusive school that embraces differentiation and personalization of learning to make school relevant to students.

Instruction is centered on “The 3 Cs” or the “Triple Helix”: conceptual learning, competency learning, and character learning. By defining these three types of learning, and then defining how they are interconnected and spiraled throughout schooling, CGC gives a map not just for defining and designing learning, but for delivering it as well. I want to talk mostly about conceptual and competency learning, but if you want to read more about character learning, see Jen Munnerlyn’s blog post for TIE.

Right now, many schools focus on content (learning facts) rather than focusing on big ideas, or concepts, that cross over multiple disciplines and choosing particular examples to illustrate these concepts. Are the American or French revolutions the only examples of the concept of “revolution” or “change” that we have? Do they need to be taught for children to understand that concept? Probably not. We can choose any number of revolutions depending on our purposes and where we are. Then, once students have built their understanding of that concept, they’re prepared to understand any number of revolutions and make connections between the concept and new event or piece of knowledge. Focusing our learning on concepts rather than isolated pieces of knowledge, and connecting these concepts to the 8 Human Commonalities defined by the CGC, makes the curriculum relevant to students’ lives.

I get really excited about conceptual learning, but I get even more excited about teaching students how to learn and teaching them skills in an authentic, relevant context. As a Learning Specialist, I see one of the biggest strengths of the CGC curriculum as being the competency learning is embedded in the curriculum. In my experience, most kids need to be taught basic learning skills: research, note taking, genre writing, reading for information, but the kids that end up in my program more so than others. Sure, we learn these things best when we’re able to apply them to an authentic, meaningful task or project, but that doesn’t mean that students will absorb it just by doing it. They need purposeful, sequential instruction that is embedded in these larger tasks. The only way this can happen is if we are teaching a concept (understanding) driven curriculum rather than a content (knowledge) driven curriculum. If we as teachers are focused on covering a curriculum jam-packed with facts, we don’t have time to teach these competencies, these learning skills. This is why all of the stands of the triple helix are essential. They work together to create the space where everybody learns.

Authoritative vs. Authoritarian Curriculum

We often use the words authoritative and authoritarian to talk about classroom management, but as my time with the Common Ground Collaborative in Miami went on, these words kept coming to mind as we discussed the curriculum. I hear from a lot of friends who work in public schools that the curriculum that comes from their school or district often feels prescriptive. “Teacher proof”. They feel like they don’t have the opportunity to do what they do best–deliver instruction to a group of kids, and modify it to meet the needs of that group. Or that there is a particular curriculum put in place and, as Kevin joked, it becomes more like a religion than a curriculum. Because of this, I often hear that curriculum would be better if it were put back in the hands of teachers. That’s why when the idea was presented that teachers shouldn’t be writing curriculum, I was a little taken aback.

There was a great deal of discussion about the fact that Gordon Eldridge (the other mind behind the curriculum) and Kevin outsourced the designing of content standards to experts in the field. The biology conceptual standards, for example, were designed by experts at Sheffield University. My knee-jerk reaction when this idea was that sure, biologists have the best understanding of the concepts, but do they know what’s developmentally appropriate? I’m sure we’ve all experienced curricula that seem to have floated down from some ivory tower without any connection to kids. But when Kevin talked about the back and forth that happened between the experts in content and concepts and a group of teachers, I was impressed. Authorities on a subject matter and authorities on student learning and the delivery of content having a conversation and engaging in a revision process together. Suddenly I realized I was seeing the smart way of creating a curriculum. And even more importantly, a great way of creating a curriculum that teachers and schools can trust, as well as a curriculum that implies a trust of teachers and their expertise.

Rather than being a disconnected, top-down, “do this or else”, “take our test to prove you learned/taught” authoritarian curriculum, CGC has developed a curriculum that has the authoritative weight of experts in content and concepts, and has left the decision about how to deliver the curriculum to those who do it best. Teachers. In particular teachers with a shared understanding of what learning means. Schools and teachers can choose to tweak modules to make them relevant to their learners, connecting different pieces of knowledge to the concepts in the curriculum. It’s a curriculum that’s all about doing what’s best for our students.

Change Is Hard

I think a lot of time was also spent talking about how to get everyone on board. I think almost everyone in the room was in. But how do we get everyone else in? I think that many of us were coming from schools where a lot of the faculty sounds like that Grumpy Cat picture above. Change is scary. It’s sometimes easier to complain about the way things are instead of taking the next steps.

What we need to remember is that change is a slow process. It happens in baby steps. In fits and starts. We start with the tiny changes that will lead to improvements in student learning and student engagement. All of those tiny changes, along with buy-in and accountability from the faculty, will add up to something great.

Maybe I’m too much of an idealist right now– you know, that post-conference or workshop high when everything about education has a rosy glow. But I think we can do it. It will take work to bring the CGC curriculum to life in our school and to get everyone on board with the philosophy. It won’t be easy, but what comes out of it will be great for our students. And that’s what we’re all here for, right?