teaching Archives - Page 3 of 4

Reading Voice vs Thinking Voice

I’ve been working a lot with my 6th graders on close reading for the past few months. We’ve been previewing, reading, annotating, rereading, synthesizing. Or, at least trying. Some of my students took to the approach right away, surprising me with how much they really got that we reread to understand more deeply and annotate to document our thinking or point out specific ideas. But others just thought it was a waste of their time. For these kids, reading wasn’t necessarily about making meaning, it was about getting things done.

Getting to the end.

Getting the questions answered.

Getting on to the next thing.

Getting it all done, so I can do something better.

This is a mindset that reading teachers struggle to change. There are definitely things that help–increasing independent reading time, helping students to choose reading material that they’ll really love, high-interest texts for instruction, authentic tasks–but when you’ve tried all of those and your students who just run a little too fast and are speeding their way through things, having a discussion about reading voice vs thinking voice can be very helpful.

I first encountered the idea of explicitly teaching about reading voice vs thinking voice, was when I read Cris Tovani’s book I Read It But I Don’t Get It very early in my career (probably my first year). This book is an amazing resource for anyone who teaches striving readings in middle or high school. In grad school, we always talked about self-monitoring and using fix-up strategies as one of the keys to strong reading comprehension, but the tools I left with were pretty limited (I am a bit worried this is still the case now that I’m teaching the class, but I’m working on it!). Really, I had one. It was called “The Critter” and it came from one of the course texts from my first semester practicum. It involved drawing an odd looking creature that the students would use to personify their thinking voices. I’m sure you can imagine how this strategy goes over with most middle schoolers. I’ve used and modified Cris Tovani’s lesson over and over again and I’ve had a lot of success with it.

The biggest thing that hooks kids is that I talk about a strategy that I really do use in real life. I can explain, quite vividly, how it works for me. When I’m reading I know that I’m not paying attention if the only thing I hear is my Reading Voice–the words going by in my head with no questions or connections popping up, I’m not engaged in reading and I’m not comprehending. But, if I’m making too many connections… You know how that goes: one connection leads to another and soon I’m thinking about what I’m going to eat for dinner later, or that one time I went to the beach in North Carolina…I’m not reading at all anymore. Well, my eyes are moving along the page, but the only voice I hear is my thinking voice. But, when my reading voice and thinking voice work together, that’s when you’re a reader who is actively engaged in comprehending a text.

After discussing and modeling, I ask students to add post-its to the anchor chart with examples of their reading voices and thinking voices to the anchor chart using post-its. I prompt them to add more information after they’ve done a few sessions of independent reading. It’s amazing what they begin to notice. I’m hoping we can keep revisiting this strategy, especially for my students who would really rather that reading was over with as soon as possible.

How do you teach self-monitoring and other metacognitive skills when you teach reading?

Checking-in in the New Year

Skyview Atlanta — The second-best picture I took in Atlanta. Again, there’s a metaphor here. I’m sure of it.

At the beginning of the school year I set goals for myself as a teacher. Right now I’m asking my students to check in on their progress toward their goals in their digital portfolios and the teachers I coach to reevaluate the goals they set at the beginning of the year, so I’m checking in on my progress as well. I also have finally set a coaching goal for myself after attending Pete Hall’s Building Teachers’ Capacity for Success workshop through ASCD.

Improve my behavior management for my “challenging” class

This is hard to admit, but I haven’t done a great job following through with this one. I’ve done many of the things that I said I was going to do, but in the more short term. The problem is, I know exactly (or at least partially) why things I’m trying aren’t working. I’ve been so focused on finding strategies to manage behavior and making those strategies work, that I’m not focused enough on planning engaging lessons to meet my students’ needs. I’m not walking into class with no plan, but I’ve been so focused on anticipating behaviors and what strategies I would use to manage these behaviors, that the content and concepts in the lessons I’ve been planning have been, well, less than stellar. So when my strategies work, the activities I have planned aren’t enough to hold the students’ attention and keep them on that good track. It hurts to admit that I dropped the ball here, but it happens and I can fix it. For the remainder of the year I want to keep implementing the strategies that are working, but refocus my efforts on lesson planning so that my students can be successful.

Better integrate the technology I have available to me into my lessons, including finding more ways to leverage “regular” technology as assistive technology for my students.

Here I’ve done much better. I’ve implemented digital portfolios for my students and I’ve been slowly refining them so they become spring-boards for student self-reflection and learning. Yesterday a student exclaimed as he had realized that our work with SRSD and Close Reading had been just as much about improving his ability to manage and regulate his attention as they had been about his reading and writing skills after going through a variety of digital and paper artifacts showing his work. I also am now able to very easily share student work with a parent who has moved back to Denmark ahead of the rest of the family.

I’ve also curated a number of resources for students on my Schoology pages for my learning support classes, including videos and interactive games (usually created by others), as well as graphic organizers (usually created by me). What’s even better is that some students are seeking out and using these resources. I think my next step here is to add more content that I’ve created (or that my students have created) to these resource pages, using podcasting, screen capture, and other methods.

Finally, the coaching goal: Go into classrooms regularly (1-2 times per week) for either very quick (30-45 seconds) or brief (5-15 minute) visits and follow up on these visits with teachers.

Or actually doing what Pete Hall calls “Rounds” and “Walk Throughs”. This goal sounds simple, but it involves a lot: coordinating schedules, figuring out “look-fors”, etc. But the biggest reason I haven’t done this is that I haven’t felt comfortable. I wasn’t given a clear description of what I would be doing as a coach at the beginning of the year, nor was it explained to teachers, so I spent most of the first semester in meetings with teachers, talking and building relationships. Now that I feel like I have a job description (even if it’s self-created with the help of a workshop and a book) and have built up fairly good relationships with many teachers, it will, I hope, be easier. The short workshop I led on Tuesday afternoon about checking in and reevaluating goals from the beginning of the year will also provide context for my visits.

How are the goals you set for your own teaching at the beginning of the year going?

Pausing to Reflect: Self-Reflection on Teaching Self-Reflection

Image by David Whelan via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

Self-reflection is an important part of growth and learning. I’m trying to ask my students to do more of it this year. I’m asking my M2 (grade 6) students to create digital portfolios (more on them soon..check out Matt Renwick’s book though!) where they track their progress toward goals they’ve set for themselves, as well as the goals that I’ve created for them for the learning plans or IEPs. Within the SRSD writing framework I’m asking students to evaluate their own work, reflect on their progress, and set new goals for themselves. Many of them enjoy these activities, but I have had several students who were resistant. The most interesting response that I got was that it was “tacky” to do self-reflections. I still haven’t figured out what she actually meant. But given that resistance I thought I should practice what I preach and figure out what went wrong.

Clearly something was making this student uncomfortable, even if she was having difficulty articulating it. Did she mean that the task–write a note to your parents that I would share with them at parent-teacher conferences telling them how you thing you’re doing meeting your goals–felt inauthentic and maybe a little weird? I suppose I can’t actually argue with her there. It might not have been able to come up with something a little more authentic. Is “tacky” for this kid like Holden Caufield’s “phony”? Had she just been asked to do the same exercise in all of her other classes and it was just enough? I realized that in addition to all of those possibilities, I hadn’t ever actually made reflection something real–something that I engage in both at work and in my day-to-day life. I didn’t let her know about all the ways reflection happens in the real life of an adult. And, yes, none of them involve a letter to my mom…

When I’m teaching I ask myself whether lessons went well and why or why not, including how I interacted with students, and I do some self-reflection in writing on this blog;
When I improvise a recipe I reflect on cooking techniques and ingredient choices and I make notes for what I’ll do if I try it again;
When I bake bread I take a bite of the finished loaf and reflect on my technique and the choices I made about rising time and liquid-to-flour ratios;
When I finish I run I ask myself if I’m tired and whether I could have pushed myself to run faster or farther;
When I finish knitting a sweater I look at how it fits and make notes about how I might change things the next time I knit a sweater so that it will fit even better.

As much as I am philosophically all for letting kids know why what I’m asking them to do is important to their lives–not just their lives as students, but their lives as human beings–sometimes I don’t do a great job of remembering to tell them that these are things that I’m not just telling them that people do, but that I do. And because I’ve learned that this helps me to be successful, I think it’s important to teach my students. Maybe I need to look into ways to making my self-reflection practices more transparent to my students, the same way I talk about what I’m reading or ways that I used math that day.

How do you make skills that seem like “school” things, but are a actually a part of your everyday life as an adult, feel relevant to your students? How do you make self-reflection activities authentic?

Games for Learning

Twelve a Dozen Screenshot via Game Revolution

This is what I’ve found this year: It is easy to add games to my classroom. It’s not, however, easy to use games for learning, either to support student learning as an intervention or to extend student learning. More importantly, it’s not easy to teach students to learn from games. Or at least the students I am teaching this year.

What I’m noticing is that many of my students are used to being passive consumers of game entertainment. They are mostly casual gamers, but some of them use systems like the X-Box to play FIFA Soccer. Otherwise they play games like Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja. Not that there’s anything wrong with either of these games. They’re fun, and can involve strategy. I even know someone who does a physics project that’s entirely centered on Angry Birds. But, the tack my students have taken on these games is, as they call it, “spray and pray”. They seem to lack the patience and problem solving skills that many of my friends who play RPGs or puzzle games seem to have cultivated, and that I even noticed in my youngest sister when she started gaming in middle school (I was in grad school at this point). When playing games like Dragon Box 12+ or Twelve a Dozen, my students quickly give up and try to sneak over to play 2048 or decide to take some selfies. However, I have another group of students who become totally immersed in these games. They stop by at lunch and ask if they can borrow my iPad to play Twelve again. They discuss strategy. They’re enthralled by Dragon Box and have even started making connections between the game and algebra tasks. What’s the difference between these two groups?

I know my approach hasn’t been different with them. I introduced the games in the same way, gave the same preview, and provided similar supports when they asked questions. Perhaps it is that one group is 7th graders and one is 6th graders, but I have a second 7th grade group where a majority of the students are more like the 6th grader group–engaged and interested in solving problems. It could have something to do with learned helplessness. It could also have something to do with the students’ respective understandings of what games are, and how their particular learning styles interact with the characteristics of my chosen games, and how my students’ experiences with school frame their educational gaming experiences.

According to Jane McGonigal in her book Reality is Broken, games are defined by four characteristics: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation (p 26). Each of these characteristics impacts a person’s engagement with a game–whether it’s a board game, a puzzle, an iPad app, or a complex MMORPG.

A Goal

McGonigal defines a goal in a game as the specific outcome a player wants to achieve. This goal, she says, is what gives the player a sense of purpose. In Twelve the goal to get the main character, 12, home after an explosion in the city of Dozonopolis that destroyed the super-computer. In Dragon Box it’s to help the dragon hatch–it will only come out of the box to eat when it is alone on one side of the screen. But the idea of a goal becomes more complex when we’re talking about using games for learning. For example, I have a goal for my students beyond the explicit goal of the game. I want them to sharpen skills and begin to develop answers to our essential questions: How do patterns in the world help us to make meaning and become better learners?, How can I use known information to figure out new information?, and What strategies can I use to work through a problem when I’m stuck? I chose these games specifically because, in addition to having an engaging explicit goal, the implied goals of the games (the learning goals) matched up with my goals for my students. But are the explicitly stated goals of the game enough to give my students a sense of purpose? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But if they don’t understand the implicit goals, will they be actively engaged with the game enough to achieve the implicit goals? This is where I’m getting stuck.

Rules

I really like McGonigal’s definition of game rules: They place limitations on how one can achieve the goal of the game, forcing gamers to think creatively and apply problem solving skills. This is another point where my students start to get stuck. I posted a while ago about how being comfortable with being uncomfortable, confused, or not knowing was an important skill for students to learn. In both of these games, the rules and obstacles reveal themselves slowly and new rules are added as the games progress. For students who aren’t comfortable with working their way through confusion, these games can be very frustrating. I don’t want to choose different game though. I chose these two specifically because I wanted my students to work on answering essential questions that lead them toward being comfortable with working their way through confusion to be problem solvers. Not having the skills or understanding of problem solving techniques to work their way through this, however, is making it difficult. This is another spot where using games for learning gets tricky.

We often think of games and gamification as a way to pull in reluctant or struggling learners, but as games become more than just a fun way to practice math drills (who around my age that’s reading this didn’t relish the opportunity to play Math Blaster?) or spelling words, some of these students end up at a disadvantage again. And it’s not because they can’t do what’s being asked. Many of these students are proficient problem solvers in other areas: video games, skateboarding, soccer, building go-karts, designing art projects, planning events. It’s possibly because they aren’t comfortable with the possibility of failure and trying again in school. Even if the gaming environment is supposed to be a safe one for making mistakes and for trying and retrying, as McGonigal asserts, the other difficulties many of these students have encountered in school is making these games for learning something that doesn’t connect them to the problem solving that they’re used to, but brings them back to school where they may have learned that not getting it the first time is failure.

The question now becomes: How do I pull these kids in? How do I scaffold this before and during game play so that they can use the games to help build their capacity for problem solving and their tolerance for working through the unknown? Perhaps I should be modeling game play more and talking through how I work my way through obstacles. Maybe we just need more time with non-digital games (which I use a great deal as well and have actually experienced similar challenges with), so I can do more of that modeling. I can also do more to model how in-game supports can help me work through problems and figure out how to work within the rules of the game. For example, Dozen has a hint button, and Duolingo (a gamified language learning app) will translate words for you as you’re going through practice mode if you tap them. I, wrongly, assume that as frequent game players my students understand these types of supports or know to look for them, but that’s not necessarily the case. I think we also need more conversations about growth mindset and about positive self-talk in order to improve their self-regulation skills.

A Feedback System

Feedback systems tell us how close we’re getting to the goal. It can be something as simple as a progress bar or points, to more complex forms of feedback like text or voice feedback. Feedback keeps us engaged in games because it tells us how we’re doing and lets us know if we’re breaking the rules. One thing I have noticed is that the students who are less engaged in the games haven’t necessarily picked up on the feedback that’s being provided. In some cases, it seems like there’s a genuine mismatch between the student’s learning style and the type of feedback they’re receiving. But in others, it seems like I need to do a better job of teaching them how to use the feedback that’s being provided.

I have one student who struggled with Twelve a Dozen. This game has a narrator that gives feedback on your performance, ranging from informing you of new rules or obstacles to overcome to telling the player that it’s time to rewind and try again. The narration is also captioned. The narrator serves several purposes: reconnecting the player to the goal during a long term game, explaining rules, and giving feedback. Since it serves so many functions, it is important to listen to, even if it is a little annoying (think of the Paperclip from older versions of Word, crossed with a fussy British nanny, with a dash of dorky mathematician humor). This child turned off the sound (because he found the narrator annoying and thought it was unnecessary) and didn’t read the captioned version, so he had no idea that he was getting feedback on the way he was trying to solve the problem (“Maybe we should rewind and try something different”). There are also more subtle forms of feedback that my students miss that involve changes in color on the screen or a simple “Yuck” from the dragon in Dragon Box. Players have to be closely attending to a game and be an active participant in the game in order to realize why the dragon is saying “yuck” instead of “yum” and adjust their game-play appropriately.

I’m not sure if the difficulties my students are having using feedback for determine what they’ve learned and what they need to do next is something that they’ll learn through experience, or something I’ll have to teach them. Either way, it seems that in order to learn from gaming, they need to be able to read and take in feedback from the games.

Voluntary Participation

This final characteristic of games is, I think, one of the most important when we want to use games for learning. Being a voluntary participant in a game, according to McGonigal, means that you buy into all of the above and are agreeing to the goal and the rules. And as I said above, my goal for having a student play a game (and the implied goal of the game) may not match up with why a student is playing a game. When that happens, can learning happen? I think so, but it’s more challenging. I think games really have the power to draw learners in and engage them in difficult work in a fun way. But I think we also need to start scaffolding their abilities to engage with the goal, the rules/obstacles and the feedback system in order for them to truly be voluntary participants and use games as tools for learning.

Nearly 2000 words later, I’m still in the same place that I started. I know that games are a powerful tool for learning and that I think they have great potential for engaging my students, but I’m not entirely sure how to make that happen. I think the most helpful thing I can do for them is to keep working with them to build their perseverance and their problem solving skills, as well as do more modeling of how I engage with games and learn from them.

How do you use games for learning in your classroom? Any advice for how to help students become active participants in game play, rather than passive consumers of game entertainment?

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.