Cult of Pedagogy

Listen to my interview with Maureen Blaha, Executive Director of the National Runaway Safeline (transcript):   Because our mission is to serve and teach kids, any issue that impacts them has the potential to impact our work. And running away from home can impact kids in dangerous ways. We owe it to them to understand the scope of the problem, learn how to spot and respond to the warning signs of running away, and familiarize ourselves with the resources that can help.  One of those resources is the National Runaway Safeline (NRS), a nationwide communication system to serve the needs of runaway and homeless youth. Executive Director Maureen Blaha talked with me about the runaway problem in the U.S. and how teachers can play a more active role in solving it. How Serious is the Runaway Problem? If you’re like me and don’t know anyone who has run away from home, you may not realize how significant the runaway problem is. According to the NRS, between 1.6 and 2.8 million youth run away from home each year in the U.S. Although these numbers are striking on their own, they don’t tell the whole story. The ways running away can change a child’s life are serious and sometimes frightening: Running away is correlated with significantly lower high school graduation rates, greater misuse of prescription drugs, and crime. Maureen Blaha “Initially they become really susceptible to being victims of crime,” Blaha explains. “They’re afraid, they’re alone, they’re on the streets. Obviously they kind of stick out like a sore thumb, and they become victims of crime.” If the youth returns home quickly and no more episodes occur, that may be the extent of it. But if the youth stays away, crime can become a way of life. “After awhile,” Blaha continues, “in order to survive, they become perpetrators of crime: panhandling, maybe dealing drugs, oftentimes they get recruited into the human trafficking vortex.” The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that every year over 100,000 children are victims of commercial sexual exploitation–the most common kind of human trafficking in the U.S. Many of these children are runaway or homeless youth. It goes without saying that if we can help prevent episodes of running away, we can also stave off a whole host of other serious consequences. Warning Signs, and How to Respond Youth who are considering running away often display a similar set of behaviors prior to taking action. If teachers can be more tuned in to these behaviors, we may be able to prevent a child from running away. Here are some signs to look out for: Changes in behavior patterns: eating or sleeping significantly more or less than usual, unusual mood swings, or spending noticeably more time alone in their room or out of the house. A drop in grades, an increase in truancy or absences, or rule breaking that is not typical for that youth. Accumulation of money or possessions; this could be a sign that the youth is gathering resources for when they are away from home. Actually referencing wanting to run away by saying things like “I have to get out of that place” or threatening to run away. These comments should be taken seriously. If you notice these kinds of behaviors in one of your students, do not ignore them. Instead, speak with a guidance counselor, administrator, or both about what you’re noticing. If there is any suspicion of abuse going on in the home, teachers have a duty to report this. After talking to guidance and administration, talk with the student. Describe the changes you’ve noticed, express your concern, and offer to set up an appointment with a counselor. If the student is, in fact, considering running away, provide them with information about the resources below, where trained professionals can help the student find the best resolution to their problem. How the National Runaway Safeline Helps Runaways The NRS offers a comprehensive set of resources to help those who have run away or who are considering it. By making this information available to students and families through the NRS’s free promotional materials, teachers will ensure that more people take advantage of these services if and when they need them. Constant access to the NRS staff through 24-hour toll-free phone hotline, a highly responsive email system, a live online chat program, and an online forum, where visitors can post questions and get advice from NRS staff within a few hours. A national database of shelters where NRS staff can help youth find safe places to stay. Communication services to help students safely contact parents include conference calls, where an NRS staff member is on the call the whole time with the youth and their parent, and a messaging service, which allows the runaway to send a message through NRS without having to talk directly to parents. NRS’s Home Free program, in partnership with Greyhound Bus Lines, provides free bus tickets to return youth to a parent or guardian. This is available to youth all the way up to age 21. The Let’s Talk: Runaway Prevention Curriculum is a 14-module, evidence-based curriculum offered free to educators. “It’s intended to build life skills and help young people learn how to resolve problems without resorting to running away or getting engaged in unsafe behavior,” says Blaha.   Although the relationship between parents and their children is ultimately the main factor in the decision to run away, educators can have an influence by paying close attention to changes in student behavior and keeping the community informed about the resources that can help. If you are thinking about running away from home or know someone who is, contact the National Runaway Safeline at 1-800-RUNAWAY.   Learn something new every week. Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration—in quick, bite-sized packages—all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. You’ll also get access to my members-only library of free downloadable resources, including my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, which has helped thousands of teachers spend less time grading!  

Interview with Megan Smith and Yana Weinstein ( transcript):   What does the word “study” mean to you? Have you ever told your students to study for a test? Have you ever actually taught them how to study? It turns out studying can be taught. And two cognitive psychological scientists, Yana Weinstein and Megan Smith (whose name has changed since this post to Sumeracki), have made it their mission to teach people how to study better. On their new website, The Learning Scientists, they use infographics and videos to share strategies and other insights about how we learn.  Here we will explore six research-based learning strategies that Weinstein and Smith teach on their site. If we can work these methods into our instruction, and teach students how to use them on their own, our students stand a much better chance of actually remembering our material. One final note before we dig in: Although performance assessments and project-based learning allow students to show what they know with more depth and authenticity, most content areas still need to measure some learning with tests. When you are teaching that kind of content, these six strategies will help your students perform better on the test AND retain that information long after the test is over. 1. Spaced Practice Space out your studying over time. Far too many students wait until the night before a test to study for it. Similarly, teachers often wait until the day before a test to review. When enough students score well on the test, it appears they have learned the material. But a few weeks later, most of that information has vanished from students’ minds. For more durable learning, the studying has to take place in smaller chunks over time. “Every time you leave a little space, you forget a bit of the information, and then you kind of relearn it,” Weinstein explains. “That forgetting actually helps you to strengthen the memory. It’s kind of counterintuitive, but you need to forget a little bit in order to then help yourself learn it by remembering again.” Teachers can help students apply this strategy by helping them create a studying calendar to plan out how they will review chunks of content, and by carving out small chunks of class time every day for review. In both cases, plan to include current concepts AND previously learned material: Many teachers know this as “spiraling.” 2. Retrieval Practice Practice bringing information to mind without the help of materials. Many people think of “studying” as simply re-reading notes, textbooks, or other materials. But having the information right in front of us doesn’t force us to retrieve it from memory; instead, it allows us to trick ourselves into thinking we know something. Recalling information without supporting materials helps us learn it much more effectively. “Put your class materials away, and then write out or maybe sketch or speak everything you know and try to be as thorough as possible, and then check your materials for accuracy,” Smith advises. “You’re bringing information to mind almost like you’re testing yourself; though it can be a practice test, it doesn’t have to be. You can just sort of go through and explain what you know, or teach a friend or a pet or even an inanimate object everything that you learned in school. By bringing that information to mind, you’re changing the way that information is stored so that it’s easier for you to get to later on.” Teach students how to do retrieval practice in class: Have them turn off their devices, put all their notes and books away, then ask them to write everything they know about a particular term or topic, or share their thoughts in a think-pair-share. When the practice is done, have students check their understanding by revisiting their materials and discussing misconceptions as a class. Once they learn how to do this in school, they can then apply it at home. 3. Elaboration Explain and describe ideas with many details. This method asks students to go beyond simple recall of information and start making connections within the content. Students should ask themselves open-ended questions about the material, answer in as much detail as possible, then check the materials to make sure their understanding is correct. Here’s how Smith and Weinstein explain elaboration:   Teachers can apply this strategy by having brief class discussions where these kinds of questions are explored and asking students to work elaboration into their own study plans. 4. Interleaving Switch between ideas while you study. Common knowledge tells us that to learn a skill, we should practice it over and over again. While repetition is vital, research says we will actually learn that skill more effectively if we mix our practice of it with other skills. This is known as interleaving. “Let’s say you’re doing a bunch of math problems,” Weinstein says. “What’s fairly typical is … five of the same problem, or 10 of the same problem. Instead of doing that, try different problems in different orders.” So if students are learning to calculate the area of a triangle, instead of having them do 20 problems with triangles, have them do one of a triangle, then one of a circle, then a triangle, then a square. “The thing about that,” Weinstein notes, “is that it’s actually harder. So they’ll be getting more wrong, they’ll be making more errors, but they’ll also be learning something very important, which is how to choose a particular strategy for each problem, as opposed to just repeatedly doing the same thing.” When planning exercises for students, resist the temptation to have them repeat the exact same process multiple times in a row. Instead, have them do a few of the new process, then weave in other skills, so that the repetitive behavior is interrupted and students are forced to think more critically. Explain this strategy to students so they can apply interleaving to their own studying. 5. Concrete Examples Use specific examples to understand abstract ideas. Most teachers already use this strategy in their own teaching; it’s a natural part of explaining a new concept. But what we don’t necessarily do is help students extend their understanding by coming up with examples of their own. Here’s how Weinstein and Smith explain this broader use of concrete examples as a study practice: Teachers can apply this strategy by using concrete examples when teaching abstract concepts, then asking students to come up with their own, correcting any examples (or parts of examples) that aren’t quite right, and looking for more. Encourage students to continue this practice when they study. 6. Dual Coding Combine words and visuals. When information is presented to us, it is often accompanied by some kind of visual: An image, a chart or graph, or a graphic organizer. When students are studying, they should make it a habit to pay attention to those visuals and link them to the text by explaining what they mean in their own words. Then, students can create their own visuals of the concepts they are learning. This process reinforces the concepts in the brain through two different paths, making it easier to retrieve later. “And when we say visuals,” Smith explains, “we don’t necessarily mean anything specific, so it depends on the types of materials. You could have an infographic, a cartoon strip, a diagram, a graphic organizer, timeline, anything that makes sense to you so long as you’re sort of depicting the information both in a way with words and a way with pictures.” “This isn’t just for students who are good at drawing,” Weinstein adds. “It’s not about the quality of the drawing. It really just needs to be a visual representation as you can depict it.” In class, regularly turn students’ attention to the visuals used in textbooks, on websites, and even in your own slideshow presentations. Have students describe the visuals to each other and make connections with what you’re learning. Then have students create their own visuals of the content to further reinforce it. Remind students to include diagramming, sketching, and creating graphic organizers when they study at home. Making the Most of the Strategies Two more pieces of advice on how to maximize these strategies for learning: Combine them. These strategies don’t necessarily work in isolation. You can space out your retrieval practice, and when doing retrieval practice, try to recall concrete examples, elaborate, or sketch out a concept. When doing retrieval practice, you can interleave between different concepts. Make them part of your class vocabulary. If you just use these strategies in your teaching, you’ll see improvement. But if you actually explain the research to students, teach them the terminology, and use that terminology when teaching—”Okay, we’re going to spend a few minutes on retrieval practice”—students will not only have a clearer understanding of why you’re doing what you do, but they may be more likely to carry those skills with them into future classes. Learn More The Learning Scientists site is full of useful information about how people learn, and more is being added every week. To learn more, visit learningscientists.org, and to download this free chart and other materials about the strategies, click the image below.   Other resources mentioned on the podcast: Learning Scientists on Twitter: @acethattest Learning Scientists on Facebook: facebook.com/acethattest Make It Stick, The Science of Successful Learning, by Brown, Roediger & McDaniel Teaching How2s My Simple Show   Learn something new every week. Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration—in quick, bite-sized packages—all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. You’ll also get access to my members-only library of free downloadable resources, including my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, which has helped thousands of teachers spend less time grading!  

Listen to my interview with Mark Barnes ( transcript): [This post contains Amazon Affiliate links; if you make a purchase from Amazon after going there through my links, I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thanks.]   It’s pretty easy to avoid solving problems. It happens to everyone: A good chunk of the year has passed, you’ve got a routine going, and whatever problems you might have, you’ve basically accepted them for now. Fixing them would take too much time. The solution would probably be too complicated. Not necessarily. My buddy Mark Barnes, a veteran teacher and author of six education books, thinks the solutions to many of our education challenges are things we could start doing tomorrow. This philosophy was the guiding principle behind the 2015 book we wrote together, Hacking Education: 10 Quick Fixes for Every School. Since then, Barnes has published eight other Hack Learning books. He knows you don’t have time to read stacks of research-heavy, theoretical books. You want answers you can use right away. With this series, he aims to give educators “hacks”—solutions that can be implemented right now. To give you a sampling of the kinds of solutions you’ll find in this series, we’re going to look at one idea from each book: Nine simple ideas that can have a big impact on student learning at your school. Although each hack has a blueprint for full implementation in the book it comes from, we’ll look at how you can get started right away. By the time you’re done reading, you should have found one you can try at your school. Let’s go. 1. Student Tech Gurus From Hacking Education: 10 Quick Fixes for Every School The Problem: Not enough tech support in your school. You have the tech, but when teachers or students need help, or something goes wrong, everything comes to a standstill because your current tech support staff doesn’t have the manpower to handle it all. The Solution: Some schools are training teams of students to provide basic-level tech support for the school, even at the elementary level. These students attend staff trainings on new technology, act as teaching assistants when a class is working with a new or challenging technology, and even conduct their own training sessions for students and teachers. If students are trained to handle and prevent the lower-level problems, this frees up the paid tech support staff to focus on the more complex issues. What You Can Do Tomorrow: Establishing a true tech team takes some time, but right away, you can make a list of students you know to be pretty tech-savvy. Beside their names, list the tools each student is proficient in. Put this list in a public location in your classroom. Then, the next time students are working with a piece of technology, have them go to the students who know that tool for help. 2. Inspiration Boards From Make Writing: 5 Teaching Strategies that Turn Writer’s Workshop into a Maker Space The Problem: In writing classes, students are sometimes slow to come up with ideas for what to write about. The Solution: Dedicate a wall in your classroom as an Inspiration Board, a place where students can place images, quotes, rough ideas, the opening lines of a story they’re thinking of writing, anything that inspires them or shows fragments of inspiration. This gets the ideas out of students’ heads and into a public space, where they can generate fresh new ideas. “Students put an idea up, and then someone else maybe will see that idea and go, ‘Oh, I like that, and that makes me think of this,'” Barnes explains. “They’re getting thoughts out onto a board, and then starting to discuss those ideas, and ultimately those turn into those stories and projects and pieces of writing.” What You Can Do Tomorrow: Clear everything off one of your bulletin boards and ask students to bring in something to hang on the board that inspires them—this can be a quote, an image, a poem, anything that can be affixed to a board. You may need to model this at first to get things going. If you teach more than one class period of writers, you could create separate boards for every class or just mix it all together. 3. Tracking Progress Transparently From Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School The Problem: Traditional grade books provide a very limited picture of a student’s progress, and students have no ownership of tracking their growth. The Solution: Have students keep a record of their own progress in a “transparent” space—a Google doc, for example—where the student, teacher, and parents can view it any time. The information they record will vary depending on student age and subject area, but the document will become more valuable if you require students to go beyond numbers: Record each assignment, the feedback they got on it, the standard(s) being measured, and what goals they set in response to the feedback. What You Can Do Tomorrow: Choose the record-keeping system you’re going to use—ideally, it will be something in the cloud, such as a Google Doc, but it can even be a chart on paper. Have students record the results of their most recent assignment, including the feedback they got and a goal for future growth, based on that feedback. Tell students you’re still just trying this out and get their feedback on how the system should evolve over time. 4. “Morecabulary” From Hacking the Common Core: 10 Strategies for Amazing Learning in a Standardized World The Problem: Students need to grow their vocabulary in all subject areas, but our most common methods of vocabulary instruction are dry and don’t lead to long-term retention. The Solution: Instead of doing traditional dictionary and sentence-writing work, have students construct the meaning of vocabulary words in a variety of ways. One way of doing this is with a tool like Padlet, which is like an online corkboard. By creating a Padlet board for each word, students can all contribute their own definitions, sentences, even links to videos or articles that use the word in context. This kind of varied work will give students a more well-rounded, memorable experience with each word, and they’ll have more fun doing it, too. What You Can Do Tomorrow: Get started with one word: Choose a term students typically get wrong in your subject area and create a Padlet for it. (If your school is light on tech, you can use a sheet of paper or part of a bulletin board instead.) Then take 15 minutes and have students contribute definitions, sentences, images, videos, or other resources to flesh out the meaning of that word. Stay involved in the process, so you can correct any misconceptions. Once kids are used to the process, it can be repeated for other words. 5. Broadcast Student Voices From Hacking Leadership: 10 Ways Great Leaders Inspire Learning that Teachers, Students, and Parents Love The Problem: Most educators say they want to “give students a voice,” but they don’t always know how to make that happen. The Solution: Using podcasting and live streaming, we can literally broadcast student voices right out into our schools and communities. Students can talk about topics or events that matter to them, or they can even share their own writing pieces or class projects. Links to these podcasts and broadcasts can be shared through the school website, newsletter, or social media account. What You Can Do Tomorrow: You can literally have students record and publish a podcast tomorrow using a free tool like Spreaker, which allows users to record podcasts right from a mobile device. For the sake of time, you might want to provide students with a starter topic or question, but once students get used to having a platform, let them take the reins. 6. OPB (Other People’s Books) From Hacking Literacy: 5 Ways to Turn Any Classroom into a Culture of Readers The Problem: Students need to be reading for pleasure, but your classroom doesn’t have enough books, and you can’t afford to buy any more. The Solution: Build a massive classroom library with Other People’s Books—used books donated by parents, community members, and local businesses. Most people have a few books around the house that they’d be happy to donate; they just need to be asked. Then contact your public library—most libraries regularly purge their shelves of books to make room for new ones, and many would be happy to donate these to a classroom. Keep in mind that these books don’t have to be fiction: Student reading proficiency will grow if they read cookbooks, DIY home project books, old copies of the Guinness Book of World Records, really anything that isn’t inappropriate for school. What You Can Do Tomorrow: Send an email out to staff and parents, explaining what you’re attempting to do and asking them to send in used books. Then start clearing some shelves! 7. Celebrity Couple Nickname Game From Hacking Engagement: 50 Tips & Tools to Engage Teachers and Learners Daily The Problem: Learning student names is essential for relationship-building, but it’s hard to learn lots of names quickly. The Solution: In the same way that the media creates mashups of celebrity couples’ names (think Brangelina), you can construct similar mashups to create unique nicknames for students using their first and last name: Jason Matthews becomes JMat. Rhianna Johnson becomes RJo. Have students offer their own suggestions until you find one that’s just right. Although you will eventually need to learn students’ real names, these nicknames can help jar your memory more quickly than a standard list of names will. What You Can Do Tomorrow: Obviously, if you’re reading this close to the beginning of a school year, you can plan to play this game with your students soon. But even if you’re way into the year and you already know everyone’s name, the game would make a fun bonding activity when you have a few spare minutes. 8. Boomerang Model From Hacking Homework: 10 Strategies that Inspire Learning Outside the Classroom The Problem: Students lack inde

Many regular ed teachers feel inadequately prepared to serve the needs of students with special needs. Here are some ideas.

Listen to the podcast or read the transcript (sponsored by Kiddom):   We hear all the time about how we need to give students more choice. About how we should be helping them discover their passions, how we need more student-directed, inquiry-based learning in the classroom. But all of that can feel like a load of abstract, pie-in-the-sky hooey without practical instructions for how to actually do it. We need a structure, a format, a plan for delivering this kind of experience. Good news: That plan is here, and it’s called Genius Hour. More and more teachers are implementing this brilliant learning practice in their own classrooms. Chances are, you already have a pretty good idea of what Genius Hour is. You might even have it on your list of things to try “some day.” If that day hasn’t come yet, it’s probably because you have some unanswered questions. So to help you out, I invited my friend A.J. Juliani to answer the 10 most frequently asked questions about Genius Hour. A.J. is the Director of Technology and Innovation for Centennial School District in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He did his first Genius Hour project back when he was an 11th grade English teacher, and since then has supported many other teachers as they implement Genius Hour in their own classrooms. Now A.J. has created a full online course, the Genius Hour Master Course, where he walks teachers step-by-step through the implementation process. (Learn more about the course at the end of this post!) The teachers who are already enrolled are seeing incredible results with their students, so I wanted to share some of A.J.’s wisdom with you and maybe get you one step closer to trying Genius Hour in your own classroom. To learn more about the course, scroll to the bottom of this post. In the meantime, there’s plenty here to keep you busy! 1. What is Genius Hour? Is it different from 20 percent time? Genius Hour is a teaching practice that has absolutely exploded in popularity over the last couple of years. It’s where the teacher sets aside a certain amount of time every week or every day—maybe one class period per week or one hour per day in an all-day classroom setting—for students to learn about whatever they want. “There are lots of terms for it,” Juliani says. “Genius Hour and 20 percent time are probably the terms people are using right now the most for this kind of inquiry-based learning, but that’s really what both are at their heart.” 2. Is Genius Hour just “do whatever you want,” or is there a way to structure it? If teachers want a Genius Hour project to be successful, they definitely need to structure it. “Even though students get to choose, and they have the freedom of choice,” Juliani says, “the project is very, very much structured and put together. And I think it has to be in order for students to actually have the ability to get to the final end result.” In our interview, he outlined how the basic structure works: Step 1: Planning First, Juliani says, teachers need to decide how much time they are going to set aside, and when that’s going to happen. “Whatever works in your classroom, in your school, with your curriculum, I think dictates how much time.” Step 2: Topic Selection After introducing the project to students, they choose what they are going to learn and what product they are going to create at the end to demonstrate their learning. Step 3: The Pitch Next comes the “Shark Tank” phase. Juliani explains how this works: “Each student either puts together four slides, and it’s 30 seconds to a minute long, and basically what they tell their peers in the class is (1) What they’re going to make, what they’re going to learn. (2) Why they’re going to learn it. Why they want to learn it. Why they want to make what they’re going to make. (3) How they’re going to go about doing it, kind of a brief schedule of how they’re going to get there. And (4) What would be a success in their mind?” Step 4: Research, Learning, and Documentation Now students start learning the thing they said they were going to learn. “Kids might go to the library and research some things, or they may pull out technology and research,” Juliani explains. “The teacher really facilitates where they’re going to research and kind of get information. They could be watching videos. They could be talking to people who are experts. They could be reading books or articles. So research doesn’t have to be typing something into a database. There’s lots of different ways students can research the world.” At the same time, students are also sharing their progress along the way. “You want to have them documenting in their journal, sharing on a blog, doing videos and sharing them on YouTube, doing a podcast,” says Juliani, “because they want to share out what they’re doing with the world. You don’t want to keep this hidden. You want to actually put it out there.” Doing this builds classroom community and helps students learn from each other. Step 5: Making “You don’t want to spend too much time in the research phase, because you really want to get into the making, creating, designing phase and start building your project into a reality,” Juliani says. “For many students, this is where they get a little bit fearful, right? They’re scared that they’re going to fail. They’re scared it’s not going to turn out well. And so what I suggest is you put up what we call ‘epic failure’ boards. As the teacher, you share out when you fail, and you get kids, every time they come in the class for Genius Hour, putting up on there, ‘Hey, here’s how I failed on my project this week.’ And you’re celebrating those failures as steps toward success.” Step 6: Presentations After the students have made their final products, they present them to their peers. The presentation can take a lot of different forms, Juliani says. “I’ve seen classrooms do TED-style talks where they live stream students doing three- to five-minute presentations and classrooms do gallery walk museum, wax museum, inviting parents in, community members, and putting it out there.” Step 7: Reflection “After the presentation,” Juliani says, “you have to take time to show the world what you made, what you did, and also reflect. What went well? What did you learn? What do you want to keep on learning? How’s this going to keep growing?” 3. How do I grade Genius Hour work? Those in the Genius Hour community handle this one differently, and whether or not this kind of project should be graded at all is still up for debate, but Juliani recommends that teachers grade students’ work during the whole process, rather than the final product. To do this, he uses something called a GRIT rubric. “It’s an acronym, and it stands for guts, resiliency, integrity, tenacity. It allows you to grade the process of students each and every time they come in or overall on, basically, are they having guts in the process? Are they actually taking on a challenge? Are they having integrity? Are they not cutting corners? Are they following through? Are they having the tenacity to go after something big? And are they having the resiliency if things don’t go well to bounce back?” 4 & 5. How do I find time for Genius Hour in an already packed schedule? Can Genius Hour meet my required standards? For some teachers, Juliani says, a Genius Hour project is a natural fit with existing coursework. This would be the case in an all-day elementary classroom or in any English language arts class, regardless of the grade level, because nonfiction reading and writing are being emphasized so much these days in many standards. In other classes, teachers may need to get more creative. “There was one elementary school that really couldn’t fit it into their typical elementary school day, until the librarian said, ‘Hey, I’m going to do it during my library block.’ Library connected to research, connected to reading, and it fit right in there. I had a middle school science teacher tied it to the lab work that they do, where they research something and they create something in kind of the STEM subjects, and so they connected it there. So I think it’s first just finding those pieces in your curriculum that overlap with inquiry and kind of seeing where it could fit in there. It’s going to be different for everyone.” Teachers may also use Genius Hour as a special project during times when it’s harder to get much academic work done. “A lot of folks have chosen to do Genius Hour projects in their class right around the time of state testing. It’s a way for students to learn and have fun and actually be thoroughly engaged in school during that window of time that traditionally is just not that fun for kids.” As for standards, “This project hits so many of the common core and other types of standards,” says Juliani. “Everything from standards that connect to reading and researching, standards that connect to analyzing and applying. Standards that connect to writing and presenting, creating and evaluating. And then you have standards for mathematical practice, ones like construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others. Another standard for model of mathematics. So you’re hitting a lot of them in a Genius Hour project.” 6. What if students want to study something weird or inappropriate? Juliani believes we shouldn’t reject a topic right off the bat if it’s something unusual or completely unfamiliar to us; we might just need to learn more about it or send students to someone who shares their interest. “If you get a topic like that, and you’re kind of really uneasy about it and not really sure, talk to some other teachers, talk to some professionals and see.” But if it’s inappropriate, he says, reinforce the idea that although they have free choice, the choice has to be something appropriate for a school assignment. “Just say, ‘Hey, this is still school. It’s got to be appropriate.'” 7. What if students just slack off instead of working? When students don’t take to Genius Hour right

  Listen to this post as a podcast (sponsored by Kiddom):   An earlier version of this post was published in 2013. This is an updated version.   A few years ago, I was working with a group of student teachers. One of them—we’ll call him Eric—was teaching seventh-grade social studies. His class was studying ancient Greece. The standards for grade 7 required teachers to address concepts like the government, economics, and culture of this era. For his 5-day unit, Eric was going to focus on the “culture” part. On the first day of the unit, which Eric developed with his cooperating teacher, students would read the chapter of their textbook that swept through three centuries’ worth of ancient Greek culture in about five pages. Then they’d write answers to a set of end-of-chapter questions. On days 2 through 4, students would create their own Grecian urns by wrapping balloons with papier-mâché. Once the urns were dry, students would paint them in a similar style to that of the Greeks, incorporating something personally meaningful as the main artistic feature. Finally, they would present their urns to the class. On day 5, they would be given a quiz asking them to match 10 vocabulary terms, such as comedy, tragedy, urn, and Olympics, to their definitions. Feeling more than a bit skeptical, I asked Eric to show me the standards his unit was aligned with. He rustled through some paperwork, then pointed to this language from the state standards: Students will demonstrate an understanding of the complexity of culture by exploring cultural elements (e.g., beliefs, customs/traditions, languages, skills, literature, the arts) of diverse groups and explaining how culture served to define groups in world civilizations prior to 1500 A.D. and resulted in unique perspectives. I read this out loud to Eric, then asked him to show me exactly how his plans taught or measured the standard. For a long moment, he said nothing. Finally, he shrugged and told me the unit was basically what his cooperating teacher had “always done for ancient Greece.” She’d told him the urn project was really fun, and that the kids loved it. The only problem was, it had nothing to do with the standards. Draping wet, gluey newspaper around a balloon has nothing to do with deepening one’s understanding of societies and cultures. All Hands-On Tasks Are Not Created Equal I wish Eric’s story was just a rare example, but in my work with student teachers, as a classroom teacher myself, in my many years as a student, and now as a parent, I’ve seen far too many “Grecian Urns”: projects that look creative, that the teacher might describe as hands-on learning, interdisciplinary teaching, project-based instruction, or the integration of arts or tech, but that nonetheless lack any substantial learning for students. What’s worse, because these activities are often time-consuming, they take away from other tasks that would give students the chance to wrestle with more challenging stuff. In their groundbreaking book Understanding by Design, Jay McTighe and the late Grant Wiggins describe this problem as the Sin of Activity-Oriented Design. Instead of focusing on the desired learning outcomes, this approach merely seeks out tasks that might be fun, or at least keep kids busy: “The activities, though fun and engaging, do not lead anywhere intellectually. (They) lack an explicit focus on important ideas and appropriate evidence of learning.” To illustrate this, Wiggins and McTighe describe a 3rd grade unit on apples. In this two-week unit, students read about Johnny Appleseed, paint pictures of apples, do math problems that involve apples, write apple-themed stories, make applesauce, and take a trip to a local orchard. Students probably enjoyed all of these activities, and it’s likely that both teachers and students were charmed by how cleverly the theme was woven into so many different content areas. Throughout the unit, students probably seemed engaged, the classroom was full of colors and productivity and maybe even collaboration, but what valuable learning actually took place? Let’s move our lens to the higher grades. Here, the Grecian Urns might involve no crafts at all, but still force students to ride along curricular tangents that, rather than inspire and ignite a passion for learning, lead to dead ends. Take the math and social studies teachers who decide to co-teach a two-week unit on famous mathematicians. Math and history, right? Students spend most of the first week on computers, researching the mathematicians’ birthplaces, families, deaths, and contributions to the field (which most students simply copy, because the actual mathematical concepts are over their heads…how many eighth graders do you know who can explain the Fibonacci sequence?). They spend another three class periods creating PowerPoints or Prezis full of facts about these obscure pioneers in math, complete with neat-o animations and stomach-turning transitions, and another three days presenting these to the class… For what? None of the kids got any better at math, nor did their thirst for history grow. But to someone walking by, maybe even to an administrator doing a formal observation, this unit would look kind of amazing. Students doing online research! Cooperative learning! Technology! Interdisciplinary study! No! These teachers misunderstood and misapplied the concepts of interdisciplinary study, hands-on learning, and tech integration, and two weeks of precious instructional time were wasted because of it. How to Spot a Grecian Urn It could be argued that all lessons have some educational value, that any kind of reading and writing, manipulating materials and words, interaction with peers, and exposure to the world in general offer opportunities for learning. With that in mind, think of “Grecian Urn” as more of a relative term than an absolute one: Few lessons will be pure Grecian Urns; almost any lesson will probably have some arguable educational value. Far more lessons will simply contain elements that are Grecian Urn-ish; we can make these lessons better if we try to minimize those elements. The best way to identify a Grecian Urn is to look at a task and ask this question: Does it consume far more of a student’s time than is reasonable in relation to its academic impact? If students spend more time on work that will not move them forward in the skill you think you are teaching, then it may be a Grecian Urn. And it may need to go. Here are some more specific ways to spot the Grecian Urns in your teaching, and what you could do to replace them: 1. Excessive Coloring or Crafting If your lesson requires more time coloring, cutting, or pasting than meaningful work with the content you’re trying to teach, it might be a Grecian Urn. If you are a primary teacher and students need to develop their fine motor skills, or if you are, in fact, an art teacher, then these activities have a clear place in your classroom. Everyone else should use these tasks more sparingly. This doesn’t mean you should never ask students to color, cut, paste, sing, act, or draw, but every time you do, ask yourself if that work is contributing to learning. If not, there may be a way to cut down the time it takes. Suppose you want students to draw illustrations of vocabulary words. Adding visuals can work wonders to boost memory, so this is an instructionally sound decision. But is it necessary for these illustrations to be colored? On posterboard? Or hanging from a mobile? Would a simple line drawing beside each word on a regular sheet of paper serve the same purpose? Now if your goal is true integration of the arts into your curriculum, I have two articles to recommend to you. Both of these really dig into what it looks like when teachers use art to really enhance students’ learning: read this post on arts integration from MindShift and this one from Edutopia to learn more about what this looks like. 2. Excessive “Neat-O” Tech This is the tech equivalent of item #1: If students are spending lots and lots of time searching for images, making digital drawings, adding animations or effects to slideshows, adding sound effects or special titles to podcasts and videos, you are probably heading into Grecian Urn territory. The key phrase here is lots and lots of time: Our students will absolutely benefit from learning how to combine text with images, manipulate presentations to make them more interesting, and make use of all the digital tools at their disposal. But when a student burns two hours listening to sound clips so he can make a photo of Langston Hughes zoom onto his PowerPoint slide to the sound of screeching brakes, well, he’s probably not doing much thinking about the Harlem Renaissance. So when you’re assigning work that requires the creative use of tech, be mindful of how much time students are putting into the bells and whistles. Look at your rubric and make sure you haven’t required too many of these bells and whistles to begin with. And if possible, see if they can make the bells and whistles relevant: If students want sound in their slideshow about the Harlem Renaissance, have them add a Duke Ellington song, music that’s actually from that era, rather than a funny sound effect. 3. Low-Level Thinking Most of the thinking in a Grecian Urn task is on the lowest level of Bloom’s Taxonomy. In other words, the task appears to be creative, but the primary academic work is rearranging and regurgitating basic facts or definitions. Let’s look at two possible assignments for students to demonstrate their understanding of the Food Pyramid. In one class, the teacher has students re-create the pyramid as a hanging mobile. They write all the parts of the pyramid on pieces of colored paper and hang those papers onto a hanger or something. They might also be asked to draw or cut out magazine pictures of foods that represent items within each part of the pyramid. All of this work is at the Remember and Understand level of Bloom

  Listen to my interview with John Stevens and Matt Vaudrey (transcript).   If you’ve been looking for a boost of inspiration lately, something to help you engage students deeply and make your teaching fun again, then I have just the book for you: The Classroom Chef, by Matt Vaudrey and John Stevens. Here’s the premise: If we want our lessons to have a long-lasting impact on our students, if we want to make our content really relevant, we need to design instruction the way a chef orchestrates a good meal, from appetizer all the way to dessert. And like any accomplished chef, we will only get really good at it if we take risks, experiment, and are willing to fall flat on our faces. In the book, Stevens and Vaudrey show us how they learned to do this in their math classes. Although the examples are all from math, and math teachers are going to absolutely LOVE this book, it’s easy to imagine how the same kinds of lessons could be prepared in any subject area. Non-math teachers who skip this book will really be missing something special.   The Classroom Chef: Sharpen Your Lessons, Season Your Classes, Make Math Meaningful by John Stevens & Matt Vaudrey This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. (What are they?)   The Big Takeaways Here’s a run-down of some of the book’s best ideas. Avoid Processed Food This was my biggest a-ha from the book. Too many teachers treat their instruction the way a college student approaches food, going for the easy, pre-packaged, processed stuff—in other words, worksheet and curricula straight from the textbook companies—rather than preparing lessons with more thought. “We weren’t happy with processed-food curriculum,” the authors write. “Outdated pre-printed modules for the students, a pacing guide to follow, and an entire department doing the same thing. And, from our observations of the students who had learned to hate math prior to arriving in our classrooms, it was clear a processed food math class wasn’t going to cut it. Somewhere along the line, we decided to learn how to cook math and serve it up like a fine meal.” Stevens and Vaudrey concede that preparing thoughtful lessons takes a lot more effort, and some of your attempts will bomb in the same way new recipes can fall flat. Still, the level of student engagement and learning you’ll get from these efforts will ultimately pay off. The Appetizers Set the Stage Although this is not a new concept, and I have written about the value of good anticipatory sets before, Stevens and Vaudrey’s approach to “appetizers” makes them a truly integral part of the lesson, a way to hook students into the day’s learning that goes beyond merely getting their attention.  In our interview, Vaudrey explained it this way: “Instead of saying, ‘Hey, guys. Let’s start with notes. I’ll give you the instruction first, and then we’ll interact with something,’ the appetizer says, ‘Hey, here’s this idea that gets students curious and interesting and hungry for the instruction.’ Now they want what you’re selling. Now they’re hungry for what you’re providing, and your instruction now is filling a need for them, filling a hunger for them.” In the book, the authors show us how to look at the day’s learning standard and figure out how to pull students into it—using a meaningful argument, question, or challenge—without ever referring to the standard itself. Here’s an example of the kind of appetizer they might use, from Stevens’ Would You Rather? math website: Hey!! This is not an ad. It’s a math lesson!   In this appetizer, students need to pick a wireless plan. Making this decision requires choosing which math strategy to use, then applying it in order to justify their choice. By arguing for their particular preference, students are engaging deeply with math in a way that applies directly to a situation they might actually find themselves in someday. Serve High-Quality Entrées The entrée is the real substance of the meal: the main lesson. This is where the learning goes more in-depth, where students work with the standard you intend to teach them…except they may not know what that standard is for a while. That’s because rather than simply providing direct instruction on the content, a good entrée delivers it in a context students are actually interested in. “We would much rather students have a meaningful experience in class than restate a standard,” the authors write. One such entrée is the Mullet Ratios lesson, where students begin by looking at examples of mullets and deciding which haircut is more “mullet-y.”   Stevens and Vaudrey walk us through lessons like this one and several others, like Barbie Zipline, Big Shark, and the lesson where students build a scale model of the Twin Towers to honor the memory of the September 11th attacks. By reading about each of these lessons and the thought process that led each of the authors to develop and teach it, readers will be able to apply the same thinking to their own content and prepare delicious, satisfying entrées of their own. Treat Assessment Like a Dessert Cart Assessment typically comes at the end, like a dessert. But what if a restaurant only offered one option for dessert? This is standard practice in schools: Most teachers give every student the same assessment. Even if we switch to a more project-based, performance type of assessment, we often assign the exact same one to every student. And why is that? “To be blunt,” the authors say, “it’s easier—easier for the teacher to create and monitor, easier to grade, and easier for kids to prepare for. Or so we think.” The problem with the one-size-fits-all assessment is that it doesn’t do a very good job of assessing, and it also doesn’t fit all students. If we assign some kind of poster, where students are graded on the standard AND on things like creativity and presentation, we have two problems: (1) the grade doesn’t necessarily measure standard mastery, and (2) any student who’s not great with poster-making will automatically be at a disadvantage, even though poster-making isn’t the skill being measured. Instead, teachers could allow students to choose their own assessment, to let them decide exactly how they will prove their mastery of a given standard. Doing this allows students to work in whatever medium or context suits their interests and talents while also showing what they know. The first time Stevens tried this, where students had to demonstrate their understanding of triangle congruence theorems, he got art projects, music videos, comic strips, blog posts, even a mock-up of an Internet dating site. “Students’ finished projects exceeded all expectations,” he writes, “[but] quality wasn’t the goal of this project. The real value was students demonstrating their knowledge in a way that was comfortable and effective for them.” Solicit Reviews A restaurant patron can review their experience instantly by going to sites like Yelp. Once these are written, the restaurant owners can read the reviews and make improvements accordingly. We should give our students that same opportunity by seeking their feedback. Stevens and Vaudrey share their system for having students complete a Teacher Report Card to give feedback, and what they do with the information once they’ve gotten it. Teachers Worth Hanging Out With Even if you get nothing else from this book (which would be impossible), reading Classroom Chef will be the equivalent of hanging out with two teachers who really have their heads on straight about teaching. Both Vaudrey and Stevens are painfully honest about their failures, excited to try new things, open to feedback and criticism, and always willing to geek out on teacher talk. For teachers who happen to work in schools where these kinds of people are hard to find, reading this book will give you the role models and kindred spirits you need to grow as a true master of the craft. ♦   Matt Vaudrey blogs at mrvaudrey.com. You can find him on Twitter at @MrVaudrey and at classroomchef.com. John Stevens blogs at fishing4tech.com, maintains the Would You Rather…? math site, and delivers a weekly parent newsletter on math at Table Talk Math. Find him on Twitter at @Jstevens009 and at classroomchef.com. Learn something new every week. Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. You’ll also get access to my members-only library of free resources, including my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, which has helped thousands of teachers spend less time grading!   Amazon Affiliate Links: The links to Amazon in this post are Amazon Affiliate links, which means if you make a purchase after going to Amazon through them, I get a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thanks for your support!  

“Diving” by Khalid Mir is licensed under CC BY 2.0   Listen to this post as a podcast (sponsored by Kiddom):   The scenario is all too familiar to me: One of my kids comes home with an assignment to complete. She brings it to me for help. Not wanting to do the work for her, I start by asking her to tell me what she knows. “Okay,” I say, looking at the paper she’s handed me. “What are you supposed to be doing here?” “I don’t know,” she says. I hand the paper back to her. “Read the directions to me,” I say. Reluctantly, she reads. As I listen, I realize I don’t quite understand the instructions, either. We wrestle with the task for a few minutes, I offer one possible approach, and when that idea is rejected, I offer another. As the conversation progresses, my kid gets more and more distressed; it has become abundantly clear that I’m not going to be able to tell her how to do it. ______________ I should mention the assignment is not the kind where creativity is the goal. We’re not talking about a task that encourages divergent thinking or has multiple possible right answers. That’s not it. This assignment and almost all the others we find ourselves stuck on are worksheets produced by large companies where the task just isn’t worded clearly. It’s obvious that one right answer is supposed to be given. We just can’t figure out what that answer is supposed to be. I should also add that my kids, in general, do not struggle in school. Early readers, good at math, high test scores, no behavior or attention issues. So we’re not talking about students who tend to take longer to understand things. These are three bright kids who do well in school, but this scenario has played out with all three of them at different grade levels and with different teachers throughout their school years. ______________ So then I say, “Well, did you go over this in class before bringing it home?” And she says, “Yeah. Sort of.” I say, “Did you understand what you were supposed to do then?” In return, I get a blank stare. “Not really.” Here’s where I start to get irritated. “So did you say something?” I ask. “Did you tell your teacher you didn’t understand?” “No,” my kid says. Then she adds, “I didn’t want to get in trouble.” That. That right there. That’s when I feel my flipping out reflex start to kick in. When my professionalism starts to waver and the hysterical, teacher-bashing helicopter parent voice starts whispering in my ear. No student should feel like they can’t ask questions in school. No student should go home not understanding how to do their homework. No student should ever worry that asking for more explanation will result in punishment. Two Sides to Every Story At first, I imagine the worst: A teacher like some I remember from my own childhood, teachers who regularly said things like, “A stupid question deserves a stupid answer,” and, “You know we just went over that. Sit down!” They never said these things to me, but when I heard them said to my classmates, I knew I’d be better off keeping my mouth shut. I can imagine this scenario, and the irrational part of my brain wants to assume this is what’s going on. But I taught middle school for seven plus years. I know exactly what it’s like to give 100 percent effort in your instruction and see that some kids are completely tuning you out. I know how it feels to answer the same question four times in a row. I know that when a student tosses his paper aside and says, “this is stupid,” we don’t always recognize it as a cry for help; sometimes we respond like regular humans, let our egos get in the way, and simply interpret it as misbehavior. I also know how unskilled students can be at asking questions. I remember how easily students could misinterpret, oversimplify, and misrepresent things I said. I know how often students ask for help two seconds before the bell rings, or two seconds before an assignment is due. I know that “I don’t get it” can actually mean a hundred different things. So when I try to figure out why my child is sitting in front of me with an assignment she doesn’t know how to do, I know all too well that my kid’s version may not be the whole story. Maybe the teacher did explain it. Maybe she provided time to work on the assignment in class. Maybe she showed examples. Maybe my kid was talking, or daydreaming. Maybe my kid was in the bathroom. Maybe there’s another student in class whose very presence makes my kid feel embarrassed to ask any questions at all. There are dozens of possible reasons why she doesn’t understand this assignment. But what can’t be argued is that the thought of telling her teacher this makes her uncomfortable. There’s something about that teacher or that classroom that isn’t as academically safe as it could be. Every time a student chooses not to ask for help or clarification, it’s a missed opportunity for learning. And it’s something we have the power to improve. Making Your Classroom a Safe Place to Learn Here are a few simple, powerful ways you can make your classroom a place where students feel free to ask questions and take academic risks. If you’re already doing most of these, you may only pick up one new idea, but it may be just the thing your students need to grow as learners. Build in More Checks for Understanding Most teachers are already doing a lot of this: We teach something, then we make sure students understand what we taught them. We just may not be doing it as much as we could to make sure everyone really gets it. Ask questions instead of asking FOR questions. When teachers finish delivering some kind of content (a lecture, a video, a reading), or giving a set of instructions, we often say, “Does anyone have any questions?” This is one of the least effective ways to actually find out what questions our students have. For one thing, when a person doesn’t understand something, they don’t always know what they don’t understand, so it may not be possible to formulate a question. On top of that, many students fear looking stupid, so even if they do have a question, it’s only the bravest who will put themselves out there. So instead of asking, “Are there any questions?” ask targeted questions to see if students understand what you just taught them: “Ciara, can you tell me what you’re going to do after you get your test tubes?” “Jordan, what could happen if you forget to carry the one?” “Mikey, where should everyone put their journal today when they’ve finished?” These brief exchanges will get everyone’s attention, provide a quick review, and help students identify areas where they might be confused. Have students explain things to each other. After teaching a concept or giving instructions, have students do a think-pair-share to explain it to each other. This gives each student a chance to process their thoughts to a low-risk audience of one, and the act of trying to put what they just learned into their own words has massive cognitive impact. Once students have explained it to each other, they can correct small misconceptions, and if they can’t, they will be more likely to ask you for help after discovering that someone else is confused about the same thing. Do the first few steps together. Instead of assigning something, then sending students off to do it on their own, provide time to get started together. The I Do, We Do, You Do structure is a classic method for modeling a task for students, and by building this kind of scaffolding into most tasks, you’re saving yourself a lot of time that would have been spent re-teaching later on. Have students score a sample completed task. When you’re giving a more complex assignment or project, give students a completed sample—ideally with a few problems built in—and have them evaluate it. This forces students to pay closer attention to the assignment criteria, and it will call everyone’s attention to areas that may be unclear. (By the way, creating this model is a valuable lesson in itself. Around here we call this dogfooding your lessons, and it’s one of the best ways to improve the assignments you give to students.) Teach Students How to Ask Questions Students don’t come into the world understanding how to monitor their own understanding, then formulate respectful questions that target their exact area of misconception. The only way they’ll get good at doing this is to practice. So in your classroom, whether it’s formally or informally, show students how to ask these kinds of questions. You may even want to provide question stems that show them the kinds of questions they could ask to clarify their understandings: This is what I do understand… (summarize up to the point of misunderstanding) Can you tell me if I’ve got this right? (paraphrasing current understanding) Can you please show another example? Could you explain that one more time? Is it ______ or _________? (identifying a point of confusion between two possibilities) By encouraging students to ask these kinds of questions, you’re teaching students how to monitor their own learning and get the help they need. Provide Time for Private Questions If the only time students are given to ask questions is when the whole class is listening, some students may never raise their hands. Ever. And the reasons could run a whole lot deeper than basic shyness. Here are some possible situations when a student may not feel comfortable asking a question in front of the whole class: Students who are aware that many of their classmates are academically stronger than them and don’t want to look stupid. Students who have a crush on someone in class and would rather die before putting themselves out there. Students who are currently embroiled in some kind of argument with another student. Students who are being bullied by another student. Students who just this morning found a huge zit on their forehead or have some other totally embarrassing physical “situation” going on. I could go on and on. The possibilities for humiliation are endless. S

  Listen to my interview with CommonLit founder Michelle Brown (transcript):   We want our students to be able to read challenging texts. That’s a given. We want them to learn to analyze, paraphrase, and infer. We want them to support their points with textual evidence. And we have a pretty good idea of how to teach them to do these things. The only catch is finding the right texts. To truly develop our students’ skills, we need to have them read a variety of well-written, challenging materials. Whole books are an option, but they don’t always lend themselves to the focused practice students need to tackle texts just at the edge of their cognitive reach. For that kind of study, many teachers prefer shorter pieces, and finding these is no easy task. That’s where CommonLit comes in. An online library of free literary and informational texts, CommonLit helps teachers quickly locate leveled texts that fit into a lesson or unit, assess student understanding, generate discussion, and even pair the texts with other media, all in one free platform. It’s an ideal tool for grades 5-12 but would also work for advanced students in the lower grades. Let’s take a closer look at CommonLit. A Library of Literary and Informational Texts When looking for a text on CommonLit, you’ll start by browsing the Library. The site offers a number of different ways to search for just the right text: You can look by grade level (spanning grades 5 through 12), by genre (with categories as specific as magical realism, interview, and primary source document), by Common Core reading standard, by literary device (such as alliteration, imagery, and hyperbole), or by theme. Multiple categories can be selected to help you really zero in on exactly what you need. Here’s a peek at some of the theme collections:   Suppose we choose the theme “Resilience.” Once we select it, we can narrow the theme down to a sub-theme, then narrow our search again by grade level. Here are the current options in the grade 9-10 group under Resilience:     CommonLit’s library of high-quality writing comes from a variety of sources: classic works that are now in the public domain, like the piece by Frederick Douglass professional writing contributed from other publications, like the Psychology Today piece examining Bethany Hamilton’s experience after a shark attack short works donated by writers like Margaret Atwood, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Gary Soto (part of other thematic collections) Helpful Features Once you have chosen a text, you can make the most of it by using all the robust features CommonLit provides. Readability Features The site offers a choice of font sizes and numbered paragraphs for easy navigation. Footnotes and Glossary Numbers embedded within the text are linked to pop-ups that define key vocabulary terms and provide background information on concepts students may not be familiar with. Summary Each text is introduced by a brief summary that gives a bit of information about the author and the text, then suggests an area students may want to focus on while they read. Text-Dependent Questions A set of text-dependent questions and discussion questions (top right) is included for every text.   A sample text page. (Click image for larger view.)   Paired Texts For every text, you will also find a section where the CommonLit staff has hand-selected other texts in the library that would make good pairings. The rationale behind each pairing is carefully explained: Sometimes two texts are paired for a common theme, other times they are linked because they use a similar literary device. Related Media In this section, video and audio clips have been thoughtfully chosen to enrich student understanding of the ideas in the text. With the addition of this section, CommonLit has provided everything you need to give your students a full multimedia experience that spans generations and genres.   Paired Texts are chosen for every reading passage. (Click image for larger view.) Parent Guides CommonLit provides a parent guide for every text, allowing teachers to share what students are reading with parents. The guide also suggests ways parents can support the learning at home. New: Student Accounts and Progress Tracking This month, CommonLit has introduced its newest feature, which allows teachers to create classes with student accounts, then track student progress on the text-based questions. A Look Inside Here’s an overview of how all these features work together:   Try it Yourself The more I dig into CommonLit, the better it gets. And it’s going to keep improving: CEO Michelle Brown says they add an average of 10 new titles every day, so be sure to check back for more. With a resource like CommonLit in every teacher’s back pocket, we no longer have to waste hours looking for the right text. Now we, and our students, can spend those hours simply enjoying some great reads. ♦   If you like what you see on CommonLit, be sure to also check out their Pinterest boards where they collect resources to support teachers’ work with texts. Update, May 2017: CommonLit has recently added the “Browse by Book” feature which allows teachers to browse its entire digital library of supplemental reading passages by 50 related, commonly taught book titles. For each book, CommonLit recommends 5-12 hand-picked text pairings along with suggestions for when and how to integrate them in a book unit. This new feature makes it easier for teachers to use research-based best practices: helping students to build context and make connections across texts. Learn something new every week. Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. You’ll also get access to my members-only library of free resources, including my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, which has helped thousands of teachers spend less time grading!  

Listen to my interview with Tracy Enos or read the transcript here.   In our never-ending quest to find better ways to differentiate and personalize instruction for students, we have plenty of options. I covered a lot of the basics in my Differentiation Starter Kit. Then last year we learned how math teacher Natalie McCutchen manages a self-paced classroom. And for ESL students, there are the Can-Do Descriptors. Now, Rhode Island teacher Tracy Enos shares her system for customizing instruction to meet the needs of every student. She calls it a playlist, an individualized digital assignment chart that students work through at their own pace. How Playlists Work First, consider what we usually do: When planning a typical unit of instruction, teachers map out a series of lessons to deliver, assignments for students to complete, and some kind of final assessment at the end. They might share this plan with students, but then the execution is done by the teacher: The teacher delivers the lessons, tells students when to do the assignments, and guides students toward the final assessment. With playlists, the responsibility for executing the learning plan shifts: Students are given the unit plan, including access to all the lessons (in text or video form), ahead of time. With the learning plan in hand, students work through the lessons and assignments at their own pace. And because each student has her own digital copy of the playlist (delivered through a system like Google Classroom), the teacher can customize the list to meet each student’s needs. Tracy Enos “A playlist is basically like a road map,” Enos explains. “I started using them in my classroom when I looked at my room full of 26 students and I saw the variety in their abilities. I knew I needed something different so that I could meet the needs of each one of those kids. Instead of just saying, ‘OK, everybody, we’re going to work on this lesson today,’ I needed to individualize it so that different kids are working on things that they needed.” The term playlist, by the way, was coined by one of Enos’ colleagues, math teacher Jason Appel. Sample Playlists Here are screenshots of three sample playlists from Enos’s class. If you click on each one, you’ll be taken to the full version to view in Google Docs. Although these examples come from a language arts class, Enos feels strongly that the playlist concept could be used in any content area. Argument Writing Playlist The first playlist is for a unit on argument writing. What you see here is just the first few tasks; there are 19 on the full playlist. In the first column, Enos simply names the task. The second column provides specific instructions for the task. The third column is set up for students to record any notes they have about the task, and the fourth is where students record the date they completed the task. Although much of the playlist will be exactly the same for each student, especially for the first few tasks, individual tasks can be customized to meet individual needs. Because the playlist is stored in digital form, the teacher can go into each student’s playlist at any time and make adjustments as needed. In addition to adjusting certain tasks, Enos also builds space in each playlist for purely individualized tasks. If we look further down her playlist, we see that tasks #14 and #15 have been left open for individualized focus revision activities, to be determined after the student has written her draft: Enos does place occasional hard deadlines into her playlists; item 13 above has a date assigned to it. Although students are allowed to complete the work before the deadline, having this task pinned to a specific date helps prevent students from getting too far off track from each other. Parts of Speech Playlist This next one is from a unit designed to review the parts of speech. Notice that some of the tasks are quite simple and quick: Students just need to log on to a certain platform, create an account, or join an online group. This makes the playlist a practical tool as well as a good instructional vehicle: One place to keep learning tasks AND the kinds of housekeeping items that accompany most units. And breaking units into smaller tasks gives students a feeling of accomplishment as they move through each item. To see the full version of this playlist, click the image below: Again, the “Directions” column allows for maximum flexibility. The teacher can add tech tips, reminders, or any other information that might help student complete the task more smoothly. And if this is done in digital form, the teacher can easily add tips, links, or other comments at any time, making the playlist a living document. Book Club Playlist The final example is a playlist created for a unit on dystopian fiction, in which students participated in book clubs. Notice that the playlist also includes checkpoints, where students must touch base with their teacher before moving on. These can be built in at any point for any reason, such as making sure students have completed key housekeeping tasks (like in the example above) or having the teacher review a draft for quality. Many of the tasks in the playlist will ultimately result in the student submitting work through Google Classroom, or they might require a paper submission in a class that hasn’t gone quite so digital. In fact, the whole system could be done on paper—one look at how student learning is managed in a Montessori classroom and you’ll see how that can work. What’s key is that students work through the list on their own, which frees the teacher up to spend more time working one-on-one with students. Managing Student Pace If students are truly working at their own pace, wouldn’t that mean some are way ahead, even finished with a unit, while others drag way behind? Setting a few hard deadlines (as shown in the argument writing playlist) can help keep the pacing from spiraling too far out of whack, but if our goal is true individualization, then we shouldn’t want everyone to be too closely aligned. This can be managed on a day-to-day basis. Students who are taking longer to master key tasks will likely get more one-on-one assistance from the teacher or be placed in groups to help them. Those who finish the required material quickly can be given enrichment tasks that take the learning to more advanced levels. Homework also takes on a different role in a class that uses playlists: Because students work through the playlists on their own, they decide whether they get homework or not. If a student is moving through a playlist quickly, they may not have a need to spend extra time on the work at home. Conversely, if a student finds he needs extra help in class, he may decide to catch up on a few videos at home. Learn More and Share Your Experiences For a more in-depth exploration of playlists, listen to my podcast interview with Tracy Enos using the player above or by listening on iTunes or Stitcher (for Android). If you have questions, ask them in the comments below and I’ll have Tracy come over and answer them. And if you have used a system that’s similar to playlists, please share your experiences in the comments so we can all learn together.♦   There’s a lot more where this came from. Join the Cult of Pedagogy mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration—in quick, bite-sized packages—all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. You’ll get access to my members-only library of free downloadable resources, including my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, which has helped thousands of teachers spend less time grading. If you are already a subscriber and want this resource, just check your most recent email for a link to the Members-Only Library—it’s in there!  

Listen to my interview with Liz Galarza (transcript):   How well do we know our students? They sit in our classrooms five days a week, we certainly spend lots of time with them, but how well do we really know them? How well do we know their thoughts, their worries, the things they obsess about? And how well do they ever get to know us beyond our role as a teacher? Liz Galarza I’ve been hammering away at the importance of the teacher-student relationship for about as long as Cult of Pedagogy has been a thing, but every now and then I come across a method or approach that can really help build those relationships more effectively. My friend Liz Galarza, who teaches middle school writing in New York, has been telling me for ages about the dialogue journals she uses with her students and how transformational they have been in building relationships. The journals had such a profound impact that Galarza made them the focus of her doctoral dissertation. What are Dialogue Journals? A dialogue journal is any kind of bound notebook where students and teachers write letters back and forth to each other over a period of time. This is very similar to the kinds of journals described in Smokey and Elaine Daniels’ book, The Best Kept Teaching Secret, but since Galarza has had such powerful experiences with these journals, I thought another post was merited. In Galarza’s class, students purchase whatever kind of journals they want, “as long as it’s going to withstand a year’s worth of back and forth,” she says. “Most of them use the marble composition notebooks. I ask them to decorate with pictures or quotes, and it really does show their personality.” How Dialogue Journals Work The First Entry In the first few days of school, Galarza gets to know her students through intake forms (not included in the journals) where she asks students to tell her five things about themselves that she wouldn’t be able to tell by looking at them or their school records. Next, she goes into the journals and writes the first entry, starting with a very general welcome, then beginning to connect with students based on things they wrote on their intake forms. Although many teachers begin these kinds of journals by having students write the first entry, Galarza has had more success by starting them herself. “I think the kids who have less confidence when it comes to writing would feel paralyzed by that. So I try and make it very, very open.” In the sample letter below, Galarza connects with this student about her love of reading and writing, softball, and pets. “The first letter I ask more questions than any other time, but I get them to see that I’m human. We have commonalities. I’m interested in you. You’re important to me. This is going to be fun.”     Student Responses Once the teacher’s first letter is written, students write back. In this sample, Nick responds to Galarza’s opening letter, where she mentioned Derek Jeter leaving the Yankees. “In his intake sheet, every single thing he wrote about was about baseball and the Yankees,” so Galarza made sure she mentioned that in her first letter.   Time and Grading As the school year progresses, the journals go back and forth between teacher and student. Galarza asks students to write one letter a week, although some students write more often than that. About once a week, Galarza will ask each class period to hand in their journals, staggering these on different days so she only has one class period per day to respond to. She takes about an hour to respond to a single class set of journals, so if it’s a busy season, she may end up only collecting them every two weeks, rather than once a week. As for grading, students are simply given credit for completion. Even if they don’t write a lot, they get credit for doing it. And that’s it. Galarza does not mark errors or evaluate the work for any kind of score. Because this journal is about building a relationship, Galarza doesn’t want to take away its appeal by assigning a grade to it. “The more often you put a grade on something,” she says, “the less empowering you’re making it for the students.”     Benefits of Dialogue Journals Shifting the Power Differential: Because dialogue journals allow students to see their teachers as people, they shift the teacher from the “all powerful” role and create a stronger, more meaningful connection between teacher and student. “As a teacher we always have that authoritative stance: We’re the teacher, and they’re the student, and they know that,” Galarza explains. “I think the more you use that as leverage, the less you’re going to get out of students.” Writing Fluency: When students write in dialogue journals, there’s no pressure to fulfill an assignment or construct perfect sentences. Students just write. And the more a person writes, the more confident they become and the better their writing gets. If the teacher can identify topics that are important to the student, this can inspire far more writing than a student would ever produce for an assignment. Nick, the student above who wrote about Derek Jeter, initially told Galarza he hated to write. After their first exchange about the Yankees, Galarza says the topic stayed with them for the rest of the year, and Nick ended up filling more pages than any other student that year. Formative Assessment: Although the journals are not designed for this purpose, having students write regularly allows the teacher to spot errors or weaknesses that can inform teaching. “I can use the multiple language errors that I find in many of the journals as a basis for my mini-lessons,” Galarza explains. “So if I see that many of my students are not using commas when they’re offsetting a list, that might become a grammar mini-lesson.” Individualized Instruction: “You can literally teach them something within the journal without anyone knowing that you’re doing it,” Galarza says. “I’ve said something like, ‘You know, you can use a semicolon in your sentence’ … I might even highlight it. ‘You know in this sentence up here? You don’t need a period there. You could use a semicolon.’ I’ll just throw in a little grammar instruction as we’re going along only if I think that they would be receptive to it.” Mentor Texts: As the teacher and student go back and forth, students pick up on the teacher’s style of writing, and the teacher’s letters effectively become mentor texts. For example, when Galarza responds to her more advanced writers, “I might use a more complex sentence structure. I might combine sentences or use phrases and just more sophisticated language.” Often she notices students using these same structures in their own responses. Funds of Knowledge: Keeping dialogue journals with students over time helps teachers discover students’ unique funds of knowledge, areas of expertise they might not have known about otherwise.  “I had this student this year who was into taxidermy and hunting,” Galarza says. “I was so interested in it, so I asked him to give me information on it, and he really did. Like technical. Like it belongs in a book. And then he drew pictures.” She asked him if he ever thought about writing a comic book about hunting or taxidermy, and in his response, he considered it:     Relationships: Ultimately, the most important benefit of the journals is the relationships they build. When students feel they have a trusted adult in school, when they feel heard and seen, that makes school a place they want to come to. “I don’t look at teaching the way many people do,” Galarza says. “I know that they could learn anything they need to learn from their homes with a device on their lap still in their pajamas. They don’t need me to learn. They need me to care.” ♦       There’s a lot more where this came from. Join the Cult of Pedagogy mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration—in quick, bite-sized packages—all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. You’ll get access to my members-only library of free downloadable resources, including my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, which has helped thousands of teachers spend less time grading. If you are already a subscriber and want this resource, just check your most recent email for a link to the Members-Only Library—it’s in there!  

Listen to my interview with Michael Linsin here or read a full transcript.   When I was a teacher, classroom management was not my strongest suit. I relied heavily on forming good relationships with my students, thereby preventing misbehavior. This worked about 90 percent of the time; I really didn’t have a whole lot of behavior problems. Unfortunately, the way I dealt with that other 10 percent was rather haphazard: Far too often, I defaulted to the “Wait till there’s a problem, then react” mode. If I had known about Michael Linsin back then, if I’d had access to the stockpiles of advice he shares on his website, Smart Classroom Management, I would have done things differently. For you, though, it’s not too late. If you haven’t already discovered Michael Linsin or Smart Classroom Management, this will be a good day for you. Because a few weeks ago, Michael and I spent close to an hour talking on Skype. I asked him to share his advice for teachers implementing a classroom management plan for the school year. Michael Linsin   For those who want the quick version, I have pulled the four most important points he made—four keys to setting up and implementing a classroom management plan so that it really works—and summarized them here. Key 1: Have an Actual Plan My biggest classroom management mistake was that “wait and see” mentality I mentioned before. I never really had a clear plan, and I don’t remember ever giving more than a few minutes to explaining my rules and procedures to students. Honestly, I didn’t want them to think I was mean, or boring, or lame. I wanted to talk about the good stuff on day 1, not bog students down with a bunch of negativity. And year after year, that bit me in the butt. It’s not that I had badly behaved students, but my lack of clear structure made my job way harder than it had to be. If I’d set up and communicated a clear behavior plan at the beginning of each year, I know I would have enjoyed teaching a lot more. A classroom management plan should not be complicated. All you need are rules and consequences. Classroom Rules Linsin recommends creating a short, simple list of rules. “It’s important just to think about how you can protect your students’ right to learn and also protect your freedom to teach. You want to think about all those behaviors from your experience that are interfering with those two goals, and you create a set of rules as boundaries that protect that freedom.” In his basic classroom management plan, Linsin recommends including the following rules: Listen and follow directions. Raise your hand before speaking or leaving your seat. Keep your hands and feet to yourself. Respect your classmates and your teacher. Now I’ll tell you this: I have always had my doubts about simple lists like this, because I felt they were way too open to interpretation (and misinterpretation). Too much gray area. But that’s because I didn’t understand how to effectively implement a simple list of rules. Now I do, and I’m going to get into that in Key 2. But first, the consequences. Classroom Consequences To accompany the simple list of classroom rules, Linsin recommends a short sequence of consequences for breaking the rules: Warning Time-out Letter home Linsin acknowledges that these rules and consequences are pretty standard, and he does not insist that all teachers stick to his specific choices. “There is no magic in the rules and consequences themselves,” he says. “It’s how you present them and then how you fulfill them.” That’s where the magic starts to happen. Key 2: Teach your plan. REALLY teach it. This is not the same as “going over” the rules. That’s just reading off a list and basically telling students what you expect. While that’s better than nothing, it isn’t enough. If you want students to really understand exactly how they should behave and exactly what will happen if they don’t, you need to teach your behavior plan as you would any other piece of content. The bulk of this, Linsin says, can be accomplished through detailed modeling of appropriate and inappropriate behaviors. “Model those rules so there are no misunderstandings about what they mean, and what behaviors they cover. You would model from your perspective as the teacher and as a student, so you may be sitting in a student’s chair with the students surrounding you showing them precisely how to raise their hands.” Linsin urges teachers to be excruciatingly specific in this modeling. “The more detailed you are, even to a ridiculous degree,” he says, “the more effective and powerful it is. I may show them the actual bend in the elbow of how to raise their hand, the finger placement…” And after you model the behavior, have the students model it back for you. “You may have the whole class showing you how to raise their hand, how to get up to get a tissue. You may have one model, and then you’ll have five model, and then you’ll have them all model at the same time.” Although this kind of detailed teaching takes time at the beginning of the year, it ultimately saves you time and frustration later. And it may not be necessary to teach ALL the rules on the very first day. “Let’s say you have time to only model one rule,” Linsin says. “If you model it in a highly detailed way, it transfers. They begin to understand that you’re going to expect that with everything. The first routine you teach of the year, you want to teach the heck out of it, to a remarkable, ridiculous level, because you’re not so much teaching the routine, you’re teaching how to do things the right way. You’re teaching excellence. You’re setting the tone of ‘This is how we do it here. We do things the right way, and we pursue excellence in everything we do.’” Key 3: Enforce Like a Robot When it’s time to enforce your rules and consequences, establish some professional distance between you and your students. Execute your plan without getting emotional about it. Linsin advises teachers to be “incredibly personable with the students, and build really close relationships, but when it comes to classroom management, you’re an unfeeling robot almost. Or a referee on a football field. You call them like you see them.” For a lot of teachers, this is easier said than done. I know it was for me. When students misbehaved, I did kind of take it personally. My heart believed that if they respected me, if they cared about me, then they wouldn’t talk when I was talking, they wouldn’t fool around when they were supposed to be doing something else. It upset me, and I’m sure that showed on my face and in my voice. It added an extra layer of tension and compounded the problem, making the interaction more about the student and me than about the behavior. It would be far more effective for teachers to train themselves to perceive misbehavior the way Linsin does.   “It’s not me,” he tells himself. “It’s a choice they’re making, and there’s a consequence for that choice. I’m not going to take it personally. I’m not going to feel like that student is doing that because of me.” He urges teachers to treat infractions quickly and with no emotion. “I believe in never lecturing, scolding, any of that kind of stuff, because every time you do it, it just makes managing your classroom more difficult.”   Key 4: Sell Your Class Although making sure students have razor-sharp clarity of your behavior plan is essential, it’s just as important to make students want to be in your class. “You have to sell your program,” Linsin explains. “My number one goal is not that at the end of the day that they know the rules and consequences. It’s that they’re happy and excited to be part of the class. That they run home to their parents and say, ‘Oh my gosh. I have the best teacher. I have this awesome class. We’re going to do this and that this year. It’s going to be great.’ Because that’s what’s going to give you the leverage. The classroom management secret is to create a classroom that students love being a part of.” So spend lots of time that first day getting students excited about the year, about the learning they’re going to do and the community they will create. “The idea of classroom management, of my website, is not just to get through the day,” Linsin says. “It’s to create an experience those students will remember for a lifetime.” ♦   Michael Linsin is the author of several books on Classroom Management: Dream Class, The Classroom Management Secret, and The Happy Teacher Habits*. His most recent publication is an e-book, The Smart Classroom Management Plan For High School Teachers. * Some of these are affiliate links. If you make a purchase through these links, I get a small commission from Amazon at no extra cost to you.   There’s a lot more where this came from. Join the Cult of Pedagogy mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration—in quick, bite-sized packages—all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. You’ll get access to my members-only library of free downloadable resources, including my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, which has helped thousands of teachers spend less time grading. If you are already a subscriber and want this resource, just check your most recent email for a link to the Members-Only Library—it’s in there!  

Listen to my interview with Monique Morris, author of Pushout (transcript):   I want to tell you about Danielle. About halfway through my second year of teaching, the other teachers started talking about how Danielle Robinson was coming back. A seventh grade student, transferring over from another school. She’d start on Monday, they said. They sounded like they were talking about the weather guy predicting the worst tornado in decades. As it turned out, Danielle was kind of legendary. She’d been at our school before, and seventh grade was more of an estimate of her grade, since she’d been absent so many times and held back at least once. Over lunch, my colleagues filled me in about her: the fights, the backtalk, the low-cut shirts, the constant truancy, the hickeys, the fights, the fights, the fights. “Of course she’s getting sent back to us,” one of them said. “I heard she met her match at her last school and got her ass beat.” The look on their faces, hearing this news, could only be described with one word: satisfied. She wasn’t in my class that year, but I knew exactly who she was. You felt her coming down the hall before you saw her, because had a way of drawing a crowd. She’d shout insults and directives at the people she passed. When the bell rang, sending others scurrying to class, Danielle continued on as before, totally unaffected. She was a force of nature, and to tell the truth, she scared me.   The following year, when I agreed to sponsor the student government, Danielle ran for student body president. The teachers had a complete fit. They scrambled, trying to figure out ways to stop her, but it was the beginning of the school year, a fresh start. She hadn’t done anything wrong yet, so they had to let her run. She won. Actually, there’s more to that story: The afternoon when I sat in my team room, counting votes, my mentor stopped by to see how the results were going. When I told him it was looking like Danielle would beat the other candidate, a white girl with straight A’s beloved by all the teachers, who had created a beautiful set of campaign posters, who would no doubt work incredibly hard in the position and do an excellent job, he told me this: It would be in my best interest to make sure the other girl won. I froze for a moment, not quite sure I understood his meaning. I asked for clarification, and he clarified: I should lie. Thirty minutes later, I got on the school PA system and announced that Danielle would be our president that year. Although I’d hoped to prove my colleague wrong, that Danielle would surprise everyone and turn out to be an outstanding student leader, that didn’t happen. I imagined myself mentoring her, developing her skills and strengths and showing everyone they were wrong about her. But I really didn’t know how. She made me nervous. Her term as president started out okay: She attended the meetings and participated in the activities, but once the school year really kicked in, the absences started, then she got into a fight or two, and her grades were terrible. By February, according to school policy for extracurricular activities, she had to step down from her presidency.   It’s my experiences with students like Danielle, my failures with the black female students in my own past, that made me take an immediate interest in the book Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools by Monique Morris, and it’s why I chose it for this year’s Cult of Pedagogy Summer Book Study. In the book, Morris examines the ways in which schools interact with black girls, the ways in which they are often criminalized when their behavior is treated as “delinquent,” and how our exclusionary responses to this behavior—usually through suspensions or expulsions—ultimately push many black girls out of school and into lives of abuse, sex trafficking, drug use, and various forms of incarceration. For some teachers, especially white teachers, an examination of this dynamic might be overwhelming: We do our best with what we are given, some might say. If a child does not come to school ready to learn, there’s nothing we can do. I disagree. I believe that a core responsibility of teachers is to meet each child where she is and help her grow. If a child does not come to school ready to learn, then our professional duty is to get her ready. And the only way to do that is to become very clear on exactly what each child needs. In this case, Monique Morris helps us better understand the needs of Black girls. “Schools serve a greater social function than simply developing the rote skills of children and adolescents,” she writes. “As Black girls become adolescents, the influence of schools is critical to their socialization. This is especially important given that schools often serve as surrogates for influences that might otherwise be lacking in the lives of economically and socially marginalized children.” If you work with students of color, and especially if your student population includes Black girls, you should consider this book to be required reading. It will deepen your understanding of what it means to truly meet the needs of these students, what mistakes you may have taken in the past, and specific steps you can take to do better. This could be especially helpful if you are not a person of color. Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools by Monique Morris 256 pages, The New Press, March 2016 Affiliate disclosure: For every purchase of Pushout through this site, I receive a small commission from Amazon.  My Personal Takeaways Here are the points from the book that resonated most with me: We need alternatives to exclusionary punishments. Removing a student from class or from school through suspension or expulsion does nothing to change that student’s behavior, and because it detaches that student from the school culture and puts them further behind academically, it often makes the problem at the root of the behavior worse. Suspension is the default setting for certain infractions in so many schools, so I’m sure it’s hard to imagine what else could take its place, especially when so many schools proudly enforce zero-tolerance policies. “Zero-tolerance policies, while intended initially to keep communities safe,” Morris says in our interview, “really turned into a way for us to justify harsh hyper-punitive reactions to normal adolescent behavior.” Schools who really want to see their students’ behavior improve, rather than just removing those who misbehave, would be wise to learn more about restorative practices or programs like PBIS. We need to build cultural competence. We need to educate ourselves more thoroughly about our students’ backgrounds and cultures in order to more accurately interpret their behavior. By “cultural competence,” Morris is not referring to cultures from other countries. We have multiple cultures coexisting right here in the U.S., students whose home lives and cultures are quite different from what we typically expect in schools. In my interview with her, Morris describes an incident where a girl could be suspended for wearing a hat, even if she’s wearing it to cover a half-completed set of braids. “The request for her to remove the hat is actually culturally incompetent. For black girls, the two day process to braid her hair is actually less important – it was more important that she arrived at school for the test. It was more important that she was there in school to learn, than whether or not she had a hat hiding the fact that the top of her hair was not done.” If we as educators have a more thorough understanding of our students’ cultural backgrounds, we are less likely to interpret certain behaviors as defiant or problematic. Co-construction of school rules is essential. When teachers are the ones who define all the rules and expectations, we get less buy-in from students. One of most important ways we can improve our relationships with students is to co-construct classroom norms, to work with students to define expectations and how we will hold them accountable. In our interview, Morris explains why this works: “If educators are really focused from day one on helping their students and working with the students to co-construct what they need in the classroom to be present, and how they are going to work together around systems of accountability…when you work with kids to develop those agreements, they are more likely to be accountable to them.” We must see ALL of our students as children. One of the most significant shifts a teacher can make to better meet the needs of black female students is to remember that they are children. “There is this way in which we sort of cast children who are most at risk of getting in contact with the criminal and juvenile legal system as being different kinds of kids,” Morris says. “I don’t believe that. I don’t believe they are different. I believe that their experiences have been different and that has shaped their reactions to many things. They are not little women, they are children. They are developing, just like your child is developing. It’s really about leading with love.” Monique Morris   I have no idea where Danielle is now, but she should be in her early thirties. I pray that life has turned out well for her, but I suspect it hasn’t. I may not have contributed directly to Danielle’s pushout, but I certainly didn’t do anything to prevent it. If I had read a book like Pushout when I was working with her, I know I would have done things differently. For one, I wouldn’t have been as intimidated. I would have seen her as a child who needed guidance and patience. I also would have tried harder: I didn’t understand the long-term consequences of her relationship with school. Most importantly, I would have asked my colleagues to read it. And now, that’s the best thing I can do: Encourage you and the other teachers you work with to read Pushout with an open heart. I can’t wait to talk about this phenomenal bo

Listen to this post as a podcast: If you struggle with classroom management no matter how many different strategies you try, there’s a good chance you might be doing something to get in your own way. In this post I wrote for MiddleWeb, I explain how each one of these teacher mistakes can cause problems for you, and what you can do instead. Read the full post HERE. Learn something new every week. Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration—in quick, bite-sized packages—all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. You’ll also get access to my members-only library of free downloadable resources, including my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, which has helped thousands of teachers spend less time grading!  

“Students – Podium” by Andy is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0   Listen to my podcast interview with Listenwise founder and CEO, Monica Brady-Meyerov (transcript): This is a sponsored post. All opinions are my own.   I have been a fan of public radio for decades. The quality of reporting, the depth of storytelling, the luxurious length of time spent on a single feature, it helps me to dig in, to learn with my senses, to actually care about a topic because I’ve gotten to know the people involved. Every day, dozens of exceptional stories are published on public radio, and they have the potential to offer our students that same rich experience, helping them connect to the content in ways written text can’t reach them. Imagine listening to an interview with Elie Wiesel when learning about the Holocaust, or having your study of the Civil Rights Movement include activist Franklin McCain’s description of participating in a lunch counter sit-in. If you happen to catch a broadcast on a topic you’re teaching, that’s lucky. If not, you might try to find something in a station’s website archives, but otherwise that outstanding content is tucked away, hard to find unless you know exactly what you’re looking for. Now that has changed. The people at Listenwise have made it their mission to bring public radio podcasts directly to the classroom. They curate a growing collection of professionally produced podcasts, organize and tag them into categories, and build a set of outstanding instructional resources around each one. With Listenwise, teachers can easily use podcasts as classroom texts, amplifying content and giving students practice in required listening skills. How it Works Suppose I’m a science teacher wanting to teach about ecosystems. I can plug that term into the search bar on Listenwise, and I’ll get a list of all the podcasts in their library that have some connection to ecosystems. Here’s just part of my search results:     Let’s say I choose the one about overfishing. When I click on that, I go to a page where the podcast itself is embedded in a player right on the page. I also get free resources to use with my students: a graphic organizer that helps students follow along as they listen plus a list of listening comprehension questions, so I can monitor whether students are really paying attention.     Notice that some of my search results were marked with a content area label, while others were called “Current Events.” The Current Events stories, which are added every weekday, don’t have the player embedded on the page; instead, these link right to the original podcast on the page of whatever public radio outlet originally produced them. Listening comprehension questions are provided for these as well. So far, everything I’ve described is completely free, an excellent set of tools for finding just the right stories to complement your content. But Listenwise also has a premium subscription for schools and districts that offers so much more. Premium Subscriptions: ESL Differentiation, Lesson Plans, and More Listenwise Premium, which is only offered on a school-subscription basis, includes an incredible set of support materials and tools to help you and your students get the most from the podcast library. The supports include: Interactive transcripts that allow students to read along with the podcast while they listen, highlighting each word as it is spoken. This offers incredible scaffolding for English language learners, not to mention any other student who just wants a little extra support. Because the vocabulary used in public radio reporting tends to be more challenging, seeing those words written down can go a long way toward boosting comprehension for any student. Variable playback speed, giving students the option to play the podcast at its original speed or slowed down. This is another feature that’s wonderful for English language learners. Vocabulary lists defining key terms that appear in the podcast. The lists are divided into several tiers, which allows you to differentiate for students if desired. Standards-aligned lesson plans for science, social studies, and English language arts, which help teachers build solid lessons to accompany each podcast. Lessons can also be searched for by standard. Listen to this lesson on Child Soldiers here.   Another key feature of Listenwise Premium is the ability to create student accounts. This allows teachers to set up classes, assign podcasts to some or all of their students, customize lessons and discussion questions however they like, and assess student responses, all inside the Listenwise platform. Using the site this way makes the most of flipped or blended learning, allowing your students to consume content on their own and freeing you up to interact with students one-on-one or go more in-depth with class discussions of the content. This video demonstrates how to set up a lesson with Listenwise Premium:     Helping You Meet Listening Standards Aside from the fact that public radio podcasts are superlative in quality and simply offer students a break from the way they typically consume content, these podcasts help teachers satisfy state and national standards that require students to develop listening skills. As a former English language arts teacher myself, I will admit that these were the standards that often got left behind. It was easy to find ways to have students work on writing, reading, and even speaking, but I rarely made time to explicitly teach listening skills, as the Common Core requires. Part of the reason for this oversight is that I didn’t have a lot of materials available for listening practice. With the podcasts on Listenwise, such as the story about the Freedom Riders, or the legal impact of Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, that problem is solved. 21st Century Learning Made Simple We live in a time when digital content—in the form of text, video and audio—is available to us like never before. Still, we only have so many hours in a day to find the materials that are just right for our students; that lack of time can keep us doing the same things the same way. With a tool like Listenwise, you can easily bring your classroom into the 21st century without sacrificing time or quality. In fact, with the years of experience public radio stations already bring to the table, you get the high standards of old-school journalism delivered with high-tech efficiency; truly the best of both worlds. ♦ Learn something new every week. Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration—in quick, bite-sized packages—all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. You’ll also get access to my members-only library of free downloadable resources, including my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, which has helped thousands of teachers spend less time grading!