Top 10 Picture Books to Inspire “Classroom Habitudes” by Lesley Burnap At the beginning of this summer I was privileged to hear Angela Maiers speak about her book, Classroom Habitudes: Teaching Habits and Attitudes for 21st Century Learning, and her movement, Choose2Matter. This passionate speaker and educator has encouraged me to be bolder. During day 2 of nErDcampMI, I found myself standing in line with my Twitter-friend, Ann King, to propose a session on Genius Hour. Now if that doesn’t sound too risky, consider this: I have not yet incorporated Genius Hour in my teaching AND I had only just met Ann in person the day before! It was a rewarding experience that has me excited for a new school year. If you are unfamiliar with Angela’s work, she writes about the 7 habitudes (habits + attitudes) our students need to thrive and excel in their careers and in life. In the list below, I have 1 or 2 titles for each habitude, and I explore some reasons why I put each book under a particular category. 1) Going Places by Peter and Paul Reynolds Like this:
Relationship Building Through Culturally Responsive Classroom Management School behavior problems often originate outside of the classroom. For example, asthma is the number one cause of absenteeism. When asthmatics are unable to sleep at night, they miss class or arrive at school so sleep drunk and irritable that disruptive behavior ensues, getting them tossed out of class. Consequently, they fall more behind in classwork, which increases academic struggle. More outbursts and further truancy results. Poverty and race nitro-accelerate the cycle. Don’t blame asthmatic students, their parents, or their teachers. Society pays a high price for these inequities. What can teachers do to reduce these inequities? Take the Cultural Competence Test Our perceptions and values might feel stable, but they’re actually influenced by social forces. “Suppose you are on a boat with your mother, your spouse, and your child. Of the U.S. citizens who answer the question, 60% decide to save their spouse and 40% save their children. Culturally Responsive Classroom Management
Dipsticks: Efficient Ways to Check for Understanding What strategy can double student learning gains? According to 250 empirical studies, the answer is formative assessment, defined by Bill Younglove as "the frequent, interactive checking of student progress and understanding in order to identify learning needs and adjust teaching appropriately." Unlike summative assessment, which evaluates student learning according to a benchmark, formative assessment monitors student understanding so that kids are always aware of their academic strengths and learning gaps. Meanwhile, teachers can improve the effectiveness of their instruction, re-teaching if necessary. "When the cook tastes the soup," writes Robert E. Stake, "that's formative; when the guests taste the soup, that's summative." Alternative formative assessment (AFA) strategies can be as simple (and important) as checking the oil in your car -- hence the name "dipsticks." In the sections below, we'll discuss things to consider when implementing AFAs. 53 Ways to Check for Understanding
7 Tips for Better Classroom Management In my mind, the first and most basic obligation of a teacher is to see the beauty that exists within every student. Every child is infinitely precious. Period. When we start from this vantage point, classroom management -- and its flip side, student engagement -- comes more easily. It's an outgrowth of students feeling loved and respected. This video, shot in the first few days of my classroom in 2010, and the seven tips below will show how I try to put these ideas into practice. 1. Love them -- and stand firmly against behavior that doesn't meet your expectations or reflect their inner greatness. Our students know how we feel about them. 2. If a student chose not to meet one of my classroom expectations, they needed to know that I loved them but not their misbehavior. For instance, a minute and a half into the first day, I gave one student a verbal warning for whispering to another student as he was searching for his seat. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Your lesson plans need to be crystal clear.
Nurturing Intrinsic Motivation and Growth Mindset in Writing It's the first writing conference, four weeks into the year, with this blond senior. He stiffly leans back from me as far as the metal desk will allow, exuding cynicism, too cool for meeting with teachers about his writing. I can see he doesn't trust me yet or know why we conference, and he's afraid. The Power of Teacher Enthusiasm Conferencing and portfolios work for me. But I wish the research would point to these systems as consistent and universal means of student growth. Then, two years ago, I read Daniel Pink's Drive and Carol Dweck's Mindset, and I realized that a system of portfolios and conferences was not enough to change student engagement on its own. Intrinsic Motivation Pink’s Drive argues that employees -- and students -- after their basic needs are met, are motivated by autonomy, purpose, and mastery. But sometimes, I also got it right. Before, I'd encouraged my students to write for real audiences as summative assessments. Growth Mindset
"What Did You Call Me?" – How to Remember Students’ Names It’s a common predicament for educators. They familiarize themselves with students quickly, but can’t easily retrieve names on demand. The crush of first week stress compounds the problem by redirecting blood for a fight or flight response, dulling teachers’ focus. Some teachers turn to awkward work-arounds. Here’s the secret: take the same enthusiasm you have for baseball statistics, or civil war battles, or Christian Louboutin shoe prices, or Kardashian trivia, and apply it to learning students’ names. To help you out even more, we’ve prepared a short cheat sheet of effective tactics for imprinting students’ names onto your brain. What techniques do you use to remember students’ names?
Observation Challenge: What Do You Hear (Part One of Three) The Importance of Learning to Observe I distinctly remember when I needed to understand the game of football. Sure, I’d spent years as a fan, cheering the touchdowns and feeling disappointment with dropped passes. So I started to ask questions about rules, about positions, and I asked people (patient people) to start pointing things out to me as we watched. If you’re wondering what football has to do with teaching, let me offer this: we’ll never understand the complexity of the work we do if we don’t learn to see beyond the surface. Yet, I know from having all kinds of observers join my classroom, that learning to observe is a tough endeavor. How This Challenge Works In this blog series, we’ll look at one lesson in three different ways: what you hear, what you see, and what’s invisible. The goal of this exercise is to simplify an observation practice. This exercise has one clear focus: pay attention to language. STEP 1: Watch this Uncut Classroom* Video STEP 2: Examine Your Observations
Back to School: A Surefire Strategy for Building Classroom Community Unlike many of the current posts and articles in educators' discussions these days, this post does not address anything related to technology or the CCSS. It addresses a topic of much greater importance -- the emotional environment of the classroom. Without an excellent, intentionally designed, emotional environment (one which builds authentic community in the classroom), the standards and the technologies are of little value. As Steven Covey and many others have said, "First things first!" There are three facets of a classroom and school environment: 1) the physical environment, 2) the emotional environment, and, 3) the academic environment. Here's a specific classroom strategy which can be done at any time, but is especially powerful to do first thing on the first day of school -- and it's one you and your students will love! "Take What You Need" Strategy Gather your students into a circle. Of course, the students will be surprised/shocked. No one is required to say anything.
15 terrific resources for close reading Snap Learning is a longtime partner and supporter of The Cornerstone, and they have sponsored this post. Though their products are not included in the roundup below as these resources are free, I encourage you to check out their Close Reading Portfolio or request a demo of the product here. They’re a fantastic company and I believe their interactive close reading exercises are among the best on the market. Close reading is an important part of Common Core because it helps students think and reflect deeply on the text. I remember teaching my third graders to use “think marks” like stars, question marks, and exclamation marks as far back as 2001. There is no one set way or “right” way for teaching kids to do close reading. Hopefully your students aren’t doing THAT kind of close reading. All of the resources below contain FREE info and valuable ideas in the post. I’d love to hear how your reading instruction has changed over the years, and how close reading fits into what you’re doing now.
The 5 Critical Categories of Rules Choices and Limits I fully agree that children need choices, a lot more than they get now in their school experience. Children also need limits to frame their choices. Limits without choices: "Do what I say or else." Neither of these options works in school, but when we combine the two, we have a symbiotic relationship that is designed to teach responsibility: "You cannot hit. Limits Are Rules In school, we express limits as rules. Regardless of whether a school is open and free or traditional, limits or rules are necessary to teach students responsibility. The categories are meant to be guidelines, not absolutes. Critical Categories Academic: These rules and expectations are related to learning, such as doing homework, class participation, cheating and interrupting others. All societies, whether free or not, need limits to protect the rights of the individuals who comprise that society.
What Teachers Need to Know about Depth of Knowledge (DOK) Framework August 14, 2014 Depth of Knowledge is a conceptual framework and a vocabulary reference developed by Webb (1977) to help with analyzing the cognitive demands and expectations students are to meet when engaged in Common Core learning. DOK categorizes the curricular activities into four major groups with each one of them corresponding to a particular cognitive level it addresses. DOK looks into the kind of thinking and cognitive rigour required for students to complete a given task. DOK1: elicits recall and reproductionDOK2: focuses on basic application of skills and concepts and simple reasoningDOK3: expects strategic thinking and complex reasoningDOK4: requires extended thinking Rigorous instructional materials should include a mixture of tasks from across DOK levels. Here is a great Guide available for free download in PDF format that will help you better understand Webb's Depth of Knowledge.
Creating a Welcoming and Intellectually Challenging Classroom As you set up your classroom for the new school year, try spending a few minutes in your students' chairs. Are you comfortable? Now look closer: Will the seating arrangement invite conversations between students, or keep them isolated? What do you notice about what's on display around the room? Will students see themselves and their families reflected in the diversity of images and books? Are whiteboards, laptops, and other tools for learning within reach for students, or reserved for the teacher? Veteran educators Dorothy M. Their book, Identity Safe Classrooms: Places to Belong and Learn (Corwin, 2013), offers thoughtful advice, grounded in research and practice, that's worth considering throughout the school year. The authors' field-tested suggestions deserve special attention early in the year when you and your students have a fresh start on building a positive classroom culture. Supporting Student Voice and Collaboration Aim high: Warm and safe doesn't mean easy.
Designing Better Lessons? | Jim Burke I haven’t much time to discuss the image below but wanted to share something I am doing this first week, which I cannot yet promise to keep up but is showing promising benefits for me and those with whom I collaborate at school. I wanted to create a lesson plan template online that I could share and use to collaborate with my colleague Melissa for our senior class. What I settled on (so far) was using Google Sheets, which is Google’s version of Microsoft Excel. This whole planning question and conundrum has been on my mind because of an article I am writing for the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy and also because of the great blogs Grant Wiggins has been writing about this issue of planning lately. To make full sense of it, you need to consider that each column is a day’s lesson plan and prints out with about a 2″ margin on the right, which turns out to be pretty useful for making additional notes (about what went wrong and why, of course).