The Know-it-All Tell All

The mental model I brought with me to the teaching profession was an amalgam of every teacher movie I had ever seen.  I was going to be all the best parts of Dead Poets Society and Stand & Deliver and Goodbye, Mr. Chips with a little Dangerous Minds cuz I’d have street cred, yo.  I would be that perfect combination of tough but cool but kind but rebellious, and I’d be kinda hot, too, so some of my students would develop crushes on me and I’d pretend I didn’t notice, and by the end of my first year, HBO would be optioning to rights to my life story. 

That was the plan.

My first day went something like this. At 7:20 I went to the ladies’ room, touched up my make-up, and fluffed my hair so that I might look perfect when, at 7:30, I positioned myself at the podium and greeted my Senior Composition class. They seemed fine if a bit drowsy. Second period I scooted downstairs to Introduction to Theatre. Also fine. They laughed at my jokes, most which I was able to recycle throughout the day. Third period—freshmen. It was at this point that things began to unravel.

My first career (I’m now on my fourth) was acting, so I am sensitive to audience reaction.  I knew something was off. The kids were grinning, but the grins didn’t seem to match the timing of the jokes. I couldn’t put my finger on the problem and was beginning to feel uncomfortable, so I finished my introductory shtick as efficiently as possible and then suggested they talk quietly until the bell.

            “Don’t you want to collect these cards?” I had passed out index cards and asked them to write down their contact information.

            “Oh, yeah. Pass those up.”

            I walked along the first row taking stacks of cards and at last I was handed one with a piece of paper folded on top of it.

“Oh.  My.  God.  The crushes are already starting, and they’re passing me notes.” With a shiver of anticipation, I unfolded the paper.  It read . . .

“X Y Z.”

I looked down and, sure enough, my fly was wide open.   And had been since about 7:20 that morning.  It was now after 10.

I quickly ran through my options. I could burst into tears, flee the building, get in my car, and never come back.  That was what I wanted most to do, but I had $30K in student loan debt, so I quickly nixed the idea. 

I could find a way to make this their fault, get really angry, and start yelling. This is how we dealt with anxiety in my family.

Or I could react the way I would hope my own teacher would react if I were sitting in one of the little desks. I started laughing hysterically and zipped up.

That group went on to be the best class I had that year.  You can bounce back from anything if you’re willing to humble yourself.

If you teach elementary school in North Carolina, you are likely aware of the Read to Achieve legislation, part of the 2013 Excellent Schools Act.  In a nutshell, by the end of third grade, all children will be reading at or above grade level.  If they aren't, their parents will have the option of either retaining them in third grade or enrolling them in a 6-8 week summer reading camp.  

Let's leave aside any editorial comments you may wish to make, such as "Summer reading camps?! What an excellent way to make children hate books!"  Let's also leave aside our vitriol regarding the use of public money to purchase boxed programs for assessing, teaching, and reassessing student achievement.  The money has already been spent, the contracts signed.  To bitch about any of it at this point is a waste of time. Instead, let us turn our attentions to the issue on which we can all agree, viz all children should be reading at or above grade level. 

I taught high school English, so my knowledge of early grades literacy is minimal.  But I like to think of myself as smarter than the average bear.  I did some reading, namely "Put Reading First," (see link below) a concise, wondrously jargon-free guide to the basics of early literacy.  In another nutshell, there are five elements: phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.  It's important to note that these components are separated only for the purposes of talking about them.  They should not be taught in isolation from each other.  

My job requires me to translate research and ideas into actionable classroom behaviors.  The section of the report on fluency--the ability to read words quickly and accurately--noted that "repeated and monitored oral reading improves reading fluency and overall reading achievement" (p. 21).  Because many NC teachers no longer have aides in their classrooms, I wondered how a teacher would find time to monitor this reading and provide feedback to all her students.  What process could I invent that would make this essential step a little less difficult to implement?

I turned on my iPad and checked the app store for a free voice recorder. Quick Voice was the first to pop up, so I downloaded it.  I then test-drove this idea with a group of 15 K-5 teachers.  They recorded themselves reading a passage, then listened to it.  If they like their fluency, they saved the file with their last names.  If not, they erased it and tried again.  Once they had a file they liked, they emailed it from the iPad to me, and I filed each person's work in an e-folder.  At her "leisure," the teacher can listen to the students' reading and work individually with those who are not progressing sufficiently and offer a simple, "Way to go," to those who are.  The files also form a chronological record of each student's progress--very handy for parent-teacher conferences.

It's been a few weeks and the results are better than I anticipated.  The teachers loved the idea and began using it immediately.  Their students have become better at self-assessing.  They listen to their own voices and make comments like, "I sound like a robot."  Ever competitive, even if only with themselves, they have begun monitoring their reading speed using the timer function at the top of the screen.  If they think they can beat their time, they re-record.  

I don't want to break my arm patting myself on the back, but I'm pretty damn proud of this idea.  It costs the school nothing.  It empowers the students.  It frees up teachers to do something else while still satisfying the mania of progress-monitoring.  There is nothing not to like about this.  And for those of you about to whiz on my parade because you don't own an iPad, Iask the janitor to haul out some World War II era tape-recorders, several hundred of which are probably gathering dust in the bowels of your school.

Let me know how it goes.

XOX,

HOMEWORK

Let me begin my discussion of homework with a sentence strand from the Old Fart School of Wisdom: When I was a child . . .

. . .  all my teachers assigned homework.  We had vocabulary exercises to complete, math problems to solve, stories to read, science and social studies chapters to complete and questions that followed to answer.  I never really struggled with homework, although there were times that I found it tedious: We already did this in class, and I understand it, so why do I have to do more of it at home? 

We tend to teach as we were taught, so when I became a teacher, I assigned homework, usually reading assignments from the novels or short stories we were studying.  Funny thing, though.  Many of my students didn’t do the readings.  Many of those who did them didn’t understand them.  Students were failing my class because of their homework grades.

Flash forward to 2011.  I’m conducting a seminar on assessment for a group of first year teachers in Western North Carolina, and we begin discussing homework as an assessment tool.  Corrie, a 7th grade math teacher, voices her frustration at the number of students in her classroom who don’t do homework. 

“How many problems do you assign per night?” I asked.

“About twenty.”

“That seems like a lot.  Have you considered assigning fewer problems?”

“They need the practice,” she countered.

“Let me ask you this.  Are there kids in your class who understand the material, who do well on tests and quizzes, but are failing simply because of their homework grades?”

“Yes.”

“Are you okay with that?”

I think a brief discussion about responsibility followed, and I may have suggested that their grade should not be a reflection of their sense of responsibility but of their competence in math.  Ultimately, we came around to the crux of the issue.  What is the purpose of homework?

This is something few of us bother to consider when we assign it.  It’s just what you do.  Teachers assign homework.

As a group, we began brainstorming reasons to assign homework:

·       Practice/repetition

·       To complete work that was not finished in class

·       To serve as a formative assessment for the teacher

I began troubleshooting each of these reasons.

Homework as practice: What if your students don’t understand the procedure, and they practice it incorrectly?  Now you have a student with a much worse problem.  It is far more difficult to expunge a skill that was learned incorrectly than to teach it in the first place.

Homework to complete school work: This has merit if the work is completing a reading assignment.  On the other hand, if the language is extremely challenging—Shakespeare, anything written in dialect—students may complete the reading but have no understanding of it.  In this case, you’ll have to reread the assignment in class anyway.

Homework as formative assessment: This is the most legitimate reason to assign homework, yet it is the reason least often cited by the teachers I know.  The primary value of homework is as a means of checking whether one’s students understand what you taught.  There are three major problems, however, with using homework for this purpose.

1.     If you receive the assessment at the beginning of the class period the following day, you will not have the opportunity to adjust your lesson plan to accommodate students who did not understand.

2.     If you collect homework every day from every student, you will soon find yourself buried under paper and unable to provide feedback in a timely enough fashion to do any good.

3.     As mentioned earlier, if a student does not understand the homework, practicing it incorrectly will do more harm than good.

I asked Corrie, the teacher in my seminar, “How many problems does a kid have to do to demonstrate to your satisfaction that he understands the material?”

“I don’t know.  Five, maybe.”  The group agreed.

“Okay, so assign five problems.  In fact, let the kids choose.  Tell ‘em, ‘On page 198, there are 20 problems.  Pick five.’  Now you’ve given them the illusion of choice.  There’s one less reason for them not to do the work.”

Here’s the catch, though.  In lieu of doing the problems as homework, have your students complete them as an exit slip.  In the last five minutes of class, have them do these five problems and collect them as they leave the room.

Now you have a manageable stack of assessments that you can quickly scan to see who does or does not get it.  You can give a mastery grade, but I recommend giving a completion grade instead.  I don’t like penalizing students for going through the learning process.

For extra impact, and to show students that mistakes are useful, use the teaching tool "My Favorite 'No'" the following day.  You can view it on the link below. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rulmok_9HVs

At this point, many math teachers may be nodding their heads, but I can hear you arts and sciences folks crying, “What about us?”

Well, what was the objective of your lesson?  Ask a few questions that require students to demonstrate their understanding of that objective:

If the objective in your English class was that students will understand how writers use figurative language to describe the indescribable, you could ask them to find an example of figurative language from the day’s reading and explain 1) what abstraction is this attempting to describe? and 2) why is it effective?

If your objective in social studies was that students will understand the effect of the Treaty of Versailles on post-World War I Germany, you could ask them to write a headline that might be seen in a German tabloid following the signing of that treaty.

If you “put the Google” on “exit slips,” you will find many possible questions to ask that will allow you to gauge immediately what the level of understanding in your classroom is.  You might also want to invest in the book Making Thinking Visible.  I may have mentioned this work in previous posts, but it’s full of good stuff—practical, useful techniques to help you help your students engage more fully.

I’d like to return to Corrie and my group of first year teachers from Western North Carolina.  When we met the following month, I asked Corrie if she had tried the exit slips.  Well, the woman had been transformed.

“Oh, yes! And I did like you said and let them pick the questions they answered.  Well, some of ‘em are doing more problems than I assigned.”

No one’s homework grades were bringing their grades down, Corrie’s workload was reduced, and she was able to catch misunderstanding in real time.

Hurray for happy endings.

ADVICE FOR THOSE STARTING OUT AND THOSE WHO HOPE TO REMAIN

Many of us became teachers because we liked school, and we were good at it.  We didn’t mind staying up until 2:00 a.m. to make sure the final paper was finished and perfect.  A week or so later, it came back with an A on it.  What a wonderful experience: a finite task with clear, unmistakable feedback. 

Teaching isn’t like that.  You can do it 24-hours a day and never be done.  Your lessons will never be perfect.  If you’re a true perfectionist, they will never even be complete.  And it may take 20 years before you get any meaningful feedback on how effective you are.  I began teaching in 1995.  In 2007, a student I had during the second year of my career found me on Facebook and wrote, “I just wanted to apologize for being such an asshole in your class.  You were an awesome teacher.”

I tell you this not to discourage you and not to congratulate myself (although, I ain’t gonna lie, it’s extremely flattering when former students go out of their way to find you).

I tell you to set the stage for some advice I want to give you that I wish someone had given me.  I don’t know if I would have accepted it at the time.  I was pretty arrogant in my younger days.  Actually, I’m still pretty arrogant, but I think I have better reason to be now. 

Take it for what it’s worth—

1.     Set time limits.  There will always be a stack of ungraded papers or a lesson to plan or a journal to read.  The work ends when you decide it ends.  Decide on a time when the work will end—whether it’s completed or not—and stick to it.  If your teaching day is over at 3:30, allow yourself no more than two, maybe three hours of work beyond that.  Set the timer on your phone, and when it goes off, put your red pen down and step away from your desk.  Go to the gym.  Go home and play with your kids/pets/husband.  Meet up with a friend for a drink or a run. 

2.     Learn to say “no.”  As a group, teachers are extremely altruistic.  This is usually a good thing.  Unfortunately, if you always say “yes,” and if you always do a good job at whatever it is you said “yes” to, you will become the default person everyone asks to do whatever it is they don’t want to do or what they can’t get anyone else to do.  Eventually you will begin to resent it, and that is the beginning of burnout.  Be a team player, say “yes” more often than not, but don’t allow yourself to be abused. 

3.     Take your sick days!  I know that it is next to impossible to write a lesson plan that will work in your absence.  I know your students will turn into swirling vortices of evil if you are not there.  I know that you have no control over the competence of the substitute teacher you get.  Get over it.  You’re going to get sick, and you have to allow yourself to get well, or you will remain sick and get sicker and eventually be hospitalized.  You don’t know misery until you’re holed up in a hospital bed with no voice and no energy and the secretary of the school is on the other end of your cell phone wondering where your roster is.  TAKE. YOUR. SICK DAYS.

4.     Keep a journal.  It is easy to get so caught up in how far you have to go that you lose sight of how far you have come.  If you keep a record, you can look back and see your progress.  You don’t have to do this in writing.  Use the voice recorder on your phone or a digital recorder from an electronics store.  Download the audio files to your computer and label them chronologically, e.g., today’s file would be named 20130818.  Trust me—I wish I had done this. 

5.     Document everything!! Unless there’s a record of it, it never happened.  If you get an e-mail in which someone has agreed to do something or has thanked you for doing something or has let you off the hook for something, PRINT IT OUT AND FILE IT. When you call a parent, even if you get no answer, make a note: “Called Mrs. Foster at 4:02 p.m.  No answer.”  If you reprimand a kid, make a note: “9/17/13, 1:30 p.m. Had short chat with Bianca about stabbing Michael with pen.  We agreed she should stop.”  I recommend making an index card for each of your students.  On the blank side, put his/her name.  On the lined side, keep your documentation. 

6.     Create three file folders.   One should be labeled “Official Stuff.”  In this, you should keep copies of evaluations and other, you know, official stuff.  The second should be labeled “Stuff from Colleagues.”  In this keep cards and letters you receive from your peers.  Finally, and most importantly, create a file called “Stuff from Kids.”  Into this file you put invitations to sporting events and plays, holiday cards, thank-you notes, gift tags, and the myriad tokens of appreciation that you will accumulate.  This is the file you pull out during the darker moments of your career and weep over while trying to shove your head into the bottom of a Jim Beam bottle.

7.     Cultivate a social life.  I lived alone with two cats when I taught.  I had five classes and a year-long an extracurricular responsibility.  On the weekends, I was too tired to go out.  Little by little, I became estranged from all my friends.  One Friday night, I had something of an out-of-body experience while standing in the school’s auditorium with the cast of the play I was directing.  I realized that this group of 16-year olds had become my peer group.  I don’t care how tired you think you are, get together with people your own age.  Get a drink, see a movie, watch The Real Housewives of Somewhere—just make regular opportunities for yourself to engage in adult conversations.

8.     Avoid the negative people on your faculty.  This can be difficult because they are often the most entertaining and are typically in charge of organizing the Friday afternoon attitude adjustment gatherings at the local adult beverage establishment (to which I definitely recommend you go).  This group will suck you in, the same way the popular kids in high school did.  They seem cool; they mock those in authority; they say really funny, albeit cruel, things about the kids.   And they represent everything that is wrong with the profession.  They have stopped growing as professionals and can only feel good about that by condemning those who continue to try.  Stay away from these people if you can help it.  If you can’t, do everything you can not to allow their cynicism to poison you.

9.     Find a mentor.  I don’t mean the person your department chair told you was your (capital M) Mentor.  I mean a faculty member with more experience than you whose teaching philosophy is one you wish to emulate, who brings out the better angels of your nature, who is generous with time and resources.  Now, if you are one of the few individuals who finds all these qualities in the same person that your department chair assigned to you, realize that you are blessed.  If not, go hunting. 

10.  Ask for help.  You may not feel comfortable asking people at your school.  One of the bitter ironies of teaching is that we punish our rookies their incompetence even as we try to instill in our students the belief that school is a safe place to take risks.  If your school doesn’t encourage a culture of professional inquiry and growth, go outside of it.  Join an online community like the Center for Teaching Quality (www.teachingquality.org ) where you can start or join conversations on issues specific to your needs.  Alternatively, join professional organizations, all of which have online discussion boards where you can solicit ideas.  Most subject matter areas have an association with elementary, middle school and high school divisions.  Here are a few:

·       English: www.ncte.org

·       Math: www.nctm.org

·       Social Studies: www.ncss.org  

·       Science: www.nsta.org

·       Music: www.mtna.org

·       Art: www.naea.org

·       Drama: www.schooltheater.org

·       CTE: www.acte.org

If all else fails, there’s an “Ask me anything” link on this blog.  I went into education because I have a pathological need to feel useful.  Reach out to me.  If I can’t give you the answer, I can probably think of someone who can.

DIFFERENTIATION BY PRODUCT

At long last, I can return to differentiated instruction. 

As you may recall, earlier I went into nauseating detail regarding how you can differentiate by process and content.  You can also differentiate by interest, and eventually I’ll get around to nauseating you with that.

Today, however, I’ll be going over differentiation by product.  Let’s say your students have read an article, either in class or for homework.  You now want to assess their understanding of the material, but you also want to create the opportunity for success in your weaker readers while challenging your higher-achieving students.  You can ask for different products.

From your weaker readers, ask for a summary of the article: What is the thesis? What are the major assertions made by the author? If you number the lines in the article, you can request that students provide line numbers that correspond to the answers to these questions, e.g., “Thesis: Bees are disappearing from farmlands in North America (line 5-7).” [1]

Your average readers can answer a question that requires them to make some inferences based on the information in the text.  For example, “Based on what you read, what is the best solution to the problem of disappearing bees?”  Students can also cite line numbers with their responses. 

Finally, your high fliers can go beyond the text with a speculative question, e.g., “If nothing is done to reestablish the bee population, what are some logical consequences you can imagine occurring in the next 5-10 years? Consider the effects on such areas as agriculture, economics, health, etc.”  Your gifted underachievers might respond well to a more creative option, such as, “Imagine you’re a bee.  You’ve been asked to serve as the keynote speaker for the US Dept. of Agriculture’s annual convention.  Write that speech.”

Each of these assignments should end up being approximately the same length, depending on handwriting size.  Ergo, when students turn them in, there will be no obvious indication that “Micah’s assignment was easier than mine!  That’s not fair!”  One of the knocks against differentiated instruction is the stigma that follows the low-achieving group when they are publicly given noticeably easier work than everyone else.  You have to be a little cagey when you’re differentiating.  My advice is that you write the assignments on individual slips of paper and give them to the appropriate students.   Allison doesn’t need to know what Micah’s assignment is (and vice versa).

Although they varied in complexity, the assignments above were all writing assignments and, thus, play to the strengths of students with a facility for words.  You can also differentiate the product by offering greater choice in how students demonstrate their knowledge.  Let’s say your ecology class has been studying biomes, and you want to know if the students can answer the overarching question, “Why do animals and plants live where they do?” Your final assessment simply has to require that students show evidence that they understand this.  They could

·         Create a tourism brochure: “Hey, Foxes! Come to the Riparian Forest.”

·         Write a short story about a cactus who accidentally winds up in the Amazon Basin.

·         Record a song: “Chain of Food” (with apologies to Aretha Franklin)[2]

·         Create a short documentary

·         Etc.

The key to making this successful and fair is to be very clear with yourself about what expertise you’re looking for.  If the short story demonstrates complete understanding of the facts of biomes, you can’t penalize that kid for punctuation errors when the documentarian won’t be turning ANY punctuation.  Write a rubric for this project that can work with any product.

We can talk more about rubrics another time.  In the interim, I refer you to http://rubistar.4teachers.org/ just to get an idea of how a rubric can work.  There are many other rubric-making sites online.  Put the Google on it, or ask some colleagues if they have recommendations.

Next time, I’ll discuss differentiation by interest.

[1] The requirement that students provide line numbers serves as a failsafe to prevent them from pulling answers out of . . . the air.  Even inferences must be grounded in the text—that is what close reading means. 

Many teachers, young and old, will take issue with the idea that it is their responsibility to be interesting.  “Damnit, Jim!  I’m a teacher, not a comedian!”  Please understand that there is a difference between being engaged and being entertained.  It is your job to engage your students.  If you don’t, they will find some other way to curb their boredom.

Helpful Hint #1: TALK LESS

One of the most frequent reasons that students begin to fidget or get out of their seats without permission is that we try to keep them still for too long.  A general rule of thumb is that the age of the student is about how many minutes of direct instruction s/he can handle.  At the middle and high school level, make 15 minutes your absolute maximum.

“How am I supposed to cover an hour of material if I can only talk for 15 minutes?!”

The easiest way is to break your presentation into chunks.  Talk for about ten minutes, or until you come to a logical cut-off point, and then ask the students to do an activity that requires them to process what you’ve said.

·       “Partner A, please tell Partner B everything you can remember about what I just said. . . . Partner B, what did Partner A leave out?”

·       “At the bottom of your notes, write one sentence that summarizes everything I just said.”

·       “Look over your notes and find something you don’t really understand.  Write a quiz question whose answer would clarify this concept for you.”[1]

While you may think you don’t have time to do activities like this, you actually don’t have time NOT to.  In the words of legendary basketball coach John Wooden, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”  Any of the above activities should take fewer than five minutes, including sharing time.  Neglecting to build in this processing time means that most of your students will never transfer the information from working memory to long-term memory.  Tomorrow, you’ll end up having to reteach most of what you covered yesterday. 

So keeping your students engaged not only cuts down on misbehavior but also increases retention and comprehension.  Additionally, it’s low-calorie and fat-free.

Helpful Hint #2: MAKE YOUR LESSON PASS THE SO-WHAT? TEST

I once watched a first-year middle school science teacher present a lesson on viruses and bacteria.  The PowerPoint was well-organized, the information was presented coherently, and at the end of the period, the students were able to articulate the difference between a bacterium and a virus, which had been the day’s objective.  By most objective standards, the lesson was a success. 

I could not help wondering, though, “So what?!”  If I’m eleven years old, why should I care what the difference between a bacterium and a virus is? 

The answer to this question has traditionally been, “Because it’s on the test.”  Unfortunately, your class may be filled with students who don’t care about grades.  Furthermore, let’s assume that it’s on the test because it’s important.  WHY is it on the test?  Why would anyone need to know that there are fundamental differences between viruses and bacteria?

Dr. Daniel Willingham, author of Why Don’t Students Like School? explained that the material we want students to know constitute partial answers to a bigger question.  By itself, the answers are not very interesting, but the question is.  Unfortunately, we teachers are sometimes so consumed with giving kids the answers that we neglect to spend much time letting them know what the question is.

If you let your lessons be guided by questions, rather than answers—spending a good portion of your planning time figuring out what the question(s) is/are—your students may find your class far more relevant and interesting than if you simply ask them to absorb answers. 

Let us return to the middle school biology class noted earlier.  Imagine if the teacher had begun the class by telling her students, “By the end of the period, I want you to be able to tell me whether it would be easier to cure a disease caused by a virus or by a bacterium and give me reasons from today’s lesson.”  Now the students have a reason to pay attention, to place all the bits and pieces of information in a context, and to exercise some critical thinking skills, rather than simple recall.

The same goes for any subject:

·       How can figurative language allow a writer to describe something that is indescribable?

·       How does long division help us keep things fair?

·       If the British had won the American Revolution, how would we describe the Boston Tea Party, the Stamp Act, the Boston Massacre, etc.?

Coming up with questions like these is probably the hardest part of writing a strong lesson or unit, but it is what will make your teaching dynamic and effective.

Helpful Hint #3: JUST BECAUSE THEY’RE ENGAGED DOESN’T MEAN THEY’RE LEARNING.

I think it was Ernest Hemingway who cautioned, “Don’t confuse movement with action.”  It is a wonderful thing when your students enjoy the activity you designed for them.  Unfortunately, a common misconception is that student engagement is synonymous with fun.  Engagement means the kids are interested.  They may be entertained or they may simply be very intensely focused.  As I’m writing this blog post, I’m highly engaged, but I’m hardly entertained.

A further misconception is that engagement/entertainment is a valuable end in and of itself.  The purpose of engaging students is to 1) cut down on misbehavior and 2) increase effort, retention and comprehension.  Don’t allow yourself to fall into the trap of wasting hours planning “cute” activities that do little to focus your students’ attention on the necessary learning.  You’re not a party planner; you’re a teacher.

Making your Expectations Clear

The third reason you may have behavior problems is that your students don’t actually know what you expect of them.

“How is that possible?!” you shriek. “I handed out a five-page list of rules and regulations on Day 1.”  Elementary teachers plaster the walls of their classrooms with posters that say things like, “RESPECT . . . yourself and others.”

Unfortunately, we tend to articulate our expectations in vague terms or in terms of what NOT to do—neither of which is very effective for some children.  For example, we tell students, “Pay attention!”  For the student who isn’t paying attention, who is not asked to pay attention at home, this admonishment fails to instruct the student about the behaviors you want to see. 

Doug Lamov, author of Teach Like a Champion, urges teachers to draw a distinction between children who fail to follow instructions due to ignorance and those who do so out of insolence.  Tell your students the exact behaviors you wish to see: “Please, get out your notebook and a pencil, sit up, and look at me while I’m talking.”  Now your student has no reason not to do what you wish, unless s/he is actively challenging your authority.

If s/he is challenging your authority, I refer you to my previous post.  Did you make the request as though you were asking his/her permission?  Were you succinct and clear in your instructions or did you ramble and back-track?  Speak with calm, polite authority.  Remember—you are the grown-up.

A little compassion goes a long way, too.  It is important to remember that not all children grew up in small, polite households.  In my family, there were four people.  When the grown-ups talked, the children listened, and vice versa.  I didn’t have to worry that I wouldn’t get my turn.  If I had been one of six, ten, twelve children, my experience would have been completely different.  Your students who show poor impulse control may simply be exercising behaviors that are completely functional—nay, essential—at home but not in school.  Rather than scolding the child and creating an antagonistic relationship, simply explain that there are different rules at school than there are at home. 

As for you rules, let the Bard be your guide: Brevity is the soul of wit.  I am often amused/horrified when I enter an elementary classroom and see a handwritten list of 19+ rules, all beginning with the word “No.”

·       No talking while others are talking

·       No hitting

·       No getting out of your seat without permission

·       No chewing gum

And so on, ad infinitum.

Instead, limit your classroom rules to 4-5, and phrase them in terms of the specific behaviors you do wish to see, not the ones you don’t:

·       Listen while others are talking.

·       Ask if you don’t know.

For secondary teachers, edit yourself to a single page.  On it, place your contact information (office only, no personal e-mail or cell phone), homework policies, and “deal breaker” behavioral issues.  If your school requires that you include a complete syllabus, who am I to tell you otherwise, but don’t be unrealistic.  Would you read a six-page document?  Make it easy for your students to do what you want.

Perhaps the best person to teach you how to get the best out of your students is the recently departed and sorely missed Dr. Rita Pierson, who survives on Ted Talks and her DVD Rita’s Stories.  Dr. Pierson instructed through anecdotes, and one of my favorite of her anecdotes is presented in the link below. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bndCdOeMO3Y

Why do your students think you don’t respect them? 

Well . . . do you? 

It’s understandable that you might not consider this.  You’re the grown-up; they’re your responsibility.  Why should it matter?

Particularly for children who have grown up in chaotic households—abusive, broken, blended, impoverished—the perception of (in)justice in your classroom will be the primary determinant of whether they opt to follow or undermine you.

So, how do you avoid getting off on the wrong foot and sabotaging your entire year?

1.     Feel respect for them.  Some of your students are the primary caregivers for more children than you.  They have multiple younger siblings for whom they are responsible: they get them up, dressed, and fed.  They cook meals, do laundry, hold down 20-hour a week jobs in addition to school.  If you don’t know what your students’ responsibilities outside of school are, find out.

2.     Greet them.  Stand at the door on Day 1, say “hello” and make eye contact.   High five them or shake hands—depending on your personal style—and welcome them to the classroom.

3.     Show an interest.  Ask them what they did this past summer, if they have a job, who they had for [the subject you teach] last year, if the outfit they’re wearing is new, what they’re looking forward to learning this year.  A turning point in my career was when I asked/challenged Laurie Kagan, wife and partner of Spencer Kagan, the guru of cooperative learning, “What if I’m not really that interested?”  She leveled me with her gaze and said, “It’s your job to be interested.”  There are few times when I have been rendered speechless, but that was definitely one of them.  Whether or not you agree with her, you can’t argue that one way or another, youth will be served.  You can choose when to show interest, or your students will choose for you.

4.     Be fair.  This does not mean that every student gets the same treatment as every other.  It does, however, mean that you may have to do some explaining about how fair ≠same.  You may think that you don’t have time for lessons like this, but you may actually save time by addressing this issue with the class ONCE so you don’t have to deal with it again.

Some students may assume, simply by virtue of your being an adult in authority that you are predisposed against them.  These are the student who will challenge you on the first day.  If you don’t handle them appropriately, they will make your life Hell for the rest of the year, so PAY ATTENTION!! I have never had this approach fail.  That doesn’t mean it can’t; only that it hasn’t.

Let’s say you’ve asked the class to be seated and pay attention.  Everyone has done so . . . except one student.  Wait until you have eye contact with this child and ask, with great earnestness, “Have I been disrespectful to you?”

It is my hope that the child will respond, “No.” [1]

That being the case, ask him/her, “Well, then, does it seem fair to be respectful to me?” It is my experience that kids are highly responsive to arguments regarding injustice.   When framed in this fashion, your challenging student may be forced to concede that, no, you have not been disrespectful and, no, it’s not fair to disrespect someone who has not disrespected them. 

Having established this, ask the student if s/he would like to start over.  Smile genuinely when you say this, so s/he knows you’re not setting a trap.

Since few children wake up and ask themselves, “How can I make my life more difficult today?” you student will probably accept your offer.  Shake hands with your new ally.

You have just saved yourself a year of aggravation.

In my next post, I'll address Reason#3 that you have behavior problems--your expectations are unclear to the children.

I know I haven’t completed my differentiated instruction saga, but it occurred to me that many of you are going back into the classroom in the next few days and might appreciate some nuts-and-bolts advice to keep the monkeys from taking over the zoo.

Point, the First: Although people tend to use the terms interchangeably, I draw a very clear distinction between behavior management and classroom management.  Classroom management is everything: lesson design, furniture arrangement, routines, relationships, discipline, instructional techniques, etc.  Behavior management is the art, craft, and science of getting students to think they want to do what you want them to do.

Point, the Second:  Don’t blame your kids.  If you tell yourself, “My kids can’t . . .” or “My kids won’t . . .” you have ceded control of the classroom to your students.  You must maintain the locus of control.  It may sound like a purely semantic difference, but learn to tell yourself, “I haven’t yet learned how to get my kids to . . .”

Point, the Third: Most behavior problems have one or more of four causes.  Your students 1) don’t respect you; 2) think you don’t respect them; 3) don’t know what you expect of them;  4) are bored.

Earning your students’ respect

You must remember that you are the grown-up.  You may not feel like a grown-up.  I just turned 46, and I’m still unconvinced.  Nevertheless, you are the grown-up, and if you don’t truly see yourself that way, FAKE IT!

Dress with authority.  This is particularly important if you work in a middle or high school.  At least for the first week, while you’re establishing your gravitas, dress like a grown-up.  Guys, if you have a baby face, grow a beard (assuming you can) or put on a tie.  Ladies, now is not the time to sport your Forever 21 ensembles.  Wear dress shoes and a skirt or dress.  If you have long hair, pull it back. 

Speak with authority.  Don’t let your statements sound like questions.  Don’t top off every direction with, “Okay?” 

Stand with authority.  Don’t fidget.  Don’t stand off-center.  Square up.  Face front. 

If you fidget or speak as though you’re constantly apologizing, consciously or not, your students will pick up on the fact that you are not comfortable as the alpha dog and will challenge you for pack leader status. 

I recommend watching several episodes of The Dog Whisperer—I’m not kidding.  Calm leadership works as well with students as it does with pit bulls.  I do not, however, recommend flipping unruly children on their backs and rubbing their stomachs. 

Careful, though.  Do not confuse being a convincing adult with being a humorless prig.  I am not an advocate of the don’t-smile-until-Christmas philosophy.  As a matter of fact, the more uptight you appear, the more fun your challenging students will have getting under your skin.  You can laugh with them; just be sure both you and your students are clear where the line between comfortable rapport and disrespect is.  If they cross it, you need to rain down on them like the wrath of God.  If YOU cross it, you deserve what you get.

Differentiation by Process: Musical Modality

My final post regarding differentiation by process involves using musical modality.  If you set something to music, it becomes almost impossible to forget.  We can all recite Jenny’s phone number[1], as well as that of Empire Carpet.  I will never be able to erase Coach’s geography lesson on Cheers.  He sang to the tune of “When the Saints Go Marching in,” “Albania! Albania! You border on the A-dri-atic.”  He and Sam both passed the test.

If the goal of a lesson is simple memory, there are many song mnemonics available online or on CD and DVD to.  Below is a link to a video on the order of operations in mathematics. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWyxWg2-LTY

Other websites that present or reinforce content musically include, but are most definitely not limited to, www.flocabulary.com , http://rhymenlearn.com, http://beans-n-frank.com, and Mr. Lee’s Science Rap Channel on www.youtube.com.  I highly recommend that the use of these sites be buttressed by having your students sing along, loudly and with gusto.  If they merely watch the videos, they are not actively engaging with the material and will require hundreds of viewings to absorb the material.

As with the fortune tellers/cootie catchers I mentioned in an earlier post, a potentially more powerful way of harnessing musical modality is to have your students write the lyrics.  On vocabulary days in my classes, I would assign each group two words and ask them to set the word and definition to an easy-to-remember song: “Old MacDonald,” “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” etc. 

NOTE: Make sure each group uses a different song or the effectiveness of the activity is substantially lowered.

One group made up the following song for the word “mendacious,” which means “dishonest.”  Sung to the tune of “The Wheels on the Bus,” it echoes in my head lo these many years later:

If you’re mendacious, you tell lies,

You tell lies,

You tell lies.

If you’re mendacious, you tell lies,

And no one likes you.

Members of each group would then team up with new people and teach the two songs they developed.  In forty minutes or less, the entire class had reviewed twenty words and definitions.  As a class, we then practiced the songs together, standing up, off-key, and loud as hell.

            Musical modality can also be used for its novelty to get students’ attention.  Westerville South High School in Ohio has a Youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYLoQ1xAW99ofZpwIDM2RZA to which they have uploaded numerous math raps with remarkably good production values.  My personal favorite is “All I Do is Solve”-- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qHTmxlaZWQ , although I can’t be certain if it’s the content I like or the way-more-handsome math teachers than I ever had doing the singing.  While I would never use lyrics this complex to teach a concept, I would certainly use it to pique my students’ interest or as a review.

            We have a saying where I work if you want someone to do a Google search: “Put the Google on it!”  I would suggest you put the Google on “[insert your content here] songs.”  Someone somewhere has probably already written lyrics for it.  Granted, they might not be very good, but you can always assign your students to write something better as a final assessment.  That brings us to differentiation by product, which I will address in my next post.

Differentiation by Modality

So how do teachers differentiate by modality?  First, we have to consider what modalities teachers use most often.  Mostly, we talk. 

If you consider the structure of the human head, you can immediately see a problem.  A dog takes in information primarily through scent; this is why most dogs’ noses are out in front.  This is something that believers in evolution and intelligent design can agree on.

On a human head, the eyes are in the front.  The ears are waayyyyy off to the side.  Yet we talk incessantly and use very few graphics.  PET scans of people asked to encode pictures show far greater brain activity than those of people encoding words (Grady, McIntosh, Rajah, & Craik, 1998).  The simple act of adding pictures to your PowerPoint presentations can increase retention.  If you further encourage your students to draw cartoon representations in their notes—even those who cannot draw—they will be apt to remember the concept associated with the picture.  Encourage them to use colored pencils or fine-tipped markers.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, Dr. Deb.  Get to the good stuff,” I hear you cry.  Okay, let’s talk kinesthetic modality.  There are infinite ways to employ movement in your instruction.  The links below are for videos of teachers using Whole Brain Instruction.  One is a kindergarten language arts lesson; the other is a high school mathematics class.  Notice that the technique is the same for both groups; only the content changes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMDvD_Ewf0U&feature=em-subs_digest-vrecs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6WJdsb0dfM

You need not become WBT certified to use movement.  You can have students do something as simple as partner up and stroll from one side of the room to another while they discuss a concept.  The act of moving while talking in the classroom is novel and, therefore, it forces students to pay attention.  In addition, the concept may become fused with the mental image of the spot where the students were standing when they discussed it.  I can remember taking a geology test in college. (Rocks for Jocks.  Science was not my strength back then.)  As I struggled to arrive at the answer on our final, the first thing I recalled was an image of myself standing at the lab table.  As that picture solidified, my lab partners and what we were discussing gradually came into sharper focus until I was able to answer the question.

For review purposes, you can take the standard study guide and repackage it in moving form.  Take two cube-shaped tissue boxes and cover them with colored paper.  On one, write numbers from one to six.  On the other, write things you expect students to know.  For example, an upcoming test in a sixth grade science class (I’m trying to redeem myself from my Rocks for Jocks days) might focus on the structure, classification, and physical properties of matter.  So the six sides of the cube might have the following items written on them:

·         Name of elements

·         Ways to identify a substance

·         Things that happen to a substance as it is heated

·         Things that happen to a substance as it is cooled

·         Liquids that are lighter than water

·         Atomic numbers of elements

Student toss both cubes and then provide X number of examples (noted on the number cube) of whatever turns up on the other cube.

Fill-in-the-blank or very short answer questions can be turned into the old fortune tellers we used to make by folding paper.  Some folks call them cootie catchers.  You can purchase or download pre-made fortune tellers, but I prefer to have students create them for homework and then quiz each other during class.  I’ve provide a link to a blank template below.

https://www.google.com/search?q=cootie+catcher+math+facts&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=Bon2UcHDFI-08QTIoYCYDA&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1147&bih=882#facrc=_&imgdii=_&imgrc=TuQEH6ztuL1fqM%3A%3B3iZhXwDTfrrAEM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Flessons4now.files.wordpress.com%252F2013%252F06%252Fcootie-catcher-template-low-tech.png%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Flessons4now.wordpress.com%252F2013%252F06%252F25%252Fteaching-with-cootie-catchers%252F%3B802%3B602

Back to differentiation by modality.  Whether we believe in learning styles is really a moot point.  There are several good reasons to differentiate this way regardless.

Reason #1: Novelty

If a stimulus has any chance of becoming a memory, you have to pay attention to it.  Novelty is possibly the best way to gain attention.  We have all experienced driving to work on autopilot, arriving at school with no recollection of the 30 minutes that got us there.  This can go on daily—until someone puts up a new billboard.  “Hey! That’s new.  Oh, look; I’m driving,” you think to yourself. 

The same principle applies in the classroom.  If every part of every day is pretty much like the one before it, your students are apt to go on autopilot, some more often and for longer periods than others, lowering the likelihood of creating a memory of your instruction.

Reason #2: The brain stores information in multiple areas.

We’re all familiar with the generalization that left-brained people are logical and systematic while right-brained folks are creative and artsy.  Our cognitive quirks and aptitudes go well beyond which hemisphere dominates. 

Consider encoding and decoding of words in early grades.  Many reading specialists recommend having students spell words by saying the letters while “writing” them with their fingers across a piece of sandpaper or a carpet swatch.  Does this work?  I don’t know; I work mostly with adults.  If it does, its efficacy would seem to be predicated on the fact that one area in the brain recognizes tactile sensations while another processes auditory stimuli while another comprehends language and so on.  The student is storing the memory of the way a particular word is spelled all over the brain. 

It may be useful to think of the brain as a house and whatever you teach as a lint roller.

Trust me.  You’re gonna love this analogy.

I have two dogs and two cats.  Nary a day goes by that I don’t need a lint roller.  I used to keep one in my night stand.  Some mornings, while I was putting my coffee cup in the sink, one of the cats would rub against my leg.  If I was running late, I didn’t want to run all the way back to my room to get the lint roller, so I got another one and put it in the junk drawer in the kitchen.  Of course, then I’d get in my car and arrive at the office covered in dog fur.  I began keeping another lint roller in my glove compartment and one in my desk at the office.  I’m covered.  More accurately, I am NOT covered—in animal fur—because I’ve got lint rollers wherever I might need them. 

The more places your students can store their memories, the more likely they are to be able to retrieve them when needed.