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I chose this article because it jumped out at me as a newly designed strategy for classroom instruction. I'm always interested in reading about new strategies such as this because I'm well aware that English lit is typically thought of as boring and students a lot of the time will use online resources to coast their way through an English class. As a future English teacher, I'm very interested in ways to increase engagement in the classroom and increase active learning. This article was written based on a math classroom however, I see how this teaching style could be adapted for any content area. The Thinking Classroom has a few main rules.

First, the teacher must remove the "I do" portion of the typically used "I do, we do, you do" method. This eliminated the mimicry that goes on a lot in classrooms. Students are forced to get the gears turning on their own, begin critically thinking, and become deeply engaged in the content.

Next, direct instruction is only applied as needed rather than front-loaded at the beginning of class like how we typically see. The students work in groups and are given a task that they begin on their own and only when they are stuck or lost on what to do does the teacher come over and guide the students' thought process.

Another key part of this strategy is that the students work "vertically" meaning they're standing up around the room working on whiteboards. The creator of this instructional strategy notes that this takes away the anonymity of horizontal participation. When the students work vertically their work and efforts cannot be hidden and they cannot disengage from the content.

Another aspect is that the students work in all the same color marker, (black) and the teacher makes notes, comments, hints, etc in a different color (red). This is to differentiate between student work and instruction delivered by the teacher. It makes it easier for the teacher to see immediately whether or not the students understand the material and instead of having to wait till Friday's quiz to check for understanding, the teacher can check for understanding right then and there.

Finally, the students work together in randomized groups of three. The groups have to be noticeably randomized to the students so that they know they will have to work with everyone in the class. This also helps the students understand that they will have to participate because they never know who they will be working with and cannot just pick a partner who they can rely on to do the heavy lifting.

Overall I thought this was a really interesting strategy to increase active learning in the classroom and I think it woudl be fun to try even if it was just a single lesson activity rather than the classroom norm. I think sometimes we think we know exactly what learning is and what it looks like and forget that education is innovative and ever-changing. Mixing up instruction like this is a great way to keep students on their toes and sharpen their minds. I think that the Thinking Classroom is definitely worth a try.

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Listen to my interview with Peter Liljedahl (transcript):
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This post was supposed to be just for math teachers. I was going to share an instructional approach that, as dramatic as this sounds, has taken the math world by storm. The methodology is called Thinking Classrooms, and now that I have gotten a closer look at it, I can see that it could work in just about any content area. Built on 14 key practices, it's a way of teaching that gets students up on their feet, collaborating and thinking through challenging problems on a daily basis.

When I first saw a video of this strategy in action, I was immediately captivated. Take a look:

The more I learn about the Thinking Classrooms method, the better it gets. Thousands of math teachers are already using this approach, and it's spreading to other subject areas as well.

Joining me to talk about this on the podcast is Peter Liljedahl, professor of mathematics education at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, the creator of the Thinking Classrooms method, and the author of the book, Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K-12: 14 Teaching Practices for Enhancing Learning ( Amazon | Bookshop.org). In our interview, which you can listen to above, Liljedahl talked with me in depth about the Thinking Classroom. Some key points are summarized below.

How Thinking Classrooms Got Started

Liljedahl began to formulate his approach after spending hours observing in dozens of different math classrooms. What he saw was not surprising: classroom after classroom of students who were not engaged and not actively learning.

"By and large students spend most of their class time not thinking, at least not in ways we know they need to think in order to be successful in mathematics." Liljedahl explains. "If they're not thinking, they're not learning. And everywhere I go classrooms look more alike than they look different: Teaching and learning in math classrooms adheres to a set of normative structures that date back to the dawn of public education over 170 years ago. We're going to have to break through some of these normative structures because they are actually creating environments that are not conducive to thinking."

What followed was a 15-year process figuring out how to break down these institutionally normative structures that were, as Liljedahl puts it, "holding non-thinking in place." Breaking those norms down means putting in place other practices that have now become foundational to the Thinking Classrooms approach.

The Practices

A Thinking Classroom is built on 14 practices, many of which were developed by looking at what was already happening in typical classroom, doing the exact opposite, and seeing what happened. Some of the key practices are summarized below.

Thinking Tasks

Unlike in a more traditional classroom, where the lesson might start with direct instruction from the teacher, a typical day in a Thinking Classroom starts with the teacher assigning thinking tasks for students to work on in groups, and direct instruction is only given on an as-needed basis.

"In a traditional classroom," he explains, "we show the students how to do it, then we do one together, then they practice it on their own, the classic I do, we do, you do, which promotes - whether you want it or not - a form of behavior called mimicking. So these students are just going to mimic their way through. In a Thinking Classroom, in order to get students to think rather than mimic, we have to remove the I do."

When they are first introducing this approach, teachers are advised to make the thinking tasks non-curricular, fun challenges that will help develop a culture of thinking. Once students are used to the format, the tasks become curriculum-based, often the same kinds of problems you'd find in the resources you'd normally use, but Liljedahl points out that they are carefully sequenced, "very carefully constructed," he says, "whereby the tasks are getting incrementally more challenging and are being given to students as their abilities are incrementally developing."

Vertical, Non-permanent Surfaces

Probably the most distinctive feature of a Thinking Classroom is the use of vertical, non-permanent surfaces, where students do the tasks, standing up, in groups of three.

Why vertical? "When it goes vertical, everyone has the same orientation to the work," Liljedahl explains. "When it's vertical, they can see each other's work, which promotes knowledge mobility and gives greater access to more ideas. When it's vertical, I can see everything. I don't have to wait for that quiz next Friday to see if the students understood it. I can see right now, and then I can intervene right now. I can't do that if they're horizontal."

But there's one more benefit of vertical surfaces that Liljedahl learned from interviewing students, one reason he felt eclipsed all the others. "It turns out that when students are sitting, they feel anonymous. And the further they sit from the teacher, the more anonymous they feel. And when students feel anonymous, they disengage. What standing up did was took away their anonymity. It made students not feel invisible, and then they didn't disengage."

The other important feature of these surfaces is that they are non-permanent. Unlike paper, which can't be reused, an erasable surface like a whiteboard or chalkboard turns out to be more conducive to thinking tasks. Liljedahl and his colleagues found this out through experimentation.

"If we compared a group working on a whiteboard versus a group working on flip chart paper," he says, "the group working on the whiteboards, they'll start within 20 seconds. They'll start making notations on the board. They'll try anything and everything because they feel like they can just erase it if it's wrong. The students who are tasked with working on flip chart paper, they will not make a single notation for upwards of three minutes, because 'This is not erasable. What I put here has to be perfect.' So there's a lot of agonizing, and that hesitation leads to a lower form of thinking."

Visibly Random Groups

Students collaborate on tasks in randomly assigned groups of three, and that randomization has to be visible. Liljedahl explains why on the Building Thinking Classrooms website:

"Whether we grouped students strategically or we let students form their own groups, we found that 80% of students entered these groups with the mindset that, within this group, their job is not to think. However, when we frequently formed visibly random groups, within six weeks, 100% of students entered their groups with the mindset that they were not only going to think, but that they were going to contribute. In addition, the use of frequent and visibly random groupings was shown to break down social barriers within the room, increase knowledge mobility, reduce stress, and increase enthusiasm for mathematics."

Another important feature is that each group only gets one writing instrument; this forces members to collaborate, rather than work in parallel.

Consolidation Practices

Once students have worked through the assigned tasks at the boards, they transition into what Liljedahl calls consolidation, activities that reinforce each individual student's learning.

"It turns out that there's a difference between what we call collective knowing and doing and individual knowing and doing. Working collectively at the whiteboards and working individually are actually very different modalities; there needs to be some sort of a transfer."

The consolidation practices that facilitate that transfer are:

guided gallery walks, where the teacher points out key elements of student work on the vertical surfaces

note making, where students construct their own meaningful notes: "They take their learning from the day and find a way to represent that in such a way that they can in part have a record, but more importantly go through that process of reification, where they are taking these ideas that started very informal and unstructured, became more formal and structured through the consolidation and now become even more formal and structured through their note making activity."

check your understanding questions, a form of self-assessment students do on their own to determine how well they have grasped the material

How to Get Started

The book (linked above) is a great place for math teachers to start, but if you're not a math teacher, that shouldn't stop you. "These practices are being enacted in every curriculum now," Liljedahl says. "Language arts, social studies, science. There are slight variances to it, but fundamentally what changes is what constitutes a thinking task, which is Chapter 1 of the book, and what constitutes a sequence of thinking tasks, which is Chapter 9. Everything else more or less stays the same."

Interested teachers should also join any one of the online communities of teachers who are already running Thinking Classrooms of their own. The largest is the Building Thinking Classrooms Facebook group, but Liljedahl says there are many others.

"Try it," he says. "The book gives you plenty of resources and ways to enact it in a way that's almost guaranteed to have some early success so that you can see for yourself what this looks like. I always say that my book has stories and data in it, but those are my stories and my data. The real data, the real stories that are going to impact your practice, that are going to sustain your practice, are the story and the data that happen in your own classroom, right. Give it a try. See what happens."

Come back for more.
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The Thinking Classroom: An Interview with Peter Liljedahl

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In too many classrooms, students aren't really thinking. It's time to try something different.

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I chose this subject because I think it's critical that students have a voice and be heard. As educators, it is our responsibility to address the causes of students' lack of motivation.

1. Keep them pushing

2. Give them choices

3. Reward with positivity

4. Encourage them to believe in themselves

Rather than assigning blame for the lack of motivation exhibited by your students, use these challenges as an opportunity for improvement.

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Listen to this post as a podcast:

When I ask teachers what their biggest struggles are, one issue comes up on a regular basis: student motivation. You are able to reach many of your students, but others are unreachable. No matter what you try, they have no interest in learning, no interest in doing quality work, and you are out of ideas.

For a long time, I had no solutions; the problem was too complex. I have had my own unmotivated students, and I never had any magic bullets for them. Still, the issue kept coming up from my readers.

So I decided to do some research, to try to find what the most current studies say about what motivates students. This is what I found:

1. Students are more motivated academically when they have a positive relationship with their teacher.

2. Choice is a powerful motivator in most educational contexts.

3. For complex tasks that require creativity and persistence, extrinsic rewards and consequences actually hamper motivation.

4. To stay motivated to persist at any task, students must believe they can improve in that task.

Stopping the Buck: The Teacher's Role in Student Motivation

The research on motivation wasn't hard to find; it seems as if any teacher with an Internet connection and an hour or two should be able to learn everything they need to know about the topic.

So where's the disconnect? If we as a collective group of educators already know what works to motivate students, why are so many students still unmotivated? When I talk with teachers about the problem, I don't hear much about the research.

Instead, we blame technology: "Students are so distracted by their phones."

Or we blame the parents: "Parents just don't want to be bothered" or "They don't want their kids to fail/experience setbacks/take responsibility."

Or we make sweeping generalizations: "Kids today just aren't like they used to be. They act so entitled."

Are we passing the buck? Maybe. It's certainly easier to blame outside forces than it is to make big changes in the way we teach. Unfortunately, even if ALL of the above statements are true, we can't do anything about those things. The only piece we really have control over is what goes on in our own classrooms.

So let's look at our own practice. When we set aside all the outside factors and just focus in on our time with students, how are we doing? How much alignment is there between our own instructional moves and the research on student motivation?

I have put together a list of five questions we can ask ourselves to see if we really are doing everything we could to boost student motivation. To keep me from getting too preachy, I'll do the exercise with you, reflecting on the years when I was a classroom teacher with middle school students.

Okay, let's go.

The Questions

1. How is your relationship with your students, really?

Multiple studies have shown a significant connection between student motivation and the quality of the teacher-student relationship. A good teacher-student relationship provides students with a sense of stability and safety, which sets the stage for more academic risk-taking. So what kind of relationship do you have with your least motivated students? How well do you really know them? Do you have conversations with them about the things they care about? Or have you more or less given up on them?

My response:
At first, I'm thinking I did pretty well in this area. I taught English language arts and my students kept journals, so I got to know them well. But when I think about my less-motivated kids, I'm not so sure I can say the same. The connection I had to Andre, one of my seventh-graders, consisted entirely of me getting him to make up missed work. It was all we talked about: the missing work, why he wasn't turning it in, how important this stuff was for his future. When Andre saw me coming, he probably just saw a looming cloud of nag. We never really talked about the stuff that mattered to him.

How we can do better:
Just becoming more aware of the value of relationships is the most important step. From there, consider one of these resources:

Jim Sturtevant's book, You've Gotta Connect, is full of specific strategies for building stronger bonds with your students. (Episode 9)

Smokey and Elaine Daniels' The Best-Kept Teaching Secret describes how dialogue journals can help us get to know our students better personally and academically.

If you want something faster, take a look at the 2 x 10 strategy, shared by Angela Watson, which has teachers spend two minutes a day for ten days casually chatting with underperforming students.

Remember that relationships between students matter, too. A well-chosen classroom icebreaker can begin building a sense of community in your room.

2. How much choice do your students actually have?

Study after study points to choice as a major factor in motivation. Most of us have probably heard this, but we may not have fully embraced it. After all, providing choice can be messy, with students completing different tasks at different rates, making it hard to be consistent with grading. It can also mean a lot more prep work: If you're going to give students three different options for an assignment, that means you have to prepare all three options ahead of time. Or do you? Isn't that kind of prep work more in line with worksheet-oriented teaching, where students are doing low-level work that was largely prepared by the teacher? If students are engaged in more long-term, authentic, creative projects, it's much easier to provide them with choices, because we aren't constantly trying to provide them with new busywork every day.

My response:
I was pretty good about letting students choose topics for writing assignments, but I also required a lot of seat work as well. I wanted students to do their work at about the same pace, and I knew next to nothing about differentiation. Now I'm thinking about Matt, another one of my unmotivated seventh graders, who was incredibly smart. He sat way low in his chair in the back of the Gifted & Talented language arts class he'd been assigned to, way cooler than all the others, and he gave minimal effort. I used the same nagging approach I'd used with Andre, with minimal success. Now that I know more about differentiation and choice, I realize I could have had a conversation with Matt about letting him work ahead on some things. I could have allowed him, and his classmates, more input on the larger assignments I gave them. If I had given Matt a more active role in his own learning, he might have been more engaged.

How we can do better:
There are lots of ways you can allow more choice in your classroom without having to completely overhaul your way of doing things. Even adding a small amount of choice to what students already have is an improvement. Consider letting them choose:

seating: Could students do some assignments on the floor? In the hall? Or just in different seats?

work groups: Some students thrive in groups, while others do better on their own.

intake mode: If you want a student to read a particular book, and an audio version is available, you could occasionally make that an option.

output mode: For some assignments, it may be possible to have students deliver their response in an audio or video recording, rather than in writing.

timing: If students don't absolutely have to do the same thing at the same time, why not let them choose the order of activities they do?

3. Are you relying heavily on carrots and sticks...or Jolly Ranchers?

Many, many teachers count on rewards ("carrots") and punishments ("sticks") to motivate students. And those who study motivation tell us that extrinsic reinforcement can be motivating if the task is something easy: If you're trying to get students to clean up the classroom quickly, for example, offering class points toward a party can get them to speed up. But for tasks that require creativity and complex thought, extrinsic rewards actually reduce motivation. In your class, how much of your motivational approach is extrinsic? How often do you use grades, treats, privileges or punishments to prod students into doing something they don't really want to do, something they have no real interest in? If extrinsic reinforcement is your primary approach, you may actually be killing off any natural motivation students might have otherwise had.

My response:
I score myself pretty low here. As a teacher, my classroom management was a mess until I learned how to control students with names on the board, extra credit, whole-class rewards for good behavior, and the ever-reliable bag of Jolly Ranchers. I did those things because they worked. But there's a difference between getting kids to do what you want and truly, deeply motivating them.

How we can do better:
Try to catch yourself the next time you're about to tie a challenging activity to a reward or consequence. When introducing a task, try focusing on its inherent interest or value, or how much students are going to learn, rather than on a separate reward or grade. Consider the difference in these two statements:

I'm going to give you a sheet of math problems. The first ten are required, the last two are for extra credit.

I'm going to give you a sheet of math problems. The first ten should be fairly easy, but I want to see how many of you can do the last two-those are the challenge problems. You guys have learned enough that I think you can solve at least one of them, maybe both.

If you have a tendency to go for the first option, you are going for the easy win, the extrinsic reinforcement. If you find that this doesn't do much to motivate your underperforming students, try moving more toward the second option and see if anything changes.

4. Do your words contribute to a growth mindset or a fixed mindset?

What could be wrong with saying "You're so smart"? It's nice, right? It boosts their confidence, no? Well, it's more complicated than that. Students are motivated to persist at a challenging task when they believe they can get better at it. That requires them to have a growth mindset, a belief that their intelligence and abilities can be developed with effort. Teachers can have an impact on this mindset with the things we say to students. So when we say "You're so smart," "You have natural math ability," or "You're a great writer," we are telling the student it's their natural ability that got them where they are. We're contributing to a fixed mindset. And that's not motivating.

My response:
When I was in the classroom, I knew nothing about growth mindset. I thought kids would feel great if I told them they were smart or talented. I can remember a conversation with Janae, a student who commanded the attention of her peers with ease but got into trouble a lot and did poorly in school. I remember pulling her aside and telling her that I thought she had strong leadership qualities, and that if she could just get her grades up, she had a bright future ahead of her. Yeah, that didn't work. If I wanted her to "get her grades up," I would have been better off noticing a well-constructed sentence or complimenting the way she got her group back on track during a cooperative learning activity, showing her exactly what kind of choices she should keep making to be successful.
How we can do better:

Instead of praising something innate and fixed about a student, focus on specific things students can actually control. So instead of telling a student she's a great student, notice the level of detail in her lab report. Marvel at the level of difficulty she was able to handle on that challenging math problem. Point out how much preparation she must have done for the presentation she gave. It's faster and easier to just tell them they're awesome, but taking the time to be specific and focus on effort will pay much larger dividends.

When you have constructive feedback to give, follow the same principle and make it specific. Rather than telling a student she "needs to work harder" on her assignments, tell her what to work on. Is neatness an issue? Does she need to read the questions more slowly? Is she doing the advanced math right, but messing up with the basic addition and subtraction? If a student knows what to work on, she will be far more motivated to do that work.

5. What are you doing to make your content relevant to students' lives?

I think this is another one of those principles that's been around for so long, we assume we're doing it more than we actually are. But showing students how the content relates to their lives really does make a difference. When students believe they are doing something authentic, something that will improve their lives or have some kind of impact, they are naturally motivated. So how are you doing in this area? Do you regularly provide opportunities for students to connect what they're learning to the world they currently live in?

My response:
I got pretty lazy about this. Just like crafting a good opening and closing for each day's learning, I often cut corners on making my material relevant. I was often much more focused on getting through content and tasks than I was on making it meaningful. I was pretty good about giving writing assignments on topics that mattered to them, but I don't know how clearly I connected what they were doing to how it could help them. For example, with something like argumentative writing-I was probably more focused on "this is how you get a good grade on this" rather than on "this is how you change someone's mind."
How we can do better:

Plan it, then say it: Making material more relevant can be as simple as occasionally stopping an activity to explain its relevance. When students are studying the Lincoln-Douglas debates, show parallels with the current presidential election. When you're studying bacteria, talk about all the places bacteria hang out in students' daily lives. Making these kinds of connections is a natural practice for many teachers, but if you're like me, you might forget to add these connections into a lesson. So just add them into your lesson plan; literally write down a few connections you plan to make some time during a class period, then check your plans before class is over to make sure you did it.

More reflection: Even asking students to think about how course material connects to their lives can make a difference. One study (see the Motivation Matters document in the collection) had teachers ask students to write weekly reflections on how the material they were learning related to their lives; lower-performing students in these classes did better compared to those where teachers didn't use this intervention. Researchers referred to these as "value interventions."

Design tasks that end with a public product: In one of the videos in the collection below, educator Kathleen Cushman describes the highly engaging work students do at High Tech High, a school whose curriculum focuses on project-based learning. Student projects have an authentic, public end product-a video, a live presentation, a community service project, a website-something that will ultimately be consumed by people outside of their own classroom. This naturally motivates students to work harder on a task. So look at your curriculum and see if you can find more ways to build assignments around real, public products.

Where to Go from Here

The purpose of this exercise is not to beat ourselves up. It's just a way of deeply diagnosing a problem most teachers struggle with. There's a very good chance that the technology, the parents, or the entitlement are playing a role in what we perceive to be reduced student motivation. But there's a very good chance that our instructional decisions play a role as well.

So pick one area and start there. Make a small adjustment this week and see what happens. Share in the comments where you think you could improve, then come back and tell us what changes made a difference. To solve a problem as complicated as student motivation, there is no magic bullet; instead we'll need a set of tools that we blend and refine over time. This is a process that will definitely be slower and more frustrating than a single, easy solution, but we're professionals. This is our craft. We can do this. ♦

Keep in touch.
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5 Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Unmotivated Students

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If we know what works to motivate students, why are so many students still unmotivated? These five questions will help you determine if your practice is really in line with research.

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I chose this topic because I was so interested in how such a little tweak can impact group work. I found that assigning roles, group structure, teacher's primary role and learning tasks are some important things that stuck out to me while reading this article. This article is very helpful for a teacher who may be struggling with group work in their classroom.

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Listen to the interview with Connie Hamilton:
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It's pretty well known in educational circles that cooperative learning is supported by research, but so many teachers still struggle with it, so when things don't work well, they give it up. In my observations of thousands of teachers, I've noticed that sometimes the smallest tweak in instructional approaches reaps the biggest impact, and group work is no exception.

I've gathered some of the most common efforts among teachers everywhere that aren't met with the same amount of effort and success from their students, and for each one, I offer a small tweak that can make big improvements. Sometimes the tweak is a shift in semantics, other times it might be a slight change in how information is presented, and in some cases, it focuses on how teachers react when students lean on them to "help" instead of doing the heavy lifting themselves.

The instructional methods are sorted into six categories: grouping structures, giving directions, assigning roles, support during student collaboration, the teacher's primary role, and the learning tasks. In each of these six categories, look for examples that describe how you approach or respond to group work, then consider these suggestions for elevating the effectiveness of student collaboration while limiting or reducing the energy you contribute.

Grouping Structures

When determining how students will tackle a task, our options are to have students work independently, with a partner, or in a group. Be more intentional with how you make this key decision by considering some of the thoughtful decisions around structuring student work.

Common approach #1: Inviting students to work with a partner if or when they like
Tweak: Select when, how, and why tasks are individual vs. partner work.
While the goal for allowing students to work with a partner any time they choose is intended to send the message that we can always get help from peers, it doesn't leave room for purposefully designing a task with collaboration in mind. The interactions between students is often not much more than a quick check to see if they got the same answer, rather than communicating their thinking along the way. So when you assign partner work, do it with intention.

Common approach #2: Choosing partners or groups randomly
Tweak: Optimize interest, level, connection, skill, personality, etc. to determine groups.
It's OK to have random groupings once in a while, especially when a quick engagement strategy is needed. However, if groups are primarily student choice or random, we miss the opportunity to mindfully align students with others based on a variety of factors.

Try using Clock Partners to organize multiple pairings. Here's how it works: Students make "appointments" with different peers at specific times. Then, when the teacher announces they should join their 3:00 partner, the pairings are already predetermined. Only you know that the 12 o'clock partner is a reading buddy, while the 6 o'clock partner considers how introverted or extraverted students are.

Common Approach #3: Assigning the same group size to all students
Tweak: Design groups of different sizes if warranted.
When flexibility is warranted, allow for a blend of solo, partner, and group structures. It can be effective to have groups of 4 or 5, a couple of partners, and a few students working alone. Depending on the task, you can offer varying levels of challenge based on their group structure.

Giving Directions

How students engage in active learning usually has steps or at a minimum some guidance. Students come to expect teachers to be the beacon of information when it comes to describing exactly - and I mean every minute detail - of what they are supposed to do.

Common Approach #4: Reading directions to students
Tweak: Give them time to independently read and repeat to peers.
Instead of reading directions, or even having a single student read them to the entire class, give your learners time to read independently, then repeat or paraphrase them to a partner. If your students often disregard the directions, this small tweak will not only give them two exposures (once when they read and once when their partner repeats), but it also gives you a point of reference. You can easily refer them back to the directions if they are going rogue in a way that jeopardizes learning.

Common Approach #5: Giving multiple steps in a row
Tweak: Post steps for students to revisit as needed.
Working or short-term memory is taxed when multi-step directions are expected to be retained for future reference. Instead of requiring students to remember all the steps of a complex task, provide a visual with them clearly stated.

Common Approach #6: Answering questions about the task
Tweak: Refer them to the resources provided or prompt them to problem-solve.
When you have provided an opportunity for students to review the directions and have made them accessible for reference as needed, there's no need for you to answer questions that they can clarify without asking you. Try to build independence and responsibility by encouraging students to access other sources to get the information they seek.

One way to accomplish this is to respond to their question with a question that prompts reflection or metacognition (see examples above). Answering questions with a question bounces the responsibility off of you and back on to them.

Of course, what you say is as important as how you say it. Cynical or sarcastic tones, when posing questions, can break down your relationship with students. Be sure your questions are delivered in a positive and productive way that strives to encourage students to activate their empowerment.

Assigning Roles

As adults who have ample opportunities to practice effective communication skills, it can be easy to overlook the fact that students do not always know how to balance partner or group tasks or communicate with peers. These are critical soft skills that can be fostered when collaborative tasks have structure and students understand the various roles group members or partners play when working and learning together.

Common Approach #7: Not differentiating between partners or group members

Tweak: Start with A/B partners.

The easiest way to elevate your intentionality and make student collaboration more effective is to assign names for your partners. A/B, red/gold, peanut butter/jelly, it doesn't matter. This simple detail assigns a speaker and a listener and structures the conversation to ensure the speaker is heard and the listener understands. It's the basics of the communication cycle where the sender (speaker) sends a message and the receiver (listener) provides feedback about the message.

Common Approach #8: Assigning roles without practice or models

Tweak: Plan mini-lessons on how to fulfill roles.

Don't get overwhelmed by this tweak. Just start with one skill at a time. Offer a mini-lesson that clearly explains how a quality summarizer, questioner, or detective would perform their role. Include models that students can critique or reflect on their effectiveness. In a small group, assign one person to execute that role, then rotate it to another group member or partner for the second part of the task.

Eventually, you will have a list of roles like the ones above that students understand how to apply in their collaborative groups. The goal is for all students to have all the skills and be able to apply these soft skills fluidly without the need to be assigned a specific role.

Common Approach #9: Giving only "housekeeping" roles to some students

Tweak: Assign academic or cognitive roles to everyone.

Jobs like "materials manager" or "time keeper" might be necessary to support groups in their journey to successful learning, but students should not have the sole role of making sure everyone has a ruler and a pencil. Every learner should be assigned a cognitive role that contributes to the learning of the group and each individual in it. Then, if you want to assign housekeeping tasks, they are add-ons to the academic roles. So for example, your summarizer might also be responsible for returning supplies at the end of the lesson.

Supporting Learning

Facilitating effective group tasks is no easy feat. It requires careful thought and intentional planning. When you have gone through the time and effort to coordinate a quality collaborative learning task, resist the natural tendency to slip into a teacher-directed mode every time a student seeks your help.

Common Approach #10: Chasing hands
Tweak: Provide tools and resources in advance so your help isn't needed.
During collaborative learning, the goal is for students to learn from and with one another - not you. Students already know you're the safety net. Ideally, we provide other options - such as appropriate tools, access to a text, sufficient or additional time, and opportunity to collaborate - that help them persevere through productive struggle before asking you for help. So for goodness sake, don't front load an invitation to seek you out at the first sign of difficulty by announcing, "If you need help, just raise your hand and I'll come over." Just think for a moment what this communicates and encourages.

Common Approach #11: Allowing individuals to ask the teacher questions
Tweak: Require students to access all resources, including other group members, before asking you.
When groups are truly working together, they tap into each other's expertise, knowledge, and thoughts. If an individual partner or group member has a question, do some investigation to make sure the other group members have been included in problem-solving before you were sought out. A simple question such as, "What have you tried so far?" will initiate conversation about potential options and could lead to an "aha" moment without your help.

Common Approach #12: Reteaching rather than systematically scaffolding
Tweak: Use prompting strategies to help learners help themselves.
During lessons, teachers are constantly checking for understanding through structured or casual formative assessments. When a red flag comes up indicating that learners have misconceptions, are struggling, or simply haven't met the target, it's natural to have an urge to support them. Rather than revisit a lesson to reinforce a concept or skill, trigger problem-solving by giving metacognitive prompts. Before repeating the key points of a lesson, try asking questions like What strategy might work?, Where have you seen a similar problem?, or How are you going to tackle this? These types of questions trigger students to think about the knowledge they already have, then apply it. When you jump to reteaching, you skip the opportunity for students to lead their own success.

Teacher's Primary Role

A collaborative learning structure positions students in the center of their learning. By design, the intent is for the teacher to take a passive role, seemingly invisible. It's often our nature to uncloak too soon and flip the lesson to be more teacher-centered during small chunks of time without even realizing it.

Common Approach #13: Spending your time answering questions and helping during group work
Tweak: Observe and gather anecdotal data while students are working.
Your primary role is to listen and watch as students build their learning. This is sometimes a mindshift that is hard to make and even more challenging to maintain. Carry a clipboard or tablet to document what students are grasping, what is challenging, and who has provided evidence of learning. Not only will your noticings be valuable assessment data, but you will be more aware of when you are pulled away from your task to assist students in doing theirs.

Common Approach #14: "Checking" in with groups
Tweak: Do not interrupt.
The gradual release of responsibility (GRR) is often referred to by its "I do, We Do, You Do" parts. Every time you approach a group and ask them how it's going, you effectively jolt them from the "You Do" part into the "We Do" phase of GRR. Unless you have a need to abruptly stop their learning progress and have them repeat what they've already done or learned, don't. Stay invisible by listening from a short distance to hear and observe how students are doing rather than interrupting them.

Learning Tasks

Learning targets, learning intentions, lesson objectives, or whatever you label as the purpose for the lesson, are almost always linked to content expectations. They communicate what students should know and be able to do in math, music, writing, and so on. When students have clarity on the learning target, it is much easier for them to work toward that goal. When teachers hold that level of clarity, instructional decisions during the lesson are intentional and therefore, more successful.

Common Approach #15: Grading a single project or assignment for all group members
Tweak: Learn collaboratively and assess individually.
I have been involved in countless conversations about group grading practices during collaborative learning. The research that supports collaborative learning applies to individual learners, not the group as a whole. The act of engaging with other learners while you're learning not only deepens the learning, but makes it more likely for students to remember it. However, group grades do not reflect how each student stacks up against the target. Activities that involve groups working together should be followed by individual assessment to gather accurate data about what each student took away from their group learning task.

Common Approach #16: Grouping students for simple tasks
Tweak: Design group work for complex tasks that require multiple thinkers.
Just because there is evidence that group work and student collaboration supports learning, doesn't mean it's always the best fit for every lesson and learning task. When a planned activity is simple and students are capable of completing it independently, you run the risk they will devalue working with their peers, regardless of the task, because they believe they don't need their peers. Select a collaborative structure when a variety of thoughts and ideas will benefit each individual's learning. Remember, group or partner work is more than just sharing the load to complete a task. Collaboration should offer a perspective or experience that single students would not have without their classmates.

Common Approach #17: Basing feedback solely on content
Tweak: Notice and assess speaking and listening skills.
Soft skills like problem solving, respectful listening, patience, articulating thinking, and many more are qualities educators and families expect students to exhibit. But too often, we don't necessarily give these skills attention unless they're exceptional or lacking. Instead of isolating your feedback solely on what students learn within your content area, pick a speaking and listening skill and include comments about how it is helping or hindering their group's effectiveness.

If you recognize one of these common approaches to group work in your own teaching style, give it a tweak and pay attention to the impact your subtle change makes on the effectiveness of group work.

Hacking Group Work is available on Amazon and Bookshop.org.

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17 Tweaks That Make a Big Difference in Group Work

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Cooperative learning can be a powerful learning strategy, but only if it works well. These small changes can make group work more effective in your classroom.

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I chose this episode/article because ADHD is something I deal with everyday. I think ADHD can be misunderstood and thats why it it important for teachers to understand what it is and how they can help their students who have it.

What is ADHD ?

ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition that impacts a person’s executive function.

ADHD Facts

ADHD is largely genetic

shows as difficult working towards goals, resisting distractions, hold information in working memory, planning and problem solving. Increase impulsivity and quicker change of emotion "Unfortunately, all of these are often categorized as misbehavior or “poor choices” in the classroom"

Rates of diagnosis do not necessarily reflect the actual number of students with ADHD.

ADHD is linked to a host of serious problems. People with ADHD have a greater risk of relationship problems (including social problems in school and both personal and professional adult relationships), employment issues, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, addiction, auto accidents, and suicide.

Ways to support ADHD students

Be Proactive rather than Reactive

Instead of waiting for problems to arise and then dealing with them, which is more likely to be done under duress, it’s far more effective to anticipate challenges and set up a plan for preventing them.

Making the Internal External

An ADHD working memory is like chalkboard on automatic wiping

Visuals be able to see all the information ex color coded folders, planner, written instruction

BREAK LARGE TASKS INTO SMALLER ONES.

Because ADHD makes it harder for students to manage long, complex tasks, it helps if teachers can guide students in breaking these tasks into smaller steps

MAXIMIZE THE EFFECTIVENESS OF INCENTIVES

Internal motivation is harder to sustain for students with ADHD due to reduced working memory and increased impulsivity

Positive reinforcements must significantly outweigh negative ones, ncentives may need to be “richer” than what you might typically use for other students

PREPARE FOR RESTLESSNESS.

To work with—rather than against—these students’ greater need for movement, keep a supply of stress balls, fidget toys, balance balls, or wobble chairs for them to use

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I still remember the feeling I used to get when looking at the paperwork for my students who had ADHD, the forms listing the accommodations I would need to make for them-usually extended time on tests and maybe preferential seating.

The feeling could be best described as uncertain. I understood what these small changes looked like in practice-seat this student near the front of the room and give him more time to work on tests. But I knew almost nothing about the mechanics behind why the changes were supposed to make a difference. I signed the papers, returned them to the office, and made a mental note that if any of these students ever showed signs of struggle, it was probably because of the ADHD.

And they did struggle. The preferential seating and extra time wasn't often enough to help them turn in completed work on time, keep track of their things, and stay focused on class activities. Knowing as little as I did about ADHD, I figured that was the best we were going to get.

As uncomfortable as it makes me to say this, I will also admit that part of me wondered why these students couldn't just power through, find the motivation, try harder. Disorganization got the better of me sometimes too, and when that happened, I would just tidy things up, declutter, reset my priorities, and get back on track. It wasn't that hard. I also wondered whether parents were to blame, if a lack of structure, too much TV or video games, or some other oversight at home might be the true cause of students' difficulties.

Suffice it to say I really, REALLY didn't understand ADHD.

It turns out my lack of knowledge wasn't unique. A number of studies have shown that many teachers don't know enough to effectively meet the needs of students with ADHD (Alkahtani, 2013, Poznanski et al., 2018). While a growing number of teachers can recognize behaviors that might suggest ADHD in a child, knowledge drops off significantly when it comes to treatments and interventions that can help-the less training and knowledge a teacher has about ADHD, the less confident they feel about working with students who have it (Flanigan & Climie, 2018). This may explain the heartbreaking statistic that teachers tend to form fewer close relationships with students who have ADHD (Ewe, 2019).

Regardless of the subject area or age you teach, you're likely to have at least a few students with ADHD in your classroom every school year, so a good working knowledge of it should be part of any teacher's professional training. In the nine years I have been sharing resources on this website, I have only ever done one piece on ADHD, a 2017 interview with Seth Perler, who shared a great set of systems that help students who struggle with executive function. But that's it, so it's time to dig a little deeper.

A Solid Place to Start: Russell Barkley

Setting out to find good resources, I kept landing on the name Russell Barkley, an ADHD researcher who has been called a pioneer, a leading expert, and the gold standard in ADHD research. In all the places where his work appears-speaking on YouTube, as a guest on multiple podcasts, and as the author of many articles and books on ADHD-what is most striking are the number of comments from adults with ADHD who are relieved to finally find some validation, to hear clear explanations for why their brains work the way they do.

Although Barkley has been criticized for sounding negative and bleak when he speaks about the condition, using language that many would characterize as deficit thinking, his work has helped many people understand the workings of ADHD, how it affects those who have it, and how to best manage it. With that in mind, he seems like a good place to start; for suggestions on where to keep learning, I'll provide a list of resources at the end of this post.

Most of Barkley's work is directed at parents of children with ADHD and adults who also carry the diagnosis, but he has also written the highest-rated book for teachers on the subject, Managing ADHD in School: The Best Evidence-Based Methods for Teachers ( Bookshop.org | Amazon).

This slim book is not meant to be comprehensive or in-depth. Barkley states outright that he's not going to spend time on narrative prose and extensive research citations; his goal is to simply explain ADHD so that busy teachers can understand it, and tell them what they can do to help students who have it. His message is "Trust me, I know this stuff. Do this, not that." And while this obviously leaves him open to criticism, the book certainly delivers on its promises, and it's a great starting point for any teacher who wants a crash course on ADHD.

As Barkley is fully retired now, he declined to be interviewed here, so this is basically my own personal book report: I learned so many things from the book that would have helped immensely in my own work with students with ADHD, so I'm going to summarize what I think are the most important takeaways here. I strongly suggest you get a copy for yourself.

Although I'm doing my best to share this information accurately, there's a chance I'll get something wrong; if you see something that needs correcting, please let us know in the comments.

What do teachers need to understand about ADHD?

Before we get into classroom practices, I'm going to summarize a few key facts about ADHD that every teacher should know. Most of these happen to be things I personally didn't know-in fact, some are the exact opposite of beliefs I held-so I can only assume other teachers might also need this overview.

ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition that impacts a person's executive function. This shows up as a difficulty with persisting toward goals and resisting distractions, holding information in working memory, and planning and problem solving. It also increases impulsivity, making immediate consequences more valuable than long-term ones, and interferes with inhibition, which results in quicker displays of emotion and other conduct that is generally discouraged in social settings. Unfortunately, all of these are often categorized as misbehavior or "poor choices" in the classroom, and if teachers don't understand how ADHD works, they can spend years responding in ways that will do little to address the underlying causes.

The cause of ADHD is largely genetic. In the book, Barkley asserts that "no compelling evidence indicates that social factors, such as parenting or educational environment, have been found to cause ADHD." Research has also ruled out diet, TV or media consumption, or videogame play as contributing factors (p. 15-16). With this information in mind, we can stop looking for outside factors to blame and get down to the business of helping these students do better in school. Knowing this should also put an end to attempts to "motivate" students with ADHD by giving them pep talks, angry reprimands, or guilt trips.

Roughly ten percent of your students are likely to have ADHD. Numbers for this are hard to pin down exactly: The National Institute of Mental Health puts the total number of children and adolescents diagnosed with ADHD at about 11%, the CDC at 9.4%, and Barkley at 5 to 8%. Regardless of the source, the numbers continue to rise every year, and boys have a higher rate of diagnosis than girls. More important than an exact number is this: Every year, you should expect to have at least a few students in your classroom who have ADHD.

Rates of diagnosis do not necessarily reflect the actual number of students with ADHD. Barkley says diagnoses tend to occur more in communities with more resources, and overdiagnosis is more frequent "in upper income neighborhoods where a premium is placed on academic excellence or acceleration" (p. 8). By contrast, students may be underdiagnosed in communities with fewer resources for diagnosis and treatment. Apart from just being good general knowledge to have, this may inform the research and action you take depending on the community where you teach: Perhaps more of your students actually need to be referred for diagnosis and treatment; by contrast, you may be working with students who are receiving treatment for a misdiagnosis.

ADHD is linked to a host of serious problems. People with ADHD have a greater risk of relationship problems (including social problems in school and both personal and professional adult relationships), employment issues, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, addiction, auto accidents, and suicide. These statistics shocked me, and they underscore how important it is for educators, who work with these students for hours every day, to learn as much as we can about how to better support them in school.

Medication can help. Although public opinion on medication is mixed, much of the research shows that ADHD medication, when combined with interventions and supports like the ones listed below, has a high rate of success for improving academic performance. It has also been shown to lower other risk factors, like suicide (Liang et al., 2018), addiction (Sherman, 2022), and auto accidents (Chang et al., 2017).

Research continues to evolve. What was known about ADHD twenty or even ten years ago has been enriched by a growing body of research on diagnosis, causes, interventions, and medication. So when you come across information that doesn't quite fit with your current understanding of ADHD, keep an open mind.

8 Principles for Helping Students with ADHD Succeed in the Classroom

Barkley packs tons of strategies and advice into his book; here I've attempted to condense them into eight general principles. Just like with so many strategies designed to help specific populations, these are also likely to help many of your students be more successful, regardless of whether they have identified difficulties with executive function.

1. Be proactive (rather than reactive).

Throughout the book, Barkley urges teachers to plan ahead with systems and strategies that can solve common ADHD-related challenges. Instead of waiting for problems to arise and then dealing with them, which is more likely to be done under duress, it's far more effective to anticipate challenges and set up a plan for preventing them.

For example, students with ADHD often struggle with transitions, so one strategy is to always pause a few minutes before a transition to verbally remind students of the procedures and rules around the upcoming transition.

2. Make the internal external.

Because ADHD affects working memory, a person with ADHD has a harder time keeping things like instructions for a task in their mind. "Even if they try to hold such information in mind ... any distractions will disrupt and degrade this special type of memory. The mental chalkboard of working memory is wiped clean by the distraction. ...having gone 'off-task,' the child is far less likely to reengage the original and now uncompleted goal or task" (p. 3-4).

Working memory can be boosted when we make the internal external: taking information that might typically be a mental process (like remembering the steps for turning in an assignment) and making it visible. Here are some examples:

Color-coded folders help students keep materials organized and find what they need more easily.

Visual timers that students can easily see keep them aware of how much time is left for a task.

Written rules and instructions posted close to where a task is going to be completed (Barkley calls this the "point of performance") offer support right when students need it.

Daily behavior report cards can work well to remind students of expectations and get immediate feedback on how well they are meeting them.

Notetaking helps students record what they are learning to make it more concrete.

3. Break large tasks into smaller ones.

Because ADHD makes it harder for students to manage long, complex tasks, it helps if teachers can guide students in breaking these tasks into smaller steps.

4. Maximize the effectiveness of incentives.

Author's note: If you listen to the podcast version of this post, you'll notice that this item is somewhat different from that version. The original primarily used the term "consequences" and came across very punishment-heavy; this did not accurately represent Barkley's recommendations. The written version is the more updated one and is the best representation of this principle.

Internal motivation is harder to sustain for students with ADHD due to reduced working memory and increased impulsivity, so external incentives are a powerful tool for sustaining motivation. He recommends these guidelines:

Positive reinforcements must significantly outweigh negative ones. In fact, Barkley recommends that any program of reinforcements have only powerful, positive incentives for 1 to 2 weeks before ever introducing negative ones.

Incentives need to be delivered with more immediacy and frequency than for students without ADHD.

Incentives may need to be "richer" than what you might typically use for other students. If a consequence (positive or negative) doesn't seem to be motivating a student with ADHD, it's probably because it doesn't mean much to the student and should be replaced with something the student values more.

With the above in mind, incentives also need to be varied or rotated more often for students with ADHD, as they lose their potency more quickly over time.

In the book, Barkley regularly uses the word "punishment" to describe negative consequences for undesirable behavior. Although he doesn't advocate for anything harsh, the term is still troubling to me after the book so clearly establishes that the behavior of someone with ADHD is caused by the way their brain is wired, not bad choices. So I would advise teachers reading his book to extract the valuable information he shares about consequences, while keeping in mind that we are not trying to cause shame or pain to students for their behavior; the goal is to create a system of incentives and reinforcements that prompt students to refocus and make adjustments.

5. Prepare for restlessness.

To work with-rather than against-these students' greater need for movement, keep a supply of stress balls, fidget toys, balance balls, or wobble chairs for them to use. You can also provide standing desks and other seating options so that student can to choose what works best for them, and plan frequent physical exercise breaks to give all students a chance to stretch and burn off some energy between activities that require more stillness.

6. Alternate low-appeal with high-appeal activities.

"Too many boring topics or activities back to back can lead a child with ADHD to lose focus," Barkley says (p. 37). This loss of focus can lead to the student becoming distracted and possibly disruptive to the class, so mix the more engaging, high-interest activities in between those that require more effort to maintain focus.

7. Use technology as a support.

Technology has been shown to be especially effective for students who have ADHD. Barkley cites research showing that students with ADHD "pay more attention to computer software learning programs and learn more from the practice with them than they do when working on worksheets" (p. 36).

He also recommends teaching these students keyboarding skills as early as possible. "Students with ADHD have a high occurrence of fine motor coordination problems...give them alternative means of expressing themselves in print" (p. 38).

8. Monitor and modify interventions regularly.

"One common scenario," Barkley writes, "is that a student responds initially to a well-tailored program, but then over time, the response deteriorates" (p. 28). This doesn't mean the interventions didn't work; it might mean they need to be modified or the implementation needs to be checked for fidelity.

A Lingering Question: Public Accountability?

As much as I want to wholeheartedly recommend the book, one repeated suggestion concerned me. In a few places, Barkley advocates for "public accountability" for student behavior (p. 28, p. 61), but at other times offers more discreet methods of accountability for older students (p. 62).

Public behavior charts and systems have gotten a lot of pushback in the teaching world over the past 5 to 10 years, and I agree with the criticism: The shame these can cause is not worth any benefit they may offer. I worry that some readers will come away from this book thinking that public shaming is an effective strategy for supporting students with ADHD, even though Barkley doesn't necessarily advocate for this. My best guess is that the recommendation should be interpreted to mean that the accountability system should be visible to the student, but not necessarily on display for the whole class to see.

With this in mind, a good rule of thumb for any time you see a recommendation in an education book, or on a website like mine, that feels off in some way or seems to go against your better judgment, listen to your gut.

I'll end this piece as I began it, with an admission of bare minimum knowledge on the subject of ADHD. As much as I have tried to accurately represent the recommendations and knowledge Barkley shares, there's a very good chance I got some stuff wrong, and this book is just a starting point, but it would have been incredibly helpful to me as a teacher, so I hope it helps you as well. If you have personal experience with ADHD, professional expertise, or links to other good resources, I urge you to share these in the comments below so we can build on what's here.

Learn More

This piece only scratches the surface of what the medical and educational communities are learning about ADHD. It is meant to serve as a jumping-off point so that teachers can be equipped with strategies that will be the most helpful to students with ADHD. To continue learning, try the resources listed below:

CHADD.org, or Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, is an organization dedicated to improving the lives of people affected by ADHD. Their website houses loads of fantastic resources, plus an online teacher training course if you want to go in depth.

How to ADHD is a website and YouTube channel run by Jessica McCabe, full of high-energy, educational videos about ADHD. (Thank you for the recommendation, Charlotte!)

Want more from Russell Barkley? Listen to this recent interview from the Ologies podcast, where he provides an in-depth overview of ADHD and how it impacts those who have it.

The work of Edward Hallowell is worth considering for a more asset-based view of ADHD. Learn about his advocacy for replacing the term ADHD with the more neutral term VAST and this summary of his public "debate" with Russell Barkley. And for short bursts of learning, follow him on TikTok.

While you're on TikTok, also check out Sasha Hamdani, a psychiatrist and ADHD specialist whose following has grown exponentially in the last year for her helpful and humorous videos. You can also find her on Instagram.

One other resource, ADDitude magazine, was previously on this list, but a reader brought to our attention that it has received criticism in some ADHD forums and was given mixed reviews by the Media Bias/Fact Check website. Although readers can probably still find lots of value on the site, it would be wise to go in knowing what the criticisms are.

References

Barkley, R. (2016). Managing ADHD in School: The Best Evidence-Based Methods for Teachers . Pesi Publishing & Media.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2021, September 23). . Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Data and statistics about ADHD https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/data.html

National Institute of Mental Health. (n.d.). . Retrieved April 14, 2022, from NIMH" Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder-adhd

Sherman, C. (2022, March 31). . ADDitude. The Truth About ADHD and Addiction https://www.additudemag.com/the-truth-about-adhd-and-addiction/

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Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

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8 Principles for Supporting Students with ADHD

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There is so much to learn about ADHD. These broad guidelines from a leading expert are a good place to start.

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I chose this post/episode #182 because I think that it's important for students to use proper grammar, especially younger students, so that they don't stray away from it in the future and in their potential professional field careers. Not only is it important to help students grow their vocabulary, but it also important for them to know what these words mean. This post was published by Angela Perry in 2021. What I learned from this post is first, the 8 steps in growing students vocabulary. These 8 steps include:

1. Informal Conversations - This is when teachers and parents engage in rich conversations with the student/child. During this "stage" one can start these conversations with preschoolers. Keeping the conversation going is the key role in this stage to ensure that the child gets used to talking and using words that their superiors have used.

2. Anchored Word Learning - This is when read aloud are used. Primarily to engage the students in reading, of course, but to also get familiarized with some complex words that they can get the chance to know how to pronounce, look up, and connect with outside familiarities. For example, when younger students are reading picture books, or having them being read to them, they connect the words in the book with the pictures that go along with these words/sentences to help them connect them in their minds for the future.

3. Tip Chart - This is a more imaged-based method to help students connect their terms, definitions and pictures altogether. Teachers will usually keep these charts posted somewhere in the room for their students guidance/assistance. So, for new units, teachers may create these Tip Charts beforehand and go over these terms, definitions and images in class with their students before beginning the lesson.

4. Save The Last Word For Me - This is where interpersonal connections are made with students and their peers to help them compare and contrast their vocabulary learning and proper use of these terms.This stage promotes peer interaction between the students and helps them with not only their vocabulary use skills, but their speaking skills as well.

5. Snap Minilessons - SNAP is the acronym for:

S - Seeing and saying each word

N - Naming a category or group each word belongs to

A - Action on the words

P - Producing an original application of the words

This helps the student go by each step when using new vocabulary and it helps them with the memorization of the term.

6. Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy - This is when students jot down terms that they may not be familiar with, or have seen before but cannot recall the definition, and go back to find the definitions to these terms to help them identify what they mean if they hear them or see them again. This helps stimulate word growth and independence within the student and their knowledge.

7. Word Talks - This is when students give an oral presentation on the words that they have learned and feel like they should share with their peers for them to also know. This can be scheduled by the teacher for students to do at least once a week and share out with the class so everyone (the students, and maybe the teacher as well) learns new terms and how to use them in sentences.

8. Digital Tools For Independent Practice - These are sites and resources for teachers and students to utilize to help them with their vocabulary. A few examples of these resources are:

Freerice

Flocabulary

Vocabador

These are games and websites with videos that engage children in terminology.

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Listen to the interview with Angela Peery:
Sponsored by Google for Education's Applied Digital Skills and fastIEP

I've been an educator for 36 years, and if there's one thing I think every educator can agree on, it's that increasing the number of words our students know is a good thing. Period.

This is supported by decades of research:

A rich vocabulary supports content knowledge in all disciplines. Conceptual understanding, along with both general and specific word knowledge, impacts learning at every age level, starting with oral language development in preschool. When older students know the meaning of specific words and are able to put related words together during a unit of study, they can connect to new content more readily and remember more (Marzano & Simms, 2013).

Word knowledge is key for reading comprehension. Kindergarten students' word knowledge predicts reading comprehension in second grade (Catts, Fey, Zhang, & Tomblin, 1999; Roth, Speece, & Cooper, 2002), and this persists through fourth grade (Wagner, Muse, & Tannenbaum, 2007). Even more surprisingly, Cunningham and Stanovich (1997) find that first-grade students' vocabulary knowledge predicts their reading comprehension level much later, in the eleventh grade.

Students who are deficient in vocabulary face numerous obstacles, including having much lower reading comprehension. Their reading range is thus limited, their writing lacks specificity and voice, and their spoken language lacks range of word choice. They risk reading less (both in volume and frequency), not understanding content-area texts or concepts well, writing lackluster essays and reports, and not being able to express themselves as well verbally.

This is why all teachers should address vocabulary instruction head-on.

But what words should be taught? In English language arts/reading classrooms, explicit vocabulary instruction should focus on general academic words (Beck, McKeown & Kucan, 2013). These words cut across disciplines and help students speak, read, and write well in all the academic settings in which they'll find themselves. In every discipline, there are also domain-specific terms students need to understand and learn.

8 Vocabulary-Building Strategies

Good vocabulary instruction can and should happen throughout the school day. This can happen through incidental learning, when students talk with and listen to others, watch videos, play games, and read independently, through explicit instruction, which are more structured activities, or with the help of digital tools.

The strategies that follow, most of which require very little preparation time, come from three of my books, shown below:

Strategy 1: Informal Conversations

One of the most powerful things teachers (and adults in the home) can do is to have rich conversations with children. Recent research on conversational turns (LENA, 2017) indicates that the more turns a young child takes in conversation with an adult, the more they grow their vocabulary and verbal acuity in general.

So asking questions of a student, receiving their responses, adding information, and asking them to reflect or add more information-in other words, keeping the conversation going-is important in vocabulary development. This idea has great potential for non-instructional segments of the preschool elementary day like snack time, lining up to go to lunch, and restroom breaks. It also has potential for older students.

Strategy 2: Anchored Word Learning

Anchored Word Learning (Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2002) is ideal to use with elementary students where read-alouds are typically part of the daily routine. It can also be used in the upper grades, especially with complex text that is being read aloud and discussed together as a whole class.

For young children, picture books provide excellent sources of higher-level, sophisticated words that are important for expanding vocabulary. They expose students to words they would not typically read within leveled books or on their own. For older children, excerpts from novels, nonfiction texts of various types, and content-area texts can all be used for anchored word learning.

Isabel Beck suggests selecting three general academic words each time the teacher reads aloud a picture book or trade book; these should not be esoteric or archaic terms, but words likely to come up in other academic texts. Older students may be able to handle more words during a read-aloud and class discussion, but teachers are cautioned not to select too many words for one lesson. Three to five words is usually sufficient.

Prior to reading, teachers need to complete three simple preparation steps:

1. Select a read-aloud. Choose from books by favorite authors, recommended books, new books, old favorites, picture books, trade books, and content-area texts that impart critical information.

2. Identify three to five words for direct instruction. Select words which will expand students' vocabulary and will likely appear in varied contexts-or focus on words critically important to the content being taught. "Nice to know" words don't have a place here. The idea is to teach important words that are likely to appear in various contexts or words you really want students to know.

3. Mark the words in the text with a sticky note or with a highlighter and annotations if the text is on paper.

Once this preparation is complete, follow these steps with students:

1. Read the entire text aloud. Don't stop in the first reading to discuss the words at length. Students need to hear complex texts being read aloud fluently-especially a first reading-so they can start to process the story itself or the complicated ideas present in many nonfiction and content-specific texts.

2. After reading the text through once, go back and bring attention to each targeted word. You may want to reread the sentences and/or paragraphs in which each word appears.

3. Have students say each word aloud.

4. Write each word so it's visible to students. You may want to have students write the words down as well (or use their fingers and "write" the words in the air or in the palms of their hands). With younger students, spell the word as you write it. Call attention to any interesting spelling feature, such as double letters, silent E, prefixes, etc.

5. Provide a student-friendly definition of each word. You may want to repeat this several times.

6. Provide examples for each word beyond the context of the text. Encourage children to provide examples of their own so they personalize the word, relating it to their own context. This is a great time to use think-pair-share or turn-and-talk.

7. If desired, post these words on your academic word wall. If you're an ELA/reading teacher, you may want to have a section of the word wall dedicated to words from read-alouds.

Strategy 3: TIP Chart

This adaptation of a word wall features a visual in addition to a brief definition. TIP stands for term, information, and picture. Basically, a TIP Chart (Rollins, 2014) is a three-column poster displayed so students can quickly use it to remind them of the meaning of an important content-area ( tier three) word. In essence, it's a vocabulary anchor chart.

Unlike the well-known Frayer Model, the TIP Chart is useful for words that are fairly straightforward in meaning-not ones with heavy conceptual weight. Once completed, the TIP Chart serves as an "at a glance" reference for important disciplinary terms; this purpose must be kept in mind if the strategy is to be most beneficial.

TIP charts are displayed prominently for the whole class to see, but students can also keep personal TIP charts in their notebooks or digital files as well. The teacher can first model how to create the chart, and later, students can be involved in deciding what information to record and what picture to draw to go with each word.

The best time to use the strategy is when beginning a new chunk of instruction, like a chapter or unit. With the chart ready, announce the first word and call students' attention to the importance of this word in the current segment of instruction. Write the word in column one. Then share the formal and full definition, which ideally would also be printed in the text or on a screen or board in the classroom. Along with students, from this full definition, develop a short, student-friendly definition or a brief list that you write in the middle column. Do not write the full, formal definition in column two. Lastly, provide or co-create a simple visual in column three.

So, for the term soliloquy in my 9 th grade English class, I would first give the formal definition: A long, usually serious speech that a character in a play makes to an audience and that reveals the character's thoughts. We might talk for a minute about the fact that playwrights use soliloquies so the audience understands what a character is thinking. So, in the middle column, we might write the student-friendly, casual definition: When someone in the play thinks out loud. And, to emphasize the fact that this kind of speech is usually given with the character standing alone on the stage, I might then draw a single stick figure with lines or a speech bubble emanating from its face to indicate that he or she is speaking.

The TIP Chart in my class might look something like this:

Here's a social studies example. For the term "monopoly," the full definition might be "the exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service." It is assumed that the teacher is also teaching the term "commodity" along with "monopoly." In column two for "monopoly," the teacher may write "control of a product or service." In the third column, he or she might draw a large square that surrounds smaller squares, thus showing the dominance of the one provider. Students might also suggest something that symbolizes a monopoly to them, like an iPhone surrounded by other types of cell phones, but the iPhone appears much larger or more prominent, or the other phones are crossed out.

Teachers can gradually do less in whole-class fashion with TIP charts and encourage students to create their own in hard-copy notebooks or digital notebooks using Google Docs, LiveBinders, or OneNote. Students might preview the first part of each chapter or unit (in any class) and try to complete a personal TIP chart to be kept in their organizational system. They could also collaborate with other students to create TIP charts, so that if any individual is confused about a word, they can get ideas from others. This is a portable strategy students can use with any content area and any textbook from elementary school well into college.

Strategy 4: Save the Last Word for Me

Save the Last Word for Me (Beers, 2003) is an ideal strategy to promote peer conversation, increase engagement, and promote deeper processing about vocabulary and content. Although it's usually applied to conversations about literature, its clearly defined structure is perfect for reviewing vocabulary and gaining deeper understanding of specific terms.

It is fairly typical for teachers to provide guided review activities before a unit test, midterm, or final exam. Let's say the instructional unit includes about 25 terms which students must recognize and understand how to use correctly within context. Save the Last Word for Me serves as an engaging vehicle for students to practice doing so in preparation for an assessment.

The steps for employing this strategy are as follows; the first three need to be completed ahead of time:

1. Print multiple sets of cards with a target word on one side and the definition on the reverse side (one set for each group of students).

2. Print the directions for the activity (see below).

3. Place the printed directions and terms in a plastic bag or manila envelope for each group of students.

4. Divide students into groups of three to five. It's important that groups are small so each student has an opportunity to discuss. The goal is for students to review and deepen understanding about concepts and specific terms, so making sure they clarify their thinking aloud is important.

To begin, one student draws a card from the deck and another student defines the term. Moving around the circle, each student adds to the definition, refining and adding examples along the way. The person who draws the cards gets the "last word" and can add to the definition or revise it before students agree upon a definition. You may want to model the process in whole-class fashion first or by having a small group model the process as the rest of the class watches.

Sometimes, if the bank of terms is large, I suggest simply printing one master deck of cards and place five or six cards in each bag. After a few minutes, signal the groups to trade bags of terms and, in so doing, each group gets new terms to review.

While Save the Last Word for Me is low-tech, sometimes simpler is better. It delivers by supporting interaction and engagement, deeper conversations, and higher-level processing.
Student Directions for Save the Last Word for Me

One student selects a card from the deck and says the term aloud with the other group members.

On a piece of paper, each student jots down what they know about the term. (This can also be "in your head" and each person takes about 30 seconds to think about what they know about the meaning.)

When everyone is finished, each person takes a turn sharing their reflections/responses. As each participant shares their thoughts, other students can share thoughts and responses.

The student who drew the card gets the last word by sharing their reflections/reactions or by stating a fresh view if the responses of others have altered their original thinking.

If students are unsure or need clarification, they refer to the text, notes, and/or handouts for clarification.

Another student draws a new card, and the process is repeated.

Strategy 5: SNAP Minilessons

Setting aside specific time daily, weekly, or periodically to explicitly teach general academic vocabulary through minilessons (of 5 to 15 minutes each) is another way you can provide explicit instruction.

Each minilesson in my books contains four core components or steps, which the acronym SNAP in the title represents:

S: Seeing and saying each word

N: Naming a category or group each word belongs to or noticing connections to related words or word families

A: Acting on the words (engaging in a brief task or conversation about the words)

P: Producing an individual, original application of the words

The example below is intended for secondary students.

Click here to see this lesson in a Google Doc.

Strategy 6: Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy

The primary purpose of the Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy (VSS) (Haggard, 1986) is to help students generate a list of words to be learned based on their prior knowledge and experience with reading and texts. This strategy can stimulate word growth and independence as students read texts and select vocabulary which they deem important to understanding the content.

VSS includes the following steps:

Selecting words

Defining words

Finalizing word lists

Extending word knowledge

The strategy can be used to support general word learning from one's environment or to support vocabulary learning from assigned and self-selected texts.

A colleague of mine routinely used this strategy to support general word learning with college freshmen. Every week, students "collected" three words from their environment (watching, listening, and reading) that they thought important to learn. For each word, students included the following information

An accurate definition

Where they heard or read the word including a bit of the context

A justification for why they thought the word was important to learn

Words were shared and discussed in class at an established time each week. Students also recorded their words in personal vocabulary notebooks. VSS engaged students in lively discussions and specifically raised word consciousness, a critical goal of word learning.

Another way VSS can be implemented is to specifically support word acquisition from content-area text. To support content learning, students can work in cooperative groups and read a chapter from a textbook (or any text). As they read, they identify words they think should be studied and mastered. During class discussion, groups then share their words and why they think the terms are important to mastering content. Additional steps can include developing a class list that contains one word from each group, creating TIP charts with the words, and having students teach minilessons focused on the words to each other.

Strategy 7: Word Talks

Word talks were derived from a similar strategy called book talks, in which students give a brief (less than five minutes) presentation about a book they recommend to their peers for independent reading. Word talks are similar in that they require a student to give a brief presentation on one or several words that they feel are important for their peers to know. This strategy is, like some others in this chapter, excellent for general academic words, not highly specialized, domain-specific words. Also, it can be easily combined with the Vocabulary Self-Collection strategy discussed earlier.

Some teachers who use word talks schedule a certain day a week or a certain day per month on which several students get up and do their word talks. Other teachers schedule a rotation so that a few times a week, one student is doing a word talk that day. Because the word talks consist of a student teaching their peers, it's important to make time for this, because students tend to find the periods in which their classmates are leading discussion much more memorable than when the teacher is; students often have a way of saying something that "clicks" with their peers just because it's said in a kid-friendly way.

What kind of words should students share in word talks? Many students share from their independent reading and their media and technology use. Teachers can ask students to provide a rationale for each word chosen if they like, but they can also allow students to share any word that might be interesting. I find myself thinking of the character Sam in the Netflix series Atypical as a high school student. He would have certainly loved to share words related to penguins and Antarctica in word talks.

In a word talk in one of my high school classes, a student selected the following words to share: ascent, descent, decompression, and recompression. Can you tell what the student was learning to do outside of school? Scuba diving. This student was studying for her initial scuba certification and thought these words would be good to share because although they have scuba-specific meanings, they also have application to non-scuba situations.

Word talks are great opportunities for some students to showcase their interests and expertise, but most importantly, they make clear that continual word learning is important.

Strategy 8: Digital Tools for Independent Practice

The following websites/programs offer support for you as a teacher as well as independent practice activities for students:

Flocabulary
This robust program includes hip-hop type videos to help students learn new terminology.

Freerice
This site has an addictive vocabulary game with five difficulty levels, with levels one and two being appropriate for students in grades three and up.

Vocabador
This game allows students to study SAT vocabulary words, choose an avatar, and "get into the ring" to play against other virtual wrestlers.

There's nothing negative that comes about when anyone grows their vocabulary-and for students, there are many, many positives. By adding even a few of these strategies to your repertoire, you'll help students build vocabularies that will support them no matter what path they choose to pursue.
References
Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G., & Kucan, L. (2013). Bringing words to life: Robust vocabulary instruction (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford Press.

Beers, K. (2003). When kids can't read, what teachers can do: A guide for teachers 6-12. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Catts, H. W., Fey, M. E., Zhang, X., & Tomblin, J. B. (1999). Language basis of reading and reading disabilities: Evidence from a longitudinal investigation. Scientific Studies of Reading, 3(4), 331-361.

Cunningham, A. E., & Stanovich, K. E. (1997). Early reading acquisition and its relation to reading experience and ability 10 years later. Developmental Psychology, 33(6), 934-945.

Haggard, M. R. (1986). The vocabulary self-collection strategy: Using student interest and world knowledge to enhance vocabulary growth. Journal of Reading, 29(7), 634-642.

LENA. 2017. Proving the Power of Talk: 10 Years of Research on the Impact of Language on Young Children. Available at https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/3975639/Research_Summary.pdf?utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lena.org%2F.

Marzano, R. J., & Simms, J. A. (2013). Vocabulary for the Common Core. Bloomington, IN: Marzano Research.

Rollins, S. P. (2014). Learning in the fast lane: 8 ways to put all students on the road to academic success. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Wagner, R. K., Muse, A. E., & Tannenbaum, K. R. (Eds.). (2007). Vocabulary acquisition: Implications for reading comprehension. New York: Guilford Press.

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By adding even a few of these strategies to your repertoire, you'll help students build vocabularies that will support them no matter what path they choose to pursue.

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I chose this article because it caught my eye with the words "Nothings going to change my mind". I wanted it read it because when I put my mind to something its hard to change my mind which is why I wanted to read this article.

what I learned

1. Unconditional positive regard doesn’t take accountability away from students for their behavior

2. people are allowed to mess up and allowed to have struggles and that shouldn't invalidate their worth

3. unconditional positive regards mean "I care about you, you have value, you don't have to prove anything to me, and nothing will change my mind." so being positive and supportive to your students.

4. prioritize getting to know your students.

5. collaborate with other teaches within your school.

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Listen to the interview with Alex Shevrin Venet (transcript):
Sponsored by EVERFI and Listenwise

This page contains Amazon Affiliate and Bookshop.org links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. What's the difference between Amazon and Bookshop.org?

Among the many challenges teachers have faced since the onset of the pandemic, one that persists is this feeling that students have changed, that they are less motivated, more entitled, and more disrespectful than ever before. Even if a teacher can find plenty of evidence to support this perception, it can't be making things any better.

And while it does seem that the pandemic exacerbated this feeling among teachers, I saw it long before we ever heard the word Covid. In the late 90s and early 2000s, I worked with far too many teachers who held a pretty low opinion of many of our students. There was a lot of "These kids (insert negative generalization)" or "Well what do you expect from him, he (insert negative generalization)."

I think many of these attitudes come from a real, valid, and vulnerable place, from teachers who once had high hopes but felt disappointed and hurt when things went wrong, teachers who had good intentions and got their hearts broken a little bit every time students rejected their efforts, teachers who see behaviors from their students that shock and frighten them. But regardless of where they come from, these mindsets hurt our relationships with students, and that makes everything else worse, from behavior to academics to the culture of school as a whole.

So with all of this in mind, I was intrigued when I came across the phrase unconditional positive regard. It was in Alex Venet's book, Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education ( Amazon | Bookshop.org), where she names it as the most important guiding philosophy in her work. Venet explains that unconditional positive regard is a stance that communicates this message to students: "I care about you. You have value. You don't have to do anything to prove it to me, and nothing's going to change my mind." In her book, she asserts that taking this stance and putting it into practice builds the foundation on which our students can thrive. And the more I learned about it, the more I was sold on its value.

But I suspect that for most teachers, adopting this philosophy won't be an easy task, because the demands of the job are so intense and the challenging behaviors students bring to school are so overwhelming. For some, even the idea of this philosophy might be off-putting at first, because you might see it as just another version of teacher-blaming. But it's not. Unconditional positive regard doesn't take accountability away from students for their behavior; it just works on the lens teachers use to address it, and that lens can make a huge difference, not only in how you interact with students, but how you feel about the work you do every day.

Because I think unconditional positive regard is such an important, revolutionary philosophy, and because implementing it can be challenging, I wanted to lift it out of the book and give it special attention. I already did an interview with Venet about the larger concept of trauma-informed teaching, but she agreed to have a separate conversation just on unconditional positive regard. You can listen to our conversation in the player above, read the full transcript, or get a peek at some of the key points of our conversation below.

What is unconditional positive regard, and why is it such an important part of trauma-informed teaching?
"Unconditional positive regard means I care about you, you have value, you don't have to do anything to prove it to me, and nothing will change my mind," Venet says. "So it's really this idea of seeing somebody as a whole and complete and worthy person starting from a place where care doesn't have to be earned, it's just assumed. Everybody gets care. You're allowed to mess up. You're allowed to have struggles, but that is never going to invalidate your worth, and it's never going to invalidate my care for you."

The concept was introduced to psychotherapy by Carl Rogers in the 1960s and applied to education by Alfie Kohn in a 2005 essay called Unconditional Teaching. Venet sees this stance as foundational in her work in equity-centered trauma-informed teaching "because it starts from that place of students are worthy, valuable people."

What does unconditional positive regard look like in practice?
"One of the things that allows for unconditional positive regard is to just get to know students," Venet explains. "I mean it's pretty basic but to get to know what they care about that's not necessarily related to the content. If you only are looking at a kid and going, oh, you're good at writing, you're good at science, whatever, then your regard is going to be conditional because you've placed parameters around what types of strengths I'm going to see in you."

It's especially important to make this a priority for students with whom you don't have much in common. "If I meet a student who is really into cats and the same TV shows as me and we have a similar sense of humor, it's easy for me to like them, to care about them," Venet says. But with students who only wanted to talk about Roblox, for example, "It was a little hard for me to find okay, where's my connection point? If I reground myself in, okay, if I'm going to believe this student has value, I care about them, I need to just get inside a little bit. What makes them tick? So tell me about Roblox. What do you like about it? How do you feel when you're playing it? Who do you get to connect with when you play Roblox? Where did you first learn about it?" Taking deliberate steps to get to know students as they are, outside of the context of your classroom, can help you see them as whole people.

Along with getting to know students, teachers practicing unconditional positive regard also work to learn about factors in students' lives that make them behave in ways that bother the teacher.

"If a student seems to never pay attention when I'm talking," she explains, "I'm not going to go immediately to a place of, Well, they're not paying attention because they don't care. Instead, I'm going to get curious and go, maybe something's going on that's distracting. Maybe they just have a hard time paying attention. Maybe I'm being kind of boring." This stance of curiosity - both for getting to know the student and figuring out what things might be causing problems - is essential for building unconditional positive regard.
What about when students become especially difficult? What insights can you offer to teachers for those times?
Venet shares the story of a former student, "Julia," who refused to participate, kept her head down most of the time, and hurled verbal insults at Venet when she tried to connect with her. Had she not been supported by her colleagues to take a stance of unconditional positive regard, "I could have come up with some conclusions like she's disrespectful, she hates me, she hates school, she doesn't care about her education. But by holding this unconditional positive regard, which essentially says with no evidence, I'm still going to believe that she has value and I'm still going to care about her, with no evidence that would support that, I gave it time."

During this time, Venet made much more subtle bids for connection. "She wouldn't talk to me in class, but if I was standing next to her in the lunch line, then I could make a little comment to her, and she would sometimes respond to it. I started to talk to her other teachers and try to find out a little bit. Like, what does she like? What makes her tick? She was really good at drawing, and so I started to see her art. I started to find some connection points. So then the next time she comes in, in the half a second before she puts her headphones in, I could say, hey, I saw you drawing in your last class. Can I see what you drew? And maybe she leaves one earbud out to start to talk to me about it."

As this process unfolded, Venet began to understand that Julia's behavior came from past trauma. "She has been really harmed by people in her life before and she's protecting herself. She's protecting herself because the same way that I don't have evidence for her, she has no evidence for me. She doesn't know that I'm safe. She doesn't know that I think she can learn. She doesn't know any of that. Out of the two of us, one of us had to take a leap of faith, and she's the kid so it has to be me. I'm the teacher so it has to be me to do that. And so I stuck with it for her until we gained that trust and until we were able to build it up."

One quote that Venet keeps in mind in these difficult times comes from the book Trauma-Responsive Schooling ( Amazon | Bookshop.org). "There's a coach in that book who is coaching some of her peers, and this question that she asks of other teachers is, How would you respond differently if you knew the student's behavior wasn't a choice? If I look at Julia and I say, her behavior's a choice. She is choosing to be mean to me and be disrespectful. Then maybe the action that I'm going to take is to say well, I'm going to punish her for it. I'm going to withdraw my part of the relationship. I'm going to put up a wall if she's putting up a wall."

Unconditional positive regard takes things in a different direction. "If I look at her and I say, maybe this isn't a choice, but it is a protective reaction to try to not get hurt by another adult, then I'm going to respond how I did, which is I'm going to stick with it. I'm going to try to earn her trust while always holding this idea that I think we're going to get there one day."

Even if the behavior IS a choice, Venet says, taking this stance helps the teacher approach the situation in a healthier way.

You advise teachers to have regular "perspective-keeping" conversations with colleagues to help stay on track with unconditional positive regard. Why are these important and how do they help?
"The relationship between a student and a teacher is not equal," Venet begins. "If I was going to meet up with a friend, and my friend called me a really horrible word and put her headphones in, I could just go, well, I'm not going to tolerate that from my friend. I don't have to spend time with this person. That's not the same relationship we have with students; students are required to be there and you're required to teach them. But as the adult, we have more power. We have the ability to impose consequences that can have long-lasting impacts.

"And so if a student hurts my feelings, it's okay for my feelings to be hurt. It's okay for me to say, that felt really bad. I hated that. I don't want to tolerate that behavior from people around me. However, the student can never be responsible for making me feel better or be responsible for my emotions because the power differential is not equal. I can't make that student responsible for me because they're not. They're required to be in school. I'm required to teach them."

But teachers shouldn't feel like they are trapped with their feelings; they can get help from their colleagues. "I can go to my colleagues and talk about how I was hurt, and they can say, yeah, that sounds really hard. We can process it. And then they can help me reset and say, okay, how are you going to show up tomorrow given the fact that you're feeling really hurt? How can you continue to hold this regard for her even though she is harming you?"

And if the student really crosses a line? "For example, if the student was calling me a slur based on my identity," Venet offers, "then I need to have people around me who can say, yeah, you shouldn't go back in that room with her tomorrow but she still deserves a teacher, so we're going to tag out. Somebody else is going to work with her. We're going to work on educating her. We're going to solve this problem. It requires a team effort. And I think this is where people have a hard time when we talk about unconditional positive regard, because if you are the only person in your building who's trying to make this shift, it's really going to be difficult because our schools are not set up to foster this."
"If we commit to an ethic of care, building relationships and caring for our students aren't strategies in the name of increasing academic achievement but the actual goal itself." This is from page 100 of your book. Embracing this stance would be a huge paradigm shift for many U.S. educators. Why do you think it's worth considering?
"It's basically the opposite of what we do in schools right now," Venet says, "and schools right now are so toxic in a lot of ways. What would it look like if kids just felt safe and cared about as part of their school experience? There's all this competition in schools, whether it be sports or perfect attendance awards or grades and scholarships or whatever, and people justify this by saying, well that's society and what do you want? That every kid gets a trophy? Well, what I want to ask is, have you ever been in an environment where every kid actually did get a trophy and seen how beautiful it was?

"At the school where I taught, they used to do this end of the year ceremony that was for kids who were graduating but also every kid in the whole school, and it was a small school so this was doable. And we actually gave a personalized academic award to every single student. All the teachers who shared students would fill out these little sheets of paper and kind of reflect on what was some of the academic growth that you saw this year. And we would create an award for every single kid, and then at this ceremony give them out. And it was absolutely beautiful. The kids really didn't care that everybody else was getting an award because what their personal award said to them was my teachers saw and noticed this thing I worked really hard on. So every kid getting a trophy? I don't know. I think that's great.

"I think a big part of why our world is so traumatic right now is a feeling of scarcity and competition, that there's only limited resources, and we all have to claw at each other to get the resources, and if you're in the way of that then you're my enemy. What if, instead of replicating that in school by saying there's only three sports awards, there's only one senior award, what if we work from abundance and said there's enough for everyone? There's enough care for everyone. There's enough celebration for everyone. And actually celebrating you doesn't mean that I lose. It means that we all have won collectively. When we make small choices as teachers to work from a place of unconditional care, we're planting the seeds for those bigger changes."

You can find Alex Shevrin Venet's work at unconditionallearning.org.

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Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

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Nothing's Going to Change My Mind: How Unconditional Positive Regard Transforms Classrooms

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What if students didn't have to do anything to earn our care?

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I chose this episode/article because I have always found lecturing to be an interesting yet controversial part of the teaching and learning experience. I have had teachers whose lectures I found very engaging and looked forward to attending, and teachers whose lectures I found terribly boring and dreaded attending. In my own classroom, I suspect that there will be many times in which I will want to deliver information in the form of a lecture, so I was very interested in learning how to best keep students engaged.

While listening, I learned that the main difference between an engaging lecture and a boring one is student engagement. If students are expected to sit quietly and listen to a droning lecture for 45 minutes, it is unreasonable to assume that they will be consistently paying attention or that any learning will take place. However, according to the podcast, splitting the information up into more bite-sized pieces and only talking for 5-10 minutes at a time is much more conducive to holding students' attention. These 5-10 minute sections are best separated by some type of student engagement. This may include (but is not limited to) any of the following strategies:

1. Polling to check understanding

2. Facilitating class discussion

3. Allowing time for small-group discussion

4. Using student engagement platforms such as Peardeck

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Two factors have given lectures a bad name: overuse and poor execution. Let's deal with both.

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I decided to take a look at this article because I feel like standardized testing is something that we don’t need as much as. As a student I always thought that we took way too many of these, especially towards the end of my high school days. They did not actually measure any understanding of anything that we did inside the classroom. I actually vividly remember in 7th grade, the test was so bad our teacher gave us the answers so we could move on. I think that these exams cause a lot of stress and pressure on each student. One thing I learned in this article is that the students are not the only ones who feel this way. This article made me realize that we have to accept that these exams are never going away but we can fight to make them more fair and accommodating for future learners. Another important thing that I learned was that teachers want administrators to really take a deep look into the vocabulary that is on these exams. This article points out that the reason students hate these tests are because the language used on them does not coincide with what they hear and practice in the classroom. I also learned that if we want students and teachers to take these tests seriously we need to make them matter. This article mentions that many students just feel obligated to take them because they are required but the author states “move 5 is a reminder the goal isn’t better or fewer standardized tests; the goal is a healthier system and more positive school experiences for students and teachers” which I think speaks volumes. Another thing that I learned that there is no call for ending these exams there is a fight and call that we take a look at them and see how they are constructed and how each question can impact each student. One area that I discovered needs to be handled now are the schools and students in poverty stricken areas that are taking the same tests as the kids in wealthy areas but do not have the same access to the learning tools. I think once we address these margins and limit the amount of standardized tests we take every classroom will see a positive change.

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Listen to the interview with Jenn Borgioli Binis:
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Over the last decade or so, we've settled into a choreographed dance around large-scale, state-mandated standardized test scores. First, an education leader stands behind a podium with charts and graphs, releases a memo, or otherwise puts the most recent scores out in the world. Then comes the cacophony of responses, which typically include concern, condemnation, dismissal, and theorizing. Next, people who have nothing to do with the design, administration, taking, or scoring of the tests will then use them to critique states, districts, schools, and/or individual teachers. Some will use them to demonstrate that a particular intervention or program is (in)effective. Eventually, the noise fades out until the next round of testing is complete, and the dance begins anew.

Yet, while all that noise is noising, scores from other standardized tests are used with little muss or fuss. To name just a few: A child's score on a standardized test, combined with other information such as teacher observations and medical referrals, can be used to facilitate access to targeted and critical early intervention education services. Young people willingly get into a car with a stranger who will use a standardized test to assess their driving ability. Thousands of professionals, from auto mechanics to lawyers, take one or more standardized tests as part of entry into their chosen field. Just this month, a group of researchers published their findings on the impact of district capital projects and used test scores to draw conclusions. Their work will undeniably help school leaders across the country make more informed decisions about district spending and likely couldn't have been done without large-scale standardized tests.

Although they defy simple categorization, we can, at least, define them. Generally speaking, a standardized test is an assessment wherein the conditions and test (directions, prompts, questions, etc.) are the same for every test taker and their answers are scored with the same answer key or rubric. Put like that, they feel benign, almost harmless. After all, framed that way, teachers give hundreds of standardized tests a year, even those who do learner-centered assessment, project-based learning, or otherwise collect evidence of student learning in ways that are considered alternative or non-traditional.

And yet, that benign definition doesn't explain why parents and communities started a standardized testing opt-out movement. We recognize that there's something fundamentally different about large-scale, externally mandated standardized tests that rely on multiple-choice questions. Teachers and students can point to how the NCLB-related tests have negatively impacted education. Meanwhile, politicians, pundits, and researchers argue that schools and students would be worse off without them.

And here we are...back at the end of the first paragraph. Despite their usefulness, standardized tests can cause harm. The conversations around them can be circular and the positions we take on them feel unmovable and intractable. It is possible, though, to break through the noise and interrupt the dance by moving away from the question of all or nothing and towards the idea of reducing harm.

Harm Reduction as a Problem-Solving Approach

Many years ago, I had a chance conversation with a superintendent who compared externally mandated, large-scale standardized tests to prescription drugs. The problem, as he saw it, wasn't the tests - or the painkillers - themselves. It was that there were simply too many. In his view, reducing the number, or even going cold turkey, would be a net good.

That conversation was long before the opium epidemic was known outside communities trying to deal with its impact and before ethicists and pain management specialists warned against unilaterally pulling them from the market. Maybe, like the opioid epidemic, when it comes to standardized tests, we need to focus less on a "cold turkey" solution and more on harm reduction.

The National Harm Reduction Coalition (NHRC) offers 8 principles for thinking about the concept of harm reduction and how communities can work to keep as many of their members as safe as possible. While specific to the issue they were created for - drug use - these principles provide a starting point for thinking about the problems posed by standardized tests. They aren't solutions, but they do offer lessons from those who have years of experience learning what it takes to reduce harm in the midst of an epidemic. With these lessons in mind, we can craft our own moves to reduce the harm caused by standardized tests.

Problem: Standardized tests are not going away.
Move 1: Accept it.

It's likely not a coincidence that NHRC's first principle is about acceptance:

[ This organization] accepts, for better or worse, that licit and illicit drug use is part of our world and chooses to work to minimize its harmful effects rather than simply ignore or condemn them.

This principle models how to acknowledge that we need standardized tests and are better served if we let go of the idea we need to or should get rid of them. In a recent conversation about standardized tests and grades, education historian Ethan Hutt points out that an important function served by standardized tests is synchronization:

" Our system is very decentralized - we don't have common standards, curricula, or textbooks - which means that despite being in the same grade or even the same course, students in different areas can have very different experiences. Yet, at key moments, we need the disparate pieces of our system to fit together; that's what standardized testing facilitates. "

As a concrete example of why that synchronization is necessary, multiple states allow a high degree of local control over the curriculum. At the same time, their state constitutions speak to public education, which is connected to children's right to an education. Large-scale standardized tests are a way for state leaders to ensure they fulfill that right. Tests also facilitate special education services, instruction, grades, reporting, placement, and more.

We can negotiate and discuss how they're used in each of these contexts, but getting rid of them isn't possible. As a reminder, the opposite of standardized tests are bespoke assessments: teacher-designed individual assessments for every one of their students every time they want to document their learning. Even if we got rid of some standardized tests, using only bespoke assessments simply isn't feasible given class sizes, existing demands on teachers' time, and the demands of designing high-quality assessments. Standardized tests are part of the educational landscape, and they're not going away.

However, accepting standardized tests as part of our world does not require backing down on calls to minimize, improve, or critique them. And our next move will help us get better at those critiques.
Problem: Not all standardized tests are created equal.
Move 2: Strive for precise language.
Consider the NHRC's use of the phrase "licit and illicit" in principle 1. The group purposefully uses language to help the public understand that drugs belong to one of two categories: those that are approved for consumption by a government agency and those that are not. The language they use is value-neutral - it's not about good or bad, help or harm, as not all illicit substances are harmful and not all licit ones are safe - but it is clear and specific. Likewise, we're better served by being as precise as possible when we discuss testing.

As an example of what that entails, consider the More Teaching Less Testing Act from NY Representative Jamaal Bowman. The text of the bill contains the line, "in 2015, a typical American student took 112 mandated standardized tests across the length of their elementary and secondary education years." Yet, of 112 those tests, only 16 or 17 were large-scale, federally-mandated but state-specific standardized tests (Math and ELA, once a year in grades 3-8 and once in high school, plus possibly a science assessment.) That's a lot of adjectives, but specificity is more helpful than generalities when discussing standardized tests. It helps us see that 96 of the tests students took over 13 years were state- or locally-mandated, which means we can move to solutions without federal involvement. (Move 5 explores some of the ways states are making changes.) Using more adjectives when talking about standardized tests may feel small and meaningless, but being more precise can help us have more productive conversations about the problem and possible solutions.
Problem: The tests take up time and energy.
Move 3: Redirect that time and energy at the classroom level.
Making moves around precision can also help us as readers and news consumers. As Jen Serravallo and Kelly Cartwright explored in their recent conversation on reading instruction, large-scale tests have shaped schools in big and small ways. As we all work to negotiate tensions related to how students are taught to read, some advocates are using large-scale testing scores to advance their arguments. As an example, this organization points to New York state "reading" tests, but the blueprint (and name) for the state's test shows it's an English Language Arts test with a heavy writing component. Talking precisely about reading scores requires tests like DIBELS or aimswebPlus, but those scores generally aren't public. The challenge is that by focusing on state test scores, advocates make it that much harder to talk about solutions.

Striving for precise language moves us from generalities to specifics, from abstract to concrete. Small moves around language as speakers, listeners, and readers, though, are only a start.
Problem: Scores are used inappropriately or to gatekeep and punish.
Move 4: Interrogate how scores are used at the district level.
One of those solutions lies with harm reduction principle 8: Does not attempt to minimize or ignore the real and tragic harm and danger that can be associated with illicit drug use. As a reminder, the overarching idea of harm reduction is safety. Reframing that to the educational equivalency is about ensuring students make it through the year without being harmed by tests. This includes their experiences preparing for the tests, taking them, and the consequences of their test scores.

At the more concrete teacher-and-student level, a few ways to minimize harm and create safer schools are to:
Problem: What gets measured, matters.
Move 5: Ensure state tests measure what matters.

Stop doing year-round test prep.

Stop buying test prep workbooks.

Consider dialing back treating every assessment as "practice" for the state tests. Instead, shift to learner-centered test prep that focuses more on helping students think about who they are as a test taker, the nature of the test, what purpose they serve, and what makes them different. More resources on this approach are available here (brief) and here (extended explanation with examples based on NYS tests).

Reconsider the language, tone, and vocabulary used when discussing the tests at or around test takers. Do we speak of the tests in terms that communicate they are a routine part of school or are we unconsciously telling students they're the most important thing that will happen to them that year? Do we focus on increasing scores or decreasing stress? Do we lift the burdens students carry around the tests or do we add to them?

If the above feels like too much or not possible, when Glennon Doyle was a classroom teacher, she and a colleague, Amy Gerene, wrote a fantastic book on integrating test prep into the reading workshop and treating large-scale standardized tests as a genre unto themselves. If nothing else, this approach gives classroom teachers permission and confidence to minimize the presence of large-scale, state, and federally-mandated tests in their classrooms.

A consequence of state test scores being readily available is they're so often used for so many different things, often in ways the tests weren't intended to be used. One way to minimize inappropriate usage is to reconsider students' relationships to the scores.

Principle 5 offers, in effect, we need to include those affected in crafting those solutions. While districts can't always include students in standardized testing design, they can include them in decisions on how their scores are used or shared with their families. Districts that incorporate structures like student-led conferences and learning stories could consider folding state test scores into those conversations as a way to lower the temperature around them and help students understand how they're used. As part of that shift, schools could introduce students and teachers to the Code of Ethics in Fair Testing Practices in Education, which advises that those who use test scores to make decisions should "avoid using a single test score as the sole determinant of decisions about test takers. Interpret test scores in conjunction with other information about individuals."

Principle 7 is also useful at the district-level as it encourages us to recognize the realities of "poverty, class, racism, social isolation, past trauma" and other social inequalities. For the purpose of standardized tests, this principle serves as a reminder that efforts around assessment are not separate from the necessary work of culturally responsive teaching, equity, trauma-informed practices, and research-based pedagogy. This work can and should also incorporate active steps to minimize bias around standardized tests, including:

ensuring standardized test scores aren't being used to keep marginalized students out of particular courses or experiences

taking stock of district-level conversations and pressures around large-scale tests and dialing back as much as possible

creating structures to ensure administrators and teachers who design their own standardized tests are taking steps to address and reduce assessment bias (more here)

attending to the phenomenon that is Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Anya Kamenetz gets more into this tension in her fantastic book, The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed with Standardized Testing - But You Don't Have to Be. (Amazon | Bookshop.org).

All of us can use more precise language. Some of us are in the position to change students' experiences with large-scale standardized testing or shift district policies. Only a few of us, though, can bring about systems-level change.

Move 5, which is a really big ask for everyone in schools, is to have hope and confidence that change is happening at the state level. Based on Harm Reduction Principle 3 which reads, quality of individual and community life and well-being - not necessarily cessation of all drug use - [is] the criteria for successful interventions and policies, move 5 is a reminder the goal isn't better or fewer standardized tests; the goal is a healthier system and more positive school experiences for students and teachers.

It's difficult to draw a straight line but it sure does seem that the current approach to large-scale, federally-mandated tests, especially for ELA, has created a whole bunch of unintended negative consequences. As an example, two trends are often mentioned in the list of things that need to be addressed regarding reading and ELA instruction. First, the mandated ELA tests are content-free; students do not need particular content knowledge to demonstrate mastery of the standards. Rather, they're expected to use ELA skills to correctly answer the multiple choice questions and respond to writing prompts. Understandably, teachers across the country in testing grades shifted to stressing skills and now, pundits and researchers are raising concerns about the over-emphasis on skills over content.

Second, the tests generally use shorter passages, which again, understandably means many students are seeing more short passages and fewer longer texts in their ELA class, leading to concerns about students' lack of reading stamina. There's also how scores are used to rank schools, the amount of time actual testing takes, and well, there are a lot of issues with large-scale, federally-mandated tests.

Change is happening though! Some of the efforts are based on projects that have been around for a while. For example, New York's long-running Performance Assessment Consortium and the rise of portfolio or competency-based schools in Pennsylvania, California, and Illinois are all multi-year projects that provide models for how states can come at large-scale assessment and accountability in a different way.

Other efforts, such as The Beyond Test Scores Project, are newer. Jack Schneider, Hutt's co-author on the recent and very helpful book Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don't Have To) ( Amazon | Bookshop.org) is leading the project, which includes the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment and the Education Commonwealth Project. What makes the project so exciting is they're looking at the entire system from student-level grades, to the nature of large-scale assessment measures, to how communities assess the quality of their schools.

Another front to keep an eye on is the Every Student Succeeds Act (the most recent reauthorization of No Child Left Behind.) Researchers and advocates have offered ways to address the issues with the law including clarifying accountability measures by eliminating single letter or number scores for schools, especially those based on student-test scores. Another solution entails shifting from one big test to smaller, shorter mini-tests given over the year. All of which is to say, many people, groups, and organizations are in a position to effect change and are trying to solve what they can. Consider reaching out to your state education department to see if there are opportunities for educator involvement.

It's absolutely understandable that people want us to go cold turkey and quit large-scale, federally-mandated standardized testing as it currently exists. It's a commendable goal and one worth working towards. In the meantime, we know harm reduction works. According to the National Institutes of Health, there are decades of research to show harm reduction strategies "provide significant individual and public health benefits." While imperfect, each of these moves can contribute to a healthier system and, in small and big ways, interrupt the annual dance around the scores and perhaps even give our weary feet a rest.

Resources and Recommended Texts

Melton Doyle, G. & Gerene, A. (2007). Test Talk: Integrating Test Preparation Into Reading Workshop. Stenhouse Publishers.

Hutt, E. & Schneider, J. (2023). Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don't Have To). Harvard University Press.

Kamenetz, A. (2015). The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed with Standardized Testing-But You Don't Have to Be. PublicAffairs.

Quinn, D. M. (2020). Experimental Evidence on Teachers' Racial Bias in Student Evaluation: The Role of Grading Scales. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 42(3), 375-392. https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373720932188

Reese, W. J. (2013). Testing Wars in the Public Schools: A Forgotten History. Harvard University Press.

Stewart, A. (2015). First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America's First Black Public High School. Chicago Review.

Wainer, H. (2011). Uneducated Guesses: Using Evidence to Uncover Misguided Education Policies. Princeton University Press.

Watters, A. (2021). Teaching Machines. The MIT Press.

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Standardized Tests Aren't Going Anywhere. So What Do We Do?

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When working to solve the problems created by testing, it helps to move away from all-or-nothing thinking and towards the idea of reducing harm.

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I chose this article because I feel it is important for teachers to see the difference they make in a student's life. Giving them the win and feeling of accomplishment they deserve.

What I learned-

1. Teachers are feeling they aren't doing well enough through podcasts, books, social media, and school leadership.

2. When doing something difficult and not getting any feedback that you are doing the right thing, it makes it easier and easier to give up.

3. Although sometimes even in a tough situation even the tiniest bit of praise can help.

4. Some things that teachers could be given positive feedback on are:

1. relationships and rapport with students

2. decision-making

3. clarity and delivery

4. classroom management and logistics

5. lesson planning

6. design

5. teachers work hard on everything they do to provide their students with the best possible education they can, giving them a little bit of encouragement that they are doing it right gives them the hope to keep going.

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Your Teachers Need a Win | Cult of Pedagogy

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The smallest bit of praise can give a person enough confidence, enough of a dopamine hit, to keep going.

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I chose this article because I believe this is a very important topic. There are many cases where students need help such as with extra time, school supplies, clothes, or even food. It is vital to understand where, as a teacher, you are able to stand on many of these topics.

Things that I learned:

1) Being too helpful for students in the long run is ultimately unhelpful. The purpose of school is to get students ready for life, if they are being saved every time something bothers them, they will not learn to, "swim," on their own.

2) Savior mentality is often a way for teachers to avoid the unpleasant reality that they really cannot save kids by themselves. According to the article, teachers attempting to be the savior of students' struggles leads them to understand that they are unable to fix the problems by themselves. Unlike what is shown in movies.

3) Instead of feeling pity for students, teachers should begin to know the student as a whole. Understanding students as a person helps teachers see that they are also people that go through struggles. Building relationships stops teachers from talking down to students and lowering expectations.

4) Students going through trauma do not need a teacher to lower standards to help them. These students rather need a community of people to help uplift them. If the student does need something, contributing to the help is something that could be done.

5) Assuming students' have a bad at home life and that as a teacher we could be the one to love our students leads to bias. This could be due to behavioral problems, students that are poor, colored or disabled. There is a large difference between not loving a child and not being able to purchase the correct resources to parent correctly.

6) Rather than attempting to be the savior of a student, help students find the proper resources they need. If a resource is unavailable to students, address the systematic issues that create the scarcities.

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Listen to my interview with Alex Shevrin Venet (transcript):
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As a teacher, you probably find yourself in situations pretty often where you're made aware of a student having needs or challenges that exceed what your school typically offers them. It might be a need for extra time or attention, a shortage of school supplies, food, or clothing, a need for transportation, a need for help with organization, structure, or time management. The list of student needs in so many schools is never-ending, and your desire to help meet them is probably pretty strong, too.

But attempting to meet these needs on your own - to become a kind of "savior" to your students - can not only lead to burnout for you, it's also not ultimately that helpful to the student long-term.

Joining me to talk about this on the podcast is Alex Shevrin Venet, author of the book Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education ( Amazon | Bookshop.org). This is Alex's third time on the podcast. The first time was in April of this year, when we did an overview of trauma-informed teaching. There were two topics from her book that I thought were so important I wanted to do a deeper dive on them, so we did separate episodes for each of these. In September we talked about a concept called unconditional positive regard, a stance toward working with students that's grounded in giving them love and acceptance without making them earn it first.

Now we're going to talk about the danger of getting into a savior mentality when helping our students, how to tell if you're slipping into that kind of thinking, and how to shift toward healthier and more helpful ways of thinking about and approaching student needs.

You can listen to our conversation in the player above, read the full transcript, or read some of the key points of our conversation below.

What is the savior mentality, and why is it a problem?

"The savior mentality is this mindset that teachers can get into that basically has us looking at students who've experienced trauma or who are struggling, and sort of taking on this feeling that our role is to rescue them," Venet explains. "So rather than seeing that we might support them, it's really more of this dynamic where You're the one that needs to be rescued; I can do the rescuing. You're the one that needs saving; I can save you."

Why do teachers tend to think this way? And why is it so problematic?

"One big reason is that our whole society tells us that we should," Venet says. "You see stories about 'the hero teacher adopts their student who had nowhere else to go,' 'the hero teacher bakes homemade muffins every day for a year for their hungry student' ... these stories are elevated but they're actually not feel-good stories. They're kind of 'feel gross' stories because they really highlight the inequities that teachers should not really be responsible for. Why was the teacher the only person positioned to do that? If the teacher's the one buying food out of their own money or cooking things on the weekend, why does that kid not have food already? What are the systemic failures that are preventing the school from having food?"

Venet also sees the savior mentality as a way for teachers to avoid the unpleasant reality that they really can't "save" kids all by themselves.

"When you let go of savior mentality you start to see that you're just going to be one small piece of a student's story," she says. "The thing that happens in the movie where one hero teacher totally turns a kid's life around - it doesn't really happen like that in real life. But that's hard because when you witness a kid who's struggling, it's normal to really want to help them. And to really acknowledge and sit with the discomfort that you probably are not going to fix what is harming them, it's just really sad and hard. And so when we don't have the time or the space to kind of feel our feelings, I think it feeds into this savior mentality because it's just easier to go Yeah, I can fix it, I can save them. I can be the rescuer."

What It Looks Like: Examples of "Savior" Thinking

Even if you think you don't fit the profile of someone with a savior mentality, there's a chance you may have had at a few thoughts that bear the hallmarks of savior thinking.

"My students with trauma are broken. I feel so bad for those kids."

"The cultural narrative about trauma usually pushes us to one of two directions," Venet says, "the first direction being that people with trauma are broken. You see people experiencing trauma on TV and you see them totally subsumed by flashbacks and anger and lashing out and just in a dark place. The other narrative that you see a lot is the What doesn't kill us makes us stronger narrative, where you go through trauma and it makes you a superhero. It transforms you. But it's really much more messy than that often. People might see some elements of growth or strength come out of surviving trauma, but they also can have a lot of struggle in a lot of hard times."

Instead of pitying students, Venet encourages teachers to focus on getting to know them as whole people. "If we look at students and try to actually see them, then we're not going to just feel bad for them because we're going to know them, that they are whole and complete people, that they have skills and strengths and they're silly and funny and they also struggle. It's that actual building of relationships that's the antidote to this one, rather than feeling a sense of pity, which is going to put us in a place of maybe talking down to students, lowering our expectations, not challenging them enough."

"My students are not capable of helping themselves. I need to save them."

This kind of thinking takes agency away from students and makes it all about the teacher instead. "People have their own strengths and capabilities," Venet explains. "Another person doesn't need me to survive and heal through trauma. What they do need is maybe a community of people, and if they do need something from me, maybe that's what I can contribute to. If I'm going into that relationship thinking, I'm going to be the one to help her. I have to be this essential resource for her, I'm undermining that student's wisdom of Who's going to be the right person for me? What do I need from those around me? When am I ready to get help? "

"Teachers can provide the love students don't get at home."

"My problem with these phrases is that they make a whole lot of assumptions," Venet says, "they often are stated when people are talking about students with behavioral challenges, students who are poor, students of color, students with disabilities, or who otherwise are the targets of bias, basically. There's sort of this coded language around, oh, the students who aren't getting love at home can come to school and get love. What makes you feel like they're not getting love at home?"

There's a difference, she says, between not loving a child and not having all the necessary resources to parent them successfully.

"There are a lot of parents who love their child so much that they work multiple jobs and therefore aren't home to help them with their homework. There are parents who love their child so much that they come up with custody agreements to make sure that the child is in a stable place to live. And so maybe they don't see them as much, or maybe there's stuff around who to contact, or these things that you might see as a teacher of 'oh, the parent doesn't come to school,' or 'the parent doesn't answer their emails' or 'there seems to be conflict with these co-parents' or 'the kid doesn't have clean shirts that they wear.' These are just little things, and to extrapolate and say that family doesn't love that child is making huge leaps and bounds."

"I alone can fix them. I can be 'the one.'"

"People often repeat this idea that it just takes one caring adult to help a child survive and thrive," Venet says. "And it is true that one caring adult can make a huge difference. But I think that how people sometimes misinterpret that is that any one caring adult can turn a child's life around, or that it only should be just one person as opposed to a community. There's sort of this individualism. Whereas what the research and experience tells us about healing is that it takes a lifetime. It takes a community. People benefit from a whole web of supportive people around them."

She also warns against trying to provide the kind of care that we haven't been trained to do. Even if no one else is available, she says "I still should not take it upon myself to become a counselor or a psychologist and delve into the psyche of this student. It's not my job, it's not my role, and I might actually be doing harm if I try, because I don't know what you're supposed to do as a therapist to work through that stuff."

By positioning yourself as the only one who can save a child, you also make yourself dangerously irreplaceable. "Sometimes I ask teachers, if you got abducted by aliens tomorrow, would your school be any more trauma informed than when you were there? And if you are baking the muffins every morning, and doing a lunch group and kind of providing informal counseling for a group of students, and you are doing case coordination that really should be done by a school social worker, and then at the end of the school year you decide to move to a different school, all of those things that you are doing are just not going to happen for the next batch of students."

"My value is in how much my students respond to me."

When students don't respond positively to our attempts to help them - or even push back - it can interfere with our ability to really meet their needs, because our ego takes a hit. But Venet advises us to maintain a healthy perspective on this; ultimately, it's not about us.

"So often a person who's going through trauma might have a response to someone that truly has nothing to do with that person," she says. "If I'm placing my whole self-worth on Does this student trust me and confide in me and see me as their helper?, I'm already setting myself up for failure because there's all kinds of things that are out of my control around how they're reacting to me. If my value is about whether the student feels supported by me and healed by me and thinks I'm the best teacher ever and can come to me and confide in me, that's placing a lot on a kid who's just trying to live their life. I can't look to a student to get all of my emotional needs met.

"My mentor would often say to us that whether or not your student has a good day shouldn't determine whether you had a good day. If I had a solid plan going into the day, if I was present and responsive, if I used my tools and strategies, if I did all that I'm trained to do and used the best of my skills and capabilities, then I had a good day as a teacher, regardless of whether my students were having a hard time."

What to Do Instead

So if we see all these pressing needs, and we're not supposed to try to meet them ourselves, what is a healthier approach? Venet encourages teachers to put their energy into helping students find the resources they need, and when those resources are not available, addressing the systemic issues that create those scarcities.

"I encourage teachers to just be really loud about these gaps," she says. "Your administrator might already be aware that there is a demand that's not being met. But let them know. Every time that you want to make a referral and you feel like you can't because there's no availability, let them know. Write to your school board and let them know. Write to your state legislators and let them know. If teachers can collectively say, we need more mental health support, or we need food pantries that are more accessible, or whatever the need is, you're setting that boundary and saying 'It doesn't make sense for me to meet this.' If you have the time, if you have the energy, just take the little extra step and let people know we need this. We have to let folks know what those needs really are, the gaps that we're seeing on the ground."

Coming From a Good Place

Venet's closing message for teachers who have fallen into a savior mentality is to be gentle with themselves.

"You didn't create this dynamic," she says. "This dynamic was created for you by the gross combination of cultural narratives, underfunding of schools, scattershot policies that don't equitably meet the needs of students and teachers, and here you are in the middle of that trying to do the best you can. If you have slipped into a savior mentality because you care, don't leave this conversation thinking that you're doing something wrong. All you've been doing is trying to meet the needs of your students. What I would invite you to do is to do some critical reflection and think about, am I honoring their agency? Am I honoring their self-determination? And am I trying to make systems change so that this dynamic does not continue to repeat forever and ever?

"Caring for your students is not a bad thing. We just want to be critical about it to really support students in their self-determination."

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How to Help Students Without Being a Savior

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Trying to meet big student needs on your own is ultimately not that helpful to the student. Here's how to shift your approach.

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I chose this article because I have seen how students are treated differently in classrooms when the teacher knows how to support their students with ADHD compared to when they do not.

What I have learned:

Roughly 10% of your students are likely to have ADHD.

Just because a student is diagnosed with ADHD doesn't mean they don't have it.

8 Principles for helping students.

1- Be Proactive

Plan with strategies and systems that can help aid common challenges for those with ADHD before they arise.

2- Make the internal external.

Instead of only having directions verbalized. Make them physical. Use things like color-coded folders, visual timers, written rules, daily behavior chats, and notes.

3- Break large tasks into smaller ones.

4- Maximize the effectiveness of incentives.

Sometimes students with ADHD have a hard time with internal motivation. Incentives should be given more immediate and frequent. The incentive might also have to be increased. If they do not seem to be working, it could mean that to the student they might not mean much.

5- Prepare for restlessness.

Fidget toys are used to combat this.

6- Alternate low-appeal with high-appeal activities.

Create a mix of high and low-appeal activities, alternating so that no one gets bored.

7- Use technology as a support.

It has been seen that students with ADHD pay more attention to things online than on paper.

8- Monitor and modify interventions regularly.

Something might work for a while and then stop. In these cases, the program needs to be modified. It is also important to know that what works for one student might not work for the next.

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I still remember the feeling I used to get when looking at the paperwork for my students who had ADHD, the forms listing the accommodations I would need to make for them-usually extended time on tests and maybe preferential seating.

The feeling could be best described as uncertain. I understood what these small changes looked like in practice-seat this student near the front of the room and give him more time to work on tests. But I knew almost nothing about the mechanics behind why the changes were supposed to make a difference. I signed the papers, returned them to the office, and made a mental note that if any of these students ever showed signs of struggle, it was probably because of the ADHD.

And they did struggle. The preferential seating and extra time wasn't often enough to help them turn in completed work on time, keep track of their things, and stay focused on class activities. Knowing as little as I did about ADHD, I figured that was the best we were going to get.

As uncomfortable as it makes me to say this, I will also admit that part of me wondered why these students couldn't just power through, find the motivation, try harder. Disorganization got the better of me sometimes too, and when that happened, I would just tidy things up, declutter, reset my priorities, and get back on track. It wasn't that hard. I also wondered whether parents were to blame, if a lack of structure, too much TV or video games, or some other oversight at home might be the true cause of students' difficulties.

Suffice it to say I really, REALLY didn't understand ADHD.

It turns out my lack of knowledge wasn't unique. A number of studies have shown that many teachers don't know enough to effectively meet the needs of students with ADHD (Alkahtani, 2013, Poznanski et al., 2018). While a growing number of teachers can recognize behaviors that might suggest ADHD in a child, knowledge drops off significantly when it comes to treatments and interventions that can help-the less training and knowledge a teacher has about ADHD, the less confident they feel about working with students who have it (Flanigan & Climie, 2018). This may explain the heartbreaking statistic that teachers tend to form fewer close relationships with students who have ADHD (Ewe, 2019).

Regardless of the subject area or age you teach, you're likely to have at least a few students with ADHD in your classroom every school year, so a good working knowledge of it should be part of any teacher's professional training. In the nine years I have been sharing resources on this website, I have only ever done one piece on ADHD, a 2017 interview with Seth Perler, who shared a great set of systems that help students who struggle with executive function. But that's it, so it's time to dig a little deeper.

A Solid Place to Start: Russell Barkley

Setting out to find good resources, I kept landing on the name Russell Barkley, an ADHD researcher who has been called a pioneer, a leading expert, and the gold standard in ADHD research. In all the places where his work appears-speaking on YouTube, as a guest on multiple podcasts, and as the author of many articles and books on ADHD-what is most striking are the number of comments from adults with ADHD who are relieved to finally find some validation, to hear clear explanations for why their brains work the way they do.

Although Barkley has been criticized for sounding negative and bleak when he speaks about the condition, using language that many would characterize as deficit thinking, his work has helped many people understand the workings of ADHD, how it affects those who have it, and how to best manage it. With that in mind, he seems like a good place to start; for suggestions on where to keep learning, I'll provide a list of resources at the end of this post.

Most of Barkley's work is directed at parents of children with ADHD and adults who also carry the diagnosis, but he has also written the highest-rated book for teachers on the subject, Managing ADHD in School: The Best Evidence-Based Methods for Teachers ( Bookshop.org | Amazon).

This slim book is not meant to be comprehensive or in-depth. Barkley states outright that he's not going to spend time on narrative prose and extensive research citations; his goal is to simply explain ADHD so that busy teachers can understand it, and tell them what they can do to help students who have it. His message is "Trust me, I know this stuff. Do this, not that." And while this obviously leaves him open to criticism, the book certainly delivers on its promises, and it's a great starting point for any teacher who wants a crash course on ADHD.

As Barkley is fully retired now, he declined to be interviewed here, so this is basically my own personal book report: I learned so many things from the book that would have helped immensely in my own work with students with ADHD, so I'm going to summarize what I think are the most important takeaways here. I strongly suggest you get a copy for yourself.

Although I'm doing my best to share this information accurately, there's a chance I'll get something wrong; if you see something that needs correcting, please let us know in the comments.

What do teachers need to understand about ADHD?

Before we get into classroom practices, I'm going to summarize a few key facts about ADHD that every teacher should know. Most of these happen to be things I personally didn't know-in fact, some are the exact opposite of beliefs I held-so I can only assume other teachers might also need this overview.

ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition that impacts a person's executive function. This shows up as a difficulty with persisting toward goals and resisting distractions, holding information in working memory, and planning and problem solving. It also increases impulsivity, making immediate consequences more valuable than long-term ones, and interferes with inhibition, which results in quicker displays of emotion and other conduct that is generally discouraged in social settings. Unfortunately, all of these are often categorized as misbehavior or "poor choices" in the classroom, and if teachers don't understand how ADHD works, they can spend years responding in ways that will do little to address the underlying causes.

The cause of ADHD is largely genetic. In the book, Barkley asserts that "no compelling evidence indicates that social factors, such as parenting or educational environment, have been found to cause ADHD." Research has also ruled out diet, TV or media consumption, or videogame play as contributing factors (p. 15-16). With this information in mind, we can stop looking for outside factors to blame and get down to the business of helping these students do better in school. Knowing this should also put an end to attempts to "motivate" students with ADHD by giving them pep talks, angry reprimands, or guilt trips.

Roughly ten percent of your students are likely to have ADHD. Numbers for this are hard to pin down exactly: The National Institute of Mental Health puts the total number of children and adolescents diagnosed with ADHD at about 11%, the CDC at 9.4%, and Barkley at 5 to 8%. Regardless of the source, the numbers continue to rise every year, and boys have a higher rate of diagnosis than girls. More important than an exact number is this: Every year, you should expect to have at least a few students in your classroom who have ADHD.

Rates of diagnosis do not necessarily reflect the actual number of students with ADHD. Barkley says diagnoses tend to occur more in communities with more resources, and overdiagnosis is more frequent "in upper income neighborhoods where a premium is placed on academic excellence or acceleration" (p. 8). By contrast, students may be underdiagnosed in communities with fewer resources for diagnosis and treatment. Apart from just being good general knowledge to have, this may inform the research and action you take depending on the community where you teach: Perhaps more of your students actually need to be referred for diagnosis and treatment; by contrast, you may be working with students who are receiving treatment for a misdiagnosis.

ADHD is linked to a host of serious problems. People with ADHD have a greater risk of relationship problems (including social problems in school and both personal and professional adult relationships), employment issues, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, addiction, auto accidents, and suicide. These statistics shocked me, and they underscore how important it is for educators, who work with these students for hours every day, to learn as much as we can about how to better support them in school.

Medication can help. Although public opinion on medication is mixed, much of the research shows that ADHD medication, when combined with interventions and supports like the ones listed below, has a high rate of success for improving academic performance. It has also been shown to lower other risk factors, like suicide (Liang et al., 2018), addiction (Sherman, 2022), and auto accidents (Chang et al., 2017).

Research continues to evolve. What was known about ADHD twenty or even ten years ago has been enriched by a growing body of research on diagnosis, causes, interventions, and medication. So when you come across information that doesn't quite fit with your current understanding of ADHD, keep an open mind.

8 Principles for Helping Students with ADHD Succeed in the Classroom

Barkley packs tons of strategies and advice into his book; here I've attempted to condense them into eight general principles. Just like with so many strategies designed to help specific populations, these are also likely to help many of your students be more successful, regardless of whether they have identified difficulties with executive function.

1. Be proactive (rather than reactive).

Throughout the book, Barkley urges teachers to plan ahead with systems and strategies that can solve common ADHD-related challenges. Instead of waiting for problems to arise and then dealing with them, which is more likely to be done under duress, it's far more effective to anticipate challenges and set up a plan for preventing them.

For example, students with ADHD often struggle with transitions, so one strategy is to always pause a few minutes before a transition to verbally remind students of the procedures and rules around the upcoming transition.

2. Make the internal external.

Because ADHD affects working memory, a person with ADHD has a harder time keeping things like instructions for a task in their mind. "Even if they try to hold such information in mind ... any distractions will disrupt and degrade this special type of memory. The mental chalkboard of working memory is wiped clean by the distraction. ...having gone 'off-task,' the child is far less likely to reengage the original and now uncompleted goal or task" (p. 3-4).

Working memory can be boosted when we make the internal external: taking information that might typically be a mental process (like remembering the steps for turning in an assignment) and making it visible. Here are some examples:

Color-coded folders help students keep materials organized and find what they need more easily.

Visual timers that students can easily see keep them aware of how much time is left for a task.

Written rules and instructions posted close to where a task is going to be completed (Barkley calls this the "point of performance") offer support right when students need it.

Daily behavior report cards can work well to remind students of expectations and get immediate feedback on how well they are meeting them.

Notetaking helps students record what they are learning to make it more concrete.

3. Break large tasks into smaller ones.

Because ADHD makes it harder for students to manage long, complex tasks, it helps if teachers can guide students in breaking these tasks into smaller steps.

4. Maximize the effectiveness of incentives.

Author's note: If you listen to the podcast version of this post, you'll notice that this item is somewhat different from that version. The original primarily used the term "consequences" and came across very punishment-heavy; this did not accurately represent Barkley's recommendations. The written version is the more updated one and is the best representation of this principle.

Internal motivation is harder to sustain for students with ADHD due to reduced working memory and increased impulsivity, so external incentives are a powerful tool for sustaining motivation. He recommends these guidelines:

Positive reinforcements must significantly outweigh negative ones. In fact, Barkley recommends that any program of reinforcements have only powerful, positive incentives for 1 to 2 weeks before ever introducing negative ones.

Incentives need to be delivered with more immediacy and frequency than for students without ADHD.

Incentives may need to be "richer" than what you might typically use for other students. If a consequence (positive or negative) doesn't seem to be motivating a student with ADHD, it's probably because it doesn't mean much to the student and should be replaced with something the student values more.

With the above in mind, incentives also need to be varied or rotated more often for students with ADHD, as they lose their potency more quickly over time.

In the book, Barkley regularly uses the word "punishment" to describe negative consequences for undesirable behavior. Although he doesn't advocate for anything harsh, the term is still troubling to me after the book so clearly establishes that the behavior of someone with ADHD is caused by the way their brain is wired, not bad choices. So I would advise teachers reading his book to extract the valuable information he shares about consequences, while keeping in mind that we are not trying to cause shame or pain to students for their behavior; the goal is to create a system of incentives and reinforcements that prompt students to refocus and make adjustments.

5. Prepare for restlessness.

To work with-rather than against-these students' greater need for movement, keep a supply of stress balls, fidget toys, balance balls, or wobble chairs for them to use. You can also provide standing desks and other seating options so that student can to choose what works best for them, and plan frequent physical exercise breaks to give all students a chance to stretch and burn off some energy between activities that require more stillness.

6. Alternate low-appeal with high-appeal activities.

"Too many boring topics or activities back to back can lead a child with ADHD to lose focus," Barkley says (p. 37). This loss of focus can lead to the student becoming distracted and possibly disruptive to the class, so mix the more engaging, high-interest activities in between those that require more effort to maintain focus.

7. Use technology as a support.

Technology has been shown to be especially effective for students who have ADHD. Barkley cites research showing that students with ADHD "pay more attention to computer software learning programs and learn more from the practice with them than they do when working on worksheets" (p. 36).

He also recommends teaching these students keyboarding skills as early as possible. "Students with ADHD have a high occurrence of fine motor coordination problems...give them alternative means of expressing themselves in print" (p. 38).

8. Monitor and modify interventions regularly.

"One common scenario," Barkley writes, "is that a student responds initially to a well-tailored program, but then over time, the response deteriorates" (p. 28). This doesn't mean the interventions didn't work; it might mean they need to be modified or the implementation needs to be checked for fidelity.

A Lingering Question: Public Accountability?

As much as I want to wholeheartedly recommend the book, one repeated suggestion concerned me. In a few places, Barkley advocates for "public accountability" for student behavior (p. 28, p. 61), but at other times offers more discreet methods of accountability for older students (p. 62).

Public behavior charts and systems have gotten a lot of pushback in the teaching world over the past 5 to 10 years, and I agree with the criticism: The shame these can cause is not worth any benefit they may offer. I worry that some readers will come away from this book thinking that public shaming is an effective strategy for supporting students with ADHD, even though Barkley doesn't necessarily advocate for this. My best guess is that the recommendation should be interpreted to mean that the accountability system should be visible to the student, but not necessarily on display for the whole class to see.

With this in mind, a good rule of thumb for any time you see a recommendation in an education book, or on a website like mine, that feels off in some way or seems to go against your better judgment, listen to your gut.

I'll end this piece as I began it, with an admission of bare minimum knowledge on the subject of ADHD. As much as I have tried to accurately represent the recommendations and knowledge Barkley shares, there's a very good chance I got some stuff wrong, and this book is just a starting point, but it would have been incredibly helpful to me as a teacher, so I hope it helps you as well. If you have personal experience with ADHD, professional expertise, or links to other good resources, I urge you to share these in the comments below so we can build on what's here.

Learn More

This piece only scratches the surface of what the medical and educational communities are learning about ADHD. It is meant to serve as a jumping-off point so that teachers can be equipped with strategies that will be the most helpful to students with ADHD. To continue learning, try the resources listed below:

CHADD.org, or Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, is an organization dedicated to improving the lives of people affected by ADHD. Their website houses loads of fantastic resources, plus an online teacher training course if you want to go in depth.

How to ADHD is a website and YouTube channel run by Jessica McCabe, full of high-energy, educational videos about ADHD. (Thank you for the recommendation, Charlotte!)

Want more from Russell Barkley? Listen to this recent interview from the Ologies podcast, where he provides an in-depth overview of ADHD and how it impacts those who have it.

The work of Edward Hallowell is worth considering for a more asset-based view of ADHD. Learn about his advocacy for replacing the term ADHD with the more neutral term VAST and this summary of his public "debate" with Russell Barkley. And for short bursts of learning, follow him on TikTok.

While you're on TikTok, also check out Sasha Hamdani, a psychiatrist and ADHD specialist whose following has grown exponentially in the last year for her helpful and humorous videos. You can also find her on Instagram.

One other resource, ADDitude magazine, was previously on this list, but a reader brought to our attention that it has received criticism in some ADHD forums and was given mixed reviews by the Media Bias/Fact Check website. Although readers can probably still find lots of value on the site, it would be wise to go in knowing what the criticisms are.

References

Barkley, R. (2016). Managing ADHD in School: The Best Evidence-Based Methods for Teachers . Pesi Publishing & Media.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2021, September 23). . Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Data and statistics about ADHD https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/data.html

National Institute of Mental Health. (n.d.). . Retrieved April 14, 2022, from NIMH" Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder-adhd

Sherman, C. (2022, March 31). . ADDitude. The Truth About ADHD and Addiction https://www.additudemag.com/the-truth-about-adhd-and-addiction/

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Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

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8 Principles for Supporting Students with ADHD

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There is so much to learn about ADHD. These broad guidelines from a leading expert are a good place to start.

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The post that caught my attention was "It's Time to Give Classroom Jobs Another Try" by Jennifer Gonzalez. I chose this blog to read about because classroom jobs are always helpful in the classroom, I also chose this blog to read about so I can learn more about classroom jobs and different jobs that I could use in my classroom. Classroom jobs can help keep your classroom running and students could develop talents from these classroom jobs. What I learned from this is classroom jobs build a positive classroom community and culture, give students opportunities to explore interests and develop talents, and let students learn job application skills. This builds a positive classroom community by making the students feel like they are contributing in a meaningful way that helps the teacher along with their classmates with something. It gives students opportunities to explore interests and develop talents by showing students different interests. It also lets students learn job application skills, they have to apply for these jobs in the classroom just like in the real world.

Some job examples are:

Messenger Leader- I can follow directions and hallway norms

Line Leader- I can help lead the class by following hallway norms

Lunch Basket Leader- I can work with others and follow hallway norms

Equipment Tub Leader- I can work with others and follow hallway norms

Library Leaders- I can work with others and follow hallway norms

Computer Leaders- I can log in to the computers in the morning

Art Smock Leaders- I can use a loud voice and look at my audience

Substitute Leader- I can do all leadership jobs and fill in for someone

Pod Leader- I am good at organizing and working with others

Here is the link for the job application

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Sponsored by Kialo Edu and Kiddom

This might be the perfect time for this topic. At first I just thought it was a neat idea, something teachers could implement pretty easily, something that would be a nice change of pace from what we usually talk about here.

But now I'm thinking this might actually be the thing that helps wake up a lot of our remote and hybrid classrooms from the white-knuckle, just-get-through-it mentality many of us have settled into as the '20-21 school year grinds through its second half. Just maybe.

I'm talking about classroom jobs, the tasks we assign to students to help keep our classrooms running. This is typically something we associate with face-to-face classrooms during normal times, but I was absolutely delighted -and I don't use the word 'delighted' every day-to learn that not only is it totally possible to assign jobs to students in remote classes, the jobs can make those remote classes really, really enjoyable. On top of that, they'll help students discover and develop passions and talents they can take with them well beyond your class.

When I was a middle school teacher, I didn't do much with classroom jobs. I was too much of a control freak, for one. The other reason was because it wasn't really a part of middle school culture. Elementary teachers are fantastic about assigning jobs to students, but as kids get older, teachers use these kinds of systems less and less. As a result, secondary teachers often work themselves to the bone, doing everything themselves as their students, ironically, grow more capable of taking on responsibilities every year.

Now that I have talked with Thom Gibson about this topic, I wish I could go back to the classroom so I could put some serious effort into establishing a robust system of classroom jobs. Gibson is a middle school STEM teacher from Austin, Texas. He has basically mastered the art of managing a whole program of classroom jobs, and he's made that process work for remote learning, too.

Thom Gibson

In our conversation on the podcast, we talked about why setting up students jobs is such a good thing to do, how to troubleshoot common problems with a jobs system, and what some of Gibson's favorite classroom jobs are-once you hear some of these ideas, I know you're going to want to try them.

Why Setting Up Classroom Jobs is Worth the Effort

It builds positive classroom community and culture. "Students feel like they are actually contributing in a meaningful way that is helping you as the teacher or helping their fellow classmates with something," Gibson says.

It gives students opportunities to explore interests and develop talents. Gibson started to see more value in classroom jobs when he had students create things that could be shared with a wider audience, like podcasts, newsletters, and art. "I started seeing an opportunity to tap into the students' interests with these class jobs as opposed to just getting something done for me."

It lets students learn job application skills. In Gibson's class, students aren't just given the jobs; they have to apply for them. So they gain experience with the job application process.

A Few Cool Job Ideas

Classroom jobs have really evolved past board cleaner and line leader. Gibson has compiled a list of over 25 unique student job titles. Here are ten to get you started:

1. Podcaster: Produces a regular brief podcast on a topic of interest to students, using tools like Soundtrap or GarageBand to make it happen. To keep it manageable, Gibson recommends only having students do one podcast per month, and keeping each episode under 3 minutes.

2. Athletic Trainer: Sets a timer for the middle of a class meeting to lead students in a movement activity, whether students are in the room or in a video meeting.

3. DJ: Plays music for 5 minutes before class. This can be done through the videoconferencing platform if you are remote.

4. Motivational Speaker: Records a one-minute Loom video each week reflecting on a motivational idea or quote to share with the class.

5. Visual Display Artist: Creates posters for in-person class or graphics to be used online for remote learning.

6. Zoologist: Cares for the class pet (or their own pet in remote learning) and lets the rest of the class check in once a week to see how the pet is doing.

7. Tech Guru: Sets up the teacher's classroom tech and helps other students with tech in-person, or troubleshoots and provides help to other students through screen sharing during virtual learning.

8. KonMari Organizing Specialist: Keeps classroom supplies organized. This one works best in an in-person setting, but many teachers probably also have online spaces that could use help with decluttering.

9. Assistant Grader: Helps the teacher with grading. In person, this student would highlight mistakes on assessments for the teacher to look at later. Virtually, this student could assist with some online grading and notify other students when assignments are missing from online platforms like Khan Academy.

10. Tutorial Creator: Makes YouTube tutorials for all kinds of tasks that other students need in the classroom.

Making it Work: The Logistics

A system like this doesn't just spring up out of nowhere; it requires organization and maintenance. Gibson shared a few key components of how his jobs program works:

Job descriptions are provided ahead of time. Students first get a chance to look at all job listings, which include a description of each job along with notes on what personality types would be a good fit.

Students apply for jobs. Gibson has found that this maximizes student buy-in. In the application, students choose their top three jobs and explain why they'd be a good fit.

Job holders get checklists. After students are "hired," (and multiple students may be hired for the same job), they are given job-specific checklists of responsibilities, including when their job is performed, how often, and how to do it.

A teacher's assistant keeps it all together. Although it was not mentioned in the above list, it is essential to have a teacher's assistant whose job it is to remind everyone else to do their job. Gibson recommends looking for "super type-A" students to fill this role.

Teach the jobs like any other curriculum. Students will need practice and feedback to do the jobs right. If a student isn't doing their job correctly, "Make them do it again," Gibson says, "not as a punishment but just as a way of, okay, so now let's try it again."

At a time when we are all hungry for human connection, when classrooms feel more fragmented than ever before, when we sometimes go days or weeks without talking to each other, adding classroom jobs to the mix could be the breath of fresh air we need for our schools. They will give students a new reason to show up, to participate, and to stick around, because in a meaningful way, the classroom will become theirs again.

Learn More from Thom Gibson

Gibson's free course, Essential Student Jobs for the Middle School Classroom of Tomorrow, can be accessed here. His paid course, How to Teach Kids About Money Plus, is here.

Follow him on Twitter, on Instagram, or on YouTube.

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Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

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It's Time to Give Classroom Jobs Another Try

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These fresh ideas for student jobs will invigorate your classroom and get you and your students excited about school again-even if you teach remotely.

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Episode 219- 8 ED Tech Tools to Try in 2024

Continuing to learn about new technology and its benefits, as well as being able to implement the tech into the classroom is important. I am not super tech savy, this episode was a way for me to gain some knowledge about these new advances in 2024. In this episode, I learned about 8 new prominent tech tools that could be utilized benefit teachers.

1. MagicSchool- offers more than 50 AI-assisted tools. Speeds up tasks like lesson planning, assessment building, communication with parents.

2. Diffit- from a reading passage, can level the wording for different reading abilities. Also generate vocab lists, discussion questions to accompany that passage.

3. Eduaide- creates many things that a classroom might need. Guided notes, classroom ice breakers, emails to parents, even rubrics.

4. Wix Tomorrow Classroom- ability to create a website. Has free resources, lesson plans, activities, templates.

5. Sembl- whole bunch of math activities, specifically at elementary level.

6. Upschool-  site offers free courses and other learning materials to equip students with skills to solve real-world problems. Goal is to "change world through purposeful education."

7. Flaticon- lots of icons to add visual support for learning.

8. Dollar Street- a global neighborhood. Show real world families on a virtual street based on their income. This could be used to develop global awareness and debunk stereotypes.

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8 Ed Tech Tools to Try in 2024 | Cult of Pedagogy

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Three AI teacher assistants, a curated collection of math activities, a website-building curriculum, a site for helping students change the world, and more.