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Think about these stages in your classroom...both as a classroom community and how your students prepare to work in smaller groups.

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You can't just switch on teamwork. It takes time for a new team to "gel" and work to its full potential. What's more, team members go through stages as they move from strangers to co-workers.

Bruce Tuckman's Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing model describes these stages. When you understand Tuckman's model, you'll know how to help your new team to become effective - faster. Let's look at how.

Click here to view a transcript of this video.

Where Does Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing Come From?

Psychologist Bruce Tuckman came up with the memorable phrase "forming, storming, norming, and performing" in his 1965 paper, "Developmental Sequence in Small Groups." [1] It describes the path that teams follow on their way to high performance. Later, he added a fifth stage, "adjourning" (also known as "mourning") to mark the end of a team's journey.

What Happens at Tuckman's Forming Stage?

In the beginning, when a new team forms, individuals will be unsure of the team's purpose, how they fit in, and whether they'll work well with one another. They may be anxious, curious, or excited to get going. However they feel, they'll be looking to the team leader for direction.

This may take some time, as people get to know their new colleagues and one another's ways of working.

What Did Tuckman Mean by Storming?

In the storming stage, people start to push against the established boundaries. Conflict or friction can also arise between team members as their true characters - and their preferred ways of working - surface and clash with other people's.

At this stage team members may challenge your authority or management style, or even the team's mission. Left unchecked, this can lead to face-to-face confrontations or simmering online tensions.

If roles and responsibilities aren't yet clear, individuals might begin to feel overwhelmed by their workload or frustrated at a lack of progress.

How Do I Recognize the Norming Stage?

Gradually, the team moves into the norming stage. People start to resolve their differences, appreciate one another's strengths, and respect your authority as a leader.

Now that they know one another better, your team members will feel more comfortable asking for help and offering constructive feedback. They'll share a stronger commitment to the team's goals, and they should make good progress toward it.

What Does the Performing Stage Look Like?

Now your team is in flow and performing to its full potential. With hard work and structured processes, the team is likely to achieve its goals efficiently.

Judith Stein, from MIT's HR department, says of this stage, "Roles on the team may have become more fluid, with members taking on various roles and responsibilities as needed. Differences among members are appreciated and used to enhance the team's performance." [2]

What About Tuckman's Adjourning (or Mourning) Stage?

Many teams reach this stage naturally. For example, projects come to an end, or permanent teams are disbanded and people redeployed.

People who like routine, or who have developed close working relationships with colleagues, may find this time difficult.

Using the Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing Tool

Follow the steps below to ensure that you're doing the right thing at the right time:

1. Identify the stage that your team is at from the descriptions above.

2. Consider what you need to do to move on to the next stage.

3. Schedule regular reviews of where your team is at, and adjust your behavior and leadership approach accordingly.

Tuckman's model isn't a one-way street - teams may go back and forth between stages. When you hit the performing stage, keep observing your team's progress in case it slips back. For example, a new team member can disrupt the group dynamic, or a new business direction might mean you have to reevaluate your team roles and goals.

Leading Through the Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing Stages

Forming to Storming

To establish clear objectives for the group at this first stage, create a team charter. And help team members to set personal goals so that they can see how their work will fit with the bigger picture.

Storming to Norming

Storming can make or break a team, so it's essential that you establish processes to track the progress and success of tasks.

Norming to Performing

Use your regular one-on-ones to encourage individuals to step back, review their goals, and take responsibility for them.

Performing to Adjourning

When the team has settled into the performing stage, you can focus on other goals and new areas to benefit the business. Free up more time for yourself - and boost team engagement - by delegating tasks and projects.

You should also make time for the group's personal development. Discuss with your team what opportunities and resources are available to them, such as the Mind Tools toolkits.

Adjourning (or Mourning)

If any team members feel uncertain about what's ahead, boost their confidence and career prospects by praising them at company meetings. And offer to provide LinkedIn recommendations and references if they're moving on.

Key Points

Psychologist Bruce Tuckman described how teams move through stages known as forming, storming, norming, and performing, and adjourning (or mourning).

You can use Tuckman's model to help your team to perform better. First, identify the stage your team is at, then use our tips to move them through the stages.

Remember, teams can slip back a stage, too. Use Tuckman's model to continually review where you team is at - and make any necessary changes to get back on course.

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Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing: Tuckman's Model for Nurturing a Team to High Performance

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You can't just switch on teamwork. It takes time for a new team to "gel" and work to its full potential. What's more, team members go through stages as they move from strangers to co-workers. Bruce Tuckman's Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing model describes these stages.

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Teaching your students about working as a team.

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Here are some strategies that can be used to promote equity of voices within your classroom culture as your students begin to understand the stages of their group.

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
When I worked with student teachers on developing effective lesson plans, one thing I always asked them to revise was the phrase "We will discuss."
We will discuss the video. We will discuss the story. We will discuss our results.
Every time I saw it in a lesson plan, I would add a note: "What format will you use? What questions will you ask? How will you ensure that all students participate?" I was pretty sure that We will discuss actually meant the teacher would do most of the talking; He would throw out a couple of questions like "So what did you think about the video?" or "What was the theme of the story?" and a few students would respond, resulting in something that looked like a discussion, but was ultimately just a conversation between the teacher and a handful of extroverted students; a classic case of Fisheye Teaching.

The problem wasn't them; in most of the classrooms where they'd sat as students, that's exactly what a class discussion looked like. They didn't know any other "formats." I have only ever been familiar with a few myself. But when teachers began contacting me recently asking for a more comprehensive list, I knew it was time to do some serious research.

So here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging. If you've struggled to find effective ways to develop students' speaking and listening skills, this is your lucky day.

I've separated the strategies into three groups. The first batch contains the higher-prep strategies, formats that require teachers to do some planning or gathering of materials ahead of time. Next come the low-prep strategies, which can be used on the fly when you have a few extra minutes or just want your students to get more active. Note that these are not strict categories; it's certainly possible to simplify or add more meat to any of these structures and still make them work. The last group is the ongoing strategies. These are smaller techniques that can be integrated with other instructional strategies and don't really stand alone. For each strategy, you'll find a list of other names it sometimes goes by, a description of its basic structure, and an explanation of variations that exist, if any. To watch each strategy in action, click on its name and a new window will open with a video that demonstrates it.

Enjoy!
a.k.a. Chat Stations
Basic Structure: Stations or posters are set up around the classroom, on the walls or on tables. Small groups of students travel from station to station together, performing some kind of task or responding to a prompt, either of which will result in a conversation.

Variations: Some Gallery Walks stay true to the term gallery, where groups of students create informative posters, then act as tour guides or docents, giving other students a short presentation about their poster and conducting a Q&A about it. In Starr Sackstein's high school classroom, her stations consisted of video tutorials created by the students themselves. Before I knew the term Gallery Walk, I shared a strategy similar to it called Chat Stations, where the teacher prepares discussion prompts or content-related tasks and sets them up around the room for students to visit in small groups.
a.k.a. Values Continuum, Forced Debate, Physical Barometer, This or That
Basic Structure: A statement that has two possible responses-agree or disagree-is read out loud. Depending on whether they agree or disagree with this statement, students move to one side of the room or the other. From that spot, students take turns defending their positions.

Variations: Often a Philosophical Chairs debate will be based around a text or group of texts students have read ahead of time; students are required to cite textual evidence to support their claims and usually hold the texts in their hands during the discussion. Some teachers set up one hot seat to represent each side, and students must take turns in the seat. In less formal variations (which require less prep), a teacher may simply read provocative statements students are likely to disagree on, and a debate can occur spontaneously without a text to refer to (I call this variation This or That in my classroom icebreakers post). Teachers may also opt to offer a continuum of choices, ranging from "Strongly Agree" on one side of the room, all the way to "Strongly Disagree" on the other, and have students place themselves along that continuum based on the strength of their convictions.

Basic Structure: Students are divided into 4 groups. Three of these groups are assigned to represent specific points of view. Members of the fourth group are designated as "provocateurs," tasked with making sure the discussion keeps going and stays challenging. One person from each group (the "speaker") sits in a desk facing speakers from the other groups, so they form a square in the center of the room. Behind each speaker, the remaining group members are seated: two right behind the speaker, then three behind them, and so on, forming a kind of triangle. From above, this would look like a pinwheel. The four speakers introduce and discuss questions they prepared ahead of time (this preparation is done with their groups). After some time passes, new students rotate from the seats behind the speaker into the center seats and continue the conversation.

Variations: When high school English teacher Sarah Brown Wessling introduced this strategy in the featured video (click Pinwheel Discussion above), she used it as a device for talking about literature, where each group represented a different author, plus one provocateur group. But in the comments that follow the video, Wessling adds that she also uses the strategy with non-fiction, where students represent authors of different non-fiction texts or are assigned to take on different perspectives about an issue.
a.k.a. Socratic Circles
Basic Structure: Students prepare by reading a text or group of texts and writing some higher-order discussion questions about the text. On seminar day, students sit in a circle and an introductory, open-ended question is posed by the teacher or student discussion leader. From there, students continue the conversation, prompting one another to support their claims with textual evidence. There is no particular order to how students speak, but they are encouraged to respectfully share the floor with others. Discussion is meant to happen naturally and students do not need to raise their hands to speak. This overview of Socratic Seminar from the website Facing History and Ourselves provides a list of appropriate questions, plus more information about how to prepare for a seminar.

Variations: If students are beginners, the teacher may write the discussion questions, or the question creation can be a joint effort. For larger classes, teachers may need to set up seminars in more of a fishbowl-like arrangement, dividing students into one inner circle that will participate in the discussion, and one outer circle that silently observes, takes notes, and may eventually trade places with those in the inner circle, sometimes all at once, and sometimes by "tapping in" as the urge strikes them.
a.k.a. Affinity Diagramming
Basic Structure: Give students a broad question or problem that is likely to result in lots of different ideas, such as "What were the impacts of the Great Depression?" or "What literary works should every person read?" Have students generate responses by writing ideas on post-it notes (one idea per note) and placing them in no particular arrangement on a wall, whiteboard, or chart paper. Once lots of ideas have been generated, have students begin grouping them into similar categories, then label the categories and discuss why the ideas fit within them, how the categories relate to one another, and so on.

Variations: Some teachers have students do much of this exercise-recording their ideas and arranging them into categories- without talking at first. In other variations, participants are asked to re-combine the ideas into new, different categories after the first round of organization occurs. Often, this activity serves as a good pre-writing exercise, after which students will write some kind of analysis or position paper.
a.k.a. Speed Dating
Basic Structure: Students form two circles, one inside circle and one outside circle. Each student on the inside is paired with a student on the outside; they face each other. The teacher poses a question to the whole group and pairs discuss their responses with each other. Then the teacher signals students to rotate: Students on the outside circle move one space to the right so they are standing in front of a new person (or sitting, as they are in the video). Now the teacher poses a new question, and the process is repeated.

Variations: Instead of two circles, students could also form two straight lines facing one another. Instead of "rotating" to switch partners, one line just slides over one spot, and the leftover person on the end comes around to the beginning of the line. Some teachers use this strategy to have students teach one piece of content to their fellow students, making it less of a discussion strategy and more of a peer teaching format. In fact, many of these protocols could be used for peer teaching as well.

Basic Structure: Another great idea from Sarah Brown Wessling, this is a small-group discussion strategy that gives students exposure to more of their peers' ideas and prevents the stagnation that can happen when a group doesn't happen to have the right chemistry. Students are placed into a few groups of 4-6 students each and are given a discussion question to talk about. After sufficient time has passed for the discussion to develop, one or two students from each group rotate to a different group, while the other group members remain where they are. Once in their new group, they will discuss a different, but related question, and they may also share some of the key points from their last group's conversation. For the next rotation, students who have not rotated before may be chosen to move, resulting in groups that are continually evolving.

Basic Structure: Two students sit facing each other in the center of the room; the remaining students sit in a circle around them. The two central students have a conversation based on a pre-determined topic and often using specific skills the class is practicing (such as asking follow-up questions, paraphrasing, or elaborating on another person's point). Students on the outside observe, take notes, or perform some other discussion-related task assigned by the teacher.

Variations: One variation of this strategy allows students in the outer circle to trade places with those in the fishbowl, doing kind of a relay-style discussion, or they may periodically "coach" the fishbowl talkers from the sidelines. Teachers may also opt to have students in the outside circle grade the participants' conversation with a rubric, then give feedback on what they saw in a debriefing afterward, as mentioned in the featured video.

Basic Structure: One student assumes the role of a book character, significant figure in history, or concept (such as a tornado, an animal, or the Titanic). Sitting in front of the rest of the class, the student responds to classmates' questions while staying in character in that role.

Variations: Give more students the opportunity to be in the hot seat while increasing everyone's participation by having students do hot seat discussions in small groups, where one person per group acts as the "character" and three or four others ask them questions. In another variation, several students could form a panel of different characters, taking questions from the class all together and interacting with one another like guests on a TV talk show.
a.k.a. Pyramid Discussion
Basic Structure: Students begin in pairs, responding to a discussion question only with a single partner. After each person has had a chance to share their ideas, the pair joins another pair, creating a group of four. Pairs share their ideas with the pair they just joined. Next, groups of four join together to form groups of eight, and so on, until the whole class is joined up in one large discussion.

Variations: This structure could simply be used to share ideas on a topic, or students could be required to reach consensus every time they join up with a new group.

Whereas the other formats in this list have a distinct shape-specific activities you do with students-the strategies in this section are more like plug-ins, working discussion into other instructional activities and improving the quality and reach of existing conversations.

One of the limitations of discussion is that rich, face-to-face conversations can only happen when all parties are available, so we're limited to the time we have in class. With a tool like Voxer, those limitations disappear. Like a private voice mailbox that you set up with just one person or a group (but SOOOO much easier), Voxer allows users to have conversations at whatever time is most convenient for each participant. So a group of four students can "discuss" a topic from 3pm until bedtime-asynchronously-each member contributing whenever they have a moment, and if the teacher makes herself part of the group, she can listen in, offer feedback, or contribute her own discussion points. Voxer is also invaluable for collaborating on projects and for having one-on-one discussions with students, parents, and your own colleagues. Like many other educators, Peter DeWitt took a while to really understand the potential of Voxer, but in this EdWeek piece, he explains what turned him around.

A backchannel is a conversation that happens right alongside another activity. The first time I saw a backchannel in action was at my first unconference: While those of us in the audience listened to presenters and watched a few short video clips, a separate screen was up beside the main screen, projecting something called TodaysMeet (update: TodaysMeet has shut down. Use YoTeach! instead.) It looked a lot like those chat rooms from back in the day, basically a blank screen where people would contribute a few lines of text, the lines stacking up one after the other, no other bells or whistles. Anyone in the room could participate in this conversation on their phone, laptop, or tablet, asking questions, offering commentary, and sharing links to related resources without ever interrupting the flow of the presentations. This kind of tool allows for a completely silent discussion, one that doesn't have to move at a super-fast pace, and it gives students who may be reluctant to speak up or who process their thoughts more slowly a chance to fully contribute. For a deeper discussion of how this kind of tool can be used, read this thoughtful overview of using backchannel discussions in the classroom by Edutopia's Beth Holland.
a.k.a. Accountable Talk
Talk moves are sentence frames we supply to our students that help them express ideas and interact with one another in respectful, academically appropriate ways. From kindergarten all the way through college, students can benefit from explicit instruction in the skills of summarizing another person's argument before presenting an alternate view, asking clarifying questions, and expressing agreement or partial agreement with the stance of another participant. Talk moves can be incorporated into any of the other discussion formats listed here.

Whole Brain Teaching is a set of teaching and classroom management methods that has grown in popularity over the past 10 years. One of WBT's foundational techniques is Teach-OK, a peer teaching strategy that begins with the teacher spending a few minutes introducing a concept to the class. Next, the teacher says Teach!, the class responds with Okay!, and pairs of students take turns re-teaching the concept to each other. It's a bit like think-pair-share, but it's faster-paced, it focuses more on re-teaching than general sharing, and students are encouraged to use gestures to animate their discussion. Although WBT is most popular in elementary schools, this featured video shows the creator of WBT, Chris Biffle, using it quite successfully with college students. I have also used Teach-OK with college students, and most of my students said they were happy for a change from the sit-and-listen they were used to in college classrooms.

An oldie but a goodie, think-pair-share can be used any time you want to plug interactivity into a lesson: Simply have students think about their response to a question, form a pair with another person, discuss their response, then share it with the larger group. Because I feel this strategy has so many uses and can be way more powerful than we give it credit for, I devoted a whole post to think-pair-share; everything you need to know about it is right there.

TWO MORE YOU'LL LOVE

Since writing this post, I have learned about two more discussion strategies that teachers are finding to be incredibly effective and powerful for getting students to talk, especially about books and other texts:

This protocol has students come up with their own Thoughts, lingering Questions, and Epiphanies from an assigned reading. Teachers who have used this method say it has generated some of the richest conversations they have ever heard from students!

This strategy places students into one-on-one conversations, getting them to learn each others' names better and create a track record of what they talked about. Excellent for classes where you want to assess for discussion and help students get more comfortable with each other.

So what else do you have? I would like to think this is a pretty complete list, but I'm sure more strategies are out there. If you use a discussion strategy that's not mentioned here, please share it below.

Come back for more.
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The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies

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Here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging.

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Strategies to Promote Engagement with Others

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Strategies to Promote Engagement with Others

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Help your students engage with instruction and their classroom community.

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Strategies to Promote Purpose in Your Classroom

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Strategies to Promote Purpose in Your Classroom

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Help your students connect to instruction and their classroom community.

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The Only List of Icebreaker Questions You’ll Ever Need

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100+ best team building icebreaker questions for work/fun with virtual icebreakers, fun icebreakers, weird icebreakers, “would you rather” questions + more

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An important first step is to create norms for the classroom community so that all students can feel safe and voices are respected and heard.

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Malcolm London: "High School Training Ground"

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Young poet, educator and activist Malcolm London performs his stirring poem about life on the front lines of high school. He tells of the "oceans of adolescence" who come to school "but never learn to swim," of "masculinity mimicked by men who grew up with no fathers." Beautiful, lyrical, chilling.

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Sample Questions to Build a Positive Learning Community

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Sample Questions to Build a Positive Learning Community

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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I saw a tweet recently that stated that the most important thing to do in the beginning of the school year is to establish rules and routines. Soon after that, someone replied asking about establishing relationships and rapport with your students. Then another tweet stated that classroom management comes down to three things: relationships, expectations, and consistency. Later I noticed this tweet from Tracey Nance Pendley (@2020GaTOTY):

Magic in my classroom means close relationships, learning engagements that make us laugh and spark curiosity, and anything that puts students and THEIR experiences at the center of instruction - role play, shared novels, creativity, & LOTS of silliness! https://t.co/p1tMZy1z9I

- Tracey Nance Pendley (@2020GaTOTY) August 1, 2019

As I continued to scroll through Twitter, I noticed post after post stating that relationships are the key to a well-managed and socially and academically successful classroom. Edutopia (@edutopia) also posted a video exploring the power of relationships in schools:

The video looks at brain science that shows that learning environments with strong long-term relationships between children and school adults and other students are pivotal to the learning process and create positive school culture. In the video, Dr. Pamela Cantor, the founder and senior science advisor for Turnaround for Children, states that closeness, consistency, and trust release oxytocin in the brain, which has positive effects on development. A school that prioritizes relationship building allows the child to experience "attunement and trust" that is strong enough to release oxytocin.

One of my favorite Brené Brown quotes only further solidifies the importance of building relationships with your students. From her famous talk at TEDxHouston, " The Power of Vulnerability," she states, "Connection is why we're here. It's what gives us purpose and meaning to our lives. What we know is that connection, the ability to feel connected, is neurobiologically how we're wired."

As the beginning of the school year quickly approaches, it is crucial that we establish classroom norms that can contribute to a healthy and appropriate classroom culture. This post offers ideas and suggestions for engaging your students in the establishment of those norms and for helping you build relationships, manage less, and teach more.

Change Up Your Attendance Routine
A typical first day, first-thing-to-do in a classroom is to take attendance. Instead of the standard method of calling out names with kids saying "Here," kick things off on the first day of school by including a game or question as part of taking attendance. Ask questions such as, "If you could switch places with someone for a day, who would it be and why?" "What is your favorite movie and why? Your favorite book?" It takes time to get to know your class, but by using little prompts, you'll learn how they communicate as well as what their interests are. Some would argue that this takes too much time out of the lesson or class period, but these strategies can be crucial to allowing students space to express their individuality as well as to demonstrate to students that their presence and interests matter to you as their teacher.

Use an Inner Circle/Outer Circle Question Activity
Commit to knowing your students right from the start. Be sure to learn about their families and cultures. A fun first-day activity that is also culturally responsive is to kick off with an inner circle/outer circle question activity. The students form two circles: the inner circle faces the outer circle. Prior to the activity, create a list of open-ended discussion questions that they can talk about for about 30 seconds. Before each discussion, require students to greet their partners with a greeting that feels comfortable to them. I've suggested fist bumps, handshakes, waving, high fives, etc. This allows space for students to get to know each other better and perform a personal greeting that is conducive to their comfort level and culture.

Let Your Students Decide What Makes a Welcoming Classroom
It is important that students feel involved in their classroom learning communities. Establish classroom norms, rules, and guidelines that students are consistently held accountable to. Divide students into groups and provide each group with poster paper and markers. Have the groups discuss the top five important classroom behaviors that they feel are most conducive to a welcoming classroom environment. Place the posters around the room and use them as classroom behavior guides.

Give Students Space to Celebrate Their Individuality
Another important component to a culturally and linguistically responsive classroom is to provide students with opportunities to share their family traditions and cultures. Have them create "All About Me" projects or posters to celebrate their individuality. Be mindful of your own cultural behavior patterns regarding classroom management and discipline. Remember to practice vulnerability and authenticity in front of your students-you are human too!

Use Learning Stations and Games
Deliver your content using learning stations and games. These strategies help students develop social skills, learn to work together with various people, and make room for all types of learning differences. Include stations that involve creating a piece of art, solving a puzzle, reading an article together, or building something. Use media to create games for test review. Or ask students to create their own learning games and have the class play them together.

Combining different pedagogical approaches keeps things fresh and interesting. Teaching is an art and a complex practice, but when your foundation is the development of relationships, healthy social boundaries and expectations, and equitable disciplinary practices, you won't feel the need to "manage" your classroom. You can do what you love-teach!

Liz Bergren is a former teacher with 15 years of classroom experience. In addition to being a teacher, she spent five years working for Park Nicollet's Melrose Institute where she counseled and taught classes to patients who struggled with eating disorders. She has a B.A. in health and secondary education from the University of St. Thomas and an M.Ed. in family education from the University of Minnesota.

We welcome your comments and suggestions. Share your comments, stories, and ideas below, or All comments will be approved before posting, and are subject to our comment and privacy policies.

© 2019 by Free Spirit Publishing. All rights reserved. The view expressed in this post represent the opinion of the author and not necessarily Free Spirit Publishing.

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5 Ways to Create a Positive Classroom Culture with Your Students

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By Liz Bergren I saw a tweet recently that stated that the most important thing to do in the beginning of the school year is to establish rules and routines. Soon after that, someone replied asking about establishing relationships and rapport with your students. Then another tweet stated that classroom management comes down to three...

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5 Brain-Based Learning Strategies to Boost Learning, Retention, and Focus

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Brain-based learning refers to teaching methods, lesson designs, and school programs that are based on the latest scientific research about how the brain learns, including factors such as neuroscience and cognitive development—how students learn differently as they age, grow, and mature socially, em…

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How Teachers Can Help Students Navigate Trauma

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How Teachers Can Help Students Navigate Trauma

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How teachers can help students navigate trauma

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“To make a difference in the life of a child ... I made the commitment to tell my personal story,” says educator Lisa Godwin. In this moving talk, she shares her experience of overcoming childhood trauma with the quiet, unwavering support of a teacher and school counselor -- and shows how educators can help students and families navigate hardships by sharing their own stories.

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Listen to the interview with Katie Novak and Mirko Chardin:
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As a teacher, I loved the annual PTO teacher appreciation breakfast: tablecloths featuring pencils, hearts, and shiny red apples, bouquets of pink mini carnations, and a coffee and tea cart fit for a barista. And the buffet! Like mead halls of yore, long banquet tables were lined with fruit salad, homemade quiches, scrambled eggs, miso soup, and gallo pinto. Bagels, croissants, chapattis, and churros sat atop a bread table. Little folded cards identified casseroles that were gluten-free or vegan. Options for everyone! I wanted to sample every single one.

A school down the street didn't have it so good. Their breakfast served a single option-a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich on a biscuit. No substitutions.

Now, I personally love a good ol' brekkie sammy, but it certainly won't meet everyone's needs. Some staff members may be vegetarian, lactose-intolerant, or gluten-free. Some may be watching their waistlines. And some will just think that the sandwich is G.R.O.S.S. We all can predict the outcome. Many will leave hungry, frustrated, and needless to say- un appreciated.

The bacon/egg/cheese saga represents the one-size-fits-all scenarios we often see in our classrooms: Every student is expected to read the same book at the same pace, listen to the same lectures, and complete the same math problems using the same materials. These inflexible solutions expect compliance and favor students who don't face significant barriers to traditional learning. Many of the "tried and true" techniques and curriculum in classrooms perpetuate privilege rather than focusing on learning, autonomy, and empowerment.

When we design the same learning pathways for all learners, we might tell ourselves we are being fair, but in fact, single pathways are exclusionary. Beverly Daniel Tatum, author of the critically acclaimed book, Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race, challenges us to focus on impact over intentions. It may not be our intent to exclude our learners, but the reality is that many students do not have opportunities to learn at high levels or to access curriculum and instruction that is accessible, engaging, culturally sustaining, and linguistically appropriate.

Luckily, there is a framework that rejects these one-size-fits-all solutions and empowers educators to proactively design learning experiences so all students can increase their brainpower and accelerate and own their learning. The framework is Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

UDL is a framework for designing learning experiences so students have options for how they learn, what materials they use, and how they demonstrate their learning. When implemented with a lens of equity, the framework has the potential to eliminate opportunity gaps that exclude many learners, especially those who have been historically marginalized. If we want all students to have equal opportunities to learn, we have to be incredibly purposeful, proactive, and flexible. UDL creates a learning environment that is the least restrictive and most culturally responsive, trauma-informed environment for all students.

CORE BELIEFS OF UDL

This work begins with asset-based beliefs about students and the power of design to eliminate barriers. A UDL Practitioner believes:

Variability is the rule, not the exception. Students may need to learn in different ways, using different materials, and share what they have learned in different ways to reach the same goals.

All students can work toward the same firm goals and grade-level standards when provided with adequate challenge and support.

All students will become expert learners if barriers are removed and they are given opportunities to self-differentiate.

Belief 1: Variability

Variability is the unique mix of skills, interests, needs, and preferences each and every learner brings to the classroom. Variability goes beyond differences between students and explores differences within students, based on context. Because of variability, what students need is ever-changing and evolving. So providing options for students to reflect on the barriers they are facing and choose pathways that best meet their needs is critical to build self-awareness and expert learning.

In traditional instruction, many educators attempt to define how students learn with one-dimensional labels. For example, many educators will ask me, "What does UDL look like for English language learners/black and brown students/students with disabilities?" My answer is always the same, "The students in those groups are not the same and they don't need one-size-fits-all solutions."

Let's connect back to the breakfast buffet. Imagine you are labeled as a member of the "vegan group." As a result, every day you and the other vegans have plates set aside for you with sliced tomatoes and plain oatmeal. Here's the thing-not all vegans like or eat the same thing. You will want choices too and you will likely make different decisions depending on the day, your mood, and how your tummy feels. Intrapersonal variability matters just as much as interpersonal variability. And if none of the foods work for you, you will definitely need an opportunity to share what you need.

Belief 2: Firm Goals, Flexible Means

Every student can learn at high levels. When creating a universally designed learning experience, educators should ask themselves: "At the end of this lesson, unit, or professional development series, what do my learners have to know or what do they need to be able to do?" Once you identify the firm goal, ask yourself, "Based on the variability in my class, what barriers may prevent learners from working toward that goal and how can I eliminate those barriers through design?"

For example, if the firm goal is "Write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence," you may predict that some students will struggle with organization. Worry not! You can create a buffet with flexible means to support learners. If you proactively provide a graphic organizer, an annotated exemplar with notes about organization, a resource that includes words, phrases, and clauses to help clarify the relationships among claim(s) and reasons, and the opportunity to sign up for small group instruction on organization, you can empower students to choose what they need to organize their writing.

Belief 3: Expert Learning

In his book, Learning to Choose, Choosing to Learn, author Mike Anderson discusses the concept of incorporating student choice into every lesson. Many educators are afraid of handing over the reins to their students, believing they won't make the best choices. The truth is they are right to be afraid; students may make poor choices about their learning, particularly when they are first given this power.

For example, a student may choose to work in a group with his friends in which he becomes distracted instead of working alongside the teacher, where he would have been more successful. But the evaluation of that choice is where the real teaching moment comes into play. Through Anderson's "choose, do, review" method, teachers transition their roles to the facilitator and can provide feedback that guides students to understand and self-evaluate their choices, determine what works for them and what doesn't, and give them opportunities to make better choices in the future and provide feedback about learning design.

If students don't have these opportunities to "choose, do, review" their way to expert learning, they will become what Zaretta Hammond has coined as "dependent learners." Dependent learners are overly reliant on the teacher to carry the load of cognitive tasks and are unsure of how to tackle new tasks because they aren't given opportunities to learn how to be expert learners.

UDL IN ACTION

Imagine this scene in a 6th-grade health classroom: Students are sitting quietly at their desks. The learning target written on the board notes that students will identify ways to reduce their risk of spreading or contracting communicable disease. The agenda outlines classroom activities: (1) watch a CDC video and (2) write an essay on how to reduce the risk of spreading and contracting COVID-19. The lesson is aligned to grade-level standards and features a high quality resource, so what is the problem? The learning experience will not meet the needs of all students because it is one-size-fits-all, so let's give it the UDL treatment. For a lesson to truly be "universally designed," it must meet the following criteria:

Provide Multiple Means of Engagement

Learners differ in the ways they can be engaged or motivated to learn. Because there is not one means of engagement that will be optimal for all learners; providing options to build interest and commitment is essential. At the beginning of the class, the teacher projects a list of communicable diseases including the common cold, strep throat, COVID-19, and Influenza A (the flu). Each disease is paired with a visual. Some learners take out their phones to look at their throats and ask their friends, "Does my throat look like that?" The teacher asks if anyone wants to add a communicable, or spreadable, disease to the list. One student offers, "mono," so she writes it down.

For the next 10 minutes, students have the option to work independently, with a partner, or in a small group with the teacher to list as many symptoms as they can for at least one of the diseases. Students have the option to write words or draw images to represent symptoms on a provided graphic organizer. As they work, they are encouraged to use their devices for research and to find a place conducive to their learning. Two students work at a standing desk while others grab clip boards and gather on the floor with their devices.

Provide Multiple Means of Representation

The second principle of UDL reminds educators to provide multiple means of representation to build knowledge and comprehension in all learners. Not all learners comprehend information in the same way, have the same background information or funds of knowledge, or have access to the same language. When teachers present information, they often use a single representation. This is often done in a lecture, by playing a video, assigning text, or teaching vocabulary, etc. Because there is significant variability in students, they differ in the information they need to learn.

In the health lesson, after students complete the activator, there is a mini-lesson unpacking target vocabulary: risk, communicable disease, and community spread. One student's father is a nurse, so the teacher arranges for a short Zoom call where Dad talks about the importance of washing hands and wearing masks. The closed caption feature is used and students are encouraged to ask questions.

After a short discussion, the teacher provides options for students to learn more about how to prevent the spread of communicable disease: watch the CDC video in English or Spanish, read an article on Newsela, review pamphlets from the nurse's office, or explore a combination of these resources. They are provided with essential questions to support their learning. As students work, the teacher checks in with each of them, asks questions, and provides feedback.

Provide Multiple Means of Action and Expression

It is devastating when students aren't able to express their understanding because of inflexible assessments. Traditionally, students have been asked to share their understanding using only a single pathway, like a multiple-choice test, essay prompt, and/or project without any flexible scaffolds or supports. When teachers provide students with multiple options that are authentic and personalized, learners are able to practice executive functioning skills as they analyze the task and choose the best option to demonstrate that they met the intended outcome.

After learning about how to reduce their risk of spreading or contracting communicable disease, students are provided with numerous options to share what they have learned. They can write a response, record a video or podcast, create a pamphlet or infographic, or suggest an alternative. The teacher provides a word bank with the target vocabulary, a single-point rubric, and a checklist so students can self-assess their work before submitting it. One student asks if he can write and produce a rap as long as it meets the rubric. "Absolutely," the teacher replies. "I can't wait to hear it."

ARE UDL AND DIFFERENTIATION THE SAME?

You may be reading this and thinking, "This sounds a lot like differentiated instruction." The frameworks are similar, and complementary, but they are not the same.

Carol Tomlinson leads the field of differentiated instruction, As Tomlinson shares in her book The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners, teachers in a differentiated classroom begin with their current curriculum and engaging instruction and then adapt the content, process, product, and environment to ensure that students receive the targeted intervention, support, and enrichment they need. This responsiveness is incredibly important, but may not set students up to reflect on their learning and make choices for themselves.

In the breakfast buffet analogy, you don't want to be a part of the "vegan group" where decisions are made for you. Even with the buffet, hosts need to be responsive and reflective, noting when some people aren't eating and figuring out how the buffet could be designed differently the next time. When differentiation is combined with the practices and principles of UDL, students have opportunities to reflect, make choices, and build ownership of their learning; they also benefit from more explicit support when necessary.

Unlike differentiation alone, UDL empowers students to self-differentiate their learning and build autonomy and independence; this sends a powerful message. In her book Antiracism and Universal Design for Learning, Andratesha Fritzgerald notes that this kind of design honors our students, that when we provide them with choice and voice, we communicate these things:

You are more important than the systems we serve.

You are more important than my personal preferences.

You are more important than the way the content is packaged.

I am willing to learn about you to help you reach your life goals.

You are important and I will honor you with instruction that holds you accountable and empowers you to take ownership of your own learning.

Proactively designing curriculum and instruction through the lens of UDL, and supplementing that design with differentiated instruction, is a pathway to equity-one that will have an incredible impact on learners.

As Mirko Chardin and I shared in Equity by Design: Delivering on the Power and Promise of UDL, "Educators hold incredible power: power to design learning experiences, power to set expectations for students, power to elevate and celebrate student voices, power to inspire and motivate students, the power to create consequences, and the power to allow for choice and personalization. We have to understand that all of us carry that power and privilege and we must use it as a tool to confront and dismantle inequities so all students have equal opportunities to learn."

Universal design is one path toward dismantling those inequities. Start your UDL journey now.

Learn More

As a next step, here is a buffet of high-quality resources to learn more about UDL and educational equity. Just like the Teacher Appreciation Breakfasts that I loved so much, check out your options, and choose what's best for you. And if you're like me and you want to try a little bit of everything, treat yourself!

Read It

Read this blog, written by Mirko Chardin and I, that shares that the time for equity (and UDL!) is now.

Read Chapter 1 in UDL Theory and Practice: Re-Envisioning Education through UDL (free with free login). The book is a universally designed text book, so you can read, have it read to you, or watch videos that explore concepts more deeply.

View a PDF copy of the UDL Flowchart, which is a tool to think about UDL lesson design. If you'd like to read a blog that introduces the flow chart, you can access it here.

View the UDL Progression Rubric to determine what UDL looks like at each phase of implementation.

Use the UDL Implementation Rubric to consider where your current practices are within UDL. There are no right or wrong answers. This is simply an opportunity to reflect on your current implementation. Choose the descriptor that best meets your practice and consider how you can continue to grow in UDL to create more equitable, personalized learning experiences for your students.

Read "Equity in Our Schools: A Pretty Little Lie" an article co-written with Andratesha Fritzgerald, the author of Antiracism and Universal Design for Learning.

Listen to It

Listen to this podcast on Cult of Pedagogy, Ten Ways Educators Can Take Action in Pursuit of Equity, featuring Pedro Noguera, Distinguished Professor of Education at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA.

Listen to this podcast from Paula Martin Johnson, where she shares concrete strategies for how educators can create a climate and curriculum that reflects students' racial and economic backgrounds, languages, religions, funds of knowledge and family structures.

Watch It

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This framework rejects one-size-fits-all teaching and offers options for how to engage, what materials to use, and how to demonstrate learning.

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Learning from Mistakes: Mistake Analysis  

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Learning from Mistakes: Mistake Analysis  

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Sponsored by Hapara and TGR EDU: Explore

My son Oliver is enrolled in virtual school this year. He has an amazing teacher who kicked off the year with her kindergarten students by going through the alphabet. As they went through each letter, students had to suggest words that started with that letter.

When they got to the letter after H and before J, one student yelled out, "Iguana."

"Great work!" the teacher said. "Who else has a word that starts with our letter?"

Crickets. No one said anything. As an eavesdropping dad, I was thankful this wasn't a drinking game, because I had nothing! Suddenly, Oliver unmuted, huge smile on his face, and joyfully shared his answer:

"Lizard!"

His teacher looked at him, smiled, and said, "I'm sorry, that's not right. Does anyone else have a word that works?"

I looked at him and saw the joy stripped from his eyes. I started to think about the wonder he and just about every child comes out of the womb with. I began to worry about what happens when we stifle that wonder because of our rigid practice of creating such a narrow window of what we consider to be helpful contributions. And I fully understood how it comes to be that previously engaged learners learn to check out of school.

A Missed Opportunity

There are serious pedagogical issues with what happened here. For formative assessment purposes, how does this teacher's answer help her understand, diagnose, and correct what Oliver's potential misunderstanding is? For the purposes of developing student agency, how does her decision to not allow Oliver to explain his thinking limit his ability to sharpen his reasoning skills and disposition towards supporting his claims with evidence? It turns out that although his mistake could have been an association between lizards and iguanas or a mistake about what constitutes an "i" word (look at the second letter in lizard), it really came down to what happens when you start school in Zoom using the Arial font where a lowercase L and uppercase i are the same character: "l." But because the teacher moved on without stopping to investigate Oliver's response, that reason was not uncovered in class.

Mistakes are a natural part of learning, but students cannot develop into critical thinkers if they regularly freeze out of the fear of making a mistake. As educators, we can shift the culture of our classrooms to embrace mistakes, and one way to do this is through mistake analysis, one of several powerful but practical strategies I share in my book, Thinking Like a Lawyer: A Practical Framework to Teach Critical Thinking to All Students. ( Bookshop.org | Amazon). As a math-teacher-turned-attorney, I wrote this book and started my organization, thinkLaw, to help educators seamlessly incorporate critical thinking into their curriculum.

Critical Thinking as a Pathway to Equity

I have a confession: I'm in this for the rule-breakers. Our profession attracts many people who became educators because the compliance-based, rule-following system worked well for them. But I was not one of those people. As a young student, I had a lot of behavior challenges, but it turned out these were the result of not being challenged. It was only later in life, when I attended law school, that I was taught the kind of critical thinking I needed when I was younger, the kind of thinking that would have kept me challenged.

Critical thinking should not be luxury good. But our current system often treats it that way, setting aside this kind of challenging work for only the most advanced students. In conversations about equity in education, one question I always ask is How do we make equity real at the classroom level? We can talk about implicit bias all day, but what about the explicit bias of saying "These kids can't"? What "These kids can't" often means is "As an educator, I have no idea how to create learning conditions such that all kids can."

So I decided to create spaces that rewarded disruption and divergent thinking-spaces I longed for when I was going through the K-12 system. I view access to critical thinking as THE pathway for making equity real at the classroom level by giving students the opportunity to lead, innovate, and break the things that must be broken as a core part of their educational experience. This is not possible in a world where students are afraid of getting the wrong answer.

Four Ways to Implement Mistake Analysis in Your Classroom

The magic of mistakes is not a belief system. It is a practical set of tools you can apply in almost any classroom context, regardless of grade level or subject area. Here are four strategies you can use to leverage mistake analysis as a seamless way to incorporate critical thinking into your instruction:

1. Anticipate "good" mistakes in advance.

When planning for instruction, think ahead about the kinds of mistakes students are most likely to make. You already know how students will get confused when adding fractions with unlike denominators. You can predict that some students might confuse fact with opinion when the statement is "pizza is the best food ever" (because it is).

But don't stop at identifying WHAT students may do incorrectly. Make sure you think about WHY the mistake may happen so you can do a better job in your instruction to show them HOW to prevent that mistake. For instance, if a student tells you that 5 + 2 = 6, you should anticipate this to be a common mistake that occurs when students start their counting with an addend, which sounds like, "Okay, starting with 5, I'm adding 2, so 5, 6. The answer is 6."

2. Use probing questions to grapple with "good" mistakes in real time.

Teacher: Who would you argue is most responsible for the assassination of Malcolm X?

Student: John F. Kennedy.

This real-life classroom exchange shows why it is hard to prepare for the infinite universe of potential mistakes. But do not be so quick to dismiss a student's answer as totally off-base. They offer a lot of opportunities for learning and some of them have the potential to be "magic." Instead of moving on so quickly, try some of the following probing questions:

JFK? Interesting. What makes you say that?

Why might some of your classmates disagree with you?

JFK was assassinated before Malcolm X was. Help me understand why you believe he is responsible for the assassination of Malcolm X. (Ask clarifying questions if the student's timeline, scientific theory, mathematical concept, grammatical rule, etc., does not appear to be accurate, even after probing.)

If you simply dismissed this student's answer as nonsense, you would have missed out on the clever connection this student made between JFK's assassination, Malcolm X's controversial quote stating that this tragedy was an example of "chickens coming home to roost," and inevitably, a turning point in the growing tension between Malcolm X and the leadership of the Nation of Islam.

3. Ask students to create their own "good" mistakes.

"How might someone get this question wrong?" When we have students anticipate the most predictable mistakes that might be made on a task, we're moving well beyond that lower level of test-taking skills and instead, getting students to think like test- makers, coming up with viable (but incorrect) options on a multiple-choice test.

Suppose your students struggle to identify the main idea of a passage. Instead of asking students to define the main idea of this post, for example, what if we asked them to create three wrong but "good" incorrect responses to what the main idea is?

"Students get upset when they get an answer wrong" works well because we know how tempting it is to just read the opening of a piece and guess a main idea from that.

"Mistakes can be magical" would be an answer a student might pick who only read the title.

"Educators should anticipate likely mistakes in advance" is the first practical recommendation, so a student might mistakenly choose this response as the main idea.

It's important that when students do this, they come up with logical possibilities. I have my students follow what I call the "Joe Schmo" rule: What kind of answer would trip up Joe Schmo, the average person who always falls for the trick answer? Instead of letting students come up with crazy, nonsensical options, this rule keeps the exercise at a challenging metacognitive level.

4. Which wrong is more "right"?

Mistake analysis can also be an opportunity to introduce conflict, drama, and meaningful opportunities to write and debate across content areas. As an attorney representing clients in business disputes, I rarely had a case where one side was pristine and the other was pure evil. They were usually both wrong, to some extent. But the core question was, which one is more "right"?

Bring this framework into your classroom by analyzing two equations that are both done incorrectly, but one has a computational error and the other has a conceptual answer. Two paragraphs or essays where one has structural errors and the other is riddled with spelling and grammatical mistakes. Two science experiments with flawed procedures because one has problems with omitted variable bias and the other struggles with selection bias. Asking which wrong is more "right" helps learners shift from asking "what" and "how to" to asking "why" and "what if" - a necessary shift for giving students the tools to not just analyze the world as it is, but imagine it as it ought to be.

I am a true believer in the magic of mistakes. To be clear, I am not advocating for a world with no wrong answers. I am advocating for a world where children (and adults) are less obsessed with being right and much more focused on the process of understanding what it means to do right. Care about social-emotional learning? There is tremendous empathy to be gained from learning why someone sees something differently than you do. Worried about how you can motivate students to engage in critical thinking? There are amazing instructional implications for planning for mistakes in a way that sets up a classroom culture where traits like compliance and risk-taking outweigh the default culture of compliance and rule-following.

When we don't give our students opportunities to engage in critical thinking at all levels, we are systemically leaving brilliance on the table. By adding strategies like mistake analysis to our regular classroom practice, we're tapping into that brilliance and making it more likely that all of our students will thrive.

Mistake analysis is just one of the many powerful but practical strategies I break down in more detail in Thinking Like a Lawyer and in the work we lead with school systems across the country to ensure critical thinking is no longer a luxury good. Learn more about what we do at ThinkLaw.us.

Come back for more.
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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The Magic of Mistakes: 4 Ways to Boost Critical Thinking with Mistake Analysis

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Wrong answers can be an incredible tool for learning. Discover how easy it is to add mistake analysis to your classroom.

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We have the opportunity to help our students cast a positive vision for their future.

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WATCH: Amanda Gorman reads inauguration poem, 'The Hill We Climb'

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Can we help our students to claim this phrase?

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In many instances, our students will be coming into new and different environments with new and different teachers. Take time to browse through these resources and draft out new ideas for how you can build a positive classroom community or a positive team community with your colleagues.

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The Wisdom of a Third Grade Dropout - Rick Rigsby

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The Wisdom of a Third Grade Dropout - Rick Rigsby

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How can you incorporate some of these life lessons in your classroom?

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"I Went From 3rd Grade Dropout To ULTRA SUCCESSFUL" | Rick Rigsby

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Post-Pandemic Teaching:  What to Take Forward

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Post-Pandemic Teaching:  What to Take Forward

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No More Easy Button: A Suggested Approach to Post-Pandemic Teaching | Cult of Pedagogy

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With this fresh start, let’s take the wisdom we’ve gained over the last year and use it. Let’s not go back to the way things used to be.

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Ways to foster discussion

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Here is a variety of protocols and resources for a collaborative classroom.

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The New York State Education Department is no longer supporting the EngageNY.org website and it will no longer be available for use after April 15, 2022. NYSED encourages educators to download any EngageNY content they wish to use in the future.

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Your full impact might never be known by you, but it is almost certainly felt by others.  

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Your full impact might never be known by you, but it is almost certainly felt by others.  

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The L.A.U.N.C.H. Cycle is very aligned to both individual and group norms.

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The LAUNCH Cycle: A Design Thinking Framework for Education