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"As a teacher, as you design a task you need at least three of those characteristics in there," Almarode said. More than that, the characteristics should be observable to anyone who walks into the room. For example, when Almarode walks into a room on a visit, he should be able to ask any student what the class is working on, what the teacher's expectations are and how it will lead to learning. He might also look for whether students are talking about the topic and bringing in their own experiences. These observations show him students are on-task, as well as emotionally and cognitively engaged.

The other thing he watches out for is whether the activity meets the expressed expectations. For example, if a student says the activity is to describe the phases of the moon, but the actual task only requires him to match pictures to vocabulary, then the activity isn't actually requiring students to describe. In that example, the cognitive engagement expected did not match the cognitive engagement Almarode saw in the work students were doing.

Effective feedback on work is another crucial aspect of three-dimensional engagement. Almarode knows how difficult it is for teachers to grade all the assigned work, but he's also convinced by evidence that shows immediate feedback is crucial to cognitive engagement and thus learning.

"If you give effective feedback to students you double the rate of learning," Almarode said. "So here's my argument: cut back on the volume of assignments and increase your feedback on those you grade and you will double the rate of learning."

That feedback doesn't necessarily mean returning fully graded papers the next day. Instead, after students turn in their papers, Almarode suggests handing out three papers that demonstrate what it looks like to have met expectations, to still be developing, or to be below expectations. Alternatively, the teacher could hand out a rubric and ask students to score a work sample. Both of these strategies give students a sense of how they performed, and the feedback comes while the process of writing is still fresh.

"Give them something to actively engage with immediately," Almarode advises. This feedback strategy doesn't mean teachers shouldn't assign other work, but he suggests doing more peer feedback sessions or dialoguing about the assignment to free teachers up for high quality feedback on fewer assignments.

Almarode realizes that his suggestions and strategies around engagement often feel to teachers like one more thing to do. He believes everyone within the profession needs to be better at filtering out demands on teacher time that aren't the most important for classroom learning. He said it's time to let go of old structures like math time in the morning or long staff meetings to go over procedures. When time is precious it should be spent collaborating, reflecting, improving and prepping. Administrators have a crucial job in protecting teachers time, not adding to long list of things they "should do."

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How To Ensure Students Are Actively Engaged and Not Just Compliant | KQED

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"As a teacher, as you design a task you need at least three of those characteristics in there," Almarode said. More than that, the characteristics should be observable to anyone who walks into the room.

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Empower every teacher with an easy way to reflect on classroom instruction and celebrate moments of student brilliance.

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Text Talk: Engaging Readers in Purposeful Discussions 

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Text Talk: Engaging Readers in Purposeful Discussions 

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"Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." -Maya Angelou
I work on being a better educator by reading. Some of my favorite professional texts that I find myself revisiting yearly are Donalyn Miller's The Book Whisperer and Reading in the Wild. These books have helped me rethink my work as an educator and started me on my journey into creating reading instruction that builds REAL readers.

When I reflected on my work in the classroom, the very first thing I removed from literacy instruction was the reading log. I have used reading logs as a teacher and a student. Who invented this idea of nightly signatures to prove student reading? I'm sure it was with good intentions, but it does nothing for readers. Reading logs simply become a task to complete and creates mindless work for both the teacher and students.

Since throwing out reading logs, I have been asked many times: How do I know if my kids are reading? This blog post is my answer. Here are five things I do in my classroom that have helped keep readers accountable and thriving:

Reading Conferences

Reading conferences in my classroom are a time for me to check in on my students and have a discussion about their reading. I don't have a set schedule for these conferences. The goal is to make sure I'm meeting with readers every day. I meet with my students as they arrive in the morning, in-between small group instruction, and at the end of the day. On a good day, I will meet with three to five students. On a crazy day, I fight for at least one. My goal is to simply to make sure I'm meeting with students daily to talk about their reading. Plus, once it becomes part of your routine, the students will beg to meet with you.

I try to keep this process and discussion as natural as possible. When I sit down with a reader, I want to know three things:

1. Do they understand what they're reading?

2. What do they need from me to keep going?

3. Are they using the tools in place to build their reading life?

These guiding questions help me stay on track because sometimes I can get too chatty. Most importantly, it allows me to focus on what the reader is doing and what they need from me.
What to do when they're not reading?
Reluctant readers are going to happen. In those cases, we have to guide these readers onto a path of success by listening to their doubts, acknowledging that reading slumps happen, and showing them how to get back on track. It is important that we support these fragile readers with tools rather than punishment. When a student is not reading, I walk them over to my library and help them find a text they'll be successful with. Then we set goals together that we'll revisit at a later conference. This isn't easy work but it's necessary.

Help Students Keep Track of Their Reading Life

Showing students how to keep track of their reading life is a great way to build readers. While the list you see in the picture above might resemble a reading log, it serves different purposes. The book lists are completed by the students and used to notice patterns about their reading behaviors. This is a fantastic tool for reading conferences. These sheets can be used to discuss how long they are taking to complete a book, what genre they're continuously visiting, and to help remember all the great, and not so great books, they've experienced.

If you're looking for reading life tracking sheets, the ones I use are all adapted from Miller's Reading in the Wild. The appendix in the book is filled with templates to get you started. You can also access some of the documents on her SlideShare page by clicking here.

Talk About Reading

I believe it's important to talk about our reading life with students. Sharing moments from our personal reading journey shows the students how to discuss their reading life with others. I start the school year by sharing things such as:

How I buy books

Challenges I'm facing with the books

How I'm adjusting my schedule to fit in reading

Who recommended the book that I'm currently reading

Something new I'm trying to grow as a reader

I share these stories before a read-aloud, in the cafeteria, at recess, etc. Then, starting around the late fall, Friday mornings become "What's Going on in Your Reading Life?" This is quick 5-10 minute opening where students verbally share the highs and lows of their reading with their partners. I listen in on these conversations and make note of things I need to do to support readers.

Give Students Different Opportunities to Show Their Thinking

I ask students to complete some type of response in their reader's notebook weekly. This response represents their understanding of a mini-lesson and/or the book they have self-selected to read on their own. Instead of requiring one way to show their thinking, I offer students multiple ways to share their thoughts in their notebook:
Reading Response Letters
These are letters that are written to me or the author of the book about what they're reading. The letters are written in different ways and include reflections, questions, and connections the readers are having.

I encourage sketches in their notebooks because it supports my visual students and growing writers. When conferring with readers about their sketches, I ask them about their images and lead them to trying to add some writing to their work.
Thinking Blobs
Thinking Blobs is something I started doing with my students this year. It's a combination of reading response letters, sketches, and sticky notes on one page. I tell my students that when they come to part of a story that is worth remembering or a quote they really love, they should give it a blob. Soon, their pages start to fill up with many blobs that lead to great discussions.

Book Talks

I love book talks. A book talk is when a reader shares what a book is about and encourages others to add the book to their reading list. This is a great way to expand book knowledge, build your reading community, and get an insight into what your students are reading.

I ask my students to give a book talk at least once a month. I keep track of this on a simple spreadsheet to make sure everyone is getting his or her chance to shine. Some students will be ready to share books with no guidance, while others will need some coaching. For those students, give them guiding questions to help deliver their book talk:

What is the book about?

Why did you enjoy the book?

Why should someone else read the book?

Closing Thoughts

Teacher friends, I will leave you with a reminder that this work takes time to build, and patience. It's rare that classroom practices worth keeping work perfectly on the first attempt. The five ideas I shared have been used and reworked every year to meet the needs of the students. More importantly, this work gives my readers authentic reading experiences and helps them grow. As you move forward in your classroom, I encourage you to throw out any practices that bring no value to your instruction. When you know better, you do better, and our students deserve our very best.

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Goodbye Reading Log: 5 Tips to Keep Readers Accountable | Scholastic

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"Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." -Maya Angelou I work on being a better educator by reading. Some of my favorite professional texts that I find myself revisiting yearly are Donalyn Miller's The Book Whisperer and Reading in the Wild .

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Big Ideas Books for Student Silent Discussion

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Big Ideas Books for Student Silent Discussion

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Student Talk Survey from Notice and Note

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Student Talk Survey from Notice and Note

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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Student Discussion checklist from notice and note

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Student Discussion checklist from notice and note

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Student Assessment of talk from notice and note

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Student Assessment of talk from notice and note

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Improve Student Discourse from Notice and Note

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Improve Student Discourse from Notice and Note

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Monologic vs Dialogic Teacher Talk from Notice and Note

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Monologic vs Dialogic Teacher Talk from Notice and Note

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How Teaching Students to Ask better questions can transform classrooms

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How Teaching Students to Ask better questions can transform classrooms

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Helping Students Write Text Dependent Questions from notice and note

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Helping Students Write Text Dependent Questions from notice and note

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Teaching students to learn how to study

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A study conducted by Andrew Butler in 2010 compared how well students performed on a variety of tests when they either restudied material or took practices tests and restudied. He found that not only did students who studied and took a practice test remember more of the specific information than those who merely restudied, they also performed almost two times better on questions that required them to make inferences.

"Students get a really powerful boost in their learning and ability to utilize that knowledge in other contexts," Dunlosky said. Butler's study is often cited as an example that retrieval practice can lead to transfer both within a domain and to new ones. "Testing the content, just retrieving the content from memory, allows them to use that content flexibly later," Dunlosky said.

Blake Harvard teaches AP Psychology to students at James Clemens High School near Huntsville, Alabama. His students are mostly high achieving and college-bound, but still they often don't know much about effective study strategies. He regularly gives them low-stakes quizzes on material he covered a few days before to both force them to recall the information and to show them the gaps in their learning.

"I find often that with high schoolers it makes sense when they hear it so they believe they've got it, but if you ask them a couple of days later they don't know what they thought they did," Harvard said. He's always clear with students that the quizzes are a learning tool, something they can use in all their classes, not another score in the gradebook.

"If they know it's not in the gradebook the stress isn't there," Harvard said. And, paradoxically, when the quiz doesn't affect their grade, students are more willing to both take it and put some effort in. Harvard then tries to put the onus back on students to fill in the gaps, pointing them to banks of practice AP questions, for example. If everyone missed a concept, he'll revisit it.

He's pretty sure these practices are helping students because he has focused more on retrieval strategies this semester and on average his student test scores are up six percent. "There are a ton of variables there, but the one thing I know I've changed is my focus on these strategies," he said. He also hears from students that they find frequent quizzing effective enough that they are using the strategy in other classes.
DISTRIBUTED PRACTICE
If retrieval practice is the "what" then distributed practice is the "when" of smart studying. Spreading practice out over time is effective in many contexts. Often courses move linearly and teachers explain a concept, assign homework that requires students to practice that concept, and then move on. That is called mass practice and is less effective than spreading practice out in smaller amounts over time.

"Distributed practice really has a major impact on long term retention," Dunlosky said. "This is something we want students to do for the most important concepts." Students often intuitively know they should spread their studying out over time, but when the rubber hits the road they end up cramming. Teachers can help them ingrain better habits through the way they assign work and by talking about the benefits.

@MindShiftKQED @doctorwhy I do! Daily math quizzing (which mix old and new concepts), interleaving of phonics concepts. Second grade dual language.

- Callie Lowenstein (@calliepatton) April 20, 2017

In a study of seventh grade math, Doug Rohrer and colleagues focus on some of the trickiest concepts like slope, graphing equations, linear equations, and word problems with proportions. During the nine week study, one group of students received grouped practice of problems, while another spread different kinds of problems out over the nine weeks. Two weeks after the end of the trial period all students took a surprise test. Those who had spread their practice out got 72 percent of the problems correct on the test, while those who had done grouped practice only got 38 percent of the problems correct. Distributed practice is most effective when students repeat problems types across class days and in homework across weeks.

Fourth grade teacher Tony Zobeck tries to use both low-stakes quizzing and distributed practice regularly in his Kendell View Elementary classroom in Morrison, Colorado. He uses a tool called ClassFlow in math to embed questions into activities that both force students to recall old information and helps them see where they need more work. If they "red out" on an exit ticket Zobeck will review strategies they can use to relearn information that they're missing.

He finds interleaving or distributing practice harder to achieve on the timetable he's supposed to follow. His curriculum moves forward in a linear way, but he does his best to cue prior knowledge in his students and remind them of how new concepts connect to old ones.

@MindShiftKQED Hi, we sometimes use @getkahoot for review quiz and formative assessment.

- Alan Appleby (@alangappleby) April 19, 2017

"Unless you're not going to cover everything in the year, the best you can do is provide those prior links and keep pushing forward," Zobeck said. He's a member of the International Mind, Brain and Education Society, so he knows the constant march through content isn't always best for students. He said he's always trying to walk the line between what the structures of public education require of him and what he knows is best for how his students learn.

He's also constantly surprised that most of his fourth graders can't remember anything they've learned before. Many can't identify an adjective or a verb until it's reviewed; they even forget content they learned a month earlier. "It really is quite shocking," Zobeck said.

That's why he focuses on what he calls "thinking patterns," basically learning strategies, that he tries to mix into everything he does. His students get a lot of retrieval practice on things like how to tackle a text and how to stay organized. He hopes if those things are hardwired then at least his students will have the tools to relearn content more quickly if they forget it.
SUCCESSIVE RELEARNING
To supercharge both retrieval and distributed practice, Dunlosky and others have been building on the work of Harry Bahrick, an early pioneer of research into how to use the two strategies together. When students practice until they can get every answer correct and then repeat that process every few days, they encode the information much better.

In all of the retrieval and relearning strategies it's "important that the responses are eventually correct," Dunlosky said. "Students get a lot more bang for their buck when they come up with the right answer."

Dunlosky also points out that successive practice is the norm for many activities students are passionate about like sports or music. "Most of your students use successive relearning for almost everything they enjoy doing outside of classroom studies," he said. For example, a student learning to play an instrument will regularly practice a piece until it sounds good and then practice again a few days later. After the first practice session some notes or phrasing are forgotten, but when they are relearned during the next practice session they are encoded even more strongly.

@MindShiftKQED Our founder @Shredwarrior uses these for his guitar training program! All three techniques are very useful for music theory & practice!

- The OWL (@TheOWLconnect) April 20, 2017

Katherine Rawson, John Dunlosky and Sharon M. Sciartelli conducted a study in 2013 to see how well successive relearning works in the context of a real college classroom. For some units students learned psychology terms pertinent to what they were studying in class and had to write the definitions. They then got feedback on their answers and kept practicing until they got them all correct. They continued to do this over three successive relearning sessions. For other class units they were left to study as they usually would.

At the end of the semester, students took a multiple-choice final exam that required students to use their knowledge of the definitions in new situations. Students scored a letter grade and a half higher on items they had successively relearned, as opposed to ones that they had studied using their own tactics.

Even more telling, the researchers gave students another test three days later and a third test 24 days later. These follow-up exams were "recall" exams, where a concept term was listed and students had to write its meaning. Rawson and colleagues found "devastating memory loss" in the control group, from 72 percent correct to 24 percent correct after three days. Those same students got only 17 percent correct 24 days later. Students in the successive relearning condition had very little loss.

The researchers were also interested in whether they would see similarly positive improvements when the study schedule wasn't tightly controlled, so they conducted a follow-up extension study. They gave students in the trial condition a flash drive with a suggested study schedule. Students also received reminder emails to use the program. In both supervised and unsupervised conditions students showed durable learning.

STUDENTS NEED COACHING

While these practices work well for what might be termed "superficial learning" for a test, they also seem to help students make inferences and connections within and across domains. They are some of the most studied and well-researched learning strategies and yet most students don't use them.

When students report on the study strategies they use most often many say they reread the textbook or their notes, underline, and highlight. None of those approaches are as effective or efficient as others they could be using. Summarizing, another popular strategy, is mostly good for memorization, but doesn't create transfer. But often students have never been taught effective study strategies and experience deep frustration when they put hours of work into studying and see no results in their performance.

That's where teachers can have an outsized impact by structuring class time and homework to include strategies like retrieval, spaced practice and successive relearning. Not only will students do better in that class itself, they may learn strategies that will serve them well throughout their academic career. Teachers like Blake Harvard take this practice a step further, making sure students understand why the strategies fit how the brain learns and emphasizing that students can use the same strategies beyond his class.

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Why Teachers Should Help Students Learn Effective Study Strategies

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A study conducted by Andrew Butler in 2010 compared how well students performed on a variety of tests when they either restudied material or took practices tests and restudied. He found that not only did students who studied and took a practice test remember more of the specific information than those who merely restudied, they also performed almost two times better on questions that required them to make inferences.

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Choose from a wide variety of shapes to create diagrams and charts. Free from Google.

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by TeachThought Staff

Bloom's Taxonomy was a remarkable attempt to create a system of learning that focuses on how people learn and organize content around those natural aptitudes.

Created by Benjamin Bloom in 1956, he created a method to differentiate questions in the education system. Here you will find an enriched list of blog posts, apps, tools, videos and strategies to help educators become more proficient with the system.
See also 10 Team-Building Games That Promote Critical Thinking
This list delivers 12 posters for teachers. Each offers a slightly different visual focus, but all, obviously, ultimately say the same thing. Plus they're pretty.

Primarily for the educator, this source gives a historical view of Bloom's Taxnomy of 1956 compared with Anderson & Krathwohl's methodology in 2000.

Bloom's In Student-Friendly Language : This source illustrates a basic, functional graphic description of Bloom's Taxonomy for students to use.

Simple suggestions for applying the taxonomy to kindergarten-level children.

Wikipedia on Bloom's: Not a ton of info here, but this is useful for the reference section at the bottom.

Special webinar given about the taxonomy by a prominent 21 st Century classroom specialist on how to apply the principles to modern learning.

PLP Network: Poses the view of focusing more on creating using Bloom's Taxonomy.

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50 Resources For Teaching With Bloom's Taxonomy -

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50 Resources For Teaching With Bloom's Taxonomy by TeachThought Staff Bloom's Taxonomy was a remarkable attempt to create a system of learning that focuses on how people learn and organize content around those natural aptitudes. Created by Benjamin Bloom in 1956, he created a method to differentiate questions in the education system.