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Teachers have long known that feeling safe and secure in school helps students focus their energy on learning. And the research bears that out: A 2018 study found that when teachers deliberately foster a sense of belonging by greeting each student at the door of the class, they see "significant improvements in academic engaged time and reductions in disruptive behavior."

Edutopia covered that study last year, and we've shared many other ideas from teachers for ensuring that every student in the classroom feels like they belong.

Some of the activities below take less than five minutes. They're divided up among the grades, but many can apply across all of the years from kindergarten to 12th grade.

Elementary School

Shout-Outs: This is a quick way for students to celebrate each other for doing a job well or for attempting something difficult. Shout-outs can be incorporated at any point in a class. First-grade teacher Valerie Gallagher of Providence, Rhode Island, rings a chime when she wants to get the class's attention to ask who has a shout-out.

"It's not just me as the teacher saying, 'You're doing well'-it's a way for them to interact with each other and celebrate positivity," says Gallagher.

Friendly Fridays: Elizabeth Peterson, a fourth-grade teacher in Amesbury, Massachusetts, uses Friendly Fridays as a simple way for students to lift each other and themselves up. Peterson has her students write a friendly, anonymous note to a classmate, practice using positive self-talk, or use storytelling to give a peer a pep talk.

Sharing Acts of Kindness: Fifth-grade teacher Marissa King, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, shares two activities that encourage kindness. In the first, the teacher gives students secret kindness instructions, such as writing an anonymous note to a peer who is struggling in one of their classes.

The second activity revolves around noticing others' acts of kindness: When a student sees a peer tidying up in the classroom, for example, they can post a thank you note on a shared digital "kindness wall." Both activities coach students to be kind to their peers in the hope that they'll begin to practice kindness unprompted.

Middle School

Paper Tweets: To build community in her seventh-grade classroom, Jill Fletcher of Kapolei Middle School in Kapolei, Hawaii, created a bulletin board modeled on Twitter. Students use a template to create a profile, and they enlist at least three followers-a friend, an acquaintance, and someone they don't interact with much.
Courtesy of Jill Fletcher
When the class does this activity-which takes about 45 minutes to set up the first time-Fletcher has them respond to prompts about their current mood or new things happening in their lives, and then their followers respond.

Class Norms: Bobby Shaddox, a seventh-grade social studies teacher at King Middle School in Portland, Maine, has his students develop a set of norms for themselves-adjectives that describe them as a community of learners. Having students come up with their own norms creates "a pathway toward belonging for every single student in that class," says Dr. Pamela Cantor, founder of Turnaround for Children.

"Instead of a top-down list of rules that a teacher gives a class, these are words that we generated together," says Shaddox. "It helps us own the behavior in the classroom."

Group Salutes: A moment shared between two or more students at the beginning or end of an activity, a Group Salute is a teacher-prompted interaction that is a quick, low-prep way to cultivate community. The shared gesture can be physical-like a high five-or social-a teacher could ask students to express gratitude to their group members.

There's some interesting data supporting this idea: Researchers found that NBA teams whose players touch the most early in the season-high fives, fist bumps, etc.-had the best records later for the season.

High School

Morning Meetings: Morning meetings have long been a staple of elementary classrooms, but they can help students in all grades transition into class. Riverside School, a pre-K to 12th-grade school in Ahmedabad, India, uses a version of morning meetings at every grade level as "a pure relationship-building time." Bonding exercises led by teachers or students include physical or social and emotional activities, or discussions of sensitive topics like bullying.

Appreciation, Apology, Aha: As a quick, daily closing activity, students gather in a circle and share an appreciation of one of their peers, an apology, or a light bulb moment. The teacher models the activity by sharing and then asks for volunteers to speak.

"Those types of appreciations and community recognitions can go a long way toward building bonds," explains Aukeem Ballard, an educator with Summit Public Schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"A low-stakes thorn might be 'I feel tired.' Yet many students choose to share more personal items, like 'My thorn is that my dog is sick and I'm really worried about her,'" writes Alex Shevrin Venet, a former school leader at a trauma-informed high school.

Snowball Toss: Students anonymously write down one of their stressors on a piece of paper, crumple it up, gather in a circle, and throw their paper balls in a mock snowball fight. When that's done, they pick up a snowball and read it aloud.

"The idea is that we're moving around. We're able to have fun, laugh, scream, be loud, and then have that discussion about stress," says Marcus Moore, an advisory leader at Urban Prep School in Chicago.

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These community-building ideas for the classroom can help teachers ensure that students in every grade feel like they belong.

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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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Student-Centered Learning: Building Agency and Engagement

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Center for the Professional Education of Teachers

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Amplify small group instruction and strategic student grouping with this interactive approach.

​Three years ago, we were quickly shifting our classrooms to online platforms as instruction was going remote for an indefinite amount of time. We tried to keep teaching throughout the pandemic and survived the snafus that happened throughout the day. (Remember that time you thought you were muted, but you weren't? Bleh!) Our learning curves for online teaching grew exponentially, and many of us have incorporated the most promising practices into our classrooms today, such as using Google Docs for group projects or editing and commenting on a student paper in live time.

Although there is an educational app for just about everything, we suggest resisting the urge to default back to solely online learning (even while in person), and instead consider the unique benefits of being together in time and space. Let's design opportunities for students to collaborate, and embrace the physical classroom by creating learning opportunities that take students away from the Chromebooks and into a live setting.

Characterized by movement, interaction, and small group learning, station teaching is one of the six established co-teaching models that takes advantage of being together within the four walls of a classroom. As with all models, station teaching comes with its own unique benefits, challenges, and logistics - let's walk through this method in an effort to support you and your co-teacher in planning and facilitating this meaningful approach to learning.

What is station teaching?

Station teaching is when content and instruction are divided into distinct components or strands. Students are divided into equally sized, typically heterogeneous groups.

Each teacher teaches a specific part of the lesson/content to different groups of students as they rotate between teachers. Students also rotate through center(s) where they complete an independent task.

​Adapt established co-teaching models
Explore co-teaching models that have been tested, tweaked, and turnkeyed, and imagine how you might adapt these models for use in your own classroom as you find ways to leverage the strengths and skills of each teacher in service of high-quality instruction. Learn more →

What promises does this model offer?

​Station teaching provides an opportunity for smaller group instruction and strategic student grouping.
One of the more obvious benefits of station teaching is that teachers have an opportunity to work with a small group of students, thus allowing for more responsiveness to individual questions, preferences, and needs. Stations also allow us to leverage the benefits of strategic student grouping, where teachers are intentional in the way that students are grouped together in service of the learning goal. Typically, heterogeneous groups, in which students with a variety of learning traits and needs work together, work best for the station teaching model; at the independent stations in particular, students have the opportunity to learn from and teach each other.

Station teaching allows for exploration of a topic or skill through multiple perspectives, entry points, and modes of expression.
In Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a framework designed to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities, one of the guiding principles is that learners differ in the ways that they perceive and comprehend information that is presented to them. Therefore, it is essential that teachers provide students with multiple means of representation of content. Stations easily allow us to provide representation of a topic in multiple ways; each station could focus on a different text, visual, or audio source. Similarly, each station can allow students to express their learning through a different medium or modality; another important principle of UDL.

Station teaching allows the opportunity for natural "brain breaks" and movement.
Research has shown that regular, short breaks in the classroom can help students increase their focus and reduce stress. With shorter "chunks" of academic engagement and clear, natural transitions between tasks, the station teaching model inherently incorporates breaks for students. The time it takes for students to travel to the next station could be leveraged to provide students with the physical or social engagement they might need to sustain focus: perhaps you play a song that students enjoy, or invite them to do a particular stretch.

Station teaching can help strengthen a co-teaching relationship by providing the opportunity for shared ownership of planning and facilitation.
Anyone who has co-taught before knows that it can be difficult to find a groove in which both teachers are easily and equally sharing the workload of lesson planning and facilitation; obstacles like lack of common planning time, unclear goals, and difference in teaching styles and preferences can often get in the way. If you and your co-teacher are finding yourself in a stage of your team development in which roles feel lopsided or undefined, a stations lesson can be a helpful way to help redistribute some responsibility. The ways in which content and instruction are divided in station teaching offer a clear path for delegating planning and teaching duties; each teacher can be responsible for the designing and facilitation of one station (with coordination and communication, of course!).

What are some potential pitfalls?

​Noise level and space limitations can create challenges.
With several groups of students working on different tasks simultaneously, some students (and teachers!) might find the level of noise and movement in the room to be an adjustment. Preparing students for this might be helpful; you might say something like, "Today's class may be a bit louder than our typical class, but there will also be quiet moments at the end of the stations so you can collect your thoughts via writing."

It's also helpful to think strategically about where each station is set up in the room; having the two teacher stations as far away from each other as possible is often the way to go, since teachers often have the loudest voices in the room!

Careful attention must be paid to pacing.
In contrast to learning centers, where students are moving between learning engagements at their own pace, station teaching is often characterized by coordinated rotation, where everyone moves on to the next station at the same time. This means that all stations need to take roughly the same amount of time, which can be challenging to anticipate in planning. All stations should have flexible tasks that can be shortened or extended with enrichment options or additional discussion questions, depending on how quickly a particular group engages in them.

Not all content is well-suited for stations.
One of the trickier dynamics of station teaching is that not all students will begin their learning in the same place; some will begin at the independent station, while others will begin at the station led by co-teacher A, while still others will begin at the station by co-teacher B. Because of this, it's important that the topics or tasks at each station are non sequential - that one station is not a necessary prerequisite to engage with another. Therefore, stations are not ideal for topics or skills that require a specific or strict sequencing of tasks or texts. It's also not ideal for tasks that require deeper and more sustained investigation or attention, since time spent at each station is relatively brief compared to a full class period. Rather, stations work great for topics that are broad with multiple strands, perspectives, or approaches, or for introductory explorations or final reviews.

How can independent work be structured?

​ Recent research has highlighted the benefits of letting kids do things on their own, and station teaching offers the opportunity for practicing independence.

We have generally found independent stations should be built on familiar territory: a concept, graphic organizer, or task directions that students have seen before. Be sure to have all of the supplies ready at the independent station, and try not to overcomplicate the directions (this sounds obvious but can be challenging)!

Here are just a few ideas for independent work:

Cut up key terms and ask students to research the terms (using dictionary or technology) and take notes on them using Cornell notes or a Frayer Model

Practice doing more problem sets on a problem set they have previously been taught

View images and ask students to take notes on what they see and wonder about

Watch a brief silent video with closed captions and ask students to write their thoughts/ takeaways

Read a grade level (or slightly below) engaging text on the topic, and ask students to annotate it (if this is something they are familiar with)

Write a letter or explain a concept they already know that relates to the overarching topic of the stations lesson

What can this model look like in action?

Given the promises and potential pitfalls of this co-teaching model, we can determine the kinds of lessons and learning objectives that will be best suited for this instructional approach. Here are a few examples:

Students engage in stations that support them with the skills of determining the main idea of a text. At one teacher-led station, students are creating titles for chunks of text. At the second teacher-led station, students are reading a short text and asking: what is this story mostly about? At the two independent stations, students are sorting pictures into categories, or listening to an audio book and answering multiple choice questions.

To begin a new unit, students are engaging in an opening inquiry around the question: Why are surface area and volume important concepts in everyday life? At one teacher-led station, students make observations about water displacement when an object is dropped in a glass of water, and make predictions on whether the tray will be able to catch the displaced water; at another, students are tasked with wrapping a present; at another, they must choose the best tupperware container for leftover "food." After visiting all the stations, students reflect on the guiding question and discuss with their peers.

Historians often teach an era through a variety of lenses, such as the culture, the key events and figures, and the different perspectives of an era; this approach lends itself easily to a station lesson. When studying the Progressive Era, for example, students can investigate: How did the growth in industrialization and urbanization lead to positive and negative changes in American society? At one teacher-led station, students can look at images from the time period (from photojournalists such as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine) and notice the subjects and stories these photographers may be trying to tell about urban life in the early twentieth century. At an independent station, students can define key terms, such as "muckraker," "progressivism," "industrialization," "modernization," and The Gospel of Wealth. Students can look up these terms and record what they learn in the form of Cornell Notes or a Frayer Model. At another teacher-led station, the teacher can facilitate a reading of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle or The Story of Ida B. Wells, and ask students to make meaning of the text, and take notes on what the text conveys to the reader. After visiting all three stations, students can compare their notes and discuss the positive and negative impact of industrialization and urbanization during the U.S.'s Progressive Era.

The devil is in the details

The more you and your co-teacher can plan in advance for the logistics of station teaching, the more successful your lesson will likely be. How long will students spend at each station? How long will they be given to transition between stations? Which teacher will be responsible for keeping time and cuing the students? How will students know where to go next? (We suggest a slide or poster indicating the direction of rotation for that one!)

Preparing all the materials in advance and having a clear and brief set of directions at each station is crucial (particularly at the independent station).

While this article details the logistics of station teaching with an eye on co-teaching, we cannot overemphasize the importance of designing opportunities for students to interact with each other and with the physical space of the classroom in
all classrooms. We know that students missed years of face-to-face interactions due to the pandemic; we suggest being proactive and creating moments for students to embrace a shared space and interact with each other in a low-stakes way.

With all these dynamics and logistics, your stations lesson might not go perfectly the first time; don't give up! We encourage you to reflect on the challenges, tweak it, and try it again. Stations might be a bit of a learning curve for your students as well, but as with any classroom protocol or routine, station rotation and engagement are skills that can be explicitly taught, scaffolded, and practiced. It's our opinion that the work pays off, as we've found this approach to be an interactive and engaging way to punctuate particularly compelling topics in a curriculum.
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Station Teaching: Elevating Lessons for Every Grade Level

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Amplify small group instruction and strategic student grouping with this interactive approach.

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Making the Declaration of Independence Come Alive

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With a solid understanding of how people process information, teachers can use evidence-based strategies to guide student learning.

Benedetto Cristofani / The iSpot

Understanding how to best support students can be confusing and complex. To deal with this complexity, we develop naive theories and unscientific beliefs about what helps students learn. The science of learning has tested many of these beliefs, and evidence now shows that some of our most common beliefs about learners are wrong. These misconceptions about learning may cause us to waste some of our instructional time and effort-or, even worse, impair students' learning.

Below, I will describe three common myths about learning, debunk those myths, and reinterpret those ideas according to our most up-to-date evidence.

Myth 1: every student has a 'Learning Style'

Many teachers believe that students have individual learning styles and that students' learning is optimized when instruction is tailored to their style.

Learners often express a preference for a specific modality of encountering information. For example, some students may say that they are verbal learners, while others profess to learn best with visual information. Sometimes, people theorize learning styles even more broadly, including concrete or abstract learners; active or reflective learners; and analytic, creative, or practical learners. There are countless unscientific tests online that will assign students a learning style-schools can even purchase expensive tests that will divide students into different style categories.

Yet, no good evidence suggests that stable and useful learning styles of students exist. Furthermore, there is zero evidence that students learn better when information is presented in a way that meshes with their chosen preferences. According to research, trying to tailor teaching to match each learner's preferred mode of processing is a waste of time and resources.

Evidence-based concept: Instead, research suggests that students will learn, remember, and apply novel information better if they process that information in multiple different ways. Processing information in multiple and varied forms (including multiple senses, abstract and concrete representations, diverse examples, and varied activities) creates elaborated and detailed memories, which enhances the long-term retention and generalization of that knowledge.

Using it in the classroom: Students who learn fractions with math symbols, words, visuals, and kinesthetic experiences should master fractions better than students who only experience a single approach. Similarly, students processing French translations acquire the language better if they see, hear, touch, and taste food translations.

Myth 2: Testing should be used only to assess student learning

Teachers and students alike often view tests as a necessary evil-a means of assessing (both formatively and summatively) what students do and do not know. Indeed, tests are critical indicators of what students have mastered. But tests are useful for so much more!

Evidence-based concept: Numerous research studies now show that tests do more than just assess memory: Tests change memory. Tests exemplify a form of memory retrieval, in which students retrieve information from long-term memory to answer questions. Retrieving information from long-term memory changes the memory in a way that makes the information resistant to forgetting in the future. In fact, research shows that one of the best ways to ensure that you remember information is to repeatedly practice retrieving that information from long-term memory.

Beyond just helping students remember information, practicing retrieval helps students organize information in their minds, apply learned information to novel problems and questions, recognize what they have understood and what they haven't, and even learn more information from upcoming lessons.

Using it in the classroom: Teachers can prompt retrieval practice in countless and varied ways (which can also help teachers assess student mastery). Students can do a "brain dump," where they write down everything they remember at the end of a class, solve a start-up question from last week using just their memories, create a mind map from memory of a text, answer questions on personal whiteboards, draw an illustration of main ideas from the lesson from memory, and more.

Retrieval practice boosts learning whether it is graded or ungraded, whether corrective feedback is provided or not (but more feedback is better), and across many ages and disciplines. The only required feature is that students retrieve the information from memory (rather than rereading, repeating, highlighting, or recopying information). If we want students to be able to retrieve information in the future, it makes sense that they should practice retrieving that information now. Practice makes perfect, after all.

Myth 3: Concepts that are easily learned are easily remembered

Teachers and students typically believe that if ideas are quickly or easily learned, they will be remembered in the long term. This "easily learned, easily remembered" belief is widespread, and it affects teachers' and students' choices about learning activities. Learners choose study techniques that allow quick acquisition of new information, including rereading or recopying notes (rather than attempting retrieval), focusing on a single concept at a time (rather than mixing together similar ideas), and practicing an idea in a single learning session (rather than distributing practice across many sessions).

Evidence-based concept: Techniques that speed up the acquisition of ideas frequently speed up the forgetting of these ideas. In other words, research shows that easily learned often means quickly forgotten.

Using it in the classroom: Some difficulties during learning help students remember information in the long run. Slowing down learning by creating desirable difficulties can create better long-term retention than easier acquisition.

For example, practicing retrieval increases errors during learning and is more effortful than rereading or recopying notes, but it produces big learning benefits over time. Similarly, students who answer a series of the same type of math problem in a row (blocking instruction) make fewer errors during learning than students answering a mixture of different problems ( interleaving instruction). However, students who answer a mix of different problems ultimately remember more. Finally, studying a concept in a single session (massing instruction) feels easier and faster than spreading out that learning across smaller, distributed sessions ( distributed instruction). Even so, distributing practice across time is very beneficial in the end.

There are important caveats here, though. Struggle in and of itself is not useful. Introducing unnecessary complexity or withholding instructions increases students' struggle but does not support learning. In contrast, struggle during learning can be productive if learners are struggling over important aspects of the problem. For example, learning how to decipher between similar math problems is productive struggle because learning how to distinguish similar problems is important. Retrieving information from long-term memory is also productive struggle because we want learners to be able to retrieve information in the future.

To ensure that students appreciate the benefits of this extra effort during learning, teachers can help students interpret struggle to mean that they are learning and view wrestling with ideas as indicating growth (rather than as indicating a limitation of their abilities).

Supporting students' learning is a complicated challenge. We often develop intuitive ideas about what works best, but sometimes these intuitions can misguide us. Correcting learning myths and aligning our practices with evidence-based approaches can enable more effective and efficient instruction.

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3 Common Myths About Learning-and What Teachers Can Do Instead

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By exploring three common myths about how students learn, teachers can find find out more about how information processing and memory work.

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Listen to my interview with Marisa Thompson (transcript):
Sponsored by Peergrade and 3Doodler

So much of the learning we do comes from texts: articles, textbooks, novels, and all kinds of online publications. Sometimes, those texts come in less traditional forms; in fact, our use of the word "text" has broadened over time to include things like films, images, and even diagrams. Regardless of what form they come in, texts make up the bulk of how our students experience learning.

But too often, when we assign texts to students, we find that they don't experience them with much depth. One reason for that may be that we don't set them up to do that. In many text-based classes (English, history, science), the learning cycle often consists of (1) consuming a section of the text, (2) answering teacher-created questions about the text, (3) taking a test after several sections have been completed.

For years, high school English teacher Marisa Thompson followed this same programming, and got typical results: Some students did the required work, but never seemed particularly invested in the books themselves. Others completed the questions unevenly, sometimes not answering them all, other times copying work from their peers. And when students didn't do the work, they got calls home and office referrals.

As this pattern repeated itself year after year, Thompson became more frustrated: The texts themselves were wonderful, but students weren't experiencing them the way they were meant to be experienced. Instead, they had shallow interactions with them, doing whatever surface work had to be done to get a grade.

Finally, she started experimenting with a different approach, and the way she teaches texts now is completely different from the way she used to. Her current approach, which she calls TQE, is similar to Socratic Seminar, where students lead a discussion on a given text, but with a few twists. Since implementing this new approach, Thompson has seen her students reading much more than they used to, and with much more depth than ever before. They are having college-level conversations about books in class, and for the first time, they seem excited about the books they're reading.

On top of that, Thompson's prepping and grading work for these class sessions is down to almost nothing.

What I love about this method, and why I'm sharing it here, is that I think it could be applied in a lot of different areas, not just with the study of novels. In any class where students need to read a text in order to learn, something along these lines could be implemented, and I think you'll find that the learning in your classroom gets much richer as a result. So as you read about TQE, think about how you might be able to apply it in your content area.

The Problem

As an English teacher, Thompson found that her students were experiencing books in a very shallow, grade-focused way.

"(I would) send students home, maybe get them started on Chapter 1, and then, Hey guys, go home and read Chapter 2. Come on back and we'll talk about it, and here's your list of questions; you're going to have a reading quiz. I realized I wasn't really assessing their reading with homework and quizzes. I was assessing whether or not they did their homework questions."

This method not only diminished the value of the books students were reading, it also led to other problems. "It made reading seem like a hassle," Thomspon says. "I started getting a bunch of cheating. One year I had 10 kids copy off each other. It turned this amazing story-this beautiful novel that everybody should read and enjoy and love-into a discipline problem."

Early Changes

Knowing something had to change, Thompson decided to try grading students only on whether their participation in class indicated that they had read the book.

"I said, 'Look. We're going to read this book, and we're just going to read it and talk about it. You're not going to have study questions. You're not going to have any reading quizzes. But I'm going to know if you read or not. I'm going to know.'"

These early discussions were similar to Socratic Seminar, where students came with questions and Thompson mostly observed. When a student participated in a way that demonstrated that he or she had read the book, their names would be crossed off of a chart. "And that was it," Thompson says. "The standard says, Be able to read and analyze at grade level. And if they're doing that, I mean, yeah, cross their name off. Move on."

For students who scored low on the discussion or who weren't initially comfortable with active participation, Thompson offered alternative means of assessment. "I said, hey, if I'm wrong with your score, then we need to come up with some sort of alternative: They were used to taking annotations, taking notes on their thoughts while they read-you can show me those. You can sit down and have a conversation just one-on-one, or you can take a test. So if you got an eight out of 10, and you're like, 'No, I want the 10 out of 10,' I have a multiple-choice test on the book."

Most of the time, Thompson's initial score on the discussion turned out to be accurate. "I did have a lot of students who had a B for their assessment, and they're like, No, I want the A. Great. And they took the test and then it was cute, because they were like Yeah, I didn't really read all of it. So my assessment was, on average, about 3 or 4 percent higher than what they were normally getting on their tests."

Right away, Thompson started to see changes in how her students were reading. "I had students who started reading more than they were assigned, and they were finishing the book early," she says. Some were even reading ahead.

Over time, Thompson refined her approach adding small-group time before the large-group discussions, offering scaffolding to help students develop better questions, and structuring student contributions so that the richest questions got the most discussion time.

These changes have so elevated the level of discourse that Thompson sometimes feels like she's teaching college class. "And that's exactly what I tell them: 'What we just did, that was a collegiate literature course. That was amazing. You could walk into a college course and have this discussion.' And you can see that they're enjoying it."

The TQE Method

Here is the approach Thompson uses now, step by step:

1. Students Complete Assigned Reading at Home

Usually, this will be a segment of a longer text, like a few chapters in a novel. Students who show up having not completed the reading are invited to finish up in the hall during small group discussion (step 2) to catch up. They are welcome to return to class for the discussion when they finish.

2. Small Group Discussions (15 minutes)

When they arrive in class, students get into small groups, where they have 15 minutes to share thoughts, lingering questions, and epiphanies (TQEs) they have about the reading. Early in the year, Thompson provides stems to help students generate these (see below), encouraging them to move from the more simplistic ideas on the left to the more complex ones on the right.

3. TQEs on the Board

By the time the 15 minutes is up, each group needs to choose their top 2 TQEs from the group and write them on the board. Although these are meant to serve as the basis for the group discussion, they are not necessarily used as is.

"If they put something on there that is not at the quality or as thought-provoking as we need it to be for the class to discuss, we'll edit it together, the 40 of us," Thompson explains. "So it becomes a writing lesson."

Thompson also insists that when discussing a text, students use the author's name. When discussing Of Mice and Men, for example, she started by having students repeat the name "Steinbeck" five times. "I love Lenny and George. I love Lenny," she told them. "but he's totally fictional. So when you start asking questions like, 'Why did George do that?' George doesn't exist."

Instead, she has students practice asking questions like, "Why did hat theme is Steinbeck have George do that?" "W Steinbeck trying to convey to the rest of us by having his character do that?"

"It's not about the character," she explains. "It's not about the character's motivation, it's the author's purpose in providing that motivation for the character."

4. Class Discussion of TQEs

Thompson then moderates a whole-class discussion of the reading, using the TQEs that have been written on the board. This takes about 40 minutes of class time-she teaches on a block schedule, so there's plenty of time to dig in. When the class is actively studying a novel, they will have these conversations in every class meeting.

As for grading, Thompson simply records when students participate, and that's it. "I have a chart with their little pictures," she explains, "and I cross them off as I go. So I'm not necessarily grading them every single day. My student Sally might have participated a ton one day, and skipped the next day. But my standard-based grading says she is reading and analyzing at at least grade level. I don't need to score each of my 40 kids every single day."

"And the amount of planning is nil," Thompson adds. " I'm not creating, I'm not copying, I'm not collecting, I don't need to waste my time. My prep is reading before bed every night."

What Student-Centered Learning Looks Like

"We have all these really great aphorisms, these quotes about, 'Students should own their learning,' and 'Empower students,'" Thompson observes. "And it's like, well that's great, but how in the heck do we do that?"

Since starting the TQE process, Thompson has seen true student-centered learning in action: Students are in charge of the content of the discussions, and the ability to participate fully has become its own motivator for completing the homework.

"The peer pressure of Everyone's discussing this book- that becomes cool. To have an idea, to have an opinion. So the student comes in, and all of a sudden it's, "Wait, I read that part, and I think this," you know? And you want to talk about empowering a student? You just turned that student into a part of the classroom community." ♦

To read Marisa Thompson's original blog post about TQEs, click here. To read more of her work, visit her blog at UnlimitedTeacher.com.

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Deeper Class Discussions with the TQE Method

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Listen to my interview with Marisa Thompson (transcript): Sponsored by Peergrade and 3Doodler So much of the learning we do comes from texts: articles, textbooks, novels, and all kinds of online publications.

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Assignments that are bigger than a lesson and smaller than a unit are a good way to experiment with inquiry-based learning.

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Sponsored by The Modern Classrooms Project.

When we have a group gathered together, like a class of students, an audience sitting in an auditorium, or even something small like a book club, a department meeting, or a Zoom call, the person running the show will sometimes start by asking the group a question like, "How's everyone doing?"

And what do they often get? Silence. Nothing. Maybe one or two extroverts will offer a word to break the awkward silence. But it pretty much never generates any kind of quality response.

Because what's supposed to happen? Am I, as a student in this class, going to (A) take the floor and respond just for myself? Like, "Thanks for asking, I'm doing ok." Because that would feel like I'm sort of assuming that I should be the center of attention, right? And then (B) there's the question of honesty. The most common response to "How ya doin'?" is something along the lines of great, fine, and so on, regardless of whether it's actually true. The true answer is usually a lot more complicated. If a good friend asked me the same question, I might spend a few minutes going into detail about how things are actually going, but I wouldn't do it in response to a teacher, in front of a whole group of my peers.

To be fair, I think most of the time the person asking the question means for it to be rhetorical. They are not really expecting an answer. But I have seen more than once where a teacher or presenter will respond to the silence with something along the lines of, "Okay, you guys are pretty quiet today." As if the participants are deliberately holding back. The same thing happens when we ask, "Any questions?" and get nothing, but then discover later that people actually did have questions; they just didn't ask.

What's most likely happening in cases like this is that there are plenty of people in the room who have something to say; they just haven't been asked the right question.

In 2019 I wrote a post called When You Get Nothing But Crickets, and it goes into more detail about this problem. For now, I'll give you three small shifts you can make that will give you much better results than asking the whole room a question:

1. Ask one person. Instead of asking everyone what they think about a topic, like "What did you guys think about yesterday's speaker?", try asking one person directly. Then they'll know you're talking to them and will be more likely to answer.

2. Ask a direct question. Although they're well-intended, questions like "How are you?" or "How was your weekend?" are often interpreted as general niceties to which you're supposed to just answer with vaguely positive responses. If you switch to a question that has a more clear answer, like "What did you do this weekend?" you'll probably get a more interesting response, something that might lead to more of a conversation.

3. Ask FOR questions instead of asking IF there are any questions. I've given this advice in lots of other places, but it works so well it's worth repeating. Instead of saying, "Any questions?" ask "What questions do you have?" This shift sends an important message that questions are welcome, natural, and expected, not an inconvenience. When teachers make this change, they often find that student hands go up with a lot more frequency.

See all EduTips here.

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EduTip 22: Stop asking questions to the whole room.

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Sponsored by The Modern Classrooms Project . When we have a group gathered together, like a class of students, an audience sitting in an auditorium, or even something small like a book club, a department meeting, or a Zoom call, the person running the show will sometimes start by asking the group a question like, ...

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The popular lesson framework can help keep remote teaching manageable while encouraging students to develop self-reliance.

Teachers across the country are saying that planning for distance learning is taking longer than it does to plan for in-person learning. But it doesn't have to. Simple changes in pedagogy, grounded in the adoption of the workshop model, can reduce unnecessary work and hopefully make your planning for distance learning more sustainable.

The workshop model is an instructional practice that consists of three parts: a mini-lesson, a workshop, and a debrief. This model is commonly used in Lucy Calkins's Reading and Writing Workshop, and the goal of the model is to support learners in reading and writing independently.

How the Workshop Model Works

In the mini-lesson, teachers model a skill, strategy, or step of a project. The key to an effective mini-lesson is brevity, but that doesn't have to mean direct instruction. While some lessons may necessitate direct instruction, I suggest erring on the side of open-ended mini-lessons that introduce flexible strategies or thinking routines that students can use on their own during independent work or small-group time.

In the workshop portion, students work on their own or in small groups. During distance learning, we must make space for small-group learning-offering students much-needed socialization-but we also know that small-group learning offers opportunities for individualized feedback and the facilitation of learning conversations between students. The challenges of distance learning also mean that we must increase our students' independent time-if we don't, they'll end up staring at their screens, listening to whole-group lectures for hours on end. Independent work cuts down on this passive screen time while building students' self-reliance.

In the final portion of the workshop model, students come back together as a whole group for a reflection or debrief. They may share samples of their work from small groups or independent work, or share successes and challenges. In some cases, I've had students fill out a Google form to tell me what worked and what didn't work from the day's lesson. It was important for my students to know that I was learning how to teach from a distance, too, and that their feedback would help me learn how to do this even better.

Using the Workshop Model to Build Independence

In Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, Zaretta Hammond encourages teachers to teach for independence. She argues that too many pedagogies intended to help marginalized students, specifically students of color, engender dependent learning habits, which operate in opposition to equity and student liberation. By leveraging the workshop model, we can teach with student independence as an input to educational equity and student liberation.

This necessitates more than a change in pedagogy-it requires teachers to reposition themselves in their classrooms as guides for students, as opposed to lecturers. In a writing workshop, this may look like modeling a strategy for revising, such as Aimee Buckner's "lift-a-line" strategy from Notebook Know-How: Strategies for the Writer's Notebook, in which students identify lines in their writing where they could describe things with greater detail. During the mini-lesson, I model for my students how to do this by generating lists of words for easy recall and demonstrating aloud how I might incorporate these into my writing.

For example, one day I shared the line, "The three pandas pranced through the forest," and asked students to brainstorm details about the pandas and the forest, reminding them to think about all of their senses. This took the first 15 minutes of an hourlong block. For the next 40 minutes, I conferenced with small groups using Google Hangouts, and then we concluded with a five-minute reflection on how the writing workshop block went.

In order to keep students accountable, I requested that they upload pictures of their work to Seesaw each day, simply to ensure that they accomplished something. This also helped me gauge the effectiveness of my mini-lesson and which students I needed to prioritize working with in the following day's small groups.

Teaching From a Distance

I began to wonder in April and May if one of the reasons why distance teaching was challenging and unsustainable for so many educators was outdated pedagogies. Worksheet-driven pedagogies and rote memorization were hard to facilitate in person, and they are proving even harder to facilitate through distance learning. I can't help but think it's because these pedagogies weren't working in the first place. They engender paternalism in teachers, subtly encouraging us to hover over our students and micromanage their every decision, in an effort to guarantee success every second.

But we all know that this isn't what good teaching is. Good teaching entails helping our students learn how to learn, building their stamina for their own independence, and otherwise humanizing the experience of learning-putting their humanity front and center. Ironically, in some ways it seems that we should always be teaching from a reasonable distance: Whether in person or through digital means, we should be far enough away to build independence in our students but within arm's reach when they need a helping hand. The workshop model, in my opinion, is one way to teach from a healthy distance while building students' independence. It can help make teaching more sustainable by eliminating the materials and energy required to micromanage classrooms of 20 or more students.

If we use this moment of distance learning as an opportunity to innovate, we may end up radically changing our pedagogy for the better. Learn more about using the workshop model during distance learning in my new book, Humanizing Distance Learning.

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Using the Workshop Model to Foster Independence

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The popular lesson framework can help keep remote teaching manageable while encouraging students to develop self-reliance.

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Sponsored by Listenwise and Wipebook

As educators, we know our students have different needs. Some fly through our content, while others need more time for ideas to sink in. Some have help at home, while others miss class. Unfortunately, in traditional school settings, the demands of pacing guides and age-based promotion make meeting these needs difficult.

Since the days of the one-room schoolhouse, educators have dreamed of a better system, one where all students have the time they need to achieve true understanding; in other words, a self-paced learning environment. We see examples of self-paced learning in Montessori schools, alternative schools, and cyber schools, but it has yet to reach the mainstream. The one-size-fits-all model churns along, leaving far too many students behind.

Today, I'd like to show you how to infuse self-pacing into your own classroom without lowering expectations for your students or replacing yourself with mindless technology. The blended, self-paced, mastery-based instructional model we built at the Modern Classrooms Project offers a framework for self-paced learning regardless of where and what you teach. If implemented properly, the model can increase the rigor of your students' learning, enhance human connection and interaction in your classroom, and better prepare your students for success after they leave your class.

While the model I lay out here is undoubtedly at its best in the in-person setting, it has real value for those in remote and hybrid classrooms. With the growing need for productive asynchronous learning time, the timing has never been better for self-paced learning.

Why Self-Pacing?

What do we mean when we say self-pacing? A self-paced classroom is one where students can complete learning tasks at a speed that's customized to their personal levels of mastery. This means they may take longer with material they struggle with, skip topics that cover material they already know, or repeat topics as needed (Bray & McClaskey, 2010).

The logic of self-pacing is intuitive. Anyone who has raised a child will tell you kids learn how to do things at vastly different speeds. From walking, to talking, to stacking blocks, kids learn differently and we should honor and respect their differences. And research has long demonstrated that students learn at different paces, and the variations in rates of learning are considerable (Davies, 1973; Eurich, 1962).

But for some reason, the large majority of K-12 education has ignored this reality. Instead, we take the opposite stance that students should actually learn at the exact same pace as their peers, and if they can't keep up, we fail them or push them through the system with no regard for what they have missed. Many of the systems that still dominate much of K-12 education make it difficult for teachers to imagine a world of flexible pacing in their classroom. So before we explore the how, lets dig into some of the reasons self-pacing is so important:

1. It builds self-confidence. We all know students who walk into class already thinking they are "bad" at school. They might say they "can't write" or "can't do math" or simply "don't like learning." We have become accustomed to hearing students express these frustrations, but we don't spend enough time asking why. The truth is, countless students have spent their whole education career feeling rushed. Instead of giving them more time, we usually give them partial credit and completion grades to push them through the system. Over time, they grow to hate school because they have never experienced the joy of authentic mastery. Self-pacing gives students the opportunity to experience the feeling of true mastery, because they are given enough time and support to get there. For students who haven't often experienced that joy, it can have profound effects on their confidence.

2. It differentiates for students' needs. Everyone talks about differentiation, but it is extremely difficult to pull off effectively in the classroom. An educator's capacity to differentiate is fundamentally limited if you aren't able to modify the speed of learning based on the needs of individual students. There is only so much you can do if every kid has to move on to the next lesson the next day. With self-paced learning, students who understand a skill can move on while you provide appropriate time and scaffolds to students who are struggling to achieve mastery.

3. It supports students' social-emotional needs. When I first started teaching, I felt pulled in two directions. I was constantly trying to balance meeting my students' unique social-emotional needs with trying to maintain "order" in my classroom. These two priorities often worked against each other. Supporting a student who is struggling emotionally requires time, care and patience: all things that are limited when trying to manage a whole-class lecture or activity. In a self-paced classroom, you no longer have to choose between nurturing an individual student or tending to the larger group; when a student needs your attention, you can provide it without inhibiting the learning of everyone else.

4. It supports self-regulation. A critical and often undervalued element of education is teaching kids the 21st-century skills that allow them to become better learners over time. Self-regulation is a uniquely important skill that ensures a student can independently or collaboratively tackle a new challenge in a measured way. Skillfully crafted self-paced classrooms allow students to practice self-regulation, taking partial ownership over the planning and managing of the learning process, which has been correlated with faster learning and higher achievement (Kizilcec, Perez-Sanagusten, & Maldonado, 2017).

5. It paves the way for mastery-based grading. The final frontier of our model at the Modern Classrooms Project is mastery-based grading. The goal is to cultivate a learning environment where students progress if and only if they have shown mastery of the previous skill. A hallmark of mastery-based grading is giving students time to revise their work and be reassessed when necessary. To accomplish this, self-pacing is not just valuable, it is essential. You have to be able to let some students move ahead while others wrestle with a skill until they achieve mastery.

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The First Step: Letting Go of Whole-Group Direct Instruction

One of the primary reasons most educators don't build self-pacing into their classroom is because they are still reliant on whole-group direct instruction. This is not a surprise, given that this is how most educators are trained to teach. But as long as your students depend on you delivering a live lecture or set of instructions at the beginning of class, you'll never be able to make the leap into self-pacing. So before you consider self-pacing, you have to develop a concrete plan for replacing whole-group direct instruction with lessons students can access on their own.

To be clear, whole-group direct instruction is distinct from whole-group discussions and activities. Any effective self-paced classroom naturally infuses collaborative experiences. I will discuss how this can be done later. But the key is reducing-and ultimately eliminating-those times when kids are simply waiting for you to tell them information so they can get started on a task.

So how do you make this shift? This is where the power of technology comes into play. The most effective way to eliminate whole-group direct instruction is to build your own instructional videos. This ensures that you are still the architect of your own content but allows you to multiply yourself so you are available to spend all of class time working with students individually and in small groups. To learn how to build instructional videos, explore our free online course* or read my previous piece in Cult of Pedagogy that details everything you need to know about building a great screencast video.

How can you self-pace within the constraints of school and district expectations?

The most frequent question we receive at the Modern Classrooms Project is about keeping up with school or district assessment schedules and pacing calendars while running a self-paced classroom. I wondered the exact same thing when I started building my own and have discovered two key strategies to make this happen:

1. Self-Pace Within Each Unit of Study

Self-pacing has real power, but when implemented without guardrails it can present substantial challenges. For example, if you go overboard and let students self-pace for an entire year, you run the risk of having the faster learners fly through content while learners who require more time grow frustrated and lose motivation. This in turn can widen the gap between learners. For this reason, we encourage educators to self-pace within each unit of study, and in many cases, even shorter bursts than that. This gives students the structure they need to flourish and frequent opportunities for fresh starts as they refine their ability to be effective, self-regulated learners.

Self-pacing within each unit of study is not only effective for learners, it also enables educators to follow district- and school-level expectations around pacing. Set your end-of-unit or mid-unit deadlines in accordance with the expectations provided to you, then cultivate a self-paced learning environment within those constraints.

2. Classify Your Lessons

What happens if students don't master all the lessons in a unit by the deadline? This is the right question to ask and there is research to support that students in a self-paced learning environment might take longer with material they struggle with (Bray & McClaskey, 2010). Therefore, you should expect that some students will be unable to master every lesson before the unit deadline. To navigate this challenge, you will want to classify lessons based on importance, which will empower you to send kids on personalized pathways based on need. At the Modern Classrooms Project, we encourage educators to use the following three lesson classifications:

Must Do: These lessons cover essential skills and content, without which end-of-unit assessments cannot be completed. These lessons are non-negotiable.

Should Do: These lessons give students valuable opportunities to develop their skills or knowledge and include skills that are still considered to be "grade level expectations." However, when students fall behind and are working hard, they can be excused from these lessons and will still be able to transition to the next unit comfortably.

Aspire to Do: These are the toughest lessons in a unit; they serve as extensions for students who are ready and able to learn skills and content beyond the normal scope of the course. You should feel comfortable excusing kids from mastering these lessons if they run out of time.

Classifying lessons like these is not an exact science, and there's no right way to determine what's essential and what isn't. However, having clear expectations in mind-a reasonable bar every student must meet during the course, plus extensions for more ambitious students-will help you differentiate your instruction to meet every student's needs.

Tracking Student Progress

Most educators, including myself, initially feel overwhelmed by the idea of running a self-paced classroom. I was certainly a bit of a control freak who had a tough time imagining a student-centered classroom where kids drove their own pace. In retrospect, my inclination to micromanage the learning environment was limiting my students' capacity to immerse themselves deeply in the learning process. To soothe my own anxiety and set my students free, I had to create healthy accountability systems to give my students the necessary guardrails to flourish.

In a self-paced classroom, both students and their teacher must know exactly what they will work on every day, constantly tracking progress toward achieving learning goals and mastering content. This helps students get right to work, fosters collaboration, and allows the teacher to provide differentiated support (Lee, 2014; Marzano, Pickering, & Pollack, 2001; Saphier, Haley-Speca, & Gower, 2008). To create the structure necessary for students to flourish, we encourage teachers to build clear progress tracking systems that are easy to update and reward students for effort. We suggest two ways to make this happen:

Public Pacing Trackers

These are publicly displayed in classrooms and indicate where each student is in the unit. In addition to indicating the lesson each student is on, public pacing trackers often highlight the expected pace as well as "lesson all-stars" who have produced exemplary work. It is important to note that public trackers NEVER display grades and given the nature of self-pacing, students have ample time and opportunity to catch up. Also, if lesson classifications are used effectively, the tracker should reflect effort, not ability level.

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These trackers are usually slide decks or spreadsheets that are easy to update daily. If students don't want their names displayed, consider using nicknames, ID numbers, or avatars.

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Arguably the biggest upside of public trackers is that they encourage organic collaboration. Students can easily identify others who are working on similar lessons or seek out those who have mastered the lesson they are on for support. In some cases, teachers will group students on pacing trackers to facilitate collaboration from the onset. The beauty of the public pacing tracker is that no matter the circumstances, everyone has a VERY clear understanding of what they need to be working on.

Individual Pacing Trackers

Either in addition to or in lieu of public trackers, teachers can create individual pacing trackers for students. These often come in the form of game boards or checklists and are kept in student binders or folders. Educators who use individual trackers will frequently check that students are using them effectively and accurately; sometimes they will label checkpoints indicating when students need to show mastery before moving forward.

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Regardless of which method you use, it is vital to have a method for tracking pace. Otherwise you run the risk of turning a controlled chaos learning environment into a completely chaotic one.

Maintaining a High Level of Collaboration

Too often, folks assume a self-paced classroom is one where students learn in silos, that there is a tradeoff between having a collaborative classroom and a self-paced classroom. But these don't have to be mutually exclusive. At the Modern Classrooms Project, we see educators naturally build in collaboration through a variety of strategies and techniques. Here are just a few to consider:

Classroom Learning Spaces

Unlike traditional classrooms, self-paced classrooms do not revolve around the teacher delivering content at the front of the room. Therefore, student seating should be designed to encourage collaboration and small group instruction. When students are sitting in groups, they are more likely to collaborate with their peers, either organically or by following their teachers' guidance. See how one teacher's daily seating charts foster this collaboration.

Collaborative Tasks and Activities

Whenever possible, educators can design assignments and activities that require students to collaborate to achieve mastery. Here are some examples:

1. Consider instituting a policy of "ask three (peers) before me" for classwork, requiring students to reach out to their peers for support before approaching their teacher. You can use student assistance forms to push students to work together and track their collaboration.

2. Jigsaw activities built into class practice can foster natural collaboration. For example, half the class completes one aspect of the lesson while the other half focuses on another aspect. Students then teach and learn from classmates who did the opposite assignment.

Whole-Group Discussions and Activities

Most educators who use our model schedule whole-group collaborative activities like labs, Paideia Seminars or discussions throughout their units. Students usually know when these events will happen and what lessons they need to master beforehand in order to fully participate. Many educators will also open each class up with a discussion. The topic can be content-specific or centered around the key 21st century skills they are developing and reinforcing in a student-centered classroom. Remember, whole-group discussions are welcome in a self-paced environment, just not live lectures.

Progress-Based Groupings

One of the beauties of progress trackers is they provide concrete data to support effective collaboration. If a student is struggling on a lesson, they can identify a peer who has already mastered that lesson and approach them for help. In some cases, teachers will use grouped pacing trackers designed to foster collaboration based on the different lessons students are on.

Positive Reinforcement

Most importantly, students will collaborate when they see value in it. Collaboration is at its best when students truly believe they will have a greater chance of achieving their academic goals by working with peers. To reinforce this idea, you can consider nominating "Lesson Superstars" who help their peers understand lessons the Superstars have already mastered. This elevates and praises students who are working hard to build and support a collaborative learning environment.

If you want to dig deeper into the collaborative strategies we have to offer, check out our Guide for Effective Collaboration in a Modern Classroom.

Strategies for Building Student Motivation

Once you have built a well-structured self-paced classroom, it is important to pre-plan motivation strategies that will help keep all students engaged. When students are in the driver's seat, some will excel, but others may be overwhelmed by the responsibility. This is usually indicative of a need for better self-regulation. Sadly, most K-12 schooling actually conditions kids to be compliant receivers of information. So it shouldn't surprise you when kids are startled by the sudden responsibility they have when they are able to control their own pace. Some will rise to the occasion immediately; others may initially deflate. That's ok! All the more reason to use self-paced learning to allow students to strengthen their abilities to be 21st-century learners.

In the same way that we have to scaffold academic content for students, you may have to scaffold self-pacing. Pacing trackers, self-pacing within each unit of study and lesson classifications all help with that process. But one really powerful way to keep students engaged and support their self-esteem is to build in motivation strategies that ensure students believe they can succeed with this newfound level of responsibility. We separate motivation strategies into two groups:

Relationship-Based Strategies

One of the greatest benefits of a self-paced classroom is the freedom you have as an educator to work one-on-one or in small groups with students. This allows you to have deep and meaningful content-related and non-content-related conversations with students without disrupting the larger learning environment. During those times, you can identify what inspires a student and what makes them deflate.

One of the most common strategies teachers use to check in daily with students is through our daily "do now" strategy featured in this 60-second video. Instead of starting class with an academic task, many of our teachers use a "do now" that is designed to get a temperature check on how students are feeling and allows kids to engage in some daily goal setting. This gives teachers instantaneous data on which students are feeling ready to learn and which students might need some additional support or positive reinforcement.

Incentive-Based Strategies

In addition to building strong bonds with students, it is always useful to create incentives that motivate students to stay on pace and excel. Educators use a variety of techniques, many of which look similar to the strategies they may normally use in a traditional fixed-paced setting. But some of the most effectives strategies leverage the power of self-pacing to motivate students. For example, a number of teachers will use "aspire to do" as a compelling strategy to get kids fired up about mastering content. For kids that are eager to succeed, they will feel compelled to master content beyond the scope of the unit.

In some cases, students need to see the downside of wasting time before they realize that too much procrastination is dangerous. That is why many of our teachers will use a "soft-zero" grading policy by entering "0" grades as placeholders for must-do lessons. These "0s" are temporary as long as the student eventually masters the skill. But it emphasizes the importance of mastering must-do lessons and gives students a grade-based reason to catch up. If you use this strategy, it is critical to reinforce to students that they can always catch up and celebrate them when they do!!

Where to Go to Learn More

Running a self-paced classroom is not easy. The strategies outlined above require careful planning, and implementing them effectively with actual students requires constant reflection, refinement, and commitment. With that said, both I and the teachers whom I've trained through the Modern Classrooms Project would wholeheartedly agree that the benefits-for both students and teachers-more than justify the challenges.

If you're interested in launching a self-paced classroom of your own, I'd strongly encourage you to start with our free online course*, a comprehensive overview of our instructional model, complete with exemplar units, templates, and other useful resources. We've heard from teachers nationwide who have completed this course, taken the plunge into self-paced learning, and marveled at the results. You can read many of their stories in our public Facebook Group.

Finally, if you'd like the support of an expert in building your self-paced classroom, consider enrolling in our Modern Classroom Mentorship Program. Our mentors are all teachers whom we've trained in our practices, and whom we've seen implement our model across a wide range of subject areas and grade levels. As part of the Mentorship Program, you'll be paired with a mentor and receive `1-on-1 coaching, feedback on instructional materials and plans you create, and ongoing support from the broader Modern Classrooms community. Most importantly, you'll leave the program ready to launch a self-paced learning environment of your own. If you're interested in enrolling, you can save $50 at any time with the coupon code CULTOFPEDAGOGY.

Whether you stop after reading this article, take our free course, or enroll in our Mentorship Program, I wish you the best of luck on your Modern Classroom journey. Your students, and our world, require nothing less!

* Cult of Pedagogy has an affiliate relationship with the Modern Classrooms Project. Although the Modern Classroom Essentials course is free, if you purchase one of their paid offerings through the links on this post, Cult of Pedagogy will receive a percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.

References

Bray, B., & McClaskey, K. (2010). Personalization vs. differentiation vs. individualization. Mid-Pacific Institute, 1(1).

Eurich, A.C. (1962). Technology in education. New Society, 11, 15-16.

Kizilcec, R. F., Pérez-Sanagustín, M., & Maldonado, J. J. (2017). Self-regulated learning strategies predict learner behavior and goal attainment in Massive Open Online Courses. Computers & Education, 104, 18-33.

Lee, D. (2014). How to personalize learning in K-12 schools: Five essential design features. Educational Technology, 54(3), 12-17.

Marzano, R.J., Pickering, D.J., & Pollack, J.E. (2001). Classroom instruction that works: Research-based strategies for increasing student achievement. Alexandria, VA: ASCD and McREL.

Saphier, J., Haley-Speca, M.A., & Gower, R. (2008). The skillful teacher: Building your teaching skills. Acton, MA: Research for Better Teaching, Inc.

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In a self-paced classroom, each student is given an appropriate level of challenge and grows at a steady pace throughout the school year. Here's how it works.

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Studio sessions are distinct from, although related to, seminar sessions and are heavily reliant on the active learning model. While instructors guide students through structured activities, there is no lecture component to these sessions. In studio, students are encouraged to explore lateral moves with their writing - composing in different modalities and the exploring different technologies to facilitate this, revising their work in different genres, etc. Collaboration is also an important component of studio work, with students frequently working in groups to compose and troubleshoot. One credit of class time should be devoted to studio sessions.

Please see this link for ideas of different activities to bring to your studio sessions.

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Studio sessions are distinct from, although related to, seminar sessions and are heavily reliant on the active learning model. While instructors guide stude ...

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by Terry Heick

According to Indiana University Bloomington, Inquiry-based learning is an "instructional model that centers learning on a solving a particular problem or answering a central question. There are several different inquiry-based learning models, but most have several general elements in common:

Learning focuses around a meaningful, ill-structured problem that demands consideration of diverse perspectives

Academic content-learning occurs as a natural part of the process as students work towards finding solutions

Learners, working collaboratively, assume an active role in the learning process

Teachers provide learners with learning supports and rich multiple media sources of information to assist students in successfully finding solutions

Learners share and defend solutions publicly in some manner"

The process itself can be broken down into stages, or phases, that help teachers frame instruction. The model we've created can be used as a guide for teachers, as it includes teacher and student indicators at each stage, ideal "tones" of each phase, and even apps that can support that phase as well.

Inquiry-based learning is an approach that can easily accommodate project-based learning, challenge-based learning, place-based education, blended learning, and other trends in education.
4 Phases of Inquiry-Based Learning: A Guide For Teachers Big Idea: Dive into engaging, relevant, and credible media forms to identify a 'need' or opportunity for inquiry
The first phase of inquiry (often produced by strategies for promoting inquiry-based learning) is one characterized by interaction. This interaction can be:

Student-to-material. This material is ideally obtained through formal (i.e., research) and informal (e.g., reading, social and digital media, collaboration) means. It can be modeled or supplemented by teacher-provided materials

Student-to-peer. This interaction is chosen by teacher or student, informed by need for information and perspective

Student-to-expert (experts within relevant fields at accessible levels)

Student-to-media (digital, text, pure data, etc.)

The nature of inquiry is ideally both curiosity-based and fluid. Narrow criteria, restrictive rubrics, and other traditional artifacts of 'school work' can stifle inquiry at this point of the learning process. The teacher's role at this point in the learning process is focused on resources, modeling curiosity, and cognitive coaching.

Tone: Open-minded, curious, unburdened, playful

Student Indicators: actively skims a variety of media, follows curiosity, responds with awe, dwells with certain media depending on curiosity or perceived utility; seeks out peers for ideas and resources

Teacher Indicators: models curiosity, thinks-aloud when interacting with disparate media, asks probing questions, withholds evaluative statements, provides exemplars, monitors and encourages student thinking habits

Apps: FlipBoard, Pocket, Podkicker, Zotero

Appropriate Questions: What sources of information are available to me? What do others around me know? What's worth studying? What possibilities, problems, or situations tend to interest me? What types of experiences, perspectives, and data are available to me? When am I at my best?
Big Idea: Summarizing, paraphrasing, and categorizing learning with teacher or expert support.
This happens by analyzing data, identifying and clarifying misconceptions, and otherwise 'getting a feel' for the scale, nature, and possibility of selected topics of inquiry.

After skimming, reading, watching, and otherwise interacting with a variety of media, this stage of the inquiry process is centered around students clarifying both their own thinking, and the nature of 'things' around them: ideas for projects, scientific challenges, opportunities for revision, need for design thinking, a new scale to tackle persistent problems, etc.

Thinking patterns are both inward and reflective, and outward and communicated. In that way, students both reflect on their own knowledge, while beginning to identify possible pathways forward.

Tone: Slightly more focused, reflective, independent, cautious

Student Indicators: Paraphrases understanding in familiar language; resists looking for 'answers' and 'solutions'; distinguishes between fact and opinion; evaluates the credibility and relevance of sources; focused on possibility

Teacher Indicators: offers non-evaluative and frequent feedback; provides relevant graphic organizers and other ways to 'frame' student thinking; asks probing questions that focus on student thinking: what they know and why they think they know it;

Appropriate Questions: What's the big picture here? What are the pieces and how do they fit? What's accessible, and what's not? What's possible? Am I missing critical data, perspectives, or opportunities for collaboration that could further clarify my thinking? What do I seem to understand, and how do I know?
Apps: MindMeister, WordPress, Quora, reddit Big Idea: Asking questions to drive continued, self-directed inquiry
The questioning phase is a critical phase of the inquiry-based learning process, if for no other reason than misunderstandings, lack of organization, uneven confidence, or an inability to see the 'big picture' surface here more clearly than other phases.

Students and teachers alike must also be able to trust the nature and patterns of inquiry that are often recursive and iterative: They often move back and forth between phases, and new skills and understandings can be obtained in frustratingly small increments. Inquiry-based learning is more about the process, tone, and instincts of learning than other 'tidier' academic forms, which can require both students and teachers to adjust their measures of progress, quality, and success.

Tone: Creative, confident, interdependent

Student Indicators: Curious, precise with questions, self-monitoring, big-picture thinking, little-picture application

Teacher Indicators: models questioning, thinks-aloud in revising irrelevant or otherwise flawed questions; models use of concept-mapping tools to analyze thinking; hosts QFT sessions and Socratic seminars

Appropriate Questions: What's worth understanding? Where are my knowledge gaps? What is both within and beyond my reach? What have I done in the past that can help me in this situation moving forward?

Apps: Evernote, MindMeister, twitter, Quora, reddit
Big Idea: Designing an accessible, relevant, and curiosity-driven action or product to culminate and justify inquiry
At this final stage of the inquiry-based learning process, learners are focused on design.

Design of solutions to address problems within a manageable scale

Design of logical and curiosity-based applications of current understanding

Design of next steps to extend their own learning pathway

Tone: Creative, restrained, calculating

Appropriate Questions:What now? What audience makes sense for this research? Where can I do 'good work'? What would be 'cool'? What have others before me done?

Apps: Posts, Mextures, Inkist, Google Drive, DesignPad, Foldify

Student Indicators: Clarifies thinking, busy, self-directed, uncertain but efficacious, follows curiosity

Teacher Indicators: Creates 'conditions and means' for collaboration; i dentifies areas for revision, reflects back on entire process (i.e., "how we get to this point")
4 Student Questions For Post-Phase Reflection
After the inquiry-based learning process is 'finished' (for the purposes of classroom work, publishing, grading, etc.), it can be helpful for students to reflect in the inquiry-based learning process through questions such as:

What skills did I depend on?

What do I now understand more deeply, and how do I know?

If I had more time or resources, what else could I have done?

What is the role of inquiry in learning?
4 Phases of Inquiry-Based Learning: A Guide For Teachers; image attribution flickr user woodleywonderworks and usgahumphreys

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4 Phases Of Inquiry-Based Learning: A Guide For Teachers

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The phases of inquiry-based learning can vary depending on context but generally include Interacting, Clarifying, Questioning, and Designing.

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Developed by the Right Question Institute, the Question Formulation Technique, or QFT, is a structured method for generating and improving questions. It distills sophisticated forms of divergent, convergent, and metacognitive thinking into a deceptively simple, accessible, and reproducible technique.

The QFT builds the skill of asking questions, an essential - yet often overlooked - lifelong learning skill that allows people to think critically, feel greater power and self-efficacy, and become more confident and ready to participate in civic life.

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What is the QFT? - Right Question Institute

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The Question Formulation Technique (QFT) is a simple but rigorous step-by-step process designed to help […]

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A strategy called hexagonal thinking provides students with an effective way to launch project-based learning.

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Collaborative Inquiry Tool (Karin Hess)

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edweek.org-What Are the Best Strategies for Small-Group Instruction

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6 Counterintuitive Strategies to Boost Student Learning

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When it comes to finding ways to get big wins in the classroom, it’s sometimes the approaches that feel a little unconventional that are the most successful.

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Teachers can empower students to recognize their strengths by offering them activities that guide them to reflect on their learning.

Metacognition, the higher-order thinking that enables understanding, analysis, and control of one's cognitive processes, especially when engaged in learning-or more simply put, evaluating how one thinks and learns -helps students develop an understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses and the strategies that are most useful in specific situations. This self-awareness promotes knowledge and optimizes understanding, memory, and independent learning skills.

Students learn more efficiently and sustain motivation to persevere through setbacks when they understand and use strategies that brought them prior success. They recognize and avoid those that were previously unproductive. Metacognition can build these learning skills and empower students to be their own guides in subsequent learning and in life beyond school.

Provide multiple opportunities to practice the metacognitive processes, making the unconscious conscious, as they examine their learning experiences.

Explain to students why you're teaching them a new strategy or having them use a previously practiced one. Students can learn more independently and confidently when aware of strategies used to bring them success.

After a successful activity, especially if it was in an area where they hadn't been successful previously, ask what they did differently and have them write down the strategy they used.

Create a journal of successful strategies, including predictions about when these might be used for future challenges and applied to other subjects.

When reading or reviewing their notes, have students predict the information they think will be on the test. After the test, have them revisit their predictions and note what they specifically considered when their predictions were accurate. How will they apply these prediction guides when preparing for future tests?

There are a few things teachers can do to foster metacognition:

Questions to Guide Self-Evaluation and Reflection

What was easy and what was most difficult?

What strategies or experiences were most helpful to my understanding of the topic?

What did I do that was the best use of my time?

What outcome improvement did I notice?

What approaches were most valuable to my understanding and test success (e.g., rereading, study groups, practice tests, rewriting notes in a different way)?

What did I try that I'd do again?

What would I do differently next time?

Guide students to consider the questions below when they succeed in an assignment or learning goal. Provide encouragement when they recognize success accomplished by reviewing, revising, or relearning instead of being satisfied with just "getting it done."

Provide guidance and opportunities for learners to build their top-down attention focus skills. Attention focus metacognition is promoted by self-awareness-recognizing the pulls on attention. This involves prioritizing the array of sensory information as to what is most important and using blocking strategies to resist the distractions.

Do slow observations and actions: have a balloon-toss, examine an object considering how it might impact multiple senses (how might this leaf, cube, map location... sound, smell, feel, move?).

Do a web search, homework, or research without following distracting tangents. Guide students to copy and paste the attractive links they want to follow into a separate list to visit later. This relieves their feelings of needing to do it now for fear of missing out.

Attention focus requires distraction inhibition. Guided practice can help students build their control of what information is accepted through their attention filters and block their impulses to attend to distracting information. Use activities that build distraction inhibition and incorporate guided metacognition, so that students recognize how to apply these strategies to enhance their attention focus.

Participate in noncredit, self-corrected timed quizzes under a variety of conditions to recognize their attentive strengths and challenges.

Self-evaluate their attention outcomes doing defined tasks in optimal conditions versus a range of distracting noises-turn on a radio, keep dropping books, have a colleague come in and talk about "students," or interrupt with jokes.

After students have formed an awareness of the impact of distractions, they can develop and share strategies to inhibit their effects.

Students can self-evaluate their distraction response. Provide them with opportunities to do the following:

For a practical example, teachers can incorporate in lesson plans a time and place for students to create and build a metacognition list of strategies they found beneficial in their learning and understanding.

Opportunities for this self-evaluation can include having students use metacognition to recognize best approaches to solving word problems. This isn't the same as students finding different approaches to manipulate the numbers in a specific problem, such as whether they used a decimal or a fraction to calculate a percentage. In math strategy metacognition, students consider and share the overall approach they took to assess and arrange the information in a word or situation problem to yield success.

Their different approaches and the respective problems can be collected in a class list called "Our Math Strategies."

Did you leave questions unfinished at the end? If so, do you think you knew the answers to some of them? Did you skip more difficult questions along the way so that you could've gotten to the last questions (and gone back to the others as time allowed)? In other words, did you get the most points for their time spent?

Were any of your errors due to not following instructions? What could you do next time, such as underlining key words in instructions and rereading them before answering the questions?

Were mistakes made because you didn't review sections of the test material, didn't focus on the information you were given about what the test would cover, or didn't ask for help to understand items you knew would be on the test but were confused about?

What predictions did you make about the test that were correct?

After students receive their homework or tests back with the errors noted, consider not putting a grade on the paper initially, but rather giving students time to evaluate their errors and consider future alternatives. Following their self-evaluations, invite class discussions of the same questions, such as these:

Unless students are given time to go over their test results and read your comments, they may never do so. To assure that process, ask students to respond to your comments in writing, remark on the patterns of their errors, and then return the assignments or tests to you.

Tests or corrected assignments returned soon after they're completed are especially valuable when students recognize what they were confused about before going too far into the next unit that builds on this preceding information.

To move beyond a process that might cause students to feel criticized or defensive, you can ask them to first respond to your positive comments, recognize their own successes, and write down what they did to achieve these. Then, your written responses or discussions will be enhanced when you respond to their insights about what didn't work, what promoted their successes, and how they will apply these strategies to their goals in the future.

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How Metacognition Can Improve Learning Outcomes

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Teachers can empower students to recognize their strengths by offering them activities that guide them to reflect on their learning.

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Project-based learning that’s student-designed and relevant to their lives can have a profound impact.

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"I can't learn from my current teacher! They don't teach like you." Earlier in my career, past students would come back to my class to share this sentiment with me, and initially this brought me a sense of pride. Though I wondered, why can't they learn from their current teacher? What challenges are they facing in learning, and how did I not prepare them for it?

I had taught my students through a traditional learning model that primarily incorporated direct instruction and (unintentionally) conditioned them as dependent learners less likely to be able to adapt to another teacher's instruction.

But as educators, we have a responsibility to deliver content in a way that supports our students' current and future learning. Not only what students learn, but how they learn it. We need to create the conditions that allow students to demonstrate their self-directed learning in order to concurrently develop their knowledge and skills through semiautonomous learning environments.

For example, guided, self-paced learning optimizes the flexibility of students working at their own pace to individually master content with collaborative learning experiences that allow students to build conceptual understanding through discourse.

Units are "open middle," where all students start a unit on one common date and end the unit on the same date with a summative assessment. Within the unit, there is flexibility for student choice of activity and pace, with the exception of daily structured collaborative activities at the "guided pace."

When I first started providing more autonomy in my classroom, I noticed that a lot of my students were struggling. I would find myself lecturing them, asking, "What kinds of jobs do you want?! Jobs where you're told what to do, tell others what to do, or jobs where you create? Right now, it looks like you're just waiting for me to tell you what to do!" These were not my proudest moments.

I did not realize that they were previously conditioned as dependent learners, and as with the progressions we have for students to be able to navigate through content over the course of a year, we need to provide progressions to empower students (and their caregivers) as they transition to more autonomous learning environments. There are three discrete elements of this transition.

3 Keys for Transitioning to Independent Learning

1. Explaining the purpose of each element in the self-directed learning environment. Before students can make advocacy decisions within your learning environment, they need to know the purpose of each element within the instructional routine. I explain that my instructional routine is intentionally built to support their iterative learning process and honors variability of individual processing time. Typically, in a lesson, my students will do the following:

Receive a short, highly conceptual, minimally procedural instructional video that I made with a supplemental worksheet for them to apply their initial conceptions. The instructional video allows for students' processing time without restrictions.

Engage in specific collaborative activities to learn from and with one another, iterating on their initial conceptions through communication and feedback (from their peers and me).

Evaluate their understanding via an individual mastery check.

Reflect on their performance in their progress tracker, writing down errors, next steps in their learning, and big ideas from the lesson.

2. Helping students learn how to maximize each instructional avenue. They should know the following:

How to take notes from instructional videos (sometimes watching twice-once to write down and a second time to compare video with their notes).

How to present work for others to learn from (similar to a presentation where you "don't read the slides"; in math we don't read each number or operation but instead explain why and how each element was used).

How to collaborate in small, student-led groups.

How to promote productive discussions in math.

How to reflect in their progress tracker (specifically in error analysis, acknowledging current conceptions, not misconceptions).

How to study math.

I also create space after unit summative assessments for students to reflect on their learning within the unit and to help them discover how they learned best (while also informing me on instructional adjustments I should make).

3. Liberating student learning through informed student voice and choice. About halfway through the school year, the structures of my learning environment diminish to create space for student choice in guided, self-paced learning. This liberation comes from the inverse relationships of student empowerment, informed with how they learn best, and rescinding classroom constraints.

My time in class is then spent mostly in one-to-one feedback conferences or through formative instruction of small-group learning, speaking only in response to what students are doing and saying.

Repurposing my time toward these formative instructional avenues builds relationships and personalizes a student's learning experience. Supporting self-pacing within units, I provide " Must Do, Should Do, and Aspire to Do" lessons. The Modern Classrooms Project-which I am associated with-provides detailed guidance through its free course on how to create the varying structures for implementing this model.

The only structured time that stays from the beginning of the year is the designated time for specific collaborative avenues to learn from and with one another, where I am providing formative instruction. A majority of my class period is then spent with students in student choice activities, or independent work time, consisting of the following:

Taking notes from instructional videos

Engaging in individual work or collaborative work

Having one-on-one or small group conversations with me

Taking mastery checks

Reflecting in their progress trackers

A typical 80-minute lesson will have five parts (with time approximations):

1. A (structured) collaborative activity for students to learn from each other (10 minutes).

2. A (structured) collaborative activity for students to learn with each other (15 minutes).

3. Student choice where I am available for small group or individual intervention/support (20 minutes).

4. Student choice where I am conferencing with individual students to evaluate their mastery checks and provide immediate feedback (30 minutes).

5. Closing and transition (5 minutes).

I don't dictate how long students spend in each avenue during student choice because they know where they are in their learning and what they need to succeed.

Transforming students from conditioned, dependent learners to empowered, self-directed learners does not happen overnight. We, as educators, must have instructional routines in place and scaffolds to support the highest level of efficacy in each routine. Then, we can provide our intentional progression for how students learn over the course of a school year.

When we inform, coach, and then liberate student learning, we empower our students (and their caregivers) through semiautonomous learning to develop and utilize self-directed learning skills of self-awareness, time management, and advocacy to succeed as lifelong learners in our classes and beyond.

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Making the Transition From Dependent to Independent Learning

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"I can't learn from my current teacher! They don't teach like you." Earlier in my career, past students would come back to my class to share this sentiment with me, and initially this brought me a sense of pride. Though I wondered, why can't they learn from their current teacher?

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What to do with questions once students ask them

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
Sponsored by Raymond Geddes and Kids Discover

This is an excerpt from a letter written to a Charlotte, North Carolina newspaper in 2002 by a first-year math teacher, a man who was vehemently opposed to block scheduling.

"I am...a first year high school math teacher. (My school) operates on a block schedule - a concept I had never even heard of until I accepted (this) teaching position. My observations of block scheduling have been a shocking education for me. Block scheduling has resulted in less emphasis on core content and more on gimmickry. Classes used to be places where serious learning took place. No more. Under block scheduling, they have become little more than glorified playtime periods. Classes used to consist of core subject material being communicated to students by individuals rich in knowledge and experience. Now teachers are no longer teachers, but merely guides - glorified baby-sitters, if you will. Under block scheduling, the students are now in groups trying to "discover" facts that used to be communicated instantly when teachers actually taught. It's obvious that this format wastes valuable class time - and that doesn't include the time students waste by talking, singing, and becoming restless all-around as a result of the lengthened class periods."

This letter articulates the concerns some teachers, parents, and even students have about block scheduling, where class periods last 80 to 100 minutes and only four classes are held each day. This type of schedule became popular in middle and high schools in the 1990s as an alternative to the traditional schedule, where students attend the same six to eight classes, 45 to 50 minutes each, every day. The idea behind the change was that with less transition time between classes, fewer instructional minutes would be wasted, and the kinds of behavior issues and bullying that can crop up during class transitions would also be cut down. On top of that, having extended blocks of time would give teachers the opportunity to dive more deeply into their content.

And in many cases, schools have been successful with block scheduling. They've even found solutions for some of the problems it presents, like offering shorter periods for classes like math and band, where consistent daily practice is more important. But one issue with block scheduling seems to persist, a problem that is highlighted in the letter above, a problem that is still voiced by teachers and students today: The ineffective use of the longer block of instructional time.

So that's what we're going to focus on here. We'll start by looking at the mindset that causes a lot of block scheduling's biggest problems. Then we'll quickly review some best practices for teaching in the block. Finally, I'll walk you through five specific structures you can choose from to plan solid, interesting instruction for an extended class period, the kind of teaching that will make those 90 minutes fly by.

The Big Problem: A Lecture-as-Teaching Mindset

Some of the challenges associated with block scheduling boil down to logistics, like needing more time for AP courses. These issues can often be solved with creative scheduling tweaks.

But the rest of it, the criticisms lobbed at block scheduling and the problems that can crop up with it, can almost all be traced back to one mindset, a single strong, pervasive belief about teaching, and that mindset is this:
teaching = lecture
This mindset, the belief that lecture is the only "real" way to teach, causes all kinds of trouble in block scheduling.

Let's go back to the math teacher who described the extended classes in block scheduling as "glorified play periods" in his letter. One likely reason he felt that way was because he saw his co-workers doing something besides straight-up lecturing. Here's a line from his letter again, where he longs for the good old days of traditional scheduling: "Classes used to consist of core subject material being communicated to students by individuals rich in knowledge and experience." What could he possibly mean besides lecture?

In this teacher's mind, anything that wasn't lecture couldn't possibly be "serious learning," and therefore all the other non-lecture-based activities he observed in his colleagues' classrooms were a waste of time.

And to an extent, he may have a point. We don't know what was going on in his colleagues' classrooms. Maybe the other teachers were using some highly effective techniques that he was just unfamiliar with. Or maybe, if his school was like some who don't invest enough in training teachers in different methodologies, they really were just screwing around. Because if teachers don't have a well-rounded repertoire of instructional strategies, methods that they know are effective, they will only use lecture to teach, and that gives them one of two choices:

1. Lecture for the full 90 minutes, which bores students to tears, can lead to behavior problems, and ultimately has a negative return, since student attention spans can't be sustained for longer than about 15 minutes. So in this case, you're "covering" a lot of material, but students aren't learning it.

2. Lecture for half the period, then give students the second half for "homework time." This is also ineffective, because that means students are actually learning only half the material over the course of a semester or year. This is typically the reason why some teachers object to block scheduling: They say they can't "get through" as much material. But if these teachers knew more strategies, that remaining time could be used for instruction that would actually hit more learning targets.

Best Practices on the Block

Do not rely solely on lecture.
This advice comes from every teacher I have talked to and every piece of research I have read about successful block teaching (for a good summary, see Queen, 2002). Although I do believe a brief, dynamic lecture every now and then is an efficient way to deliver instruction, and does not need to be abandoned entirely, teachers who lean too heavily on it are doomed to failure in a longer class period. Instead, use a variety of instructional strategies, many of which we will get to in a little while.

Switch activities every 15 to 20 minutes.
Students get restless when they are required to sit still or do the same thing for long periods of time, so unless they are working on a task that will truly engage them for a full hour (and we'll get to these later on), look at your class period as a series of 15- to 20-minute chunks of time and switch activities in each chunk.

Overplan.
If you've ever finished your planned activities in a 50-minute period and found yourself with ten awkward minutes to kill, imagine how much worse it is when you have 30. So plan for the essential activities, but also build in some extras that would be nice to get to, but aren't essential. Meagan Brockway, a high school history teacher in Greencastle, PA, says, "Block scheduling requires planning for more than you can accomplish and then continually readjusting based on student needs." This readjustment may vary from student to student and class to class. "If I have a class that is tremendously behind, then it is a matter of looking at the 'extras' and either cutting those out completely to get to the content needed OR if it is a class that is up for a challenge, then I give them extended time to complete it on their own."

Use a smart pacing guide.
One of the challenges of block scheduling is "fitting in" all of the content you might be used to teaching on a daily schedule. Pacing guides, which are used to map out when you will address each learning target or standard throughout the year or semester, are essential to make sure you use class time wisely. But these often value "coverage" over actual learning. The late educator Grant Wiggins, who always offered incredibly insightful ideas on authentic learning, wrote a great post on designing pacing guides that help teachers hit the most essential standards but also build in time for re-teaching and extension when necessary.

5 Structures for a Block Class Period

To make the most of your extended class period, consider one of these five structures, which you can mix and match over the course of a marking period, depending on your instructional needs. For the sake of convenience, I'm going to assume we're talking about a 90-minute class period, but you should obviously make slight adjustments if your block is longer or shorter than that.

The Classic

This would look the most like a typical lesson, except you would have time to do it right and include ALL the bells and whistles that we all know a good lesson should have:

(10 min) An engaging anticipatory set to pique students' interest, build relevance, bring concepts out of long-term memory or just set the stage for learning. This is a step we often skip over when we are pressed for time. (For ideas, see my post on anticipatory sets or this one on How to Approach Your Teaching Like a Master Chef.)

(15-20 min) Some kind of direct instruction, where the teacher delivers the day's lesson through a lecture (Yes! In small doses this is okay!), doing a demonstration, showing a video, having students read through some kind of text or do an interactive online lesson.

(30 min) Student application of the content. This might take the form of individual practice, reciprocal learning, or some other kind of group work.

(15-20 min) An assessment of the content or skill, followed perhaps by re-teaching to those who need it and an extension activity for students who met the standard.

(10 min) A reflection or other kind of wrap-up, where the value of the lesson is reinforced.

Whitney Schultz, who teaches 80-minute blocks of English at a high school in Baltimore, MD, uses this kind of structure on most days, mixing up the activities within each of the segments. "That 10-15 minute review and 10-15 minute introduction might instead be a 20-30 minute quiz followed by self-grading; or, in my AP class, it might be 20-30 minutes of daily AP practice followed by 40-50 minutes of text discussion/analysis. I've found it's easier to fill 80 minutes than try to trim down what I cover each day!"

The Workshop

In this structure, students would spend the majority of time working on their own projects. The class period might start with a brief (10-minute) mini-lesson, and it would ideally end with some kind of a wrap-up, sharing, or reflection time, but at least a full hour would be spent working independently or in groups on a long-term, hands-on project. Meanwhile, the teacher would circulate, conferencing individually with students as needed or using an appointment system like the one used at the Apollo School.

In an English language arts class, this could be independent writing or reading, or a mixture of both, depending on what each student happens to be working on at the time.

If you are running a self-paced math class, or are delivering instruction through hyperdocs or playlists, where students work at their own pace through a series of lessons, then during the hour, students would just get started from wherever they are in the materials.

In any class that has implemented Genius Hour, this time could be devoted to research, writing, or working on presentations.

The Lab

One big, focused activity takes up most of the class period in this structure. Class may start with some kind of an introduction and end with a reflection or wrap-up, but at least an hour is set aside for an activity where the whole class digs into a single meaty task. In this case, the task itself is designed to be active and engaging, so the rule about switching every 15 or 20 minutes is waived. The big activity could be any of the following:

Simulations or role-plays, which can be incredibly useful in helping students understand complex social studies or science concepts.

A debate, socratic seminar, or some other long-form discussion strategy

A project-based learning activity

A virtual field trip

Jigsaw or another cooperative learning activity

An actual lab (hello, science!)

Sketchnoting: This idea comes from Jana Maiuri, a middle school English teacher in Oakland, California, who will occasionally set aside a whole class period for students to create sketchnotes on a given topic. It starts with "a ten minute rapid-fire warm-up...followed by a kind of 'okay, show me everything you know about commercial fish depletion in a sketchnote in the next 90 minutes.' Then in the next class we do two concentric circles and everyone gets two minutes to present their sketch: three vital facts, the most unique or compelling thought, and one artistic accomplishment or challenge. The movement and the art are engaging and thought provoking." (To get started with sketchnoting, see Vicki Davis' comprehensive post on sketchnoting here.)

The Performance

At the end of a learning cycle, students should ideally have some kind of final product to share with peers, or even outside visitors. A 90-minute block class would be ideal for sharing and celebrating this student work. This performance could take many forms:

Student speeches

Film festival

Gallery of physical or digital products

Skits

Poetry or other readings

The Variety Pack

On some days, you might opt to just give students a fast-paced mixture of activities, some that might review previously learned content, some that introduce new stuff, others that do a bit of drill and practice, and even some that are just there for fun and enrichment. These can be handled in a station rotation model, with student-selected learning centers, or just by having the whole class do a a series of smaller activities together. Here are just a few possible activities you could include:

Any kind of skills practice, flashcard work, or retrieval practice

Watching a short video clip

Independent reading

Journal writing

Having a short philosophical chairs debate

A short read-aloud from a book you're reading together as a class

Small group work with the teacher

Games like Kahoot or Crumple & Shoot

So whether you're brand-new to block scheduling or you've already been doing it for years, I hope you've found at least one new idea to help you make the most of that extended class period and never again be accused of running a "glorified playtime period." ♦
References
Queen, J.A. (2002). Block scheduling revisited. Phi Delta Kappan, 82(3), 214-222.

There's more where this came from.
Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration-in quick, bite-sized packages-all geared toward making 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. Come on in!!

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Whether you're brand-new to block scheduling or you've been doing it for years, these strategies will have you handling those 90 minutes like a boss.

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The power of flexible spaces

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(Not everything on this resource works, in my opinion, but I think there are a few key points like student talk, authenticity, collaboration, etc. Language is a little dated).

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The Station Rotation Model: Prioritize Differentiation, Student Agency & 4Cs of 21st-Century Learning - Dr. Catlin Tucker

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I have a soft spot for the station rotation model. It was one of the first models, along with the flipped classroom, that I could employ in my low-tech classroom. In the early days of my transition to blended learning, I had one Chromebook, which I received after writing a Donor's Choose project.

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Listen to the interview with Melanie Meehan (transcript):
Sponsored by Pear Deck and Spinndle

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

If we want our students to learn as much as they can, ideally they should be presented with learning tasks that are right at their level, or slightly above, so they have to reach a little bit, but they can get there. Making this happen as a teacher-what we refer to as differentiating instruction-is really challenging, because within any group of students you'll find a huge range of abilities, background knowledge, and interests. To do differentiation well, you need lots and lots of tools. A few we've offered here are playlists, self-paced learning, and Universal Design for Learning.

Today we have one more called backward chaining. It's an approach that allows a student who struggles with a task to skip some of the early steps in order to experience the later ones. The strategy was shared with us by Melanie Meehan, a Connecticut-based elementary writing and social studies coordinator who has written three books about teaching writing and contributes to the phenomenal collaborative blog Two Writing Teachers.

Melanie Meehan

Although Meehan uses backward chaining to help students with writing, it's a strategy that can be used in many, many subject areas, so even if you don't teach writing, stick around, because you will likely find some ideas here for how you can use it in your own classroom.

What is Backward Chaining?

Backward chaining is a specific kind of scaffolding that has the student begin a task closer to the end, rather than starting it from the beginning. Where the starting point is depends on the student's particular needs. "There's no telling where the gum in the straw might be for somebody getting stuck doing something," Meehan explains. So finding it will require assessment and experimentation.

For example, if you are teaching a child how to brush their teeth, and that child doesn't quite have the fine motor skills to put the toothpaste on the brush, you'd do that step for them and have them start with the brushing itself. Eventually, as they build confidence with brushing, you'd have them move backward and add on the skill of toothpaste application.

While this strategy is frequently used in situations like the above- teaching life skills to young children or students with disabilities-it can be applied to any educational task where a student needs extra scaffolding or support.

"It's another way to give kids access," Meehan says.

The reasons a student may need a strategy like backward chaining can vary. It may be that their current skill or ability level would hold them up at an early stage of the task, or it might be that executive functioning is slowing them down. "So many of the kids that you might be envisioning at this point are kids who don't always see things to completion," Meehan explains. "To give kids a sense of completing a task is kind of a big deal."

Examples of Backward Chaining

Writing: If a student struggles to come up with an idea for a narrative piece, supply them with an idea (even give them three pictures of a basic sequence of events) and have them write the story of those pictures. Later, they may be ready to try again with their own idea.

Research: If a student needs to create a presentation or write a paper based on research, and they don't yet have the skills to find resources or take notes, you could supply them with pre-selected resources and pre-written notes on the topic, then just have them write the summary of the research. In the future, they can work on the research or notes part of the process until they get to the point of being able to do the whole thing from beginning to end.

Math: For complex problems, have the first few steps done and have the student take over from there until they are ready to work backwards with fewer steps done for them.

Cooking: Many people may be familiar with meal kit services like HelloFresh or Blue Apron, which supply pre-measured ingredients for specific menus and tell you exactly how to cook them, which puts you a few steps into the process of making the meal.

Tips for Using Backward Chaining in Your Classroom

Start with a task analysis. If you know you have an assignment coming up that some students typically struggle with, think through all the steps involved from start to finish. Doing this will give you options for different entry points for students.

Include the student in the process. Meehan recommends that teachers be transparent with students about the options available and let them choose where to start. For the research example above, she'll tell them, "If you feel like you're ready to have a text set that you can research yourself and take notes on yourself, I have those. If you feel like you need the notes, I'll give you the notes so that you can get straight to writing. And if you're like, no, I want to do the whole thing myself, I want to decide on my topic and find my resources and get myself set up, you can do that. It's kind of like where in the process do you feel like you're ready to start?"

Gradually move the starting point back. Backward chaining is not a permanent solution; the idea is that the student will eventually be able to move back to where they can do the whole task from the beginning. "Scaffolds by definition should be temporary and there should be a plan to take them away," Meehan says. "So I am intentionally and purposefully doing work for kids, but with the idea that they are going to build their confidence, they are going to build their competence, they're going to build their curiosity around the whole process, and they're going to become more willing to go backward in the process to an earlier step."

LEARN MORE

You can find more from Meehan on her website, melaniemeehan.com. She goes more in-depth about the backward chaining strategy and lots of others in her 2019 book, Every Child Can Write ( Amazon | Bookshop.org).

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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How to Use Backward Chaining to Differentiate Instruction

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Starting a student a few steps ahead can help them experience a sense of completion that might otherwise be out of reach.

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Listen to the interview with Melanie Meehan (transcript):
Sponsored by EVERFI and Today by Studyo

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

Over the years, we've covered a lot of different ways to differentiate and personalize instruction, methods for giving each student what they need when they need it, rather than planning the exact same learning experiences for everyone, every day. ( Click here to see all of our posts that connect to differentiation in some way.) The good news is that there are so many ways to differentiate - here we'll focus on another strategy that we're calling seminars.

I say "we're calling it that" because I assume you're already familiar with the word seminar - a short-term gathering of people for the purpose of learning about a given topic. Typically, adults attend seminars. University students attend seminars. What we're talking about today is offering a version of that concept to students within your own classroom. These seminars are mini-lessons given during class time, but the key is that most of the time they are optional - students only sign up to attend if they have an interest in or need to learn more about the topic. And yes, they could just be called mini-lessons - in fact, I heard about this same concept years ago from the high school teachers at the Apollo School - but something special is added when you call them seminars.

That's what Melanie Meehan calls them. Meehan is a Connecticut-based elementary writing and social studies coordinator who has written three books about teaching writing and contributes to the collaborative blog Two Writing Teachers. She appeared on episode 192 of the podcast, where we talked about backward chaining, another differentiation strategy. While working on that piece, she also mentioned the seminar strategy, and I liked it so much I thought we should give it its own separate space.

Melanie Meehan

In the podcast episode above, Meehan talked with me about the logistics of how she sets seminars up in her classroom and what an effective tool they are, not only for differentiation, but also for building student agency. And just like with backward chaining, seminars can be used in any subject area and any grade level.

What do seminars look like in a K-12 classroom?

"Basically, seminars are small group instruction," Meehan says, "and that is, as far as I'm concerned, the sweet spot of differentiation." She acknowledges that seminar is a deliberately 'fancy' word, but "it's a word that kids love."

The seminars are 7 to 10 minutes long, with each seminar covering a small, focused topic. They are offered during times when students are working independently on other tasks. During a typical class period, Meehan usually offers one or two seminars.

When she first introduces the concept of seminars to students, she talks about her own daughters attending seminars in college: "It was the special classes where they got to really work on what they were interested in. So I'll bring them up as seminars in terms of what are you really interested in learning about? And it just generates some excitement and some joy around the whole process."

Nuts and bolts: What are the logistics?

Choosing the Topics

Seminars can be offered in any subject area; because she teaches writing, Meehan's seminars are all geared toward that. "It can be any of the learning targets that align with the standards that the unit's going after," she explains. "So that could be developing sections for my writing, it can be making sure that I have enough information in a given section. It can be making sure my reason's clear. Depending on what genre they're working on, those seminars can be content-specific. But they can also be writing behavioral. They can be, I'm having a hard time getting to work. I'm having a hard time staying on task. So sometimes I'll put those up too."

Topics can come from Meehan's observations of students at work, noticing areas of struggle. They can also come from student surveys. Meehan has a Google Form ( click here to make a copy) that asks students to evaluate themselves with these questions:

"Once I have that information," Meehan says, "I can establish seminars based on that. If I get four kids who have checked that they need some work on including small stories into their argument pieces, I've got a seminar going."

Sign Ups

Meehan has students sign up on a sheet of chart paper with lined sticky notes indicating the seminars being offered that day. "So I can just pull that sticky note right off of the chart, and be like, oh, okay. You four needed to work on ways to help your introductions. Great. Seminar's going on about hooking introductions. I've got Jenn, Melanie, Garth, and Julia, you four come on up. I'm giving that right now."

Ideally, seminars will only be given to groups of four to five students. If more than five sign up for a seminar, Meehan will offer two separate sessions. If a large number of students show interest in a topic, that becomes a whole-class lesson.

How do these lessons fit into class time? Meehan describes a typical 45-60-minute class period: "I'm envisioning a 7 to 10 short, what we would call a mini lesson. So a quick, here's your learnings for the day. You don't necessarily have to do it today because you might be in a different place in your writing process, but probably at some point in this unit, you are going to need this teaching point. And, you know, off you go, and you're working on your independent pieces. So during that independent time, and in my head, there are two 20-minute solid blocks of independent writing time. So you've got your 7- to 10-minute full group lesson that everybody's listening to, you've got your 20 minutes of independent writing time, during which time you have the opportunity to teach kids as small groups or teach kids individually. I like to challenge the teachers that I work with to think about having in those 20 minutes one small group and one conference, at least.

"So if you can fit those in in those 20 minutes, then you're doing a good job being efficient, because after that 20 minutes, you'll do a quick interruption. You might highlight something that you saw. You might have an additional teaching point, you might ask somebody to share what they're proud of. That's the two-, three-minute interruption, which sometimes kids need, right? Great, everybody. Back to work. You got another 20 minutes, and teacher, you've got another opportunity for another seminar and another meeting with the kids."

Are seminars always self-selected?

Meehan's long-term goal is to build student agency, with students understanding their own needs and taking steps to meet them. Seminars are an important part of making that happen. "Ultimately the goal of learning is transfer," she says. "It's owning your learning and being a learner out in the world without a teacher at your side. So I love having kids sign up for their own seminars."

With that said, Meehan also occasionally assigns seminars to students. If a seminar is being held and she knows a student needs to work on that particular skill, she'll either gently encourage them to attend or simply tell them they really need that seminar. And if, during a writer's workshop, she notices four or five students who appear to be stuck or off-task? "You've got a seminar. Like, hey, friend, have I got a seminar for you. This one's going to be mandated."

Sometimes student choices don't always align with what Meehan thinks they need, like when a student chooses a seminar on a skill they have already mastered. But in those cases, she usually won't interfere. "I can move them along quickly through the choice that they've made and honor that choice," she says. "And then they're much more pliable toward my recommendation for the next one."

Leveling Up: Student- Run Seminars

Once students have gotten used to attending seminars run by the teacher, you can start to move toward having students give the seminars themselves. When Meehan notices that a student really understands a topic, she'll instruct them to listen to her give a seminar as if they'll have to teach it themselves.

"I'll be like, you're going to be the one who listens and then turns it around because we've got so many other kids who need it," she says. "So you're going to become my teaching partner, and at the end of this, you're going to go off and teach it to another group, and I'll teach it to the other group."

By taking this approach, Meehan not only becomes more efficient at managing demands on her time, she also builds more confidence and agency in her students.

"I think that we run past the power of the abilities of some of the kids in the room," Meehan says. "Kids are sometimes really effective teachers to each other." So if she notices that a student is starting to master a skill, she might say something like, "You've used transition words brilliantly in your piece. Could you run a seminar on that for your friends?"

Having students teach each other also pushes them to a new level of mastery. "A kid might have a specialty or a strength that they want to develop, and that also forces them to kind of prepare for it and make sure that they're extra good."

Seminars in Any Class

Although this idea is being presented here in a writing class, which is built on a workshop model, seminars could be offered in any subject area. Even if you are teaching a content-heavy subject, as long as you build in some time for students to work independently, you'll have an opportunity to offer seminars on the unique set of skills needed for success in your subject.

LEARN MORE

You can find more from Meehan on her website, melaniemeehan.com. The seminar approach appears along with lots of other fantastic strategies in her 2022 book, Answers to Your Biggest Questions About Teaching Elementary Writing ( Amazon | Bookshop.org).

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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How to Personalize Instruction with Seminars

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Listen to the interview with Melanie Meehan (transcript): Sponsored by EVERFI and Today by Studyo This page contains Amazon Affiliate and Bookshop.org links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.

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8th Grade Sample Social Studies Lesson For Redesign

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Melissa Messing Around with Sticky Notes

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Small groups of students move from station to station to read, watch, and interpret a variety of resources.

English & Language Arts

History

Social Studies

Most teachers are willing to tackle the difficult topics, but we need the tools.

- Gabriela Calderon-Espinal, Bay Shore, NY

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Stations: Interacting with Multiple Texts

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Small groups of students move from station to station to read, watch, and interpret a variety of resources. English & Language Arts History Social Studies Most teachers are willing to tackle the difficult topics, but we need the tools. - Gabriela Calderon-Espinal, Bay Shore, NY

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4. Collaborative Response Protocol_Slam Poetry

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/15z367goWdRum4qUTgJMBuxUxR8_aYBVaxBYO0d2hFLg/edit?usp=drivesdk