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Students will demonstrate increased motivation and application of philosophies of Growth Mindset.

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Students will participate in a classroom rotation model of blended learning, allowing for student set pace of material through iXL and other online resources.

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Students will complete alternative assessments that incorporate scaffolding of content area skills so that students will develop higher order critical thinking skills as measured by rubrics to determine levels of performance.

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Listen to my interview with Natalie McCutchen (transcript)

With few exceptions, I would bet that most teachers feel they could be doing a better job of differentiating instruction. It's not that we don't want to do it-we know our students learn at different rates, that some need more help and others could be moving much more quickly than we let them. The problem for many of us is that we just can't figure out how to manage it. How do you run a classroom where each student is working on a different thing at a different speed?

The first time I ever saw a truly self-paced learning environment was on my visit to a Montessori Elementary School two years ago. And although I was completely enchanted by the student-centered environment there, the class size was small. I wondered whether that method could really be scaled up to class sizes at a typical public school.

So I was excited when, at a recent TeachMeet, I saw that there would be a session on self-paced learning. At the session, Franklin, KY, middle school math teacher Natalie McCutchen showed us how she has converted her pre-algebra class to a completely self-paced system, where students work on different skills at their own pace, and how she's gradually introducing self-paced learning in her other math classes as well. I found her system to be astonishingly simple, and I thought a lot of other teachers might like to try it for themselves, so I interviewed her for my latest podcast episode (see player below) and asked if I could share her methods here.

Here's a quick snapshot of how she does it: For each chapter in their math textbook, students take a pre-test to determine which skills they have already mastered and which ones they still need to learn. For the skills they still need to master, they work independently on lessons (either reading them in the textbook or watching them on videos) and do practice problems until they feel they've got the skill down. This is the true self-paced part: Students decide how many lessons they need. They decide how much practice to give themselves. "Maybe there are five videos that you could watch today," Natalie explains to her students. "You watch as many as you need. If you watch two videos and you understand it, then you move on to the practice. If you need all five, use all five." Rather than forcing students to follow the same path in lockstep with one another, practicing page after page of skills they already have down, this system gives them a chance to build the metacognitive muscle they'll need to become lifelong learners.

When a student feels he is ready, he takes a mini-assessment for a single learning target, usually made up of just a few questions. If he does well on that small assessment, he can move on to another skill. Once he has mastered all the skills in the chapter, he takes a whole-chapter assessment-this is the same test he was given as the pre-assessment. If he does well on that, he's ready to progress to the next chapter.

How do students know which lessons and practices to work on, and when?
Natalie creates a Chapter Guide for each chapter. It includes each learning target, the pre-test question or questions that align with that target, the lessons students should watch or read to learn about that target, the practice problems that match up with that target, and the assessment question or questions for that target.

Look at the example below. If this student missed question 2 on the pre-test, she should do Lesson 2.4 on pages 102-104 and may need to do Skills Practice 2.4 on pages 403-406 in preparation for the assessment for that learning target, which is item 2a on page 38. She might only need to read through the lesson and do one or two practice problems in order to do well on the assessment, or she might choose to do them all. Likewise, if she got question 6 correct on the pre-test, she doesn't need to do the lesson, the practice, or the assessment for that learning target at all-she'd just mark that as mastered on the chart.

Do students get the answer keys?
Students have access to the answers for all of the practice questions, so Natalie does not need to check these; it's up to the student to do the practice problems, then self-check them to see if they're getting the skill down. There's no real incentive to cheat here, because if a student doesn't teach herself the skill, it will show up in the mini-assessment for that target: The mini-assessment IS scored by the teacher, and students are not given an answer key for it.

hey keep the chapter guide in a composition notebook. We glue all their items in there. So they have that with them on their desk every day, and I'm able to go by and say Some kids may turn in two assessments per class period, depending on how hard they worked. Some kids may turn in one. Some kids, maybe they didn't get to an assessment that day." And because Natalie encourages collaboration between students, the room is What does class time look like?
"It's very much organized chaos," Natalie says. "T Okay, what have you done? Where are you today? And at the end of class, I can say, busy: "I really prefer them to work together on the lesson, especially with my pre-algebra students, because they are such good math thinkers, they understand and can talk math, I want them to work together. You know, two or three in a group seeing if you can figure it out on your own using the video." How much did you get done?" Because students are all working independently, the amount of work produced on any given day can vary. "

ometimes they have to come back to the pack," she explains. "I'll say What if some kids can't handle all that independence? What if they just fool around the whole time?
Natalie's solution to this problem was what really impressed me about her system: Not all students get to do self-paced; some have to work with her in a more traditional teacher-led setup. Self-paced learning is a privilege reserved only for kids who take it seriously and work hard. If you mess that up, you can lose the privilege, returning to a group that's working directly with the teacher. "S You know what, you really didn't work that hard yesterday. I'm not even sure what you got done, I don't see anything on here. Just come back with us today. " For some students, this is a step backward, but they get other chances to move ahead later. "They like being ahead. You know, they think it's kinda cool. Sometimes I'll let them go out in the hallway, sit at a little table. They like that, but I stress to them you still have to work."

Natalie McCutchen developed her system through some trial and error, and she's constantly refining it, so none of this is set in stone. But if you'd like to try and replicate her approach to self-paced learning, here are the steps to take:

Step 1: Select a Unit of Content
This can be a chapter in a textbook or a batch of skills or content you would typically teach as a unit over a couple of weeks. This unit should have clearly defined learning targets, which are likely dictated by whatever standards your school follows. If you've been teaching for a while, you probably already have this step taken care of. In Natalie's class, each chapter in her math textbook represents one unit.

Step 2: Create the Assessment
Decide what students should be able to do by the end of the unit and create an assessment that measures it. The simplest type is a test with clearly identified right and wrong answers, where each item (or small group of items) in this assessment is aligned with one learning target. For skills that require more teacher interpretation to measure, like writing, the assessment could be a writing task, such as an extended response question with a prompt and a rubric. Each skill listed in the rubric would align with a specific learning target.

Step 3: Create the Chapter Guide
Following the model shown above, set up a guide that shows which assessment question aligns with each learning target, then lists book or video lessons students can follow to learn each skill, exercises that will give students independent practice with the skill, and a brief assessment students can take to test their mastery.

Step 4: Give the Pre-Test
Use the assessment you created in Step 2 to pre-test students on the skills for this unit. Use the results to identify which learning targets each student has already mastered, and which ones they still need to learn. [Note: Natalie's school uses standards-based grading, but that's not a strict requirement for this system. You could still record mastery of learning targets in the standards-based style and convert those measurements to traditional grades. To learn how, see Matt Townsley's video on converting standards-based indicators to letter grades.]

Step 5: Help Students Identify Standards to Master
Giving each student a Chapter Guide, have them mark which standards they have already mastered-based on pre-test results-and which ones they still need to learn.

Step 6: Provide Time, Materials, and Supervision for Self-Paced Learning
From this point on, students will begin the process of moving through the lessons on their own. Your job is to make sure they have the materials they need to do the work: If you are sending students to videos, make sure they have devices to access them (and earbuds to keep the audio to themselves). Make sure students know where to look for answer keys, and where they can access the mini-assessment when they are ready to take it. Check in with students regularly to make sure they are making good use of their time.

Step 7: Iterate
Keep in mind that this system probably won't work perfectly the first time you try it. You may want to try it just once with a short unit, rather than attempt to convert your whole year to self-paced learning. You might want to offer it only to students who have the academic skills and maturity to handle it. You may need to tweak it, then tweak it some more. But speaking for the kids who would love a chance to see just how fast they can learn and how far they can go, I'd say it's worth a serious try. ♦
Other Resources:

There's more where this came from.
Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration - in quick, bite-sized packages - all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. To thank you, I'll send you a free copy of my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half. I look forward to getting to know you better!

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Self-Paced Learning: How One Teacher Does It

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Most teachers feel they could be doing a better job of differentiating instruction, but many can't figure out how to manage it. How to run a classroom where each student is working on a different thing, at a different speed? See how one teacher does it.

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Listen to my interview with Tracy Enos or read the transcript here.

In our never-ending quest to find better ways to differentiate and personalize instruction for students, we have plenty of options. I covered a lot of the basics in my Differentiation Starter Kit. Then last year we learned how math teacher Natalie McCutchen manages a self-paced classroom. And for ESL students, there are the Can-Do Descriptors.

Now, Rhode Island teacher Tracy Enos shares her system for customizing instruction to meet the needs of every student. She calls it a playlist, an individualized digital assignment chart that students work through at their own pace.

First, consider what we usually do: When planning a typical unit of instruction, teachers map out a series of lessons to deliver, assignments for students to complete, and some kind of final assessment at the end. They might share this plan with students, but then the execution is done by the teacher: The teacher delivers the lessons, tells students when to do the assignments, and guides students toward the final assessment.

With playlists, the responsibility for executing the learning plan shifts: Students are given the unit plan, including access to all the lessons (in text or video form), ahead of time. With the learning plan in hand, students work through the lessons and assignments at their own pace. And because each student has her own digital copy of the playlist (delivered through a system like Google Classroom), the teacher can customize the list to meet each student's needs.

"A playlist is basically like a road map," Enos explains. "I started using them in my classroom when I looked at my room full of 26 students and I saw the variety in their abilities. I knew I needed something different so that I could meet the needs of each one of those kids. Instead of just saying, 'OK, everybody, we're going to work on this lesson today,' I needed to individualize it so that different kids are working on things that they needed."

The term playlist, by the way, was coined by one of Enos' colleagues, math teacher Jason Appel.

Here are screenshots of three sample playlists from Enos's class. If you click on each one, you'll be taken to the full version to view in Google Docs. Although these examples come from a language arts class, Enos feels strongly that the playlist concept could be used in any content area.

Argument Writing Playlist

The first playlist is for a unit on argument writing. What you see here is just the first few tasks; there are 19 on the full playlist.

In the first column, Enos simply names the task. The second column provides specific instructions for the task. The third column is set up for students to record any notes they have about the task, and the fourth is where students record the date they completed the task.

Although much of the playlist will be exactly the same for each student, especially for the first few tasks, individual tasks can be customized to meet individual needs. Because the playlist is stored in digital form, the teacher can go into each student's playlist at any time and make adjustments as needed.

In addition to adjusting certain tasks, Enos also builds space in each playlist for purely individualized tasks. If we look further down her playlist, we see that tasks #14 and #15 have been left open for individualized focus revision activities, to be determined after the student has written her draft:

Enos does place occasional hard deadlines into her playlists; item 13 above has a date assigned to it. Although students are allowed to complete the work before the deadline, having this task pinned to a specific date helps prevent students from getting too far off track from each other.

Parts of Speech Playlist

This next one is from a unit designed to review the parts of speech. Notice that some of the tasks are quite simple and quick: Students just need to log on to a certain platform, create an account, or join an online group. This makes the playlist a practical tool as well as a good instructional vehicle: One place to keep learning tasks AND the kinds of housekeeping items that accompany most units. And breaking units into smaller tasks gives students a feeling of accomplishment as they move through each item.

To see the full version of this playlist, click the image below:

Again, the "Directions" column allows for maximum flexibility. The teacher can add tech tips, reminders, or any other information that might help student complete the task more smoothly. And if this is done in digital form, the teacher can easily add tips, links, or other comments at any time, making the playlist a living document.

Book Club Playlist

The final example is a playlist created for a unit on dystopian fiction, in which students participated in book clubs.

Notice that the playlist also includes checkpoints, where students must touch base with their teacher before moving on. These can be built in at any point for any reason, such as making sure students have completed key housekeeping tasks (like in the example above) or having the teacher review a draft for quality.

Many of the tasks in the playlist will ultimately result in the student submitting work through Google Classroom, or they might require a paper submission in a class that hasn't gone quite so digital. In fact, the whole system could be done on paper-one look at how student learning is managed in a Montessori classroom and you'll see how that can work. What's key is that students work through the list on their own, which frees the teacher up to spend more time working one-on-one with students.

If students are truly working at their own pace, wouldn't that mean some are way ahead, even finished with a unit, while others drag way behind? Setting a few hard deadlines (as shown in the argument writing playlist) can help keep the pacing from spiraling too far out of whack, but if our goal is true individualization, then we shouldn't want everyone to be too closely aligned.

This can be managed on a day-to-day basis. Students who are taking longer to master key tasks will likely get more one-on-one assistance from the teacher or be placed in groups to help them. Those who finish the required material quickly can be given enrichment tasks that take the learning to more advanced levels.

Homework also takes on a different role in a class that uses playlists: Because students work through the playlists on their own, they decide whether they get homework or not. If a student is moving through a playlist quickly, they may not have a need to spend extra time on the work at home. Conversely, if a student finds he needs extra help in class, he may decide to catch up on a few videos at home.

For a more in-depth exploration of playlists, listen to my podcast interview with Tracy Enos using the player above or by listening on iTunes or Stitcher (for Android). If you have questions, ask them in the comments below and I'll have Tracy come over and answer them. And if you have used a system that's similar to playlists, please share your experiences in the comments so we can all learn together.♦

There's a lot more where this came from.
Join the Cult of Pedagogy 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 my members-only library of free downloadable resources, including my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, which has helped thousands of teachers spend less time grading. If you are already a subscriber and want this resource, just check your most recent email for a link to the Members-Only Library-it's in there!

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Using Playlists to Differentiate Instruction

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Want better differentiation? Learn how to use this simple method for providing students with customized plans for working through a unit of study.

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Tools to use when incorporating videos into blended learning.

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It's no secret that I am a passionate advocate for using video in the classroom. When used well, videos can help students make connections to people and ideas beyond their usual frame of reference. That's why I've been really excited to see a wave of new (and mostly free or low-cost!) tech tools recently that enable teachers to take favorite clips and make them more valuable for educational use. Whether you use videos to flip your classroom or you just appreciate the power of video to engage kids, maybe one of the tools in my playlist below will help you go deeper this school year.

Video Playlist: Tools to Enhance Videos for Learning

You may notice my playlist below looks a little different this time; I'm embedding using a great tool called Huzzaz, reviewed below. Watch the player below to see the whole playlist, or you can still view it on YouTube.

1. TED-Ed Website Tour (03:08)
Most educators know TED-Ed publishes amazing animations, but did you know their platform allows users to build lessons by adding questions and notes to any video on YouTube? The elegant interface allows your students to watch and then dig deeper into resources you've provided, via a unique URL that allows you to track their responses. See an example.

2. How to Use Vialogues (04:54)
If you'd like to have a discussion around a particular video, Vialogues is a useful way to allow threaded conversations on a clip. You can also add surveys and open-ended questions with this tool, which was developed by the EdLab at Columbia University Teachers College. See an example.

3. Using Metta.io (05:04)
Wanting to string a few videos together and add text and graphics overlays? Metta is the tool for you -- although it had one of the more confusing interfaces on the list. Still, it's unique from the others in that it's creating less of a wrapper than a whole new media experience, a mashup -- for some applications, this could be amazing. See an example.

4. VideoNot.es: Improving How We Learn with Online Video (04:00)
VideoNot.es is an app that allows you to take live time-coded notes on any video, and skip around by clicking on those notes -- and even better, it's integrated with Google Drive so saving and syncing your notes is simple. You have to install it to see this example.

5. How to Create a PlayPosit Lesson (05:39)
With teacher favorite Zaption no longer available, Playposit (formerly EduCanon) has emerged as a great to to allow you to supplement a chosen video with all manner of add-ons to make it more interactive, from "reflective pauses" to audio clips to multiple-choice questions. You can also track responses with this tool.

6. Huzzaz (02:34)
Huzzaz is about discovery and curation of videos -- it's an easy way to collect, sort, and take notes on your playlists, from both YouTube and Vimeo. If you love gathering videos on themes, you'll find this tool very powerful. Or, have your students curate playlists on choice topics! See an example.

More Resources on Using Video in the Classroom

I'd hazard a guess that the popularity of the flipped classroom idea is one of the drivers of this renaissance of tools to make videos more flexible and useful for teachers, but any teacher could find a way to use this kind of functionality to add value for learners. Below, I've listed some more detailed reviews of the tools above, as well as a few more resources for both finding and using great video in the classroom. I hope my enthusiasm has encouraged you to jump in and play with a few of these tools! And if you have other ways of supplementing or enhancing videos you use, I'd love to hear about those in the comments.

Reviews and Guides for Interactive Video Tools

"A Step by Step Tutorial on How to Flip your Classroom with TED Ed," from Education Technology and Mobile Learning

"Vialogues: Videos + Dialogues Promoting Communication and Critical Thinking," from Web 2.0 Teaching Tools

"Create Digital Learning Content By Easily Combining Parts of One or More Videos with Images, Text, and Audio Using Metta," by Tom Raymond, from EmergingEdTech

"VideoNot.es: Note Taking For Flipped Classroom," by Shaun Takenouchi, from K12 Tech Info

"Turn YouTube into a Classroom with eduCanon," by Jennifer Gonzalez, from Cult of Pedagogy

"Huzzaz Makes it Easy to Create and Share Online Video Collections," by Kimberlee Morrison, from SocialTimes

"The 10 Best Web Tools For Flipped Classrooms," by Jeff Dunn, from Edudemic

"5 Digital Tools For The Flipped Classroom," from TeachThought

Sources and Ideas for Using Videos in the Classroom

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5-Minute Film Festival: 6 Interactive Video Tools for Engaging Learners

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It's no secret that I am a passionate advocate for using video in the classroom. When used well, videos can help students make connections to people and ideas beyond their usual frame of reference. That's why I've been really excited to see a wave of new (and mostly free or low-cost!)

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Originally, blended learning referred to adding an online component to instructor-led training or classroom education.

But now that technology offers so many varied options, a blended approach has evolved to mean the use of more than one delivery method to provide and enhance training and support. This is the way of the future.

Advantages of Blended Learning

Some of the advantages of using an effective blended strategy include:

Designers and learners are not limited to one medium or delivery channel to meet the learning objectives.

It promotes a continuous learning approach which is more effective at creating change and deep learning.

It provides more opportunities for social learning, collaboration, increased participation and informal strategies.

Using both synchronous and asynchronous approaches can provide more opportunities for learners to cultivate skills and apply them.

There is the potential for faster development and reduced costs depending on the approaches that are selected.

Technology-enabled delivery can reach a geographically dispersed audience.

Examples

In workplace training, blended instruction can incorporate any strategies that improve on-the-job performance and satisfaction. For example, a blended approach could mean a webinar enhanced with forum discussions and outfitted with mobile support tools. Or it might involve a flipped virtual classroom and working with a mentor.

Ten Best Practices

Designing for blended instruction is going to be different than designing for a stand-alone course. In an effort to identify effective design strategies for this approach, I researched journal articles, books and white papers and synthesized the following ten best practices.

1. Design to meet learning outcomes, not to use specific technologies. Choose approaches that will fulfill the learning outcomes, rather than focusing on a specific technology. The appropriateness of meeting the learning objectives should take precedence in the design.

2. Design to meet organizational drivers.
Know the underlying purpose for using a blended approach. Is it to reach a wider audience or to meet the needs of varied learners? Whatever the organizational drivers are, be sure to also meet those goals.

3. Design for synergy.
Determine how the components of a blended strategy will fit together as a whole. Link the learning experiences from each component of the blend to each other so they work to reinforce and augment each other. Think in terms of weaving a tapestry.

4. Consider learner preferences and use cases.
Take learner preferences into account during design and development. Survey the audience to discover the learning environments they prefer. For example, if audience members are isolated from their peers, such as a widely dispersed sales force, they may wish to partake in an online learning community.

5. Design from scratch rather than redesign an existing course or curriculum.
In The Handbook of Blended Learning, authors Bonk and Graham recommend taking a fresh start with your blended design. A blended approach needs a new perspective. If you re-work an existing course you are already constrained by the previous approach.

6. Consider the full range of options.
Learning designers have more options now than ever before. There are numerous online technologies and apps. One thing to remember are the on-the-job options, such as coaching, mentoring and shadowing experts.

7. Find ways to make social and emotional connections.
Provide ways to build community, when this is appropriate for the audience and content. Make interaction and engagement part of the blended approach. Social learning is powerful.

8. Ensure the asynchronous components are considered as valuable as the live components.
Although this may be obvious to eLearning professionals, those who are coming from an instructor-led background could have a bias toward thinking that classroom training is more important than other approaches. Value all the components that are part of your blend.

9. Evaluate the program with a pilot.
To evaluate a blended program, start with a pilot version. See if learners can understand how it works and watch to see where people may stumble. Note which aspects are motivating and which are frustrating. Implement a continuous improvement strategy.

10. Prepare the learners.
Because a blended strategy will be new to many employees, it is important to provide an orientation and rationale for using this approach. You may need to introduce it at an organizational level, getting buy-in from upper management.
What about you? Please add your best practices in the Comments below. References:

1. Bonk, C. & Grahm, C. The Handbook of Blended Learning: Global Perspectives, Local Designs. Pfeiffer, 2005.

2. Glazer, F. & Rehn, J. Blended Learning: Across the Disciplines, Across the Academy. Stylus Publishing, 2011

3. Kineo & The Oxford Group. Blended Learning Today, 2013.

4. Oliver, M. , & Trigwell , K. Can "blended learning" be redeemed? E-Learning , 2 ( 1 ), 17 - 26, 2005.

5. Schuhmann, R. & Skopek, T. Blurring the Lines: A Blended Learning Model in a Graduate Public Administration Program. The Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 10(2), 2009.

6. Singh, H. Building Effective Blended Learning Programs. Educational Technology,
43 (6), 51-54, 2003.

Get smart about eLearning with The eLearning Coach delivered to your Inbox every month. Ideas-articles-freebies-resources.

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Originally, blended learning referred to adding an online component to instructor-led training or classroom education. But now that technology offers so many varied options, a blended approach has evolved to mean the use of more than one delivery method to provide and enhance training and support. This is the way of the future.

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Possible survey

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ReadWorks | Award-Winning, EdTech Nonprofit Organization

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ReadWorks is an edtech nonprofit organization that is committed to helping to solve America’s reading comprehension crisis.

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Thanks for being part of the Google Assignments LTI (formerly known as Course Kit) beta! In addition to the LTI tool you have today through your Learning Management System, Assignments will also be accessible directly through G Suite for Education so it can be used alongside a Learning Management System or at assignments.google.com.

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EDU in 90: Apps for Portfolios & Presentations

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For Lisa Berghoff, Director of Instructional Technology at Highland Park High School in Highland Park, Illinois, one of her big assistive technology "aha" moments came while working with a student with autism. The student, often disruptive in class because she wanted immediate answers to questions, needed a teaching aide at her side-an accommodation that set her apart from her peers. "There's nothing less cool than having an adult next to you in a high school class," Berghoff says.

Berghoff decided to open up a Google Doc on the student's Chromebook, with the teaching aide accessing the same Doc on her own Chromebook from across the room and responding to the student's questions in real time. "That document, with all the questions and answers captured by the student, actually became a resource for other students-it was a huge win for everyone," Berghoff says. "That's something we couldn't have done years ago."

In Berghoff's 25 years in education, she's seen the many changes that technology has brought to every student-but particularly those with learning challenges. In honor of Disability Awareness Month, we asked Berghoff about the impact of assistive technology and accessibility up close. Just getting started with G Suite and Chromebooks, and want to learn more about accessibility? Head to edu.google.com/accessibility to learn more.
How'd you get started in special education?
I did my undergrad degree in psychology with grand plans to be a psychologist, but when I applied to some Ph.D programs they told me to get some experience in the real world. My first job was working at a crisis shelter for teenage girls. Because of my work with the girls who struggled so much to learn, I took some courses in special education-and realized that was where I wanted to be.
How'd you make the switch from special education to instructional technology?
I'd spent the last several years working with high school students with an array of significant disabilities. I would try anything if I thought it could help my kids learn, so the technology office started throwing all the tech my way-everything from Chromebooks to iPads to Promethean boards-because they knew I'd give it all an honest try.

I saw that when used with integrity, technology could really be a game changer in helping kids learn. I distinctly recall a reading lesson where I recorded myself reading and shared a YouTube link, so students could pause and replay the video at their own pace.

Timing was on my side, and when the instructional technology director position opened up at Highland Park, the thought of having a wider influence appealed to me. At the time, I was fascinated by all kinds of kids with learning challenges-not just the students with Individualized Education Programs (IEPs). No matter what challenges kids have, many often need some kind of special support and could benefit from the right technology.

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How classroom tech brings accessibility with dignity

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For Lisa Berghoff, Director of Instructional Technology at Highland Park High School in Highland Park, Illinois, one of her big assistive technology "aha" moments came while working with a student with autism. The student, often disruptive in class because she wanted immediate answers to questions, needed a teaching aide at her side-an accommodation that set her apart from her peers.

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Laura Collier, an Education Consultant and a former Math teacher, was invited to attend a two-day workshop with the amazing Marcia Kish, who is the expert on blended learning. After that training, Laura has not been able to stop sharing about blended learning and has since begun to adapt her training style to embrace this model of instruction. She shares her experience with us and provides a step-by-step process that can be easily implemented into lessons.

So, Laura, tell us, what is Blended Learning?

Blended Learning can take on many different meanings and can look different in every classroom, so I am going to use the definition given to me by Marcia Kish.

Blended learning is defined as students working at their own Pace, Place, and Path. - Marcia Kish

This simple, but very clear, definition works as a guide while making decisions in your blended classroom. When in doubt, simply stop and ask, "Does this allow my students to move at their own Pace, Place, and Path?

Let's breakdown each of these words to ensure we are all on the same page.

1. Pace means that if a student needs to continue working on a skill or concept longer than his or her peers, your classroom provides the resources for this to occur. No student should be forced to move on or slow down when it is not best serving their needs. Allowing students to move at their own pace increases their engagement, ownership, and overall enjoyment of their time in school. If our goal is to prepare students for the "real world", we have to teach them how to adequately pace themselves when working on easy and difficult tasks.

2. is pretty easy to define because it is a tangible piece to this trifecta of blended learning. Place will depend on the physical limitations of your classroom but do not let those four walls hold back your creative imagination. A simple Google search or Pinterest hunt will provide dozens of cost-effective ways to create unique seating options for you and your students. If you are at a loss, put an "ideas box" in the classroom and let your students mastermind the plans. Allowing students to work in a physical location where they feel comfortable and safe will free up their minds to produce higher quality work. I do not know about you, but when I am uncomfortable it is all my mind can think about. When I am able to stretch out a little and relax, my mind can focus on more important ideas, which result in more time being productive and less time being distracted.

3. to be honest, was the hardest for me to wrap my head around. I'm a former math teacher, so I think about everything in very linear straight lines. How can I possibly allow one student to venture down a path that I have not first prepared for them? What if they learn something I have not taught yet? What if they learn it wrong? If I am being completely honest, what if they learn something I do not know the answer to? This is where Marcia Kish guided me in her outstanding training. She advised us to take it slow. Start with stations, 10 minutes at each station including independent practice, future-ready skills, digital learning, and a teacher mini-lesson. Now, pick your mouth up off the floor, yes she said 10 minutes! Stop and think about it, how long is your attention span? The fact that you have made it this far in my blog already shows me that you have an above average ability to focus. Our brains are wired to move on if something is not interesting to us. Our brains prefer to learn new material in small doses, so 10 minutes is the perfect fit. However, if you are still struggling to wrap your head around it, I would suggest again, to take it slow. Start with 2 stations 20 minutes each and ease yourself into what works for you and your kiddos.

Once you have mastered the stations and rotations, your next challenge is to move to a checklist. Students will complete the checklist at their own Pace, Place, and Path. Now that does not mean that a student can come into class and work on the digital learning task the entire period. Every student, every day, has to visit the mini-lesson with the teacher at least once. Marcia Kish was also very clear in stating that blended learning has to work within the confines of your school district testing calendar and preset curriculum expectations. She encouraged us to spend the second day working with our district curriculum and building our stations using the materials already provided to us. This way no one has to reinvent the wheel.

How does it work?

From what I have observed so far, the main reason this method is working has to do with the students taking ownership of their learning and the teacher not being exhausted at the end of the day. The district I work in is pretty new to this concept so they are learning and moving forward every day. The best part I have seen is that Marcia Kish is jumping right in the deep end with the teachers! She coaches, guides, and moves them forward as they master each new idea! Now if you are thinking, "how do I get a coach to support me with blended learning?" I would suggest you check out her Blended Learning Cookbook and see how blended learning can fit into your classroom.

How do I get started?

From my experience, I would start by splitting your classroom into two groups to include the teacher mini-lesson and independent practice. Once you have mastered these groups and your students have embraced the procedures and expectations you have set for them, add in a new station, such as digital learning. Slowly grow your blended classroom to meet your students' needs. Once you feel comfortable with all four stations, it is time to bring in the DATA! You will now begin pulling small groups to work with you in the teacher mini-lesson based on what skills they need to work on, and the rest of the class will be working to complete a checklist of tasks you have created for them. Keep pulling small groups, based on data, until you have visited with everyone in the classroom.

A few tips when getting started:

1. Hang a sign somewhere in the room that says Pace, Place, and Path to remind you that everyone in your room is learning, INCLUDING YOU, the way that works best for them.

2. A small caution: when you begin implementing blended learning you will very clearly begin to see the gaps in your students learning and understanding. This may scare you into returning to whole group instruction because you worry they are not "figuring it out on their own". Please give it time and keep looking back at the data. You will find areas of improvement, even if it simply means an improvement in classroom behavior or attention span.

3. If you are a lone wolf on your campus trying out blended learning, I would highly encourage you to reach out to a broader personal learning network and find other teachers who can share ideas and help keep you motivated. Twitter is a great place to find your tribe, and I would highly suggest following Marcia Kish @dsdPD!

4. Lastly, remember that you and the students are in this together. Ask them for feedback on what is working for them and what is not working for them. Do not take it personally but instead keep blending until you get that perfectly balanced recipe of Pace, Place, and Path.

For more information on blended learning and other classroom topics, follow LearnPromethean.

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How to Get Started with Blended Learning | Promethean Blog

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Laura Collier, an Education Consultant and a former Math teacher, was invited to attend a two-day workshop with the amazing Marcia Kish, who is the expert on blended learning. After that training, Laura has not been able to stop sharing about blended learning and has since begun to adapt her training style to embrace this model of instruction.

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Provided in the faculty memo

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Provided in Faculty memo

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8 Strategies For Helping Students Learn To Ask For Help

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Help students understand that 'help' is the norm in the creative, scientific, and professional world. Asking for help is OK and necessary.

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Provided in Faculty Memo

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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Provided in Faculty Memo

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Using three stations effectively-teacher-led, online, and offline-should provide your students with plenty of ways to collaborate.

Interested in blending learning models?

A three-station rotation model is a valuable tool for teachers who want to integrate technology, writes former Teacher of the Year and author Caitlin Tucker on her blog. The tactic moves students through different areas of the classroom: teacher-led stations, online stations, and offline stations. While this blended learning model "creates a nice balance between online and offline work," says Tucker, "it is easy for teachers to slip into a rut when it comes to designing their stations."

Tucker identifies common pitfalls and possible solutions:

The teacher-led station: Just because a station is teacher-led doesn't mean the teacher should do all the talking; it's not all about direct instruction. Encourage students to engage and collaborate. Model a practice and then have students try the same practice in pairs. Or use the teacher-led station for immediate feedback on a recently completed piece of writing, completed homework, or a lab assignment, either through formal assessments or informal Q&A sessions. The teacher-led station is also a great opportunity for differentiated instruction: even if the activity is the same, give different students different instructions tailored to their particular needs. Scaffolding in small groups or moving around the group to observe students individually as they try to complete a modeled task allows teachers to cater to individual needs.

The online station: One common pitfall in the online station is using it "exclusively for personalized practice using adaptive software or an online program." Asking kids to work on computers or tablets in isolation can be limiting and de-motivating. Find ways to make technological integration collaborative, Tucker says, and focus on activities like designing, creating, and publishing digitally. Using technology to support project-based learning, for example, ensures that students interact with each other and not just with screens. Interactive games and quizzes where students play with each other, like Kahoot, can build knowledge while encouraging student interaction. Social media platforms can be a useful tool for engaging with experts as well.

The offline station: The offline station is often dominated by independent work on paper. "Instead of designing collaborative tasks that allow students social learning opportunities, they are required to practice without support or peer interaction." Like the online station, the offline station works best when students have an opportunity to engage with others and receive guidance. Art projects, STEM experiments, or in-depth discussion allow students to work together and engage in deeper learning.

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Optimizing Station Rotations in Blended Learning

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Using three stations effectively-teacher-led, online, and offline-should provide your students with plenty of ways to collaborate. Interested in blending learning models? A three-station rotation model is a valuable tool for teachers who want to integrate technology, writes former Teacher of the Year and author Caitlin Tucker on her blog.

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Provided in Faculty Memo

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Throughout your career as a teacher, you will deal with hundreds, if not thousands, of parents. Most will be perfectly lovely-friendly, supportive, and involved-but a handful will not. Occasionally you will encounter a parent who is challenging, difficult, or even downright combative. But as we all know, parent involvement is an important factor in children's success at school. So even though it may be tempting to ignore or avoid difficult individuals, learning how to deal with them is a much better strategy. Here are some helpful suggestions to help you deal with six types of extreme parent behavior.

1. The Constantly Present Parent

This parent is very friendly and engaging but at times overly chatty, wanting to have long conversations and dropping in at inconvenient times. The Constantly Present parent doesn't seem to understand that this isn't playgroup-you have an actual job to do. And that is to teach not only their child, but 25 more.

How to deal:

It's best to assume that this parent has nothing but good intentions. Welcome them, but set boundaries. "I'd love to hear more about that, but right now I need to get the children into the classroom so we can start our day. Perhaps you can email me." Better yet, make constructive use out of their energy-include them by giving them a job to do. If you find their presence in the classroom too distracting, suggest they help out in the library or office, or send home projects for them to do at home. Communicate guidelines with all parents by sharing your classroom schedule, policies, and expectations in your back-to-school newsletter or on your class website.

2. The Nervous Nelly Parent

Then there are parents who are genuinely having a hard time separating from their child. They're not too sure their child can actually survive without them and worry incessantly about their child's well-being. Are they making friends? Wearing their coat? Eating every bite of their lunch?

How to deal:

Your best strategy with a Nervous Nelly parent is to build trust. Calmly and warmly reassure them their child is in good hands-you are, after all, a professional. You may need to invest in a little above-and-beyond communicating with this parent. Set up a system that works for both of you. Maybe you send a quick email midday to let them know how their kid is doing. Maybe you include a communication log to send back and forth in their child's homework folder. Consistently and regularly keeping all parents in the loop builds trust and goodwill.

3. The Invisible Parent

Every once in a while you'll wonder if one of your students actually has a parent at home. They don't show up at meet-the-teacher night or at conferences. Your phone calls and emails go unreturned-you don't hear a peep.

How to deal:

Find out why. Are the parents apathetic or overloaded? Maybe they're work ing multiple jobs just trying to keep a roof over their family's heads. Perhaps there is a language or cultural barrier. Ask the student's former teachers about their experience with the family-perhaps they have valuable insight. Involve admin to help you problem solve. Maybe the family is in crisis and needs help. No matter what, be professional and keep up your end of communication with all parents.

4. The My Child Can Do No Wrong Parent

Some parents don't exactly have a clear picture of who their child is outside of the home. And when you try (in the most professional way) to inform them that perhaps their child is not a complete angel, they respond with indignant reproach. "How dare you suggest my child talks too much/picks on other kids/is disrespectful to teachers, etc.?"

How to deal:

The best way to deal with this parent is with straight-up honest communication. Document incidents (in your classroom and when the child is with other teachers). Let the parent know that you are not condemning their child (or their parenting), but rather you want to help the child be the best person they can be. Meet with the parent and child together. While they may sing a song of innocence at home, they may not be able to carry the tune in front of you.

5. The But My Child Is Special Parent

Every parent wants to believe their child is the best and brightest, deserving of special recognition. But some parents get uber-competitive about it. "Why isn't my child in the highest reading group? Being tested for gifted? Have the starring role in the play?" This type of parent is frequently the kind to complain their child is not being challenged.

How to deal:

These parents need reassurance that you understand and believe in their child. But sometimes a reality check is in order. This is where data can be your best friend. Share assessments and have an open conversation about the child's abilities and potential. Assure the parent that in your classroom every child is special and that it is your mission to ensure that every child has the opportunity to shine.

6. The Practically an Expert Parent

A lot of people think that their experience as a student automatically qualifies them to be a teacher. After all, they successfully graduated from school, so of course they know all about education! Sadly, they don't respect the years of study and experience you've put into being on the other side of the desk.

How to deal:

When an "expert" parent challenges your teaching style or curriculum, politely listen (they may have valuable insight) and try not to get defensive. Explain how you teach-the methods you've discovered that work best for you and your students and the resources you use to meet the required standards. Provide them with copies of materials that will help them understand your objectives and the research behind the methods you use. Invite them to come observe your class; they may walk away with a greater understanding of the scope of your job.

Extreme parent behavior can definitely be one of the most challenging parts of a teacher's job. But keeping a steady eye on the needs of your students, and a belief in yourself as a professional, is a surefire way to find a resolution that is in everyone's best interests.
How do you deal with extreme parent behavior? Come share in our WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group on Facebook. Plus, why lawnmower parents are the new helicopter parents.

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6 Types of Extreme Parent Behaviors (Plus ... How to Deal)

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Throughout your career as a teacher, you will deal with hundreds, if not thousands, of parents. Most will be perfectly lovely-friendly, supportive, and involved-but a handful will not. Occasionally you will encounter a parent who is challenging, difficult, or even downright combative. But as we all know, parent involvement is an important factor in children's success at school.

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Provided in Faculty Memo

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25 Alternatives To "I Don't Know" And "I Can't" - TeachThought

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Want to encourage a growth mindset in students? Here are 25 alternatives to "I Don't Know" and "I Can't," in convenient, ready-for-students form!

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Provided in Faculty Memo

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On my first day as a teacher, I had a very distinct image of who I would be and what my class would look like.

I wanted to be that guy kids remember the rest of their lives. I'd have them drop their textbooks on the ground next to their desks as I loudly proclaimed that they would not need them in my class!

My class would be engaging and exciting. I would be a teacher who was always available to my students, ready to carry anyone's burdens and go to any length to help kids succeed. I would coach soccer, chaperone dances, and design every lesson to blow kids away. And I would always score "highly effective" on my end-of-the-year evaluation.

I wanted to be the perfect teacher.

The difficulty of trying to be perfect

For a while, I was doing pretty well. I poured every ounce of energy into my class and my students. I arrived early every morning and stayed late every day. Whenever I learned one of my student's troubling backstories, I took it upon myself to give them all the attention they needed.

I'd be ragged when I got home each day. My wife would say to me, "You have to slow down. You're going to wear yourself out."

But I didn't listen. I believed that if my students were going to learn, grow, and transform in my class, I needed to be perfect for them.

After a couple years of this, I burned out.

A change of perspective

I told a brilliant teacher of 40 years that I wasn't sure how much longer I could stay in the classroom. The weight and pressures of being perfect in this job are too much to sustain. I wanted to quit.

This veteran teacher looked at me and said, "You don't have to be perfect to be a great teacher."

Everything in me wanted to disagree with her. What if kids think my class is boring? Are they going to think I don't care about them because I don't show up at their soccer games? What if administration doesn't see how engaging my class is? What about those kids who, like me in sixth grade, need that one teacher to listen while they talk about their parents' divorce?

All of these thoughts kept going through my head. How can I possibly be a great teacher if I don't consider all of those things all the time?

She responded, "You can. Trust me. Teachers cannot do everything, and you just need to realize that."

Learning to be a great (but not perfect) teacher

Her words stayed with me, and I eventually decided to hit the reset button. If I was going to last in this career, I had to relieve myself of this pressure to be perfect. Some things had to change.

The first thing I adjusted was my planning period. Instead of giving it up for the good of helping others, I decided to actually use it for myself. I kept the lights off and the shades drawn. Not because I didn't want to talk to kids but because I needed to recharge. It was a small start, but it definitely made a difference.

After that, more things followed. I stopped overextending myself. I quit saying yes to everything. And I found ways to take time for myself to reflect, refocus, and unwind.

It's not like I stopped being an engaged teacher. I just started approaching teaching a bit differently. Sometimes I plan huge, epic projects where my students create work that changes the world. And sometimes my kids watch Crash Course videos and have to submit their notes.

I don't coach soccer anymore. I chaperone homecoming or prom, never both. My class is sometimes exciting, and sometimes I have to let me students watch a movie so I can grade their papers.

I don't need my administrator to score me "highly effective" to feel like the work I do is valuable. Therefore, I don't carry that weight around either.

Because the truth is, you don't have to be perfect to care for your students. You don't have to be perfect to make learning relevant for them. I don't need perfection to model for my students hard work and determination. I still sometimes want to be Robin Williams from Dead Poets Society or Mr. Feeny from Boy Meets World. But I also know I don't have to be.

And with that pressure gone, I find it a lot easier to be a great teacher.

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On my first day as a teacher, I had a very distinct image of who I would be and what my class would look like. I wanted to be that guy kids remember the rest of their lives.

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Provided in Faculty Memo

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STEAM

Integrating Makerspaces Throughout the Curriculum

The makerspace isn't just a fixed space where kids come and go to complete busywork. It's an extension of a well-established approach to educating students that has applications and deep implications across disciplines.

As makerspaces start to pop up in schools across the country, some educators, particularly those teaching non-STEM subjects, may be wondering what exactly they're supposed to do with them. Policymakers and administrators, meanwhile, want to make sure the spaces and resources are well utilized and are providing as much educational bang for the buck as possible. Luckily, integrating makerspaces throughout the curriculum is fairly easy with the right frame of mind.

Old Methods Made New Again

Though the term makerspace is fairly new to education, the learning theory underpinning the makerspace use - constructivism - is among the foundational theories most teachers are trained with, explained Trisha Roffey, emerging technology consultant and teacher for learning services innovation at Edmonton Catholic Schools.

"Constructivism equally applies to any subject area because it's the whole idea of learning through doing," Roffey, who also runs the site makerspaceforeducation.com, said. "The foundational pedagogy actually transcends a specific subject area because in its essence - when it was Jean Piaget and Seymour Papert and John Dewey talking about this it was about the whole system, the whole structure of education that could be transformed by this methodology."

And makerspace projects don't always have to be about producing a tangible project. Roffey said she loves Rube Goldberg machines made from, essentially, a table and trash for $5 and talks about how excited students get making a flight simulator with a power glove made from a kitchen glove, tinfoil and a Makey Makey, but the simulator itself existed in Google Earth and she's just as happy to talk about social studies projects that ask students to create virtual tours of Tunisia, Peru or the Ukraine instead of writing a book report.

Taking that approach also allows for a much broader definition of what constitutes a makerspace.

"In my whole career I have never had a 'makerspace,'" Roffey said. "I've never had a dedicated room. I've been doing this for six years now, and I've always had carts and bins and baskets. So I think what people need to realize is that this doesn't necessarily mean you need a $50,000 grant. This can be done with 50 bucks and a plastic bin and a Raspberry Pi and some tinfoil. It's more about transforming your approach to teaching and learning and student inquiry."

She added: "Anybody and everybody can do this. It's any budget, anywhere, any ability of student. Don't just keep this for your best and your brightest. This really is for anyone. And I think the humans have been inquisitive since we made fire. And so I just think we can use makerspace to make fire in our classrooms again - to bring that learning alive and to give that a chance. Even if it's just for one day for one project ... to just see the magic that can happen when you let kids be able to make fire."

Interlocking Literacies

Hanna Shekhter, director of STEM innovation and education at Brauser Maimonides Academy, said that introducing students to engineering and building things in the classroom can help them to develop the soft skills that they'll need in their careers, regardless of what those careers might be.

"When you're in the STEM fields, when you're a computer science major, you rarely work in a bubble," Shekhter said. "You must work with others and you take your piece, and you have to fit it in with their piece, and that's an important part" of being effective in any career.

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integrating maker space across the curiculum

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Integrating Makerspaces Throughout the Curriculum -- THE Journal

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STEAM The makerspace isn't just a fixed space where kids come and go to complete busywork. It's an extension of a well-established approach to educating students that has applications and deep implications across disciplines. As makerspaces start to pop up in schools across the country, some educators, particularly those teaching non-STEM subjects, may be wondering what exactly they're supposed to do with them.

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designing rubrics to assess what really matters

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Listen to my interview with Mark Wise (transcript):
Sponsored by Pear Deck and Microsoft Teams for Education

In my 20-year career as an administrator, I've had the opportunity to be a fly on the wall in hundreds of classrooms across grade levels and content areas. While much has changed in education over those years, one element has remained constant: the well-intentioned use of rubrics with varying levels of success.

Starting with their use as early as kindergarten and continuing through high school, rubrics are meant to clarify expectations, but poor design can make the experience anything but clear. Rows of criteria describe, often in 10-point font, how students will be graded for an upcoming project. Students attempt to decipher the details, review the exemplars provided, and note the corresponding due dates, but the information doesn't always translate into action.

This is unfortunate because a well-designed rubric can be more than just an evaluation tool. For the teacher, it can clarify expectations, which increases the likelihood that these traits will be attended to during instruction and as a result, can provide more targeted feedback. For the learner, knowing what is expected from the start along with clear indicators of progress provides an effective means to self-assess, make adjustments, and improve the quality of performance.

So how do we get there? How do we take our current rubrics and fine-tune them so they deliver on those promises? These five guidelines will help.

1. Measure What Really Matters

Teachers often include multiple criteria in their rubrics without adding the primary learning outcome they are most interested in: Did it persuade? Did it create an emotional connection? Did you win your argument? We tend to construct our rubrics with important but sometimes peripheral components of performance because they are easy to see, count, or score ( Wiggins and McTighe, p. 34). For example, if your students are writing an editorial, it could be stylistically sophisticated, well-organized, and meet the length requirement. However, an editorial, regardless of how well written, is wholly ineffective if it fails to persuade the reader.

Moreover, since students can become overwhelmed by the sheer number of criteria they are required to meet, less can be more. One way to accomplish this is to utilize a single-point rubric, which allows the student to focus on the stated expectations while receiving feedback on the degree to which they are meeting them. If you are using a more traditional 4-6 point rubric that details the continuum of performance, it is even more incumbent upon you to identify the main reason students are engaged in the task in the first place and edit down the criteria so it incentivizes students to focus on the most important aspects of the performance.

The "before" example below shows a rubric that measures a lot of things that don't have anything to do with whether a student understands the lunar phases: things like creativity, attractiveness, and whether the task is completed on time. If the purpose of the assignment is to assess whether students have really learned the lunar phases, the rubric should focus primarily on whether the content in the model is accurate and effective.

In the revised version below, all of the criteria is focused on the quality and accuracy of the information in the model and measures the desired scientific thinking from building the model in the first place.

2. Weigh the Criteria Appropriately

As designers of rubrics, we can signal to students that certain criteria matter more than others. Just because a rubric has four criteria, doesn't mean that each needs to be worth 25 percent of the score. With the weight of each criterion adjusted, the rubric itself guides students to focus on what is most important.

In the example below-which is the same revised rubric from above, but where the teacher wanted to include some accountability for mechanics-all four criteria are weighted exactly the same. This means a student who demonstrates a perfect understanding of the science behind lunar phases, but who struggles with spelling and punctuation, could end up with a C on the project. That would not be a true reflection of mastery.

By contrast, in the revised rubric below, "Mechanics" is only assigned 10 percent of the overall grade, while the other three criteria make up 90 percent combined. This way, the final grade will be a much more reliable measure of student understanding of lunar phases.

Another thing to keep in mind is that each criterion doesn't have to be graded every time or the same way. Within the structure of the rubric, teachers have a great deal of flexibility. Although all of the criteria are important, we can use our discretion by grading only certain items, then attending to the others when those skills or concepts are formally taught and practiced. Likewise, since our expectations of what students can accomplish at the beginning of the year are quite different from what we expect at the end of the year, we can continue to adjust the grade or point values we assign to each column.

3. Check Your Math

Your point values for each column need to yield an accurate reflection of the student's performance. For example, if on a 4-point rubric the "3" is "meets expectations" most teachers believe the point value should reflect a range from A- to B+. This stands in contrast to a C (3 out of 4 points) which is what would be earned if a student met expectations for the criteria within that column. This can result in either the teacher giving an unfair grade or altering the feedback in order to generate the desired grade.Either result isn't helpful for the student.

A design tip is to look at each column vertically and choose a number or range that would be appropriate for a student scoring exclusively within that column. The corresponding grades don't have to reflect a neat 4, 3, 2 progression. Often using decimals or a range of numbers is necessary to align each column vertically to a grade that matches the column's descriptors.

4. Can Do Rubrics, Not Can't Do Rubrics

We need to consider the language we choose so that our rubrics encourage students to improve. Without realizing it, when teachers detail the levels of performance, we tend to use degrees of deficiency (e.g. mostly, somewhat, lacking) rather than affirmative non-judgmental statements as to what the students are capable of at each point along the continuum. If we are going to truly use the rubric as a tool to enhance students' ability to self-assess and thus enhance their performance, we must provide clear markers along the way for how students can improve and not unintentionally send the message that their ongoing work is insufficient rather than on a path of progress.

The examples below show two rows in a rubric for a research project. The first uses deficit language to describe the lower levels of performance, while the second describes each level in terms of what the student CAN do.

A real-world model that clearly illustrates a learner's progression toward achieving proficiency is the traditional swim chart which indicates where the swimmer is in on the path toward achieving independence in the deep end of the pool. The language of the swim chart describes traits-from treading water to extended front crawl-that are required for the learner to move from Tadpole (beginner) to Seal (advanced). The expectations are clear, measurable, and non-judgemental; it describes what swimmers can do rather than what they can't. We can view the transparency and progression of the swim chart as an aspirational goal for our rubric design, being mindful to choose language that states the desired outcome, rather than anticipated problems.

Educators are already working toward this in the area of world languages. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) has performance descriptors that describe the learner's degree of communication fluency. ACTFL has also developed "Can Do" statements that describe what language learners can do consistently and independently. Like the swim chart, these indicators allow learners to use the statements for self-evaluation so they are more aware of what they know and can do in the target language. In turn, world language educators have developed rubrics that match those desired outcomes.

5. Models, Models, Models!

When we design rubrics, we tend to pore over their construction. We perseverate over the language we use ("should I say 'clearly.'.. or 'distinctly'?"), repeatedly delete rows or columns, and painstakingly choose fonts.

From the student perspective, they experience the rubric differently. After being introduced to the rubric at the start of the project, the next time students typically see it is when it is returned, replete with circled boxes, teacher comments, and a final grade attached. Understandably, many students suffer from "rubric fatigue," a condition caused by encountering a series of disconnected rubrics across subject areas on any given day.

What students really benefit from are actual models (both exemplars and non-exemplars) that link to descriptors on the rubric that illustrate the quality of work expected. For example, in the real world we typically have many models of the performance or product we are trying to create or implement-whether it is for how a game should be played, a song should be sung, or an editorial should be written. Similarly, when launching a project, showing students multiple examples of prior student work or appropriate real-world examples makes the rubric meaningful and brings these descriptors to life.

Another strategy is to have students sort the various models in order to determine the specific qualities that make some examples stronger than others. The teacher can then incorporate the students' language in their draft version of the rubric or highlight aspects the teacher may have initially overlooked before distributing the final rubric. This process allows the students themselves to generate the criteria and descriptive language of the desired performance which deepens their understanding and creates shared ownership of the expectations for quality work.

Similarly, the rubric can become more user-friendly if we make the criteria more visible to students. This can be done by adding hyperlinks of models tied to the descriptors so students can access a range of examples to inform where they are along the continuum and show them exactly how they can improve.

Better Rubrics Support Student-Centered Learning

As educators, we are rightfully drawn to the goal of establishing a classroom where students have opportunities to engage in complex problem solving, participate more actively in dialogue and debate, design their own experiments, or research topics that interest them. These types of experiences-ones that do not result in a single "correct" answer or follow a formulaic procedure-require more of an open-ended assessment tool with clear guidelines for success that students can use to guide, self-assess, and ultimately improve their learning. Hopefully by following these five suggestions, your rubrics will help clarify what you really want students to take away from the experience, provide your learners with the means to get there, and allow you to fairly and honestly assess their performance. ♦

Reference

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2012). The understanding by design guide to advanced concepts in creating and reviewing units. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

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Rubric Repair: 5 Changes that Get Results

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Rubrics are meant to clarify expectations, but poor design can make the experience anything but clear. These five guidelines will help.

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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Twenty-first century skills necessitate the implementation of instruction that allows students to apply course content, take ownership of their learning, use technology meaningfully, and collaborate. Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is one pedagogical approach that might fit in your teaching toolbox.

PBL is a student-centered, inquiry-based instructional model in which learners engage with an authentic, ill-structured problem that requires further research (Jonassen & Hung, 2008). Students identify gaps in their knowledge, conduct research, and apply their learning to develop solutions and present their findings (Barrows, 1996). Through collaboration and inquiry, students can cultivate problem solving (Norman & Schmidt, 1992), metacognitive skills (Gijbels et al., 2005), engagement in learning (Dochy et al., 2003), and intrinsic motivation. Despite PBL's potential benefits, many instructors lack the confidence or knowledge to utilize it (Ertmer & Simons, 2006; Onyon, 2005). By breaking down the PBL cycle into six steps, you can begin to design, implement, and assess PBL in your own courses.

Step One: Identify Outcomes/Assessments

PBL fits best with process-oriented course outcomes such as collaboration, research, and problem solving. It can help students acquire content or conceptual knowledge, or develop disciplinary habits such as writing or communication. After determining whether your course has learning outcomes that fit with PBL, you will develop formative and summative assessments to measure student learning. Group contracts, self/peer-evaluation forms, learning reflections, writing samples, and rubrics are potential PBL assessments.

Step Two: Design the Scenario

Next you design the PBL scenario with an embedded problem that will emerge through student brainstorming. Think of a real, complex issue related to your course content. It's seldom difficult to identify lots of problems in our fields; the key is writing a scenario for our students that will elicit the types of thinking, discussion, research, and learning that need to take place to meet the learning outcomes. Scenarios should be motivating, interesting, and generate good discussion. Check out the websites below for examples of PBL problems and scenarios.
Problem-Based Learning at University of Delaware Problem-Based Learning in Biology Science PBL
Step Three: Introduce PBL

If PBL is new to your students, you can practice with an "easy problem," such as a scenario about long lines in the dining hall. After grouping students and allowing time to engage in an abbreviated version of PBL, introduce the assignment expectations, rubrics, and timelines. Then let groups read through the scenario(s). You might develop a single scenario and let each group tackle it in their own way, or you could design multiple scenarios addressing a unique problem for each group to discuss and research.

Step Four: Research

PBL research begins with small-group brainstorming sessions where students define the problem and determine what they know about the problem (background knowledge), what they need to learn more about (topics to research), and where they need to look to find data (databases, interviews, etc.). Groups should write the problem as a statement or research question. They will likely need assistance. Think about your own research: without good research questions, the process can be unguided or far too specific. Students should decide upon group roles and assign responsibility for researching topics necessary for them to fully understand their problems. Students then develop an initial hypothesis to "test" as they research a solution. Remember: research questions and hypotheses can change after students find information disconfirming their initial beliefs.

Step Five: Product Performance

After researching, the students create products and presentations that synthesize their research, solutions, and learning. The format of the summative assessment is completely up to you. We treat this step like a research fair. Students find resources to develop background knowledge that informs their understanding, and then they collaboratively present their findings, including one or more viable solutions, as research posters to the class.

Step Six: Assessment

During the PBL assessment step, evaluate the groups' products and performances. Use rubrics to determine whether students have clearly communicated the problem, background, research methods, solutions (feasible and research-based), and resources, and to decide whether all group members participated meaningfully. You should consider having your students fill out reflections about their learning (including what they've learned about the content and the research process) every day, and at the conclusion of the process.

Although we presented PBL as steps, it really functions cyclically. For example, you might teach an economics course and develop a scenario about crowded campus sidewalks. After the groups have read the scenario, they develop initial hypotheses about why the sidewalks are crowded and how to solve the problem. If one group believes they are crowded because they are too narrow and the solution is widening the sidewalks, their subsequent research on the economic and environmental impacts might inform them that sidewalk widening isn't feasible. They should jump back to step four, discuss another hypothesis, and begin a different research path.

This type of process-oriented, self-directed, and collaborative pedagogical strategy can prepare our students for successful post-undergraduate careers. Is it time to put PBL to work in your courses?

References
Barrows, H.S. (1996). Problem-based learning in medicine and beyond: A brief overview. In L. Wilkerson, & W. H. Gijselaers (Eds.), New directions for teaching and learning, No.68 (pp. 3-11). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Dochy, F., Segers, M., Van den Bossche, P., & Gijbels, D. (2003). Effects of problem-based learning: A meta-analysis. Learning and instruction, 13(5), 533-568.

Ertmer, P. A., & Simons, K. D. (2006). Jumping the PBL implementation hurdle: Supporting the efforts of K-12 teachers. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-based Learning, 1(1), 5.

Gijbels, D., Dochy, F., Van den Bossche, P., & Segers, M. (2005). Effects of problem-based learning: A meta-analysis from the angle of assessment. Review of Educational Research, 75(1), 27-61.

Jonassen, D. H., & Hung, W. (2008). All problems are not equal: Implications for problem-based learning. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning, 2(2), 4.

Norman, G. R., & Schmidt, H. G. (1992). The psychological basis of problem-based learning: A review of the evidence. Academic Medicine, 67(9), 557-565.

Onyon, C. (2012). Problem-based learning: A review of the educational and psychological theory. The Clinical Teacher, 9(1), 22-26.
Vincent R. Genareo is a postdoctoral research associate at Iowa State University, Research Institute for Studies of Education (RISE). Renee Lyons is a PhD candidate at Clemson University, Department of Education.

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Problem-Based Learning: Six Steps to Design, Implement, and Assess

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Twenty-first century skills necessitate the implementation of instruction that allows students to apply course content, take ownership of their learning, use technology meaningfully, and collaborate. Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is one pedagogical approach that might fit in your teaching toolbox.

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The practice of using single point rubrics is slowly but surely catching on. The simplicity of these rubrics - with just a single column of criteria, rather than a full menu of performance levels - offers a whole host of benefits:

Teachers find them easier and faster to create, because they no longer have to spend precious time thinking up all the different ways students could fail to meet expectations.

Students find them easier to read when preparing an assignment. With only the target expectations to focus on, they are more likely to read those expectations.

They allow for higher-quality feedback, because teachers must specify key problem areas and notable areas of excellence for that particular student, rather than choosing from a list of generic descriptions.

Want to Learn More?

I first talked about this type of rubric in an earlier post ( Know Your Terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single-Point Rubrics). If this is the first time you've encountered this type of rubric, reading this will give you some background knowledge on all the different types of rubrics and why the single-point deserves world domination.

To give credit where it's due, I did not come up with the name single point rubric. Although the idea for a simplified rubric with a single set of criteria came to me independently, when I went looking for academic support for its use, I found that the type of rubric I had in mind was given the name "Single Point Rubric" in 2000 during a conference presentation by someone named Mary Dietz. Attending that conference was a researcher named Jarene Fluckiger, who published a study on its effectiveness in 2010. (The reference to Dietz is in Fluckiger's paper, but no one named Dietz has published anything on the topic.)

Show Us Your Rubrics!

I urge you to take one of your most convoluted rubrics and make a single-point version of it. Then show it to the world, so other teachers can learn: Take a screenshot of it and post the picture on Twitter with the hashtag #singlepointrubric. If you aren't on Twitter or don't feel like doing this, just put a link to your rubric in the comments below. Help us start a movement to rid the world of ineffective rubrics!

Another Variation (Added in 2017)

After considering some of the limitations of this format, I played around with the rubric a bit more and came up with this variation:

The original version of the single point rubric allowed no space for actually pointing out when the student hit the standard, apart from maybe circling or highlighting the middle column. With this format, teachers can pinpoint where the student is on each descriptor, then offer feedback, either constructive, positive, or both.

To grab a copy of this for your own modification, click here.

Need Ready-Made Rubrics?

My Rubric Pack gives you four different designs in Microsoft Word and Google Docs formats. It also comes with video tutorials to show you how to customize them for any need, plus a Teacher's Manual to help you understand the pros and cons of each style. Check it out here:

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Join my mailing list and never miss another post. You'll get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration - in quick, bite-sized packages - all geared toward making your teaching more effective and joyful. To thank you, I'll send you a free copy of my new e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half. I look forward to getting to know you better!

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The practice of using single point rubrics is slowly but surely catching on. Try one for yourself and let us see it!

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Dear Students, Asking For Help Is A Strength
contributed by Penny Kostaras

I am a K-12 learning coach. My approach is comprehensive - executive functioning, time management, and academic content. A trend I've noticed over my career is a winter influx of bewildered freshman, and I am always sorry that we hadn't met in the summer prior, or even earlier in middle school to help create a roadmap for success.

The major roadblock I've noted for these students is the fear of asking for help. To acquire this skill, students first need exposure to a growth mindset vs a fixed mindset. Students must believe that they can learn more and become smarter through hard work and perseverance and abandon the idea that they are naturally good at _____ or bad at _____. Becoming a lifelong learner takes time, effort, and help from others. We can always improve. Asking for help and using one's resources to solve problems is a strength, not a weakness. Developmentally, middle and early high school students are ripe for learning that self-advocacy is essential to future success.

Middle schoolers have a harder time asking for help because they are still transitioning from the cut and dry thinking of elementary school. Add to that the self-consciousness and insecurity that puberty brings, and no one dares to ask for help for fear of being 'found out' or 'exposed.' The thought of something being 'wrong' with them is devastating. Students entering high school bring with them their old patterns from elementary and middle school which don't serve them anymore.

Being embarrassed to ask questions and stuck in a fixed mindset hinders their growth. From here on out, they'll need to ask for help and be open to receiving it in order to be successful. Here are some ideas to promote the acquisition of these skills in the classroom.
8 Strategies For Helping Students Learn To Ask For Help 1. Encourage Students To Ask for Help
Reward students who ask questions and come to see you - whether it's a points system, gold star, or praise. Create a log where you tally how many students asked questions or came to see you for extra help and have a competition between classes to make it fun.
2. Start From A Young Age
Convey that asking questions is a strength, not a weakness. No one accomplishes anything great on their own. Collaboration bolsters creative thinking and innovation. Encourage students to see asking questions as their new superpower where they gain insight and have extra time with the teacher.
3. There Are No Dumb Questions
Restate this tired phrase in a more positive way: "Questions are welcome, so please ask them. If you have a question, I guarantee someone else has the same one, so you'll be doing the class a favor by allowing me the chance to clarify for everyone."
4. Communicate The Ideas That Everyone Needs Help
Consider inviting older members of the local community to come to visit and reveal ways that asking for help has benefitted them. Revealing to younger students that getting help is the norm at the higher level makes them aware that receiving help is universal and O.K. Once in the know, students can let down their guard and be open to receiving help earlier so that they can thrive.
5. Play A Game
Establish your classroom as a place that fosters a growth mindset. Have students get to know each other by asking them to write on a piece of paper two things they are good at and two challenges they typically struggle with regarding the subject you teach.

In small groups, share strengths and challenges. For each share, the group comes together to offer help to each person and brainstorm how they can offer the individual assistance when they need it: "You can count on me (us) when you need help with __________." This support structure will inspire community and empathy where students will simultaneously want to help and accept help.

Further, you can gamify it using gamification. Done well, gamification works. Start by offering points or rewards or playful barriers to encourage students to ask for help when they need it-and for knowing the difference for when they need help and when they don't.
6. Set The Expectation / Map Out The Road Ahead
Set individual and group goals that highlight progress overachievement. Show them how much they'll learn and that an uphill climb is to be expected. From the start, this normalizes work ethic and stretched thinking in the classroom. Remind them that they will all need to play a role in supporting each other when they feel challenged.

This can demystify the idea that some students will naturally breeze through the class while others will struggle alone in silence. Keep checking in throughout the year to promote teamwork and remind them of the goals they set.
7. Share Your Story
Share with your students what you were good at and what you struggled with when you were their age. It's important to remember what it was like to be the age of your students. What were your strengths and weaknesses in the subject matter that you teach or in other subjects? How did you overcome those obstacles? What embarrassed you?

Looking back now, what's funny about it? What would you have done differently? Give them a glimpse into your past and they will see you in a new light, not as an untouchable authority, but as a relatable human who has grown and changed throughout the years.
8. Normalize 'Asking For Help'
By normalizing asking for help, teachers can encourage a growth mindset in students - particularly those who are experiencing a big transition - elementary to middle, or middle to high school. Discarding preconceived ideas about their abilities will empower them to learn more about themselves and what they are capable of.

Through various strategies that promote sharing, being a team-player, vulnerability, mentorship, and sustained effort over time, students will be inspired to abandon self-sabotaging habits and instead embrace self-advocacy. They will now have a chance to see school as an environment that supports the idea that asking for help is a strength.

When students feel safe to take risks, real change can take place. With proper guidance, they will learn to hone their communication skills and leverage their resources with confidence. A growth mindset allows students to appreciate themselves as work-in-progress as they make their personal transformations throughout high school and beyond.
Penny Kostaras has been a trusted academic coach and educator for 13 years and is an expert at taking students from struggling to confident and successful. Penny is the founder of Wise Student, a program offering effective strategies to help students improve time management, organization, and study skills.

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Dear Students, Asking For Help Is A Strength -

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Dear Students, Asking For Help Is A Strength contributed by Penny Kostaras I am a K-12 learning coach. My approach is comprehensive - executive functioning, time management, and academic content. A trend I've noticed over my career is a winter influx of bewildered freshman, and I am always sorry that we hadn't met in the ...

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Part of the reason social media has taken off so much are the connections. Seeing other people's reaction to what you've shared. Learning from others.

We can get the same attraction when we do collaborative learning in the classroom.

Google Slides makes this possible. Really easy and quick, too.

By creating a slide presentation and sharing it with students, it creates a few really cool features:

A shared learning environment where everyone is doing their work together

A little piece of digital real estate for every student

An easy way to talk about what they're creating and learning

In this tutorial video, I'll show you step-by-step how to get started with shared Google Slides and some of the great things you can do with it:

Collaborative writing prompts (kind of like a blog)

Sharing research findings with the class

Creating something big together a little at a time

... and more!

1:30 - Step 1: Create a new slide presentation

2:20 - Step 2: Set the layout the way you want

2:35 - Step 3: Create slides for every student in the class

3:10 - Step 4: Share the presentation with students

4:00 - Ways to share the presentation with students

6:10 - Step 5: Have students get to work on their assignment

8:55 - Activity idea: Simple question/prompt

9:10 - Activity idea: Virtual manipulatives

10:15 - More ideas: Ads, billboards, graphic organizers and more

11:00 - Step 6: Add comments for student collaboration

13:15 - Tips for great student comments

16:30 - How to make sure every student in class gets comments

18:10 - Ninja trick 1: Use add-ons for more Slides functionality

21:00 - Ninja trick 2: Set background to make items un-moveable

24:30 - Ninja trick 3: Copy/paste groups of slides repeatedly

25:40 - Ninja trick 4: Stash useful images around the slide

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Student collaboration in shared Google Slides - Ditch That Textbook

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Teamwork is a desirable job skill in today's economy. When we let students collaborate, we prepare them for the future! Here's how Google Slides can help. Part of the reason social media has taken off so much are the connections. Seeing other people's reaction to what you've shared. Learning from others.

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One of my favorite rituals of the holiday season is watching classic cartoon specials from my childhood. Whether it's seeing Rudolph's eventual redemption by leading Santa's sleigh or hearing Linus recite the simple message of Christmas to Charlie Brown, there is a timelessness to these programs that millions continue to enjoy. That said, my absolute favorite is the 1966 version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

When we first encounter the Grinch, he is a social outcast, living alone on Mt. Crumpit. It's not clear if he was expelled from Whoville, or if this is by choice given his desire for high levels of quiet. He may have suffered from anhedonia, a form of depression where an individual cannot experience pleasure from common activities, such as singing. Only his faithful companion, Max was privy to their reasons for isolation, and became his unwitting accomplice to the Grinch's master plan to hijack Christmas from Whoville.

The planning and execution of the Grinch's plan reveal the roots of what Dr. Carol Dweck calls a 'growth mindset.' Dweck's research found that some people view their capabilities, like intelligence, as a 'fixed' item; other people look at these same capabilities through a 'growth' lens, possible of being expanded with proper effort and coaching. These mindsets form early in childhood and inform our thinking and choices throughout adulthood. Business leaders are increasingly citing growth mindset as a necessary competency for the future. Her research also found that people can start out with a fixed mindset and choose growth mindset behaviors, which brings us back to our friend the Grinch. Here are the five ways the Grinch exercised a growth mindset:

1. Explore unconventional solutions. Stuck in a problem? The answer might lie outside your usual options. Just make sure your alternative does not require stealing someone else's identity.

2. Accept that some effort is required. A key hallmark of growth mindset is the willingness to be uncomfortable as new skills are developed and acquired.

3. Find an accountability partner. Sweet and loving Max may not have agreed with the Grinch's plan, but he was willing to stay the course in the journey. Cultivating a growth mindset is hard work, so get help when you need it.

4. Be willing to consider contradictory data. The unsettling realization that Christmas arrived in Whoville in spite of the Grinch's extensive efforts was a clear surprise - and one that he was willing to entertain. This leads us to the most important behavior...

5. Reframe failure. After his "puzzler was sore," the Grinch accepts "he hadn't stopped Christmas from coming, it came! Somehow or other, it came just the same!" A fixed mindset would view this as a personal failure, yet the Grinch does not. Instead, he concludes that his understanding of Christmas is wrong and becomes transformed by the experience.

The fourth quarter crush is typically a time when businesses and employees focus on performance in all the wrong ways. The pressure to lift revenues or meet hurried deadlines can produce some fabulous fixed mindset responses. Leaders, if you want to bring out the best in your people, take a page from Max and employ a little growth mindset behavior. You might be pleasantly surprised, just ask the Grinch.

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How the Grinch Became a Growth Mindset Leader

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One of my favorite rituals of the holiday season is watching classic cartoon specials from my childhood. Whether it's seeing Rudolph's eventual redemption by leading Santa's sleigh or hearing Linus recite the simple message of Christmas to Charlie Brown, there is a timelessness to these programs tha

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provided in faculty memo

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Learn one teacher's strategies to return from break well-rested and recharged.

In my teaching experience, winter break arrives at the moment when both the students and I need it most. As we are nearing winter break, I look forward to some time to relax and renew my energy before school resumes in January. Some years I realized a day or two before the end of my time off that I wasn't any more rested than I had been in the days leading up to break. Over the years there are some things that I have found to help me have a truly revitalizing winter break.

Plan Ahead

Before break, I designate days on my calendar when I won't check email or do anything work-related. Allocating days when I won't engage in work helps me to be intentional about spending time with family as well as spending mindful time alone. Around a week before winter break, write down all work-related to-do items. Check off as many as possible before break. Listing what needs to get accomplished helps me stay organized. Even better, if I succeed in checking off all of the items, I return from the break with a clean slate.

A few days before break, plan a lesson for the first day back. Write out all ideas in detail and gather any materials needed to implement the lesson. Having a day planned for my return allows me to enjoy the break without worrying about the first day back.

The winter break can be a busy time filled with shopping, cooking, and chores, which means running the risk of arriving at the last day of break and realizing that I haven't taken any time for myself. To make sure the break isn't only full of responsibilities, I make a list of fun things I hope to do over break and then schedule them on a calendar. I include items such as outdoor activities, leisurely walking around a bookstore, taking exercise classes, baking, traveling, or watching a movie. Designating time for these activities means they are more likely to happen.

Nurture Relationships

Over the years, some of my best friends have started out as colleagues. I have found that having those supportive relationships at work helps reduce stress throughout the year. Over long breaks, I like to make plans with a colleague or group of colleagues to hang out and enjoy each other's company. We commit to not talking about work during that time together. Building relationships with colleagues outside of the work environment can reveal what is important to them other than their work.

During the school year, my schedule is often very busy, and I don't have a lot of time to connect with friends and extended family. The winter break is an opportunity to visit friends and family outside of school.

Pick a Book

I read throughout the year, but it is typically work-related. During the break, I forgo reading young adult literature or nonfiction and instead find a relaxing book purely for pleasure. Over winter break, choose one "beach read" and take some time to read for fun. I also spend some time casually reading online for inspiration. I scroll Twitter and Instagram and read some of my favorite education bloggers for inspiration. This allows me to gather some new ideas for the second half of the year but doesn't feel like work.

Reflect and Set a Goal

I have never been much for New Year's resolutions, but I find that making one professional goal for the second half of the school year is inspiring without being stressful. When making a goal, I often begin by reviewing student feedback from first-semester student surveys. From these surveys, I may learn that students feel we need to spend more time on a certain aspect of the curriculum, students enjoy being read aloud to, or certain students feel distracted by the organization of the desk. I combine that feedback with ideas from the social media.

Possible goals include:

Try at least one new technology tool with students before the end of the year.

Ask students to name some of their favorite books they have read this year, and choose a few to read myself.

Send at least one positive note home to each child's parent before the end of the school year.

Collaborate with colleagues in another subject to add interdisiplinary elements to a current assignment.

Incorporate new texts based on student interest and needs.

Find opportunities to make changes to assignments in order to provide more student choice.

Attend more events with students outside of school, such as sports, concerts, or plays.

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Learn one teacher's strategies to return from break well-rested and recharged. In my teaching experience, winter break arrives at the moment when both the students and I need it most. As we are nearing winter break, I look forward to some time to relax and renew my energy before school resumes in January.

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provided in faculty memo

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Coaching students to think in terms of concepts helps them understand how to apply their learning in the future.

Donna Grethen / Ikon Images

We want our students' learning to be enduring, enabling them to make sense of complexity now and in the future. For this to occur, we need to nudge students beyond the learning of facts and skills to uncover concepts-transferable ideas that transcend time, place, and situation.

Learning knowledge and skills is like standing in the middle of a forest, surrounded by trees: It's easy to spot details but hard to see patterns. For students to think conceptually, they need opportunities to head up to the mountaintop, pause, and take in the entire forest. They need the chance to search for big ideas-to generalize, summarize, and draw conclusions by looking at their learning in a holistic way.

By intentionally designing learning activities in which students move between the factual and conceptual levels of thinking, we can help them construct understanding, facilitate transfer, and build their sense of agency.

Questions to Consider During Lesson Planning

To help students go from surface to deep learning, we can ask ourselves three questions:

1. From the facts or skills being taught, which concepts are at the heart of the learning? For instance, a unit on the human body may be driven by the concepts of system, interdependence, and health.

2. Which connections between concepts would we like students to make as a result of the learning? For example, in mathematics, we may ask students to connect the concepts of multiplication and division. In science, we may wish to see how they draw links between photosynthesis and energy transformation.

3. What opportunities for application and transfer can we design to help students take their learning further? For instance, we may ask students who have learned about principles of art and design to create posters for a social or environmental cause of their choice.

These questions reflect different levels of conceptual thinking. If students do not have a strong understanding of individual concepts, they'll struggle to see patterns and make connections between them. Likewise, if we don't give students time to construct understanding, it will be challenging for them to apply their ideas to projects, current events, or other new contexts.

3 Ways to Promote Conceptual Thinking

1. Using categorizing, naming, and sorting activities: In order to understand individual concepts, students need to grapple with examples, non-examples, and attributes of a concept. We can ask students, "What is it like?" and invite them to describe the key features.

For instance, young children learning about habitats may be shown images of a beehive, pond, log, fish tank, rabbit hutch, and zoo enclosure and prompted to describe how these homes are similar or different. By comparing these examples and non-examples of the concept habitat, students come to understand that a habitat is the natural environment in which an animal's needs are met.

By asking students to engage in categorizing, naming, and sorting activities, we prepare them for more-complex thinking to come later in a unit and reduce misconceptions.

Concept formation activities:

Create a T-chart labeled Yes and No and ask students to sort examples and non-examples of a concept, such as a polygon.

Provide students with examples of a concept and invite them to find common attributes and write their own definitions using a stem, such as, "Migration is when _____."

Share a concept and ask students to generate their own examples or non-examples. These can be represented in words or pictures. In the image below, Grade 1 student illustrations show the concept of a performer; the students collaboratively analyzed the images to come up with attributes like being in front of an audience.

2. Asking students to make connections: As students engage with a unit, they explore a variety of contexts that illustrate concepts in action. In a unit on the civil rights movement, for example, students may learn about the Montgomery bus boycott and the Greensboro sit-ins. By drawing out connections between concepts such as protest and rights, students can zoom out to see the big picture of their learning.

To support generalizing, we can design activities that require students to link concepts. For instance, students in my Grade 7 social studies class engaged in concept mapping at the end of a unit on sustainability. They mapped out concepts hierarchically, then created connections using linking words to describe relationships between them. I asked them to chart out their main understandings as statements next to their concept map. It's important when facilitating such activities to ensure that students support their thinking using evidence from prior learning.

Concept linking activities:

Invite students to take the role of a specific concept explored in a unit, and ask them to sit in a circle of four or five people, each representing a different concept. They then make connections to each other, explaining how and why they connect using evidence from prior learning.

Use graphic organizers that ask students to collaboratively synthesize multiple case studies. For instance, have students read about Malala Yousafzai, Martin Luther King Jr., and Greta Thunberg and take notes using a triple Venn diagram that will help them answer the question, "How do change makers overcome challenges?"

3. Planning for transfer: Activities that invite students to form concepts and make connections between them prime the brain for transfer-in each of these stages of conceptual thinking, we help students to reason abstractly and identify the "So what?" of their learning. Once students have formed connections between concepts and articulated these as understandings, we can provide them with opportunities to apply them to new situations. This allows students to see the relevance of their learning to both near and far contexts.

Transfer activities:

Give students a novel case study to grapple with and invite them to apply their understandings. Ask them to revise their thinking: How might we need to change our original idea to include the new case study?

Invite students to take a stance on a provocative statement and debate using their prior knowledge and understanding. For instance, "Plants are the most important organisms within an ecosystem" could be discussed at the end of an ecosystems unit.

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3 Ways to Boost Students' Conceptual Thinking

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Coaching students to think in terms of concepts helps them understand how to apply their learning in the future. Donna Grethen / Ikon Images We want our students' learning to be enduring, enabling them to make sense of complexity now and in the future.

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Productive struggle is important for students to retain what they learn.

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Online June 2018 | Volume 75
Fighting Educator Burnout Pages 34-38

Glen Pearsall

During a coaching session, I once asked a group of teachers to talk to the person next to them about the strategies they use to reduce their workload. The room was silent. Then people started to laugh. Capturing the moment beautifully, one teacher at the back of the room put his hand up and with a broad grin said, "Working more?"

Sometimes, it appears educators view unreasonable workload pressures and burnout as unavoidable occupational hazards. Or, if these issues are raised in schools, they're discussed solely as a matter for union negotiations. Yet, as many educators know, unmanageable workloads can impact every aspect of teacher practice.

This is a blind spot in school-improvement efforts. I don't come across many research studies on new teaching practices that include a specific analysis of the time it will take to implement and maintain them. I rarely see schools do a time management study of school-change initiatives. I don't know many teacher-training programs that include a component on managing the workload associated with teaching. These are big oversights, because good teaching isn't just important for increasing student gains-it also has to be sustainable for teachers.

As an instructional coach who runs workshops for teachers in professional crisis, I have seen close-up how the burden of workload leads directly to teacher burnout. Many times, I have witnessed dedicated and conscientious teachers who have become overwhelmed by their teaching obligations. This is not because they were underperforming or misunderstood what was required of them, but because they tried to live up to an unrealistic model of what good teaching is.

What would it look like if educators better recognized time and workload as variables when we discuss good teaching practices? Let's use assessment, or grading practice, as a case study.

Sustainable Assessment

Sometimes it is hard for teachers to see what really good assessment practices look like because huge piles of unmarked student work get in the way. One recent survey found that, on average, teachers work 14 more hours per week than they are paid for; and the majority of that time is spent on "preparation, planning, and particularly ... marking." Many teachers "solve" this problem by simply working harder-staying longer at school to correct work or carving out more time from their personal life to do it at home. This is just not sustainable.

An alternative approach can be built around five questions for teachers and school leaders to identify potential adjustments in the way they approach assessment:

1. Could you hone your questioning technique so you get more feedback without students ever having to put pen to paper or you having to mark written work?

2. Could you do more to establish the learning objective at the outset of the lesson (or sequence of lessons) so that students can target their efforts and you can spend less time later correcting misconceptions?

3. Could you develop a wider array of techniques-including alternative testing strategies such as closed/open testing-to elicit feedback that is fast, formative, and frequent?

4. Could you use more techniques for both reducing your correction workload and speeding up how quickly you mark?

5. Could you get your students to take a more active role in the correcting process, so you can make better use of the limited time available for assessment?

Let's look at this last question as an example of how addressing these queries can change how you assess written work and alleviate the burden associated with excessive correction.

The term correction implies that after teachers mark up work, students then actively respond to and apply the advice given. In my experience, however, many students pay only cursory attention to this feedback. I often video-record the scene in classrooms when students receive a piece of corrected work. Rather than read their teacher's detailed comments about how to improve, the students glance at the grade and then put the work away in their folder. If you spend a lot of time and energy marking up a piece of work, but your student doesn't really look at it, then that is a waste of time for both of you. "In many schools," John Hattie dryly observed, "the students come to watch their teachers work really hard."

How then do we avoid this trap? One way is to have a toolkit of strategies that nudge students to play a more active role in the feedback cycle and reduce the amount of time you spend correcting work. Such strategies will help ensure that your students do their fair share-and serve as a reminder that it only takes small changes in practice to substantially improve the dynamics of your classroom. Pedagogy that is designed with your time and workload limitations in mind can be revelatory-not because the changes are so substantial, but because these variables are so rarely considered. "I always thought that 'better teaching strategy' was just code for more work," one teacher told me.

Strategy 1: Minimalist Marking

Rather than laboriously marking up every single student error in a piece of work, you target the most pressing issues and arrange for students to self-correct the less important surface errors in their work. You can do this in many ways:

Error Flagging: Instead of correcting surface errors, spelling mistakes, factual inaccuracies, and so on, you simply place a dot or dash at the start of the line in which the errors appear. It is then your student's responsibility to find and correct this mistake. (If you have a student who might struggle to identify the error, then circle a word or phrase to provide more direction.) This approach speeds up correcting and encourages students to better proof their own work.

Error Counting: Rather than noting on a test or quiz whether an answer is right or wrong, with error counting you divide the work into subsections and give students a subtotal mark for each section. It is then their responsibility to work out which questions they got right or wrong based on the subtotal, asking themselves, "I got three out of four right for this section-which one did I miss?" This works particularly well in math and science, but I have seen it work on everything from weekly elementary school spelling tests to high school pop quizzes in English class.

Student-Generated General Comments: Annotate your students' work as you normally would, identifying errors and writing margin comments. Then, instead of writing general advice for the student, ask them to write a general comment summing up your advice. Inverting this shared approach to correction-with you writing a general comment and students having to correct their work in light of this advice-also works well.

Model Correcting: Select a representative portion of the student's work to mark. Closely annotate and correct this section of their submission and then ask them to make changes to the rest of the piece based on your feedback.

Strategy 2: Alternative Grades

There are many alternative grading schemes designed to ensure that feedback and reflection is a collaboration between the teacher and student, and not another thing teachers must do on their own. One of my favorites is to replace a formative letter grade or score with "<", "=," or ">". They denote:

= The same standard as your previous work on the topic.

< A better standard than your last work on the topic.

> A lower standard than your last work on the topic.

I like using this approach in my classes because it discourages students from comparing their grades to others and gets them to concentrate on their own improvement-thus focusing their attention on the comments I spent time creating rather than just looking to see what grade they "got." I always found that when using alternative grading schemes like this one, students took up my advice more readily and I spent less time re-teaching the same concepts.

Strategy 3: Annotating Feedback

Asking students to annotate feedback is another way to encourage them to look more closely at your comments. One effective version of this strategy is an Oral Feedback Stamp. Whenever you give oral feedback, mark a section of the student's work with a stamp that asks them to create a written summary of this advice. I use a stamp that says, "Student's response to teacher's verbal feedback." (If they are working on a digital platform, I enter the same comment in mark-up or use a different font or color in the body of the text.)

For example, I recently told a student that an introduction for a text essay should discuss ideas, not events. The student paraphrased this back to me as "Make sure your intro analyzes rather than summarizes the book," letting me know that they understood my feedback. This strategy only adds an extra moment to a teacher-student conversation but ensures the exchange is a much more efficient use of your time. The earlier the feedback sticks in the process, the fewer corrections teachers will have to make down the line.

Strategy 4: Identifying Patterns of Error

Alternatively, you can encourage students to study your feedback more closely by helping them recognize patterns of errors in their work. I often coach teachers to do this by completing an error-cluster activity. In this activity, you return corrected work back to students with a table of common types of errors and ask them to group their errors into the categories you have outlined. A math teacher, for example, might ask students to group the incorrect answers into two categories:

Calculation errors: where a student has made simple mistakes working out a problem.

Conceptual errors: where the student doesn't understand how to solve the problem.

Teachers usually do the work of identifying patterns of error, but with training this is something students can do, too. In my experience, this makes students much more likely to recognize error types themselves and to work harder on addressing these gaps in their understanding. It also reduces the total time spent marking up student work.

Effective and Sustainable Practice

One teacher I worked with was reluctant to adopt these strategies but eventually tried error flagging to great success. "Who'd have thought," he observed, "that the answer to having to do so much is not to do it all yourself." This can be harder than it sounds. It is one thing to change your mind about your practice, it is another thing to change your habits. I often meet teachers, for example, who say they want to "work smarter instead of harder" when it comes to correcting student work but don't know how to achieve this goal. Having a toolkit of quick, practical feedback strategies makes it easier to address this problem. The handful of techniques described here are representative of the kind of small adjustments that can make assessing work a more collaborative and less onerous experience.

Of course, asking students to take a more active role in responding to feedback is just one way we can reduce the workload burden of assessment-and assessment is just one of the workload burdens facing teachers. (I tell preservice teachers that teaching can sometimes feel like trying to drink from a fire hose.) However, these examples are emblematic of the way that being alert to time and workload pressure can help us design instructional practices that are more effective-and more sustainable. Such an approach safeguards not just the wellbeing of teachers, but, in keeping good educators in the classroom, that of the students they teach, too.

Endnotes

Invargson, L., & Weldon, P. (2016). Improving School Practice: School staff workload study. Australian Council for Educational Research. Retrieved from https://research.acer.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1028&context=tll_misc

Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers: Maximizing impact on learning. Oxford: Routledge.

Glen Pearsall is an educational consultant whose areas of expertise include feedback and assessment, workload reduction for teachers, and instructional practice. His most recent book is Fast and Effective Assessment: How to Reduce Your Workload and Improve Student Learning (ASCD, 2018).

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Online June 2018 | Volume 75 Fighting Educator Burnout Pages 34-38 Glen Pearsall During a coaching session, I once asked a group of teachers to talk to the person next to them about the strategies they use to reduce their workload. The room was silent. Then people started to laugh.

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Why Being Wrong Is Actually A Good Thing

by Terry Heick

Being wrong is only 'bad' if the consequences of that 'wrong' outweigh the benefits (and potential future benefits) of becoming right.

David Deutsch wrote about this idea over on Nautilus a few years ago, but I saw it for the first time recently. Part of his take revolves around political ideas, but focus on the bits about 'right' and 'wrong.'

"It's all about error. We used to think that there was a way to organize ourselves that would minimize errors. (Philosopher Karl) Popper's answer is: We can hope to detect and eliminate error if we set up traditions of criticism-substantive criticism, directed at the content of ideas, not their sources, and directed at whether they solve the problems that they purport to solve. Here is another apparent paradox, for a tradition is a set of ideas that stay the same, while criticism is an attempt to change ideas. But there is no contradiction.

Our systems of checks and balances are steeped in traditions-such as freedom of speech and of the press, elections, and parliamentary procedures, the values behind concepts of contract and of tort-that survive not because they are deferred to but precisely because they are not: They themselves are continually criticized, and either survive criticism (which allows them to be adopted without deference) or are improved (for example, when the franchise is extended, or slavery abolished). Democracy, in this conception, is not a system for enforcing obedience to the authority of the majority. In the bigger picture, it is a mechanism for promoting the creation of consent, by creating objectively better ideas, by eliminating errors from existing ones.

"Our whole problem," said the physicist John Wheeler, "is to make the mistakes as fast as possible." This liberating thought is more obviously true in theoretical physics than in situations where mistakes hurt. A mistake in a military operation, or a surgical operation, can kill. But that only means that whenever possible we should make the mistakes in theory, or in the laboratory; we should "let our theories die in our place," as Popper put it."

And in that last bit is the good stuff: 'Wrong' is a corrective force. Used well, it's a kind of feedback loop.
It's All About The Feedback Loop
Think of the 'You're getting warmer/looking for things with your eyes closed while guided by someone else' game. If you're turning away from what you're looking for, the feedback loop (in the form of the temperature metaphor) starts correcting you.

Here is the sequence.

1. You turn left.

2. Your ears hear the word 'colder.'

3. Your brain translates the metaphor (this is a hugely abstract process that is a skill unique to the brain of homosapiens).

4. Having translated 'colder' as 'wrong,' your brain tells your hands and feet to respond by doing the opposite of whatever they were doing. How urgently it does so depends on the tone and voice inflection of the person coaching your movements, which is another translation your brain has to process.

In this sequence, being 'wrong' is part of the fun. If you walked right to the object, it'd seem like you were cheating. It'd also cut the game short. In the classroom, of course, being wrong has been stigmatized and we have many words for it:

Wrong.

Incorrect.

Inaccurate.

Error.

Mistake.

These all lead to the destination of Wrong, Failure. At best, we recommend students learn through failure.

Fail often enough, and you're no longer Proficient but a Novice and Interventions must be planned for you (this is the same word we use when families confront some suffering from life-threatening drug or alcohol addiction). This is an idea Laurenc Prusak at NASA explained:

"...if you pay a substantial price for being wrong, you are rarely going to risk doing anything new and different because novel ideas and practices have a good chance of failing, at least at first. So you will stick with the tried and true, avoid mistakes, and learn very little. I think this condition is still endemic in most organizations, whatever they say about learning and encouraging innovative thinking. It is one of the strongest constraints I know of to innovation, as well as to learning anything at all from inevitable mistakes- one of the most powerful teachers there is."

Prusak goes on to mention 'wrongology' and-well, isn't that what we're all doing? Becoming right by being wrong?
'Becoming Right' As A Process
Striving for accuracy, in our hunches regarding the stock market, theories about increasing yield on a farm, decisions made about the engineering of a rocket, adherence to standards of complex medical procedures, or any other 'real world' circumstance, is a 'good.' It has as an underlying assumption the possibility of being wrong-we are 'striving for' the accuracy, not simply 'being accurate.'

So much of this is a matter of language and semantics, but there is lesson here for educators. This sounds like a 'growth mindset' admonishment, this is first about how the process of becoming wrong-the sweeping of the arms out in front of you as you search-helps you become right.

Put another way, the feedback loop here (of becoming) is far more important than the destination (of being); the latter is finished, fixed, and ready for measuring while the former is ongoing, fluid, and informative.

Becoming right benefits hugely from becoming wrong.

In fact,the idea of being wrong is ridiculous and only accurate if one stops striving to become right. Consider the quote above on the idea of a 'laboratory.'

A mistake in a military operation, or a surgical operation, can kill. But that only means that whenever possible we should make the mistakes in theory, or in the laboratory; we should "let our theories die in our place," as Popper put it."

And classrooms are nothing if not learning laboratories.

So how can we design learning so that, rather than emphasize errors, the feedback loops actually grow understanding?

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Why Being Wrong Is Actually A Good Thing - TeachThought

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Why Being Wrong Is Actually A Good Thing by Terry Heick Being wrong is only 'bad' if the consequences of that 'wrong' outweigh the benefits (and potential future benefits) of becoming right. David Deutsch wrote about this idea over on Nautilus a few years ago, but I saw it for the first time recently.

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Work-life balance is a struggle for both beginning and veteran teachers, and grading seems to be one of the biggest barriers to overcome in maintaining this balance. These ideas may help you give effective and efficient feedback on student work across the disciplines.

7 Grading Hacks

1. Divide and conquer: A large stack of essays or lab reports waiting for feedback can be daunting; the simple act of dividing them into manageable chunks makes them more approachable.

Decide how many products can be assessed in one sitting at a relatively fast pace without compromising the quality of feedback. Divide your stack based on either a number (maybe five or 10) or a percentage basis (a fourth or half of a class set). If you're grading physical papers, literally divide them into stacks; if you're working electronically, keep your eyes focused on the top few submissions.

Another approach, for more tedious assignments like tests, is to grade one question at a time. Grading all of the number 1s, then the 2s, etc., will go quickly because you can focus on one response at a time.

2. Take breaks: Maintaining sustained focus for long periods of time can be difficult, so frequent short breaks can actually increase productivity. When a small chunk of grading is complete, choose a reward (think chocolate or maybe a stretch break) and rest your mind.

Our personal strategy is to divide the total number of papers by five and put out one gummy bear for each group-grade papers with a timer on (see next tip), eat a gummy bear, and repeat until finished.

The key is to figure out what works for you and create a routine.

3. Grade with a timer: Setting a timer is a strategy that helps sustain focus and eliminates the temptation to edit or write a lot.

One method is to start a timer with a lap feature at the beginning of the chunk of papers and hit the lap button at the end of each paper. Try to keep an even pace, so if you spend five minutes on the first paper, try to do the same on each subsequent paper. This simulates the feeling of racing against the clock and can keep you focused on pushing forward.

You can instead use a timer as a countdown clock by allowing a reasonable amount of time to grade and provide feedback. Stay on task with the timer and do not allow yourself to spend too much time on any one paper or project.

4. Try Glow and Grow and a highlighter: Teachers need to shift from editing student work to offering meaningful feedback. Marking every single grammar error is not only demoralizing for students but also time-consuming for teachers. One of our biggest shifts has been trying Glow and Grow: one comment praising students for what they've done well (Glow) and one offering a focus for students to work on in revision or keep in mind for the future (Grow).

We also read written work with a highlighter in hand (or use the highlighting tool on the computer) to draw attention to something students have done well. This is a quick way to reinforce solid ideas and good writing and takes little extra time.

5. Have a specific focus: Narrowing feedback to one or two skills per paper can focus students without overwhelming them, and doing so cuts down on grading time for teachers. One week the focus may be on transitions and adding details, while the next week may focus on sentence variety and strong conclusions.

Students can also have a voice in the process and offer direction by either leaving a note requesting feedback on a specific objective or using a tool such as Flipgrid for self-evaluation. Student reflections point teachers directly to issues of concern, thus saving time.

6. Utilize technology: Thanks to today's technology, written commentary-often the most time-consuming method for giving feedback-is not the only option.

Kaizena allows teachers to leave voice comments directly on student documents-the company says voice comments are 75 percent faster for the teacher to give than written ones. Google Docs also supports voice comments, and teachers can easily use Canned Replies for frequently used comments to save time. Voxer is another free app teachers can use to send comments to students.

7. Respect your own personal preferences: For grading done outside the school day, determine if you're best at grading in the morning or at night. You may find yourself in a staring contest with an essay after 9:30 p.m. that could go on for a ridiculous amount of time-just step away from the papers, go to bed, and then wake up 25 minutes earlier than usual in the morning. You may find that you're much more productive when rested.

Changing the setting can be helpful as well. When the weather is nice, some prefer to grade outside; others prefer to go to a coffee shop. Know what time and setting work best for you and plan accordingly.

Grading is a necessary part of a teacher's life, but it doesn't have to own us. Work to take back some time for yourself.

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Work-life balance is a struggle for both beginning and veteran teachers, and grading seems to be one of the biggest barriers to overcome in maintaining this balance. These ideas may help you give effective and efficient feedback on student work across the disciplines. 1.

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Coaching students to think in terms of concepts helps them understand how to apply their learning in the future.

Donna Grethen / Ikon Images

We want our students' learning to be enduring, enabling them to make sense of complexity now and in the future. For this to occur, we need to nudge students beyond the learning of facts and skills to uncover concepts-transferable ideas that transcend time, place, and situation.

Learning knowledge and skills is like standing in the middle of a forest, surrounded by trees: It's easy to spot details but hard to see patterns. For students to think conceptually, they need opportunities to head up to the mountaintop, pause, and take in the entire forest. They need the chance to search for big ideas-to generalize, summarize, and draw conclusions by looking at their learning in a holistic way.

By intentionally designing learning activities in which students move between the factual and conceptual levels of thinking, we can help them construct understanding, facilitate transfer, and build their sense of agency.

Questions to Consider During Lesson Planning

To help students go from surface to deep learning, we can ask ourselves three questions:

1. From the facts or skills being taught, which concepts are at the heart of the learning? For instance, a unit on the human body may be driven by the concepts of system, interdependence, and health.

2. Which connections between concepts would we like students to make as a result of the learning? For example, in mathematics, we may ask students to connect the concepts of multiplication and division. In science, we may wish to see how they draw links between photosynthesis and energy transformation.

3. What opportunities for application and transfer can we design to help students take their learning further? For instance, we may ask students who have learned about principles of art and design to create posters for a social or environmental cause of their choice.

These questions reflect different levels of conceptual thinking. If students do not have a strong understanding of individual concepts, they'll struggle to see patterns and make connections between them. Likewise, if we don't give students time to construct understanding, it will be challenging for them to apply their ideas to projects, current events, or other new contexts.

3 Ways to Promote Conceptual Thinking

1. Using categorizing, naming, and sorting activities: In order to understand individual concepts, students need to grapple with examples, non-examples, and attributes of a concept. We can ask students, "What is it like?" and invite them to describe the key features.

For instance, young children learning about habitats may be shown images of a beehive, pond, log, fish tank, rabbit hutch, and zoo enclosure and prompted to describe how these homes are similar or different. By comparing these examples and non-examples of the concept habitat, students come to understand that a habitat is the natural environment in which an animal's needs are met.

By asking students to engage in categorizing, naming, and sorting activities, we prepare them for more-complex thinking to come later in a unit and reduce misconceptions.

Concept formation activities:

Create a T-chart labeled Yes and No and ask students to sort examples and non-examples of a concept, such as a polygon.

Provide students with examples of a concept and invite them to find common attributes and write their own definitions using a stem, such as, "Migration is when _____."

Share a concept and ask students to generate their own examples or non-examples. These can be represented in words or pictures. In the image below, Grade 1 student illustrations show the concept of a performer; the students collaboratively analyzed the images to come up with attributes like being in front of an audience.

2. Asking students to make connections: As students engage with a unit, they explore a variety of contexts that illustrate concepts in action. In a unit on the civil rights movement, for example, students may learn about the Montgomery bus boycott and the Greensboro sit-ins. By drawing out connections between concepts such as protest and rights, students can zoom out to see the big picture of their learning.

To support generalizing, we can design activities that require students to link concepts. For instance, students in my Grade 7 social studies class engaged in concept mapping at the end of a unit on sustainability. They mapped out concepts hierarchically, then created connections using linking words to describe relationships between them. I asked them to chart out their main understandings as statements next to their concept map. It's important when facilitating such activities to ensure that students support their thinking using evidence from prior learning.

Concept linking activities:

Invite students to take the role of a specific concept explored in a unit, and ask them to sit in a circle of four or five people, each representing a different concept. They then make connections to each other, explaining how and why they connect using evidence from prior learning.

Use graphic organizers that ask students to collaboratively synthesize multiple case studies. For instance, have students read about Malala Yousafzai, Martin Luther King Jr., and Greta Thunberg and take notes using a triple Venn diagram that will help them answer the question, "How do change makers overcome challenges?"

3. Planning for transfer: Activities that invite students to form concepts and make connections between them prime the brain for transfer-in each of these stages of conceptual thinking, we help students to reason abstractly and identify the "So what?" of their learning. Once students have formed connections between concepts and articulated these as understandings, we can provide them with opportunities to apply them to new situations. This allows students to see the relevance of their learning to both near and far contexts.

Transfer activities:

Give students a novel case study to grapple with and invite them to apply their understandings. Ask them to revise their thinking: How might we need to change our original idea to include the new case study?

Invite students to take a stance on a provocative statement and debate using their prior knowledge and understanding. For instance, "Plants are the most important organisms within an ecosystem" could be discussed at the end of an ecosystems unit.

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3 Ways to Boost Students' Conceptual Thinking

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Coaching students to think in terms of concepts helps them understand how to apply their learning in the future. Donna Grethen / Ikon Images We want our students' learning to be enduring, enabling them to make sense of complexity now and in the future.

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Opinion

As the brain science on adverse childhood experiences evolves, teaching must, too

We all know that when children aren't well, they're less likely to learn.

More and more teachers recognize that children who can't sit still in class, act out, or have asthma may be showing warning signs of a toxic exposure to childhood trauma.

More than two decades ago, landmark research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente found that exposure to adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs-ranging from parental addiction to abuse, neglect, or divorce-can have lasting effects on children's health. These ACEs can lead to abnormal levels of stress hormones-a condition known by doctors as toxic stress, which increases kids' risk of serious illnesses including asthma and diabetes, as well as long-term problems including heart disease and cancer later in life.

But the science also tells us that two things are clear: Early intervention improves outcomes, and safe, stable, nurturing relationships can be healing for children. With nearly 35 million children across the country at risk for toxic stress, what if the person giving the biggest daily dose of healing treatment for toxic stress isn't a doctor or a therapist, but a teacher?

As education researchers have found, stress can change brain architecture, making it more difficult for children to focus and learn. When a child's fight or flight response is constantly triggered by adverse experiences such as abuse or neglect, the child's nervous systems can become dysregulated, which can also affect thinking, decisionmaking, emotional control, and learning. This makes it more likely that children will experience negative academic outcomes such as poor grades, an increased risk of suspensions, or dropping out of school all together.

Although scientists used to think the brain circuitry was "set" around age 6, they have recently found the brain is malleable well into the 20s. As such, the brains of students who've experienced trauma can also be "rewired" for greater connection and feelings of security. To do so, it's essential to design an education system that takes into account our new knowledge of the developing brain. One of the most important findings is that for students who've experienced trauma and adversity, caring, secure relationships, and trust can restore their ability to learn.

See Also: " The Brain Science Is In: Students' Emotional Needs Matter"

How might schools incorporate these important findings? Teachers want to offer social-emotional learning, but many are unsure how to do so. Here are 10 practical, low- or no-cost strategies for turning things around:

1. Immerse your school in trauma-informed approaches. Such approaches focus on infusing the values of safety, trust, collaboration, choice, empowerment, and equity into all learning environments. Trauma-informed teaching is less about following a checklist than adopting a new way of doing business as a school.

2. Create a positive school climate that offers long-term, secure relationships between teachers and students. These relationships support academic, physical, cognitive, and social-emotional development-an approach known as whole-child education-that can help children overcome trauma and toxic stress.

3. Incorporate practices that address belonging and safety. Neuroscientists have found kids need a feeling of safety and connection in order to thrive. As a recent Edutopia video series on how learning happens demonstrates, something as simple as greeting children at the door each day with a hug, high-five, or handshake can help develop an atmosphere of trust, safety, and caring.

4. Implement one-on-one time with the teacher. Giving children a few moments of private time each day will help students feel cared about and soothed, experts say.

5. Create "safe" corners in the classroom. Children should have space if they need to take a break and regroup. This respite is particularly important if children are suffering from trauma or toxic stress.

6. Be predictable. As the Houston-based psychiatrist and trauma expert Bruce Perry writes, "If a schedule is consistent, but the teacher is not, there is no predictability for the child." Your smile and the calm rhythm of your voice can make a child feel safe, he explains.

7. Make sure your students are eating nutritious food and have time to move and play at school. Study after study shows that healthy students perform better on tests, attend school more often, and behave better in class. With this in mind, schools should ensure that students have nutritious meals and snacks (including during celebrations, where it can be easy to default to less-nutritious foods like birthday cake) as well as regular opportunities to be physically active.

8. Hang up reminders to use "talk moves" for classroom discussions. Taping helpful conversational formulas to the wall for kids to refer to-"What do you think?" or "I heard you say X-could you explain that?"-can help children get into a classroom discussion and feel more connected socially. This is especially helpful in getting shy students to join the conversation.

9. Boost engagement with phrases like "I wonder" and "I notice." Encouraging students to use these phrases in conversation can clue in teachers about what and how children are learning. This can make it easier to pinpoint gaps and reach out to students who need help, which may reduce their anxiety about learning.

10. Teach and model social-emotional learning. Showing kids how to calm themselves, work out conflicts, and name emotions helps everyone in the classroom better focus on learning and promotes academic and social development.

While sleep, exercise, nutrition, and mindfulness are critical to help children heal the impact of toxic stress, research suggests it is the cumulative dose of positive student and teacher interactions that makes the biggest difference.

Of course, these suggestions are just one piece of a bigger puzzle for mitigating the impact of toxic stress. Children who experience more severe or frequent ACEs, such as abuse or household instability, will likely need more interventions beyond those that even a caring, nurturing teacher can provide, and referrals to counseling and community resources are likely the next step. But using the above strategies can do wonders for easing toxic stress in the classroom.

What's especially gratifying is that most of these science-based teaching practices are simple ones. They don't need expensive technology. They don't require specialists or extra rooms. And they can be easily incorporated into almost any school. Even a daily hug or high five from a caring teacher can help kids thrive.

Published in Print: November 27, 2019, as Ten Simple Steps for Reducing Toxic Stress in the Classroom

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10 Simple Steps for Reducing Toxic Stress in the Classroom

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Opinion We all know that when children aren't well, they're less likely to learn. More and more teachers recognize that children who can't sit still in class, act out, or have asthma may be showing warning signs of a toxic exposure to childhood trauma.

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Some interesting ideas on building critical thinking that could be applied to any area.

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Provided in Faculty Memo

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8 Ways To Grow As A Teacher
by TeachThought Staff

You've likely read about something recently that caught your eye.

Game-Based Learning. A new app. A comprehensive literacy strategy.

And that recognition was probably followed up by something else-a tweet with a link to a YouTube channel that blew you away. Or a quote about learning that's causing you to rethink what you thought you knew about education. Maybe even an idea for project-based learning, a resource from a fantastic PD session, a learning framework from a book, or discovering a new community online.

While there are many new ways to learn in our digital age, encountering new ideas is different than internalizing that thinking and working to integrate it meaningfully. Below are some tips to help you make that transition-from seeing to using the best ideas you see on a daily basis.
8 Ways To Grow As A Teacher 1. Start Small
Don't reinvent everything you do, even if that new "thing" you've found suggests to do exactly that. This needs to be sustainable. Start small, even if you're starting small so that you can change everything.
2. Start Right Away
Within reason. Soon your perception of that new idea or resource will change-lose its shine, or become vague somehow. Start small, and start right away.
3. See Learning as a System
With new changes, adjustments need to be made. Your new assessment strategy, learning app, social media tool, or clever use of analogies will change the ecosystem of how you teach. Which is good. Go with it, not blindly, but with the understanding that if you're not adapting, you're likely withering.
4. Reflect, Reflect, Reflect
Reflect on what you learned, reflect after further reading, reflect after discussing it with students or colleagues, then reflect after giving it a try. Consider using "How did it go, and how do you know?" to help frame that reflection, which forces you to both confront how you think things went, and then consider the "data" or evidence of that assessment (whether formal or informal).
5. Collaborate Meaningfully
Speaking of sharing it with colleagues, collaboration not only opens up new thinking to further thinking, revision, and extension (a colleague offering up an excellent literacy strategy to go with your new spin on blended learning, for example), but also "puts you on the hook" to see the idea through (unless you want to be known as the teacher who starts a million projects without seeing any through).
6. Listen to Students
They'll let you know how you're doing, and how any changes to your teaching are "going." You just have to be willing to listen with an open mind.
7. Stay Curious
One change to your craft of teaching will undoubtedly lead to another. Stay curious, respond to new thinking with a critical eye and a heart full of possibility.

Just as you encourage your own students to stay active, engaged, and connected, you too can keep reading about new ideas, connecting to new communities, participating in twitter chats and collegial conversation in order to reflect, and in the process continue to refine yourself professionally, making lasting change in the way you teach.
8. Celebrate Learning!
Because that's why we're here. Without celebrating success-the success and growth of your students and how you helped them are it happen-your job is unsustainable. The same way your students need to see progress and believe what they're doing is working, so do you.
8 Strategies To Make Lasting Change In The Way You Teach; 8 Ways To Grow As A Teacher

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8 Ways To Grow As A Teacher by TeachThought Staff You've likely read about something recently that caught your eye. Game-Based Learning . A new app. A comprehensive literacy strategy. And that recognition was probably followed up by something else-a tweet with a link to a YouTube channel that blew you away.

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provided in faculty memo

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Placing prompts throughout a text challenges students to analyze and interpret what they read-improving reading comprehension.

Alice Mollon / Ikon Images

Reading comprehension is an important skill throughout all grade levels, and students who struggle to comprehend texts may disengage from learning. Engaging instructional practices allow students to form a connection with the content.

Confident and successful readers engage with the material. A strategy called "Stop and Think" gives teachers across content areas and grade levels a tool to implement in their classes to enhance their reading instruction. When reading is modified with purposeful questioning, students have enhanced comprehension and engagement.

Create the Prompt

When I implement this strategy with my students, I read through a text and write questions as I read. These can include personal reflections like a reaction or opinion about the text. They may include more specific questions if I identify certain passages that display different content. After my own text annotations are completed, I use that material to design prompts for the students. In student copies of the text, I purposefully place the prompts throughout to promote a fluid but thorough reading experience. The placement of a prompt is determined by its purpose. For example, if students are being encouraged to make inferences prior to reading, the prompt will be placed at the beginning of the text. I use the heading "Stop and Think" in all caps and then insert a question or prompt.

Student responses display their comprehension of the text. These responses from students can be used to informally or formally assess students. Teachers can also use the responses from students to guide further reading instruction. For example, if students are asked to summarize a section of the text and they cannot adequately do so, the teacher will know that more instruction is needed. Teachers should be using the responses to guide their instructional choices for the needs of their students.

Differentiated Assessment and Instruction

The Stop and Think strategy enables teachers to differentiate instruction. Some prompts may require students to make inferences, while others may ask students to pose questions. When crafting Stop and Think prompts, consider the following:

Who are your learners? Do you have students who are below grade level for reading? What are their learning preferences, and how can you use that in your prompts? For example, can students draw a visual summary of a passage instead of writing?

What do they need to enhance their comprehension of the text? What are specific reading skills that they need to practice?

What specific skills do the standards dictate that the students must master?

Using different levels of language in the prompts accommodates varying levels for individual students. For example, my prompts for a College Prep English II class are different than my prompts for my Honors STEM English III class. Use knowledge of the needs of students when creating their guided reading prompts.

Consider where prompts should be placed throughout the text. Purposeful and intentional placement can emphasize different reading skills. For example, teachers can have students make inferences solely based on the title by placing a prompt below the title of a text. Also, teachers can place summarizing and reflecting prompts in the middle and end of especially compelling sections. By sprinkling a text with prompts for students, the teacher can promote active reading skills for their students.

Stop and Think prompts encourage engagement throughout the reading of a text. They also encourage students to dive deeper into a text. Instead of simply skimming a text, students are challenged to interpret and analyze it.

Beyond Paper

The Stop and Think strategy can be utilized with online tools as well. If students use programs like Google Docs to interact with texts, teachers can share a document with their students with prompts included. Students can use the comment feature to respond to each of the prompts. Another online tool that can be used with this strategy is Seesaw, which provides many different outlets for communication and collaboration. Prompts can be shared through this program for students to analyze and record their responses with written text, pictures, or audio.

Teachers across content areas are being encouraged to implement effective literacy strategies throughout their instruction. Stop and Think can be used in classes of all levels and content areas. With any text, teachers can construct prompts that address literacy standards and requirements for their content areas. Asking students to explain their motives when solving a math program or doing a chemistry experiment reinforces content while promoting deeper engagement.

When we promote active reading skills, we engage students in reading. Using Stop and Think, teachers create intentional and purposeful reading instruction to enhance student learning.

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Placing prompts throughout a text challenges students to analyze and interpret what they read-improving reading comprehension. Alice Mollon / Ikon Images Reading comprehension is an important skill throughout all grade levels, and students who struggle to comprehend texts may disengage from learning. Engaging instructional practices allow students to form a connection with the content.