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Themes in Early Childhood Education: Will They Ever End? | Technology Rich Inquiry Based Research

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Themes in Early Childhood Education: Will They Ever End? | Technology Rich Inquiry Based Research

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Fountas and Pinnell Resource Level Books, Not Children: The

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Fountas and Pinnell Resource Level Books, Not Children: The

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Fountas and Pinnell Resource Level Books, Not Children: The

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In this article, published in the January/February 2019 issue of Literacy Today, the member magazine of the International Literacy Association, Fountas

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Rethinking the Lesson Plan – KATIE MARTIN

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Rethinking the Lesson Plan – KATIE MARTIN

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Katie Martin | Informed by Research, Inspired by Practice

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When I was in my teacher preparation program, I remember being taught to complete extensive lesson plans to ensure I was prepared to engage students in learning

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How to Become and Remain a Transformational Teacher | Edutopia

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How to Become and Remain a Transformational Teacher | Edutopia

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David Cutler

High School History, Government and Journalism teacher from Boston

However talented, no one is a natural-born teacher. Honing the craft takes significant care and effort, not just by the individual, but also by the school at large. Though experience does matter, it matters only to the extent that a teacher -- regardless of how long he or she has been in the classroom -- commits to continued professional development to refresh his or her status as a transformational teacher. Along those lines, even after a decade in the classroom, I don't claim to be beyond criticism -- not in the least. Still, I wish to offer some advice on constantly striving toward perfection, however elusive that goal will always remain.

Constantly Share Best Practices

As a first step, work toward recognizing that, no matter how long you've been in the classroom, there will always be someone else who's more effective at a certain facet of teaching. When I was a first-year teacher, a veteran colleague inquired how I'd engaged such strong student interest in the American Revolution, something that he'd struggled with achieving. I shared my lesson plan, which culminated in a formal debate about whether the colonists had acted justly in rebelling against British rule. Moving forward, I felt more confident and comfortable about asking that colleague for help with providing quality written feedback, which he excelled at doing.

Find a Trusted Mentor

No matter how much experience you have, it's crucial to find and rely on a trusted confidant. As a new teacher, I spent countless hours chatting with colleagues about best practices and where I feared that I might have fallen short. Not once did they pass judgment on me, or suggest that whatever I had done (or failed to do, in certain cases) was beyond repair. Instead, they offered thoughtful advice on how I might do things differently. No matter the subject, I value hearing fresh perspectives from new and veteran teachers about becoming even better at my job. Nobody has a monopoly on good ideas.

Commit to Classroom Observations

I do my best to observe other teachers in action. This year, I benefited from watching a colleague inject humor into his English classroom to cultivate a more relaxed but effective learning environment. In turn, I tried to strike a similar balance in my history classroom, which helped students feel less afraid of sharing ideas and learning from mistakes. I'm equally grateful for observing a colleague teach French to students whom I also instruct. She possesses a gentle firmness that learners respond to, but more importantly, students know that she cares about them -- and they don't want to let their teacher or themselves down.

Change Things Up

I also observe other teachers to see how they change things up, especially when I get too comfortable in a routine. It's certainly easier to teach the same books and content each year, but it's also incredibly boring, which can lead to burnout. This summer, I'm working to revamp some of my American history curriculum to fall more in step with what students are learning and doing in their American literature class. For example, when juniors are studying the Cold War in my class, they'll be reading Alan Moore's in their English class -- an award-winning graphic novel highlighting many Cold War-era fears and tensions. For both classes, students will complete a yet-to-be-determined project to showcase their understanding.

Model the Usefulness of What You Teach

In line with changing things up, I'm always looking for new ways to model the usefulness of what I teach. More than ever, I find that students want to know how they can apply what they learn in the classroom to the real world. In American history, I continue to de-emphasize rote memorization in favor of activities requiring clear, analytical thinking -- an essential tool for whatever students end up pursuing in college or as a career. On most assessments, I allow students to bring a notecard. It seems less important in the age of Google to assess how much students know. Instead, I'm significantly more concerned with how much sense they can make of all this information so readily available to them. In all of my classes, I also make it clear that knowing how to write well will play a significant role in their future success.

Caring Beyond What You Teach

To motivate my students toward success, I strive to show that I care about them beyond the classroom. I do my best to chaperone trips, watch sporting events, and attend plays and other student-run productions. I advise the Model United Nations Club, which allows me to share my passion for diplomacy and fostering change. I also coach cross-country to help students see that I value maintaining a healthy body just as much as developing an inquisitive mind. The most transformational teachers that I know have a deep understanding of how their role transcends far beyond any subject that they're teaching. Such teachers have the most lasting impact on their students long after graduation.

How else can one become a transformational teacher? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.

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How to Become and Remain a Transformational Teacher

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David Cutler High School History, Government and Journalism teacher from Boston However talented, no one is a natural-born teacher. Honing the craft takes significant care and effort, not just by the individual, but also by the school at large.

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When Kids Have Structure for Thinking, Better Learning Emerges | MindShift | KQED News

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When Kids Have Structure for Thinking, Better Learning Emerges | MindShift | KQED News

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By sixth grade a few students are starting to include some strategies for thinking in their maps, such as "concentrate" or "don't get caught up in things that aren't relevant." But by ninth grade many students include specific strategies for thinking on their concept maps, including "making connections," "comparing" and "breaking things down."

Ritchhart studied 400 students at a school focusing on cultivating a culture of thinking. The study had no control group, but Ritchhart could chart development of metacognition from 4th-11th grades.

"Students basically made a two-and-a-half year gain from what would be expected just from teachers trying to create that culture of thinking," Ritchhart said. He admits that the study isn't definitive, but to him it's proof that when teachers focus on these ideas they do see improvement.
HOW CAN EDUCATORS HELP?
In a culture of thinking, students recognize that collective and individual thinking is valued, visible and actively promoted as part of the regular day-to-day experience of all group members. This type of culture can exist in any place where learning is part of the experience including school, after school programming or museum programs.

To help make these ideas more concrete, Ritchhart and his colleagues have been working to hone in on a short list of "thinking moves" related to understanding. To test whether these moves were really crucial, researchers asked themselves: could a student say she really understood something if she hadn't engaged in these activities? They believe the important "thinking moves" that lead to understanding are:

Naming: being able to identify the parts and pieces of a thing

Inquiry: questioning should drive the process throughout

Looking at different perspectives and viewpoints

Reasoning with evidence

Making connections to prior knowledge, across subject areas, even into personal lives

Uncovering complexity

Capture the heart and make firm conclusions

Building explanations, interpretations and theories.

These thinking moves all point to the conclusion that learning doesn't happen through the mere delivery of information. "Learning only occurs when the learner does something with that information," Ritchhart said. "So as teachers we need to think not only about how we will deliver that content, but also what we will have students do with that content."

One easy way to start asking students to be more metacognitive is to build in reflection time about thinking. Ask students to think about the lesson and identify the kinds of thinking they used throughout. That not only builds vocabulary around thinking, but it often gives kids confidence to name specific thinking strategies they used. Taking this time to reflect also reminds students that they did real work during the lesson.
THINKING ROUTINES
To get at how teachers make thinking visible, Ritchhart studied teachers who were very effective at helping student dive below surface level retention of information into really understanding material as it connects to the rest of their studies and their lives. He noticed none of them taught a lesson on thinking.

"They had routines and structures that scaffolded and supported student thinking," Ritchhart said. This discovery led him and colleagues at Project Zero to develop "thinking routines" that all teachers can use to help students develop the habits of mind that lead to more understanding.

One way to develop a culture of thinking is to pick one of the thinking routines Project Zero has designed and use it over and over in a variety of contexts. Rather than trying each routine once, applying one routine in multiple ways will help make thinking in that way habitual. It becomes almost an expectation in a classroom, like other class norms.

One example of this that goes beyond the K-12 classroom comes from Harvard Medical School, where instructors were struggling to train students to listen to patients and make strong diagnoses based on the symptoms they heard. As an experiment, the medical school offered an elective module to students, where once a week they would join a fine arts class using the "See, Think, Wonder" thinking routine to observe art. After 10 weeks, all the medical students were assessed on clinical diagnosing and the students who had done "See, Think, Wonder" had improved much more than those who had not participated.

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When Kids Have Structure for Thinking, Better Learning Emerges - MindShift

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By sixth grade a few students are starting to include some strategies for thinking in their maps, such as "concentrate" or "don't get caught up in things that aren't relevant." But by ninth grade many students include specific strategies for thinking on their concept maps, including "making connections," "comparing" and "breaking things down."

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A Closer Look at Reading Incentive Programs - Alfie Kohn

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A Closer Look at Reading Incentive Programs - Alfie Kohn

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(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993/1999/2018)

By Alfie Kohn

All those reading incentive campaigns inflicted on elementary school children across the country provide sobering evidence of just how many parents and educators are trapped by Skinnerian thinking. They also illustrate the consequences of extrinsic motivators more generally. Asked about the likely results of "Book It!", Pizza Hut's food-for-reading program, educational psychologist John Nicholls replied, only half in jest, that it would probably produce "a lot of fat kids who don't like to read."

Consider the following excerpt from a recent article in USA Today:

When school let out for the summer, a Philadelphia mother was concerned her 9-year-old son would take a three-month vacation from reading. "He has not learned to love books," Christina Long said then. "He only reads what's required of him." That was before Greg Prestegord learned he could earn packs of baseball cards and other prizes by reading books through his library's summer reading programs. Two days later the avid baseball fan checked out six books. "That's why I'm doing it," Greg says. "I must have a million baseball cards."

The article goes on to note that this summer program is similar to others around the country that offer movie parties, zoo passes, and other prizes to children who pick up enough books. Presumably the librarians who administer them and the parents who support them have the very best of intentions. But if Ms. Long is typical, they are not listening to what their children are telling them. Greg is both candid and unequivocal: baseball cards are "why I'm doing it," he says. Thus, he is still reading (as his mother puts it) "only . . . what's required of him"; the only thing that has changed is that reading is now required to get a card instead of a grade. A program that turns vacation reading into something one has to do to obtain a reward is hardly likely to produce children who have "learned to love books." Quite the contrary.

"But at least he's reading now," Ms. Long might protest. "At least he's being introduced to new books!" And this is true. The reward buys us a behavior - in this case, the act of checking out a book and reading it. But at what price? The quality of performance in general and of learning in particular tend to decline significantly when people are extrinsically motivated (see chapters 3 and 8). Moreover, once the library runs out of baseball cards, children are not only unlikely to continue reading; they are less likely to read than they were before the program began. Think about it: reading has been presented not as a pleasurable experience but as a means for obtaining a goody.

The experience of children in an elementary school class whose teacher introduced an in-class reading-for-reward program can be multiplied hundreds of thousands of times:

The rate of book reading increased astronomically . . . [but the use of rewards also] changed the pattern of book selection (short books with large print became ideal). It also seemed to change the way children read. They were often unable to answer straight-forward questions about a book, even one they had just finished reading. Finally, it decreased the amount of reading children did outside of school.[1]

Notice what is going on here. The problem is not just that the effects of rewards don't last. No, the more significant problem is precisely that the effects of rewards do last, but these effects are the opposite of what we were hoping to produce. What rewards do, and what they do with devastating effectiveness, is to smother people's enthusiasm for activities they might otherwise enjoy.

*

.... As if grades weren't doing enough damage, tens of thousands of schools now use corporate-sponsored reading incentives. At least as disturbing as Pizza Hut's "Book It!" is something called Accelerated Reader. Here, a school purchases (from a corporation called Advantage Learning Systems, Inc.) a packaged program in which students must choose their reading from a list of accepted titles and then take a fact-based computerized quiz on each book in order to earn points and prizes. Many educators who spend scarce funds on this program simply (and understandably) wish to encourage reading. But what matters more than the fact that children read is why they read and how they read. With incentive-based programs, the answer to "why" is "To get rewards," and this, as the data make painfully clear, is often at the expense of interest in reading itself. The answer to "how," meanwhile, at least with Accelerated Reader, is "superficially": they're skimming for facts they will need for the quiz, which is altogether different from the sort of thoughtful engagement we'd like to see kids come to adopt when they open a book.[2]

In 1997, Jeff McQuillan at California State University published a review of the available research on the effects of reading incentives. He found that the few investigations that did turn up positive effects tended to rely on self-selected samples of students, which makes it difficult to draw conclusions about what actually led to the results. Typically, the studies also failed to compare these students to others who were not in such programs, much less to others who were in programs that didn't involve rewards. (For example, other research has shown that time set aside for free voluntary reading in school is effective at promoting both skills and interest). McQuillan concluded that none of the available studies "showed any clearly positive effect on reading comprehension, vocabulary, or reading habits that could be attributed solely to the use of rewards and incentives, and in one case the practice [of offering rewards] may have led to a decline." He recommended that schools spend money on books rather than on packaged programs that offer extrinsic inducements for reading.[3]

*

"Children who see reading as a desirable activity tend to read more frequently and thus develop better reading skills," one group of researchers reminded us. Their 2010 study also found that children who read for extrinsic reasons "have poorer reading skills than do children with lower extrinsic motivation." And this effect proves distressingly durable: Kids with an extrinsic orientation in fourth grade are still weaker readers in sixth grade, and that's true even if their earlier literacy skills are held constant.[4]

No wonder offering kids rewards for reading books reliably backfires. A new study confirms that finding: Children who get a goodie for reading subsequently become less interested in reading. (The only exception in this study was that kids who received a book as a reward remained as interested in reading as those who didn't get a reward at all.)[5] And in a recent multi-district investigation of Accelerated Reader, kids whose elementary schools used A.R. were less excited about books by the time they were in middle school than those whose schools were A.R.-free. A smaller study of third graders likewise found that "reading incentives were counterproductive."[6]

One teacher captured all this research in a succinct slogan: "Reading is rewarding when there's no reward for reading."[7] (Feel free to print that on a poster and offer it to your local public and school libraries.)
NOTES
1 Barry Schwartz, "Reinforcement-Induced Behavioral Stereotypy: How Not to Teach People to Discover Rules," Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 111 (1982): 53 n 5.

2 For a similar criticism, see Betty Carter, "Hold the Applause: Do Accelerated Reader and Electronic Bookshelf Send the Right Message?" School Library Journal, October 1996: 22-25. This article elicited a number of letters to the editor. One fan wrote in to defend Accelerated Reader on the following basis: "If the program is so ineffective, then why are 25,000 schools participating?" In the same issue, however, another librarian reported seeing "parents take books away from children because they didn't have a high point value and therefore weren't worth reading." Other educators have pointed out to me that the Accelerated Reader program has a demoralizing effect on students who don't read as fluently as their peers, driving home their relative failure in a painfully public way.

3 Jeff McQuillan, "The Effects of Incentives on Reading," Reading Research and Instruction 36 (1997): 111-25. Quotation appears on p. 122.

4 Michael Becker, Nele McElvany, and Marthe Kortenbruck, "Intrinsic and Extrinsic Reading Motivation as Predictors of Reading Literacy: A Longitudinal Study," Journal of Educational Psychology 102 (2010): 773-85; quotations appear on p. 781.

5 Barbara A. Marinak and Linda B. Gambrell, "Intrinsic Motivation and Rewards," Literacy Research and Instruction 47 (2008): 9-26.

6 Multi-district study: Linda M. Pavonetti, Kathryn M. Brimmer, and James F. Cipielewski, "Accelerated Reader: What Are the Lasting Effects on the Reading Habits of Middle School Students Exposed to Accelerated Reader in Elementary Grades," Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 46 (2002/2003): 300-11. Third-grade study: Gayle M. Stanfield, "Incentives: The Effects on Reading Attitude and Reading Behaviors of Third-Grade Students," The Corinthian, vol. 9, article 8 (2008): 99-116. For an overview of A.R. research, see Stephen Krashen, "The (Lack of) Experimental Evidence Supporting the Use of Accelerated Reader," Journal of Children's Literature 29 (2003): 16-30. And here are perspectives on A.R. of a teacher and a children's book author, respectively.

7 This aphorism is by John T. Spencer, a middle-school teacher turned college professor.

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A Closer Look at Reading Incentive Programs

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A Closer Look at Reading Incentive Programs

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The Pedagogy of Being Lost – Without Windows

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The Pedagogy of Being Lost – Without Windows

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The forest is beautiful, fascinating, green, and full of hopes; there are no paths. Although it isn't easy, we have to make our own paths, as teachers and children and families, in the forest. Sometimes we find ourselves together within the forest, sometimes we may get lost from each other, sometimes we'll greet each other from far away across the forest; but it's living together in this forest that is important. And this living together is not easy.

Loris Malaguzzi wrote these words in an article titled "Your Image of the Child: Where Teaching Begins." In the larger context of his publication, these words provided a metaphor for navigating the constantly shifting dynamics of a learning community and the sometimes unpredictable nature of working in the Reggio Way. And while it does serve as an excellent description of the work we do, our Reggio-inspired nature school has come to take it much more literally than he probably intended.

Taking children on adventures into the woods is one of the most beloved activities our program has to offer. To our students, the forest is a magical place for a myriad of reasons. It contains a wealth of living creatures, both flora and fauna, that children can experience with the full array of their senses. The woods are a place for children to let their bodies move unfettered; they are free to create their own opportunities to run, jump, climb, swing, fall, and meander as they see fit. To many students who live in suburban areas or apartment complexes, its mystery stems entirely from being a realm wholly and completely overrun by plants the likes of which many of them have never seen nor experienced in their young lives.

While each of these aspects is worthy of a blog post in and of themselves, one of the greatest and most overlooked assets the forest can provide to young learners is often what we fear most as educators: the possibility of being lost. Deep in the recesses of every teacher's mind, especially in the minds of nature educators, there is an awareness that at any moment a child could wander outside the confines of what we deem to be a "safe place" for them. Across the country, adults and teachers expend tremendous amounts of effort and time building barriers to create these safe places, their labors including everything from erecting metal fences to installing self-locking gates to teaching the children to form neat lines.

Although it comes from a desire to insulate them from danger, the consequence of this unending drive to keep children completely safe and accounted for is that we accidentally label wandering as dangerous, and being lost as undesirable. To me, that could not be farther from the truth. What we sometimes forget is that at its core, real discovery can only happen in the presence of unfamiliarity. Outside the fence and off the trail, students have the ability to feel a sort of unbridled, primal stress that necessitates an incredibly valuable and almost completely forgotten set of social-emotional skills. Children need to be exposed to places and experiences that are uncharted, untamed, uncontrollable, and unpredictable. These spaces, not the artificially constructed safe zones, are where children blossom.

When romping in the woods with students, there is always a visible moment in which children begin to understand that they no longer know where they are. Each child articulates this moment in a different way. Some that aren't used to exploration express it in the form of panic or tears. Those that are practiced in the art of wandering look over their shoulder at where they came from, then look up the hill at where they are going, then don a goofy grin as they romp on. This moment of realization is pivotal for both teachers and students.

To children, the moment they realize that they are lost is also the moment they understand that they have a limitless number of choices. Without a predetermined goal and a set of instructions, children can go wherever they want, a fact which is both freeing and terrifying for those who are experiencing it for the first time. In this context, students have the opportunity to defeat their own analysis paralysis, flex their executive functions, stay calm, and make a decision. Without a trail, there is no right or wrong answer. There is no playbook or code of conduct or series of rules that validates or refutes the decisions they make. At its core, the experience of being lost is valuable to children because it brings them face to face with a swirling cloud of infinite, chaotic possibilities. And it affords them the opportunity to take that cloud and transform it into a single, concrete choice using nothing more than their own agency.

From a social-emotional perspective, being lost is incredibly important to children because it creates a circumstance in which our sympathetic nervous system and our higher brain functions come in direct conflict with one another. When they feel lost, children simultaneously feel two opposing sensations: fear and excitement. As educators, it is our job to help students understand both and make a choice. In much the same way that we should strive to provide a context for children to take acceptable risks, we have to scaffold the art of being lost with children so as to properly prepare them for this dichotomy of feelings. It is perfectly acceptable for children to feel scared, and the sympathetic nervous system often wins out the first few times. In that sense, being lost is a risk-associated skill that children need to practice, much like climbing or big-body play. But over time, with the right language and strong relationships, students can begin to let excitement take hold and propel them into a world of endless curiosity, investigation, discovery, and fun.

For teachers, being lost with students is an invaluable experience because it strips away every ounce of meticulously constructed safety until only the foundation of learning remains: the relationships that exist within a tight-knit community. In the wilds, children help up their friends that stumble. They pat each other's backs and dust each other off. They hold hands with their peers and the adults that they trust and depend upon. Just like an anchor is the only way to find footing in the open ocean, trustworthy friends are the first and only place children find safety and security in new and sometimes frightening natural places. Being lost creates a context in which teachers can both observe these preexisting relationships and facilitate the development of new bonds of trust and interdependence.

In short, fear of the unknown is natural. But it is important to remember that more often than not, we aren't actually afraid of unfamiliar places themselves. As adults, we are scared of the potential for disaster that we see lurking around every corner. There is a fine line that we have to tread between vigilance and complete insulation, and it is our responsibility to constantly redraw that line in an effort to provide students with what they need to grow. Being lost in the great outdoors can be scary, but as the comforts of our four walls fall away, we can find a place for children to gain a better understanding of themselves, the possibilities the world has to offer, and the true value of companionship.

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The forest is beautiful, fascinating, green, and full of hopes; there are no paths. Although it isn't easy, we have to make our own paths, as teachers and children and families, in the forest. Sometimes we find ourselves together within the forest, sometimes we may get lost from each other, sometimes we'll greet each other...

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Carol Dweck Explains The 'False' Growth Mindset That Worries Her | MindShift | KQED News

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Carol Dweck Explains The 'False' Growth Mindset That Worries Her | MindShift | KQED News

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Finding the joy in learning. Harnessing the power of ‘What if…’ |

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Finding the joy in learning. Harnessing the power of ‘What if…’ |

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I cannot believe that I have just spent the last four hours learning a new skill, so engrossed that I was totally oblivious to the passage of time. My goal was to become familiar with a new (for me) digital tool to share with teachers. I saw its potential to increase the engagement of students in their learning, allowing them to easily demonstrate their learning, to deepen their learning in a wide range of curriculum areas and key competencies. As an extra bonus, the end product looked cool to boot! I had spent most of the day fully focussed, going off on tangents to add to my kete of skills, exploring, being curious, failing, succeeding, failing again, pushing myself to go beyond just a basic level of competency by asking myself, "What if I...", "How can I...", "Where can I find more out about...". I ended up with a skill set I could apply in my role as a facilitator AND with a product that I had created of which I was very proud. I would be able to share my creation and my learning on a wider global platform as well as share it with others as part of my facilitator practices (Learn, Create, Share¹).

I can almost hear you saying, "nice story, but what has this got to do with anything?" It led on to my wondering, what if more of the learning within schools could be like this? What would need to change?

I know many schools are moving towards, or already include this style of learning with extended periods of time via project/problem-based learning, genius hour, inquiry learning, etc., but what if all students at all levels could feel as engaged and as excited about their learning as I did about mine today? Today, I experienced being lost in the joy of learning that is too frequently denied many of our students.

The OECD report on The Nature of Learning (2010) may have come out a while ago, but we still need to be cognisant of its seven principles of learning (pg 6-7). On reflection, many of those principles applied to me today:

1. Learners at the centre - I was motivated to construct my own learning pathways and was actively exploring as I had a clear and authentic purpose for this learning.

2. The social nature of learning - I may not have been working collaboratively with others at the time, but my purpose was to share the outcomes of my learning with others so that they were then empowered to create learning opportunities for their students, in a tuakana/teina way.

3. Emotions are integral to learning - throughout my learning I developed a sense of achievement, encouraging me to explore further via a feedback loop of failure and success, to be proud of my final product. I became increasingly motivated to be curious and to persevere.

4. Recognising individual differences - I was able to direct and manage my own learning based on my learning needs, abilities, and motivation. I had the freedom along with the support to explore, and I had options to refer to when I encountered difficulties.

5. Stretching all students - not being satisfied with a basic level of mastery and asking, "how can I make this better?" pushed me to stretch my skills as did the final expectation of having to share my learning with an audience.

6. Assessment for learning - I was clear on the 'why' of this learning. Achieving mastery as various stages provided formative feedback - I can do this, so what can I do next? Summative assessment came when I was successfully able to teach others, who were then able to teach their students, who in turn ... (a cascade effect of learning/teaching).

7. Building horizontal connections - learning for an authentic purpose allowed others to make connections to a range of learning areas, especially when I asked them, "how can this tool be used to support the pedagogy and learning within your context?"

We often forget that, as a teacher, we should also be a learner, and it is important to remember that the principles of how we all learn, which are condensed within the OECD report The Nature of Learning, apply to all teachers/kaiāko as much as it does to our ākonga.

"Understanding the fundamentals of how we learn allows us to address more effectively the conditions in which successful learning can occur." (OECD, 2010, p3)

My challenge to you, then, is to find ways that you can (re)discover the joy of learning for yourself and for your learners and to not underestimate the power of "What if?"
References
Image Credits
Michelangelo quote: J. Young, CC0, adapted from image by Marcus53 on Pixabay under CC0.

"Learn, create, share - Manaiakalani." http://www.manaiakalani.org/our-story/learn-create-share

"The Nature of Learning - OECD.org." http://www.oecd.org/education/ceri/50300814.pdf.

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Finding the joy in learning. Harnessing the power of 'What if...'

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I cannot believe that I have just spent the last four hours learning a new skill, so engrossed that I was totally oblivious to the passage of time. My goal was to become familiar with a new (for me) digital tool to share with teachers.

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leading and learning: Transforming education: Stop teaching and begin learning with your students

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leading and learning: Transforming education: Stop teaching and begin learning with your students

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It seems counter-intuitive but students are failing because teachers are teaching too well.

Teachers spend hours and hours of their time preparing lessons for their students but all too often the only person learning anything are the teachers themselves. Even the most attentive and compliant of students do not get what the teachers intend - and worse still researchers have shown that that such teaching does not change students' minds - and changing minds is the definition of learning.

Many students learn to play the game and give back to the teachers what their teachers want to hear without really comprehending what it is they repeating. One educator calls this inert knowledge. Others call it 'fragile', 'trivial', or 'ritual'.Research shows that the ' prior knowledge' students bring to any learning situation has been shown hard alter. Many teachers are unaware of their students prior views ignoring educationalist David Ausabel's advice 'ascertain what the learner knows and teach accordingly'. All too often the more teachers' teach the more students' curiosity, the key to learning at any age, is lost. Consider who asks all the questions in class.

So what is the alternative?

﻿ The answer is to observe what appeals to students and then to help then dig deeper ensuring feelings of accomplishment and success and, in the process, create a desire for them to learn more - for their own reasons. Educationalist Jerome Bruner has written that ' teaching is the canny art of intellectual temptation'. Thankfully, curious children are easily tempted!
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Once teachers appreciate the importance of tapping and amplifying their students' curiosity then they can begin 'teaching'.

Students are innately curious - it their default way of learning. There is an evolutionary drive for the young to make sense of their experiences and, in turn, to express what it is they are thinking or learning - using whatever media is available. Humans are meaning hunters!

And this drive to make sense applies to all areas of learning.

Traditional classrooms are almost obsessive about ensuring their students learn to read, write and do mathematics - the 'three Rs' as exemplified by their latest iteration National Standards and the obsessive associated testing. Such an audit culture narrows the curriculum killing the initiative andcreativity of both teachers and students in the process. Add to this the negative effects of ability grouping or streaming!

The real solution is to place students in situations that create the desire to talk, write and read. The secret is to value the voice/ ideas of each student, to help them express what they are thinking and then, where possible, help them to share their ideas. The same process applies to mathematics. Students naturally involve themselves in mathematical activities from a very early age - counting, grouping, sharing, sorting and predicting. That so many students leave formal schooling with negative feelings about reading and mathematics shows that more of the same is not working. Even worse far too many students leave alienated from schooling altogether.

The art of teaching is ensure that this innate curiosity, this desire to learn, their 'default' way of learning is not crushed by formal schooling by our misplaced effort to teach students what 'we' feel we think they ought to know

A twenty first century school would not be based on transmission assumptions of an industrial age where schools are based around the metaphor of a benevolent factory, students divided by age, placed in ability groups and taught a range of fragmented subjects. In contrast a twenty first century school would be one where students have access to whatever learning disciplines and expertise they need to complete self-chosen tasks. Teachers in a twenty first century school needs to work alongside their students, challenging them to think deeply, helping them reflect on their ideas, giving them feedback, encouraging them to be creative and to provide them with whatever resources, including full range of information technology. To succeed all students need to appreciate the need to persevere and to realise that any real achievement involves effort and often involves confusion and false trails - there are no right and wrongs.

True learning is to be seen as enlightened trial and error not pre-determined by teachers as is all too common now.

In contrast to traditional standardised schooling the twenty first century requires teachers to personalise, or 'tailor' the learning to the needs of their students. In depth content understanding will still be important students but students will need to develop the attitudes and dispositions to enable them to thrive in an increasingly ambiguous and unpredictable world.

This requires a very open ended approach to teacher planning to ensure teachers have enough background material to assist students in their own learning. Teachers will expect certain concepts, or big ideas, to be gained but can never be sure what it is each of their students will finally learn - except for the strengthening of learning dispositions. Teachers , as it says in the 2007 New Zealand Curriculum, need to ensure all students have the attitudes and skills to be able to ' seek, use and create their own learning'.

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Transforming education: Stop teaching and begin learning with your students

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It seems counter-intuitive but students are failing because teachers are teaching too well. Teachers spend hours and hours of their time preparing lessons for their students but all too often the only person learning anything are the teachers themselves.

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Flexible Classrooms: Research Is Scarce, But Promising | Edutopia

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Flexible Classrooms: Research Is Scarce, But Promising | Edutopia

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There are plenty of studies that isolate the effects of light, acoustics, or air quality on learning. But the research on flexible classrooms is frustratingly scarce.

There are good reasons for the apparent lack of interest. Variables like natural light and acoustics lend themselves to single-factor experiments that can be conducted in a laboratory setting. Give subjects a task to complete in a room with ample windows, for example, and then administer the same test in a room without them.

But flexible classrooms are complex, living systems. One flexible space looks nothing like the next, and often dozens of children and one or more teachers operate within them, pushing and pulling furniture into novel configurations, dimming or turning up lights, and otherwise reshuffling things to suit an almost infinite variety of personal preferences. Studying flexible classrooms, it would seem, means circulating among real children.

Despite the challenges, an ambitious effort to study the design of lived-in classrooms, including looking at hard-to-define factors like flexibility, was completed in 2015 by the University of Salford, in the United Kingdom. Researchers put in the legwork, visiting 153 classrooms in 27 schools across the country-from small, remote village schools to much larger suburban buildings on the outskirts of metropolitan London. In the end, the effect of classroom design on academic performance was studied across 3,766 British children aged 5 to 11.

"We were trying to take a holistic perspective," explained Peter Barrett, the lead researcher and now an honorary research fellow at the University of Oxford. "In other words, we were trying to look at spaces as experienced by people. So this isn't just air quality, this isn't just temperature, or an effort to measure the factors separately. This is the whole lot together."

The Findings

The study looked at three dimensions of classroom design: naturalness (factors like light and temperature), stimulation (factors like color and visual complexity), and individualization (factors like flexibility and student ownership).

The big insight? Optimizing all of these physical characteristics of primary classrooms improved academic performance in reading, writing, and mathematics by 16 percent. The personalization of classrooms-including flexibility, which Barrett defined as "student choice within the space"-accounted for a full quarter of that improvement.

Another way to look at it: When isolated from other measured factors, classroom flexibility is about as important as air quality, light, or temperature in boosting academic outcomes.
Katherine Madden
Barrett's team singled out the effectiveness of learning zones-"a reading area, a wet area, usually a carpet area for whole-class activity, tables usually in blocks of four or six"-and made special note of unique classroom shapes, which seem to allow for easier partitioning of the space. But the study doesn't prescribe fixed solutions, setting out loose guidelines instead. When I described American flexible classrooms, which are even more individualized than their British counterparts, Barrett agreed that the Salford findings applied.

A few insights surprised even the researchers. Flexible, welcoming spaces had a startlingly large effect on learning in math- 73 percent of the students' progress that was attributed to classroom design was traced back to flexibility and student ownership. The reasons are a mystery, but Barrett and his team hazarded a guess: Academic subjects that provoke anxiety-in math, that's a known issue -are better addressed in classrooms that feel comfortable and familiar to students.

And some of the air quality data came as a shock. Despite a 2015 Harvard study that showed steady declines in higher-order thinking when carbon dioxide levels exceed 500 parts per million-the gas is a by-product of human breathing, for those who've forgotten their biology-the researchers consistently recorded levels over six times that high in a classroom they observed. That's alarming-and fixable.

"If air quality is OK at the start of the class, it won't be by the end unless you do something," according to Barrett. "It's an absolute fact. So you have to open a window or a door. But you have to do something."

Form, Function, and Flexibility

So will lugging new furniture into your room improve student outcomes? Do Hokki stools and throw pillows drive up test scores?

The answer is no.

Barrett thinks it's the old dictum that form follows function at work: Flexible classrooms are successful because they go hand in hand with a change in pedagogy. That conclusion never fails to emerge in teacher-led discussions on Edutopia. Flexible spaces, educators agree, alter the fundamental dynamics of teaching and learning, giving students more control and responsibility, improving academic engagement, and undermining the typical face-forward orientation of the traditional learning environment.

In other words, it's not the inert fact of the furniture itself-the new couch in the center of the room or the standing desk near the window-but the dynamic use of the space by the teacher and students that pays, in the end. Changing the layout of your classroom will almost certainly have no impact at all-if you don't change your teaching too.

The takeaway: Flexibility, combined with characteristics like acoustics and air quality, has a real impact on student achievement. If used properly, flexible classrooms produce better academic outcomes among primary school children than more traditional, static classroom designs.

The author of this article is the chief content officer at Edutopia. You can follow him on Twitter @smerrill777.

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Flexible Classrooms: Research Is Scarce, But Promising

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An ambitious study of 153 classrooms in the United Kingdom provides the best evidence that flexible spaces can boost academic performance.

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Retrieval Practice: The Most Powerful Learning Strategy You're Not Using | Cult of Pedagogy

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Retrieval Practice: The Most Powerful Learning Strategy You're Not Using | Cult of Pedagogy

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Listen to my interview with Pooja Agarwal ( transcript):

Sponsored by Raymond Geddes and Kids Discover

We've talked about retrieval practice two other times on this site: First in 2015, when we read the book Make it Stick. Then in 2016, I interviewed cognitive psychologists Megan Smith and Yana Weinstein about the Six Powerful Learning Strategies You Must Share with Students.

In both cases, I noticed that although we were discussing collections of techniques, retrieval practice was at the core of both groups. Because it's such a powerful technique, I would think that by now it would have really taken off, that I'd hear teachers talking about it and see the term crop up in lots of education spaces, but I don't see that happening.

So I wanted to give it one more push by carving out a designated spot for it here. My goal is to help retrieval practice become a regular part of classroom practice and part of our common vocabulary as teachers. To help with this cause, I interviewed Pooja Agarwal, Ph.D., cognitive scientist and founder of RetrievalPractice.org.

What is Retrieval Practice?

Retrieval practice is the act of trying to recall information without having it in front of you. Suppose you're studying the systems of the human body-skeletal, muscular, circulatory, and so on. You could do retrieval practice by attempting to name those systems without looking at the list. Once you've listed all you can remember, you'd open up your book or notes and check to see if you got them right.

You might be thinking, This is nothing new. The whole concept of flashcards is built on retrieval practice, and flashcards have been around forever, right?

What's new is the research: In recent years, cognitive psychologists have been comparing retrieval practice with other methods of studying-strategies like review lectures, study guides, and re-reading texts. And what they're finding is that nothing cements long-term learning as powerfully as retrieval practice.

The Research

Agarwal and her colleagues studied the effects of retrieval practice with students in a middle school social studies course (McDaniel, Agarwal, Huelser, McDermott, & Roediger, 2011). Over the course of a year and a half, while the teacher continued teaching as normal, students were regularly quizzed on the material with no-stakes quizzes, meaning they wouldn't count against their grades. These quizzes only covered about one-third of what was being taught. The teacher left the room for every quiz, so she had no knowledge of what was included in the quizzes.

On end-of-unit exams, students scored a full grade level higher on the material from the quizzes than on any of the other material. The other concepts had been taught and reviewed by the teacher as they normally would; the only difference was that some things also appeared on the no-stakes quizzes, and those were the concepts students retained more fully when tested on the exam.

The very act of being quizzed actually helped students learn better.

Here's what this means for teachers: When we teach something once, then want to do something else to help students learn it better, instead of just reviewing the content, we're much better off giving something like a quiz instead. In other words, if we do more asking students to pull concepts out of their brains, rather than continually trying to put concepts in, students will actually learn those concepts better.

To read about other studies on retrieval practice, click here. For now, let's look at some ways you can incorporate retrieval practice into your instruction.

Ways to Use Retrieval Practice in the Classroom

Think-Pair-Share
This quick, low-maintenance strategy can be used at any time to have students recall information, then share it with a partner. You can use think-pair-shares with single-answer questions, or make them more open-ended, like "Think of one thing you learned yesterday about cells." Be sure to have students think on their own before turning to a partner. "It's important for students to retrieve individually as much as possible," Agarwal advises. "If you jump right into pairs, then we all know as educators that some students are retrieving and some may not be." One way to make sure all students retrieve is to have them jot responses down on paper before sharing them with a partner.

Low-Stakes Quizzes
These can be given on paper, in a Google Form, with an individual response system like clickers, Plickers, or Poll Everywhere; or by using a game like Kahoot or Quizziz. It's important to note that these quizzes are a learning strategy: Ideally, students wouldn't get scores on them at all, but if you must give some points, make them an almost negligible part of students' overall class grade.

Brain Dumps
Have students get out a sheet of paper and, within a certain length of time, write down everything they know about a topic of study. This can be done at the beginning of a unit (similar to how you'd use a K-W-L Chart), partway through as a way to reinforce learning, or near the end of a unit. Once students have completed theirs, they can exchange them in a think-pair-share or use them to compile a whole-class brain dump. Then they can return to their texts to see what they missed or what needs correction.

Flashcards
These can be a powerful retrieval tool in class or at home, but students need to be taught to use them correctly:

Once a card has been mastered, keep it in the deck a while.
Research has shown that students tend to "drop" cards out of their decks too soon after they have mastered them (Karpicke, 2009). Ideally, a fact should be successfully retrieved three times before a student moves on from it.

Actually retrieve.
Karpicke's research also found that when students see a familiar prompt on a flashcard, they have a tendency to tell themselves they know it, then flip it over to see the answer, rather than taking a few extra seconds to actually recall the answer-and ideally, say it out loud-before flipping the card over. The difference in timing is subtle, but important: Students will not get the same benefits from flashcards unless they actually retrieve the answer before seeing it.

Shuffle the deck.
Keeping the cards in the same order makes them predictable. Once a deck has been gone through a few times, it should be shuffled to make it more challenging.

For more tips, take a look at College Info Geek's excellent post on effectively using flashcards.

Tips and Cautions

Retrieval practice is not the same thing as assessment.
Although some retrieval activities might allow you to formatively assess student understanding, remember that retrieval practice is a learning activity. Again, if you must assign points for practices, make sure they will have a very low impact on student grades.

Space your practice.
Retrieval practice is even more effective if it's done in short bursts over time, rather than in a single long session. This spacing causes students to forget some of the material, and the struggle involved in trying to recall it strengthens their long-term learning.

Include feedback.
If students retrieve the wrong information, the practice won't be much good unless they find out the right information, so be sure to give them feedback as they go. This can be as simple as providing the correct answer or letting students check their texts after they have attempted to retrieve. "Part of that isn't just so students know if they got their answer correct or incorrect," Agarwal says, "but it adjusts students' metacognition," helping them get "better at estimating or judging what they know and what they don't know."

Match your practice to your assessment.
If your summative assessment for a chunk of content will be basic recall of facts, then the retrieval practice can be that simple. But it you're going to include some higher-order questions as well, then be sure to ask those same types of questions in retrieval practice.

Does it Fit with Inquiry Learning?

If your classroom is built around more hands-on, inquiry-driven approaches to learning that don't prioritize retaining specific content-structures like Genius Hour and project-based learning -you might wonder whether retrieval practice is relevant to your teaching.

Consider this: Within any of those frameworks, students still have to learn and retain discrete information. Take, for example, a student who has decided to learn Arabic as his focus for Genius Hour, or students who are studying soil pH as part of a gardening project. Both students will need to study and remember concrete information in order to make progress, so even if your instruction isn't set up in a traditional way, understanding how retrieval practice works can help you help your students learn better.

A Little Goes a Long Way

Agarwal's final piece of advice is to start small. "If a student just writes down two things or one thing they learned, and then you move on, that's okay," she says. "You'll still get benefits of retrieval without spending five minutes in a classroom discussion."

It can be a bell-ringer. An exit slip. A sponge activity. Something you do while students stand in line for lunch. Don't overthink it. Agarwal advises teachers to ask themselves this: "What is one way we can flip from reviewing information to students retrieving information? What can we do tomorrow?"

What will you do tomorrow? ♦

Learn More

Dr. Agarwal and her colleagues have put together this comprehensive guide to using retrieval practice. Visit RetrievalPractice.org/download to get a free copy for yourself. And be sure to follow Retrieval Practice on Twitter at @RetrieveLearn.
References:
Karpicke, J. D. (2009). Metacognitive control and strategy selection: deciding to practice retrieval during learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 138(4), 469.

McDaniel, M. A., Agarwal, P. K., Huelser, B. J., McDermott, K. B., & Roediger III, H. L. (2011). Test-enhanced learning in a middle school science classroom: The effects of quiz frequency and placement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 103(2), 399.

There's a lot 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. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Come on in!!

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Retrieval Practice: The Most Powerful Learning Strategy You're Not Using

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Nothing cements long-term learning as powerfully as retrieval practice. Learn how to incorporate it into your classroom.

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
Sponsored by Screencast-O-Matic and Microsoft Hacking STEM

I saw a video a few months ago that I haven't been able to get out of my head. In the video, a high school student named Jeff Bliss stood up in the middle of class and basically expressed his frustration to the teacher in the room:

Okay, now let's get something out of the way: Yes, this student was disrupting class and his behavior is disrespectful. I will acknowledge that. On the other hand, we don't know exactly what happened before the camera was turned on. Based on what he says in the video, my guess is that Bliss had just voiced some kind of concern, the teacher told him to quit complaining, and at that point, I guess he'd had enough.

What I have gleaned about Jeff Bliss from the internet is that at the time of the video, he was an 18-year-old sophomore. So apparently, at some point, he had not been successful in school. For some people, this takes away his credibility. For me, it makes him an even better source of information about why school isn't working for some students.

Disruptive behavior aside, the content of Bliss's outburst tells me that his teacher's primary mode of instruction is through packets. This was what got me. This is what made me watch this video six, seven, eight times over. Because I just believe him.

I believe him because I've seen it. I've seen classrooms where teachers deliver instruction overwhelmingly through worksheets, or packets of worksheets. I have seen my own kids' schoolwork come home, and I have asked friends, other parents with school-age kids, and colleagues who consult in lots of schools, and nearly all of them tell me that a lot of our students' instructional time is being spent hunched over some kind of worksheet.

That's a problem.

I want to spend some time looking at this problem from all sides: What distinguishes a "busywork" worksheet from something that delivers real value, why teaching with worksheets is usually not the best choice for learning, the reasons teachers default to worksheet teaching, and what other learning experiences would be better for our students.

Not all Worksheets are Created Equal

Let's start by agreeing on some terms.

First we need to define what we mean by "worksheet." Technically, a worksheet is anything printed on copier paper and given to students to write on. And since you can print just about anything on a piece of paper, we really can't say that worksheets per se are good or bad. That would be like saying "books" or "movies" are good or bad. It's a medium. A delivery system.

And there are plenty of instructionally rich things you can do with a worksheet: A graphic organizer is a wonderful tool for research, pre-writing, and notetaking. An excerpt from a primary source can be printed on a worksheet for close study and annotation. Worksheets can be used for analyzing data (like this collection from Maria Andersen), as scaffolds for notetaking, as tools for reflection, or as formative assessments. They can also be used as recording tools alongside more active experiences: data sheets for labs, planning sheets for group projects, and so on.

In my experience, when people criticize worksheets, they are referring to a specific type of worksheet, what I will call a busysheet, the kind where students are either doing work that's fairly low-level recall stuff-filling in blanks with words, choosing from multiple-choice questions, labeling things-or work that has no educational value at all, like word searches, word scrambles, or coloring stuff in cases where coloring adds no extra layer of understanding.

Sometimes the difference between a busysheet and a quality learning tool is obvious, and other times it's a judgment call. After talking to lots of educators about how they use worksheets in their classrooms, I think it's most accurate to say that every worksheet falls somewhere on a continuum: Some worksheets are clearly nothing but busysheets, while others, like note-taking sheets or data collection tools, directly support student learning; I'll call these powersheets. I think a lot of worksheets fall somewhere between the two. Because there is such a range, the only person who can really make the call is you.

Packets, to be clear, are simply a bunch of worksheets stapled together. They could contain a lot of powersheets, but when a student refers to them as frickin' packets, it's highly likely that they are mostly made up of busysheets.

Possible Busysheets in Disguise

Some formats have come along recently that have the potential to deliver the same kind of work we find in busysheets, only they don't always look like it. While each of these certainly could offer instructional value, they could also be just another way to keep kids still:

Computer programs or apps that have students performing the exact same activities we see on busysheets.

Interactive notebooks: These vary widely in quality, with some offering true interactivity and others just offering the same value of a worksheet, just colored, cut, and pasted into a notebook.

HyperDocs: If these are thoughtfully designed, they have the potential to offer wonderful variety, exploration, and differentiation, but they could also just be a new way to organize busywork.

The Problem with "Busysheet Teaching"

"Busysheet teaching" is when we use busysheets in place of other, better forms of instruction. This type of teaching might take the form of bell-ringers, homework, early finisher work, classroom centers, or even the main learning activity during regular class time.

So what's wrong with teaching this way?

It's disconnected from anything meaningful.
Busysheets isolate skills so much that students have trouble connecting them to real life. When a student sees little value in an activity, he is not truly engaged. Take this reading worksheet, which has students read a short passage about Maya Angelou, then answer four fill-in-the-blank questions about the passage.

This type of busysheet would most likely be used to teach reading comprehension or serve as a Black History Month activity.

Let's unpack these one by one.

Reading comprehension: Having students answer low-level recall questions about a passage of writing that offers no meaningful context doesn't do a lot to make them better readers. If the questions were more challenging, if they asked students to choose which textual evidence supports some particular idea, for example, that might move it up the continuum a bit more toward the power end, but is this the best way to give students reading practice? If students do this kind of work day after day, with passages instead of real books, they won't be reading enough. So much of what we call "reading instruction" is far inferior to having students read real books.

Black History Month: Giving students a packet of these types of busysheets-where the work and contributions of significant African Americans are reduced to one-page blurbs followed by some cute activity-is inadequate in so many ways. This article from Teaching Tolerance lists much more comprehensive and authentic ways to honor Black history in your classroom all year round.

It often misses the standards.
Even if they are labeled as addressing certain standards, the kind of work we see on busysheets often misses the mark. Take, for example, this typical grammar worksheet:

This type of worksheet, where students are asked to label or identify various grammatical constructions, has thrived for decades, and in the days before worksheets, it existed in the form of exercises from grammar books.

Apart from the well-established fact that teaching grammar outside the context of meaningful writing does nothing to help students become better writers, and in many cases makes them worse, the skills being practiced in this kind of worksheet don't actually teach or reinforce the goals set by our academic standards.

Here's what I mean: For convenience, I'll use the Common Core Standards as a reference. There is no mention anywhere in the standards of students being able to identify or label these verb tenses. Nothing. It does, however, require students to use them correctly in their writing. So it would make a lot more sense to show students these different constructions, then have them find places in their writing where they are using them. If they aren't using them anywhere, have them try it. They never ever have to actually know the names of the verb tenses or a whole lot of other grammatical constructions. Despite this, tens of thousands of students are required to complete busysheets like this every day. And I bet they get tested on the same kind of information, too. Meanwhile, little to no time is being spent giving them opportunities to use these constructions in their real writing.

It often has no instructional value.
By definition, a busysheet's goal is to keep students busy, not necessarily teach them anything. The most egregious types of busysheets are word searches, word scrambles, and and crossword puzzles, which might as well be a list of definitions with blanks next to them.

I have watched my own children do word searches for homework and stress out about not finding every single word because they would lose points. If there is any pedagogical justification for that, I certainly haven't found it.

It requires lots and lots of sitting still.
The more teachers use busysheets, the more students will sit and sit and sit. Yes, it's possible that there are teachers who use a lot of busysheets but have great alternative seating options in their classrooms, but my guess is that in most of the classrooms where busysheets are abundant, students are basically sitting in desks. This is far from ideal. In 2014, teacher Alexis Wiggins spent two days shadowing her students and was shocked to discover just how much time they spent sitting, and how exhausting that was. And we hear all the time about the studies that are confirming how dangerous it can be to sit for extended periods of time. So planning for extended periods of sitting, all day long, just isn't good for our kids.

It requires a ton of copying.
Anyone who has ever had to wait in line for a copy machine or found themselves staring desperately at a cryptic error message on the copier knows that relying heavily on worksheets wastes a lot of time and paper.

It gives you more stuff to grade.
Many teachers who use a lot of worksheets also grade them, calculating those points as part of a student's overall grade in a course. This approach creates two problems. One, it erases the value of formative assessment: If worksheets are meant to be used to teach students something or give them practice on skills they are learning, then why would students be penalized for making mistakes on them? I can see why teachers might give points for completion, but going through and marking wrong answers, then taking off points for something students are still actively learning is really missing the point: That's what summative assessments are for. The other problem is that this system creates a ridiculous amount of grading for the teacher. If you are going home with piles and piles of papers to grade, you're assigning too many things to be graded. If you can shift some of these activities from graded to "practice," you'll be giving students the practice they need without creating a lot of extra paperwork for yourself.

Why We Do It, and What to Do Instead

Teachers have a lot of reasons for leaning heavily on busysheets, and some of these may seem unavoidable. Let's look at the most common reasons, along with some ideas for what we can do instead.

1. No Textbooks, No Tech

If your school is short on materials and technology, it may be necessary to use printables to build your curriculum. Much of what we learn comes from reading things, so if you don't have good science textbooks, for example, worksheets and handouts can serve the same purpose. What's important is that we do this thoughtfully.

Even if you download a whole unit or curriculum, only use the parts that are going to provide value to your students, rather than just marching students through the whole thing.

Beware of cute: Some materials are so beautifully designed, they may make it hard to notice if they're thin on quality learning. If you can get both at once, awesome, but always scrutinize for the learning first.

Not all students need the same materials: Consider making some handouts and worksheets available to students as resources, rather than giving everyone the same stuff. Show them how to select the materials they need and where to store them for future reference.

2. Skills Practice

Many teachers use worksheets to give students practice in required skills. This seems to be most common in math (or, in the later grades, with things like chemistry equations). While this method obviously gives teachers some of the results they're hoping for, if you take a few things into consideration, you can probably refine the practice. Here are some questions to consider when heading to the copy machine:

How much practice is really needed? Does every student need the same amount of practice? Can they stop when they've had enough?

Would other activities be just as beneficial-or more beneficial-than practice problems? In this youcubed article, professor Jo Boaler describes four other ways to develop number facts and number sense. She also shared a strategy in a recent tweet where a problem is placed in the center of a paper and students use the corners of the page to show four different ways of solving the problem. These kinds of activities get kids to actually think and talk about the math they're doing, rather than just completing problem after problem.

I'm going to bring this up again: If you're recording a grade on practice work, especially if that grade is based on accuracy, it's not practice!! Keep this in mind when deciding how many problems are really necessary to give students the practice they need.

3. Differentiation

Teachers often find that creating leveled packets of work is a simple way to personalize learning for each student. But again, does that have to mean each child gets one of three large, comprehensive packets? Let's look again at the suggestion I made earlier, where handouts (containing information) and worksheets (offering practice) are offered as resources, and students decide which they need. To see this idea fully developed, check out Natalie McCutchen's self-paced math classroom: Students work through units on their own, and they decide how much practice they need before taking the assessments, so some students do a lot, while others do very little.

4. Grade-level Alignment

In some schools, teachers are required to teach the same thing as their grade-level counterparts, on the same day, and document the whole process in detailed, standards-aligned lesson plans. When I talk to teachers about why they're burned out, it's policies like these that they often cite as completely draining them. This type of requirement also causes many of them to resort to teaching entirely with packets: Find a workbook that says it's standards-aligned, then everyone use the same set of pages every week. Done.

This makes for incredibly dry, uninspired learning, and unfortunately, I don't have a good solution for it. My best advice is to share this post with your administrator so they can see the impact that this type of policy is having. I would also urge you to question the integrity of the standards label: Is the packet really getting kids to do what the standard says, or is it a "lighter" version of that? These packets may act as a stopgap for now, but if your team has been using the same set for several years, now may be the time to look more closely at them to see if some pages could be removed and replaced with other activities.

5. Sub Work

When we have substitute teachers, sometimes packets seem to be the only option. This is another tricky one. If you really have no other option, at least do everything you can to make sure the worksheets lean more toward the "powersheet" end of the continuum. Another option that can work if you know you're going to be out ahead of time is to train a few students to lead the class in an actual lesson, then let the sub know that the plan is to let these students teach. This would obviously require a lot of work up front, and you need to have built a classroom culture where students want to behave while you're gone, but I do think it can be done.

6. Crowd Control

In overcrowded classrooms it seems impossible to do anything hands-on, any kind of group work, anything interactive. Worksheets keep everyone in their seat and under control. This, again, is more of a systemic issue that could only truly be solved at the policy level. With that said, I still don't believe worksheets are the only option. Sure, you might not be able to do big, sweeping hands-on stuff, but you can do paired work, set up tasks around the room in stations, or even split the class in half so that only some are doing the "active" work while others are seated and calm, then switch. More than anything, just don't throw in the towel on this.

7. Bell-Ringers & Morning Work

In order to maximize instructional time, we are advised to make sure students have meaningful work to do from the moment they walk into class; hence the birth of the bell-ringer. I have definitely seen the value of a good bell-ringer, and saw a huge difference between the year that I didn't use these and the years that I did. But if that work isn't really meaningful or isn't helping most kids learn, it's a waste. Here are some other options:

Have students do self-selected reading for the first 10 minutes of class.

Give students a great anticipatory set to introduce the day's learning. There are so many options for these, like the thought-provoking images that Christina DeCarbo-Wagners now uses instead of morning work, or the "appetizers" recommended by math teachers Matt Vaudrey and John Stevens in their book, The Classroom Chef.

Establish morning choice: Why not offer students a variety of choices for morning work? In this fantastic post, principal Adam Dovico describes how one teacher made this shift, allowing students to choose between artistic expression, problem solving, computer time, leadership, collaboration, and game time. The big key in making this successful was that she rolled it out slowly, giving students experience with each station first before giving them more freedom to choose later on.

8. Some Kids Like Worksheets

For some students, busysheets give them a nice, calm, quiet activity to pass the time. But this alone is no reason to make them standard fare in your classroom. What you can do is make busysheets an option for free time, as something to do to decompress, or as one of several options students might choose to practice a set of skills or test themselves on some aspect of your content-not for a grade, but for practice.

9. Students Need Fine Motor Practice

Early childhood educators sometimes rely on worksheets for handwriting practice or to have students color, cut, and glue items to develop fine motor skills.

Although worksheets offer one way to give students fine motor practice, there are lots of other ways to do it, too. This post offers 40 ideas for fine motor practice, and this one offers 30 more.

Once a child has gotten to a certain level of fine motor development, do they still need to keep practicing it the same amount as other students?

More Ideas

If you're going to cut down or eliminate your use of packets and worksheets, you'll have a lot more instructional time, and that's a good thing. Here are some things you can do with that time:

The Challenge: Do a Worksheet Audit

Everyone teaches differently, and as we have established, all worksheets are not created equal. There is no single prescription for what kind or how many worksheets you should be using with your students. Only you and your students can know that for sure.

So my challenge to you is simple: From now on, every time you're about to use a worksheet, ask yourself if it's contributing to student learning or if it's actually just keeping them busy. If it's the latter, start replacing your worksheets with better, richer alternatives. Your students will learn better, school will be more fun, and you'll waste a whole lot less time in line at the copy machine. ♦

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Are your worksheets contributing to meaningful learning, or just keeping students busy?

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The Knowledge Standing Beside You – Without Windows

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The Knowledge Standing Beside You – Without Windows

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To me, working in the Reggio Way is all about a sense of community. Students learning in a Reggio-inspired classroom need to feel like they belong there, almost like the environment is a second home for them. They need to feel respected, free to express themselves, and safe to take risks and make mistakes. But students aren't the only members of a learning community; teachers need to feel a sense of belonging for the place they work, because school is as relevant and essential to their lives as to those of their students.

As Reggio educators, we tend to focus very heavily on relationships to understand the course of learning. Our observations and documentation are often centered on how students interact with their environment, how students interact with each other, and how they interact with their teachers. When we turn inward, we reflect on teacher-student and teacher-environment relationships, and how they can be honed to better facilitate learning in the classroom.

But in my experience, teacher-teacher relationships somehow have a tendency to fall by the wayside. For a while, I just assumed our school never talked about them because they were the last line-item on the in-service agenda and we always ran out of time. I think some teachers just assume that interactions with their coworker automatically improve with the passage of time, so they aren't worth discussing. The most likely reason is that teachers just forget sometimes that students aren't the only ones who need to be shown respect and affection.

Over time, it has become apparent to me that teacher-teacher relationships are the start and the end of the cycle of learning. They are the bond upon which students can start to form classroom expectations, and the glue that holds schools and childcare facilities together in difficult times. The relationships teachers have with one another form the foundation upon which the ECE profession can grow and improve, but also the framework by which we can grow to love our profession more with each passing day.

My co-teachers and director contain an incredible wealth of information about teaching practices, educational theory, business expertise, and practical life experience that is at my disposal every day. And while that is useful to me, they have something that is far more important to me in my growth as an educator. They have lived experience, and they have an intimate knowledge of the context in which I am an educator.

When they make a suggestion, whether I agree with them or not, I can be confident that they are making that suggestion with the specific framework and inner workings of our classroom in mind. They know our students, they know our schedule, and they know the expectations established by our community of learners. My teaching partners have an intimate understanding of me as a teacher, including my strengths and weaknesses. In many ways, my coworkers don't make suggestions to me; they make suggestions for me. This intimacy and implicit understanding of a learning community is the backbone of Reggio-inspired practices like progettazione. It is so complex that in some schools, they have a pedagogista/o whose entire job is to observe and advise teachers to help them and their students continue to grow. Face-to-face discussions with my coworkers are how I metabolize pie-in-the-sky ideas into real, grounded solutions that fit our program and our students. My co-teachers inspire and comfort me, and sometimes crush my enthusiasm when my ideas are impractical or ridiculous. In many ways, they create a constant ebb and flow of innovation, implementation, and reflection that is organic and profoundly personal.

Additionally, my coworkers have the insight to advise me in not just my teaching practice, but also my life as it relates to being a teacher. They can shed light on the difficulties of being a new parent and an educator. They can share their experiences with burnout, and offer up advice for potential next steps in the field for me and my family. My teaching partner has been working in the field for so long, and has operated in such a variety of positions in diverse facilities, that her word is gospel to me when she chooses to voice concerns for the way I do things or reflect on the trajectory of the field of ECE. I can be confident that, when she has an idea or suggests a course of action, she is never shooting from the hip; she is grounding her assessment in immense practical experience and specific, contextualized knowledge of the learning community she is an integral part of.

But beneath the professional boons my coworkers provide to me, there is an social-emotional relevance that cannot be understated. Especially for those working with younger students, it is vitally important for teachers to establish care routines that help students adequately adjust to their learning environments. Co-teachers, sometimes unintentionally, do the same for one another. My teaching partner and I have care routines for each other that are sometime subtle and sometimes not. A mug of coffee in the morning, an offer to change what promises to be the most raucous diaper of the day, or even something as simple as a chipper "Good morning" can be enough to make a coworker feel nurtured. The benefits of happy teachers are multiplied in the classroom as well. Children are observant and many understand adult relationships better than we may realize. Visibly stressful interactions between teachers can have a negative impact on students, but the opposite is also true. When teachers are friendly (sometimes even goofy with one another) it can cultivate a classroom atmosphere that is productive, but also jovial, fun-loving, and familial.

As teachers, we are given a choice. We can explain the importance and impact of positive peer interactions to children until we are blue in the face, or we can channel our energy to providing a powerful example of positive peer interaction: two teachers who are friends. Cooperation, healthy disagreement, and compromise can all be demonstrated on a daily basis when teachers commit to working together in front of the students they teach. In many Reggio-inspired classrooms, there is an underlying understanding among young learners that the greatest asset in their learning journeys is often the person standing next to them, but that understanding is not specific to young learners.

The truth is that teachers are and always will be another teacher's greatest resource.

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To me, working in the Reggio Way is all about a sense of community. Students learning in a Reggio-inspired classroom need to feel like they belong there, almost like the environment is a second home for them. They need to feel respected, free to express themselves, and safe to take risks and make mistakes.

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Teachers often ask youngsters to learn in ways that exceed even adult-sized attention spans - The Hechinger Report

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Teachers often ask youngsters to learn in ways that exceed even adult-sized attention spans - The Hechinger Report

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Distracted students are the bane of teachers. In surveys, teachers complain about students walking around the classroom, talking with peers, staring at the walls and fidgeting with their clothes - anything but paying attention to the lesson or the task at hand.

Teachers are crying out for help to keep kids on task, but student behavior is difficult for education researchers to study. Just the presence of an outside observer can suddenly put kids on their best behavior. And it's a challenge to track what every kid in a classroom is doing. Researchers usually resort to picking a handful of students to focus on. But that leads to small studies where the results are less reliable.

Thanks to technology, and a novel system for tracking more than 20 kids in a room at once*, a team of seven researchers managed to track off-task behavior among every student in more than 50 classrooms, from kindergarten through fourth grade. They collected more than 100,000 observations of student behavior from roughly 1,100 students over the course of a school year.

What they found confirms that students are distracted a lot. In one subset of 22 charter school classrooms, 29 percent of student behaviors were off task. In a broader group of 30 private, parochial and charter school classrooms, 26 percent of behaviors were off task. In other words, the average elementary school student is distracted more than a quarter of the time. That was as true for fourth graders as it was for kindergarteners. Off-task behavior didn't improve with age, or with a child's socioeconomic status.

The 2016 paper, " Off-task behavior in elementary school children," was published in the peer-reviewed journal Learning and Instruction, and was funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, an arm of the Department of Education.

The researchers also kept track of how the teachers were instructing students during these observations. Not surprisingly, students went off task more frequently during whole-group instruction than during small group or individual work.

Length of lesson matters, too. Students went off task more often as an instructional activity increased beyond 10 minutes. Indeed, the researchers found that 25 percent of instructional activities lasted longer than 17 minutes. That's longer than the typical adult attention span of 15 minutes, according to Karrie Godwin, a professor at Kent State University, and one of the lead authors of the study.

"If adults are not good at maintaining attention, and we're talking mature cognition, it's certainly going to be difficult for children," said Godwin. "This research points to divvying up instructional activities into smaller chunks."

Godwin especially recommends smaller blocks of time for challenging material, such as fractions.

A common source of distraction was classroom decor. A quarter or more of all off-task behavior involved kids looking at posters or playing with classroom objects. That confirmed Godwin's laboratory research in 2014, which found that heavily decorated classrooms hinder learning for kindergarteners. In her laboratory, Godwin is now experimenting with projectors that change what is displayed on the walls depending on what subject is being taught.

We certainly don't want to promote putting children in a sterile environment," said Godwin. "Maybe it's okay if kids are distracted by the learning environment if the distractions are closely aligned with the educational goals. We're researching that now."

It's an open question whether all off-task behavior is bad. Previous research has generally shown that distractions reduce the amount of time that kids are learning and that in turn lowers achievement. However, some psychologists have theorized that children can productively give themselves a sort of "time out" to calm themselves, and then re-engage in the lesson with renewed concentration. Experts call it emotional self-regulation. Others theorize that seemingly irrelevant conversations between peers are helping to build social bonds that allow group projects to flourish. And some theories link off-task behavior to creativity.

But given the sheer quantity of off-task behavior in a typical classroom, Godwin believes it's worth trying to reduce it. "There's certainly room to improve classroom management and increase learning opportunities," she said.

* One of Godwin's six co-authors, Ryan Baker at the University of Pennsylvania, created a software application for hand-held devices where classroom observers can rapidly document what both teachers and students are doing. Observers are trained to observe children through their peripheral vision so that a child is unaware that he or she is being observed. Observers look at every child, one at a time, in a specified order. As soon as a child is showing a clear behavior, whether on or off task, it is noted and the observer moves on to the next child on his list. More than a dozen observations are taken for each child during each classroom session. This gives equal weight to all the children in the class and avoids overemphasizing attention-grabbing behaviors or highly distractable children.

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Teachers often ask youngsters to learn in ways that exceed even adult-sized attention spans - The Hechinger Report

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Distracted students are the bane of teachers. In surveys, teachers complain about students walking around the classroom, talking with peers, staring at the walls and fidgeting with their clothes - anything but paying attention to the lesson or the task at hand. Teachers are crying out for help to keep kids on task, but student ...

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There are 7 million people in Moscow and one elephant. Last night they got the elephant.

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There are 7 million people in Moscow and one elephant. Last night they got the elephant.

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There are 7 million people in Moscow and one elephant. Last night they got the elephant.

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A distinguished Soviet professor of statistics was well-known for his refusal to go to an raid shelter during German air raids on Moscow du...

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After 100 Years of the Same Teaching Model It’s Time to Throw Out the Playbook – Education Rickshaw

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After 100 Years of the Same Teaching Model It’s Time to Throw Out the Playbook – Education Rickshaw

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In looking back at my parents' education in the 1950s and 60s, and my own education in the 1990s and 2000s, I worry sometimes that despite the huge advances that we've seen in technology, not much has changed when it comes to how we view learning and how we design learning environments. The transmission model of education is still the name of the game, although in some circles there are signs of its erosion.

I would like to take you on a journey in this post, starting from the 1950s banking model (Freire, 1968) of instructional design, before comparing it to my own schooling experiences as a digital native at the turn of the century. Then, finally, I would like to share my vision for C21 learning, and propose some ways that we can move forward so that we are meeting the needs of today.

When my parents went to school....

In each of these infographics, students are shown as (S) and teachers as (T). The important focus in each of these images is the direction of the arrow. By looking at where the arrow originates and where it is pointed, we can ask ourselves, Who is doing the thinking? Who is actively using language? Who is leading? What is the relationship between the student and the teacher? And since learning is the ultimate goal, Is learning happening? and Is this how students best learn?

In an industrial-age classroom, with a teacher-centered/teacher directed, one-size-fits-all approach, the arrow always points from the teacher to the student. The directionality of the traditional teaching arrow doesn't differentiate to allow for students to learn from any source but the teacher and the resources prescribed by the teacher. The roles are clearly defined: It is the teacher's job to create memorable lessons, and the student's job to remember them whether or not they are memorable.

The only positive spin I can put on the 20th century compliance model is that learning can potentially happen despite the teacher's illusion of control. My mom, for example, was a Deaf student learning in a 1960's hearing world. She recalls how she would resort to sneaking notes to ask for help from her peers before being caught and punished by her teacher. According to her, and countless other students with similar experiences, it was the help of peers or an adult tutor that saved them from what could potentially have been a lost education. Of course, reconceptualizing the entire learning model to one that allows for personalization and multi-directional dialogue would have done the trick as well.

Now, if you think that things got better for us millennials circa Y2K, I am sad to report that by the time school started for me in 1992, the directionality of the arrow had barely changed at all.

When I went to school....

Let me paint a picture of what it was like when Stephanie and I attended school. In almost all of my classes growing up, teachers put us in groups of 4-6 desks like those depicted above. There were 6-8 iMacs collecting dust around the perimeter of the classroom, and class sets of simple word processing laptops on wheels. We had book bags and class libraries, and we took brain breaks and played learning games, too. There was an increased understanding on the value of pastoral care and differentiation, although they didn't call it that. Despite an overall appearance of progress, the teacher still held the cards. The direction of the arrow didn't change; It still went from teacher to student to nothing.

I don't want to devalue the work that was being done by a handful of forward-thinking teachers in my life. If it weren't for them, I wouldn't have entered the profession. But for the majority of my experience, the focus was on making traditional teaching work for the 21st century, not on shifting the paradigm. Yes, my generation's instructional methods included "turn and talk", for example, where we were asked to turn to a partner and mindlessly babble fake discussion, with one eye on the teacher to make sure she wasn't coming around. Then, when "talk" time was up, we would just share what we were already going to say before the exercise began. This is how we did "discussions"; We were allowed to talk to a partner for 15 seconds, and then those selected by the teacher were allowed to share before the teacher took back the reigns once more.

Again, the arrows of my education were not much different than the linear, teacher-controlled, unidirectional arrow that formed the education of my parents' generation, and the generations of organized schooling that existed for 100 years before. In order to truly reject the pedagogy of the 20th century, which may have been adequate for the time, we literally have to make a 180 ° turn and run the other way.

My dream for school....

It's time to change the direction of the arrow by for once and for all turning it around and allowing it to originate from the student.Imagine a classroom where students are the ones driving the learning and are empowered to pursue things that matter to them. In the infographic above we see multiple modalities being employed by these students as students are accessing human and digital resources to drive their own learning. In a 21st century learning model, learning extends beyond the classroom walls, and students are exchanging, discussing, questioning, reflecting and making connections anywhere, anytime. Most importantly, students are inspired and empowered to act, rather than sit back and have the knowledge brought to them.

Ideal classrooms always change, are a mess & have no teacher desk. They encourage interactions & personalization. #africaed #kicslearns pic.twitter.com/mnAPoa6hJw

- Bradley Arnold (@leybradly) September 14, 2017

This learning is so nonlinear, publicly shared, and student-driven that there is no silver bullet for how to achieve this in your classroom overnight. I'm still learning and reflecting on how best we might do this, and I don't pretend to have arrived the proverbial mountaintop of understanding. Regardless, here are some things I've tried in my class to change the direction of the arrow, with a related blog post explaining below:

With the world of knowledge now available at our students' fingertips, and in a time when we're certain that the workforce of the future is going to look completely different from what it does now, it's time to reject the status quo of how we design learning opportunities for our students. Seeing as we are already well into the 21st Century, my hope is that once and for all we put an end to the 20th century mindset of the teacher as the keeper of knowledge and our students as the passive consumers of information.

- Zach Groshell @mrzachg
You're welcome to join our facebook group, Over-posting Educators.

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After 100 Years of the Same Teaching Model It's Time to Throw Out the Playbook

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In looking back at my parents' education in the 1950s and 60s, and my own education in the 1990s and 2000s, I worry sometimes that despite the huge advances that we've seen in technology, not much has changed when it comes to how we view learning and how we design learning environments.

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Meet the #SinglePointRubric | Cult of Pedagogy

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Meet the #SinglePointRubric | Cult of Pedagogy

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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:

Stick around.
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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The Danger of Teacher Nostalgia | Cult of Pedagogy

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The Danger of Teacher Nostalgia | Cult of Pedagogy

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
Sponsored by mysimpleshow and Peergrade
"This is the worst group we've ever had."
When I hear a teacher say this, I know those students are in trouble: The person in charge of their well-being, the tone of their classroom, and their opportunities to grow has decided they are beyond saving.

They never look up from their phones, we say. They have this attitude of entitlement. They have no respect for authority. No respect for themselves.

We warn our colleagues: "Just wait till next year when you get this group."

Over lunch, we share anecdotes. The shocking thing that one kid said. The outfit this one showed up in.

And as we ruminate on the many ways our students fall short, we can't help but settle into nostalgia: It wasn't like this before.

...at my other school.

...with last year's group.

...when I was a student.

These conclusions don't come from nowhere. They start when something goes wrong: a missed assignment, a lesson gone bad, a hostile email, an act of aggression. Hurdles appear that were never there before. Teaching gets harder, and we try to figure out why. We notice things, we start to see patterns, and we construct generalizations to help us make sense of it all. The first step toward fixing any problem is to diagnose it.

But when we settle for a "kids today" diagnosis, romanticizing the past and blaming our teaching problems on the collective inferiority of a generation, we only make things worse.

What's Wrong with a Little Nostalgia?

It sounds so innocuous, doesn't it? Nostalgia. I think of those Country Time Lemonade commercials, with grandpa on the porch reminiscing about his boyhood, the late afternoon sun playing across his face. It's just looking back on the good times. How could that be a bad thing?

It depends entirely on the impact: Nostalgia for the past is toxic when it makes us feel contempt toward the present. And that toxicity works itself into our classrooms in some pretty destructive ways.

It Feeds on Itself

The problem with comparing the current batch of kids to an earlier group is that it puts a negative lens in front of our eyes. Through that lens, we start to view even ordinary, age-appropriate behavior as bad. We will treat the whole group as if they are always up to no good, or all lack motivation, or are all narcissistic, entitled little farts.

Then, through the magic of confirmation bias, we start to find more and more evidence to support that conclusion, which in turn is likely to generate a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby students actually start behaving more like narcissistic, entitled little farts. If several teachers regularly report these incidents to each other, the lens just grows thicker, thereby assuring that few students in this group stand a chance of ever being seen as individuals.

It Blocks Relationships

Building strong relationships with students is arguably the most important factor in student and teacher success. And when we decide that "this group" has some kind of undesirable trait compared with "that group," we prevent ourselves from really getting to know this group as individuals. It's kind of a done deal.

In his book, You've Gotta Connect: Building Relationships that Lead to Engaged Students, Productive Classrooms, and Higher Achievement, high school teacher Jim Sturtevant* warns teachers about the impact nostalgia can have on their ability to connect with students. "When nostalgia takes you away from the students that you have been blessed with the power to influence, it is far from harmless. This moment is all we ever have with each student. Nostalgia can absolutely detour efforts to accept a student for what she or he is in this moment."

It Lets Us Shirk Responsibility

If we stamp an entire batch of students with a problematic label, we get a pass. It's not me, it's them. It's the parents. It's society! This country! The world today!

Taking this stance is convenient, because it means we don't have to try. We don't have to look at our own practices and find the spots that need improvement. It means we don't have to fail. Sadly, it also means that whatever problem we're experiencing will never actually improve. And even if it does, it certainly won't be due to anything we did.

Here's the thing: A whole lot of our nostalgia might be true. Kids today might actually be more challenging. Teaching is undoubtedly harder than it used to be. But so what? If we stop there, throw up our hands and start counting the days to retirement, we lose. And so do our students. We can do better than that.

How to Get Over Nostalgia and Work in Reality

Tap Into Mindfulness

One big key to overcoming this kind of damaging nostalgia is to practice nonjudgmental mindfulness, to pay close attention to exactly what's in front of you and just take it in without judging it as good or bad; simply notice and accept things as they are.

Does that mean letting students do whatever they want? Ignoring harmful or destructive behavior? No. Maintain your expectations, deliver appropriate consequences, just work on how you feel about these exchanges. Instead of interpreting a student's behavior as more evidence of his inferiority or poor character, just deal with the behavior. You're still doing your job, but with a change in how you look at it, you no longer have that harmful added layer of judgment. In How to Practice Nonjudgmental Mindfulness, counselor Laura Schenck explains, "Releasing judgment does not mean that you "approve" of things that violate your true values. It means allowing yourself to move into a place of emotional stillness, peace, and acceptance of what is."

Another benefit to practicing mindfulness is that it helps you more clearly see the things that are working, to notice the students who are behaving, caring for each other, respecting your guidelines, and trying their best. On days when my classroom started to feel out of control, I would sometimes stop teaching, sit down, and write in a notebook, often recording the names of students who were behaving, rather than listing the ones I wanted to punish. This helped me shift my focus away from the problems and give some energy to the things that were going right.

Look Back with Accuracy

Sometimes, rather than compare students to previous groups, we compare them to ourselves. Maybe you were a great student. Plenty of teachers were; we loved school so much we became teachers. But a lot of students in your peer group were not like you; because you were a kid, you didn't know about all the problems that were being handled while you were out at recess or sitting on the carpet for story time. You didn't know about all the homework that didn't get turned in or the other kids' low quiz scores. And if you were the kind of kid who turned work in on time and never talked back, if your handwriting was neat and your clothes completely free of rips or questionable slogans, you're in a perfect position to be incredibly judgmental of every student who isn't just like you were. And that's a whole heck of a lot of kids.

So if that's the case, instead of thinking about how you were as a student, try widening that lens a bit and remember some of the other kids you went to school with. Not everyone was an excellent student. Not everyone behaved. And now that you're the one in charge, they are all yours.

Love the Ones You're With

The only real cure for a bad case of nostalgia is to focus entirely on the students right in front of you, to set aside whatever visions you might have of past students and fall in love with these people.

And that can only happen if you make a real effort to get to know them. Ask questions about their lives and record that information somewhere (I have a chart that can help you here). And get to know their "stuff." Instead of judging their music, have them play their favorite songs for you and tell you why they like them so much. Watch some of their movies, then talk about them with your students. Play around with the apps they use. Have them give you a lesson on all those abbreviations they use, then let them quiz you.

Where will you find the time for this? You have content to cover and assessments to give. But it doesn't have to be all that time-consuming: We're just talking about five minutes at the end of class every now and then. I promise you, it will be worth it. It might even turn what could have been the worst group you ever had into a collection of real people you actually kind of like. ♥

* Thank you to Jim Sturtevant for introducing me to the concept of nostalgia as a teacher problem. This idea resonated so much with me when I read his book a few years ago that I wanted to devote a whole post to it!

Keep in touch.
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Listen to this post as a podcast: Sponsored by mysimpleshow and Peergrade "This is the worst group we've ever had." When I hear a teacher say this, I know those students are in trouble: The person in charge of their well-being, the tone of their classroom, and their opportunities to grow has decided they are beyond saving.

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When Kids Have Structure for Thinking, Better Learning Emerges | MindShift | KQED News

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When Kids Have Structure for Thinking, Better Learning Emerges | MindShift | KQED News

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By sixth grade a few students are starting to include some strategies for thinking in their maps, such as "concentrate" or "don't get caught up in things that aren't relevant." But by ninth grade many students include specific strategies for thinking on their concept maps, including "making connections," "comparing" and "breaking things down."

Ritchhart studied 400 students at a school focusing on cultivating a culture of thinking. The study had no control group, but Ritchhart could chart development of metacognition from 4th-11th grades.

"Students basically made a two-and-a-half year gain from what would be expected just from teachers trying to create that culture of thinking," Ritchhart said. He admits that the study isn't definitive, but to him it's proof that when teachers focus on these ideas they do see improvement.
HOW CAN EDUCATORS HELP?
In a culture of thinking, students recognize that collective and individual thinking is valued, visible and actively promoted as part of the regular day-to-day experience of all group members. This type of culture can exist in any place where learning is part of the experience including school, after school programming or museum programs.

To help make these ideas more concrete, Ritchhart and his colleagues have been working to hone in on a short list of "thinking moves" related to understanding. To test whether these moves were really crucial, researchers asked themselves: could a student say she really understood something if she hadn't engaged in these activities? They believe the important "thinking moves" that lead to understanding are:

Naming: being able to identify the parts and pieces of a thing

Inquiry: questioning should drive the process throughout

Looking at different perspectives and viewpoints

Reasoning with evidence

Making connections to prior knowledge, across subject areas, even into personal lives

Uncovering complexity

Capture the heart and make firm conclusions

Building explanations, interpretations and theories.

These thinking moves all point to the conclusion that learning doesn't happen through the mere delivery of information. "Learning only occurs when the learner does something with that information," Ritchhart said. "So as teachers we need to think not only about how we will deliver that content, but also what we will have students do with that content."

One easy way to start asking students to be more metacognitive is to build in reflection time about thinking. Ask students to think about the lesson and identify the kinds of thinking they used throughout. That not only builds vocabulary around thinking, but it often gives kids confidence to name specific thinking strategies they used. Taking this time to reflect also reminds students that they did real work during the lesson.
THINKING ROUTINES
To get at how teachers make thinking visible, Ritchhart studied teachers who were very effective at helping student dive below surface level retention of information into really understanding material as it connects to the rest of their studies and their lives. He noticed none of them taught a lesson on thinking.

"They had routines and structures that scaffolded and supported student thinking," Ritchhart said. This discovery led him and colleagues at Project Zero to develop "thinking routines" that all teachers can use to help students develop the habits of mind that lead to more understanding.

One way to develop a culture of thinking is to pick one of the thinking routines Project Zero has designed and use it over and over in a variety of contexts. Rather than trying each routine once, applying one routine in multiple ways will help make thinking in that way habitual. It becomes almost an expectation in a classroom, like other class norms.

One example of this that goes beyond the K-12 classroom comes from Harvard Medical School, where instructors were struggling to train students to listen to patients and make strong diagnoses based on the symptoms they heard. As an experiment, the medical school offered an elective module to students, where once a week they would join a fine arts class using the "See, Think, Wonder" thinking routine to observe art. After 10 weeks, all the medical students were assessed on clinical diagnosing and the students who had done "See, Think, Wonder" had improved much more than those who had not participated.

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When Kids Have Structure for Thinking, Better Learning Emerges - MindShift

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By sixth grade a few students are starting to include some strategies for thinking in their maps, such as "concentrate" or "don't get caught up in things that aren't relevant." But by ninth grade many students include specific strategies for thinking on their concept maps, including "making connections," "comparing" and "breaking things down."

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A Guide To Questioning In The Classroom - TeachThought PD

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A Guide To Questioning In The Classroom - TeachThought PD

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A Guide to Questioning in the Classroom
by TeachThought Staff
This post was promoted by Noet Scholarly Tools who are offering TeachThought readers 20% off their entire order at Noet.com with coupon code TEACHTHOUGHT (enter the coupon code after you've signed in)! Get started with their Harvard Fiction Classics or introductory packages on Greek and Latin classics. Noet asked us to write about inquiry because they believe it's important, and relates to their free research app for the classics.
This is part 1 of a 2-part series on questioning in the classroom. Part 1 focuses on questions in general-their function, purpose, forms, their relationship with cognitive dissonance, as well as a quick overview of essential questions. Part 2 of the Guide To Questioning In The Classroom focuses on question strategies, especially those that help students learn to ask their own questions in an inquiry-process.

Something we've become known for is our focus on thought, inquiry, and understanding, and questions are a big part of that. We've done questions that students should ask, parents should ask, students should and shouldn't answer, questions that promote and stifle inquiry, question that reveal self-knowledge and wisdom, and more.

If the ultimate goal of education is for students to be able to effectively answer questions, then focusing on content and response strategies makes sense. If the ultimate goal of education is to teach students to think, then focusing on how we can help students ask better questions themselves might make sense, no?
Why Questions Are More Important Than Answers
The ability to ask the right question at the right time is a powerful indicator of authentic understanding. Asking a question that pierces the veil in any given situation is itself an artifact of the critical thinking teachers so desperately seek in students, if for no other reason than it shows what the student know, and then implies the desire to know more.

Asking a question is a sign of understanding, not ignorance; it requires both knowledge and then-critically-the ability to see what else you're missing.

Questions are more important than answers because they reflect both understanding and curiosity in equal portions. To ask a question is to see both backward and forward-to make sense of a thing and what you know about it, and then extend outward in space and time to imagine what else can be known, or what others might know. To ask a great question is to see the conceptual ecology of the thing.

In a classroom, a student can see a drop of water, a literary device, a historical figure, or a math theorem, but these are just fragments that are worthless in and of themselves. A student in biology studying a drop of water must see the water as infinitely plural-as something that holds life and something that gives life.

As a marker of life, and an icon of health.

It is a tool, a miracle, a symbol, and a matter of science.

They must know what's potentially inside of a drop of water, and then how to find out what's actually inside that drop of water.

They must know what others have found studying water, as well as what that drop of water means within the field of science, and beyond it.

They must know that water is never really just water.
Teacher Questions vs Student Questions
When teachers try to untangle this cognitive mess, they sacrifice personalization for efficiency. There are simply too many students, and too much content to cover, so they cut to the chase.

Which means then tend towards the universal over the individual-broad, sweeping questions intermingling with sharper, more concise questions that hopefully shed some light and cause some curiosity. In a class of 30 with an aggressively-paced curriculum map and the expectation that every student master the content regardless of background knowledge, literacy level, or interest in the material, this is the best most teachers can do.

This only a bottleneck, though, when the teacher asks the questions. When the student asks the question, the pattern is reversed. The individual student has little regard for the welfare of the class, especially when they're forming questions. They're on the clock to say something, anything. Which is great, because questions-when they're authentic-are automatically personal because they came up with them. They're not tricks, or guess-what-the-teacher's-thinking.

A student couldn't possibly capture the scale of confusion or curiosity of 30 other people; instead, they survey their own thinking, spot both gaps and fascinations, and form a question. This is the spring-loading of a Venus flytrap. The topic crawls around in the mind of the student innocently enough, and when the time is right-and the student is confident-the flower snaps shut. Once a student starts asking questions, that magic of learning can begin.

And the best part for a teacher? Questions reveal far more than answers ever might.
The Purpose of Questions
Thought of roughly as a kind of spectrum, four purposes of questions might stand out, from more "traditional" to more "progressive."
(More Traditional) Academic View
In a traditional academic setting, the purpose of a question is to elicit a response that can be assessed (i.e., answer this question so I can see what you know).
(Less Traditional) Curriculum-Centered View
Here, a "good question" matters more than a good answer, as it demonstrates the complexity of student understanding of a given curriculum.
(More Progressive) Inquiry View
As confusion or curiosity markers that suggest a path forward for inquiry, and then are iterated and improved based on learning. (Also known as question-based learning.)
(More Progressive Still) Self-Directed View
In a student-centered circumstance, a question illuminates possible learning pathways forward irrespective of curriculum demands. The student's own knowledge demands-and their uncovering-center and catalyze the learning experience.
The Relative Strengths of Questions

Good questions can reveal subtle shades of understanding-what this student knows about this topic in this context

Questions promote inquiry and learning how to learn over proving what you know

Questions fit in well with the modern "Google" mindset

Used well, questions can promote personalized learning as teachers can change question on fly to meet student needs

The Relative Weaknesses of Questions

Questions depend on language, which means literacy, jargon, confusing syntax, academic diction, and more can all obscure the learning process

Questions can imply answers, which imply stopping points and "finishing" over inquiry and wisdom (See questions that promote inquiry-based learning.)

Accuracy of answers can be overvalued, which makes the confidence of the answerer impact the quality of the response significantly

"Bad questions" are easy to write and deeply confusing, which can accumulate to harm a student's sense of self-efficacy, as well as their own tendency to ask them on their own

7 Common Written Assessment Question Forms
Questions as written assessment (as opposed to questions as inquiry, questions to guide self-directed learning, or questions to demonstrate understanding) most commonly take the following forms in writing:
Questioning & Self-Directed Learning
For years in classrooms, questions have guided teachers in the design of units and lessons, often through the development of essential questions that all students should be able to reasonably respond to, and that can guide their learning of existing and pre-mapped content.

In the TeachThought Self-Directed Learning Model, learners are required to create their own curriculum through a series of questions that emphasize self-knowledge, citizenship, and communal and human interdependence. In this model, existing questions act as a template to uncover potential learning pathways.
Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive Dissonance is the cognitively-uncomfortable act of holding two seemingly competing beliefs at the same time. If you believe that Freedom of Speech is the foundation of democracy, but then are presented with a perspective (through Socratic-style questioning from the teacher, for example), you arrive (or the student does) at a crossroads where they have to adjust something-either their belief, or their judgment about the validity of the question itself.

In this way, questions can promote Cognitive Dissonance-which means a good question can change a student's mind, beliefs, or tendency to examine their own beliefs. Questions, cognitive, and self-reflection go hand-in-hand.
Role of "Lower-Level" Questions
Lower-level questions are questions that inquire at "lower levels" of various learning taxonomies.

These are often "recall," questions that are based in fact-definitions, dates, names, biographical details, etc. Education is thought to have focused (without having been there, who knows for sure?) on these lower levels, and "low" is bad in academics, right? "Lower-level" thinking implies a lack of "higher level" thinking, so instead of analyzing, interpreting, evaluating, and creating, students are defining, recalling, and memorizing, the former of which make for artists and designers and innovators, and the latter of which make for factory workers.

And that part, at least, is (mostly) true. Recall and memorization aren't the stuff of understanding, much less creativity and wisdom, except that they are. Bloom's Taxonomy was not created to segregate "good thinking" from "bad thinking." In their words, "Our attempt to arrange educational behaviors from simple to complex was based on the idea that a particular simple behavior may become integrated with other equally simple behaviors to form a more complex behavior." In this way, the taxonomy is simply one way of separating the strands of thinking like different colored yarn-a kind of visual scheme to see the pattern, contrasts, and even sequence of cognitive actions.

Nowhere does it say that definitions and names and labels and categories are bad-and if it did, we'd have to wonder about the taxonomy rather than assuming that they were. It doesn't take much imagination to see that if a student doesn't know there was a war, and that it was fought in the United States in the 1800s, and that it was purportedly over states' rights, and that both culture, industry, and agriculture all impacted the hows, whens, and whys of the war, that "higher-level thinking strategies" aren't going to be very useful.

In short, lower-level questions can both illuminate and establish foundational knowledge on which to build more complex and nuanced understanding of content. They provide a foothold for thinking. To further the point, in 5 Common Misconceptions About Bloom's Taxonomy, Grant Wiggins explains that the phrases "higher-order" and "lower-order" don't appear anywhere in the taxonomy.
Essential Questions
On his website, Grant Wiggins defines an essential questions as those that are "broad in scope and timeless by nature. They are perpetually arguable."
Examples of Essential Questions

What is justice?

Is art a matter of taste or principles?

How far should we tamper with our own biology and chemistry?

Is science compatible with religion?

Is an author's view privileged in determining the meaning of a text?

A question is essential when it:

causes genuine and relevant inquiry into the big ideas and core content;

provokes deep thought, lively discussion, sustained inquiry, and new understanding as well as more questions;

requires students to consider alternatives, weigh evidence, support their ideas, and justify their answers;

stimulates vital, on-going rethinking of big ideas, assumptions, and prior lessons;

sparks meaningful connections with prior learning and personal experiences;

naturally recurs, creating opportunities for transfer to other situations and subjects.

You can see more examples of essential questions here.

On Tuesday, we'll help you take this background information and channel into specific question strategies that you can use to help students learn to create their own questions.
A Guide To Questioning In The Classroom; image attribution flickr user flickeringbrad; previously published at TeachThought.com

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A Guide To Questioning In The Classroom - TeachThought PD

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A Guide to Questioning in the Classroom by TeachThought Staff This post was promoted by Noet Scholarly Tools who are offering TeachThought readers 20% off their entire order at Noet.com with coupon code TEACHTHOUGHT (enter the coupon code after you've signed in)! Get started with their Harvard Fiction Classics or introductory packages on Greek and Latin classics.

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Talking at students instead of with students | Time Space Education

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Talking at students instead of with students | Time Space Education

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Having the privileged of being in a number of schools and classrooms provides a lot of insight into the teacher personality and how teachers teach. For whatever reason we assume that talking 'at' students means they are listening and learning. Research shows that this could not be further from the truth. We need to be mindful of how much we talk 'at' students. One person in the room should not be doing all the thinking and talking. It is our responsibility to set the scene for learning, provide a stimulating experience and allow students to lead the conversation and thinking. And if we're doing our jobs properly, we are capturing and connecting the ideas and thinking swirling around.

We have put this to the test and have had teachers use a timer to measure the time spent talking. This has made teachers consider the talk time when coming together.

Let's consider a few things first:

Not every adult in the room has to speak to validate why they are there (if you're in a co-teaching situation);

Say what you need to and let students get on with it;

Use a visual so students can clearly see what you mean;

Be clear about the learning focus and purpose;

If there are clarifying questions, let the students go and address the questions in the mean time.

All pretty obvious things, right?!

Talking for 30-40, hey even 20 minutes while students are on the carpet/desks is a real time waster. There is no better way to turn their enthusiasm for learning off. A lot of those behaviour problems will disappear if we engaged our students more and let them drive their learning. We need to give them the time to do that though.

This is where the speaking 'with' students comes in. A wise teacher will set the learning, work the room and have conversations with their students. What an opportunity to learn more about what they are thinking while creating excitement and energy for active learning.

While I understand how simple this reminder is, we need to be mindful of the time we use when setting the learning up for our students.

Have a solid structure in place that allows learning to be more fluid so it can flow. Develop clear systems and expectations that in turn create a culture of empowered learners. This will build more independence with our students. Invite students to take authentic action by giving them time so that they have an opportunity to lead their own learning. This requires a lot of trust. Let them go!

Aim for 10 minutes, say what needs to be said and then hand it over to them. Simple!

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Talking at students instead of with students

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Having the privileged of being in a number of schools and classrooms provides a lot of insight into the teacher personality and how teachers teach. For whatever reason we assume that talking 'at' students means they are listening and learning. Research shows that this could not be further from the truth.

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So often we pull teachers together to collaborate but never set norms regarding how they will interact, communicate, and learn from one another. This is particularly ironic since as teachers, we know to do this with our students and spend countless lessons teaching them these precious skills.

Many of you are familiar with the Seven Norms of Collaborative Work (Bill Baker Group Dynamics, Berkeley) and have probably used them in your work with teachers. I was recently asked to paint a picture of how these norms look in action, which made me think about how they look within collaborative groups and how that compares with how they look for coaches working with individual teachers. Here's what I came up with:

Pausing Pausing before responding allows time for thinking and enhances dialogue, discussion, and decision-making.

In Group Work: Group members engage thoughtfully in the conversation by taking time to think and reflect before responding. This requires participants to slow down, listen, and weigh the thoughts of others before sharing their own thinking. To promote this behavior, the facilitator may use practices such as; reflective writing/journaling at specific points in the conversation, reminding group members to resist the temptation to solve a problem right away, and using protocols that build in time for each person to contribute.In Coaching Conversations: The coach listens attentively to the teacher before responding with the 'right' answer. The coach also recognizes that coaching conversations are more meaningful when both the teacher and coach are provided with the opportunity to share their knowledge and ideas over time.

© Diane Sweeney Consulting, all rights reserved.

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So often we pull teachers together to collaborate but never set norms regarding how they will interact, communicate, and learn from one another. This is particularly ironic since as teachers, we know to do this with our students and spend countless lessons teaching them these precious skills.

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Leveled Books – Questioning our Practice | Catching Readers Before They Fall

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Leveled Books – Questioning our Practice | Catching Readers Before They Fall

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Do your students know their reading level? Why? Why not?

Lately I've been thinking a lot about leveled texts and their purpose and place in the classroom. Thanks to Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell for designing a text gradient based on Reading Recovery levels, teachers have strong support and guidance when they are matching books to readers. But the level of text is only one thing we can use as a resource when making decisions. We also need to know about the child's interests, strengths and weaknesses, what strategic actions they are using, how they are constructing a reading processing system, etc... But I am concerned how these levels are being used in classrooms across the country. Fountas and Pinnell intended for levels to be used by teachers, as a way to help teachers analyze texts and select "just-right" books for small-group reading instruction and as a support for teachers to guide readers in choosing books. They never intended levels to be used by students. The levels on books are for teachers, not students.
"We do not recommend that students use the levels of a gradient to choose books for independent reading. The levels should be very unobtrusive (if not totally invisible) in your classroom. Students need to learn how to choose books based on their own assessment of readability, interesting topics or plots, favorite authors, and general appeal. You can teach students how to assess the appropriateness of texts they find interesting for their present reading levels."
-Fountas and Pinnell, Teaching for Comprehending and Fluency, page 152.

I started thinking about teaching independence and how that connects to this quote. If our goal is to teach children to be independent, self-motivated, voracious readers - then aren't we doing them a disservice by labeling books in our classroom with levels? This is going to encourage mindlessly choosing a book because "it's a J" - not looking and thinking if it's a good match. I think teachers have to teach children how to choose just-right books for themselves, not teach children to rely on a leveling system. I'm very concerned about the authenticity of teaching children to use the level of a book as a guiding factor. What happens when that child goes to the book fair, the public library, the bookstore or to a pile of books at a yard sale? Real readers in the real world don't use a level to choose their books. If children have access to lots of books that are "just right" from guided reading and conferences - carefully selected by teachers for that student - and teachers are teaching kids what makes a "just right" book, then shouldn't we be giving them the opportunity to practice this when choosing books from the classroom library, the public library, a bookstore or when out with their families? We want to create real world readers who can assess whether a book will be a good choice independently.

What happens when children are told their level? Often times that becomes the way a child defines himself as a reader - bragging "I'm a level M." or, with head hung low, "I'm only a level E." How do you define yourself as a reader? What would your answer be if someone asked you, "what kind of reader are you?" I would guess that no adult is going to identify herself as a level. I want my kids to say things like, "I'm a reader who loves Mo Willems, who likes to read books that are about real things and who can't wait to see what new books arrived at the library." Perhaps asking your students this question might give you some insight into what kind of readers they are becoming. Do we want kids who can identify what kind of reader they are or who can tell us what level they are?

Another thing that I've seen is a high level of competition and comparing in classrooms where children know their levels. Instead of clamoring to read the new Mo Willems book, or an enticing picture book displayed at the library, children quickly dismiss books if they are not on their level and start to look down on children who are at a lower level. At the other end, I've seen strong readers held back by their level - being made to stay at a level when they can really take on much more challenging and interesting texts because they've been identified at a level lower than where they are really reading. That level becomes part of the readers' identity. Kids are ashamed to be reading at a level that is not associated with that grade level. The focus becomes all about a level instead of about reading, books, authors, genres, series books, or fabulous illustrations. When I sit down to confer with a child I never want the focus to be on what level we are aiming for. Do I have that in my head as a teacher? Of course. It's a tool I use as a teacher. But I want children to be working on their reading and setting goals relating to thinking deeply about texts, authors, genres, a variety of topics, talking about reading with others, enjoying reading and creating a reading processing system that helps them in becoming fluent, flexible, strong readers. I don't want their goal to be moving to the next level.

What happens when parents are told the level that their child is reading? Most parents have no idea what a "level J" book means. I'm concerned that this is making school reading and real world reading two different things. It's creating a gap comparable to when we teach young children to use words like "schema" and "metacognition" - parents are mystified as to how reading instruction is happening. Parents may start to compare their child with others in the neighborhood, or try to push reading books at a much higher level than that child can handle at the moment. What if, instead of sharing a child's reading level at conferences, teachers showed families examples of books where that child is reading now, and examples of benchmark texts for where we are heading? This helps families understand what their child is working on and helps them understand much more than a "level J" text.

So do my students know their reading level? No. These are a few reasons why. But are leveled books important? YES! Check back for Part II tomorrow when I will post on how I use leveled texts in my classroom as an important tool for teachers.

I would love any thoughts on this post. I realize this may leave some people uncomfortable or unsure or questioning our practice. But isn't that what we want to do as educators? I invite you to ask yourself, your team and your school "how are we using leveled texts, and why?" As Lucy Calkins wrote in my The Art of Teaching Writing book many years ago, "be brave enough to outgrow your own best teaching". Questioning and challenging how levels are being used, and what messages we are sending, might be an area where we need to be brave.

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Leveled Books - Questioning our Practice

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Do your students know their reading level? Why? Why not? Lately I've been thinking a lot about leveled texts and their purpose and place in the classroom. Thanks to Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell for designing a text gradient based on Reading Recovery levels, teachers have strong support and guidance when they are matching books...

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Should young children be grouped by ability? - BBC News

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Should young children be grouped by ability? - BBC News

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Should children as young as three, four and five be taught by ability?

Grouping children like this in nursery school, Reception and Years 1 and 2 is increasingly common across England, according to a report by University College London's Institute of Education and the National Education Union.

The study raises concerns about the impact of teaching by ability on pupils' confidence and aspirations.

But while some are critical of the practice, others say it works well.

So what are the different views on the issues of grouping children in the early years, Reception and Key Stage 1?

The report

In the Grouping in Early Years and KS1 "A necessary evil"? report, which was based on responses from 1,400 union members, authors Dr Guy Roberts-Holmes and Dr Alice Bradbury claim the practice of grouping young children has become "taken for granted".

The report says school leadership teams expect teachers to group pupils and the practice is seen as preparation for tests such as the phonics screening check and KS1 Sats tests.

"Many teachers think children are aware of their group, and they are concerned about the detrimental impact of being labelled on children's self-confidence and behaviour, and about the production of limits on children's learning," it says.

"There were concerns raised that this could have a potentially negative impact upon some children's mental health.

"Teachers both in early years and KS1 feel that the pressure of assessments produces the need for grouping in some form."

The research quotes a teacher from a focus group who recalled a girl telling her that her aspiration to become a doctor, like her mother, had disappeared when she was moved down a set.

The reaction

Some people feel that grouping children so the work is targeted to their individual needs makes perfect sense.

John Blake, head of education at the think tank Policy Exchange, says: "If children need additional support to understand the key concepts of learning, then grouping them together to provide such support is perfectly sensible.

"Provided it is clear to teachers why the division has been made, and the additional support required is given, there is no reason such grouping should be bad for children - quite the reverse, in fact, since schools should be using whatever tools they think are appropriate to ensure children have learnt the curriculum.

"Parents should be worried if schools were avoiding teaching children appropriately, using effective methods, including ability grouping if the school judges that to be appropriate."

Mr Blake says it is a teacher's job to make sure that children don't feel inadequate or stressed.

"There is no reason at all that teachers should be passing on to children any stress or pressure about the phonics screening check or their Sats tests - these are not 'high stakes tests' for the students.

"Indeed, many schools never even tell the children they have been through a statutory test at all. I find it extraordinary that teachers think that children are stressed and it's not the pupils' fault."

The mother

Mother-of-two Elisa felt let down when she found out her son had been grouped by ability - into a lower group - from Reception.

"It was like he'd been branded - 'you belong to the lower group and you'll never move up to the higher group'," she said.

"I couldn't understand why some of the mums were so pushy with their children in Reception and Year 1 - it was because they wanted to make sure they were in the advanced group.

"Children develop at different times, so to say at five or six that's what you are, you're not as smart as everyone else and you belong to a certain group and you're stuck with it is just not fair - you're condemning those children to say at that stage rather than pushing them on."

Elisa says the experience made her son doubt himself.

"He called himself not as intelligent as the other children, he wasn't as clever as so-and-so. He found it hard with his self-esteem, I think."

Elisa says she's now much stricter with her second child, who is a summer-born.

"I'm much less relaxed with her - she has to work a lot harder, I'm not going to let her fall behind. I tutor her, I'm not going to take any risks whatsoever - my trust with school after my experience with my son was lost."

The head teacher

Some head teachers say the practice of grouping children helps them as professionals to target help, especially as some children start school "ready to go" and others need a lot of nurturing.

One school leader quoted in the UCL/NEU report said: "I personally think it's better for the children, because otherwise your more able children get bored and frustrated and your less able children just get left behind.

"So the grouping means that you can focus your attention."

The groupings

Whether and how teachers arrange any grouping of pupils is very much down to individual schools. Some schools might move children between groups fairly loosely, others might be more regimented.

Minister for children and families Robert Goodwill said: "Teachers and early years staff are best placed to make decisions about the teaching methods they use.

"There is no statutory requirement that suggests children should be grouped by ability."

Teaching primary-age children by ability can be done in a number of ways, the UCL/NEU report says.

Streaming: Children are put in a class based on a view of their ability.

Setting: Children are placed in groups for particular subjects, usually literacy and maths, and move from their normal mixed-ability class for this subject.

Within-class ability grouping: Ability groups are used within a class - usually sitting at different tables with different tasks and levels of support. This may occur in a mixed-ability class, or within a set.

Interventions: Specific children are targeted and removed from the class for additional support or extension activities. This is often for a fixed period of time and a specific purpose, for example booster groups.

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Should young children be grouped by ability?

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Should children as young as three, four and five be taught by ability? Grouping children like this in nursery school, Reception and Years 1 and 2 is increasingly common across England, according to a report by University College London's Institute of Education and the National Education Union.