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ELL2.0 - End of Class Reflection Based on Blooms

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Elliott Seif is the author of Teaching for Lifelong Learning: How to Prepare Students for a Changing World.

In my various roles in education, I have had direct teaching experience, conducted professional development with hundreds of preservice and practicing educators, and observed and had important discussions with teachers over many years. All these experiences have helped me learn a lot about powerful teaching and learning and what seems to work well for many teachers in many circumstances and situations.

My ideas and suggestions below, based on my many years of experience, will hopefully be helpful to educators and suggest ways to think about powerful teaching and learning. I have classified these suggestions into nine categories, and you may find the categories themselves helpful as a way of thinking about how to improve teaching and learning.
1. Humanize yourself and your students.

Talk to your students about your own life, where you grew up, your college experience, why you decided to become a teacher, etc.

Don't stand too long in the front of the classroom. Make a conscious effort to continually walk around the room as you teach. When students are working on an exercise or activity, make it a point to see what students are doing and comment on their work.

Provide opportunities for students to self-reflect. For example, frequently use activities that ask them to summarize and explain what they have learned, reflect on their interests and talents, and describe their goals for the future and their plans for getting there.

One self-reflection exercise, called the Values Writing Activity, has been demonstrated to shrink the achievement gap among students. In one study, students who wrote about this for 15 minutes and didn't even discuss it shrank the achievement gap by 40 percent! The activity is as follows: Have students write about their most important value or values. (What do you value the most and why? What are your most important values and why?) Share responses in pairs. Discuss as a large group. List values described by students on the board. Discuss whether the values include helping others, solving problems, dealing with injustices, etc. Discuss whether there are values that are missing. Put key values on a posterboard and post in the classroom to periodically remind the class what they value.

2. Explain, clarify, and focus goals and expectations.

Discuss and create two to three positive core rules for the classroom and try to strictly enforce them (e.g., work hard, support your classmates, be a model for others). Praise students as they follow the rules. Come back to these periodically to discuss whether the rules are being followed, and, if not, why not.

Try to focus on a few important understandings and skills at any one time. Explain your learning goals often-why they are important, and why they should be important to students (if you can't figure out why it's important to them, then don't teach it!). You might tie your goals and expectations to learning more about the world around them, developing key, critical skills for living in a changing world, how meeting the goals will contribute to their success in life, how the learning goals will help them move ahead in school, or other reasons that resonate with your students.

Break down key goals and expectations into smaller steps if possible. Help students figure out how they can learn these smaller steps to get to the larger goal.

3. Make learning more relevant and meaningful.

Teach content around understanding and learning big ideas that put learning information into a meaningful context.

Pick relevant, meaningful themes that also enable you to teach critical skills like research (including reading), thinking, and communication. For example, use more relevant writing assignments to teach essay, report, or persuasive writing, or more interesting reading materials to teach vocabulary and concepts. Many reading materials like this are freely available through the internet.

Instead of behavioral goals or other ways of depicting goals that are hard for students to understand or identify with, start your units of study with essential, compelling, relevant questions that you develop out of your goals, or challenging problems or puzzles. Discuss these with students to introduce the unit.

Find relevant, interesting resources and materials to use with students. If you need to, raise money on fundraising websites for these materials.

Create more choices, such as giving students the opportunity to self-select books to read or opportunities to develop interest-based or passion projects.

Use online and community-based resources where possible-videos and podcasts, interviews online and in person, and field trips. Introduce students to the Khan Academy, a website where they can independently watch videos that explain important concepts, ideas, and skills.

4. Feed the positive, starve the negative.

Try to focus more on the positive aspects of your students and classroom. Concentrate a lot more of your energy on your students who want to learn, are doing their work, etc. Praise them for their effort and hard work, support them, use them as the model for what you expect from all. Make it a point to contact parents or guardians on a regular basis about good things that they do, hard work, good behavior, etc. When you can, work with parents or guardians to help them support your efforts and be helpful.

Learn more about ways to encourage a growth mindset, such as praise for effort and a focus on improvement and feedback. This is a way to encourage students to do their work, see progress, seek to improve, and learn from errors.

5. Make yourself accessible to your students.

Be a good listener to your students.

Create office or after-school hours where students can ask for help on assignments or just come and talk.

6. Find help and support for students who most need it.

If some of your students are dealing with traumatic situations and need outside help, find ways to help them. Refer students who need the most help to the counselor or to other available services.
7. Rethink instruction.

Think of instruction in terms of four different phases: setting the stage, building a foundation, applying and deepening learning, and closure (completing work and sharing). How will you set the stage for learning and encourage curiosity and interest? Guide students so that they develop important skills and understandings? Help them to apply learning and work independently and more deeply? Complete their work at a high level and share it with others? Read more about this instructional approach in chapter two of my book Teaching for Lifelong Learning.

Don't teach directly to a standardized test. Teach the content and skills students need, but in an interesting and different way. For example, if students need essay-writing skills, there are many ways they can be taught through interesting assignments. The skills they learn can then be applied and translated into test questions.

Expand your repertoire of teaching strategies. Find resources that suggest more ways to engage and involve students, give them supportive feedback, and so on. Many Solution Tree publications can help with this.

8. Have more fun with your students.

Take some time during the week to do something different with your students-solve a puzzle, play a game, talk about their lives.

If you are an elementary teacher, institute a time during the week, such as "game time," when students are given game options-Scrabble, chess, checkers, etc.

Periodically give students a chance to share, reflect on, and discuss what they have learned, their goals, their interests, their hobbies, and so on.

Finally, the ninth suggestion, find allies and build a support system, is a way to build a learning community to help implement the previous eight suggestions, and more. The goal is to find allies in a school, a district, or other educational communities (such as online) to form a team to learn from each other and to try new things, such as how to make learning more relevant to students or how to feed the positive and starve the negative. Small groups might work informally, but also set up formal times to discuss specific teaching situations and student problem situations in order to determine how to handle them more effectively. Members of support teams can find new resources to share-and act as resources to each other-to help solve teaching problems, make teaching more interesting and effective, and better implement the other eight suggestions in this post.

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Nine Ways to Create Powerful Teaching and Learning

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Elliott Seif is the author of Teaching for Lifelong Learning: How to Prepare Students for a Changing World . In my various roles in education, I have had direct teaching experience, conducted professional development with hundreds of preservice and practicing educators, and observed and had important discussions with teachers over many years.

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The heart of the TeachingWorks strategy is to ensure that all teachers have the preparation and support necessary for responsible teaching. We focus on a core set of fundamental capabilities that we call "high-leverage practices."

What elements of the work of teaching should novice teachers learn to enact?

High-leverage practices are the fundamentals of teaching. These practices are used constantly and are critical to helping students learn important content. The high-leverage practices are also central to supporting educators to identify, understand, and begin to disrupt patterns

of injustice in the classroom while reinforcing students' social and emotional development through equity and inclusion.

These high-leverage practices are used with care and sensitive judgment across subject areas, grade levels, and contexts.

They are "high-leverage" not only because they matter to student learning but also because they are basic for developing capability in teaching.

Click below to learn more and explore each practice on the TeachingWorks Resource Library.

610 E. University Ave. Suite 1005
Ann Arbor, MI 48109

© 2022 TeachingWorks. All Righst Reserved.

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The heart of the TeachingWorks strategy is to ensure that all teachers have the preparation and support necessary for responsible teaching. We focus on a core set of fundamental capabilities that we call "high-leverage practices." What elements of the work of teaching should novice teachers learn to enact?

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J acqueline is a sixth-grade special education teacher whose school district recently decided to implement an inclusive approach to teaching and learning. Now special and general educators collaborate to provide a stronger system of instructional supports based on their analysis of students' data. Jacqueline and her colleagues are systematically supporting students with disabilities and others who are struggling in one or more academic or behavioral domains. After months of online learning due to the coronavirus pandemic, they now have a hybrid model in which students are on staggered schedules, coming to school two days a week. While some families have been able to adjust, many are experiencing a great deal of stress. More students than ever are slipping behind, acting out, and withdrawing. The whole sixth-grade instructional team has been searching for more effective practices to foster academic, social, and emotional development.
Jacqueline's sixth-grade general education colleagues have started to teach using modeling with think-alouds and strategies like summarizing text. They are also using specific scaffolds, including graphic organizers, to better accommodate students' learning needs. When working with students in small groups, Jacqueline reteaches strategies, models foundational skills necessary for successful participation in the general education curriculum, and helps her students learn to use accommodations that will support learning in both settings (such as text-to-speech software so that students who are still developing reading skills have access to grade-level content). The changes Jacqueline and her colleagues are making seem to be working. Almost all the students with disabilities and the students who have been struggling during the pandemic are securing better grades and seem more motivated to participate in instruction. Many are even beginning to show their peers how to use strategies they learned in Jacqueline's small groups.
Jacqueline and her general education colleagues have always worked hard and been dedicated to their students, but in the past their instructional strategies were not well coordinated. As they started working together more closely to adopt the inclusive model, they also dug into research on how to accelerate learning. They found that agreeing on some foundational ideas-like collaborating so that core and supplemental instruction are tightly connected and being more specific about students' learning goals and the scaffolds the team would use to meet them-made a big difference in their team's day-to-day work and their students' development.

Jacqueline's experience is in keeping with what research has established: students with disabilities can achieve content-area standards and meet social and emotional milestones when they are consistently provided the instructional practices and accommodations that best support their learning. Decades of research have defined effective instructional practices that general and special education teachers can use to help students with disabilities, and students without disabilities who need additional supports, achieve better academic and social-emotional outcomes. ¹ These well-researched, trustworthy instructional practices are freely available through national centers like the IRIS Center and the Collaboration for Effective Educator Development, Accountability, and Reform (CEEDAR) Center, and in publications like Practice Guides published through the Institute of Education Sciences.

The challenge for teachers, however, is translating the many research-based instructional practices that exist into daily classroom instruction. Classrooms are complex environments, and teachers must attend to many demands. Time to study, try out, and reflect on new practices is in short supply. And time to do so collaboratively as an instructional team is all too rare. To address this problem, the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) and CEEDAR convened scholars, researchers, practitioners, teacher preparation faculty, and advocates to carefully review the literature and identify high-leverage practices that improve instruction across different content domains and grade levels for students with disabilities and for other students with learning differences. These practices, when used over time, are designed to support and enhance teachers' implementation of content-specific, research-based practices in such areas as reading, writing, mathematics, and social-emotional learning. (To learn more about these practices and the professional learning system that states, teacher preparation programs, and school districts ought to provide for general and special education teachers, see the companion article, "Systemic Support for Special Education: Making It a More Integral Part of General Teacher Preparation.")

What Are High-Leverage Practices?

High-leverage practices (HLPs) are instructional approaches educators in K-12 can use to teach different types of learners and content. ² The working group convened by CEC and CEEDAR identified 22 such practices after spending 18 months engaged in the following process: discussing research on effective instruction, distilling that research into a manageable set of practices, incorporating feedback from several focus groups, presenting practices to the CEC representative assembly, and finalizing the HLPs with the CEC executive board. The group deemed the selected practices "high leverage" because they are foundational to effective instruction, they help with managing and intervening in students' behavior, and they support successful implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (the legislation guaranteeing that students with disabilities receive a free and appropriate education with their nondisabled peers to the extent that is possible ³). The 22 practices are organized into four essential aspects of teachers' work: collaboration, assessment, social/emotional/behavioral, and instruction. (For the complete list of practices, see the box on the top right.)

In this article, we describe two HLPs that are foundational for delivering effective instruction: (1) use explicit instruction, and (2) provide high-quality feedback. Research shows that teachers can use these two practices in general and special education classrooms to improve student outcomes. In addition, they are a great starting place for implementing other HLPs. In describing these two HLPs, we provide examples of how teachers might use them. We also provide a list of resources teachers can use to support their implementation (see the lower box on the right).

Explicit Instruction

Explicit instruction (HLP 16) is one of the most well-researched HLPs for teaching students with disabilities in grades K-12. When teachers provide explicit instruction, they make clear for students how to engage in a particular skill, how to be strategic when they approach a task (such as solving a mathematics problem or summarizing a paragraph), or how to define a concept using examples and nonexamples. Explicit instruction has been shown repeatedly to promote skill learning in many domains, problem-solving approaches in mathematics, and strategic thinking in disciplinary literacy instruction. ⁴

Most educators agree that explicit instruction includes the following components:⁵

Break down (or segment) the learning task.

Set clear, measurable, and feasible lesson objectives.

Provide numerous opportunities for students to respond to prompts of varying difficulty, and deliver immediate feedback.

Model by demonstrating and thinking aloud.

Provide guided and engaging practice.

Promote student independence.

In the following sections, we describe each component of explicit instruction and provide examples to support implementation. We suggest that teachers spend extra time learning how to engage in the explicit instruction component of modeling, as researchers have found that many teachers find modeling difficult and could benefit from additional professional development. ⁶

Break down (or segment) the learning task. During planning, teachers break down a learning task by analyzing the concept, strategy, or skill and listing key steps needed to teach it. For concepts, they think carefully about an appropriate definition and select examples and nonexamples that will elucidate the critical features or dimensions of the concept when teaching.

Here's an example from Jacqueline and one of the general education teachers, Tanisha; they want to use a graphic organizer to help students write persuasive essays. During a joint planning session, they list steps students need to learn in order to use a graphic organizer to map out ideas before writing. Jacqueline and Tanisha (1) decide how they will explain the graphic organizer's purpose; (2) set a measurable learning objective for each lesson; (3) script what they will say while thinking aloud-including the specific topic, examples, and nonexamples-when they model how to map out ideas with a graphic organizer; and (4) choose guided practice and independent practice activities to help students learn to use the graphic organizer. Jacqueline and Tanisha also consider scaffolds, such as speech-to-text software, that some of their students with disabilities may need to record their ideas.

Set clear, measurable, and feasible lesson objectives. This aspect of explicit instruction has been widely adopted. Many teachers begin every lesson by presenting an objective. The most effective approach is to provide a specific and measurable objective that can be accomplished in the time allocated for the lesson; they display the objective (e.g., on a dry-erase board), read it to the students, and discuss its importance. They also conclude each lesson by reviewing those aspects of the objective that were accomplished.

When introducing the graphic organizer for persuasive writing, Jacqueline and Tanisha explain to students that they will learn how to use a graphic organizer to develop a persuasive essay. They display and discuss the lesson objective: "Students will correctly explain to a partner the purpose of writing to persuade as well as how a graphic organizer can be used to organize key ideas and plan before we write." After introducing and discussing real-world examples of the genre and the purpose of persuasive writing, they explain each part of the graphic organizer, along with its function. Tanisha and Jacqueline provide several writing samples that include a graphic organizer and several others that do not. They then ask students to "explain to a partner the purpose of writing to persuade as well as how this particular graphic organizer will be used to organize ideas and plan before we write." To see if their learning objective has been met or if additional teaching is needed, Tanisha and Jacqueline close the lesson by assigning student pairs to report back on what they discussed.

Provide numerous opportunities for students to respond to prompts of varying difficulty, and deliver immediate feedback. A key element of explicit instruction is to provide students with numerous opportunities to respond to prompts. This both engages students in the learning process and enables teachers to assess understanding and learning. Teachers should be deliberate in terms of crafting opportunities to respond so they reflect the spectrum of difficulty (e.g., rote or deep/probing questions) and modalities (e.g., responses that are choral, gestural, individual, or written). Jacqueline and Tanisha use planning time to make decisions about what types of opportunities to respond each lesson will feature, and which individual students Jacqueline will focus on to demonstrate their learning. Wanting to ensure that Tanisha calls on many different students while she facilitates a whole-group discussion of which writing samples are or are not examples of persuasive essays, they decide she will use a system that helps keep students engaged: drawing popsicle sticks with students' names on them from a cup. Jacqueline and Tanisha also plan how they will provide students with immediate and specific feedback (the second high-leverage practice we discuss in this article). Feedback reinforces students' efforts and prevents them from unintentionally learning incorrect information.

Model by demonstrating and thinking aloud. Modeling includes the following steps: (1) demonstrating, (2) thinking aloud while demonstrating, and sometimes (3) presenting examples and nonexamples to reinforce learning. Although some educators assume that modeling is more applicable to elementary school, modeling is also relevant in grades 6-12, as well as in college and the workplace.* For instance, a 10th-grade history teacher can use modeling with a think-aloud to demonstrate some strategies for detecting bias in documents from a website. Steps may include demonstrating how to navigate to and within a website, describing the criteria he uses to evaluate a document for bias (such as looking for funding sources, for representation of multiple perspectives, or for acknowledgements of limitations of the work), and thinking aloud while he applies that criteria to evaluate the credibility of different documents (e.g., news articles, speeches, or policy papers). Time spent in the modeling phase is determined by skill complexity (e.g., modeling a cursive letter for third-graders versus a multistep algorithm for students in precalculus).

Jacqueline and Tanisha model with a think-aloud to show students how to use their notes from the graphic organizer to compose sentences for their persuasive essays. Jacqueline begins the model by showing students how to take two words from her graphic organizer, "vegan options," to write an introductory sentence. Jacqueline states, "My notes are brief, but contain good ideas. My notes say 'vegan options' for the introduction to my paragraph. Hmm, how will I turn this into a great sentence? Well, what I believe is that there should be at least one vegan option each day. I'll write, 'I believe the time has come for students to have a daily vegan option for lunch.' I like my sentence because it conveys to readers where I stand!" To demonstrate, Jacqueline writes the sentence on the board as she talks through the process.

Provide guided and engaging practice. In this component of explicit instruction, teachers plan highly interactive practice activities to build students' proficiency. Teachers ask students multiple questions to assess understanding or provide multiple opportunities to demonstrate what they are learning by showing their work. Teachers then provide quality feedback on students' responses.

Tanisha and Jacqueline realize that many students will require considerable support to independently write a persuasive essay. Along with breaking down lessons for each step-use a graphic organizer to plan ideas, convert notes into an essay, and revise and publish their essays-they also conduct guided practice for each step. In one guided practice session, Jacqueline, Tanisha, and their students generate ideas and notes for the graphic organizer based on the prompt: "Should the voting age be lowered to 17?" Through discussion, the class decides that 17 years old is appropriate. They then brainstorm reasons to support their position. To give students more opportunities to respond, Tanisha and Jacqueline divide the students into two groups, with each teacher facilitating one group. (Once the pandemic is over and it is safe for students to sit close to each other, they plan to pair students for "turn and talk" brainstorming.) In Tanisha's group, two students argue that 17-year-olds are responsible enough to vote because they had obtained drivers' licenses at age 16, and doing so demonstrated responsibility. As the students talk, Tanisha provides suggestions to help limit how many words they use during note taking. The students then choose the following words for their notes, "license shows responsibility."

To support three students whose graphic organizers are only partially completed, Jacqueline breaks a few of the group's ideas into more specific questions to improve their understanding of and participation in the task. For example, one student says her older brother, who is 17, has a job and that means he is responsible enough to vote; she then argues for being able to vote as soon as you get a job or turn 18, whichever comes first. To engage the three students in considering that assertion, Jacqueline asks a series of brief questions (starting with "Does having a job mean you are responsible?") and helps the students write their notes after each question. Once the class completes the graphic organizers, Jacqueline and Tanisha bring the whole class back together and provide feedback on ideas they generated. In their next planning period, they agree to create additional modeling and guided practice activities to help students learn how to generate text using ideas in their graphic organizers.

Promote student independence. Teachers gradually remove support during the guided practice phase and plan continued practice opportunities for students to increase their proficiency and their ability to apply what they have learned in new situations. ⁷ Independent practice activities vary in length and format (e.g., independent practice with solving mathematics word problems versus with writing chemistry lab reports), and include immediate and corrective feedback, a return to modeling as necessary, or additional examples and nonexamples if a review is warranted.

Tanisha and Jacqueline allot 30-minute periods spread over several days for independent practice. Students choose a topic to plan and compose a persuasive response. Topics include (1) whether the local government should install solar panels on government buildings, (2) whether the local library should add a computer lab or an art studio, and (3) which historical figure should be honored with a statue at a local park. Jacqueline conferences with students based on their needs. For instance, one student watches Jacqueline model and share examples of using transition words like furthermore, another reason, and besides when introducing a new idea. Jacqueline teaches another student to improve his writing by using the thesaurus on his laptop. Noting that he used the word obviously twice in one paragraph, Jacqueline models using the thesaurus to choose a new word. He then practices using the thesaurus independently.

Importantly, Jacqueline and Tanisha recognize that some students benefit from ongoing review as the school year advances, including repeated modeling of the steps in writing persuasive essays and other instructional scaffolds. After several months, the process of using explicit instruction to specify how to use a graphic organizer for writing a persuasive essay resulted in increased performance and greater confidence among the students, including those with disabilities. When the students with disabilities used the graphic organizer combined with speech-to-text software to support their spelling and handwriting issues, their writing improved substantially.

Feedback

Feedback (HLP 8, under social/emotional/behavioral, and HLP 22, under instruction) is a powerful research-based practice teachers can use to improve students' learning and development-from understanding concepts to mastering skills to enhancing social interactions. ⁸ Feedback is a key feature of explicit instruction that occurs after a teacher has provided an opportunity to practice a concept, skill, or strategy that the teacher has modeled and explained. When used effectively, feedback can increase student motivation and effort toward a learning task and improve performance.

To be effective, teachers' feedback must be specific. Specific feedback incorporates these qualities:⁹

Goal directed

Constructive

Immediate or timely

Positive and respectful

Goal directed. Goal-directed feedback focuses on the academic or behavioral target students are working toward. The learning target should be important for student growth, based on assessment of student performance, explained to the student clearly, and, when possible, developed collaboratively with the student.

Two of Jacqueline's students have not yet been able to write a cohesive essay. To support them, she and the students are working toward writing strong, well-organized paragraphs that include a topic sentence and three to four supporting details. When providing feedback to one of her students, Sam, she notes he has developed a strong topic sentence because it introduces what the paragraph will be about, and he has two details that support it. Jacqueline also points out that the remaining two sentences contain details that are not related to the topic sentence and helps Sam generate two related details that he can write about. In addition to focusing on Sam's writing, Jacqueline tells him that he did a good job of working independently, a skill she has been trying to promote. Being more specific, Jacqueline tells Sam that she appreciates that he first asked his peers for ideas and also looked up information on the computer before asking her for help. She emphasizes that it will be important for Sam to continue to seek help on his own to continue growing as an independent learner.

Constructive. Constructive feedback helps students understand specific aspects of performance that are effective and specific aspects that need to be improved. In Jacqueline's work with Sam, she helps him understand what he has done to meet his learning and behavior targets-such as writing the topic sentence, adding two related details, and improving his work through independent strategies. Then, Jacqueline specifies what he needs to do to improve (replacing the unrelated details in his paragraph). Building on the initiative Sam took by trying to look up information on the computer, Jacqueline later follows up to help Sam learn more about online research. Such support and clarity usually motivate all students, especially those who have been struggling to learn.

Immediate or timely. Immediate feedback is ideal in supporting student learning, whether instruction is focused on academic content or behavior. For example, while Jacqueline is teaching a small group of students to capitalize proper nouns in their essays, she draws attention immediately to the students' errors. Jacqueline offers this real-time feedback in a helpful manner, with an encouraging tone, such as pointing to a lowercased name in a student's paragraph and asking what is missing. The same is true for improving behavior. Quickly pointing out that a student engaged in an appropriate behavior is a positive way to increase prosocial interactions. For instance, right after Marcel helped Sam with his writing, Jacqueline tells him that she liked how helpful he was being-and she notices over the next week that Marcel is more frequently helping other students in the class.

Immediate feedback is not always possible, especially in general education classrooms where teachers are working with a large group of students on tasks such as extended writing or applying a summary strategy while reading with their peers. In these instances, teachers will want to provide feedback as soon as possible.

For the general education students' persuasive essays, Tanisha chooses to provide written feedback on their long-term learning goals: organization, use of details, capitalization, and appropriate punctuation. Tanisha also provides written feedback when her students are honing their ability to summarize. Once her students are ready for independent practice, Tanisha has them underline the topic sentence and then highlight ideas that supported it before writing a 10- to 15-word summary. That approach gives Tanisha insights into the students' thinking, allowing her to provide written feedback on whether they were able to identify the topic sentence and related ideas before they write their summaries. It also helps Tanisha identify what additional instruction the students need (such as a repeated modeling lesson or additional background knowledge and vocabulary).

Positive and respectful. Positive and respectful feedback helps students feel that their efforts are worthwhile and appreciated by the teacher. Teachers should acknowledge students' efforts as well as their correct answers and prosocial behaviors. For instance, Jacqueline often tells students she notices they are working well with their peers to read a passage; she appreciates the way they are taking turns and praising each other for reading carefully. Likewise, when students are decoding multisyllabic words but need additional help, Jacqueline is careful to focus on their efforts. She often makes remarks like, "Oh, that was an interesting way to sound out the word, let me show you what I would do."

To provide constructive feedback, it is most effective to focus only on what students did well and what they need to do to improve-and to avoid criticizing the quality of their efforts. For instance, when a student, Zara, gets stuck solving a word problem, Jacqueline tells her that she did a fine job of reading the mathematics problem aloud and then paraphrasing the question; Jacqueline then reminds Zara that she would find it easier to solve the problem if she drew a picture representing it, as Jacqueline taught the class to do earlier that week. Seeing that Zara looks confused, Jacqueline remodels how to represent the problem in a picture.

These high-leverage practices provide an excellent road map for K-12 educators to consider when designing and implementing instruction for students with disabilities and others who need additional supports. Although all HLPs are important for teachers' tool belts, use of explicit instruction and feedback stand out as must-have practices to produce strong outcomes for the broadest possible range of students-including large numbers of students who have fallen behind as a result of the pandemic. As noted above, educators can use explicit instruction and feedback across the day to teach just about any content, and then give students positive, timely information about the extent to which they are meeting expectations. But explicit instruction and feedback are not standalone practices.

To implement explicit instruction, teachers must also be able to establish consistent, organized, and respectful learning environments (HLP 7); otherwise, they will be unable to accomplish any instruction. They also must be able to identify and prioritize long- and short-term learning goals (HLP 11), if they are to focus their explicit instruction, and be able to promote active student engagement (HLP 18), if they are to create highly interactive instruction that helps students learn. Because all 22 HLPs reinforce each other but cannot be learned simultaneously, we recommend that educators looking for a logical entry point to adopt the HLPs begin with explicit instruction and feedback. These key practices serve as a strong foundation for other HLPs and are essential elements of many content-focused, research-based practices, such as teaching decoding in a systematic manner and encouraging positive behaviors.
Mary T. Brownell is a distinguished professor of special education at the University of Florida and director of the Collaboration for Effective Educator Development, Accountability, and Reform (CEEDAR) Center. Stephen Ciullo is an associate professor of special education at Texas State University. Michael J. Kennedy is an associate professor of education in the Curry School of Education and Human Development at the University of Virginia and head of the STORMED (Supporting Teachers through cOaching, obseRvations, and Multimedia to Educate students with Disabilities) Lab. The content of this manuscript was produced under US Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs, Award No. H325A170003. David Guardino serves as the project officer. The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent the positions or policies of the US Department of Education. No official endorsement by the US Department of Education is intended or should be inferred.
*For more on the importance of modeling in schooling, see "'Cognitive Apprenticeship' Revisited" in the Fall 2020 issue of American Educator. ( return to article)

Endnotes

1. R. Gersten et al., Assisting Students Struggling with Mathematics: Response to Intervention (RtI) for Elementary and Middle Schools, NCEE 2009-4060 (Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education, 2009). See also S. Graham et al., "Reading for Writing: A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Reading Interventions on Writing," Review of Educational Research 88 (2018): 243-284.
2. J. McLeskey et al., High-Leverage Practices in Special Education (Arlington, VA: Council for Exceptional Children and CEEDAR Center, January 2017).
3. Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, 20 U.S.C. § 1400 (2004).
4. A. L. Archer and C. A. Hughes, Explicit Instruction: Effective and Efficient Teaching (New York: Guilford Press, 2010); and S. De La Paz et al., "A Historical Writing Apprenticeship for Adolescents: Integrating Disciplinary Learning with Cognitive Strategies," Reading Research Quarterly 52, no. 1 (2017): 31-52.
5. Archer and Hughes, Explicit Instruction; and C. A. Hughes et al., "Explicit Instruction: Historical and Contemporary Contexts," Learning Disabilities Research & Practice 32, no. 3 (2017): 140-148.
6. D. L. Coker Jr. et al., "Writing Instruction in First Grade: An Observational Study," Reading and Writing 29, no. 5 (2016): 793-832.
7. Hughes et al., "Explicit Instruction."
8. J. Hattie and H. Timperley, "The Power of Feedback," Review of Educational Research 77 (2007): 81-112.
9. M. Kennedy et al., "High-Leverage Practices #8 & #22: Provide Positive and Constructive Feedback to Guide Students' Learning and Behavior," 2018, highleveragepractices.org/701-2-3; and McLeskey et al., High-Leverage Practices.

[illustrated by Rachel Sender]

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J acqueline is a sixth-grade special education teacher whose school district recently decided to implement an inclusive approach to teaching and learning. Now special and general educators collaborate to provide a stronger system of instructional supports based on their analysis of students' data.

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There are many different types of effective blended learning models available to schools today, making it extremely flexible to implement. Once you've determined the type that works best for your program, it is important to consider the strategies you'll use to combine both face-to-face instruction and online learning.

Searching for effective blended learning strategies can be a time-consuming task, but we know how important they are. Blended learning strategies develop students' mastery of learning objectives while increasing student engagement, interaction, collaboration, and the use of digital learning tools.

Blended Learning as having three components:

1. Instruction delivered partially online, with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace.

2. Instruction delivered partially at a supervised brick-and-mortar location

3. An integrated student learning experience is taking place

Many educators are already leveraging blended learning in their classrooms. However, it's worth noting that blended learning is different than - and not to be confused with - a "tech-rich" learning environment. According to blendedlearning.org , " Technology-rich instruction shares the features of traditional teacher-led instruction with technological enhancements. This includes electronic whiteboards, digital textbooks, online lesson plans, Google Docs, virtual reality, and so forth. These tools may enhance learning experiences, but do not fundamentally shift instruction in a way that gives students some element of control. "

A Blended Learning Classroom Example

Let's look at an example by checking out what Mr. Hubbard does in his science classroom that differentiates his instructional strategies to meet the needs of a blended learning classroom versus a tech-rich classroom. The below example is based on how he introduced students to the concept of force and motion.

1. Mr. Hubbard first assigned a short 'direct instruction' video for homework, that introduced his students to the concept of force and motion. This video was watched outside of his core classroom time before the students were active participants in the lesson itself. This video introduced his students to this new concept. He asked his students to jot down notes, questions, ideas, etc., that they experienced while watching this new concept video and bring them back to class with them the next day.

2. The next day in class, Mr. Hubbard had different 'stations' set-up for the kids to explore in collaborative groups where they extended their learning in a variety of concept (and topic) related activities.

Students explored the concept of force and motion further in a hands-on experiment activity.

Another station was set up for small group time with Mr. Hubbard where he went over the questions that students wrote down in their science journals while watching the direct instruction video. He used this time to really encourage students to think critically and problem-solve. He even had an example problem at his station in which he asked students to think about how to solve based on their introduction to the concept. This opened up a huge conversation with students and Mr. Hubbard was able to identify gaps - and accelerants - in the students' thinking and understanding of the concept, which allowed him to make decisions on next steps for instruction for the next lesson.

Another station allowed students to further explore the concept in a different hands-on experiment.

The last station required students to read an online digital lesson on force and motion

In this example, Mr. Hubbard was employing a combination of blended learning implementation models of flipped classrooms and station-rotation.

If Mr. Hubbard were to make his classroom "tech-rich," he could employ strategies such as:

Submission of documents digitally (Google, Dropbox, etc.)

Creation of Powerpoints, videos, podcasts, etc., as a form of presentation or culminating activity

Using Adobe Suite software to create products to demonstrate knowledge

Photo collages to document steps and outcomes in STEM class activities

When we "blend" our in-class learning activities with those that we leverage online learning, we not only are implementing blended learning strategies, but we are additionally getting our students engaged in learning and preparing them with the skills they need for college and career.

Blended Learning is the equation of online learning + face-to-face learning = blended learning!

Blended Learning Strategies

eDynamic Learning recognizes the importance of offering effective blended learning strategies to use with our curriculum. This is why our Teacher Resources includes a Blended Learning Strategies guide alongside a Pacing guide and Project-Based Learning guide. These teacher resource materials accompany all career and technical education (CTE), electives, and Career Ready Program™ courses .

Below are just a few strategies from our Blended Learning Strategies guide. These strategies help develop the skills students need for college and career readiness, including academic language, higher-order thinking skills, content-area literacy skills, technology skills, notetaking strategies, and soft skills. Furthermore, strategies included in our full edition of our Blended Learning Strategies guide,

address different learning styles,

integrate multiple modalities, and

are differentiated to address diverse students' needs, including English language learners and special education students.

In addition to the blended learning strategies that support face-to-face and/or online learning, engaging digital course features such as podcasts and videos can truly bring blended learning to life and support a variety of blended learning implementation models .

The following methods benefit both face-to-face and online learning; they suit a variety of blended-learning models; and they easily integrate into any course unit or lesson.

1. Collaborative Learning

Strategy Overview

2. Frontloading Vocabulary

Strategy Overview

3. Translating the Text

Strategy Overview

4. Visualize-Represent-Share

Strategy Overview

5. Discussion Points

Strategy Overview

What Is It? Discussion Points is an accountable talk strategy that ensures all students participate in group discussions. Students share their responses to course discussion questions and discussion topics and earn points each time they participate.

When Do I Use It? Why Do I Use It? This strategy can be used with the course Text Questions , course Discussion prompts, or other discussion topics or questions. Discussion Points can be included as part of the before, during, and after phases of reading or listening to the lesson text. It engages students in discussion and deepens their understanding of unit objectives while acquiring course and academic language.

Get in Touch!

Are you ready to incorporate blended learning in your classroom or school program? eDynamic Learning not only provides schools with the largest library of career and technical education (CTE), elective , and Career Ready Program™ courses in the industry for grades 6-12, but also provides teachers with a Blended Learning Strategies guide (and Project-Based Learning guide) to engage students in strategies that promotes engagement, enthusiasm, and deeper learning. Get in touch with us today to learn more!

Check it Out!

Check out our on-demand webinar: Blended Learning with eDynamic Learning Courses
In this brief webinar, you'll:

get a high-level overview of some of the most popular blended learning implementation models

learn how you can incorporate a blended learning model into your teaching strategies

see how eDynamic Learning courses come to life and enable deeper learning through blended learning

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There are many different types of effective blended learning models available to schools today, making it extremely flexible to implement. Once you've

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First, using a poster board, butcher paper, or some other easily displayable medium, put together a display with the routine written out step by step.

Keep each step of the routine as concise as possible.

Ensure that the steps are developmentally appropriate. Using pictures and large print is a great way to communicate classroom expectations for young children who may not be able to read the labels.

Try to keep routines to as few steps as possible.

Next, identify an area of the classroom to post the routines. Ensure that the area can be easily viewed by the entire class without causing disruption. Placing it in proximity to where the routine happens can be a helpful reminder to students (e.g. posting the line-up routine next to the classroom door).

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Teaching Classroom Routines | Classroom Check-Up

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First, using a poster board, butcher paper, or some other easily displayable medium, put together a display with the routine written out step by step. Keep each step of the routine as concise as possible. Ensure that the steps are developmentally appropriate.

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Years ago when I did student teaching, my cooperating teacher had me observe classroom rules, routines, and procedures from a variety of teachers. This was one of the single most important things she had me do.

It was an effective task where I was able to observe and note not just how I wanted my future classroom to run, but definitely how I did NOT want it to run.

When I decided to develop my classroom management system it wasn't even as close to how elaborate it is today. I just knew that I wanted my routines and procedures to be implemented with daily practice and ease.

First these are the basic questions to ask yourself when building your classroom routines and procedures:

1. How will you gain student's attention?

2. How will students signal that they want help/attention?

3. How will students obtain needed work materials and books?

4. How will students transition to cooperative group work?

5. What are the procedures for students needing to use the restroom or getting a drink of water?

6. What will students be expected to do when they finish assignments early?

7. What are your procedures for tardies or early dismissals?

8. What are your procedures for turning in homework and passing homework and assignments back to students?

9. What are your procedures for turning in late homework?

10. How will you make sure your student understand the expected behavior?

11. What will the consequences be if your students don't follow the classroom expectations?

However, when you start working on your classroom rules (now called 'agreements') you want to decide if you will involve your students writing them together as a class.

Now, I tried this early on in my teaching career, but it didn't stick. I no longer write classroom rules as a class and post them up anywhere in my classroom. You can read more about that here: Simple Strategies for Managing Classroom Behavior

Every teacher's routines, procedures, and expectations are going to be different based on the student age group, school-wide rules - I mean agreements, and really just personal preference. The classroom routines and procedures for elementary school are going to look a lot different at the high school level.

While, I substitute taught every grade level and content area, my procedures and routines for middle school have led to a lot of positive classroom success. You honestly might have to try out a few things every year or even switch it up in the middle of the year if you find a certain routine just isn't working - it's okay. I've done it.

But always try to implement either at the beginning of the school year. If you do decided to change things up, let your student know that there will changes coming either at the beginning of a new quarter, semester, or after a break. It's easier to implement this way, than to just spring it on them without notice.

Once you have all your routines and procedures together, put it in a presentation. I make mine in PowerPoint but you can use whatever presentation methods you feel most comfortable with.

The first day of school is when I always start my routines and procedures presentation and but as I go through as a class we practice and implement for a week. Then I give a partner/group quiz on paper or Kahoot and go over all expectations again but this time a lot faster while having students respond with answers.

Classroom Routines and Procedures Examples

This is a list of routines and procedures I put into my presentations:

Entering/Exiting the classroom

Turning in assignments & late work

Attendance/Absent/Tardy procedures

Lunch and/or Recess

Bell-work/Do Now/Entry Task

Finishing work early

Use of classroom library

Independent work time - asking for help

Use of technology - laptop, tablet, cell phone

Transitions and moving in the classroom

Pencil Sharpening

Organization (being prepared)

Group/Project work

Getting supplies

Handing out papers

School-wide expectations and rules

Eating, drinking, chewing gum

Emergency drills

Heading papers and assignments

Dismissal

Bathroom policy

Homework

Assigning classroom jobs

Behavior management - warning, action, contacting parents/referrals/infractions

Do you have a routine or procedure that you can add to the list? Please comment below!

For related readings, check out how I set up and organize my classroom!

Years ago when I did student teaching, my cooperating teacher had me observe classroom rules, routines, and procedures from a variety of teachers. This was one of the single most important things she had me do.

It was an effective task where I was able to observe and note not just how I wanted my future classroom to run, but definitely how I did NOT want it to run.

When I decided to develop my classroom management system it wasn't even as close to how elaborate it is today. I just knew that I wanted my routines and procedures to be implemented with daily practice and ease.

First these are the basic questions to ask yourself when building your classroom routines and procedures:

1. How will you gain student's attention?

2. How will students signal that they want help/attention?

3. How will students obtain needed work materials and books?

4. How will students transition to cooperative group work?

5. What are the procedures for students needing to use the restroom or getting a drink of water?

6. What will students be expected to do when they finish assignments early?

7. What are your procedures for tardies or early dismissals?

8. What are your procedures for turning in homework and passing homework and assignments back to students?

9. What are your procedures for turning in late homework?

10. How will you make sure your student understand the expected behavior?

11. What will the consequences be if your students don't follow the classroom expectations?

However, when you start working on your classroom rules (now called 'agreements') you want to decide if you will involve your students writing them together as a class.

Now, I tried this early on in my teaching career, but it didn't stick. I no longer write classroom rules as a class and post them up anywhere in my classroom. You can read more about that here: Simple Strategies for Managing Classroom Behavior

Every teacher's routines, procedures, and expectations are going to be different based on the student age group, school-wide rules - I mean agreements, and really just personal preference. The classroom routines and procedures for elementary school are going to look a lot different at the high school level.

While, I substitute taught every grade level and content area, my procedures and routines for middle school have led to a lot of positive classroom success. You honestly might have to try out a few things every year or even switch it up in the middle of the year if you find a certain routine just isn't working - it's okay. I've done it.

But always try to implement either at the beginning of the school year. If you do decided to change things up, let your student know that there will changes coming either at the beginning of a new quarter, semester, or after a break. It's easier to implement this way, than to just spring it on them without notice.

Once you have all your routines and procedures together, put it in a presentation. I make mine in PowerPoint but you can use whatever presentation methods you feel most comfortable with.

The first day of school is when I always start my routines and procedures presentation and but as I go through as a class we practice and implement for a week. Then I give a partner/group quiz on paper or Kahoot and go over all expectations again but this time a lot faster while having students respond with answers.

Classroom Routines and Procedures Examples

This is a list of routines and procedures I put into my presentations:

Entering/Exiting the classroom

Turning in assignments & late work

Attendance/Absent/Tardy procedures

Lunch and/or Recess

Bell-work/Do Now/Entry Task

Finishing work early

Use of classroom library

Independent work time - asking for help

Use of technology - laptop, tablet, cell phone

Transitions and moving in the classroom

Pencil Sharpening

Organization (being prepared)

Group/Project work

Getting supplies

Handing out papers

School-wide expectations and rules

Eating, drinking, chewing gum

Emergency drills

Heading papers and assignments

Dismissal

Bathroom policy

Homework

Assigning classroom jobs

Behavior management - warning, action, contacting parents/referrals/infractions

Do you have a routine or procedure that you can add to the list? Please comment below!

For related readings, check out how I set up and organize my classroom!

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24 Examples of Classroom Routines and Procedures

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Years ago when I did student teaching, my cooperating teacher had me observe classroom rules, routines, and procedures from a variety of teachers. This was one of the single most important things she had me do.

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"Routines are the backbone of daily classroom life. They facilitate teaching and learning…. Routines don’t just make your life easier, they save valuable classroom time. And what’s most important, efficient routines make it easier for students to learn and achieve more."

—Learning to Teach…not just for beginners by Linda Shalaway

When routines and procedures are carefully taught, modeled, and established in the classroom, children know what’s expected of them and how to do certain things on their own. Having these predictable patterns in place allows teachers to spend more time in meaningful instruction.

Go inside 16 classrooms from across the country to see how other teachers have successfully established routines to manage important times of the school day. Each of the slideshows below takes you on a visual and audio tour explaining how to establish similar procedures in your classroom

As children start trickling into the classroom, they need to know exactly what to do. What should they do with their homework? Where should they put their book bags? Where do their coats and other materials belong? What should they do while they wait for the rest of the class to arrive? When does class actually start? When kids know the answers to these questions, they can move smoothly through the morning routine and get straight into learning.

After the bustle of putting away book bags, coats, and homework, taking attendance and discussing the schedule can help bring students together and build community in the classroom.

Students move through many activities during the course of a typical day, from whole-group lessons to small-group work, from reading time to math time, from in-class work to specials outside the classroom. It’s important to plan for these in-between times just as carefully as you plan your lessons. With predictable routines in place, students can move smoothly from one activity to the next without losing learning time. The teachers in this section share some clever ideas for signaling transition times and keeping track of students as they leave the classroom for various reasons during the day.

Just as a morning routine helps set the tone for the rest of the day, an end-of-the-day routine helps get children and the classroom ready for the next day. You may want to enlist some children’s help in tidying up the classroom while others gather their belongings, including homework.

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Creating Classroom Routines & Procedures | Scholastic.com

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“Routines are the backbone of daily classroom life. They facilitate teaching and learning…. Routines don’t just make your life easier, they save valuable classroom time. And what’s most important, efficient routines make it easier for students to learn and achieve more.”

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Classroom routines can be quietly powerful. They help daily activities run smoothly so teachers and kids can focus on learning, not procedures. And both students and teachers feel more confident and secure when their daily activities are familiar and predictable, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

There's a big difference between routines and rules. Rules tend to focus on expected individual student behaviors, like being on time for class, respecting others, or not talking on the phone during instruction. Routines are simply practiced responses to the teacher's directions that add structure to the day. "Rules have consequences, and routines have reminders," says Rebecca Alber, a UCLA literacy specialist.
Further Reading: 5 Activities to Make Your Classroom Morning Routine More Productive
Here are a few of those small but mighty routines that teachers find effective in their classrooms.

Routines to Start the Day

To immediately set the tone for students, try these routines at the start of the day:

Greeting students at the door. "I used to just sit at my desk during the change of classes," says my friend Crystal, who teaches seventh grade. "Now, the routine is that students and I greet one another at the door. They've come to expect it, and they like that little moment of eye contact and attention. And they actually seem more ready to learn." Crystal says the routine is particularly effective when a student has been absent or had a bad day the day before. "I just welcome them to class," she says. "We start fresh."

Starting class on time. Some teachers spend the first 10 minutes of class taking attendance, handing back papers, or even collecting money for various activities. But those first minutes are prime teaching time, says Ohio high school teacher Jenny Baker. "My kids know the drill," she says. "When the bell rings, they need to be ready to roll, because they know I'll be."

Routines During Class

As the day progresses, more distractions are likely to arise. These routines can help you keep things running smoothly:

Bathroom breaks. Many teachers use a regular bathroom procedure that doesn't involve kids interrupting the entire class by raising their hands to ask permission to leave. A few kids have told me they would rather be uncomfortable for the next 45 minutes than risk having to explain why they didn't go between classes, a question some kids consider too personal. The routine many teachers use is to have a bathroom pass that students can just pick up as they leave the room. Kids who appear to overuse the pass can be talked to privately.

Walkabouts. Students have lots of reasons to leave their seats, says Rebecca Alber, and that's fine. Pencil sharpening, getting supplies or a tissue, and turning in work are all legitimate "missions." But sharpening a pencil shouldn't involve stopping at a friend's desk to chat, she says. If that happens, she reminds kids of the classroom routine by asking, "What's your mission?" The key word here is reminds-this kind of situation doesn't need a consequence.

Accessing materials. It happens. Kids forget all kinds of stuff. Just last week, I had to take track shoes to a student-athlete who forgot to pack them for her regional track meet. Students who need a pencil, pen, or paper should be able to just follow the routine. Keep a few of these supplies in a designated place in the room near your desk so they can be borrowed without making it a big deal or into a class interruption. I have to admit the first year I loaned students pens and pencils, kids forgot to return them at the end of class. I changed the routine so anyone who borrowed a pencil or pen had to leave something of value on my desk that they would get back when the items were returned. That didn't work either, and I soon had a collection of kids' watches, dollar bills, and even jackets they forgot. Finally, I decided they had to leave one of their shoes. That worked. Today, I would probably ask for their phone.

Handling late work. A good routine for kids with late work is to deposit it in a basket near your desk. But the routine for returning graded late work is to keep it in a folder for you to hand back so other students can't leaf through papers to see their classmates' grades.

Routines to Wrap Things Up

As the day comes to a close, students tend to get antsy, so it's important to have a few routines in place to keep them focused:

Planning time for closure. End instruction with a few minutes left to review the lesson and share important reminders, like when the next test or project is due. Students will learn to expect closure and know it isn't time to pack up yet. If you tend to forget to stop a few minutes early, set a timer.

Dismissing students. Class is over when you dismiss students, not when the bell rings. Kids can learn that this is the routine in your class even if that's not the case in all their classes. Yelling, "Don't forget the test tomorrow," as students scurry out isn't a good look.

Why Routines Matter

These are just a few of the routines teachers can use to minimize disruptions to the learning process. Teachers use plenty of other routines for transitioning from one activity to another, working in groups, or just lining up and walking down the hall. In fact, educator Dr. Fred Jones calls classroom routines "a teacher's primary labor-saving device."

Further Reading: 7 Habits of Highly Effective Classroom Management

It does take time and effort at the beginning to teach students routines and remind them about procedures every now and then. But the payoff is that the classroom runs more smoothly and kids are comfortable knowing what to do-and you can focus on teaching and learning.

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Classroom Routines That Are Small but Mighty

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Classroom routines that are small but mighty can help kids feel safe, comfortable, and able to focus on learning.

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Effective Classroom Procedures & Routines for Classroom Management

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Teachers can build rapport with students by starting the year with activities that encourage sharing of interests, and by connecting those interests to curriculum.

Knowing about your students' interests can go a long way, since research has shown that it's easier to remember new information when it's related to something we already know. Your students are already interested in something and are doing it. Learn what it is, and find a way to connect it to your school subject. Consider the walkways around the Oval at Ohio State University, which were paved based on the students' desired paths.

When students feel that what they are learning actually relates to their lives, it helps to foster their inner motivation. Getting to know your students may also advance community building and help with establishing rapport.

I've tried the following six activities with different groups of middle school students in our English as a second language lessons. These community-oriented activities may be of help if you are looking to enhance your students' inner motivation and retention by learning a bit more about their interests and by connecting your curriculum to those interests.

1. Two Things You Like and One Thing You Don't

This is my go-to activity that I use with new groups. It doesn't take much time or require extra preparation, yet it gives you an opportunity to immediately connect with your students. This simple task not only provides you with some insights into your students' interests but also sparks authentic reactions in the classroom. It helps with finding common ground for your students, as well as with bonding over some usual dislikes (licorice: "Yuck, right?" or "Not!").

A good tip is to remind the students to be respectful and try to react without judgment. I would also suggest modeling this activity first in order to show the level of openness you are looking for. If you have a large class, take notes so that it is easier to use this information in preparation for your future lessons.

2. A (Digital or Paper) 'Unity Quilt'

Each student creates their own personalized square on a joint unity quilt. I got inspired by the notable unity quilt that Leslie Knope, the main character in the series Parks and Recreation, made in order to ease the tension among her future in-laws. We never sewed a quilt in class (although it might be an option for those who enjoy the challenge) but assembled it digitally instead, using the online collaborative whiteboard platform Miro.

Each square looked like a collage with images representing varied interests of every student. Later on, the classmates guessed whom each square belonged to. This project gives the teacher an opportunity to have a bird's-eye view of the most common interests in the class and to connect some of the curriculum to them. For instance, I found out that all my students enjoy watching YouTube videos and anime, which informed my teaching further on in the year.

3. Judge by the Cover Activity

This activity can also act as a handy tool to promote reading and to get the students interested in lesser-known items from the library. The getting-to-know-you task revolves around a handful of picked books. It doesn't matter what they are, although it could be helpful to suggest books of the appropriate reading level and length, so that students feel inspired and actually carry on reading (fingers crossed) even after this activity is over. The students choose a book from the selection that best describes them in any way imaginable, and afterward they explain their choice to the rest of the class.

Students can pick a book based on its relatable title, its color scheme, its cover layout, or the name of the author-anything will do. Allow enough time for sharing (I would suggest a minimum of three minutes per student), as the explanations can prompt further discussions. It may be a good idea to choose some books that suggest common student interests in the title, like football, camping, or traveling, for example.

4. Time Traveler Activity

Merriam-Webster's dictionary has a Time Traveler webpage, where you can choose a year and see which words appeared in the dictionary for the first time. The idea of this getting-to-know-you task is to ask your students to pick a word from their year of birth-the word should somehow be connected to their lives. For instance, if you were born in 1990 but still feel younger than your age at heart, the word twentysomething, which first appeared in the dictionary in 1990, may just fit the bill.

This is a fun activity that promotes literacy and also sparks creativity, because students have to think about the ways these random words can be connected to their lives. This activity is best suited for the older students and may require additional pre-moderation, as some of the dictionary words may not be school-appropriate.

In her book Ghosts, Dolly Alderton describes how the main character starts her birthday by listening to the pop song that was number one on the day she was born-which gave me an idea for this getting-to-know-you-better exercise. Students are asked to research the number one song on the day they were born and choose one line from the song that somehow relates to their lives.

This activity also promotes literacy, as it aims at developing reading skills and may initiate some interesting discussions based on the reasoning that the students provide. It is also a gateway to the world of former hits, so be ready for a possible impromptu disco party!

6. 'Hi, This Is Me' Video

We used " Kids of New York City" from The New York Times as a starting point for our own video projects about our typical days. After watching those examples, the students were asked to film bits of their days and narrate them as they went or later on with a voice-over.

We used smartphones for this activity. We also have stationary desktop computers and iPads available at our school, so students can access them during lessons to work on such projects if they don't have their own equipment. We've used the built-in camera and voice recorder and edited everything later in iMovie. Making and watching these almost turned into a film festival. We learned a lot about ourselves (for example, that some of the students were natural-born editors). This is a creative task that also supports digital literacy.

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6 Ways to Get to Know Your Students and Build a Classroom Community

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Teachers can build rapport with students by starting the year with activities that encourage sharing of interests, and by connecting those interests to curriculum.

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If it's tailored to the individual student and clear-cut, feedback can be a formidable learning tool.

Feedback can be a powerful process that greatly impacts student learning when it affirms students' identities as learners, is clear and direct, and considers the individual attributes of each student.

Strength: You clearly state your claim, The women's rights movement began with the suffrage movement but it's not over yet, and provided a list of recent events, such as the Women's March of 2017 and the U.S. Women's Soccer Team's court case, to support your thinking.

Need: Include the counterclaim and how you would respond. What would someone say if they disagreed with you? Where would they find fault with your supporting evidence? What can you include to address these arguments?

Next step: Work with your writing partner to talk through the Claim, Support, Question protocol. Do some more research to address the questions that you and your partner generate, and add this information to your essay.

Here's an example. A student receives the following feedback from her teacher:

This feedback moves beyond what students often receive in response to their work-statements such as "Great job!" "Shows improvement." "Add evidence." The more comprehensive feedback can empower students because it's individualized to the student; leverages students' assets, interests, and learning preferences; and builds students' confidence in themselves. Let's unpack the above example to see how to accomplish this.

Providing Meaningful Feedback

Strengths: Identify what students can do in relation to the learning target, regardless of whether they've achieved mastery. The feedback in our example is based on the following learning target and success criteria for the student:

Stating a claim

Providing supporting reasons and relevant evidence

Addressing counterclaims

I can write an argument by doing the following:

When a teacher identifies what students can do, it communicates the belief that all students are learners and can achieve high expectations. Students know what to repeat in future assignments and, most important, develop confidence in themselves. Often by middle and high school, students who have repeatedly been told what they cannot do have accepted failure as a norm and need support in redeveloping their identity as a learner. Identifying what students can do helps rebuild this identity characteristic necessary for learning.

Needs: Identify where a student is in relationship to the learning target. The language the teacher uses in identifying needs can affect how students receive the feedback. In our feedback example, the teacher states the need- Include the counterclaim and how you would respond-and then provides some questions to prompt student thinking. Zaretta Hammond writes in Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain that direct and honest feedback helps students understand that feedback is affirmation that the student can reach the goal. When feedback is cushioned or vague, a student may interpret it to mean that the teacher doesn't believe in the student's capability.

Next steps: These directly correlate with the identified needs and provide suggestions on how students can move forward. Too often, students are given feedback but don't know how to address it. The teacher supports student independence and self-regulation by describing actions that the student can take on their own to strengthen their work. In our example of feedback, the teacher reminds the student to use a thinking routine that has been repeatedly used in class-to identify possible counterclaims and provide stronger evidence to support their reasoning.

Next steps should also consider the individual attributes of the student. For example, if the teacher knows a student is an artist, suggesting that the student use sketchnoting before writing might be a good next step. Students who use oral language to process information might benefit from peer discussion, as mentioned in the example, before writing. A linguistically diverse student might write in the language they are most comfortable with to organize and elaborate on their ideas.

The amount, timing, and format: These can influence how a student receives the feedback and their willingness to act on it. Some students need less feedback more often, while other students prefer to have the time to process and apply the feedback. Feedback can be verbal or written and offered privately or in small groups. The same process for providing feedback will not work for everyone. If a teacher is unsure as to what strategy might work best for the student, the teacher can conference with the student and discuss different strategies. This builds the trust that underlies the successful feedback relationship.

The feedback that students receive from their teachers serves as models for students to engage in peer feedback and self-assessment. When students use the same process with their peers and then apply it to themselves, they're truly empowered. Students, like their teachers, must have clearly articulated learning targets and a protocol, such as the strengths, needs, and next steps. They must also reflect on the feedback process. Questions such as "How did feedback from your classmate help you revise your work?" "What did you learn from examining your classmate's work that will help you in revising your own?" and "How did you revise your work after completing your self-assessment?" all help students see the value of the feedback process.

Empowering students through feedback begins with teacher feedback that identifies what the student can do, clearly states areas of needs, and considers the individual attributes of each student in providing next steps. When students receive quality feedback from their teachers, they are primed to engage in peer feedback and self-assessment, and empowered to be self-regulated, independent learners.

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If it's tailored to the individual student and clear-cut, feedback can be a formidable learning tool.

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Although certain aspects of teaching are natural (e.g., parents teach children and coworkers share and give advice on how to complete projects), other parts require work that is intricate and nonintuitive (Ball &amp; Forzani, 2011; Ball &amp; Forzani, 2009). Teaching involves a specialized knowledge of content as well as an ability to think and act simultaneously.

A set of general, core practices underlie the teaching profession and can be interpreted across multiple disciplines (Ball &amp; Forzani, 2011; Ball &amp; Forzani, 2009; Windschitl, et al., 2010). In an effort to guide future teachers in the practice of teaching rather than knowledge about teaching, calls to reform teacher education programs have focused on using high-leverage teaching practices (HLTPs) as a framework for coursework and experiences. Thus, future teachers learn to break down a practice, such as questioning, into smaller components. For example, micro-practices for questioning might include identifying gaps in student knowledge, using students' experiences and interests to connect new and old content, and anticipating student misunderstandings. As a result, teachers plan their questions by reflecting on, planning for, and practicing these smaller components. Although these HLTPs were designed to assist teacher education programs, in-service teachers also find them useful to guide reflective practice and lead to improved student outcomes.

Many HLTPs focus on instruction; however, they can also help educators break down those crucial teacher-as-manager practices that set the stage for learning. Three such practices are implementing organizational routines, building respectful relationships with students, and setting long- and short-term goals with students. The remainder of this article explores these three practices and associated teacher reflections and actions to foster implementation in the classroom.

Implementing Organizational Routines

Routines are a series of steps or activities that maximize learning time. According to Teaching Works , organizational routines might include a sequence of activities to manage time, space, materials, and even students. According to Campbell and Wahl (2015), routines clarify expectations for students, provide consistency and smooth transitions, and reduce stress for students and the teachers. One way to consider which routines might benefit you or your students is to reflect on one week of school and notice where students needed extra reminders or the class lost learning time in transitions.

Figure 2. Additional examples of implementing organizational routines.

Figure 2. Additional examples of implementing organizational routines.

Setting the Stage for Success with High-Leverage Practices-table

Reminding students to get on task

Create a behavioral contract with students. When students are off task, they will refer to the contract, identify their behavior, and explain why this behavior was inappropriate.

Collecting and distributing papers

"Create a folder for each student that remains in the classroom. The folder can include the day's worksheets or assignments and previously graded items. To organize the materials, consider color-coding folders by class, assigning students numbers, and arranging folder items chronologically. Create a ""homework area"" where students submit homework. To reduce congestion in this area, consider placing it away from the door or other high-traffic areas such as the teacher's desk, the pencil sharpener, or the trash can."

Repeating directions

"Clarify directions in advance. Write directions on the board. Ask students to discuss the directions with a classmate and then again as a full class."

Calling attendance

"Use pictures and seating charts to quickly identify absentees. Create a buddy system in which each student tells the teacher if his or her buddy is not present. Use a folder system to visually check attendance (i.e., students who do not take their folders are not in class). Integrate a daily warm-up journal that students pick up from a shelf designated for their class. Journals left on the shelf belong to absent students."

Integrate a daily warm-up journal that students pick up from a shelf designated for their class. Journals left on the shelf belong to absent students.

Use a buddy system in which each student collects the work for his or her absent classmate, writes the student's name on the paper, and places it in a designated area (which could be labeled by number or color).

Responding to questions during collaborative work

"Provide help cards to students and groups. When a student or group needs assistance, they turn a card over so the teacher can see that help is needed (rather than hearing a cacophony of students calling for help). Integrate a rule of ""ask three before me"" in which students ask other students or groups for assistance before calling on the teacher. Use sticky notes to provide ""hints"" to students or groups to ensure you do not provide more assistance than you intend. This also serves as a record that students can consult."

Responding to questions such as "why are we doing this?"

"Write objectives, can-do statements, and agendas on the board. Connect exit tickets directly to objectives (e.g., students can demonstrate knowledge before leaving class)."

Building Respectful Relationships with Students

Student learning is enhanced when a caring relationship exists between student and teacher. According to Campbell and Wahl (2015), "caring, trusting relationships with students are absolutely the most important ingredient in an enjoyable, effective classroom" (p. 26). Often the day-to-day activities of a classroom teacher make it difficult to build a rapport with students and truly know them. Yet, good relationships likely reduce potential behavioral problems, lead to academic success, and create a sense of community and belonging (Campbell &amp; Wahl, 2015). To build relationships, teachers need to first learn about their students. Campbell and Wahl suggest teachers begin with what they know about students and then create learning experiences based on these identified interests or goals. By doing this, teachers also learn when they need to be especially sensitive or when they should recognize students for successes outside of school. Teachers can create recognition areas or a period of the class when students can share their successes unrelated to the class. Teachers can even place students in groups based on either similar or different interests or personalities.

Setting Long- and Short-Term Goals

Setting expectations for learners is the start of a continuous dialogue between students and teachers. Students use expectations to know where they're headed and how they'll get there. Expectations can include both behavior (e.g., how to enter the class or how to turn in homework) and content (e.g., what students are learning, how they will demonstrate their understanding, or how all of the lessons fit together). Teachers can clarify expectations by involving students in goal-setting and self-assessment of their progress. For example, teachers can create can-do or objective statements for each unit. As leaners progress through the unit, they check off various statements and provide evidence for how they can accomplish that particular goal. Teachers can give students sticky notes, and as students leave for the day, they write and stick on the wall "what stuck with them today."

The beginning of the school year provides an opportune time to reflect on the routines that create a successful learning environment. By using the management HLTPs that focus on implementing organizational routines, building strong relationships with students, and setting long- and short-term goals, teachers can anticipate classroom disruptions or student misunderstandings in the planning phase, reflect, and act accordingly (see Figure 5). In this way, teachers will begin the year ready to guide learners effectively through content exploration.

References

Ball, D., & Forzani, F. (2011). Teaching skillful teaching. The Effective Educator, 68(4), 40-45.

Ball, D., & Forzani, F. (2009). The work of teaching and the challenge for teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education,60(5), 497-511.

Campbell, K., & Wahl, K. H. (2015). If you can't manage them, you can't teach them. Chicago, IL: Incentive Publications.

Windschitl, M., Thompson, J., Braaten, M., Stroupe, D., Chew, C., & Wright, B. (2010). Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association: The beginner's repertoire: A core set of instructional practices for teacher preparation. Denver, CO.

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Setting the Stage for Success with High-Leverage Practices - ASCD

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Although certain aspects of teaching are natural (e.g., parents teach children and coworkers share and give advice on how to complete projects), other parts require work that is intricate and nonintuitive (Ball & Forzani, 2011; Ball & Forzani, 2009). Teaching involves a specialized knowledge of content as well as an ability to think and act simultaneously.

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contributed by Laura Reynolds

While assessment gets all the press, we often misunderstand effective feedback for learning.

When feedback is predominately negative, studies have shown that it can discourage student effort and achievement (Hattie & Timperley, 2007, Dinham). In my experience, the only thing I knew is that I hated public speaking and I would do anything possible to get out of it. As a teacher, most of the time it is easy to give encouraging, positive feedback.

However, it is in the other times that we have to dig deep to find an appropriate feedback response that will not discourage a student's learning. This is where the good teachers, the ones students remember forever in a positive light, separate themselves from the others.

A teacher has the distinct responsibility to nurture a student's learning and to provide feedback in such a manner that the student does not leave the classroom feeling defeated. Here you will find 20 ideas and techniques on how to give effective learning feedback that will leave your students with the feeling they can conquer the world.

20 Ways to Provide Effective Feedback

1. Feedback should be educative in nature.

Providing feedback means giving students an explanation of what they are doing correctly and incorrectly. However, the focus of the feedback should be based essentially on what the students is doing right. It is most productive to a student's learning when they are provided with an explanation and example as to what is accurate and inaccurate about their work.

Consider using the concept of a 'feedback sandwich' to guide your feedback: Compliment, Correct, Compliment.

2. Feedback should be given in a timely manner.

When feedback is given immediately after showing proof of learning, the student responds positively and remembers the experience about what is being learned in a confident manner. If we wait too long to give feedback, the moment is lost and the student might not connect the feedback with the action.

3. Be sensitive to the individual needs of the student.

It is vital that we take into consideration each student individually when giving feedback. Our classrooms are full of diverse learners. Some students need to be nudged to achieve at a higher level and others need to be handled very gently so as not to discourage learning and damage self-esteem. A balance between not wanting to hurt a student's feelings and providing proper encouragement is essential.

4. Ask the 4 questions.

Studies of effective teaching and learning (Dinham, 2002, 2007a; 2007b) have shown that learners want to know where they stand in regards to their work. Providing answers to the following four questions on a regular basis will help provide quality feedback. These four questions are also helpful when providing feedback to parents:

What can the student do?

What can't the student do?

How does the student's work compare with that of others?

How can the student do better?

5. Feedback should reference a skill or specific knowledge.

This is when rubrics become a useful tool (single-point rubrics, for example). A rubric is an instrument to communicate expectations for an assignment and a useful way to provide effective feedback for learning. Effective rubrics provide students with very specific information about their performance, compared to an established range of standards. For younger students, try highlighting rubric items that the student is meeting or try using a sticker chart.

6. Give feedback to keep students 'on target' for achievement.

Regular 'check-ins' with students let them know where they stand in the classroom and with you. Utilize the '4 questions' to guide your feedback.

7. Host a one-on-one conference.

Providing a one-on-one meeting with a student is one of the most effective means of providing feedback. The student will look forward to having the attention and allows the opportunity to ask necessary questions. A one-on-one conference should be generally optimistic, as this will encourage the student to look forward to the next meeting.

As with all aspects of teaching, this strategy requires good time management. Try meeting with a student while the other students are working independently. Time the meetings so that they last no longer than 10 minutes.

8. Feedback can be given verbally, non-verbally, or in written form.

Be sure to keep your frowns in check. It is imperative that we examine our non-verbal cues. Facial expressions and gestures are also means of delivering feedback. This means that when you hand back that English paper, it is best not to scowl.

9. Concentrate on one ability or skill.

It makes a far greater impact on the student when only one skill is critiqued versus the entire paper being the focus of everything that is wrong.

For example, when I taught Writer's Workshop at the elementary level, I would let students know that for that day I was going to be checking on the indentation of paragraphs within their writing. When I conferenced with a student, that was my focus instead of all the other aspects of their writing. The next day would feature a new focus.

Utilize this strategy when grading papers or tests to provide effective feedback for learning. This strategy allows you the necessary time to provide quality, written feedback. This can also include using a rotation chart for students to conference with at a deeper more meaningful level. Students will also know when it is their turn to meet with you and are more likely to bring questions of their own to the conference.

11. Educate students on how to give feedback to each other.

Model for students what appropriate feedback looks like and sounds like. As an elementary teacher, we call this 'peer conferencing.' Train students to give each other constructive feedback in a way that is positive and helpful. Encourage students to use post-it notes to record the given feedback.

12. Ask another adult to give feedback.

The principal at the school I taught at would often volunteer to grade history tests or read student's writing pieces. You can imagine how the student's quality of work increased tenfold! If the principal is too busy (and most are), invite a 'guest' teacher or student teacher to critique work.

13. Have the student take notes.

During a conference over a test, paper, or a general 'check-in,' have the student do the writing while you do the talking. The student can use a notebook to jot down notes as you provide verbal feedback.

14. Use a notebook to keep track of student progress.

Keep a section of a notebook for each student. Write daily or weekly, dated comments about each student as necessary. Keep track of good questions the student asks, behavior issues, areas for improvement, test scores, etc. Of course, this requires a lot of essential time management but when it is time to conference with a student or parent, you are ready to go.

Returning papers and tests at the beginning of class, rather than at the end, allows students to ask necessary questions and to hold a relevant discussion.

16. Use Post-It notes.

Sometimes seeing a comment written out is more effective than just hearing it aloud. During independent work time, try writing feedback comments on a post-it note. Place the note on the student's desk the feedback is meant for. One of my former students had a difficult time staying on task but he would get frustrated and embarrassed when I called him out on his inattentive behaviors in front of the class.

He would then shut down and refused to do any work because he was mad that I humiliated him. I resorted to using post-it notes to point out when he was on task or not. Although it was not the most effective use of my time, it really worked for him as a way to provide effective feedback for learning.

17. Give genuine praise.

Students are quick to figure out which teachers use meaningless praise to win approval. If you are constantly telling your students 'Good Job' or 'Nice Work' then, over time, these words become meaningless. Make a big deal out of a student's A+ on that vocabulary test. If you are thrilled with a student's recent on-task behaviors, go above and beyond with the encouragement and praise.

Make a phone call home to let mom or dad know how thrilled you are with the student's behavior. Comments and suggestions within genuine feedback should also be 'focused, practical, and based on an assessment of what the student can do and is capable of achieving' (Dinham).

18. "I noticed...."

Make an effort to notice a student's behavior or effort at a task. For example; "I noticed when you regrouped correctly in the hundreds column, you got the problem right." "I noticed you arrived on time to class this entire week." Acknowledging a student and the efforts they are making goes a long way to positively influence academic performance.

19. Provide a model or example.

Communicate with your students the purpose of an assessment and/or feedback. Demonstrate to students what you are looking for by giving them an example of what an A+ paper looks like. Provide a contrast of what a C- paper looks like. This is especially important at the upper learning levels.

20. Invite students to give you feedback.

Remember when you finished a class in college and you were given the chance to 'grade' the professor? How nice was it to finally tell the professor that the reading material was so incredibly boring without worrying about it affecting your grade? Why not let students give you feedback on how you are doing as a teacher?

Make it so that they can do it anonymously. What did they like about your class? What didn't they like? If they were teaching the class, what would they do differently? What did they learn the most from you as a teacher? If we are open to it, we will quickly learn a few things about ourselves as educators.

Remember that feedback goes both ways and as teachers, it is wise to never stop improving and honing our skills as teachers.
20 Ways To Provide Effective Feedback For Learning; A version of this post first appeared on opencolleges.edu.au;

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20 Ways To Provide Effective Feedback For Learning

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One way to provide effective feedback for learning is a 'feedback sandwich' to structure your feedback: Compliment, Correct, Compliment.

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One of the first things teachers learn in their pre-service teaching classes is the importance of establishing effective classroom routines and procedures for the middle school and high school classroom. Here is a look at 12 effective daily classroom routines to consider for your middle school ELA or high school English classroom.

According to Shana Ramin from Hello, Teacher Lady, daily agenda slides are one of her classroom's most valuable tools. She started creating daily slides a few years ago to keep track of lesson materials and make it easier for absent students to see what they missed. At first, she only posted them on Google Classroom - students could log on and access the information and materials they missed in one convenient place - but Shana quickly realized how beneficial it was to display the slides for students at the beginning of class as well. Students would walk into class knowing exactly what they needed for the day and were able to write down important reminders/dates in their planners before class even started.

With the sudden transition to distance learning due to COVID-19, Shana says that her daily agenda slides became even more of an essential classroom tool. In an end-of-year survey, many students commented explicitly on how much they appreciated having the slides as a single reference point while working from home.

How do you make your lessons meaningful? One small routine Staci from The Engaging Station started doing last year is adding a "Why" section to her agenda slides. You can see some examples here and here.

Often, we ask ourselves (as learners), "Why are we doing this?" Including a" Why" statement explains why we are doing that lesson and why it's meaningful. It's something Staci learned about in her grad class on equity and excellence with a focus on vision and mission statements.

Including a "Why" statement also helps us reflect on our lessons and understand why we are teaching certain content and skills. Through this lens and introspection, we can also see who we are centering in our lessons and who we are excluding. Discussing the "Why" with students can be incredibly powerful to hear their perspectives on what should be included in our curriculum as well.

One of Christina's ( The Daring English Teacher) favorite classroom routines is the use of a daily bell-ringer activity. By starting every single class period with a bell-ringer, my students quickly get into the habit of starting their work at the start of class. It is one of the classroom routines that she establishes at the beginning of the school year. Plus, I use this time to take and submit attendance and answer student questions.

In Christina's classroom, as her students are completing their bell ringer work, she walks around and stamps each students' paper to mark their work as complete. This routine allows her to assess students' understanding of the topic, and it also gives her one-on-one time with each student every single class period. This bell ringer routine helps her build strong relationships with my students. You can read more about this strategy in this blog post.

When it comes to assigning a bell-ringer in the secondary ELA classroom, the possibilities are endless. Christina likes to assign a variety of bell-ringer activities to help students build their skills. For example, when students work on sentence combining bell-ringers, they improve their writing skills. Another effective bell-ringer strategy is to have students work on literature-related bell ringers that are related to your lesson.

When teachers start their careers, they're taught to focus on classroom management and content. What my friend Amanda from Mud and Ink Teaching has found, however, is that strong routines at the beginning and end of class set up a classroom environment that prevents the kinds of behaviors that need to be "managed" and create space for students to learn more during the class period.

To open class, Amanda uses a simple bell work routine that is flexible for the time of year and type of unit that your class is working on. Bell work can consist of vocabulary study, watching and reacting to YouTube videos, listening to and reacting to a poem, or any other type of quick content that students can independently work on. That's the key: independence. In Amanda's classroom, the first 5-7 minutes are silent and focused on the work so that she can do some key things: take attendance, check-in with a student in the hallway, or even send off a quick email about a situation from the previous class period. Training students at the beginning of the year to do this work instead of crowd around the teacher desk or take that entire time to get settled down takes work, but Amanda has a blog post that's got you covered here.

To close the period, a fancy routine isn't required, but structurally, there needs to be something in place that signals closing. Amanda has two lines that she says with her kids at the end of the period: "It's time to pack up" and "Have a great day!". The first command about packing up is the ONLY point at which students can start with that zipper sound - beforehand is an oh no no! You might try using a wireless doorbell to signal when it's time to pack up or using a favorite catch-phrase that the kids say together at the end of the period. What's important is that every class period closes together rather than simply running endlessly into the bell.

Between interruptions, bad breaks, multi-tasking, and general challenges that come with teaching every day, it's easy to lose track of time during a lesson. That's why Jenna Copper from @drjennacopper loves using a simple classroom timer. A classroom timer can be a tool to create urgency for your students on a specific task (hence minimizing lag and downtime), but most of all, it's a tool to help you keep track of time. It's easy to lose your sense of time when students are working on a task and you are answering questions or helping students one on one.

It's a great way to "budget" the time in the classroom. Your timer can be a physical timer or a digital one. I like to project my timer on the Smart Board so we all can see the timer at once. You can find timers on YouTube or www.online-stopwatch.com. Keep in mind, they aren't perfect. If you have anything else to project on the Smart Board, you must switch back and forth between the screens, and YouTube has some annoying ads you'll need to filter.

If you'd like more information on workarounds and an even simpler solution, check out her blog post here.

Co-creating a classroom community where everyone feels seen, valued, and primed to engage in high-quality lessons is critical to the success of secondary ELA classrooms. Students have many emotions and life circumstances that they are balancing, and sometimes need a window to be celebrated and to share concerns. Each year, Tanesha from Love Tanesha, prioritizes developing and maintaining relationships with quick class meetings. These meetings provide opportunities for students to give feedback on lessons, share important information, and celebrate one another.

Given the often tight class structure of the ELA classroom, Tanesha leverages surveys ( example) via Google classroom that students have time to complete at the end of each lesson. The survey provides space for students to share if they need a check-in, feedback they have about the class, and/or a shout-out for a teammate. Tanesha starts the meeting with shout-outs, and rotates between bringing a feedback point to the group and highlighting trends in work. Tanesha prioritizes maintaining a quick class meeting throughout the year so that students always have a way of advocating for their needs.

You may have heard of Restorative Justice and even tried implementing some or all of its practices in your school or class. Nurturing relationships is an important aspect of Restorative Justice, and one that Staci over at Donut Lovin' Teacher says is an important routine for any classroom. She does this 1-2 times per week through Proactive Circles. In her class, they refer to them as Community Circles though she's also heard similar structures called Council or Talking Circles.

The purpose of these circles is to build relationships with and among students while honoring experiences and perspectives. This circle time (and yes, you actually need to sit in a circle) can be a quick twenty minutes, or a full hour class period. This time can be used for 'get to know you' activities and weekly check-ins surrounding student successes or needs. It can be used to share ideas and concerns about academic and social needs, or as a way to dive into topics around race and privilege. It can even be the space to address and process events impacting the community. When you set these structures up for your students, you won't have to ask yourself how or when to talk about the hard topics; you'll already have a space for students to share what they are experiencing safely.

You can read more about how Staci structures her proactive Community Circle time with students and grab some posters to set up the intentions of this time. If you're looking to learn more about Restorative Justice, she recommends you experience it for yourself with her friend David over at Amplify RJ.

Ashley Bible at Building Book Love used to think peer review days were a waste of time. Though students were reading and commenting on each other's essays, their writing showed no real improvement. Desperate for a solution, Ashley completely revamped her peer review process and now vows to never grade another essay until students have completed these game-changing steps. You can read about the essay routine here: 5 Essay Grading Tips for Grading Essays Faster and More Efficiently and grab the FREE and editable peer review stations here: Peer Review Stations.

Once you find a peer review or self-evaluation essay process that actually works, it will be a routine that you will want to implement in your ELA classroom for the rest of your career!

Teaching writing is challenging, but with the right structure and routines, it can be much more manageable for both teachers and students. For Abby at Write on With Miss G, embracing the writing workshop model was a game-changer in her classroom. Writing workshop is a student-centered model of instruction that is structured through mini-lessons, modeling, workshop time, and peer learning.

Here's what it looks like in Abby's classroom:

1. Mini-Lesson: First, the teacher delivers a targeted mini-lesson on a skill or part of the writing process. This may involve mentor texts and/or modeling a technique.

2. Workshop: After the mini-lesson, the teacher gives students time to write. Ideally, students should apply what they have just learned to their writing. During this writing workshop time, the teacher confers with students.

3. Exit Ticket/Sharing: At the end of the writing workshop, the teacher checks in with each student through an exit ticket and/or gives students time to briefly share their successes or questions with a peer or the whole class. Abby loves to use Google Classroom questions for the "exit ticket" component.

Because peer learning is an important part of the workshop model, Abby also loves to incorporate multiple opportunities for peer review, such as peer feedback speed dating.

For more information on how Abby teaches writing with Google Classroom, check out her blog post here.

Emily Aierstok of Read it. Write it. Learn it. uses standards-based reflection portfolios all year long to help solidify student learning. As ELA teachers with so much content to cover, we don't often have time for students to reflect on their learning in our classrooms; however, reflection and metacognitive skills have been proven to be one of the most effective learning techniques we can implement to solidify student learning. The research of John Hattie revealed that the effect size for teaching metacognitive strategies is 0.69, making it one of the best teaching strategies.

Emily uses standards-based portfolios to give students the tools they need to reflect on (and organize!) their work. Work is filed in binder portfolios by standard. For example, Emily has her 7th grade students organize their work into one of six sections: writing arguments, writing informative essays, writing research, writing narratives, reading literature, and reading informational texts. More specific standards are listed on cover pages for each section.

Emily does not cover every standard every quarter. For example, the focus first quarter might be informative writing, so students are only filing their work in that section. They might be reading both literature and informative texts connected to their writing, so they would file reading responses in those sections.

At the end of each quarter, students add the work evidence to "prove" their learning. Looking back on their work, students reflect on their learning and set goals for the next quarter. Students become more intentional and aware of their own learning. Learn more about Student Reflection Portfolios here.

A routine my secondary students hold me to is reading aloud to them every Friday. Earlier in the week, students will question what I'm reading to them for First Chapter Friday. Not only does this routine show students new books and authors, but it also builds relationships in my classroom.

You can download my FCF starter kit for free, and in it, you'll find cards for students to suggest books. As we continue to experiment with different books, authors, and genres, students show me more of themselves as readers. This routine accomplishes more than sharing stories. Students look forward to this routine, to growing with their teacher as readers.

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12 Classroom Routines to Try in the Secondary ELA Classroom

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One of the first things teachers learn in their pre-service teaching classes is the importance of establishing effective classroom routines and procedures for the middle school and high school classroom. Here is a look at 12 effective daily classroom routines to consider for your middle school ELA or high school English classroom.

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As an edtech company, Edmentum certainly believes in the promise of online solutions to improve student outcomes and empower teachers with additional tools to provide effective, individualized instruction. However, educational technology is an incredibly young field, and everyone - educators, developers, and students alike - is still learning how best to use these tools. A lot of brain power is being dedicated to answering these complex questions. One such effort comes from the Marzano Research Laboratory (MRL), whose experts conducted A Study of Best Practices in Edmentum Online Solutions, looking at Edmentum's online solutions in various settings to evaluate the relationship between student learning and effective pedagogical practices with respect to the use of online instruction.

The MRL study considered Edmentum solutions being used in three instructional settings - purely virtual, a blended learning model, and to supplement instruction in a classroom - for the purpose of either original credit, credit recovery, intervention, or Advanced Placement® instruction. The study identified 13 best practices across three dimensions of teacher behaviors and strategies which are correlated to significantly higher levels of student achievement in an online learning environment. Adopting these practices can help teachers effectively engage with their students in an online or blended environment, and get the most out of online tools. Here, we will take a close look at all 13 best practices identified in the study, along with insights into how each can be implemented and common challenges associated with them.
Marzano Dimension One: Strategies involving routine events 1. Communicating course/assignment rules and procedures
Clarifying your expectations is key to a smooth-running classroom, whether it's traditional or virtual. Think about it: if you didn't know to file your income tax return on April 15, wouldn't you be late every time? The concept is even more applicable to children. If they don't know what the rules are, they probably won't follow them.

Mastery of classroom procedures is an academic skill like any other - and it's necessary for student success throughout the school year. Ambiguity can lead to confusion amongst students as to what is expected of them, which in turns makes it that much more difficult for them to actually meet those expectations. Additionally, if students do willfully break guidelines, it is in your best interest to be able to easily prove they were aware of the expectations in place. The same need for clarification also exists for specific exercises and assignments. How can you expect work that meets your standards if your students don't know what is being expected of them? Setting out well-defined expectations and making sure that all of your students are aware of them is a key step to seeing your students achieve the grades they are capable of.

Implementation Tips: Many teachers dedicate the entire first week of school to instructing students in how they want the classroom to operate-including everything from procedures for sharpening pencils to turning in assignments. This same kind of investment of time needs to be made before any exercise or project is given to students as well. Spend an amount of time proportionate to the size of the assignment reviewing expectations. For large or multipart exercises, break up the expectations into manageable chunks and processes based on your students' ages and level of comprehension.

As always, when laying out expectations for the classroom or an assignment, be sure to use best practices in teaching by discussing all learning modalities. If you're covering a pencil-sharpening procedure, actually have the children perform the action. Make written explanations that can both go home to parents and be referenced by the students in their notebooks or folders. Finally, plaster your walls with every rule and procedure that you deem necessary for the success of the class. In an online or virtual environment, make sure you are taking advantage of all the teacher-student communication tools at your disposal. Most of these systems have messaging functionality, individual assignment directions and description features, and places for students to take notes for reference. Covering all of these bases should eliminate "I didn't know that" from your classroom vocabulary.
2. Providing students with all materials needed to complete an assignment
Defining clear classroom and assignment expectations and procedures is only half the battle in ensuring your students have the tools they need to be successful in the classroom. It is just as important to provide your students with the actual materials they need to accomplish the goals you set out. For all classroom activities and assignments, make sure the necessary materials are readily available and easy to access. Think of it this way: you buy a kit to build a wooden picnic table in your backyard. All of the wood is pre-cut, and it even comes with the nails, bolts, and nuts that you will need. However, you don't have access to a hammer or a wrench. You're not going to get very far in building your picnic table.

Implementation Tips: There are many ways to make sure materials are accessible to your students. The best strategies to use in your classroom can largely be determined based on how extensively you use technology. If you are relying on paper for most of your classroom activities, keep a bank of file folders in an organizational rack that are clearly labeled by assignment. As students work through an assignment, all they have to do is go to the correct folder to access what they need. This method also makes it easier for students who missed a class or two to get their make-up work without needing to interrupt class.

If your class relies more on technology, there are plenty of free tools you can use to distribute materials. Consider creating a classroom website where things can be posted and downloaded - try Weebly for Education for free and easy-to-use templates. Another option is to start a folder system, similar to the physical method discussed above, on Google Drive. Or, you can write a post on your classroom blog for each assignment that provides directions and links to any materials for downloading.

Biggest Challenges: Timing can be an issue if you implement physical or web-based systems like the ones discussed above to distribute assignment materials. If you release everything at the beginning of a unit or assignment, there's nothing stopping your high-performing students from working ahead and then becoming bored when they finish. However, if you release materials on a certain schedule, you will likely frustrate students whose timetable doesn't match up with yours. The best solution is to release materials on a schedule, but work to align your timetable to the pace the majority of your class is working at. Be sure to also set aside some time for individualized work with those students who are struggling or in need of enrichment.

Another common problem in implementing this best practice is related to paper-based classroom, and is as old as education itself: the dreaded words, "I lost it." There will always be students for whom organization is a challenge. You can't make unlimited copies of materials without going over budget, and you don't have unlimited time to dedicate to these students. So, make a point of providing instruction on organizational skills early in the year (during the time dedicated to reviewing expectations from tip #1), and then continue to touch on those ideas throughout the school year.

3. Clearly presenting the goal/objective for each assignment
Although there's always room for creativity and experimentation in education, a lesson should never be delivered with an overall "let's see where this goes" approach. Every instructional day, each task should have a clear goal associated with it. The clarity of these goals is key to this tip. Not only do you need to understand the goal each task is working toward, but so do your students. Just like if you were on a field trip, you wouldn't want to leave with a bus full of students and not know where your destination will be.

Implementation Tips: Many schools and districts mandate that teachers post the day's learning goals and objectives somewhere on their classroom whiteboard. However, they often don't say anything about teachers having to use age-appropriate language in those goals or even having to discuss them with their students. This approach is structurally flawed because it doesn't take the students into account.

Instead, each day should start with a frank and age-appropriate discussion of what you hope your students will take away from the day's lesson, what successful completion of the lesson looks like, and what students can expect if they are struggling. When you transition to a new task, even if it's under the same goal, remind your students of why they're doing the work. This is not to say that you shouldn't use your board to post goals; visuals can serve as a great reminder throughout the lesson. Simply be sure to write the goals in language that can be easily understood by all of your students.

Biggest Challenges: It will come as no surprise to any teacher to hear that learners can have short attention spans. If you are in the middle of a multi-day lesson with the same goal or objective, students can feel as if they aren't making any progress, or they may simply lose sight of the goal and become disengaged. If you find yourself in this position, try to break up your overall goal into smaller parts that are easy to follow. Take time to explain the overall goal, but focus most of your attention on covering how the smaller goals fit into the larger objective. This practice will help your students feel invested in what's going on in the classroom every day.
4. Offering encouragement and positive feedback to students
Positive reinforcement is key to instilling a sense of confidence, self-worth, and motivation in children, but for some students those kind of interactions are hard to come by in their lives outside of school. This fact makes it that much more critical that the classroom always be a safe and encouraging environment for students. Without any encouraging words, a learner is likely to shut down from their entire educational experience. By using positive feedback, teachers can be the oasis in the desert for their students. This is not to say expectations should be lowered simply to ensure students will be successful. Instead, maintain high standards for your students and challenge them to achieve difficult goals, but encourage them the whole way. When a student meets a standard or goal, celebrate the accomplishment with them and share it with their parents or caregivers. On the other hand, when a student is struggling with an objective, focus on those aspects where they are making progress to encourage them to persevere.

Implementation Tips: The best thing about working to offer encouragement and positive feedback to your students is that it does not need to take a lot of class time. Be effusive with your verbal praise. The goal should be five positive comments for every piece of negative feedback for each learner. Offering feedback through quick notes on assignments can also go a long way. Although it is more time-consuming, don't be afraid to direct your positive feedback somewhere other than the student, such as to their parents or guardians. Not only will an encouraging call or email home help to build a better relationship with your student's caregivers, but you are also likely to be surprised by how much the student appreciates it.

Also keep in mind that there is no bad time to offer encouragement and positive feedback. It will likely be most impactful immediately after a student experiences a success, but if you miss the exact moment, acknowledging their success at a later time will still be appreciated. You can even set aside dedicated class time to recognize learners who made big progress or breakthroughs during the day's lesson. However, it's important to remember that some students can be shy about receiving praise in front of others; consider whether or not each student will appreciate being singled out before doing so.

Biggest Challenges: Teaching is a demanding job, and on days when your classroom is particularly challenging, remembering to be positive at a 5:1 ratio can be difficult. Just remember that for as much good as some positive feedback can do for your students, it can also help lift your own mood and pull you through a hard day.
5. Allowing students to keep track of their learning progress
Ownership of learning is key to student achievement. Students need to feel invested in their progress in order to thrive academically. All students should know where they stand in your class and with the curriculum at all times. They should be able to see the scoreboard so they know when to feel proud about keeping up or when to step it up to avoid falling behind.

Implementation Tips: Remember the old days when the only way to know where you stood in your bank account was to actually reconcile the checkbook? If you weren't diligent about balancing, you had no idea how much money you had. Now, it's as simple as logging in to your bank's website. Not allowing students constant access to their progress data has the same effect. They have no idea where they stand, so they can't take the appropriate steps for the desired outcome. When should students have insight into their progress?-24/7.

Thankfully, most schools and districts employ an online learning management system (LMS) where students can log in to keep track of their grades. If your school does not have a system like this, make it a point to update students by paper as often as possible. Another option is regular, quick conferences with your students to talk about their progress. Not only does this practice keep them informed, but it also gives you an opportunity to provide the positive feedback recommended in tip #4.

Biggest Challenges: The accuracy of classroom data often comes down to one factor: the speed at which the teacher can grade incoming work. If you're falling behind in grading, students cannot be kept up to date on their progress. Every teacher will get a little behind from time to time, but there are things you can do to help stay caught up. One tip is to use as much automation in your classroom as possible, either with online assignments or through "clicker" programs. Another practice is to employ lots of rubrics. They make grading easier and set clear goals for learner success.
6. Accessibility to students via electronic communication as well as face-to-face
The days of teachers simply lecturing at the front of the classroom are gone. Teachers and students need to collaborate in many different ways in order to advance their common goals. Oftentimes, that collaboration doesn't end with the last bell of the school day. In today's connected world, the key is to find a balance between being easily accessible to your students to answer their questions and provide help without smothering your own productivity and free time.

Implementation Tips: First, any communication between you and your students must be recorded in some manner that is easily accessible and shareable for accountability purposes. Unfortunately, we live in a time where some educators have abused their authority in a variety of ways. You want to be able to easily prove that all of your interactions are above board. That being said, most electronic communication provides a record like this, even texting with a service like Google Voice. To be most helpful to your students, it's also important to make yourself available in a manner that they will be most likely to take advantage of, which may mean via text or on social networks. Be sure to implement any initiative like this in a manner that aligns with your district's policies.

No matter what communication strategy you choose, it's important to stick to a consistent schedule. Make sure your schedule allows time for your personal life outside of school. To encourage face-to-face communication with your students, let them know what time you arrive at and leave school, and invite them to visit before or after the school day. Then, depending on your own needs and your students', consider making yourself available electronically at a certain time (preferably during homework time) every night. You can still watch TV or participate in any other off-duty pursuit-just have your phone or computer handy. Also, remember that you are the one who gets to decide whether something is urgent or can wait until tomorrow. For some students, everything feels urgent. Set appropriate boundaries, and give yourself permission to give important personal matters priority.

Biggest Challenges: The dedication teachers have to their students is what makes them great at their jobs, but it can also be taken too far. Be sure to set aside time for yourself, when you are not available to communicate with your students. Not only does this decrease burnout, but it also helps ensure that appropriate boundaries between you and your students are maintained. There's nothing wrong with building rapport and personal relationships with your students, but it's important to model appropriate communication and save those discussions for suitable times in the classroom.
Marzano Dimension Two: Strategies enacted on the spot 7. Monitoring student work
Without an accurate view of student progress, effective classroom decision making is very challenging. Are your learners ready to move to the next unit? Who is need of remediation? Who would benefit from enrichment activities? Assessments, both formative and summative, are one good way of monitoring your students' development. The goal of monitoring student work is to find out how much progress your students have made in relation to the initial goals you set. Organizing that progress into a four- or five-point scale can help you and your students see the headway that has been made.

Implementation Tips: There are many ways to assess learning without adding to your grading pile. Informal assessment needs to occur regularly during every lesson. Although this type of monitoring usually comes in the form of discussion and circulating the room while your students are working, there are plenty of other informal strategies, like exit tickets and short quizzes, that you can leverage. Familiarize yourself with these strategies, make regular use of them in your classroom, and watch the status of your class become increasingly clear.

Empowering your learners to keep portfolios of completed work and projects also helps engage them in their own progress. This strategy gives your students a broad and tangible overview of their progress throughout the year, which can serve as a powerful motivator. It also gives you evidence of their learning to share during parent conferences and evaluations. In addition, most schools use some sort of online LMS to share grades with students and parents virtually. Try to keep your online gradebook as up to date as possible and leave comments where you can to offer additional insight. Most online curriculum, whether used for enrichment, remediation, or assessment, will have significant reporting capabilities as well.

Biggest Challenges: Teachers tend to put a lot of pressure on themselves when it comes to grading, thinking that it's the only way to get an accurate assessment of student progress. If the grading pile is too high, some teachers forego activities that could be helpful in informing instruction. Keep in mind that effective progress monitoring need not involve much grading-or any at all.
8. Knowing every student by name and being able to recognize them outside of the online environment
Learning your students' names might seem like common sense, but you won't believe how many teachers are unable to call students by name a month, two months, or even several months after the first day of school. There are various reasons for this, but the bottom line is that your ability to form a connection with those students whose names you don't know is severely inhibited. Especially for students with difficult home lives, forming this connection can be critical to their academic success.

Implementation Tips: Students hate seating charts, especially on the first day of school. However, a great way to learn names is to arrange your students in alphabetical order-by first name. Taking attendance every day at the beginning of the school year also gives you added practice in name and face recognition. Don't move students from those seats until you have everyone memorized! Additionally, make sure your school takes advantage of any of the tricks your LMS has to offer, like showing the previous year's school pictures of your students. Print them out and quiz yourself if you have to. In some systems, you can even arrange seating charts using student pictures.

When it comes to name recognition, teachers tend to have the bulk of the responsibility, but it's also important for other personnel in the school to be acquainted with as many students as possible. This can be a challenge, since principals, media and technology staff, and other support staff will be exposed to more students at the school than teachers but will spend significantly less time with them. However, hearing something positive from a principal in the hall can make a student's day-especially if he or she is at-risk.

Biggest Challenges: Learning names is not an easy task. As a teacher, you might have as many as 150-200 students. Other staff might see more than a thousand. Adding to the sometimes impersonal approach of certain blended learning strategies, screen time seems to be increasing the amount of time it takes to learn names. However, learning your students' names might be the most important part of your job in the first couple of weeks of the school year. It lays the groundwork for the rapport you hope to build as you move through the early part of the year.
9. Allowing students to progress through assignments at their own pace
We all know what it feels like to fall behind in a task or project. We also know what it's like to be faster or more accomplished at something than our peers. In both cases, the feeling can be awkward and distracting. Now, think about how students, who are just starting to find themselves and get to know their talents, feel in one of those situations. Allowing students to progress through curriculum at their own pace helps them get to know their own strength and weaknesses, which builds their sense of confidence as well as a willingness to persevere.

Implementation Tips: Small group instruction is a go-to strategy to differentiate pace. This either means grouping students of similar abilities or creating groups of mixed-ability levels so that high-achieving students can help struggling learners move along in the curriculum. In many situations, small group instruction like this can be very effective. Another strategy to consider is using online or computer-based curriculum to supplement instruction. With an adaptive platform, each student can receive instruction in the appropriate areas and at the appropriate speed for their skill level. However, limited resources and availability of class time can be barriers to utilizing online solutions.

It's also important to not give students too much freedom over their own instruction and pace of learning; it's simply too disruptive to the curriculum. However, accommodating self-paced learning over the course of single assignments or class periods can help students take ownership of their learning. Just be sure to have a plan in place to keep fast-working students busy while the rest of the class finishes the activity.

Formative assessment is also key to effectively using self-paced methods. Out of all the assessment practices, formative assessment has the greatest effect on student learning outcomes. It needs to be timely and reflective. You always want to know when a student has fallen too far back or is working too far ahead. Formative need not mean formal. Informal assessment is often the best practice here.

Biggest Challenges: Pacing guides are becoming more prevalent as class time is further compressed by testing and other mandates. Teachers simply need to make sure that everything in their curriculum is covered. This can make differentiation of pace a challenge, but it should still be facilitated whenever possible.

Additionally, the challenge of keeping fast-working students engaged will always be an issue. Spend a great deal of time brainstorming enrichment activities to give to these students before embarking on a self-paced assignment.
10. Providing help to understand and practice new knowledge
This is why teachers teach-to help students acquire and master new knowledge. It's perhaps the most fundamental part of the job. That being said, it might also be the most complicated. Who do you help? When do you help them? How? Even veteran teachers struggle with these questions. And there is no shortage of pedagogies to try to make sense of these practices.

Implementation Tips: Most teachers prefer some sort of gradual release model, variations on "I do, we do, you do." These kind of models are where pacing and formative assessment take precedence. There is, of course, the process of delivering a lecture to present new knowledge and then using homework to help students practice. However, most forward-thinking teachers want to get away from that. There are also approaches that are completely different, like flipped learning. In a flipped classroom, students acquire new knowledge at home using videos and content available online or made by the teacher. Then, they come to class in order to practice those skills and receive help from the teacher. The theory is that class time is used for what's important-practice-rather than rote memorization.

In theory, if curriculum is paced correctly and mastery has been achieved by all students in your class before moving on, no one should need help with the next topic. Of course, that's rarely the case. And that's why it's important to perform some sort of formative assessment or pretest before each major topic or unit, with more informal assessments coming at the beginning and end of each lesson. You should also keep the pulse of your class during a lesson. It may sound like a lot of work, but a deep understanding of informal formative assessment strategies is essential to helping students grasp new material.

Biggest Challenges: The first barrier to effective teaching of new knowledge is simply time. Benchmarks have to be met. Tests have to be prepared for. A lot of administrative minutiae cut into class time. Many times, the students who are struggling the most need to be moved along for the sake of the rest of the class. The other barrier to this practice is a question of differentiation. How do you know where everyone is? Who needs more time? Who's working ahead, and how far? In many classrooms, small groups, formative assessment, and online learning tools can solve these challenges.wledge. It's perhaps the most fundamental part of the job. That being said, it might also be the most complicated. Who do you help? When do you help them? How? Even veteran teachers struggle with these questions. And there is no shortage of pedagogies to try to make sense of these practices.
11. Allowing students to ask questions during online courses/assignments
A teacher's dream class is full of bright, inquisitive minds eager to explore all of the knowledge this world has to offer. Hands always go up. Questions are always thoughtful and on point. The natural conclusion to draw from this is that all teachers would be more than happy to take any question at any time during a lesson in an effort to generate that sort of atmosphere in their classroom. However, in an effort to stay on schedule and maintain hard-won order in the classroom, it's typically not the case. The problem with this reality is that a classroom where questions are discouraged is one where young learners will struggle to stay engage. So, to hold and deepen students' interest in all the topics you cover, make sure that your classroom is one where all questions are consistently encouraged and embraced.

Implementation Tips: There are a variety of ways to encourage students to develop questions that will help the whole class progress through the lesson without completely overtaking class time. First, make your expectations clear. State that questions are welcome at almost any time during the class, but ask that no one interrupt while someone else is speaking and that questions only address the topic at hand. Make sure that these policies are available and easily visible as a reminder to your learners. Second, you should act as a model for your students of best practices for asking questions throughout the year. When your students are speaking, ask questions that drive the conversation forward. Always wait for them to finish a thought before launching in with your questions. And, gently correct bad questioning technique whenever you see it.

Remember that many students are shy about asking questions or speaking in class. Instead of forcefully calling on them, introduce some randomness into the procedure by drawing cards or Popsicle sticks with each student's name on them. You can also use Post-it notes and a poster to let students leave a question or comment about the day's lesson anonymously as they exit the room. Another idea that makes use of technology is the idea of backchanneling. Backchanneling is similar to a discussion board, but it happens online in real time. In the classroom, students can engage in a backchannel chat with their devices while a passive activity, like a lecture or video, is taking place. Students love an opportunity to use their devices, and this mode of communication can feel less intimidating to your more reserved learners.

Biggest Challenges: In addition to the reluctance of some students to speak in class, you can also encounter the opposite side of the spectrum-those students who are all too enthusiastic for any chance to make their voice heard, whether or not it relates to the topic at hand. Again, this is a situation where modeling and timely correction can be effective. And just because you encourage questions doesn't mean you need to receive any and all that your students pose. On the other hand, if you are struggling to get your students to ask any questions at all, quick, informal assessments can help you figure out if it is because the content is too easy for your learners to stay engaged, or because it's over their heads.
12. Treating all students equally
This practice may sound completely obvious, but in truth, it might be the most difficult of all to fully and successfully implement because it goes against basic human nature. Even the most patient and kind teacher may take a sigh of relief when certain students are absent. Others find it difficult to call on everyone in the class equally, skipping some students for a variety of reasons. And some teachers tend to give extra opportunities to the same students repeatedly because they have demonstrated that they can handle them.

Habits like this are incredibly easy to fall into - and all teachers do to some extent at some point or another. They just seem to make days go more smoothly. But for the betterment of every student, you need to be conscious of them, and catch yourself when you feel that you are slipping into such habits.

Implementation Tips: There are a variety of strategies to make sure that all of your students receive equal attention in class. Most have to do with methods to randomly select students, whether by drawing names out of a hat, using popsicle sticks, or some other creative strategy. It's important to establish this precedent early in the school year so that everyone knows they can't hide from your attention. Another tactic is to make a point of having short conferences with each of your students periodically throughout the school year. This is a good way to reconnect with students who perhaps haven't received as much attention recently.

In a blended learning environment, it's actually easier to connect with every student because of the differentiation capabilities of online programs and the fact that there are fewer whole-group exercises. More small-group and individual work means more time for teachers to circulate the room (just make sure you circulate the entire room!). It's also easier to monitor your students' work, which means there are more opportunities to notice something worth bringing up.

Biggest Challenges: Some students thrive on attention-usually with negative consequences. The natural tendency is to reduce negative behaviors by denying them that attention, so these students may rarely be called on in discussions. While this can make for a quieter classroom, these students, who are probably masking social and emotional difficulties, are denied opportunities to progress. Other students may be overlooked simply because they are extremely reserved; they work hard to avoid attention, and when surrounded by a room full of louder, more outgoing students, they succeed. Overcome these challenges by taking time to engage one-on-one with all of your students, to get to know them on a personal level and understand the ways that they tend to interact.
Marzano Dimension: Strategies addressing content
13. Adding external resources to assignments aligned to local objectives

There is no doubt that the scope of education has expanded in the past decade or so. In decades past, curriculum was centered on a textbook, and little thought was given to providing students with real-world experiences. Now, the focus has shifted to immersive educational experiences that better reflect what students will see once they leave school. Part of this shift involves encouraging students to take advantage of the vast amount of information now at their fingertips thanks to the internet. Teachers must embrace their students' ability to extend their own learning, and actively make it a part of their curriculum by having students find and utilize external resources.

Implementation Tips: It is to both your own and your students' benefit for some filtering to occur when students are seeking outside resources for assignments and projects. If possible, provide instruction not only in the curriculum but also in information gathering relative to the subject area your students are working on. Provide acceptable online options for students to consult in the course of their work by using a class website, blog, or other link-sharing system. This isn't censorship; it's a way to optimize the information-gathering process for your students and teach them about appropriate online research methods.

Students, particularly those in online learning settings, also need opportunities to unplug. Pointing out the local real-world resources available - like museums and libraries - to further their studies is a great way to get students to venture out into the community. Consider offering extra credit or extra time to complete assignments in order to motivate your students to engage with the offline world. This also teaches students how to effectively research and use resources outside of the structured environment of the classroom, which is a highly valuable "real world" skill.

Biggest Challenges: Some resources, particularly online ones, simply aren't reliable enough to be consulted in an academic situation. A good use of time early in the school year might be to instruct students on how to discern reliable information and resources for particular subject areas from subpar ones to avoid students forming poor research habits.

Interested in hearing more about the Marzano Research Lab's findings regarding online teaching best practices? Check out how Marzano Research peer-reviewed a research project that we conducted for our classroom practice and assessment program, Study Island!

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The Marzano Research Lab conducted A Study of Best Practices in Edmentum Online Solutions, looking at Edmentum's online solutions in various settings to evaluate the relationship between student learning and effective pedagogical practices with respect to the use of online instruction.

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We teachers are always looking to innovate, so, yes, it’s essential that we try new things to add to our pedagogical bag of tricks. But it’s important to focus on purpose and intentionality -- and not on quantity. So what really matters more than “always trying something new” is the reason behind why we do what we do.

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6 Instructional Strategies That Challenge And Support Students

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A teaching strategy is anything the teacher does to help students learn. From reciprocal teaching to clarity, here are 6 to get started.

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These five strategies can help ensure that students feel they belong in your classroom.

©Ikon Images/Trina Dalziel

About a year ago, I received a text in the middle of the teaching day from the mother of a student I had taught eight years earlier as a second grader. She thanked me for always being there for her son, who had come out as gay to their family the night before. She shared that her son-now a senior in high school-mentioned me in their conversation and said I had taught him that all people have equal value in the world, a lesson that helped him face the truth of who he was.

Early elementary teachers rarely see the seeds we try to plant in our young students come to fruition, but we always hope they will grow into the people we imagine they can be. For the last 16 years, I've taught in an inclusion classroom where many students have learning differences that can pose a challenge to connecting with others. I've learned that if students feel anxious socially, they will not be open to taking academic risks, so building a culture of belonging has become my greatest priority. It is important to clarify that when I say "belonging," I am not talking about "fitting in"-students' individuality and uniqueness should always be valued. Belonging in the classroom means ensuring that all students feel welcomed, comfortable, and part of the school family.

Here are five simple ways I've found with which I can convince every student that he or she was meant to be in my classroom:

1. Shine a light on each student. Students often look to their teacher for a cue on how to handle social situations. In learning, we simply call this modeling. When working with students who have learning differences, I've learned it's important to model that every child has something special about him or her that we can celebrate. I had a student who ate alone every day the year before she joined my class. Her behaviors set her apart, and other students naturally started avoiding her. When she became my student, my co-teacher, my aide, and I made an intentional effort to laugh with her and praise her around her classmates. Soon, my students began to see her in a different light, and she never ate alone again. Help your students see each other through your eyes, so they can see each other's greatness.

2. Foster student identity building. Five times per year, I allow my students to do genius hour or passion projects of their choosing. I require only a two-paragraph written or typed piece to ground the work in English language arts. For students, these projects become very personal and a way to share more about who they are with their classmates, while boosting their public speaking skills. I've had students present about their rare medical conditions that they were previously afraid to talk about. Other students have explored their family heritage or activities they participate in, like karate or dance. In every case, students are empowered by their interests and passions, and they regularly say they enjoyed the learning that took place-about themselves and each other.

3. Always leave one desk empty. Every year, I have had at least one new student join us halfway through the school year. Chances are, for any 8-year-old going through a midyear move, it is one of the most difficult times they will ever endure. Seeing an empty desk when they arrive signals that our class has been waiting for them all year-and reminds other students throughout the year that our class could grow and change at any time. I also have my students make and hand out cards for the new student to welcome him or her upon arrival. Teachers have the power to send the message that they've been inconvenienced or the message that they're excited and happy for a new student to join the class.

4. Make sure that each child feels chosen. Several times a year, I ask my students to anonymously write down the names of three students they want to sit with or work with-ranked in order of preference. I go over the results to see who is being selected and who is not. With that knowledge, I seek out students who aren't chosen and create opportunities for them to build relationships with their peers. I may call on one of them and say, "Choose anyone you want to walk this to the office," for example, to help improve their social equity in the eyes of their peers. Other times, I will assign these students specific partners who will help them by modeling good social behaviors.

5. Weave social and emotional practices throughout the day. Toward the end of a school year, I start allowing students to choose their partners for activities, but I change up the traditional classroom social dynamics by letting the students who are typically not chosen to be the choosers. Knowing how this could easily backfire, I remind students of the proper and improper ways to react if the person who chooses them wasn't who they had in mind by stating, "When someone chooses you, they are giving you a gift-the gift is saying, out of all the people in the class, I choose you." This simple exercise takes only about three minutes, but it builds an important social and emotional foundation that teaches students to appreciate each other.

We can never take for granted the importance of our students feeling they belong. In a world that does not yet fully welcome everyone, schools can reinforce existing divisions or provide students a safe community that feels like a second home. That former second-grade student of mine went on to attend the prom with his boyfriend in our very conservative town and initiated a town-wide pride campaign. I have never felt more proud of my impact as a teacher. As educators, we really can help change the world, one child at a time.

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Every Student Matters: Cultivating Belonging in the Classroom

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These five strategies can make a big difference in ensuring that students feel they belong in your classroom.

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Can you think of a time you found yourself somewhere new and were given a sign that people like you didn't belong there? Walked into a restroom holding your infant and there was no changing table? Noticed the street signs were in a language you didn't know? Realized you were the only Black person there? Needed a ramp and there were only stairs? Signs like these likely triggered a feeling you should leave and never go back.

But what if you have to go back? What if you are 7 years old, and it's not a fleeting, one-time experience, but it happens every day at your school. In your classroom. With your teachers and classmates. And it's not one signal; it's nearly all signals. It's the images on the walls, the pictures in the books, the holidays recognized, the way nonbinary children and gay parents are stigmatized. Each school norm reinforces how students like you should look, behave and learn. Except they don't include you.

Children won't learn if the signals that schools send tell them they don't belong there. And while U.S. schools are less likely than ever before to exclude students based on their differences, inclusion is an activity, not a placement. The common responses - one-off efforts and short-term initiatives on diversity, equity and inclusion - may be popular, but they are not the right approaches. Simply having students with a wide array of strengths and needs does not make a classroom inclusive, and periodic training sessions that are disconnected from children's experiences in and out of school do not equip teachers to equitably serve them.

Instead, schools must create a sense of belonging that allows students to feel included, respected and supported. Belonging is strongly tied to identity and evidenced through the validation of a variety of backgrounds, experiences and cultures. When done right, schools can foster healthy and positive development in their students, particularly important for those who have been historically marginalized. Yet, the National Association of Secondary School Principals has found that nearly a quarter of middle school students and a third of high school students feel they don't belong. Addressing this can start by better understanding and celebrating learner variability - recognizing that every student has unique strengths and challenges that are interconnected and vary according to the learning environment that child is learning in or experiencing.

Here are some strategies schools can use to nurture a sense of belonging for each student:

Create safe spaces. Safety is a prerequisite for belonging. Turnaround for Children offers teachers a series of suggestions that are as simple as framing classroom norms around "do's" that guide relationship building (respect, responsibility, kindness) rather than "don'ts" (don't touch, talk, move). Key is to develop this set of norms with students, which enhances buy-in.

Continuously affirm that all students belong. Focusing on the "average" student implicitly neglects individual identity and can lead to what Harvard professor and author Todd Rose describes as a "harmful binary such as abled/disabled, fit/unfit, intelligent/non-intelligent." Recognizing that classroom design, rather than students who don't fit the mythical average, is the real problem is an essential step. Combining anti-racist and anti-ableist practice with frameworks like Universal Design for Learning and culturally responsive teaching can help educators shift from questions that focus on the student ("how are individuals disabled?") to those that consider flaws in the system ("how are learning environments disabling") to support the development of more truly inclusive systems.

Facilitate an understanding of overlapping identities. No one has solely one identity, and the intersection of identities can bear many consequences for students. From an early age, children can recognize their own uniqueness and develop an appreciation for their classmates' variability. A new resource developed by Educate All Learners Alliance partners consists of classroom posters that depict students' unique identities. An accompanying teacher guide supports conversations among students about what makes them unique and helps foster an appreciation for the variability in all of us.

Activate a strengths-based approach to teaching and learning. Identify, communicate and harness students' assets to promote flourishing in and out of school. Focus on 21st century skills alongside academic strengths. Brooklyn Laboratory Charter Schools and Digital Promise launched the IEP Project, which provides teachers with a set of reflective questions and strategies for writing up Individual Education Plans that consider each child's strengths to mitigate challenges.

Promote student agency and voice. This requires deliberate action by educators to ensure all learners feel safe and trusting of their school. InspirED is a Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence program anchored on the belief that young people's voices matter and that they can be change agents in improving their school experience. Through active engagement with their own school's climate data, inspirED encourages students not to avoid uncomfortable or unpleasant emotions, but rather to fully engage with their worry about peers' safety, surprise at unexpected responses, curiosity about demographic differences in data or dissatisfaction with the school environment. In this way, they can become catalysts in improving their school for themselves and their peers.

Belonging is crucial to the human condition. Schools that intentionally develop environments that actively include each learner are more able to construct pathways with students that will help them meet their potential in school and beyond. Building a climate of belonging in classrooms and schools is a sure path to active inclusion of each and every learner. And a door opener for robust and joyful teaching and learning.

Christina Cipriano, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine and director of research at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. Barbara Pape, Ed.M., is senior director of the Learner Variability Project at Digital Promise.

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Cipriano & Pape: Building a Climate of Belonging in Schools Opens the Door for Robust - and Joyful - Teaching and Learning

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Can you think of a time you found yourself somewhere new and were given a sign that people like you didn't belong there? Walked into a restroom holding your infant and there was no changing table? Noticed the street signs were in a language you didn't know?

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Cultivating learner agency is an endless journey. It not only entails knowing our students as human beings but also requires identifying and unlearning patterns in our teaching that unknowingly engender dependence in learners.

The term agency comes from the Latin agere, meaning "to set in motion." It is precisely what agency should do in our classrooms: empower learners so that their minds and hearts become the engines that drive learning in our classrooms. This isn't as simple as some might believe. Providing too much voice and choice without proper scaffolds can be counterproductive, resulting in chaos in the classroom.

Consider the following moves that cultivate learner agency-and choose one to try in your classroom.

Embrace the Quiet Moments

In an era of learning acceleration and learning loss, it can be hard to grant ourselves permission to slow down. But if we're looking to cultivate learner agency, we must consider the negative effects of accelerating learning-of always asking our students to be "on" in our classrooms. We must ask ourselves: Where does the urgency come from, and how might it be disenfranchising some of my students?

That sense of urgency can actually cause us to diminish learner agency. I've certainly been there. When I'm feeling that sense of urgency, I can't help but intervene prematurely, act on behalf of my students, and bear the majority of the cognitive load. But when I extend my wait time and embrace quiet moments that allow students to have opportunities to think on their own, my time investment pays off in large dividends, providing me with independent learners who find they have lots of tools to overcome obstacles on their own.

When we embrace these quiet moments, we bear witness to student process, which is perhaps the most personalized part of learning in our classrooms.

Praise Students' Journeys

By stepping back and supporting our students while they productively struggle, we can learn a great deal about their learning habits, praising and coaching their efforts along the way.

Praising students' journeys is a great place to start. But we must be specific in our positive feedback. We must name what our students are doing well in order to help them identify it for themselves. Otherwise, our classrooms become places full of empty compliments.

"I can tell you're seeking patterns," I said to a student recently. "That is something good mathematicians do. You may not always find the patterns, but looking for them is a great idea."

"I know research can be frustrating and confusing," I say to validate my students' feelings when they engage in the research process. "Let's talk about some ways to work through those feelings."

Cultivate a Sense of Mastery

Daniel Pink, author of Drive, describes mastery not as unlocked achievements or boxes checked on a report card, but instead as a "desire to get better at something that matters." In schools, this means cultivating awareness of how effort is connected to tangible progress.

After all, it makes intuitive sense: If we can see that the effort we're putting into a task is helping us grow, we're more likely to replicate those behaviors and persist through challenges. But it's easier said than done.

Allow for Learner-Driven Evaluation

In order for students to evaluate their own work, they need to have the language to do so. Otherwise, students may nondescriptively refer to their work as "good" or "bad." This means that educators must create structures, such as learner-friendly rubrics, that can provide them the language necessary to self-evaluate.

These learner-friendly rubrics should contain standards-based, student-friendly learning objectives, such as I can calculate the area and perimeter of rectangles. After evaluating their work on the rubrics, I recommend following up with a structured reflection, in which students state strengths, challenges, and action steps in their own words, as I detail in Reclaiming Personalized Learning: A Pedagogy for Restoring Equity and Humanity in Our Classrooms.

When first starting learner-driven evaluation, learners will need a lot of support. You may want to model how to reflect, even letting them borrow some of your language until they're ready to do it on their own.

Ask Questions More Often Than You Provide Corrective Feedback

While providing specific and actionable feedback is helpful for productive learning, asking thoughtful questions can help students give themselves feedback, allowing them to tap into their own agency and initiate improvements to their work on their own.

Good questions will have multiple answers; they won't lead students, either. Consider asking questions like "Why did you choose to...?" or "Is there a more efficient way to...?" This will force students to think about their thinking, adding a layer of agentive criticality to conversations.

When students are stuck, you may feel inclined to intervene directly in order to get them over their obstacles. But we must remember that if we, the teachers, are acting on behalf of students to help them overcome challenges, we may be doing more to diminish agency than we are cultivating it. In this instance, I like to ask students, "What tools do you have to help you get unstuck?"

Tell Students You Trust Them

This sounds simple, but it's really powerful. By telling students that you trust them, you hand over responsibility to them, and you let them know that no matter what happens-even if they make a mistake-it's all going to be OK.

But you have to walk the talk. It's not enough to only tell students that you trust them. You have to show them, too, by embracing the aforementioned teacher moves that cultivate learner agency.

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Teacher Moves That Cultivate Learner Agency

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Cultivating learner agency is an endless journey. It not only entails knowing our students as human beings but also requires identifying and unlearning patterns in our teaching that unknowingly engender dependence in learners. The term agency comes from the Latin agere, meaning "to set in motion."

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Visible Learning means an enhanced role for teachers as they become evaluators of their own teaching. Visible Teaching and Learning occurs when teachers see learning through the eyes of students and help them become their own teachers.

Visible Learning plus is a professional development programme for teachers. It provides an in-depth review and change model for schools based on John Hattie's research. With a seminar and support series the Visible Learning plus team helps schools to find out about the impact they are having on student achievement. www.visiblelearningplus.com

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Infographics Archives - VISIBLE LEARNING

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Visible Learning means an enhanced role for teachers as they become evaluators of their own teaching. Visible Teaching and Learning occurs when teachers see learning through the eyes of students and help them become their own teachers. Visible Learning plus is a professional development programme for teachers.

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Balance Instruction and Feedback with Blended Learning

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This maybe of topic, and I do apologize, I am just afraid that even though I copied and pasted your web address, I may not be able to get through since this is part of the Blazing Trail course. I noticed your Blended Online Courses that are available.

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3 Strategies That Position Students to Take Responsibility for Their Progress and Behavior

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There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. I believe a focus on metacognitive skill-building can be a powerful way to combat student apathy. We need to help students take an active role in thinking about their learning. They need to take responsibility for their actions, work, and behavior.

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There can only be one reason why you're here, you are looking for tips for new teachers. Okay, maybe there could be more. But most likely, you are gearing up for your first big teaching job and you just want everything to be perfect, right?

You don't want to screw anything up, and you are bound and determined to impress your principal and the rest of your school's staff. You want to make friends with your peers and earn the instant respect of your students, right?

Sure... it'll all go exactly as planned.

Are you laughing too? Good!

Now, while it's not funny to be nervous or concerned about your performance as a new teacher, it is okay to have a laugh-especially if you're going into teaching!

Every experienced educator can tell you that one of the first things you learn is that you never know what you're in for on any given day. That's why it's a good thing you're here, and we're excited to talk to you about what you can do to prevent mishaps, create efficiencies, and work smarter as a new teacher.

Many of these tips can be relevant throughout your entire career. So, even if you're an experienced teacher, you might want review the list as well - and provide us any helpful insights we can add to our list.

Before we get too far-a word to those of you who are just thinking about going into teaching...

Many people, from all walks of life and with all types of different experience, decide that becoming a teacher makes sense. So regardless of your history, if you're thinking about being an educator, the first big tip we have for you is this:
Finding the right education degree program can lead you to your desired teaching career outcome.

In addition to helpful advice for first year teachers, information and resources for prospective teachers, at EducationDegree.com, we also have relationships with schools across the United States that offer campus-based and online degrees in education. You can easily use our search methods to locate schools, or browse around for other resources and advice for new educators on our site.

We are here to help you move closer to a successful start to your teaching career.

So, without any further ado...

Here Are Our Tips For New Teachers

Alright, take a deep breath, and just remember: You're human, and we all make mistakes. That said, review these tips for first year teachers carefully. We researched top education organizations, media outlets, and found first-hand accounts of how teachers try to make things a lot easier for themselves, and for their students.

1.) Plan for the year.

Sounds simple, right? You would be surprised at how easy it can be to get caught up in the day-to-day challenges of teaching, and lose track of your long-term goals with your students.

That's why you should start mapping out your game plan for goal setting in August while you're still enjoying the last few weeks of summer break. Give yourself time to assess goals every week or two, and look at your master list of school year goals then. This is no different than a business owner looking at their goals for revenue and growth quarterly. If you're not assessing progress on a regular interval, how can you know if you're truly an effective teacher?

2.) Be positive.

Believe us when we say we know how hard teaching can be! We spend our time focused on helping students find teaching degree programs, and providing tips for new teachers.

But we also know how important it is for teachers to stay positive to remain an inspiration to their students. Your students will also perform better when they are encouraged, and learn to recognize their strengths if you focus on them too, while still improving their weaker areas. You will be the main contributor to their self-esteem while they learn outside of their homes.

Don't take that responsibility lightly. Their futures depend on your kindness and encouragement.

3.) Learn to balance your monitoring and direct teaching methods.

Your students will respond to different methods of learning, and they will need to learn how to work independently, in groups, one-on-one with you, and in other environments. When you design your monthly and year-long curriculum strategies, think about how you will mix it up, in regards to your teaching methods and styles. This advice for first year teachers will help keep your students' minds fresh, and will help develop their ability to work and learn in various ways.

4.) Practice sound classroom management skills.

It can be easy to get frustrated, or let your inner child out; especially when managing a classroom of children. No matter how grown and 'adult' we become, simple stress can make us stoop to a toddler's level.
However, we cannot stress enough how important classroom management is!
So, do whatever it takes-write out your own 10 Commandments, or a list of sayings that remind you how to act towards your students in times of stress. Find ways to remind yourself that you are the adult in the room. Implement meditation, for yourself and your students. Just remember, that no matter how hard it may be sometimes to be an adult, you have to act like it in your classroom.

5.) Tap into your peers for knowledge and insight.

The next time you are working lunch room duty or have time to interact with fellow teachers, make the most of it. Ask questions, share strategies and open up!

These educators are in the same place you are and are trying just as hard to help themselves and their students as you are. This takes a strong support system among faculty and staff to remain good role models and effective educators.

One of the best tips for beginning teachers: Communicate with faculty and participate in your school events to help out as much as you can. Schools need teachers for more than just their classroom skills. It can only benefit your career as well, and will give you insight into how your peers manage teaching!

6.) Address misbehavior as quickly and appropriately as possible.

The last thing you want to do is try to be the 'cool' teacher and let inappropriate behavior slide. This is one of the most critical tips for first year teachers.

It sets a bad precedent and only prolongs the behavior until it escalates too far. If that happens, then your principal will likely hold you accountable for not acknowledging and fixing the problem-not to mention what it does to classroom management. That's why you should be diligent about solving classroom behavior problems as quickly as possible. You also need to make sure to apply the most appropriate solution. That's why it's important to understand the standards and preferred methods for discipline at your school.

7.) Lighten up.

Another essential piece of advice for new educators: Even if you aren't a natural clown or comedian, you can still make learning enjoyable for your students, without completely losing your dignity.

Try to find ways to make learning interactive and engaging for them. Why not turn a history lesson into a competitive game of Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune? When students forget they are learning because they are having fun, it's a win for everyone.

8.) Set clear expectations with each assignment.

Make sure you review the goals of each new area of your curriculum and for each new assignment. When students have a direction to point their mind's compass, they can go into the lesson with a clear idea of how they should approach or absorb the information.

This will also help students take good notes and start thinking conceptually about the topic as soon as you begin your teaching. Sometimes the best advice for first year teachers can be a simple as setting clear expectations!

9.) Set rules for the classroom.

This can be effective for elementary, middle and high school students-especially if you set expectations early. When it comes to classroom rules, remember to keep them simple, and try to have fun with them.

Kids are used to being told what to do, and have a tendency to roll their eyes when adults go overboard with the lectures. If you can think of ways to incentivize good behavior, then do it. Positive reinforcement is always better than dangling punishment over them to maintain law and order in the classroom. This piece of advice for first year teachers can save you lots of headaches!

10.) Acknowledge every student the first time you see them every day.

Yes, you read that right. Every student. Every day.

It's easy to let some students blend into the crowd when you have your hands full. But don't let the quiet ones pass you by. Say hello to all of your students every day, so they know you are thinking about them and feel comfortable talking to you. This is one of those tips for beginning teachers that will last a lifetime for your students. You see them even more than their parents do many days of the week, so it's critical they trust you and feel seen by you. Teachers and students can form bonds through constant positive communication.

From the first day of school to the last, let them know you're there.

11.) Be caring and empathetic.

No matter what age group you are teaching, students are going through mental growth that can be challenging and frustrating. Be sure to put yourself in their place when you approach your students, while you teach them, and especially if you must discipline them. They are counting on you to help them learn critical thinking skills, as well as interpersonal skills. When you show a child that you care about them and spend time understanding where they are coming from, then you will earn their respect. It will also help build trust, so they know they can come to you for help and mentorship, when they need it.

12.) Create a plan for parents.

This might be one of the hardest tips for first year teachers to execute - but absolutely necessary. Parents are sometimes the elephant in the room when it comes to effectively teaching children. You have hands-on parents and those you may only see at required meeting times.

Make sure you have a plan of action for how you will manage the parents. This is key not only when discipline issues arise, but during regular communication as well. You should set the processes and boundaries from the beginning. Think about it-for every student, you typically have two parents to work with. It may not be as challenging as teaching a class of students, but it can get tough if you aren't efficient with your time and lead the relationship.

13.) Teach respect and stress anti-bullying.

Remember when we said you should take care of discipline issues as soon as they arise to keep them from spiraling out of control? This advice for new educators takes that philosophy one step further. With so much time spent interacting with video games compared to humans, today's young learners need to practice mutual respect with their peers and teachers on a daily basis.

Create exercises that reward diversity and show the ill effects of treating others unfairly. This will help create a culture of respect in your classroom, and help your students learn their own lessons in being empathetic towards others.

14.) Allow free learning time, and free time in general.

It's easy to think that you have to keep kids busy, busy, busy-accounting for each minute of every day. While this philosophy can aid in goal achievement and keep challenging behaviors at bay, it is also stagnating. Give your students a mental break from the routine so they can do something constructive and new. This can be five minutes a day, a half hour each week, a weekly group exercise, or ten minutes of independent journaling once a week.

The point of the assignment would be to give students time to explore their own minds, interests and curiosities. These breaks can also be a great introduction to freeform discussions about current events, creativity, or anything meaningful that your students want to reflect on.

15.) Look for continuing education opportunities.

Even though you already have your degree and you're working 24/7 - or at least, it feels like it - you should keep your ear to the ground in the world of academia. Make sure you join all the relevant teaching organizations, both national and local, that you can find to stay in tune with what's going on.

Education is so connected to our political system that teachers are often engaged and organized to protect their occupational interests. You can also find workshops and educational opportunities through these organizations.

Our advice for first year teachers: Do everything you can to connect and network right away!

16.) Take your professional goals seriously.

When you meet with your principal and other administrators to discuss your job, be sure to discuss your own professional goals. These can be as simple as earning a master's degree, teaching a particular subject, or starting a new club for the students. It will make your principal happy to hear you are committed to your career in education and demonstrates that you want to improve your skillset.

Be sure to ask if they see any strengths you could turn into opportunities to help out more or reach a new goal in teaching.

17.) Try to include technology in your lessons.

Let's face it, students love technology. And who can blame them? We've been dreaming of having all these cool toys since we were kids - so hurry up with our hoverboards already, please! But seriously...

If you can find cool ways to show kids how they can learn to code, or use their artistic skills on the computer, they will be more apt to develop the kinds of versatile skillsets that will be required more and more as we continue to see technology expand.

18.) Plan field trips.

Do you remember finding yourself at home during Winter break with serious cabin fever? Imagine being a child stuck in a classroom for eight hours a day, five days a week. Kids are constantly being told what to do while trying to figure out what the heck is going on in this crazy world. Yeah, it's pretty overwhelming for those students sometimes.

So get them out of the classroom and show them what the real world is actually like. Take them to plays, museums, sporting events and other activities that reflect the curriculum you're teaching. They'll love the opportunity to get out and do something different - and so will you!

19.) Be mindful about sensitive topics.

You have to remember that children come from all walks of life and face many

different challenges. Be sensitive and conscious of anything you might say that could alienate them or make them uncomfortable. This is another one of those tips for new teachers that will make a lasting impact in your students' lives.

That doesn't mean you can just avoid discussing topics that aren't relevant to your curriculum. You just have to do it in a way that is inclusive and objective. You don't want to accidentally make any student feel economically or socially inferior to you or anyone else in the class. When you complete your education degree program, you should look for courses that help you develop strong skills in this area. You will need to apply this same tip to working with parents as well.

20.) Go into it for the right reasons.

Since teaching is such an important, influential role in students' lives, you really need to go into this profession to change lives and inspire students. Teachers can make a fine living, but very few go into it to get rich. Become a teacher because you want to help kids reach their potential and believe in themselves. If you do that, then all you need is the right teaching degree to meet your state requirements to get going.
Do you have some helpful tips for first year teachers who want to be effective leaders and mentors?
If you have additional ideas, experiences or insight that we can share with prospective educators - let us know! We want to hear from you and encourage others to become great teachers.

Do you need to earn your degree, or pursue a graduate level education? We can help you there too! Just use the search functions on this page to narrow your options.

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20 Tips For New Teachers There can only be one reason why you're here, you are looking for tips for new teachers. Okay, maybe there could be more. But most likely, you are gearing up for your first big teaching job and you just want everything to be perfect, right?

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Being a first-year teacher is stressful. There are so many things that just aren't covered in your teacher education program, and it can be nearly impossible to keep up with all the things on your to-do list. Here are 15 great pieces of advice for new teachers from some veterans who've gone before you.

Last year, I asked some veteran teachers to share their most valuable tips for new teachers getting ready to start their first year teaching. There were so many great tips that I wanted to share so I grouped the advice into six common themes. Keep reading to find out what the vets want you to know!

1. Give yourself some grace & celebrate successes.

During your first year of teaching, every day is another first. You'll encounter different challenges and learn something new every single day. One big theme among the advice veteran teachers shared about making it as a new teacher was to have realistic expectations for yourself and celebrate the progress you are making.
Here's what the veteran teachers had to say:
" Balance your time by accepting help, enjoying life outside of teaching, and by not expecting perfection! " - Libby from CuriousFox

"Keep a journal celebrating your successes and areas you want to work on." - Carrie from My Book Boost

" Veteran teachers aren't perfect and neither are you. Give yourself a break and look at what you have accomplished instead of what you still need to do. " - Renee from City Girl in Third

2. Ask questions...lots of questions.

If we expect our students to ask questions to learn, it is okay to expect the same from ourselves!
Here's what the veteran teachers said about asking questions:
" It's okay to not know everything!! Your teammates would much rather you ask them how to do something or what something means instead of guessing!" - Georgia from Anderson Academics

" Don't be embarrassed to ask questions! You will NOT know everything you need to know your first year, and nobody expects you to. Smile and ask! " - Jan from Laughter and Consistency

3. Don't try to do it all.

Teacher burnout is real, and the fastest way to get there is by trying to do everything. This is especially true for a first-year teacher. While there is no surefire way to prevent burnout, there are a number of things you can do so you're less likely to experience teacher burnout.

You can read more about them and take steps to create your own burnout prevention plan in this post about finding work-life balance.
Here's some tips for new teachers on preventing burnout:
" Keep it simple. New teachers often find themselves burnt out by November. Use premade materials (like those on Teachers pay Teachers) to keep your sanity. " - Brenda from Enjoy Teaching

" You don't have to be perfect and original. Give yourself time to relax and sometimes say to yourself, "This is good enough and I'll make it better next year." - Jenny from ELA at Home and School

4. Get organized and have the right supplies.

Getting organized can make a huge difference in your first year teaching. Whether it's collecting student information at the beginning of the year or figuring out a system for tracking missing assignments, you'll have to figure out how to set up systems.

One big piece of this is having the right supplies. Right now you are probably worried about getting a ton of cute organizers and containers from the Target Dollar Spot, but you can also think about how you'll organize important information you'll need to lesson plan and communicate with families.

You'll very likely have students receiving special education services or intervention supports in your classroom. Here's a quick tip for new teachers out there: Creating a simple student info sheet, like the one below, can help you quickly and easily track what accommodations and supports you'll need to plan for when you're working on lesson planning.
Here's some more great advice on organizing and preparing your supplies.
" Buy yourself a Keurig. If you don't life coffee, start to like it. You're going to need it! " - Ashley from Ashley's Brainy Centers

" Create a couple of sets of materials you need for each student when they start with you - nameplate, cubbie/hook labels, birthday icon, workbook, etc - and put it in a large ziplock bag. Keep the sets in a spot easy to access. You'll get a new student at some point in the year! If you are able to quickly grab everything you need it will save you time and stress." - Growing Roots Classroom

4. Build relationships first.

Relationships are the foundation of good classroom experiences for both you and your students. Spend time getting to know your students from Day 1, and you'll have fewer issues with behavior and more engaged learners throughout the entire year. In fact, you could argue that building relationships is the key to good classroom management.

If you're unsure how to get started with relationship building, check out this blog post about the first steps to take to build relationships with your students.

Speaking of relationships, get to know the school secretary and custodians. Building relationships with them can really help make things easier because the reality is they run the school in many ways!
Here are some more great tips about the importance of building relationships as a first-year teacher:
" Parents are often one of the most intimidating parts of being a new teacher, but you are actually on the same team. Relax, they are people just like you looking out for the best interests of their child. " - Kelly from Created by Kellyann

" Get to know your students! Learn each students' background and what motivates them; This builds a trusting relationship which is the first step to classroom management." - Laura from Discovering Hidden Potential

5. Take care of yourself.

Self-care is SO important.
Here's some more great advice about self-care:
" During this exciting and hectic first year remember to take time for yourself through a hobby, exercise, or friends & family. Staying balanced will help both you and your students have a great year. " - Rachel from Classroom Confetti

" Don't forget to pay attention to your health! Exercise and a good night's sleep will help you be the best teacher you can be for your students." Princess Netherly from Teaching, Love, Cupcakes

6. Classroom management is the foundation for success.

Having a strong classroom management system probably doesn't belong down here at the bottom of the list because it is one of the most important pieces of having an effective classroom.
Here's what veteran teachers have to say about classroom management for learning:
" Classroom management is one of the critical factors in a positive learning environment. One of the most important things for first-year teachers to consider is how you will organize and teach your classroom expectations, procedures, and routines." - Queen of the Jungle

" Students come to our classes with multiple capabilities, diverse interests, and awesome brains. One brain-compatible way to optimize more of their talents is to co-lead with them, so they help develop authentic learning tasks to meet your shared goals and rubric criteria. Co-leading accesses unique brainpower in students to increase learning, while it also decreases new teachers busy planning workload. " - Ellen from Brain Leaders and Learners

You can do this!

You only get to be a first-year teacher once. This last piece of advice is a perfect reminder that you will be great, and to enjoy the ride!

" Your first year of teaching is like riding the world's most thrilling roller coaster. Your learning is at a crazy scary incline when you first start off, but once you get through that climb the ride is AMAZING! Good luck this year! " - Learning Lane
If you enjoyed this article, check out these other posts:

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15 Must Read Tips for Success as a First Year Teacher

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Being a first year teacher can be overwhelming. There is so much to learn that it can constantly feel like you're struggling to keep your head above water. These helpful tips from teachers who've been can help you navigate life as a new teacher.

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Dear New Teachers,

This blog post is for you. Perhaps you've heard that your first year will be "sooo hard." I want to offer you another possibility. Your first year might just be awesome. You might not only survive it but you could even thrive.

Here are some suggestions to help you have a fantastic first year in the classroom.

1. Build Community

Your relationships with others will keep you strong, and they might be the key to fueling your energy to persist through challenges. Build strong relationships with your colleagues and administrators and with your students and their parents. If you're shy, now is the time to pick up some strategies for making connections with others. Ask questions, knock on doors, and invite people into your classroom. Your community will be a buoy when times get hard.

2. Find Hopeful, Positive Mentors

There are veteran teachers who are sad and cynical, and there are others who are wise and hopeful. If you find yourself amongst the cynical (I found them congregating in the staff lunchroom), leave. Stay far from that negativity. You need mentors who can share their wisdom and expertise and who can remind you at the end of October that things will get easier. If you can't find any in your school, look in other schools in your district. They are there, and many will happily mentor you. Ask.

3. Ask for Help and Demand Good Professional Development

Yes, I do suggest that you demand good professional development (PD). You have so much to learn as a new teacher (and I know you know that), and you can't do it alone. Ideally, you need an instructional coach (coaching is a form of PD), but if you can't get a coach, then at least you need some high quality PD. Ask other teachers to recommend workshops, online courses, and conferences. Your administrators don't expect you to be perfect. They know you have a lot to learn -- so ask for support (persistently) to close those gaps.

4. Observe Other Teachers

Ideally, observe really effective teachers in your school or other schools. Even if they don't teach the same thing you do, you'll learn a great deal. Pick one thing to pay attention to so that you don't get overwhelmed. For example, pay attention to routines and procedures, the pacing of a lesson, how questions are asked, or the different ways that students are engaged. Ask your administrators for a release day so that you can do this. If they say no, then at the very least, take ten minutes a few times a month to poke your head into another teacher's classroom during your prep period. You will learn so much from observing your colleagues.

5. Do Home Visits

Visiting the homes of just a few of your students will provide unique insight and perspective into your students. You could visit just about any of your students' homes and this would be the case. Visit the home of a student you are concerned about, as well as the home of a student you're confident is doing well. This is easiest to do in the first few weeks of school when you're building relationships with families, and you can explain that you want to learn more about your students. Use the visit as an opportunity to listen to parents -- to ask about their child's interests, family, friends, and so on. Be curious. It's not a time to share your concerns or complaints.

6. Write Down Your Vision for Yourself as a Teacher

What do you see as your goal or purpose as a teacher? Can you distill that into a short paragraph or a few sentences? Creating a personal vision or mission statement can help anchor you when times get hard. It can serve as a guidepost when challenges come up. You don't need to make it too complicated or fancy. You don't need to share it with anyone. This is for you.

7. Don't Neglect Your Body

Sleep. Rest. Eat well. Exercise. You've heard it before. It really matters during your first year of teaching when the stress -- plus all the new germs -- depletes your immune system. Don't wait until you get the flu in January to commit to taking care of yourself -- start now. Sleep.

8. Do Something Non-Teaching Related

Once a week, at least, do something for yourself. Take a Saturday pottery class or a Brazilian dance class. Run marathons. Join a romance book club. Do something that engages other parts of your being. It's easy and tempting to get sucked into all teaching, all the time during your first year, but you need a mental break from it.

9. Catalogue Every Single Success in the Classroom

Write them down. Make lists of what's going well. Identify your successes; include every single tiny one: Alfredo smiled today when he walked into class; James remembered his book; Jackie said goodbye to her mom and didn't cry; I ate lunch; my lesson plan is done for tomorrow. If you don't do any of the other tips on this list, but you do this one thing every day, I can almost guarantee that you'll have a great year.

10. Take a Day Off

Most teachers get personal days. Plan ahead, get a sub, and take them. Take them and catch up on laundry, go to the dentist, sleep, or go for a walk. Use them. You need days off. It's okay.

Your first year doesn't have to be hard -- nor do subsequent years. These strategies can help you thrive in your first year and build the kind of resilience that will carry you through the many challenges we face as teachers.

By the way, welcome to the teaching profession. You're embarking on a wonderful, wonderful journey.

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10 Tips for Surviving and Thriving in Your First Year Teaching

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Dear New Teachers, This blog post is for you. Perhaps you've heard that your first year will be "sooo hard." I want to offer you another possibility. Your first year might just be awesome. You might not only survive it but you could even thrive.

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Templates are productivity boosters. They can help us get more done in less time.

They're also great lesson design frameworks. They help us craft a path for students to take their thinking -- or for them to guide their creating.

And once a template is created, we can always go back to it again the next year -- or even the next week!

I love making student templates in slide presentation tools like PowerPoint. Making PowerPoint education templates offers us lots of benefits:

Flexibility in design

Blending images, text, lines, shapes, videos and more

Incorporating drag and drop options (more on that later)

An easy place for students to type

An easy place for us to leave feedback (in comments)

Ready to use PowerPoint education templates in your classroom? Jump straight to the section you need using the Quick Navigation below or just keep scrolling!

Quick Navigation: PowerPoint Education Templates

FREE PowerPoint education templates to download

Some people like to make these templates and sell them on Teachers Pay Teachers. Not me. I like to make them FREE to download so you can start using them with your students right away!

Below, you'll find a wide variety of PowerPoint education templates. Students can work on these whether they're using the PowerPoint desktop app or working in PowerPoint Online. Here's what you need to do to use them:
1. Click the link to download a template.
2. Share it with your students.

If you're using Microsoft Teams, attach it to an assignment and choose "Students edit their own copy" in the three dots to the right. Many learning other management systems (Canvas, Schoology, etc.) have similar options.

If you don't have Teams or another LMS, click the "Share" button and get a link to your template to share with your students. They should open the file and go to File > Save a copy to make a copy of their own to work on.

3. Students work on the template, filling in text, adding images, moving things around ... whatever you have asked them to do.

4. Students turn the template back in to you to grade. In Teams or another LMS, they would do this through the assignment you gave them. Without Teams or an LMS, you can have students email it or share it with you.

Tips for using templates:

Zoom out to 50 percent (or, sometimes, even 33 percent). Many of these templates have items in the space around the PowerPoint slide. This will let you see everything. You might use the zoom slider in the bottom right corner of PowerPoint (see below).

To use something around the outside of the PowerPoint slide, duplicate it before putting it on the slide. Use the Ctrl+D keyboard shortcut (Mac: Cmd+D). This leaves the original item to be used again.

If you find someone's template in Google Slides, you can easily convert it over to PowerPoint. Just open the Google Slides template. Go to File > Download as > PowerPoint .pptx.

Here are DOZENS of templates ready for you to download and use:

Graphic organizers

BONUS: SlidesMania templates (+ lessons for each!)

How to make your own templates with PowerPoint

Finding pre- created templates is great! You can use them as-is or even adjust them to fit your needs.

But what if you can't find a pre-created template that's just right?

Maybe it's time to make one.

Creating your own PowerPoint templates might be easier than you think. With a couple of tips and tricks, you can make effective PowerPoint education templates that can engage your students, help them think, and let them practice.

My favorite way: Create a one-slide PowerPoint presentation. The slide acts like a sheet of paper. I have more design flexibility making my templates in PowerPoint than I do in Word.

Step 1: Plan out your template

Dream up what your template will look like. What do you want students to do? What's the goal: guide them through thinking, give them repetitions with content, let them create with what they know?

There's no shame in borrowing ideas. Look around at other activities (i.e. all of the PowerPoint education templates above) to get inspiration. Then, use the ideas that work best for you.

There are LOTS of actions you can have your students do on templates, including:

typing text

taking photos and adding them to the template

dragging arrows or shapes on an image or text

removing a box to display something that's hidden behind it

adding comments to the template for conversation or metacognition

It doesn't hurt to draw a quick sketch on paper of what your template will look like. For me, I like to start creating my template in PowerPoint and adjust it as I go.

EXAMPLE: I want to create a template where students consider the different elements of a story. To get them to think critically about them, I want them to pick the three most important parts of a story to them personally. Then, I want them to describe why they're important to them. Here's how I envision it:

They'll pick the three elements of the story that matter most to them. They'll drag the icon into the box. Then, they'll describe why it's important in a text box.

Once you have an idea for your template, create a new PowerPoint presentation to get started.

Step 2: Create the parts students won't edit.

When you use a traditional photocopied worksheet, the parts on the photocopy are locked into place. Students can't erase them. But they create the framework for the worksheet. What students write -- and where they write it -- has to do what's locked into place on that photocopy.

PowerPoint education templates are similar. We can lock certain parts of our templates into place so students don't accidentally move them around or change them.

(Remember, though ... we don't just want to recreate traditional worksheets. We're making something interactive and engaging that goes to the next level!)

EXAMPLE: In my story elements template, I want to create a title header, some instructions, and a place for them to put the most important elements of a story. So, I designed the template first with only the parts I don't want students to edit.

I used icons from The Noun Project (thenounproject.com) for the books and the ribbons.

The title and the instructions are simple text boxes.

The line tool made the line under the title. I added rectangle shapes next to each of the ribbons.

I added text boxes on top of the ribbons to add the numbers.

I will want to add parts to this template that the students can edit (i.e. text boxes, movable labels, etc.). But that comes later.

Step 3: Make those parts immovable by turning them into a background image.

Once I finish making the parts of the template that students won't edit, I want to lock them in the background so students can't accidentally move them. To do that ...

1. Save the slide as an image file by going to File > Save as.

2. Choose image from the dropdown menu below the file name. (I save my images as .png images.)

3. Choose where you'd like to save the image and modify the file name if you wish.

4. Click "Save".

5. A dialog box will ask you if you want to save all of your slides as images or "just this one" (the one you have selected). I choose "just this one".

Now, you have an image file of the slide -- just the parts you don't want students to modify. Because it's an image, students can't move any of it around.

Next, go back to your slide and delete everything off the page. (I know, it seems strange! Trust me!)

Once it's clear, add your image file as the background of your slide. To do that:

1. Right click and choose "Format background ..." from the menu box.

2. In the sidebar, find "Picture source" and click the "Insert ..." button.

3. Choose "From a file" in the dialog box.

4. Find your file and click "Open".

Now, all of the parts of your template that you don't want students to move are locked in the background image of the PowerPoint slide. (Pretty slick, huh???)

Next, it's time to add the editable parts of your template -- the ones students will do and fill in.

Step 4: Add editable parts of your template.

We can add parts to our template that we want students to work with. This can include a text box for typing, moveable icons or text for them to drag, and even a space where they can add photos they take.

EXAMPLE: I want to add moveable images with the names of the story elements on them. After students choose their three favorite elements and move them into place, they type why they chose what they chose in text boxes below them.

SUPER EASY WAY: Instead of the image/text tiles I have above, just use text boxes. Have students drag the text boxes around.

A BIT FANCIER WAY: To make the tiles, there are lots of free image creation tools out there, including Canva, Adobe Express , Pic Collage, and more. If you want draggable tiles like I have, you can use one of those image creation tools. Make your tiles with images and text. (Again, my icons came from The Noun Project.) Then insert them as images for your students to drag around.

SUPER FANCY WAY: Another option for making those tiles (and the one I used in my example above): PowerPoint! In a new slide, I made all five of my image/text tiles. I used the same process as I did to make my background image (File > Save as > .png file). Then, I added my tiles image to the slide. Right-click the image and use the crop tool to cut the other tiles out. Then, insert the image again and do it again for the rest of the tiles.

In my example, after I had the five draggable elements of a story in place, I added text boxes for students to type their responses.

Other things you can add to your templates:

Draggable arrows: Go to "Insert > Shape" and choose an arrow. Draw in an arrow for students to drag around. Double click it to add text to it!

A space for a student photo: Go to "Insert > Shape" and choose a rectangle. Draw in a big rectangle where a student could insert an image. Students can use the camera app on their Windows device to take a picture. Then, they can insert the image from their camera roll onto the template.

Justify response in the speaker notes: Students can tell you why they did what they did (chose what they chose, wrote what they wrote, etc.) in the speaker notes at the bottom. It's a great place to incorporate thinking about their thinking (i.e. metacognition)!

Hyperlinks: Have students turn their templates interactive with hyperlinks! Any text, image, shape, line, etc. can become clickable by adding a link. Use the Ctrl+K keyboard shortcut.

Comments: Comments can be added to any item on the template. They're like sticky notes where students can add extra thoughts.

Step 5: Share your template with your students.

If you're using Microsoft Teams, attach it to an assignment and choose "Students edit their own copy" in the three dots to the right. Many learning other management systems (Canvas, Schoology, etc.) have similar options.

If you don't have Teams or another LMS, click the "Share" button and get a link to your template to share with your students. They should open the file and go to File > Save a copy to make a copy of their own to work on.

Video: How to make your own draggable templates

The video below will walk you through how this whole process works. Note: It shows creation of the template using Google Slides. However, it's easy to cross this over to PowerPoint using the instructions in this post.

Video: How to make PowerPoint education templates

In this video, Holly Clark of The Infused Classroom and I talk about templates, how to make them, and how they can be used.
How have you used templates in your own class? What are your best tips and tricks? Share them in a comment below!

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30+ FREE PowerPoint education templates + how to make them

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PowerPoint education templates create meaningful interactive activities for students. Find free templates and how to make your own.Templates are

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"I finished my book today at school!" my son exclaimed, as he got off the bus and headed toward us. This is a phrase most parents would enjoy hearing. And I was happy to hear his love for his new chapter book. It was his second day of school and I had asked him my typical questions like, 'what was the best part about today' and 'what challenges did you enjoy?' Sometimes I might ask about mistakes or things he might improve. I haven't always been a growth mindset groupie but I am now and I try to practice this work at home.

I have two children and they both love school and they both enjoy the social aspect of school. For our son, school can come easy, so we have to search for ways to keep him challenged and to truly love the act of learning over succeeding at school.

When our son shared his accomplishments, although excited for him, I found myself wondering how he read a whole book during reading time. So, I asked. He said every time he finished his work early in class, he was told he could read. I like reading to be encouraged, but I don't want there to be 'rewards' for finishing early; I want my son to receive challenging work that keeps him engaged. I want him to see himself as a learner in search of knowledge who always has more to learn. In essence, the foundational belief behind growth mindset culture, and what I believe is the ultimate goal of education, is to develop a love for learning, seek out ways to grow, and achieve a level of agency in a student's learning pathway.

Growth Mindset Awareness

Understanding the concept of fixed mindsets and growth mindsets has helped so many educators (and parents) begin to reshape what is productive struggle and how we embrace new learning. The revolution of language around this concept has swept through schools, classrooms, and hallways. And like with any great education trend, this led to beautifully designed resources available through Pinterest, Instagram, and Teachers Pay Teachers. Posters and bulletin boards were adorned with visuals of what is fixed and what is growth. As an educator, I share the love of a great visual for learning environments but as any educator knows, this work does not happen in isolation or by just putting up a picture. It is part of a larger approach to a learning culture.

Similar to many of the mission statements posted on walls and websites, the growth mindset work can lose impact if it is not embedded into everyday life that includes aligned systemic approaches.
Rebecca Midles

Similar to many of the mission statements posted on walls and websites, the growth mindset work can lose impact if it is not embedded into everyday life that includes aligned systemic approaches. A growth mindset can be a cultural approach, one that invites us to think about how we learn, how we define learning, and how we celebrate growth. We have written about Building a Growth Mindset Culture and the phases that support this, including brain research, inner voice work, and how we give feedback.

Building a Growth Mindset Invites Change

Embedding a growth mindset approach within a learning model sets up a system to embrace and encourage learning growth. Choosing challenging work is considered 'smart' and this becomes a norm for learning. A growth mindset culture also sets the stage for larger efforts of systemic change and can be a great foundation for laying the groundwork.

When part of a larger approach, learners grab these concepts quickly. They show initiative with transfer and often share with their families and sports teams, you can hear it influencing the way they speak to one another.

Thanks to Carol Dweck's work, Growth Mindset is no longer an unfamiliar term. Building awareness of this concept is a great step in building a learning culture in the classroom. With that work, teaching learners about their brains and how they learn is equally important. When learners can connect this understanding to thoughts about learning, they can become aware of not only how they learn but how they could impact their learning. This awareness includes starting to identify how they face challenges, and what their inner voice tells them as they hit obstacles or struggle with a new concept.

Building A Growth Mindset Culture Does Not Stop At Awareness

Moving into strategies and tools for learners provides them access to feel empowered in their learning and to be able to impact their growth. These tools can provide reframing strategies to move them through learning obstacles, seek other learning strategies, or ask for help.

As educators, we must also be aware of how we facilitate learners' perception of their learning by how we intentionally give feedback and how we coach them through learning struggles. Successful examples are when learners design personal coaching language for themselves and their peers, perhaps posting this in the room and referring to it. When peer-to-peer language changes and the buzz in the learning environment is about achieving new learning and embracing personal growth through ambiguity and productive struggle.

In A Mindset for Learning: Teaching the Traits of Joyful, Independent Growth, the authors, Kristine Mraz and Christine Hertz, promote the importance of research-based strategies to build independence and that this falls squarely in the world of a growth mindset. They advocate for the value of optimism, persistence, flexibility, resilience, and empathy and provide ways to incorporate this into learning environments.

Parent as Educator, Educator as a Parent

This is where my mind went as I walked back to our house with my son. I wanted to hear him want more challenging work or share ways he was seeking this in his learning. I recognized that this does not just 'happen' at school and would continue to take initiative on my part as well.

My husband and I committed to being more thoughtful about the family activities we choose, the way we frame feedback, and how we embrace tough issues. What made this equally tough and also vitally important, is that my daughter has significant learning challenges within traditional settings and how, when, and why we praise was incredibly important in terms of messaging between the two siblings. The type of parent work that is often not easy but endlessly worthy. How we provide feedback sends a message to not only how we see learning, but how we see the learner. And in that vein, praise should be considered just as much as constructive feedback and is often most useful when aimed at the process of learning.

As we are embracing mindset practices across the country, we need to also be more conscious of how we interact with learners; how we support their learning, and how we build their self-awareness of their learning to ensure we are aligned to a growth mindset and not sending a mixed message of what is learning.

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Growth Mindset is More than a Colorful Bulletin Board

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"I finished my book today at school!" my son exclaimed, as he got off the bus and headed toward us. This is a phrase most parents would enjoy hearing. And I was happy to hear his love for his new chapter book.

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Education fads come and go, but how do they stack up against the more modest, everyday pedagogies that make up the bulk of a teacher's repertoire?

Recently, the Education Endowment Foundation, a U.K.-based nonprofit, published the Teaching and Learning Toolkit, a high-quality compendium of 30 common educational strategies or structural changes, ranging from metacognition to one-on-one tutoring to extending the school day. For each strategy, experts sifted through the research-in most cases evaluating hundreds of studies-to calculate the academic impact (the number of additional months of academic progress made), the evidence (how robust the empirical evidence is), and the cost of each strategy.

Recently highlighted in the seminal research journal , the toolkit of pedagogies is used by more than 70 percent of secondary school leaders in the U.K. to make informed decisions about the best, most cost-effective programs and strategies to adopt.

There are no silver bullets in education-what works for one group of students may not work for another. But here are four powerful strategies every teacher should know about, plus a few that either deserve closer scrutiny or should be jettisoned.

WHAT WORKS
Topping the list were interventions that could easily be implemented in classrooms without having to purchase costly programs, make significant staffing changes, or alter the structure of the school day. These interventions required only a modest investment in teacher training-much of which could be accomplished informally through a school's PLC.

Metacognition and self-regulation. The strategy that received the highest score for academic impact, metacognition and self-regulation involves teaching students how to plan, monitor, and evaluate their learning-helping them build awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses while gaining a deeper understanding of which learning strategies are best suited to a given task.

To maximize the benefits of metacognitive strategies, teachers should model their own thought processes, the toolkit suggests-for example, they can explain their thinking when reading a text or solving a problem. Teachers can also encourage students to ask themselves questions like, "What did I find difficult about this lesson?" and "What can I do if I get stuck on a problem?" to help surface gaps in their understanding and make good use of educational resources.

Reading comprehension strategies. While the conversation around reading instruction has recently focused on phonics and decoding, it's also critical that students across all age groups learn active reading strategies such as inferring meaning from context, summarizing key points, using graphic organizers, and actively interrogating texts by asking and answering questions as they read.

The researchers conclude that these strategies have "very high impact for very low cost based on extensive evidence": reading comprehension activities advance student learning by an average of six months, making it "a crucial component of early reading instruction," according to the toolkit.

Before jumping into a difficult text, for example, teachers in Edutopia's community sometimes develop a "comprehension canopy" with students, identifying the main purpose, asking an overarching question, and previewing the background knowledge they'll need to keep pace with the material. To deepen reading comprehension further, students can use thinking strategies such as connecting ideas or making predictions, or they can create their own visual annotations to pose questions and synthesize information.

Oral language interventions. One of the most effective methods to reinforce learning is to explicitly use structured questioning techniques and discussions to encourage students to articulate what they know. Activities include reading books aloud, having conversations about a topic, going over vocabulary lists and concepts, and asking questions that help students delve more deeply into a topic.

At School 21 in London, where oracy is valued as much as reading and writing, teachers use a range of strategies-from Talk Detectives, where students use a checklist to spot key elements in classroom discussions, to a practice called Ignites, which allows students to practice their public speaking skills in front of an audience. After analyzing 154 studies, the researchers concluded that oral language interventions are a low-cost, evidence-backed strategy that boosts learning by an average of six months.

Collaborative learning. Asking students to work together in small groups has "a positive impact, on average, and may be a cost-effective approach for raising attainment," according to the researchers. Avoid unstructured group work, however-teachers are encouraged to step in and carefully design activities that are challenging and robust enough to exceed the capabilities of a single student. "The most promising collaborative learning approaches tend to have group sizes between 3 and 5 pupils and have a shared outcome or goal," according to the toolkit.

One highly effective collaborative learning approach is the Jigsaw method, but it needs to be carefully constructed: students are assigned a topic, and then form small groups to first specialize, then consolidate and share knowledge with their peers.

WHAT'S QUESTIONABLE
For school leaders, it's never just a question of what works. After all, working within the constraints of a limited budget-and limited staffing resources-requires a judicious approach. In a 2016 study, Harvard researchers explained that when it comes to meeting the needs of students, "budget decisions serve as a compass." Questions about cost, required teacher training, and the impact of new programs on the health and well-being of teachers represent key dimensions that are often overlooked when evaluating the research on effective education practices.

Extending school time. Increasing the time that students spend on academics during school does improve outcomes-a modest increase of three months' worth of additional learning over the course of a school year-but it can spread teachers thin, dramatically increasing workloads and potentially harming their well-being.

There's also a significant opportunity cost: Increasing academic seat time can crowd out time spent on professional development, lesson planning, and other crucial tasks, lowering the overall quality of teaching. Instead of extending school time, resources are better spent on well-structured, high-quality afterschool programs, the report concludes.

One-on-one tutoring. Pairing a student with a tutor adds roughly five months' worth of learning, on average, making it seem like a highly effective strategy-albeit with notable caveats. The approach is expensive, especially when delivered by teachers, and the research is riddled with studies that lacked independent, third-party oversight, calling into question the effectiveness of the strategy.

Instead, two similar strategies should be used: small-group tutoring and peer tutoring, both of which yield nearly similar academic results at a fraction of the cost. In the classroom, peer tutoring may even be preferable since "learners take on responsibility for aspects of teaching and for evaluating their success"-giving them the metacognitive boost that deepens learning.

Peer tutoring is highly effective when "used to review or consolidate learning, rather than introducing new material," the toolkit suggests. Use rubrics to guide peer feedback and ensure that it remains productice. Finally, one of the best ways to learn about a topic is for a student to take responsibility and teach it to someone else.

WHAT DOESN'T WORK
The toolkit doesn't shy away from challenging assumptions we have about what works-through a systematic analysis of the research, it identifies strategies that at minimum deserve more scrutiny, if not a wholesale rejection by schools.

Repeating a year. Two million children are retained in the U.S. each year at an estimated cost of $20 billion-yet it's a "significant risk" that few ever recover from, the report found, resulting in a host of problems, from low self-esteem, apathy towards school, and lower graduation rates. On average, these students lose three months of academic progress compared to their peers who move on, even after completing an additional year of schooling.

Learning styles. Despite a decades-long campaign to axe learning styles from schools, 89 percent of teachers still believe that matching instruction to a perceived learning style-visual, auditory, reading/writing, and kinesthetic-improves learning.

Every student learns in different ways, but sensory systems work together-not independently-when information is being processed, and the research shows that labels like "visual thinker" can discourage students from exploring other ways of thinking about an idea. Instead, use a multimodal approach: ask students to use a variety of methods, from drawing to acting concepts out to writing songs, to learn about a topic-the research shows that it'll lead to more durable, robust learning.

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A Research-Backed Toolkit of What Works-and Doesn't Work-in Education

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Education fads come and go, but how do they stack up against the more modest, everyday pedagogies that make up the bulk of a teacher's repertoire? Recently, the Education Endowment Foundation, a U.K.-based nonprofit, published the Teaching and Learning Toolkit, a high-quality compendium of 30 common educational strategies or structural changes, ranging from metacognition to one-on-one tutoring to extending the school day.