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This article explains the importance of distinguishing professionalism and being a human being. There is a balance between being professional and being a real person to your students. This article outlines ways we can let our personalities and imperfections help inside our classrooms and provide a more comfortable, judgement free environment for students.

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
This post was originally contributed to Cathy Rubin's blog, The Global Search for Education, on the Huffington Post.
They are watching.
Every moment students spend in our rooms, amid the business of the day, the paper pushing and content coverage, amid the set-up and tear-down of projects, they hear everything we say. About ourselves. About the world. About them. They watch how we handle ourselves when we are pressed for time and when we receive gifts and when we screw things up.

So yes, deliver your curriculum. Yes, provide rich, hands-on, authentic learning experiences. Offer rigorous academic challenges. Raise the bar. Coach and guide. Nurture. Push. Advise.

But also be: To truly lead is to pay attention to who we are in the downtime, in the margins. To help them become the best people they are capable of becoming, we must first be those people.

We can do it in these ways:

1. Lead with imperfection.
Try things you're not good at, right in front of them. Demonstrate a spirit of experimentation. Speak of your mistakes without judgment.

2. Lead with assertiveness.
Show them how a self-assured person says no. Show what it looks like to set firm limits, without apology and without hostility.

3. Lead with relationships.
Let them hear you laugh with other teachers, prioritize loved ones, and speak respectfully of your significant other. Let them see what healthy relationships look like.

4. Lead with language.
Use the right words to describe concepts. Avoid dumbing things down. Savor a good word when it presents itself.

5. Lead with self-control.
When a student makes you angry, think of how you tell students to handle their own anger. Then do that.

6. Lead with manners.
Say please and thank you. Avoid cutting people off mid-sentence. Have sensitive conversations in private. Respect other people's time.

7. Lead with quality.
Take a few extra minutes to get something right. Do what you say you're going to do. Proofread.

8. Lead with humor.
Laugh. Be silly. Don't take yourself too seriously. Avoid mocking or ridiculing your students. Mock yourself instead.

9. Lead with enthusiasm.
Share your obsessions. Geek out on the things students think are uncool. Show them that it's possible to fall in love with a forest, a perfect pizza crust, the moment when a song changes key.

10. Lead with humility.
When you don't know something, say so. Allow for the possibility that you might occasionally be wrong. Check your ego. Apologize.

To stand before children-share physical space with them day after day-is a rare privilege. In every minute we spend together, they will learn something. Whatever it is we put before them, they will learn from it.

Let's make it good. ♥

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

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Lessons in Personhood: 10 Ways to Truly Lead in Your Classroom

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Listen to this post as a podcast: This post was originally contributed to Cathy Rubin's blog, The Global Search for Education , on the Huffington Post. They are watching. Every moment students spend in our rooms, amid the business of the day, the paper pushing and content coverage, amid the set-up and tear-down of projects, they hear everything we say.

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Some people have a hard time distinguishing between curating information and dumping information. Dumping information on students can be overwhelming, seem cluttering, and deter students from learning or looking at any of the information provided. Curating creates a more approachable and navigable experience to students, thus encouraging them to explore the topic with ease and confidence. This gets information across to students more effectively then it would by just dumping words and articles on students

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Are You a Curator or a Dumper? | Cult of Pedagogy

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You have so much good stuff to share, but to get anyone to actually look at it, you need to give it some polish.

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Teachers are humans just like everyone else. School can be just as overwhelming and cause just as much burnout to the teacher as it does to the students. This article explains what teacher burnout can look like and how to avoid it or remedy it. This article is important because people are only as successful as they let themselves be, burnout can have bad effects for not only the teacher, but also cause the students to miss out as well.

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Why It’s So Hard for Teachers to Take Care of Themselves | Cult of Pedagogy

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As a whole, teachers aren’t great about taking care of themselves. But that can change, and these four steps can help make that happen.

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Teaching and our education systems are definitely changed for good because of the pandemic. This article focuses on how it is more attractive for us to gravitate towards the easy option, but because of how the pandemic changed things, teaching became slightly more difficult. This article gives ideas for educators to rearrange and replace some old teaching techniques and use ones that fit better for students that are flipping between remote and F2F learning.

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No More Easy Button: A Suggested Approach to Post-Pandemic Teaching | Cult of Pedagogy

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With this fresh start, let’s take the wisdom we’ve gained over the last year and use it. Let’s not go back to the way things used to be.

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Many students are urged to use academic research to support their thesis or writing but are often times not taught how to access, read, or properly use academic research. This article explains good tips on how to instruct and guide students towards good sources, annotations, and citing.

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Sponsored by simpleshow and ISTE

This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. When you make a purchase through these links,
Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.

When I put things out into the world about teaching, I do my best to support those things with research. But honestly, I've never felt really secure about it, because I don't have any formal training in academic research. I have a Bachelor's degree in secondary education and an M.A. in writing and publishing, so my direct experience with academic research has been mostly self-directed.

Although plenty of people in the education world do have this training, I'm guessing quite a few others-especially K-12 classroom teachers- are in a similar boat to mine: You have a vague understanding of how a peer-reviewed, published piece of research works, but a lot of it is still pretty confusing. It's like the university folks who study best teaching practices are standing at the edge of a canyon and all the way on the other side are the actual practicing teachers. There should be steady, clear communication between these two groups-lots of good bridges that are easy to access-but so far we only have a few, and far too many of us on the teaching side don't even know about them.

That's what this post is for: to teach teachers how to get ahold of research that can inform what you do in your classroom, hopefully in ways that won't require crazy amounts of time.

My guest, Dr. Kripa Sundar, is an educational psychologist who agreed to help me get better at understanding how to read research. After talking about some of the excellent publications that are out there that already summarize this research for us, she then walks me through how to find the actual research, then shows me how to read a meta-analysis and a sample study.

Because what Dr. Sundar taught me was highly visual, especially the second half, I have produced it as a 6-part series on YouTube. The last three videos, which are the most visual, are embedded below.

Kripa Sundar, PhD

Start with Good Summary Publications

Before you spend a lot of time looking for single, specific studies to answer your research questions, start by making use of all the research summaries that are already out there.

The What Works Clearinghouse, backed by the U.S. Department of Education, offers a fantastic collection of resources to help educators make research-based decisions. Visitors can compare the effectiveness of various practices, and download practice guides that summarize key research findings, sorted by area of interest. This video offers an overview of everything you can find on the site.

American Educator is a free quarterly journal of the American Federation of Teachers, publishing peer-reviewed, research-based articles on a wide range of education-related topics. Each article goes in-depth on a topic like this one on community schools, summarizing and synthesizing relevant research, and offering robust reference lists so readers can follow up on individual studies.

Handbooks like those from Routledge and Cambridge offer overviews of research on hundreds of topics.

Books. Although these may not be the best source for finding an answer to one specific research question, they'll give you a good foundation in the general practices that are supported by research:

Blogs that do a good job of regularly incorporating solid research into their posts:

Initiatives like TLRC, ResearchED, and Deans for Impact work to disseminate research more effectively.

Things to Keep in Mind About Research

When dealing with any kind of research, Sundar cautions educators to keep the following caveats in mind:

Research is an ongoing process. "As you collect more data, the evidence can suggest other things," Sundar explains. "So what once we said, hey, this works, maybe in a decade or five years or 20 years we're saying, that doesn't work. That doesn't discount the value of research in its whole. It's a mere factor of how education research happens: We work with students who are living beings in real times of changing context. So as we collect data from these folks, they're going to show us different sets of data."

Research is done by humans. "There will always be inherent bias," Sundar says. So always take the results with a grain of salt.

There are no silver bullets. Even if something worked in a study, "it's going to be in very controlled setting," Sundar cautions. That doesn't mean it's going to work in your context, with your students, so test it out. If it works, add it into your repertoire.

You can find research to support both sides of any argument. "Without methodological training," Sundar says, "it can be very hard to (tell) is this a good study or a study that I want to be cautious of?" For this reason, she's a fan of meta-analyses, because they look at many studies all at once.

Where and How to Find Studies

Dr. Sundar recommends three places to look for research:

In this video, she walks me through each of these platforms and shows me how they work:

Watch the full 6-part series here.

Reading a Meta-Analysis

For people who don't have a lot of time to research, or those without extensive formal training, Sundar recommends looking for either systematic reviews or meta-analyses, both of which summarize the results of many studies on a particular topic.

What's the difference? "A systematic review gives you more a thematic analysis of the papers that have been published," Sundar says. "A meta-analysis is quantitative summary, so we're trying to say, on average, across all of these studies, how effective is this strategy?" In other words, the systematic review reads more like a book, whereas a meta-analysis actually crunches the numbers across studies.

When reading a study of this kind, she recommends this process:

1. Start with the abstract. This will give you a general idea of how the study was conducted and its results.

2. Read the introductory paragraphs to get a sense for what the authors were looking for in their study and to get clear on how they define the terms they'll use throughout the paper.

3. Try reading the methodology section. This may be where a lack of formal training starts to hamper your understanding, but it's worth a shot to at least get a sense for how the study was conducted. For a meta-analysis, you're looking to see how many studies and how many subjects (people) were included.

4. Read the discussion at the end. (This may also be called a "conclusion.") This section summarizes the findings and how the authors are interpreting their results, along with recommendations for practice and future research.

In this video, Sundar shows me how to read a sample meta-analysis:

Sundar has also written this guide to reading meta-analyses for RetrievalPractice.org.

Reading a Single Study

Although the process for reading an individual study is similar to that of reading a meta-analysis, it can be interesting to see an example. Here Sundar takes me through a single study:

Two Big Takeaways

If you're a practicing teacher who is dipping your toe into educational research, Sundar has two pieces of general advice that will make the process go more smoothly.

1. Test things out in small doses.

When you come across a research finding that seems promising, test it on a low-stakes lesson in your own classroom. "Don't experiment with your hardcore lessons," Sundar says, "try a super small one. Test it out and see how your students respond, and that way you have the lived experience of, does this work in my context or a classroom

2. Go easy on yourself.

"If you take the initiative to start reading a research article," Sundar says, "and you're not sure if the interpretation's right, I wouldn't self-doubt or kind of beat down on myself at all, even if I didn't have the research training. It takes prior knowledge to know what they're talking about, right? Like, the terms, the more you read them, the more familiar you get. The more number of studies you read, you start noticing a pattern, and you're kind of like, oh, I see what you mean. As an educator, if you pick up an article and you feel like, God, I don't understand this, I wouldn't fret about that. Just read what you can."

You can find Dr. Kripa Sundar on her website or by following her on Twitter at @KripaSundar.

Come back for more.
Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

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How to Find, Read, and Use Academic Research

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Sponsored by simpleshow and ISTE This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. When I put things out into the world about teaching, I do my best to support those things with research.

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It is alarming how many students lack multicultural education. Many predominantly white schools do not spend anytime focusing on other cultures and what life is like for them. This article addresses the importance of integration of cultures into the classroom despite the majority race population within a class.

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Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

Sponsored by PowerSchool and ViewSonic

These last few weeks have been especially difficult for me as the news continues to reflect that racism still exists in 2020. I've witnessed video footage of Ahmaud Arbery shot and killed while jogging, George Floyd murdered by the police, and Christian Cooper harassed while bird watching in Central Park. As we think about the next generation of adults we are influencing, particularly our White students, now more than ever, we need to teach more than kindness.

As an equity advocate, I have lots of conversations about culturally responsive teaching and multicultural education. Not too long ago while I was consulting with an elementary school principal she said, "Multicultural Education is nice, but we are well over 90% White at my school."

A common myth regarding multicultural education is that it is about helping students of color see themselves within the content. But multicultural education is about more than just race: It refers to any form of learning or teaching that incorporates the histories, texts, values, beliefs, and perspectives of people from different cultural backgrounds ( Glossary of Education Reform). And even if the majority of your students are White, it doesn't mean we shouldn't teach from a multicultural perspective.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not advocating for a bunch of Kumbaya moments in the classroom. This is not a post about how we need to teach students to embrace diversity and love each other. It's about the influence we can and should have on our students. Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings taught us that we teach what we value. Therefore, we are part of the problem if we refuse to teach about antiracism and speak out against police brutality. Our students look up to us as adults, and many of our students mimic our behavior. If we are silent around social justice matters, we send a loud message to our students about where we stand as these issues impact many of the communities we serve.

In fact, we need to go beyond multicultural education. In this 2017 interview, Zaretta Hammond differentiates between multicultural education and social justice education, which provides "a lens for the student, really being able to look at the world and seeing where things aren't fair or where injustice exists." To ensure the changes our society is hurting for, we need to give our White students both multicultural and social justice education. Additionally, Dr. James Banks, the father of multicultural education, advocates for educators to teach our students about social and civic action. Ensuring that students engage in multiple perspectives without coupling their learning with civic engagement does not complete the process of developing socially just citizens who are willing to take a stance against the mistreatment of others. We need to help our students find ways they can take action in response to what they have learned.

Going back to the principal I was speaking with about whether there was a need for multicultural education at her school, I was thinking, "This is why multicultural and social justice education is so important!" Even with her assumptions that because there wasn't a lot of racial representation at her school, does that mean the small percentage of students of color don't matter to her? If that's the case, what would her teachers say? Would they support her sentiments?

Why Multicultural Education is 100% Relevant in All-White Schools

"Whiteness" is Complex

When someone asks why multicultural education is needed at a predominately White school, an assumption is being made that White people are a homogenous group. But White people are as heterogeneous as other racial and ethnic groups: there's socioeconomic status, gender and sexual orientation, identity, religion, language, age, and disability, to name a few. All of those represent different cultures. Sometimes, when you're in a dominant culture and used to things being a certain way, you don't necessarily think about your ancestry or heritage and how things have changed over time. And because conditions have changed over time, it may appear that Whiteness is Whiteness, but there are so many different cultures embedded within that broad category.

I think it's essential that we help teach our White students about their ancestors and the origins of when their families first arrived in the United States. The languages, the cultures, the traditions, all those things don't necessarily have to be lost. They can be retrieved.

Let's go back to the 1790s, where the first census was started. With the first US Census, they classified race. The classifying of race allowed those in power to determine or allow a few rights: Who gets the right to get jobs? Who gets the right to marry? Who gets the right to own property? That's how the social construct of race started.

Above is a view of Europeans, or some of the first immigrants, who were coming from various countries. And if you look at the picture, they're White people, right? But they're coming from multiple countries. At this time, there were several languages represented. You had folks that came from Italy, Germany, Russia, England, and so on. There were all types of cultures coming into the United States.

There were also various forms of religions represented when the Europeans began to arrive in the US. In Russia, you had the Orthodox church. In England, you had the Anglican church. When they first came, they weren't willing to give up their culture and become this one White race. They held onto their traditions, values, and beliefs. But we see that over time, things have changed to where White supremacy and racial hierarchies began to form. Today, there are a lot of families who have European origins that may not necessarily speak the language from their original land of ancestry because those things might have been lost over generations.

Multicultural Literacy Is a Separate and Necessary Literacy

The concept of "literacy" is broad. Still, it can be divided into many different sub-categories. One of these is multicultural literacy, the ability to uncover biases relating to culture, and the skills to view the world through different cultural perspectives.

Dr. Robin DiAngelo says, "Historically reinforced ideologies such as individualism and color-blindness have left many White people racially illiterate but racially conscious when perceiving other racialized groups." So because they're in the dominant culture, they don't necessarily have to think about race, but they'll maybe notice racial issues that are not related to Whiteness.

In other words, maybe they might notice police brutality in a Black community. Perhaps they might see issues of race with Islamophobia and discrimination. But we want our students to do more than notice; responding to issues of racism, prejudice, and discrimination is essential.

Having literacy in this area is also key for equipping White students to participate more actively in conversations about racial justice. If they are not regularly exposed to these conversations, they are less likely to speak up on this topic. White friends and colleagues tell me all the time that they want to say something when racism and equity come up, but they often hold back because they don't know what to say or are afraid to say the wrong thing. With a higher level of multicultural literacy, our students will build more confidence.

What We've Been Doing Isn't Enough

Although multicultural education certainly isn't new, it's clear that what we've been doing up to this point hasn't been enough.

As recently as a few weeks ago, there have been instances of White people utilizing the police as a means to address their encounters with people of color. The underlying issue of racism is apparent in many of these instances. Discussing current events and helping White students understand why they should also be upset at discrimination and racism may prevent a continuous cycle of White people remaining silent and complicit when issues happen that do not directly impact them.

These conversations are essential to have. It's also critical to teach students about becoming allies and co-conspirators, especially at the middle and high school levels. It might be a little bit difficult with your first and second graders, and maybe your kindergartners, but I think there are some messages you could still portray to your students even at that age.

What Can Multicultural Education Teach Our White Students?

We've already established multicultural education goes beyond race. There's so much within the concept of "culture," and we must help our White students understand how race can impact them and how they can actively use whatever privilege they have to reduce issues of racism, discrimination, and bigotry.

1. Understanding Their Own Cultural and Ethnic Background

It's not uncommon for White people to say, Oh, I'm just White. I don't have a culture. We need to teach our White students about what their cultural background is and their ethnic backgrounds so they can understand and think about their language and religions going back to their ancestry. Lessons on their culture may help them start to understand how privilege and White supremacy began. So begin with going back and taking some time to help your students understand that. You can also work with students by exploring community history and cultural influence.

One of the things you can teach your students, your White students, is in history. Many White immigrants have been accused of marginalizing other White immigrants. For example, the Irish and Italians were mistreated, discriminated, and marginalized against by other White immigrants. If we can teach our White students how their ancestors might have perpetuated that oppression or perhaps were part of that oppression against each other, maybe that will help them understand a little bit how in 2020, oppression continues to exist to those who are not included in the dominant culture. They can kind of see how the "haves" and the "have nots" happened back then. One of the things we want to do is help students relate items from their background knowledge and be able to bring those to light.

2. Studying Implicit Bias in Everyday Language

Another thing we can do is discuss everyday language. How are words associated with white and black used? Words such as blackmail, blackballed, or blacklisted have different connotations than words like white labeled or whitelisted. We can have students examine how these words may spark negative perceptions based on their meanings and associations.

Consider how words such as "alien" or "immigrant" may trigger the thoughts of someone of Mexican descent. These types of stereotypes in our language may trigger our Latinx community. The same rule applies to phrases like "You should speak up more, you're so quiet" to an Asian student.

The language we use every day may not seem significant because of the implicit biases we have developed in our lives. The words we use daily are influenced by how we were raised, our social circle, and the media. We may not notice how some of the words we use may have adverse effects on particular groups of people (stereotypes, derogatory language, etc.). We can teach students about implicit bias and how to overcome bias in our language usage.

3. Examining Representation in Curriculum and Beyond

Let's take a look at our school curriculum. Have your students investigate how various cultural groups are represented in the school's curriculum. Lead these discussions with your students and have them understand it because a lot of times, that's not a thing we think about. When we are discussing representation in the school's curriculum, allow opportunities for a dialogue beyond heterosexual, cisgender, Christian-based educational norms. Instead, talk about subjects that aren't reflected, such as disabilities, and how they are depicted in the curriculum. How are people from the LGBTQ community portrayed or even acknowledged in the content? Chimamanda Adichie talks about the danger of a single story. We need to make sure that we can bring in various perspectives in our curriculum and instruction.

If students find minimal to no representation of certain groups in the curriculum, discuss ways to bring in a variety of multicultural perspectives. The website We Need Diverse Books is an excellent resource for building a more inclusive classroom library, and Milner published an article that discusses developing a multicultural curriculum for an all-White classroom.

From there, you can expand your communications by discussing popular culture and how various groups are represented in multiple media outlets such as the news, music, movies, and social media. Have them study or research certain groups and how the articles that come up and the titles of those articles. What do the reports say versus other articles about various groups?

4. Understanding and Recognizing Privilege

A combination of multicultural and social justice education can help students see the trouble with implicit racism and how even though they are not doing anything actively racist, they are still benefiting from a legacy of racism. Calling the cops to say that "an African American man is threatening me and my dog" is a result of White privilege. Knowing that Black people have historically been mistreated by law enforcement and using that knowledge to one's advantage is inhumane.

Teaching White students about power and privilege may be a touchy subject for some as White guilt and fragility may seep into the mindset of White teachers and students. However, we must learn to "disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed." Starting at a young age, we can help our students learn to understand that not everyone has access and the same opportunities as others. Students as young as six years old can learn about race and class. And this work doesn't have to be limited to social studies class. We can embed these principles in all subjects, including mathematics.

5. Dismantling Racism

It is not enough to teach White children to embrace racial and cultural diversity. We've got to go beyond cultural competency. "Children must also develop individual and group identities that will recognize and resist the false notions of superiority and racial entitlement" (Derman-Sparks, Ramsey, and Edwards, 2011). Because today we have to teach our students how to be antiracist and how to work to dismantle racism actively.

Invest in meaningful dialogue that brings awareness to issues impacting both local and global communities. Additionally, a social justice-minded educator teaches their students to develop their own socio-cultural consciousness and advocacy skills so they can advocate for themselves and others.

For elementary students, that action may include students committing to do more than not bully or laugh at each other. They may also commit to bystander intervention by stepping in and helping their peers who they see are being mistreated. We can help our students take a stance instead of just teaching them to be kind to each other and not engage in activities that include mistreating others.

For secondary students, action may include writing their school board about their concerns and calls for change. A strong student group organized with a mission and objectives goes a long way toward challenging institutional practices that are unjust toward certain groups. On local and national scales, have students engage in lessons that address mass incarceration, police brutality, civil rights, immigration, racism, healthcare disparities, unequal pay issues, trauma, suicide, drug abuse, and women's rights, and privilege.

Sometimes we teach our students how to be kind to others, embrace diversity, and respect differences. We can go beyond that by teaching our White students how to be antiracist actively and do their part to support advocacy towards social justice and reform. The foundation for teaching our students how to engage in these practices actively is by helping students understand their White racial identity and positionality in society. From there, students may have a better understanding of the need for a multicultural approach in education and what they can do to find their voice and role in creating a socially just society.

Additional Resources
Framing Brave Conversations About Race and Ethnicity 8 Ways Teachers Can Address White Supremacy in the Classroom Teaching About Racism, Antisemitism and White Supremacy How Does Race Affect a Student's Math Education? Curriculum for White Americans to Educate Themselves on Race and Racism White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America Diversity Equity and Inclusion Activity for Project Based Learning Racism No Way: Anti-racism Activities, Years 3-12 How Should I Talk About Race in My Mostly White Classroom?
Learn more from Sheldon Eakins on his website, the Leading Equity Center, where he offers resources, courses, and his podcast, the Leading Equity Podcast.

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Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

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Why White Students Need Multicultural and Social Justice Education

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Sponsored by PowerSchool and ViewSonic These last few weeks have been especially difficult for me as the news continues to reflect that racism still exists in 2020. I've witnessed video footage of Ahmaud Arbery shot and killed while jogging, George Floyd murdered by the police, and Christian Cooper harassed while bird watching in Central Park.

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Correlations between movement and learning have been found throughout the years. That being said, this article acknowledges the importance and benefits of having physical interactions throughout lessons and how that can impact a student's cognitive function.

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Sponsored by Pear Deck and NewseumED

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If you were to start singing "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider" right now, I bet you'd have a hard time keeping your hands still. That's because most of us who know the song learned it with gestures, and things we learn with physical movement tend to stick.

We can apply that same principle to classroom learning, using movement to enhance learning from preschool all the way through college. Let's take a look at what the research says about movement-based learning, then explore six different ways you can add more movement to your instruction.

The Research on Movement

The concept of "learning styles" has overwhelmingly been labeled a myth by researchers, so attempting to determine which of your students are kinesthetic learners will not be a good use of your time. What is worth your time is using movement when working with all learners, because plenty of research backs that up.

In general, people learn better when information is presented in more than one way (Sankey, Birch, & Gardiner, 2010). In other words, if we take in information through more than one sense, we're more likely to encode it in long-term memory. This would include visual, verbal, and kinesthetic modes of learning.

Specifically, the use of gestures results in more enduring learning than learning without gestures (Cook, Yip, & Goldin-Meadow, S, 2010). So even the addition of a few small hand gestures can have an impact on how well students remember material.

Study after study shows that physical activity activates the brain, improves cognitive function, and is correlated with improved academic performance (Donnelly & Lambourne, 2011). This means any kind of physical activity, not just movement associated with the material we're learning, can benefit students academically.

Six Ways to Add Movement to Instruction

1. Total Physical Response

Developed for use with second-language learners in the 1960's ( Asher, 1966), Total Physical Response simply has students act out physical gestures to represent vocabulary words. Shown to be highly effective with both children (Singh, 2011) and adults ( Carruthers, 2010), TPR can also be used to help learners remember new vocabulary terms in their native language. In other words, it can be used in any content area, with any student.

This video from the Teacher Toolkit shows Texas teacher Michael Rowland using TPR with his third grade students, who are English learners.

And here is Craig Gaslow, another Texas teacher who teaches AP Human Geography, demonstrating how he uses TPR to teach three different models of diffusion:

https://youtu.be/9HtrVh2Dzzs

Finally, here are Scott Causer's high school students demonstrating a few earth science processes using TPR:

What strategies support learning? Here's high school science using TPR to recall processes in Earth Science -thanks Mr. Causer and team for modeling! @ESMSchoolDist @cultofpedagogy pic.twitter.com/njoAaVdBB9
- Naomi Trivison (@NaomiTrivison) March 30, 2019

2. Tableau/Snapshot

In this strategy, students create a physical "snapshot" with their bodies, a still picture that represents an idea.

This example, demonstrated by 4th grade teacher Stefannie Cundiff, comes from Teacher Toolkit:

Another example is explained in this Slides presentation by Tyler Jacobs, an Idaho-based high school ELA and social studies teacher. Click the image below to view the slideshow in a new window:

3. Simulations

In these, students demonstrate a concept with some kind of motion or interactivity. They could represent non-human components, like in the examples below, or they might actually take on the role of humans in a re-enactment of an event.

The first example comes from the University of British Columbia, where electrical engineering professor Matthew Yedlin has students simulate the difference between linear growth and exponential growth:

The second example, a simulation of the circulatory system, comes from Michelle Cliche, who teaches grades 4 and 5 in London, Ontario, Canada.

Ss learned about the complexity of the circulatory system by acting out delivery of blood through red & blue bean bags. S in middle is ❤️ directing blood flow to different organs. Later, we did this on playground climbers because heart has to pump 'up'. pic.twitter.com/dhzTqRTEOp
- Michelle Cliche (@Clicheteach) March 29, 2019

Finally, here's a different kind of simulation demonstrated by Amy Tepperman, where participants show fractions by placing different body parts on the floor, Twister-style:

An important note about simulations: If you are doing simulations about historical periods or events, proceed with caution. Many, many teachers have ended up traumatizing students with these types of simulations. This article from Learning for Justice explores the topic in depth.

4. Songs with Movement

Songs are another powerful way to teach concepts to students, and if the songs also incorporate movement, even better.

Dan Adler, a 6th grade science teacher in Lawrence, MA, regularly uses songs with physical movements to help his students remember challenging concepts. In this video, students demonstrate "Bodak Particles," a song about phase change sung to an instrumental version of Cardi B's song "Bodak Yellow." (Get a copy of the lyrics here.)

Check out our science scholars rapping about phase changes! pic.twitter.com/uO3sJQubgw
- UP Academy Leonard (@up_leonard) November 8, 2018

5. Virtual and Augmented Reality

The experiences offered by virtual and augmented reality allow students to move around in and interact with virtual objects and spaces in ways that would be difficult if not impossible to pull off in the real world.

Augmented Reality layers digital enhancements on top of objects in the real, physical world. Using a device, like a smartphone, loaded with AR software, users point it at a picture or physical object, and the software brings up some kind of digital element like a 3D animation, text, or a video. ( Pokémon Go is an example of an AR game.)

One set of AR tools that have tremendous learning potential comes from a company called Merge. Their Merge Cube is a handheld cube that can "become" a variety of objects when paired with the Merge Goggles, as shown below:

Virtual Reality immerses the user in a 360-degree environment, a computer-generated simulation, viewable through a VR headset, and allows them to move through and interact with that environment.

One outstanding source for VR experiences is Google Expeditions, which offers tours to over 500 different locations: historical landmarks, national and state parks, underwater sites, and up-close studies of scientific phenomena.

And if you don't find the exact tour you want, you and your students can even create your own expeditions with Google Tour Creator.

6. Brain Breaks

I left this one for the end because it's the easiest to implement. This brain breaks guide from the University of Texas summarizes the research on the connection between movement and academic achievement and offers dozens of ideas for brain breaks that can be put into action immediately.

Brain break videos are super easy to find on YouTube, especially for younger kids. My daughter came home from first grade years ago excited to demonstrate this one for me:

But what about older kids? High school math teacher David Sladkey has written a a book, Energizing Brain Breaks ( Amazon | Bookshop.org), that has ideas for all ages, even middle and high school kids who may not be as comfortable with the Tooty Ta. in this video, students demonstrate a simple toe-tapping brain break:

Tips for Getting Started

Don't overdo it. Attempting to add a movement component to every concept students learn would not only be too time-consuming, it could also get old, shifting from a fun novelty to something that causes students to slump over in their seats and say, Not THAT again!!

Get input from students. When coming up with gestures or movements, you don't have to rely solely on your own brain. Ask students to help you come up with ideas. Involving students in the process will help them remember concepts better and will increase the likelihood that you'll end up with really effective movements.

Know what works for your students. Some of your students may not be comfortable with or physically able to do certain movements, so keep that in mind and make modifications based on ability and need.

Use movement for retrieval practice. Rather than using movement in a single lesson, apply the principles of retrieval practice by repeating the movements in short practice sessions, spacing them out over time, and interleaving concepts with one another.

For younger students, meaningful gestures matter more. While adults learn from both iconic gestures (those that have some meaning in relation to the concept they are connected to) and beat gestures (those that have no inherent meaning but are just tied to particular "beats" in a sentence or phrase), younger children learned more from iconic gestures (So, Sim Chen-Hui, & Low Wei-Shan, 2012). So when working with younger students, try to make the gestures match the concepts in some way.

References

Asher, J. J. (1969). The total physical response approach to second language learning. The modern language journal, 53(1), 3-17.

Carruthers, S. W. (2010). The total physical response method and its compatibility to adult ESL-learners. Retrieved from http://tesolteachers.net/t.pdf

Cook, S. W., Yip, T. K., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2010). Gesturing makes memories that last. Journal of memory and language, 63(4), 465-475.

Donnelly, J. E., & Lambourne, K. (2011). Classroom-based physical activity, cognition, and academic achievement. Preventive medicine, 52, S36-S42.

Sankey, M., Birch, D., & Gardiner, M. (2010). Engaging students through multimodal learning environments: The journey continues. In Proceedings ASCILITE 2010: 27th annual conference of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education: Curriculum, technology and transformation for an unknown future (pp. 852-863). University of Queensland.

Singh, J. P. (2011). Effectiveness of total physical response. Academic Voices: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 1, 20-22.

So, W. C., Sim Chen-Hui, C., & Low Wei-Shan, J. (2012). Mnemonic effect of iconic gesture and beat gesture in adults and children: Is meaning in gesture important for memory recall?. Language and Cognitive Processes, 27(5), 665-681.

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Physical movement makes learning stick better, and today we're exploring six ways you can add more movement to your classroom.

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This article focuses on the difficulties teachers face with their classes unpredictable meeting schedules. This article gives great tips to keep all students engaged whether they're at home or F2F. Synchronization and routine tend to be a recurring factor.

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Sponsored by Teaching Channel and UL Xplorlabs

Let's go back for a moment to a simpler time, back to 2019 when you may have "struggled to differentiate." When you tried to meet the needs of all students who came to you with different levels of readiness, who had different physical, emotional, and cognitive profiles, and who learned best under different scenarios.

2020 laughs at 2019.

Teaching is much more complicated now, and you are most likely in a situation where your students are scattered in some way. It may be one or a combination of these:

Half of your class is at home while the other half is in-person, then this switches the next day.

Some of your students are all-virtual, all the time.

Even the kids you do have face-to-face (F2F) have to be socially distanced and therefore can't collaborate and interact the way they once could.

Before, a teacher only had to worry about meeting students where they were academically, socially, and emotionally. Now you literally have to figure out a way to meet them where they are.

Depending on who's running your school, you may be expected to do any number of instructional gymnastics to keep all of these students engaged and on track. While I'm not going to get into the "shoulds" here (I address some best practices in this post, and I ranted about one specific remote teaching problem in this Facebook live broadcast), what I'd like to do in this post is curate some of the ways teachers have solved the problem of teaching students who are literally all over the place.

I pulled these ideas from responses to two separate tweets: In the first one, I asked what was working when teaching some students in person and others at home. The second tweet came a few weeks later, where I was asking specifically for strategies to build community among all the scattered groups. I got hundreds of responses, some of which I was still trying to digest an hour ago, so this list is just a sampling of some of the ideas I saw repeated several times and a few that I thought were really noteworthy. If you want to see all of the ideas, follow those links and enjoy! I'll warn you though, it's a lot. With so many people working on the same problem at the same time, there are a lot of ideas in many different iterations. My goal here is to pare it down to just a few that I think you can use.

(One more thing: For efficiency, I'm going to refer to all videoconferencing software as Zoom. So when I say "Zoom," just know that this means Google Meet, Microsoft Teams video, Skype, or whatever you're using. It's just faster this way.)

1. Create Student Cohorts

This was the most frequently mentioned piece of advice from teachers doing this work, so I'm putting it first and separating it from everything else.

The idea is to put students into groups that span different populations-some virtual, some F2F, some from different days in an A/B schedule-so they can help each other through your course. Doing this allows students to ask each other questions and support each other at times when you're not available. It's also a way to create connections between your in-class students and those who are learning from home.

In some classes, these cohorts are simply contact groups, so that when students get stuck, they can get clarification or help from each other.

In other cases, cohorts actually work on projects or assignments together.

In classrooms where F2F and at-home students are participating at the same time, teachers are putting students into pairs made up of one F2F and one at-home learner. This arrangement gives each at-home student a designated partner to connect them to what's happening in class.

For best results, give students a getting-to-know-you activity to do with their cohort or partner so they can form a connection and feel more comfortable with one another.

2. Limit the Synchronous

Many teachers are finding that synchronous instruction-where all students in class and at home are plugged in and participating in real time-needs to be very limited and used intentionally, as opposed to just recording an entire class session and expecting everyone to sit through that. (Again, I explored the ridiculousness of this idea here.).

Here are some ways this principle is playing out:

Brief and debrief. Some teachers are only using synchronous instruction to do a quick overview at the beginning of the class session and a quick debrief at the end, leaving the middle for independent work, group work, or small-group instruction with the teacher.

Make synchronous time special. Several teachers reported using synchronous time for things like read-alouds, reader's theater, and Shakespeare reading, where parts are given to both the at-home and in-person students.

Use virtual bell-ringers. Sort of. Some teachers are starting their synchronous time with a short pre-recorded video that gives everyone a task and reviews the day's agenda. Like a bell-ringer, doing this frees up the teacher to handle administrative tasks, lets kids trickle into the Zoom, and gives everyone something to do until it's time to start as a group.

Put EVERYONE on Zoom. If bandwidth allows and the activity fits, then put all students on Zoom for the synchronous part of your lesson, even F2F students. This will put everyone on the same playing field and make interaction easier.

Try interactive apps. Teachers are reporting great synchronous experiences using Pear Deck and Nearpod, which allow you to create and share interactive presentations with students on their own devices. Tools like Poll Everywhere and Mentimeter let you conduct fast whole-class polls with a few clicks. And YoTeach! offers backchannel chats that are similar to what used to be found on the now-defunct TodaysMeet.

Put direct instruction on video. Not surprisingly, quite a few teachers are reporting that they feel their direct instruction just doesn't work as well via Zoom as it does in a well-planned, pre-recorded video.

Have a backup plan. Use choice boards (general ones prepared ahead of time that can be used over and over) for at-home kids to use when tech goes out. This post about choice boards from Jenny Pieratt offers some things to think about when putting these together.

Differentiate synchronous learning. Here's something to consider: Does every student need the same amount of synchronous learning? Most solutions I'm hearing related to the synchronous/asynchronous question seem to be shooting for one model for everyone. But just like in the old days, it's not likely that every student needs or wants that much face-to-face time with the teacher, even the ones who are face to face. So maybe we can work toward customizing the amount of synchronous instruction for every student, allowing some to work independently or through digital channels more often, while others who need more interaction can get it?

3. Chunk the Time

It can be tremendously helpful to break up the class period into designated chunks, where some students are learning directly from the teacher, others are working in groups, and others are working independently. If you can make the structure visible and predictable for students, even better. The two resources listed below can help you imagine what those structures might look like for you. (Notice that none of the options listed have the teacher lecturing for the entire period. That's important.)

In this post from earlier this month, Catlin Tucker shared three blended learning models that can work in what she calls "concurrent classrooms."

Beth Alexander, director of Teaching and Learning at the Linden School in Toronto, shared a collection of hybrid lesson structures she's been trying, along with visuals like the ones below. Alexander has given me permission to share all of her models in a PDF, which you can download here.

Courtesy of Beth Alexander. All models available in this PDF.

Courtesy of Beth Alexander. All models available in this PDF.

One more tip for this "chunking": When you switch from synchronous to asynchronous, but there will be a time when you go back to synchronous, set up an on-screen timer to let at-home kids know when time is up for an activity.

4. Build Community Intentionally

Having students in multiple locations makes it much harder to build a classroom community, but those relationships are so important for making students feel a sense of belonging and connection. Here are some things teachers are doing to meet this challenge:

Reserve time to get to know each other. As a teacher, you can get to know students-both F2F and virtual-by scheduling short one-on-one meetings with them. To help students get to know each other, do icebreakers throughout the year and assign students to interview each other as a class project. And set aside time whenever possible for non-academic conversations; over time, these will continue to grow those relationships.

Make using names part of your classroom norms. Several teachers mentioned the positive results they got from greeting online students by name at the start of each class period, and others described setting discussion norms that required students to use each other's names regularly. Be sure you're pronouncing student names correctly, too; this will make a big difference.

Create communal spaces online. Slack and Microsoft Teams are two great options for giving students spaces online for general communication. Padlet is another option for structured or unstructured conversations. And Parlay is a robust platform for much more formal discussions.

Use lunch and recess for socialization. Some schools are setting up Zoom sessions for "lunch buddies," where students at home just hang out and talk with students in school. Although you may not get a large response to this kind of an opportunity, think of the social impact it could make on just a few kids to have that small community to visit with every day.

Use video. Flipgrid offers a simple space where students could record short videos that could be shared with the class. One teacher mentioned using these videos to have students record short responses to the prompts that would normally be given for writing in journals.

Play games. Quite a few digital games, like Kahoot!, Quizizz, and GimKit, can be played with both at-home and F2F students at the same time, all while reviewing course content. A few people mentioned Minecraft as an ideal platform for play and interaction. Even a game like Crumple & Shoot can be played where the F2F students shoot the paper wads, but at-home students can still be on the teams.

5. Experiment with Cameras and Screens

Lots of teachers mentioned setups that involved more than one camera and screen so that the same broadcasts can capture different things simultaneously. The number of ideas and combinations along these lines got pretty overwhelming, so I'll just share three big ones:

Two Zooms. When broadcasting, many teachers are setting up one camera to focus on them and another to focus on the board, another shared screen, or a document camera. This puts the "teacher" on Zoom twice but gives students more of a feel for what's happening in the classroom.

Mics and Headsets. Some teachers are putting Bluetooth earbuds in and/or wearing mics on headsets so they can communicate directly with at-home learners without disrupting the in-person class. I think this might drive some people (like me?) crazy, so take this with a grain of salt.

Swivl Cams. A few teachers mentioned using Swivl cameras to track either the teacher or to follow group interactions for students at home to watch.

6. Optimize Discussions

If your synchronous time includes class discussions that include both F2F and at-home learners, these suggestions can help you make the most of that time.

Establish norms. Many students will hold back in discussions if they don't know what the rules are, for fear of messing up in front of everyone. So be sure to establish clear norms for discussion: What should students do if they have something to say? Are there time limits on commenting? What kinds of things are appropriate to type into the chat? Should students write to each other in the chat? Should everyone stay muted or keep microphones on? The clearer these guidelines are, the better participation is likely to be.

Enable the chat. Some students will never feel comfortable unmuting in a large group, but will participate much more actively in a written chat, so whenever you can offer that as an option for participation, do it.

Assign a chat moderator. Have a student or another adult-anyone but you, if you are the one conducting the discussion-moderate the written chat in Zoom so you don't have to multitask. You can occasionally break from the "live" discussion to take questions from the chat, or establish norms where other students can respond to those questions in writing if they have the answer.

Share questions ahead of time. To improve participation from home, some teachers are sending questions to students ahead of time, having students turn in their responses, then calling on individuals to share their responses in the group discussion. This extra preparation ensures a productive discussion and removes some of the doubt students may feel about volunteering responses or having to think of them on the spot.

Repeat questions. When students ask questions, repeat or rephrase them yourself so everyone can hear. This practice helps anyone who didn't happen to hear it the first time, which is more likely in a hybrid situation.

Deal with the crickets. If lack of participation is a problem, you need to figure out the root cause, because it could be any number of things. Start by reading this post about improving student participation. You might also try to add more structure to your discussion by using a strategy like Philosophical Chairs, the TQE method, or the Discussion Game.

None of these ideas are really tested, researched, or optimized in any way, so don't feel like this is some massive to-do list that you have to check off. If you can implement one or two strategies that make things better for you and your students, that's a success.

Probably the worst thing you can do is to try and replicate exactly what you were doing before 2020, time-wise and content-wise. That's trying to force a square peg into a round hole; by doing that, you're just signing up for a ton of frustration.

Years ago I wrote a piece urging teachers to think of your teaching as always being "in Beta." Consider teaching in a post-COVID world to be the most massive project-in-Beta ever. It's going to be messy, but that's how humans learn and grow and adapt. Continue to experiment, fall apart on the days when it's your turn (because everyone seems to need a turn every now and then), ask students and parents for feedback, observe other teachers when you can, and most importantly, keep giving yourself and your students grace.

We're getting through this.

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Some students are in the room with you. Some are home. Everyone is spread far apart. How do you teach this way? How do you build community? Here are some ideas.

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Classroom jobs tend to fade out as students start entering higher grade levels. This article explains how classroom jobs are just as important to the older kids. Jobs can allow students to connect and work together, find new things they're good at, and also develop job application skills.

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Sponsored by Kialo Edu and Kiddom

This might be the perfect time for this topic. At first I just thought it was a neat idea, something teachers could implement pretty easily, something that would be a nice change of pace from what we usually talk about here.

But now I'm thinking this might actually be the thing that helps wake up a lot of our remote and hybrid classrooms from the white-knuckle, just-get-through-it mentality many of us have settled into as the '20-21 school year grinds through its second half. Just maybe.

I'm talking about classroom jobs, the tasks we assign to students to help keep our classrooms running. This is typically something we associate with face-to-face classrooms during normal times, but I was absolutely delighted -and I don't use the word 'delighted' every day-to learn that not only is it totally possible to assign jobs to students in remote classes, the jobs can make those remote classes really, really enjoyable. On top of that, they'll help students discover and develop passions and talents they can take with them well beyond your class.

When I was a middle school teacher, I didn't do much with classroom jobs. I was too much of a control freak, for one. The other reason was because it wasn't really a part of middle school culture. Elementary teachers are fantastic about assigning jobs to students, but as kids get older, teachers use these kinds of systems less and less. As a result, secondary teachers often work themselves to the bone, doing everything themselves as their students, ironically, grow more capable of taking on responsibilities every year.

Now that I have talked with Thom Gibson about this topic, I wish I could go back to the classroom so I could put some serious effort into establishing a robust system of classroom jobs. Gibson is a middle school STEM teacher from Austin, Texas. He has basically mastered the art of managing a whole program of classroom jobs, and he's made that process work for remote learning, too.

Thom Gibson

In our conversation on the podcast, we talked about why setting up students jobs is such a good thing to do, how to troubleshoot common problems with a jobs system, and what some of Gibson's favorite classroom jobs are-once you hear some of these ideas, I know you're going to want to try them.

Why Setting Up Classroom Jobs is Worth the Effort

It builds positive classroom community and culture. "Students feel like they are actually contributing in a meaningful way that is helping you as the teacher or helping their fellow classmates with something," Gibson says.

It gives students opportunities to explore interests and develop talents. Gibson started to see more value in classroom jobs when he had students create things that could be shared with a wider audience, like podcasts, newsletters, and art. "I started seeing an opportunity to tap into the students' interests with these class jobs as opposed to just getting something done for me."

It lets students learn job application skills. In Gibson's class, students aren't just given the jobs; they have to apply for them. So they gain experience with the job application process.

A Few Cool Job Ideas

Classroom jobs have really evolved past board cleaner and line leader. Gibson has compiled a list of over 25 unique student job titles. Here are ten to get you started:

1. Podcaster: Produces a regular brief podcast on a topic of interest to students, using tools like Soundtrap or GarageBand to make it happen. To keep it manageable, Gibson recommends only having students do one podcast per month, and keeping each episode under 3 minutes.

2. Athletic Trainer: Sets a timer for the middle of a class meeting to lead students in a movement activity, whether students are in the room or in a video meeting.

3. DJ: Plays music for 5 minutes before class. This can be done through the videoconferencing platform if you are remote.

4. Motivational Speaker: Records a one-minute Loom video each week reflecting on a motivational idea or quote to share with the class.

5. Visual Display Artist: Creates posters for in-person class or graphics to be used online for remote learning.

6. Zoologist: Cares for the class pet (or their own pet in remote learning) and lets the rest of the class check in once a week to see how the pet is doing.

7. Tech Guru: Sets up the teacher's classroom tech and helps other students with tech in-person, or troubleshoots and provides help to other students through screen sharing during virtual learning.

8. KonMari Organizing Specialist: Keeps classroom supplies organized. This one works best in an in-person setting, but many teachers probably also have online spaces that could use help with decluttering.

9. Assistant Grader: Helps the teacher with grading. In person, this student would highlight mistakes on assessments for the teacher to look at later. Virtually, this student could assist with some online grading and notify other students when assignments are missing from online platforms like Khan Academy.

10. Tutorial Creator: Makes YouTube tutorials for all kinds of tasks that other students need in the classroom.

Making it Work: The Logistics

A system like this doesn't just spring up out of nowhere; it requires organization and maintenance. Gibson shared a few key components of how his jobs program works:

Job descriptions are provided ahead of time. Students first get a chance to look at all job listings, which include a description of each job along with notes on what personality types would be a good fit.

Students apply for jobs. Gibson has found that this maximizes student buy-in. In the application, students choose their top three jobs and explain why they'd be a good fit.

Job holders get checklists. After students are "hired," (and multiple students may be hired for the same job), they are given job-specific checklists of responsibilities, including when their job is performed, how often, and how to do it.

A teacher's assistant keeps it all together. Although it was not mentioned in the above list, it is essential to have a teacher's assistant whose job it is to remind everyone else to do their job. Gibson recommends looking for "super type-A" students to fill this role.

Teach the jobs like any other curriculum. Students will need practice and feedback to do the jobs right. If a student isn't doing their job correctly, "Make them do it again," Gibson says, "not as a punishment but just as a way of, okay, so now let's try it again."

At a time when we are all hungry for human connection, when classrooms feel more fragmented than ever before, when we sometimes go days or weeks without talking to each other, adding classroom jobs to the mix could be the breath of fresh air we need for our schools. They will give students a new reason to show up, to participate, and to stick around, because in a meaningful way, the classroom will become theirs again.

Learn More from Thom Gibson

Gibson's free course, Essential Student Jobs for the Middle School Classroom of Tomorrow, can be accessed here. His paid course, How to Teach Kids About Money Plus, is here.

Follow him on Twitter, on Instagram, or on YouTube.

Come back for more.
Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

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It's Time to Give Classroom Jobs Another Try

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These fresh ideas for student jobs will invigorate your classroom and get you and your students excited about school again-even if you teach remotely.

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To summarize, this article addresses the ways mistakes and wrong answers can be used within the lesson in order to help students think critically and guide them to the correct response.

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Sponsored by Hapara and TGR EDU: Explore

My son Oliver is enrolled in virtual school this year. He has an amazing teacher who kicked off the year with her kindergarten students by going through the alphabet. As they went through each letter, students had to suggest words that started with that letter.

When they got to the letter after H and before J, one student yelled out, "Iguana."

"Great work!" the teacher said. "Who else has a word that starts with our letter?"

Crickets. No one said anything. As an eavesdropping dad, I was thankful this wasn't a drinking game, because I had nothing! Suddenly, Oliver unmuted, huge smile on his face, and joyfully shared his answer:

"Lizard!"

His teacher looked at him, smiled, and said, "I'm sorry, that's not right. Does anyone else have a word that works?"

I looked at him and saw the joy stripped from his eyes. I started to think about the wonder he and just about every child comes out of the womb with. I began to worry about what happens when we stifle that wonder because of our rigid practice of creating such a narrow window of what we consider to be helpful contributions. And I fully understood how it comes to be that previously engaged learners learn to check out of school.

A Missed Opportunity

There are serious pedagogical issues with what happened here. For formative assessment purposes, how does this teacher's answer help her understand, diagnose, and correct what Oliver's potential misunderstanding is? For the purposes of developing student agency, how does her decision to not allow Oliver to explain his thinking limit his ability to sharpen his reasoning skills and disposition towards supporting his claims with evidence? It turns out that although his mistake could have been an association between lizards and iguanas or a mistake about what constitutes an "i" word (look at the second letter in lizard), it really came down to what happens when you start school in Zoom using the Arial font where a lowercase L and uppercase i are the same character: "l." But because the teacher moved on without stopping to investigate Oliver's response, that reason was not uncovered in class.

Mistakes are a natural part of learning, but students cannot develop into critical thinkers if they regularly freeze out of the fear of making a mistake. As educators, we can shift the culture of our classrooms to embrace mistakes, and one way to do this is through mistake analysis, one of several powerful but practical strategies I share in my book, Thinking Like a Lawyer: A Practical Framework to Teach Critical Thinking to All Students. ( Bookshop.org | Amazon). As a math-teacher-turned-attorney, I wrote this book and started my organization, thinkLaw, to help educators seamlessly incorporate critical thinking into their curriculum.

Critical Thinking as a Pathway to Equity

I have a confession: I'm in this for the rule-breakers. Our profession attracts many people who became educators because the compliance-based, rule-following system worked well for them. But I was not one of those people. As a young student, I had a lot of behavior challenges, but it turned out these were the result of not being challenged. It was only later in life, when I attended law school, that I was taught the kind of critical thinking I needed when I was younger, the kind of thinking that would have kept me challenged.

Critical thinking should not be luxury good. But our current system often treats it that way, setting aside this kind of challenging work for only the most advanced students. In conversations about equity in education, one question I always ask is How do we make equity real at the classroom level? We can talk about implicit bias all day, but what about the explicit bias of saying "These kids can't"? What "These kids can't" often means is "As an educator, I have no idea how to create learning conditions such that all kids can."

So I decided to create spaces that rewarded disruption and divergent thinking-spaces I longed for when I was going through the K-12 system. I view access to critical thinking as THE pathway for making equity real at the classroom level by giving students the opportunity to lead, innovate, and break the things that must be broken as a core part of their educational experience. This is not possible in a world where students are afraid of getting the wrong answer.

Four Ways to Implement Mistake Analysis in Your Classroom

The magic of mistakes is not a belief system. It is a practical set of tools you can apply in almost any classroom context, regardless of grade level or subject area. Here are four strategies you can use to leverage mistake analysis as a seamless way to incorporate critical thinking into your instruction:

1. Anticipate "good" mistakes in advance.

When planning for instruction, think ahead about the kinds of mistakes students are most likely to make. You already know how students will get confused when adding fractions with unlike denominators. You can predict that some students might confuse fact with opinion when the statement is "pizza is the best food ever" (because it is).

But don't stop at identifying WHAT students may do incorrectly. Make sure you think about WHY the mistake may happen so you can do a better job in your instruction to show them HOW to prevent that mistake. For instance, if a student tells you that 5 + 2 = 6, you should anticipate this to be a common mistake that occurs when students start their counting with an addend, which sounds like, "Okay, starting with 5, I'm adding 2, so 5, 6. The answer is 6."

2. Use probing questions to grapple with "good" mistakes in real time.

Teacher: Who would you argue is most responsible for the assassination of Malcolm X?

Student: John F. Kennedy.

This real-life classroom exchange shows why it is hard to prepare for the infinite universe of potential mistakes. But do not be so quick to dismiss a student's answer as totally off-base. They offer a lot of opportunities for learning and some of them have the potential to be "magic." Instead of moving on so quickly, try some of the following probing questions:

JFK? Interesting. What makes you say that?

Why might some of your classmates disagree with you?

JFK was assassinated before Malcolm X was. Help me understand why you believe he is responsible for the assassination of Malcolm X. (Ask clarifying questions if the student's timeline, scientific theory, mathematical concept, grammatical rule, etc., does not appear to be accurate, even after probing.)

If you simply dismissed this student's answer as nonsense, you would have missed out on the clever connection this student made between JFK's assassination, Malcolm X's controversial quote stating that this tragedy was an example of "chickens coming home to roost," and inevitably, a turning point in the growing tension between Malcolm X and the leadership of the Nation of Islam.

3. Ask students to create their own "good" mistakes.

"How might someone get this question wrong?" When we have students anticipate the most predictable mistakes that might be made on a task, we're moving well beyond that lower level of test-taking skills and instead, getting students to think like test- makers, coming up with viable (but incorrect) options on a multiple-choice test.

Suppose your students struggle to identify the main idea of a passage. Instead of asking students to define the main idea of this post, for example, what if we asked them to create three wrong but "good" incorrect responses to what the main idea is?

"Students get upset when they get an answer wrong" works well because we know how tempting it is to just read the opening of a piece and guess a main idea from that.

"Mistakes can be magical" would be an answer a student might pick who only read the title.

"Educators should anticipate likely mistakes in advance" is the first practical recommendation, so a student might mistakenly choose this response as the main idea.

It's important that when students do this, they come up with logical possibilities. I have my students follow what I call the "Joe Schmo" rule: What kind of answer would trip up Joe Schmo, the average person who always falls for the trick answer? Instead of letting students come up with crazy, nonsensical options, this rule keeps the exercise at a challenging metacognitive level.

4. Which wrong is more "right"?

Mistake analysis can also be an opportunity to introduce conflict, drama, and meaningful opportunities to write and debate across content areas. As an attorney representing clients in business disputes, I rarely had a case where one side was pristine and the other was pure evil. They were usually both wrong, to some extent. But the core question was, which one is more "right"?

Bring this framework into your classroom by analyzing two equations that are both done incorrectly, but one has a computational error and the other has a conceptual answer. Two paragraphs or essays where one has structural errors and the other is riddled with spelling and grammatical mistakes. Two science experiments with flawed procedures because one has problems with omitted variable bias and the other struggles with selection bias. Asking which wrong is more "right" helps learners shift from asking "what" and "how to" to asking "why" and "what if" - a necessary shift for giving students the tools to not just analyze the world as it is, but imagine it as it ought to be.

I am a true believer in the magic of mistakes. To be clear, I am not advocating for a world with no wrong answers. I am advocating for a world where children (and adults) are less obsessed with being right and much more focused on the process of understanding what it means to do right. Care about social-emotional learning? There is tremendous empathy to be gained from learning why someone sees something differently than you do. Worried about how you can motivate students to engage in critical thinking? There are amazing instructional implications for planning for mistakes in a way that sets up a classroom culture where traits like compliance and risk-taking outweigh the default culture of compliance and rule-following.

When we don't give our students opportunities to engage in critical thinking at all levels, we are systemically leaving brilliance on the table. By adding strategies like mistake analysis to our regular classroom practice, we're tapping into that brilliance and making it more likely that all of our students will thrive.

Mistake analysis is just one of the many powerful but practical strategies I break down in more detail in Thinking Like a Lawyer and in the work we lead with school systems across the country to ensure critical thinking is no longer a luxury good. Learn more about what we do at ThinkLaw.us.

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The Magic of Mistakes: 4 Ways to Boost Critical Thinking with Mistake Analysis

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Wrong answers can be an incredible tool for learning. Discover how easy it is to add mistake analysis to your classroom.