Literacy in the Math Classroom: Vocabulary

Looking for a way to spice up a review day?  Students in Geometry reviewed for a quiz by playing a version of Taboo.  First round, they pull a slip of paper with a vocabulary term on it and then they must describe to their teammates the concept without using the term itself.  Students describe theorems, angles, scale factor, and more in their race against the clock and in their competition against another team.  Round 2 presented students with the challenge of creating drawings of their vocabulary words, and students busily sketched alternate interior angles, corresponding angles, and other related terms to clarify their thinking, making plain any misconceptions to their teacher.  Learning vocabulary can be a fun process!

Literacy in the Math Classroom: Speaking and Listening

Tired of the sound of the same three voices in your classroom?  In a Geometry classroom near you, students partnered up based on the shape of their assigned polygon and then discussed which statements posted around the room were true or false for their image. Choosing to group students by partners filled the classroom with different voices and required all students to make meaning of key terms, like similar, congruent, and isosceles.  Getting more students talking gets more students learning.

Literacy in the Science Classroom: Reading

Whether students are reading a text or a word problem, some don’t know the questions good readers ask themselves during the process.  A Chemistry teacher recently modeled her own think-alouds as she tackled a word problem with her students.  By sharing her thinking and delineating the questions she asked herself throughout the process, the teacher was able to help students begin to own the process of breaking down a complex text.

What do literacy strategies look like in your classrooms and content areas?

 

When Tag returned home after his first full week of 4th grade, he flung his backpack on the ground and slumped onto the couch.  “I don’t think I’m smart enough for 4th grade.”

What? I sat next to him on the couch.

“My teacher told us he’s gonna keep making it more challenging and he’s gonna give us more and more responsibility.  I’m pretty sure I’m not smart enough for 4th grade.”

When did my kid decide smart was a status?  How did I miss instilling that all important

lesson about the brain being shaped by hard work and grit?  I started replaying all of the conversations I had with my son where I called him smart or told him he could work it out because he was smart.   I guess he got the message.

Deliberate Practice

In Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, he reminds us the people we often define as geniuses in their fields weren’t born that way.  Instead, he claims 10,000 hours of deliberate practice are largely responsible for their success.  While his argument has sparked some controversy, the basic premise is a powerful message for our own children and the children we teach.

Hattie echoes Gladwell’s thinking and further defines deliberate practice and persistence in the classroom (Visible Learning for Teachers, 2012).

He asserts all practice is not the same, and practice that leads to mastery often has similar qualities.  Deliberate practice:

• establishes an understanding of the goals of practice
• provides choice in practice tasks
• varies in developing the skills
• repeats practice with rapid formative feedback (p.108).  

This deliberate practice should lead to students learning to monitor, control, and regulate their own learning.

Persistence

Persistence, or being able to concentrate on a task in spite of distractions, is the other required skill for learning, according to Hattie.  And, while novices learn better with fewer distractions, we need not remove their smart phones, iPads, and televisions to help them learn.  Instead, Hattie suggests the power of deliberately attempting to focus students on the task by designing tasks that are initially outside their range of dependable performance (p.110).

Feedback

Some might equate feedback with praise (You’re a great student!), but Hattie warns praise might actually dilute the impact of meaningful feedback on task and product, process, and the ability to self-regulate (p.121).

Instead, teachers should aim to provide student feedback based on these questions (Hattie, 2012):

• Where am I going?  What are my goals?
• How am I going?  What progress is being made toward my goals?
• Where to next?  What activities need to be undertaken next to make better progress?

Beyond Smart

Helping our children and students see beyond labels to the value of hard work is daunting but necessary.  “Smart” or “not-so smart,” these labels diminish the effect of our daily work, and they impact the mindset of our students.

Classrooms at KHS

How have you designed learning around the concepts of deliberate practice and persistence in your classrooms?

With your feedback, how do you help students determine where they are going, how they are going, and where they need to go next?

 

 

 

I used to think Open House was a time for me to show parents of my students how rigorous my courses were.  I had printed syllabi, perfected PowerPoints, and dense texts stacked on my desk: evidence of how their children would be challenged over the course of the semester or year.  I had read Harry Wong, and I felt prepared.

Then, I attended my first Open House as a parent.

Sitting in the small desk of my kindergartner, I realized I was nervous. This teacher was spending more daylight hours with my child during the week than I was, and, while I hoped she would challenge my son, I was more concerned about her keeping his love of learning alive.

Was she kind?  Did she love learning?  Would she go out of her way to learn about my son, his penchant for Legos, his inability to sit for long times, his love of stories?  Would she use that knowledge to craft lessons and to instill in my son a desire to attend school and continue learning?  Would she treat me as a partner or a nuisance?

While these questions might seem particular to the parent of a kindergartner, I find that with each passing year and each additional child’s Open House night, I still ponder them as I sit in my children’s chairs.  My theory is parents of high school seniors do, too.

As a teacher, my Open House talk changed in response to these lingering questions.  I talked less and showed more.  I pointed to my walls, adorned with student writing and artwork.  I gave parents letters from their children, where they reflected on the highlights and struggles of their first few weeks of school.  And, yes, I still spoke of rigor, but with an intentional focus on how their children were responding to the rigor and how I hoped we could work together to support them in their learning.  I showed them I wanted to be their child’s champion, just as I wanted my sons’ and daughter’s teachers to be their champions as well.  Rita Pierson’s Ted Talk from KHS’ Opening Day captures a similar sentiment.

After all, we are all in this together: parents, students, teachers, and the community.

Relationships.  It’s not just one of the words on our district t-shirts; it’s what sets us apart from other districts.  It’s why our school mantra is every student, every day.  It’s why students transferring from other districts become Pioneers as soon as they set foot on campus.  We’ve spent the past few weeks nurturing relationships with students, so they don’t see our school as Malcolm London describes the front lines of his.

Open House is our opportunity to foster relationships with parents.

What does Open House look like in your classroom?  How has it changed over the years or how might it change this year?  

My husband and I met again with our architect yesterday.  After weeks of back and forth on a design for an addition, we realized we wanted, no needed, a few upgrades.  Not just a deck off the back of the house, but a ten foot wide deck so we could easily sit down at our table instead of climbing over the arm of the chair and shimmying down like we do now to avoid falling over the edge of our patio.  Not just an island where friends and family could congregate before a meal, but an island wide enough to allow for both food preparation and a family of five to eat dinner on the run.  These upgrades are strategic replacements to make our lives easier, to make our home run more smoothly.

But upgrades are not reserved for construction.  In Heidi Hayes Jacobs’ recent talk at TEDxNYED , she outlines the areas in education ripe with opportunity for updates: content, skills, and assessment.  She posits if students understand that social production democratizes learning, social networks enrich understanding, media unleashes forms of expression, and that learning itself is not always linear, we need new kinds of teaching and learning.

But, Jacobs is not asking teachers to shred their lesson plans and start from scratch. One upgrade in one unit as a strategic replacement has power on its own.  She believes our assessments in particular look quite similar to the assessments of decades ago and she’s suggesting upgrades.

Teachers at KHS are no strangers to upgrades.  Consider Amy Leatherberry’s upgrade for the research paper.  Students in Amy’s class now write an interactive research paper, learning where it is appropriate to link to more in-depth source material, to highlight key ideas with images or video, to synthesize numerous resources in an engaging way that is easily accessed by a larger audience and that mimics much of the research we do today: online, multimedia, and divergent.  In Reza Behnam’s blog, he calls this Periphery Reading Research, or PR2, where his students, armed with their iPads, drift into research that interests them as they hop (with intent) from one link to the next.
Mandy Melton asks her students to learn a concept (like Exocytosis) through the creation of RSAs.  For this project, students  learn Exocytosis well enough to teach it through metaphor and images as well as a thoroughly researched script.  Jenny Willenborg asks students to use systems thinking as they ponder the ethics of human research in a Socratic Discussion over HeLa cells, the Tuskegee Syphillis Study, the South African Military Aversion Project, and Johnson’s Stuttering Study.

Upgrades don’t always have to be monumental shifts.  They are strategic replacements to increase engagement, authenticity, and understanding.

How have you upgraded your assessments?

 

 

 

 

 

The real question is not about blogging or not blogging.  Instead, KHS teachers wonder about the best way to transform blogs into powerful learning tools for their classrooms.

Trying something new in your classroom?  Write a quick blurb once a week in your blog about your experiment and elicit feedback from students, parents, and peers there as well.

Asking your students to reflect on their learning and growth?  Create a blog entry for the end of each unit where students summarize their learning, pose questions to peers about understanding they have not yet gleaned, and set goals for the next unit.  Their blogs become a collaborative record of their risking, stumbling, and learning.

Tired of being the terminal audience for student work?  Extend the reach of student learning through your blog.  Invite parents, librarians, local business owners, and other schools to take part in the conversation.

If you have a blog, respond below with your name and URL so we can join in your learning.

If you want to join the blogging movement at KHS, send me an email and we can make that happen!

In my daughter’s classroom on Monday, her teacher sat beside her during her time to journal and listened to Delaney’s reasoning for selecting her outfit for the day, her excitement about Christmas and Santa and seeing her cousins and receiving new dollies.

My son’s teacher brought out puzzles and challenged her students to work together to overcome the most difficult ones, and as she did, she checked in with each student, asking about his weekend, commenting on her new birthday book.

A teacher at KHS became teary-eyed as she described the joy she had in spending a semester with her students and seeing them grow and mature.  Another consoled a student in the hallway, hand on his shoulder, listening and offering advice for the everyday challenges our students face.

The teachers I know keep teaching.  They teach love.  Of numbers, experiments, history, literature, business, carpentry, art, performance, health, language, food, engineering, and more, but most of all, they teach a love of learning and a love for others.

During this holiday season I choose to think about love.

 

 

 

Sally enters her class with two annotated articles that connect to the Socratic question, a thoughtfully completed graphic organizer, and absolutely no idea how to engage in a meaningful group discussion which might deepen her own understanding and her classmates’.

In the past, she has spent these “Socratic Seminar” class periods spewing facts and quotes, worrying about the number of times she speaks, and cutting off her classmates’ thinking so she could reiterate her own.  This time promises to be different, though.  Her teacher has been working with her friends in other departments to learn the best strategies  for making discussions more powerful.

Setting the Purpose:  While Sally organizes her papers, her teacher displays a picture of an iceberg.  She asks her students to connect the image they see with conversations they have had in the past. Sally and her classmates agree that most of their student-led conversations about texts have remained at the tip of the iceberg, and they point to their fears about grading as the root cause of this issue.  Sally’s teacher asks her students to pair and share while they consider the other levels of the iceberg and the power that lies beneath the surface.  Sally and her partner discuss the patterns they see throughout the texts they brought to the discussion and how they might ask others to help them think about the meaning of those patterns.

Setting Goals:  Sally’s teacher then asks students to consider a good goal for their discussion that might help them reach those deeper levels of thought.  The class agrees that focusing on their QEUs will shift the focus from expressing their own thoughts to learning the minds of others.  These Questions that Expand Understanding become the goal of the class instead of worrying about the number of comments they make in a discussion.

Overcoming Discussion Challenges:  While the 30-minute discussion is not quite perfect, Sally feels it is much better than ones she has participated in previously.  More students ask questions and invite others into the conversation.  When a few students dominate the conversation, Sally’s teacher asks them all to pause, reflect with a partner on the big idea of the moment, and then she asks a team that had not yet been heard to begin the conversation again with a point or question that arose during their partner discussion.

Debriefing:  During the debriefing session, each of Sally’s classmates offers one piece of feedback for the group’s discussion techniques and one specific compliment for a person in the discussion.  From this feedback, students set a class goal for their next discussion and then write a personal goal as well.  They jot this personal goal on the back of the table tent with their name on it, so they can easily reference it just before the next discussion begins when they place their name tents on their desks.

How do you help students dig deep in Socratic seminars?

How might we structure Socratic seminars so they are powerful for students and ask them to dig into the big ideas of our courses?  Teachers with 10 or fewer years of experience discussed this question at a recent gathering, and we want to tap into the expertise of our staff to answer it.

Over the next few weeks, I will share tidbits from Socratic seminar trainings and teachers’ experiences about how we might create engaging and mind-opening discussions for our students.  More importantly, I ask each of you to share your insights, exemplars, and questions about each stage of the Socratic seminar process.

This week, we hope to learn more about the preparation for a Socratic seminar.  Here are the essentials we have heard from teachers so far:

1. Teachers should clarify the purpose of a Socratic seminar versus other discussions.  A Socratic seminar’s purpose is to hear other perspectives.
2. A Socratic discussion typically has at least one common text at its core.  That text might be a primary document, a piece of art, music, an article, a fictional work, a video, or another source.  (Dense texts might require time to unpack prior to a discussion–in small groups or partners.)
3. Many teachers use an entrance ticket for participation in a Socratic seminar.  These tickets might be graphic organizers, answers to questions, or written reflections based on a text that connects to the question for the seminar.  Students who have the entrance ticket sit in the inner circle and have a discussion.  Those who don’t have their ticket take notes on the discussion (i.e., What were the questions that were posed?  How did students respond to the different kinds of questions?) and write a reflection about their discoveries.
4. When you are writing a question for a Socratic seminar, consider drafting with a partner.  There will be many revisions in this process.
5. A good Socratic question connects to the world; has a universal idea; avoids yes/no constructs; avoids judgments of right or wrong; seeks diverse opinions; might ask students to role play; is not too specific.

What insights can you share about preparing for Socratic seminars?  Which texts have you used with students as a basis for their discussion?  Do you believe in entrance tickets–why?  How have the questions you have posed to students changed over time?