Reading Instruction Revisited

“Hey, Mrs. Phillips. Watch this. I can read with my eyes shut!”

Many years later I can still picture Tyler, an earnest and keen young grade one reader, proclaiming his new reading skill. We relied on pattern text as an early reading strategy and Tyler had mastered it. While I smiled at his achievement, I made a mental note to move him along. He was missing one of the key components of reading: the letters mattered and you couldn’t do it with your eyes closed.

The “reading wars” are back. Teachers who have been teaching through a balanced literacy approach are now confronted with The Science of Reading. Boards and school districts (and publishing companies) are scrambling to ensure that their primary years teachers embrace the components of the science of reading and eschew the balanced reading approach. Articles abound. PD is happening. And teachers may be feeling overwhelmed. Surely they were not “bad” reading teachers before.

I fully support the tenets of the science of reading. However, I worry that in our collective desire to do the right thing, the implementation of this approach to teaching reading will cause more angst than is necessary. Instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water, let’s look at how teachers can take what they have been doing and tweak it to support more students in learning to read.

1. Pattern texts will not teach students to read. But they do help students figure out some very early things about reading: stories have meaning and the words go with the pictures; each group of letters is a word that makes sense; when you say the pattern, some words become recognizable. These are very early reading behaviours. We don’t want to linger here. We don’t head to have a running record at 92% accuracy. These books are highly dependent on a student’s vocabulary knowledge of the objects in the pictures and second language teachers have long known they don’t work if you don’t know the word in the picture. Teachers don’t need to throw them out but they do need to know that the books have limited value as an early reading tool.
2. Rethink the three cuing systems to be a way of error analysis: what are students doing when they misread a word. For example, the actual word is truck and the student reads dump truck because that is the picture. Good reading teachers have always used that information to cue students to look at the letters and use phonics. If a student reads “the” instead of “a”, using syntactic clues, good reading teachers have always used that information to cue students to look at the letters and use phonics. When the word is “car” and the student stumbles, good reading teachers encourage the student to use phonics (let’s look at the sounds) and might have noticed if the student also looked at the picture to guess at the word. Good reading teachers have always made a mental note about why students were misreading words and what they needed to do to help them read the correct words. As we move forward paying attention to why students are misreading a word and then helping them to focus on the letters and letter patterns will move students toward solid reading skills.
3. Running records can still help you.  I’ve never been a fan of analyzing all the errors in a RR but have always used a running record to see what kinds of errors a student is making and look for patterns.  As your knowledge of phonics instruction increases you will also begin to notice which sounds a student is confusing or missing.  Instead of thinking that a student needs to use more picture clues, you will notice when a student is over-relying on picture clues and provide learning opportunities for the student to pay more attention to the words such as making sentences out of words on cards.  But you still need a way to know how well your student is reading real text and a running record on the fly is one of many tools you can use.
4. Inventive spelling in your writing program is still the best way to get kids to practice the phonics they know and to develop the phonics they need to know. Good literacy teachers have always used student writing to determine which rules a student needs to learn next. For example, an early writer will likely represent all vowels with an “a” at first.  When this happens teachers will focus their teaching on the other short vowel sounds.  Early writers will write the long e sound at the end of the word as an E (babe for baby, sune for sunny, pupe for puppy). When a student is doing this regularly, good literacy teachers will help them to see that two syllable words that end in a long e sound are almost always spelled with a y. Knowing the conventions of English spelling is key to this type of teaching.
5. Differentiation is still key. Research is clear that all students use phonics and letter-sound relationships to read. But the amount of support they will need, the type of support they will need and the pace of that support will differ. While 10 minutes of fun phonemic awareness activities in kindergarten may be useful for the whole class, teachers will still need to pay attention to who needs extra practice. Teachers will need to be wary of class sets of phonics worksheets that do little to support students who don’t need them. And to be aware of phonics worksheets that don’t require you to read at all to complete! Just like always, some students will need more and some will need less and worksheets are boring. They were in balanced reading and they are in the science of reading.
6. Read alouds are still important for students to develop vocabulary and background knowledge Choose read alouds that have a rich and varied vocabulary and on a variety of themes, topics, fiction and nonfiction.  Don’t beat the read aloud to death with too many questions.  Model learning and thinking and enjoying.

As you delve into the science of reading you will learn new things. I loved this article in 1999 and I love the revised version now. If you only read one thing, try Reading Is Rocket Science. Remember that you don’t have to tell your students all the stuff you are learning. Perhaps you have now learned about r-controlled vowels, and the different shape your mouth makes in saying different sounds, and digraphs, diphthongs, morphemes and phonemes. You don’t have to tell your students all this. Remember that for your students, learning to read should be fun. A quick internet search of “sound walls” has both good ideas (organizing words by sounds not initial letter) and crazy ones with way too much information for young learners.

Good literacy teachers have always tweaked their programs based on the latest available research.  But it takes time. As you tweak your reading program it is going to be messy. You will try things and love them and try things and hate them. When your students are successful learning to read is when you will know that your new practices are working. 

The Best First Day of School

Which day of the year will you have all eyes on you?  The keenest students? The least amount of student misbehaviour?  The first day of school.  So, think about how you can capitalize on that to engage your students in the deep thinking and exciting work you want them to do.  Often we think, as teachers, that we have to set down all the expectations on the first day of school or the rest of the year will be chaos.  You do have to live and model your expectations, but I’m not sure you need to talk about them.  Maybe that class agreement is something to save until later in the first week.  By then, I suspect your students will have already figured out your expectations and the activity will go a lot faster.

Let’s think about the first day of school from a student’s point of view.  They are excited to be back and meet their new teacher and see their friends.  they are excited to use their new and shiny pencil crayons.  They actually WANT to do some work.  But frequently it is a day of “sit and get”: one teacher after another going over the rules and expectations.  Really, our rules aren’t any different than last year’s rules.  And most rules are self-evident.  We don’t really need to talk a lot about keeping your locker tidy since I doubt any of our students would think that our expectation was to do otherwise (although they may act that way over the course of the year!). Except for kindergarteners everyone knows you should put up your hand, and if you have ever taught kindergarten you know that this is not a rule figured out on the first day of school!

In some schools/classrooms, there is a feeling that we need to ease students into school with a week of fun activities.  I don’t think so.  First of all, they just had 10 weeks of fun activities or camps or TV or playing with friends.  Second, if you describe your first week as “fun”, then by default you are saying that real school is not “fun”.  You may want to have a few team building activities, but I would urge you to have them be within the context of curriculum.

Why not have that first interaction with your students be challenging? Be engaging?  Be creative?  Set the tone for how learning will take place in your classroom.  Pose a question, get them creating or writing or exploring or problem-solving.  Hook your students in right away.  Here are a few ideas:

• Read aloud the best short story you know, or the first chapter of the read aloud.
• Introduce writer’s workshop with idea generation activities so that they are itching to start writing.  You could even start writing. Do a quick write about what you didn’t do this summer, or the best small moment, or what you wished you had done.
• Introduce a complex but open ended problem such as “How could you measure a puddle?” Or, “If all the  students lay head to toe, how far would we reach?” Or, “What are all the different ways we could arrange the desks in this classroom?  Why are the advantages and disadvantages?”  Or, “If we all joined hands, in the whole school, could we encircle the school?”.  Check out these sites for some great problems: http://learn.fi.edu/school/math2/ or www.estimation180.com or http://www.101qs.com/
• Get in teams and create an obstacle course that will challenge the rest of the students. Or, read the rules to Harry Potter’s Quidditch and figure out how to create your own version of the game (without the flying broomsticks).
• Have some equipment available and have students figure out how to move an object from point A to point B without carrying it.  Or, review structures, movement and friction by having groups create a marble maze that goes the slowest.  Or, provide students with a stack of newspapers and masking tape with the challenge of building a piece of furniture.
• Put out a variety of art supplies and have students begin to experiment with texture and line with mixed media.  Have them create and critique a piece in the first week that can then be their jumping off point for the remainder of the year:  what did they like? What would they want to do differently?
• In any subject present a problem to solve by the end of the week.
• Start the year with a week of genius hour where students can learn about and present about a passion of theirs.
• Have students create a class song on their instruments or in garage band.  Show them a clip from “Stomp” and have students create their own number.
• If you teach kindergarten or grade one, you have to teach them to “read” on the first day–even if it is just a shared poem.  Let them take a copy home to read to their parents.

Just start your course–but not by lecturing, or reviewing, or a really big diagnostic test.  Start by engaging your students in the kind of learning you want them to be doing all year.

I am sure for your subject area you have thousands of ideas.  Often I hear teachers saying that we need to ease into school.  Maybe that is not true.  Maybe we should jump in with both feet and just start.  When our students go home after the first day of school, we want them to go home full of excitement, joy and enthusiasm for learning.  It is up to us to create those conditions.  The first day of school could be the best day ever..until the second day of school.

Teaching is really hard, and totally worth it.

My friend, also a newly retired teacher and I were reminiscing about our early days of teaching.  She surprised me when she said that she hated teaching when she first started.  “I was going to be the best teacher there is.  And then I wasn’t.  It was just so hard.  It took a good year or two to figure out all the little things that made a big difference,” she said.  “Like being able to move away from my desk, standing next to the kid who is talking too much or figuring out that I don’t have to plan so much for every class.  Learning to trust that I know what I’m doing.”

The early days of teaching were a blur of excitement and constant work.  I remember feeling like it consumed my whole life.  I brought every kid home with me every night.  I thought about teaching all the time.  And I remember never really knowing if the lesson I’d spent so long planning was actually going to work or not.  Of course, like my friend, I figured out the little tricks that make all the difference.  But we shouldn’t forget how hard teaching really is.  Sometimes we don’t give ourselves enough credit for the number of tasks we juggle on a continual basis.  Nor, as we ask teachers to implement new strategies and ideas, do we necessarily honour that teaching is more than completing a checklist of tasks.  It involves integrating all your knowledge about teaching, all your knowledge about assessment, all your knowledge about your students and classroom management, and all your knowledge about learning into a whole.  And that whole keeps changing as new students arrive and go, as you learn a new idea or teaching strategy, as you decide to add google classroom, as a pandemic disrupts everything!

So…recognize that teaching is not something you are ever going to “get” (sorry new teachers).  It is a continual process of reflecting and trying and learning and reflecting and trying again.  Sometimes, because we want to think “this has got to be easier” we fall into the trap of wanting someone to tell us what to do.  But the truth is, no one can tell you all the pieces.  You have to learn the pieces, think about how they all go together, try it out and start again when you figure out what doesn’t work.  And at that point you will have learned something else you want to integrate!  Teaching is really, really hard.  But when it works, it is totally worth it.  Even in a pandemic.

Teaching in Covid Times – exactly them same and totally different

I am planning to teach an online “zoom” class. It feels like everything I know about teaching will work in this milieu and everything I know about teaching won’t work. The last time I taught was in Tanzania last year-in a nearly open-air school with dirt floors, snakes and a single blackboard with the smallest pieces of chalk I’ve ever seen. I felt the same way as I do now: I know how to do this and I have no idea how to do this.

As teachers we learn after a few years what works and what doesn’t. The early years of endlessly planning lessons, many of which bomb, you arrive at a place where for the most part you know how to do this. And then something happens, like Covid-19, or like moving to Tanzania, which throws you off your game. Part of you panics and part of you embraces the challenge.

Teaching around the world has changed (even in Tanzania I suspect although I left before the schools closed). It is both familiar and foreign. Teachers working virtually have new sets of challenges but so do those working in classrooms with social distancing and masks and hand sanitizer. As teachers we are committed to student learning and while lamenting what cannot be, look for ways to make this work.

I am wondering how to engage university level students are #zoomhausted from online learning. Lecturing into a screen with minimal feedback (and did they really turn off video to go to the washroom?) isn’t nearly as engaging as a live lecture where feedback lets you know whether to keep going (they are leaning in and laughing) or to change tracks (on their phones, heads down). My teaching has always included group work, turn and talk, figure this out together. Will breakout rooms work as well? While it feels comfortable to stop by and listen to a table group, entering a breakout room feels a little more intrusive.

But I remember teaching in Tanzania, speaking English to a group of girls who were far more comfortable in Swahili. I had to adjust my jokes, my pace, my vocabulary otherwise it was exactly speaking to a screen of blank faces. I had to work extra hard to get them to do group work as this was a new concept to my Tanzanian students. They could not believe that I actually wanted them to figure out the math problem together! I learned tricks like only giving them one writing utensil, allowing them to speak in Swahili, even to me, when they were discussing the question, and getting them to switch their partners around. It was exactly the same as teaching in Canada and totally different.

Today, teaching in our classrooms today, virtually or in schools, is also exactly the same and totally different. I am heartened by stories of teachers who are figuring out ways to continue to have student talk – through google classrooms, using Zoom whiteboards, with group chats, using Jamboard and padlet and student conferencing. It would be easier, I think at times, to revert back to “transmission teaching” or the “sage on the stage” where the teacher provides the information and the students regurgitate it back to us. But we aren’t doing that. Teachers everywhere know they can do this – it’s exactly the same and totally different.

Five Equity Moves

My daughter has a significant reading disability.  As a parent I found it difficult to imagine how hard school was for her since it had always come easily to me.  As teachers I think it is often difficult for us to imagine the lived experience of some of our students.  Most of us got into teaching because we liked learning and school.  We want to recreate our great experiences with learning for our students.  But it is difficult to recreate that exact experience when we don’t recognize that our students may be experiencing school differently than we did.   The equity question becomes how do I create that great learning experience for all students, not just the ones who learn like I did?

The problem is big.  And the more I learn the bigger it becomes.  However daunting the problem of equity in our schools is, there are four small moves (and one big one) teachers can make that begin to address the issue.

1. Think about how you partner students.  My other daughter, who loved school and underlined all her titles in red, twice, used to come home sighing that she was partners with “Tyler” once again.  I wonder how Tyler felt.  What did the rest of the class notice, about both my daughter, and “Tyler”?  When we let students choose their partners you can watch the social power dynamics in the classroom right away.  There are the few students whom everyone clamours to partner with.   Students surround them, pleaing to be chosen.  There are the students who are never picked.  But if you visibly randomize how you group students it is an equity move.  What you are saying to your students is that everyone matters and everyone can be partners with everyone else.  On top of that, there is research to show that it works.
2. Think about who gets to work with you at the guided learning table.  It is easy to always pull the same group of kids to work with you.  You want to strategically choose who works with you, and some students will need more support than others.  But that certainly sends a message to the whole class.  I worked with a teacher once who created an atmosphere in her class whereby it was “cool” to work with the teacher.  She often started the class working with a specific group, which she tried to change up regularly.  But then as seats at the table became available, other students would come to their table with their questions.  No longer was the guided learning table seen as the place for the “dumb” kids; needing help was for everyone.  Allowing all students access to work with you is an equity move.
3. Think about open ended tasks.  Time and time again I have seen students who are working at a lower grade level sitting off to the side with a booklet of worksheets. These students are definitely not feeling part of the group although the booklet was created with the best of teacher intentions.  When we have a variety of leveled texts or when the math question is open-ended with multiple entry points or when the science experiment can be recorded in a different ways or when you can choose volleyball or beach volleyball or ping pong, we allow all students to participate at their own entry level.  When all students are part of the class, it is an equity move.
4. Think about how you have students respond.  How often do you ask questions and have students raise their hands to respond?  Every time you choose one student to respond over another, someone  feels left out.  “The teacher never picks me…” and even if that is not true, that is how it feels.  Students will make up their own reasons as to why that is.  And what about the students who just aren’t raising their hand?  How do they feel?  You don’t have to give up the practice entirely but it is worth adding other strategies to your repertoire.  Turn and talk gives all students a chance to think about the question and participate in learning.  In number talks when students have the answer they put their thumb up by their chest.  This is a much more private gesture which does not stop other students from continuing to think because they see hands waving in the air.  Providing students with little white boards so that all students answer and hold up their boards is another one.  When all of your students are participating in answering the questions and doing the thinking, it is an equity move.
5. Think about high expectations – really think about it.  We all bring preconceived ideas to our practice, even when we think we don’t.  When I think back to some of the students I have had over the years, I wonder if I really had high expectations for them or if I quickly categorized them into a group in my head and unintentionally lowered my standards.  It is hard to examine our own biases but they often get in the way of high expectations.  When we know a student belongs to a particular socio-economic group, or has a learning disability,  do we have certain expectations, even if we think we don’t?  So, although having high expectations for all is a phrase we throw about, I think it is harder to realize than we believe.  When we truly believe in high expectations for all students, and we teach in ways that allow students to access those high expectations, then it is an equity move.

 

Making a “quarter turn” in your teaching practice: little changes that have huge impact

The year my daughter, Jill, turned 12 she discovered cheesecake.   Jill’s first 12 attempts at baking cheesecake were dismal failures and our family ate our fair share of under-cooked soupy cheesecakes and over-cooked dry cheesecakes and there was the one where she forgot the sugar.  Yet Jill forged ahead undaunted, convinced that the next cheesecake would be the perfect one.  And eventually it was.

All of us have had experiences of trying new skills and recognize that it takes time and patience to develop them.  Except, perhaps in our teaching practice where we are often unwilling to make changes or when we do try something new it doesn’t turn out like  the recipe, we go back to the old and comfortable way of doing things.  I’m not exactly sure what the difference between baking cheesecake and changing teaching practice is but I surmise the following:

• We are emotionally tied to our practice and it defines us.  We don’t want to fail.
• We feel that it is not just us, but our students, who will suffer if it doesn’t go well.
• It feels like we lost time trying something new that didn’t work.

The reality is that our students don’t have access to our day plans and are probably unaware of when a lesson didn’t go as we thought it should.  And, if it isn’t going well and the teacher just stops and does something else (read a story, do jumping jacks, run around the school, play a game, start the homework early), the students will be just fine.

One of the problems with changes in teacher practice is that we often elect to make a 5 course meal, not a cheesecake.  Teachers often try, or administrators and districts suggest, big “blow up your course” changes.  That is hard work and more likely to have a lot of bumps along the way.  Instead I suggest the “quarter turn change”.  What change can you make that is small but that you think might have a huge impact?  What can you do that is just a slight deviation from how you normally do things?  When you make that change what happens with your students?  Does that little change inspire you to make another change?

A teacher I worked with, Karen, taught grade 6.  She wanted to move towards inquiry-based learning in her flight unit but was nervous about leaving something that was tried and true.  So I suggested a “quarter turn”.  She always taught her unit and then at the end culminated with a big “fly off” in the gym with student-made paper airplanes incorporating all the principles of flight.  The “quarter turn” was to start the unit with making a paper airplane.  Throughout the unit, taught the same way as always, students continued to refine their paper airplanes, tryout  modifications and share what they were discovering.  This small change had huge impact in both student engagement and learning.  We still had the big “fly off” at the end but the planes were of a much better quality and there was a great deal more pride in the students’ creations.  Plus, students were much better able to explain why their plane could fly.

A group of junior math teachers wanted to start spiraling their math course but it seemed like an overwhelming task ( TEDx talk). The “quarter turn” was to only spiral for 5 to 15 minutes a day.  We spent a morning exploring some short, fun and engaging activities students could do to increase conceptual understanding and fluency in math.  We played with creating human number lines to explore ordering and comparing numbers, we practiced number talks, we did some work with puzzle pieces on a hundreds board, we played some estimating games, and did activities such as building two digit numbers with only 6 base ten blocks.  Then we made a list of curriculum expectations that could be addressed with these types of short activities repeated many times over the course of the year.  Teachers went back to their math classrooms with a small change but the impact was huge:  students were engaged and loved the activities; teachers were covering curriculum expectations throughout the course of the year which freed more time for their longer units of study during the rest of the math black.

A secondary math team was not ready to dive into learning through problem solving full tilt but decided to start their unit on linear relations with one problem.  They called it their “mentor problem”.  Throughout the rest of the unit, which they taught as they always had, they returned to this “mentor problem” to highlight key concepts.  Students were better able to connect to these key concepts as they returned to their thinking during this one task over and over.  A “quarter turn” changed practice.

A grade eight teacher, Monica,  was intrigued with incorporating mindfulness into her classroom practice but wasn’t willing to “give up” 10 -15 minutes of instructional time a day.  So she made a “quarter turn” in her thinking.  She devoted the 10-15 minutes for one week only  to teaching some mindfulness practices but then turned it back to the students, allowing them the permission and space to take a mindful moment when they needed.  She was thrilled when those students who needed it, took their mindful moments and found that it did not interrupt the flow of her day.  Every few weeks she incorporated a whole class refresher mindfulness session to keep the thinking alive.  She didn’t need to blow up her program; her willingness to make a small adjustment in her own thinking about how to incorporate mindfulness into her program worked.

“Quarter turns” are bigger than “baby steps”.  I dislike that terminology because it is usually in relation to a top down change.  I often hear that a staff or a group of teachers or an individual teacher is making “baby steps” towards a new initiative.  It usually means that nothing of any significance is happening.  A “quarter turn” is teacher driven.

Like learning to make cheesecake, changing our practice and adopting new pedagogical ideas takes courage and time.  We need to give ourselves and the teachers we work with permission to make a “quarter turn”. Think of one small move you could make within your existing program that you think might make a big difference.  Give it a try and see what happens; no one will die and you might be surprised.

Self-regulation does not mean being good when you are bored

When I am in a meeting (and I go to lots and lots of meetings) and there are challenges to solve, or the speaker is entertaining and has something to say that I am interested in, and when I get opportunities to talk about what I am learning, I am totally engaged.  I don’t check my email.  I don’t text my friends.  I don’t secretly hope my secretary will call with an emergency.  I don’t drink lots of coffee so that I have to visit the restroom.  On occasion I have to remind myself to listen to others when I am excited about the topic and be patient with others who may have a different viewpoint. My level of engagement and my ability to attend, though, is more about the content and structure of the meeting and my social and emotional skills are secondary.

Now, when I go to a meeting that is not engaging it is a different story altogether.  At first I try to be attentive but soon my attention wanders.  I  look around.  I check my phone.  I read my email. I even do my email if it won’t look too rude.  I play with anything I can find to fiddle with.  I get up and get more coffee.  I frequent the restroom. If you watched me you might think I have very poor self-regulation skills.

Self-regulation does not mean being good when you are bored.  Grit, perseverance and resilience are not skills that you develop in environments that are not conducive to obtaining them.  I worry that we are jumping on the bandwagon of teaching students skills they seem to be lacking before we examine whether the classroom environment we create may be a contributing factor.

Lest teachers feel I am picking on them, administrators tend to do the same thing.  We often look at our staff meetings and see that no one is participating or attentive and think, “Those teachers just don’t care.”  But perhaps they are not engaged.  Teachers care.

But this is difficult to do because it means we need to examine our own teaching and facilitation practices.  And when you are leading or teaching, you are usually engaged.  It is hard to step out of our own shoes and look at it from the participant’s perspective.  We are deeply tied to our work emotionally and therefore it is extremely difficult to examine our own practices.  So we often tend to blame the lack of engagement or poor behaviour on the participants.  I know as a beginning teacher my go-to response to a bad day was to change the seating plan.

Do kids need to learn to manage their emotions appropriately?  For sure.  Do teachers need to teach and support students to develop self-regulation?  Absolutely.  Is it worthwhile creating norms for adult working groups?  Yes.  But don’t jump to blame the participants for not using those skills when things don’t go as you wish.  Check and make sure that the lesson or the meeting was the very best ever. Seven year olds aren’t going to sit quietly if they have been on the carpet for a long time.  Fourteen year olds aren’t going to ignore their phones and friends if you have been lecturing for more than 15 minutes.  Adults are not going to engage in professional development if it is not relevant and interesting.    Sometimes I hear “Well, everything in life isn’t fun and kids need to learn to behave in those situations.”  Really?  The job of school is to train kids to be bored?  Workplace meetings need to be boring?  I don’t think so.

As educators we know more about how people learn and how to engage others in learning than most.   We have an obligation to ensure that happens every lesson, every meeting, every day.

What can’t you ask Siri?

I can remember going to the library if I needed to know something.  We didn’t have Siri.

I can remember taking out a pad of paper to divide 7843 by 46.  We didn’t have Siri.

I can remember looking words up in a dictionary or thesaurus.  We didn’t have Siri.

I can remember waiting until the hour to hear the weather for the day.  We didn’t have Siri.

I can remember getting the newspaper off the front stoop in the morning.  We didn’t have Siri.

I used to know all my friends’ phone numbers.  We didn’t have Siri.

I can remember looking things up in an encyclopedia.  We didn’t have Siri.

I can remember feeling frustrated if I couldn’t remember the capital of Peru.  We didn’t have Siri.

Our students are growing up with Siri.  So much knowledge is at their fingertips, or rather in their phone.  You don’t even have to type to talk to Siri.  We hear all the time that education in the 21st century needs to change.  We know that education can no longer just be about the transmissions of facts.  We have Siri for that.  So what can’t Siri do?  Maybe that helps us to define what our students need to learn.

Siri can’t

• solve problems,
• think critically,
• collaborate,
• offer an alternative point of view,
• compare and contrast,
• add emotion to thinking,
• create,
• evaluate,
• critically synthesize,
• enjoy,
• depict beauty and heartache,
• find new problems to solve,
• be a good citizen,
• use examples from history to shape the future,
• argue or debate,
• define and defend an argument,
• innovate

Perhaps we need to use Siri for some of the factual stuff so that our students can concentrate on these higher order thinking skills.  Instead of fighting against Siri, can we bring her into the fold?

That is not to say that I don’t believe that students should have some base knowledge.  It is inefficient to not have the most important facts of a discipline at your fingertips.  Students do need to be able to make mental math calculations, know the capital of Canada (if they live there or close by), know the parts of a cell to study biology, know how to read and construct a piece of writing for a variety of audiences and purposes.  A base knowledge of the “stuff” is important in being able to access the higher order thinking skills.

But now that we have Siri (and whoever or whatever her successor will be; and there will be one, perhaps before I finish typing this blog), the importance and the role we give to knowing the facts, has to change.  We have managed to embrace Siri in so many other facets of our lives: do you wait to the hour to know the weather forecast; do you look up trivia (or ask Siri) when out with friends: do you still memorize phone numbers?

It is hard to change how we think of education.  It is hard to believe that students will grow up to be just as successful as we are, without having the same educational experience that we did.  But my life with Siri is very much different than my life before her.  Our students will never know a life without Siri.  Why do we keep making them learn the stuff that they could just ask Siri?  Why don’t we free up their cognitive energy to solve problems, create, innovate, analyze, evaluate, collaborate….

The “Best-Teacher-Ever” Feeling is the key to changes in practice

I love data – I’m a little geeky that way.  And for many years, as a school administrator, I believed that if teachers could just look at the data and see how their students were doing they would be galvanized into action!  What could I do in my classroom so that my students would improve?  Except it didn’t really happen that way.  Sure, for some teachers it made a difference.  But, on a larger scale I didn’t find that classroom data was providing the incentive for change.  However, over the years, as I have observed what does make a difference in changing practice,  I  have landed on something that has been occupying my thinking.  I call it the “I’m the best teacher ever” feeling.

Teachers care about what they do.  I don’t believe that we have very many teachers who wake up and decide to do a poor or mediocre job of teaching when they could choose to do a better one.  I believe that everyone is doing the best they can.  Why wouldn’t you?  And, I believe that teachers go home every night believing that they were competent at their job that day.  And so the world goes, day after day, school year after school year.

The magic happens, though, on the day that the teacher goes hope invigorated, excited and passionate.  The teacher goes home and says “I’m the best teacher ever!”.  We all know that feeling.   The one where the lesson goes well; the one where the students are engaged; the one when the parent writes the nice note.  When we design professional development that spurs the teacher to try something new, something not too crazy or complicated, something that we know will be successful, then the teacher goes home with the best-teacher-ever feeling.  That is a much better feeling than merely competent.  And, as human nature goes, the teacher will repeat that activity the following day in order to recreate the best-teacher-ever feeling again.  Practice starts to change.  The teacher starts to see his or her class in different ways.  The students are more engaged.  But, as life goes on, one day the lesson won’t go as well.  The teacher does not go home with the best-teacher-ever feeling but competent doesn’t cut it any more.  This is the point where teacher reflection really kicks in.  This is the point when the teacher is most likely to engage in professional inquiry.

When we can help teachers achieve the best-teacher-ever feelings, other things happen, too.  The rest of the teacher’s practice isn’t as enjoyable and he or she will begin to look for ways to change other areas of the day.  The best-ever-teacher will be excitedly talking about new ideas in the halls, in the staff room, on duty at recess.  Excitement breeds excitement and the best-teacher-ever will convince the other teachers to try something new.

So often we go to professional development workshops and come away with the BIG, BIG picture and it is too overwhelming.  We come away feeling that we have learned nothing but theory.  We come away believing that before we can embark on something new, we have to plan and plan and revise and plan.  It’s too much work in our busy lives to start something new with no real guarantee that it will work.  Or, we come away with a “must-do” (think posting learning goals and success criteria) that we comply with but the new practice doesn’t send us home with the best-teacher-ever feeling (not because it is a bad idea, necessarily, but because we are only complying).

I still love data.  And I still like to look at data with teachers and principals and almost anyone who will listen.  But the data alone won’t change practice of anyone in the educational system.  Students don’t change because of a mark-they change when a teacher takes an interest and helps them to improve right away.  Principals don’t change because of school scores – they change when they create a staff session where everyone leaves excited and then they see those changes in classrooms the very next day.  So the next time you design a lesson or design a PD opportunity, think about what can you help people leave with that will work tomorrow?   What can you help teachers do tomorrow so that they go home feeling like the best teacher ever?

 

Teachers change their practice when their students are successful

I’ve been going to a lot of conferences lately, and watching a lot of video clips, about how leaders can influence change in teacher practice.  Mostly they are full of big ideas about collective inquiry, distributed leadership, forming relationships, using evidence-based practices, learning goals and success criteria, etc.  All of these big ideas are true.  But they are big ideas and sometimes big ideas are overwhelming to implement.

So I’ve been thinking what are ways of engaging teachers in changing practice which are not overwhelming but do lead teachers to changes in practice.  In the end, my experience is that teachers are learners and do want to do their very best for their students.  I do not adhere to the notion that we have great numbers of teachers who are resistant to new ideas.  I believe that the great majority of teachers walk in the school doors every day believing that they are teaching the best way they know how.  But I also believe that there are many teachers who are clinging to very traditional practices, probably because they appear to be working.  How does teacher practice change?

Teachers change their practice when they see that their students are successful or more engaged in learning after implementing change in practice.  When a teacher tries something new, and the lesson is successful, the teacher feels good.  The teacher goes home feeling like “this is the profession for me”!

However, often we ask teachers to change practice in ways that are not successful or make no difference.  Without a belief that the change will make a difference for an identified problem, teachers are most likely to simply comply:

• Asking teachers to change assessment practices without changing pedagogy might mean they rename their quizzes formative assessments.
• Asking teachers to have lots of anchor charts, without teachers understanding how the anchor chart scaffolds learning, results in lots of pretty anchor charts that rarely change.
• Asking teachers to post learning goals and success criteria, without teachers actually changing how they plan, results in learning goals and success criteria that are often just the recipe for the day’s lesson.

Compliance is not change.

On the other hand, when teachers feel empowered to identify changes they’d like to make and try new ideas that they have identified as possible solutions, then they are more likely to change their practice.  Now, I don’t suggest that teachers who decide that the solution to a lack of student engagement is to feed them chocolate cake!  However, when teachers work collaboratively, with their principal at the table as an interested learner, identify aspects of their practice they’d like to change, look at some of the research or resources that might support that change, and then have the freedom to try it out, I’ve never never met a teacher who isn’t interested.

These conversations can come out of conversations which begin with:  What do you wish your students could do better?  Most teachers can identify an aspect of their course where students don’t seem to do as well as they’d like.  It might be a curriculum need or a behavioural/attitude need:

• I wish my students knew their math facts.
• I wish my students would persevere on challenging tasks.
• I wish my students would write with more voice.
• I wish my students thought critically about their reading.
• I wish my students took more risks in solving problems.

The next step is to assess what the students are actually doing now, usually by looking at student work or by observations and conversations.  And then, teachers need to be empowered to try something new without feeling they are being judged, have timelines, or that there is a “right” way to do this.  But it is key that the teacher feels supported in the implementation of this new practice.  And this is the role of the principal as instructional leader; the principal needs to be interested in what is happening in the classroom, ask how the new practice is going, and be willing to offer suggestions and ideas as an interested co-learner not as a boss.

When teachers “play” with their practice and engage in thinking about what works, what doesn’t and what solves the problems they notice, then they change.  Success breeds success.  We need to be careful that our professional development ideas don’t bog teachers down to the extent that they comply rather than change.  If what teachers are asked to do, doesn’t have a fairly immediate effect on their practice, they aren’t likely to engage.  Who would?  But, when teachers implement ideas that they understand, that they choose, that they believe in, then their students will be successful.  Teachers change their practice when their students are successful.