Creating Lifelong Learners

Teaching students to work independently.  Getting students to problem solve math problems without a teacher intervening.  Facilitating student-led discussions.  Asking students to engage in higher level thinking when analyzing literature.  Doing any of these things in your classroom for the first time may be like pulling teeth.

The reason why higher level thinking doesn’t happen often in classrooms is because students can’t do it.  But students can’t do it because they haven’t been taught how to do it.  And if they don’t know how to do it, then it’s difficult to teach them.

When I reflect on my day, naturally it’s the lessons that flowed easily, when it seemed like all the students were “getting it” that help me to sleep better.  However, if we never challenge our students, they can never rise to new levels.  Higher expectations for all students doesn’t simply mean that if we built it, they will come.  We have to help students reach our higher expectations and getting there from where we are now takes work.

So, here’s to pulling teeth.  I wouldn’t encourage you to remain at frustration level for very long but pushing your students past their cognitive comfort zone is our job.  Getting there may feel like pulling teeth but the good teachers keep pulling and less effective teachers just give up.

The author of the article, The Tao of American Idol, attempts to decode what the Idol judges really mean. For example:

When Simon says …

“You didn’t do anything different with the song.” What he really means is “I am incredibly bored right now. Thank goodness they pay me so much money to sit here and listen to this.”

Based on my work this year, providing intervention to struggling readers via a intervention program, I’ve decided to decode some of what I’ve heard a lot of this year.

When a teachers says, “he’s so low,” what the teacher really means is that he knows the student is having difficulty but he has no idea where that difficulty lies and how to help that student.

When a teacher says, “he’s easily distracted,” what he means is that the students finds lectures and paper and pencil activities really boring.

When a teachers says, “he’s totally clueless,” what the teacher means is that none of the class activities have yet found a way showcase the child’s intelligence.

I can’t stand blaming teachers for all the ills of the world but I do think we can reframe our thinking about student achievement and lack thereof. We can better pinpoint student difficulties and make sure we’re planning activities that engage multiple intelligences and allow all students to be successful at something. We can also ensure that we’re not boring.

Related Articles:

Classroom Management: Appropriate Consequences

Energize Your Classroom: How Jim Cramer Made Me a Better Teacher of English Language Learners

A New York Times article reports on teachers selling their lesson plans online and raises ethical questions about the practice.

Both the article and the letters to the editor in reaction to it are informative.  I have several thoughts about this which I’ll break down in three categories, business, ethics, and practice.  First I’ll address my own bias.

My Bias

In addition to this blog, I run Open Court Resources.com which contains thousands of teaching resources contributed by teachers (including myself) that are available for free.  The web site contains advertising that offsets the cost of running a web site including the thousands of hours of my time spent creating, maintaining, and editing the site.  If you read the article about how much money some people have made selling lesson plans, I will tell you that if my web site was a business, I’m in the wrong business.

I do sell a training CD through the web site that I created.  It’s the only pay item available on the site.  I spent two entire days of a summer vacation creating the CD and unlike the virtual resources, the CD is a product that is shipped physically to your house.

Business

As reported in the article, the top selling teacher on the web site Teachers Pay Teachers has earned $36,000.  It’s impossible to know how much the average teacher earns but it is certainly less than the $600,000 in sales that the web site itself has racked up.

I started my own web site hoping that if I gave away my own materials for free it would ultimately help me because other people would add to what I created and lessen the workload for everyone (like “Field of Dreams” for teaching resources).  Ultimately, my own web site helped me immensely when I moved from first grade to second grade and already had racked up hundreds of ideas and resources I could use in my own classroom.  Other teachers write to me to tell me my site has helped them as well.

I have no moral problem with teachers selling their lesson plans.  I applaud their ingenuity.  However, I do feel that the greatest value in the internet is in a free flow of ideas that allows you to browse resources quickly and try them out risk free in your classroom without paying.

Ethics

Do taxpayers own lesson plans?  No.

If a firefighter invented a better fire hydrant based on experience gained working for the fire department, isn’t that his own idea?  If a police officer wrote a book about how best to stop crime, wouldn’t it benefit society to have that book published? What incentive would the police officer have to write that book if all the profits went back to the government?

In terms of teachers specifically, lesson plans are written outside of school hours and I do believe that they belong to the teachers who wrote them.  If it’s legal for textbook publishers to market lesson plans, why can’t teachers who have the ability to market test their own ideas be allowed to compete?

Practice

What the article does not address is whether someone else’s lesson plans work.  I don’t believe they do.

My own scribbled plans probably wouldn’t do many other people any good.  Someone else’s plans aren’t likely to apply perfectly to my own students and my own style of teaching.  Only 10% of the materials on my own web site do I use personally in my classroom.  But the other 90% is valuable to other people and they tell me they use it.

While it is possible to get ideas from other people’s plans, blogs, web sites, lesson planning is a personal thing.  The best teaching…multimedia-rich, experiential, constructivist doesn’t come out of books or plans or sites—even though those resources can be a jumping off point.

Real lesson planning is personal to teachers, students, and the real world in which those plans will be carried out.  I suspect teaching by numbers doesn’t often work.

What are your thoughts?

I write this post at the risk of being nicknamed Scrooge.  Let me preface this by saying that in my classroom, I have always bought the kids presents which they unwrap after lunch on the last day of school before the winter break.  Every year there is one student who tells me something like the art supplies I gave her, “were just what she wanted” or that “this is the only present I’ll get this year.”  I like bringing a little magic to school and building good memories with my class.

Some years I have had a party in addition to the gift giving but I got discouraged after buying the students pizza and having them tell me that they were serving pizza in the cafeteria that day.  It was much more fun and healthy to go out to P.E. and burn off some energy after gift giving than to hype up on sugar.  I still would get requests for parties or hear that “Ms. So and So is having a party, why aren’t we?”  However, I just point out all the things we’re doing that Ms. So and So’s class never does.  You have to resist that kind of student guilt because it can easily extend to logic like “Ms. So and So’s class doesn’t have to face forward in the auditorium, why do we have to?”

At schools I’ve worked at we’ve always had holiday performances and these do take time away from regular class work.  However, I’ve always felt that the act of practicing for our performances and the experience of being in front of an audience taught things like discipline and perseverance and allowed some  students who were less than stellar in their classwork to shine onstage.  My schedule in those performance weeks is cramped and hurried but when your time management is effective you can incorporate those kinds of extra-curricular events without them being a hassle or taking time away from the core subjects.

In contrast, as early as Monday or Tuesday of this week I’ve seen several classrooms shut down their academics to build gingerbread houses, color pictures of Santa, and make reindeer hats.  And it seems that it’s often the classes who need the instruction most who get it the least…the ELL class, the intervention students, the low-income district.  It’s not a coincidence that more time goes wasted in these schools.  (I refer you to my favorite blog post ever, Why Can’t Inner City Kids Learn, by City Teacher for more).

I realize that when working with disadvantaged students we want to give them more…more love, more happiness, more good things.  But I would suggest that giving a student confidence by nurturing a strong reader is longer lasting happiness than a sugar high.  I would also suggest that there’s a certain amount of laziness on the part of teachers.  I realize building gingerbread houses takes a lot of preparation but certainly there’s a lot less planning involved than an academically rigorous lesson.

I don’t want to take holiday celebrations out of schools, I like the Halloween/Fall Festival Parade as much as the next pagan teacher but I do suggest that coloring turkeys, reindeers, skeletons is a waste of time (to be clear, I see this as often in grades 4 and 5 as I do in kindergarten and first grade).

If you must do this kind of busy work, at the very least can you relegate it to the last hours on the last day of school before the vacation?  Can we stop complaining that we don’t have enough time to fit in things like technology integration, reader’s theater, and student led discussions when we have time for coloring and parties?  Can we avoid giving in to students’ desires for candy and fun?—we’re the adults.

Your thoughts?  Have I gone too far?

As you are getting ready to meet your new students, remember that getting to know them is more than just silly ice breakers and bingo games.  I’m not disparaging those activities, I’ve even posted several of them.  However, know that the process of getting to know your students doesn’t end when you’ve found out who’s visited a foreign country.

I’ve never believed that you have to like your students in order to teach them.  However, over the course of a year, I do try to find one thing I appreciate in each  of them.  Some things like charm, a sense of humor or an encyclopedic knowledge of dinosaurs show themselves on the first day of school.  However, other things like a penchant for organization, a photographic memory, or the ability to cleverly problem solve take time to reveal themselves.

Signs of personality in your students show themselves everywhere if you’re looking for them.  I notice which cartoon characters are on which student’s backpack or homework folder.  I notice how they relate to each other when they think I’m not listening.  I provide opportunities like music and drama, often integrated with the rest of our curriculum, to provide opportunities for students to show talents that don’t typically show up in a classroom.

So, if you think you’re going to get to know your students during the first day, first week, or even first month of school, remember it’s a marathon and not a sprint and keep yourself open to getting to know who they are all year.  Knowing who they are helps you know how to reach them.  And the ones who are hardest to reach need you the most.

Here are some resources I’ve compiled to assist you in planning for your return to school:

Need something to do?  Want to get to know your students?
Activities for the First Day of School

Want to beef up on classroom management?  Here’s everything you need from job charts to management systems:
Classroom Management for Teachers

For Open Court Reading teachers, I’d start with
Unit Openers
then Concept Question Boards
and finally have a plan for more explicitly teaching reading comprehension this year

It’s that time of year again for Open House in my district.

I’ve always taught at schools where parent engagement is a “problem.”  Getting parents to come to school is often difficult and it’s not unusual for some classrooms to have only one or two parents.  Here are my tips for the night.

Do

• Make ‘em laugh.
You don’t have to use humor but I do like to keep parents entertained.  Even if you feel that it’s not your job to make classroom engaging for students, understand that parents have a choice of whether to show up or not and if they’re not showing up then one of the reasons is probably that your classroom isn’t that interesting.  Since I started using Open House as a night to premiere our latest classroom films I’ve started having a full house.  A secondary goal is to downplay the institutional atmosphere of the school that is intimidating for parents who come from other countries and/or have been out of school for many years.  I am intimidated when I visit my old high school so I understand this.

• Give Your Students Some Ownership of the Room
Even in first and second grade I’ve started having students put their own work up on the wall.  I know this is unthinkable to many teachers.  However, I noticed that when I put students work up myself students have a hard time finding their work.  I still add the headlines and standards to the bulletin board but students learn to hang their own work on the wall.  This adds to students’ feelings of ownership of the room and as they get good at hanging papers straight they learn life skills and fine motor skills that they’re not getting reading and writing all day.  It takes very little time and it results in the bulletin boards being changed more frequently.

• Train Your Students to Lead Tours
Many of my students’ parents don’t speak English and they’re not that interested in checking out the work that we have posted around the room.  If they can’t read it then understandably checking out my students’ writing is boring and even an embarassing experience.  Ideally students can read their work to their parents but they can’t do this without being trained on how to give a tour.  I teach this to students ahead of time.

Don’t

• Discuss Students Individually
I always have a slideshow playing (using iPhoto and my laptop hooked up to the computer) as parents come in the room.  This makes it less awkward as parents enter and are standing around waiting for you to start.  This gives parents something to do right away and helps to diffuse questions about students.  If parents do want to know about their children, I have a conference sign up sheet available so that they can come back.

• Lecture
If parents get a lecture they will not be back.  You can work in teaching tips as you go through the night but lecturing parents, particularly English Language Learners who can’t understand you, will not get you far.

• Assume that Parents Who Don’t Who Up Don’t Care
Parents have many reasons for not coming to Open House.  They’re working, they’re busy, they’re intimidated.  Don’t assume that the parents who don’t make it to school don’t care about their students.

What are your tips?

Tim “VidSnacks” Holt posts another example of a teacher losing it in the classroom and being caught on video.  Students have cameras and audio recorders in their pocket?  Should we be surprised?

The teacher who was caught on tape has since resigned and the news story has interviews with union officials and administrators pointing fingers in all directions.  Teachers yell at kids all the time.  I find it a little disingenuous that we treat videotaped verbal beatings as if they’re worse than the yellings that go on every day unrecorded.  Are administrators really unaware that there are teachers on their staffs who yell?  I find it hard to believe that this was a one-time incident for this teacher.

One of the values I bring to my classroom is that kids are people.  Shocking, I know.  I don’t implement any rule that I wouldn’t expect to be a rule in a faculty meeting and I talk to my students as I would talk to my colleagues.  Have I ever gotten mad in the classroom?  Yes.  We’re people too.  But one of the most effective things I do is to say in a perfectly calm voice, “I am getting very upset with you (class) right now and I need to calm down.”  I go to my desk and shuffle paperwork for a minute and come back to the front of the class.  This works in my classroom only because students get to a point where they really care about me and know that the feelings are mutual.

Admittedly, teaching in the upper grades might be different.  But do your students know that you care about them?  I don’t mean that you bring them stickers, I mean that they know you want them to do well and are interested in what they’re interested in?  Do your students feel like people in your classroom?