I am a big fan of the program Fresh Air on NPR, hosted by Terry Gross. Every day she presents an extended interview with a public figure in contemporary arts, news, or culture. Her genius is that she approaches each interview with genuine interest and curiosity, getting into the lives, and often the heads, of her subjects with a depth that I have never heard elsewhere. Instead of tackling the interview from a spectator’s position, asking routine and superficial questions, she finds a way inside, bringing the listener along. Gross presents her subjects in a way that honors and respects the passions, the intellect, and the work of each, while still asking challenging and thought-provoking questions that pry back their facade.

On countless occasions, I have tuned in to the program to discover that Gross is going to be interviewing someone outside of my area of interest. Perhaps it is a rap musician, or a romance novelist, or an activist pursuing what I perceive as a fringe issue. My initial reaction to these is always to turn it off, since I’m likely to be bored. I’ve learned to resist that urge, however, since without fail, Gross is able to put me in a place where I not only appreciate the depth of their work but understand their life journey in a deep way. By meeting the person where they are and walking alongside, she deftly splinters my expectations, and I spend the hour watching them blow away in the wind. Inevitably, the next time I see that person’s work, I have an appreciation of where it came from. I may still not like it much, but I can relate to it.

Last week I sat in a meeting at one of the schools in my district with several other staff members talking about students and what we need to do to make them more successful. A worthy conversation, no doubt, and I know that each one of the adults in that room was looking out not only for the school’s needs, but more importantly the best interests of each individual child. But I became very aware of a disturbing tendency. It’s one I’ve been conscious of for a long time, but have recently become increasingly concerned about. Throughout the conversation, no student was mentioned by name.

Instead, we discussed clusters of students as if each cluster was somehow uniform and homogeneous. There were the standard labels we attach to students in these kinds of meetings: the “Basic” and the “Proficient” kids, the “gifted” and the “ELL” and the “Spec Ed” kids. Then there was the term that jolted me the most: the “Cusp Kids.”

Who are the Cusp Kids? These are the students who, on the most recent benchmark test, are just a hair below the cut off score for proficiency. They are the ones who are “on the cusp” of passing the state exam. “What are we doing for the Cusp Kids?” one of us asked. And the discussion for the next few minutes focused on the collection of interventions we were going to enact to ensure that the Cusp Kids were boosted up to proficient in time for the state test next month.

Don’t misunderstand me. We did not ignore any of the other groups. Teachers and administrators in that school are very conscious of working with every child and doing everything possible to ensure they are achieving at their highest possible level. Though there was a hint of a mindset to focus our resources and attention on the group that would give us the most return (in terms of AYP) on our investment, there was never any intention, explicit or implied, that we would ever ignore a group because they were a lost cause.

My worry is that we have lost sight of the individuals. We have lost sight of the fact that each one of those Cusp Kids is a person, with unique needs, interests, desires, background, family, knowledge, skills, and passions. Yet we treat them as if they are all the same, and that the only thing we need to worry about is getting them “up to proficient” (which in itself is a concerning phrase to me, but that will have to wait for another blog post).

Labels have great power. As soon as we attach one to a person—whether that label is “rap musician” or “fringe activist” or “Cusp Kid”—we immediately assign all of the traits and tendencies associated with that label to the person, and we neglect to dig beyond that.

Labels do have their uses, however. It makes broad conversations and strategic planning more straightforward. Our district, for example, has a significant racial achievement gap, and if we were to always look at just the individuals instead of clusters of kids, we would never be able to recognize that gap or do anything to alleviate it.

So what do we do? How can become more like Terry Gross in our approach to children? How do we get inside their heads—individually—and honor them as people instead of members of an arbitrary clump? How do we create truly student-centered schools and classrooms where the child (singular) is the most important thing we think about? Some of the influences that affect this are out of our local control. State tests, funding issues, regulations; these drive much of what we do every day. But there must be things we can do even within those constructs. What has to change in our administrative structures, our curriculum, our conversations, that can move us towards the goal of knowing each individual child?

I am wrestling with these things every day, and would love to hear your thoughts. Keep the focus on real actions. As I heard in a session at Educon this weekend, stop saying, “Yeah, but,” and start thinking, “What if?” If we can start moving towards treating children like people instead of labels, it would truly be a breath of Fresh Air.

A couple of days ago, I wrote about how schools often take the “camp bus” approach to learning: load all the kids on the bus at the start of the year, take them all for the same ride, and arrive at the same destination.

Imagine a family trip planned this way. Grandpa calls the house one day and says, “We’re all going on vacation to Disney World this summer. The whole family, kids, grandkids, everyone.” Sounds wonderful, especially when he adds that he’s paying.

“I already booked the hotel and the flight. We’re all meeting at the Philadelphia airport and flying to Orlando.”

Problem is Grandpa didn’t consider that these plans might not work for everyone in the family. Mom just found out she was pregnant, due a month after the trip. She won’t be able to do much of anything in Disney World, not to mention what Florida weather is like in August. Mom’s brother lives in Atlanta, so it makes little sense to have him come to Philadelphia to fly to Orlando. Then there’s Mom’s sister, who is a cast member at Disney, so she’ll be working through this “vacation.”

We could imagine a number of other similar scenarios that would affect the wisdom of planning a trip this way: Cousin Eddie won’t fly. The nephew gets violently ill on any moving vehicle (even the tram from the parking lot would be iffy). The new granddaughter is terrified of mice. You get the idea.

How often in school do we make our kids get on the plane where we predetermined they need to get on? Instead, what if we were to show them the destination and help them make their own way there?

Or better yet, let them choose their own destination. Take it back to the vacation: what’s the purpose? Is it family togetherness? Is it to have the Disney Experience? Is it to be somewhere warm? Let the family talk about all the possibilities and plan it together.

How could this play out in your school or classroom? How do we deal with the reality of common standards and imposed expectations? We usually respond to these with the convenience of the camp bus or the prearranged flight, but could there be other ways? How can we marry the nonlinear nature of learning with the neatly scripted curriculum that we are increasingly given?

When I was about 9, I went to Cub Scout day camp at Camp Delmont for the first time. Every day, a group of us got on a bus and we rode for an hour or so. I had a great time, and at the end of the week, for reasons that I can’t now recall, my dad and I decided to take a ride up to the camp. So we hopped in the car, and Dad said, “Tell me which way to go.”

Now I had sat in the middle of the bus and knew vaguely (at best) which way the bus had gone, but I did remember one of the other kids commenting at one point that we were getting on the Turnpike. Or was it the Expressway? No, Turnpike, definitely. “Go to the Turnpike.” We hadn’t gone more than a minute or two, when Dad took a left at an intersection through which I was absolutely certain the bus had gone straight. “No, Dad, go straight!” So he calmly got turned around and back onto the route I remembered.

Wasn’t long before I was completely lost. But I wasn’t about to let Dad know that, after my absolute certainty about the first turn. So he kept driving, and I kept directing him as best I could. “Are you sure you drove through Norristown?” he asked. “Yep, Dad, I’m sure. Right through here. Yep.”

Miraculously, or so it seemed at the time, we managed to end up at the camp, and I showed him all the places I had done stuff that week, and we had a great time. In retrospect, Dad, being the map king he is, probably had already figured out where the camp was and knew how to get us where we needed to go.

School has a tendency to work like the camp bus. At the start of the year (or a unit, or a chapter, or a lesson), we pile all the students on the bus, the teacher drives us to camp, and the kids all get off. The teacher knows where we’re starting, where we want to end up, and the best way to get there. All the students have to do is go along for the ride.

The problem comes when later the students have to make the journey on their own. Without the bus or the driver, they get lost, miss turns, and lose track of where they’re going.

Learning isn’t linear, though, and the kids aren’t all at the same starting point. The process is much more complex and takes place in three (or more) dimensions. As a teacher it is far more efficient to plan the camp bus kind of lesson than to work in three dimensions, but it’s not about our convenience. In my next post, I will elaborate more on the implications of nonlinear learning as I consider what a family vacation would look like if it were organized according to school structures. I will also be co-presenting a session with Mary Beth Hertz on this topic this Saturday at TeachMeet NJ. If you’re in the area, come join us to continue the conversation.

Last month some colleagues and I ran a workshop for teachers at my school on differentiation. In preparing for it, I came across the idea of anchor activities. Unfortunately, many of the resources I found giving examples actually list a lot of the traditional time-filler busy work (extra worksheets, copy and define words from the dictionary, coloring pages, etc.) and slap the “anchor activity” label on them. In her book The Differentiated Classroom, Carol Tomlinson defines anchor activities as

At the same time, it’s important to keep in mind that students’ brains cannot stay in high academic gear all day long. They need frequent short “brain breaks” (as Eric Jensen calls them) to be able to stay alert and focused throughout the school day. The real trick is finding the balance and making sure that the breaks are built into our instruction so that students are more able to continue academic work during their unstructured time.

As with many differentiation techniques, though, anchor activities should be just a starting point. Tomlinson herself explains that setting up anchor activities as a routine in your classroom should be a way to train students to expect that there will be times when different people are doing different things so that some students can break off from the group.

What do you do, then, when you have students who are ready to break off? Perhaps you have a few gifted students who have compacted out of part of a math unit. Or you have several students who routinely finish their work quickly and accurately. Here are a few ideas for ongoing, long-term activities they can do that are meaningful, useful, and important:

• Independent Study. This is of course the tried and true traditional approach, and much has been written about it. What I recommend is that you always give students a way to share their results or integrate it back into the classroom community. I had a student once who was fascinated with folk tales and fairy tales. Her fourth grade class was learning about Africa that year, so her independent study project was to find and study some African folk tales and adapt one into a play (another interest of hers). She then selected student volunteers and put on a very simple (just a few masks and props) production in the classroom.
• Classroom yearbook. Have your regular early finishers form a “yearbook committee.” Their job is to plan, design, and prepare a classroom yearbook to go home with your students at the end of the year. They would need to interview each member of the class, prepare a page about each, take photos, record important classroom events, and so on.
• About Our School video. Have your kids take snapshots of activities around the classroom (and around the school if your situation permits and your students are trustworthy). Use Animoto to put together an introductory music video that the principal could use during Back to School night presentations or post on the school website.
• Unit reconnaissance. Enlist the aid of your better researchers to help you find good materials for upcoming units. Tell the students what the next unit will be in one subject area. Give them some guidelines and some topic suggestions, then give them time to explore the library and the Internet for materials that will support what you will be doing. Use online tools like Diigo or a classroom wiki to gather the information in one spot.

What are your ideas for keeping anchor activities and bigger projects connected and meaningful? How will you work to eliminate busy work from your classroom and school this year?

References:

Tomlinson, C. A. (1999). The differentiated classroom: Responding to the needs of all learners. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Yesterday I shared some thoughts about pretesting that were prompted by a year-old post by Scott McCleod. Today, I came across another year-old blog post, this time by Angela Meiers. In this article, she talks about how comprehension is not something that can be contained in a discrete list of facts and skills, but rather it is an ongoing, recursive process of applying those facts and skills to build a picture of the world.

It occurs to me that what we often do in school is something like handing the students a birdhouse kit. The pieces are pre-measured and pre-cut, and everything we need is already there. We walk them all step-by-step through the assembly of the kit, focusing on their technique in hammering and gluing. It doesn’t matter that some of the kids have designed and built their own birdhouses, and others haven’t ever seen a bird before. At the end of the lesson, everyone in the class has an identical birdhouse–though perhaps we allow them to choose their own colors for the paint.

Rather than giving a pretest that runs through all of the discrete skills in a unit (“explain how to hammer a nail without bending it”, “which goes on first, the roof or the base?”), consider giving your students a one-question pretest that gets at the most important aspects of the unit you are going to teach: “Draw a design for a birdhouse and explain how you would build it.” Here are some sample One-Question Pretests that might work in various subject areas:

• Explain how America became an independent country
• Pretzels come in bags of 24 and you want to give one to each of the 473 students in our school. Figure out how many bags we need to buy and show how you computed the answer without a calculator.
• Where do new plants come from, and how do they grow?
• Tell me what grade you should get for this class, and write a paragraph that convinces me you’ve earned it.
• Read the beginning of this story and write what you think will happen next. Explain why you think so.

While you wouldn’t get discrete data on what specific skills and knowledge your students have, a careful reading and analysis of the students’ responses can give you a wealth of information that would be immensely helpful in planning your instruction. It wouldn’t take any more time than a traditional pretest. If you embed it into other activities, such as including the pretest as a learning center activity that all students will complete over the course of a week during normal rotations, it might even take less time.

How can you apply the One-Question Pretest idea to your own subject and grade level?

Teachers frequently complain about debate the need for the plethora of tests that we administer on a regular basis, and I have to admit I’m right in there with them. It seems like there is so much testing going on that we have little time left for instruction.

The reality of course is that there is plenty of instruction going on, we just don’t have time to teach everything we would like or even are supposed to teach.

In this article, Scott McCleod proposes doing more testing, not less. I can almost hear you saying, “You have got to be kidding!” But hold on. He has a great point, and in fact if we do more of the right kind of testing, we can actually save time and have more time for the quality instruction we want to do.

Pretesting like Scott is suggesting is something that I heartily advocate. As a teacher of gifted students, I’m often called on to help classroom teachers figure out how to meet the needs of students who have already mastered a large chunk of the material they are about to cover in class. Though some teachers are open and willing to learn how to compact the curriculum by letting kids “test out” of some things they’ve already learned, many are reluctant. They are afraid they won’t have enough “scores” for the child to adequately calculate a report card grade, for example. They have a hard time justifying allowing a child to “skip” an assignment that others have to do because it’s “unfair.”

But as Scott points out, how fair is it to the child who has to sit through instruction they don’t need? Consider taking the time to pretest every unit you teach, and you will gain much:

• Pretesting can help you identify content that everyone in the class has mastered, which means you can skim over or skip it completely.
• You will also note the areas that are most broadly misunderstood so you can plan the most intensive instruction around those topics and avoid skimming over things you “knew” they already had last year.
• You can identify patterns in the errors that students make so you can select specific exercises and instruction that will correct those misconceptions.
• You can use the data to group students according to need, designing small group instruction or learning center assignments that are targeted to supporting their particular weaknesses.
• If you team teach or co-teach with someone who isn’t in the classroom with you every day, pretest results can give that co-teacher a more complete picture of your students
• If you are basing instructional decisions on pretest data, you have something objective you can point back to if you are challenged by a parent or administrator about why you are doing a particular lesson, activity or assignment.

What have been your experiences with pretesting? When is it most useful? When do you find it not as helpful?

(A shorter version of this article originally appeared in Grandé With Room.)

Image by kevindooley via Flickr

Yesterday, I shared some questions that I often use to help create an atmosphere of thinking in my classroom. Unfortunately, when I ask a student to explain their reasoning, they often aren’t able to reflect back on their thought process and verbalize what took place. In some cases, the best they can come up with is “it just popped into my head.”

In order to train students how to do this, I scaffold the process for them at first to give them a structure within which they can build their own responses. They need to learn three skills to allow this to happen:

1. Focus on the process before they start
2. Monitor their reasoning as they are working
3. Reflect back and explain to someone else what they were thinking

Each of these skills needs to be modeled and practiced, and students need many opportunities to use them. These thinking skills are learned best when they are integrated into the regular flow of instruction rather than explicitly taught as discrete topics. One way to do that is to build one or more of these scaffolding activities into every lesson:

• Think-Alouds
• Leveled problems
• Graphic organizers (e.g. T-chart)
• Using “magic words” that students can use which require explanation of reasoning
• Asking prompt questions (such as those in yesterday’s post)
• Give part of the solution, then have students complete it
• Give the answer, students write the solution
• Give the explanation, students write the solution
• Give the solution, students write the explanation
• Checklists or mnemonics to aid recall of processes
• Journals to practice informal writing about problem solving
• Vocabulary games to build language skills and improve communication about reasoning
• Allow students to rewrite weak explanations to improve them
• Show sample student papers that demonstrate good skills
• Teach students to score responses using a rubric
• Have students score their own work or a partner’s work
• Trade papers with another class and have students score

As adults, when we are in a learning situation that’s boring, it is often because the content is something we already know and don’t need to practice more.

It’s important for us as parents to remember that children often don’t have the vocabulary or introspective ability to explain what they are feeling, so they may fall back on “boring” as the closest approximation. They also may not understand the root causes of their feelings to be able to describe for you where they are coming from.

Certainly students will be bored when the work they are asked to do is too easy and they have already mastered it, and it is one of the first things we need to consider. But there are many other things that might be contributing to the feeling that a child associates with boredom. When a child says, “I’m bored…,” it could also mean…

• The work is too hard
• The work isn’t interesting to me
• The work is…work
• I’m afraid I can’t do it
• I don’t like the subject
• I don’t like the assignment
• I don’t like the teacher
• I don’t like my classmates
• I don’t understand
• I don’t want to understand
• I’m tired
• I’m distracted
• I’m preoccupied
• I’m uncomfortable
• I’m angry about something that happened this morning
• I’m worried about something that might happen tomorrow
• I’d rather be at recess
• I’d rather be at home
• I’d rather be at the movies/pool/park/etc.

If we are too quick to assume that “bored” always means “too easy,” then it won’t take long for our children to learn that when they don’t like doing something, just saying those magic words will make it go away

It’s up to us, then, to be sure we don’t take this kind of statement at immediate face value. Instead, ask questions and probe deeper into the situation to find out more about what is going on and why. Then we will have the information we need to address the problem and fix it.

(Originally posted June 5, 2008 at Grandé With Room)

In strength training, so the common wisdom goes, if you want to tone the muscles you have, use moderate weight and many repetitions of the same exercise. If, on the other hand, you want to bulk up and build more muscle, higher weight and few reps will do the trick. I’m no exercise physiologist, so I can’t tell you whether this is actually true, but I’ve been thinking lately about how the principle should be applied to learning new skills in school.

Think about the typical classroom math lesson: introduce a skill, model it, walk the class through an example or two, then a set of eight or ten problems to practice the skill. This is not arbitrary or simply traditional. For the average student, it takes at least five to seven correct repetitions of a new skill before it begins to become automatic. Most students in your classroom, then, need to be guided through this process each time a skill is taught. And we need to use the same process each time a new variation in the skill is added. (Think subtracting without regrouping, then with regrouping, then regrouping across zeroes, for example.)

There are students in your class for whom this approach is inadequate, however. Some will need more practice before they begin to master the skill—these are the ones who you pull aside for extra help from time to time. We often forget, though, that there are students in the class who not only got it the first time they tried it, they are already extrapolating the variations you’re going to teach for the next three days.

So what happens to these kids in a typical lesson? They start the classwork before they’re instructed, they finish their homework before it’s assigned, and they start to daydream because they’ve already finished the thought that you haven’t finished explaining yet. And typically we treat this as misbehavior: students who aren’t on task, aren’t following directions, and are disrupting the flow of the lesson and the learning of the students around them.

The reality, though, is that these kids are ready to move on and do something new, and being asked to continually repeat over and over what they already understand is actually disrespectful. Here are two strategies that can help you address these kids’ needs without undue stress and extra work on your part:

Stay With Me or Go Free

A colleague of mine recently explained this strategy she uses with her class. After introducing a skill to the class, she will pause before starting the practice session and tell the kids, “You can stay with me, or go free.” Students who feel confident with the concept may choose to use the time for other work. Of course, she has already established routines in the classroom which are conducive to this, such as wait-time folders and extension menus with challenging activities for the students who can handle them.

Most Difficult First

This strategy, described by Susan Winebrenner in her book, Teaching Gifted Kids in the Regular Classroom, is appropriate for situations where you need more accountability for the students. When planning an assignment, identify the four or five most difficult problems in the set. When it is time for independent practice, any students who feel ready may opt to do the most difficult ones first. If they are all correct, the students are excused from the rest of that assignment and also are given a reduced homework set.

When you see students who are off task, working ahead, or seem to be daydreaming, consider the possibility that they may already get what you’re working on. What are some other things you do for students who are able to finish quickly and move ahead? Share your ideas in the comments.

Here are a few ideas about how you could use this with your gifted students:

• Select one of the speeches and have the students infer whatever they can about the historical context in which it was given.
• Research the historical period and compare/contrast what was mentioned in the speech with things that were left out.
• Compare how vocabulary has changed over time. Figure out a way to illustrate these changes (perhaps with a graph or timeline).
• Combine the text from several speeches (perhaps all the speeches over a 50-year span, or all the speeches from the top-ranked Presidents) and create a Wordle to look for broader patterns of words.
• Create a Wordle from President Obama’s speech and compare it to those from other Presidents. (Thanks to Lee Kolbert for this idea.)
• Imagine you’re elected President. Which other Presidents would you emulate? Use words from their speeches to begin building your own.
• Research which Presidents wrote their own speeches and which used speechwriters. Is there any difference in the vocabulary?

This is admittedly a very rough list of ideas, and none of these are fully fleshed-out lessons. What other thoughts do you have?