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Keep engagement high in whole-group review

I have written several posts attempting to address the challenge posed by student voices being hesitant, inaudible or lost in classrooms. Here is one more in that series: While Turn-and-Talk is often the logical next step after an individual warm-up, there are also times when it makes good sense to include some whole-group review or sharing. Here are four ways to keep the energy high and ensure that students can actually hear each other during whole-group sharing.  Set a quota: Name the number of volunteers you want to hear from. Before anyone responds, wait until you have achieved that number of volunteers (“I have 3, I need 2 more...”)  Be prepared to wait it out. Make a routine of instructing students to remember their order, so they're not relying on you to call on them a second time. This strategy keeps the pace moving, and also increases the number of volunteers.  Make it count: When a student is speaking , ensure that they have the floor. When even 1 or 2 students are tal
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Maximize your Turn and Talk

I'm noticing two trends in whole group work in our building--whether its direct instruction or discussion. First, many students are reticent to share out loud, and hard to hear when they do. My last post outlined some strategies for establishing good habits for being heard. Second, Covid schooling has been inconsistent and irregular for some of our students who most need support. The transition to the daily structure, expectations and accountability of school has been especially challenging for them. Whole group work is a time when inappropriate or distracting behaviors are center stage, and it can be a set-up for kids who are struggling. Not to mention exhausting for teachers and annoying for kids who are waiting, waiting, waiting for the learning to move on. A work-around is to reduce whole group time and maximize independent or paired work, along with robust routines for Turn and Talk. Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion 2.0 reminds us that Turn and Talk is one of the building
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Teach students to speak up

 Masked students are hard to hear, and with a return to what one principal called “normal-ish” school, we need to fortify our strategies for amplifying students’ voices in everyday teaching and learning. Here are 4 strategies for doing that, whether in Chorus or Chemistry. 1. Use Turn and Talk. In High Expectations Teaching: How we Persuade Students to Believe and Act on "Smart Is Something You Can Get " (2017), Jon Saphier encourages us to “use turn and talk often in large-group settings” as a way to “create a talk environment of robust student-to-student discourse.” Also known as think, pair, share, or simply pair-share, this strategy gives students a chance to gain practice and confidence in talking about the material before it goes to the whole group. They're then more likely to project. 2. Resist repeating what students have said . If students’ responses can’t be heard, have them say it again. Turn it into one more corny thing that you do. So sorry, Cody, I can’t he
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Let them be heard

I blog about teaching and learning. If it's your first time here, the gist is this: I choose a theme, summarize some of the experts’ findings, and provide a few specific strategies from the resources and/or my own experience that teachers can apply immediately. Most of my subscribers work in our schools in Burlington, VT, but I do aspire to posts that are broadly applicable in secondary schools. At Hunt Middle School where I work,  our students have spent the last year masked and socially distanced, and more often than not required to face away from rather than toward each other. Across our school, I’m seeing that this shift has had a student engagement cost. Now that we are back full-time and in-person, students need our help in rebuilding the good habits of learning. This includes the habit of speaking to be heard, along with listening to peers. Since our students continue to be masked for everyone’s safety, we need to especially creative and deliberate in developing new habits a
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Give 'em something to talk about

Before the December break, I wrote a post titled "Get them talking," about the importance of structures that encourage and support student-to-student talk. But we don't actually want students to just talk; in order to leverage our precious few moments of learning in a Covid world, we want meaningful student talk. Cathy O'Connor's work on "academically productive talk" is useful here. She describes academically productive talk is focused and rigorous--a pathway to deep learning. Talk is a fertile source of information... By talking about academic content with others, students begin to see ideas from more angles, and make links to other concepts and meanings they already have. This helps them remember new ideas and develop a richer set of associations with them, so that they can use them in new contexts. Students gain a deeper sense of what words and expressions mean and how to use them...Talk supports language acquisition, vocabulary development, and t
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Get them talking

Last winter I wrote a series of posts about the questions we ask students, wait time, who we ask , and how we react to student responses (“ Signaling ,” “ Poker Face ,” and “ When the answer is wrong ”). The strategies I summarize in those posts all focused on specific teacher actions and their impact on student learning. These days when I pop into classes, I'm paying attention to students' actions. In a hybrid model, in-person learning is gold. How can we leverage the heck out of the precious few moments that we have students with us? And how do we ensure that students have structures, time and the right support for talking to each other about what they’re learning, while they’re in the room together?  Routines like think-pair-share, small- and whole-group discussion have long been a regular part of many teachers' engagement toolbox. And then...Covid. Nowclasses are small, and students are masked and spread out. IOriginally, we were asked to keep them facing forward; c
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Leveraging the Warm-up 2.0

I'm re-purposing one of my first blog posts. Maybe that's bad blogging manners, but since no one was reading my first posts, I figure no one will mind.  In a hybrid model, the warm-up is more important than ever. The last time we saw students was...who can remember? It was days ago. As one of my colleagues in the 6th grade said, in a hybrid model every day is a Monday.  So we need to leverage cumulative review and spaced practice. Chapter 4 of Benedict Carey's book  How We Learn:  The Surprising Truth About When, Where and Why It Happens,  lays out the benefits of spaced practice: "people learn at least as much, and retain it much longer, when they distribute--or 'space'---their study time than when they concentrate it." An efficient way to build in spaced practice is through a warm-up review.  And the first moments in class are prime time. This graphic from David Sousa’s  How the Brain Learns  shows the two “prime time learning” moments in a 40 min. class
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