K.I.S.S. = Keep It Simple Sister

If you are a teacher then chances are you're experiencing the most stressful August you’ve ever endured. Whether your school is about to open in-person, has already opened, or whether you’re teaching virtually, nothing about the beginning of school is normal this year. Nothing.

With so much to worry about this year (Will I get Covid? Will I pass it on to my loved ones? How do I keep students physically distanced at recess? How can I teach word study with my mouth covered by a mask? What happens when the little rugrats start shooting their masks at each other?) it would probably behoove us to take a deep breath and think about these two questions:

1. What must we ABSOLUTELY get right during the first weeks of school?
2. What can wait?

I’ve learned than when things get complicated, it’s best to react with simplicity. Distill down the most critical concepts and save the others for later.

What MUST we get right?

First, it is imperative that students feel safe and loved when they come to school. Some of our students are extremely anxious about picking up the virus, some have been in neglectful or abusive situations for the past five months, and others are simply “regular” anxious about the beginning of school. Our first order of business needs to be building trust and a sense of community so that these little people can relax. Eric Jensen has shown us that stressful situations release cortisol, and cortisol has distinct negative effects on people’s ability to learn. If our kids don’t feel safe and cared for, all the teaching we do will be for naught.

Secondly, we must create and follow procedures that will make future learning possible. If you are teaching in-person, that means all the new rituals and routines surrounding CDC guidelines: how do we line up safely without touching each other? When do we have to wear a mask? What do we do with our mask when we don’t have to wear it? How and when should I use hand sanitizer? How can I use classroom manipulatives safely? If you’re teaching virtually, students must understand your schedule, create a learning spot at home, and make a plan for sharing devices with siblings and parents.

All of this will be different this year, and it must be taught. Of all the things that are new, I think this is what stresses teachers the most because we’re trying to teach kids something we’ve never done before. Therefore, while this teaching-of-safety-routines is a must, we need to give ourselves grace while we work through it. Tell your students, “This is how we’re going to store our masks when we go to recess today. We might do it differently tomorrow or next week, but if we change I promise I’ll show you how so we can all get it right.” Flexibility is the name of the game for both teachers and students.

Finally, in these beginning weeks of school we must help students become familiar with technology and the platforms/tools our schools are using. Most likely our schools will be going digital at some point this year, or at the very least particular students or cohorts will go digital if they have to quarantine. They need to be comfortable logging in and navigating the platform. This can be done through games, scavenger hunts, and simple assignments that inspire confidence rather than fear in students (and parents!). If your students are beginning the year in a digital format, it’s even more important for them to be comfortable with the technology before you introduce grade-level concepts.

What can wait?

Honestly, deeper content and grade-level standards are not important in these first weeks. Give yourself and your kids a break and instead play games to build community and trust. You might toss in some concepts they learned last year, but make sure they’re easy concepts that your students are sure to have mastered. Nothing provokes anxiety more than being thrown two-digit multiplication when you’re still unsure about addition.

Another piece of the educational puzzle that can wait? Assessments. This may be a bit controversial, especially since we know our students will likely not be academically up to speed due to last spring’s Pandemic Pause. But I still come back to the great amount of stress students and teachers are under right now. Imagine if you were on a mission trip to a third-world country and when you arrived instead of allowing you to settle in, your hosts drove you to the middle of the capital and dropped you off to “assess” your ability to find your way to the mission compound? You’d have done much better if they’d just waited a short while and let you get the lay of the land. The same applies to students. Of course, teachers are constantly assessing in informal ways from day one – speaking vocabulary, behavioral strengths, small motor control, desire to read – and these can still be done during games and routines. Just save the formal assessments until kids have settled in.

"Don't let success go to your head. Don't let failure go to your heart." - Tim Keller 

We know these first weeks of school will be hard. The only thing that’s guaranteed is change. In these times of uncertainty, keep it simple. Love your students and let them know it. Create structure that will allow for deeper learning later. And above all, give yourself grace.

Classroom Community in the Time of Covid

It’s the time of year when I find myself dreaming of school each night, but this year instead of energizing thoughts of fresh faces and sharpened pencils, my dreams are anxious ones, troubled by struggling to keep kids apart, computer programs that won’t operate, and children chewing their masks into soggy chinstraps.

Among the many things Covid-19 has stolen from us is the ability for the approximately 3.7 million teachers across the county to plan for the beginning of school. What would normally be one of the most enjoyable times of year for a teacher (Anything is possible! This will be the perfect class of eager, dedicated learners!) is instead being spent in debates between politicians, parents, and the general public with no clear right answer.

So, how can teachers find a bit of calm in this storm? How can we make plans when so much is up in the air and un-plannable? We do what we’ve always done – we think of our students first. Our students are coming, one way or the other. If we are nervous and anxious about this year, our students are much more so. They’re likely concerned about the same things as always – Will my teacher be nice? Will the work be too hard? But they’re also probably afraid of how school will be different, whether Covid guidelines will keep them from making friends, and how to negotiate this new version of school. Some will carry with them fears of catching the virus and spreading it to loved ones while others are dealing with the ongoing economic impact to their families. It’s our job to allay those fears as much as we can, and build a supportive community in our classroom, even if it’s a virtual space.

According to Dr. Mark Wilson, teachers and students who had strong, trusting relationships made an easier transition last spring to distance learning. Strong relationships build trust, and when teachers and students trust each other, much more can be asked of each. And we know this year will be asking a lot of all of us.

So, here are some ways I worked to build classroom community and trust at the beginning of each school year, with ideas on how to adjust to a digital format if that’s how school begins in your area:

• I like to help students, even young ones, understand that fair does not always mean equal. Along with sharing this image, I try to bring it closer to home by asking students to interview their guardians to find out the age at which they began to walk (in months), said their first word (in months), and lost their first tooth (in years). We then graph this information, which could easily be accomplished on software such as Kahoot (by creating answer choices with age ranges) or Microsoft Excel. We then have a conversation about how everyone grows differently and reaches milestones at different times. Similarly, not everyone will learn to read or multiply or shoot a basketball at the same exact time. Therefore, my job as a teacher is to meet you exactly where you are and give you just what you need. My teaching will look different for different students, and that’s ok.
• A classroom agreement is a great alternative to a set of rules. I like to read “The Kingdom with No Rules, No Laws, and No King” by Norman Stiles. After discussing how this applies to our classroom, we would create an agreement written in positive language (e.g. We agree to behave in ways that allow our friends to learn). An agreement with several broad, short statements tends to be most effective. If you are meeting with students via video conference this might be done best in groups of 5-7 rather than whole group to allow everyone to participate, then compile and narrow them down as a whole class.
• I also like to start the year by sending the message to students that our community values problem-solving and out-of-the-box thinking, that mistakes are interesting and worth examining, so I like to put students into problem-solving situations fairly quickly. 3-Act Tasks are a great way to do this in math and could be adjusted to a video conference format. To celebrate problem-solving in literacy I love Jon Scieszka’s book Baloney (Henry P.) in which Henry explains why he’s late to class using alien terms that require careful use of context clues. I read the story to students without showing the pictures, then give partners this printout  and ask them to work together to problem-solve the underlined words (if your classroom is digital or you teach younger children the class could work collaboratively with the teacher scribing, perhaps on a shorter section). After sharing our guesses as a group, we finish by listening to the story again with pictures. It’s important that during these problem-solving activities you encourage divergent thinking and praise risk-taking. Repeatedly asking, “What makes you say that?” can help kids begin to adopt a metacognitive stance.
• Personal goal setting can be extremely powerful for students, even our youngest learners. Adapt this goal setting form for specific content areas or for certain timespans (e.g. quarterly goals). 

If you’re finding yourself in a funk (like I am) because it’s hard to find your place in this weird Covid world, spend some time thinking about the students who are on their way to your classroom community. Whether they arrive by bus or by internet videoconference, they’re coming, and it will benefit them and you to plan some community-building exercises to put everyone at ease.

What are some ways you plan to build community in your classroom? Share in the comments below

Emotional Baggage

I have a love/hate relationship with one of the key parts of my job as a coach. On the one hand, I love dropping into classrooms to talk with students about what they’re working on or to do an impromptu conference. On the other hand, it feels very much like a “power move” to me, something that only someone of authority, like an administrator, has the ability to do. I worry that it aligns me with the evaluation side of administration, and yet I also feel like I need to see the current instruction happening in the school in order to plan “best fit” professional learning for our staff.

So then imagine my inner turmoil after this recent visit to a second grade classroom. The teacher is conferring with a student at the back table while all the other students are spread out around the room. I bypass the kid closest to the door and sit next to, let’s call her Kayla, who has her feet comfortably propped up on her desk as she reads a graphic novel version of Captain Underpants. “How’s it going?” I ask. “Can you read me a little bit of your book?”

Kayla glances at the book. “Well, I can’t really read the words. I just tell what’s happening from the pictures.”

“Let’s give it a try,” I tell her enthusiastically. “Maybe I can help you with the hard words.” Kayla proceeds to labor through three frames of the text, needing help with many of the words.

“Hmmmm,” I mention after having helped her with supposed and joke. “I’m thinking this book might not be a just right book for you yet. That doesn’t mean it won’t be later, but we probably need to find some books that are a better fit for you.”

Kayla begins to cry. “But I want to read chapter books like the other kids are doing!” she says. “That’s my best friend over there,” she gestures towards a girl reading a Magic Treehouse book, “and she’s reading a chapter book and I want to read one too!” Her voice is starting to get louder.

“Not everyone reads the same kinds of books at the same time, and that’s ok,” I tell her, but she buries her head in her arms and begins to cry loudly. “Let’s try reading one of these other books you have in your bag,” I say as I pull out two books labeled as level 10 texts and then Ralph S. Mouse, which I quickly set to the side.

“Those are baby books! They’re too easy! My auntie says I have to read chapter books to get to be a better reader,” Kayla cries.

“Why don’t you show me how easy they are?” I ask, and I pull out Cookie’s Week and open to the first page. Sure enough, she reads smoothly and accurately, though she substitutes “windshield” for “windowsill” and doesn’t want to hear about that error.

“I want to read chapter books like the others! I don’t want everyone to know I can’t read!” she wails loudly enough for everyone in the class to hear. At this point a blonde girl nearby brings her another leveled reader that apparently Kayla had been reading yesterday. Not helpful. It’s not a chapter book.

“How about this?” I whisper, “What if I can find some books for you that are chapter books that you CAN read? Will you come to the media center with me to find those books?” I’m wracking my brain trying to think of a low-level chapter book – maybe Nate the Great? Ivy and Bean? Did we buy some Hi-Lo books for 3^rd and 4^th grade last year?

It doesn’t matter, because Kayla has completely fallen apart, wailing loudly, bottom lip quivering, hiccupping and gasping for air. Her teacher mouths, “I’m sorry!” to me, shaking her head. Apparently I’m fighting an old battle and have opened up old wounds.

“Why did you come in here?” Kayla wails loudly, “Everything was fine until you got here!”

I feel for Kayla. She was not at all shy about her dilemma – she’s very aware that she’s reading at a level lower than the others, and it’s breaking her heart. She has a vested interest in keeping up appearances, and that involves holding thicker books during reading time and being able to tell her friends that she reads chapter books. If I want to ensure she makes progress this year, this is a critical moment in her reading life. I need to find her books that look hard but are easy to decode.

I quickly walk down the hall and burst into the media center. Fortunately, it’s empty. “I have a reading emergency!” I announce to the media clerk. “Where are your Nate the Great or similar books?” She quickly directs me to the early chapter books and we find a few – Owl Diaries, which might be a bit on the high side, but is a graphic book with heavy picture support; Unicorn and Yeti, an even easier graphic book with three chapters; and two more books with heavy picture support, fairly simple sentence structure, and most importantly - chapters.

I run back to Kayla’s class, where she is still crumpled on her desk, crying quietly while everyone else sits on the rug for writing time. After some coaxing, I convince her to come to a back corner of the room to look at the books I’ve brought. “Are they chapter books?” is the first thing she asks, so we flip through each, looking at the tables of contents and chapter headings. Instantly, her tears dry up.

“Let’s read a few pages of one of these – which one would you like to try?” I ask. Quietly, she chooses Unicorn and Yeti and then she literally crawls into my lap, dries her tears, and begins to read. She still needs some help, and we study the pictures a good deal to understand the context, but after reading four pages, she is beaming. “Thank you!” she whispers.

Later that day as I see her class on their way to lunch she breaks out of line and runs up to me. “I read more of those books you got me! I’m taking them home to my auntie to show her I can read chapter books!”

At the time, I didn’t realize quite what had happened for Kayla. Honestly, for a while there, I thought I’d broken her. There’s nothing quite like a wailing, blubbering reader to make you feel like a conference failure.

But all Kayla wanted is what we all want – to be loved by our friends, which to her meant fitting in by reading the same types of books they had. As a teacher, our jobs are to meet kids where they are while simultaneously helping them with the emotional baggage that comes with being a struggling reader. Thankfully, there are texts that can help with this. But it’s also important to realize that without Kayla’s buy-in and emotional confidence, nothing I said to her about reading strategies would stick. She needs first to feel like she belongs, that she’s in a safe zone with her peers. Once she has that comfort, we’ll be able to work on cracking the nut of finding the skills and strategies she needs as a reader.

Storytelling - The Secret Sauce of Instruction?

“Once there was a little girl…” Much has been written about how the human mind is primed for stories (Newkirk, 2014; Perry, 2012). Our brains perk up when we detect a story in the making – reading “once there was” above probably cued that response in your own mind. Scientists suspect this innate response is due to the eons we’ve spent in huts and caves passing knowledge along to others through the stories we tell. Narratives are how we learn what works and what not to do – which animals were dangerous, how to escape scary situations, and how to respond in social settings. Nowadays, we don’t encounter as many physically dangerous situations as humans did in the past, but stories still matter immensely for how they help us process learning. The most engaging informational books have micro-stories sprinkled throughout to illustrate the most important points. Writers know the brain responds best to stories.

In their book, “A Mindset for Learning”, authors Kristine Mraz and Christine Hertz describe how storytelling can be a powerful method for sharing the habits of mind that encourage a growth mindset. True to form, they sprinkle stories from classrooms throughout their book that perfectly illustrate the habits in action through whole-class conversations and teacher-student conferences.

Kristi and Christine’s key points for teaching storytelling are deceptively simple. They are worth thinking about when we teachers tell our own stories and when we teach our students to storytell:

1.     Set the scene (the who and the where)

2.     Name the challenge or problem

3.     Raise the tension through multiple attempts or worsening events

4.     Reach a resolution (Mraz & Hertz, 2015, p. 91)

I know my own downfall is rushing step 3, the tension and events that make up the bulk of the story. When I tell jokes or repeat a story, I tend to rush headlong towards the punchline or resolution, without spending enough time marinating in the problem for the listener. Not surprisingly, this is also the problem most students have when writing their stories – summarizing major events in the rush to be “done” instead of elaborating on the tension of the major events.

The solution? Simple – add dialogue and dramatization to the story. Don’t just summarize, but act out parts, and include the dialogue or internal thinking of the characters. Practicing this in oral storytelling will likely impact students’ written stories in positive ways as well.

Building on Kristi and Christine’s suggestion to tell stories about growth mindset learning, if I were to tell a story of one student’s growth to a class, it might sound like this:

It’s the end of reading workshop in second grade and students are spread around the room in clumps or singles, their books spread around them, quietly murmuring. I stand from my conference with Khloe and call out, “Class, clean up your book baskets and join me on the rug – I have a wonderful story to tell you about one of your friends!” After the group is gathered in a circle on the rug, I lower my voice to a whisper: “Everyone has been working so hard on tackling their trouble words in books, just like we’ve been practicing. Today, I want to tell you a story about one of your friends who’s done just that. Once upon a time, there was a determined little girl named Khloe…” I glance over at Khloe beside me, who ducks her head and grins. The other students’ ears perk up at the familiar beginning of a tale.

“Khloe had been reading and reading and reading the books in her book basket, all except for one book. She had tried to read it once before, and it was just too hard. Just reading the first page was frustrating because there were too many tricky words. So what did she do?” I looked around the circle and shrugged. “Did she give up?”

“No!” the other children called out, smiling. I grinned back. “Of course not! She could have given up, but she decided to be persistent and so she showed the book to her reading partner. ‘I’ve got a tricky book!’ she told her partner. ‘Can you help me figure out these words?’ Her reading partner, being the understanding and helpful partner that she is, agreed to help. They decided to read the book at the same time – chorally reading. When they got to a tricky word, they used their superpowers together: they looked at the picture, they made sure they had the right beginning sounds, and they backed up and read from the beginning of the sentence.” I touch my fingers and exaggeratedly glance at our anchor chart of decoding strategies as I describe the steps the readers took. “And guess what?!”

“They read the book!” yelled the students, some up on their knees, others clapping their hands.

“You’re exactly right! Did they get all the words exactly right? No, but that’s ok. They knew that they had worked together to solve many of the tricky words, and most important of all, the story was making sense. Together, they decided to keep working on the book the next day and the day after that, so they could get better and better at tackling the trouble words.” I lean in and whisper to the students as I wind up my tale. “They persevered, which means they kept on trying, even when it was tough. I bet there are other readers just like that in our classroom.”

Storytelling brings issues to life. It can make an abstract concept real and relevant to students. Try incorporating storytelling into the daily fabric of your classroom. And once you do, tell the story of how it went in the comments below. We all love a great story!

The Chameleon Effect

When I was six years old, my family moved from the big city of Memphis, TN, where my dad was an accountant, to the western North Carolina mountains. Back in the 70s, there weren’t many “ferreners” in the mountains, and we stood out like a tick on a beauty queen.

When I got a little older, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. Anytime we stopped for gas at the local full-service station, my dad would always get out and talk to the owner. That wasn’t the interesting part. Rather, I was fascinated to hear my college-educated father pick up the country twang of the locals while he leaned on the fender talking about the weather, wild hogs, and deer hunting, which I was not aware that my father did. His entire demeanor changed in that situation, and I realized at some level it was necessary to try to fit in.

It turns out that this is called the Chameleon Effect, and we all do it. We tend to adapt ourselves to the surrounding social environment by changing our speech patterns, gestures, posture and behaviors to match those around us.

This morning I was in a 5^th grade classroom in which the teacher has built an amazing sense of community. She is constantly encouraging kids, celebrating their accomplishments, and having them set individual goals. As I was visiting this morning, I overheard one of her boys pass by her and whisper, “I love you!” to the teacher. She smiled and whispered it right back to him.

How many 5^th grade boys do you know who willingly tell their teachers they love them? This boy’s outward show of emotion is a direct result of the Chameleon Effect – he is taking on the same behaviors he sees modeled in his teacher. We’ve all observed it – students with a sarcastic teacher are much more likely to make biting comments to each other. “Good” students will suddenly become trouble-makers when put with a teacher with a loose management style. We see chameleons when upper elementary students must change their demeanors multiple times a day as they transition between classes and teachers with very different styles.

The good news is that kids are listening and watching. The bad news is… kids are listening and watching.

We must be incredibly tuned in to our demeanors and how we interact in our classrooms because, like it or not, we will have a couple dozen chameleons mimicking our actions. Studies show that, “if teachers ask lots of questions that everyone knows they already know the answer to, then often students ask teachers questions they tend to already know the answer to – questioning becomes a performance rather than an inquiry” (Hattie & Zierer, 2018, p. 137).

Do you feel like your kids aren’t listening to you? Is it possible that you’re not listening to them?

Do you kids love being at school? Are they picking that up from you?

This is one reason that establishing community is so incredibly important in classrooms. It’s not just a feel-good fluffy thing. It actually changes student behaviors and thought patterns as they mimic us. Hattie & Zierer say, “the more intense our relationships are, the more closely we imitate each other” (p. 137). It’s worth examining our students’ behaviors for what we wish were different, and then considering how we might model those behaviors when we interact with them.

Your students are chameleons. What types of behaviors do you want them to take on when they enter your classroom?

Hattie & Zierer (2018). 10 Mindframes for Visible Learning

Stress and ADHD

That title may make you think of teacher stress as a result of kids having ADHD, however I'm really thinking about a comment Eric Jensen  made at the 2017 ASCD conference in California. His session was filled with rich nuggets of information, more than I could process at once, so I'm thinking his newest book will contain most of the information he covered.

One particularly fascinating piece was about how the human body responds to stress. Chronic stress, the kind that comes from stressors occurring again and again (think about soldiers in a battle, or kids who are abused or beaten) creates not only physical changes to the brain due to high levels of cortisol (the stress hormone) but also behavioral changes. Kids will generally respond to stress one of two ways: 1) hyper-vigilance or 2) apathy. Kids will either “blow up” at very little provocation, or seem very unmotivated and as if they don't care. It brought to my mind the parents at high-poverty schools who can be extremely difficult to deal with, seemingly quick to anger and “go off” on the principal or teachers. Jensen explained that this hyper-vigilant behavior is an effort to control situations in a life that often seems out of control. If your world is crumbling around you, and it has been for a while, it makes sense that you do your best to take control the best (or only) way you know how.

But Jensen also made another provocative comment: this hyper-vigilance due to chronic stress can look like distractibility, impulsivity, and hyper-activity. In other words, it looks just like ADHD. How many of our poverty students are being diagnosed with ADHD (or being blamed for having untreated ADHD) when in reality they may be under chronic stress? Are we treating the wrong problem?

Eric has several recommendations for addressing student stress in schools:
1. Relationship building
2. Giving students more choice and control
3. Teach stronger coping skills
4. Learn to manage your own stress (as teachers)

Would we have fewer students with ADHD in high-poverty schools if we followed these recommendations? What are your thoughts? Add your comments below.

Fair Isn't Equal

It's the time of year when students and teachers are cramming in last-minute vacations before the fast-approaching first day of school. If you're a teacher, then most likely you're already dreaming “school dreams” at night and having day dreams as well. I always love the planning part of summer, when anything is possible and my optimist self foresees all my plans going perfectly in the upcoming year. Yep, THIS year I'll be organized, efficient, and downright inspirational to the best group of kids a teacher could hope to assemble in one place. Then reality hits as soon as every kid arrives bringing a bag of notebooks, folders, and reams of paper, none of which have their name on them, and somebody's crying and another one's mom wants to stay for the first 3 hours and my best laid plans are out the window before 8:15.

I do know, however, that however chaotic those first hours are in the classroom, one of the most important things I do during that crucial beginning time is to establish through my words and actions what kind of place this classroom will be for the 25 or so kids and I who inhabit it. Everything I say and how I say it is watched ever so carefully by kids those first hours, and so no matter how messy the pile of notebooks and folders, I have to prioritize and spend time creating community. My actions and words need to communicate that this is the kind of place where you'll be expected to think, where we value what you think even if we don't understand or agree with it, and where it's safe to be different and creative and even wrong.

Something I love to do on the first day, after everyone is settled and I've gathered everyone on the rug to tell them a little about myself, is to share with them an anonymous quote written large on chart paper: “Fair isn't equal. Fair doesn't mean everyone gets the same. It means that everyone gets what they need.” We talk about what this means, and how my job is to figure out what each one of them needs and their job is to help me find that out. Everyone in our classroom is different and has differing needs. One person might need me to help them come up with ideas for writing while another person might have plenty of ideas but need help organizing them. Some of them might love multiplication but need help with fractions, while others are just the opposite. People are complicated beings, which is why teaching isn't easy, but it's always interesting.

As I'm explaining this, all their faces are turned towards me, listening intently, not really sure what I mean. Some of them want to trust me, but if they've struggled in school they may be wary of being the one that's “different,” the one who sits in the special desk or sees the teacher every day for interventions. They don't really trust that I'll treat everyone's needs differently or that I'll ask their opinion about why they feel the need to distract other kids in circle time or that I really do want to hear about the fort they built behind their house during a writing conference. That will come later.

For now, they have homework: find out from their parents at exactly what age they learned to walk, say their first word, and lost their first tooth. We spend the next few days charting these facts so that I can once again reinforce the idea that we're all slightly different, just like snowflakes. And if our bodies grow at differing speeds, reaching these milestones at different times, then our minds and how we think develop the same way: at different speeds and at different times, but we all DID eventually lose our first tooth, right? We all did learn to walk and talk. So too will we all learn the things we're setting out to learn this year, but it won't happen at the same time for each one of us. And that's perfectly okay, because that's only natural.

It's my job to find out exactly what they need as students, and it's our job as a classroom community to help each other get there. It should be what being in school is all about.

New Beginnings

The power of teaching is no more evident than at the start of the school year, when our classrooms fill with scrubbed faces full of fear and hope about what the upcoming year will bring. As the leader of the class, we have the power to make it a year the child will remember until adulthood or, conversely, the ability to define the child as a troublemaker or “slow learner” and begin a hatred of school that could last a lifetime.

It’s an awesome amount of power.

But it’s also one reason I love those first weeks of school, as exhausting as they are. As a classroom teacher I saw it as the opportunity to help kids define school as an engaging, safe place where I expected them to treat each other well and think outside the box. For many kids, this was a different way to look at school from their experience thus far. It took a few weeks for them to understand they couldn’t just sit back and play it safe or mistreat their classmates like they always had. The constant vigilance I held, to establish routines, watch for and praise new behaviors, prompt deeper thinking, and redirect negative behaviors, was exhausting. But it paid off in the connections we built as a community as the year progressed.

When I taught first graders, I learned a technique from another teacher for helping them become more independent and to feel ownership of their learning. I spent some time telling them the parable of the fisherman who, rather than give the poor man a fish, taught him to fish so he might eat for a lifetime. I really fleshed out the story, described the characters, and built up to the climactic ending. And then I made the connection to our own classroom. I explained that my job was like that fisherman – I wasn’t going to give them fish, but I was going to teach them to fish so they’d be self-sufficient for a lifetime. From that day on they learned not to “give each other the fish” when helping a classmate, but instead to teach them to fish by giving clues or hints that helped their teammate learn. When they struggled with reading a word at home, parents told me they’d hold up a hand and say, “Don’t give me the fish!” and they’d work to figure it out themselves.

Common experiences and “inside jokes” like these serve to bind a group of students together into a community of learners. One 5th grade teacher I work with, Debbie Bagwell, showed the video below to her students and has made “the power of words” the theme of her first few weeks of school as she establishes community with her all-boy classroom.




The power of words is reflected in the power we hold as teachers. We create the nature of the community that makes up our classroom. How do you establish your community in your classroom?

The Fog of Teaching

I’ve spent the last couple of days at a “retreat” for one of our grade levels where we have spent very valuable time discussing the meat of what we do as teachers. We’ve interspersed really deep discussions about curriculum and instructional strategies with hilarious stories of bathroom mishaps and “the things children say”. It’s been both intense and relaxing, and we’ve gotten an incredible amount accomplished.

If only teaching could always be like this.

Unfortunately, too often we can’t or don’t spend time discussing the “meat” of our teaching with our colleagues because the clutter of daily school operations gets in the way. Meetings become clogged with lists of complaints or field trip details and organizational tasks take up the planning time we could so much better use to reflect on our teaching effectiveness. And no one knows better the flustered feeling one gets when eight kids need to go to the bathroom, someone spills their drink on the carpet, and the technology won’t work, all as the principal enters the classroom with her clipboard for an observation.

The best teachers are able to teach on the fly and adapt as needed, but for many teachers daily life in the classroom can feel very much like “the fog of war”. I think of it as the fog of teaching.

The fog of war is described as the degree of uncertainty and lack of situational awareness that occurs in a large battle. It’s the confusion that tends to stop forward progress and sometimes even cause instances of friendly fire. In the classroom, at least, we don’t have to worry about fatalities due to the fog of teaching, but there are casualties. If we succumb to the sense of confusion we feel in the midst of the daily bombardment of information and operational/classroom management requirements, then we lose our forward momentum and the vision of where we’d like our students to be.

How do we prevent the fog of teaching? In actuality, I don’t think there’s a way to completely avoid periods of time during which the fog descends. There will always be report card weeks that fall on a full moon and a holiday weekend. But for the times in between, we have got to set aside sacred time to discuss the meat of teaching. We have to ignore the operational and discipline issues in order to focus on the curricular and instructional decision-making that is at the heart of teaching, and then share these ideas with our colleagues. Just like a soldier working through the sleep-deprivation, harassing orders and harsh conditions of boot camp in order to condition himself to think clearly on the battle field, as teachers we have to force ourselves to maintain intentional practices even in the most adverse of conditions. Otherwise, we’ll all just wander around in a fog.

"Commander's Intent" in the classroom

When I was a new teacher, the first few years of my career, I remember struggling with the tone of my classroom discipline. I started out with the intention of being like those favorite teachers I remembered from my own childhood – so likeable and strong of character that we students would do anything to please them. But without much idea of how to make that happen, I found myself gradually reverting to a list of rules for kids to follow: keep your hands and feet to yourself, clean up your own mess, walk in the hall, raise your hand when you want to speak, etc. I had an elaborate system of rewards and punishments to enforce these rules, and it worked. My kids were well-behaved. But I was exhausted. And my bank account was dwindling as I spent more and more on prizes to entice the kids to follow the rules.

I began to value the good behavior of the kids more than the evidence of their learning, and became annoyed by eager interruptions and messy activities. Around my second or third year of teaching this newfound power to control behavior began to seriously conflict with my beliefs about active learning for kids. I had to make a decision about which I valued more.

Fortunately, I moved to a new school with an experienced principal who helped me realize that I didn’t need to spend quite so much energy on discipline if my instruction was strong in the first place. Kids who are engaged and challenged are rarely off task.

The number of rules, rewards, and punishments does not determine the quality of classroom management, she taught me. Rather, rely on something the army calls “Commander’s Intent”. The army famously believes that “a plan never survives its first contact with the enemy”. Therefore, a group of soldiers is advised of their commander’s intent for a specific battle: “defend the south side of the village” or “take control of that hilltop”. When the inevitable manure hits the metaphorical fan, every soldier in the group is able to adjust and make decisions on the fly because they know their commander’s intent – the ultimate goal of this battle.

The same applies to a classroom. If the teacher’s intent is made clear in simple terms – “be kind to others” or “we’re all here to learn” – then when troubles arise, students can be taught to make all decisions around that one principle. If Billy is interrupting classroom discussions by sharpening his pencil or calling out, he’s interfering with others’ learning. The same applies for bullying, running in the hall, stealing, not completing work, etc. One simple rule can summarize the intent of an entire discipline plan, and all decisions thereafter revolve around it. It’s simple for kids and for the teacher, and it gets at the heart of why we’re at school.

Think about the message you send to your students each day in your classroom. What do you think they believe your commander’s intent to be? Is it the message you want to send?

Addressing Classroom Management

Jim Knight, in his book “Instructional Coaching: A Partnership Approach to Improving Instruction”, says there are 4 Big Areas that coaches should focus on when working with teachers: behavior, content knowledge, direct instruction, and formative assessment. What’s different in how he describes these areas, however, is that he states they should be addressed in sequential order. In other words, if a teacher expresses a desire for help with her writing instruction, as a coach you must first help her to analyze her behavior management system to see if it’s effective and be sure she has a strong understanding of the content knowledge that’s needed for successful writing workshop.

As I was discussing these ideas with another coach the other day, she almost jumped out of her chair in agreement as she realized why a particular coaching partnership had not worked well in the past. As she and the teacher had worked to improve guided reading instruction in her classroom, the coach had tried to ignore what was for her a huge elephant in the classroom – the complete off-task behaviors of the students at literacy centers: some students were huddled in the classroom library with the hanging chart stand blocking the teacher’s view from what the students were actually doing, another group of students was sitting on the rug tossing marbles into a plastic cup for no discernible reason, and other students freely roamed the room looking for other things to do, all as the noise level made hearing the guided reading group difficult. At no time did the teacher redirect the students, however, since she felt perfectly comfortable with their activities and the noise level.

In this particular instance, the teacher lacked both the content knowledge regarding the purpose of literacy centers (more than just busy work for students while the teacher conducts small groups) but also the necessity for consistent rituals and routines to focus students and maximize learning time. For the coach to be truly effective in helping this teacher improve her instruction, she was going to have to address the classroom behavior first, and then provide her with the content knowledge she needed. Simply going in and modeling a guided reading lesson would not be enough.

As coaches, sometimes we feel that behavior management is a personal decision by the teacher – some teachers are more lenient than others, and comfort levels with noise differ. I agree that there are certainly many ways to organize classroom behavior, and no one way is the “best” method. But if we are to be truly effective as coaches, and if students are going to benefit from the teacher’s instruction, we’re going to have to become more comfortable discussing classroom behavior with the teachers for whom it is a problem.