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!

Book Review: Onward – by Elena Aguilar

This jewel of a book is one you’ll want to read very slowly so that you can stretch out the experience. It has taken me months to read it, and even now I’m sad it’s over. Elena knew it would likely have this effect, because she’s organized each chapter around a month of the year, beginning with June.

The book is about cultivating resilience in educators. Each chapter examines aspects of resilience such as emotional intelligence, storytelling, taking care of yourself, compassion, and dealing with change. Along the way she takes deeper dives into specific emotions such as optimism, empathy, and perfectionism. Each page gave me so much to think about and reflect upon that I felt the need to slow down to digest, but also share with others.

For instance, she begins the short section on perfectionism saying, “At the heart of perfectionism is the belief that, in order to be loved and accepted, we must strive to act and be the best all the time” (p. 166). This isn’t possible, of course, and so along with perfectionism comes frustration and even anger when things don’t work out perfectly. Understanding this helps me understand some people I know who at first glance appear to be angry much of the time, but underneath it all may be frustrated perfectionists. Education is certainly a difficult field if you’re constantly striving for perfection.

Her chapter on change made a big impression on me as well. Appropriately, she fit this into the April chapter, which in education is the month of testing and finding out the big changes for next year – the principal’s not coming back, or you’re asked to teach a new grade level. Change is incredibly stressful. The secret to leading change, Elena says, is to understand that most people are fearful of change, and as leaders we must acknowledge this and lend encouragement. There’s no fast way through this. “Leading change most often includes learning; in order for people to do something different, whatever it is that you want them to do, you need to address skill, knowledge, capacity, will, cultural competency, and emotional intelligence” (p. 280). She suggests setting up opportunities for teachers to reflect on their purpose and their ongoing growth. And above all, to listen.

As teachers, we all feel a complete range of emotions throughout the year. If you have lately been feeling less bounce in your step, less resilience in the face of challenge, I urge you to pick up this book. Each time I set it down after reading, I felt better, more encouraged, and filled with food for thought. Treat yourself to this book – you deserve it.

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

Correcting the Fundamental Attribution Error

It turns out that we’ve all made a critical error. And not just any error, but a fundamental attribution error. If it sounds terrifying, well, that may be only slightly off the mark.

I read about this error in Richard Nisbett’s book Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking  in which he describes “scientific and philosophical concepts that can change the way we solve problems by helping us to think more effectively about our behavior and our world.” It turns out that we are not nearly as smart as we think we are.

Our problem is that we tend to attribute other people’s successes and failures to personal dispositions while we discount the context or circumstances that may have contributed to them. For instance, we might think of Todd as a lazy student, or of our co-worker Susan as standoffish and rude, or of Bill Gates as incredibly brilliant. We don’t take into account the circumstances that may have led to our perceptions. Nisbett digs into the Bill Gates story to reveal that when he was an 8^th grader his parents transferred him to a different school because he was bored. His new school happened to be one of the very few schools in 1968 that was connected to a mainframe computer. This lucky break meant that he was able to log time on the computer and even test software for a local company. From there he began sneaking out of the house at 3am to spend time at the University of Washington computer center. If Gates had not transferred schools at that critical time, would he have become who he is today?

Nisbett states, 

“Behind many a successful person lies a string of lucky breaks that we have no inkling about” (p. 35). 

We tend to assume it was the person’s characteristics rather than the surrounding circumstances that made them succeed or struggle.

The kicker is that we do the opposite with ourselves – we, having the luxury of an intimate knowledge of our own circumstances, tend to give ourselves a break when we experience failure. We attribute our problem not to a personal traits, but to the situation. “Well, I would have gotten that job if I had not gotten a cold – I just wasn’t at the top of my game” or “The teacher doesn’t like me” or “The requirements aren’t fair.”

The truth is, contexts and situations have a great deal to do with our behaviors. While we tend to think other people behave the way they do because of some innate characteristic (e.g. laziness, brilliance, greed) the reality is that life is a series of circumstances that make us into the people we currently are.

This Fundamental Attribution Error has huge implications for teachers when we think about how we approach students, parents, and even our fellow teachers. I’ve been guilty of thinking Parent A “just doesn’t care” about their child’s needs in school, or that Teacher X just has a chip on her shoulder, or that my administrator is rude. But if it were me in those exact same circumstances I would cut myself a break by understanding how the current situation is making me appear as if I don’t have time for my child or that I’m too busy to socialize and be friendly with my co-workers or that my fracturing marriage is spilling over into negative interactions at work.  

The bottom line is that we need to give each other a break. It can be hard to catch yourself doing this but, fittingly, it’s easier to catch someone else in the midst of committing the Fundamental Attribution Error. Once you begin to see it in others, you can notice it in yourself.

Does this strike a chord for you? Do you notice yourself doing this with others? Have you discovered ways to catch yourself in the act of judging others and halt the judgment? Share in the comments below.

Questioning Game for Coaches

I recently attended a great conference on The Art of Coaching hosted by Elena Aguilar, the author of the book The Art of Coaching . I've read a lot of books on coaching over the past ten years, but Elena's perspective stands out because of her commitment to social justice throughout the text. She helps us move beyond looking only at the interaction between coach and teacher to consider the implications of systems thinking, systemic oppression and change management, among others. Her book is changing how I think about coaching, and I have a feeling I'll be referring to it in future posts as I digest and attempt to apply her approach.

Elena mentioned that in coaching interactions, the coach should only speak about 1/3 of the time. This stems from her belief about coaching, which I paraphrased as: Most of the time, people are able to solve their own problems. Therefore, coaching should be about helping people solve their own problems. To do this, we need to let teachers talk, we need to draw out their beliefs and help them connect these to their actions, we need to tap into who they are being and who they want to be, and we need to understand their core values.

Over the course of the two day conference, I realized that I am much more tempted to solve people's problems for them, in an effort to be helpful and speed things along, instead of doing the harder and often more time-intensive work of helping them grow themselves so that they can solve future problems on their own.

To get better at this, I think I need to start by listening more, so I'm going to attempt something I'll call the Questioning Game. It's based on those Improv game shows where contestants can only ask questions:


I'm wondering if making myself ask a series of questions will encourage the person I'm with to think through their dilemma and possibly solve it themselves. I imagine it might go something like this:

Teacher: I'm really worried about my low group of kids. Their DRA scores show they're reading more than a year below grade level and a lot of them struggle with writing anything more than a couple sentences.
Coach: What have you tried so far?
T: Well, they all go to Mrs. Y for intervention and she's working with them on sight words and some of the comprehension strategies. But they miss most of my writing mini-lesson because they're gone to intervention, so I'm worried that they're falling even farther behind in writing.
C: Do the kids have to leave during that time? Is there a way to rearrange the schedule to make it work?
T: Well, unfortunately the intervention teacher's schedule is tied to everyone else's schedule, so I don't think she can pull them at another time. [pause] I wonder if I could move my mini-lesson back a little so they could be here for that and leave when we do independent reading?
C: Would you feel better about that?
T: I think so. Then they'd get to hear the mini-lesson from me AND receive intervention.

Of course, it can get awkward to answer everything with a question, so if I'm ever at a loss on a question to ask - like the comedians in the clip, there's a point at which you draw a blank - then rather than trying to solve the problem for the teacher, I'll try to restate what they've just said. I find that easier when restating emotions: It sounds like you're frustrated with this situation for instance.

In today’s stressed world, it can be tempting to take the “most efficient” route by solving people’s problems for them. But then they don’t own the solution, and can leave the interaction feeling less energized and empowered than when they arrived. So, my new goal is to ask more questions and act as a mirror by restating the thinking teachers are doing as they talk with me. I’ll let you know how it goes… 

Explicit Coaching

Recently I overheard a coach conferring with a teacher about a lesson the teacher wanted to see modeled. “What I’d really like to see,” she said, “is how to work with my stronger readers on the reflection and interpretation questions similar to those on the DRA. Could you work with a guided reading group on that?” The coach agreed and set a date for the lesson.

I waited for more conversation to happen, but none did. I thought the coach might probe for what specifically the kids were having trouble with, or she might think aloud about how she could address these higher-order skills in a guided reading group, how she might model thinking aloud to the kids or think through which book to use. But none of this happened – the conversation moved on to other kids in the class who struggled.

Perhaps this coach and teacher will meet again before the modeled lesson, but it made me realize that one of the hardest parts of coaching, especially when we’re new to coaching, is remembering that we’re not there to teach the students. We’re there to make our teaching moves explicit to teachers. We have to make the implicit explicit, and that’s not always easy.

Many of us are “unconsciouslycompetent” – we’ve been teaching effectively for so long that we’re no longer conscious of why we do the things we do. We teach like we drive – automatically, effectively, and unconsciously. Perhaps one solution is to practice narrating our driving on the morning commute: “See what I did just then? That truck up ahead put on its blinker to pull into the deceleration lane, so I automatically glanced in my rearview mirror. I need to know how close someone might be following me before I apply the brakes.”

In the classroom this might mean saying, while modeling a reading conference, “At this point, I’m deliberately ignoring the minor oral reading errors I hear in order to keep the focus of the conference on comprehension. Otherwise I run the risk of overwhelming the student with too many teaching points.” These types of automatic, subconscious decisions are what highly-effective teachers do, but if we don’t lift them to a conscious level then some teachers may continue to be left in the dark.

Effective coaching makes implicitly good teaching explicit. It’s about sharing our thinking in the midst of the acts of teaching. That includes sharing the thinking that goes into planning instruction, the myriad small moves that happen in the course of a lesson, and the reflection after a lesson is complete. As coaches, we must move beyond unconscious competence into becoming reflectively competent.

Who's In Control?

“Good thinking!”
“I like how you inferred the answer to your question.”
“You’re right!”

These are all things I’ve said to students in the interest of giving them feedback, bolstering their self-esteem, and praising their use of strategies in the classroom. But I’m currently reading What Readers Really Do: Teaching the Process of Meaning Making by Barnhouse and Vinton, and they’re making me question these types of statements to kids.

When we evaluate student’s responses as being either good or bad, we subtly assume control of the learning. We become the keeper of the knowledge, the one who determines if an answer is “right” or not.

For instance, one day during a unit on inferring I read The Three Little Pigs and the Big Bag Wolves to a group of 2nd graders, and led them in using context clues and background knowledge to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words. As I turned a page partway through the book, a picture of the wolves playing badminton in front of their concrete bunker revealed itself to the children. When I read that the characters enjoyed a game of “shuttledore and battlecock” outside their new home, one boy exclaimed, “That’s just badminton!”

Here’s where I messed up. I simply said, “You’re right!”, saw the nods from the other students, and continued to read. However, Barnhouse and Vinton argue that my simple statement positioned me as the “one who knows the answers”. In classrooms where this is the norm, students will continuously search for the “right” answer that will please the teacher. They usually end up thinking there’s only one right answer.

Instead, these authors argue, I should have simply asked, “What made you say that?” That simple statement gives control back to the student and forces him to search within himself to describe his inferring process.

If I’d said that during my read aloud he might have responded, “Well, that’s what’s in the picture.” I imagine, these being 2nd graders, that I’d have to have given some good wait time, or even said, “Tell me more” in order for him to explain that he’d played badminton in P.E. last year, he’d used rackets and the funny little cone-shaped ball, and so he was drawing from his own schema to infer the meaning of the unfamiliar words “battledore and shuttlecock”.

Those simple little words, “What made you say that?” have the potential to be so powerful. They take away the easy answer, the search for the one “right” answer, and force the student to be an active, reflective participant in their own learning. And they force us teachers to dig deeper, listen more, and be willing to accept multiple answers. If school is about teaching kids to think, we have to make room for kids to do just that.

What's the Underlying Message?

If there's one thing I've learned during my work over the past few years, it's that words matter. Whether they're spoken, emailed, or Tweeted, what we say and how we say it can often be two different things. Many times, we're not even aware of the competing messages we send.

I have a friend who I often talk to about teaching and coaching, and I realized after a discussion the other day that she often begins her sentences to me, "You need to..." rather than, "What about..." or "Have you thought of..." The difference is subtle, but the underlying message of the former is, "I have the answer" and it can be quick to shut down divergent discussion.

In working with a group of teachers earlier this summer, I learned from a participant to ask, "What questions do you have?" rather than, "Does anyone have any questions?" because the message then becomes, "I fully expect questions and don't judge you for having them".

Every year as the school year gets ready to begin, I like to reread Peter Johnston's book "Choice Words". My copy is heavily highlighted so I can skim the book within an hour. He argues eloquently that our words in classrooms have immense power to create efficacy and identity in children. Debbie Miller, featured often in his book, is a master at giving children power with her words: "You really helped me think through that part" she tells a student and "You solved that word by rereading and chunking". The underlying message is, "You did the work, and I merely witnessed your brilliant thinking".

I'd argue (and have before) that the same applies to coaching. Cathy Toll says a coach should never ask a question she already feels she has the answer to. So, we should never say, "Have you thought about making your mini-lessons shorter?" That's not really a question. It's a statement about the length of the current lesson. Asking a convergent question sends the message that the coach knows best, that she's searching for the "right" answer, and it automatically disrupts the power balance in a coaching relationship.

It's helped me to always step out of my shoes in conversations with teachers and put myself in their place. How will what I'm about to say come across? If I were them, would I feel motivated to continue our discussion? Or would I want to shut down? What underlying message am I sending?

Coaching Labs

Oftentimes in education, we treat teacher professional development as if it in no way mirrors best practices for students, when in reality what’s good for kids is good for those who teach them. This has become much more obvious to me as our county has begun implementing coaching labs based on the approach used by Lucy Calkins and her colleagues at Columbia University.

The model is built on a gradual release framework with the idea that teachers should have the chance to learn about a new approach to teaching, see it modeled with live students, co-plan and co-teach students with a colleague using the new approach, and then receive support as they implement it in their classrooms.

I’ve been piloting this approach over the past year and while some labs have gone very well, others have flopped. I’m beginning to find some guidelines that may help ensure labs are successful:

• Make sure teachers know the structure of the lab from the beginning. The time commitment is a big one – usually 90 minutes once a week for a series of weeks. Almost every time teachers begin the lab feeling resentful of the time commitment and not at all convinced it will be useful. Explain the focus of the labs and quickly give them valuable experiences to create buy-in.

• Be sure the lab has a specific focus and revisit that focus at each and every meeting. Too often we address topics that are too large – narrow the focus down. Instead of “guided reading”, make it more about the quality of the prompts during guided reading. Instead of “conferences”, make it about how to find the teaching point for average and above average readers. If something else comes up during the labs, don’t go chasing rabbits. Make a note for a future lab, but keep the focus on your intended teaching point. Otherwise you dilute the potential power of the labs and teachers will ask afterwards, “What was the purpose of what we did?”

• Allow teachers to have a say in the focus of the lab. Have a pre-lab meeting to ask teachers about their instructional needs. Dig deeply in the discussion to find that specific focus you’ll use in the labs.

• Be intentional about the structure of each lab. It should mirror the workshop approach of mini-lesson, work session, and sharing. Begin with information for the teachers specific to their work with children that day (the mini-lesson), have teachers work with or see you work with actual students (work session), and then debrief afterwards (sharing). Don’t allow the debrief session to be left off – this is where some of the most powerful thinking occurs.

• Broaden the debrief session. Too many times, the tendency will be to discuss the particular students the teachers just observed. A part of the debrief should concern these kids, but then the discussion should pretty quickly transfer the key understandings of this lab to the teaching happening in the teachers’ classrooms. Ask open-ended, divergent questions to get people thinking about their own practice.

• Don’t allow too much time between lab sessions. Each lab should build on the previous one, and if too much time elapses before teachers meet again the learning that occurred can be lost. At most, allow 2 weeks between sessions.

• Monitor the transfer to classroom instruction. As the lab sessions progress, teachers should begin to apply more of what they learn to their classroom practice. Coaches need to be there every step of the way, offering to model in teachers’ classrooms or co-teach lessons for added support. Teachers might also benefit from observing each other in their classrooms. Informal walk-throughs can let you know how comfortable teachers are with transferring learning from the lab to their classrooms.

This is at least a starting point towards conducting a successful coaching lab and avoiding some of the pitfalls I’ve fallen into with less productive labs. Much of the feedback I’ve gotten regarding the labs has been very positive – teachers have enjoyed the hands-on approach and the sense that it met their needs and allowed them to be reflective about their practice.

As one participant said,

“Small group learning with practice on real students (because adult learning is really not that different than what works well with children!) is so much more meaningful than sitting in a big room watching someone click through a PowerPoint.”

The Possibility of Being Wrong

A while back I read an email from a teacher about an issue that I thought had been taken care of by a third person months ago, only to find out that appeared it hadn’t. Student well-being was at stake, and as I read and reread the email I found myself getting more and more upset. I vented to my office-mates and talked myself into a frenzy before vowing to “go take care of it right now!”

However, upon talking to the third party in question I quickly realized that I’d misunderstood the entire task, it HAD been taken care of months ago, and I’d just made and a** of myself in front of her, and possibly burnt some bridges I’d need later on.

This doesn’t happen to me too often, but when it does it causes me to sit back and re-evaluate my impulses. I should have counted to 10 (or 200) and waited to calm down before addressing the situation. And I should have entertained the possibility that maybe I was wrong in this case. There have been so many times that I have been wrong, you think I’d be used to it by now.

Too many times as coaches, we feel like we know the right way of doing things, the right instructional technique, the right materials to use, the right person for the job, the right solution to a problem. But the best coaches, in my experience, are the ones who approach a situation with an open mind, a questioning stance, and a willingness to entertain others’ ideas. Yes, you may feel that there is one “right” way to do guided reading, but what if this teacher’s adaptation is what works for her students? Or what at first appears to be a hallway display of very convergent, narrow thinking may, upon deeper inspection, be a truly creative way to teach inferential thinking.

From now on, before I make judgments, I vow to take stock of the situation and ask myself, “but what if I’m wrong?” If I ask questions and stay open-minded, perhaps I can build more bridges than I burn.

Coaching/Real Estate

I learned a lesson about coaching from my real estate agent. It wasn't a lesson about coaching as much as it was about relationships, which of course is at the heart of coaching.

Our real estate agent, Shannon, helped us buy what we consider to be the perfect house and piece of property several years ago. While I'd like to think we weren't as demanding or self-absorbed as some couples she might work with, we still wanted to see a range of houses and get a feel for the market, and so she patiently drove us from house to house for weeks. When we found a place we thought we loved, she toured it with us for hours contemplating the pros and cons, and suggesting options without ever pushing her opinion. She was an exceptional listener, really looking at each of us as we spoke, weighing our comments before responding, and never interrupting.

But the biggest thing she did was making us feel like we were her only clients. I know for a fact that, in a market that was very depressed, she was closing on more houses than most other agents in the area - that's why we'd chosen her. So she obviously had quite a lot of other deals going on simultaneously. And yet she never mentioned them. She didn't leave us with, "I'm off to attend a closing" or say, "I've got to take this call from other clients." We felt like the center of her world.

As a coach juggling many teachers, it's tempting sometimes to join in the general complaints with others about how busy we all are. I've caught myself rushing a conversation by explaining where I needed to be next, or apologizing for not getting to an email because I was working with someone else.

Teachers don't want to know that. They want to feel like they're the center of our world. And they deserve to be, just as kids deserve to feel like they're the center of their teacher's world.

It's a basic human need, to be listened to and truly heard. We all value it when someone is looking us full in the face, considering everything we're saying, and not simply juggling multiple ongoing thoughts in their head as we talk. Someone said, and I'm paraphrasing here, "In America, we've lost the ability to have a true conversation. People no longer listen to each other. Instead, they reload."

Shannon taught me the value of setting everything aside and truly being wherever you are. For coaches, the teachers we work with deserve to feel like our number one priority

Lucy Calkins and the Power of Feedback

These are hard times for education, there can be no doubt about that. It seems like everyone is under fire and nothing is sacred, even the legendary Lucy Calkins and her almost-as-legendary colleagues at Teacher's College.

At the recent New York Coaching Institute, Lucy Calkins talked with the group about how Teacher's College has stayed alive in these hard times. She had several suggestions, but the one that stuck out the most to me was her first one because of what they discovered as a result.

Lucy suggested that in order to deal with the current negative culture, we need to cultivate friends who aren't literacy geeks. Talk with them, use them as informants, and ask them, "What should I be reading?" Broadening our friendships helps expose us to the types of thinking we might not otherwise encounter.

That's exactly what she did, and in talking to some friends outside her department, she was told about the work of Geoff Petty. He has been examining the effects of feedback and found that specific feedback has the largest effect size of anything teachers do. Good feedback can add the equivalent of TWO years of growth if done well.

The website above has specific findings (in a very readable format) about how to make feedback specific by including medals (positive statements), and missions (ideas for improvement) based on clear goals. Lucy's commented that the difference between an excellent workshop and one not-so-good is the amount and quality of the feedback.

This makes perfect sense. I think about some classrooms I visit, in various schools, where the teacher may be teaching in a workshop format, but it's fairly obvious she's just going through the motions. The teaching is still very teacher-centered or standards-centered rather than student-centered. The teacher tends to view the class as a group rather than as a collection of individuals.

Lucy asked us to examine our workshops and ask ourselves, "Does it appear that the students know that their writing should be getting better each day? Do they understand that they're supposed to be a better reader in October than they were in September? Do they know that their partner conversations should be improving, and their reading logs and revision techniques should be building upon each other?"

Too many times we aren't explicit enough about how we expect students to learn in our classrooms. We hide the running record from the child and use it merely as an assessment rather than also as a teaching tool. Or we teach a concept without explaining how this will help them as a reader or a writer.

Students deserve for us to help them set honest, specific goals and to help them towards those goals by continually offering feedback on their progress. Wouldn't we all appreciate this honesty regarding our own work?

Naming What We Do

I have just returned from the weeklong Coaching Institute at New York’s Columbia University and I am energized, seeing the teaching world through clearer coaching eyes. We spent the week in a combination of breakout sessions and intensive work with students in public schools practicing both our reading instruction and our coaching strategies.

There’s so much that I learned that week, much of which I’ll attempt to share here in the coming weeks, but if there’s one big “aha” I brought back from this institute, it’s the need to name what we do. So many times, as coaches, we think what we’re doing is obvious. We assume that observers will understand why we do what we do, when in reality much of that can be missed as observers get distracted by the well-made wall charts or the classroom’s organizational structures.

Shanna, our cohort leader, told a story about her husband taking her out for Valentine’s dinner. They went to a delicious Turkish restaurant, and she came away from it thinking how delicious everything was. But she also realized that she couldn’t describe exactly what it tasted like, or why everything was delicious. She didn’t have the words for it. Her brother, however, is a famous chef in the city, and he would have been able to name what she tasted. He could have told her, for instance, that the butter and brown sugar sauté caused the chicken and onions to caramelize slightly, or that the combination of sea salt and lemon reduction is what made the vegetables pop.

The difference between her and her brother is that her brother, if he’d gone to that restaurant, would have been able to remember what he experienced. She, on the other hand, with no better words than “delicious”, will forget the details as the experience fades. Weeks from now she’ll just remember it was a fantastic Turkish restaurant and nothing else.

Think how this applies to a modeled lesson. If we don’t give teachers words for what they’re seeing, if we don’t voice over and explain exactly what they’re seeing and how we “cooked up” this precise experience, they will leave with a general impression: “It was a good lesson” but few specifics on how to replicate it. Words are what allow us to remember events. Well-chosen words name the teaching moves, the subtle adjustments that happen in response to the unpredictable in the classroom. And it’s these words that are remembered weeks, months, or even years later when a similar situation is encountered.

Words are powerful. And I learned from Shanna to be more conscious and intentional about using words to capture what happens in the classroom so it can be replicated.

Stages of Competence

This past week our coaches had a good discussion concerning the 4 stages of developing competence. In developing a skill, a person is:

• unconsciously incompetent – completely unaware of their lack of skill. Of course, many children are at this stage in many areas, but I also think of some adults I know and their joyous, uncoordinated flailings on the dance floor. At some point the person then becomes:
• consciously incompetent – all that’s changed is that the person now realizes they could be better at this thing they’re flailing at. Their skill hasn’t improved, simply their awareness of their lack of ability has. With focused effort, the person then becomes:
• consciously competent – much has to happen between stage 2 and stage 3. Really, it’s the crux of everything – how do we get people from stage 2 to 3? Brenda Powers, of Choice Literacy, argues that it’s often “third things” such as books, videos, demonstration lessons, etc. that provide the person with what they need to improve their skill. With time, the person then becomes:
• unconsciously competent – the skill has become natural enough that little thought is given to decisions that are made. In the case of the dancer, after someone has pointed out their lack of coordination , and a great deal of dance lessons have been undertaken, the person can become a graceful, fluid dancer who need not concentrate to the degree they must have when learning their new steps.

For those of us attempting to teach people acquiring new skills, the mistake we too often make is assuming the person is already at stage 2. We take for granted that they’re aware of their need to improve and are willing participants. If, however, they are still at stage 1 no amount of advice or instruction will get through to them until they realize they’re not as good as they think they are. This requires us to “create the need”. Until they know they need help, they won’t hear a bit of the advice that’s given them. No need to buy something they already think they have.

And so, the parallels to coaching should be fairly obvious at this point. As coaches we must:
1. Find out which stage our learners are at
2. If they’re at stage 1, we have to create the need for change to take place
3. If they’re at stage 2, we have to provide those things the learners need to improve their skills. This is the very heart of coaching, and many books have been written about what coaches do at this stage.
4. For teachers at stage 4, we can help them develop what David Baume has termed “reflective competence”.

His thoughts, and I agree completely, are that we can’t stop at simply being unconsciously competent, otherwise how will you teach someone else the skill? If you don’t know how you do it, you can’t pass it on. So in order to become a teacher of that skill yourself, you must become reflective about the theories, skills, and knowledge required in the process.

Regarding teaching, this is where future coaches are made. Those reflective teachers who know why they do what they do and are aware of the literature and research behind it are the perfect people to help those further down the stages of competence.

Underlying Messages

Last month, at our monthly instructional coach meeting, we had a fascinating discussion revolving around Peter Johnston’s book “Choice Words” and the implications not only for our interactions with students, but also with other teachers.

Johnston argues that how we speak has as much impact as what we say. For instance, saying to a student, “How did you go about solving that?” implies an underlying assumption that, “You’re the kind of person who solves things, and I’m interested in hearing how you did it. I value your ideas.” Or simply using wait time sends the message that we believe that the child is capable of coming up with the answer, and we won’t give up.

On the other hand, when we jump in too quickly to prompt a student when they make an error, the underlying message is that we believe they need support and are incapable of solving the problem on their own. Over time, this creates the kind of passive child who puts for little effort because she knows the teacher will do most of the work for her.

As coaches, we discussed this language, and the underlying messages in what we say, as it regarded students. But then we took it a step further and looked back at what we’d read as it relates to our work with teachers. What do our underlying messages say to teachers, and do they match our actual words? Do our words imply a partnership approach with teachers, or do we send the message that we are the experts, the ones who know best? For instance, saying, “I’m so proud of you!” instantly puts the two people talking on unequal footing. Or by saying, “We have to do running records every two weeks” places this assessment in a negative, mandated context. How often do we use wait time with teachers instead of jumping in quickly to provide support? What messages might that send about our confidence in their opinions?

My favorite quote of Johnston’s comes near the end of this fascinating book:

The way we interact with children [and adults!] and arrange for them to interact shows them what kinds of people we think they are and gives them opportunities to practice being those kinds of people.”

Listening

The importance of listening has been underestimated in the job of coaching, in my perception. Too many people think a coach's job is to impart wisdom about literacy to teachers. The thought is often that the coach is the expert in their academic area and so must convince the other teachers in her building to come around to the "correct" way of teaching. The coach then works her heart out leading after-school professional development sessions and scheduling modeled lessons, but ends up frustrated by the end of the year when only a few pioneers, the teachers who will try anything, are applying her strategies. The coach grumbles, makes plans to readdress it next year, and the cycle continues. After a few years of this, the coach begins to believe either a) "there's something wrong with these teachers" or b) "there's something wrong with me" and in either instance wants to quit. Sometimes they do quit, but continue to remain in the position of coach.

Granted, there can be lots of reasons that coaching doesn't "work" at a school. But I think a huge part of a coach's success has to do with his or her willingness to listen to the teachers she works with. And by listen, I mean truly listen. William Isaacs says we have trouble with this because:

If we try to listen we find it extraordinarily difficult, because we are always projecting our opinions and ideas, our prejudices, our background, our inclinations, our impulses; when they dominate, we hardly listen at all to what is being said.

I don't know how many times I've done this, but I know it's a lot. In his book "Dialogue - the Art of Thinking Together", Isaacs says "People do not listen, they reload". I have been guilty of this many times in my life, ignoring the person talking to me in an effort to pre-argue my point in my head so I can jump in at the earliest opportunity to get that point across.

And yet those people in my life that I value most are the ones who I feel have truly listened to me. The childhood teachers I felt closest to were the ones who made me feel cared about and listened to. The leaders I've worked for whom I most respect were the ones who respected me right back by listening to my opinion - really listening, and considering what I had to say.

As coaches, we should be offering that focused listening to the teachers with whom we work. If we truly listen, then oftentimes we'll learn something. And when people feel listened to, more likely than not they'll be more willing to listen right back.

Delicate Dance: Teacher Conferences

This past week I’ve been following up some earlier professional learning on guided reading by offering to give feedback to teachers one-on-one as they work with a small group of kids. It’s always intimidating for teachers to be observed, mainly for reasons that I’ve already written about: teaching is a profession where we think for a living, so any comments on our actions is really a comment on our character.

I’ve tried to help by avoiding the “O-word” (observation) and instead have phrased it as “offering feedback”, and I’ve been using the same form with the teachers that they used with me when they observed me working with a group of students during our professional learning.

Working one-on-one with teachers is some of the most delicate work we do as coaches. A slightly different choice of words can be the difference between building confidence or building a wall between the coach and teacher. I always try to think of how I’d feel sitting in their chair if someone came in making suggestions, and it’s helped me to realize how innocent I often am of the judgmental way words can sound. I’ve found that using the words “I wonder” has helped. As in, “I wonder if you’d tried a meaning-based prompt here if he would have figured out the word sooner?” or “I wonder if he’s waiting for you to provide most of the help? What do you think he’d do if you just waited him out?” The trick, of course, is to truly wonder about whatever I’m asking. People can smell a fake question a mile away and nothing turns people off quicker than feeling manipulated.

The other thing I’ve discovered about individual conferences with teachers comes from the wisdom of Donald Graves, writing workshop guru. He has always said, “Teach the writer, not the writing. Focus on one important thing that will make this child a better writer after the conference is done.” Helping a teacher home in on one big thing that can help them with many students, not one particular student is critical. But this is often difficult if there are a plethora of “next steps” to address. By choosing one, and not overwhelming the teacher, the time spent in conference will be well worth it.

Graves also says, “The student should leave the conference wanting to write.” If we use the right language, and can be transparent with our feedback, teachers will leave our conference wanting to teach.

Communication

I’ve been reading Jim Knight’s book “Instructional Coaching” and finding it refreshing. Despite having read more coaching books over the past 3 years than I can immediately count, Knight’s book offers new perspectives written with a clear, entertaining voice.

In his chapter on communication, he simplifies the idea by describing it as process whereby a speaker expresses an intended message to an audience.

“A funny thing happens to the message on the way from the speaker to the audience, however. Interference messes with the message…Consequently, the audience receives a modified version of the intended message – we call this the perceived message. Unfortunately, the perceived message can be quite different from the intended message, but the audience doesn’t know that and believes the perceived message is real.” (p. 59)

Knight goes on to describe various types of interference, from external interference, such as extraneous noise, to internal interference, such as distracting, off-topic thoughts or preconceptions or lack of prior knowledge.

That intended messages can be distorted by the audience is not new information for teachers. Children misinterpret our communication with them quite frequently. When I worked as a parapro at my college laboratory school I had to reinterpret for a Kindergartener who was fearful after the Kindergarten teacher said, “Line up to go outside, boys and girls. It’s time for us to go get our blood moving around.” After seeing the shocked, disgusted look on the child’s face, I quickly told her, “Sara, he means INSIDE our body! Get the blood moving inside our body.” Another time I inadvertently let down one of my second graders because I told him I’d bring in some pumice, a volcanic rock that floats. After demonstrating what I thought was a quite impressive display of a floating rock in the classroom sink the next day, a disappointed Daniel told me at lunch that he thought the rock floated in AIR and why couldn’t I have brought a rock that could do that?

Of course, these are misinterpretations that I know about, but how many times did I send my intended message only to have it be received very differently, unbeknownst to me? As teachers, we often feel that we’ve done our part by presenting our intended message to our students – here’s how to find the product of two 2-digit numbers, this is the reason Eleanor Roosevelt is famous, here’s the difference between a subject and a predicate. As educators, though, shouldn’t we do more? It seems to me to be the difference between someone who “teaches curriculum” and one who “teaches students”. The latter requires that we be constantly tuned in to our message as we give it, and be ready to adjust it or clarify at a moment’s notice. It’s something I aspire to, and hope to learn to do better.