For most of us, only a few weeks remain in the marking period.  Secondary teachers probably have exams arriving in the next couple of weeks while elementary teachers may be feeling their time slipping away due to special holiday programs and end-of-unit assessments. Rather than “running out of time” during the last few days before winter break – or leaving so many things due the day before vacation that your time off is consumed by grading – take a few minutes to plot out your remaining December classes on a calendar and mark the due dates for your must-do assignments and assessments.

You might want to compare the school calendar to your personal calendar.  Guard your quality of life in this busy month by trying to schedule long stretches of grading or intensive preparation for times that you don’t have personal or family commitments.  If you’re wondering how you’ll pack everything in, consider some of the following ideas for condensing and consolidating the volume of work while still meeting your objectives for the unit.

• Review early: Who says the unit has to be over to begin reviewing for the test or exam? If you provide a review packet, consider breaking it into pieces. Go ahead and give students the review materials for the content you have already taught. This way they can begin studying early (and avoid last minute cramming) and you can get ahead of the end-of-semester crunch.

• Consolidate: Does your class usually read three separate stories to practice three distinct reading strategies? Look for a single story or article that will allow students to practice all three strategies. The time you save covering more material can be focused on working with the strategies in greater depth.

• Tier your homework: If students usually complete 20 problems for homework – and you spend your time during or after class grading them – consider creating tiered homework assignments. This strategy works best for practicing concrete skills like math or science computation, grammar assignments, foreign language verb conjugations, etc.  In the last 10 minutes of class give a very short (4-5 question) formative assessment that covers the content of tonight’s homework. For students who get everything right, give minimal practice and a challenge application or extension. These students clearly get it, so they can self-check with an answer key the next day. For students who miss a couple of problems, provide review and practice.  They can self-check homework with an answer key and help one another or identify a few problems as a group for which they would like teacher assistance. For students missing nearly all of the material, provide homework that focuses on building understanding of the concept and spend most of the time the next day you would normally spend on checking homework with the whole class providing reteaching to this group.

Have other ideas for getting the most bang for your instructional buck during the December crunch? Post them here!

–Claire Lambert

Whether students are missing classes in December due to illness or travel, you’re bound to have more than a few absences throughout the month. Consider creating an Absent Work Folder system either on a bulletin board or crate in your classroom. When you hand out new assignments or return papers, put a copy (with the student’s name) in the absent work folder for anyone who isn’t there. With older students, you could even have a classroom helper do this job. Then when a student returns, anything he or she missed is in one spot and can be found without help from you!

–Claire Lambert

In keeping with the Thanksgiving theme this week, take a moment to consider what you’re thankful for in your teaching career. I’m guessing for most of us it isn’t test prep, grading on the weekends or writing college recommendations that makes us thankful, but forming meaningful connections with students and seeing young people grow in our care.  This could be the perfect week to take a few minutes out for community building in your classroom. Sometimes community building activities are dismissed as too fluffy, off-topic or a waste of time, but consider that when students in a class feel connected to the teacher and to each other they may be more likely to help a neighbor, work effectively with a group, take academic risks and develop a positive self-concept.

Here are a few ideas of community builders that don’t require a lot of time or planning, are easy to adapt for your grade-level or student population, and  build a sense of interdependence in the classroom.

• Group Résumé – Have students work together in groups of 4 or 5 to create a poster-sized résumé of their combined skills, talents and experiences. For example, all together students may have strengths in math, science, basketball, scrapbooking and babysitting. They may have 6 brothers and 5 sisters, 3 dogs and 4 cats. They may speak 4 languages and have traveled to 6 different countries. Choose résumé categories that make sense for your age group and student population. Post the résumés or have students share out.

• Thank you notes – give each student – and the teacher — a few index cards or small squares of paper and have them write anonymous thank you notes to their classmates and teacher. Don’t include any names, only the things they’re thankful for. Read or post the cards so students can see “thanks for explaining the homework when I called you” “thanks for asking me to be in your group when I was alone” and “thanks for handing back papers while I helped a student.”

• Positive Attributes — Provide a word splash with 20 or more positive character traits. Have students choose two or three that best describe themselves. Then put them in small groups and ask other group members to choose a few words from the list to describe each of their team members. Students discuss to find overlap and hear from their team mates about what makes them special.

• Man on the Street Interviews – Pick up a toy microphone (or imagine your classroom stapler is a microphone) and let students interview each other about what they’re thankful for. Even better, build connections by having students talk with a partner in advance and then share for the group what their partner is thankful for. So you might get to hear

Reporter: This is Tiffany, she’s a first grader, and she is thankful for her big sister. Tiffany tell us more about that.

Tiffany: I’m thankful for my sister because she shares her markers and she saves a seat for me on the bus.

Reporter: Thanks for talking with us, Tiffany.

Have other ways to build community while giving thanks in your classroom? Post them here!

–Claire Lambert

Once in a workshop I heard a teacher describe a group of five or six kids in her elementary class as “the gorillas” – the crew that always raised their hands and emitted a low “oooh-oooh-oooh” until they were called on.  The gorillas can be wonderful when they keep the discussion moving and reassure us that the lesson is working, but there are probably other students in the class who rarely or never raise their hands who either know the answer or would benefit from working through it with the teacher.  Teachers often resist calling on students whose hands are not raised for fear of embarrassing them or putting them on the spot if they are unprepared or don’t have the right answer.

Next time your lesson calls for problem-solving, making inferences, or dealing with complexity, consider using the Numbered Heads Together strategy in order to increase the diversity of voices in your classroom (and perhaps give the gorillas some practice listening to their peers). Put students in small groups of three or four – students sitting close by are fine – and have them number off so that each student in every group has a number from 1-3 or 1-4. Students will know their own numbers, but the teacher won’t know who has each number.  Students work together to complete the short activity or practice from your lesson and each student makes sure she has captured and can explain the group’s responses. Then the teacher can randomly select a number – the 2s for instance – and whoever is member #2 in each group reports out on the answer or group’s process for finding a response.

The strategy allows students to engage with peers, practice their responses in a small group first, and talk to the whole class with the confidence of representing a group rather than being on their own.

Quick tips: if you are using groups of 4 but one group has only 3 students, have student #1 also be #4.  If one group has an extra student, let two students share a number and answer together if their number is called.  Feel free to switch up your number anytime – if the 2s in your first two groups have already thoroughly answered the first question, switch it up to the 4s to address the next item.

Claire Lambert

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot lately about formative assessment and have heard from teachers who embrace it and from those who are still struggling to find a place for it within their curriculum and teaching style.  As an adult, I’m noticing that “real-life” formative assessment is all around us. Whether you’re checking the treadmill display to see your calorie count half way through your work out, taking a friend shopping with you for a special occasion outfit, or tasting something on the stove before it’s done, you’re participating in formative assessment – essentially checking along the way to make sure you’re on the right track and allowing time to correct your course if you’re headed in the wrong direction.

We hear a great deal about what formative assessment does for teachers in terms of providing data to track student progress and inform instruction. But could there be more to it? Does formative assessment also teach a “soft skill” to our students about the importance of checking their own understanding before the due date rolls around?

Think back to your own days as a student. Did you ever walk out of a test thinking “I just bombed that!” or “I didn’t realize that would be on the test!” Remember that sinking feeling that your grade was going down the tubes or that you would have to do some creative explaining to your parents? How might life have been different if a week before the test your teacher had given a short practice quiz, an example written response, or a blank map for you to complete?

I often hear teachers who are grappling with formative assessment express concern that it breeds laziness in students or spoon-feeds them what will be on the test. But consider how those same short, low-stakes formative assessments – especially those that students can be involved in scoring and revising – could focus a student’s studying or give her a heads-up that she doesn’t know something as well as she thinks she does. Wouldn’t it be great for students to leave a test without that sinking feeling – and for you to grade the test without the sinking feeling of your own?

Please join in the blog discussion with examples of how you involve students in formative assessment, how you’re trying to make formative assessment work for your class, or the roadblocks standing in your way.

–Claire Lambert

Here is Robyn’s Latest Newsletter Article.  You can subscribe to our Free Monthly E-Newsletter by clicking here.

After a year of resisting, I finally drank the apple-flavored kool-aid and bought an iphone. I had read about its brilliant design but was entirely unprepared for its simplicity. Now I suppose the folks at Apple could have sent me a questionnaire in order to discern my likes and dislikes and used that information to figure out what I wanted and needed in a phone. And I guess they could have sent someone out to interview me to determine my telephone and texting habits and the gone back to the factory and built a phone to my exact specifications. But Apple didn’t focus on trying to build a phone designed just for me. In fact, it did just the opposite. Rather than offering an array of colors, the phone comes in only 2 – white and black. Instead of offering an array of built-in applications, it offers just a few basic programs loaded into the phone. Instead of trying to offer an array of phones to meet my needs, Apple offers just one.

But this phone does meet my needs exactly. I can buy a cover for the phone in any color and design I can imagine. I can download any additional software I need from entire app store filled with applications not built by Apple but by its customers. Although I bought the same phone that anyone else can purchase, I have the opportunity to make it uniquely my own. I was able to customize it to fit my needs.

Later that week, I was following the Twitter edchat on my iphone about Differentiated Instruction while I was waiting for a plane I began to think that maybe Apple could teach us a thing or two about teaching. For years we have tried to differentiate our instruction, often creating several different lesson plans to meet the needs of more of our students. Often we miss several students’ needs and wear ourselves out in the process. I wondered what if instead of differentiating our lessons for students, we created lessons that were customizable? What if we taught like an iphone?

Stay with me now. I promise you that I haven’t turned into Steve Jobs’ evangelist. The brilliance of the iphone’s design is that it can be customized to meet the individual needs of each us. Apple doesn’t bother creating apps it thinks we might use, instead, it offers us the users an opportunity to build our own. Apple doesn’t try to anticipate my needs. Instead, it built a phone that is flexible enough that I can make it fit my needs.

In the days of DVR’s that allow you to watch TV when and how you want, and Pandora radio that lets you create your own radio station customized to your tastes and preferences, it is hard for many students to sit and get lessons that are pitched to the nebulous middle. And, even when we attempt to get to know our students’ individual likes and dislikes, learning strengths and weaknesses, backgrounds and dispositions and create lessons that address all of these, trying to do so for every child every day is next to impossible and we often settled for superficial connections or just give up entirely.

Maybe instead of differentiation, we should focus on building lessons that are flexible enough that each student can find a way to access the curriculum. Maybe instead of trying to guess what our students may need, we should teach students how to show us what they need in ways that can be quickly addressed by the supports available in the classroom. Maybe instead of trying to adapt our lessons to meet each student’s need, we should create lessons that students can customize themselves.

Differentiation focuses too much on individualization rather than customization. We are trying to meet the individual needs of students rather than showing them how to meet their own needs. We are building individual lessons for each student instead of building lessons that are flexible enough so that all students can access them.

Differentiation presumes that we know what is best for students and puts the onus of meeting their needs on us. But what if we enlisted our students to partner with us to figure out what they needed instead? If we did, we would create a shared learning space where we can work with our students to help them get what they need from our classes. We would also show student how to leverage the currencies they bring with them to the classroom to access the curriculum in the way that works best for them.

Imagine what would happen in this kind of classroom! Students would be more engaged because they would be actively involved in creating and monitoring their own learning. Students would also feel more comfortable because they are learning how to leverage their backgrounds and currencies in order to access the curriculum. Learning would take place at a much deeper level because students are learning how to learn and how to take the curriculum and adapt it to their own contexts. Rigor and relevance would naturally increase, and because students and teachers are co-creating the learning experience, relationships would thrive.

I know, I know. Creating this kind of classroom is really hard at first. It requires really understanding your curriculum, flexibility, and the time to create and implement. And, thinking about teaching this way requires a real shift in our thinking. The TIP sheet this month has some ideas for getting started and in the next few months on our blog, in this newsletter, and on our site, we will be posting new resources and offering new workshops that provide step-by-step guidance for moving towards customization instead of individualization. Stay Tuned.

Robyn R. Jackson

I loved my high school drama class and really wanted to participate in the school play. Unfortunately most of the plays were musicals and, while my acting was pretty passable for a 9th grader, my singing is best confined to the shower and solo car trips. Nonetheless, I auditioned and was excited to get a part in the third tier chorus of the production of Annie. My group appeared in only a few songs and we were really more like mobile scenery than actual actors, but I had a terrific time rehearsing, hanging out back stage, and making new friends.

One afternoon during a choral rehearsal, I noticed a quote tacked on the bulletin board in the chorus room. It said, “Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig” (Robert Heinlein). As I stood in the back row doing my best to avoid the chorus teacher’s attention, I realized without a doubt – I was the pig.

Luckily it wasn’t necessary that the teachers directing the play advance my singing. The show was full of talented singers and as long as I danced enthusiastically with my mop in the orphanage scenes and kept mouthing those words, everyone was happy. But what about our students whose progress does matter an awful lot, but who believe that they are pigs of our classrooms? They probably appear disengaged or distracted, and if you’ve ever wondered if you’re wasting your time with them, chances are they’ve considered the same thing.

Take a moment to think of one or two of these students whom you see each day. How could you engage them in the learning that takes place in your classroom? Encourage them to participate? Unlock some of the secrets of how to make progress in your class or show them that their success is important to you? Try to think of one small thing you can do this week to try to teach that pig to sing – I hope you’ll share your ideas and progress on the blog!

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Catch the student looking good – reinforce a productive learning behavior like being prepared, following directions, asking for help, completing work, etc.
• Encourage transparency – explicitly clarify something the student does to increase the likelihood of success – “When you completed the organizer with your group, you were able to answer the question on the test” or “When you asked for clarification about the directions, you were able to do the activity right the first time.”
• Pre-alert for participation – as students work independently or in groups, listen in and find something the student has done right. Let him know you will call on him. – “You answered number three correctly, I’m going to call on you to explain to the class how you figured it out.”

Claire Lambert

It only takes a few minutes, but once you number the chairs in your classroom you’ll find countless ways to use this system. Print out or write on individual note cards the numbers 1 – the total number of chairs in your classroom. Use sturdy clear packing tape to attach the number to the chair – a great place to put the number is on the seat back so students can easily turn around and see the number, but won’t be tempted to doodle on the number or peel it off. Next make a set of note cards with each number to keep on your desk. You can even laminate them and reuse them from class to class and year to year.

Now you can use the numbered chairs to:

Promote Random Name Calling– Let students shuffle the deck and pull from the top or pick a card to see who will answer the next question, be next to the board, or give the next presentation. (Secret hint – if there’s someone you really want to hear from, it’s okay to put his card close to the top!)

Assign Classroom Jobs – Need someone to run a note to the office or pass out papers? Pull a number from the top of the pile and save the time wasted on “Pick me! Pick me!” hand-raising

Assign Partners or Groups – Pull cards to make random pairs or groups on the spot. If some seats are empty or students are absent, just pull the next card in the stack.

Rearrange Desks – Quickly move desks from rows to groups by creating a diagram on the overhead or electronic board showing how you want the chairs arranged by number. Students move their own desks rather than the teacher arranging 30 desks after school.

Claire Lambert

Somewhere in every classroom there’s the black hole that is the “no name bin.” Whether your students are six years old or sixteen years old, there’s always someone who can’t remember to put her name on her paper. The no-name syndrome gets worse as assignments become more complex – students answer only part one of a two part question, leave out some of the requirements (“What, I needed quotes from the text in my essay?!”), forget to show their work, leave their lab notes out of the lab report – all despite the teacher’s clear directions.

Next time your students are turning in an important assignment, consider showing them a very bad example a few days before the due date. If you have a copy of student work from a few years back, you could remove the name and go from there, or create your own bad example of an assignment that is missing pieces or otherwise not quite complete. Let students use their directions and rubrics for the assignment to figure out why this is a bad example. If you’ve ever handed out something with a typo, you know how students love to find mistakes.

As the class shares their findings of what is wrong with the assignment, have a student record and post what should be included. For example, the paper should have the student’s name and the date at the top, the answer should include the page number in the textbook where it was found, the final answer to the Algebra problem should be circled, the bibliography should be attached, etc.

Now as students prepare to submit their own work, they have reviewed the rubric and directions, applied the expectations to example work and helped create a checklist of what’s required. Students can use the checklist to make sure their own work is in order before submitting it – saving themselves point deductions and you the headache of dealing with incomplete assignments.

Claire Lambert