Over Spring Break, I flew to Edinburgh, Scotland to visit one of my sons, Jack, who is spending this semester at the University of Edinburgh. My sister, Colleen, joined me after flying in from her home in Oklahoma. Scotland exceeded my high expectations and traveling reminded me of some important life lessons. In this post, I want to share some of those lessons and how they connect to teaching.
Community of Learners & Learning Environment
Coaching Partnership Tools: Part II
In my previous post, I described several of my “go to” tools for planning and reflecting on coaching conversations. In this post, I want to share two of the language tools I use in partnership meetings. When I focus on language, I can ask more precise questions and model how intention to language is important when we work with students and colleagues. The more precise we are with language, the more impact our language can have!
Coaching Partnership Tools: Part I
As I engage in mid-year reflection on my goals as an instructional coach, I would like to share some of the tools I use to plan and engage in coaching meetings. I call these coaching meetings “partnership meetings” because both my colleague and I are learning together. It is my job, as a coach, to reflect on, and plan for the conversations. Intentional planning focuses on ensuring that conversations focus on my colleague’s goals and priorities, while centering students, especially our formerly marginalized students. In this post, and an upcoming part two, I want to summarize some useful coaching tools. Continue reading “Coaching Partnership Tools: Part I”
Empowering Elementary Students With Disciplinary Literacy
I’m so happy to share that my third article has been published! Here it is:
Joint Construction
Joint Construction is a critical component of the writing curriculum, as it nurtures a writing community and it models negotiating writing moves. In this post, I want to describe what Joint Construction is and give some tips for negotiating the writing of texts with students.
Tools for Calling In to Conversations About Race
A colleague recently said to me, “We know we are doing important equity work if people are asking lots of questions, when people are getting uncomfortable.” Like many, I like to refer to the conversations we have as Healing or Courageous Conversations rather than Hard Conversations. In a recent email, Elena Aguilar called these simply “Conversations About Race.” Aguilar writes, “Even if they’re uncomfortable or complicated, these conversations can bring relief, closure, and closeness.” I think that Hard Conversations are about me, while Healing and Courageous focus on the purpose which is to address racist actions, biases, and microaggressions. The purpose is to be an advocate for marginalized groups and to plant seeds of awareness, reflection, and potentially transformation for those who intentionally or unintentionally cause harm. The purpose, in education, is to continually ask “How Are the Children?” In this post, I want to share two tools to help engage in Conversations About Race.
Continue reading “Tools for Calling In to Conversations About Race”
Student Agency, Feedback, and Voice
Last year, I wrote about Pedagogy of Voice, as described in Street Data: A Next-Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation. This weekend I am rereading the Pedagogy of Voice chapter: Redefine “Success” and striving to go deeper into the content. In this post, I want to share some of the passages that are standing out the most, and why.
Making Space for Student Feedback and Voice
“My job as a teacher is not to teach the curriculum or even to just teach the students; it is to seek to understand my kids as completely as possible so that I can purposefully bend curriculum to meet them.” – C. Minor
“Creating a collaborative culture is the single most important factor in school improvement for those seeking to enhance the effectiveness of teaching and learning.” – R. DuFour and B. DuFour
The quotes above are on my mind as I celebrate the publication of my second piece, Making Space for Students in PLCs. The processes I describe in the article are built off what we learned from our students and what we learned together as collaborative teams of inquiry.
As always, I look forward to feedback as you read the article!
Speak Up to Call In
One of my school’s goals this year is to engage in Strategic Listening and to lean into Courageous Conversations. We know that the language we use has an impact on students, colleagues, and families. The language we use also reflects our beliefs, and by being intentional on our language choices, we can increase our own self-awareness and shift beliefs. As educators, we must strive to examine our language and beliefs. We must also support each other in this work to help us see our blind spots and to grow as social justice educators; and that happens through conversation. In this post, I want to highlight some ideas from Teaching Tolerance’s Speak Up Guide, in order to synthesize the guide and to share this important resource with others.
“Every moment that bias goes unanswered
is a moment that allows its roots to grow deeper and stronger.
Bias left unanswered is bias tacitly approved.
If you don’t speak up, you are saying, in your silence,
that you condone it.” – Speak Up Guide
The Importance of Effective Classroom Talk
The productive hum of students engaged in talking and learning is like hearing a symphony, a favorite song. They are evidence of a teacher intentionally planning for and developing the expectations and strategies of effective talk with their students.
“Children’s speaking and listening lead the way for their reading and writing skills, and together these language skills are the primary tools of the mind for all future learning.” – Roskos, Tabors, & Lenhart, 2009
Increased effective discourse between students leads to deeper learning.
“According to John Hattie (2018), teachers can ask between 200 and 300 questions a day – whereas students typically ask clarification questions. Research also indicates that teachers should limit their speaking to 20-30% of the class time and the student talk time should be around 80%.” – Greenwood
According to Hattie’s meta-analysis, classroom discussion has an effect size of .82 which is more than twice the average growth in a year! When students talk together, their relationships strengthen, their oral language skills grow, they see each other’s strengths and feel an increasing sense of belonging, and engagement increases! Today I want to bring together some rich resources on classroom discourse, to support the ways that teachers scaffold increasingly complex student talk in their classrooms.
Continue reading “The Importance of Effective Classroom Talk”