Stealing Library Books

I am totally against the practice of stealing library books, but I must admit that I did it once.

When I was in high school, visiting the library, my favorite teacher Mr. Mulvey suggested I check out the book “The Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison. I did, and in the process I fell in love. This was a book unlike any other I had read. It was powerful and challenging. It made me question my world. It made me hunger for more books like this. And it ignited a deep affection for Ellison, an author who could do such amazing things with words. Ultimately, that book is the reason I became an English teacher.

While I was reading “The Invisible Man,” Ralph Ellison died. On the one hand I knew this was really nothing more than a strange coincidence, but it triggered something in my imagination. I began to feel more than the usual connection to that book. I kept renewing it long after I had read the pages twice over. I convinced myself that Ralph Ellison himself wanted me to keep it.

I didn’t want to steal it. I went through the rational process of asking the librarian if I could buy it. She thought this was a crazy proposition as I could buy a copy at any local bookstore. But I wanted THAT book and she refused my offer. This left me no choice, and the way I saw it I’d pay for it in library fees later on. So one day I walked out of the library after renewing it once more and never brought it back.

I carried that book with me everywhere. It was my constant companion throughout college and each year I dedicated part of my summer to reading it again. Each year my life experiences brought new insight to the pages and I loved it all the more.

Then I became a teacher, and though my students’ reading levels made the text cumbersome, I loved sharing passages from the book whenever appropriate. At the end of one school year a student who’d really made progress came and asked me if he could borrow THE BOOK for the summer. He really liked the pieces we’d read in class and wanted to try the whole thing.

I should have said no, but what kind of teacher would I have been to shut down that desire to learn? Predictably, he didn’t come back the next school year and I never saw my beloved book again. To this day I can still see the pages where I scrawled my epiphanies over the years, and there are whole passages I can still recite from memory.

I figure the disappearance of “The Invisible Man” was my payback for stealing a library book in the first place. But I like to imagine passing that book on was my way of continuing a powerful chain of events Mr. Mulvey started long ago.

My Love/Hate Relationship with Feedback

At Inspired Teaching one of our favorite interview questions for potential employees is: “How do you take feedback?” Feedback is something we expect everyone who works with us to give one another on a regular basis. We consider it to be essential to our growth as individuals and as an organization.

This belief reflects our efforts to practice what we preach. We believe the art of teaching is one of continual reflection, readjustment, and improvement. Feedback is key to the process of becoming an Inspired Teacher.

Even though I know this now and consider feedback an important part of my work, whenever I interview a candidate who says, “I LOVE feedback” I am suspicious. This reaction comes from my old relationship with the term.

Before joining Inspired Teaching I always thought of feedback in the negative and, to be honest, I still cringe whenever someone tells me I’m doing something wrong. Nobody likes to be wrong, but growing up I never considered the critical connection between acknowledging mistakes and growing as a person. In my first professional role as a teacher I was no less afraid of having my errors laid plain on the table. Maybe because I’m the big sister in my family, I just simply never wanted my flaws to be publicly recognized.

So, when I was asked, “how do you take feedback?” at my interview with Inspired Teaching I’m pretty sure I lied and said, “I love it.” In my few months working with the organization my colleagues gave me feedback on pretty much a daily basis. Every time they shared a concern I went home and melted into a pool of embarrassment and self-pity. I know I got an equal balance of positive feedback from them as well, but it was the negative that I noticed most.

Eventually I started spending more time in our training sessions where we constantly ask teachers to reflect on their practice and to offer feedback to one another. I learned about our mentoring program, which is built on the art of giving feedback. I took the Inspired Teaching Institute and learned about giving and receiving feedback to and from your students. Gradually I stepped outside of my ego and looked at the effect all the feedback from my peers was having on my growth as a person and a professional.

It was hard not to notice that I’d achieved more in my time at Inspired Teaching than at any other non-profit job I’d ever held. It was also hard not to notice the genuine and rich relationships I now had with my colleagues. And at the end of the day I realized that an environment that required us to give constructive feedback to one another was responsible.

Now when I teach teachers I actually look forward to the feedback I get from them at the end of each class. When they ask me to bring more clarity to the next session I look forward to the challenge. When they say they need more activities and resources I set to work finding them. Every time they share their observations and opinions, I become a better facilitator.

I’d still be lying if I said I LOVE getting feedback, my ego still rears its ugly head from time to time and it takes awhile to lose the sting of a critique. But what I do love about feedback is what it’s done and continues to do for my growth.

Investing in Teachers to Turn Schools Around

Lots of voices in education seem to believe that the only way to turn low-performing schools around involves big, top-down initiatives. While the role of excellent leadership can’t be underestimated, there is plenty of evidence that the key ‘lever’ to change is teacher quality. A good example of the essential role of investing in teachers is in the Benwood schools in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The Benwood schools went from among the 20 worst-performing schools in the state of Tennessee to acclaimed models of success. The results are impressive – in the eight targeted schools, student achievement has jumped 27 percentage points on state reading tests, well above state and district averages, teacher morale is up and teacher turnover is down, and an analysis using William Sanders’ Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System shows significant gains in teacher effectiveness. Simply put—the students learned more because the teachers got better.

So what made it happen? Both Benwood reformers and outside analysts acknowledge that there were multiple factors that led to the changes, but as Elena Silva at Education Sector explained recently, the success can ultimately be ascribed to the fact that the reform was teacher-centered and partially teacher-driven. Instead of taking an ‘out with the old and in with the new’ approach (firing under-performing teachers and relying on new hires to create change), the Benwood Initiative invested in the teachers it already had, providing ongoing professional development focused on high-quality classroom instruction.

The most high-profile of the Benwood reforms was a financial incentive plan, established by local business leaders, and designed to attract top talent to Benwood classrooms. These incentives, which included help with mortgages and graduate school payments, as well as performance bonuses, appeared in the press, government proposals, and policy papers nationwide. Yet only 5% of teachers actually participated in the incentive plan. Silva concludes that the impact of financial incentives was "overstated" and that reforms that focused on existing teachers, such as mentoring, collaboration, and feedback, were at least as successful as trying to bring in new talent, if not more so.

In an ultimately successful move, the district superintendent asked Benwood teachers and principals about their needs and opinions, and then listened to what they had to say. As a result, teachers soon had "mentor and peer support, constructive principal feedback, and more time for instruction and lesson preparation." The district brought in consulting teachers, leadership coaches, and additional staff such as reading specialists, and fostered an improved relationship with the union. This new atmosphere of collaboration, support, respect, and progress led to more satisfied teachers, better schools, higher-performing students, and a more effective administration.

There are many lessons to be taken from this. As Silva affirms, "teacher effectiveness isn't fixed." Instead, supporting and inspiring teachers to challenge themselves is not only possible, but essential to building better schools. Teacher-centered reform should not mean mass firings and new hiring, but helping teachers become more effective, and allowing those teachers to have a voice in the reform process.

Sounds pretty inspired.

Thanks to Research Assistant Rebecca Shinners for researching and drafting this post.

Why is science so cool in school?

There was the science room in elementary school where we could touch frogs and taxidermied skunks. There was Mrs. Stemler’s dissection of a pig uterus in middle school. And all of my most potent high school memories come from biology, chemistry, and physics.

As a high school English teacher it did not escape my notice that the most memorable things were still happening in the science wing of my building. I married a science teacher and for years I’ve seen that his dinner-table school-stories are way more engaging than mine.

This has prompted me to wonder, why is science so cool in school?

I think it’s because the root of science as a study is inquiry and inquiry requires problem-solving and an active approach to learning. By its very nature, the subject of science requires inspired teaching – especially if teachers build their instruction around the scientific method and use exploratory experimentation as the foundation of their curriculum.

While there is plenty one can read about science in textbooks and magazines – the subject lends itself so well to hands-on investigations of every concept learned. From the kindergarten grow-a-lima-bean experiment to the high school physics matchbox-car-derby, there are a million and one ways teachers can bring exciting experiments into the classroom.

But why should science teachers get to have all the fun?

No matter what subject you teach, there’s probably some way you can link your curriculum to the fun of science. Students can read about the latest scientific discoveries in English and discoveries of the past in History. They can write biographies of famous scientists, or perform an experiment and practice writing directions to describe how the experiment was done. Experiments that require measurement obviously involve math. Physical education can easily lend itself to experiments that study heart rate, speed, and even the biological wonder of how we turn food into energy. Art teachers can revel in the beauty of nature and tie into math as well as they look for geometric patterns in the growth of all living things.

As our young people grow up into professionals in a highly specialized job market, the need for scientists will never be greater. No matter what we teach in school, science should not be a side-subject and it can easily play a feature role in the “core subjects” we must teach every day. Perhaps if that happens all of school will be cool – not just one subject a day…

Let’s teach them to make Molotov Cocktails!... or not.

In the summer of 2004 I taught in a program called the Civic Leadership Institute run through Northwestern University. The goal of the program was to take extremely bright high school students away for 3 weeks, plant them in the poorest parts of cities (Chicago and Baltimore), give them service projects to do each day and courses to take on civic leadership each evening, and by the end of the program they’d leave with a passion for changing the world.

The summer of 2004 was an interesting time to be teaching in this program. I spent those weeks with amazing kids and incredibly passionate teachers. The teaching staff was disproportionately liberal (in fact I’m not sure there was a Republican among us.) And with the election months away we spent many of our lesson-planning hours debating the future of our country. The war in Iraq was going badly, and we were spending every day with our kids experiencing the reality of extreme problems in our own country that were going relatively unnoticed.

Part of the Baltimore program included a trip to Washington, DC and my colleagues thought it would be a good experience for the students to arrange a protest outside the White House. I don’t remember what exactly happened politically the day before we were scheduled to go but some bit of news had really riled up a few of the teachers and when I stumbled upon them in the lounge they were talking about teaching their students to make Molotov Cocktails. They were joking of course about this element of the experience, but an organized protest was still very much in the planning stages. Several of them had been part of the war protests in Chicago the previous year and had spent time behind bars for their participation. They were heroes in my eyes, real activists who had put their beliefs on the line in a way I never had.

In almost every way the opportunity to turn our kids onto social activism was incredibly exciting, but I knew there was something wrong with this protest plan. The kids would have jumped on board in a heartbeat. They would even have loved the thrill of getting carted off and fingerprinted for their role in a protest. But I knew they would have been doing it for all the wrong reasons.

In a summer program, away from their parents, their preachers, and their communities, my kids were searching for sage adult advice to help them put the poverty, neglect, and inequity they were experiencing in perspective. Tempting though it was to provide my own perspective when solicited, I was conscious that these students’ parents, preachers, and communities had entrusted me with their safe-keeping, not their indoctrination into my own belief system.

I talked this over with my colleagues and after passions had cooled a bit they all agreed. Even though I knew we’d made the right decision, I went to bed that night feeling like I’d disappointed myself.

Had I just killed an experience that would have led these young people to become the greatest political leaders of our future?

Had I pro-actively diffused an important spark of passion for social justice?

But then I remembered the huge political movements of the past and the way that those with the power of experience and knowledge can easily persuade those without to believe in agendas that lead to both good and terribly bad outcomes. That summer it was my role as a teacher to provide my students with the space to develop their own beliefs based on their own experiences and knowledge.

Years later I know that many of those students went on to be leaders on their college campuses. They ran service learning spring break trips, majored in political science and sociology, led student activism groups, and joined political campaigns.

They will be future leaders, but I like to believe they will do this because it is a path they have chosen, not one we as teachers forced them to follow.

Even Superheroes Need to Sleep

I’ve never met a teacher who signed up for the job because he or she wanted to be mediocre in the classroom. Everyone comes to that position from a slightly different place but when you ask teachers why they chose to teach, you tend to get some variation on one theme: to make a difference in the lives of young people.

That’s a pretty lofty career aspiration if you think about it. It’s right up there with a doctor’s wish to make people well, and a fireman’s wish to keep people safe. So it’s not really surprising that many find teaching to be a stressful job. When you wake up every morning determined to make a difference in the lives of children, all the obstacles of the day that try to divert you from that goal can get a bit overwhelming.

Even if you don’t visibly let yourself sink beneath the pressure, your body may be the first to let you know it’s feeling the stress. I remember one very stressful spring when everyone in the building seemed to want me to do something and I was trying desperately to sprout new arms and heads to accomplish everything on the list. My colleagues frequently remarked that I was shockingly calm and relaxed considering all that was going on. I told them I was feeling fine.

But then my eye started twitching.

It was the kind of twitch your eye does occasionally, just a simple muscle spasm, except that it happened almost constantly, all day, for a week. I ignored it. The feeling was unusual but not painful or particularly unpleasant and I had stacks of papers to grade, a student leadership conference to plan, the prom to oversee, and the tests to prepare for. I thought everything was going fine.

Then I talked to my mom on the phone. “You’re stressed out and overly tired,” she said. I rejected this observation and asked her how she could tell. “You’re talking really fast and I can hear the tiredness in your voice, trust me. You need to get some sleep.” My mom has been a teacher for fifteen years, and she knows me very well, so hiding teacher-stress from her was not going to work.

“But I have so much to do! I have enough work to pull an all-nighter and then some,” I whined into the phone. That’s when she gave me advice I’ve held onto ever since. “You’re going to be less productive trying to work when you’re tired than you’ll be with a good night’s sleep. All that work will still be there tomorrow and its completion is not life or death. Put some of those papers you’re grading in the circular file cabinet – no one will miss them. You have to take care of yourself before you can take care of your kids.”

She was right. A good night’s sleep cured my twitching eye, and the kids never even asked about those papers.

When you’re trying to “make a difference in the lives of young people,” it’s easy to convince yourself that you don’t need to spend time making a difference in your own life. But if you don’t, progress towards your ultimate goal will meet the limitations of your own body and mind.

After all, even superheroes need to sleep.

Confidence: The Secret to Test Success

Second period freshman English was a motley crew of the lowest-performing, worst-behaved, hopeless cases at my high school. On the first day of class they looked around the room and up at me and asked who I’d pissed off in the administration. “We’re the worst in the school and we’re all in the class for dumb kids.” For some reason I became a liar and an actress in that awkward moment because with great confidence I explained that they were quite mistaken and that actually this was an honors class. They didn’t really believe me, but they didn’t have any way to prove me wrong, and so our semester of “honors” English began.

The class was small and that group of eight posed no threat thanks to their desire to live up to their befuddling “honors” reputation. They worked hard that semester. They ditched most of their classes, but not mine. They supported one another and called our group a family.

The principal told me he didn’t expect them to pass the end-of-grade test but he didn’t want them in the other ninth grade classes where they would disrupt their peers and bring the overall scores down with their antics. So, from the start, my competitive nature established the goal that they would ALL pass the test. Passing the test was also required for them to move to sophomore English. Every one of them had been stuck in ninth grade for a few years thanks to this one course.

You’d think with such a goal I would have had a robust action plan in place, but I would have to say my greatest test prep strategy was simply telling them they would pass. They were honors students after all. They knew the material. They were reading novels (for many, this was a first). They could write. They were going to pass.

So on the day of the test they had to fill in the cover sheet with their names, my name, the title of the course, and whether or not it was an honors course. And you already know what they filled in. I could have cleared up my lie on that last day, but what would the point have been?

Every last one of them passed. It’s crazy what a little confidence can accomplish.

An Inspiring Reality Check

I came to Inspired Teaching in 2004 with a pretty high opinion of myself as a teacher. I’d worked with students grades 4 through college and always had a good rapport with my kids and good reviews from my administrators. At times I had questioned the academic impact of my teaching on the lives of my pupils, but casual comparison with my fellow educators always made it clear I wasn’t doing any worse than them, and in most instances I was better.

That was enough for me until I took the Inspired Teaching Institute.

I’d been working with Inspired Teaching for a full year before I took their flagship course. I’d participated in enough workshops to know it would be interesting and probably entertaining, but I didn’t really expect to learn anything new. Boy, was I in for a surprise.

Over the course of 5 weeks the facilitators led me through a rigorous process of self-examination and teacher transformation. This is an outline of the process Inspired Teaching uses to accomplish this:

Step 1. Analyze and deepen my understanding of the ways I learn.

Step 2. Articulate and defend my philosophy of teaching and learning, including what I believe about children. Find room in my philosophy for an appreciation of children's natural curiosity and desire to learn.

Step 3. Make the connection to classroom practice. Develop new strategies to make sure my philosophy of teaching and learning matches what I do in the classroom.

Step 4. Build the skills of effective teachers, including listening, asking thoughtful questions, observing, and communicating effectively.

Step 5. Practice! Create and practice new strategies that will make my classroom an active place of learning fueled by students' ideas. Arm myself with research that shows children learn best when they engage in work that is important and challenging.

And this is what happened to me: I realized that I had a lot to learn as a teacher and someday when I go back to the classroom, I’ll be doing things completely differently. I learned that “better” than my fellow educators was still not good enough for my students. I learned that even if I thought I had high expectations for my students, the discipline systems I was using to control them conflicted with my belief that they had the capacity to govern themselves. I learned that teaching students the rules of grammar means little if I haven’t also empowered them to use those rules to strengthen their own writing. I learned so much more. I was truly humbled by the experience.

Before I took the Inspired Teaching Institute I believed I was a good teacher, and I had references in the world outside that experience to back up this belief. But after taking the workshop I discovered my desire to be an exceptional teacher and I became fully aware of the fact that this is something I can’t accomplish in a single course or a program. It’s something I’ll have to continually work toward my whole life.

Got Motivation? Not in this environment!

There has been a lot of talk in the news lately about what must be done to motivate students. How do we “get them to perform” on standardized tests? How do we “get them to achieve” at grade level? How do we “get them to behave” according to the rules and regulations of the school?

There’s a growing trend out there to bring money into the conversation. Our neighbors in New York City and Baltimore are experimenting with paying students for their test performance. In schools in DC, students are rewarded with pizza parties for good attendance. And in classrooms across the country students participate in “behavior modification systems” designed to recognize good rule-followers with sticker charts and prizes.

Though some of the approaches are new, the philosophy from which they are born is not. Over the past several years we’ve begun to operate under the assumption that kids need to be bribed into “doing well” in school. Perhaps this is because going to school isn’t very inspiring these days.

In many instances we’ve traded the joys of art, music, PE, even recess for more “instructional time” devoted to math and language arts. We’ve abandoned field trips for the same reason. In order to maximize this instructional time, we’ve had to minimize class disruptions so we’ve grown more strict about keeping students in their seats and off their feet. We have so much to cover in a school year; there’s no time for deviating from the standard curriculum so students’ individual interests cannot be pursued unless they happen to fit within the content we’re required to teach. And now we’re in the thick of testing season with the added pressure of filling any available mind space with the facts kids need to do well on the big exams. And we as teachers will be judged much more by how students do on these tests than they will.

If you were a student in this environment you might need an incentive to get up in the morning and go to school. (Indeed, all the talk of merit pay implies teachers need that push as well.) At a young age you might not question being bought for a slice of pizza, extra recess time, or a couple of bucks.

But when you grow up and get into the real world, nobody pays you to be a good parent. If you get paid to go to college, it’s only because you’ve worked hard to be a strong student or athlete. You get paid to work, but nobody pays you to have the right qualifications for the job, or the motivation to keep it. No one is going to hand out checks to folks who treat their spouses and family members with dignity. You don’t get a pizza party for showing up to a meeting on time.

While there are often short-term rewards for the prizes and payoffs we currently use to keep students “on track” in school, there may also be real long-term problems associated with failing to instill intrinsic motivation in our young people.

We can only build the intrinsic motivation to learn in our students if we make the learning itself an appealing option. As a student, I can look forward to going to school because I want to know what happens in the next chapter of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, or because I am excited about the building project we’re doing in geometry. I can even look forward to going to school to take the test if I know it will give me an opportunity to show off how smart I’ve become this year. But if I’m asked to go to school to meet AYP, you’re going to have to sweeten the deal for me because that goal has nothing to do with what matters to me as a young person.

Working Memory: The Conscious Processing of Information

(Notes from a chapter of the same name in Brain Matters: Translating Research into Classroom Practice by Patricia Wolfe)

Getting students to remember what we teach for more than 15-20 seconds is not easy, but it’s also not impossible if we understand how the brain works and make use of strategies that get information to stick.

The Cocktail Party Effect

• Even when lots of people are talking all around you, it is possible to pay attention to one person who is talking directly to you. Using selective auditory attention, your brain allows you to pay attention to the information that is most relevant.

• However, it is nearly impossible to consciously process two trains of thought at the same time, especially if they involve the same sensory modality.

Implications for your teaching: It is important to minimize classroom distractions as much as possible because you don’t really want it to resemble a cocktail party, but when students are working in groups it may very well sound that way. So, if a lot is going on in your room at a given time, think of ways to make distractions work to your favor by providing additional ways for students to learn. For example, make the things you post on your walls informative so your visual learners can take in something new and important when they’re gazing around the room. If you or your students are giving an oral presentation, try to include an additional learning modality in your talk. Can you include visual charts or pictures? Can you incorporate movement into the learning process?

The Magical Number Seven (Plus or Minus Two):
Our span of immediate memory tends to be around 7. The number of digits children can recall accurately increases by one every two years until a mental age of 15 at which point the magical number of 7 is reached.

Implications for your teaching: When I learned vocabulary words in school I usually had lists of 20 words to memorize in a week. Years later I probably only remember a fraction of the words I was taught, partly because I was given too many to learn at one time. When I taught vocabulary to my students I only gave them 8 words to learn in a week but at the end of the year they were able to define and use almost every word they learned during the week. The old phrase “less is more” applies here!

Rote Rehearsal
Rote rehearsal is repeating the information over and over, but this strategy for memorizing typically works better with skills or habits than with content.

Implications for your teaching: Rote rehearsal happens to be the main strategy we use when trying to get students to learn a lot of material – so it’s interesting to note that it doesn’t actually work that well when it comes to content. So, when teaching content, we should rely more on these other strategies than on repetition of the facts.

Habits of the Teacher Mind

“When we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

~ Wendell Berry

In reflecting on “Habits of Mind” that we want to cultivate in our students it’s interesting to note that they are often similar to the habits we need to cultivate in ourselves as teachers.

Every second we spend in the classroom requires us to make decisions – some small, some large. We have to mediate conflicts while simultaneously ensuring students are comprehending content. We have to plan lessons at the same time we grade past assignments. We have to dedicate ourselves to our students and to our lives outside of school.

How do we do all these things? We employ our own set of “Habits of Mind.”

Much of what we know about what works in the classroom must be learned through trial and error, and patient progress through experience. At Inspired Teaching we have spent several years learning from teachers and from our own teaching experience. Our observations have generated a list of qualities we believe exceptional teachers possess and what follows is an attempt to condense them into what we could call Habits of the Teacher Mind.

What would you add to this list? What would you take away? Let us know!

Habits of the Teacher Mind

Inspired Teachers are…

1. Passionate about the art of teaching, the subject matter, and the students we teach.
2. Compassionate and dedicated to building positive, and productive relationships with and among students, colleagues, parents and the community.
3. Observant and proactive, using the data we collect from our students to help them reach their full potential in school and in life.
4. Reflective and curious, always seeking new ways to improve our practice and reach our students.
5. True facilitators who know how to get the most out our students by holding them to and helping them reach high expectations.

Our goal is to teach students how to think, not just what to think and as educators this is also the goal we hold for ourselves.

Do I get a grade for my EQ?

Every time I’ve ever been cast in a play I’ve played a mother. In college that was my nickname on every dorm-room floor. When I was a high school teacher it was not infrequent for my students to accidentally call me mom. In my adult life I’ve probably spent more time listening to people share their feelings than I have watching TV. I’ve never been tested, but I suspect my EQ (emotional quotient) could run a few circles around my IQ.

So, it’s little wonder that one of the most meaningful things a student ever wrote to me reads: “through this class I have learned how to create, imagine, and dream. Thank you. It’s because of your encouragement I’ve become comfortable expressing myself.”

The standards I was supposed to teach her focused primarily on comprehension and analysis of various American literary genres, and she did an amazing job of learning everything she was taught. But that’s not what she remembered from my class.

Without knowing what I was doing, I was building my students’ emotional intelligence. And I was just doing what came naturally. I think one of the biggest errors people make as new teachers is assuming emotion has no place in the classroom. I loathe the old saying, “don’t smile until Christmas” because it forces teachers to suppress one of the true joys of teaching! If I didn’t smile at least once in class I knew the day was NOT going well.

How we feel, what we feel, and why we feel are core elements of what makes us human. Teaching about these elements of our humanity comes naturally if we’re in touch with these elements of ourselves. You don’t have to deviate from your general instruction. You just have to bring emotional intelligence into your instruction.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Pre and Post Test Reflections – Have students write a brief description of how they’re feeling prior to taking a test. After the test is completed, have the last item on the assessment be a question that asks how they’re feeling after finishing. Be sure to ask WHY they are feeling this way – that really helps students examine where their feelings come from.

End of Class Shout-Outs – At the end of the class period (especially one in which you’ve worked through a complex assignment or had a particularly intense discussion) invite students to give shout-outs to their peers. A shout-out is a piece of positive feedback like: “I’d like to give a shout-out to Rashawn for helping me understand this math problem.” Push your students to be as specific as possible. In this way they’re not only learning how to support each other but how to identify their own good qualities.

Birthday Silhouettes – For younger students, trace their bodies on a piece of butcher paper or bulletin board paper on their birthday (for older students you can just use a decorated piece of poster board). Ask each student in the class to offer a positive statement about this student that you write on the paper. Make sure students’ comments are specific. The birthday girl or boy takes the paper home at the end of the class.

Life Boxes – Ask students to bring in shoeboxes that they’ve decorated at home along with 5 things they can put into these “life boxes” that are very important to them (but not things that could get stolen). One at a time, invite students to share the contents of their life boxes with the rest of the class and to explain the way they decorated the boxes. The rest of the class should be encouraged to ask questions and make comments about what is shared. The life boxes should stay in the classroom for a while so everyone can look at them, and when students are doing writing activities they can go to these boxes for inspiration!

What can I do in my classroom to maximize student success?

So you have 5 and a half months of school to go, and a room full of students primed and ready for the most important stretch of the academic year. You want every one of them to be successful, but you have SO MANY to keep track of! What can you do to maximize their potential right now? Consider the following questions and ideas as they relate to your class:

The Physical Classroom Space
Study your classroom throughout the day and look at how the space is being used. Consider the following questions and think about new ways to organize the room to best suit the needs of you and your students.

• Do you have a quiet corner for students who need to get away from external stimuli to focus?
• Can you easily move students from individual work to group or partner work?
• Do students know where to find things in the room if they need to get their own supplies (pencils, paper, staples, paper clips, scissors, etc.)?
• If you have a teacher-desk, where is it located? How do you use it? Is there another way to use that space that would be better for students?
• Do you have computers in your room? If they don’t work, is there a way you can move them to free up space? If they do work, is there a way you can use them more for students who learn best with this tool?
• How do you move around the room throughout the day? Is it easy for you to reach all students? How could you rearrange desks so that your path is even easier to travel?

Student to student relationships
There is only one of you in the classroom at any given moment, but there are always many students. At this point in the year you can use that to your advantage and share a little more of the responsibility for teaching with the class. For example:

• Partner students of different abilities so some have teaching opportunities and others have an additional support.
• Create small working groups that focus on different projects (reading different books, taking math problems at different levels of complexity, research projects on different topics).
• Try the “ask 3, then me” rule where students can ask for help from 3 of their fellow students before they ask you. This gives you more time to work individually with students and fosters more self-reliance in the classroom.

Creative Techniques for Each Individual Child
You can’t possibly meet every student’s needs all the time, but there are some tiny individual things you might consider that end up helping everyone in the class. For example:

• Can you give your more physical students something to manipulate (like a squishy ball, or a piece of yarn) so they can burn off energy and pay attention?
• Do your students always have to sit in chairs? Some might be more comfortable on the floor (consider getting some cheap carpet squares, pillows, or yoga mats for this purpose), and some might even be more comfortable if they can stand. See if a local office supply store will donate clipboards to your class for those students who hate to be confined to a desk.
• What happens when you play music in class? Some students really do learn better when there is a little noise in the air. Some need total quiet. Think about what would happen if you allowed headphones in class when students are working independently. (In some schools these aren’t allowed and they pose problems when it comes to stealing, but for some students they can make the difference between acting out and getting down to the business of learning.)

What skills are needed in a democracy?

According to an article by John Patrick, when we think about teaching students to be informed participants in a democracy there are three areas in which educators tend to focus: civic knowledge, civic skills, and civic virtues.

This is how he describes each area:
"Civic knowledge consists of fundamental ideas and information that learners must know and use to become effective and responsible citizens of a democracy… In particular, it involves concepts and data about democracy in the learner's country and comparisons with other countries.

"Civic skills are the cognitive operations that enable the learner to understand, explain, compare, and evaluate principles and practices of government and citizenship … Civic skills involve the citizen's use of knowledge to think and act competently in response to the ongoing challenges of democratic governance and citizenship.

"Civic virtues … are the traits of character necessary for the preservation and improvement of democratic governance and citizenship. Examples of civic virtues are respect for the worth and dignity of each person, civility, integrity, self-discipline, tolerance, compassion, and patriotism.”

In the context of the school day we can think about these three areas in terms of the content we need to teach, the skills students must develop to understand the content, and the sense of community we build in our classroom so students feel safe and can focus on learning.

The problem solving students do today in math class should build the same skills necessary in the future to solve a budget deficit, an architectural challenge, or an applied math solution to a biological crisis.

The critical thinking students put into planning a debate today should build the same skills necessary in the future to present an argument in court, negotiate an important business deal, or make a political speech.

The social skills students develop while learning to work together in your class should build the same skills they’ll need in the future to hold leadership positions in their jobs, or work with a team to accomplish a business objective.

The skills needed in a democracy are the same skills we already know students need to be successful in school. But if we think about them as important beyond their relevance to passing benchmarks, meeting AYP, and getting good grades – perhaps we’ll endow them with a even more enticing significance.

A Sample Question Curriculum

In November, Center for Inspired Teaching presented at the Coalition of Essential Schools Fall Forum in Denver, CO. Participants in our workshop put their heads together to create a "Question Curriculum" that offers several thought provoking ideas!

Participants began by brainstorming inspired questions their students might ask and then generated sub-questions, divided by subject area, that would address these larger ideas.

K-3 Question Curriculum

Inspired Question: Why is she mean to me?

Subject Area Sub-Questions
Social Skills

• How can we include everyone?
• What are ways we can support each other?
• Do we know of periods of time where people were mean to each other?

Language Arts and Reading

• Have you ever felt this way?
• Has anyone read a story about people being mean to you?

Writing

• How can writing help us solve our problems?
• What would you say to someone who was mean to you?
• Can you write a story about a time you solved a problem
• about someone being mean to you?

Science

• How do you feel when someone is mean to you?
• How can you tell how someone is feeling?
• What did you notice when you did…?

Math

• Can we keep track of acts of kindness- tally marks, graph

Inspired Question: Why did my dog die?

Subject Area Sub-Questions
Social Skills

• Have you experienced a loss?
• Can you imagine what it feels like?
• How can you help others?
• What helped you?

Language Arts and Reading

• Read books about loss and ask- how did you feel?

Writing

• How can writing help you deal with your loss?

Science

• Life cycle- how do we care for ourselves?
• What happens to our bodies?

Math

• How long do we live?

4-5 Question Curriculum
Inspired Question: Why is our world in conflict?

Subject Area Sub-Questions
Reading

• Why did the Holocaust happen?

Writing

• Why do we fight with people we love?

Math

• Why is gas so expensive?

Science

• How will global warming increase conflict?

Social Studies

• Why are we in Iraq?

6-8 Question Curriculum

Inspired Question: Why are things unfair?

Subject Area Sub-Questions
Math

• How do we show that things aren’t fair?
• What mathematical representations can illustrate unfairness?

Social Studies

• Should things be unfair?
• Is the justice system fair?

Language Arts and Literature

• What is the definition of unfair?
• What literature pieces give examples of fair/unfair?

Science

• Is ‘survival of the fittest’ fair?
• How do we make environmental decisions?
  

Art

• Does advertising impose ideas of fairness/unfairness?
• What areas of the arts are open to whom? Fair?
  

Health

• Why do bad things happen to good people?
• Why are some people healthier than others?

Inspired Question: Why are illegal immigrants returned to Mexico?

Subject Area Sub-Questions
Math

• What is the demographic distribution of people in the United States and Mexico?
• What is the relative income between Mexico and the United States?

Social Studies

• What are nations? What are borders?
• How do you choose where you live?

9-12 Question Curriculum
Inspired Question: Why can’t you just tell me?

Subject Area Sub-Questions
Math

• What is the difference between knowing something and understanding something?

Science

• How does discovery lead to new inventions?

Language Arts and Humanities

• Why do you have to learn some things on your own and what experiences have you had on your own?

History

• Why is there only one answer?

More Movement Ideas

What are some other ways you can bring movement into the classroom?

So you want to get your class up and moving... where to begin? These are a few simple activities you can use to get students on their feet and out of their seats. As recess time gets taken over by the cold weather, some of these energy-burners may become the difference between an unruly afternoon and one that makes way for learning!

Warm Ups
Count Down Shake Down: The class should do this in unison. Beginning with the right hand, shake and count in rhythm 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1, then do the same with the left hand, the right foot and the left foot. Begin again with the right hand and count in rhythm this time from 9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1, move to the left hand, right foot and left foot. Continue counting down until you get to one. You can start at a higher or lower number depending on how much shaking you need the class to do!

What's Shakin'? Call out parts of the body to shake, for example:
Shake your right hand.
Add your left shoulder.
Add your right knee.
What's shakin'? Students will respond: "right hand, left shoulder, right knee"
Now, take out your right knee.
Add your left knee.
Take out your right hand.
Add your head.
What's shakin'? Students will respond: "left shoulder, left knee, head"

Zip, Zap, Zop: This activity is done in a circle. The starter gestures (with the palms of both hands together, arms straight, and all fingers pointing out) to someone in the circle and says, "ZIP". That person gestures to someone else in the circle and says, "ZAP". That person gestures to someone else in the circle and says "ZOP". The next player says "ZIP" and play continues.

Subject Specific Movements
Vocabulary Exercises: Students create stretches or exercises that express the meaning behind each of their vocabulary words. These exercises can be used to start each class period or practiced right before the test so the words are fresh in their minds.

Math Movement Chants: Many teachers use math chants and accompanying movements to help students remember concepts or formulas. This site may provide you with a few ideas but you can just as easily have your students create their own.
http://www.songsforteaching.com/numberscounting.htm

Acting Out History: Have students choose particular events from their history or social studies text books to dramatize. Acting out these events and then talking about the experience is a good way to make these "events from the past" relevant to students' lives today.

Science in the Everyday: As much as possible try to connect science concepts to real-world applications. Bring in living things when discussing biology, use common household chemicals when talking about chemistry, look at everyday phenomena to explain physical theories. This is more work for you up front, but the more students connect what they learn in a textbook with their own lives, the more interesting and engaging the material will seem!

New Thanksgiving Stories

At my first Thanksgiving as a new teacher I was the center of attention at the dinner table. My first three months had provided me with plenty of captivating tales to tell. It felt good to make the table ooh and ahh, laugh and gasp, over my stories. But I remember feeling slightly uncomfortable after the dinner table talk died down.

These stories were of the variety that capture public attention, but they were not stories that captured the magic I felt in being a teacher. They were true, but they were also mainly shocking. Like most of the news we hear about schools they featured the appallingly low skills of my students, the struggle to overcome a tremendous lack of resources in my school, the atrocious behaviors that cropped up in my classroom, the adult experiences endured by teenage children, etc., etc., etc.

My stories were not of the inspiring variety, and I remember thinking when I went to bed that I had created a grim picture of my school in the minds of my audience. Though I knew the picture was accurate, it was not complete, and I was sad that I had not used my moment on the stage to talk about all the beautiful things that also happened within those cinder-block walls.

Maybe this is why people have such a bad opinion of schools in general. We don't tend to tell many of the good stories, although in even the worst schools wonderful things happen every day. These are not the things of bold headlines, often they're so tiny they escape the notice of nearly everyone in the building.

Last week we asked our Teacher Advisory Board, a group of about 15 DC Public School teachers, to share their inspiring stories from the past 3 months of school. It took a minute for the group to warm up to the request. That's just not the way we're used to talking about school.

Eventually these are some of the beautiful things that came out:

• A Head Start student who has already been kicked out of 5 elementary schools finally found a teacher who is taking the time to see what makes him tick. He's learning to work with his peers and trust the love he's getting from his teacher.
  
• A music teacher found a way to let a suspended student attend the opera because she'd seen a spark light up in him when he studied the score.
  
• Tasked with the challenge of teaching a classroom full of boys, a teacher changed her style to incorporate more kinesthetic learning in the day.
  
• After struggling under challenging leadership for a few years, a teacher has discovered new enthusiasm for his profession with an inspiring new principal.
• A lesson on nutrition empowered one young girl to teach her mother about what constitutes a healthy breakfast.

These are just a few of the stories we heard, and they're not the kinds of stories you're likely to see covered on tonight's evening news. But they are the kinds of stories that keep teachers coming back to school every day, and they're the stories that hint at the slow but incredibly powerful work we are engaged in when we set about the task of helping children reach their full potential.

I like to think I didn't tell these kinds of stories that Thanksgiving long ago because I didn't have them to tell. But I did. In truth I think I knew they wouldn't get the same reaction out of my audience. Perhaps if we told these stories more, people would begin to expect more out of our schools because they would see what is possible.

This Thanksgiving I have the tales of these teachers to tell. I have the other variety too. But I've come to believe those really aren't the stories people need to hear.

This is Our Classroom

This is a lesson on belonging as taught by a mysteriously decapitated Nasturtium.

After spending several months getting to know my 9th grade students I had arrived at several conclusions - key amongst them was the realization that they hadn't had many of elementary school experiences I remembered with great fondness from my own childhood. So, I tried to find ways to weave these experiences into their adolescent lives in ways that made them seem (at least tangentially) relevant to the curriculum I had to teach (9th Grade English).

The Nasturtium project was one such effort. Most of my students claimed they had never planted anything in their lives - not even the lima-bean-in-a-cup that is the standard science project of so many Kindergarten classrooms. We were beginning a poetry unit and it seemed like as good a time as any to explore the magic of watching a seed grow. I wanted something more exciting than a lima bean and something that would grow quickly so we could write about this growth process weekly and explore the metaphorical connection between the seed>plant>flower and their own lives. Upon a quick study of flowers, the Nasturtium emerged as the seed of choice with only a week's gestation period and the promise of flowers by the end of the month.

The students were so excited to plant the seeds. They took the watering of those seeds more seriously than they had taken most of what we done all year. The poetry flowed each week as they watched the seeds sprout, grow leaves, and then get moved from cups to pots. Simile, metaphor, and personification came naturally as they saw beautiful parallels between the unfurling of each new leaf and their own emergence into young adulthood.

I had three classes doing the project and each was incredibly possessive of its tray of plants. Students often ran to class early to chatter over how their plants were greener, taller, stronger, than those of another class. (In truth they were all basically the same.) They brought in students from other classes to show off the wondrous lives they were cultivating.

Real excitement began to brew as the month drew to an end and the first bud of a flower appeared. Strangely, only one appeared at first. It belonged to Diana in 3rd period. Each morning hoards of students would pour into my classroom to see if Diana's plant had bloomed. What color would it be? When would it appear? How long would it last? These were the questions that bubbled amongst them. A little jealousy was present, but I never thought it would cause any harm.

Then, one day, probably the very day that bud should have burst open, we arrived at 3rd period and found it severed at the stem. A pair of guilty looking scissors lay on the counter beside the plant tray with traces of green juice fresh along the edge of the blades. Someone had snuck into the room when I wasn't there to commit the crime.

Chaos ensued. Anger rose. Some students began to cry. Threats of payback flew. My students, people who had witnessed human cruelty of the worst kind many times in their young lives, were horrified by this tiny act of plant violence. I did not know what to do, so I set aside my plans for the class, moved the desks into a circle, and we talked about how they were feeling.

This was a class that, at the start of the year, regularly erupted into verbal altercations and had come to blows more than once. But surprisingly, none of the students ever suggested the flower-murderer came from their own class. On this day they were adamant that no one in our class would ever hurt one of their own. Even though only one student's plant was affected, they felt a collective sense of loss because that single flower had been a source of collective pride. As I listened to them speak I realized that my silly plant project had become something much bigger for these students. Perhaps it was because they had been asked to make a personal connection to these plants from the time they were seeds.

After some careful discussion moderation, I successfully convinced the class not to partake in retaliatory pruning of the other classes' plants - and we even got some powerful poetry out of the experience. But the best thing that came out of the Nasturtium project, at least for that class, was not particularly academic. It was a sense of belonging and a sense of collective responsibility for one another. That experience has often made me wonder what would happen in our world if teaching kindness, respect, and compassion were as important in our schools as teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Within a week everyone's plant had bloomed, and Diana's quickly grew another flower of its own. The culprit behind the plant crime never came forward but, lucky for us all, the scissors never struck again.

The Rewards of Taking Risks

A teacher brings a field trip she couldn't take into the classroom. Students take a stand in the name of free expression. Each of these true stories was a risk, and the risk-takers experienced the rewards.

The Risk: Carol teaches Pre-K in the inner city. Her students have never been to a pumpkin patch. She wants to do the traditional "trip to a farm" but due to budgetary constraints and concerns that "out of class time = no learning" she's not allowed to take the students this year. Carol is undeterred. She takes a weekend drive to a pumpkin patch and with her own money buys enough pumpkins for every student in the class. She also buys a bushel of apples, several hay bales, and some corn stalks. "If I can't take them to the farm, I"ll bring the farm to them," she says. On Monday morning she arrives at school before the sun comes up and sets to work creating a "pumpkin patch" on the playground. She covers the pumpkins with hay so the students can hunt for them, and hides the apples as well. She ties the cornstalks to tree trunks and sets up a paint station, a clay station, apumpkin carving station, and a giant tarp/tent. When the students arrive they spend the morning "on the farm."

The Reward: "I might get written up for insubordination," Carol says, "but to see the smiles on my students' faces - that made the whole thing worth it." She recognizes that the learning experience her students had that morning trumps whatever she could have taught them about math or writing.

The Risk: Richard walked into high school one day with his usually blonde hair dyed bright green. His hair caused quite a sensation and, in the eyes of his principal, quite a distraction, so by the time 4th period rolled around he was in the office being suspended. I was Richard's American Literature teacher and it just so happened that we were deep in a week-long debate about the virtues and drawbacks of our American freedoms as described in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. When Richard was missing from class, the students shared his story. They were indignant that he should be suspended for what they considered his right to free expression. I encouraged them to use the power of the pen to share their concerns with the principal. They did, but their letter was met with the explanation that the rights of an American citizen and the rights of high school students are not the same. So, they took an even bigger risk. After school they met at one student's house and the entire class dyed their hair a wonderful rainbow of florescent colors.

The Reward: When this group (representing the highest achieving students in the school) marched in the next day, there were too many students to suspend (and too many influential parents involved). Richard was allowed back in school and the students celebrated what they considered a triumph of their rights as free citizens and the potential power of social activism.

Neither of these risks was particularly "academic" and yet it would be difficult to argue that learning didn't take place in each example. While it's never a good idea to take risks that put students in danger, those that challenge their minds and encourage them to seek their own pathways for learning are undeniably valuable.

Ultimately, shouldn't learning that stretches one's mind, takes one to new places, and opens new doors - be exactly the kind of learning we're supposed to do in school?

Being Fully Present for Your Students

With so much to focus on in the classroom it can be easy to switch into auto-pilot when it comes to giving your students feedback. Unfortunately this often cheats you and them out of a meaningful learning experience. So what can we do to be fully present in the classroom?

Engage the Body and the Brain
Your mind and body must work together so if you're going to be mentally engaged with your class you need to be physically engaged as well. Try to exercise before or after work, this will improve your sleep and overall health which will make it easier to focus during the day. You can also include your students in your exercise by starting each class with a brief physical warm-up. This will bring the same benefits to your students!
Learn to Compartmentalize
The better you get at separating your work-life from your home-life the better the classroom experience will be for you, your students, and your family. This doesn't mean you shouldn't share elements of each world with the other. It simply means you deserve to have quality time away from each. The art of teaching requires balance in all aspects of your life. Explore hobbies, go on trips, spend time with people outside of work - these activities will keep you fresh when you're in school.
Listen and Repeat
If you're having trouble focusing on what your students have to say, practice listening and repeating what you hear. You can say things like, "So what you're saying is..." "Am I understanding this correctly?..." This makes the speaker feel heard and ensures that you understand what they've said.

Focus on the Details
Pay specific attention to your students' body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, etc. If you're focusing on these things you're less likely to get distracted. Try to remember details and practice recalling things your students said at the end of the day. If you can remember these things, chances are good you've been fully present during the day.

Eliminate Distractions
With so many ways for people to get in touch with us during the day it's easy to be distracted, even when we're teaching, by the world outside. Confine the use of your email, cell phone, pager, ipod, blackberry, etc. to times when students are not present. Even though its tempting to stay connected all day long, you'll find that you can enjoy the moments in your classroom more when they have your undivided attention.

Be Prepared, Be Organized
It goes without saying that a well planned day goes much better than one planned on the fly. It's not always easy to have everything planned in advance but doing so greatly reduces the stress on you and your students. Try to always be prepared at least one day ahead and have all the materials you'll need for a lesson ready before class begins. At the end of the day take 20 minutes to put everything in order for tomorrow. This ensures a calm start to the morning and a calm morning bodes well for the many hours that follow.
Be Gentle with Yourself
Making an effort to be fully present in your classroom is like any exercise, it takes time to build up the muscles that eventually make it easy. So, don't beat yourself up for daydreaming now and then or having an "off" day. Nobody is perfect, not even teachers. (Though we do come closer than most.)