Monday, June 24, 2019

Four Foundations Top Ten Habits #7

Next on the list of practices of great teachers is #7:

"I make it a habit to plan activities that require full involvement of all students."

Effective teachers make sure that all classroom activities engage all students. There are some students in every class who would love to answer every question and do every demonstration, and others who would be content to let them. Instead, teachers should set up all activities in such a way that all students must participate. 

It's important to avoid ‘batting practice’, or a situation where one student works and others merely observe (observation can be valuable, as long as students know that they will need to account for their observations in some way). This can be challenging during whole-class teaching or presentations. Here are a just a few ideas for making sure everyone stays involved in the learning:
  • Rather than just ‘follow along’ or watch others at work, students fill in a study guide or graphic organizer, or correct their own work.
  • During presentations or speeches, students use a grading sheet or rubric to assess student presentations.
  • During teacher presentations (which should be rare!) stop frequently and have students write three questions they have, briefly summarize the main point, or have them tell how they did the process differently.
  • Stop and have students engage in ‘mini-discussions’ with a partner on a specific question. Have one partner report to the class.   
For more on this very important habit, take a look at pages 19-25 in Four Foundations of Great Teaching

Tuesday, June 4, 2019

Four Foundations Top Ten Habits #6

We've considered five of the Four Foundations Top Ten habits so far:
-plan unit and daily lesson learning targets before planning activities
-write clear, student-learning-focused learning targets
-share the learning targets with students
-plan frequent formative assessments to check for understanding during lessons
-be sure that formative assessments are involuntary and all-inclusive

Next on the FF Top Ten is #6:
"I make it a habit to give frequent feedback to students that is specific and descriptive." 

Students need frequent feedback from teachers in order for them to know how they are doing in achieving the learning targets we have set for them. This feedback should be consciously connected to specific aspects of the learning, and it should be descriptive. Feedback that merely praises (e.g. "good job!") doesn't communicate to students what they are doing that is working well (and what is not), and how they can improve. Worse, it may ingrain a fixed mindset, even in stronger students, leading them to focus on maintaining their 'excellent' standing rather than on learning.  Giving specific, descriptive feedback helps to shift the responsibility for learning increasingly onto the student--which is where we want it to be. 

See The Four Foundations of Great Teaching, page 12, for more on this topic. 

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Developing great classroom habits is critical to our success as teachers, that is, our students' learning. According to research, it takes an average of 66 days to develop an automatic behavior--a habit. As teachers, we want the excellent practices described in the 'top ten' to become second nature, to be so natural and integrated into our classrooms that they are virtually habitual. We shouldn't just do them unthinkingly, of course, but certainly we want them to be so much a part of our classroom routine that something would seem out of place if we didn't do them. 

So, I encourage you to make it a goal to establish these practices as habits in your classroom. Put them deliberately into your daily plans for the next quarter and see if they don't become an important, nearly automatic, part of your daily teaching. Your students will benefit tremendously!

Monday, June 3, 2019

Formative Assessment Packet for 2019 ACCS Conference

The link below is for a 23 page packet I'll be using in my presentation on formative assessment at the ACCS Conference in Atlanta next week.

Formative Assessment Packet B Lynch 2019 ACCS Conference