By G. FAITH LITTLE

By the time you’ve cultivated a course curriculum, it’s easy to run out of steam as you move into building a unit plan, the detailed guide that will support your lesson planning. One way to make the most of your time and energy is to plan using a batching strategy. We can think of this like grocery shopping for the week.

If I walk down the aisles (online or in real life), filling my basket with ingredients for Monday (breakfast, lunch, dinner) then Tuesday (breakfast, lunch, dinner) and so on, the trip will take a while. If I shop by meal type, like breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, I cut down on the time and effort I spend. Of course, it’s even faster when I identify ingredients that can be used for more than one meal type. I pick up eggs to scramble for my breakfast sandwich and hard boil for my evening salads. I grab apples to go in my lunch box and morning smoothie. 

Like grocery shopping, when we identify areas in our unit plan that we can create or gather in batches, we cut down on the time we need to design that part of our plan. For instance, if we want to include transition tools for teachers to use in their lesson planning, we could develop our list in a batch starting with our own ideas and incorporating others:
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• Write down the transitions regularly used in the classroom
• Ask colleagues to share their favorite ways to transition between activities
• Ask students which transitions work best for them

Batch your transitions depending on what you and your students need in the classroom — is it about needing time? Do you want students to read, write, or talk to one another, or should they quietly move from one activity to the next? Do your transitions depend on whether students are individually working or in groups? Batch them in a way that works best for you, and drop the transitions you’ve collected into the batch that makes most sense:

One you have your lists together, it’s simple to drop transition tools, one at a time, into logical places in each unit plan. Even quicker, and possibly more empowering for other teachers, is to turn the list into a menu of options teachers can use to find what works best for their teaching style, content area, and students. 
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Here’s a menu we developed for educators at Jewish Home Lifecare who were teaching students how to provide services that support health, individuality, and dignity to elders. This menu allowed novice teachers to review a number of options and find transitions that were a match for their teaching style and their students for that session. Even the simplest of menus can be a good jumping off point for generating new ideas!

Whiteboard agenda

Writing out a simple agenda is helpful for easing transitions — it makes it clear where we are and what's to come. Write agenda on the whiteboard (sample below):
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• Welcome and please take out HW and ...
• Read page ___ and underline what strikes you about ___
• Pair share
• Group share
• Come up with discussion questions
• Vote on best discussion question for tomorrow 
• HW: write a page-long response to the discussion question (to prep for discussion tomorrow) 

Check items off the list as you complete each activity/task so students know where they are in the plan for the day. Invite a student to read off what’s next as you go through the day and/or to reiterate what they’ve already accomplished. 

Bonus tip: Have a very chatty/active student? Make them Agenda Leader for the day. They should help you stay on schedule by recounting what has been done and reading what should happen next.

Time to learn!

Play this as a little game that will result in a call & response. The more you practice this, the more the students will come to experience it as a cue to look up and engage. It takes a bit of time, so be bold and power through until this becomes a ritual. 
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• Instructor: What time is it? 
• Students: It’s time to learn! 
• In the split-second moment of silence after students use their breath to answer, jump in with an instruction to get them on their next task. 

This also works to get them back on their current task if they get distracted. Play around with ways to use this method, modifying it to fit what works for you and your students.

Organizing student groups

One of the hardest transitions to make is moving from individual work to group work. An effective way to guide grouping is to use post-it notes with a number or a letter, colored paper, or even playing cards. Using one of these items helps students organize themselves in their groups all at once, rather than calling out every student's name individually or having students wander around the room "looking" for a group.
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• Colored paper: Cut strips of paper out of three different colors of paper until you have enough for your group. Shuffle. Pass around the squares/strips and ask students to gather with others who have their same color paper.

 

• Playing cards: From a deck of cards, take out 3 Kings, Queens, Jacks, and so on until you have enough for your group. Shuffle, then deal the cards (or ask a student to deal the cards).

 

• Sticky notes: Write the numbers 1, 2, and 3, on the back of individual sticky notes, until you have enough for your group. Post notes on wall or table, and ask students to choose one sticky note & find the others with their number to form their group.

Two-minute timer

Two minutes before one activity ends and another begins, make announcements about how much time is left and what students will be doing next (including what they need to have to move forward).

Examples: 

• "In two minutes we'll finish our reading and begin the activity. You'll need your notebook and a pencil."
• "One more minute and we'll begin the activity ... I'm looking for notebooks and pencils ..."
• "Okay now we're finished reading and are ready to begin the activity ... I see ___# of students are ready, and we're waiting on # more."

Deep breath
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• Take a deep, cleansing breath. 
• Exhale, and let students know it's time to take a breath and move back into group: "I'll know we're ready once we're all breathing together." 
• Take another deep breath and acknowledge students who have joined you by name: "Thank you, Marisol. Thank you Devon." 
• Repeat instructions. Continue process until all have joined. 

You're ready to move on to the next instruction!

By G. FAITH LITTLE

​​We walk through our days meeting the needs of our kids, our students, our partners, and our colleagues. When times are free from major conflict or loss, we can stay afloat or even find ourselves dancing under a beautiful sky of carefree moments. When times are tough, the margin we enjoyed shrinks. When times are as tough as they are today, we wake up almost daily to disheartening news, disturbing events, and distressing social media posts. We are overwhelmed and we may not know where to begin to make a difference when much around us seems to be crumbling or unfixable.

Restore your energy

Overcoming Overwhelm, an original CPET workshop, is designed to support a teacher’s self-care practice. It can expand to an all-day experience at one of our institutes, or its building blocks can be customized to accommodate a shorter time frame. The objective is for each educator to develop a unique plan to thrive through tough times. 

The live workshop engages participants in self-reflection focused on their current social, emotional, and mental space, with a lens on themselves as a human and in their role as a teacher/student/professional. Each person identifies areas of overwhelm and concern, explores their processes for dealing with the stresses resulting from challenges in both their professional and personal life, locates one leverage point for restoring their own energy, voice, and/or activism, and receives feedback and support from fellow participants. Participants come away from the workshop with a co-created self-care packet made up of their own writing and artwork, their colleagues' recommendations, and resources provided by our team (participants choose what resources they find most useful for their own packet, so it is a truly customized experience).

Connect to your body

What about today? This moment? How can you address overwhelm where you are right now? Body Connection is a simple practice you can follow to engage in a self-care — you won’t be surprised to hear this works great with kids of all ages as well!

By G. FAITH LITTLE

When designing professional development projects, we’re constantly examining how our promising practices can be solidified as we support educators. Through this examination, we’ve come to identify five principles of practice: Communities of practice, Contextualized practice, Critical reflection, Cultivating strengths, and Cycles of inquiry. As part of our series investigating each of these principles, let’s dig deeper into critical reflection. (You can see previous entries in this series here.)

Critical reflection includes meta-cognition, self-awareness, and considering multiple viewpoints — features which result in reflective action. Individuals who are able to reflect critically on their experiences are better positioned to learn from their successes and missteps so that they can be constantly improving their practice. The basic principles of critical reflection are all the more relevant today as we live in this fast-paced world, and we include opportunities for personal, professional, and peer-to-peer reflection in all of our workshop experiences.

What can reflection look like? 
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A cornerstone of CPET conferences and institutes, critical reflection helps us begin each Chancellor’s Day with time, space, and guidance that positions teachers as experts who can articulate the needs and desired outcomes for their learning.

• At Inspire, teachers explore critical reflection using a creative modality that best connects with how they want to reflect on their teaching career — what drew them to the profession, what inspires them, and what they need in order to keep going. 

 

• The Big Learning Challenge is unique among CPET conferences, and this year we integrated our reflection and planning throughout the project creation process. Teachers reflect on the content and skills connected to their project, the reading they complete, their discussions, and their final products.

 

• At In Practice, we create space for teachers to share promising practices with one another, while being critically reflective about their challenges through the use of curriculum inventories, graphing and mapping, music, poetry and prose, recipes, and reflection unbound (an extension of our Literacy Unbound initiative). 

Getting started: three ways to incorporate reflection

Reflection recipes
Teaching is like cooking: both an art and a science. Invite participants to reflect by making a list of ingredients from their year. Turn the ingredients from a list into a reflection recipe. What do they notice? What happens when they add a creative element to their practical list? Participants share their recipes, draw connections between experiences, and consider how they gain perspective on their school year as a result of this reflection.

Reflection inventory
Not all participants will be into the touchy-feely-artsy reflection. For those folks, we include a teaching career inventory as a means for reflection. Using a timeline template, participants review what they’ve taught over their experience as a teacher, what education they have pursued themselves, and their goals, and then consider next steps for their future as an educator. Teachers may want to sit in subject area groups to bounce ideas off one another.

Reading reflection
Following a period of research or reading, utilize our What, So What, Now What resource to help jumpstart your reflective process:

• What: What did I just read?
  
• So What: How does it apply to my teaching?
  
• Now What: How can I take this back to my classroom?