​Exploring the connection between instructional autonomy and student engagement. 

Excerpted from Centering Students for Literacy Engagement: Voice, Choice & Identity, A Review of Literature for Behind the Book, conducted by the Center for Professional Education of Teachers at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Teachers who engage in the design of their own instructional goals understand the direct link between engagement, literacy, and content knowledge. They understand that when students are engaged, there is no limit to their learning, which is why it is such a powerful motivator. Teachers are also keenly aware that how they create visible and invisible space for learning to take place has an impact on student engagement. Everything from how a classroom space is organized, decorated, and maintained has an impact on how well students can physically interact in the space. Relationship building is also critical in the classroom, and the research indicates that fostering non-evaluative literacy experiences creates opportunities for students and teachers to more deeply engage in reading and writing. 

Essential factors in engagement

​​In a research review on literacy engagement, produced by The Center for Professional Education of Teachers (CPET) in collaboration with Behind the Book, we analyzed previously published reviews of literature and research studies on literacy engagement. Throughout the literature, student voice, agency, and confidence emerged as essential factors that lead to increased literacy engagement over time. While many attributes contributed to increasing student voice, choice, and agency, six high leverage areas surfaced: student voice, student agency, student confidence, teacher autonomy, learning environment, and relationship-building. Refer to our companion article to read about Student Voice, Choice & Identity.

How do you incorporate these in your practice? 
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What support might you need to deepen your understanding and implementation of these attributes?

Teacher autonomy

Decision-making ideally involves all stakeholders in a school community. The unique role of teachers positions them as professionals in their content areas and the consummate experts of their own classrooms. There is a strong connection between student engagement and how a teacher perceives themselves as authors of their classroom spaces — especially when it comes to teacher autonomy. The concept of professional independence and decision-making is central to motivating teachers to think critically about what, why, and how they’re engaging with their students, which increases their sense of personal and professional responsibility. 

Teachers navigate their choices within the systems and structures of their districts, school, and department. Educational policies affect the everyday experience of teachers and can construct barriers to teachers exercising autonomy in their classrooms. The shift away from autonomy and professional freedom in K-12 schools has had a dramatic impact on teacher engagement, creativity, and organic professional evolution. Policies that acknowledge teachers as experts will implement systems and structures designed to increase decision-making opportunities on every level, from classroom to school to district. Teachers immersed in the design of their own instructional goals understand the direct link between engagement, literacy, and content knowledge. They understand that when students are engaged, there is no limit to their learning, which is powerful for both teacher and student.

When a person has a high level of efficacy in their work, they believe that their time and effort will result in a desired extrinsic or intrinsic reward. For educators, autonomy and efficacy go hand in hand. Teachers are most effective when they have autonomy (decision-making power and the professional responsibilities that come with that power) and efficacy (the belief that their time and effort will generate their desired reward). The effort and self-determination of teachers contributes to their own sense of autonomy and to their students’ success. 

Teacher autonomy is not something that can be developed overnight, especially in communities where there has been tight control on curriculum, instruction, or teacher style. Schools or districts looking to increase teacher autonomy may want to make an investment in professional development for teacher leaders. Starting small and then building with a team is a great entry point to increasing autonomy for some, and creating a sustainable process for others to develop more autonomy. It is important to remember that teacher autonomy does not mean everyone does anything they want at any time, but rather that teachers are able to exercise professional freedoms for instructional and curricular choices focused on the responsibility of meeting students’ needs. This process can be developed and replicated. Schools interested in developing teacher autonomy can first focus on Department or Content area or grade level teams and develop a structure for meeting together, facilitation, and shared research. As teachers learn more about their field, they are better equipped to make decisions grounded in research. 

Instructional autonomy leads to the creation of a dynamic learning space, an increased growth mindset and a mindset towards social justice.

Learning environment

If we think of the word environment, as in habitat or place, the learning environment becomes the space where learning takes place. Curating a positive learning environment requires educators to consider how students learn best, under what conditions their learning can be maximized, and what disrupts the learning environment. Once these questions are answered, educators must use their available resources to design the physical or virtual space to create that environment. 

It’s important for teachers to think critically about creating a space for each student that provides access to resources, manipulatives, and intellectually stimulating tasks. This is commonplace in most elementary school classrooms which utilize their classroom spaces for strategic academic interactions — like the reading rug, the classroom library, and the conferencing table for students to work with their teachers individually or in small groups. All teachers create and cultivate learning spaces in how they interact with their students, how they utilize the space they have, and how they invent ways for students to interact with texts together. 

Rituals and routines play an important role in creating a learning environment that increases student literacy engagement. With a specific eye towards supporting English Language Learners, we can think beyond the physical resources found within a classroom space and focus on having a mindful routine, creating dynamic personal relationships between stakeholders, and developing instructional materials that are culturally and cognitively responsive to students. Additionally, when surrounded by physical texts and images of texts in the classroom spaces, students are more likely to engage in reading on their own. 

Implementing discussion is an integral part of the reading and writing process. When students discuss what they’ve read with their peers, it enhances their understanding, and their interest in the text. When students spend time and effort in retelling what they’ve read, creating a response to their reading, or synthesizing the text in new ways, their energy and effort has a direct correlation to their engagement in the reading itself.

School and district leaders can support teachers to think deeply about their learning environment by being explicit about the resources available to teachers, as well as clarifying a theory of action that articulates how students learn best and translating that theory into an action plan for the learning environment.

Beginning with the theory of action, schools that take the time to develop a shared understanding and a shared approach to learning also reap the benefits of a faculty and staff who are aligned in their mindset and approach and as a result create culture and environment quickly. After articulating the theory of action, schools need to develop an implementation plan, and an accountability plan. How will they see their values come alive in the daily interactions across the school? How will they hold teachers and other school staff members accountable to their ability to translate vision into action?  

Resources may vary, but the constant in any educational setting are teachers and students, together.

Relationship building

Relationships support building bridges between challenging content and critical skills. The relationship provides an avenue for teachers and students to bridge differences and bond through shared experiences. These bonds become a highway for academic support and interventions.

Teachers with a high level of professional freedom typically have the confidence and the creativity to create a positive and engaging learning environment, which will in turn create personal and social spaces for students to find themselves as readers. Those personal and social spaces are nurtured through student-to-student and student-to-teacher relationships. Sharing reading ideas is especially motivating for students. Whether there are formal or informal conversations, teachers and students who read and discuss shared texts create shared experiences and shared memories. These experiences create strong bonds between teachers and students and inform their identities as readers and writers. 

When teachers and school leaders want to increase engagement through relationship building, focusing on social-emotional learning can be a great entry point. Creating spaces for students and teachers to identify their feelings within a given assignment can avoid misunderstandings that develop hurt feelings and divide teachers and students, impacting culture negatively. 

For decades, teachers have found that stories are ways to connect students to themselves, to each other, and to their larger community. Reading and writing are both connected to an audience which makes the act of either an experience in connection. Supporting students academically must include supporting students relationally. When students are able to connect with themselves and their classmates; when they connect with their teachers and count them as caring adults in their lives, they have essential support to then connect with texts that will become the driving force of their learning.

The real and deep need for strong relationships is a key component to student engagement in reading and writing.

Download the white paper: Centering Students for Literacy Engagement: Voice, Choice & Identity, A Review of Literature for Behind the Book, conducted by the Center for Professional Education of Teachers at Teachers College, Columbia University. 


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A look at high-leverage areas for student engagement in reading and writing.

Excerpted from Centering Students for Literacy Engagement: Voice, Choice & Identity, A Review of Literature for Behind the Book, conducted by the Center for Professional Education of Teachers at Teachers College, Columbia University.

When it comes to compliance vs. engagement, we can generally agree that compliance is about conforming, yielding, adhering to cultural norms, and cooperating or obeying. Compliance is focused on a mindset of teachers (or adults) having power over students, rather than empowering them. Whether we’ve recognized it or not, many schools are dominated by compliance-oriented structures which often mimic the behaviors of engagement. When schools structure how students enter, exit, move throughout the building, where they sit, how they sit, when they can go to the bathroom or eat food, the learning environment is dominated by a power-over culture which has an impact on authentic student engagement. 

Engagement, on the other hand, is more difficult to define. Research on engagement and theories of engagement date back over 50 years and come primarily from perspectives in the fields of psychology and sociology. Each field has contributed theoretical frameworks designed to articulate what engagement is, how it works, how engagement breaks down, and how to generate it. 

We may understand the theories behind engagement, but can we articulate what engagement looks like for students in school, with respect to literacy through reading and writing specifically? A focus on literacy engagement is critical because without a personal and intrinsic motivation to read or write, school becomes a space that stifles student growth and prioritizes compliance over engagement. When students can develop a personal, authentic engagement in reading (taking in information and ideas) and writing (expressing information and ideas), students can develop sustainably positive experiences in school that develop their self-efficacy and self-confidence.

Essential factors in engagement

​In a research review on literacy engagement, produced by The Center for Professional Education of Teachers (CPET) in collaboration with Behind the Book, we analyzed previously published reviews of literature and research studies on literacy engagement. Throughout the literature, student voice, agency, and confidence emerged as essential factors that lead to increased literacy engagement over time. While many attributes contributed to increasing student voice, choice, and agency, six high leverage areas surfaced: student voice, student agency, student confidence, teacher autonomy, learning environment, and relationship-building. Refer to our companion article: Centering Students for Literacy Engagement: Teacher as Interdependent Curator & Bridge-Builder to read more about teacher autonomy, learning environment, and relationship building.

How do you incorporate these in your practice? 
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What support might you need to deepen your understanding and implementation of these attributes?

Student voice

Student voice can be cultivated through classroom culture, through reading, and through writing. Classroom culture accumulates the small, large, formal, and informal ways that students interact with one another and their teachers. Here, when their voice is either heard or silenced, it has an impact on how the student engages in classroom activities and tasks. 

Educators find ways to elicit student voice intentionally by creating windows and mirrors. Windows are opportunities for students to see themselves in the literature they’re reading. When teachers design prompts that help students make connections, find commonalities, or empathize with characters or situations they’re reading, they create a metaphorical window for students to see how they connect with a text. Alternatively, teachers can also prompt students with entry points to reading and writing that act as mirrors for students to see their thoughts and feelings emerge on the page as they write or draw. Mirrors reflect our identity, and mirroring tasks and texts give students an opportunity to see themselves as valid, legitimate, and important enough to write about. 

Through publication projects, drawing, drama, and the wide variety of activities teachers can plan, centering student voice is a key factor in reading and writing engagement. For example, when educators place students in the driver’s seat of the drafting, revising, editing, and publishing process, student publication projects support students to both find their voices and to broadcast them. 

Teachers can invite all student voices by creating classroom spaces with a mix of culturally responsive teaching characteristics such as communicating high expectations for all students, expressing positive perspectives on parents and families, practicing student-centered instruction, and reshaping curriculum to meet all student learning needs.

What makes some students more readily able to access and raise their voices is influenced by how the teacher designs a classroom space where students feel free to use their voices.

Student agency

Cultivating in-school literacy experiences that highlight student voice, agency, and influence is in sharp contrast to the drill and kill test prep approach that many teachers feel is necessary to get students to pass the test at the end of the school year. But this is precisely where students need to have their identity, voice, and influence emphasized. 

Student engagement increases when educators deliberately create a culture that does the following: expects students will give feedback to their teachers about their experiences in class; expects students will share what they want to learn; and expects students will share how they want to learn. The student engagement from this culture occurs when teachers respond to those suggestions by making visible changes to instruction. Specific practices include students performing their writing, conducting research with adult allies, and having forums where student voices, ideas, and lived experiences are prioritized. 

Authentic or real-world reading and writing tasks increase student engagement. When the audience for writing widens to include people in addition to one teacher, such as letter writing to local politicians, posting poems on classroom walls and stories in school hallways or publishing a class book in which each student authors a piece and reads it aloud during a celebration and book signing ceremony, students experience an increased sense of agency and engagement in the writing process. Student authors connect their writing to a larger purpose, and writing for an authentic audience allows students to gain skills and perspectives that will serve them beyond the classroom.

Dynamic and long-lasting engagement comes from the combination of student agency (how do students use their voice to influence their education?), community (how do the people surrounding students influence their perception of school?), and the organizing structures of school (how does student voice influence the structure and organization of the school?).

When students choose for themselves, they exercise their own agency, which can increase the strength they feel when attempting to express and act upon their own goals and values.

Student confidence

Confidence is often seen as something that someone either has, or doesn’t have, as if the belief in oneself was a static perception that was either present or not present at birth. However, we know from Carol Dwek’s work on the Growth Mindset that our intelligence and our sense of self evolve over time, and that our self-perception is never at a fixed point. Respected and caring adults in students’ lives have the amazing power to influence students’ perceptions of themselves and others.

There are varied ways to build student confidence, including consistent use of authentic writing tasks, reading choice, and repeated reading practices. Increasing student confidence is complex, requiring innovation and persistence from students as they move toward their educational goals, as well as from teachers on behalf of their students.

Educators can make choices to provide an array of differentiated reading and writing tasks, integrating student voice and choice into the mix and building their confidence with each new learning opportunity.

Required readings, assignments, and projects can be shared at the start of a school year, semester, or unit and teachers can then support students in finding their unique and desired ways to process and express their connections to the reading and writing

Valuing a student’s home language and utilizing it as a linguistic tool to problem solve, communicate, and access materials develop students’ literacy skills and self‐confidence. Even in situations where younger students are learning English as a Dual Language, their ability to negotiate the language will have a major impact on their motivation to read and write, or to not read and write. The same can apply to older students who are learning English as a New Language. Whatever the age or nuanced way of referring to learning a new language, when language creates a barrier to entry, students are more likely to give up than they are to keep trying. 

When students new to learning English can talk with their classmates in their home language, think through complex ideas in their home language, write out their notes in their home language — they’ll have increased confidence in their understanding of the concepts and can, as a separate task, get to work on translating their ideas into English. 

Success cycles are built when educators better understand how to design their instructional tasks to incorporate opportunities for student voice, agency and confidence.

Download the white paper: Centering Students for Literacy Engagement: Voice, Choice & Identity, A Review of Literature for Behind the Book, conducted by the Center for Professional Education of Teachers at Teachers College, Columbia University. 


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Make sense of your thinking as you articulate the what, why, and how of your lessons.

My most common resistance and response, when prompted by our director to articulate my next workshop plan in one of our templates is, “We don’t have time for that. I need to get in there and get the work done. I don't have time to also articulate what the work is going to be.” After I express my frustration with a lack of time, I take a breath and sit down with my thoughts, our goals, and the template. 

Thankfully, the template has been through our usual practice of draft, revision, practice, and more revision, so that I’m working with a helpful, useful, and practical tool. As I move through prompts like driving questions, objectives, skills, activity, assessment, and resources, I see what’s in my head come together on the screen. By the time I’m done, I’ve experienced the magic of a pre-planning template. I’ve actually done all the work of thinking through what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, what skills I need to teach, and how I will confirm what students know and can do throughout the workshop. 

Not enough time to plan? I actually don’t have enough time NOT to plan!

As it turns out, articulating my plan supports me in grounding the lesson in its larger context and provides a way to make my thinking visible to my students, my colleagues, and my supervisor. Bonus: I won’t need to reinvent an agenda the next time this workshop rolls around. I have a lesson plan I can reuse and customize going forward.

Our lesson planning resource supports teachers like you in experiencing this same process — moving your thinking from inside your head out into the world, and considering all of the pieces of a lesson, because the template reminds you with supportive prompts. You can leave yourself room to think more deeply about teaching and learning by relying on our preset categories to pull you through your planning time. 
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​It’s important to be confident and clear about your plans, and articulating your thinking is an excellent way to get there. This is what will allow you to be more flexible, because you’ve got a plan from which to work. You know what’s essential and what might be able to shift when unexpected changes occur in your classroom, as they so often do!
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You can use this resource as a tool for yourself as we teach, your students as they engage in the work, and your colleagues as you offer each other formal or informal coaching in this challenging and rewarding world of teaching.

Understanding the connection between what is taught and what is learned is a vital part of your classroom practice.

One effective tool we use when delving into new content is the resource It says...I say...So... With this tool as our guide, we can explore Danielson’s Framework for Teaching, 3d Using Assessment in Instruction.

Danielson 3d says...

“Assessment of student learning plays an important new role in teaching: no longer signaling the end of instruction, it is now recognized to be an integral part of instruction. While assessment of learning has always been and will continue to be an important aspect of teaching (it’s important for teachers to know whether students have learned what teachers intend), assessment for learning has increasingly come to play an important role in classroom practice. And in order to assess student learning for the purposes of instruction, teachers must have a “finger on the pulse” of a lesson, monitoring student understanding and, where feedback is appropriate, offering it to students.”

This means...
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• Assessment isn’t something that we do only at the end of a lesson or unit. Now, we know that assessment is essential in all parts of the learning process. 
• It has been and will be important for us, as teachers, to see clearly what students have learned. Assessments show me if what I intended to teach is actually what students learned. This understanding of the connection between what I teach and what is learned is a vital part of my practice. 
• I must be fully present in my lesson and with my students in order to assess their learning. I need to notice what is happening for students and offer feedback in the moment, based on what I’m seeing. ​

This looks like...
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• Paying close attention to evidence of student understanding
• Posing questions specifically created to elicit evidence of student understanding
• Circulating to monitor student learning and to offer feedback 
• Students assessing their own work against established criteria

This is challenging, because...
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• We often have MANY students! Monitoring all students' learning can be challenging. 
• Offering and providing feedback to large numbers of students can feel overwhelming. 
• It’s difficult to know how to respond, in the moment, when a student doesn’t understand. 
• When helping one, it often means we’re leaving all the others behind. 
• We were often taught that assessment is at the end of a lesson or unit.

So...

Let’s consider formative assessments. They are most helpful to us when making instructional decisions. They are used to monitor student learning and inform feedback. They help give us an overall picture of a child’s achievement. Formative assessments are used throughout the lesson. 

You can try...

Below are a few examples of practical pre-instruction assessments you can try in your classroom.

What are you trying in your classroom? What do you want to integrate into your practice? Tell us more in the comments! Learn more about opportunities to Design Coherent Instruction for your students. 

Happy teachers tend to be wonderful teachers.

Did you ever get one of those letters? Those notes written in crayon or #2 pencil? Those sweet messages with a picture drawn at the bottom? Some of us remember those. We may have them tucked in drawers or taped in journals. Some of us remember emails or texts, sometimes years after our students graduate. They might have shared a memory or thanked us for a positive moment that stuck with them. 
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Those messages can help us float above the floor for a few minutes or keep us grounded for the day. What an encouragement! Here we are, in our next normal — whatever that looks like after whatever we’ve gone through. It seems like a good time for a letter from some of your colleagues with practical encouragement that builds our practice of supporting ourselves and each other. 

Dear Teacher,

Happy teachers tend to be wonderful teachers. To be happy you have to figure out how to take care of yourself. It's not selfish. The trick is to figure out how best to take care of yourself, and then be deliberate about doing it. Nobody can do this but you! (I learned this a few years ago — I was late to the party)! 

I think it's important to make time for yourself, otherwise you'll burn out. Even on my busiest weeks, I value taking a little bit of time to be human. That might look different for everyone, so find a practice that centers you — whether that's working out or gardening or just reading mindless BuzzFeed articles.
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Making time for yourself is essential; not optional. Whatever you do, MAKE the time — otherwise you will burn out and be of no use to anyone. 

With five minutes, you can:

• Get on the floor and stretch. Hold a plank for a minute, and hold stretches for 20-30 seconds. On your hands and knees, arch your back in both directions. Pull yourself back to sit on your heels to stretch your back and shoulders. Sit in a V and stretch side to side. Stretching is a healthy way to loosen tense muscles. 
• Take a quick breather. I like to water my plants. It’s a quick and easy way to clear my mind. 
• Soothe yourself with a scent. Add a candle and a bit of relaxing music to your bathroom/shower time.
• Take a screen break. This is important to me, especially since SO much of my work, school, and social life still happens over the computer. 
• Breathe. Take deep inhales and exhales. Lie down if you can, or sit where you are and deliberately take deep and life-giving breaths!

With 30 minutes, you can:

• Walk and talk! I have been calling a friend or family member while walking outside. So important to get some air, and to be in touch with people! And don't wait for someone to call you — if you feel like talking, just call them while you're walking.
• Take yourself or your pet on a quick walk. Lace up and get those steps in — sometimes stroll, other times go for a trot! When I feel overwhelmed, getting outside for a few minutes really helps to clear the mind and calm the soul. 
• Do yoga and/or another at-home workout. Yoga is the absolute BEST after being hunched over a screen all day.
• Find something short to read. Try something light and fluffy and/or a chapter of a young adult book)
• Catch up/check-in with a teacher-friend/colleague, especially if you have a shared planning time or break. 
• Simply stand, stretch, and move to get your body and mind activated. Stretch each part of your body from toes to hands, from neck to knees.

​With an hour, you can:

• Take time to read a book/article/blog that has nothing to do with academics. 
• Watch a TV show you love. 
• Call a friend/family member you haven’t spoken with for quite a while and catch up.
• Start a game. Play a board game, virtual break-out game, or virtual trivia game over Zoom with friends.
• Listen to a podcast or audiobook while doing work around the house to take a break from the screen! 
• Take your reading out to the park to enjoy some time outdoors.
• Enjoy a deep hot bath or hot shower. Add some epsom salt. Soak. Heat your body and when you’re done with the water, enfold yourself in a big, soft, fluffy towel. Moisturize in your favorite oils from head to toe — use your favorite essential oils and mix with almond, or vitamin E oil as a base. Paint your nails — even if you don’t normally, even if you're a cisgendered straight man! Choose your favorite colors and treat your body lovingly — it houses your soul.

Thanks for being a teacher! Take this letter and tuck it away or tack it up somewhere to remind yourself to care for yourself first. 

With love from your CPET colleagues,

Ashlynn, Faith, Laura, Marcelle, Sean, and Sherrish 
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Recognize the motivations behind behaviors that block success and explore how to respond appropriately.

A social media post ignites a tiny fire, and the fire blazes as people pour fuel in the form of dislikes and comments accusing one another of being wholly disrespectful to a person, people group, larger community, or an entire country. From social media to the dinner table to the holiday family gathering, we hear words and actions that offend us, and we attribute disrespect or out and out defiance to the person across the table. So much disagreement, so many approaches.

The same goes for our classrooms, right? We’re teaching and a student rolls their eyes or puts their head down – but wait, before we even got to this teaching moment, we spent hours in backwards planning for our unit and prepared an essential lesson to our topic — and now, we’re getting disrespect in return? It’s easy to give up, but what if we approached what we’re seeing in a different way? What if we get curious about what it is we’re noticing in student behavior?

Responding vs. reacting

Our resource for tackling off-task behaviors — Behaviors that Block Success — helps us respond rather than react. We consider that there are four types of behavior that have a negative impact on the classroom environment, and it’s important to be able to recognize what each behavior type looks like, as well as the motivations behind it. This is what will allow us to act responsively.
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​We can use this resource as a tool to interpret student behavior in a constructive way, cultivating curiosity in ourselves. In order to interpret behavior, we must challenge ourselves to see beneath the surface and identify why the behavior is happening. When encountering inappropriate student behavior, our goal is to respectfully communicate the expectations, de-escalate the conflict, and maintain teacher authority.
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We can review the behaviors, make connections between what we are seeing and what we already know about our student as a whole person, and ask the student what they’re experiencing as well. This will open up communication by demonstrating respect for the student and asking questions instead of jumping to conclusions.

Imagine having this resource out on your desk during class, picking it up when you’re struggling with what you think might be defiant behavior and considering all the possibilities. Put it up as a poster, and share with your students that you’re trying something new or adding to your toolbox.

​You’re all learning together, and no one is on the “other side” of anything in the classroom, so why not make it clear to both yourself and your students?
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Breathe new life into book clubs and place students at the center of their reading experience.

G. FAITH LITTLE
Initiative Director, 21st Century Learning
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Time moves forward, as it always does. We can take this time to reflect on lessons learned when we unexpectedly and quickly shifted from teaching in the classroom, to teaching remotely, and then into a next normal of blended in-person and virtual learning spaces. One big takeaway from this time of critical reflection is that we aren’t starting with a blank page. Whatever the season, we can adapt tools we already have to meet the challenges we’re facing.

Breathing new life into book clubs 

New tools can breathe new life into our planning and our teaching, and creating a new tool doesn’t need to be done from scratch. By connecting Ten Tips for Successful Book Clubs with our Global Mindset Framework, we can quickly create a new resource that integrates teaching 21st century skills into each reading opportunity we plan for our students. 
 
Book clubs offer many benefits to student readers, including:

• Promoting a love for literature and a positive attitude toward reading
• Reflecting a student-centered model of literacy (employing a gradual release of responsibility)
• Encouraging extensive and intensive reading
• Inviting natural discussions that lead to student inquiry and critical thinking
• Supporting diverse responses to text
• Fostering interaction, cooperation, and collaboration
• Providing choice and encourage responsibility
• Exposing students to literature from multiple perspectives
• Nurturing reflection and self-evaluation

A successful book club for your students will:

• Generate excitement
• Create opportunities for shared decision-making
• Communicate expectations
• Establish ground rules
• Offer opportunities to lead by example
• Gather tools
• Anticipate tough conversations
• Be student-centered
• Celebrate completion
• Tweak what you’ve already tried

Understanding the Global Mindset Framework

​Now that we’ve framed some of the characteristics of book clubs, we can connect each facet to our Global Mindset Framework. This will help us streamline our work when planning for our next book club iteration, or beginning a book club community with our students.

The Global Mindset Framework is the articulation of 21st century skills students need to navigate their present and their future, sorted into five categories of capacities: caring, collaborative, creative, critical, and global. The framework addresses key questions that teachers and school leaders struggle with as they attempt to make key concepts relevant to children in a changing world. 

To understand the Global Mindset Framework, we can look to the Global Learning Alliance (GLA). The GLA is the outgrowth of our groundbreaking research on the features and practices surrounding 21st century teaching and learning. It has evolved from the seeds of a research project and is now a consortium of schools and universities around the world dedicated to understanding, defining, applying, and sharing the principles and practices of a world-class education within a wide range of educational contexts. 

21st century capacities

​Global capacity: The capacity for students to step outside the confines of their own familiar social world to understand distant realities in order to engage productively with the world. 

Critical capacity: The capacity for students to develop their full critical cognitive capacities in order to be discerning and informed citizens of the world.

Collaborative capacity: The capacity for students to develop habits of observation, reflection, and collaboration, and to be able to communicate in multiple modalities such as through images, words, sounds, gestures, or an integration of these modes in order to actively contribute to various discourses in the world. 

Creative capacity: The capacity for students to follow their curiosity by questioning or imagining in order to contribute positive improvements or inventions to their world.

Caring capacity: The capacity for students to explore compassion, empathy, and self-awareness in order to develop caring partnerships with themselves, their communities, countries, and world. 

Activating 21st century skills

​Using the template below, we can imagine how we might combine various capacities from the Global Mindset Framework with our tips for success to generate a profile of a book club that integrates 21st century skills into student learning. We want to keep moving our teaching forward to meet the needs of today’s students, but we don’t often feel we have the time we need to recreate our plans. By layering the Global Mindset Framework over our book club planning, we can revise what we’ve already got going for us instead of starting from a blank page.

Connecting skills to next steps

​Using the template above, we can customize our profile to fit a specific book — in this case, we'll use Malala Yousafzai's I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World. In this model, we start with our to-do list; we imagine some of our options, and what we need to collect to complete our plan.

The task before us all is to educate students today for the world they’re poised to lead tomorrow, and as we recognize that we can no longer sustain a 20th century in a 21st century world, we must remain flexible in order to meet the dynamic needs of our students. As we look for ways to build upon the expertise and techniques already alive in our classrooms, we can easily create opportunities for students to build 21st century skills, shifting from teacher-centered instruction to an environment that puts students at the center of their reading and writing experiences. 
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Engage in reflection, gain self-awareness, and pinpoint an area you want to develop further.

G. FAITH LITTLE
Initiative Director, 21st Century Learning

Our personal and professional lives collided during the distance learning, work from home reality these past months. We’ve lost some spaces to breath and decompress. The drive between our classroom and our own front door has been replaced, if we’re lucky, with a one-minute walk from desk to couch. If we’re even luckier, perhaps we can get in a 20-minute walk before we take care of our personal responsibilities, including managing distance learning for our own children. Gone are train rides home when we could people watch and listen to playlists or podcasts, shifting our focus out of problem-solving, answering and asking questions, grading and planning.

Perhaps you, like me, have searched for ways to create more space, and you’ve added a new practice or two to your routine, like taking scheduled walks, meditating before class, keeping a journal, or adding breathwork before dinner. Maybe the ideas you’ve uncovered don’t seem to integrate into your professional life. Sure, they’re great if you have all the time and space to engage in them, but let’s be honest — there seems to be even less time for that elusive self-care now that work days stretch from dawn until well past dark. Reading article after article on how to manage stress may have resulted in a lot of ideas, but little implementation. That’s normal. We all need support to take our next steps, and starting with the smallest thing could make the biggest difference.

K - W - L

As we move deeper into the year, we might look to practices that feel more authentic to our teaching selves. Using a familiar tool can provide a valuable structure, bridging the best of our personal pursuits with our professional realities. We may be familiar with K-W-L (Know - Want to Know - Learned), a reading strategy which serves as a self-propelling guide for students as they read through a text. Students begin by charting everything they know about a topic in the K column. They move on to generating questions about what they want to know about the topic. During and after reading, students document what they have learned. 
We can chart what we know, want to know, and have learned about anything at all, including our own professional development and the self-care habits we need to keep going strong. This process draws on our own prior knowledge, sets a purpose for our routines, reveals obstacles, and documents our progress, giving us the opportunity to both plan for our success and to celebrate steps we take along the way.

Below is my K-W-L example, which is focused on collaboration, because that is an area I want to develop in my professional life during 2021. My “texts” are a combination of reading and action. In one case, I was having trouble maintaining my boundaries with colleagues. I read an article that felt more personal in nature than professional, but when I took action to make self-care a priority, (#7 in the article) I found myself carrying over some practices into my professional life. I began to honor my own feelings instead of pushing them aside in deference to others. My feelings were signaling when my boundaries were crossed, and I could then address that within myself and with my colleagues.

Identifying your how

What it seems we have more than enough of is access to ideas on what to do, like this idea about using a K-W-L in a new way, but we’re short on the how. My how emerged out of my needs and came out in three steps:

• Identify what to focus on: At first, I was frustrated that even though I thought we had clearly articulated and agreed upon expectations at the close of staff meetings, we weren’t following through on them. My frustration turned to anger as I began to imagine others purposefully ignoring our agreements because collaborating felt too slow to them. While I was compassionate as to why they might be compelled to skip permission in favor of asking forgiveness later, I did not subscribe to that method of working together. I felt stuck.

 

• List what I want to learn more about: I trusted collaboration was more fruitful than working alone, but collaborating was becoming painful as I felt disrespected and ignored at the end of the day. I needed to articulate what I already knew or believed about collaboration and what I wanted to learn so collaboration might work for all parties involved, not just one or the other. I wanted to learn more about what to do when my boundaries were crossed. How could I maintain my boundaries without cutting off collaboration?

 

• Circle back: As I tried out a few ideas that emerged from my bit of research, I looked for connections between what I learned and my areas for growth. I asked myself what worked and what questions emerged and what I wanted to research next. They were baby steps since time was short, but I wasn’t stuck any longer.

Simple supports

Even when we know the how, we also need support. Support can come in many different forms. Consider a few of the following simple ways to create support for yourself:

• Be your own coach by setting an appointment to revisit your learning or thinking. Keep it positive. When you notice you’re starting to judge yourself harshly, remember to simply be curious. Ask yourself, “What happened? What do I want to do next?” Write it out, draw it in your sketchbook, paint, or make a video. Look for ways to explore more and judge less.

 

• Send a note to your future self. Treat yourself like you would your closest friends and drop a line of encouragement. You know what gets you down and what lifts you up. When you’ve determined what you want to try, like prioritizing exercise on most mornings, at that moment write yourself a note to read in a week or in a month. Be as encouraging to yourself as you would be to a friend. Put the note somewhere you know you will find it, either as a surprise or because you calendar an appointment to go look for it.

 

• Ask a friend. Look for support from your community. Consider asking a friend to mail you the letter you wrote to yourself or text you an encouraging quote every Monday morning or to meet up for a virtual happy hour to share what obstacles have come up (because they always do) and commiserate. 

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• Paper your walls. Take a marker or crayon and write down the words that encourage you. Short quotes, one word reminders, or visual representations of what you’re working toward go on the page and then up on the wall near your desk, in the bathroom, hallway, or on the fridge. Have fun hiding them in drawers so they surprise you with positive reinforcement.

Using a K-W-L structure is one way to engage in reflection, gain self-awareness, and pinpoint an area you want to develop further. Returning to the "L" column can help you feel a sense of accomplishment, or at least identify a new place to begin work. Whether you want to chart about any of the hundreds of self-care options out there or you want to chart your progress toward specific teaching goals, by using K-W-L as a way to drive inquiry, we can uncover some answers, more questions, and plenty of celebration on the small and large steps we are taking as we continue adjusting to the next normal.
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Offer your students an opportunity to authentically engage with content, even when learning remotely.

G. FAITH LITTLE
Initiative Director, 21st Century Learning
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Over the past year, school has been a rollercoaster event filled with openings, closings, virtual connections, and dramatic shifts in teaching and learning techniques and experiences. No matter the grade level or subject area, our learning spaces have been completely redefined. And it isn’t just due to in-person or online learning schedules — many teachers are finding that what worked in person may not be working as well online or in other virtual settings. Additionally, changes to state tests and other accountability measures have created opportunities for teachers to redesign their teaching methods and learning outcomes to authentically engage students in the core elements of their content areas. 

Finding ways to engage students in content can be difficult, particularly when so much teaching and learning is happening remotely. We understand this challenge. Our Literacy Unbound team faced the same concerns about how to engage teachers and students in our 2020 Summer Institute — traditionally a 2-week, in-person immersive learning experience. Rooted in the belief that students learn best through authentic inquiry, curiosity, and through the multimodal embodiment of a text, Literacy Unbound brings teachers and students together with teaching artists to explore the in-depth themes of a shared text, independently.

In a typical summer, we would develop a series of Invitations to Create as a way to invite and entice students into the world of the text. These invitations might prompt readers to journal, draw, collage, create a playlist, or explore some other form of expression related to a key quote or “hotspot” in the text. As readers collect their responses, they traditionally come together for a dynamic experience in which they construct an original performance based on their responses to the invitations. 

While much of the in-person institute needed a complete redesign to fit a virtual institute, the structure of Invitations to Create did not. Invitations provide the perfect setup for virtual reading, writing, and collaboration. And they come with plenty of choice, freedom, and personal exploration, which means that participants can be authentically engaged from the very beginning.

Creating your invitation

Even though Invitations to Create begin as prompts to pieces of literature, they’re extremely flexible and are a promising practice for all content areas and grade levels during remote and/or blended learning experiences. How can we begin to incorporate invitations into curriculum for math, science, and social studies, and beyond? 

To get a sneak peek of the process, we’ve developed the sample below to experiment with Invitations in Mathematics, adapted from A Guide to Crafting Invitations to Create by Dr. Nathan Allan Blom.

Note: As you read, look for the examples in blue of building an invitation for A Mathematician’s Lament.

Step 1: Jot
Whatever the content, there are literacy expectations in your field. What are the reading and writing requirements in your field? In your course(s)? In the exam? Jot down some of your thinking as a warm-up.
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Step 2: Identify
What is a text you go back to over and over again that you want to introduce to your students — or -- what is a text you already plan to use in a future lesson? Have the text handy.

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​Step 3: Choose
Choose a “hotspot” within the text. This is a passage of the text that captures your attention. Typically, it’s helpful if a hotspot contains:

• Character or item descriptions
• Important details
• A significant setting
• Anything else that seems inspiring

 
Explain in a few words the context of the hotspot within the larger text.

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Step 4: Offer
Offer an idea you had or a connection you made during your reading. Share with the voice of a fellow student, rather than an authority on the subject.

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Step 5: Connect
Connect the hotspot to a piece of media to illustrate and/or extend your connections, questions, or ideas. Explore media to find something that connects and inspires you, like:

• Works of visual art (illustrations, graphics, paintings, etc.)
• Audio works (instrumental pieces, songs, recordings, etc.)
• Nonfiction texts (websites, articles, poems, quotations, etc.)
• Historical documents
• Videos
• Anything else you can find

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Step 6: Prompt
Create your prompt, using this structure: In whatever way seems best to you (equation, movement, experiment, poetry, prose, music, art, video, etc.), explore ______.  
 
Let's look at our invitation for A Mathematician’s Lament created from steps 1 - 6:

Include directions about how students will share their creation with you and each other. This process supports students to make their own meaning of the text, and is also a way for you and your students to experience an invitation together, whether you’re in the same concrete or virtual space. If possible, create your own response to the invitation and share it at the same time your students share theirs.

Each invitation offers an opportunity to reflect, analyze, and synthesize the text at hand. Once the invitations have been developed, students are invested in their interpretations and eager to share their ideas. This sharing is a powerful tool, inspiring motivation and encouragement across the community.
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 What can you invite students to create using this simple and effective structure?

We must face the realities of our current teaching and learning situation — and then find ways to adapt.

G. FAITH LITTLE
Initiative Director, 21st Century Learning

The sunlight is still Summer while the breeze feels like Fall. Teachers stream in, eager to find their names at check-in and chat with colleagues on their way to hear the keynote speaker frame the day, “It’s not that differentiation is part of the work. Differentiation is the work itself. We all can make progress and we can all grow. Each student deserves a goal that they can work hard to achieve!"
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This excerpt from a previous post about bringing a series of in-person professional development workshops to life evoked memories that seemed to stand in stark contrast against our current teaching and learning situation.

Adapting our plans

​We began our Spring 2020 workshops series on a cold day in February. At the end of the day-long sessions, facilitators reviewed feedback from participants, noted adjustments they would make to their plans, and tucked away sign-in sheets in folders, ready for their next session — a month away. A few weeks later we found ourselves siloed, setting up spaces at home where we could work, on screens, day and night. It felt as if we were living in a snow globe that someone picked up, shook, and set back down, leaving our environment sloshing around us, debris floating through the air, settling at our feet. 

We moved quickly, collaborating from our siloed spaces, pushing one another to reframe our thinking: 

• Instead of, “Can this even work if we’re not all in the same room at the same time?” we asked, “How can this work while we’re in different places with different schedules?”
• Rather than, “I’ll need to start planning all over again for this to work in a new setting,” we wondered, “What can I preserve from this plan?” and “What’s one way I can get this message across with the tools I have?”
• In addition to using high-tech options, like Canvas as a platform for content, we consistently considered what the low-tech and no-tech options would be.

Through connection and communication, we were able to find ways to support teachers who were going through the same process themselves: expanding their classroom from inside the walls of a school building out in the city, across the state, and around the world.

The phrase we're in this together became a mantra not only when it came to wearing masks, washing our hands, and social distancing, but also when it came to our own teaching and learning. Stay-at-home restrictions created an environment in which we needed to open our minds to as many options to meet as many students in need as possible.

As teachers — from early childhood education to graduate school — revised and remodeled their plans, many began to ask, “Why didn’t I think of this before? I could have a distance learning component for each of my lessons.” At CPET, we realized that we could not only offer each of our workshops in an online space, but we could make all of our offerings available at no additional charge to our participants. The limitation of being in a specific session at a specific time was gone, and what was left was the opportunity for teachers to experience as many of the asynchronous offerings as they cared to.
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Our Spring 2020 asynchronous offerings; view upcoming opportunities here

Utilizing practical strategies

​Of course, after plans are adapted into a new space, the work again becomes customizing to our students. What do our first graders need to connect during distance learning? What about our sixth graders? Our seniors? As our snow globe settles and our vision clears, we see that trusted strategies are a foundation we can still hold on to. We can identify practical and adaptable tips we’ve used in the classroom and integrate them into our remote teaching and learning.

• Discussion Strategy: Provide prompts for students to connect to themselves
  • Pose open-ended questions about a text or topic to help students engage in the conversation
  • Turn your questions into writing prompts
  • Support students in asking their own questions through invitation and exploration

 

• Informal Formative Assessment: Peaks & Pits
  • Students articulate one peak and one pit. A peak is something they are excited they now understand or something new they learned during class, invitation, or exploration. A pit is something that’s still troubling them or that they wish they understood more clearly.
  • Possibilities: Pair share, read aloud, or collect through chat, email, Google Doc, or by uploading a picture

 

• Differentiating the way students engage with information: Introduce a topic, concept or theme
  • Step 1: Quote — students interpret a quote about the concept or theme
  • Step 2: Image — students interpret an image that represents the concept or theme
  • Step 3: Question — students answer a questions about the concept or theme
  • Step 4: In groups of three, students compare the quote, question and image; students identify connections between the three

So, we end where we began: differentiation is not simply part of the work — it is the work.

Each student deserves the opportunity to grow, demonstrate progress, and work hard toward an achievable goal.

Each teacher deserves the same. 

Listen to children at every age. Meet them where they are, in the best way you know how. That will be more than enough for the moment we’re in.

G. FAITH LITTLE
Initiative Director, 21st Century Learning

In a recent letter to the community, CPET Director Roberta Kang shared her childhood memory of the Challenger Space Shuttle’s explosion, and her experience as a teacher in the classroom during 9/11. She wrote, “As educators, we are not unfamiliar with working through a crisis. We know that some crises are visible, and some are invisible. We know that some are explosive, while others are slow burns that dismantle a sense of safety bit by bit. We know that some have villains attached, and others are just, well, science.”

Our children will have strong memories of this time. They will recall what it was like when their school closed, when they had to wear masks, stand far away from people, or when open air parks were locked to visitors. Already, children are telling stories about when they went to school, “before the virus came” and what they want to bring to school, “after the virus is over.” Having conversations with children about what is happening around them and within them will support their growth and learning during this challenging time.

Although COVID-19 is a new type of coronavirus, talking with children about scary situations is not new. To support our conversations, we can lean on reliable resources and use age-appropriate methods. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) connects their general principles for talking to children to the National Association for School Psychologists guidelines:
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• Remain calm and reassuring
• Make yourself available
• Avoid excessive blaming
• Monitor television viewing and social media
• Maintain a normal routine to the extent possible
• Be honest and accurate
• Know the symptoms of COVID-19
• Review and model hygiene and healthy lifestyle practices for protection

There are many resources online to support our conversations, and it can be overwhelming to sift through for “the perfect one.” During this time of emotional, mental, and physical overload, it’s important to remember there is no such thing as perfect. Using a reliable, science-based option will give you a starting place for you and your kids to generate questions and keep the conversation open. 

Pre-K — Elementary

Support your younger students with ready-made resources from PBS. Sesame Street’s Caring for Each Other page has informative, age-appropriate videos and free e-books to support your conversation about what COVID-19 is and what we can do about it. Use their infographic to prepare for your conversation if you are feeling concerned about what to say.

Older elementary students can learn more about germs and build their vocabulary by reading an article together, like What are Germs? — available in English and Spanish, with an option to listen to the article while you read. 

Middle school

Middle school students are moving into a space where they question the answers they are given. Use this natural developmental stage to engage kids with inquiry cycles. Consider not only a focus on COVID-19, but a student exploration into a simple history of viruses. 

Whether you adapt lessons from online sources, like three lesson plans for science, math and media literacy focused on COVID-19, or you set students on a path to conduct their own research, trying out an inquiry cycle can help students gather information and generate real questions that lead to deeper exploration.

Don’t have a template of your own? Give ours a try — within this template, students can share their findings in discussion groups while you use the written information as formative assessments, make adjustments to lesson plans, and provide supplemental materials or advice for students as they explore. 

During this time of distance learning, we have the opportunity to see what happens when self-discovery and experimentation places learning in our students’ hands. As students get more autonomy, we get to see firsthand what teaching looks like when students are at the front of the class.

High school

Students at this age can do their own research on the topic starting with the CDC’s Coronavirus-19 page (available in at least five languages), which covers symptoms, how to protect yourself, slowing the spread, daily life, and coping and is updated regularly to include subjects like cloth face coverings.

​As new questions arise, students can create a simple art project, like an infographic. With them, you can research to find answers, add them to your infographic and draw, color, or paint for emphasis. If infographics aren't your thing, consider having kids create one of the following to illustrate their research: 

• PSA poster
• Top 10 list
• Illustration
• Graphs & charts
• Slideshow

​Above all, listen to children at every age. Listen to their words. Listen to their behavior. Meet them where they are, in the best way you know how. That will be more than enough for the moment we’re in.

Approaching change as if you’re training for hurdles is a practical way to address and overcome any fears that may surface.

G. FAITH LITTLE
Initiative Director, 21st Century Learning

Fear of change is real and challenging.

Fear manifests itself in different ways for each of us, whether it means becoming defensive in the middle of a coaching conversation, avoiding a colleague you’re paired with, or becoming paralyzed at the prospect of dealing with conflict directly and openly. As Roberta Lenger Kang noted in Don't take it personally: de-escalating conflicts in the classroom, “The more fear we have, the more likely we are to become hyper-vigilant micro-managers in the classroom, which can sometimes magnify small issues and escalate conflicts…”

Whether you’re affected by a change taking place or you’re implementing change that will affect others, treating the process as if you’re training for hurdles is a practical way to address and overcome fear of change in yourself and as you lead others.

This training can be broken into three parts.

Before change: flexibility and preparation

Before enacting a change, stretch, practice, and count. 

Stretch: Whatever the change, find where you already have some flexibility and elongate it.

• Example: You’re tasked with finding a new way to address the social-emotional learning (SEL) needs of your students. Even though the task is daunting and feels far outside your content area, you locate your own practice of writing for full presence before you start the day and connect to that as a healthy investment you make in your own SEL.
• Outcome: You find you're not actually starting from scratch after all.

Practice: When preparing for a change, implement small steps on your way to the starting line or implementation date.

• Example: The announcement is made that your grade level team is going to implement an advanced literacy plan and will start by incorporating I used to think, but now at the end of each unit. You’re anxious to implement another new idea and aren’t sure how your students will respond. Instead of waiting for the end of a unit to jump that hurdle, introduce the I used to think, but now tool after a lesson. Frame the idea as a practice for your students and solicit feedback so you can customize the experience at the unit’s end to be most helpful for your class.
• Outcome: You get to practice and the added bonus of an additional formative assessment built into your lesson plan.

Count: When leading change, you know teachers will have some level of anxiety or fear of change. It’s normal.

• Example: Instead of asking teachers to ignore their fear or push down their resistance, consider what their reasons may be and count them up. Name them. Name them for yourself and for others. Ask your colleagues to add any other reasons they are experiencing discomfort around the change ahead.
• Outcome: Teachers can express their concerns and you'll know exactly what you'll want to address prior to and during the shift ahead.

During change: keep moving forward, but pace yourself

During a process of change, speed up toward the first hurdle, run steady through the middle, and finish strong.

Speed up: After laying the foundation for the change ahead, consider taking the first hurdle of actual change with excitement, energy, and speed. With a little extra energy, you can leap through the discomfort and make it over the first goal.

• Example: If you’re trying a new guided reading technique, you might tell your students how excited you are about something new you’re trying and that even though they might not notice, you are learning and growing just like they are. Then go for it, welcoming any mis-take is an opportunity to learn.

Run steady: After the initial hurdle, move forward steadily, pacing yourself as you go. You’ve already entered into a new way of teaching, so keep the changes to a minimum.

• Example: Consider a simple cycle to help you stay focused when shifting from asking students questions during a discussion to students asking one another questions. Notice that changes aren’t the focus here, but staying steady, encouraging students, and making observations keeps the process moving forward.

Finish strong: As you round the corner toward a natural check-in point, gather some energy.

• Example: If the change you’ve been working toward is implementing weekly formative assessments, what about adding them daily during the final week? At the beginning of the week, have your students start a Know, Want to Know, Learned chart, completing the first two columns (Know, Want to Know) only. Then, each day during the last few minutes of class, have students add to the third column (Learned). This will allow you to get daily information, as well as an overall look at the end of the week.

After change: celebrate and reflect

After implementing change, allow yourself time and space to reflect on your experience and celebrate your successes. 
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Celebrate: Pick a finish line. The finish line may be obvious, like the end of a unit or the semester. It may be decided by administration based on an outside deadline. It could be ongoing, like making a change that lasts the entire school year and beyond. If that’s the case, choose a check-in as your finish line. When you get to the finish line, celebrate. You did it! You engaged in change.

You may or may not feel like it went well, but that doesn’t affect the celebration. To celebrate, you simply share with yourself, and others if possible, that you made it to a finish line! Find a way to concretize the celebration, whether in writing, capturing your success using social media, or sending an email to people who care about you. If you’re leading change, consider making a well-deserved certificate for your teachers or students to commemorate their progress.

Reflect: To make the most of your experience, find the time to reflect. Find ways to adjust your practice going forward, and ask more questions about what is possible. What went well? What would you like to see more of? What questions came up that you’d like to explore? Journal, use a template (create your own or download our What, So What, Now What tool), or make a list of what you want to talk about with your academic coach or colleagues.

Hurdle after hurdle, make a habit of attempting your jumps. Whether you sail over them, tip them, or knock them over, you’ll give yourself the opportunity to learn from every leap and fall.

Strengthening your communication with students and families can seem daunting. How can you get started?

G. FAITH LITTLE
Initiative Director, 21st Century Learning

We want our students, parents, and teachers to experience these benefits.

Challenges are easy to list, and we likely have a long list beyond these, but here are some of the big ones. 
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• Time: how do I find it outside of parent/teacher conferences?
• Training: what do I do when the discussion goes beyond my content area?
• Expectation: the reasons I became a teacher didn’t include communicating with families, so how do I manage this in a way that’s aligned to my personality and content area?
• Planning: how do I begin to fit this in with my other teaching responsibilities?

Start by planning

Strengthening your communication with students and families can start as simply as organizing your approach. Whether you’re approaching the beginning of the year, a new term, or are in the middle of a course, trying a new tool that can be customized to your unique communication style and your school’s expectations for family contact will support your work.

• Create a communication table (sample below) for each student. Update this electronically to save time when adding your notes, or print out the pages and keep them in a binder for easy access at your desk, especially if you prefer to write by hand. You can always scan in the documents later when you need to share your communication practices with leadership. Download our Family Connection template to get started.

 

• Establish a communication goal. Perhaps your school already has a certain number of contacts required for each student. If so, integrate those into the template. If not, consider for yourself what a reasonable goal would be, based on your unique situation and number of students.

 

• Choose a natural time you can merge a check of this document into your practice. Is it when you take attendance, or during the last few minutes of class? Is it every Friday afternoon or Monday morning? What’s the best time to integrate it into your schedule?

 

• Organize your chart in a way that makes sense for you. Do you need to make contact at least once a month? Do you need to make a specific type of contact (text, email, portal)? Shift your template to fit your needs.

Communication goals

In the example below, our first goal was to start with listening, in this case using a baseline survey to the student’s parents that establishes a connection and supports us in understanding our student from the parent’s perspective. Our second goal was to have three positive contacts with the family, in addition to any contacts necessary to discuss issues that may arise in the classroom.

From here, we would continue to add our notes and check in on communication that may be needed in order to meet our goals. This template can continue to be streamlined or expanded as practices change over time.
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While the content of parent/teacher conversations may not always be easy, simply getting started can give you confidence and increase the ways in which you can connect with families.

Ways to get clear feedback that can inform further instruction. 

G. FAITH LITTLE
Initiative Director, 21st Century Learning

We check for understanding constantly, don’t we?

“Does that make sense?”
"Know what I mean?”
“Get it?”

When it comes to our classrooms, we’re looking for more precise ways to check for understanding. Here are some simple ways and a few tools to use in your class as soon as tomorrow!

Thumbs up!

A simple and positive hand gesture can check to see who is hearing your instruction and who needs more support to move forward. You can use this: 

• on the board: Thumbs up when you’re on page 49 and ready to read.
• out loud: Thumbs up if you remember two rules of volleyball. Three? Four? More?
• on a slide: Thumbs up if you’ve written down a question about the periodic table. 

Choose your emoji

Expressions are a helpful way for students to share how they’re feeling or thinking about new or challenging content. It is especially useful for English Language Learners and Students with Disabilities. Using emojis (which can be individual cut outs or together on one piece of paper), ask students to choose the emoji that best represents their current experience.

As you move around the room, you can customize your questions and support. Find out more about what the happy faces understand, what the thinking faces are working out, and what the sad faces need to make their struggle productive.

Entrance tickets

See how the homework informed thinking or where yesterday’s mini-lesson landed by collecting a little data at the beginning of class. You can even combine this tool with the emojis you've used previously:

• On the board: Choose the emoji that best describes your experience as you work out today’s problem.
• Out loud: Show your emoji! Let me know how you’re experiencing this reading.
• On a slide: Which emoji represents where you are with writing up your experiment notes?

Whatever the tool, getting clear feedback is key to differentiating your instruction and increasing communication with your students!

Exit tickets allow you to breathe for a couple of minutes before your next class period starts. 

G. FAITH LITTLE
Initiative Director, 21st Century Learning

An exit ticket is like an Instant Pot. You hear about how great it is — it saves time, it’s simple, it’s flexible, and it doesn’t need many ingredients. It seems to be a staple tool at this point, so you pick one up and start using it. So it goes with exit tickets. When we start using them, it may be because of both convenience and necessity. They’re quick and easy, and they allow you to breathe for a couple of minutes before your next class period starts or you need to switch over to the next subject you’re teaching.

Exit tickets also provide a supportive rhythm to your class. They signal to kids that they will be transitioning soon, and this is invaluable to many students — especially if they struggle with change during their school day. Exit tickets provide a natural way to move from one space into the next, figuratively (if students stay in the same classroom) and literally (if students move to a new room). 

Sometimes that’s as far as we get with using exit tickets. It feels like enough, especially at the start of the school year or in the first year of your teaching career. But we can improve our use of exit tickets by taking them from simple (and valuable!) classroom tools and morphing them into invaluable formative assessments. 

What is an exit ticket? 

Backing up for a minute, let’s define an exit ticket. An exit ticket is a task that typically requires a short response from students. Teachers use exit tickets after an activity or learning period, and it can literally be the ticket to exit the room at the end of a period or a way for students to exit a part of the lesson. Exit tickets are not graded. Because they are not associated with a grade, students take on very little risk and can be honest about what they do and don’t understand, and may be more likely to ask questions they wouldn’t on a graded piece of writing. 

Using exit tickets as formative assessments

Exit tickets can be used in any subject area at any grade level as formative assessments to provide teachers with authentic data, in real time. 

Making exit tickets your own means designing (or using templates) for short responses that you can read fairly quickly. This can be as simple as a sticky note on which students respond to a prompt with a few words or a What, So What, Now What chart. 

​​At the end of a day, class period, or activity, you can engage in a quick cycle of inquiry with the data. 

1. Sort the data based on your own criteria from the lesson or for your specific students.

• Example: students who demonstrated they understand the concept, students who demonstrated they somewhat understand, and students who provided no evidence of understanding.

2. Examine each set of data. What do you notice? What needs attention?

• Example: a third of the students mentioned key terms from the lesson. 

3. Identify areas that need to be taught, retaught, or further investigated.

• Example: need to revisit primary colors

4. Adjust your next lesson to accommodate your findings.

• Example: start tomorrow’s lesson pairing students to share their knowledge

5. Revise your next exit ticket (if needed)  if you see that your prompt isn’t yielding useful data.

• Example: “Did you learn what osmosis was?” didn’t show me what they knew, only if they thought they learned the concept. Revise to an open-ended prompt.

​Using exit tickets as formative assessments is a promising practice that can be quick and can also support deep and differentiated learning in your classroom. Share with us your exit ticket practice below. Similar to Instant Pots, when you learn new ways to use them, it’s fun to share your findings with others!

Make the most of your time and energy by using a batching strategy for your planning. 

G. FAITH LITTLE
Initiative Director, 21st Century Learning

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!

Where to begin when much around us seems to be crumbling or unfixable.

G. FAITH LITTLE
Initiative Director, 21st Century Learning

​​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!

Three simple ways to incorporate critical reflection into your practice.

G. FAITH LITTLE
Initiative Director, 21st Century Learning

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?

Engage in low-inference observations that can lead to new discoveries about your students' needs.

G. FAITH LITTLE
Initiative Director, 21st Century Learning

Behavior is a form of communication.

Plug this sentence into your preferred search engine, and it will return enough results to keep you reading for hours. Since it’s more likely you’re scrolling through this post on your train ride, between classes, or at lunch than sitting with a cup of tea and hours to spare, let’s connect the dots quickly and consider a way to look at communication through behavior as data that we can analyze to determine a productive possibility in our classrooms.

Collect the data: what is the behavior?
Start with documenting low inference observations of behavior. As you jot down the description of the behavior, challenge yourself to write only what is observable. When you write, “a fight broke out,” ask yourself, “what did I actually see?”.

What did you see? What did you hear?

It’s worth the time it takes to develop your low inference observation skills, because you will be working from more accurate data, as free of assumptions as possible.

Analyze the data: what might it mean?
While you already have classroom expectations clearly outlined and students may be fully aware of the consequences of certain behaviors, whether it is a phone call home, a visit to the AP, or other intervention, you may also consider using a tool to support your own problem-solving. This is especially helpful when you’re confronted with a persistent, or even new, behavior. 

Lifelines is a tool we’ve used with our partner schools when looking at data reports together. With a few customizations, we can use this tool to explore behavior as data.

• What is the behavior? This is your low inference observation. Consider remaining curious about this behavior and what it may be communicating as you move forward.
• What might it mean? This is where you bring in your understanding of the student, their context, their story. Is there information you may be missing? Who else do you want to talk with in order to get a more complete picture that could inform your analysis?
• Why is it important? You considered this behavior important enough to analyze for a reason. What else have you discovered during your analysis that makes this behavior important to address?

​Consider possibilities: apply analysis to inform instruction
What questions, lessons, or interventions make sense to support the student and their learning? Is it an individual moment that is needed or could the whole class benefit from some time investigating this issue together? 

Try your lesson or intervention out. What happened? What other questions came up? What might you try next? If you continue to remain curious, your “final” determination in the Lifelines tool can be a starting point to a simple cycle of inquiry.

By engaging your curiosity and making low inference observations of student behavior, you can engage in an inquiry cycle that could result in new and exciting discoveries about what your students’ behavior is communicating. Your findings can then support students academically by addressing their social-emotional needs.

Utilizing a cycle of inquiry with school teams as a powerful means towards transforming practice.

G. FAITH LITTLE
Initiative Director, 21st Century Learning

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 cycles of inquiry. (You can see previous entries in this series here.)

We believe in and utilize a cycle of inquiry with school teams as a powerful means towards transforming and improving practices and school structures. Our approach is inspired by the notion of social inquiry, as developed by John Dewey and C.S. Pierce, which privileges reflection and action, and articulates a process to identify a problem and investigate it through collaborative experimentation and exploration to develop a clearer understanding of an issue. 

We’ve got more to say on our foundations and theory, but my three-year-old nephew demonstrates the practice efficiently and effectively with his very favorite question: Why? 

We aren’t going to go swimming right now.
Why?
Because we’re going home.
Why?
It’s late, and you need to get dinner and a bath before bed.
[Pause] Is the pool open?
Yes, it’s open.
Can we get bath at the pool?
I suppose we can, yes. But what about dinner?
Why?
Because you’re going to get hangry soon.
What’s hangry?
Remember, when we don’t eat and then small things bother us, and then we get mad easily, and sometimes we throw a tantrum?
And we have to sit to think about it?
Yes.
[Pause] McDowell’s! (yes, he says McDowell’s) I see it. Maybe can we eat then go swim?
Why?
Then we can eat and swim and be happy to swim.

​​The conversation continued. We went swimming. On the way home we talked about swimming and why it makes us happy. My nephew asked, “Why?” at least a dozen more times. His pauses helped me see that he was thinking about the answer — he remains curious no matter the subject. 

Previously, I shared how our team goes about exploring our questions and challenges. Once a month, we gather together for Fiesta Fridays, which involve self-directed team-building activities that allow us to use play to surface larger challenges. Last year, our team began a cycle of inquiry focused on our Fiesta Friday experiences by using a simple structure to capture what we were curious about:

I am studying (topic): norms and consensus within the Fiesta Friday (FF) experience
because I want to find out how: FF partners should perform
in order to better understand: the goal of FF 
so that we will know more about: how well we are meeting that goal.

From this starting point, we introduced letter writing as a way of passing along our learning from one Fiesta Friday to the next. Planners from January’s experience wrote a letter to those planning February’s outlining their goals for the experience, how it connected to the previous FF goals, and what, if anything, they might have changed following the experience. After a few months, we had some data we could use to loop back into our original question about FF partners and FF goals. 

Our inquiry process is informed by Dewey’s and Pierce’s descriptions of three cyclical stages of the inquiry process: deductive: identifying an issue and developing a hypothesis or approach to try; inductive: testing a hypothesis and noting implications; and abductive: returning to adjust and hone a hypothesis or strategy based on experimentation.

With our partner schools, we see that by engaging in a cycle of inquiry to improve instruction, educators can identify the problems specific to their contexts and engage in a cycle of exploration to seek promising practices that address their particular needs, as opposed to relying solely on experts for “answers.” We turn the focus toward the questions that are bubbling up for teachers and for students. Where is the curiosity? What questions do their questions lead to, and what can they learn along the way?

During our inquiry process, we may refine the question or gather information that leads us to a new question, but we start with curiosity. We wonder. We ask, “Why?” We imagine. 

What are you curious about today? Perhaps you’re interested in giving it a little thought through writing:

I am curious about ___________________________________
because I want to find out (what/how/why) ___________________________________
in order to better understand (what/how/why) ___________________________________
so that we will know more about ___________________________________.