Utilizing a cycle of inquiry with school teams as a powerful means towards transforming practice.
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 ___________________________________.
How to step back, look, and listen to see where communities may be forming or where we can invite them to form.
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 communities of practice. (You can see previous entries in this series here.)
Identifying members of your community with an interest in professional development can be a first step in building an internal coaching structure within your school, and if you’re already humming along with a teacher coaching practice, looping back to some basics can help you identify additional teachers to invite into a growing community of practice.
“Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope. In a nutshell: communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”
Step back
We often become so familiar with our own school and colleagues that we miss a new or forming interest — especially when it’s late in the school year and we’re sure we know everyone well enough to ascertain who is interested in receiving or leading PD and who isn’t. However, if we step back, we may see something new. At the next grade level team meeting, take a breath and look around as if it were the beginning of the school year. During your next staff meeting, imagine the people around you have changed over the school year (they probably have) and look and listen for new evidence of the desire to grow professionally. Look Take a look over a list of your staff and identify which teachers have tried something new in their classroom. What might happen if you invite them to share with one other teacher, in their department, or with the larger community? Where do you see teachers gathering in pairs or small groups? Do they share a common interest that could translate into professional learning? For instance, back when the first Harry Potter book came out, teachers reading the book decided to gather together to form a book club that spent the first half hour talking about their own experience of the book and the second half talking about how they could spark their own student’s imagination through creative writing prompts. Look around. Where might professional learning groups be a logical next step to what is already happening? Listen Perhaps it’s more likely in your situation that teachers aren’t forming their own learning groups naturally. Take a moment instead to listen for the needs you hear being voiced. Do you hear struggles in the form of complaints? There’s not enough time. / How am I supposed to fit [this] in? / I’ve tried everything with [this kid]! What teacher do you know who has struggled through this same problem in the past? Consider asking the teacher who overcame the struggle to invite the teacher in the midst of the struggle to problem-solve together. Listen to the whole staff: do you have results from any recent survey you can dip back into for a sense of the needs across your team? Identify several needs and offer a problem of practice protocol in your next email to staff or invite teachers to form small groups that engage with a protocol to address their concerns. Maybe it’s time for a new survey focused on asking questions directly about PD needs and especially about the interest of teachers to collaborate and learn from one another. It’s a great time to listen for needs that you want to meet over the summer and going into 2019-20.
The reality is that communities of practice are everywhere. Sometimes we can see them clearly and other times we need to step back, look, and listen to see where they may be forming or where we can invite them to form between folks who don’t realize that just across the hall is someone else with the same interest or struggle. Wagner describes it like this:
[Communities of practice] are a familiar experience, so familiar perhaps that it often escapes our attention. Yet when it is given a name and brought into focus, it becomes a perspective that can help us understand our world better. In particular, it allows us to see past more obvious formal structures such as organizations, classrooms, or nations, and perceive the structures defined by engagement in practice and the informal learning that comes with it.
Incorporating time and space for key 21st century skills.
By G. FAITH LITTLE
Being aware of 21st century skills as a common phrase and focus in our schools is a first step many of us have taken toward planning and teaching for our students. We are integrating the language. We may have even tried a project as an assessment for one of our units. Yet, making the shift into full integration of real-world projects that set the stage for our students to practice these skills regularly eludes us. Uchenna Ogu and Suzie Reynard Schmidt, in their article The Natural Playscape Project: A Real-World Study With Kindergarteners beautifully articulate a design that can be applied across grade levels and content areas. Students are the authors of their own playscape, with teachers as their guide and support. In this case, playscape refers to the natural playscape created by kindergarteners — a “playground with as few human-made components as possible”. The process brings together research, exploration, and the hard work of thinking and taking action, both individually and collaboratively, where the playscape is not a final project for the purpose of assessing learning. The playscape is the unit.
Playscape
Lesson: The playscape is “designed to bring children back to nature and offer a wide range of open-ended play possibilities that allow children to be creative and use their imaginations.” Application prompt: What is the playscape for your classroom? Consider the landscape students could create and navigate in math, social studies, foreign language, physical education, literature, or science. What world could they build that would engage their senses and invite them to learn in order to create?
Creativity
Lesson: “To begin the project, teachers shared their own knowledge from studies about play and sustainable schoolyards with the children.” Teachers went on to share a text the children read together and articulated some boundaries for their building: "You may build houses small and hidden for the fairies, but please do not use living or artificial materials." “With inspiration and wonder, we set off to imagine, play, and invent small worlds for fairies and other fantastical and real woodland creatures at a nearby park and on an empty back lot on the school campus that eventually became our natural playscape.” Application prompt: What knowledge from your own field of study do students need in order to begin to plan or build their playscape? What texts will open new possibilities for them or serve as foundations for their invention? Consider what knowledge students truly need to begin and what knowledge it makes sense for them to discover on their own. Invite them to discover for themselves, serving as a mentor or guide rather than an expert giving out all the answers.
Collaboration
Lesson: Plan and prepare for meaningful collaboration: “…teachers offered each pair of children a tray of sand. Teachers provided glass beads, twigs, seashells, and other natural materials, as well as time to play, experience, create, imagine, and explore. Children used these materials to create small worlds, miniature playgrounds, or fairy houses. Teachers then asked the children to draw on all of their previous experiences, both indoors and out, to generate a comprehensive list of materials that they might want or need when designing their miniature playscapes. Pebbles, seeds, dirt, grass, leaves, and flowers all made their way onto the list and eventually into their work…Next, teachers invited the children to collaborate in small groups to create miniature playgrounds for the fairies and small woodland creatures.” In the third year, the second-graders, who were the originators of the project while in kindergarten, rejoined the process as collaborators and consultants. Application prompt: What mini-scape could students create as a model for their larger playscape? Instead of listing the materials they may need, support students in generating their own lists of materials. As a mentor, you may do the advanced work of obtaining possible materials, but have them waiting in the wings. Let students take ownership by asking for what they need. When grouping students to collaborate, give each student a specific role that requires an outcome, so that each person’s contribution can be seen.
Communication
Lesson: Committees were formed to investigate a specific aspect of the playscape in depth. After learning more deeply about their subject, children shared what they learned. “For example, since it was important to the current kindergartners to invite birds to the playscape, those involved with the Birdhouse Committee researched native Missouri birds and built birdhouses.” The committee members expressed their love for birds through letter writing, addressing their notes to the birds themselves and including important details from their learning, “We are bird experts. We can tell you apart. You are really cute. We hope you like to splash in the birdbaths. We made them look like flowers, because we thought you might like that.” Application prompt: What are some buckets of information or concepts all of your students will need to understand in order to create a useful playscape? Consider grouping them and naming the groups as it makes most sense in your field. Are they architects? Technical writers? Applied mathematicians? Statisticians? Commentators? In what genres do people in these roles write?
Critical thinking
Lesson: “Being on the committees engaged the children by allowing them to research and pursue one aspect of the playscape with depth.” At one stage in the process, kindergarteners were matched with second graders to explore their design process further. “The two age groups facilitated and scaffolded each other's learning as they talked about, represented, reflected on, and began to evaluate aspects of their own and their partners' design ideas.” Application prompt: Whether it’s pairing students in different grade levels or perhaps pairing students with complementary skills, how can you support students to listen to their partner, communicate clearly, and come to an agreement on next steps? What skills do you need to teach? What practices should students engage in to get the most out of their collaboration in order to sharpen their own critical thinking skills?
Reflection
Lesson: Ongoing reflection is key. During: “Throughout the natural playscape project, teachers encouraged children to frequently reflect on their experiences.” After: “At the end of the study, as a way to help children reflect on their growth and learning, teachers asked them questions about their experiences.” Application prompt: What structure will you support, or put in place, so that students reflect after each step of their process? This reflection will allow them to quickly make use of their learning, going back to foundations or taking a risk, based on their findings. What will the final reflection look like? How can you support student to design their own reflection?
Consider responding to each application prompt as you plan for next year. Whatever grade level you teach, incorporating space and time for creativity, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and reflection for your students will boost their 21st Century skill set!
The earlier a connection begins, the better chance students have for developing necessary social-emotional skills.
Teacher training and education often does not shine a light on the importance of social-emotional growth for student academic achievement. We know our content. We have solid classroom management. Isn’t that enough? How do you find time for more? What if you feel nervous about connecting to students on a level outside of your field of study?
In their recent publication, the Utah Department of Health issued a status update on the impact of social-emotional development on health: “Historically, building success in children has meant an emphasis on academia; good math and reading skills yields good grades, which increases the likelihood of obtaining a college degree and securing more earning power. It goes without saying that core reading and math skills are important, but research shows it’s time to focus on another set of skills to build lifelong success—those within the social and emotional realm.”
Zero to Three, an organization dedicated to the well-being of infants and toddlers, further emphasizes the importance of social-emotional connections:
“Infant-early childhood mental health, sometimes referred to as social and emotional health, is the developing capacity of the child from birth to 5 years of age to form close and secure adult and peer relationships; experience, manage, and express a full range of emotions; and explore the environment and learn—all in the context of family, community, and culture.” We probably don’t need much convincing that children need connections with each other and with caring adults. It seems clear that the earlier their connections begin, the better the opportunity for a strong foundation upon which they can develop the necessary social-emotional skills needed to thrive. What we do need are practical ways to connect with our students within a limited amount of time. From grade school to middle school to high school, there are effective and efficient ways to integrate these connections into our practice.
Engage authentically
Each of your students is an original, and so are you. Express yourself in the style and manner that feels most real to you. You may connect with your students in quiet ways while your colleague across the hall conducts spotlight celebrations to connect with theirs. There is not only room for different styles, but there’s a need for them. When students are able to experience a variety of relationships and ways of connecting with adults, it gives them more opportunities to feel seen and find a sense of belonging. That quiet student in the back may connect best with a teacher who encourages in quiet ways. The student seeking attention may feel their needs being addressed when the teacher calls out their encouragement more publicly. And, let’s face it, students are pros at recognizing when an adult is faking interest, so choose something you’re genuinely interested in as a means of connecting. What are some interests of your own that you can share as a way of opening up a conversation? What would happen if everyone wrote down one thing they do or are curious to learn about (inside or outside of school)? These could be shared or kept between you and each student. The class could create a found poem or an original periodic table to represent the elements in your classroom community. What else comes to mind?
Grow your practice
Whether you’re simply starting out or are already a social-emotional skill-growing pro, reach for your next steps in connecting with your students. Read an article about prioritizing social-emotional competencies on your way home on the train. Or watch a TED Talk on the role of vulnerability in human connection, especially if you’re nervous about stepping outside of the comfort zone of your content area. Find a PD focused on social-emotional growth and sign yourself up! While you’re growing your knowledge, keep pushing your experience. Write down all the ways you already connect — which would you like to see more of in your own practice? Which need to be revived, like something you did when you first began teaching but has been on the back burner for the past few years? Find new ways to connect! Here are few suggestions that may spark new ideas:
Share the intention of your plan with your students as it makes sense to you, and ask them to hold you accountable by saying something like, “If I haven’t given you a sticky note by the end of the week, remind me that I owe you one, because I intend to notice contributions each of you are making to our classroom community.”
Enjoy the experience
As you’re making connections with your students, you are nurturing the growth of a child’s sense of well-being and belonging. Take a few moments from time to time and recognize the ways this is transforming you and your students. You’re creating community, together. You’re modeling and taking the lead in finding ways to connect. As you model ways of connecting, your students are watching. They are learning from you, and you will likely not know which acknowledgement, email, phone call, sticky note, or shout out they hold onto as they move through their days and weeks, in class and out. Connection shows them that someone cares. That someone is you. What an opportunity! What hard work and how valuable! Enjoy this process of planting seeds, trusting they will grow and bloom in gardens beyond your own.
The importance of social-emotional connections
The light is shining brighter, spotlighting the importance of social-emotional learning (SEL) for students. In The Importance of Social Emotional Learning for All Students Across All Grades, the National Education Association says: Research shows that SEL can have a positive impact on school climate and promote a host of academic, social, and emotional benefits for students. Durlak, Weissberg et al.’s recent meta-analysis of 213 rigorous studies of SEL in schools indicates that students receiving quality SEL instruction demonstrated:
Whether you’re nervous to step into the SEL world or already comfortable, continue to develop promising practices that support students as whole human beings and look for the positive results in yourself and in your students!
If a prompt is like a camera lens, pulling your task into focus, an invitation is like a colorful string you can’t resist pulling to see what happens next.
If a prompt is like a camera lens, pulling your task into focus, an invitation is like a colorful string you can’t resist pulling to see what happens next. Writing an invitation for the reader to connect with a text can be as simple as choosing a quote and offering ways for the reader to respond, as we did with our One Book, One New York invitations when the city was reading Americanah.
When we send out invitations to our Literacy Unbound players, each day for about a month leading up to our annual Summer Institute, we wait in anticipation to find out which strings they’ll pull and what will happen next. It isn’t magic to create an invitation, though when people respond the results are often magical! Nathan Blom’s Guide to Crafting Invitations to Create provides guidance on creating “invitations [that] speak to the recipient, enticing them to run with it and see where it leads; [that] open up and spark the creative process; [that] limber up thinking and lead us into meaningful conversations.” Consider playing with all or part of the structure Nathan outlines below and see what happens for you and for your students.
A Guide to Crafting Invitations to Create
Nathan Allan Blom INSTEP Program Coordinator & Adjunct Instructor, Teachers College, Columbia University Literacy Unbound Facilitator Contextualized quote from the text Choose a “hotspot” within the text. These should be passages of the text which you find worthy of attention, for whatever reason. These hotspots might or might not be the most important passages for the novel’s plot or themes. They should be rich with:
Be sure to contextualize the quote and explain where it comes from. Give your recipient an idea of where this passage occurs within the arc of the story events, or within the theme that you want to draw their attention to. Let’s use The Color Purple as an example. The inscription to Chapter 1 states, "You better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy." We can assume these words come from Celie's father, and that he is talking to her about the trauma he inflicts upon her. Celie takes this up and the entirety of the novel results from her letters to God (an "epistolary" is a novel in the form of letters).
Commentary on the quotation
Offer your recipient a brief commentary on the passage, without being heavy-handed. Phrase your commentary as a tentative offering of ideas, not a definitive statement of authority. Or, share the connections that occur to you when you read the passage. Or, explain the questions that arise when you read this passage, and the reasons for those questions. In Chapter 3, while trying to protect her younger sister, Nettie, from their rapist and infant-killing father, Celie says, "But I say I'll take care of you. With God help." Again, she turns to God for psychological and spiritual strength in the face of horrific events. Throughout history, people have sought spiritual refuge in the face of traumatic events, and this refuge often appears in the form of music or art. An example of this phenomenon is the tradition of African-American spirituals.
Connections to other "texts"
Putting texts into conversation with each other allows for deeper understanding. In essence, bringing in other texts is bringing more voices into the conversation. These voices add ideas and perspectives that may be absent if we only heard the single voice of the original text. The new voices complicate and contextualize meanings in unique and powerful ways. Also, sharing creative works is one of the keys to inspiring creative works. What outside media exist that illustrate and/or extend your connections, questions, or ideas? Include them in the Invitation, not as a way of defining what your recipient should do, but instead as a way of showing them what they could do and inspiring them to move further. Look to different media for inspiration:
Here are some links to African-American spirituals and gospels from performers during early 1900s (the time period of The Color Purple), and from more contemporary performers, descendants of the same tradition. There are many more examples out there. Listen and watch and respond to some of this music. Consider the interaction between the meaning of the words, and the emotional color of the music. What is being expressed? Why is it being expressed? Have you ever felt the need to express in a similar manner?
A prompt for creation
The final part of the Invitation to Create is the actual invitation itself. You must leave your recipient with a call to create. Be thoughtful in how narrowly or broadly you craft your prompting. Do you define a medium they should use (“Represent your ideas visually….”)? Do you leave it open (“Respond in whatever way you see fit….”)? Often times asking someone to move from one medium to another, such as from the written word to the visual image, for example, inspires an act of creation as the recipient tries to imagine how ideas transfer between the two. Do you guide the content of their response (“Create from the perspective of one of the silent characters of this scene….”)? In whatever way seems best to you (poetry, prose, music, art, video, dance, etc.), explore the ideas, emotions, and experiences within these moments of refuge seeking.
Invitation for The Color Purple using this structure
The inscription to Chapter 1 states, "You better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy." We can assume these words come from Celie's father, and that he is talking to her about the trauma he inflicts upon her. Celie takes this up and the entirety of the novel results from her letters to God (an "epistolary" is a novel in the form of letters). In Chapter 3, while trying to protect her younger sister, Nettie, from their rapist and infant-killing father, says, "But I say I'll take care of you. With God help." Again, she turns to God for psychological and spiritual strength in the face horrific events. Throughout history, people have sought spiritual refuge in the face of traumatic events, and this refuge often appears in the form of music or art. An example of this phenomenon is the tradition of African-American spirituals. Here are some links to African-American spirituals and gospels from performers during early 1900s (the time period of The Color Purple), and from more contemporary performers, descendants of the same tradition. There are many more examples out there. Listen and watch and respond to some of this music. Consider the interaction between the meaning of the words, and the emotional color of the music. What is being expressed? Why is it being expressed? Have you ever felt the need to express in a similar manner? In whatever way seems best to you (poetry, prose, music, art, video, dance, etc.), explore the ideas, emotions, and experiences within these moments of refuge seeking.
Happy practicing! Enjoy the exploration, and if you’re interested in learning more, check out our Literacy Unbound initiative.
The idea that “one size fits all” is a myth.
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 contextualized practice. (You can see previous entries in this series here.)
Contextualized practice — what does it mean?
Contextualized practice means that our processes, activities, and strategies are situational, and will change based on the environment or circumstances. The idea that “one size fits all” is a myth in clothing and a myth in professional development. Our work responds to the needs of the community as we build relationships and engage community members as collaborators and co-architects of our PD plans and processes.
What does it look like in real life?
It looks messy. Though contextualized, it doesn’t mean we’re working without a plan, goal, or strategy. It does mean, however, that we show flexibility in how we implement our plans based on the experiences we have and the people we’re working with. We may find that a project needs adjustment after realizing initial goals were overly ambitious, or that necessary skills are not yet in place. In real life, we take into account what we know and understand about the project and the people in order to plan our approach, and we continue to mold and shape our processes to meet the needs that emerge throughout the project. This can sometimes lead to changes in goals, responsibilities, or ways of working — and we know that it takes time to realize these nuances within a project. We are committed to this approach because without it, we don’t believe that impactful learning occurs.
What needs does it address?
First, it’s responsive to the needs of our partners and their goals. Because our processes aren’t prescriptive, we seek to match the values and priorities of each project rather than prioritize our own set agenda. Second, it positions us as a true partner at the start of each project, co-constructing with educators, schools, and learning communities. Rather than informing what people should do, we serve as thought partners, imagining what we could do.
What are key practices or strategies?
Can coaching be effective without this principle?
The answer is simply, no. If we are not customizing our practices and approaches to work with each individual project, we aren’t meeting the needs of their unique community.
Support students in developing a plan to build endurance for a testing environment.
In researching perseverance, you may start with a common definition like persist in doing something despite difficulty, or delay in achievement of success. You’re bound to come across synonyms like tenacity, determination, resolve, resolution, staying power, purposefulness, firmness of purpose, and so on. Pushing past definition and into application, article after article will give you the top 5, 10, or 12 ways to persevere in everything from training your dog, to taking a road trip, to growing a garden.
Borrowing from a few of these lists, we can support our students in developing a plan to build perseverance in test-taking through healthy habits. Like a Choose Your Own Adventure story or Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, teachers and students can determine which practices make the most sense for their ways of working.
Here's one version:
Build strength by writing at the beginning of every class period, starting small, and increasing as the semester progresses. Breathe when you need a few moments to figure out your path forward during the exam. Breathe deeply when you notice that your mind or heart is racing. See obstacles as part of the process by noticing when you see a problem you’ve had trouble with in the past, reminding yourself, “I can do hard things. I’ve gotten through this type of problem before,” and moving forward one step at a time. Develop a habit of working by doing homework in the same space or at the same time each day. Consistency not an option because of real-life demands? Try developing a habit within the work, like before stopping homework, make a list of questions you want to explore next time or ask your teacher about next class period. Take care of your body by stretching during long periods of sitting during class, so when exam time rolls around, it’s a habit to wiggle your fingers and toes, massage your temple, or point and flex your toes when you start getting weary or feeling stress.
Students can mix and match, using lists that already exist, as we’ve done here. Teachers can share their own list as a model – what do you do that builds your own testing perseverance, and what can students take on as their own?
Small groups can brainstorm healthy habits and then connect to what makes the most sense for their own test-taking needs. Whatever the method, starting and building on healthy habits to build perseverance is a practice that students can apply across all content areas, as well as life inside and outside of the classroom.
Even five minutes of writing during each day or class period will build a comfort and strength for students in their writing-on-demand skills.
Write On is a simple way of building the practice of writing-on-demand into your students’ routine. You can begin this process at any time during the school year, and you need only to set aside a discrete brainstorming session, followed by a regular practice time during your day / class period with your students for them to practice writing-on-demand. Even five minutes of writing during each day or class period will build a comfort and strength for students in their writing-on-demand skills.
Brainstorming
Using a basic sentence, support your students in brainstorming their ideas. For example, “Discovering the ________ in you.” Let students fill in that blank by listing every idea they have in three minutes. Work individually, and then again in small groups to generate a wide variety of words. Don’t think a brainstorming session will yield enough prompts? Consider reviving your own brainstorming practice using some tips from the Brainsprouting process.
We’ve developed a guideline in our design thinking workshops based on a Brainsprouting concept:
If you’re thinking it’s more efficient for you to come up with all the prompts, consider that all of us are more engaged when we come up with our own topics or questions that we’re already interested in exploring. Imagine the connections students will make when they see a title they generated in their daily writing practice!
Prompt
Simply take the list of 20, 50, 100 ideas and transfer them into your title. It can be as simple as drawing from a hat, literally, or using an app like Magic Sorting Hat. Now you’ll have a variety of topics to choose from, within your theme of personal discovery: Discovering the warrior in you. Discovering the seed in you. Discovering the genius in you. Discovering the baby in you. Discovering the sidewalk in you. Discovering the magic in you.
Write
Set a timer for the amount of time that makes sense for your students. Provide a short prompt – it can be the same for a week at a time, can change more often, or align with the lessons you’re working through. For example: Discovering the Writer in You Prompt: Think back to your first year at this school. Recall a difficult experience either in your personal or academic life. Write a letter to a new student that describes this experience. If you’ve got more time, or for students who are ready write more, you can add: what did you learn from the experience? Even more to add? Try what advice you’d give should they experience something similar in their future? As you can see, the prompt is flexible – scaffold it, align it with your current lesson, or align it with the genre students are working in during a given unit. Have fun!
Teacher's choice
Use the writing your students generated in a way that makes most sense with what’s going on in your classroom:
Imagine working in cycles that align with your school calendar or writing projects you’ve already established in your units. Integrate the process into what you’ve planned and you could find this a natural entry point for you and your students, easing into a new habit together.
Pause your internal story and focus on one small action you can take to overcome fear.
Fear of change is real. Whether it’s seemingly small, like sharing with someone you just met, or much larger, like being challenged to move from teacher-led to student-led discussions, you don’t know what to expect. A script can begin to run in your head about what happened last time you tried a new technique in the classroom and it didn’t land, or a story develops about why people around you keep asking you to change – they probably see my weaknesses and think they’re better at teaching than I am. Great, now I’m going to feel like I’m not really competent if I’m being asked to change.
This is a good place to stop. Stop the story and focus on one small action you can take to overcome fear. Simply ask, “Why?” "Teachers must embrace the same message we give to students: Learning is about taking risks, trying, failing, and improving." In his article The Challenge of Change, Harvard’s Zachary Herrmann says “Every time we find a gap between our values and our practice we have an opportunity to reflect and ask, ‘Why?’ What is really getting in the way? As leaders, are we creating environments that make others feel safe to take responsible risks? As teachers, how ready are we to feel incompetent in service of our own learning and growth?" At CPET, we use the 5 Whys protocol when we want to get below the surface of whatever is standing in our way. We start with a statement -- in this case it could be: I don’t want to share how I feel about my classroom. Then we begin to ask, “Why?”
This protocol is a simple one that can help us address our fears, connect with ourselves, teams, and students. The process of questioning keeps our minds moving instead of freezing up with fear, and after our need is expressed we can consider how we want to meet it, by ourselves or with support from others.
Putting aside work so we can play, as a team.
It’s Friday afternoon. We're at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met). Our colleague, Brian, is leading CPET’s senior staff in a playful experience where we explore bits of the museum guided by a podcast. At least one of us is thinking, I don’t have time to just have fun right now. My time could be better spent getting work done at the office. Brian counts down, “3, 2, 1...begin,” and we all press play and follow our ears. We are prompted by Nate DiMeo of The Memory Palace: Met Residency: A Scavenger Hunt and If You Have to Be a Floor.
“We’re going on a scavenger hunt, you and me. I will tell you things to look for. You will find them.” We wander. We wonder. We walk. At times we cross one another’s path and other times I look up to find I’m in my own corner after DiMeo says, “Find me something useful, something that does a job, that stores something…that lights something on fire…find me a glass or a platter or a helmet…find me a useful thing. Something more beautiful than it has any need to be and stop for a moment, and gaze upon it."
At one point, we were all standing in different spots across a small space – Gallery 719 (The Alexandria Ballroom) at the Met, headphones in our ears, eyes wandering from floor to furniture to windows and back down again as stories come alive in our ears. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice Brian smiling with a look of anticipation. A moment later, we all break into dance, awakening the silent room with our movement, and Brian beams with delight.
This is our third year of practicing team-building through play. Once a month for a couple of hours, we put aside our work so we can play – together. Among our experiences, we’ve attempted to Escape the Room, wandered Central Park, practiced yoga, gone bowling, played games we invented ourselves, created art, pretended to be trees, and watched a movie together.
Few would argue that play isn’t important to a child’s learning process, although there is ongoing discussion and research exploring the finer points of play, such as whether or not it’s more effective for learning if it’s adult or child-directed. How does screen-play factor into the play-learning equation? Can play exist as an end in itself, or must it be attached to learning something specific to be valued in the school setting? And so on. As educators, parents, caregivers, aunts, uncles, and former children ourselves, we each have stories about how we’ve seen and experienced play as a pathway to new learning. The President of the American Association for the Child’s Right to Play and professor at Hofstra University, Dr. Rhonda Clements, says, “It is important to maintain a healthy sense of play throughout childhood and into adulthood. Our complex society requires clear thinkers, playful attitudes, humor, and creativity for complex problem solving.”
CPET’s senior staff is responsible for leadership across the Center. With many of us out in the field for a good portion of our week, we work hard to carve out time to collaborate on small and large projects: school site PD sessions, student publications, new partnerships, conferences, communication and outreach, making sense of new mandates, developing online courses, supporting new teachers, and on and on. Work time is precious. So precious that we cannot afford to miss our play time. Each time we play, we:
Wouldn’t any one of these practices serve us well in our classrooms, faculty meetings, or school PD sessions? Play is one space you can step into with some levity and lightness! Could you start with an objective? We want to cultivate active listening in our team. Yes, absolutely. You could also start with a game -- let’s play old school Pictionary -- and then have your staff reflect after the game to find the learning gems. We use a simple set of questions with our team:
So we will continue to play, exploring our questions and our challenges, because the lessons we learn together tend to stick. Months after that visit to the Met, I reach for one of my favorite quotes from the podcast when I’m seeing my day starting to devolve into stress and pressure: “If you have to a be a room, be a room where people dance. If you have to be a floor. Be a dance floor.” Cultivating strengths in real life requires deep thinking and sustained practice to become authentic. We work hard to meet the needs of teachers and school leaders within their own context. As they’re striving to meet ever-changing standards, we’re striving to bridge gaps between theory, research, policy, and practice. When designing professional development projects (including job-embedded coaching, workshop series, institutes, and retreats), we’re constantly examining how our promising practices can be solidified even as we support schools to manage evolving mandates. Through this examination, we’ve come to identify five principles of practice: Cycles of Inquiry, Communities of Practice, Contextualized Practice, Cultivating Strengths, and Critical Reflection. Theory Professional development that is anchored within a strengths-based framework results in greater teacher satisfaction and greater rates of goal completion. Supervisors that are trained to cultivate strengths with an incremental implicit theory mindset are more likely to better discern growth in an employee (Heslin & VandeWalle, 2008). Incremental implicit theory is also known as a growth mindset, which is the belief that personal attributes like ability and intelligence are improvable over time. Carol Dweck’s growth mindset work demonstrates how this understanding translates to developing ability in more than just students. This provides the space to assess, plan, and coach toward improvements. Strength-based coaching, or Positive Psychology Coaching, works with the inherent strengths that we all have and uses both general and targeted development strategies to make an impact in one’s practice. Great! Yes! From personal coaching language to professional coaching language, in yoga class, podcasts, and article after article across the internet, we see the theory repeated. I did one quick Google search with these top returns:
While most of us would probably agree that positive language is . . . well . . . positive, is that really what we mean when we’re talking about cultivating strengths? When responding to student work, for instance, how does a positive comment like, “Good job!” cultivate the student’s problem-solving skills in math class or invite them to the next level of their writing craft? “Teachers can’t ’make’ students focus on or learn something. Teacher feedback is input that, together with students’ own internal input, will help the students decide where they are in regard to the learning goals they need or want to meet and what they will tackle next.” Practice Cultivating strengths in real life requires deep thinking and sustained practice to become authentic. To be useful in our classrooms, the language we use cannot merely be positive for the sake of creating a positive environment, but it must also provide students with a map so they can move from the place they are to the place we are confident they can be. When you want to say, “Good job!” what is it that you mean? Why is it a “good job”, and what can you point out as a strength? What are the next steps for the student to cultivate this strength you’re pointing out? And how do you provide this feedback when you have 30 – 150 students to respond to in any given week? The good news is that since we often see similar issues in our discipline — common errors in a math problem or science experiment, typical word choice at a given writing level, similar mistakes at each stage of learning during physical education challenges, or consistent misunderstanding of historical events — once we think through the language we want to use in our feedback, we can apply it to more than one student. Additionally, there are some common phrases teachers use that can be transformed by using a sentence stem to support your feedback across all students.
What about me? I use MINUS, CHECK, PLUS
You’re the expert on your classroom. What ideas does this give you? What does cultivating strengths look like for you with your students? Comment below! A group of educators in China push through discomfort and come out on the other side, with a sense of confidence and pride that their learning is their own. They were looking at me like I had sprouted horns or was speaking another language. Wait — I was speaking another language; I was speaking English to 26 teachers in Shanghai, China. I tried again, leaning on our interpreter, Serena, for support. I waited for understanding to cross their faces, for light bulbs to turn on. Instead, I saw blank stares and suspicious expressions. Then Serena said, “Yes, yes, they get it,” and motioned for them to get started. I moved around the room, table by table, asking teachers to flip their check for understanding card to the emoji that represented their thinking: Most of them were thinking and some smiling. “Is it the positive kind of thinking (productive) or the negative kind (destructive)?” I would ask. For most it was the former. I circled back around to support those who pointed to destructive thinking or sad faces. We were on the third day of a five-day institute, part of a partnership with YouXi, an organization that serves Chinese families and students by helping schools to raise their teaching standards and working with local teachers closely on their professional development. Our team was pushing them to engage with new ideas in what, we quickly discovered, was a completely new way of experiencing professional development. “They’re used to being lectured to, taking pictures of the Powerpoint, and then being finished,” we were told on day two, “This is a tough transition for them to make.” While we did have a Powerpoint they took pictures of, the slides were mostly filled with opportunities for making meaning -- with questions, not answers. We had invited them on day one to experiment, on day two to imagine, on day three to collaborate, and on each of those days to reflect and to question. With two days left to go, I could tell they wanted me to give them an answer. How could I tell? They said it, that’s how. “Just tell us the example. We will do it the way you say,” I heard more than once. Yet, our objective was to teach, inspire, and support these teachers in integrating 21st century assessments into their classrooms. I couldn’t do it for them. There were no answers to give, because they had the answers inside of them. As uncomfortable as we all felt — the teachers with this new way of learning and me anxiously wondering, have I pushed too hard? Have I discouraged them, or are they in a positive struggle? -- the only way out was through. I made my third round to each table. Each teacher was still in the room. Not only were they still present, but each one was working, either on their lesson or their rubric, so they had a way to assess learning in either:
They were doing it! They were intellectually engaged, absorbed in their attempt to make sense of this new framework, exploring how they might use it in their own classroom, investigating possibilities, and problem-solving individually and collaboratively. The day ended with presentations of their work.
We laughed with joy as Chinese language teachers demonstrated how their students would collaboratively embody a traditional story involving a fish and a stomach ache. We perched on the edge of our seats when a Biology Engineering teacher shared her lesson on artificial intelligence, winding her fascinating story toward her end goal to provide opportunities for her students to communicate their learning in multiple ways. We asked an art teacher question after question about the painting her 8th grade student did and how she planned to use the piece in a lesson focused on observation and reflection. Their sustained struggle to make sense of new concepts resulted in the opportunity to teach and inspire one another. They were able to develop their own examples and become models for one another for what it looks and feels like to push through discomfort and come out on the other side, with a sense of confidence and pride that their learning was their own, and the knowledge that they could take it to places only they could imagine. |
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