#cisdedchat questions for October 29, 2014

Hey all, just to kind of prime the pump for this weeks #cisdedchat I am posting the four questions in advance.  I think that it is important to always reflect on and remember why we do what we do.

Question #1 - Why did you choose teaching/education as a career?  Why did you want to become a teacher?

Question #2 - How do you "recharge your batteries" as an educator?

Question #3 - What is the number one encouragement you would give to a new teacher?

Question #4 - What is the best advice that has ever been given to you by a mentor or friend in regard to teaching that would help inspire us all now?

I hope that these questions will help to inspire us as we move along in this school year.

The practice of shadowing students

This last week I read an article that really caught my eye and made me think.  A teacher who had recently been promoted to an instructional coach was given the assignment of shadowing two different students for two days.  This coach had to do everything that the students had to do.  Here are some insights this coach walked away with:

1)  Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting.

• Have you ever sat through a day long professional development?  How did you feel at the end of the day?  Exhausted, right?  I encourage you to look at your style of teaching and track how long your students just sit and get.  Our students need to be actively involved.  What CISD is doing with the instructional rounds where we are decreasing the amount of teacher talk time and increasing the amount of student talk time is right on.

2)  Students are passively listening 90% of the time.

• We need to help students make important contributions to their classes on a daily basis.  Brief high-impact mini-lessons followed by engaging checks for understanding is definitely the way we as educators need to be headed.  Again, I truly believe that the problems of practice that the instructional rounds are addressing is moving CISD in this direction.  Creating high level questions and having the patience with the students for them to process the questions is vital to students making critical connections with the material we are presenting to them.

3)  Students feel a little bit of a nuisance all day long.

• Here is another experiment for you to run in your classroom.  Count how many times the students are told to be quiet and pay attention.  It is hard for adults to sit and pay attention for as long as we ask students to sit and pay attention.  Again, get them involved in productive ways.
• Also, how do we respond to students when questions are asked about something that has just been explained?  Gentle answers go a long to developing great relationships of trust and respect.  Sarcasm, impatience, and annoyance create barriers between people.  I encourage you to dig into your wells of patience and love.

Please do not look at this as indictment to how teachers teach.  That is not the goal.  The goal is to improve our practice of teaching.  If you have a nudge of guilt tugging at your mind right now, some changes might need to be made.  I just encourage everyone to honestly look at how you are engaging students throughout the day.  All of us have areas where we need to improve.  Myself included.  If you would like to read the article yourself you can go to this link  A Veteran Teacher Turned Coach Shadows Two Students for Two Days - A Sobering Lesson Learned.  Enjoy.

Edchat Musings

This week I just wanted to share an overview of ideas that were shared in the cisdedchat this last week.  It was very important for me to go back over this information, especially as an instructional leader on the campus.  All of the ideas that were shared there are practices that need to implemented in the classrooms in order to meet one of the goals for this year, increasing the quality of the responses of our students. 

These are the ideas that jumped out to me as I read through everyone’s responses.  First, trust needs to be built so that students feel safe even trying to answer questions.  Second, teachers need to learn to let go of the control of the classroom.  Third, students need to be shown models and given tools that will help them answer with more complete answers.  Fourth, use technology, a medium that students are very comfortable with, to help them learn how to share their opinions and respond to other people’s opinions.

So, the question for us is, how do we go about accomplishing all of this?  I don’t have all the answers, but I do have some ideas from my own experience and from what I have seen teachers do in their classrooms that could get us going in the right direction.  So, here are some ideas to ponder.

#1 – Building Trust – How do we go about building the trust of students?  We need to start here by building their confidence.  Educators can take a huge step in the right direction of building the confidence of students by being clear in what needs to be accomplished.  Once students clearly understand what they are supposed to be learning in the classroom they will be more confident and trust teachers and each other more as they make attempts to answer questions.  Anchor charts, solid introductions and reviews to lessons, and wise teachers leading discussions that grasp even the smallest seed of understanding in a student and expanding on it will help to build this confidence and trust.

#2 – Letting go of the control of the classroom – Long gone is the stand deliver model of teaching.  Here to stay are the strategies of questioning, collaborating, and flipped classrooms.  One of the best lesson I have recently seen had to do with a teacher wanting students to understand the idea of multiplication.  Instead of the teacher telling the students what multiplication was, she lead the students in a discussion that helped them discover what multiplication was.  With each idea that was shared in small groups and then with the class at large you could see more and more light bulbs coming on over the heads of the children.  Teachers are more and more becoming facilitators of discussion.

#3 – Models for students to give more complete answers – As we all know students love to give one word or two word answers.  So the question is how do we help them improve in this area?  Two suggestions.  First, as I saw beautifully done in a first grade classroom I visited this last week, encourage the students to answer in super sentences that include the word because.  Don’t let them answer with short answers, but teach them to answer more completely.  Second, put up anchor charts around the classroom that will help the students answer with higher level questions.  Teach these sentence starters to the students much like you would teaching them how to use math and reading centers.  Baby steps are key here.  Don’t do everything at once.

#4 – Use technology – As we all know many students are very comfortable with texting, blogging, and communicating very effectively with technology.  Obviously, we all need to use this to our advantage.  There are many different ways that technology can be used to encourage students to share their opinions.  One way that the district is giving to the older students in the district is gaggle.  How can teachers use gaggle to their advantage in helping the students.  I would love to hear examples to all of this.  Please share.

I hope this is helpful to people.  I am just sharing ideas that I have been learning and that I think can help us all improve our craft as educators.  This blogging thing is really helping me to begin to share my opinions, and as I think through the things I am writing about I am questioning ideas, doing research to come up with more complete ideas, and learning.  I hope that I can benefit others by passing on some of my simple observations.  Have a great week everyone.  TJJ

Drafts - A powerful tool for the iPad

I am constantly trying to improve myself as an administrator.  One of the tools that is helping me achieve this is my iPad.  There are several apps for the iPad that I have started to use that truly does make my job easier.  The most powerful app that I have started to use recently is an app called Drafts.  When you first open drafts it doesn't look like much, but once you start to use it you will see how it makes many of your day to day tasks easier.  I use this app to document meetings I have with students, parent phone calls, and ARD meetings to name a few.  It is very helpful with tasks that you do over and over again by allowing you to create templates that can be filled out with a few key strokes rather than retyping complete e-mails.  For example, whenever I assign a child ISS I have a template that I have created with Drafts that allows me to quickly communicate with the office about who the child is and how long they will be serving.  All of this documentation and communication is accomplished through Drafts being linked to e-mails addresses, Evernote and Dropbox (for documentation), as well as Google Drive Actions and specific URL actions.

Let me give you a very specific application that I have just recently learned to use.  At my school I am responsible for all of the Speech ARDs.  I like to take my own personal minutes during the ARDs and found myself retyping the same things over and over again at each ARD meeting.  It was so time consuming recreating this document at each meeting.  I decided to use Text Expander and Drafts to help me with this time waster.  In Text Expander I created the document, giving it the simple title of aard.  I linked this document with Drafts and in Drafts simply typed in aard on the main screen and hit return.  Presto, the document came up and all I had to do was fill in the specific details that had to do with that ARD meeting.  The date, time, permanent participants and outline of the form popped up.  Then I linked this form in Drafts with the specific ARD folder I had already created in Evernote.  Once the ARD meeting was complete all I had to do was choose the particular destination that I wanted the meeting minutes to go to and off it went to that location.  

I encourage you to check out Drafts.  It is a powerful tool that can be used for many different tasks that administrators and teachers alike need to do each and every day.  Thanks needs to go out to Justin Baeder at the Principal Center for bringing this tool to my attention.  Check out his on-line professional development for administrators and teachers at Principalcenter.com.  You will not be disappointed.