Using Big Words in Context Helps To Close The Achievement Gap

When I was serving as a 2nd grade teacher in HEB ISD I had an Assistant Principal friend named Michael Granado who loved to use the word cognizant.  He used the word so often and so effectively (within proper context) that I became cognizant of the meaning of the word without even having to look it up.  This one example is a perfect example of how we need to be teaching vocabulary to students in our classrooms.  We need to be using what is known as tier II words (words like verify, superior, and negligent) in our daily classroom written and spoken language in context in varying situations so effectively that students will be able to infer the meaning of those words.  Another example that stands out in my mind comes from a walk through I did in a kindergarten classroom earlier this school year.  The teacher, Mr. Remis, was talking with the students about the attributes of different shapes and using content specific vocabulary like vertices and surfaces.  He was using the terms appropriately in context and these kindergarten students were clearly beginning to grasp the meanings of the terms.  Using specific words in context over and over again so that students intuit the meaning of those words is good pedagogy.  This is something that needs to be purposefully practiced by all educators and will help to close the achievement gap between those students who come to school with big vocabularies and those who come to school with limited vocabularies.

Super Sentences

You should see the changes that are happening in the classes here at Castleberry Elementary.  One of the biggest changes I have seen as I visit the classes on a daily basis are the use of “super sentences”. The students are using these sentences more and more as they share their thoughts and ideas with their teachers.  The one or two word answers are being used less and less and sentences that are extended with the word because or that answer the question why are becoming more prevalent.  The force behind this big change?  Expectations.  The teachers are expecting more complete answers from the students and the students are becoming more accepting of the fact that teachers are going to ask them to expand on their answer.  This question and answer practice that is happening is going to reap huge benefits for our students both now and into the future as they continue to learn how to better express themselves with these super sentences that are quickly becoming the norm.  In short, students are beginning to become better thinkers.  When people think new ideas are formed.  When new ideas are formed powerful, wonderful change begins to happen.  Keep thinking everyone!

Monitoring and inferencing - important reading comprehension skills

I was reading a snippet of an article this last week and came across an idea that I thought was important to pass along about struggling readers.  Reading is more than decoding - it's figuring out what the writer is trying to communicate to you.  Pretty basic, right?  Then let's move on.  This article stated that after students learn to decode there are three things students struggle with the most:

• The meaning of words - or vocabulary
• Not noticing that they don't understand what they are reading, or failing to monitor their understanding
• Failing to make inferences

I feel that reading teachers do a very good job of teaching vocabulary, so let's leave that alone.  What we need to focus on is monitoring (pausing, evaluating, and thinking about where the text is going), and making inferences (using personal background knowledge coupled with what the author is saying to make meaning).  I remember the first time I helped some fourth graders effectively monitor and make inferences about what they were reading.  We were reading the book Hatchet and were in the passage where the plane the young man was attempting to fly was crashing into a lake.  After reading the passage the first time I asked them about what had just happened in the story.  They couldn't answer my questions.  They were just reading the passage because I told them to read it.  Their only goal was to get to the end of the passage.  So I decided to build some background knowledge and started to ask them about times they had seen planes flying in the sky and what would happen if one of those planes crashed into a lake.  After building some simple background knowledge, that most of them had some idea about, I gave them the assignment of reading the passage again with those pictures in their mind and then to draw a picture of what they had just read.  The difference in their understanding of what they read was amazing.  Students made comments about being able to see what the author was describing in their minds.  Some students said it was like a movie had turned on in their head as they read.  This was all done because we took the time to talk before we read the story about experiences they were already familiar with that were found in the story and connected that with what the author was writing.     

So I encourage teachers, of younger students especially, to specifically talk about the main ideas authors are presenting in stories before you read the story for the first time with your students.  As Harry Wong encourages, share with the students what you are going to be doing before you do it.  Ask them questions about times they might have experienced or seen something that relates to the topics found in the story.  Then tell them that today you are going to read a story that has to do with the topic you all just talked about.  It's ok to do that as we are teaching students to construct meaning.  We need to show them how to relate to stories just as we model for them how to do mathematics problems.

#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.