What does good teaching look like?

This is a question that I have been pondering a lot lately. What does good teaching really look like? Does it look like what we see on television, movies and commercials? Is it a teacher standing at the front of the room in front of a board lecturing students who are sitting in rows passively listening? Is it assigning students to watch lectures at home and then have them come to school to complete digital worksheets?

These are questions that all teachers need to ask themselves. One thing that I learned by going through the National Boards process and becoming a Candidate Support Provider is that there isn't just one right answer. However, there are some constants that you can find in the classrooms of each amazing teacher.

In these classrooms, students always come first. We cannot continue teaching in the same way that we've always taught because our students have changed. Just because it's easy for us, doesn't mean that it's what is best for our learners. Whatever their individual needs are, it is our responsibility to identify them and help them grow. Every decision we make, must focus on them and what they need to accomplish. We must get to know our students and have conversations with them. We need to let them design their learning environment, set their classroom norms, design their own assessment, and set their own goals for learning. Amazing teachers listen to their students and let them create solutions to academic and personal challenges.

Learning has to be meaningful and engaging. With technology, students are the masters of their own universe. They have a 24/7 constant flow of information and connection to those around the world. Everything in which they engage themselves is meaningful and purposeful to them. Students, no matter the age, need to find the relevance to what they are learning and how it improves them and the world around them.No longer are students enthusiastic about digging into a subject matter because it's going to be on a  test.  "About" presentations aren't engaging or meaningful as students are just spitting out facts that don't relate to their lives.They want to know how they will use the content standards now. They must have a reason to connect with their learning.

In these classrooms, the teacher is the facilitator learning, not the sole disseminator of information.We are the content specialists and the strategists. We need to guide our students in making important discoveries and reaching their academic and personal goals. Can this be done if the teacher is in the front of the room lecturing for the entire class without active student participation? No. It doesn't matter if we give the best lecture of our lives if we don't know what each student is thinking, processing, and applying  from the content into meaningful context for them. Our students need an opportunity to share their voices and their thoughts. They need to communicate with one another and with those around the world to share their learning and ideas.  With our guidance, they need to make choices about what they will learn, how they will learn it, and how they will share their learning with others.

Because none of us has the exact group of learners, the appearance of  good teaching will differ from classroom to classroom. However, outstanding teachers know that their students must come first and that they must be engaged in active, meaningful learning. It is important for us to reflect and make sure that we are doing everything we can to positively impact student learning. Without it, we've lost our lost our kids and ultimately...our future.

ASCD Annual Conference

Come join me on March 25th at ASCD's Annual Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to discuss "Empowering Students with Web 2.0 and Social Media to Foster Student-Directed Learning." Can't wait to meet you!

Making Math "Yummy"

This year I have continued my quest to find challenging mathematical problems that related to real life. This has been a real challenge. Most of what I've discovered has been too difficult or too easy for my fifth graders.I know that learners need to discover the relevance of what they are learning to their lives; it gives those standards a personal meaning to them. They realize that these aren't just a bunch of random procedures/processes/problems they are being forced to learn. They are relevant and useful. It totally changes their perception of learning.

This year, I was fortunate to stumble across a site called Yummy Math. I must admit that the title is what caught my eye from the beginning. At first glance the two words may seem at odds...unless you're talking about using some food items as manipulatives. Their tagline is "We provide teachers and students with mathematics relevant to our world today …"   As I investigated further, I realized these were a collection of "math stories" that set up a real-world scenario; then they pose questions for the students to ponder and problem-solve. They are timely with current events. Currently, there are math stories on March Madness, Pi Day, Green green Chicago River, and Shamrock Shakes. You can search by month or by math standard. Each math story involves multiple math standards and new stories are regularly added.

To be honest, these standards are a bit over my students' heads, but I loved the whole concept of real world scenarios that focus on multiple math skills while adding some interesting trivia or information; I decided to try it with my young mathematicians anyway. My students were immediately engrossed in these problems. We begin each of the stories by discussing the  beginning "set-up" together. Then they set to work in small groups as I travel from group to group to listen to their conversations and ask questions to discover their thought process. We periodically have a whole group conversations to share their discoveries. They get so excited about "figuring" something out, they don't stop to question whether or not this is a 5th grade standard. I never hear my students say, "This is too hard."  They see how the different math standards overlap and relate to one another.

They are not just solving problems with numbers either, they are having to write explanations for how they got to their conclusion. We all know that it is one thing for a students to just go through a  process...that doesn't denote a true understanding of a concept. It is a totally different thing if a student can explain not just what they've done to find a solution,but also why they've done it.

It's highly engaging and interesting for them to see how math supports life. It's relevant. Whenever we do a Yummy Math story, our math class goes on for over an hour and a half. When it's time to move to another subject, a chorus of "Awwwww, can't we have 5 more minutes?" ensues. One student told me that he loves yummy math because it's math for life. He is so right. Kids begging to keep solving problems? Absolutely!

~To the Yummy Math teachers, I hope I did justice describing your site. Please feel free to make comments adding any important information that I might have omitted. Thanks for such a great site!

A Few of our Favorite Things

As I've been tweeting and Pinterest-ing (is that a word?), I got an iPad for our classroom.The reason I didn't jump on the bandwagon earlier was that I wasn't convinced that an iPad could offer my students learning opportunities that they couldn't find elsewhere. A vast majority of the apps I had seen, turn students solely into consumers. Just because you make a worksheet (or textbook) digital doesn't change that fact that it's still just a worksheet. I want my students to be more than consumers...I want them to be producers of  new content. After some research I found enough of  reason to make this purchase for my learners.

They are having a blast embedding the iPad into their learning routine in the different content areas. What I'd like to share today are some of the tools that we have been using to increase our productivity and efficiency of regular classroom routines. With these apps the students take (further) ownership of their learning environment.

Our Favorite Things... Productivity Edition:

• Confer As we all strive to meet the needs of our individual students, one of the most daunting tasks can be documenting the progress of each learner. Over the years, I have tired all kinds of methods...folders, binders, tables in Word (many of our school computers don't have Excel), but I knew there had to be a more convenient way for me and my students to track their progress in each subject. Not only do we chart their successes, big and small, but my students create personal goals in each content area. Confer does all of this and more. Through confer, you can easily form flexible small groups and you can export your data as a Google spreadsheet or a an email attachment.  You can tell this app was created by a classroom teacher who knows what teachers and their students need to make their conferring productive. Here is a video demonstrating how Confer works.

• Notability We all have to address what we do for students who are absent from class. How do we keep them informed? How do they know what they've missed and get caught up with their peers? We started using Notability. Each student takes a turn creating a note of the day's activities. The notes can include text (class activities, homework, classwork, deadlines, announcements, etc.), photos (my students take photos of the flipcharts they use, review games, vocabulary lists, science experiments, etc.) and audio (of me or one of them explaining something that needs more than text or photos). When a student is out for a day or two, he/she comes in when he/she returns to school, pulls up the note for the dates he/she was out and discovers exactly what went on in the classroom that day. The notes are also easily emailed, so they can also be sent to parents.
• Teacher's Assistant Pro Another task that can easily take up precious instruction time is documenting behavior within your classroom. We know how important it is to document everything: good, bad or ugly.One thing that I do with my students when we privately discuss their behavior is that I have them design the consequences and future plan of action for their behavior. It puts the responsibility on them to make any necessary changes. This app is easily customizable to meet your needs. So if you like to send home positive behavior reports like I do, this can be easily done as well. This app comes with a feature where with the click of a couple of buttons, the behavior report can be emailed to parents. You can tell that this app was also designed by a classroom teacher. Here is a video demonstrating the basics of how this app works: 

So although these apps may not seem as flashy as other apps, in the hands of my learners, they have increased our productivity and given us more of that valuable learning time. It's given my students tools to track their progress and take further ownership of their personal learning journey. And that is what all tools we bring into our classroom should do.

What do you do when things fall apart?

We've all had those days...or weeks...where it's like our classes have had an invasion of the body snatchers. Students seem to have lost focus and form new, bizarre habits. So what do you do about it? We had such an invasion recently and I turned the tables on the students. I asked them for some solutions. We had a great discussion about the norms and routines they had set. Then, we all knew the most powerful way that we can improve ourselves is through some personal reflection. My learners had raised some ideas to ponder and they began writing. I thought I would share some of the things that they wrote about the learning environment that they had designed.

"In our learning environment...we can teach other people by doing amazing projects that teach life skills."

"Our learning environment helps me learn to help people, just like they help me." 

"We learn better this way. We're all teachers and students so we learn more and learn faster. If we have any trouble, we go and fix it ourselves." 

"...have an environment where we can learn, not just from books,but from our PLN." 

"Working in groups helps me learn better."

"My classroom is the coolest place that I've ever been to in my entire life."

"I keep earning A's on my report card because I know this classroom works." 

I could keep going, but I think they have made their point. They value our class and how we learn every day. They understand the power that they have to learn from and teach one another. They see the relevance of the learning they are doing each day.

So next time you have one of "those days," take some clues from your students.Give them time to reflect and and find solutions. As with so many things, our students have answers as to how to solve problems and meet challenges. We've just got to give them the opportunity to do it.

photo credit: _StaR_DusT_ via photopin cc

In Defense of Student-Directed Learning

Recently, I was in a training session where we observed a lesson. Once it was over, we were led into a group discussion about what we had observed. Immediately negative comments were made placing the blame solely on the students. As the negativity escalated, I knew I needed to speak up. I also knew how they would react, but I jumped into those shark infested waters anyway.

Even though many of our children have no support system at home, we can give them the skills to learn at school. If they become invested in what they are learning and they see the relevance, they will WANT to learn and practice what we do in the classroom...even when they aren't in the classroom.Students need to be given the opportunity to explore how each standard we teach relates to their lives. They need to have the guidance from us to find how learning this content will make their lives better. Then, we need to give them the opportunity to explore, design and create something new with what they have learned. If we give them this, they will be self-motivated to learn...not because of some grade or a test, but because they LOVE it.

I know there is plenty of research out there that supports student-directed learning. However, I don't need research to know that this is a valid way of facilitating learning.  I see it every day in my class. I have had students that are exceptional education students, who are so low or such behavior problems, I was told they wouldn't even be able to function within the classroom. My administrator admits to putting the more challenging students in my classroom because "they always make such great gains and reach a level of success that they've never had before." (See Let's Celebrate or When Things Click or  Becoming Techknowledgeable) I'm not saying this to pat myself on the back, but to give examples of how successful this is with students...academically high or low; wealthy or homeless; Asian, Latino, African American, or Caucasian. When you have 10 year olds who don't want to go home at the end of the day or they want to spend their Friday afternoon doing research to prepare for a lesson they are going to teach older students via Skype, you know that it works. (See Students as Teachers). It works because we are giving students the power and responsibility to drive their own learning.

The reason I spoke up was because the students of those teachers were being sold short. Their potential wasn't being explored. That love of learning hadn't been ignited. I hurt for those kids.

Isn't it our responsibility to do whatever we can to meet the needs of our students? We can't afford to waste any time giving them the tools to success. Because when you ultimately think about it, we are only hurting our future selves. These are the kids who will be running the world in a few years. We can't afford to sit on the sidelines and point fingers at the students. Students know how they learn best if they are given the opportunity. They are the SOLUTION.

How We Love to Learn

One thing that I've observed that makes a huge difference in student motivation is HOW the students learn the content. I've written other blog posts on this subject (see An Afternoon in Pleasantville and A Tale of Two Tools and Learning Inside the Box) but this past week, we've put a little different twist on it. We are working on the 10th Edition of the Coast to Coast Chronicles. The students wanted to learn more about the scientific method for this edition.

One of the collaborative projects we are doing is a Voice Thread of poetry on different science topics.This is a way for the students to connect, broaden their horizons in the field of science, and sharpen their poetry writing skills. We are working directly with a 3rd grade class in our building along with the students across the country. For this activity my students and the 3rd graders were put into heterogeneous groups across the grade levels. The first day, they brainstormed different topics that interested them in science. Because my students had just had Innovation Day, they were really thinking outside of the box. My learners did an amazing job of guiding the 3rd graders into topics in which they were unfamiliar.  The conversations were amazing. When the groups had a time to add their ideas to a words splash, because of the way that my students had encouraged and nurtured their ideas, all of the students participated in sharing their thoughts and why that topic was of interest to them as a group.

The second time we met, the learners began building context and meaning with different types of poetry. Because SimplyBox has closed their site, we moved to LiveBinders. Some of my previous students (who are now in 6th grade) and I created a Poetry LiveBinder of examples of different types of poetry. As with all genres of writing, I want my students to read real examples (mentor texts) to building their understanding of the characteristics of that type of writing. As one student said, "If I want to write great poetry, I need to read great poetry."  With the LiveBinders, you can create a collection of URLs, files, images, video or text on a particular topic. It is a great collaborative tool because you can invite collaborators to add to the binder.  It also allows the user to embed it into another site, which made it easy for my students to access.

As the writers were reading and discussing the different genres of poetry, the 3rd grade teacher and I were moving around the room, joining groups, listening to their conversations and asking guiding questions. They were already selecting a genre that they wanted to compose. What was validating to hear was that they weren't just choosing a particular genre randomly, they were thinking about how that genre would support their science topic.  All 50+ of these students were engaged in deep and meaningful conversations. With their previous experience, my students already knew where this was headed and guided their younger partners who stepped up to the challenge and joined right in the conversations.

Before they began composing, the learners set the criteria for their writing. This is where the real evidence of the learning manifested itself; not just my students but also the 3rd graders had a clear understanding of not only their genre of poetry, but also what things needed to be included with their topic, the audience and the purpose. As they began creating their poetry, they divided up the work. In most groups, you had a researcher to check facts, a recorder to write the ideas, and editor/time keeper, and an illustrator. With this lesson, everyone, no matter their exceptionalities, were able to successfully participate.

Of course the enthusiasm was intoxicating...all of the learners enjoyed themselves and they gained a much deeper understanding of poetry and their science topic. When kids complain about having to pack up to go home because they want to keep reading and writing, you know you've found a winning idea.