Scenes From This Morning's Classrooms

Laurel - Continuing their ongoing "Here I am in the month of" project, Julianne worked with students to create self-portraits in the style of...

Blackberry - During a literacy workshop, students worked on either word sorts or "lift the flap" books, while a small group of students worked with Fundations.

2nd math - Drawing on the TERC Investigations curriculum, students worked with creating and predicting numbers based on pattern trains, and then solving and creating addition and subtraction sentences with multiple operations per sentence.

3rd math - Drawing on the TERC Investigations curriculum, students worked with the idea of "close to 100", both on worksheets and playing the actual game (six cards are dealt, and each player tries to make two two-digit numbers that total as close to 100 as possible). This was preceded by conversation about the difference between a guess and an estimate, and the relative certainty between them (teachers created a scale that read "no clue/guess/estimate/certainty" in increasing order to illustrate this).

5th math - After a lesson and activities on classifying triangles (scalene, obtuse, acute, right, isosceles, equilateral), students moved into the Show Me 1/2 curriculum to develop their skill with fractions and decimals. Today's "exit ticket" was identifying two attributes of a triangle from among the set given by the teacher.

Strawberry - Extending their marine biology science unit, students used books and websites to engage in research on an aspect of the oceans, choosing from among animals, topography, or mythology. Each child had generated a list of research questions and took notes in his/her science notebook.

Moments I Witnessed Today

Laurel Creek - Students reading "just right" books during Reading Workshop.

Blackberry Creek - Students working in their Handwriting Without Tears workbooks.

Temescal Creek: A range of activities during math workshop, including tracing and then painting complicated geometric shapes based on the property of symmetry - using the Stamp Game to understand division problems - practicing multiplication facts - using snap cubes to create pattern trains for TERC work - and investigating ratios.

Sweet Briar Creek - Students choreographing on a dance to the Water Cycle Rap:

Strawberry Creek - A mixed 4/5 math class on measurement. One station asked students to select classroom objects, estimate their length or width, and then measure them. At another station, students were measuring the length and width of insects. At a third, a variety of objects not easily measurable waited on a platter to be measured. The crowning activity: how can you measure the thickness of a piece of paper?

What's in a Word?

I loved this chart capturing student suggestions in Temescal Creek (2nd and 3rd grade) for ways to make their writing more interesting by using words in place of "said". It grew out of a lesson in which students practiced noun-verb constructions ("Birds chirp," "dogs bark," etc.).

Thinking and Linking Pt.2

Funding for California public schools is a mess, but at least Gov. Brown has the right idea about less testing and more learning. (ABC News)

I'm not an occupational therapist, but it makes sense to me that for best learning and performance, students need to be fully aroused, and chewing gum can help. (NBC News)

I'd love to have a class set of iPads. Other folks aren't convinced yet - they think there's other, newer, or better technology. But I see that as public and private schools start breaking the trail, the ability to use these machines in service of learning has important potential. (The Olympian)

One of my favorite quotations ever is from Donald Keough, the former CEO of Coca-Cola, who once said, "What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one's ability to ask for help." But how do we deal with the fact that equity traps of race and social class impact the ease with which a student acquires this skill? (Chicago Tribune)

Obama wants to raise the drop-out age. This is good. But can we get past the superficial metrics of educational success and talk about the development of understanding, please? (New York Times)

Duh: social media and multitasking degrade social skills. (CNN)

Boy do I love Brain Pickings.

There's a little bit of propaganda and hero worship in this, but it's still inspirational:

Thinking and Linking Pt.1

Is there a connection between handwriting and success? I suppose it depends what you mean by success, and though this article barely touches on this point, it is worth considering. Handwriting is linked to attention, focus, memory, and motor control, which are all important factors in early literacy and mathematical skill development. (Florida Sun Sentinal)

Many people seem to dislike the idea that parents have a say in what gets taught in school. It's difficult to find a fully reasoned position among the fear-mongering and shield-banging on both sides of this issue. Many parents select independent schools as a form of having that say, either through the school's established curriculum, or because the school is more receptive to family involvement than other options might be (and at independent schools, the "consumer model" is already a reality, despite our desire to also create community and the important equity issues in determining who has access). Personally, I know that parents have a lot of ideas and resources to offer that can make a program and curriculum much more interesting....the problem I've encountered is how to tell people "thanks but no thanks" without them getting upset (maybe that's because of my lack of skill in communication). (New York Times)

Progressive educational thinkers like Alfie Kohn have been telling us for years about the dangers of praise - even of "effort praise" that centers around effort instead of results - because it turns children into Pavlovian dogs who work for the praise instead of their intrinsic interest. This is excellent advice, but the resulting challenge has been to find ways to communicate our respect and admiration for their thinking and learning. At TBS, our response has been to ask children to engage in high-level reflection around their work, and to build their capacity to evaluate themselves rather than seek out validation externally. Perhaps using praise focused on the neurological effects of hard work is also worth investigating. (Washington Post)

What is there to say about lesson study? That it's awesome. The opportunity to observe another teacher and then engage in collaborative conversation about the decisions and actions that she or he made is as close to the clinical model of supervision established in the medical field, and one that both has proven results, and that participants cite as transformative to their work. Let's do it! (WBEZ 91.5)

Parents sometimes wonder how we can effectively evaluate a child in middle school when we don't give grades, and how we know a child is effectively learning. I have a whole soapbox speech on the intellectual dishonesty of grades, but for a change of pace, here's an example of a school that does a part of what we do; while they do give grades, they simply don't allow students to fail. Instead of getting a "0" for a missed assignment and moving on to the next thing, that work is marked incomplete until it is finished. (Statesman Journal)

I have very mixed feelings about the length of the school day for kindergarten students. I'm not sure I believe the claims that it will lead to increased academic success - from my direct observation and experience, those little beings are often so tired from the mental and emotional energy of the morning that the quality of learning in the afternoons is not necessarily high. I do appreciate that they want to find time to provide more opportunities for play, though. (The Tennessean)

When I was an English teacher, I loved asking questions to stimulate student thinking, though I always knew my approach was not a traditional Socratic method, since I integrated many other teaching practices. So I'm not surprised that someone thinks the Socratic Method isn't right for every student in every situation; a diverse set of pedagogic techniques is the only way to be sure to reach all learners. I just wonder why people become dogmatically wedded to one particular way of doing things (like the Harvard Business School's use of case studies). (Time)

What happened in math today?

Here's what I saw when I took a stroll through the elementary math classes today.

Kindergarten - Students sat as a group thinking about, discussing and exploring the idea of attributes. Building on their experiences playing Attribute Castle (a classroom favorite), they took turns identifying attributes about the group (shoes with laces; striped shirts), and then identifying who possessed that attribute and thus fit into the category.

First grade - Students worked on consolidating their understanding of both static (not requiring regrouping) and dynamic (requiring regrouping) subtraction, using one of two tools; some worked with hundreds charts, while others used snap cubes.

Second grade - Students explored the patterns and relationships between the number of sides on a geoblock (triangle, square, rhombus, hexagon, etc) and various number of geoblocks. Understanding that one square will have four sides, and two will have a total of sides, etc, is a precursor to developing multiplicative understanding, very similar to skip counting, and this activity used visual and kinesthetic interaction to reinforce the concept.

Third grade - Students created and identified various types of addition combinations, including "make 10", "doubles", "near 10 (+/-1)", "plus 10", "plus 9", and others. This is a topic begun in kindergarten and usually terminating in third grade, as children's number sense and automaticity allow them to no longer need to count for addition purposes, since the value of single-digit numbers has become internalized.

Fifth grade - Students stood in a circle tossing a ball to each other. When a student caught the ball, she or he had to give an "exit ticket" from class in the form of a combination of various unusual fractions (1/3, 4/7, 3/8, etc) that totaled 1.00.

Unfortunately I didn't stop by the fourth grade class in time to observe!

Thinking and Linking about Leadership

I love reading about leadership -- sometimes more than practicing it! -- and there's a good neurological basis for me doing so; long-term memory is best created through regularly structured and timed repetitions of information. Each time I read about an aspect of leadership, it helps reset that idea for me as I go through my day tackling difficult topics in classroom practice, curriculum design, teacher collaboration, administrative practices and policy, parenting, and many other elements of my work that take courage, stamina, and insight to address. Moving back-and-forth between practice and theory keeps me focused on both addressing the issue at hand, and the lens with which I'm viewing that issue. With that in mind, here are a few links about leadership I've found useful in the last month; the links-as-descriptions are my summaries of what I've taken from each article and used in my own work.

Creating change requires overcoming your fears.

Failure precedes success.

Fear of being wrong is the biggest mistake of all.

Design a strategy that eliminates resistance.

It's all about the team. (I wrote about this article earlier this month)

Know when to lead and when to manage.

Leading is living a balanced life.