Tag Archives: causing learning

Speak Less and Listen More

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The advice Aaron Burr gives to Alexander Hamilton in the musical Hamilton applies to the best practices in teaching.  Speak less and listen more.  If we recorded the audio only for one week in a school classroom, what would be the ratio of teacher speaking to listening?  On the other hand, don’t make such a recording.  The ratio of adult to child voices may be too embarrassing.

Instead, read and consider the following statements.  Don’t talk about what you are reading – read and listen to your own thoughts about each statement.

  • The algorithm of speaking and listening related to educational outcomes begins with an understanding that what a child says is much more important than what a teacher says.  Education is about children learning not adult’s telling what they know.
  • Listening to children allows us to know the quality and quantity of their learning and understanding.  Listen for both.
  • Listening to children informs us that a child may know and understand her learning much better than can be displayed in on demand testing.  Listening is your best formative and summative assessment.
  • Listening to children helps us to know what the child needs to learn next in order to have a more complete understanding of the lesson.  After listening, you can clarify, correct, redirect, expand, and extend a child’s understanding.  If you don’t listen, all you can do is tell them the same things you already told them.
  • Listening to children shows us how a child is processing new learning and integrating new with prior learning.  Listen to how a child thinks not just what a child tells you.
  • Listening leads to questions you ask the student that leads to more listening and to more questions.  Listening leads to causing students to learn.
  • Listening to children is one of the most respectful things adults can do.  It says, “you are important to me”.  Consider how many times a child passes through an entire school day without being heard.  What does silence tell a child about how we value her?
  • Listening is interactive.  The best teachers know when to listen and when to speak.  Listening before speaking assures that speech is focused and purposeful for the listening child.

If a teacher is consistently speaking too much and listening too little, advise the teacher to change professions and become a broadcaster.  That is what broadcasters do, not teachers.

Do It Differently, Smarter – Student Rounds

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“I spend the first days and weeks of the school year getting to know my students so that I can meet their needs as learners.”  I have heard this statement each September since the 1970s and I frown.  What hubris!  Unless the child is new to your school, teachers have a wealth of relevant and reliable information about every student’s needs at their fingertips.  There is no need under the sun to waste the first days and weeks “getting know” your students.  Why don’t we do it differently and smarter and do educational rounds just as medical doctors do patient rounds?  And, do these rounds at the end of the preceding school year so that a teacher has all summer to use solid information to plan for each child’s instruction in the fall.

Current Practice

On the last day of school in the spring, the experts who know the most about the students in a teacher’s next fall assignment go home.  Historically, the last days of school are all about ending the current school year.  Records are updated and classrooms are closed.  School is vacated for the summer recess.  The knowledge next year’s teachers need departs for the summer.

Ten weeks later teachers return to school in the last week of August to prepare for a new school year.  The major focus of August work is getting classrooms ready for children and teaching.  As a rule, more professional time is spent reviewing school rules and regulations and putting up bulletin board displays than is spent in discussion of student learning needs.  We are compelled to get ready for the first day of school and most teachers sitting in August PD meetings wish they were in their classrooms doing their physical preparation tasks.

Check this out.  A teacher who cannot pronounce the name of a child in their classroom on the first day does not know that child’s learning needs.  Mispronunciation of the names of children who were students in the school last spring occurs in almost every classroom.  Not knowing how to pronounce a continuing student’s name is a sign that no teacher-to-teacher discussion of learning needs has taken place.

At best, we hold rushed meetings in which counselors share information about various students and their learning challenges.  There is scant time for a teacher to delve into those needs and plan instruction.  We prioritize classroom readiness not instructional readiness. 

The closest current practice comes to rounds is an IEP or 504 Plan meeting that includes all of a child’s teachers plus parents and advocates.

Student Rounds in the Summer

Better practice is to extend contracts for all teachers beyond the last of school and use time at the end of a school year for this year’s teachers to tell next year’s teachers what they know about promoted children.  There are many ways to implement and schedule rounds. 

Grade level to grade level – Within a schedule, 4K talks to 5K, 5K to first grade, until all grade level conversations are completed.  This organization favors more global discussion as teachers discuss each child across all instruction.  All teachers of a grade level, including special subjects and special education participate.  Grade level to grade level applies to children 4K into middle school or until the next year’s student schedule is dominated with elective or leveled courses.

Subjects within grade levels – This organization focuses on each subject areas of instruction and completes one subject area before starting a next area.  Regular, special education, and second language teachers share in discussing each child’s development in one subject at a time.  If there are different art, music, PE, and technology teachers at different grade levels, subject area sharing is the pathway for “specials” teachers to share student information teacher-to-teacher.

Secondary Subject departments – The daily class pathway for children in secondary school fans out, especially in high school with multi-grade classes and electives and an array of teachers.  Using the next year’s already developed student schedules, children are ordered alphabetically and information about their learning preferences, challenges, and uniqueness is shared. 

Face-to-face – School leadership may choose to organize students rounds as a whole school, all teachers at the same time and in the same place activity.  Every student-based meeting is face-to-face.

Virtual – We became better than average facilitators of virtual, group meetings in the pandemic.  Rounds can be held with teachers in school or at home or other locations using virtual platforms.  Virtual rounds accommodate teachers and administrators’ preferences to work from or home.

Why Rounds?

Fresh details matter.  In primary grade transitions, the current teacher has fresh knowledge of the child’s mastery of phonemic sounds and letters and ability to pronounce new words and spell words on demand.  Because these details are fresh, the current teacher can anecdotally describe what works best to support this child’s learning.  Freshness details are diminished over the summer as each former student melds into the greater group of former students.  This just simply happens.

Magnify this across all the children in a school and fresh details become even more important.  There is no reason for next year’s teachers to await similar experiences to arise when they can learn from and plan using the expert commentary of their colleagues.

Learning styles and preferences matter.  Although there is current literature that devalues learning styles profiling, the truth is that some children prefer to watch, listen, or do.  Whereas teachers want to develop broader learning modalities for all children, starting a school year with a child’s preferences creates early school year success and nothing succeeds greater than early success.

Progress in annual strategies prepared by a teacher and a child’s parents’ matter.  We tout and encourage parents to engage with teachers to create student-centered partnerships.  There is no reason to recreate new partnerships every time a teacher assignment changes.  Our current practice of starting a new discussion about their child confirms for parents that teachers are independent contractors and do not cooperate or collaborate.  This is not the storyline we want to perpetuate.  Just share what you know and build upon what you collectively know.  Be professionally seamless.

SEL challenges matter.  Children face developmental challenges as they transition from pre-school to 4K-5K, grade school to middle school, from pre-adolescence adolescence, and into semi-independent learners in high school.  The pandemic and remote education caused challenges for children returning to in-person schooling.  These mean that teacher-to-teacher discussions about children are even more important.  In-school behaviors and dispositions about school, respect and consideration for teachers and fellow students, and consistent school attendance all took hits from the pandemic.  Lack of shared knowledge hampers a child’s next teacher understanding of what she needs to know on day one of a school year.

What To Do?  If you believe your current practices optimize your teachers’ knowledge of the children they will teach in fall, continue with your current practices.  If you believe your current practices are not preparing all teachers for their next year’s students, develop your version of student rounds.  You have a wealth of knowledge about your students, use that knowledge to their advantage in preparing for the 2022-23 school year.  Do student rounds.

We Are Known By What We Prioritize

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Not one.  As a school board member, I have not received one letter asking what can be done regarding depressed student proficiency scores displayed in the fall 2021 assessments.  Not one letter or phone call asking what actions our school will take to teach children the content and skills they missed while in remote education or reteach what children forgot while disconnected from instruction.  Not one person pointing at the increase of students whose assessment results fall into the significantly below proficient category this fall.

Beyond reading, ELA and math, not one communication regarding a child’s loss of learning in art, music, or foreign language.  Not a word about a child’s stagnant growth in business education, marketing, and computer science.  Learning in every school curriculum has been stymied by the pandemic, yet there is scant discussion regarding lost learning experiences.

Not one inquiry about how diminished proficiencies affect our junior and senior students’ preparation for post-secondary education, work, and military endeavors.  Without doubt, a graduate’s transcript and activity resume’ will be different in 2022 than a pre-pandemic resume’.

I grant that many children profited from their instruction in remote education.  They benefited from an optional return to in-person instruction in 2020-21 and a more complete return to in-person instruction in 2021-22.  We owe much to our teachers who labored through virtual and hybrid venues to teach their students.  Yet, every curriculum no matter how it was instructed remains behind its times in the winter of 2021.

Instead, letters, phone calls, texts and parent attendance at school board meetings demonstrating anger about masking protocols.  The demand for parental rights to choose whether a child will wear a mask overwhelms discussion of a child’s educational progress.  Am I dismayed?  No but yes. 

This observation informs us about the evolution of our culture and what we value.  We should not generalize any conclusions to the population of all parents but only to the sub-set of vocal parents.  We should not diminish our educator’s work on closing instructional and learning chasms but understand that this work is done because we, educators, know that it is the most important work before us.  It would be better if parents and school boards and teachers were all on the same page about how to repair student learning at this time of the pandemic, but we are not.

The issue of masks will resolve itself either when all school-age children have had access to the protection of vaccination or when school leaders acquiesce to the loudest voices in their community.  At that time, viral mitigation protocols will not be generalized across school districts, schools, and grade levels but will be responsive to breakouts as we ordinarily treat influenza and measles in schools.  These events will happen, and the response will be very local to those in contact with the outbreak.

The purpose of this writing is not to encourage parents to become enflamed about the status of their child’s educational progress, but to independently review what really matters and consider if their attention aligns with those matters.  For this writer, causing all children to learn with special regard for our most challenged learners is what matters.  Their challenges are not only intellectual but include all concerns that affect their total education and wellbeing.  Children today demonstrate varieties of gaps in their 4K-12 education, gaps we can close if we are able to give this teaching and learning our focused attention. We will be known by what we prioritize and how we meet our priorities.

The Teacher I Wish For You

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(This is a letter to our grandchildren. Each of our grandchildren will be in a public school this fall ranging from third grade to tenth grade. Our grandchildren know their Gramps is “old school.” Old as in living in his eighth decade and school as in being actively and constantly engaged in public education since 1970. And, they know that at the end of every school day, he will ask “Tell me what you learned today.”)

I wish for you a teacher who teaches you. Seems like a “No, duh!”, but it isn’t. The list of things a teacher is required to be in 2018 is long and teaching children is just one that can be lost in the many. I wish for you a teacher who expands your knowledge and challenges the ways you think about what you think you know. I wish for you a teacher who teaches you new skill sets and helps you to hone these skills so you will do things thereafter that you could not do before. I wish for you a teacher who builds your concept of personal challenges so that problems become opportunities and solutions become keys to opening possibilities and you begin to look for your next challenge with a smile. I wish for you a teacher who causes you to learn and to enjoy your learning.

Every teacher has a job description. Seldom do the descriptors say “Do this first – as in teach.” All descriptors are to be successfully enacted. That’s what a teacher is hired to do. Some teacher responsibilities are instructional: develop and submit lesson plans, assess learning, meet individual student learning needs. Teach class. Some responsibilities are managerial: keep an orderly classroom, maintain classroom supplies, submit required reports.   Some are supervisory: assure student safety in the hallways and on the playgrounds. All are important to the teacher’s supervisor. However, only one is essential for Gramps: cause all children to learn the grade level or course curriculum. The rest of a teacher’s responsibilities will take care of themselves when children are actively learning from a proactive teacher.

Your learning is between you and your teacher. I hope your teacher will give you a smile frequently. Smiles are a good thing and help to connect children and teachers. But, I also hope she will give you a frown or a shake of the head when your learning or learning behavior is not on target. When teachers take causing children to learn as their personal duty they are invested in how well each child does every day. A smile rewards and a frown corrects. Your teacher should focus you on achieving the day’s lesson every day.  Smiles!  Teachers cause learning.

I hope your teacher talks with you every day. Teacher talk helps you to know how close you are to getting things right. Many times each day you will not be getting things right. If the day’s lesson is designed properly, the work should be challenging and you will make mistakes. Teacher talk helps you iron out the mistakes. Talking with your teacher also is your teacher listening to you talk about your learning. It is essential that you talk to your teacher. In listening to you talk, your teacher will know more about how you are learning and cause you to learn more.

I hope your teacher laughs a lot. Learning at school may seem like work to you and sometimes hard work, but learning also is fun. A teacher’s joy derives from student learning. The more students learn, even when learning is difficult, the more teachers should laugh. When your classmates are really working at their learning, someone will say something that is so perfectly correct that a teacher cannot help but laugh. Kids also say strange things, things that just don’t make sense at the moment and this also causes everyone to laugh. There is a difference between laughing with children and laughing at children; good teachers laugh with you. Imagine a classroom without teacher laughter and ask yourself if anyone, the teacher especially, is having fun. That’s not a classroom for you, Kiddo.

I hope for you a teacher who isn’t afraid. “Teachers shouldn’t be afraid,” you say. But, they are. Most are fearful of what children say to their parents at supper. You know how this goes. Mom asks, “What did you do at school today?” And, you say, “You should have seen (or heard) Mrs. Smith. She …”  Teachers worry about what others think about their teaching and what parents are telling the principal. I hope your teacher is fearless and tries ways of teaching that push your limits. Teaching must always be child-safe, but it may sometimes cause you to say “Wow! That was crazy!” It is not strange that those “Wow!” things in class stick with you and begin to make sense later in time. I hope your teacher pushes all the good buttons that make you remember what happens in class every day.

Lastly, I hope your teacher will say more at the end of the school year than “Your grandchild was a good kid.” Of course, you are a good kid. Instead, I want your teacher to talk about how much you learned and how well you learned. I want her to say that you were serious about your learning and that you asked serious questions and lots of questions and sometimes questions that pushed her teaching. She should say that you were a respectful and earnest learner. And, in her own thinking, I want her to consider that you made her a better teacher.

These aren’t too much to hope for, my grandchildren. No, they are what every grandfather should expect.

Educating Is Moving The Needle

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“What am I doing here?” is a good question to ask oneself frequently. The context of this question is your workplace, your career, your job. I surmise that many respond with confidence that “I am doing the work I want to do and have trained for and I am pleased with where I find myself.” Or, “I find my work to be both challenging and rewarding. What I do matters to me and to others.” To these responses, I say “Great! Keep on keeping on.” When considering their work, these folks smile, become energized, and talk with specific examples that illustrate what they do and how their work is a positive contribution to their industry. What they do helps their employer to achieve positive qualitative and quantitative organizational goals. This is “moving the needle” – how you measure performance – toward success.

Others may be both discomforted and disappointed when looking for an answer. This leads them to not ask the question very often. For these folks, I need to rephrase the question. “Is what I am doing here meaningful to me or to others?” “Is what I am doing important?” “Does what I do make a difference?” Already the fear that the answer may be “no” or “not much” may have them rethinking the wisdom in pursuing the question.

When considering these questions, you must come to grips with the “what am I doing and why am I doing it?” As a high school and later college student, I worked summers and vacations in a meatpacking plant. I helped to reduce animals to meat and agri-products. My goal, however, was to earn money. My needle was my bank account and success meant having enough money to pay for the next year of college. As a junior high school teacher, I taught English and social studies. My goal was to cause children to learn our grade level curricula. My needle was a measurement of what they knew, could do and how they solved learning problems on September 1 compared with the same measurements on June 1. Success was achieved when every child was ready for the next year’s curricular instruction. As a wrestling coach, my goal was to cause wrestlers to win and how to think about how they won. Success was measured in wins through a personal commitment to healthy goals. As a high school principal, my work was to cause every teacher to cause every child to learn their grade level curricula – to be a needle moving teacher. Success was measured in finding positive cause and effect relationships – what instruction would cause learning improvements. The scope of these cause and effect challenges increased when I was a district administrator. In each context, the “here” changed, but the “what I am doing” did not. My goal always is to move the needle. Sometime the needle was a direct cause and effect and easy to measure. Hours in the hog kill equals payroll. A wrestler’s hand raised in victory. Some time the needle of cause-effect was less direct and not easy to measure, as in learning and learning performances. Yet, in every situation, “What am I doing” is about moving the needle.

When you add the “here” to “what am I doing,” you give the question personalized immediacy. For educators, “here” requires you to be introspective concerning your current assignment and the educational objectives that are attached to the assignment. “Here” is all about you and your ability to move the needle of learning for the children you teach, coach or direct.

Too often we consider only one needle in education – academic performances. Make no mistake, academic performances are extremely important, yet there are other needles of importance beyond test scores. And, these needles also move as a result of a teacher’s work efforts.

  • Daily school attendance
  • Child behavior
  • Willingness to engage in learning
  • Persistence
  • Self-esteem
  • Collegiality
  • Problem solving
  • Creativity
  • Career preparation
  • Artistic and aesthetic appreciation
  • More

Identifying needles to be moved does not rest with you alone. If it did, any needle movement would do. Identifying needles to move relates to the goals of the school and its community, the realities of learning challenges each student and all students present, the current status of measured needles, and the skill sets of each and all teachers. Picking priority needles leads to the determination of targets for how far and how fast the needle must move in the macro sense of whole school or classroom and in the micro sense of each child. Moving needles is hard work and it begins with selecting appropriate needles and targets of needle movement.

The rest is easier. Needle movement is doing the work needed to move the needle. In a meatpacking plant, you do the bloody work of earning a paycheck so that your bank account will let you do what comes next in life. In teaching, it is causing all children to become proficient learners and to demonstrate their knowledge, skills and problem solving at a quality level. In educational leadership, it is focusing school resources to cause all children to achieve high quality outcomes in academic, activity, arts and athletic programs, and to be proactive and healthy problem solvers.

Educating is moving the needle.