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You probably spent significant time setting up your physical classroom to welcome your students back to school. Did you dedicate the same time and intentionality to setting up your learning management system (LMS)? You’re not alone if the answer is a sheepish “no.” The good news is it’s not too late to set up your LMS to support your students this year!
Your LMS is your digital classroom and should complement and enhance students’ work in your physical classroom. You’ll want to set it up so students can confidently navigate that space to access resources, check due dates, submit work, communicate with you, and engage with one another asynchronously.
This post will review important things to consider as you organize your LMS.
Backward design your units and organize them in digital folders. Using backward design to plan and organize your units:
Begin by identifying the learning outcomes or desired results for a unit. What do you want students to know, understand, or be able to do at the end of the unit?
Once you have clarity on what you and your students are working toward, decide how you will assess student progress toward those learning objectives. What assessment evidence can you collect to measure their progress? Aligning your desired results with your assessment strategy (formal or informal) makes it easier to organize the path (or sequence of learning activities) to move students toward those desired results.
Finally, use the folders in your LMS to organize the video instruction and models, learning activities, and resources students need to progress through the unit. Consider using subfolders for each week labeled with the dates that students will be working on items in that folder. This allows for a higher degree of self-pacing and helps students stay organized.
Depending on the LMS you are using, you can explore features like “completion rules” in Schoology or “requirements” for modules in Canvas that require students to complete particular tasks in the folder before progressing to the next task. For example, you can require students to watch a video and then take a quiz or participate in an online discussion to assess their comprehension of the content. You can set up your completion rules or requirements to require that students earn a particular score on the quiz or post their response to the discussion question before advancing to the next task in the folder. These features make it possible for you to transfer control over the pace of their progress through a unit to students.
You and your students are juggling a lot! Your calendar is the best way to keep everyone on the same page and reduce confusion about assignments and due dates. Use your class calendar to make sure students and their families can see:
As you create events, remember to utilize the features inside your calendar to provide the necessary instructions, information, descriptions, resources, etc., that students and their families will need to navigate an assignment or participate in an event successfully.
Your online calendar can also double as your digital planner. Check out this blog post to learn how you can transform your Google calendar into a flexible and robust digital planner.
Your LMS is not only an excellent place for organizing course content and transferring information, but it can be a space where students engage with one another in meaningful ways. Your online discussion functionality presents an opportunity to give every student a voice in the class dialogue. We all know that whole group discussions do not provide all students with the opportunity to participate. The same vocal students often dominate discussions, while our shy students, those who need more time to process, and students struggling with anxiety may never have the opportunity to share their ideas. That’s why balancing in-class discussions with online discussions can create avenues for all students to have a voice in the conversation.
Online discussions:
When you design your online discussions, I suggest incorporating the following five tips to increase student participation.
Students will need support and practice (lots of it!) to get good at engaging with each other online, so you’ll need to provide explicit instruction on what you expect from their interactions. How long should their responses to the initial question and replies to each other be? What strategies can they use to ensure their responses are substantive and meaningful? How can you encourage students to assess their participation in online conversations regularly?
Your LMS should also provide a space for you to interact with students and support their progress toward learning objectives. Feedback may be the most powerful (yet underutilized) tool in our teaching toolbelts. Despite the powerful impact that feedback can have on student progress, it is easy to neglect because it is time-consuming to give. Utilizing the digital feedback tools in your LMS (e.g., audio and video feedback) can help you streamline the feedback process and support students as they work on an assignment or task.
Research suggests that using media beyond text comments positively impacts the student’s perception of the quality of feedback. Students who received audio feedback perceived that feedback as more thorough, detailed, and personal than text feedback (Voelkel & Mello, 2014). Students also reported being more motivated by audio and video feedback because it was clear and personalized (Voelkel & Mello, 2014; Henderson & Phillips, 2015). Interestingly, teachers also reported higher levels of engagement when giving video and audio feedback. Explore the audio and video options for providing feedback in your LMS to maximize the impact of that feedback while saving you the time it takes to type out detailed explanations.
Your LMS should be a digital extension of your classroom that empowers students to drive their learning. The time you invest in setting up your LMS and understanding the functionality available to you and your students will pay dividends this year!
Are you interested in learning more about setting up your digital classroom to empower students? You can watch the free webinar I presented for the Modern Classroom Project!
This is the final blog in this social-emotional learning (SEL) series designed to create clarity about the five SEL core competencies identified in the CASEL Framework and how to develop these skills in your classroom. I believe SEL skills should be integrated into our curriculum and class culture, not treated as an add-on or separate from the learning in our classrooms. Cultivating SEL skills benefits academic success, mental health, quality of relationships, self-regulation, and classroom management. So, the time we invest in developing these social-emotional learning skills will pay dividends over a school year.
This final blog focuses on social awareness and helping students to appreciate the diversity of people, perspectives, cultures, and social norms around them.
CASEL defines social awareness as the ability to “understand the perspectives of and empathize with others, including those from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and contexts.” Social awareness includes the ability to:
To help students cultivate social awareness in classrooms, educators should consider the following questions:
Heightened social awareness can reduce friction and help students to appreciate their peers’ perspectives and strengths, making collaboration and group work positive and productive. Research indicates that developing social awareness can:
So, how do we help students develop social awareness?
Strategy #1: Cross the Line
Cross the Line is an exercise designed to help students appreciate the diversity of experiences held by a group of individuals. It highlights the similarities and differences between people and their life experiences. This activity helps students understand the impact of prejudice, stereotypes, and bullying.
The activity requires a high degree of trust between the teacher or facilitator and the students involved. The students line up against one side of a room or open space (e.g., yard, gym). Then the teacher or person facilitating the activity reads a series of statements, ranging from the relatively innocuous “You play a sport” to the more personal ones such as, “You have been picked on our bullied at school.” After each statement, students who have had that experience walk across the Line and stand facing the other side of the room. As students stand facing each other, they can see who has had a similar or different experience from them. This can help them develop empathy and compassion for one another.
After the exercise, asking students to reflect on their experiences is essential. You can encourage them to write or draw their reflections. Regardless of the strategy you use, provide students with prompts to guide their reflection.
This exercise can be emotional for students, but it is a powerful strategy for raising awareness about the other individuals in their class community. Operation Respect has a resource that teachers can reference to learn more about this activity.
Strategy #2: 4-Corner Debate
The 4-corner debate strategy helps students appreciate the variety of perspectives and opinions in a class. During this activity, each corner of the classroom is labeled: 1) strongly agree, 2) agree, 3) disagree, and 4) strongly disagree. The teacher will read statements like, “Most people are good,” “The United States should limit immigration,” or “Solar energy is the most promising renewable energy source.” Students consider their perspective on the statement and stand in one of the four corners of the classroom that aligns with their point of view.
After students have clustered in the corner that aligns with their thinking, the teacher facilitates a share-out, inviting students in each corner to share their perspectives. The goal is to help students appreciate different points of view and understand how a person’s culture, past experiences, and background have shaped their thinking about various topics.
Like the Cross The Line activity, the 4-corner debate should be followed by a reflective practice to encourage students to think more deeply about the experience.
Strategy #3: Peer Feedback
Peer feedback can help students to recognize and appreciate each other’s strengths and demonstrate compassion. Too often, feedback is viewed as a “teacher responsibility.” However, in a learning community, all members should play a role in providing thoughtful and substantive feedback.
Peer feedback is most effective and constructive when it is focused. To ensure students are successful in recognizing each other’s strengths and providing each other with specific suggestions for improvement, they need clear guidelines for giving feedback.
Teachers can use sentence frames to structure focused feedback, provide students with a choice board of options for how they can respond to their peers, or they can transform a rubric into a vehicle for peer feedback.
If you want to learn more about how to structure peer feedback, check out this blog.
We have an opportunity to approach this school year differently with a focus on building strong learning communities and helping students to develop the skills necessary to thrive socially and academically. Cultivating social-emotional learning skills can happen in the context of our curriculum to deepen our students’ understanding of themselves, the content, and their communities.
The previous posts in this social-emotional learning series focused on self-awareness, self-management, and responsible decision-making. These skills fall under the umbrella of intrapersonal skills. Intrapersonal skills are cultivated inside a person. We’ve explored strategies designed to help students:
This post on relationship skills shifts the focus to interpersonal skills, which require a person to interact with others. Interpersonal skills include our ability to communicate and collaborate, engage in negotiation and compromise, manage conflict and listen actively, and understand another person’s experience and feel empathy for them.
CASEL defines relationship skills as the ability “to establish and maintain healthy and supportive relationships and to effectively navigate settings with diverse individuals and groups.” Relationship skills include the ability to:
To help students cultivate relationship skills in classrooms, educators should consider the following questions:
Strong relationship skills are fundamental to the healthy functioning of any group or learning community. Positive relationships “create an environment in which children feel competent, independent, and akin to others, which increases their motivation” (Thijssen, Rege & Solheim, 2022). Research indicates that developing relationship skills impacts:
So, how do we help students develop relationship skills?
Strategy #1: Academic Discussions
When students engage in academic discourse, they have an opportunity to exchange ideas, ask questions, and make meaning as part of a learning community. However, the whole group, teacher-led discussions are not equitable. They do not allow all students a voice in the class dialogue. Instead, I would encourage teachers to explore small group, student-led discussions, and online asynchronous discussions.
The benefits of discussion include:
4 Corner Conversations
Teachers can use a “4 Corner Conversations” strategy for in-class small group discussions. As the name suggests, each of the four corners of the classroom has a small group of 6-9 students engaged in a conversation. The teacher can supply the discussion questions or ask students to write a couple of questions they would like to discuss in the small group. When they join their discussion group, the expectation is that students will:
4 Corner Conversations give every student a chance to participate in the discussion without each idea being filtered through the teacher. This helps students develop their communication skills while also improving their grasp of the topics they are studying.
Online Discussions
Online asynchronous discussions can be text-based in a learning management system (LMS) or video-based with a platform like Flip. Online discussions, unlike in-person conversations, allow everyone an equal opportunity to participate. Students who are shy, need more time to process, or are managing social anxiety may find it easier to respond thoughtfully to a discussion prompt and reply to peers online.
Below are four tips to ensure your online discussion questions are engaging and provide multiple entry points into the conversation for learners at different levels.
If students are going to be successful engaging in small group student-led discussions or online discussions, they need explicit instruction, modeling, and practice, practice, practice! These discussions will take time to develop depth, but the payoff is students who are able to communicate effectively in order to learn with and from each other.
Strategy #2: Collaborative Group Challenges
Collaboration and teamwork are critical relationship skills. Students need regular opportunities to work together around shared tasks that require creative problem-solving, social negotiation, and clear communication. As pictured in the table below, there are several strategies teachers can use to engage students in collaborative tasks designed to position them at the center of the learning experience.
| Jigsaw Activities | This cooperative learning strategy requires each person in a “home group” to become the expert on one aspect of a topic or one section of a text. All students in a class assigned the same subtopic or section of text work together to build their expertise. Then they return to their home group so each member can share out what they learned and teach their group members. |
| Reciprocal Teaching | This instructional activity asks groups of students to engage in a reading session where each person focuses on employing a different strategy as they read the text together. The four strategies or roles include summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting. |
| Building Background | Instead of transferring information to students via a lecture or mini-lesson, a building background activity positions the students to work in small groups researching a topic, moment in history, famous person, scientific phenomenon, literary movement, etc. Students work collaboratively to make sense of the information they are finding online and create an artifact to share their learning (e.g., digital document, slide deck, infographic, or artistic timeline). |
| Real-world Challenges | Linking student learning to real-world problems, issues, or challenges makes learning more relevant and interesting. Real-world challenges encourage groups of students to tackle complex and often messy problems using strategies and processes they have practiced in the classroom. For example, a quirky website called YummyMath.com has a huge collection of bizarre math problems. They are perfect for encouraging students to apply their mathematical thinking to real-world situations. |
Strategy #3: Conflict Resolution Role Playing
Conflict is unavoidable. Students bring their past experiences, cultural norms, personalities, and personal preferences into the classroom. It is essential to help students build empathy for each other and resolve conflicts in a kind and constructive way.
Role-playing exercises position the students as active agents in the learning process and provide them with the opportunity to be creative. Role-playing also encourages students to evaluate situations and consider how they might respond.
| Step 1: Group students and have each group write a scenario where two or more students encounter conflict. What is the situation? Who is involved? |
| Step 2: Ask groups to exchange scenarios and practice performing a short skit or scene acting the scenario out. |
| Step 3: After each group performs their skit or scene, encourage each group to huddle up and discuss the scene. What was causing the conflict? What information did the different people involved need to understand the other perspectives? What misconceptions or assumptions were causing the conflict to escalate? What would have helped the people involved to understand and empathize with each other? |
| Step 4: Allow each group to share their thoughts about the scene and what was really happening. Then brainstorm a list of strategies the participants could have used to avoid the conflict or work through it in a kind and constructive way. |
| Step 5: Encourage students to spend a few minutes reflecting on the exercise and what they learned. |
These routines and strategies help students develop the skills they need to interact with other members of the learning community in a kind, constructive, and productive way. Developing these relationship skills creates learning communities where students are comfortable sharing their ideas, engaging in collaborative tasks, and taking academic risks.
My next blog post will focus on the final competency of social awareness!
In my last two posts on self-awareness and self-management, I explored strategies for helping students identify, understand, and regulate their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. The next social-emotional skill is responsible decision-making. This competency requires students to take their heightened self-awareness and ability to manage themselves and make responsible choices about how they respond to different situations and interact with others.
Responsible decision-making is the ability to assess a situation, understand the benefits and consequences of different responses, consider what is ethical and safe, and make kind and productive choices. Responsible decision-making includes the ability to:
To help cultivate responsible decision-making in classrooms, educators should consider the following questions:
Research suggests that when students are better able to make thoughtful and constructive decisions, this skill positively impacts:
So, how do we help students make responsible decisions?
Strategy #1: Co-construct Classroom Agreements
Instead of handing students a syllabus with a set of class rules, engage your students in the process of co-constructing classroom agreements about behaviors. Students have valuable prior knowledge on this topic they can draw from. They know what makes them feel safe and supported in learning environments. They also understand what makes them feel unsafe or uncomfortable taking academic risks in a classroom. Teachers should encourage students to draw on their prior experiences in school to compile a list of behaviors and norms they believe will establish and maintain a high-functioning learning community.
| Reflect on Past Experiences | Ask students to think about a time when they felt safe sharing their ideas, taking risks, and engaging with classmates. What about that class or learning environment made them feel comfortable? When have they felt uncomfortable sharing their thoughts, taking risks, or engaging with peers? What caused them to feel unsafe? |
| Collaborate with Peers to Identify Key Norms | Encourage collaborative groups to discuss their prior experiences in school and identify three norms they feel are critical to establishing and maintaining a safe, supportive, and productive learning community. |
| Share Out and Create a Class Set of Agreements | Ask one person in each group to share their group’s norms and explain why these norms should be added to a class set of agreements. Once each group has shared their norms, give students time to review them (e.g., silent gallery walk) and add dots to the five norms they think are most important. Add the 5-10 norms with the most dots to the class set of agreements. |
When the class has defined a set of class agreements, document those expectations for behavior and post them, so they are easy to reference.
This process gives students ownership over the creation of class agreements. They are more likely to comply with and respect expectations for behavior if they have played a role in creating them. A list of co-created class agreements is also more likely to reflect what they care about regarding their interactions with each other.
Strategy #2: Collaborate to Create a Clear Path of Consequences
When consequences are unclear, it can create unnecessary power struggles in the classroom. If students are to accurately assess the potential consequences of their actions or choices before making a decision, the path of consequences needs to be clear.
You can articulate a clear path of consequences for missteps in the classroom and online for your students or engage the class community in this process. If you identify a path of consequences for students, make sure to review those with your class and post those consequences somewhere that students and families can see them. Again, the goal is clarity. We want students to know what will happen if they violate an expectation for behavior in your class.
| 1st misstep: Verbal redirect |
| 2nd misstep: Move student to an alternative seating area (e.g., floater desk apart from collaboration) |
| 3rd misstep: Move the student and ask them to complete a safe space reflection; follow up with a conversation about the behavior |
| 4th misstep: Move the student, ask them to fill out a safe space reflection, discuss the behavior with them, and communicate with the family about the student’s behavior in the class |
It is helpful to engage the class in exercises that encourage them to think about potential missteps in class or online and work to define a reasonable consequence for that action. This exercise encourages students to think critically about unproductive or unkind behaviors, their impact on others, and appropriate consequences for those behaviors.
Strategy #3: Use the Urgent vs. Important Matrix to Guide Decision Making
Learning to decipher between what is important and what is urgent is a critical skill for students when deciding how to use their time and focus their energy.
Important tasks are those that help students make progress toward personal and academic goals they value. By contrast, urgent tasks are those that demand immediate attention or action. Some important tasks are urgent, while others are not. Too often, people focus on urgent tasks instead of important tasks because the consequence of not completing an urgent task is immediate. The urgency of an assignment or task may make it feel important when it actually is not.
You can help students to begin to assess the tasks on their proverbial plates and think critically about which category of the “important versus urgent matrix” they fall into. This can help students prioritize tasks and make responsible decisions about how they use their time.
A routine of categorizing tasks using the matrix above encourages students to assess various tasks to determine which items on their to-do lists will help them make progress toward goals they value.
Strategy #4: Frayer-style Well-being Analysis
Students may not consider the impact of their choices on themselves or the people around them. Yet, the CASEL Framework points out that students should reflect on their role in promoting personal, family, and community well-being.
You can use a Frayer-style reflection to get students thinking about how they are positively impacting their personal and academic well-being as well as the well-being of their families and communities. This exercise encourages them to think about their actions and decisions and how they influence important aspects of their lives.
Alternatively, you can have students engage in a conversation with a peer, reflect in writing, or record a video explanation to explore the impact of their choices and actions on others.
Strategy #5: Role Playing Exercises
Role-playing exercises position the students as active agents in the learning process and provide them with the opportunity to be creative. Role-playing can be leveraged to encourage students to evaluate situations and scenarios to consider how they might respond. It provides them with a safe space to practice weighing the benefits and consequences of different decisions.
As with most things in a classroom, I’d prefer to see students play an active role in generating the scenarios, performing the scenes, and engaging in discussion with peers about the best ways to respond in a particular situation.
| Step 1: Group students and have each group write a scenario they can imagine a student their age facing in school (or their lives beyond school) that would challenge them to make a tough decision. |
| Step 2: Ask groups to exchange scenarios and practice performing a short skit or scene acting the scenario out. |
| Step 3: When each group performs their skit or scene, encourage them to pause or freeze at the moment when a big decision needs to be made. Encourage each group to huddle up and decide how they would respond and why they think that response would be the best course of action given the situation. |
| Step 4: Allow each group to share their thoughts about how the person faced with the decision should respond. Facilitate a discussion among the groups about the potential benefits and consequences of each response. |
| Step 5: Encourage students to spend a few minutes reflecting on the exercise and what they learned. |
These routines and strategies do not require significant time, but they help students learn how to assess a situation, consider other people’s points of view, demonstrate empathy, and weigh the benefits and drawbacks of different choices to make responsible decisions. The ability to make kind and constructive choices can positively impact their academic success and the overall functioning of the learning community.
My next blog post will focus on the competency of relationship skills!
In my last blog post, I said self-awareness is a foundational social-emotional learning skill. If students are unable to identify their emotions, thoughts, and values and recognize how they influence their behaviors, it will be challenging for them to develop the other SEL core competencies. As students understand themselves on a deeper level, they’re more likely to be successful in developing their self-management skills.
Self-management is the ability to regulate one’s feelings, thoughts, and behaviors effectively in various situations to achieve a particular outcome, goal, or aspiration. Self-management includes the ability to:
To help cultivate self-management in classrooms, educators should consider the following questions:
A large-scale study found that “self-management is a better predictor of student learning than are other measures of socioemotional skills” (Claro & Loeb, 2019). Research suggests that when students are better able to manage themselves and their behaviors, this skill positively impacts:
So, how do we help students develop the ability to regulate their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors?
Strategy #1: Setting Academic, Behavioral, and Personal Goals
Setting goals is key to helping students develop their metacognitive muscles to better understand themselves as people and as learners. A regular goal-setting routine encourages students to identify academic, behavior, and personal goals they want to work toward. It asks them to think about what is required in terms of their actions and behaviors to make progress toward their goals.
As much as teachers value goal setting, it can be challenging to make time for this routine. Depending on the age of the students, teachers may want to begin each week by asking students to set a single goal they want to work toward. Teachers working with older students may want them to set a few goals to focus on for the length of a grading period or unit of study.
Regardless of your approach to facilitating goal setting, it’s important to:
Strategy #2: Prioritizing Tasks with To-do Lists
As adults, many of us use to-do lists on paper, online with tools (like Google Keep), or an app on our phones to keep track of everything we need to get done in a day or week. A to-do list helps us prioritize the most important tasks to ensure we are spending our time and energy in places that will have the biggest impact. A to-do list can also function to ease anxiety simply by naming what needs to get done. Checking items off a to-do list creates a sense of accomplishment, motivating us to continue working through the list.
Students juggling multiple classes and myriad assignments with varying due dates will benefit from making to-do lists; however, they may not have any practice with this routine. Teachers can support students by dedicating class time to the creation of to-do lists and modeling how to prioritize items on their to-do lists. Similar to the goal-setting routine, it’s best to provide students with options for how to record their lists (e.g., online or offline) and give students class time to practice. This can happen as a welcome task routine or an end-of-class activity.
Strategy #3: Reflecting on Missteps
Missteps and mistakes are a part of the learning process. Students need opportunities to reflect on their choices and behavior to understand how they impact other members of the learning community. Simply reprimanding students is unlikely to help them develop their self-management skills. Instead, pairing a consequence with a reflective practice can help students to identify why they behaved in a certain way and how that behavior may have impacted other people.
We can ask students to complete a safe space reflection form when students violate a class agreement or expectation for behavior to encourage them to think more deeply about the incident. Once they’ve had an opportunity to reflect, we can meet with them to discuss what happened, why it happened, and how the students might respond differently to a similar situation in the future.
Strategy #4: Conducting a Retrospective
A retrospective, or “look back,” is a strategy that encourages students to consider four questions.
The goal of a retrospective is to encourage students to reflect on their work, so they can create an action plan to build on their successes and implement changes for improvement.
A retrospective can happen any time during the school year (e.g., end of a semester or unit) to encourage students to reflect on their experiences and make adjustments to improve their academic performance and behavior in class.
Strategy #5: Enjoying Agency with “Would You Rather” Choices
The ability to demonstrate personal and collective agency is another dimension of self-management. Students need to be able to make meaningful and appropriate choices about their learning experiences. However, many students spend their days in classrooms where they may not get to make any decisions about what they learn, how they learn, or what they create to demonstrate their learning. As a result, many students may be uncomfortable making decisions and benefit from practicing this skill.
In a mini-episode of my podcast, The Balance, I described a simple “would you rather” strategy I encourage teachers to use to build at least one meaningful choice into each lesson or learning experience. This simple strategy makes giving students agency more sustainable and manageable while helping students develop confidence in their ability to make meaningful decisions about their learning.
Instead of designing a choice board with six or nine options, which may feel overwhelming, teachers can provide students with one choice between two options during the learning experience. This requires less time to prepare while still giving students agency. It’s worth our time to prioritize student choice because it positively impacts self-management skills and improves retention, transfer performance, and motivation.
These routines and strategies do not require significant time, but they help students learn how to manage their feelings and behaviors to positively impact their academic success and the overall functioning of the learning community.
My next blog post will focus on the competency of responsible decision-making!
In my previous blog post titled “Social-Emotional Learning Series: Cultivating Skills All Students Need to Thrive,” I identified classroom management, lack of engagement, and general student apathy as challenges that plagued the 2021-2022 school year. Teachers have an opportunity to approach this new school year differently by dedicating class time to cultivating social-emotional learning skills that are critical to a high-functioning learning community. In this blog post, we’ll explore the first competency of social-emotional learning: self-awareness.
Self-awareness is a cornerstone of social-emotional learning. Without self-awareness, students struggle to manage themselves, make responsible decisions, build healthy relationships, and understand and empathize with others.
Self-awareness is a multifaceted competency that encompasses a person’s ability to:
To help cultivate self-awareness in classrooms, educators should consider the following questions:
Dedicating time and energy resources to cultivating self-awareness benefits individual students and the ability of the learning community to function in a healthy, positive, and productive way. Research suggests that when individuals see themselves more clearly, the benefits include:
So, how do we help students develop self-awareness?
Strategy #1: Start Class with Check-ins
Begin each class with an informal conversation or check-in activity. Teachers can dedicate time to a whole class check-in with each student sharing their response to a prompt. If that is too time-consuming, teachers can put students in small groups and allow them to check in with a handful of peers.
A regular check-in routine that asks students to share their feelings and experiences builds community and empathy while also helping students feel more comfortable engaging with their peers when working on academic tasks.
Strategy #2: Feelings Graph
Encourage students to take a few quiet moments to take an inventory of how they feel physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Once they’ve had a chance to gauge their feelings, ask students to graph their emotional state on a piece of chart paper and write a short reflection explaining why they put themselves at a particular spot on their graph.
Tracking how they feel over time can help students identify trends in their emotional state and gain clarity about the people, routines, situations, and interactions that positively and negatively impact them. If they understand how different variables affect how they feel physically, mentally, and emotionally, they can make choices that will positively impact them.
Strategy #3: Model Stress Management Strategies
Rates of stress, anxiety, and depression are rising (Pincus, Hannor-Walker, Wright & Justice, 2020; Wan, 2020). Helping students practice stress management strategies can help them deal with their anxiety and stress in a healthy way. When woven into the fabric of their days at school, breathing, meditation, and mindfulness routines can help students develop the skills necessary to manage their stress and build confidence in navigating challenging situations.
Educators can begin one class each week focusing on a mindfulness activity to help students check in with themselves and hone the skills necessary to deal with moments of stress and anxiety.
Strategy #4: Who am I? Thinking Routine
Project Zero developed this thinking routine to encourage students to explore their identity and the identity of others. It “encourages students to reserve judgment, take time to find out more about what they see and/or hear, and explore more deeply and broadly other people, and develop a greater understanding of similarities and differences.“
Strategy #5: Practice Mindfulness STOP Skill with Role-play
Role-play asks students to assume the identity of a person placed in a situation or scenario that mirrors something they might encounter in the classroom or in life. The scenario might challenge them to think about how they would react if a classmate made a rude comment, they received a low score on an important assignment, or they had to work in a group with a student they did not like.
As students engage in a role-play scenario, encourage them to practice the mindfulness STOP skill of:
These mindfulness activities do not require significant time, but they are more likely to positively impact a student’s level of self-awareness when teachers carve out time each day or week to dedicate to these routines. Teachers should consider dedicating time during a welcome routine to these exercises. Beginning the first 5-10 minutes of class a few times each week with an activity designed to boost self-awareness or encourage mindfulness can help students get comfortable identifying their feelings and thinking critically about the impact of their interactions with others.
My next blog post will focus on the competency of self-management!
The focus on learning loss and getting kids “caught up” after two years of online, concurrent, and hybrid learning distracted educators from the critical work of developing the skills students needed to be part of a thriving learning community. The result was a frustrating school year mired in discipline issues and unproductive behaviors.
Almost every teacher I interacted with last year said the 2021-2022 school year was the most challenging of their careers. They reported discipline issues, lack of engagement, and general student apathy. As frustrating as those issues were for teachers to navigate, the source of those behaviors was not a mystery. Many students had not been in a structured academic environment for two years. Students transitioned from a high degree of control over their environments and time to classrooms where they had little or no control. The pandemic has also introduced myriad social and emotional stressors that negatively impacted students.
This year we have an opportunity to approach the school year differently with a focus on building strong learning communities and helping students to develop the skills necessary to thrive socially and academically.
Schools emphasized social-emotional learning (SEL) during the pandemic to support students struggling with social isolation and trauma. Yet, it often felt like an add-on instead of an integrated part of the class curriculum and culture. Helping students develop their social-emotional skills is critical to creating classrooms where students have both the intrapersonal and interpersonal skills necessary to navigate complex learning tasks. Students must develop the skills and confidence required to project their social and emotional selves within a learning community. This requires that teachers explicitly teach and model these skills, integrate routines that actively engage students in refining these skills, and provide feedback on student progress in relation to these skills.
The CASEL Framework presents five competencies at the heart of social-emotional learning. I am writing a 5-part blog series between now and the start of the new school year. Each blog will focus on one competency with the goal of sharing concrete strategies and resources teachers can use to cultivate these skills in their classrooms.
I want to support educators in approaching the upcoming school year differently. Instead of jumping right into content and curriculum, I’d like to see educators begin the school year with a focus on building strong learning communities. This requires that we help students cultivate the skills they need to “develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.”
Investing time and energy into cultivating these critical competencies will pay dividends over the school year and, ultimately, improve the quality of student learning and interactions. It also has the potential to eliminate many of the unproductive behaviors and frustrating issues that made the 2021-2022 school year so challenging for teachers.
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In my post titled, “Could Doing Less in Education Give Everyone More?” I identified teacher talk as the biggest barrier to human connection in the classroom. The more time teachers spend at the front of the room transferring information, the less time they have to sit alongside individual and small groups of students to facilitate learning and support their individual progress toward learning objectives.
Teachers can use the flipped classroom model to create more time and space to connect with learners by shifting the transfer of information (e.g., lecture, mini-lesson) online with video. The flipped classroom model allows students to control the pace of their learning and maximizes engagement in the classroom.
As teachers prepare for a new school year, the summer is a perfect time to create videos for the instruction they find themselves repeating over and over again each year. Those foundational explanations that students often need repeat exposure to are the perfect place to start when recording videos because they pay dividends, saving teachers precious class time!
If teachers are planning to say the same thing the same way to everyone, I suggest they make a video and allow students to self-pace through that instruction. Then teachers can use precious class time for more dynamic and differentiated learning experiences.
I’ve developed a mini-course to help teachers 1) create effective instructional videos and 2) build dynamic, student-centered learning experiences around those videos. This mini-course has 9 lessons with videos, templates, resources, and “your turn” application activities to help participants put what they are learning into practice. The goal is for participants to leave with a high-quality instructional video and a 3-part blended lesson that builds engagement around that video content.
Below is a preview of the course content.
If you would like to purchase this mini-course for multiple teachers on your campus to support self-paced learning this summer, fill out this form for a group rate! You’ll be contacted directly to coordinate a bulk purchase of licenses.
Want to learn more about the flipped classroom model? Check out this blog!
Given the challenges of the last year and the staggering number of teachers leaving this profession, I wanted to talk with two of my previous graduate students who were wrapping up their first year of teaching. I wanted to hear about their experience…challenges, successes, and lessons learned.
“Every day there are a new set of challenges which keeps this profession exciting.” Joe
| Procedural Knowledge | Learning how to take attendance and navigate a new campus. |
| Classroom Management | Creating a classroom environment where students are engaged but also following class agreements and norms. |
| Differentiation | Meeting the wide range of needs, skills, and abilities in a classroom to ensure all students have the support they need to make progress. |
| Grading | Setting realistic expectations about what gets graded and balancing teacher assessment with routines where students self-assess. |
| Pressure to Make Every Lesson Exciting | Understanding the difference between engagement and entertainment and keeping expectations about lessons realistic. |
“I am so shocked and surprised at how forgiving the students are…If I try something and it fails, they are forgiving and will power through. They almost put in more effort if they know it’s not going well because they want you to do well. So that has been just the best kind of surprise.” Joe
| Realize You Don’t Need to Be Perfect | Keep in mind that students are forgiving and want you to do well. They will understand if a lesson doesn’t go well. Taking risks and failing makes it less scary for students to take risks and fail. |
| Collect Feedback from Students | Use feedback forms helps you to better understand what students are thinking, feeling, and experiencing. The responses can be surprising and validating. |
| Ask Students to Create Norms for a Task | Engage students in the process of articulating what they think will make a particular activity successful (e.g., student presentations, small group discussions, collaborative tasks). |
| Embracing Routines | Maintain routines beyond the classroom (e.g., working out, journaling) can keep you feeling balanced, healthy, and energized. |
| Being Strategic About How You Use Time | Leave work at work. Designate days to stay after school late and work in your classroom and days when you leave after school to engage in activities that help you to relax and re-energize. |
“We so badly want these lessons to just land and for the students to get the most out of them that it can be frustrating when we feel like it didn’t work.” Carina
| Capture Quick Reflections | Make notes on lesson plans at the end of each day, noting what went well and what needs to be reworked or reimagined to avoid repeating lessons that didn’t engage students. |
| Start Every Class with a Check-in | Begin every class with a community-building check-in question or icebreaker for students to discuss or respond to in writing at the beginning of class. |
| Repeat Expectations and Norms | Choose two or three non-negotiables (instead of compiling a long list of class rules), publish them on the wall, revisit them weekly, and follow them to a tee. |
| Advocate for Your Needs | If you’re overwhelmed by the workload, ask for help from a colleague and talk to leadership to avoid burning out. |
| Know That It’s Okay to Say “No” | Set realistic expectations for yourself. If you are asked to do something that will lead to an unhealthy work-life balance, feel confident saying, “no, I cannot take that on right now.” |
To retain high-quality teachers in education, it is critical to ask about their experiences to understand what is working for them and what is not. That is the only way to make changes on a campus or in a district that are likely to have a positive impact on teacher engagement and the job satisfaction experienced by a staff.
You can check out other episodes of The Balance on Apple Podcasts, Podbean, and Spotify!
While listening to Shankar Vedantam’s podcast Hidden Brain episode titled “Do Less,” I kept thinking YES! We need to do less in education! We need to stop adding to teachers’ already full plates and start thinking about how subtracting or taking things away might improve our teachers’ and students’ lives.
Vedantam talks with Dr. Leidy Klotz about the power of subtraction. They discuss how removing, streamlining, and simplifying have led to positive change. However, humans have an innate drive to innovate. Innovation often leads to creating more or adding to what already exists. This trend is evident in most school districts and classrooms. School leaders identify priorities and adopt new initiatives without dedicating equal time and energy to identifying things that can be removed or eliminated.
Let’s explore some examples in education where doing less can give teachers and students more.
Teachers are asked to cover a massive amount of content in a school year. There’s pressure to cover course standards, teach the adopted curriculum, keep up with rigid pacing guides, prepare students for standardized exams, and post a particular number of grades in the grade book each week.
This pressure to cover curriculum can make moving away from teacher-led, teacher-paced whole group instruction scary. As a result, teachers spend significant time at the front of the room talking at students instead of allowing students to engage in the messy and often time-consuming work of exploration, meaning-making, and discovery.
Even though most teachers recognize that teacher-led instruction relegates students to a passive and consumptive role and is not the best way to engage learners, they feel trapped by the bombastic pressure to “get through” their curriculum. What is the point of covering content if students don’t understand it and will not remember it?
Teachers need the space to encourage deep learning by engaging students in constructing knowledge through student-centered learning activities where they have more control over their learning experience. Students must do the heavy cognitive lift of asking questions, engaging in conversation, researching and exploring, creatively problem solving, and collaborating around shared tasks.
Asking teachers to cover less would allow them the time and space to explore different instructional models that leverage technology to differentiate and personalize learning, cultivate social-emotional learning skills, and incorporate metacognitive skill-building routines into their classes.
My research identified that the depth and quality of a teacher’s relationships with students significantly impacted their work engagement. Relationships are built through meaningful interactions between the teacher and learner. When students hang out in our rooms at break or lunch and chat informally with us, we get to know them and, often, feel more connected to them because of those interactions. Yet, those teacher-learner interactions can and should be happening daily in the classroom.
So, what stands in the way of human connection in the classroom? Teacher talk. The time teachers spend talking at the front of the room is the biggest barrier to human connection. When facilitating blended learning workshops, I encourage teachers to ask themselves a question before they present information in a mini-lesson or lecture. Are you planning to say the same thing the same way to everyone? If the answer is “Yes,” I encourage them to make a video. Shift that explanation online, allow students to self-pace through it, and use that valuable class time to work directly with small groups or individual learners supporting their specific needs.
The less teachers talk at the front of the room, the more time they can dedicate to tasks like feedback that typically happen outside the classroom. Feedback is how students feel seen and supported, but it is easy to neglect when teachers feel pressure to cover content. Instead, using video strategically and exploring blended learning models, like the station rotation model, can help teachers create the time and space to give timely, focused, and actionable feedback in the classroom as students work. Not only can this lighten a teacher’s workload, but the act of providing real-time feedback can help teachers better understand where students are in their progress and help them develop their relationships with learners.
Too many teachers are spending their evenings and weekends grading. It is exhausting and not a particularly enjoyable task. It’s no wonder so many teachers are frustrated and disillusioned with the profession. They do not enjoy work-life balance because of the massive amount of work they take home.
There is a real fear driving the practice of grading everything. Teachers worry that if there is no grade attached to the work, students will not do it. I understand the rationale, but it’s problematic. Instead of using points and grades as a carrot to entice students to do the work, how can we get students to see the value in their work?
Instead of spending hours grading, I’d love to see teachers invest that time into their design work. Unlike grading, a teacher’s work as the designer of learning experiences is a cognitively engaging task that demands creativity and intentionality.
When I facilitate blended learning workshops, teachers express concern about the time it takes to design student-centered learning experiences with the various models. It’s true that it takes more time to architect a student-centered lesson that invites learners to make meaning as opposed to standing at the front of the room telling students everything we know about a topic. Yet, the time we invest in our design work should free us to spend our precious class time engaging with students and supporting their progress toward learning goals.
Teachers are exhausted and leaving the profession in droves. Hiring and retaining high-quality teachers will demand that schools think about how to make this work more sustainable and rewarding. Continuing to add to our teachers’ workloads will only result in high levels of teacher burnout and attrition from the profession. Instead, school leaders should be asking, what can we remove? How can we give teachers more breathing room and flexibility?
Instead of assuming that the best way to solve every problem is to add something new, it’s time to start tackling issues in education by considering what we might remove or eliminate. Subtracting might be the best solution for re-engaging our teachers and students!
Last month, I delivered a keynote on the future of education. It’s a vast topic, so I focused on four trends likely to impact our work as educators.
As school leaders prepare for the 2022-2023 school year, these four trends can help them identify district priorities and create a strategic plan for the year ahead.
The pandemic pushed teachers and learners online out of necessity. By fall 2020, 69% of districts offered a virtual school option, up from 27% before COVID, and 30% of district leaders, administrators, and teachers expect to see significant growth in blended learning (Arnett, 2021).
Some of the factors contributing to this growth include:
A challenge associated with the increasing growth in blended and online learning is that survey data indicates, “Many current approaches to remote and hybrid instruction aim to replicate the conventional classroom experience online” (Arnett, 2021). However, traditional approaches to instruction fail to maximize the benefits and affordances of the online learning environment. Designing learning experiences for blended or online learning environments demands a high degree of intentionality about what students do synchronously versus asynchronously. To optimize blended learning and online learning, educators need professional development focused on designing student-centered learning experiences that blend active, engaged learning online with active, engaged learning offline.
Teachers are leaving the profession in record numbers due, in part, to the strain of the last three years. When surveyed, 77% of teachers report feeling somewhat or extremely exhausted. 33% of teachers say they are very likely to leave the profession in the next two years, up from 13% before the pandemic (Hanover Research, 2022). Hiring and retaining high-quality teachers will be a challenge for school districts in the upcoming year.
As districts grapple with high levels of teacher turnover, it is essential to understand the connection between work engagement, job satisfaction, and teacher self-efficacy (Granziera & Perera, 2019). Teachers have faced shifting teaching and learning landscapes in the last three years. They transitioned online with little warning and, in many cases, no training to prepare them for teaching online. This negatively impacted their feelings of self-efficacy or their confidence in their ability to do this work well.
The rough transition online and the challenge of engaging students learning in home environments that may not have been conducive to online learning created myriad obstacles for teachers. Student engagement and teacher engagement are reciprocal, so it is not surprising that the lack of student engagement online had a devastating impact on teacher engagement (Roth, Assor, Kanat-Maymon & Kaplan, 2007; Tucker, 2020).
When teachers finally returned to classrooms, they faced new challenges, including concurrent teaching, hybrid schedules, students re-entering schools with trauma, substitute shortages, and fears about contracting COVID. All of this made an already challenging profession more exhausting and stressful.
Attracting and retaining high-quality teachers will require that school districts compensate teachers well for this demanding work. They also need to support teachers in their continued learning and growth with high-quality professional learning opportunities that help them develop high levels of self-efficacy.
As schools reopened, there was a focus on learning loss, and educators felt pressure to make up lost ground and get students “caught up.” Unfortunately, the pressure to address learning loss may have overshadowed the more significant issue of students returning with trauma after two years of social isolation. 49% of students reported feeling “depressed, stressed, or anxious to the point of interfering with their learning.” 71% of teachers said that student morale was lower than before the pandemic (Hanover Research, 2022).
After two years of remote learning, students needed to be reacclimated to an academic learning environment. They needed to feel connected to a supportive learning community where they felt welcomed and safe. Although social-emotional learning (SEL) has been a frequent talking point in education, it needs to be woven into the fabric of our students’ classes.
The CASEL Framework for SEL provides a concrete path for applying evidence-based SEL strategies to our students’ daily lives at school. Educators who focus on integrating SEL skills into their classes can help students manage their emotions, make responsible choices, consider the impact of their behavior on others, and develop healthy relationships. When students develop their SEL skills, they can also take a more active role in their learning, sharing the responsibility for learning with their teachers.
As we approach the 2022-2023 school year, teachers and students will benefit from a focus on SEL, not as an add-on but rather as a skill set integrated into every subject area, to create more robust learning communities and help students develop the skills necessary to thrive in schools and beyond.
Miguel Cardona, the Secretary of Education, said, “While COVID-19 has worsened many inequities in our schools and communities, we know that even before the pandemic, a high-quality education was out of reach for too many of our nation’s students and families.” The pandemic exacerbated existing inequities and has had a disproportionally negative impact on students from underserved communities, including communities of color, multilingual learners, and students with disabilities. Moving forward, Cardona emphasizes the need to “create more culturally and linguistically responsive and inclusive learning environments for all students.”
In the last two years, my focus has been on helping school districts and teachers leverage Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and blended learning to create more accessible, inclusive, and equitable learning experiences for all students.
UDL is a framework grounded in brain-based research and provides “concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities” (CAST, 2022).
While working with Dr. Katie Novak on our book UDL and Blended Learning, we focused on exploring the synergy between these two frameworks. We explore how blended learning models can make implementing UDL more manageable and sustainable.
Universally designed blended learning is grounded in four fundamental beliefs:
The two aspects of education that will not change in the future are 1) learner variability and 2) technology. Given these realities, schools must help teachers understand how to universally design blended learning to honor learner variability and maximize the impact of technology in classrooms.
The summer is a time to reflect, refocus, and prepare for a new year. After the challenges of the last school year, it is critical that school leaders focus on preparing teachers to begin the 2022-2023 school year with the skills they need to design and facilitate equitable learning experiences that integrate SEL and leverage technology to better meet the needs of all learners.
Arnett, T. (2021). Breaking the Mold: How a global pandemic unlocks innovation in K–12 instruction. The Christensen Institute. Retrieved from https://www.christenseninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/BL-Survey-1.07.21.pdf.
CAST. (2022). About Universal Design for Learning. Retrieved from https://www.cast.org/impact/universal-design-for-learning-udl
Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). What Is the CASEL Framework? Retrieved from https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/what-is-the-casel-framework
Granziera, H., & Perera, H. N. (2019). Relations among teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs, engagement, and work satisfaction: A social cognitive view. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 58, 75–84.
Hanover Research. (2022). 2022 Trends in K-12 Education. Retrieved from www.hanoverresearch.com/reports-and-briefs/2022-trends-in-k-12-education
Roth, G., Assor, A., Kanat-Maymon, Y., & Kaplan, H. (2007). Autonomous motivation for teaching: How self-determined teaching may lead to self-determined learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 99(4), 761–774.
Tucker, C. (2020). Teacher engagement in full-release blended learning courses. [Doctoral dissertation, Pepperdine University]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
U.S. Department of Education. (2021). Department of Education Announces Actions to Advance Equity in Education. Retrieved from https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/department-education-announces-actions-advance-equity-education
A retrospective, or “look back,” is a strategy that can be used by school leaders, professional learning communities (PLCs), and teachers to engage a group in a structured reflection and brainstorming session. A retrospective can happen any time during the school year (e.g., end of a semester or unit) to encourage a reflective practice, gather feedback, and make adjustments to improve a group’s experience.
A retrospective strives to answer four questions:
The goal of a retrospective is to encourage a group or team to reflect on their work, so they can create an action plan to build on their successes and implement changes for improvement.
If you are a school leader guiding your staff through a retrospective, a coach facilitating a retrospective for a PLC, or an individual teacher using this strategy with your students, you may want to use a digital tool, like Jamboard or Padlet. A virtual platform makes it possible for participants to share their reflections in a digital space where they can see and interact with each other’s ideas. If you are using a Padlet Wall, like the one pictured below, select the column feature to organize responses under each of the four questions. Once participants post their ideas to the virtual wall, they can heart or comment on each other’s virtual post-its.
If you prefer Jamboard, I suggest creating a slide for each question to ensure the group’s responses to each question are organized and easy to navigate.
If you prefer to make this a more tactile experience, you can segment a whiteboard into four sections or post each of the four questions in each of the four corners of a room. Then participants can capture their reflections on actual post-it notes and add them to the board or wall.
Once you’ve decided on the strategy you will use to facilitate your retrospective, you will want to follow the steps below to maximize the effectiveness of this activity.
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Step 1 Reflect & Post |
Review the four questions with your group of teachers or students and give them time to reflect on the year and capture their thoughts on digital or physical post-it notes. Ask the members of your group to post their responses to each question. |
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Step 2 Silent Gallery Walk |
Once everyone has posted their thoughts, give the group time to do a silent gallery walk of the responses to see what other members of the group had to say in response to each question. |
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Step 3 Review & Cluster |
As the facilitator, you will want to identify ideas that were repeated by multiple people to identify trends in the responses and cluster similar responses together. |
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Step 4 Discuss & Brainstorm |
Once you have reviewed the responses with the group and clustered the similar responses, group participants into smaller groups of 3-5 individuals. That way, they can engage in conversation and begin to identify the most important items from the board to create an action plan for next year. Each group should collaborate to identify:3 things that are working well that the staff or class would like to see continue.3 things that are not working that need to be reimagined.3 struggles, questions, or wonderings they want to explore further. |
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Step 5 Create an Action Plan |
Ask each group to spend time discussing and brainstorming solutions they think can help the group reimagine the three things that are not working. Encourage each group to collaborate to come up with creative solutions! |
As groups discuss the aspects of their work or their experience that did not go well, encourage them to capture their ideas on an action plan document, like the one pictured below. Ask them to brainstorm ways they think this thing could be reimaged and challenge them to identify what would be needed to make those changes (e.g., resources, a shift in mindset) and how they would measure success as this change is implemented.
The beauty of this final step is that the school leader, coach, or teacher facilitating the retrospective can tap into the collective intelligence of the group to generate ideas for how to improve everyone’s experience moving forward. The ideas generated during the retrospective can be captured, saved, and then referenced at the end of summer as school leaders, coaches, and teachers prepare for a new school year!
Calling all coaches!
“This was an excellent learning experience for me. As a coach and as a PD leader, I took away many concrete examples that I can use with my staff.”
Who is this course for?
What can you expect from this course?
This school year has been intense! Teachers are eager to rest, recharge, and hit the reset button! Many teachers use the summer break to take stock of the year and reflect on what they want to do differently in the year ahead.
As teachers reflect on this challenging year, it’s important to remember why many of us entered this profession in the first place. We wanted to spark a life-long love of learning in our students. We imagined energetic classrooms full of curious students eager to learn. As I discovered early in my career, that reality is hard to manifest in a teacher-led classroom where students have little control over their experience. Students are more likely to be motivated to learn if they enjoy higher levels of autonomy and agency!
As teachers plan for the next school year, I’d love for them to add an instructional model to their teaching tool belts that allows them to:
That’s why I am excited to announce the release of my first mini-course focused on the station rotation model!
This mini-course has 11 video lessons complete with templates, resources, and “your turn” application activities to help participants put what they are learning into practice. The goal is for participants to leave the course with a high-quality station rotation lesson they can use immediately.
The course will also provide information on classroom management, grouping strategies, and tips for maximizing the success of the station rotation model. It will also address concerns about large class sizes and short class periods! Check out the curriculum below!
If you want to purchase this mini-course for multiple teachers on your campus to support self-paced online learning this summer, fill out this form for a group rate! You’ll be contacted directly to coordinate a bulk purchase of licenses.
Want to learn more about the station rotation model? Check out this blog.
After years of coaching and working with teachers, there are two things I consistently encounter that cause imbalance in the classroom and beyond.
#1 Teacher Talk is a Barrier to Connection
In previous posts, I’ve focused on this first point by encouraging teachers to use blended learning models and strategies to free themselves from the front of the room. When designing lessons where teachers want to transfer information via a mini-lesson or lecture, I encourage them to ask themselves, “Am I going to say the same thing to everyone?”
The goal is to shift the transfer of information online using video and other resources (e.g., podcasts, curated online resources) and free the teacher to spend more time facilitating learning. If teachers are not trapped at the front of the room during the lesson, there are myriad ways they can use that time.
#2 Traditional Grading Practices are Exhausting and Unsustainable
This brings me to the second thing I’ve learned as a coach. Too many teachers are grading everything. They worry that if they do not grade everything, students will not do the work. This approach to grading creates massive amounts of work for the teacher, who may have anywhere from 30-170 students.
I have shared the flowchart below before, but it is the strategy I used as a teacher and now use as a coach to rethink how teachers use their finite time and energy.
I want to focus on that last leg in the flowchart. Suppose the work is an assessment or finished product, like an essay, performance task, or project. In that case, the teachers should focus their energy on grading that finished piece with a standards-aligned rubric, but they should not spend hours writing comments, suggestions, and corrections on that finished piece. Teachers should give feedback when students are working on the assignment, not at the end of the process when they will not act on the feedback.
Some teachers balk at the suggestion of using a rubric and not writing comments because that isn’t how they’ve approached grading in the past. Even though most teachers dislike grading, many are hesitant to explore alternatives to their current approach. Despite the initial hesitation, the teachers I’ve coached quickly realize there is a more effective and sustainable way to grade: side-by-side assessments.
Side-by-side Assessments
I began using side-by-side assessments after reading a quote by Margaret Heritage, who said “the word ‘assessment’ comes from the Latin verb ‘assidere,’ meaning ‘to sit with.’ This word origin implies that in assessment the teacher sits with the learner, and assessment is something teachers do with and for students rather than to students.”
I remember having an “ah-ha” moment when I read this. It made absolute sense. Why was I grading at home in isolation? If the grades were worthy of going in the grade book, why wouldn’t I carve out time in class to facilitate side-by-side assessments so students could understand why they were getting the grades they were getting? I also saw an opportunity to use grading as a strategy to develop my relationships with students and to lighten my load.
Setting Up for Side-by-side Assessments
As with most things in education, preparation is key to implementing the side-by-side assessment strategy. You will feel more prepared if you move through the following steps:
Facilitating Side-by-side Assessments
When it comes time to facilitate the side-by-side assessments, I encourage you to do the following:
You may find students will ask for support or additional instruction. In that case, add their name and request to a list. These are assessment sessions, not instruction sessions. You won’t have time to provide personalized instruction given the limited time you will have with each student, but you can document those requests. Then, you can reference those notes to design follow-up lessons that aim to provide targeted instruction and support to close gaps or address student concerns.
As teachers prepare for the final weeks of the school year, this can be a powerful way to approach grading final projects and authentic assessments. Side-by-side assessments turn grading into an opportunity to connect with learners and create transparency around the grading process, which often feels opaque from a student’s perspective. It can also eliminate the need for teachers to spend the better part of the first week of summer break grading assessments and projects. And as everyone in education can agree, teachers need their break this year to rest, recharge, and push the reset button!
Read more about side-by-side assessments and other strategies designed to create more balance in your work!
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