Adjusting the Recipe

I spent a great deal of time baking over the past week.  As I was mixing a cheesecake, I was thinking about how baking is a lot like teaching.  Each recipe, like each student, calls for a different set of ingredients to be mixed in different ways, each one added at just the right time in just the right measurement.  When we don't do those things in just the right way, we do not get the desired outcome.  But, a baker does not give up.  He analyzes the cake's consistency, flavor and level of moisture in order to determine where the recipe went wrong.  The next step is to start again and make necessary adjustments to the ingredients or process to get the desired outcome.  Bakers, professional as well as amateur, often consult others to gain insights to improve their goods.  For them it may mean looking in a cookbook, phoning a knowledgeable friend or researching on the internet.  It may take several attempts at the same recipe, but if a baker perseveres, the end result is a moist, delectable cake.  

Teachers, like bakers, do not give up either.  We look at student work and data.  We analyze closely and determine patterns that indicate where our students need more time, experience, or intense instruction. We plan for engaging opportunities for our students to learn collaboratively or guide them ourselves in 1:1 and small group settings.  We open the oven and check again to see if we've made that perfect cake.  When we have not, we often turn to one another for suggestions and advice on what's working. 

When I'm in need of ideas and motivation and my trusted colleagues are not available, I turn to a few women I know I can also count on, Penny Kittle and Donalyn Miller.  Penny Kittle's, Book Love and Donalyn Miller's, The Book Whisperer, have been inspirational for me in helping students get excited about reading for real and building their "reading lives".  Kittle helps us understand the importance fluency, stamina, conferring with students and increasing text complexity over time.  Most of that means that I'm sharing my love of reading with them.  Book talks and trailers are a powerful way to hook students into new texts.  I saw this in action two years ago after Mr. Doerges had done a book talk on Neal Shusterman's book, Unwind.  It resulted in a torrent of students in the library looking to check it out!  

If we want our students to read for life we have to teach and show them why they should, help them form the habit. That begins every morning. It is up to us to share our passion for reading and the stories we love.  Through our own personal narratives, our students can see how reading has made a difference in our lives, how we have learned from it, escaped into it and connected to other people, places and times through it.  We need to be the examples of how powerful the experience of reading can be.  

If you feel your recipe isn't working as we move into trimester two, remember there are a lot of bakers in the Wilson kitchen ready and willing to share trade secrets. 

I'd like to give Carly Gates an S for her cape for taking the lead on the recipe for success for one of my students!

Should a School be Named After Thomas Jefferson?

Today, I started a new coaching cycle with Michael K.  I am super excited about this as Social Studies is not my area of expertise and I have already learned so much from a days worth of planning.

The 8th grade SS unit's big performance event is being able to argue a position by taking a claim, use  evidence and back up the evidence, and then present the counter claim and a response to that counter claim.

To get the kids started, we are pulling some relevance into the lesson by having student work on the claim using two articles (article #1 and article #2) about teen driving.

As we worked through the lesson, we made sure to structure the lesson so all students had access points.  The topic was split into 3 parts about Thomas Jefferson (common man, presidency, moral character) where students will take either side (which will be assigned) and work through the readings we have found to be able to support a claim of whether or not Thomas Jefferson should have a school named after him.  Students will practice using an organizer to cite evidence to back their claim and continue with a counter claim and response.  This will lead up to each group taking a position and then arguing with the other 8th grade SS class on if a school should be named after good ol' Tom.

I am really excited to see how the structure of this will play out!  I look forward to stepping outside my comfort zone of math and seeing how I can use the structure of this to help students with their thinking in math class!

Reading for Meaning

For the past several years, I have looked for resources to implement new strategies into the math classroom that met several different types of learners.  I finally found that resource!  Styles and Strategies for Teaching Middle School: 21 Techniques for Differentiating Instruction and Assessment by Edward J. Thomas and John R. Brunsting (there is also a high school version!)  Both versions are pretty similar but different enough that if you teach both sets of students -- it is worth it to buy both! 

One of the grade levels I was working with was getting ready to work on 6.RP.1-3.  We used Teaching Student-Centered Mathematics by John Van  de Walle to pull some ideas on how to conceptually teach students about ratios.  

After just getting done reading the Styles and Strategies book, I thought this would be a good way to implement one of the things I learned in this book, Reading for Meaning.  The idea is pretty simple but takes students through three distinct and active phases of learning: previewing the statements to call up prior knowledge, searching for information and evidence that supports or refutes each statement, and them looking back on what was learned and reflecting on how initial ideas have changed or evolved.  It was modified a bit from the book to add a taste of PGW into the mix.  This is what the final product looked like:  Reading for Meaning -- Ratios Van De Walle.  This format lead to a great discussion on how to appropriately teach students about ratios. 

One of the 6th grade teachers humored me and let me come in to try the strategy.  We launched the activity with Dan Meyer's Sugar Packets.  Students were engaged in figuring out how many sugar packets were in one soda.  We then split into master groups and each table of 4 watched a short clip from Learn Zillon and decided as a table group what evidence they were citing to support or refute the statement (sample RFM template for activity).  After about 10 minutes, groups then were sent back to their home groups to share out the learning.  Setting a timer (2 minutes) ensured each student shared and then giving students 1 minute to clarify and reflect what they learned.  After all was said and done, students came up to the front and had a great discussion about what they learned in the short amount of time they had to complete the activity.