Last year, I whole-heartedly embraced the Building Thinking Classrooms (BTC) model for grading. Students took tests and I used the navigation tool with a row per standard, and often a non-standard quality (perseverance, kindness, collaboration, etc.) at the bottom. Here's what it looked like in math:

The top lists the standard, the problems associated with that standard/level, and the bottom lists the objectives students developed to help us evaluate the quality we were looking for in that unit. 

So I went into this year thinking I'd do something similar, but not quite sure how that would work.

I build a navigation tool for the first unit, which focuses on supporting claims with evidence:

One key difference is that while I wanted to ASSESS qualities like collaboration, I wanted them to be evaluated differently. We are making a school-wide push to reestablish PBIS this year, so I decided all non-academic standards would be assessed in PBIS. Students received points for when they returned their beginning of year paperwork. It didn't affect their grade, but I had just as many students return it as when it was for a grade, and I got most of them back the next day (I offered "Advanced" to anything who returned it then). 

Another difference is that I don't plan on giving a lot of multiple choice tests, as I did last year. The district provided common assessments we had to use, but in ELA, the assessments aren't obligatory.

My plan was to have them write a few claim paragraphs and do a Socratic Seminar to assess these standards. I did both of those, but felt like it wasn't enough data, so I decided to have them write a claim paragraph every day for seven days of class and give them feedback on the rubric for each. 

But how does that translate to the grade book? 

I will take a snapshot of their scores, weighted more heavily towards the last few attempts, and give them Basic, Intermediate, or Advanced for each standard. That is what goes in the grade book. I also will give them another round of assignments that meet this standard so they have built-in ways to improve. If a student can show mastery, I will make sure their grade reflects that, no matter when they demonstrate it (within cut-off guidelines built into the grade book, at least).

The goal is that all students score Advanced on both strands before we leave this unit (which lasts about a month). Some have farther to go than others, but with frequent repetition and feedback, I know they could all get there. 

I mostly kept to my plan from last week, though we spent a little more time on writing good sentences than I planned. We also started looking at archetypes and writing claim paragraphs based on how a Bluey character meets that archetype. Starting next week, they will look at an archetype a day, with two or three episodes to draw from. Today, we looked at the archetype of Sage/Mentor, as they looked in-depth at Calypso from Bluey. We watched "Obstacle Course" (an episode without Calypso) to see if they could transfer the knowledge to a new character/situation.

Next week, we do the same thing with the archetype of the Loner/Outcast ("Onesies," "Kids," and "The Decider"), the Villain ("Granny Mobile," "Circus," and "Fairy Tale"), the Trickster/Fool ("Teasing," "Unicorse," and "Seesaw"), and finally, the Hero ("Beach," "Curry Swap," and "Work"). We will build in Hero's Journey as a plot archetype after that.

There is one episode in each archetype that uses Bandit, the dad, as the featured archetype. That's by design - I want them to see that the same character can fulfill different roles throughout a story, but that by knowing the patterns, they can start to recognise them as the read more complex texts. They can also pay attention to the break in the patterns. To me, seeing Bandit as a villain is the most interesting, because he is such an ideal parent in so many ways. That helps them later attune to places in a text where a character is more dynamic and breaks patterns.

The other meta-goal here is to start talking about whether Bandit is a good person*, and whether he is a good dad. I have intentionally pulled episodes that show his less-than-ideal parenting so that they have lots of evidence for our end-of-week Socratic Seminar about Bandit. I plan to split them into groups with two discussion questions and have them record evidence given by their partner so I can get more students interacting during seminar.

On Thursday, they will write a narrative about a time they felt like they were one of those archetypes. The end of unit writing task is a narrative, so I plan to have them choose one of the short narratives to expand for that. They should have five or six to choose from, and that will help them have a more concrete starting place. They wrote about a time they failed this week.

That will give me two narrative paragraphs, seven claim paragraphs, and two Socratic Seminars to use for the snapshot of their grade. I also have a Common Lit article with some multiple choice questions to start introducing them to what questions can look like in this standard. For thirteen days of school, that is eleven major assignments, but only two grades in the grade book (one for claim/commentary, and one for evidence).

Throughout the week, they will also continue using the Writing Revolution structures like But/Because/So and fixing sentence fragments/run-ons. This week, we focused on what makes up a sentence, and how to tell if the required parts are all there (I simplified it as a subject and an action, but we'll layer in more specific language as they get better at it).

I've also planned to show them some mocked-up claim paragraphs and have then evaluate which is best and why, and have them work at their boards to determine what makes the paragraph successful/unsuccessful.

If there's time, I'd like to start running 8 pArts, but I fear I've already packed too much into this week. That can wait a week.

We also started SSR, which I've definitely missed. I like to read with the kids, and I missed having that time in every class period when I taught math. That's probably the biggest benefit of going back to ELA for me.

One added benefit of having many of the same students from last year is that they trust me with their grades, and have convinced their friends to trust me. They don't fully understand the system yet, but they have bought in so far. I want to model Growth Mindset in my grading practices and make sure they understand they can keep trying until they are happy with their effort and performance.

*I know he's a dog. But "good dog" is a different connotation.

Because I have a good percentage of the same students I had in math class last year, I expected this question on the first day:

Why do you still have the boards? This isn't math class.

It took until second period.

I asked them if you still think in ELA. 

"Nope." 

So we have a lot of work to do. 

I posted about my first week's plan in my last post, and I pretty much stuck to it. They watched Bluey, wrote on the whiteboards, and wrote two paragraphs of a mini-essay. That took us about two hours of class time - the rest of the week was spent with the usual beginning of school meetings, paperwork, chromebook distribution, and general chaos.

I do have a few reflections on how it went:

1. Consolidation is different than in math. Sequencing answers is also more difficult because there isn't as much "a strategy to highlight" as there are different possible responses
2. Giving every student in the group a job (that changes every class period and is assigned by the card they draw) is a game-changer
3. Notes in ELA are WAY easier to do well than in math

Let's break those down a bit more.

Consolidation and Sequencing
Consolidation in math is about breaking down the problem, anticipating possible solutions, then making sure groups preserve enough of their thinking to have other groups figure out what they did. You sequence what boards you go to in order to build conceptual understanding from the ground up. That's not really the same in ELA (at least with the tasks I chose). A lot of time at the boards was spent outlining claims and evidence. So consolidation took the form of walking around and seeing what other groups chose, then stealing that if you liked it better than what you had. 

The one time it was a little more formal was when we talked about terminology. They had come up with the qualities Calypso had, then supported that with three specific examples. After they all had done that, I pulled them over to a new board and introduced the language of Claim, Evidence, and Commentary. I made connections between what they had done and what those do in paragraphs. Then they went to write down those definitions as well as their own choice of claim and evidence (I let them pick their own or one from another group). More on the notes part in a minute.

Giving Students a Role
This year, I asked students to sit in their exact seat - if they got 7 of diamonds, they sat at only 7 of diamonds. Last year, I let them sit in any of the three of that matched their number. I introduced the roles of Speaker, Writer, and Resource Manager. The Speaker is the one who communicates for the group when I come around. The Writer writes. The Resource Manager gets any needed materials, erases the board, and holds the prompt/any other papers. If there's a group of two, then the Speaker and Resource Manager double up.

It has increased time on task, and really helped students keep each other on track. I don't like being that prescriptive, but knowing these kids like I do, I knew they needed more structure from me. And so far, it's going great.

Each day, I either just tell them what suit has what job, or I post it on the LCD daily slide, or write it on an extra whiteboard. I did make at least one strategic choice when I saw that a student who really struggled with handwriting was at the seat I had chosen for Writer. I switched it for that period because there was a TON of writing to do on the board. That's an easy way to differentiate that is invisible to students.

Note-taking
Kids really struggled with meaningful notes last year - we worked on it a lot, and it got a lot better. They would write down an example problem and walk through ways to solve it (at best) or just copy down their work (at worst). This year, I am treating notes as the second or third draft of something. The goal is that they are thinking on their boards, brainstorming, revising their ideas, and then seeing all the other groups' work. Then they choose what is meaningful from that work to write down. For outlining a paragraph, that made it incredibly easy for them to go from nothing to fully completed paragraph in less than a class period. And NONE of them complained about writing it twice. I think they have all been in situations where they have to erase copiously, and this time, they knew exactly what they needed in their outline and didn't even need to copy it from their boards - they KNEW it.

Their paragraphs were also a lot better, and I got more of them than I would have in a traditional ELA class. Even the students who tend to do nothing turned in at least a typed version of their outline. 

What's Next?
This week, we start what I'm thinking of as "writing bootcamp." 

We will be reading an article (which I adapted using AI to lower the lexile/complexity) about Growth Mindset, learning about the four types of sentences by writing each one about the article, introducing But/Because/So (students write one sentence for each of those conjunctions that interacts with the content of the text), and watching the Bluey Episode "Bike" and talking about who shows a Growth Mindset.

I have pulled these activities from The Writing Revolution (highly recommended). After they've done those activities, they will work on identifying run-ons and fragments using the higher lexile level original article.

They will do all of that (but for the reading of the article) at the boards. 

We will also be starting etymology, where they will learn Greek/Latin roots, and brainstorm all the words they can that use the day's root. Then I've identified three target words that I'll pass out to the groups and have them write the four types of sentences that use the word in a way that shows the meaning of the word. They'll also draw a picture. Seeing (and checking) all the other groups' work will also give them more reinforcement and practice with the word. Writing the best examples at the end is even more reinforcement. 

Hopefully, I will be back next week to reflect on how it went and talk about where it's going.

​I still miss teaching math, but it was an excellent first week.

When I was in 2nd grade, I finished the entire year's math curriculum before Halloween. The decision was made to have me walk to the 3rd grade room to take math every day. I saw myself as a "math person" and was always the one figuring out who needed to pay what when I went out with a big group of friends.

Then, in college, I decided that reading novels and learning about the past was more fun than Calculus and Chemistry. 

But I always wondered if that wasn't a cop-out because it finally got hard and I didn't want to work harder.

Last year, I decided to take the leap into the math classroom - the one subject I've never taught full-time. We couldn't find a math teacher, and I needed a new challenge. I had been the part-time math teacher for my students due to the original teacher (and then two part-time teachers) quitting mid-year. My principal joked that half of the time she came in my room, I was teaching math during ELA and when she went in the sub's room, they were reading during math. 

It wasn't really a joke. That's exactly what we were doing.

I spent all of last summer (2022) studying for the math Praxis, which I passed easily on the first try with about a 92%. I worked my butt off to relearn a lot of math and learn a lot of math for the first time. Despite that confidence boost, I was out of my depth pedagogy-wise.

Enter Peter Lilejdahl's Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics. If you're an English teacher reading this blog, hear me out. The pedagogy is solid and has completely transformed how I think about teaching, learning, and the structure of my classroom.

Despite moving back to ELA this year, I intend to continue with the Building Thinking Classrooms model. This Executive Summary does a good job outlining what the model is, but here's my own summary:

1. Tasks that get students thinking
2. Working in visibly random groups of three at whiteboards
3. Direct instruction comes at the end of the lesson during Consolidation and is built on student work instead of teacher work
4. Collaboration skills are taught, modeled, reinforced, and assessed
5. Grades are for demonstrating mastery of a standard - not for turning in the practice or for getting answers right

That was a fairly large shift pedagogically for me, but I figured that if I was changing subjects, I may as well just go full-force.

And it was glorious. I've never had a more fun year of teaching.  I had amazing growth, and several students were able to move into the high school math track when they weren't predicted to do so.

But then the call came that they needed me in 8th ELA, and I was left with wondering how to make the kind of thinking that worked in math work in ELA. 

Initially, my thought was that there are loads of activities well-suited for the BTC model:

• When learning new roots or vocabulary words, groups can brainstorm uses or sentences on the whiteboard and get feedback
• When practicing sentence construction or grammatical structure, students can complete the work on the whiteboards and we can look at a variety of ways of fixing the sentences
• When doing any kind of graphic organiser (for plot, character development, Hero's Journey, etc.), students can do it on the boards so we can compare ideas on where certain events/quotes fall
• When preparing pre-writing for essays, such as evidence collection, students can choose their best evidence and write it on the boards then we can discuss the merits of each quote
• When reading texts looking for patterns, students can trace patterns on their boards so we can compare how groups made decisions on which to include and how they fit together

The pedagogy shift is sometimes even called the "real" flipped classroom model - where students are thinking, creating, and sharing, and the teacher comes in at the end to help them make sense of and consolidate what they learned. 

So what does this look like? I broke down my first week in more detail, and my second week in rough outline.

Day #1:

1. A brief written survey about their experience with reading/ELA class
2. Go to the boards to discuss the question "What does a good teacher do/say/think/believe?" As students come up with a list, have them narrow to the three most important and explain WHY good teachers need those things. 
3. Do a quick consolidation** to discuss some of the groups' lists and reasons and develop a class-wide list of three things, which they add to their notes (they will need it later).
4. Watch the Bluey episode "Calypso" and look for what she is doing/saying/thinking/believing (students are in their seats for this)
   1. If you're not familiar with this episode, Calypso is a teacher of kids ranging from 5-8(ish) and facilitates various games and pushes students to think laterally until everyone comes together in their individual purposes to a greater collective act of storytelling
5. After the episode, students go back to the boards to write the things they saw Calypso do/etc. We repeat the consolidation process so we have a solid list of actions but without value statements (this is good/this is bad) and including (as much as we can) WHY she is doing it. Students add this to their notes.
6. Next, we continue the same process for "Typewriter" and then "Stories," adding to their notes at the conclusion of consolidation for each one.
7. We wrap up for the day talking about how the stories we tell ourselves will not only shape how we start this year, but how we remember this year in the future. We have the choice to end the story with failure (as Indy does initially) or to continue the story through persevering. 

Day #2:

1. Students return to their lists from the day before. We talk about (and show examples of) the people who have more coherent notes and talk about how that will help us today, as we prepare to do some writing about Calypso's methods. 
2. Students go to the boards to construct a compelling paragraph about how Calypso is a good teacher (note: if their group says she is not a good teacher, they can absolutely choose that if they can support it). It should include three specific examples that explain what she does (evidence) and why she does it, and how that helps her students (commentary). 
3. We consolidate with several paragraphs and look at what makes them compelling. Students then go back to write their own mini-essay (yes! On day 2!) following this format:
   1. Intro paragraph about what makes someone a good teacher, and who Calypso is.
   2. Claim paragraph (they can absolutely use the one their group wrote). 
   3. Conclusion about how Calypso fits their conception of what makes a good teacher, and what her goal is for her class/students.
4. Students are graded on a rubric that addresses the main standard for the first unit: using textual evidence to support a claim. 

Day #3

1. We return to the idea of the stories we tell ourselves. If you aren't familiar with the idea, I highly recommend Derren Brown's outstanding book, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine, or his TEDxTalk on how we use stories to influence our own reality. They write briefly about what story they want to tell themselves about this year when they're looking back on it.
2. Students work on Code of Conduct (school required lessons).

Week #2

• Now we turn our attention to "What Makes a Good Student?" and look at a variety of non-fiction texts to gather evidence. My focus is Growth Mindset and attention. We will also start the program Finding Focus, which I LOVE.
• I'll also use pieces of this unit on Growth Mindset that I made a few years ago.
• Students will write a similar set of paragraphs on how to be an effective learner. 
• The other focus standard for the unit is about vocabulary in context and learning new words, so this will layer in nicely with using textual evidence.

One of my main goals is to get them off the chromebooks and get them thinking. They need the chance to think about the questions, work collaboratively, and then have time to make mistakes and get feedback. The only work I'll grade is the finished piece of writing, which will already be a teacher and peer-reviewed draft. 

If you're an ELA teacher using Building Thinking Classrooms this year, I'd love to talk to you. It was a game-changer in math, and while I think I'll go back to teaching math after this year, I want there to be resources out there for ELA teachers looking to incorporate the model in their room. 

​You can find me on Twitter or send me an email - guster4lovers at gmail dot com.


**Consolidation starts with students returning to their seats, rephrasing the task/question, then the teacher going to groups and asking the class what they see. The group whose work is being discussed is silent. We usually look at different strategies or approaches to the task, and end the time with students going back and adding to their notes. Notes are all in their own words, and should make sense of what we talked about in consolidation.