We are in the last two weeks of the grading period, and energy is running thin. This is less a blog post and more of an update as to what I've been thinking about and planning as we finish out the unit.

As we begin to approach the narrative writing at the end of the unit, we are building all the skills to understand plot, pacing, and voice. For about a dozen stories, students have charted the plot, done SWBSTF summaries and hero's journey maps, and looked at action/reactions and who is driving the action of the story. We've done that through looking at character archetypes and talking about what role those archetypes generally play in stories, and how they influence different parts of the plot.

All of those things involve looking at story patterns - how are stories and characters likely to behave. That will build the basis for the system of patterning I teach students to make meaning out of texts. It will also help them as they use the same resources and patterns to write their own story.

For many, it will be the first "essay" they've ever written. To prepare, they've written probably 20-25 paragraphs already, including six narrative paragraphs; hopefully one of those will yield a story they can turn into a longer piece. My hope was that by doing one a week, it would feel less overwhelming when I asked them to brainstorm possible stories.

To help students build on their ability to choose the right words and establish a writer's voice, I went looking for short lessons that I could easily incorporate in the BTC model. 
​
I stumbled on a Kindle Unlimited book called Discovering Voice: Lessons to Teach Reading and Writing of Complex Text by Nancy Dean. What I like about it is that the lessons are short, and they're complex enough for high school students, but simple enough for middle school. I've compiled them into slides to use in class. Here's the first activity:

As our focus standard is supporting claims with evidence, this activity is a good way of making it more concrete. We talked about the colours, the brush strokes, the way the background blends in with the foreground, the expression on his face and in his eyes, the way he chose to depict his hair...lots more detail than many students can get from a written text.

The book builds from visual art to music to short texts, then longer ones. I haven't used the longer texts yet, but I love how it builds the idea of "perfect words" and encourages students to think about what writers do as making choices. Everything is a choice - just like with life.

Good writing should teach us about life, and that major theme of thinking carefully about our own choices and the choices of others is one that students desperately need. The Stoic dichotomy of control is something that I come back to a lot, both with my own choices and in counseling students about the choices they make.

That's all I've got this week. Hopefully I'll have something more connected to say next week.

As the dust settles and everyone gets more used to the structures, I'm seeing more students struggle to stay engaged when we're working at the boards.

​They fall into a few groups:

1. Students who struggle academically
2. Students who struggle with self-regulation and attention
3. Students who struggle with social situations/anxiety

All three present different challenges in a thinking classroom. The first group is the group teachers are most used to helping. We can scaffold skills, help provide them extra information/keep-thinking hints, or work with group members to help explain concepts to them. 

The second and third groups are the ones I've worked on supporting this week. It's usually opposite problems, but I'm trying a strategy that has shown promise with both. It's something I borrowed from someone on the Building Thinking Classrooms Facebook group, but adapted for the roles I already have (writer, speaker, resource manager).

First, I have had them rotate their roles within a single class period, instead of rotating each day. So if they go to the boards three times, each person gets a chance to do each job. I write down who does what for the first round on my daily seating chart, but for the most part, I don't have to stay on top of them. They just do what they're supposed to.

But more importantly, the speaker now adds an additional responsibility: keeping a tally of participation. It's all positive - no marking off-task behaviour. If someone speaks to the group about the task, they get a tally mark. 

The speaker keeps track using either a small whiteboard (I have a class set) or if there is room, on the group's whiteboard.

Here's what it looks like on two different assignments. 

With the top group, there is one student who is less likely to participate due to shyness, and one who struggles with attention. But keeping track let me have a conversation with them and acknowledge how much better they were doing in sharing the load. The third student in the group tended to take over while the others stepped back, and it also let me talk to them about how to help their groupmates participate more equally.

With the etymology paragraph, you can see a pretty even distribution of participation. That assignment is one I've been developing and is a regular feature on Fridays. Students have two Greek/Latin roots per week, and we discuss 4-6 vocabulary words that come from those roots. I give them a handout on Fridays (see below for an example), and they compose an original paragraph on the boards:

I grade it on a rubric, so I can finish grading work for 80 students in about 20 minutes. Then I circle back to the words that multiple groups struggled with (insupportable and subjective remain a challenge for most groups).

**

We will be working toward using rubrics (managed by the resource manager) in the next few weeks. I wanted there to be something that was more objective to help them measure what it looks like to be engaged in an activity, and this seems to be helping.

The new monitoring system has also helped clarify what kinds of participation are helpful within the group. We talked about:

• reading from notes
• asking a question
• clarifying something
• offering an idea ​

I had a student who misses a lot of school in one group, and in the first activity, they didn't contribute much. When I talked to his group, he said that he didn't think he could participate because he hadn't been there. We talked about how him asking questions and clarifying could help him get his participation credit, but also help him learn the content. 

I've also been trying something for the students who genuinely just can't handle working at the boards (either because of something in the moment, or a larger issue, like unmanaged ADHD). After doing everything I can to get them on task, I quietly ask them to go work in the collaboration room next door. I am very lucky to have a completely empty classroom right next to mine, with no specific purpose, other than to be used as my team needs it. The goal is to remove the audience for the student that is perpetuating the off-task behaviour and reduce distractions so they can get some of the work done.

Today, I had two different students in two different classes working on the etymology paragraphs in the collaboration room. It's not perfect, and I don't like excluding anyone. However, it's maintaining the relationship without the strain of involving disciplinary procedures, it's helping the student learn coping strategies like "remove myself from situations where I'm going to get in trouble," and it's helping them show me what they are actually able to do when they can focus.

My hope is that it's a crutch that we use for a few days or weeks and slowly move beyond.

The reason I started trying this strategy is that I found myself giving a lot more correction and negative feedback than positive feedback. I was frustrated, and they felt like I was always on them for something (this is a direct quote from three separate students). By breaking the pattern, my hope is that they will learn how to function in a Thinking Classroom, and I'll figure out how to reach all students and get the best out of them.

I think learning how to manage engagement is one of the biggest challenges of a Thinking Classroom, especially when most of the strategies in a teacher's toolkit come from managing students who are sitting in a seat most of the time. I was never a "sit for 90 minutes straight" type of teacher, but I also didn't have them up and moving nearly as much before trying the BTC model. And with that, comes new challenges. 

Do you have solutions in your thinking classroom? I would love to hear about them.

This week, I rolled out my favourite EduProtocol: 8 pArts. The goal of the assignment is to get students familiar enough with all the parts of speech and how they are used that they can apply that to writing better sentences. If you're not familiar with it, here are some older posts about it. Or better yet, here's the website. Or even better, buy the book!

The basics of the assignment: the format doesn't change, but the image students write about does. They brainstorm three nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives about the picture. They write a paragraph using all of those words correctly. They write a simple three-word-sentence that has to include subject and predicate. They write a simile. They write three sentences using the conjunctions "but," "because," and "so."  

In discussions with my students, I knew they weren't quite ready for all 8 parts at once, so I used a slightly modified version that I thought they could handle. 

 Here's the template I'm using (click here for a forced copy):

Students recreated that template on the board. I always direct them to start with the three word sentence, then do the three examples of verbs, nouns, adverbs, and adjectives, then do the paragraph, then fill in everything else (but knowing that many groups won't get that far).

​That helps me differentiate a bit - groups that really struggle on word generation are the ones I work with more closely, and groups that are able to fly through have extra sentences to help them practice their skills.

I started with this picture:

It's always a good one to start with, as it's very evocative and has some easily accessed verbs, nouns, adverbs, and adjectives.

The second one I use (we only did this activity twice this week) is this one:

With this one, I had them brainstorm their three-word-sentence immediately out loud. They typically say "Orca eats penguin" or something similar. Today, I decided to add a new element: I asked them to imagine some other stories for this picture.

​Some of my favourites were:

• The penguin is a dentist and is checking the orca's teeth
• The orca asked the penguin to help him retrieve a rotten fish from his stomach
• The penguin is a serial killer and this is mob justice at work
• It's a magic trick that the penguin and orca are in on together

By brainstorming those alternate stories together, they went to their boards with some options for better stories than their initial reaction.

It reminds me of Ze Frank's brainstorming strategy of writing down any ideas he has immediately about a topic and throwing them away, because if he can think of those quickly, they're probably cliched and not good fodder for creativity.

​It also builds some foundation for the narrative writing we're doing in the next few weeks. Telling a more interesting story is a skill they have to practice.

Another element I added this year was the Guided Notes format I introduced last week for the four parts of speech (click here for a forced copy). 

The paragraph is about the story we studied this week (Grimm's "The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage" and the adaptation from the Myths and Legends podcast). 
​
This is a multi-week lesson, so I expect to have to run through a few more times before it will get quicker. Adding the guided notes was absolutely helpful, as it not only gives them something concrete to look back on, but gives them a paragraph that shows how some words can be identical but their usage makes them different parts of speech (change being both a noun and a verb is the example we looked at).

I also made one more change that made a big difference in curbing some of the chaos that we've had in groups. I started rotating jobs when we changed tasks.  So today, they did three things at their boards: an etymology activity, 8 pArts, and the Guided Notes. After we did consolidation, they'd go back to their seats, and the jobs would change. So every member of the three-person group did every job. By the end of class, kids actually commented on how quiet and productive it was. I'm going to continue with that as much as possible.

I also have started assigning the disengaged student to be the writer - it's something I did last year quite a bit, but I've held back this year to see who would step up when needed. 

Next week, we take on the Storyteller's Hans My Hedgehog and the Grimm version Hans the Hedgehog. We are looking at how minor changes to the story change the entire focus and how the characters function within the story (in this case, the hero actually changes in the Storyteller version). We also continue with 8 pArts, and I'll introduce the last four parts of speech the week after, if all goes well.

Even though I was moved to ELA this year, I still listen to the Making Math Moments Podcast weekly. It's where I heard about Building Thinking Classrooms for the first time, and this week's episode is another interview with Peter Liljedahl. This time, he shared an update to the book that has made a huge difference in my classroom. It's about how to make note-taking more effective.

The purpose of note-taking in a Thinking Classroom is to help students connect the dots between what was discussed in consolidation and what they did in the day's task, and to take ownership of the learning in the classroom. Last year, I eventually went to a system of daily note-taking after consolidation. It worked great for about 25% of the students, moderately well for another 50%, and not at all for the last 25%. 

On the podcast, Liljedahl confirmed that they had seen the same distribution in their research, and they were working on a model that was showing promise. It has four distinct quadrants, and students complete them in order from the top left clockwise. The four quadrants are:

Guided Notes - a problem or fill-in-the-blank scaffold that goes over the essential knwledge from the topic. For math, that could mean a partially worked problem with notes that students finish/fill in. 

Worked Example - a space for one problem/idea that everyone completes that uses the knowledge from the first box/the day's lesson.

Your Choice - students choose from a range of problems or topics to complete something on their own. A key component here is that students have choice, though the teacher can provide guidance. Ideally it would include a range of topics/problems that span from easy to challenging. 

Things to Remember - this is where students write notes on the topic to their future forgetful selves. I illustrate this by showing them something they learned the year before with a lot of blanks and ask them what they remember. Sometimes it's a lot, but mostly, it's only a little. I ask them how well they knew it a year/six months ago. This helps them clarify what might be helpful to write down.

But the most important part of this practice is that students complete them together in groups at the whiteboards. They work on it all together, then teachers can have them transfer it to their own note paper. But working as a group allows students who are usually in that bottom 25% to access the information and get support in completing it.

When I tried it, I found that every student was able to be successful using this structure. The groups that struggled more at the whiteboards were able to get help from me and from other groups, and by the time they wrote it down, I was confident they understood. 

This week, we talked about Hero's Journey structure as well as Plot Diagrams. So I made two Guided Notes and we've been working on them together throughout the week. 

​Here's the Hero's Journey one (blank - click here to get a forced copy):

Here's my example filled in (which I do provide for reference after we have completed it in class):

​And here's the one about Plot Diagram (click here to force copy)

And here's my completed example:

This content all builds to the ways they understand texts throughout the year. This week, we focused on the story "The Heartless Giant" from Jim Henson's The Storyteller and its origin, "The Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body."

Next week, we reinforce summaries with Somebody Wanted But So Then Finally. I'll be using the Myths and Legends podcast "The Dark Forest."

I'll also be starting 8 pArts to build the pieces needed for Sentence Parts as we lead into the first narrative writing assignment.

Weeks like this make me really miss teaching math. 

Reading is hard. Writing is hard. Teaching reading is hard; teaching writing is hard. 

And while there was definitely challenge in teaching math, I loved the order and structure of it. There were always different ways of approaching a problem, but there were definite pathways that always worked. Once you decipher the patterns, you could figure out how to approach it.

Reading comprehension is something that depends so much on so many different factors: phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, context/background on the topic, text patterns...not to mention the vagaries of adolescence. Writing well depends on idea generation, as well as knowledge of the patterns of sentence structure, grammar, syntax, etc. 

That's hard to teach, ya'll. It's pushing a boulder uphill most days.

In the last week, my students wrote five claim paragraphs. Their ability to write a claim wasn't consistent across those five paragraphs - some wrote beautiful claims in one paragraph, then didn't have one in the next one, and had a mediocre one in the next. Does that mean they didn't understand that text as well? Does it mean the first was a fluke? Does it mean they had a bad day? Did they struggle with the archetype more in one than another?

Yes.

This is also a lot more marking than I did as a math teacher. I think I've done more in the first two weeks than in the entire semester of teaching math. It's less prep and I don't have to work as hard to feel prepared (19 years of experience vs. 1), so swings and roundabouts.

***

In order to balance the need for practice and repetition and my own sanity, I haven't given individualised feedback on every one of the 700+ paragraphs, but I have scored them on a simple rubric. More importantly, they were formative assessment to help me figure out what they needed to work on.

I took sentences from their writing and anonymised them, then gave them to students to revise on their boards. Some of them we used for practice writing complete sentences. Some we looked at for ideas and how they supported claims with evidence. With those activities, we always end with consolidation about what makes those sentences work, or what makes those claims work. 

They will now move into revising one of their own claim paragraphs and making sure their claim is supported by solid evidence. I will also be asking them to polish them so that they have complete sentences and errors have been minimised.

The next text set is Greek Myths, including the Jim Henson Storyteller series; we are examining plot patterns, such as the Hero's Journey. They have looked at character patterns (archetypes) and now will look at how those character types tend to move the plot forward. My plan is to give them claims and ask them to choose evidence to support those claims (they'll do this at the boards) to give them a break from writing their own claim paragraphs. We'll consolidate about what makes good evidence and how to choose the right details without moving too much into plot summary.

An essential part of this process is working on the boards. There has already been more discussion and dialogue about writing than I had in the entire year the last time I taught ELA. I heard them say things like, "But that doesn't sound right," or "When you read that out loud, I noticed..." The level of focus and engagement is high and has happened faster than it did last year when I taught math. Maybe that's comfort with me or knowledge of my procedures; maybe that's comfort and knowledge of the subject. Either way, the time we spend at the boards is the best part of the class period.

If there's interest in seeing the actual assignments, I am happy to share them here.

​**

This was the hardest blog post to write so far. It's a good thing though - it reminds me that writing is hard, and some days you just don't have it. But the only way to improve is to keep going and keep trying. So here's to pushing the boulder uphill for one more day, and teaching our students to keep pushing that boulder too.

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.

I must have written this blog post in my head a hundred times over the last three months.

A lot has changed for me in the last year. I moved to North Carolina, got married, gained a bonus 8-year-old, bought a house, started at a new school, and got back into the swing of teaching English 9 again, after a three-year foray into teaching middle school Humanities.

I walked back into the classroom this year excited to do some good for my students. I was incredibly fortunate to be chosen as an Apple Distinguished Educator this summer, and the Institute was one of the most profoundly moving and inspiring professional development experiences I’ve ever had.

And yet.

I also came back with some other exciting professional experiences. I got to be involved with John Green’s new book Turtles All the Way Down. Like, my name is literally in the book. With a friend from Malaysia, I created the art that is stamped onto the hardcover of the book. We also have a shirt for sale through DFTBA Records featuring the same logo. It represents a community that had a role in influencing the content of actual book as well, and I’ve had the great pleasure of working closely with and meeting John as well. It’s one of the things I can’t really even believe happened to me.

That seems to be a theme this year.

And yet.

The energy that carried me through this crazy summer of moving and change, and then ADE Institute, and then the creation and launch of Turtles All the Way Down hasn’t been enough to sustain me in my classroom. All of those beautiful things didn’t change the fact that I am vastly underprepared to do the job I’m showing up every day to do.

Because I have spent the last fourteen years of my life believing that I am in control of my classroom. That my job is shoving as much learning into their heads as I can, and that I am the one who motivates them to do that. That my skill and personality and charisma are what make me a good teacher.

And as it turns out, all of those things are bullshit.

Starting with control. I hear people talk about power and control in the context of classroom management all the time. It’s a regular thing to hear teachers talk about how someone “doesn’t have control of their classroom” or how a student is getting in “power-battles” with them over various and sundry things. Hell, I’ve said those things before.

But finish that analogy for a minute. It’s not a room you’re trying to control. They are human beings.

On one hand, we talk about inspiring and influencing and mentoring and caring for students. And then we turn right around and talk about how to wield power and techniques for silencing, managing, and controlling.

We think that if a student isn’t doing well, it must be because they don’t want it enough. That if they are failing, it’s because they just aren’t living up to their potential. That if they would just TRY A LITTLE HARDER, they would be fine.

That’s like waving a dollar at a drowning man and offering it to him, so long as he can somehow stop himself from drowning.

Every time a teacher tells a kid, “Did you READ the instructions? How do you not know how to do it?” picture a dollar waved above the head of someone slipping below the surf for the last time. See that same thing every time you say “Well, they’d be fine if they just sat down, shut up, and tried for a change” or “I can’t make them want to do the work” or “I don’t understand what’s so hard about getting it done.”

Now imagine hearing that a dozen times a day, every day, for nine years.

Imagine how you’d feel about your own ability level. How you’d feel about school. How you’d feel about your teachers. Imagine what you might say or do.

If you read those sentences without truly feeling it, please stop and really put yourself in that place for a minute.

That’s the place I’ve lived for the past three months. I had to live there in order to teach here, because to reach a student, you have to put yourself in their position. And once I saw it from their position, it was really hard to go back to talking about classroom management in the same terms again.

The truth is that kids do well if they can. If they aren’t doing well, it’s because they can’t. Not because they won’t.

If a kid can’t read or has a reading disability, we don’t use punishments and rewards to try to get them to read better. We teach them how to read better. As educators, we finally understand that reading is not just something everyone can do - it’s a complex process that can easily go awry and requires specialised instruction in order to build phonemic awareness, fluency, and comprehension. And treating a reading problem as a problem of motivation is absolutely ludicrous to most people - as it should be.

So why do we look at behaviour differently? If it’s true that kids do well if they can, then why would we use rewards and punishments for students who don’t know how to behave? Or for students who have difficulty with impulse control? Or for students who have difficulty with anger? Or for students who have difficulty with flexibility or frustration tolerance?

If you see those as a different kind of developmental delay, then our use of “classroom control” language, as well as our liberal use of referrals, removals, detentions, and suspensions for students who have difficulty in the classroom, becomes as offensive as giving a detention to a dyslexic kid who can’t read.

I wish I had been the one to work this all out for myself, and I wish that it hadn’t taken me fourteen years to do it. I spent a lot of years frustrated that I couldn’t make students behave and do the work. I punished students who were already doing their best but just couldn’t meet my expectations. I rewarded students who came to me already capable of meeting my expectations.

I wish I had read Lost at School sooner. Though I’m sure the full impact of its truth hit me like a speeding truck because of how much difficulty I’ve had this year.

Since implementing Collaborative and Proactive Solutions in my classroom (and my home), my job went from “Is this even survivable?” to “I can probably make it to the end of today in tact” to “I can do this. And so can they.”

So I’m resurrecting this blog to chronicle the trip I’ve taken from teaching in the richest county in California to one of the poorest schools in North Carolina, and how CPS has made me a better teacher than I’ve ever been.

I want to tell you how you can help students who are failing everything else, and have for YEARS, who have hundreds of referrals and suspensions, who don’t even believe they’re capable of learning, and help them see themselves are capable human beings.

Who just happen to be getting an A in English.

Who are learning how to problem-solve.

Who are learning what to do when they need help.

Who are learning how to deal with frustration.

Who believe me when I tell them that we’re in this together.

​

Lately, many of my students have started a new hobby: solving Rubik's cubes.  They like to do it as fast as is humanly possible and they have everything from the standard 3x3 or 4x4 to really strange versions.  I usually don't see them; it's more common to hear the rustle from below the desk or table.  To be honest, the noise is seriously annoying to me as I'm incredibly noise-sensitive.  But I've never stopped students from solving Rubik's cubes during class, and that's not because I'm especially tolerant or nice.  

I don't stop them from solving the puzzles during class because I understand why they need them: solving Rubik's cubes help them to calm the monsters that constantly pull for attention and gratification.  These puzzles give them the element of control over a strong emotion: anxiety. 

If you asked me what the number one problem facing my students right now, I would say - without hesitation - it's anxiety.

It didn't used to be this way.