Are Your Students Highly Engaged or Strategically Compliant?

The Schlechty Center on Engagement tells us that when students are not fully engaged, they are often strategically compliant. They are working and learning, but there is no heartfelt commitment. Though learning is taking place, strategically compliant students are less likely to remember the information and use it in other situations. Strategic compliance has the appearance of success, but the students are not engaged in deeper learning.

In engagement, students have high attention and high commitment. These students are in optimal learning. When students are optimally engaged, they want to go that extra mile. They want to write that extra paragraph, they want to stay in from recess to work on that project. These are the kids that tend to excel on standardized tests.

The benefits of fostering high student engagement are obvious. The Schlechty Center on Engagement has compiled a list of ten things that you can do to help your students to be highly engaged in your classroom.

1. Expect excellence and provide plenty of support.
2. Know your students’ learning styles and vary the delivery of the lesson so that it meets those learning styles.
3. Allow students to interact (Think/Pair/Share, learning partners, collaborative groups, etc).
4. Provide opportunities for student ownership of learning (goal setting, student created learning materials, sharing examples of excellent work, etc.)
5. Give specific positive and negative feedback (5:1 ratio).
6. Make the learning relevant.
7. Teach with energy and show enthusiasm for the subject.
8. Avoid down time and vary the pace.
9. Design the course to provide opportunities for success.
10. Manage so that all students are active participants

Thanksgiving 2013: Thank You Teachers!

You are not only teachers; you are good friends, philosophers, guides, and heroes. On a daily basis you wipe noses and tie wet shoelaces. You mediate disputes between students and maintain order among 25 or more different (and sometimes difficult) personalities. You make sure that children who are hungry are fed and those without a jacket are given one. You watch and protect your students. Throughout it all, you strive to encourage a love of learning into each and every child you meet.

Thank you for teaching character and for working to make our schools safer. Thank you for caring, for putting in the extra hours and the extra thought to make sure classroom lessons help our students to succeed. Thank you for preparing future generations for participation in our diverse democracy. Everyone should be thankful for you on this Thanksgiving Day! I am!

Outstanding Picture Books to Teach Reading and Writing Strategies

Scaredy Squirrel has a problem. He only feels safe at home in his nut tree. That’s the premise of the three Scaredy Squirrel titles, authored by Melanie Watt. As I’ve written before, I love using picture books to teach certain reading strategies. To me, authentic reading includes any reading that would be done voluntarily, outside of the classroom, either for enjoyment or for information. I believe that the Scaredy Squirrel series meets my definition of ‘authentic reading’.

Though the reading levels of the books hover around the 3^rd grade level, Scaredy Squirrel is at level 3.6, Scaredy Squirrel Makes a Friend is 3.0 and Scaredy Squirrel Goes to the Beach is 3.6, I feel that’s it’s perfectly acceptable using this text to teach 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th and even 5^th graders. The way the Watt organizes the text is perfect for giving kids practice and background knowledge with organizing information and representing it in graphic organizers and Thinking Maps. Each of the titles also gives good illustrations on what motivates characters and how they undergo changes.

If ever there was a series of books about facing your fears of change, this is it! Not just for kids, Scaredy Squirrel has a meaningful (and hilarious!) lesson for all of us about trying new things and experiencing the world in new ways. It’s a great reading choice for students going through life changes: new school, new home, new city, or a new relationship. I’ve read this book to 2^nd-5^th graders; they all roared with laughter, and afterwards, several students wanted to make up their own version using a different animal. It is great fun as a read-aloud, but the kids also loved looking at it in small groups--they seemed to find some new detail each time.

The humor in the book will appeal to adults and kids, too. Watt pokes fun at people who are afraid of everything, but it's a sympathetic sort of fun. We can tell that she's been there, too. We know what to expect from the warning on the very first page: "Warning! Scaredy Squirrel insists that everyone wash their hands with antibacterial soap before reading this book."

The vocabulary in the book doesn't talk down to kids. For instance: "He'd rather stay in his safe and familiar tree than risk venturing out into the unknown." Venturing-kids ought to know what venturing is. Venturing is the basis for adventure, after all.

Happy Birthday Dav Pilkey!

Today marks the 46th birthday of one of my favorite children's authors, the great Dav Pilkey. Dav’s experiences in school can teach teachers a lot, especially about how we look at the abilities and potential of our more challenging students. Check out this link for some interviews with Dav.

What is 'Teaching to the Test?'

One of the worst things a teacher can be accused of doing is ‘teaching to the test.’ What does that really mean, though? Think of the weekly classroom spelling test. On Mondays, I introduce the 20 spelling words for the week. Students have the list that they can refer to anytime before the test, the list is right in their spelling text! I even assign homework to make them more familiar with the spelling of the words, the exact same words that will be on the test. On Wednesday, we take a practice spelling test. When Friday comes, I administer the big test pretty much in the same way that we have been practicing them all week. Am I being unethical or inappropriate? Am I teaching to the test?

In their book Deep Curriculum Alignment, English and Steffy tell us that “teachers are hired to teach a curriculum, not a test.” When a state exam like the STAAR test is not aligned to a district’s curriculum, educators are put in a confusing, moral dilemma. What types of activities should they plan for their students that will help them to be successful on the STAAR test? So educators end up using Released STAAR items (or a variation of them) available on the internet. Luckily for teachers in my district, the curriculum IS aligned with the assessment.

I believe that when those teachers are using Released STAAR items, they are attempting to align their instruction with STAAR, to the benefit of their students. This is not ‘teaching to the test,’ it is instructional alignment. Instructional alignment is an example of equitable, excellent classroom instruction. Let me add, however, that by using Released STAAR items, I mean using them in way that is authentic and engaging - not just worksheets.

Just as when a curriculum is back-loaded, or designed around an assessment, teachers who properly link the content of their lessons to STAAR are providing ‘back-loaded instruction.’ Back-loaded instruction is one way that teachers can ensure the success of all of their students. Students need to be familiar with the content AND the context of the exam. This is especially true with at-risk students.

My definition of teaching to the test would include an over-reliance on practice worksheets. Assigning passage after passage isn’t teaching, it’s monitoring and inspecting. No product ever got better through inspection alone. If students clearly aren’t getting it, there’s no need for more inspection, it’s the process that needs to be adjusted. Drill and kill instruction is not child-centered, it’s mind-numbing.

By incorporating back-loaded instruction for at-risk students, teachers can help to level the playing field for those students. The first step in providing back-loaded instruction is to know the assessment, here in Texas, it’s the STAAR test. One needs to REALLY know the exam, not just be familiar with it. Educators need to take the assessments that the students take, analyze them, all of them. We should be so familiar with them that we don’t even need an answer key.

Individual test items should be deconstructed. We want to know exactly what is being asked of the students. What vocabulary is required? What skills do the test-takers need to complete the item? What prior knowledge is needed? In addition, we need to understand the distractors and how they are used.

Armed with valuable testing information, educators now have the ability to develop test items for their students. These teacher-created items can be directly linked to the content being studied in the classroom. Doing so makes the learning authentic, and it will help students to transfer their learning and apply it to testing situations. The more that a teacher can routinely integrate aligned practice items, the less surprises there will be for their students on testing day. This is the essence of aligned instruction.

Aligning instruction is good teaching. It helps to prepare students to handle challenging assessments and to not be blindsided by them. Aligning instruction is not ‘teaching to the test,’ it is equitable, quality teaching.