Writing a blog at times can become a difficult thing. When you come up with a topic, you’re not always going to say the right thing and there are certainly people that are going to disagree with everything you say, or just have no interest. It is sometimes a risk that you take when choosing a topic- sometimes it comes off right, other times it doesn’t. The common theme here is that it can become a struggle. I’ve come to realize that if there was no struggle, what’s the sense of doing it? How will I learn? We learn from our mistakes, right?

Struggle is commonplace in education. We all experience it, so we must all have some interest in the topic. We see it in our classrooms quite a bit, with students and sometimes with ourselves. You might just see it in the everyday world as well. Just the other day I witnessed what I feel is a common form of struggle. I’m not saying that this happens all the time, but I have seen it on more than one occasion. And, I am quite sure that I’m not the only person that has experienced it, but it made me think about how we sometimes make things easy on our students and they don’t get the learning. Take a look and see if this sounds familiar to you.

I was placing my order at a fast-food restaurant when this transaction/conversation took place.

Cashier: “Your total is $8.37.” (I was hungry, alright?)

Me: Hands cashier a ten dollar bill.

Cashier: Punches ten dollar payment into the register.

Me: “Oh, wait, here’s the 37 cents.”

Cashier: “Um, hold on a second. I need to void this out and ring it up again.”

This just left me cringing inside. I wondered why this conversation was even happening. Why do people struggle with something that seems so practical? Has this employee ever been pushed to think outside the box? Have they only experienced surface level thinking? Were they part of an educational system that never allowed deeper thinking? Have they ever been challenged? Will they learn from this struggle or will the same thing happen with later ?

Challenging students to dig deeper can sometimes be difficult because we want our students to be successful. If the challenge becomes too difficult do they give up and question future challenges? We’re taught to learn from our mistakes, but not everyone enjoys taking this direction. We sometimes reach the barrier of, if we challenge too much, do our students just give up? It’s a tight line that we walk.

I recently stumbled across a book titled Faster Isn’t Smarter by Cathy L. Seeley that touches on this subject. The book discusses the recent trend in education, specifically in the United States, with messages about math, teaching, and learning in the 21st century. Seeley talks a great deal about how, “from an outsider’s perspective, American teachers are considered soft, that they don’t challenge their students to think critically.”

In Faster Isn’t Smarter, Seeley references a study completed by Jim Stigler and Jim Hiebert in The Teaching Gap where they mention that “when American teachers choose mathematically complex tasks, their teaching approach tended to remove the complexity and reduce the difficulty of the tasks.” It appears that maybe we’re “spoon feeding” our students so that the struggle diminishes. There comes a time when we need to stop showing our students how to solve a problem and allow them the opportunity to figure it out on their own. Maybe we just need to offer more challenges.

When we assign a task, how many times have we told a student how to do the problem or task? Are we teaching them that they will always need guidance whenever they are posed a problem? Are we babying them? There comes a point where our students need to start learning things on their own. Students need to struggle sometimes to figure things out and they need to learn from their mistakes. However, if we continue to do things for them they will be those same cashiers that void out their transactions.

Seeley explains this concept as “constructive struggling- the value of challenging our students.” When we pose problems or tasks to our students, we need to allow a struggle- we even need to accept failure. When teachers continue to supply information, and even do the tasks for their students, they seem to be doing more harm than good.

This reminds me of the eight Standards for Mathematical Practice that we were introduced to several years back. The initial standard (MP1) “Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them” really stands out when you reference “constructive struggling”.  When we’re supplying students with the necessary formulas or a step-by-step method, are they really learning anything? They might be getting their answer correct because we guided them, BUT are they really absorbing their learning?

So you ask, what exactly is “Constructive struggling”? Seeley identifies Constructive Struggling  as…….

-when students are given engaging yet challenging problems.

-when demanding, possibly time-consuming problems will likely provide more learning value than several shorter but more obvious problems.

-when presenting students with problems that call for more than a superficial application of rote procedure.

-when guiding questions are presented in a way that stops short of telling students everything they need to know to solve a problem.

“As students engage in the constructive struggling needed for some of these problems, they learn through perseverance, in-depth analysis, and critical thinking are valued in mathematics just as much as quick recall, direct skill application, and instant intuition”, Seeley continues. Mathematics is hard, as are other content areas. Sometimes students need to struggle to figure things out, especially when things are complex. Maybe the next time any of us are in that fast-food line we should take a minute and explain to that cashier how to problem solve.

 

Sources:

Seeley, Cathy L., Faster Isn’t Smarter, Math Solutions, Sausalito, CA 2009

http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Practice/ Standards for Mathematical Practice

As I began to think about my blog post this week, I thought I may want to refocus on the “why.” Why are we in education? Why are we teachers/coaches/interventionists/administrators?

And then I started to do my own reflecting.  What was my “why” when I started out as a teacher?  How has that evolved throughout the last 14 years?

I started to think about how my own teaching career has had so many ups and downs.  How there were days I could take on the world and felt that I could teach anyone anything, and other days I wondered if I was going to be able to reach one kid in my room.  

As I continued thinking about the multiple highs and lows in my career, I found myself reflecting on the times that I have hit the proverbial fork in the road.  Those times created situations that looked a lot like this:

I would love to embrace chaos, but that is not my natural inclination. I know order and structure; I thrive in order and structure.  Yet, at multiple points in my life, I have been hurled into chaos and my five year plan tossed out the window. (Honestly, five years ago I was a high school English teacher in Sandwich, IL now I am elementary instructional coach in Kaneland)

So where (except the inner workings of my brain) am I going with this blog post? Innovation, change, growth, personalization, and teaching can often times look like chaos.  It is hard to tell where things begin and end, just like the line in the scribble above. It is hard to figure out if we are moving forward or just looping around again.

How do we move from the chaotic scribble, to a loopy line, to a solid direction?  For me, it took a process.

I found comfort in the midst of uncertainty by jumping into something called the design thinking process.  I was first exposed to this structure at the Learning Forward Conference in 2017.  While the session in December sparked my interest, it wasn’t until my life was thrust back into a mode of chaos that I decided to really give design thinking a try.  At the end of last school year, I was in a cycle where we were focusing on project based learning. I dove into the book Launch: Using Design Thinking to Boost Creativity and Bring Out the Maker in Every Student to help me coach but at the same time I began the design thinking process for my own life.  

I quickly clung to the fact that while things were messy at the moment, the framework I was reading about and engaging in gave me an opportunity to know what step I was in the process of and give me direction to head toward.  It granted me the permission to allow the beginning to be chaotic because I was taking productive steps to figure out how to come to my solution.

Design thinking is a structure that has been used for years.  John Spencer and A.J. Juliani took this idea, which is prevalent in the business world, and shifted the focus to how we can use this process with our students in the classroom in Launch: Using Design Thinking to Boost Creativity and Bring Out the Maker in Every Student. Teachers are guided in the book to help students move through seven phases.  These phases create structure in a messy process of creation for students, teachers, or anyone trying to solve a problem or innovate.

The Seven Phases of the Launch Cycle (partnered with the Design Thinking terms) are:

Phase 1: Look, listen and learn=Empathize It is all about taking the time to step into someone else’s shoes and begin to really view the issue from their perspective or multiple perspectives.  

Phase 2: Ask lots of questions=Empathize  Students work on developing and asking those tough questions that elicit productive answers.  This is a great time as a teacher to get into the world of QFT .

Phase 3: Understand the process or problem=Define After viewing a problem/situation from a variety of angles it is time to figure out what is the real issue or problem that needs to be solved.

Phase 4: Navigate ideas=Ideate  This is where true creativity can flow and students come up with all the possible solutions that they can.  During this stage there is no such thing as a bad option. By the end of this stage you want students to gain a focus and select one or combine a few ideas to get moving on.  

Phase 5: Create=Prototyping This is the time to get hands on and actually start working on making their ideas from the phase before a reality.   

Phase 6: Highlight and revise=Test We learn best through failure and this is the place where students acknowledge those failures and figure out how to grow from them.  Phases 5 and 6 may go back and forth for a while until the student has a solution that they are ready to move forward with.

Phase 7: Launch  Have students present, share, send, etc. their work to an authentic audience for their problem.  Allow this process to move outside the walls of your classroom and make an impact on the world.

 

Personalized learning can seem chaotic when you think only big picture.  The Launch Cycle can help you and students find a way to structure the process of personalization with an understanding of steps to take as you/they move forward.  This can ease that discomfort that can come with change, innovation, and growth.   

Back to where design thinking led me… I started my own educational consulting company this summer. I took the process step by step until I was able to launch my idea out into the “real world.”  Now my question is where will this thinking take me next? Or maybe more important, where will you let this process take you and your students?

 

Spencer, John, and A. J. Juliani. Launch: Using Design Thinking to Boost Creativity and Bring Out the Maker in Every Student. Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc., 2016

“When we are connected to others, we become better people.”   -Randy Pausch

EC-5 Kaneland Twitter Chat Series on Personalized Learning  #PLbeforetheBELL

What a celebration that 35 Kaneland Staff members took time to experience our first district wide Twitter chat!  Kudos to KST with 15 contributing staff members! We had and incredible span of participants from experienced tweeters that have led their own Twitter chats to an individual who tweeted for the very first time.  Through this initial conversation, staff members shared topic suggestions related to personalized learning as well as scheduling options that will work best for them.

 

 

This idea evolved from the #20QPL chat that Nancy and Natalie hosted last spring.  In that chat Kaneland participants had conversations with educators across several states.  When we reflected on this process, we considered how we really wanted to be having these conversations with our Kaneland colleagues.  That is not an easy task when our school district spans over 140 square miles. There are so many questions to ask, answer and ponder.  Please consider this an opportunity for us to strengthen our understanding of personalized learning and support one another as we experience this journey together.

 

We will sort through all of the information provided from our launch chat and develop a series of chats that will allow all of you to connect and collaborate to grow your understanding and application of personalized learning.  We will post topics, as well as questions, ahead of time so that you can consider which chats are suitable for you.

 

With so many new to Twitter Chats, be on the lookout for a Lunch and Learn opportunity regarding the use of Tweetdeck, hosted by your Instructional Coaches.  Tweetdeck makes participating in a Twitter Chat so much easier. If you prefer to be an independent learner, here is a brief tutorial.  Please don’t hesitate to reach out to a coach for technical support!

 

Still on the Fence? Why Twitter?

Twitter is one of the many social media options for people to reach out to friends, family, colleagues, and beyond.  I often hear people say they don’t have time for another distraction or don’t see the value in Twitter. However, Twitter offers opportunities to explore outside of our classroom, school, district, state, and even country.  I admit, when I created my account 5 years ago, I needed some real guidance. I started following people, but really didn’t know what to do, so I set it aside and didn’t really come back to it for about 6 months. It took me a while to figure out who to follow and how to make it useful, but once I did, I was astounded at the depth of learning that I have been able to experience on my own terms.  It was through participating in Twitter Chats that I was able to discover other educators outside of my Kaneland network, which in return, helped me bring more back to my Kaneland network of educators.

 

Twitter Tips for Success

Twitter is what you make of it.  It is not about keeping up with others or feeling left out It is about connecting with others, finding more colleagues who are like minded, and validating the hard work you do everyday.  Here are a few suggestions that have made Twitter more effective for me.

 

• Allow your activity on Twitter to ebb and flow with your mood and activity level.  There is no pressure to be constantly checking on what is out there.

 

• Keep your teacher account professional so that when you are on Twitter,you are in the frame of mind to connect with teachers.  On the flipside, other social media accounts, keep strictly personal. This helps create that work life balance by not intermingling the two.  Some people even prefer to have two separate accounts on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook so that they can keep their focus separate.

 

• It is okay to just follow others and digest what is there.  You don’t have to post often to benefit from an educational Twitter account.

 

• There are several educational hashtags that you can search to see what people are sharing. Linked below are some recommended Twitter Chats for educators, but you can simple search the hashtag at any time and it is as if you had been there.  It is almost like eavesdropping, but no one cares!

 

What Other Chats can I Explore?

If you are looking beyond Kaneland, participating in a chat with colleagues at your grade level or who have a similar interest could be extremely valuable.  Here is a list  from Scholastic of some recommended chats for educators.  If you have participated in a chat that you would highly recommend to your peers, please comment on this blog….and you might just find a delicious thank you heading your way!  Sharing is sweet!

 

Total participation in the classroom – – every teacher’s holy grail!  According to Persida and William Himmele in their book “Total Participation Techniques: Making Every Student an Active Learner,” there are a multitude of techniques that we can elect to use in the classroom. But before we can get there, we first need to know what exactly is their definition of total participation techniques. They define total participation techniques as: “teaching techniques that allow for all students to demonstrate, at the same time, active participation and cognitive engagement in the topic being studied.” You might be asking yourself — how can I get my students there? First, let’s take a look at the keys to creating  total participation techniques, classroom ready techniques that can be employed and the benefits of (TPT’s).

Keys to Creating a TPT Conducive Classroom:

• Appreciate student differences – give students multiple opportunities to participate in class, show their strengths, and demonstrate their cognitive abilities.
• Foster student collaboration – employ numerous groupings of students based on the activity and knowledge of your students.
• Promote peer acceptance – create a safe and accepting learning environment for all students.
• Higher order thinking questions and prompts– ask higher order thinking questions and don’t forget to give students time to process.
• Grow confidence – always give positive feedback to students.
• Build trust – do you believe your students are capable of learning? How do you show your students that you trust them?
• Follow through – be an active presence in the classroom by asking questions, walking around and participating with students, redirecting students if necessary.
• Move away from right/wrong – ask students to justify their responses based on learned content. Never ask a student why — instead use the phrase tell me more.

Now that you have the keys to having a TPT conducive classroom, here are a few, and know there are a plethora of other classroom ready TPT’s that you can employ. One key to success with the techniques listed below – – always remember that when phrasing your questions or prompts to students, make sure they require higher order thinking skills.

Classroom Ready TPT’s:

• Turn and Talk – have students turn to their partner and discuss what has just been asked of them. Remember circulate through the group and you too become part of the discussion.
• Quick Draws or Quick Writes – have students write or draw their understandings.
• Line-ups – give students a discussion question (remember to give them time to process and think). Have students line up in 2 parallel lines and discuss with the person across from them. Repeat by having students take 2 steps to left so they can discuss with a new partner.
• Networking session – prepare prompts ahead of time for discussion. Have students locate a partner to discuss responses with. After a few minutes have students find a new partner to discuss with.
• True/Not True – create 4 cards for each student — 1.) true, 2.) not true, 3.) true with modifications, and 4.) unable to determine. Ask students a higher order thinking question and then have students hold up their card.

And finally, here are some of the benefits that can be realized by using TPT.

Benefits:

• provides you with ongoing formative assessments
• increased student participation
• deeper learning and cognitive engagement
• increased social connectedness

Should you wish to read more about this, fill out a coaching request or contact me and I will loan you my book by Himmele – –Total Participation Techniques: Making Every Student an Active Learner.

 

Works Cited

Himmele Pérsida, and William Himmele. Total Participation Techniques: Making Every Student an Active Learner. ASCD, 2017.