Category Archives: Blog

Carpe the First Day

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The first day of a new school year is a singular event.  After the first day, all days are school days.  The first day is different; it is show time for children and adults.  Carpe the first day.  Show time is a magical and essential moment.  Make the most of it.

All eyes are big on day one.  For some, the first big eye is when a child gets on the school bus.  For all others, the first big eye is walking in the schoolhouse doors.  On day one, children cross a threshold of bus and/or school and become students.  This labeling matters.  During the summer, they are their parents’ children and the community’s kids.  In school, they are your students.

For teachers, the big eye is when students walk into the classroom.  A teacher without students is a professional educator awaiting the moment to teach.  The instant students enter a classroom teachable time starts.  The same is true for all instructional support staff.  The moment they engage with students, summer is over, and the school year is afoot.  Carpe that first moment with genuine positivity toward each student and a voracious learning about them as a class.

For custodians, food service, secretaries, transportation personnel who have prepared for weeks and days for day one, the first day of school shifts all work from preparing to serving the school.  Floors are polished, snack and lunch menus are planned and published, school materials are ordered, delivered, sorted, and distributed, class lists are printed all in anticipation of day one.  When children become students, all of these and hundreds more tasks become actions repeated and maintained for a school year’s time.  Day one matters to everyone in the school.

Carpe the day, don’t squander it.  A smile and calling a student by name (pronounced correctly) as they cross thresholds tell a child “I see you.  Your success as a student in our school is important to me.  I am prepared for you.  We start right now!”  When we begin day one with the message “I see you and you are important”, we initiate a respecting of each other that pays dividends for months to come. 

The swell of a summer’s planning and preparation for principals does not peak on day one, but continues to a crescendo somewhere into September when the benefits of planning and preparation are observable facts in the work of the school.  Day one exemplifies the historic role of the school principal as the school’s principal teacher.  Carpe the day.  As a teacher greets students to a classroom, principals greet students to a school.  As teachers carpe day one to build respect for all in the classroom, the principal carpes day one to build a respectful schoolhouse.  When parents delivering their children to school see the principal “out front”, a principal reinforces the parent’s perception that this school is a good place for their children.

We know from recent polling that more than 80% of students look forward to the first day of school for social reasons – they will be with their old friends and will make new friends.  Carpe that by observing these very visible networks.  On day two you will know better about student grouping – who wants to be with whom and who needs to be integrated into the web of students.

We know from polling that more than 35% of students prize school for its athletics and activities.  On day one we assist student/athletes and student/actors and student/leaders and student/musicians to optimize immediate motivation opportunities to facilitate new learning.  The area of school that less than 25% of students look forward to is deskwork.  Carpe that low anticipation with highly engaging moments, glimpses, and previews of what they will learn in the next weeks.  Carpe all that you can learn about your students on day one and sew what you learn for reaping during the school year.

The first day of school comes but once a year.  It is a significant day for everyone in the school community.  Carpe the day and reap the benefits of your seizing all that day one is.  Day one is gone on day two.

Speak Less and Listen More

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The advice Aaron Burr gives to Alexander Hamilton in the musical Hamilton applies to the best practices in teaching.  Speak less and listen more.  If we recorded the audio only for one week in a school classroom, what would be the ratio of teacher speaking to listening?  On the other hand, don’t make such a recording.  The ratio of adult to child voices may be too embarrassing.

Instead, read and consider the following statements.  Don’t talk about what you are reading – read and listen to your own thoughts about each statement.

  • The algorithm of speaking and listening related to educational outcomes begins with an understanding that what a child says is much more important than what a teacher says.  Education is about children learning not adult’s telling what they know.
  • Listening to children allows us to know the quality and quantity of their learning and understanding.  Listen for both.
  • Listening to children informs us that a child may know and understand her learning much better than can be displayed in on demand testing.  Listening is your best formative and summative assessment.
  • Listening to children helps us to know what the child needs to learn next in order to have a more complete understanding of the lesson.  After listening, you can clarify, correct, redirect, expand, and extend a child’s understanding.  If you don’t listen, all you can do is tell them the same things you already told them.
  • Listening to children shows us how a child is processing new learning and integrating new with prior learning.  Listen to how a child thinks not just what a child tells you.
  • Listening leads to questions you ask the student that leads to more listening and to more questions.  Listening leads to causing students to learn.
  • Listening to children is one of the most respectful things adults can do.  It says, “you are important to me”.  Consider how many times a child passes through an entire school day without being heard.  What does silence tell a child about how we value her?
  • Listening is interactive.  The best teachers know when to listen and when to speak.  Listening before speaking assures that speech is focused and purposeful for the listening child.

If a teacher is consistently speaking too much and listening too little, advise the teacher to change professions and become a broadcaster.  That is what broadcasters do, not teachers.

Inform Yourself Globally – Act Locally

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“Water, water everywhere.  Nor any drop to drink”, wrote Coleridge in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  We feel the mariner’s pain today when we write, “News, news everywhere.  Nor any idea to validate”. 

There was a day when I awaited the postman for my monthly subscriptions to educational journals and periodicals.  Today’s in-box is flooded with both subscribed and unsolicited postings.  As soon as I seek educational info on the web, the all-seeing eye of its hosts provides a torrent of information.  News information cascades in such a flood that it is often difficult to find one uncontradicted idea to pursue, one idea that is can be validated and is worthy of implementing.

Still, it is essential for an educator to read and inquire globally.  Reading with such a wide lens creates an understanding of the scope and depth of issues.  Case in point – the pandemic is worldwide and pandemic effects on education are worldwide.  Its manifestations lead to intriguing and unnerving stories that will affect today’s students and our educational institutions for decades.  Gaps in educational achievement caused by poverty, interrupted access to instruction, and personal social-emotional distress are evident across the nation.  Teaching and learning are changed by the pandemic.  The entire educational enterprise in our pandemic world is changed in ways we cannot yet fathom.

The lingering question is – all indications tell us that pandemic school is and will not be like pre-pandemic school – how does this information affect our local school?

What do we know?

One strand within the flood of news is this – pandemic children returning to school in 2022 are not like pre-pandemic children who left school in 2020.  Strengthen this strand to include teachers.  Students and teachers in 2022 are not like students and teachers in 2020.  Globally, all indicators tell us that this statement is true.

What to do?

This may be a lottery-winning question.  Hundreds of thousands of schools in our nation are on the cusp of this question.

Test the questions above.  Will the 2022 students and teachers in your school be like the 2020 students and teachers you knew?

We are at Robert Frost’s fork in the road.  We either –

  • Like our 2020 school so much that we reinvent that iteration of teaching and learning, student and teacher relationships, and educational services, or,
  • Accept that 2020 is history and 2022 is the present and has more to do with the future than 2020.  We analyze our current, local conditions and create/reform educational services that address the changed nature of students, teachers, and teaching and learning.

Why is this decision necessary?

Globally, the news tells us that pandemic education is caught in a whirlpool.  We are spinning around in a cycle of indecision – make schooling continuous, 2020 and beyond or acknowledge that true changes have occurred.  Test this statement in the evidence of your own reading. 

A local school needs to jump out of the spin cycle and decide its future.  It cannot be both – a 2020 and 2022 school.  Until a local school makes this decision and acts locally, that school and everyone associated with it remains in a quandary of a lack of focus.  Our children, teachers, and community deserve a focus.

Look at the state of education at large then act locally to bring your school out of the pandemic whirlpool.

Do It Differently, Smarter – Student Rounds

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“I spend the first days and weeks of the school year getting to know my students so that I can meet their needs as learners.”  I have heard this statement each September since the 1970s and I frown.  What hubris!  Unless the child is new to your school, teachers have a wealth of relevant and reliable information about every student’s needs at their fingertips.  There is no need under the sun to waste the first days and weeks “getting know” your students.  Why don’t we do it differently and smarter and do educational rounds just as medical doctors do patient rounds?  And, do these rounds at the end of the preceding school year so that a teacher has all summer to use solid information to plan for each child’s instruction in the fall.

Current Practice

On the last day of school in the spring, the experts who know the most about the students in a teacher’s next fall assignment go home.  Historically, the last days of school are all about ending the current school year.  Records are updated and classrooms are closed.  School is vacated for the summer recess.  The knowledge next year’s teachers need departs for the summer.

Ten weeks later teachers return to school in the last week of August to prepare for a new school year.  The major focus of August work is getting classrooms ready for children and teaching.  As a rule, more professional time is spent reviewing school rules and regulations and putting up bulletin board displays than is spent in discussion of student learning needs.  We are compelled to get ready for the first day of school and most teachers sitting in August PD meetings wish they were in their classrooms doing their physical preparation tasks.

Check this out.  A teacher who cannot pronounce the name of a child in their classroom on the first day does not know that child’s learning needs.  Mispronunciation of the names of children who were students in the school last spring occurs in almost every classroom.  Not knowing how to pronounce a continuing student’s name is a sign that no teacher-to-teacher discussion of learning needs has taken place.

At best, we hold rushed meetings in which counselors share information about various students and their learning challenges.  There is scant time for a teacher to delve into those needs and plan instruction.  We prioritize classroom readiness not instructional readiness. 

The closest current practice comes to rounds is an IEP or 504 Plan meeting that includes all of a child’s teachers plus parents and advocates.

Student Rounds in the Summer

Better practice is to extend contracts for all teachers beyond the last of school and use time at the end of a school year for this year’s teachers to tell next year’s teachers what they know about promoted children.  There are many ways to implement and schedule rounds. 

Grade level to grade level – Within a schedule, 4K talks to 5K, 5K to first grade, until all grade level conversations are completed.  This organization favors more global discussion as teachers discuss each child across all instruction.  All teachers of a grade level, including special subjects and special education participate.  Grade level to grade level applies to children 4K into middle school or until the next year’s student schedule is dominated with elective or leveled courses.

Subjects within grade levels – This organization focuses on each subject areas of instruction and completes one subject area before starting a next area.  Regular, special education, and second language teachers share in discussing each child’s development in one subject at a time.  If there are different art, music, PE, and technology teachers at different grade levels, subject area sharing is the pathway for “specials” teachers to share student information teacher-to-teacher.

Secondary Subject departments – The daily class pathway for children in secondary school fans out, especially in high school with multi-grade classes and electives and an array of teachers.  Using the next year’s already developed student schedules, children are ordered alphabetically and information about their learning preferences, challenges, and uniqueness is shared. 

Face-to-face – School leadership may choose to organize students rounds as a whole school, all teachers at the same time and in the same place activity.  Every student-based meeting is face-to-face.

Virtual – We became better than average facilitators of virtual, group meetings in the pandemic.  Rounds can be held with teachers in school or at home or other locations using virtual platforms.  Virtual rounds accommodate teachers and administrators’ preferences to work from or home.

Why Rounds?

Fresh details matter.  In primary grade transitions, the current teacher has fresh knowledge of the child’s mastery of phonemic sounds and letters and ability to pronounce new words and spell words on demand.  Because these details are fresh, the current teacher can anecdotally describe what works best to support this child’s learning.  Freshness details are diminished over the summer as each former student melds into the greater group of former students.  This just simply happens.

Magnify this across all the children in a school and fresh details become even more important.  There is no reason for next year’s teachers to await similar experiences to arise when they can learn from and plan using the expert commentary of their colleagues.

Learning styles and preferences matter.  Although there is current literature that devalues learning styles profiling, the truth is that some children prefer to watch, listen, or do.  Whereas teachers want to develop broader learning modalities for all children, starting a school year with a child’s preferences creates early school year success and nothing succeeds greater than early success.

Progress in annual strategies prepared by a teacher and a child’s parents’ matter.  We tout and encourage parents to engage with teachers to create student-centered partnerships.  There is no reason to recreate new partnerships every time a teacher assignment changes.  Our current practice of starting a new discussion about their child confirms for parents that teachers are independent contractors and do not cooperate or collaborate.  This is not the storyline we want to perpetuate.  Just share what you know and build upon what you collectively know.  Be professionally seamless.

SEL challenges matter.  Children face developmental challenges as they transition from pre-school to 4K-5K, grade school to middle school, from pre-adolescence adolescence, and into semi-independent learners in high school.  The pandemic and remote education caused challenges for children returning to in-person schooling.  These mean that teacher-to-teacher discussions about children are even more important.  In-school behaviors and dispositions about school, respect and consideration for teachers and fellow students, and consistent school attendance all took hits from the pandemic.  Lack of shared knowledge hampers a child’s next teacher understanding of what she needs to know on day one of a school year.

What To Do?  If you believe your current practices optimize your teachers’ knowledge of the children they will teach in fall, continue with your current practices.  If you believe your current practices are not preparing all teachers for their next year’s students, develop your version of student rounds.  You have a wealth of knowledge about your students, use that knowledge to their advantage in preparing for the 2022-23 school year.  Do student rounds.

Do It Differently, Smarter – Teaching and Learning Is Not Piece Work

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Henry Ford’s assembly line strategies revolutionized industry.  In a Ford plant, all work was piece work – an employee did one task repeatedly as the car chassis passed down the assembly line.  The speed of the “chain” determined work productivity.  Optimized speed of assembly and quality control were the abilities of all workers to do their assigned piece work in a predetermined number of minutes.  The image to consider is a naked car chassis at the beginning of the assembly line and complete and drivable car emerging at the end of the line.  It takes an extreme emergency for the speed of the assembly line chain to slow or stop – it never backs up.

What we should know.

Transfer that image to school.  A 4K child is at the beginning of the assembly line and a graduate emerges at the end of a school’s edu-assembly line.  In the early 1900s schooling took on an assembly line process.  Thank you, Henry Ford and John Dewey, and 1892’s Committee of Ten.  Elementary schools build the chassis and secondary school does the finishing work.  The chain runs 180 school days.  Teachers apply grade level or subject content knowledge and skills to the student as the child moves through the K-12 system.  Quality control is measured by standardized tests and displayed on a bell curve – some children demonstrate a higher quality of education than others, but any student within the parameters of two standard deviations below the norm is promoted and graduated.

Most educators do not like the image or analogy of schooling to assembly line work.  It offends their professional sensitivities.  However, current, and usual school operations look like, feel like, sound like, and are like assembly line work.  If you doubt this, try to change the speed of the school chain, or modify the work done at each grade level or subject along the edu-line.  It should not be difficult to do, but it is.  Try to diminish the school year by 10 days or make it longer by ten days.  The system will fight back and after much argument the chain will remain set at 180 days with its traditional work being done at each workstation.

What to do?

Accept that school is an assembly line and change the nature of the work along the assembly line.  It is the work at each teaching station along the line that matters.

My work with the WI DPI on teacher licensing requirements says that the teaching act is a sequence of six steps.  Each teacher candidate is required in pre-student teaching and student teaching to demonstrate evidence of their proficiency in:

  • Planning – creation of unit and lesson plans
  • Teaching – using a variety of teaching strategies, including explicit teaching
  • Assessment – formative assessment of initial student learning success
  • Reflection – the use of formative assessment data to help the teacher clarify, correct, enhance student learning
  • Adjustment of teaching – tactical use of differentiated teaching strategies to clarify, current, enhance student learning
  • Re-assessment – summative assessment at end of lesson or unit

This sequence is built into every unit and lesson design.  Each step is plain to see and document and verify.

What Makes the Edu-line Different?

It is the emphasis on the three middle points points – assessment, reflection, and adjustment of teaching – that separates education from piece work.  Henry Ford did not want an assembly line worker checking the effectiveness of their work, stopping the chain for a closer inspection, talking with other workers about how to fix an error in the car’s assembly, or to check for quality after the fix was applied.  We do.  In education, this is what makes good teaching effective teaching.

A child is a very messy car chassis.  Unlike a metal frame, a child moves, speaks, has personality, and individuality.  A child’s mind may still be on recess during a late morning lesson in reading or thinking about lunch while doing arithmetic.  A child may wriggle and moan when called upon to sing a solo or be bashful in showing an art project.  Messy is anathema to assembly line work.  The truth is teaching children is messy work and time effort committed these three essential steps – assessment, reflection, ad adjustment – is how we ensure that every child is a successful learner.

What does this look like?

We need to insist that every lesson and every unit has built in requirements for assessment, reflection, and adjustment.  Bell curve be damned.  The lesson does not move to re-assessment or to a next lesson until a teacher has demonstrated assessment, reflection, and adjustment and exercised all efforts to ensure successful learning.

Assessment, reflection, and adjustment require teacher time.  These tasks are not accomplished while a teacher is driving to school in the morning or home after school.  They are not accomplished during a teacher’s lunch time.  And they are not accomplished while a teacher is doing daily prep period work.  Interestingly, the number one function of teacher prep time is a bathroom break.  The next most important functions are talking to another adult, checking correspondence, and just taking a break from being on the classroom stage.  The assessment, reflection, and adjustment of daily teaching rarely surfaces in a teacher’s usual school day.  We need to face this reality – daily prep time before, during and after the school day is inadequate for the assessment, reflection, and adjustment of ongoing teaching.

We need to build new organizational structures to ensure that all teachers have the time and resources for assessment, reflection, and adjustment of new teaching.

Intermittent breaks.

The administration provides individual teachers with a substitute teacher for a school day and the classroom teacher engages in assessment, reflection, and adjustment work.  That is the only assignment the teacher has on this day.  Prior to the intermittent day break, the teacher and administrator select the unit(s) of instruction to be the focus of the break day.  They discuss the assessment data to be examined.  The teacher uses this day to make a full evaluation of student learning via the teacher’s observations, existing assessment data, and any personal education plans (IEPs and 504s) for her students.  Reflection is reviewing the lesson plans for this unit(s) and notating parts that were successful and parts that were not as successful.  Reflection also is consideration of the teacher’s expectations for student performance on the assessment(s).  Adjustment is a planning of a necessary lesson(s) that will assist all children to achieve the teacher’s expectations on re-assessment that will follow these necessary lesson plans.

Intermittent breaks assures that all children in the school have continuous instruction AND rotates all teachers into their intermittent day break.  Every teacher in the school is provided intermittent breaks several times each school, perhaps once each quarter.

An intermittent break fits every teacher because the assessment data is the teacher’s data – it is not state assessments that are narrowly academic.  All subject area teachers, e.g., art, music, PE, second language, shop, use their intermittent break to assess, reflect, and adjust their subject area teaching and learning.

Whole school breaks.

The advantage of whole school breaks for assessment, reflection, and adjustment is that all teachers are available for this work.  The administration places a whole school break day on the school calendar so that parents can plan for a day when children are not in school.  Whole school breaks are scheduled once each quarter of the school calendar.

On whole school break days, all teachers are available for grade level, subject area, special grouping collaboration.  A team of grade level teachers can provide each other with insights and observations and alternative adjustment strategies.

Whole school break days can also be in-person and/or remote workdays.  Whole school break days also contribute the mental health of the school by releasing all students and teachers from the usual routines of continuous school. 

Reduced daily assignments to create daily time.

A school that wants to institutionalize teacher availability for assessment, reflection, and adjustment can build time for these three activities into teachers’ daily assignments by removing one or more classes for each teacher’s assignment.  For example, instead of assigning a teacher to teach five classes per day with one period of preparation time, assign the teacher four classes per day with one period every day for assessment, reflection, and adjustment and one period for preparation.  This requires hiring additional teachers to be assigned the teaching of class periods removed from other teacher’s usual schedules.

Costs – Pay Now or Instead of Later

There is cost to providing breaks for assessment, reflection, and adjustment of teaching.  One cost is the employment of substitute teachers, or the employment of more teachers.  There is the cost of additional resources for adjusted teaching – the same old, same old will not produce new results.  There also is the cost of institutionalization and constant prioritization of assessment, reflection, and adjustment in the school. 

When considering the cost of hiring more teachers, consider the cost to student learning of not providing consistent time for assessment, reflection, and adjustment.  Because schools are edu-assembly lines, we keep the edu-chain moving until after student failures to learn have piled up and we play catch up trying the remediate students out of sequence with their learning.  We spend more annual revenue hiring intervention teachers, tutorial aides, and assigning students to summer school and other make-up venues than we need to.   Instead, use those financial and professional resources to ensure adequate assessment, reflection, and adjustment of teaching in the real time of lesson and unit instruction. 

The Key Essential for Breaks

The essential element for making an assessment, reflection, and adjustment break successful is an administrator/teacher conversation about the goals for the break.  This is laser focused work on teaching and learning – what worked to cause successful student learning, what did students NOT successfully learn, how can teaching be changed and improved to cause all students to be successful learners, and then teaching using those changes and improvements. 

Teaching that is carefully targeted for students with enough rigor and challenge will always cause a distribution of learning successes.  Teaching that all students succeed at in at their first exposure is undertargeted.  Conversely, if no students succeed in the first exposure, then teaching has been overtargeted.  Assessment, reflection, and adjustment are how teachers practice this sequence – aim, fire, adjust your aim, fire again – instead of our usual fire, aim, fire again

This is effective teaching and effective teaching is not piece work.