Greatness is in demand these days. World Series contenders are looking for great pitching. Starters. Short relievers. Mid-relievers. Closers. You don’t have to throw more than a couple of innings, maybe 20 pitches at most, but if you have “great stuff”, major league baseball general managers want your phone number. Wide-bottomed offensive linemen, tall and mean defensive ends, and wide receivers with 40 inches of vertical lift command attention in the NFL. Children idolize those that play with skill and abandon. These are game changers. Their presence on the field tilts the outcome in favor of their teams.

I read Mary Amato’s article entitled “What Are We Doing to Support Great Teachers?” in the October 8th issue of Education Week. I appreciated Ms. Amato’s recognition of teachers she has observed over many years whose passion and command of the classroom consistently incite their students to engage in daily instruction. In contrast, she acknowledges that other teachers appear to be barren of the capacity to exude any contagious excitement and simply occupy their classrooms. She wonders what we can do to support these great, impassioned teachers and believes that burdening “great” teachers with professional development in the Common Core State Standards is a waste of their time and talent. “A set of official common-core standards isn’t necessary to achieve a high-quality education; great teachers are,” she writes.

I read on wanting to learn how Ms. Amato developed the picture of these teachers as “game changers” of great talent. She did not satisfy my inquiry. Many stars of stage, screen and television, many enlightened and inspired parents and grandparents, and a lesser number of people informed by the exampling of their great teachers may fill Ms. Amato’s billing for what is great in the classroom. But, none of these are game changers.

As much as passion and energy and interpersonal relationship engage children in learning, I offer that passion alone does not change the game of causing children to achieve a world class education or even a grade level education. There are too many children without either to simplify great teaching to characteristics of the teacher. Once excited and engaged, the question is “to what end will the children’s passionate instruction take them?” It is the light of the candle not the lighting of the candle that is of interest. Hence, what do game changing teachers do that makes them really great?

Add two qualifications to the characteristic of passion and teachers can become game changers: adeptness with a curriculum of knowledge, skills and dispositions that will prepare a child for a lifetime of learning and the capacity to find a way through their future world, and, pedagogical skills that can cause every child, regardless of distractors, to become a successful achiever of that curriculum. Now we have a more complete description of a teacher with the disposition, knowledge, and skills to approach greatness.

So, imagine the teacher of eight year olds who can cause children, those without a single book in their home and those without a home as well as those with a dyslexia or neuroses that stands as a barrier to most instruction to read at or greater than a grade level and understand and resolve complex arithmetic problems.

Imagine the teacher who excites a child to learn and then gives that child a lesson that causes all other children to learn but this child. Less than great teachers might truck on to the next lesson and take pleasure in the high percentage of initial learners. A great teacher circles the student with alternative and adaptive instruction again and again using all the teacher’s pedagogical skills until this student, the last student to learn, has done so.

Imagine the teacher who lifts most the efficient learners past promotional or graduation requirements and causes these students to surpass the required benchmarks. And, who mentors gifted children through personalized and personally crafted experiences and causes these children to live up to the potential of their talents.

Excitement in the classroom is wonderful, but analytical and prescriptive instruction that incrementally builds student learning concept and skill and understanding upon concept and skill and understanding until great learning challenges are overcome and all children are successful learners – that is the description of a great teacher who is a game changer.

September is a great month to tour the United States. The crowds of summer are thinned after most children are back in school and their parents have returned to work. Just fellow geezers and international tourists and occasional newly-weds.

Most children are back in school but not all. Children and their folks stood around Old Faithful and hiked the ancient volcanic slopes of Mount Rainier. They walked the trails in the coastal rain forests of Lake Quinnault in Washington and took pictures of Half Dome in Yosemite. Through parental choice, these children were in their in non-traditional classrooms.

Touring can provide wonderfully, rich educational opportunities. Park rangers provided we tourists with expert information about how mountains are formed and how some mountains are caused by tectonic action and others are volcanic. They talked about the history of the western United States and the preservation of natural resources, including national parks. A corporate naturalist, one of the best non-certified Biology teachers I have encountered, made a hike in the rain forest into a supernal of a seminar. What opportunities to not only see these natural wonders in person but to breathe them and feel them! Better than photographs. Better than videos. Better than virtual touring. Some parts of home schooling beat traditional schooling all to heck.

I was ecstatic. As an adult, and an educator to boot, I looked, I experienced, I asked questions of others and of myself, and I learned a great deal from my month on the road. I was a self-learner in a rich learning environment. Looking at the children on tour, I wondered about the richness of their learning. If they are not self-learners, who is Socrates for these children in the splendor of their first-hand education? Who asks the important questions that build the concepts and generalizations with which the great mounds of information they experience can make sense? Who assists children to sort out the rich detail that forms the background knowledge for a lifetime to come from the unimportant?

Asking questions, what’s the big deal about that? When touring in Yellowstone or Yosemite or the Grand Canyon, who needs someone nagging with questions? Learners do. The right question at the right time makes the difference between seeing the Golden Gate or just another bridge over a lot of water. Hello, Socrates, one of history’s great teachers who taught through questioning. So, I wonder who is Socrates for children whose classroom is our natural world?

When children saw a banana slug at work on bear scat on a forest trail did they see a very specialized organism cleaning up the environment or was it just a fat, yellow worm eating crap? When they looked at Mount St. Helens from the heights of Rainier, did the Volcano Evacuation signs along the highways downslope into the suburbs of Seattle make any sense to them? Did they see a problem with so many people living in the shadow of an active volcano? Or, when they saw the remains of the Rim Fire northwest of Yosemite and later heard a Park Ranger talk about using managed fires to prevent future Rim Fires, did they think about the mix of political and economic and ecological problems inherent in managing natural resources? When they heard German and Japanese being spoken by internationals looking at Mount Rushmore, did they try to use the context of place and time to consider what was being said? Did they wonder what descendants of soldiers and civilians from three warring nations would think when looking together at Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln? These and thousands of other questions jump up and bite a tourist at every turn.

Learning begets questions and questions beget learning and children are natural learning machines. So, I answer my initial question. Socrates in absentia, to speak of the Greek in Latin.

We use imprecise language when talking about the time between the first and last days of the annual school calendar. I hesitate to use the words “school year” because a school year is not a year. It is not even close. To paraphrase the message at the bottom of the passenger side mirror of your vehicle, “on the first day of school the last of day of learning is closer than you think.”

PI 8.01(2)(f) of the Wisconsin Administrative Rules states that a school year shall be a minimum of 180 days. Because time is money and school money is largely payroll, school boards seldom seek DPI permission to exceed 180 days. Hence a school year begins with 180 days, fewer than half of the days in a calendar year (365).

The advent of the digital age makes school calendars very visible. One need only tap into a school’s web site to find a display of the annual school calendar. School boards approve an annual school calendar, however this calendar always is constructed using the days instruction is to be provided. “Provided” is a hypothetically legal number and is not close to the number of days of actual instruction.

The rule goes on to say that a maximum of five (5) days of the 180 may be counted to meet the required 180 even if children are not in school. These five days may be used for parent-teacher conferences or be days in which school is cancelled due to inclement weather, the proverbial snow days. Even before school begins, the instructional calendar contains only 175 days.

From this point of 175 days, the school calendar falls victim to the realities of public education. Educational accountability calls for testing and testing takes time. Wisconsin requires all children in grades 3 through 8 plus 10 to complete an annual statewide academic assessment. Most schools use three to four days for mandated fall testing. Secondary schools also use the equivalency of one day each semester for final exams. High school children take the PLAN, AccuPlacer, PSAT and ASVAB tests on school days. Testing usually reduces another five days from the instructional calendar. Now, there are 170 days for instruction.

Just because the web site calendar shows that all other days are available for instruction does not necessarily make it so. Schools are required to conduct safety drills. Most schools conduct one fire drill each month and one tornado/weather emergency drill in the fall and one in the spring. Because schools have been the sites of tragic violence, security drills also are conducted. Some of these are “secure and hide” rehearsals and others practice school evacuation procedures. Public confidence in child safety at school requires these drills and rehearsals. Good school administrative practices distribute these events across the hours of a school day so that children know what to do wherever they are in the school house. Good practices also distribute the distraction these events create. Drills will account for an aggregate of two days of instruction. Now, there are 168 days.

School assemblies are distributed across the annual calendar. Some are connected with specific dates. Veterans Day and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day are examples of an annual historical, cultural observance involving children in school. In-school rehearsals for school musicals, concerts and plays reduce instructional time. In elementary schools, instructional focus wears thin in the days before Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas as those events become in-school class room themes. In Wisconsin, many high school boys are absent in the fall for the opening day of deer hunting season. It is Wisconsin culture!

Class field trips use and lose time for instruction. History teachers make good use of time dedicated for a trip to a regional museum. However, the time required for the history event takes children out of their math and science and language arts instruction as well as art, health, music and physical education.

Assume that two or three days of the calendar are used for school assemblies and field trips and now there are less than 165 days for instruction.

Good and continuous teaching causes children to learn. Good teaching requires the continuous presence of a good teacher. Even though a teacher prepares lesson plans for a substitute teacher to follow in the regular teacher’s absence, the absence of the child’s regular teacher disrupts the continuity of instruction. This does not denigrate the work of substitute teachers. Children, however, respond differently to a substitute teacher and a substitute teacher responds differently to each child. Teacher absences for personal illness and emergencies average five to eight days each school year. Absences for professional training average four to six days each school year. Teacher absence reduces the number of effective teacher-student instructional days to 154.

Equal to a teacher’s absence, if a child is absent from school, the child is absent from instruction. While it is true that class instruction continues in the absence of children every day, the absent child does not receive that instruction until she returns to school. It used to be that when a child was not in school it was because the child was ill. Not true today. Wisconsin Rules allow a parent to excuse a child from school for up to ten (10) days each school year without providing a reason for the absences. The frequency of absences varies greatly child to child, however, perfect attendance is a rarity and most children are absent an average of seven to fifteen days annually.

The number of days for teacher-child instruction now is less than 150. Fewer than 150 is the number of effective instructional days for most children. So, let’s put this calendar and instructional intent into propositional statements.

A child has less than 150 learning episodes in which to add a grade level of reading achievement.

A child has less than 150 learning episodes in which to learn Algebra or Chemistry or World History or Spanish 1.

A teacher has less than 150 learning episodes in which to cause a child to learn the designated Common Core Standards for the child’s grade level.

Together, teacher and child have less than 150 learning episodes to cause the child to perform at a competent level on the next annual state assessments.

Ouch! One hundred fifty is not very many. In fact, 150 episodes is the equivalency of 124 hours of instruction because a school’s class periods typically are 50 minutes in duration. Double ouch!

Only in school can less than 150 days or less than 124 hours be called a year.

You bet it does.

Separate your thinking about past practices from your thinking about the future. The dividing line between the two is educational accountability. In the past, educational achievement was the record of how well individual children learned. Some children achieved at a high level and others did not. General accountability in the past was teaching those who could achieve to achieve and letting their high test scores carry the rest of the class by pointing only at the class average. That was the past.

Present and future thinking demands that all children learn and that indicators of their learning are at increasingly higher levels of achievement. The past mean average now is just a statistic of diminished concern. The metric of interest is the qualitative indicator of competence that all children must achieve. To reach these now qualities, teachers must consider all aspects of instruction and learning. Who sits where is a strong contributor to future learning success.

In the past, seating arrangements typically were created to eliminate distraction. Talkers and inattentive children gravitated to the front corner desks of the class room or seats nearest to where the teacher usually sat. Corner desks diminished the number of children the talkers could distract. The seat nearest the teacher was a chair of intimidation. In each instance, the goal was to isolate the talkers and inattentive children in order to diminish their negative activity. This strategy seldom worked. More often than not this special attention only provided positive reinforcement by making their negative behaviors the focus of teacher attention.

Past thinking about seating was about classroom management. Seating alphabetically. Alternated seating by gender. Seating in rows by reading group or other ability groupings. Seating at random. Seating by student choice. In the past, seating was not about qualitative learning.

When I was a K-12 student in the last century, seats or desks were assigned on the first day of school and a desk in each class and classroom I attended was mine for the entire school year. It was the same for each of my classmates. Attendance was taken by noting empty seats. Papers were returned to students by the teacher who placed the papers on the assigned desks. Seating assignments made for good class room management. I was my desk and my desk was me and these were fixed in time.

Today, seating must be a manipulative for causing all children to learn complex and rigorous content and perform higher order problem solving tasks at an elevated and prescribed level. Seating assignments are a strategy for building multiple learning networks and each network is designed to scaffold student learning. Where children sit to engage in their learning activities should be flexible, shaped to the nature of the activity, and serve learning not management. Seating is grouping and regrouping according to changing learning designs.

Some activities lend themselves to children working at independent desks that can be pushed together for collaboration. Desks, however, are very limiting. Other activities make good use of a large table around which children can sit and share. Physically active learning may need more floor space with no seating – children sit on the floor if they need to sit. Hallways are good for this purpose. Quiet and contemplative activities may want floor pillows or soft seats. Where and how children sit or work must be an instructional consideration.

Who sits with whom? This instructional question is more important than where and how. The right mix of children can lead to learning success for all children just as the wrong mix can lead to very different and less successful learning results.

A good seating and grouping decision relies upon the teacher knowing the learning needs and learning style preferences of each child. Who is social and who is not. Who is a kinesthetic learner and who is verbal. Who needs space and who can tolerate close proximity to others. Who leads and who follows. Who is a divergent thinker and who is convergent. Grouping and regrouping using these and other variables allows the teacher to create the right heterogeneous “soup” for learning.

Mixing students heterogeneously calls for assignments that cause children to learn from each other. Seating or grouping paired with assignments that both exercise learning strengths and make children synergize these strengths can raise the productivity of each child in the group. Underachievers do learn from achievers when instructional strategies include metacognitive discussion in which collaborative processes are just as valuable as the conclusions reached. A seating or grouping assignment can turn a child’s talkative nature into a skill valued in oral presentations, a leader into a spokesperson, an introvert into a research specialist. And, the “democratic’ feeling associated with heterogeneous is reinforced when the outcomes of the group are greater than the individual outcomes of its members.

There also are many reasons for using homogeneous grouping. Proponents for children with special learning needs point to the need for children to work and associate with their educational peers. Children who are academically capable and gifted need to work with their capable and gifted peers. Children who are receiving prescribed instruction for special education, ELL or Title 1 needs profit from working with their peers. Parents can be very outspoken for homogeneous learning opportunities for their children. Grouping decisions, however, must remain the teacher’s and be made to promote learning success for all.

Research abounds on the values of homogeneous and heterogeneous grouping. The literature review in the following study provides a good summary. http://www.appstate.edu/~koppenhaverd/rcoe/s10/5710/q1/groupShannon.pdf

Manipulating group membership or seating dependent upon the learning objective is a valuable instructional tool. Fixed seating for classroom management purposes in counterproductive to the mandates for current and future educational accountability. A teacher who understands grouping for learning seldom employs a written seating chart. For class room management purposes, the best place to start a new class period is for children to sit where they ended the last class period. From that point, it is a new day for new learning.

Big changes take time. They are achieved by blending many small changes through consistent and conscious effort overcoming innumerable obstacles arguing for the status quo until an aggregate of change is accomplished. Big changes are hard to accomplish because personal commitment to change is even harder to maintain than the many small, individual efforts required for a large-scale change.

Hence, commit to small changes. They are easier on the body and soul. And, incrementally they cause very large results – one at a time.

Teachers say to me, “There is tremendous pressure on us to improve student academic achievement. And, every day we receive information about another new professional development venture guaranteed to cause students to learn more or learn more efficiently. There are so many ‘do this’ advertisements that it makes my head spin.” Then, they ask the important question. “If I only did one small thing differently, what one thing should I do that would help my students to learn?”

Here it is. Spend more time checking all students for their understanding of what they think they heard you say or saw you do before they launch into an assignment. The essential words in that statement are “what they think.”

Sadly, a classroom of students frequently is as attentive as small children playing baseball. Picture nine children on a baseball field. One or two players are informed and skilled and focused on every play. In the field, they have their eyes on the batter ready to field a ball hit their way. Other players stand in the right position, have their glove on the hand they catch with, but may be drawing their name in the dirt with the toe of their shoe when the batter swings. And, other players are watching clouds or turning like a top or have dropped their glove on the ground so they have a softer place to sit. There also is this kind of variance in the classroom even though all children may be sitting in their chairs looking toward you.

Elementary-aged children? Yes. The above descriptors may not read like the children in your classroom. It is because elementary children can at least look as if they are attentive. Innocent-faced tykes wanting to learn while their minds are on breakfast, recess, the Ipad game they played before school, and wondering what worms do at night. They wiggle loose teeth and try to pinch dust motes that float across their desk. A few hang on their teacher’s every word. More need help in focusing on what the teacher’s words mean because their wonderful little minds are constantly thinking their own thoughts.

Secondary students can be a totally different inattentive lot. The difference between elementary and secondary students is that the inattentive middle schooler or high schooler may not care how they appear to you. While the academically-focused students give you their more mature, note taking focus, the inattentive may be looking out the window, turned all the way around in their chair looking at someone in the back of the room, or sitting with their heads down on their desk tops not looking, not listening and not caring. Others may resemble the seemingly attentive elementary student – sitting up and looking at you while they are texting on a phone in their hip pocket.

Checking is checking for readiness to do the activity of learning.

Checking means asking all children to give back to you the directions that you gave to them so that you know they not only heard but listened when you described or demonstrated what they should do next.

Checking means having all children write down the steps you provided – step 1, step 2, step 3.

Checking means having all children tell, show, list, or illustrate individually or in groups. Checking can be social as long as the outcome is a demonstration of their understanding.

Checking means that you listen, watch, and observe demonstrations of what all children think they heard you say, do or write.

Checking means that you have the opportunity to correct any aspect of their misunderstanding prior to their work. It is so much easier to correct misunderstandings before children begin to work rather than during or after. Waiting just five minutes means that children, acting upon what they thought you said, may have focused on the wrong ideas, made mathematical mistakes, or assumed something to be true that isn’t and committed their time and effort on a wrong pathway. When learning children start with mistakes, you must not only give them correct information but you must also neutralize their mistakes and this neutralizing business is not only time consuming but may not be effective. Mistakes and wrong information have their own lifetime and can reappear later because the mistakes are in the child’s short-term memory and will compete with the correct information.

In each of the above checking statements the word “all” precedes children. It is easy to ask a student who you know to be attentive to recite the directions for the class assignment. However, to stop with an attentive child’s response is to enter the swamp of time and effort correcting misunderstood directions. Check all children by engaging all in your demonstration of understanding and then randomly watching, listening, observing for correctness. This is worth the few minutes it takes to accomplish and will breed improved attention practices over time.

So, the one little thing to do that will have huge positive results is to check what children think they thought you said for did before they start reading, writing, solving math problems, start a game, begin group work or even walking down the hall to music class.

Check. Listen, watch, observe. Confirm or correct. Then, worry about the next little thing to do differently. Together, these small little changes can make a large difference in how well children learn.