Tag Archives: effective teaching

The Art of Breathing and Teaching

Posted on by
Reply

Breathing is an autonomic body function and is essential for human life. A healthy person breathes without thinking about it. When teaching children, knowing when to pause and take another breath to let learning unfold is a conscious act of breath control. Effective teachers know the art of breathing.

What do we know?

As a child, I was told to pinch my nose, jump into the deep end of the pool and swim. “Take a deep breath, hold it, and jump!” “Oh, and do not open your mouth to breath until you must. You will know when!”

As a student teacher, I learned to prepare an objectives-based lesson with a Madeline Hunter lesson design. When all students were seated and I had their attention, I took a deep breath and jumped into the lesson. Once I had connected the day’s lesson to yesterday’s lesson, I taught/swam hard moving through my lesson plan. My college supervised advised, “Once you have children’s attention, do not lose that connection until the lesson is finished. It is easier to keep them with you than it is to regain the attention of children you lost.” That mantra served me well until I looked up and around. Like a swimmer who has held his breath and come up for air, I was teacher in the middle of a lesson without knowing much about the children I was teaching. Their learning was secondary to my teaching.

Experience can teach us, and informed experience teaches us to create better experiences. I learned that I did not need to pinch my nostrils and hold my breath like a balloon under water. Diving headfirst was both more efficient and more exhilarating. I learned shallow racing dives and to hold a for four flutter kicks then to begin my stroke count and breath as planned. Informed practices created better experiences.

So, it is with teaching. Breathing may be autonomic, but effective teachers know how to pause, breathe, and let learning catch up with their teaching.

Intellectual breathing.

Hunter taught us to check for cognitive understanding. Checking is taking a breath from teaching finding the extent to which children are learning from your teaching.

Strategies for intellectual breathing include the following:

  • Cold calling. Do not ask for volunteers, but call in your “bell weather” students, the students who if they understand then most other students also will understand.
  • Think-pair-share. Students write quick responses to your question, share their response with another student, discuss and modify their mutual response, and report orally to the class.
  • Roll a question around. Ask a question requiring more than recall, one that causes a child to connect new learning with prior learning or provide a new context. Then ask another child to either agree, disagree, or add to the response. Continue with five or six students to push their thinking.
  • Quick quiz/ticket. Ask students to respond in writing to name the main points of the lesson so far, or to explain a concept in the first instruction, or formulate questions they have about what they have learned.
  • Use a visual fist to five. This strategy checks each child’s security with what they have learned. A five-finger wave says the child believes she has a high level of understanding, and a fist says, “I am confused.”

These are formative strategies that tell a teacher “Success. Keep teaching.” Or “Whoa, you need to reteach, correct, clarify, and reinforce what children know before going on,”

Emotional breathing.

Teaching usually is focused on what children think and know. Take a breath and pause to allow children to consider how they feel about what they have learned. “Aw, this is soft. Feelings do not help students on their statewide assessments.” Wrong!

Unlike the factual nature of checking for cognitive understanding, taking an emotional breath is observational and attitudinal. As children progress through a lesson or unit, their executive skills, social awareness, relationship skills, and ethical well-being are equal to their cognitive understanding.

Can or are all students able to –

  • Initiate and use a new skill independently? Can they self-start or are they dependent on their teacher?
  • Aware of the social context of what they have learned? Do they know that different economic, socio-political, cultural, or linguistic groups have a different take on the topic? Can they accept such diverse thinking? How do they feel about this?
  • Work with all other children in the class to extend their new learning. What groupings will help understanding? What needs to be done to improve child-to-child relationships?
  • See ethical and responsible decision-making issues in what they are learning? Can children self-regulate based on their ethical integrity?

Emotional breath taking relies on a teacher’s observational and perceptional acuity. First, a teacher must be self-aware of each of these. Second, a teacher needs to be aware of indicators of SEL indicators that children give off in their classroom experiences. Third, a teacher needs to be prepared to convert observation into planned instructions. If children are lacking in executive functions, teach them. If students are socially unaware, teach them. If children do not see ethical issues, teach them.

Taking a breath of emotional checking assures that teaching and learning are not mechanical but also humane.

Self-awareness.

Breathe also for yourself. Like the swimmer coming up for air, take a pause to help yourself adjust within the lesson. Stop teaching. Take a sip of water. Look around and breathe. Take time to see where you are in the classroom. As a mentor told me, “Pull your socks back up. You have been going at it strong.” I have seen teachers so “into their teaching” they are not aware that they have walked themselves into a corner of the room where the whiteboard hits the wall. One or two kept on teaching through the passing bell and when they turned around a new class of children was seated in their classroom wondering what they should do.

With experience, most teachers know when lessons are working successfully and when they are not. Perceptive teachers know when a lesson that is faltering lies in their preparation and when it is with them in the moment. They can take a breath and adjust themselves and their teaching.

At the same time, ineffective teachers do know how to breathe. They plow ahead in their ineffective lessons with ineffective practices.

The Big Duh!

Teaching is a human endeavor exercising the art and science of causing children to learn. Because we are human, we need to use our natural instincts to inform our uses of the arts and sciences. Effective teachers know how to stop teaching, take a breath, use the pause to monitor and adjust themselves and their instruction, and with new insights go forward.

Lastly, and most importantly, while you pause for breath look around at children engaged in learning. It is a most wonderful sight. And know that your pause for breath also is instruction and reinforcement to children that they also need to pause and breathe.

The Tension of High Expectations

Posted on by
Reply

Tension.  Anxiety.  Investment.  These are tangibles most of us want to diminish in our daily lives.  Tension, anxiety, and pressure can be aggravants and we see them as undesirable for our general well-being.  Yet, without degrees of tension, anxiety, and an investment to move forward, it is hard to cause learning.  Highly effective teachers know how to use positive attributes of external tension, anxiety, and investment to raise a child’s internal motivation to learn and keep learning. 

Primary schooling for most children begins with excitement.  School is new and exciting for a 4K or K student.  It is a new place with lots of children who will become friends and new things to do.  The blaze of early social excitement wears off with time.  While some children rise every morning with a “I can’t wait to get to school”, most need our assistance in answering the school bell every day.  Motivational theory helps us to keep children from sinking into the drudgery of compulsory education, the grind of getting through school.

Madeline Hunter taught us how components of tension assists motivation that leads to successful student learning.  (Hunter’s name and teaching reverberate in many discussions of teaching and learning.)  Motivation starts with a teacher setting a positive yet challenging feeling tone about learning.  A feeling tone has a friendly edge to it; an edge like a tool that is constantly pushed into new information and skills to be learned and the tension of that pushing causes learning.  That edge is a tension that the teacher sets and controls over time.  It is a friendly edge because effective teachers coat it with more Hunterisms – personal interest, challenge, the rewards of success, and how what is learned is useful in a child’s future.

Motivation is jump started by a teacher’s understanding of each child’s readiness to learn and beginning point for learning and adjusting initial instruction for early, meaningful success.  Motivational tension is enhanced when the challenge of what comes next is “just beyond the current reach” of student knowledge and skills yet within a student’s grasp with guided work.  There is a tension in that distance between what a child knows and can do now and what she needs to know and do next.  Effective teachers make this a positive tension because it results in success.

Bill Spady taught us that “successful learning begets more successful learning”.  When he laid out the outcomes to be taught and learned, he relied upon sound instructional practices to cause learning.  Students become invested when the outcomes set by the teacher are important and meaningful.  The drive to achieve important outcomes carries an element of anxiety to succeed.  Teachers monitor each student’s sense of internal anxiety knowing that too much causes a student to shut down or make poor decisions.  Just the right amount of anxiety keeps a student properly and positively pointed toward learning success.

All children need to see that what they learn is beneficial to them personally.  They need to see and feel personal gain or improvement in order to invest themselves in school assignments.  If a child does not feel personal interest and connection to a curriculum, it is easy to see school assignments as just a long line of work assigned by teachers and required to pass to the next grade.  Drudgery.  When this is a child’s mindset, any distraction or other thing to do moves a child’s interest from learning to something more immediately rewarding or fun to do.  Gaming and other Internet links are perfect and available for distracted and disillusioned students who have no personal investment in their school education.  A child may not see herself in every assignment, but there has to be enough and frequent enough personal interest to keep her invested.

Effective teachers purposefully tell students that “what comes next” holds special interests for aspiring artists and musicians, or is very hands-on for students needing tactile learning, or is necessary for students who see themselves in a medical profession.  Good teaching tells them then shows them.  Investment in the future is a wonderful subliminal tag for any new subject or skill set.

Teaching and learning carry many caveats, some more meaningful than others.  One of the most potent is “low expectations are connected to low achievements and higher expectations to higher achievements.”  Raising expectations is more than just declaring them or sending them in an e-mail.  Higher expectations are built by teachers with rigorous instruction of knowledge, skills, and dispositions AND by students who elevate their work, their commitment, and their performance.  There is a lot of “doing” in teaching and learning to higher expectations.  Higher achievements are a continuous push-pull between teachers and students.

Tension, anxiety, and investment are used by effective teachers in setting the right tone and providing rigorous teaching toward the knowledge and skills learning children need to learn.  Expectations won’t rise on their own – they are constructed on sound principles of motivation and instruction.  Constructive use of tension is a necessary component for teachers and students to achieve successful teaching and learning.

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.