Academic Survival Kit For 21C Teachers

Remember the days when the Welcome Wagon came to your new home to welcome you to the neighborhood? While this might be a practice of the past, particularly with the growth of urban living, we can adapt this practice to welcome new and continuing teachers back to another exciting school year. Here are some tools and resources that I would share with teachers upon their return to school. What would you share?

"Getting to Know You...Getting to Know All About You"

During the first week, get to know your students as individuals. The time you spend doing this now will help you to establish rapport with your students and the classroom rules and expectations that will help maintain classroom management. One can't instruct students on high impact rigorous curriculum if anarchy reigns in your classroom. Consider what motivates your students to do well? Consider the style of learning through which your students learn best.

Consider providing students with a youth based personality inventory - the adult Myers Briggs Personality Test for high school students and a kid's version for younger children. One can find these tools online. This would be a great first step in determining whether your students will learn best through kinestetic, visual, and/or auditory activities. Once you know student personality types, you can plan lessons accordingly and efficiently. Why create a kinestetic lesson if no students in class prefer that learning style? Why NOT include short video tutorials and/or visual models, if two thirds of the class prefers this learning style?

Deepen the impact of this work by combining what you know of student learning profiles with student mastery on content/skill standards. This will come from your classroom assessments. This will help you to plan lessons that are not only aligned to student interest but to differentiate learning even further by readiness level. For example, while you may have a class that is overwhelmingly auditory, you will need different activities to ensure students below standard proficiency can make progress, on a particular benchmark, whereas those students who have already mastered a standard receive enrichment. Here is a neat tool/checklist that you can use to keep track of where your students are in this regard and to plan lessons:

Further consider what motivates your students to learn. Knowing this will provide huge dividends to you when deciding how to reward students for hard work and attention to detail. Not everyone is motivated by the same thing. Although, generally, all humans are motivated by one of the following - praise, public recognition/prestige, power, prizes, and/or preference/choice. Yes, we want students to ultimately be intrinsically motivated. However, a little external motivation never hurt in establishing a positive classroom culture. Try ascertaining student motivation by giving them the following tool which can be adapted for different age groups:

In addition to the use of checklists to help teachers to keep track of preferences, color coding and/or the use of symbols can further assist teachers when organizing student and planning materials.

See how an elementary school teacher assigned students into "Harry Potter" like groups or houses. House rewards and/or assignments could be based on this rewards preference checklist for younger students while this tool could also be used in discussions with older students and/or in planning for adult learning. Image: NJCU.edu

We are ALL Vocabulary Teachers...

Harvey Silver's Vocabulary Code - Differentiated activities to develop student ability to (C)onnect, (O)rganize, (D)eep Process and (E)xercise (use of) vocabulary - can be used in any grade and/or with any academic content. Since students often do not perform well on assessments because of a lack of academic vocabulary knowledge, this is a very useful tool that will help teachers not only to help students learn vocabulary but also one that will engage students in discussion around vocabulary. If there is one thing that I would like teachers to take away from reading this article is that having students simply copying definitions out of the dictionary is bad and boring practice. For a further breakdown of academic vocabulary by content and grade level, see Robert Marzano's Building Academic Vocabulary resource. This link is for the teacher edition - try to find the student version for the vocabulary word bank.

Ensuring High Quality Instruction - Conducting Lesson Objective Walks

Whether or not your state is using the Common Core State Standards, there is a national push in the United States to ensure that student learning objectives are academically rigorous and that students are doing the heavy cognitive lifting (thinking/struggling)rather than the teacher. For example, are students being asked to explain opinions and/or using evidence (in writing and/or verbally) to support arguements being made? Are students comparing/contrasting multiple texts on a single topic? Are students evaluating the quality of their work as well as that of peers? Recently, in one school that I observed, students were even ranking "best" wrong answers to Math problems as to the quality of processes and/or procedures used when solving algebraic equations.

Most pre-service teachers have been exposed to Blooms Taxonomy of Academic Rigor. Some have been exposed to Webb's Depth of Knowledge (DOK) Matrix. How many have been exposed to Hess' Cognitive Rigor Matrix which combines both tools into one? See link here. While a lesson objective might have students "creating" - i.e. taking information and putting into a new form - which might be high on the Blooms Taxonomy, the actual amount of strategic and/or extended thinking (DOK) is low if students are only creating a brainstorm/mindmap of ideas being recalled from elsewhere rather than synthesizing information from many mind maps into one extended map. Use Hess' Cognitive Rigor Matrix to ensure that your lesson learning objectives are rigorous and promote student thinking.

Also, teachers - think about any background knowledge your students have or will need to meet highly rigorous lesson objectives based on the unwrapping or breaking down of standards into goals that are achievable per lesson. Administrators/teachers - consider collecting actual classroom objectives over time and then have teachers place them on the Cognitive Rigor Matrix, as they exist now, and then how these objectives can be rewritten/developed to extend rigor.

Academic "Gift Baskets" for Teachers

Yes, budgets are tight. However, if teachers are expected to form a ha moments and/or discuss takeaways from key teaching resources (say in collaborative book study and/or PLCs), it is good practice to provide teachers with "starter libraries" and/or to ensure that there is, at least, a school professional library from where teachers can borrow books. Also, consider how to stretch teacher efficacy year after year, with new resources, and not just train new teachers to the school. One sign that teacher efficacy is growing is when teachers not only can integrate best in class instructional practices but can reference the author and/or the research backing up use of these practices. See a tiered list of suggested resources for teachers here:

Extension Tools for Teachers -

Recently, I wrote about adaptations for ESL learners which can be used with any students struggling in literacy acquisition. I also wrote about the benefits of teacher inter-visitation. I have linked to these articles here.

When conducting peer inter-visitations, teachers are often focused on reviewing the work of ELL students and/or strategies for assisting special populations academically. Also, concurrently, teachers are often interested in improving their classroom management, student engagement, and/or assessment practices but don't necessarily know teaching frameworks, such as the Danielson Framework, well enough to find the corresponding performance rubric to augment and deepen pre and post observation discussions. Charlotte Danielson has created a cluster tool which can be used to guide teachers in finding relevant performance rubrics by topic cluster. I link to the download page for the cluster tool above.