Sarah Fischler’s Fifth Grade ‘Teaching Assistants’

Sarah Fischler is a science teacher at North Star Academy in Newark.  She’s one of our seven TLaC Fellows this year.  She recently shared with us a video of a great system she’s implemented: classroom TAs. The system allows her to keep kids productive and give them agency over their work but also to spend her own time in the classroom more efficiently and check for understanding even more efficiently.  It’s a bit like a combination of the Front Table and Affirmative Checking.

Here’s a video she made of the system in action:

What’s most impressive and most important about the system is the installation. Hopefully as you watch Sarah’s video you are thinking–“OK, that probably took a ton of work to implement that system.  If I tried to just tell my kids they were going to be TAs tomorrow the results would not look like this.”  If that’s what you thought you were right.  But that’s why the best part of this blog post is what comes next: Sarah shared the details of her implementation- notes on all the things that happened in the weeks leading up to this clip to make it possible.

Here’s what she sent

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