If someone would have told me last year that Pinterest would be one of my frequently visited websites as an instructional coach, I would have laughed. Sure, I completely understand that Edutopia, the Teaching Channel, and YouTube are bookmarked websites... but Pinterest?
It turns out that Pinterest can be a valuable tool for educators. It is a great place to go to find new ideas for the classroom. During a recent perusing of Pinterest, I found some pins on how to quickly assess student learning during the last few minutes of class (aka- exit slips). Below are just a few of the pins that are creative, informative, and fun.
Hashtag Mania: Students summarize their learnings as a hashtag.
Tweeting: Using no more than 140 characters, like a tweet on Twitter, students answer a question or describe what they learned in class.
Instagram Photo: Students take a photo they believe best reflects the learning that took place and post it to a class Instagram account.
Vine Blog: Students create a video that captures the most important six seconds of class.
Exit Slip Poster: Create a poster with pockets. Number the pockets, and assign students a number. Students answer a question on a small piece of paper and place it in their assigned pocket.
It is the middle of December, almost halfway through the school year, and the time of year when teachers feel the most frustration and failure. It is a time when we are bitter and complain endlessly about the job. It is a time when we want to throw in the towel and say we will start anew in January.
It is precisely at this time that we can all learn from Willie Burton. Born two months premature with cerebral palsy, he cannot walk unassisted, has limited use of his right hand, and struggles with speech. Yet, Willie has more gumption and drive than most people. Despite having the odds stacked against him, Willie went out for wrestling in ninth grade and never quit. His perseverance inspires us all.
At a time when we feel the negativity overpowering us, I implore you to watch this video. It may give you the motivation you need to push through until Winter Break.
The vast majority of people I have worked with in my thirteen years of teaching are excellent educators. They challenge, motivate, and inspire their students. Their classrooms are well-oiled machines where students are maturing, growing, and learning. But just as there is no perfect person, there is also no perfect teacher. We can all improve in our trade.
And this is where instructional coaches enter the picture. Instructional coaches support and collaborate with teachers as they continue to master their craft. Whether a person is in his first or twentieth year of teaching, he can partner with an instructional coach to develop or enhance his skills.
Below is a list of some specific examples for how instructional coaches can work with teachers.
Behavior
Collect data on the ratio of positive to negative interactions with students
Help create effective, corrective comments when addressing student behavior
Document students' time on task
Provide support to increase the number of opportunities student have to interact in a learning activity
Content
Assist with the creation and modification of learning targets
Work with PLCs to determine power standards and mastery or learning
Organize a unit of study
Clarify what content will be taught in a unit
Help enhance instruction so students master more content
Instruction
Model lessons
Collect data on types of questions asked in class
Improve the quality of student activities
Formative Assessment
Aid in developing appropriate, high-quality assessments
Assist with providing student feedback that is quick and authentic
Are you looking for ways to differentiate learning in your classroom? Would you also want to create more opportunities for higher order thinking? One of the newer trends in education that incorporates differentiation and higher order thinking is flipped learning.
What is flipped learning?
According to the Flipped Learning Network, flipped learning is "a pedagogical approach in which direct instruction moves from the group learning space to the individual learning space, and the resulting group space is transformed into a dynamic, interactive environment where the educator guides students as they apply concepts and engage creatively in the subject matter."In other words, flipped learning is where the instruction occurs outside of class, and the activities and deeper learning occur in the classroom. In flipped learning environments, the students have direct access to the knowledge, freeing up the teacher to be a guide and mentor to their learning.
What is the difference between flipped classroom and flipped learning?
Flipped classroom and flipped learning are actually two different terms. Flipped classrooms are classes where students learn the material outside of class and complete the homework in class. Flipped learning is like a flipped classroom on steroids. It includes the basic notion of a flipped classroom, but it requires a more interactive environment within the classroom. To create a flipped learning environment, educators actively engage in the Four Pillars of F-L-I-P.
What are the Four Pillars of F-L-I-P?
The Four Pillars of F-L-I-P stand for flexible learning environment, learning culture, intentional content, and professional educator.
Flexible learning environments include changing work spaces and timelines for learning based on student need.
Learning culture refers to a classroom where the focus changes from teacher-centered to learner-centered.
Intentional content is when teachers determine what they should teach and what students should learn on their own in order to maximize learning for all students.
Professional educator is when the teacher monitors student learning and reflects on his/her practice as a flipped learning educator.
Why should I flip my learning environment?
It allows students to take charge of their own learning.
It fosters development of 21st century skills.
Flipped learning lends itself more easily to higher order thinking skills.
It allows for differentiated learning to occur.
It enhances learning outcomes.
What do I do when students don't have Internet access at home?
Several options are available for students in flipped learning environments who do not have Internet at home, including:
place materials on a flash drive or DVD for students to use at home
go to a public library or another person's home to access the Internet
use a smart phone
utilize school technology during study halls or before or after school
How do I go about making a video?
There are numerous platforms for creating a video. Teachers can record on a camera, use a webcam, create a podcast, and much more. Once the video is created, teachers can upload it to a classroom website, a common drive, or another place that is easily accessible to students.
Aaron Sams, founding director of the Flipped Learning Network, has tips for creating videos for flipped learning.
Sit in a room with good lighting, a quiet background, and a non-distracting background.
Don't worry about creating a perfect video.
Create videos that are approximately the same number of minutes as 1-1.5 times the grade level of the students (e.g.- videos for 8th grade students should be 8-12 minutes in length).
What do I do when students don't complete the assigned learning outside of class?
Just as there are students who don't complete homework assignments, there are students who will not complete the assigned learning outside of class. There are safeguards, however, to engage students and keep this number to a minimum. Examples include:
require students to take notes over the material and show these to the teacher the next day
include a Google form with basic questions of understanding for students to complete after watching the video
pose a question in the video that students must answer as an entrance ticket into class
Even with these safeguards in place, there will be students who come to class and have not watched the video. These students will need to watch the video in class while everyone else partakes in the other activities and receives assistance on the more difficult tasks.
What do I do when my students watched the video but still don't understand the lesson?
Many times, students don't understand the lesson because they passively watched the video. They don't have the skill set to view a video for learning, and as a result they watch a flipped lesson video the same way they would watch a movie or a television show. When creating a flipped learning environment, students need to interact with the video.
Teachers can use numerous methods to bring interactivity to a video lesson. Here are just a few ideas:
Create a graphic organizer or notes packet for students to complete as they watch the video.
Create a Google form for students to answer questions during or after viewing the video.
Use free tools, like Zaption, to assist in creating interactive videos.
Require students to post questions and comments about the video via Google Classroom or Edmodo.
Do I need to flip every class or can I go back and forth between flipped and traditional learning environments?
The great thing about flipped learning is that is does not need to occur everyday. Teachers can flip a lesson, a unit, or an entire class. Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams from the Flipped Learning Network recommend starting small. Pick out something that students struggle with and turn it into a flipped lesson. Doing so will create the opportunity for differentiated learning and deeper understanding.
Want to learn more about flipped learning? Check out these videos.
I am one month in as an instructional coach now, and although I enjoy my new position, one drawback is that I miss working with kids. One of the reasons for this is because I am discovering numerous teaching resources and am unable to try them out with the students. Since I cannot utilize my new learnings directly with the kids, the next best thing for me is to disseminate the information to other teachers for student use. Therefore, the other WDMCSD secondary instructional coaches and I created a Symbaloo site to house these teacher resources.
Symbaloo is visual bookmarking tool that organizes what you find on the internet. Our Symbaloo site houses different tools and resources beneficial to teachers in the district. We have bookmarks for the Teaching Channel, Kahoot, the Iowa Core, and much more. This is a work in progress, so please be patient as we add more links to our board.
Twitter is becoming a popular network for educators. It can be a valuable tool to learn about the latest trends in education, gather ideas for the classroom, find educational blogs, and much more.
For those new to Twitter, here are some sites to help you become acquainted with the social network:
For roughly three years now, we have been using learning targets in the West Des Moines Community School District. We know that it is a one-word sentence describing what the student will learn, and we do a great job of posting them somewhere in the classroom for the students to see. Most of us even understand that learning targets tie in with our district goal, the Essentials of Effective Instruction (more specifically- how will my students know what they will be learning today).
But just because we know what a learning target is, does that mean we can create an effective, appropriate one for our students? Do we know if the learning target posted for students is what they are supposed to be learning? As teachers, can we write a target that is meaningful to children, and they can describe in their own words? And how do we know if they hit the target by the end of the lesson?
To address these issues, we need to do the following:
Collaborate with our Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) to determine what the students should be learning. By looking at the Common Core (or Iowa Core, or the WDMCS standards and benchmarks), we need to agree on the most important concepts, called power standards, to cover in the course of a year. This will ensure that we create targets based on what the students should belearning.
Determine how we will know when the students hit the target. As PLCs, we need to decide what it will look like when a student has demonstrated mastery of the content.
Go above and beyond posting the learning targets in our classroom. We should ask students to define the learning target in their own words and use formative assessments to gauge their level of mastery.
Constructing meaningful learning targets is no easy accomplishment. It can take years of collaborating, writing, and revising to produce targets that are relevant to students, teachers, administrators, and parents. But it is necessary if we want to create classrooms of intentional, motivated learners.
I have now successfully completed my first full week of instructional coaching, and it is amazing to see already how much I have grown as an educator in such a short span of time. This growth can be attributed to the fact that I now have more time to collaborate and learn from others in the West Des Moines Community School District.
I am going to let the readers in on the dirty, little secret of being an instructional coach: we are not know-it-alls with infinite amounts of knowledge and creativity. Most (okay, maybe all) of our ideas are actually stolen from others. And many of these ideas come directly from our colleagues.
Here is a very small snippet of my new learnings and where I obtained them:
1) Although there are no national standards for social studies, there is a national framework for enhancing the rigor of K-12 civics, economics, geography, and history based on the ELA Common Core (http://www.socialstudies.org/system/files/c3/C3-Framework-for-Social-Studies.pdf). I learned about this from our curriculum director.
2) In the Common Core, there are standards for mathematical practice that all math teachers should seek to develop in their students, such as, "make sense of problems and persevere in solving them" (http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Practice/). I gained this bit of knowledge from a math teacher here at Stilwell.
3) A teacher can calculate his/her semester grades by total points from both quarters, in addition to averaging 1st and 2nd (or 3rd and 4th) quarter grades. Another teacher in the building taught me this one.
4) There is a program already installed on our desktops that allows us to draw on images from the document cameras, as well as record videos without using an SD card. One of the district's professional development curriculum facilitators showed me this program, which is called Ladibug.
Collaborating with my colleagues has allowed me the opportunity to learn these new skills, which I can pass on to others. I appreciate the interactions I have had with my co-workers this past week and am looking forward to future, collaborative learning experiences.
This is my last full week of maternity leave before returning to work and beginning my new position as an instructional coach. Although I am quite nervous to embark on this new journey, I am also excited for the adventures that it will bring. I am looking forward to collaborating with other teachers, supporting them in the classrooms, and in general making their jobs more manageable and enjoyable.
With that in mind, I feel like I will be extremely busy these last few days leading up to October 3rd. Therefore, I made a list of what I need to accomplish prior to returning to work.
1. Prepare my brain to use higher-order thinking skills.
These past seven weeks have been spent feeding Lucy, changing diapers, catching up on sleep, and watching television. I now plan to carve out time to catch up on emails, read some educational articles, and collaborate with other teachers in preparation for when I return to work.
2. Complete any final to-do items here at home.
Basically, I want to finish writing my thank-you cards and do a deep cleaning of the house.
3. Hope, pray, and wish for Lucy to decrease her nighttime feedings from two down to one.
It's no big deal now if she decides to wake up several times to eat, but there will be issues if she continues this once I return to the world of the working. I'm planning on having a stern talk with her about this, which I really think should solve the problem.
4. Enjoy my final moments at home with Lucy.
I can't believe she's already been here for a month. I know the time will fly, and before I know it she will be graduating from high school.
So, there's my list. I think it's doable. With that, I must get to work at accomplishing this list. I look forward to seeing my colleagues on Friday, October 3rd and diving in to my new position.
2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ut2_VFVU4W4
This video is an actual meeting between a teacher and a coach, and it will give you an idea of how meeting with a coach is informal and non-evaluative. Don't be fooled by what YouTube tells you is the length of the video. Only the first 3 minutes and 49 seconds contains the meeting between the teacher and coach.
I'm now 1 1/2 weeks into my maternity leave. Although I've spent the bulk of my time doing non-productive things like watching TV and checking Facebook (in addition to spending time with Lucy), I've also spent a small amount of time reading educational articles. One of the items I stumbled upon recently seemed to resonate with me, which is the power of video.
Jim Knight (the Instructional Coach guru out of the University of Kansas) did a webinar back in May on how videotaping yourself teaching can be a powerful tool. He said that we should periodically videotape ourselves because we do not have a clear picture of our practice and it is an easy tool to utilize.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that I HATE watching myself on video. Many times it seems to be counterproductive for me, as I spend the length of the video noticing physical flaws and cringing at the sound of my voice. But...I do see the value of the experience.
I remember back when I was student teaching I had to video tape myself, and my student teaching co-hort would analyze my teaching. I really thought I did a great job with the lesson; the students seemed to understand the material, my timing was good, and I was able to answer the students' questions. It wasn't until I watched the video with my classmates that I noticed some key areas for improvement. Mainly, I saw that as I talked, I like to stand behind the podium and rock back and forth. I was highly embarrassed, and I wondered if the students also noticed this during the lesson. I learned a valuable lesson from the experience, though, and to this day I always make a concentrated effort to walk around the room when talking to students for an extended period of time.
Jim Knight says when you videotape yourself, you should watch the video twice. Identify an area of focus during the first viewing, and analyze the area of focus during the second viewing. From there, you can identify a goal and method of practice to make improvements in your teaching.
When I return from maternity leave, I plan to videotape myself (with teacher permission, of course) in order to grow as an instructional coach. I'll even try to focus on my content and delivery, rather than the bags under my eyes from lack of sleep or those last ten pounds I still need to lose from having a baby.
If you are also interested in videotaping yourself teaching, Katie and I would be more than happy to assist with this process. We can videotape the lesson for you, sit down to analyze it with you afterwards, and set goals for future practice.
It's feels a little weird spending my mornings tucked away in the Instructional Coach office (which is behind the learning lab room) instead of surrounded by students. I look forward to getting out and about more often and observing, modeling, and assisting teachers. However, I have been very busy these first few days. Some of the highlights:
-working with reading and writing data to produce spreadsheets for 8th grade ELA teachers
-troubleshooting technology issues for teachers and students
-arranging meeting times for new teachers and veterans to better serve students
-planning upcoming project help with math, science, and social studies teachers
As I am sitting on the couch with my not quite one-week-old daughter, I thought I would take a moment to do something adult-like and read a professional article. Hopefully my brain hasn't completely turned to mush, and I accurately summarize this article from Learning Forward on how to keep PLCs focused on learning. It is important to remember the purpose of our PLCs as we begin this new school year. The reason our teams or departments gather together is to improve student learning. We may meet as a group (at least one time per week) to discuss student concerns, plan Tiger Time activities, co-plan, etc.; but if we are not building our skills and knowledge, then we are unable to improve the learning of the students. In order to keep the focus of PLCs on professional growth and improved student learning, our teams and departments should follow these three essential elements: continuous improvement, collective responsibility, and accountability. 1) Continuous Improvement- Team members should strive to continuously improve so that students and professionals are effectively learning. To do this, we should follow this cycle:
Analyze educator, student, and school data to identify student learning needs.
Define educator professional learning goals based on student learning needs.
Select and implement evidence-based designs for professional learning to achieve professional learning goals.
Provide job-embedded coaching and other forms of assistance to support transfer of learning.
Inform ongoing improvement in teaching, leadership, and learning.
Assess and evaluate the effectiveness of the professional learning.
Tap external assistance when necessary.
2) Collective Responsibility- We should build a culture of collective responsibility by sharing leadership roles and supporting each other in the learning process. To do this, we (as in teachers and administrators) must
Build a shared commitment to the success of all students.
Encourage all learning community members to share successes and challenges openly so they may benefit from the wisdom of the group.
Make sure that all teachers experiencing a challenge know they are not facing that challenge alone.
Establish opportunities for teachers and staff to regularly work and learn together toward a shared goal of ensuring a higher quality of instruction for students.
Give teachers and staff time to learn and work together.
Develop the ability of individuals to develop trust, take risks, and expose themselves to the vulnerability of open and honest feedback and growth.
3) Alignment and Accountability- Our PLCs need to be aligned with shared goals, and we should hold each other accountable to promote student and professional growth.
By following these three elements, our teams and departments will achieve the purpose of PLCs- improved student and adult learning.
Welcome to Stilwell Tiger's Eye. This blog will be used to communicate what Stilwell Instructional Coaches see and do. It will also be used to communicate new ideas and resources for the classroom. We hope to give insight as to what is happening in our classrooms and where we are headed.
