Week 1: So What Do They Really Know?

This summer, I followed the Stenhouse Summer Blogstitute. A variety of amazing authors posted on their blog each week and readers were asked to respond in the comments. If the wealth of information shared in the blog posts wasn't enough of a reason to follow, anyone that shared a comment each week was entered into a drawing to win five (5, people!!) Stenhouse titles.

I was a lucky winner (yes, I did a happy book dance when I found out) and Cris Tovani's So What Do They Really Know? was one of the books I requested.

I could not be more pleased with my selection! After reading the first few chapters, I realized I wanted to share what I was reading with some of my teacher friends. And this little bloggy book study was born. This week I reread chapters 1 & 2, highlighting the points that stood out to me.

Chapter One
Here's a favorite quote from the first two chapters (found in chapter one):

"Teachers don't need any more numerical 'data.' What they need is validation to use the data that matters most--like student work and student talk--to help them figure out next steps for the learners in their educational care."

I connect to this book on several levels -- her sour taste for assessment along with the desire to really know her students quickly grabbed my interest. I feel exactly the same way. But I do like that right away she lets the reader know she doesn't feel like assessment deserves all the blame:

"I realized that assessment wasn't the enemy; it was the way it was being used to judge and punish instead of inform and help educators get smarter about teaching and learning."

 I also thought her comparison between multiple choice tests and open-ended questions was spot on! Just because a student can ace a multiple choice test does not mean they know the material. I think the same is true in reverse. Who hasn't been completely bewildered or frustrated when a student bombs a test over material they know?

If you know me at all, you've probably seen my eye-rolling sneer when the topic of standardized testing comes up. I abhor the district benchmarks, grumble about the STAAR, and shake my head at any assessment that barely skims the surface of what my students know and the progress they have made from where we began. I really identified with Tovani's thoughts on how she had mostly ignored the assessments she was forced to give, even while feeling it wasn't the best way to handle things. I often feel the same way. Finding a balance between the standardized testing students must take and my personal feelings on assessment is a difficult thing for me!

Chapter one ended with our first challenge -- write and define your definition of assessment. Again, this really challenges my over-analytic brain to make some concrete decisions! But if I have to put it in words, this is my working definition of assessment: any interaction or work example that shows a picture of what a student knows and understands at a given time. This can include what seems like an infinite number of possibilities. Audio clips, video, photographs, written work, blog posts ... really, anything that I can use to inform me on where my student is and what they need from me to grow -- that's assessment.

Chapter Two
You guys! I had a hard time narrowing down my favorite quote from this chapter, but here you go:

"When I know my students well, I am a better teacher."

This chapter involved a lot of fist pumping and excited book waving about in the air. I may have read sections to my husband and then stared at him all doe-eyed expecting him to engage me in deep, meaningful conversation about the importance of getting to know your students.

This did not happen.

Instead, I'll share here, because I know you guys will be much more excited. First of all, you need to know that I have been using the Conversation Calendars for about a month in my classroom. I love them! I started out letting students just write to me about anything they wanted. I was a little nervous, thinking they might not give me much to work with. I mean, I'm no Cris Tovani -- maybe those calendars are magical in her classroom, but in mine they were just going to be extra paper littering my classroom floor.

But wow -- I mean, honestly. Without the calendars, I wouldn't have learned that one of my students blames herself for her parents divorce. I wouldn't know the struggles one of them has every day with a difficult sibling. I wouldn't know many things. And they might not know how much I care. But every Tuesday and Thursday we write back and forth to each other and learn about one another and become a tighter community. It's golden. I just love it. Have I mentioned that already?

A couple weeks ago, I started asking them to write to me about the read aloud we're doing in collaboration with The Global Read Aloud. We're reading The One and Only Ivan and this is a book that practically begs for hours of rich discussion. It doesn't matter how much we discuss in class, everyone always has more to share. So we are sharing through the calendar and I am learning so much about them as people and as readers -- I know who is grasping the deeper themes and who is paying attention to word choice and figurative language. I can tell which of them could benefit from some note taking as I read (sticky notes, sketches, word captures, whatever works) and which do better to just sit and listen. It is  a magical thing, but not just in Tovani's room. It's working in mine, too. When we finish this book, I'll have students start responding to their own reading. I'm excited to see where that leads us.

I feel strongly that student-teacher relationships make all the difference in the success of every student. Brain research tells us that all humans need to be enveloped in a safe environment for learning to take place. I work hard to make my students feel secure enough to take risks and explore learning.

The challenges in this chapter really stuck with me. It's so important that we show our students that we see them -- not just that they are a body in our classroom, but that we acknowledge their importance in the universe, and we respond to it.

Tovani's student surveys seem like a great way to let students know that you are invested in their success.  Next week I plan to ask my students what they believe their role is as a reader. What do they think about all the reading we do? What importance do they put in it? I'm interested in those answers.

The challenge at the end of chapter two also included asking readers to make a list of student needs and to-do's. In my Evernote app, each student has a notebook with a list like this (created after my first read of this chapter). I love having this in the app, because anytime I learn something new about a student I can use my phone to enter new info into their note. Before reading about this, I always thought getting to know my students was something I was pretty good at. But having this ongoing list keeps it at the front of my mind, and I find I'm learning more about my students than ever before.

Next Week
For next week, read chapters three and four and be ready to share some more reflections!

A Clear Mind

As a follow up to the lesson we did in class Monday, today I talked to my students about having a clear mind. I'd love to take credit for this fabulous visual representation of what happens in our mind when we get all jumbly-bumbly from the stresses around us, but all props must go to Susan Kaiser Greenland, author of The Mindful Child and the Inner Kids program, which teaches mindfulness through games and activities.  Check it out!
But in the meantime, here's Susan using a jar of water and baking soda to show kids how breath awareness can help us calm our minds when life gets crazy.

I did the same activity with my class today, which was especially fitting as we had a science test that they were a little worried about. Before adding the baking soda to the water we talked about how we feel when we are calm, taking time to notice where we feel "calmness" in our body. We also talked about what it feels like when things around us start to bug us. I brought up our hula hoop experience, so we were able to add in a discussion about how it feels when people get in our personal space or when we allow others to start making choices for us. My students impressed me with their ability to define how and where they feel their frustrations -- in their chest, their stomachs, their head, and one student even said in his fist! As we talked about that, I added in baking soda and had them call out all the things that bother them -- the room got louder and louder as the water turned into a thick white cloud.
And then I asked them to take a moment and just breathe. I told them that when I need to get control of myself, I sometimes image that there is a string attached to my head that is pulling my body straight and tall, and then I take a nice, long deep breathe. So we all did that together. One of my kids quietly commented that the water was beginning to clear up.
We talked about how nice it is to have a way to let the frustrations that come into our mind sink away and focus on ourselves instead.
Throughout the day they brought up the jar, which I left sitting on my desk all day. They also wrote about their experience and how they thought they could use picturing the jar in their mind along with taking three deep breaths to help destress. At the end of the day, a few of my students even said they used this technique during our test and were looking forward to trying it at home when their brothers or sisters started bugging them!
Here's one example of their writing today:

I'm excited to check in with them tomorrow to see how it went!

A Mindful Hula Hoop

Last week I spent three days in San Francisco at the 31st Learning and the Brain Conference. I had the privilege of listening to powerful presentations from Dr. Dan Siegel, Susan Kaiser Greenland, and Michael Posner, among several other researchers and authors in the field of neuroscience and education . A common theme throughout the conference centered on attention, self control, and mindfulness. In fact, I had the good fortune to be there at the same time that Jon Kabat-Zinn was speaking at a benefit for Mindful Schools, and enjoyed an evening at Berkeley gleaning a stronger understanding of the need for mindfulness education in our schools.

Seventeen hours packed full of statistics, graphs, anecdotes, research, and practical application is a lot to try to synthesize back into one cohesive framework to take back to the classroom, so last night I was tossing and turning while visions of attentive, well-rounded children danced in my head. I came up with a couple ideas on how to use simple methods to begin teaching my class the benefit of executive function and mindfulness.

First, a quick definition: executive function sounds super fancy, but it is really a simple concept -- think about a game of Simon Says. When playing Simon Says, a child must suppress the urge to perform the action they hear when the speaker leaves out the trigger words "Simon says..." Executive function is all about impulse control, attentiveness, and self-regulation. Mindfulness in a school setting is used to help students learn to focus attention and concentration, build their social-emotional skills, and reduce stress.

My class this year has struggled with self-control, social cues, and boundaries. I wanted desperately to find a way to use all these new tools to help my kiddos learn to bring some balance to their life.

And suddenly, it came to me.

Hula Hoops.

This morning I gave each student in my class a hula hoop. We held our hoops around our bodies and I instructed each of them to drop their hoops. I asked them if they had enough space to sit, stand, hop, do jumping jacks, and numerous other stunts. Laughing, they all agreed they had plenty of room to do just about everything they needed to do, and could still talk to each other without difficulty.

We held our hoops again and held them up above our heads. I told them to look up through the hoop at the sky and imagine that the space around their hoop extended all the way up to the clouds and beyond. This was their space. This was the area that they could control. I asked them if it was possible for them to control anyone else's hoops while they were focused on holding up their own. They decided quickly that they could only focus on their hoop. I demonstrated walking around them without touching their hoops, without overlapping or bumping into anyone and asked if they thought it would be easy or difficult. Naturally, they all replied that it would be easy. So I gave them a few minutes to jump, run, skip, and hop around each other -- but the one rule was that their hoop needed to touch only their hands and not run into anyone else's space. Afterward, we regrouped and they reported back it was as simple as they thought it would be.

Next, I asked them to form a big circle around me with their hoops. Immediately they began telling each other what to do. A loud chorus of, "Hey, you need to move! No, go there!" and many other comments were exchanged. A completely ill-formed shape spread out around me, resembling something more akin to the blob than a circle. I reminded them that they had all agreed earlier that they could only control their own hoops, so to form the circle they needed to focus on just their hoop and let everyone else do the same. Very quickly an almost perfect circle had surrounded me.

"Wow!" I practically shouted, "That was fast! Why do you think it worked so well?"

Everyone was bubbling with answers about how much easier it was to work together when they focused on what they needed to do, rather than telling other people how to do the job. 

So of course, I walked around the circle and removed every other hoop. I asked each hoopless child to step into a hoop with another person. I asked them to do everything they had done before -- still not touching the person next to them. They tried to sit, stand, hop, and even do jumping jacks. They were not happy. I asked them to pick up their shared hoop and walk, run, skip, and hop around the playground. This resulted in at least one group tumbling to the ground and a few arguments. I asked them to come back to make a new, smaller circle. This almost never happened.

I asked what happened. Why did they seem to have so many problems this time?

Unanimously they decided it was much easier to take care of their own needs when they were in complete control of their own space.

We put the hula hoops away, went back to class and talked for a few minutes about what we noticed, and then I asked them to write without stopping for ten minutes about their experience with the hoops, what they thought it meant about self-control, and how they could keep the hula hoop image in their mind to help them think about coming back to their own space and making thoughtful choices.

I was amazed at their insight, the lessons they learned that I hadn't even anticipated, and the way it changed their mindset for the rest of the day.

This is just the first step, the introduction, the tiniest spark to get them rolling in a direction that I hope will serve to set them on a course of mindful awareness that will last their lifetime.

And all it took was a hula hoop.

Not bad for a Monday.