I loved having the opportunity to walk through our building today and see the many wonderful things people at Lone Tree are doing to create visible learning. I was proud of the many strategies I have visible in my room, from my writing success criteria to the concept mapping done by students to describe aspects of our conceptual curriculum. I think that I have done a nice job this year of establishing our three main areas of focus within our conceptual curriculum umbrella, so that my students have been exposed to our social studies and science curriculum in many different ways and understand the vocabulary. This will support us going forward because students will have many examples and experiences to draw from when they develop their yearlong impact projects. In other classrooms, I enjoyed seeing how many different grades have some type of student accountability organizers or personalized learning planners. In our case, fourth grade uses a workshop planner that students use to keep track of their "Must-Dos" on a weekly basis. For most of my students, this is a successful tool to track what they need to work on and what they have finished already during independent work times or when I am meeting with small groups of students. Some of the other examples of this that I saw today were very similar, but had more teacher input and less student ownership. I like that our workshop planner has more space for students to fill out their own "to do" list, and many spaces for them to make choices about what they will work on at each point of the day. Still, I loved seeing many different versions of this type of accountability as other options for students who may not benefit as much from the workshop planner we are currently using. One new example of inspiration that I got from my walk-through today was that I saw several examples of classroom data walls to support conceptual curriculum. We have discussed creating a fourth grade data wall to monitor LTE's energy usage, but previously we had discussed making that an interest project for students who were passionate about it. After seeing a few examples of people creating one data wall for their classroom, I think that we could begin a data wall of the school's energy usage at a classroom level using data that we have gathered on each month's energy usage. This could be a powerful visual for students to observe how energy levels change and how we might impact them. Our next steps will be following up with the person who provides us with energy reports to hopefully continue receiving this monthly data, and then using a wall in the classroom to display it.
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The last five mindframes in the book 10 Mindframes for Visible Learning: Teaching for Success by John Hattie and Klaus Zierer, in my opinion, related to focus and classroom environment. Giving and accepting feedback, collaborative learning, creating clear success criteria with students, fostering an environment of trust, and focusing on the language of learning are all aspects of a successful, positive classroom environment.
I have fostered a positive classroom environment this year by promoting lots of opportunities for students to work together and practice collaborative learning skills. In the book, the authors suggested that collaborative learning is a skill that should be taught, and that elementary school is a great place for students to learn these foundational skills. I would agree wholeheartedly that collaborative learning, and the skills necessary to work successfully with others, are well worth practicing at an elementary level. Students are not always exposed to opportunities that allow them to think critically and challenge them to work with others in order to be successful. My students participated in many of these activities at the beginning of the year to build classroom community, and we still complete collaborative learning activities roughly once per week to give them the chance to continue practicing those skills. For example, students practiced the Kagan "Square Game", where they had to work in groups of four to use 16 individual strips of paper to form designs with pre-determined numbers of squares. The trick was that every four strips of paper had a different design on them, and each student was only allowed to touch his or her own strips of paper. In a situation where one student may be tempted to "take charge" and another may sit back and watch, everyone had to work together and help their group members. This was also a great way for me to promote growth mindset, because when students got frustrated we were able to have meaningful conversations about why these skills may be necessary and how they could move forward. Academically, feedback and clear success criteria are directly related in my classroom and both play a role in a positive classroom environment. When we begin a new assignment, we discuss the success criteria (or what it would look like to be successful) as a class (or sometimes as a small group, if that assignment only applies to certain students). This allows students to provide feedback and ask questions so that I can help with any misconceptions. It creates a positive learning environment because students are quickly able to assess their individual goals and levels, and this motivates them to continue challenging themselves and working towards success. Clear success criteria, whether it be checklists or other formats, also make peer-peer or teacher-student feedback simple and actionable. Just as the "IKEA Effect" was discussed in our book, my students are empowered to take charge of their own learning goals and they are able to hold themselves accountable for their own progress because they are part of each step of the process. The chapter on "the language of learning" made me think about one of the first years of my teaching career, when I read the book Choice Words by Peter H. Johnston. It discusses, in depth, how students can internalize everything that teachers say, and how as a teacher, my tone sets the tone for the whole classroom. It provided examples of how to use empowering, positive language in all interactions throughout the day. Simple changes in sentence formatting can make big impacts on students. This was a powerful read for me and I always recommend it to others. Hattie and Zierer discussed "the chameleon effect" in 10 Mindframes as when "we unintentionally change our behavior to match that of others we interact with in our social environment, including our posture, casual movements, gestures, facial expressions, and speech tempo, to name but a few examples". This is just more proof that students see and hear everything that I, as their teacher, do and say throughout the day, and this is why I always try to approach conversations with students from a place of understanding and encouragement. The mindframe "I am a change agent and believe all students can improve" really spoke to me in the book 10 Mindframes for Visible Learning: Teaching for Success by John Hattie and Klaus Zierer. I loved that this chapter focused so much on growth mindset, which is something that aligns directly with what we do every day at LTE. It is always a goal of mine to help my students develop more of a growth mindset while they are in my classroom, and to encourage them to embrace challenges, rather than rushing to complete tasks or learning goals. In addition to trying to support my students in this way, one of the quotes mentioned in the book from Carol Dweck, the developer of growth mindset, stuck with me: "Growth mindset leads to expending more empathetic effort in contexts where empathy is challenging" (Murphy & Dweck, 2016, p.487). This is definitely a reason that I strive to help my students develop a growth mindset, because I can tell a big difference in how students respond to conflict when they have constructive coping skills. I also think that personally, I have improved my own growth mindset within the last few years, specifically in my communications with parents. I always try to be conscious of the fact that everyone I talk to has prior experiences that I am not aware of. If I communicate after considering what type of communication I would want to receive if I were discussing my own child and what may be going through that parent's mind, I find that my conversations are more successful and I am able to forge stronger parent-teacher relationships.
I also connected to both the fourth mindframe (above) and the fifth mindframe, "I strive for challenge and not merely 'doing your best'" through many of the academic procedures I have put in place in my classroom. Both mindframes discussed the importance of keeping students engaged, both to continually challenge them, and to pre-empt classroom disturbances. In my classroom, each student has personalized goals that he or she is aware of and is able to pursue at an individualized pace. For example, writing goals in my classroom are posted on the wall with exemplars on a numerical scale. For each "number" of writing, students can reference this wall to see what writing goal was added on to achieve that level of written work. I did not create these criteria myself and then introduce them to my students, but I collected examples of work from each student first, and then organized them based on strengths areas of need. This has provided a student-friendly structure for goal setting during writing in my classroom, and each student can clearly pinpoint where he or she is at and where they will go next. When students exceed the existing writing criteria, it is easy for me to add higher "numbers" of writing to the wall with exemplars. This structure is one way that I continually challenge my students and support each student in making personalized improvements. |
AuthorCourtney Hayes is currently a teacher at Lone Tree Elementary Magnet School in Colorado. She has teaching experience in both primary and intermediate grades, and is passionate about personalizing her instruction to meet the needs of all students. Archives
April 2021
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