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.
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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. After beginning the book 10 Mindframes for Visible Learning: Teaching for Success, I am excited to continue reading. The first three mindframes that the book focuses on, "I am an evaluator of my impact on student learning", "I see assessment as informing my impact", and "I collaborate with my peers and students" all helped to further define my personal take on the systems I have in place in my classroom.
In my educational career, I have experienced very different formats of student learning and teacher evaluation. As a new teacher, my lesson plans were scripted up to six weeks in advance and submitted for approval every two weeks. I frequently had difficulty teaching along the very specific lines of those lessons, and at that time I wasn't sure why. However, as a more seasoned teacher in a different setting, I now know that the learning process varies from one child to another just as much as growth varies from teacher to teacher. In their discussion of the first mindframe, "I am an evaluator of my impact on student learning", the authors describe that learning is not linear, and differs based on where each student starts at. This is much more representative of the way that I teach now - my lesson plans are very flexible to allow for moment-by-moment changes, and created each week based on where my students are at. I spend the beginning of the year putting systems in place so that each student knows what his or her own personal goals are and how to work to achieve them, so that when students have time to work they are all aware of what they should individually be focusing on. The most meaningful commentaries to me from the mindframe "I see assessment as informing my impact", were that time on task should really represent the time that a student spends on personalized tasks (tasks geared toward that student's goals and needs). The authors also specified that the focus of assessment should be more on how students perform during the process of learning and benchmarks along the way, rather than just on one cumulative score or grade. I really connected to both of these statements because I support that if a task is not at a student's personal level or that student does not have "buy-in" for that task, they most likely will not be as focused on it as if they were aware of their own personal data and goals and knew that this task would help them reach them. Through the systems that I use in my classroom and through frequent goal conferencing, I am both assessing how they are progressing through the process of learning and I am ensuring that each student maximizes their own time on task. Finally, focusing on collaborating with my peers and my students, I have always felt that this was one of my strengths as a teacher. However, I enjoyed that this chapter reframed collaboration in a slightly different manner. Hattie and Zierer propose that the purpose of collaboration is not just to share learning activities on a surface level, but also to evaluate a teacher's own effectiveness and how students are responding to that teacher's performance. Even if this is something that I have always done, this book outlined it more clearly as not just convenient, but a necessary function of collaborating as a successful educator. Teachers who may have been taught to operate as "lone wolves" may end up being more competitive than collaborative, which I find to be extremely stressful, so I have always enjoyed the collaborative piece of teaching. |
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
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