Having fun with public speaking

We had a lot of fun in class this past Friday.

Because it was Patron’s Day, we had a special schedule with 20 minute classes. Twenty minutes is too short for some lessons but perfect for practicing public speaking.

To be honest, I always considered myself a writing teacher. Even though I require presentations as part of every class I teach, I never stopped to consider what I should do to prepare the students except to remind them to speak loudly and clearly and make eye contact with the audience.

Several years ago, I visited the Science Learning Academy with my principal to investigate the way Chromebooks were being used in the classes there. I learned a great deal about Chromebook classrooms that day, but I learned even more about students and public speaking.

When we created the Digital Literacy course, a project based course, we began to look at the ways that students should deliver their presentations. My colleagues and I were all too familiar with students reading slides, and since we were creating a course that would require presentations, we started to consider how to help our students do a better job with public speaking, specifically with presenting information orally to a class.

These ideas and others are now part of what I teach to all of my students. And what I love is that I start making visible the kinds of things that good speakers do by having some fun with Tongue Twisters, something I learned from my PLN coach Bernadette Janis.

Each group is assigned a particular Tongue Twister, and each student in that group gets a slip with the words. The directions are simple. Students are directed to practice together and decide the best way to present the Tongue Twister multiple times. I usually say they need to say the Tongue Twister one time more than the number of people in their group. I invite them to consider ways to make this work. Each student could say it once and then the whole group one time together. The entire group could recite it together the requisite number of times. Or they could come up with any way that works for their group.

Over the past few years I have been doing this, there have been groups with students that have difficulty with speaking. Students with speech issues and international students are not able to say the sentence alone, but when they are part of a choral group, they can dip in and out of saying the Tongue Twister and actually practice fluency as part of the exercise.

On a whole, the kids laugh a great deal. And the rule is if anyone makes a mistake, the whole group starts over from the beginning. Sometimes they laugh so hard, they have to restart four or five times.

I find myself smiling. I smile because I watch the student whose parent told me that she has a great fear of public speaking as she stands in front of her peers laughing and trying to say some silly words. I smile because the groups that have students who cannot speak fluently take care of their teammates. They find ways to support each other. I smile because they are practicing speaking in front of the class in a non-threatening and supported way.

Of course, we have many more aspects of public speaking to cover. I will model for them. I will find ways to support them, reviewing key points like enunciation, projection, eye contact, extemporaneous speaking. But I am so happy that the first time my students stood in front of the class they were laughing and having fun.

Hopefully, they will feel like Brittany, a former Digital Literacy student, who in a recent article in the student online newspaper said that not only did she learn tech skills in that class, but that she “was able to become more comfortable speaking in front of people from this course.”

Out of the mouths of teenagers.

Coaching writing with a growth mindset

Oct2

As an English teacher, I have taught writing to many students of all abilities. And how I teach writing, really coach writing, is applicable to all of my students. But my AP students require a more intensive experience, and I am trying out something new this year that I plan to apply to the way I approach writing with all of my students.

My AP students need to write many essays over the course of our year together. Coaching them to be prepared to sit for the AP exam in May requires some serious hard work–on my end and theirs.

Moving them from writing as sophomores to writing as college freshmen who are really juniors in high school is tricky. After all, they are only sixteen or seventeen, so even though their brains are at a point for the greatest growth since infancy, their ability to handle stress is not well developed.

In my experience, many of my students take criticism of their writing personally. Sometimes I think that the fear of being “wrong” causes them undue stress. And nothing can kill good writing like stress. That is why I have segued from a “Leave your ego at the door” mindset to a “Not yet” mindset.

Past Practices

Literally, there is a sign above my door, given to me years ago from a student, that says “Leave your ego at the door.” I used to tell my students to practice this in the hopes that my criticism would not hurt their feelings.

Honestly, no matter what class, I approach all of my students’ writing respectfully. I use green pen instead of a bloody red one. I find something noteworthy in their essays and draw their attention to the positive aspects of their work.

I attempt to honor their thoughts and words and coach the best expression without promoting my ideas or words. I always explain the rubric. I conference with them about their writing. I read thesis statements and outlines and first drafts. Furthermore, I look more at the process to help them get to the product.

I have had success with those practices, but recently I have found the benefits of approaching writing instruction with a growth mindset. It helps my students feel better about their work, and by doing that, helps them be open for improving as writers.

Not yet

The AP English Language and Composition nine point rubric is what I always use for any essays my AP students write. I train them on the nuances of the rubric, and they become quite skilled at recognizing the score for any student essay they read.

There is a grade attached to each point in the rubric as well. However, this year, anytime an essay scores in the inadequate or unsuccessful range, I am writing “Not Yet” instead of the score.

This idea of Not Yet is from Carol Dweck’s work with growth mindset. She reports about a school who does not give any student a failure on the report card; they receive, instead, the grade “Not Yet”.

My students said that the difference between a failure and “Not Yet” is notable. One makes them feel like giving up; the other encourages them to keep trying. If I want to practice what I preach–that revision is the key to good writing–then I definitely do not want them giving up and feeling defeated.

Comments

As I become more aware of how helpful (and necessary) fostering a growth mindset is for my students, I am working hard to respond to their writing in different ways.

Even though I have taught writing for almost all of my 27 years of teaching, I have taken a hard look at the kind of feedback I have given my students. Although I have praised kids for what they have done well, I have noticed that in the past, more often the bulk of the paper might have marks pointing out content issues or grammar mistakes.

This year, I am still noting areas that need support, but I am circling what needs attention instead and trying to comment more often on what is going well. I am trying to be more purposeful in writing a response that comments on what is good and asking guiding questions to help students think about what needs work.

Mistakes vs Errors

When students review their papers, I now ask them to determine if the things I noted that need work are mistakes or errors. In a recent discussion, my students intuited the difference quickly; a mistake is doing something wrong they really know how to do, and an error is doing something wrong because they do not know how to do it.

Drilling down on the difference is important. My students can create a personalized checklist of common mistakes, and they can take ownership for relearning the content they never mastered. One student’s singular comma splice might be a typo; another’s might signal the need for a deep review of sentence structure.

Language

Sometimes words hurt more than actions. When my AP students would ask me what their grade was on a paper, I would frequently say, “You got a five.” Or a six. Or a two.

That is about as close as I could get to making them feel like THEY were the SCORE. I am working hard this year on changing my response. “Your essay scored a five.” Or a six. Or a two. That way, there is a differentiation between the assessment and the person. No person should be a number. A student’s essay meets the criteria for a score, but the student is not the essay. This distinction in words also builds some distance from ownership, and hopefully that will make it easier for my students to see their essays not as an extension of themselves, but as one of many things that they are willing to change in order to learn more.

Taking a risk is easier when you have the chance to recoup from a failure. If I want my kids to become better writers, they need to take risks. If they take risks, they have to be okay with failure. And if they fail, they cannot see that as the end of the world. Rather, they need to see it as part of the normal process of learning to write well.

Teaching writing is a very personal experience. There are as many ways to teach as there are people who do. My way might not work for other teachers, but hopefully it will help all of my students to have a better experience with writing.

Stay on top with Newsela

Sep25

Last year, when I was going over some SAT questions with my AP students, the overwhelming majority got one rather easy question wrong. We drilled down on the reason, and together we figured out that the entire question hinged on one vocabulary word–cityscape.

Frankly, I did not think that was a word that most juniors in high school would find unfamiliar. And I realized, yet again, that my students lack background knowledge of vocabulary and ideas because they do not read as much as I would like.

While we work at trying to make our students good readers who read lots of things because they like to read, we also need to expose them to other texts to shore up that store of background knowledge which is so important not only for standardized tests, but for life.

Enter NEWSELA. Newsela is a nonfiction grade 2-12 reading program, available now in browser or iOS, that takes news stories from nationally acclaimed news sources like the Washington Post or Scientific America, and rewrites the articles into five different lexile versions. Teachers can assign the same content to each student in a class, differentiating for reading level, but allowing all students the ability to discuss the same information. There are quizzes for each article that are aligned with Common Core standards as well as writing prompts. Even though ELA is part of the title, this is a program that can work for every teacher of every subject.

Notably, with Newsela teachers can help build background knowledge AND help improve student reading skills.

Free vs Pro

One of the best programs for helping kids practice the kinds of skills that are part of the Common Core, Newsela has two options for most teachers, the free and the pro. The free portion of Newsela is fairly robust; the pro version offers significant and worthwhile options that allow both teachers and students to annotate articles and interact with each other’s comments. It also allows teachers to customize writing prompts. At my school, we are fortunate to have the pro version, but we are still learning the many features.

However, for all schools, I think the number one feature that the pro version offers is data. Teachers can view individual student progress and whole class progress. Most impressive is that fact that administrators can see schoolwide (and districtwide) data. As we are looking for ways to compile and access data to improve instruction, Newsela is a gold mine.

Content teachers

Newsela offers articles in content areas including Science, War and Peace, Law, Money, Health, and Arts. Content area teachers can assign current event articles that not only increase student content knowledge, but support the literacy standards for the content area as well.

As SATs start to tease out the scores across Science Literacy and Social Studies Literacy, Newsela is a game changer for the high school content teacher.

Google Classroom integration

There are two ways the Google Classroom integration feature helps the teacher. First of all, teachers can import their entire class into Classroom at once. Teachers create an account at Newsela and follow the directions for logging in with Google. After you create your classes, simply sync your classes with Classroom, and each student is already enrolled in Newsela; they simply sign in using the Google sign in option.

But that’s not all! When you want to assign an article, you can share it using the same share button for email, twitter, and facebook. Using the dropdown menu, choose the Google Classroom icon and you will be taken right to Classroom to create an assignment.

Other features

Teachers have the ability to choose articles based on content or reading standards. Or both. The implications for using Newsela to track students progress and concentrate on one of the skills that are featured is mind boggling.

Another cool feature of Newsela is the ability to curate related articles into one set for thematic study or for working on synthesis writing. You can create your own text sets or use the ones already established.

In addition to everything else, there are great getting started guides, interesting webinars, and even training to become a certified Newsela Educator so experienced Newsela teachers can share the amazing features and capabilities of Newsela in workshops and conferences.

If you have not tried Newsela, please do. And if you have the pro version at your school, please take advantage of it.

Strategies for SAT prep–helping students increase scores and decrease anxiety

Sep18

We are just a few weeks into school, and already PSATs are looming, with other standardized tests quickly lining up behind. In this era where there seems increasing emphasis on numbers, there are a few things that we as teachers can do to lessen our students’ anxiety and help them achieve the highest score they can earn.

We know that the best test prep comes from rich academic experience–and lots of reading–but our students may need help in navigating how to approach these tests, familiarizing themselves with the format, and determining areas to pinpoint for improvement. Above all, we are in the delicate position of trying to help them get the highest scores without making our students feel like the score is the only measure of their success–and certainly not a measure of their worth.

Hopefully, some of these tips will help you as they have helped me to create a classroom where the students are developing strategies to maximize their performance and minimize their apprehension.

Practice makes perfect

Arguably the best SAT and PSAT prep comes from Khan Academy, who has partnered with the College Board. In fact, you can register your students with Khan Academy, and their skills from past PSATs are analyzed to provide an individualized program for each student.

It is not difficult to do, but there are several steps. Here is how to do it.

Have your students register at collegeboard.com.
Make a teacher account at khanacademy.org.
Create classes for your students. Note the CODE for each account.
Have your students register at khanacademy.org.
Tell them to allow Khan to access their scores from previous PSATs. This will require them to sign into their College Board account once.
Tell them to go to to their profile and select “Coach”.
There they enter the class code.
If your students are already registered with another teacher, all YOU have to follow are steps 2 and 3, and all they have to follow are steps 6 and 7.

Voila! You now have access to the work your students will do. You can get a weekly email reporting on their work for the week. You can also send them messages of encouragement at the same time. At this time, teachers cannot get a report on the time students spend on SAT work, but you will have access to different missions they complete and badges they earn.

Khan also offers six practice tests for students to work through.

Go to the source

The College Board website offers a wealth of information, too, although their partnership with Khan is outstanding. One of the great features from the College Board is the SAT question of the day. There is an app for that!

Practice books

Although I do not like to teach to a test, I do believe that practice books–for SATs or AP tests or any other test–are a good tool. This year we have done away with our student vocabulary books and replaced them with Princeton Review SAT books for juniors and seniors and PSAT books for freshman and sophomores.

Recently, our math and ELA teachers met together to discuss how to work together to help students prepare for the test using the book as a guide. Several innovative ideas came from that meeting, including using the prep book to support skills practice as those skills are taught. Furthermore, since the students take the test with a pencil in hand (as opposed to online) simulating the testing situation and familiarizing students with the layout is helpful.

Growth Mindset and Grit

One of the best test preps I know is psychological . Fostering a growth mindset in students helps them to lessen the fears that often accompany such high stakes testing. When students are taught to analyze mistakes as a way to learn, they develop resilience to difficulties. No matter our position on such testing, the truth is that students HAVE to take standardized tests. Students need to learn to view the tests as tools to use for learning instead of tools that determine their intelligence.

Using the Khan Academy program, students are able to note which skills they need to develop further, and thinking about how they can work out a better solution to those problems helps further metacognitive practices that they can transfer to other situations.

Above all, teaching students that tests are not designed to trip them up but to let them shine is a great boost. When students stop competing for a score–whether with classmates or themselves–and learn to view the results in a more detached manner, then they can approach it with much less fear.

SATs are not going away anytime soon. And just like a photograph, which captures just a split second in time and may not be as flattering as we wish, SATS so to capture that split second in time in terms of learning and test taking skills. Nevertheless, the lessons involved in learning from mistakes will last our students a lifetime.

Changing the nation–one ripple at a time

Sep11

On this sacred day, the day we will “Never Forget,” I find myself contemplating what it means to be an American.

For me, the privilege of being an American, as first stated in the Declaration of Independence, speaks to how a group of dedicated, visionary people were able to create the groundwork for a great nation, but as Lincoln said, a nation that other nations would test “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

When we look at the reports on how the United States stands with other nations in education, we are right to be concerned.

Newly canonized Saint Teresa said, “I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.”

The waters wherein I can create ripples are in my classroom.

That is why, with only two class days in the opening week, both of which were shortened because of extreme weather to a total of just over 60 minutes, my focus was on planting the seed of Growth Mindset in my students.

To be certain, the ideas that underlie growth mindset are nothing new. In fact, any movement in education that I can think of that is worthwhile has been tested over the years under many different auspices. What is good in education will always remain; but being able to name and explain such an abstract idea is what makes the growth mindset movement able to take root.

There is research that supports the results that fostering a growth mindset can have. Just a few weeks ago, The New York Times ran a story about the effect of growth mindset and college retention.

My students and I accomplished a great deal in 60 minutes. Mindful of creating a community of learners, I did not start with the course description and requirements. I welcomed them and led a community building activity that incorporated reading, writing, listening, and speaking–truly the real “curriculum” of my courses. Eventually we segued into supplies and ideas, but not before laying the groundwork for fostering a growth mindset.

Here are some comments from their exit slips about what stood out for them from the first two days of class:

I learned that this class will not only teach ELA, but will teach each student that failures can happen, but they aren’t permanent.
I learned that failure shouldn’t keep you from trying to succeed at something.
Today I learned that success doesn’t come without a few failures.
I learned that everybody fails at one point or another, so you should not feel so badly when you do. Just pick yourself up and try harder.
One thing I learned today was it doesn’t matter how many times you fail. You should always keep trying and never give up or lose hope.
Today I learned that remaining positive about failure may increase your likelihood of success.
If you are persistent and don’t give up, you will succeed.
Sometimes to really appreciate a success, you need to fail. Failure is what drives you to work harder.

I know that what I do in my classroom will not affect the United States. Rather, what the students in my room can do with the right mindset, THAT is what can ensure “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The future of our nature is in the hands of those sitting in our classrooms. Let’s give them the tools they need to work hard, to take risks, to accept failure, and to try again so they can forge a solid future for our country.

Tech–making teaching easier or harder?

Sep4

Recently, I was asked if I thought technology made teaching easier or harder.

I answered yes.

To understand why I think it is both, let me recount some pivotal moments in my life as a teacher.

During my first year teaching, in 1981, the principal game me a TI-99 computer for the classroom. The first personal computer, the TI-99 was a novelty to my students whose only previous exposure to digital devices was Atari.

The students were amazed and thrilled to have access to this computer. We spent hours learning how to “code”–using BASIC to make a letter or a word appear, rising from the bottom left of the screen to the apex back to the right bottom. In that instance, the tech WAS the learning.

Years later, during my hiatus from teaching as a stay at home mom, after we already had a home computer for dial up Internet, I took a continuing ed course to learn more about Word. I remember the thirst I had for learning the ins and outs of “save” and “edit.” I told my teacher how I would love to teach this. I remember her saying that they would prefer to teach teachers the technology than to take a tech person and have them teach it. That stuck with me, but still, in that case, the tech was the learning.

When I returned to teaching 21 years ago, I was in a school that was rapidly becoming a center of digital excellence. Ryan had already developed a Writing Skills course, still in existence today, where students were encouraged to develop a toolkit for writing that would help them become more confident through high school and beyond. The school had established a relationship with Prentice Hall at the time, and Writing Skills showcased their new tech program, Writer’s Solution. Although rudimentary compared to today’s programs, this program helped students to “check” their writing in other areas other than Spelling. The program included components, video and eventually online, that offered REAL authors talking about their REAL writing. This was the first time that I saw the tech becoming the tool, and not the focus of the learning.

As we continued, the tech changed at a dizzying pace. Suddenly, we were talking about the Read Write Web and the Internet 2.0. Other publishers entered the race and there were products galore. The idea of the cloud was at once terrifying and exhilarating. And during this time period, most kids started to outpace most teachers in their understanding of tech.

When Social Media became mainstream, the students yet again surpassed most teachers’ use and understanding. Nevertheless, much professional development exposed us to new ideas and pushed us to “meet the kids where they were.” The tech seemed cumbersome sometimes, and time could easily be frittered away troubleshooting and getting the tech to work. Sometimes, the tech slowed down the learning.

However, slowly and steadily, the tech became simultaneously ubiquitous and invisible. Chrome and chromebooks permitted easy logins for students and expedited the time needed to connect. Google Classroom and GAFE offered us tools that worked easily and almost intuitively so we could maximize teaching time and learning impact. Suddenly, the tech was supporting the learning.

Now, we stand at the dawn of the Internet of things. I am not sure where tech and the classroom will head in the next ten years, but I do know this. Since 1981 when I first stood in front of a classroom until now, the changes in technology have supported learning in a sort of geometric progression. Nevertheless, the necessity of advanced reading and writing skills are in many ways the same as they were when I was graduated from high school 40 years ago,

The ability to vet information, to critically analyze writing, to develop positions based on evidence, to argue, to explain, to narrate–all of these skills are what still remain as WHAT we teach. HOW we teach it may have expanded to include websites in addition to magazines. The wealth of information, good and bad, has multiplied in staggering percentages. The graphic features have become sophisticated to the degree that is unfathomable. But the skills that we need to teach remain the same.

Has tech made teaching easier or harder?

Yes.

What’s in your backpack?

Aug28

We are down to the final few days before school begins. When I was a child, I loved the feel of a new school year. I loved the barely perceptible change of fall quietly slipping past summer. I loved the clean and crisp uniforms and unscuffed shoes. The lightly stocked school bag, holding folders waiting to be filled, copybooks waiting to be inscribed, and crayons waiting to lose their sharp point.

I still like those things. But as an adult, my backpack is filled with new and exciting school supplies. This is a good time to take inventory of those “things” that we could have ready in our backpack.

A growth mindset. Starting the year accepting the fact that not everything we will do will be perfect is, well, reassuring. As teachers, we tend to be hard on ourselves and dislike making mistakes. Long ago, I had a wake up call that made me realize the humility that I needed in order to accept both my humanness and the likelihood that I would experience failure as a teacher.

Years ago, as the school paper moderator, I let go to press an edition which centered on the canonization of St. Katharine Drexel. Only when the stacks of papers were circulated to the students and faculty did I notice that “Katharine” was spelled in every possible permutation on the front page. Katherine, Catherine, Catharine…it was all there. I was mortified. After all, as the moderator and ELA teacher, I read and edited the “final” version of each article. I went to my principal before he could find me. In the middle of my apology, he stopped me. “Do you think YOU are perfect? The only perfect human ever was Jesus.”

I was humbled to my core. Perfection is not a human requirement. Learning from mistakes is part of the human condition. It was in those kinds of moments that I started to find comfort in having a growth mindset, long before I heard about mindset. The idea of a sterling work ethic was delivered to me by my parents; the notion that I could take risks and learn from failure was put into words by Carol Dweck.

As a teacher, I have realized that having a growth mindset is the only way I can improve my craft. And fostering a growth mindset for my students is the best gift I could “teach” them.

If you are new to the idea of mindsets, you can begin learning about it by looking at the resources available at mindsetonline.com. A growth mindset is good for the teacher and the students.

Literacy strategies. Our students are required to read increasingly complex text at a time when some report not liking to read at all–not for pleasure and certainly not for “work”. As teachers, we are aware that the things kids do not like to do are often the things they do not know how to do well. Of course our students can read. But we need to nurture that skill and support that skill all the way through their education, providing them with ways to deal with different texts.

Check out some of the literacy strategies available all over the Internet. Reading rockets, Teach Thought, and Read Write Think offer a wealth of cross curricular information.

Want to really step up your skill in teaching literacy skills? Sign up for one of the Penn Literacy Network courses, some available online.

A little Kelly Gallagher. The best way to improve student writing is through reading. Kelly Gallagher offers tons of ways to make that happen, from mentor texts, to Article of the Week, to reading in class and much, much more. Read one of his books, check out his resources, maybe even attend one of his conferences. There is something for everyone, no matter your grade or content area.

A little John Collins. Another great name in teaching writing, John Collins also offers lots of advice online. Learn about his Ten Percent Summary and Type 1 and 2 writing. The last two will help you assign more writing with less grading! Just the act of writing more is proven to improve student writing.

Some new tech. Our students live in the world of technology. It is not necessary, however, that everything has to be done online, but finding ways to integrate technology to maximize student engagement and achievement is something we need to concentrate on. Whether you are a newbie or a master in ed tech, try something new! For some great ideas, check out this article!

I am sure that there are many more items that we could have in our backpack. What do you think is most important?

Gallagher and Dweck–perfect together

Aug21

Just a few weeks away from the beginning of school, I am seriously thinking about what one new thing I am going to concentrate on this year.

Mentor texts is the winner for teaching strategies. But growth mindset is the overarching winner for teaching philosophy. Is there a way that using mentor texts supports growth mindset?

Ever since I attended Kelly Gallagher’s workshop in May, I have understood the importance of explicitly teaching using mentor texts. I say “explicitly” because even though that is what I have been doing this all along I never told the students about it, and I never fully developed their role in finding mentor texts for their future learning.

Gallagher explains the importance of mentor texts beautifully when he discusses how the special effects teams worked on Star Wars. They studied video from World War II footage of actual dog fits and, after they identified the kinds of moves the pilots did, the team members modeled and imitated those kind of moves as they created the storyboard.

Here is what I like about the way Gallagher explains using mentor texts. First, expose the students to a wealth of texts. If I want to teach argument, offer them samples of argument essays to read and analyze. Lead them to uncover the different devices the authors use, looking at the entire work all the way down to the sentence and word level. Help them to find the strategies the authors use. Coach them to discover the conventions of that mode of writing. Let them create a list of best strategies to use when writing something like the samples. Have them write lots of little pieces, eventually creating a longer, polished piece incorporating the characteristics they uncovered. For example, have students “discover” the effectiveness of parallel structure in a piece and learn to use it in their own writing, instead of “teaching” it.

Certainly, this simplistic explanation does not fully explain the nuances of Gallagher’s work, but it gives an idea of the kind of framework I hope to use this year. As an AP English teacher, I always used mentor texts–to a degree. We read and analyzed the rhetorical devices and strategies the author used in a particular piece, and I encouraged them to incorporate that kind of writing when they wrote their practice essays in Synthesis, Argument, and Analysis.

However, I never use professional written texts to demonstrate how one might write an essay that had the features of those three response demands. Certainly, we read student samples of each, and we read plenty of prose that had argument, but I did not expose them to mentor (professional) samples of the kinds of writing that make up synthesis and analysis. So that is one change I need to make.

Nevertheless, the biggest change this new requires me make is in Digital Literacy. Let me give an example. When we studied infographics, I would have the students look at a variety of samples and ask them to write what the message was. I never really delved into having the kids react and then analyze HOW the message was delivered. It seemed evident to me that they would know that without me pointing it out. However, the biggest takeaway from my last few years of study with PLN has been to “make visible the invisible things’ that good readers do. That is something that is key when using mentor texts.

This year, I plan to surround my Digital Literacy students in samples of the work, professional samples, and let them discover what makes a good digital memoir, or pro-con infographic, or digital process analysis. Then I will proceed with helping students to uncover what they want to “write” about and how they want to deliver that content.

For me, though, what is most notable is how this attention to mentor texts supports growth mindset. A recent article by Dave Paunesku,a Stanford University mindset researcher, reveals that mindset is not just about trying harder. For teachers, it is about creating an environment where each student can “focus on the fact that working through mental challenges strengthens the brain.”

Kids cannot perform tasks that are unthinkable just because they try harder. We have to set the challenges for them, ask them to think a little more, require them to work a little harder. Scaffolding their work by providing mentor texts is one way to introduce students to looking at writing that will help them become better readers AND better writers.

I cannot expect a student to sit down and write something–or even analyze something–like Virginia Woolf’s “Death of the Moth.” But by using that piece as a mentor text, and struggling to find the meaning and then determine the strategies, the student will be able to “try harder” and “grow” his/her brain.

The most important part of this endeavor, however, is helping kids to reflect on the role mentor texts can play in their own lives and their lifelong learning. As Gallagher explained, when he first needed to write a grant proposal, he found examples of effective models and emulated them. This, I think, is the real goal of making mentor texts a focus in the classroom. In the future, they can TRANSFER the idea by finding their own mentor texts for required work in classes or the workplace.

Mentor texts and growth mindset. I wonder if Kelly Gallagher ever met Carol Dweck?

From the first day–fostering a growth mindset

Aug14

I like a bargain. So when I can create a unit that serves more than one purpose, I feel like I am getting a good deal. My opening plans for this school year are great two-fers! Not only will this beginning work set the stage for student growth, but it will also be grounded in developing skills that will help them achieve success this year.

Last year, due in part to the Papal Visit, I planned a unit to be completed in the first few weeks of school before we had almost a week off to allow people to participate in the event. My coach suggested that I open the year with a lesson on growth mindset, and that is exactly what I plan to do this year as well.

We will be starting school with full length days, so not only will this unit provide a framework for the year, but it will hopefully provide an engaging transition from summer for my students.

The following activities represent what I hope to accomplish in the first week of school. I am still developing the day to day lessons, but this overview is what I consider to be the first part of the unit; it starts with the students discovering their own ideas about struggling while learning and ends with them writing a summary of an article about growth mindset.

After some community building activities, I plan to have my students complete a headline prediction activity with an article that I used in a workshop with teachers this summer. The article, “An Inspirational True Story of Resilience and the American Dream”, highlights the experience of Ping Fu, a Chinese immigrant. The article is written by MeiMei Fox, who wrote Ping Fu’s memoir, entitled Bend, Not Break. I will provide most of the article in a handout for the students to read, and I will ask them to work in pairs to create a headline for the article. After sampling some answers, I will reveal the actual title, and we will spend some time discussing and defining resilience.

Hopefully, the discussion will bring into focus the idea of grit, which we will also define and discuss before completing Angela Duckworth’s Grit Scale. I will ask the students to write about their results from the survey and share them with a partner. This step is critical because it will give my students a starting point to see what their relationship is with the idea of how they handle learning things that are difficult.

From there, I plan to use some of the resources found at Khan Academy. Khan Academy partnered with PERTS, the Stanford University research center on learning mindsets, and they created an amazing lesson plan. I plan to show the Khan Academy video “Growing Your Mind”. Students will Think-Pair-Share to deepen their understanding of how they can grow their intellect.

Following that, I will initiate a discussion on failure, retelling my experience with earning Google certification. Here I will remind students about John Collins’ Type 1 writing and ask them to write about a time when they struggled with learning something, even failing in the process. And I will again ask students to think-pair-share, and I will sample the class for responses.

To understand Carol Dweck’s ideas about growth mindset, students will read and annotate a section of an article from Brain Pickings entitled “Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives”. Brain Pickings is an amazing blog that features rather dense articles on interesting topics. It definitely characterizes challenging prose. However, what I plan to accomplish with this is for students to reap the benefit of close reading. This “push” not only provides them with background information on growth mindset and introduces or reviews reading strategies, but it models the kind of growth mindset I will encourage them to develop this year.

From there, we will work on completing a template for Kelly Gallagher’s Article of the Week. We will start that in class together, and students will continue to work on it in pairs. Completing it will become their first homework assignment.

So, to recap, in one week my students will have begun to develop a sense of community, worked in pairs and small groups, read an inspiring account of resilience, summarized that in a headline, discovered their level of “grittiness”, considered the message of a video that describes how the struggle in learning helps us grow our brains, reviewed Collins Type 1 writing, listened to my story of failure as learning, read and annotated a difficult piece of writing, and completed a written summary of that piece–all centered in growth mindset.

This beginning one week plan is chock full of skills practice that support the standards and helps to create a classroom atmosphere conducive to encouraging hard work and accepting failure as a natural part of learning. Not only will we get to work right away, but we will start off the year the right way–with a Growth Mindset.

Confessions of a growth mindset groupie

Aug7

My back to school supply list is filling up fast. One thing I am sure to include on my list is a growth mindset.

I introduced my students to the idea of growth mindset early last year, and anecdotal evidence from their end of year reflections makes me think that this move was successful. My students worked to think more about learning and less about grades; they were concerned more about supporting each other and less about competition; they were more likely to take a risk and less concerned with always being correct.

They had such success with the shift in thinking that I am examining the ways that I as a teacher can develop a more consistent growth mindset and through that, support my students by modeling it. Certainly I will teach them explicitly, and in another post I will share the activities I plan on using in the first few works. But in this post, I want to explore the role growth mindset plays in teaching.

Mindset is an idea that Stanford professor Carol Dweck researched in determining factors that contribute to a person’s success. She describes a person with a fixed mindset as perceiving that intelligence is the primary determinant of ability or achievement. A person with a growth mindset, on the other hand, has the view that positive outcomes are largely influenced by effort and hard work.

In addition, someone with a growth mindset does not shy away from failure; s/he reflects on failure and uses new insights to accomplish goals. That reflection is metacognitive, and the practice of metacognition is what makes learning stick. There is a great deal of information available on the relationship between growth mindset and metacognition, but this recent article from Mind/Shift explains how “metacognitive reflection can be used to develop resilience in the face of a challenge.” The article explains how this process can help students grow because it “is concerned not with assessment, but with self-improvement.” This reflection is something that will help our students, but it can also help us to grow and develop professionally.

In my mind, growth mindset is not something you just talk about. You have to believe in it. For me to be an effective teacher, it is essential that I am willing to take risks in how I am teaching, especially if I want my students to believe that risk taking is a part of learning.

I was especially struck by this recent post by Vicki Davis,”Social Media in Schools,” which talks about embracing social media for our students’ sake, even if we as teachers are not comfortable with it. Although she does not mention the idea of growth mindset explicitly, she provides the rationale for why we as teachers need to be pushing ourselves beyond our comfort level. She writes, “When you love kids, you change even when it makes you uncomfortable.”

It is that constant self reflection that we as teachers engage in that is the hallmark of a growth minded approach. It is important to note that sometimes we fall back into patterns of fixed mindset, but it is through metacognition that we can become more aware of when we are starting to fall back into those thought patterns and teach ourselves to reframe our inner conversation.

Read this excerpt from an article published by PERTS, a learning center on mindsets at Stanford University, where Carol Dweck developed her work with growth mindset:

“Developing a growth mindset is a practice that we all — student and teacher alike — must learn to embrace as an ongoing process. The more we continue to explore and practice having a growth mindset, the more resilient we, and our students, can become, even when entering contexts that may send us fixed mindset messages.”

There is never a school year that is exactly like another; I certainly cannot teach the same way each year. A growth mindset gives me permission to try new approaches. And if I fail, it is metacognition that will help me learn what I need to improve.