Tuesday, June 16, 2009

A Poem to Share

I have been reading Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline. The book was written with the business world in mind, but the ideas are applicable to the education world and to those who hope to lead a school. In the text, Senge writes about stewardship and references a poem by Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese poet. The poem is incredible. I hope you enjoy it.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.
They come through you, not from you.
And though they are with you, they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot
visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but strive
not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows
from which your children as living arrows are
sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and
he
bends you with his might that the arrows may go swift and
far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness; For even as he
loves the arrow that flies, so he loves the bow that
is stable.

Monday, June 15, 2009

The Last Five Minutes

In my last post--Lesson Design and Classroom Management, June 14, 2009--I stated that teachers need to find ways to engage students during the last five minutes of class as much as students are engaged in learning throughout the class period. When faced with finding something to engage students during that time, all teachers are initially over-whelmed with the task and uncertain as to what to do. Perhaps this blog can serve as a forum for teachers to begin posting ideas as comments. If it happens, I will then compile the suggestions into a later blog for easier access.

Thinking about the last five minutes and considering what I would have students do, I came up with the following, which is directly related to teaching grammar--as I was an English teacher. I believe the basic idea could be applied to other disciplines:

As I enter the last five minutes of class, I turn on the overhead projector or pull off a sheet of paper that had been concealing the task as written on the board or hand the assignment to students, copied onto a half sheet of paper. The assignment contains two sentences; for instance, "Larry asked that I keep the information between he and I." and "Larry asked that I keep the information between him and me." The assignment states that one of the sentences is correct. Students are to determine which sentence is correct and write a single paragraph (100-300 words) explaining their reasoning. The assignment is due as they leave.

This would certainly cause a bit of hysteria at first, but as students became accustom to this, they would engage immediately and be able to complete the task successfully. The writing is important. It is through the writing that the teacher is able to assess the reasoning skills of the student. I suggest that this would be used no more than twice a week, but that it would definitely be used at least once every week for the entire semester.

What are your ideas?

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Lesson Design and Classroom Management

Although a lot of people are calling for data before they make a decision in education and some are even using the call for data as a means of denying the validity of good practice, we must admit that there are good teaching practices that we can recognize through observation, through practice, and perhaps through intuition. I have not done any research on this topic, but I know that there is a direct correlation between good lesson design and good classroom management. In other words, if a teacher has prepared a lesson to engage students for the full time that they are in her class, she is less likely to have classroom management issues.

The school that I am leaving and the school that I am going to both use a traditional bell schedule, with each class lasting approximately 50 minutes. I have noticed--over the years in my own classroom as a teacher and through observing other teachers--that it is common for teachers to lose the first five minutes of class and the last five minutes of class to minutia, to fumbling around, to getting started, to packing up. It has become a part of the student culture to expect that nothing happens in the first five minutes, therefore validating tardiness, and nothing happens in the last five minutes of class. Once this has become a part of the culture, it is difficult to change, but this has to change.

Consider the above. A teacher loses the first and last five minutes of class. That is ten minutes per day. Classes are held five days a week. Simple mathematics establishes that the teacher is losing 50 minutes of instruction per week by allowing nothing to happen during the first and last five minutes of class. Fifty minutes is equal to one entire day's instruction. Multiply this by the number of weeks that students attend school (36) and we find that our students are missing out on 36 days of instructional time. The irony of this is that the teacher will then go to the administrator and say that she does not have enough time in the school year to teach the curriculum, to meet the standards, or to help the struggling students. The answer is in preparation.

I firmly believe that we move from awareness to preparedness to confidence. Becoming aware that we can plan how to use the first and last five minutes of class more effectively will give us the confidence of having a more orderly classroom and that we are possibly being more effective in meeting the learning needs of our students.

It is important to note that it is easy to prepare for these times. Many highly effective teachers use "bell ringer" activities to engage students from the moment the bell sounds to begin class. I have sat in such a class and noted how the moment the bell rings students have paper and pencil out, look to the board, and begin working problems or writing in a journal, without the teacher having to say a word. The teacher then is free to take attendance, to follow up with students who need to turn in an assignment or who have been late, or to organize materials to begin the day's lesson. The bell ringer activity is generally used to reinforce the previous day's lesson, to create anticipation for the given day's lesson, or to review concepts expected to appear on the high stakes, standardized test that the students are expected to pass as a requirement for graduation, etc.

The last five minutes of class should be used to engage students in reflection upon their learning. John Dewey stressed the importance of reflection in the educative process in his book How We Think (1910) in stating, "any subject...is intellectual...in its power to start and direct significant inquiry and reflection." He goes on to say that "the only information which can be put to logical use is that acquired in the course of thinking." Throughout the text, Dewey confirms that thinking that promotes learning is reflective in nature. Therefore, accepting what Dewey says and admitting that I intuitively arrived at the same conclusion, it is important that students be given time to reflect upon their learning.

So, teachers should use the last five minutes to promote reflective thought. This could be done through the use of "exit notes" or through a short (one to three question) quiz. Whatever is used, however, I believe it should involve writing and not just speaking. Many teachers believe they are reviewing with the entire class when they ask for a student to repeat the important points of the lesson. In a class of twenty-five, the same five students are always repeating the lesson and validating that they have listened, but there is no way for the teacher to verify that the other twenty even know what the lesson was about. Saying it is up to the kid to learn the stuff is the opposite of being a teacher. Teachers have to verify that students are learning and respond when there is evidence that students are not learning. That is why the last five minutes of class--every day--are vital to the learning process.

When a classroom is running smoothly--no classroom management issues--students are happier and the teacher is happier. Dr. Gruenert of Indiana State University once wrote that happy teachers are more effective teachers. (I'm paraphrasing and hope I got it right.) Therefore, it follows that spending time preparing well-designed lessons that fully utilize the class time and engage students in meaningful activity will result in greater learning and in improved morale throughout.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

The Road Not Taken

My favorite poem is Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." It seems pertinent to me at this time, as I prepare to leave the school where I began my teaching career and began my administrative career and served for twenty-five years, and as I set out to meet my first great challenge as principal of another school.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I am not one of those who gets hung up on the last two lines. Taken out of context, these two lines cause people to stare off into space, striking a pose of nobility and victory, feeling quite satisfied that their lives have been different and better because they did not follow the crowd. This is not what the poem is about at all. Read the title. The speaker is filled with doubt and perhaps regret.

As I move on, I have no way of knowing if I have chosen the right path. But, unlike Frost's speaker, I am not going to dwell on what might have been, where the other path may have taken me. I know that the road ahead will diverge again and again and again, and I have to be ready to make the decisions regarding which path to choose, even when both equally lay with leaves no step has trodden black. And this, too, is in the poem.