Teach Like A Champion - KeynesYouDigIt/Knowledge GitHub Wiki

Notes

  • Standards are meaningless without assessments
  • Use data to inform instruction
  • Time is your most precious commodity
  • Change the physical layout of the room to match the activity
    • 3 columns, 2 seats each for listening to instructors
    • Pods for discussion and group work
    • Think about aisles and alleys for easy observation
    • Use tape on the floor to indicate layouts
  • Make sure the environment (such as the walls) are uncluttered and undistracting
  • Direct instruction is not bad- it's an essential ingredient. Make them engaging, and no more than 15 minutes without having students practice what they're learning.
  • All of our activities need to overcome the "hurdle rate" of learning, which is probably based on reading
  • 3-30-30
    • 3 minutes setting expectations for work product, process, and behavior, then stand sentry (not circulating) to make sure everyone starts working, then start circulating
    • 30 second burst of checking with an individual
    • 30 second burst of checking the whole group
  • Make the students look forward to upcoming activities to build energy
  • You can only think deeply if you know a lot- otherwise they just trade empty ideas and unfounded speculation
  • Knowledge that's in your long-term memory doesn't diminish your processing capacity- knowledge that's in your short-term memory does
  • If something has to get squeezed out of a lesson for time, it should not be the writing.
  • The goal is for students to be constantly on their toes, answering questions, drawing on or developing their knowledge base, and refining their ideas
  • The question isn't whether an activity is "good," but if it's the best- for that moment, that group of students, and that lesson

Check For Understanding (CFU)

Gathering Data on Student Mastery

  • You can get data through questioning or observation.

Reject Self-Report

  • Replace rhetorical questions with more objective forms of assessment
  • No "Got it?"
  • They might feel like they were the only ones who didn't get it and are holding back the group
  • Not self-monitoring:
    • Take a thoughtful assessment of themselves
    • Figure out precisely what they don't know
    • Take action to fix it

Targeted Questioning

  • Ask multiple, quick, open-ended questions to a strategic sample of the class to get data on where they are
  • Self-monitoring is expensive, targeted questioning is cheap
  • Needs to be fast - 1-2 minutes
  • Ask 5-6 questions to a sample of the class- cold call them
  • Have the questions in advance
  • The answers you get are a data set - NOT a story that culminates in the right answer

Standardize the Format

  • Make observation easier by making it easier to find the data you're looking for
  • Same tool, same place, same format- aids in gathering data quickly
  • Similar physical layouts that are easier to scan
  • Find out if people need more time
  • Find out which options people chose
  • Find out what common mistakes you could talk about during the debrief

Tracking, Not Watching

  • Decide what you're looking for when you're scanning the classroom
  • Separate excellence from completion. Track specific errors and success points.
  • Keep track of amount of error and success points, use them as data
  • Track specific students to call on

Show Me

  • Make sure students actively show you evidence of their understanding
  • Hand signals (giving your their answer with a number, or a sign)
  • Slates to show you their work
  • Clickers for answers to multiple choice questions
  • Objective data shown to the teacher in unison

Affirmative Checking

  • Make students verify that they understand something before they move on
  • Need to be able to verify that they're at the checkpoint very quickly
  • Students aren't waiting for everyone else to catch up
  • Students give you a signal that they're ready to be checked
  • Students can do peer checking too

Acting on the Data and the Culture of Error

  • Once you have data, you need to do something with it

Plan for Error

  • Give yourself eyes for errors by planning for common mistakes in advance
  • By knowing specific mistakes in advance, you may even be able to prevent them from happening
  • Have multiple paths through your lesson based on the performance
  • Have more material than you need, so you can jump back, ahead, or continue on
  • Plan reteach-time

Culture of Error

  • Create an environment where your students feel safe making and discussing mistakes
  • Praise students who are brave enough to ask questions early on
  • Complement improvement, not high performance
  • Praise people who help each other
  • Students have to be a part of building this culture also, so you need to shape their behavior too
  • Students watch how you react to your own errors
  • Thank people for their errors
  • There might be more than one right answer, norm disagreement
  • Withhold the answer - Discuss all possible answers, and help reason about each of them before giving the right one
  • Look out for your "tells" about disapproving of wrong answers and being excited about right answers
  • You want students to be in suspense about what the right answer is, and you're discovering it together

Excavate Error

  • Dig into errors to understand their causes
  • Assessing errors doesn't always need to happen in public or immediately- you can circle back later
  • Light excavation:
    • Comparing two answers, right and wrong
    • Ask for an alternative response
    • Ask the students to come up with what a common misunderstanding might be
    • Analyze wrong choices
  • Deep excavation:
    • Collect every student response, then evaluate each of them
    • Expensive- use sparingly

Own and Track

  • Have students correct or revise their own work
  • Having incorrect work gently reinforces the errors
  • Some tools:
    • "Make note of any mistakes you made"
    • "Circle your mistake and make a note that it uses the wrong operator"
    • "Draw a line through the mistake and write it correctly in the margin"
    • "Make yours look like mine"
    • "Reread your response, and add at least one piece of evidence to support it"
    • "I'm coming around to check that this is in your answer"

Academic Ethos

Create a culture of "better."

Setting High Academic Expectations

No Opt-Out

  • Students don't get to not answer questions or just say "I don't know"
  • Techniques:
    • You provide the answer, student repeats
    • Another student provides the answer, student repeats
    • You provide a cue, student uses it to provide the answer
    • Another student provides a cue, student uses it to provide the answer
  • "It's ok to not know, but it's not OK not to try."
  • Show that success wasn't a fluke- get them to answer several similar questions in a row or explain the answer more thoroughly
    • Add another at bat
    • Add a stretch
    • Add an error analysis - think through how you came to that result
    • Add a "star" - positive reinforce the behavior you were looking for
  • Technqiues that require thought are more rigorous than techniques that require repeating, but rigor takes time. Be more rigorous the closer you are to your learning objective.

Right Is Right

  • "Almost right" is not good enough. Don't "round up" an answer- make them get all the way there themselves
  • Hold them to the appropriate level of rigor
  • It's hard to hold out for "all the way right" if you don't know what that is beforehand- script your questions and your answers
  • Be wary of "I know what she was trying to say"
  • Things students will do to get away from right-is-right answers:
    • "The Kitchen Sink" - Say everything you know about the topic until the teacher stops you
    • "Bait and Switch" - Answer the question you wish you were asked
    • "Heartfelt Topic" - Say something sincere and obvious about the topic
    • "Vague Vagaries" - Use imprecise language
  • Be careful about a student who anticipates and answers the next questions ahead of time- they got there, but the class didn't
  • Techniques:
    • Hold out for all-the-way right (don't round up)
    • Answer my question (make your students be disciplined)
    • Right answer, right time (don't reward rushing ahead)
    • Specific vocabulary (lock in the precise words)

Stretch It

  • Reward correct answers with harder questions
  • Ask a diversity of types of questions
    • Ask how or why
    • Ask for another way to answer
    • Ask for a better word or more precise explanation
    • Ask for evidence
    • Ask students to integrate a related skill
    • Ask students to apply the same skill in a new setting
    • Use a non-directive prompt:
      • "Say more"
      • "Keep going"
      • "Develop"
      • Keep going gesture
      • Head nod
      • Raised eyebrows
  • Build a culture around the idea that learning is never done
    • "When I overcome a challenge, I look forward to the next"
  • Follow-up questions are more expensive, but also more targeted than prompts
  • Students can know how stretch-it works- you can be transparent

Format Matters

  • Hold students to a high standard of delivery, not just ideas
  • Grammar, complete sentences, and voice all matter
  • There's different language for different settings
  • Techniques:
    • Interrogative- Repeat the mistake back to them
    • Begin the correction - Start the correction and let them finish
    • Prompt them- "Who can answer like a scholar?"
    • If not loud enough- "Voice please"

Without Apology

  • Embrace rigorous content, challenge and hard work
  • Don't assume something will be boring ("Let's just try to get through this")
  • Don't blame the content ("They say we have to do this")
  • Don't try to make it more accessible by dulling it down
  • Don't make excuses for students

Planning For Success

These happen before you come to class. Don't crowd out high-value planning tasks with low-value ones.

Begin With The End

  • Work background from unit planning to lesson planning
  • Define the objective, how you'll assess, and then choose activities
  • Instead of figuring out what you're going to do tomorrow, figure out what you want students to learn tomorrow
  • The question to ask when choosing activities- is it the fastest way to reach my goal?

4 M's

  • Lesson objectives should be manageable, measurable, made first, and most important
    • Manageable - Can be taught in a single lesson
    • Measurable - Be able to assess how successful you were by the end of the lesson
    • Made First- Don't justify a topic or an activity with an objective. An objective is the tool you're using to push a class forward, based on data.
    • Most Important - The next step up the mountain

Post It

  • Display your objectives where everyone can see them
  • Same location every time

Double-Plan

  • As you plan, plan what students will be doing at each step
  • Lesson packets are things that students use to follow along during a lesson
    • Keep everything in one place during the lesson to minimize disruption
    • Put notes in the margins of the packets for pacing, questions, "stage notes", etc.
    • Keep making notes during the lesson for revisions and notes based on captured data, pacing notes, performance data, etc.
    • Packets reduce transaction costs with switching topics, activities, pacing, etc. ("Flip to the yellow section")
    • Packets keep students and instructors accountable
    • Include rubrics and tips
    • Embed adapatibility- include more than you need to

Lesson Structure

  • Guided Practice - I do, we do, you do
    1. I do
      • Do good showing (modeling) and telling (explaining)
      • Preteach the pitfalls
    2. I do, you help
    3. You do, I help
      • Get more cognitive work out of the audience
      • Feigned ignorance
    4. You do
    5. You do, and do, and do
      • Very few students get it on the first or second try
      • Go until they can do it on their own
      • Use multiple variations and formats
      • Have enrichment problems ready to go
  • Consistent structures reduce the cognitive load on the content

Do Now

  • Short warm-up that the students can do without instruction or direction to start the day
  • Keep it in the same place every day
  • If you have to give directions, it's not independent enough
  • It should be obvious whether or not they've done it
  • It should either preview or review
  • It should be quick to do, and quick to debrief
  • Start the day after the Do-Now

Name the Steps

  • Break down complex tasks into discrete, repeatable steps
  • Decompose all of the things experts do intuitively into steps
  • Needs to be fewer than 7
  • You can teach corner-cases and complexity, but keep the actual steps simple
  • Name the steps and use mnemonics to make them "sticky"
  • Two stairways- Work on problems in the abstract and specific at the same time

Board = Paper

  • Model how students should be taking notes to capture the information
  • Students often need help learning to be students as much as they do learning the content
  • "Make your paper look like mine"

Control the Game

  • Ask students to read out loud frequently, but actively manage the process
  • Reading is critical to success, but not just silent reading
    • Independent reading is hard to hold people accountable for
    • You can combine these with a task- "Read the next paragraph, write a summary of it, then we'll pick up again together"
  • When one student is reading aloud, the other students need to be reading too
  • Reading aloud gives you a chance to catch and correct reading issues
  • Their inflection and tone gives you some sense of how well they understand it
  • Technique:
    • Vary the time so that students don't know when their turn will be
    • Keep the durations generally short
    • Don't make the next reader predictable
    • Keep the transaction costs low
    • Use yourself as a "bridge"- model expressiveness, etc.
      • Spot-check/Oral Cloze- make students finish your sentence to get them back on track
    • When you want them to focus on you, have them hold their place and close their books

Circulate

  • Move strategically around the room
  • "Break the plane"- get out from the desk to add energy
    • This should happen during the first 5 minutes of any lesson
    • It's your room, and you need to norm being able to be in any part of it
  • You need full access to everyone, or you'll have places that are easy to hide in
  • Types of interactions:
    • Simple walk-by, slowly monitoring
    • Non-verbal- thumbs up, keep going, pat on the shoulder
    • Read and review- Non-invasive
    • Pick-up read- you interrupt the student to study their work
  • You can "dot" students work to note an error- don't tell them how to fix it, just note it
  • Be systematic to get the whole room, but not predictable
  • Always try to stay facing the class, even as you circulate

At Bats

  • Give lots of practice- succeeding once or twice isn't mastery
  • Go until they can do it on their own
  • Give them multiple variations and formats
  • Grab opportunities for enrichment and differentiation for students who master it quickly

Exit Ticket

  • End each class with an assessment of your objective
  • 1-3 questions, multiple formats
  • Designed to yield data
  • Can be used as Do-Nows the following day
  • Reviewing data:
    • Sort them into yes/no/some- potentially use for groups
  • If comprehension is low across the board, reteach
  • If only a few students are struggling, do a breakout
  • Write the exit ticket first

Pacing

  • Pacing isn't the speed, it's the perception of speed
  • "Don't do anything for more than 10 minutes"
  • Too much perception of speed, and the energy can get out of control, you need to balance

Change the Pace

  • Create fast or slow moments in your class by shifting activity types or formats
  • 5 kinds of activties:
    • Knowledge assimilation - Via direct instruction or reading
    • Guided practice or guided questioning
    • Independent practice (doing, not reading)
    • Reflecting (quietly and deeply, idea generation, brainstorming)
    • Discussion and developing with classmates
  • Knowledge assimilation has to precede the others
  • You don't need to change the activities every 10 minutes, sometimes just the delivery of the same activity
  • Celebrate mile markers to give the illusion of speed

Brighten Lines

  • Make beginnings and endings of activities visible and crisp
  • Start everyone at once
    • Creates strong social incentives
    • Use tone to convey exactly what they should do
      • "Go!" - Hustle
      • "Begin." - Be contemplative
  • End an activity cleanly together
    • Make sure that the transition is efficient to save time
  • You can make them interactive- have them say "Go!" or do a particular signal at the end of a countdown

All Hands

  • Leverage hand-raising to help with pacing
  • Raising your hand is powerful- it means "I want to participate"
  • Each question/answer is a different event, and responses should build on each other
  • Don't let students keep their hands up while someone else is talking- help them build the habit
  • Occasionally limit the number of people who can raise their hands (by part of the room, table, demographics, etc.)
  • Unbundle big questions into smaller ones to increase participation
  • Ask follow-on questions to help build a discussion instead of just having a disconnected set of comments
  • Cut off ramblers with "pause- " and then redirect them

Work the Clock

  • Measure your time intentionally and strategically to shape your experience
  • Showing the clock helps build a time-sensitive culture
  • Clocks help keep your students and you accountable to your goals
  • Use odd time intervals- round numbers have an implied "around..." in front of them
  • You want to create the highest value in the least amount of time, it should not be a rush
  • You control the clock, not the students- don't let their behavior dictate how firm you are
  • Have them wrap up activities and transition very quickly

Every Minute Matters

  • Respect student's time by spending every minute productively
  • Pay attention to squandered moments- minutes at the end of class, etc.
  • Have back pocket activities ready to go:
    • Reviews
    • Challenge activities
    • Quiz and vocab questions
    • Reading activities
    • You can literally write them and keep them in your back pocket
  • If something is bombing, figure out how quickly you can switch to something of value

Ratio

Building Ratio Through Questioning

  • The workout belongs to the student
  • You need high engagement and high rigor
  • You need a high "think ratio" and a high "participation ratio"
    • You may have to prioritize one over the other occasionally
    • High-ratio activities where students don't know enough facts are not meaningful
    • You need to make an investment in teaching facts first

Wait Time

  • Allow students time to think before answering a question
  • Help narrate them toward being more productive
  • Benefits:
    • Allows more hands to go up
    • Enabling a wider range of people to engage
    • Supporting better, more rigorous answers
    • Prompting more cognitive work during the "wait"
    • Decreasing the number of students who can't answer
    • Increasing use of evidence in answers
  1. Wait time is ineffective if you don't have a culture where everyone wants to answer
    • You may have to reset the expectation if you see blank faces
    • You can count the hands- "One hand, two hands, three..."
    • "Hands down- I want you all to take 15 seconds to locate the answer"
  2. Prompt them with thinking skills
    • "I'm seeing lots of note-taking and furrowed brows- I like that"
    • "I'm giving lots of time because this is tricky- your first answer may not be your best"
  3. Be silent- don't interrupt their thinking
  4. Tell them how much time they'll have and how much depth you want

Cold Call

  • Call on students regardless of whether they've raised their hands
  • Purpose:
    1. CFU - Helps you be systematic about who you're calling on
    2. Engagement & Accountability - Shows that the students don't control their level of participation
    3. Pacing - Begging students to answer slows the pace and takes up too much time
    4. Ratio - Makes students use things like wait time more effectively
  • Keys to effective cold-calling:
    • Predictable - That it might be coming is what brings up ratio
    • Systematic - Not meant to single anyone out
    • Positive - Not a "gotcha"- who wouldn't want to participate?
    • Unbundle - Break it up into small pieces to increase participation
  • Variants:
    • Hands-up / Hands-down - You can also allow students to volunteer or not
    • Follow-on / Follow-up - Ask students to develop on each other's ideas
    • Name timing - Calling the name last is higher ratio, calling the name first increases their chance of getting a win
    • Slow call - Use it as an opportunity to increase wait time
    • Turn and talk, followed by a cold call
    • Data drive cold calls- Script them ahead of time, and indicate which part of the sample you want to target them to

Call and Response

  • Ask your class to answer questions in unison from time to time to build energy and engagement
  • Benefits:
    • Academic review and reinforcement- everyone gets the answer
    • High-energy fun
    • Behavioral reinforcement- increases compliance
  • Types of call and response:
    • Repeat - Fill in the blank
    • Report - "Give me your answer on 3"
    • Reinforce - Make everyone repeat a student's exemplar answer
    • Review - Multiple questions asked quickly
    • Solve - Take time to answer the question- needs to be a clear answer that everyone should get
  • Needs a strong cue to get everyone to respond, to differentiate from a different kind of question
  • Stretchable - make them say more of the phrase on repeat

Break It Down

  • When a student makes an error, provide just enough help unblock them
  • This is very hard, and easy to destroy the rigor
  • Ways to do it:
    • Provide an example
    • Provide context
    • Provide a rule
    • Provide a missing (or first) step
    • Roll back - Repeat their response to them and emphasize the part they got wrong
    • Eliminate false choices
  • Make sure you connect it back to the rigor of the original question

Pepper

  • A fast-paced vocal review to build energy
  • Doesn't build new skills, just helps build energy
  • No discussion, just action
  • Fast-paced, unpredictable review
  • Good for warm-ups
  • Should feel like a game
  • Can pick student names randomly (or at least appear like you do)

Building Ratio Through Writing

The amount and quality of writing students do are the most important thing students can do. Writing is ideal for summary and synthesis.

Everybody Writes

  • Give them the chance to reflect in writing before you ask them to discuss
  • Writing helps turn a notion into an idea, which is a good entry ticket to a discussion
  • The first person to raise their hand or talk just had the fastest idea, which is rarely the best idea
  • You can use this as an opportunity to "hunt and gather" for good starting points in your discussion
  • Can be the basis for good cold-calling
  • Writing increases ratio and retention

Art of the Sentence

  • Synthesize a complex idea into a single well-crafted sentence
  • Give them a sentence starter:
    • "Growing exponentially, ..."
    • "The relationship between..."
    • "In the long run..."
  • You can give your sentences parameters:
    • Include a word or phrase
    • Address multiple things
    • With a length limit
  • Good at the end of a lesson, because it helps summarize
  • Good as an exit ticket

Show Call

  • Increase the effort that goes into writing by publicly showcasing and revising work, without volunteers
  • A visual form of cold calll
  • Helps students learn how to edit
  • You can ask their permission ahead of time
  • Three questions for a show call:
    1. What kind of work? Can be:
      • Exemplary- show how to achieve success
      • A common error- opportunity to correct something common
      • A blend of strengths and weaknesses- Show how to take something from good to great
    2. When? Can be:
      • After writing is complete
      • After revising is complete - To hold students accountable for learning something
      • During writing - If it's a longer prompt, gives a mile marker
    3. How many?
      • Deep with one
      • Coverage with multiple
  • Accountable revision techniques
    1. Check or change- Either affirm that an answer is correct or fix it, but everyone has to write
    2. Offline revision- After a show call, make everyone do the revisions they learned and then show call again
    3. Live edit- During a show call, everyone fixes their work in place
  • Two key moments during a show call:
    1. The take - Try to be emotionless or positive when you take their work
    2. The reveal - Do you keep it anonymous? Read it out loud or have everyone read it silently? Do you tell them what to look for?

Build Stamina

  • Gradually increase writing time to build stamina for longer writing
  • Start small and build up
  • "I should see all pencils moving" - Might not be a best practice for all writing, but helps build the stamina
  • Prime the pump - Come up with some ideas before the session starts
  • Valorize student writing- savor it, read it out loud, and show pride in it

Front the Writing

  • Put writing closer to the front of the lesson to ensure students think rigorously
  • It's very easy to get false-positives in mastery by having discussions or writing at the end
  • Put the writing up front to avoid students "piggy-backing"
  • Format should be: Read-Write-Discuss-Revise

Building Ratio Through Discussion

  • Discussions are not people restating their opinions to each other
    • You need to react to the things being said
  • Spend less time steering the content of a discussion, and more time steering the format

Habits of Discussion

  • Normalize a set of ground rules to make your discussions more productive
  • Parts:
    1. Fundamentals: Voice, tracking, and names
      • Loud enough to be heard
      • Look at the person you're talking to
      • Use their name
    2. Follow-on / Follow-on Prompting
      • Cold-call students to respond to the previous statement
    3. Sentence-starters
      • Their first sentence should show the relationship between the present and the previous sentence in some respectful way
      • You can post them on the wall for students to refer to until they get the hang of it
      • "I understand why you'd say that, but..."
      • "Another example of that is..."
      • "Thing that doesn't take into account is..."
    4. Managing the meta
      • Try to keep discussions "inside the box"- focused and reflective, rather than too divergent
      • "How does that relate to what we were just talking about?"
      • Move a topic on when it stops being productive

Turn and Talk

  • Have short pair discussions to help students formulate their thoughts
  • Almost always an early-or-middle stage activity
  • Assign pairs ahead of time and have them sit next to each other- looking for a partner is a waste of time
  • Manage the turns- "Short hair to long hair" is a way of saying the person with the shorter hair starts first, and you may prompt them to switch at some point
  • Prompt them to wind it down to avoid cutting someone off
  • End a turn and talk when the ideas are bustling the hardest, not when they're tapering- this keeps the energy high
  • Be precise with the time you'll afford them, so they know how deep to go with their point
  • Ask them to present their partner's viewpoint
  • Don't let discussions spread low-quality or erroneous ideas
    • On its own, turn and talk is low rigor and should be followed up with a higher rigor activity
    • Do a whole-class analysis of the discussions
    • Lead into a whole-class analysis
    • Lead into a writing activity where they have to reflect on the discussions
    • Whole group discussion into a writing activity

Batch Process

  • Give students autonomy and ownership by allowing them to have unmediated discussions
  • Sometimes callled a socratic discussion, a socratic seminar, or a fishbowl
  • Works better with smaller groups (<12)
  • Timebox it to something short (2 minutes)
  • Have them generate topics- "What's worthy of analysis in this?"

Five Principles of Classroom Culture

  1. Discipline
  2. Managemnet
  3. Control
  4. Influence
  5. Engagement

Systems and Routines

Threshold

  • Meet students at the door, setting the standard for behavior right away

Strong Start

  • Design and establish efficent routines for students to enter the classroom and begin class

STAR/SLANT

  • Teach students baseline behaviors by using memorable acronyms

Engineer Efficiency

  • Teach students the simplest and fastest procedure for evaluating key classroom tasks and make them routines

Strategic Investment: From Procedure To Routine

  • Rehearse and reinforce routines until excellence becomes habitual

Do It Again

  • Give students more practice when they're not up to speed

High Behavioral Expectations

Radar / Be Seen Looking

Make Compliance Visible

Least-Invasive Intervention

Firm Calm Finesse

Art of the Consequence

Strong Voice

What to Do

Building Character and Trust

Positive Framing

Precise Praise

  • Reinforce actions, not traits
  • Align to objectives
  • Differentiate acknowledgement from praise:
    • Acknowledgement is meeting objectives- Neutral tone, no judgments
    • Praise is exceeding expectations- Judgmental language
    • Praising someone for meeting objectives communicates that your standards for excellence are low
  • Public and private praise both serve a function- private is more likely to be perceived as genuine, public is more easy for others to replicate

Warm/Strict

Emotional Constancy

Joy Factor