Leadership Part 2

What makes a good leader worth following?  In my last post, we explored the classroom implications of the first five points in an article by Forbes contributor Mike Myatt: 10 Reasons Your Top Talent Will Leave You. bit.ly/leadthem  Today we will explore numbers 6-10.

6. Show your students you care about them: Take the time to get to know your students, and let them get to know you. If you have a great relationship with your students, they will be eager to follow your lead, do what you ask, and rise to your high expectations.  If you don't, they won't.   

7. Be the leader your students need: Sometimes teachers get the idea that creating a "shared environment" or providing for student-centered learning means taking a back seat or behind-the-scenes approach. Nothing could be further from the truth. Your students are going to get guidance and feedback from someone--the class clown, the drama queen, or even the bully. As the teacher, you need to be more worthy of attention and consultation than your competition. Be the leader in your classroom, and your students will look to you to meet their needs.

8. Recognize the successes and contributions of others: Celebrations of learning are powerful and meaningful to students.  Take advantage of every opportunity to recognize academic successes, but don't stop there.  Be determined to recognize the kindness, helpfulness, preparedness, and other quality traits your students exhibit as well. Also, don't forget to recognize the contributions of the other adults who help make the school day all that it can be.  If you have folks helping in your classroom, thank them in front of your students and encourage your students to do the same.  Show the students that you value the contributions of the custodians and cafeteria workers, the secretaries and your principal. Your students will take their cue from you and learn an attitude of gratitude. Challenge your students to recognize the contributions of their peers and others--either in writing or verbally. When your students recognize you as someone who appreciates others, they will appreciate you as their leader.  

9. Don't stagnate your students: I once heard a pastor say, "If you're not growing, you're dead."  This is true in many arenas of life, and school is definitely done of them.  I remember being so bored in school, and the teacher's only answer for those who finished their boring work early was to go do more boring work.  Like all people, our students want to be recognized as having the capability to do challenging and meaningful work, so it's our job to assign it to them.  Be sure that your formative assessments keep you informed as to each student's next step for learning, and strive to keep all of your students moving forward.  When you work together with your students on continuous improvement, they will count on you as a leader who will give them wings to fly.  

10. Keep your promises: Okay, so I know that unexpected and unplanned-for things come up: fire drills, assemblies, lock-ins, vomit, students getting excited and taking off with a project, students not finishing work as quickly as you had anticipated...  Sometimes you really do intend to give your students a longer recess or time in class to work on homework, but things just don't work out they way you hope.  Be honest and apologize for those times, but strive to make that the exception and not the rule.  My eighteen-year-old daughter still remembers her third grade teacher promising her and a few other kids a king-sized candy bar and never delivering, and it colors her opinion of that teacher to this day.  Let your word be good as gold, and your students will see you as a leader worth your weight in king-sized candy bars.

Here is the quote from the end of Mike Myatt's article: 

Bottom line, if leaders spent less time trying to retain people, and more time trying to understand them, care for them, invest in them, and lead them well, the retention thing would take care of itself. 

Here's my re-write for all of us teachers: Bottom line, if teachers spent more time trying to understand their students, care for them, invest in them, and lead them well, then learning, the environment, and classroom management would take care of itself. 

Changing Settings Does Not Change Leadership

What makes a good leader worth following?  Today I found an article by Forbes contributor Mike Myatt: 10 Reasons Your Top Talent Will Leave You. bit.ly/leadthem  As I read through the article, I began to realize that leadership in business is exactly like leadership in a family or leadership in a classroom.  This makes sense because when you get right down to it, leaders aren't actually leading businesses, families, or classrooms.  What they--what we--are actually leading is people. 

If you are a parent, I would encourage you to reflect on the ten points of this article as they may relate to raising your children. District leaders and principals, please reflect on how these points relate to your relationships with your staff. Teachers, let's take some time to reflect on five ways good leadership can empower our students.  We will explore the other five in a future post.

1. Unleash your students' passions. With increasing class sizes and decreasing support, addressing an individual student's passions can seem like an overwhelming charge.  Fortunately, there is plenty of commonality in passions among students: technology, sports, animals, hands-on science experiments, holidays, careers...  The list is practically limitless when you really start to think about the various units that can be linked directly or indirectly to your students' passions.  In my kindergarten classroom, most of my students were passionate about the movie Frozen when we came back from Spring Break.  It was easy enough for me to incorporate names, songs, pictures, and themes from the movie into my lessons in reading, writing, math, science, and social studies.  Similarly, I recognize my students' passion for technology, and I provide vast opportunities for students to both learn and share what they know using computers, cameras, iPads, videos, and Chrome Books.  When you recognize and spark your students' passions, they will recognize you as a leader that lights their flames.

2. Challenge your students' intellect.   Ask your students hard questions and assign them challenging and meaningful work.  Students 'know' what you think of them based on what you expect from them.  I am not saying that all students can or should be doing the same work.  A skilled teacher will modify the content, process, or product expectations for individual students while still expecting the highest order of thinking from everyone.  When you challenge your students, they will understand that you are a leader who believes in them.

3. Engage your students' creativity.  This does not mean you need to let your students sing, paint, and draw (though those things may address #1).  It means to let them help you solve problems, create a shared vision, design classroom environments, provide feedback to drive future projects, think through classroom processes and procedures to make them better, set worthy classroom goals, choose their own learning paths, and transform the classroom into our classroom.  You will be surprised how powerful the creativity of even the youngest students can be in positively altering a classroom environment; and when you honor your students' creative processes, they will honor you as their leader.

4. Develop your students' skills. On the surface, we know that we, as teachers, need to teach students the skills that they need to succeed.  We use standards and curriculum to define these skills, and we assess students' academic abilities in order to recognize their accomplishments and address their needs. We teach our subject matter well, and we are good at it.  Our students learn and show academic growth, and we celebrate their successes.  However, we do them a great disservice if that is where we stop.  There is no curriculum in life, though the lives of our students will be full of tests and trials.  These are the tests that truly matter for our students--as people, so let's remember to address life skills at least as often as we address academic skills.  I cannot begin to scratch the surface of what these skills entail, but here are a few that come to mind: goal-setting, planning, and perseverance; recovering from failure; being accountable; leadership (empowering others); appreciating diversity; healthy living; teamwork; delayed gratification.  Let's also be sure to recognize the skills and talents that students come into our classrooms with. As you find ways to develop their current strengths, while also filling in the gaps, your students will appreciate you as a leader who strives to develop them as learners and as individuals.

5. Give your students a voice.  This mandate is directly related to #1 and #3 above.  If you are honing in on your students' passions and listening to their creative ideas, they will feel heard.  Of course, there are many other ways--both big and small--that we can give our students a voice in our classroom.  One of these ways is to provide choice.  These can be simple choices such as which book to read or where to sit.  On occasion, they can be bigger choices such as which field trip to go on or which writing unit to pursue next. Another way to provide voice is to give students a tool for reflection and feedback on individual lessons, units of learning, or the classroom environment as a whole.  With older students, this can be accomplished by posting a parking lot.  Here, students can use sticky notes to provide you with feedback, share their new learning, and ask questions.  Younger students can do it orally.  When you give your students a voice, they will feel heard.  In turn, they will listen to you as their leader.

Increasing Wait Time in Blended Learning Lessons

When questioning students, one easy way to increase student learning and promote higher order thinking is to increase wait time.  Studies repeatedly show the benefits of increasing wait time when asking students to do something as simple as recite sight words or as complex as evaluate the scientific processes used in an experiment.

Often after teachers ask questions, students are only given one second or less to formulate an answer before the answer is supplied--either by a student or the teacher.  The results of this questioning are low levels of thinking and engagement throughout the classroom.  However, when the teacher allows two to seven seconds--depending on the complexity of the question--before eliciting student answers, student thinking and engagement increase markedly:

1. More students answer or are prepared to answer the question
2. Students provide longer more thoughtful answers
3. Students ask more questions and more higher-order questions
4. Students provide more unsolicited responses
5. Student interaction increases
6. Students who process more slowly are more likely to respond

Many teachers have already seen the positive results in increasing classroom wait time when leading a class or a small group.  However, teachers may not have considered the importance of allowing for wait time in blended learning lessons, as well.  I have implemented multiple methods to accomplish wait time in my blended learning lessons, and I vary them depending on the type and purpose of the lesson.  

The first, and most disconcerting method I use mirrors the instructional wait time I use in the classroom.  That is, in the middle of a recorded lesson, I pose a question to the students.  Then comes the disturbing part:  I wait.  Three seconds.  Dead air.  That is really tough, especially when listening to the playback.  Nobody likes to hear dead air.  The glorious part, though, comes when I hear the students responding during the lesson.  No teacher is standing in front of them to smile or offer encouragement, yet they all respond.  Seeing this in action reinforces to me that I need to remember to add clarifying thoughts and specific praise to my recorded lessons as well.  I try to anticipate or take note of specific errors in student thinking that I notice while students are working with me and include specific teaching in my recorded lessons.  Vice versa, I take note of what I overhear when students are working with recorded lessons and incorporate needed teaching or re-teaching into my classroom lessons.  

Think (wait...time...)

Speak

Another method I use during timed PowerPoint presentations is the use of icons at the bottom of the page. For example, if there is a sight word the students are to recite, or a question is posed about a shape or a character in a book, I will use a thinking icon to prompt students to think silently--this takes some teaching.  Then, when the time is up, the slide will automatically change, and a speaking icon or a "hands up" icon will present itself where the thinking icon used to be.  I often change the color of the slide as another indicator that the students are now free to answer.  

The pause button is the final method I have used for allowing students increased wait time.  For example, I may ask the students, in the middle of a recorded guided-reading lesson on a book about fruits and vegetables, to hit pause and draw a picture of their favorite fruit.  However, the ultimate in using the pause button to improve learning is when a student recognizes his own need for wait time and pauses the lesson in order to improve his own thinking and learning.  I believe that it is when we teach students to do this, and they internalize the control they have over their own learning, that the true power of blended learning is harnessed.

Journal of Teacher Education Wait time: Slowing down may be a way of speeding up http://bit.ly/1cmdZXP 

Wait Time http://bit.ly/19csoBj

You Can Be In Two Places At Once

Be in two places at once!

With class sizes on the rise and differentiated grouping a must, what teacher hasn't wished for the ability to be in two places at once?

In my own little kindergarten literacy world, my class size won't permit for any fewer than five differentiated reading groups.  More groups means fewer minutes available to instruct each group, and fewer meetings with each group throughout the week. That said, I struggle to meet the needs of my diverse student population because of time constraints.

If the problem is not enough time to engage with each student group, then the only solution would have to be one that allows me to duplicate myself.  Enter Show Me.  This app is very simple to use and I was up and running with it in a matter of minutes.  I use Show Me to extend my guided reading lesson past my kidney table.  First, I select the texts that I want my students to engage in. I use my iPad to take pictures of each page of the book, and then crop the pages to look neat and tidy using the standard photo editor.  To simplify my life, I put the pages of each book into their own album, so that as I am creating my Show Me presentation, I only have to look at the pictures that are relevant.  When my husband is helping out with the photography, he takes pictures and crops them down on his iPad.  Then he puts each book's photos into its own Photo Stream, and shares the streams with me.  I don't get bogged down in this part of the process, and I don't stress over the perfection of the pictures.  Like I once heard Jonathan Bergmann say, "Do you want it done perfect [sic], or do you want it done by Tuesday?"

Once the pictures are done, I open the Show Me app and upload the front cover on page one.  Then, using the right arrow, I load all of the subsequent pages.  Show Me only has ten pages available to pre-upload on to, but don't worry if you need more, there is a way around that which I will explain in a bit.  No matter how many pages my book has, I always make sure that the front cover is the last picture in my presentation, as well as the first.  That is because the file icon that the app uses to display each presentation is the last "slide" in the recording.

After all ten pages of the app are loaded with my book pics, I am ready to record.  I start each lesson by greeting the children and telling them the purpose for our reading--which learning targets, sight words, text features, etc. we will be working on with this book.  I then go through the lesson just as if I were sitting at the kidney table with them, but with some added perks.  For one, I can use my finger or stylus to write directly on the text or picture we are looking at.  I do underline the text as we read, write out sight words, point out phonograms, discuss letter differences (b vs. d), and many other reading strategies and skills.  If at any time I want to erase what is on the page, I simply click on the eraser and "clear drawings only."  I can do this right in the middle of recording (it won't show up on the posted presentation), or I can pause to do it.

Pausing in the middle of the book also allows me to think about what I want to say next.  I do this often when I am stuck, because there is no way to rewind.  If I mess up, then the only way to erase what I have said is to start the whole project over--from scratch.  Pausing is also important if my book has more than ten pages, because after recording the tenth slide, I can pause, click the eraser and "clear all." Then I just upload the next picture, record that page, and repeat this process until all of the pages are done.

After my last page is recorded, I show the cover again and give the students instructions on what to do next: "Go read the book to a friend. Then put it back in the bag for the next group to enjoy, and have a wonderful day."

There are many teachers using this app in a variety of ways.  Some simply use it as a white board--Kahn academy style while others use it to edit student text. You can even create student accounts so that students are using the tech productively instead of just receptively.  Oh, the list goes on and on, and you can gain inspiration from others by exploring others' posts.  Yes, everything you create is subject to world review. Joy.

One word of caution.  If you create your Show Me account at home, be leery of using the "Sign up with Facebook" option.  Depending on your district's mobile network settings, your access to post new presentations in your app may be limited.  It may not be impossible to post, even if your district blocks Facebook on mobile devices, but it won't be as easy as clicking "Log in with Facebook".