Knowing When to Shift

By Wolfgang Staudt from Saarbruecken, Germany (steep grades - sharp curves)
[CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I was about 20 years old when I learned how to drive a stick shift. Or at least I thought I knew how to drive a stick shift. Growing up in the Valley of the Sun didn't afford me the opportunities to drive on many inclines - so you can imagine my frustration the first time that I attempted to drive up the mountains to college with my newly acquired driving skill set - I couldn't get enough speed. I mean I was literally (not the figuratively, literally, but LITERALLY) pressing the pedal to the floor and not going anywhere. Semi trucks were passing me. Giant RV's were passing me. And I couldn't figure out what was going on. 

Once I finally made it up the mountain I called my dad, because, who else do you call in times like these? I felt so uninformed when he explained to me that I should have down-shifted in order to get more power when driving up a steep grade. 

Part of being able to survive in life is knowing when to shift; shift patterns of behavior, shift expectations, mindsets, and attitudes, shift positions. 

But truly successful people anticipate a necessary shift and do what it takes to be ready beforehand. 

I'm picturing a crowd of people on an airport transit train. It never fails, someone forgets to hold on to something or at least plant their feet - and before they know it, they are thrown off balance once the train begins moving. And then again, when the train comes to a stop, the same person is caught off guard and trying to grasp onto something in order to keep from tumbling over. 

I always wonder...How can do they not prepare themselves for what's coming? They know the train is going to start/stop moving. Did they not pay attention to their 8th grade science teacher during the lessons on Newton's Law of Inertia???

But life isn't much different. If we stop paying attention to all the signs around us, we wouldn't be caught off guard so often, we would be able to begin to shift behaviors and mindsets long before circumstances demanded that we do so. 

And in case I discourage myself while I'm writing this and you while you're reading it, a shift doesn't imply turning something comfortable upside-down and inside-out. A shift is simply a tweak. A nudge. A scooch. A bump up or down, left or right. 

It's just doing something different in such a way that the next hill in life doesn't find us with the pedal to the floor going nowhere. 

Offering my BEST to you!

-bethany.

This post is part of my reflections for my OneWord2017: SHIFT. To read what I've written previously, click HERE. 

What about you? Where might you need to shift something - either professionally or personally? When was a time you made a minor adjustment and it made all the different in a particular situation? When was a time that you didn't make a shift when you should have? What advice you do have regarding making shifts?

#oneword2017 SHIFT

Sometimes it takes me a while to figure stuff out. Sometimes, it takes me way too long to figure stuff out. 

Last year, I chose my #oneword pretty easily - it was THRIVE. You can read about my thoughts HERE. I didn't stick with it very well, mostly because someone moved my cheese (remember that book?) and I had a difficult time finding it. 

That lost feeling stuck with me into the beginning of 2017. I eventually got over it, but was in a quandary for what word I could use to focus on. Well, just a few weeks ago, as I was reading Shift This! by Joy Kirr, it smacked me upside the head - SHIFT - was my word. It had actually chosen me but I was too caught up in attempting to keep things as they were that I completely missed it.

SHIFT seems appropriate because already in my professional world things have changed and continue to be rearranged. In my personal world there are things that I wish would be different, but for whatever reason, just haven't...yet. 

I found this quote from Kristin Armstrong that seems most appropriate for where I'm at right now:

It's not only moving that creates new starting points. Sometimes all it takes is a subtle shift in perspective, an opening of the mind, an intentional pause and reset, or a new route to start to see new options and new possibilities.  

I look forward to where this word takes me for the last half of 2017. 

Shift This!

I am so excited to have found this book just in time for my district's second summer book study! Shift This! by Joy Kirr is a provoking read for anyone who is looking to make subtle and manageable tweaks in their teaching practices that will produce noticeable differences on daily life in the classroom. 

What I am most hopeful for is that it will begin a district-wide dialog among teachers and their campus site leaders. Our district has undergone some significant changes the last couple of years and the last thing anyone needs is someone else dictating what to do and how to get it done. But we all need to continue to grow. The topics between the covers of this book come at just the right time for us. 

Ms. Kirr has prepared Twitter Chats for the summer which can be found on her website, which I'm looking forward to participating in as much as my summer schedule allows. 

For teachers within my district I also prepared a Google Classroom environment where teachers are asked to connect and reflect in a variety of ways. Here's a link to a make-your-own-copy Google Doc that details what I'm asking participants in my district to do in order to obtain documented professional development hours to be used for re-certification purposes. If any of the links do not work as anticipated, please let me know and I'll do my best to fix them as soon as I can. 

Offering my BEST to you!
-Bethany.

Student Reflection - Why and How Should We Plan For It?

I'm guilty. I wasn't the best at giving my students time to reflect as part of the learning cycle. If there was time at the end of the lesson, the unit, the week, the quarter, semester, or school year, then I would ask my students to reflect in order to process what they had learned, how they learned it, and how they might apply what they’ve learned to future endeavors.

However, the more we educators (myself included) understand about how our students' brains work and how learners process new concepts and skills, the more we understand the need for reflection to be part of the learning cycle. It's a piece that is not negotiable. It is so valuable because it is what holds the new knowledge together.

As a result, the new knowledge is easier to retrieve and provides additional connection points for future practice opportunities and learning experiences to attach themselves to.

And just like we educators take advantage of reflection as part of our professional practice to structure our instructional sequences, students also use their reflections as a guide as they set additional learning goals.

To be clear, reflection is different than checking for comprehension. Checking for comprehension requires that the learner demonstrate skill proficiency. Reflection, on the other hand, is a much deeper cognitive process because it requires the learner to make judgments about the learning process itself.

So how do you go about setting a supportive environment and provide activities for reflective thinking? The University of Hawaii has some good suggestions:

• Provide an emotionally supportive environment that allows for students to be vulnerable, if necessary, as they evaluate their learning.
• Provide sufficient time for students to reflect.
• Reflection prompts are authentic
• The prompts encourage consideration for what was known prior to lesson, what was learned, and what has yet to be learned.
• The reflection prompts promote assessment of the learning experiences themselves
• The reflection process includes opportunities for social interaction among learners to gain additional perspectives.

How often should reflection take place? As Larissa Pahomov, author of Authentic Learning in the Digital Age, states, that if reflection is going to benefit student learning, the ideas need to be documented in some fashion and then referenced at the starting point of the next learning point. When considering where reflections fit in on the learning cycle, the ideas should be recorded at the end and referred back to at the beginning of the next cycle. Learning begins and ends with reflection.

And if we as educators want to maximize the potential of reflecting on learning, we will provide opportunity and space for the learners in our classrooms to share their thinking. Educational leader, George Couros, will often ask participants in his sessions to record their thinking in a video and share it out via Twitter. Why? He states that among several reasons, it continues the conversation beyond the time and space that learners are in a physical arena together.

Whether or not we utilize Twitter in our learning spaces (which is a topic I’d love to discuss further with you, if you’re not already doing so) or simply have students do a think-pair-share at the end of the class period, we need to provide the opportunity to build understanding through sharing ideas. If our mindset is that learning is solely an independent practice, then our mindset is outdated. Yes, there is a time and place for students to practice and provide evidence of proficiency in a skill, but if they never or rarely share their thinking with others, we are literally depriving them of a necessary component of the learning cycle.

Based on my own practice, not many of our students are adept at being reflective, they need scaffolds in order to produce reflections that help them make connections and solidify learning. The following four questions, when used in concert, tend to help the ideas in our students’ minds be transcribed into a journal (paper or digital), written or audio/video recordings.

1. What did you learn?
2. How did you learn it? What activities helped you to learn?
3. How does what you learned connect with what you already knew?
4. What questions or comments do you still have?

Providing students with sufficient time for reflection, including sharing their reflections and referring back to them periodically, will no doubt take a bit of time and planning on our part. However, we are no longer the sage on the stage, rather we are facilitators of learning and as such, we will enrich the learning experience with periods of reflection.

Offering my BEST to you!
Bethany

What reflective strategies do you use as part of the learning cycle? What impact have you noticed for yourself as students reflect? Are there any areas you struggle with when implementing this practice?

Here are the resources that helped shape my thinking on this topic:

• Peter Pappas' Taxonomy of Student Reflection
• What Meaningful Reflection on Student Work Can Do for Learning
• The Reflective Student
• University of Hawaii - Reflective Thinking
• What Meaningful Reflection On Student Work Can Do for Learning
• 40 Reflection Questions
• 6 Ways to Use Twitter to Enhance In School Professional Learning

Showcasing Student Work

Imagine this...your students have just completed a major project. After days, or weeks, or even months of research, collaboration, teacher-student conferences, and revisions, the projects have been presented, reflections have taken place and a final teacher evaluation given. You feel confident that your students have not only learned, but mastered the content. You're proud of their accomplishments as well as the fact that you resisted the multiple urges you had to put the kibosh on the entire assignment because it was getting out of hand. In fact, you already have ideas of how to adapt the project for next year's students.

And then...you walk past the garbage and see the projects carelessly discarded. Wait! What?!?! Who would throw it away? It represents the figurative blood, sweat, and tears (maybe literally) of your students. Why? Why would they just throw it all away? Did it not mean anything to them? 

At one point or another, this has happened to every teacher who has dared to do a major project with their students. And we wonder why do the students not want to take their work home and keep forever and ever. 

I'm guilty of the following practice: teacher assigns the work, students work on the assignment, student presents to the class, teacher grades the work, teacher hands back the work, class transitions to a new concept rarely to ever consider the task again. Am I the only one? I took so little time to think about how to showcase my students' work. Maybe it's because I didn't explain how their work would be displayed to the public as part of the introduction to the project that students simply tossed their work in the trash after it had been graded.

In retrospect, grading should not be the last part of an assignment. Showcasing student work should be the final piece. Here's why:

1. It gives purpose to the task. 
2. It can often raise the quality of work produced.
3. It builds community between the learner and their audience.

What should be displayed? How about anything that represents what your students are currently working on. Showcasing student work should not be limited to the art teachers. But we can take lots of cues from them. Every day we are asking our students to think like authors, scientists, mathematicians, and historians. And as such, we need to proudly showcase their efforts.

And now I'm going to make a bold statement...If your students are not producing work that is worthy of being showcased...your lessons need revision. 

Every.single.strand of the new 2016 ISTE Student Standards has at least one component that has something to do with students producing a demonstration of what they are learning. Review the standards for yourself and see if you agree or not. 

Now that I've gotten that off my chest...Where do you display student work?

1. Does your school have a place to showcase student work? Maybe it's in the front office, maybe it's in the library or media center. If you have bulletin boards or display cases in your hallways, take a few minutes a month and have your students check out their peers' work. Go the extra mile and have students write Wow! notes to the artist, author, scientist, mathematician, and historian expressing appreciation and admiration. 
2. Work with your local community centers to showcase student work. Your public library is a place to start asking. Your town's other public offices might also appreciate brightening up their offices with student creations.
3. Ever considered assisted living facilities to showcase your students' work? Residents are always appreciative when they know that others are thinking of them. 

And let's not forget social media! 

1. Do you have a blog or teacher website? Does your school? Photos of student work can easily accessed and more importantly shared to a larger audience.
2. Posting student work on Facebook, Twitter, and/or Instagram can spread the message that what students are doing in your classroom is important and valuable. It builds community with your followers and you are more likely to have support when you really need it if your family and friends and followers know not only what students are learning, but how they are learning.
3. Take videos of student work and post them on YouTube. Take still shots of students' work, set it to music and viola! Instant showcasing availability!

Our students need to know that the work that they are doing is worthwhile. There is no better way of communicating this message than by showcasing their work. But let's not wait until the big projects are in motion. Get started today by posting what your students are doing - even if they're quietly taking an assessment, be proud enough to let your community know how hard your learners are working on showing what they know! 

Offering my BEST to you!

Bethany

How often do you showcase student work?

What kinds of things do you showcase?

Why do you think the practice of showcasing student work is not a standard among educators?

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