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In this final post in l, we’ll focus on things remote instruction revealed the full importance of more clearly.

Perhaps one of the biggest things we learned was how quickly an online class can die a slow death if a a norm is passivity rather than a norm of engagement is allowed to emerge. As we shifted to online learning, we quickly were caused to have to plan more intentionally who participates, when and how into the lesson. As part of planning these means of participation, we also realized how important it was to match the form of thinking we want to the form of participation we chose. For example, do we want formative thinking, initial ideas to start us off (in which case use the chat or Everybody Writes), or more careful reflections on our peer’s ideas, (in which case use a Linked Sheet so that students can input a more formal response and respond to each other’s ideas via comments)?  We’ve seen this idea play out in hybrid classrooms as well, as teachers often plan a Double What to Do  �� a set of directions for each set of students to ensure that both students at home and in class are fully engaged in the task:

Remote: ��Write in the chat. Do not send it yet.��In-Person: ��Write it on your whiteboard. Hold it up when it’s ready.��

And while we talked about it in the last post on learnings from remote instruction, we believe it requires repeating.  The power of inclusive cold call to engage and include all students, especially those on the margins who wonder if their voice is relevant, continued to be revealed more fully online. We learned about sequences of highly synergistic Means of Participation such as the “Chat Appreciative Cold Call�� to tell students their voice matters was an invaluable tool in online learning (“Joshua, I loved that you used the word ‘conflict�� in the chat. Can you come off of mute and expand on your thoughts there). We see adapting this technique to in-person learning by intentionally combining it with Everybody Writes (“Suzannah, I loved the rationale you provided for problem number 2, do you mind starting off the conversation.��) The in-person recipe for this is quite similar �� circulating to gather data, genuinely praising a specific part of their work and asking them to share. Notice also this positive Cold Call framing invites the student to “start off the conversation�� �� implying both that this is just a starting point so does not require a fully formed thought �� and that more students will be invited to participate as well. This emphasis on the universality of Cold Call is key and another thing that we learned from online learning �� especially in leading our own PD sessions remotely. When we used a Chat Appreciative Cold Call within the first 5 minutes of a session, this immediately signaled to other participants that they too might be called on and led to increased engagement throughout the session. This simple technique, when used positively, immediately broke the expectation of passivity online.

That brings us to one of our final learnings that was revealed more fully after spending a year studying remote learning. We’ve always believed in the importance of a Strong Start �� engaging students early and often in a lesson, ideally within the first three minutes. But in watching teachers like , we realized the critical importance of doing this online in order to break the norm of passivity and to signal to students what the endeavor of online learning was all about. Learning together and being in a state of flow are the primary ways through which people feel a sense of belonging. Doing this from the minute class begins turns this into a reliable norm for students and invests them in the shared endeavor of learning together �� no matter where they’re learning from.

Again, we would be remiss if we didn’t end here with our biggest learning in watching teachers teach remotely for the past year. It’s the immense gratitude that we feel each and every day to get to learn from you and the confirmation that we chose the right career path if it means getting to study and learn from the greatest problem solvers on earth.

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Nice job. Now let’s see you do it with fifteen 12 year olds joining via laptop��.

Many schools are making the shift to hybrid so we’re excited to share this clip from Allison Dungey of Achievement First with you today as an example of how to manage perhaps the biggest challenge teachers have been asked to take on this year: monitoring two separate settings at once.

We think there’s a lot that Alison does that we can learn from as she prepares to send her student into a burst of independent work. Let’s take a look:

The first thing we notice is that Alison has an orientation slide which makes the task clearly visible for both students online and in the class. This is important because it ensures that everyone is set up for success, a key element of remote instruction that

Next, she checks for understanding of the vocabulary word “reputation�� by cold-calling on Adam. She knows it’s important not to assume everyone knows this term given how important it will be to the discussion following the independent task.

 Once Allison has ensured that students know the key term, she checks for understanding again on the directions for the task by calling on Zaraiah who is at home. Allison further emphasizes the importance of taking notes as they read, and importantly,  reminds them what this task is going to be used for: as a springboard for their class discussion.

Allison also has several assessment systems in place to be able to monitor how well students are reading.

She directs students to use the sentence starter which will help shape their response, and has a Criteria for Success (CFS) posted to practice good writing habits. 

She encourages students to take notes using the “highlight and note�� feature so she can clearly see whether they have understood and taken notes on the reading focus for the day.

These pre-planned assessment processes are also a strategic use of s and give her students a safety net: this task, with its extended work time, gives students the opportunity to self-pace, but Allison is still there to circulate if students struggle.

In addition to being a great example of how to manage a hybrid setting, we think this is also a textbook example of how to set up students for success with independent work even when we’re not online.

–Jasmine Lane

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We’re all going to have to make some bets��.

In a year of massive educational challenges schools now confront the latest new challenge.  How to bring students back to the classroom after a year of reduced learning and social isolation, with dramatically increased inequity.

This raises the question: What to do first—over the summer perhaps, even before the new year starts–especially in the area of reading.

I’ve been thinking about that question and my proposed first step might be surprising but I’ll make the case for it here. It’s an idea called book club modeled on an approach my colleagues and I used in founding our first school in Rochester almost 15 years ago.

Book club involves reading whole books aloud together with students- cover to cover. It builds fluency, vocabulary attention and community via reading. These things are critical and often overlooked. Another way of thinking about it is as a tool to maximize time spent reading well (versus, say, talking about reading.)

In a minute I’ll share some more details about how, but first a few words about fluency. “Research shows disfluency causes as much as 40% of the variance in students who pass [state] tests versus those who fail. This is true for every testing grade,�� Student Achievement Partners wrote in a recent report. Almost half of what we measure in reading is the ability to read with fluency—or it forces us to realize that analysis and interpretation cannot happen without a fluent reading.

The science behind why is straightforward. Working memory—the site of our conscious thinking–is powerful but limited. Being “better�� at critical thinking does not expand the size of your working memory. The key to applying more of thinking to analytical tasks is to automate more mundane tasks the brain is asked to do at the same time. To think deeply you have to read text “at the speed of sight�� as Mark Seidenberg puts it. You need to be able to absorb the meaning and syntax at almost no load to your working memory.  And fewer students than you think can do this- especially with complex text. Especially with reading rates going down,

This applies at all grade levels. Students rarely get practice reading for speed and expression of meaning (prosody) beyond grades 2 or 3 but it is just as important. As one study revealed:

��Reading fluency predicted…marks in all literacy-based subjects, with reading rapidity being the most important predictor. School level did not moderate the relationship between reading fluency and school outcomes, confirming the importance of effortless and automatized reading even in higher school levels.��

Constant practice reading aloud and exposure to high level models of fluent reading by a teacher develops fluency. But it also makes the process enjoyable because it’s a shared group task built around a book that we’re bringing to life.

The second thing to be aware of is the importance of rebuilding attentional habits. “The hallmark of an independent learner is his ability to direct his attention toward his own leaning,�� Zaretta Hammond writes in Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, but students are increasingly not in control of their own attention. It is, as Maryanne Wolf writes, increasingly fractured by constant exposure to screens. Skimming, and states of attention that last just a few seconds before some new distraction is introduced, are now normal states of cognitive engagement- both with texts and more broadly. Your students read for a few seconds, check their phones, distract themselves and maybe pick up reading again. And maybe don’t. To say they are reading is ot say something different than it meant 15 years ago. You cannot think deeply unless you can sustain states of focus and concentration (this is the topic of Cal Newport’s excellent book Deep Work).

The way to combat this is by building an environment characterized by regular, sustained states concentration, where students are insulated from technology and where focus is maintained by both a sense of “flow�� (getting caught up in a moving and meaningful task like the narrative of a good book) and group dynamics-seeing everyone around you do the same.

Students, it is worth noting, have spent the last year in a tech intensive environment where their attentional capacity—already fragile by the standards of past generations—was surely reduced by virtue of their living in a crucible of distraction via constant screen exposure and the reduced attention it socializes. There’s a good chance we’re going to have to rebuild attention.

A third benefit of book club is that is builds community around and through books and makes books a social and shared experiences. There is a difference between discussing a book together and experiencing it—as a story—to which we bring the full array of our emotions and responses. When we we are in a room with others sharing the experience draws us together and makes reading meaningful.

“I will always remember the moment my class realised Eric is the father of Eva’s unborn child in An Inspector Calls. The audible collective gasp. A sea of [stunned] faces,�� a teacher shared in response toa recent Tweet on this topic. This social aspect of reading builds community and in the end will be the way we make the case for the book- it’s connectedness

So book club draws on these three things: Fluency, Attention and Connection:

You choose a book and read it aloud together focusing on story more than analysis. If your group is 10 students great. if it’s 20 great. When we did this at Rochester Prep many years ago we used every teacher in he building (not just ELA teachers) and made slightly smaller groups for students who needed especially high amounts of practice.  

The teacher does perhaps a third of the reading aloud (plus or minus 25 percent) modeling expressiveness and the sound of the authors prose and bringing the book to life.

Then students are called on to read short sequences of unpredictable length in unpredictable order as in this video. The teacher occasionally steps in to push the story along.  She praises and asks for expression in reading. This technique is called Control the Game or as it will be called in TLAC 3.0 FASE Reading. (You can see an example of Control the Game here:

In book club the teacher may add brief pauses to explain/pronounce vocabulary words or key background knowledge or assumptions but only very briefly. (and thus unlike what you see in the video). It’s about reading more for sustained periods.

I’d do this for 45 minutes or perhaps even an hour a day.  Maybe with short independent reads at night. I ’d try to read three good books cover to cover in the course of the summer. Most likely kids would come to love it but they’d develop their foundations: fluency, attention and vocabulary most quickly this way.

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Part 2:��New Learning We Can Use

Not without silver linings��

This is the second in our series of post around the lessons we’ve learned from remote instruction. In this post we will focus on some of our new learnings �� things that hadn’t fully considered before spending a year remotely.

We’ve long talked about the importance of Participation Ratio and Think Ratio �� the importance of getting as many of our students to do as deep thinking as possible. But online learning has brought our understanding of this to a new level. One of the continued silver linings of online learning is our ability to get universal responses from all students via the chat, linked sheet, or another technology tool.

The chat function and other similar tools allowed us to make a habit of universal responses to questions. We’ve got to carry that habit forward and capture that in our questioning practices in classrooms so the goal, frequently, is for everyone to answer. Silent Solo for example, a routine that normalizes everyone writing quickly and informally in response to a prompt is a powerful tool to apply this idea—you’ll see it in TLAC 3.0. Turn and Talks, implemented online via breakout rooms, proved to be not only powerful tools for ratio, but also critical in building community at a time when students felt as disconnected from each other as they did from us as the teacher. And perhaps one of the most important tools for online learning was creating a positive culture around Cold Calling �� allowing teachers in zoom rooms across the country �� to create opportunities for voice equity in their classrooms. Cold Calling ensures that you’re not only hearing from the 4-7 students that are most likely to raise their hand, but instead creating classroom cultures of engagement where all students feel their voices matter (and have put the thought into formulating an answer to the question.)

Secondly, remote learning has expanded the possibilities for us when it comes to asynchronous online support materials that will allow students to access materials post-lesson to reteach or reinforce previously taught ideas (something that will be important when we fully return in person next year). In the beginning of the pandemic, we saw teachers like and support students in incredible ways with their asynchronous videos.

And while none of us are looking to go back to that time, we could consider how we might be able to change the dynamic of homework through asynchronous tools to support learning and enrichment. Could there be extra asynchronous review and enrichment units? Could we allow students to complete brief asynchronous activities or assessments during class while we conference briefly with some students, assess reading progress or some other individual focused task?  These creative ways of utilizing asynchronous tools will be particularly important as we focus on acceleration next year.

And finally, online learning has given us a fuller understanding of the importance of visuals and the influence of what you see (e.g. charting,) on engagement and participation, with special note  on critical it is to couple clear directions with a visible presentation of the task. Clearly planned directions that are made visible is a form of inclusion. Similarly, we came to realize how much “charting�� or tracking key talking points during a discussion, makes it easier for everyone to participate. While this is true for students learning remotely, we now more fully understand how important it is for students when they’re in person as well. It turns out there’s quite a bit of science to good visuals that we often had the luxury to ignore before the pandemic. But in looking at with the beautiful visual from Jo Toye’s history class, attending to how clear and how free of extraneous information it is, how the numbers help guide students eyes to different points so she can ask them specific questions etc. reminds us of the power of thoughtfully designed visuals in supporting student learning in brick and mortar as well.

Jo Toye’s visual: Thoughtfully designed

We’d love to hear from you in the comments or via �� what are some of your new learnings that you are excited to bring back to the classroom?

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Part 1 �� Doubly Important: Re-Building Community and Attention

Returning to bricks and mortar�� just maybe a little wiser and a little smarter

After a year of synchronous, asynchronous, and hybrid learning, our heads are swirling with new terms, new platforms, and new normals. Now, as we start to emerge, we find ourselves reflecting not just on the challenges of the past year, but about silver linings. Surely there are things we’ve learned during this year of unintentional experimentation that can make us better going forward.

A great many things, actually.  Three categories of insights (besides the obvious fact that teachers truly are superheroes) struck us:  

First, what is doubly important now as we return to class after disconnection and possible learning lossSecond, new learnings from remote learning that can just possibly make us better going forwardAnd finally, what has always been important but revealed more fully by spending a year teaching through a screen.

We’re going to do a series of three posts (and perhaps a workshop in the summer) sharing these learnings �� all of which have come from teachers, who continue to prove to be the world’s best problem solvers. This first post will focus on what is doubly important now �� community building, and rebuilding students�� diminished capacity for attention that will prove especially pressing as we strive to ensure the greatest amount of learning in the months to come.

Doubly Important Now: Community and Attention

Top of mind for teachers and the topic of one of our upcoming is the redoubled understanding of the importance of community building �� seeing the classroom as a place that functions by creating a sense of belonging for students through our teaching and through investing our students in rigorous content. Online teaching has reminded us that students need to feel “seen�� in order to feel like they are part of a community.  In online learning, feeling seen is often fairly literal—it’s about having cameras on and letting students know we see and care about the things they do to engage. In the classroom, it may be more figurative-I see you in class, I value you, so I ask your opinion and engage your ideas- and I see you when you engage.

Feeling “seen�� figuratively starts with knowing you are “seen�� literally

Students feel most connected to us and each other when there is a shared task to engage in that feels worthy of their time and effort. A pitfall we saw during the pandemic was trying to build community devoid of content. Teaching relies on relationships but is also the tool by which we build relationships. We learned that community building online doesn’t mean spending 10 minutes asking kids how their weekend was one by one. That often resulted in lost student attention and therefore lost engagement.

Instead, we saw teachers like greet students warmly and get started with a meaningful lesson right away, sprinkling in moments that build connection in the midst of her lesson.We saw use a “Double Chat�� at the top of class to allow students to respond to two questions �� one academic and one a more playful community builder. Both teachers get to the academic work right away, signaling to their students that community is built in the classroom through a shared purpose that centers and celebrates content.

The double-chat

Less obvious at first is that in addition to creating a sense of community in our classrooms, we need to seek to rebuild students�� ability to pay attention.  A year spent online has fractured our own attention–we suspect you feel the scattered-ness after all those zoom calls too. The impact has been felt more perhaps by students who have spent hours staring at screens during school hours, attempting to resist the fact that the rest of the world is at their fingertips, only click away.

As we return to brick and mortar instruction, we have to seek to build up the student’s capacity to attend. One of the ways we can do this is by remembering the power of going pen to paper for memory formation.

Advanced tool for memory formation and focus-building

This reflects one of our favorite tools in online learning. While we know google docs, the chat, and technologies like Nearpod or Peardeck were used to great effect �� the good old-fashioned pencil and paper was perhaps the greatest tool in ensuring that knowledge was lasting. Not only does writing help students think and process new ideas, it helps them encode what they learn into long term memory.

We want to hear more about what you’ve learned too. After a year spent online, what feels doubly important to you as you return to the classroom? In our next post we’ll discuss some of our new learnings from remote learning that we can apply now that we’re back.

-Erica Woolway

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Almost there��.

I’m on the home stretch, I think- I’m wrapping up the manuscript of TLAC 3.0 this week which means it’ll be out in late summer. Meanwhile I’m going to start sharing some excerpts here on the blog. A couple of them are going to be major as the kids say, but I actually thought I’d start things off by sharing something “simple but useful�� you might say, which is a phrase that describes the things I like best: humble, unspectacular and apparently mundane things that make a big difference. So this excerpt is about questioning and he power of ��Phrasing Fundamentals.��

How we ask a question can help ensure that it is worth trying to answer from the perspective of the listener, and the question’s structure can have a significant influence on the degree of thinking and answering it inspires. Understanding a few “phrasing fundamentals�� can help make sure your questions engage your students as you’d hope they would.

The Obvious Trap

One reason students don’t answer or think about questions is because they don’t seem worth answering, often because they are either rhetorical—the teacher doesn’t really expect an answer—or, worse, so obvious that they seem rhetorical. You might call this the obvious trap. Questions with obvious answers are killers of intellectual culture because they pretend to ask a question when there’s really no question. Why are you asking me that? students think. If you’re often asked meaningless questions, you become skeptical of the questioner. Students become reluctant to answer under those circumstances. When everyone clearly knows the answer, the person who says it aloud anyway appears a dupe, oblivious or overeager. Sometimes we seek to start a discussion with an “easy�� question for example, but because the answer seems so obvious, participants are reluctant to answer, perhaps thinking they’ve missed something or that it was actually a trick question. The effect is the opposite of the intent.  In the long-run too. Over time, asking questions with obvious answers undercuts the credibility of your questioning more broadly.

Yes or no questions and questions with just two possible answers are especially vulnerable to the obvious trap. And, obvious or not, they often reduce the quality of the learning environment because one-word answers are the natural response.

Consider a science teacher who asks, during a lab, “Should we add our solution now or wait till it cools?��

I haven’t provided enough context to indicate whether the solution should be added now but I’d wager the answer is pretty likely that we should wait. Would you stop a lesson to ask, “Should we add the solution now or wait till it cools?�� if the answer was that you should add the solution now? Unlikely. You’d just say, “Now we add our solution.�� Or would you ask “What should we do now?�� The answer is obvious and students are likely to perceive the question as rhetorical or think Why are you asking us?

One reason this may happen is because a teacher is trying to ask a question when she really just wants to explain something: “It’s important to remember that we should wait for the solution to cool.�� Or even: “It’s important to remember that we should wait for the solution to cool. Why?�� It’s OK to tell people things directly. Appearing to ask a question when you want to tell students what to do wastes time and builds a culture where questions don’t feel engaging and authentic. It’s hard to build intellectual engagement from that kind of experience.

The questions, “Should I add the solution now?�� and “Should I add the solution now or wait till it cools?�� are uninspiring because they are binary. There are two possible answers in each case. “Yes�� or “no�� in the first question and “now�� or “later�� in the second. “What should I do now?�� would be more interesting. “What should I look for now?”—a perception-based question for which the answer might be “the temperature”—would be better. Or “What’s happening now?�� which, assuming you can’t see anything happening at the moment, might have more of a retrospective focus on checking for understanding of content taught previously. These questions are all more interesting because there are more than two possible answers. Simply making the question unbinary helps.

Binary questions are also problematic because they are especially prone to “tipping,�� which occurs when the questioner adds voice inflection on a word or phrase to suggest the answer. A bit of emphasis on “now�� or perhaps on the “let it cool”—“Should we add the solution now? Or let it cool?”—makes answering doubly redundant. Your questions could be about bocce, something I know exactly nothing about, and given a binary question with a bit of voice inflection to tip the answer, I’m getting ten out of ten correct answers.

Avoid Bait and Switch

Another way questions can go wrong is because you ask a question, give students time to think about it, and then call on them to answer a different question, or a question you rephrase in a way that changes its meaning. “How is Jonas changing in this chapter? Turn and talk with your partner for ninety seconds,�� you say. But after the Turn and Talk you say, “Great. Where and how do we see Jonas’s anxiety showing up?�� The question is now different and the  eager student who put her hand up thinking she’d be asked the original question is caught out. She showed her eagerness and now possibly can’t answer. It’s bait and switch and it makes it less likely that she’ll keep raising her hand as confidently or as often.

Most of the time, bait and switch happens because we haven’t prepared. If you think up your question in the moment, you will have to keep it in your working memory while you listen to student responses, manage the classroom, think about the content, and so on. Under these conditions it’s easy to forget your own question—or to remember only the general idea. It’s one more reason to plan (and write down) your key questions in advance.6 If you do use questions that are thought up in the moment, write them on the board when you can. The visual will help students remain disciplined to answer what you asked, and it will also help you to remember the original question.

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For teachers who spent months navigating the transition to all-remote instruction, making a second leap to the “next normal”–hybrid learning–can feel like another massive challenge in an already challenging year (and one that’s twice as daunting as the first!). After all, you’ve still got all the issues of online learning–glitchy internet, helping students feel connected and lovingly accountable–but now you’re navigating those challenges while also teaching a classroom of kiddos “live�� and in-person. In spite of this, so many teachers are out there tackling this “next normal�� with ingenuity and commitment to kids. Hats off to all of you, and especially to teachers like Mika Salazar, who have been gracious enough to share their video with us. Joaquin Hernandez put together some useful notes on some things he loved about Mika’s hybrid lesson and his conversation with her afterwards. His notes include a hybrid classroom shopping list!

We are especially grateful to Mika, a middle school science teacher at Ocean Hill Collegiate, for sharing her video. Doubly so because it shows her in action during her very first hybrid lesson. Here’s a brief snippet that stood out to us from her footage:

from on .

Notice how well-planned and engaging her procedures are and how carefully she makes students feel a part of the larger classroom community. 

To prepare for our upcoming webinar , I interviewed Mika about her lesson and the transition to hybrid.  Our team found her reflections to be so useful–and her hybrid classroom to be so joyful and productive–that we had to share her insights on the blog!

Here are four (of the many) useful tips that Mika shared with us about making the switch to hybrid learning:

(Re)invest in Systems & Routines: Mika found that one of the most effective ways to streamline her hybrid instruction was to maintain or adapt her existing routines. Once she established clear routines for simple, recurring tasks, she found that it freed her up to focus on what matters most: her kids, building relationships, and her content. If you’re preparing to make the switch to hybrid, Mika recommends revisiting core routines for starting class, hand-raising, Turn and Talk, and Show Me. You may find that these (and other routines) benefit from simple tweaks. One such routine is her start to class. Before diving into each lesson, she makes it a habit to greet both Roomers and Zoomers and has students answer a fun, getting-to-know-you question that builds community.

In hindsight, Mika shared that one of the most important systems that she rolled out on day one was how and when students should mute/unmute to speak to the class. In any other classroom context, a system like this might seem superfluous, but in a hybrid setting in which all students –those in person and those remote–are learning on Zoom together, knowing when to mute and unmute your Zoom mic becomes essential. If a student forgets the procedure for muting/unmuting, the entire class receives a blast of audio feedback. As you surely noticed in the clip from Mika’s first hybrid lesson, with clear instructions and practice, this system rapidly becomes a habit. Today, discussions in Mika’s classroom unfold effortlessly, with students weaving in and out of discussions without missing a beat. 

Set Your Classroom Up for Connection. One of the most important ways you can prepare for hybrid learning is to be thoughtful about how you set up your classroom. Although there’s no one “right�� way to arrange a classroom for hybrid learning, it can be tremendously helpful for you and your students if you arrange it in a way that allows them to see and hear each other. If you’re curious about Mika’s setup, check out (below). We especially loved how it allows all students to be seen and heard, and to follow along with any student-facing materials that she wants to display via her LCD projector.

Prep Your Tech. Not surprisingly, Mika was just as thoughtful about how she set up her tech for hybrid learning. If you want to replicate or adapt her arrangement, below is a list of what she calls her tech “essentials�� and “nice-to-haves.”��

Essentials: LCD projector, which she uses to share student-facing content. She keeps teacher-facing materials (students�� cameras, the Chat) materials are on the laptop screen.Laptop with teleconferencing programPortable computer speakers connected to laptop (which play audio from “Zoomers��)

Nice-to-haves (that are uber-helpful) Wireless mouse and keyboard. This allows her to freely and easily toggle between tabs and applications.Bluetooth headset. Mika’s wireless headset has been “a game-changer�� for a few reasons. First, it allows her to also teach from the front of her classroom, which comes in handy if she wants to point something out or teach from a different vantage point. Second, it allows her remote learners to hear her, even as she circulates throughout her classroom. If you invest in a headset, Mika recommends being intentional about finding opportunities to step away from the screen. Being able to provide in-person learners with support in real time is one of the biggest advantages of hybrid learning, so we don’t want to neglect opportunities to do so! Utility cart. Mika’s utility cart is her primary workstation. Since it comes equipped with outlets, she can use it to maintain a charge for her laptop and portable computer speakers (the latter which broadcasts audio from remote Zoomers). She also recommends propping up your laptop with a monitor stand so the screen is within your field of vision.

Begin with the End. Throughout this pandemic, many teachers have found themselves grappling with two tensions. On one hand, teachers may feel urgency about “covering�� as much of their curricula and standards as possible. On the other, they might also feel compelled to slow down the pace of their instruction to ensure they teach important topics with depth and rigor and avoid leaving students behind. Both of these tensions are right, and Mika says what has helped her resolve those is to use the learning objectives in her curricula to help her prioritize what she might modify or adapt. When she vets her materials with this lens, she almost always finds a way to cut or adapt content that’s less aligned to that lesson objective.

If you’re interested in learning more about hybrid instruction, please check out the Teach Like a Champion for our latest videos and analysis, or consider joining us at an upcoming 401 webinar:

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We’ve just finished watching Allison Dungey’s lesson from Achievement First. She and her kids do a great job discussing Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars and there’s lots to learn about getting the most out of discussions online from watching the clip. Jasmine Lane put together these notes on some of the things we liked: 

It’s helpful to know that before the clip began, Allison asked students to jot thoughts on the juxtaposition of two very different descriptions in the novel, one stressing the scenic beauty of Denmark and one stressing the terror of the Nazi occupation. The clip begins as Allison is following up on that initial reflection.

During the discussion, Allison is first careful to establish meaning. While it might be tempting to simply read a section of text and ask a students to analyze it straight away, this assumes that students have already understood what we wanted them to notice in the section of task�� but developing readers don’t necessarily notice what the teacher does so Allison begins by asking students to simply describe the key difference in the two descriptions. When Sophia points out the sudden change, Allison uses what is essentially a close reading question to make sure students understand Sophia’s comment. “What is IT? What changed with time in that sentence?�� This kind of referent question is often critical to establishing meaning of a text but here Allison is asking it about a student comment. If students don’t follow Sophia’s reference they won’t be able to respond fully to the text.

Allison also uses charting—writing summaries of key student contributions in the margin and tagging them with the names of the students who made them.  This honors student contributions but also keeps previous comments visible and available. Since students�� working memories are probably heavily engaged at this point, they’d be likely to forget many of their peers responses without this so the charting keeps comments ‘alive�� so peers can refer to them. This allows students to continuously refer to and weave one another’s thinking into their own. 

Alison also asks Kennedy to try to synthesize the direction of the discussion, which puts a high value on listening and reflecting on peers comments.  She is teaching students to listen well and connect with one another intellectually.

Afterwards students re-write their initial response. As we’ve noted elsewhere in this blog (and in Teach Like a Champion) this is an ideal post discussion activity.

Having noticed some difficulties with initial responses, Allison redirects students to the sentence frame to structure and organize their thinking. She also prompts students to use their classmates�� ideas which, again, is easy because they are still visible and tagged with names. She further amplifies this process via the beautiful phrase “Use the brilliant ideas from your classmates��- in Allison’s classroom that learning is a shared process.

We also loved the task because asking students to revise and improve their original answers (without judgment) based on the insights of their peers validates the discussion. It implies that the class shared things of value that rendered our initial thinking incomplete.  She sends them back their original answers so they can revise and see the difference.

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As many readers of this blog know, we are hard at work developing a middle grades reading curriculum. It’s built around a diverse array of great books and is designed to implement research on the importance of intentionally building background knowledge, as well as to develop fluency with complex texts and increase opportunities for students to think in writing. Beth Verrilli has been a key part of the process and she offered this glimpse at how we use Stack Audits to constantly examine, refine and improve our materials.

We thought you might like a peek behind the curtain of a Curriculum Team meeting to get sense for how we use feedback and review to constantly improve the Reading Reconsidered curriculum.

Recently, for example, we held a “stack audit�� to reflect on our lesson plans.

We find stack audits powerful—the general idea is to gather a group of people and a group of similar products (in schools, that might be Do Nows or Exit Tickets or homework assignments). For our purposes, we gathered ten lesson plans from the Reading Reconsidered Curriculum, covering different texts, different grade levels, and written by different curriculum writers. Our team of eight then spent about twenty minutes reading through the plans, focusing specifically on what we call ‘Key Ideas’—the model answers we provide for each question in the daily lesson. Teachers use them to draft their own exemplars so they have a clear sense for what a good answer looks like and where they want to go with the question while teaching it.

First, we noted examples of Key Ideas that worked well and what we’d like to replicate; then we noted examples that showed areas where we’d like to improve, sharpen, and refine. As a group, we shared out a couple of rounds of these “glows�� and “grows.��

Our “glows�� were trends we want to continue: including paraphrased or quoted text evidence in the key ideas; following an annotation task with a robust lists of potential annotations; challenging students to use explicit vocabulary words or terms from their Knowledge Organizer in their responses. One of our “glows�� (considering multiple interpretations of a question) also became a “grow��: help teachers prioritize interpretations by listing the most important one first and building to additional layers of depth or meaning.

The stack audit reveals something we value in our curriculum- the collaborative nature of our team and its products. We take time to regularly circle back to review our lessons and we make time for constant feedback. Guided by our colleagues�� insights, we continue to learn from each other about what works, what resonates, and what inspires us to continue to craft the highest quality units.

In terms of content, the stack audit revealed how an ideal student answer should be grounded in the text and also reference background knowledge that underpins the unit. Especially strong answers might include one of the vocabulary words under study or connect to an image or larger idea.

Here’s a visual of the Key Ideas from one question in our Freak the Mighty unit:

We’re pretty obsessed with Key Ideas because we think they are the crux of a teachers�� intellectual preparation process. Internalizing the Key Ideas of a lesson helps teachers to understand the text on an expert level. It’s crucial for teachers to have the deep understanding of where each question fits in the lesson and where each lesson is going, so they feel equipped to strengthen and guide student understanding.

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Video-study: We dress for the occasion��

This January, we embarked on a new endeavor to bring school leaders and teachers together with the TLAC team to do what we love to do: study video of exceptional teaching. 

Studying video is at the heart of what our team does; it’s how we unearth the techniques in all our books and workshops. And even beyond the way it enriches our own understanding of the craft of teaching, video study is among the best tools for professional development: watching with colleagues develops perception and shared understanding of the craft of teaching.

That’s why we launched TLAC Partners: Video Collaborative, an initiative that provides schools with the opportunity to watch footage of their own teachers in collaboration and partnership with our team.

In a Video Collaborative session, school teams select footage of their own teachers and identify areas of strength, as well as areas of opportunity: places they would like to focus on in developing their teachers.

We then watch and discuss the video together in a 90 minute session, generating insights and exemplar clips that leaders can use in training their staff. 

We were delighted to pilot our first Collaborative with Cardiff High School in Cardiff, Wales, and we thought it was a big success. For example during our session, we watched a video of History teacher Jo Toye exploring key sources with her students during a synchronous lesson.

Among other things:

We loved how Jo varied her Means of Participation, shifting between cold calling, taking volunteers and using the chat. She keeps the pacing strong and students stay engaged while thinking about the core content. We loved her upbeat, irrepressible energy. Students feel her love for the content and respond.We thought the idea of labeling the diagram with numbers to facilitate review could not have been more brilliant- uh, “brill,�� that is. It prove that with careful planning and preparation, rigorous content comes to life!We appreciated her follow-up questions like “why�� that took students�� thinking a step further rather than matching faces to names.We also appreciated the focus on retrieval practice of key content from previous lessons to build long-term memory. That’s always important but doubly so, we think, online when attention is even more fractured and memory thus doubly tenuous.And then there’s her resilience when the lights (literally) go out during her lesson; Jo keeps the lesson going with a smile and a laugh.

One of the biggest takeaways that came from our session was that there was a lot to celebrate in how their teachers were building community with their students while teaching remotely. So we are thrilled to be able to share in that celebration–and thank the teachers and leaders of Cardiff High School for sharing their craft with us.

Here are a few takeaways from their experience:

“I think the experience made us think critically. The collaborative approach was really supportive and unthreatening. It is so useful to have people from outside our organization look at what we do- it was great!”“Any professional learning experience that allows for staff to reflect on practice is so important and valuable. The addition of the external viewpoints of the TLAC team gives this process more validity, credibility and insights.��

If you or someone you know would be interested in participating in a TLAC Partners Video Collaborative, please email us at [email protected]. 

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