The Classroom AS Instruction

What visual supports and reinforcements do you use in the classroom? Do you change them or do they become wallpaper on the walls for the course of the year?

By changing the visuals around your classroom, you draw attention to timely learning objectives that reinforce your instruction.

In this picture, the clock represents current learning expectations. If you would have been in the classroom during the previous unit of instruction, the clock would have shown fractions.

What? Teaching Reading in Math?

Reading is a cross-curricular activity, whether students are reading directions or gaining background information. In this math class, students read an article about how to study for a math class. What a great integration of skills: reading, studying, organizing and doing math!

Using Brain Pop to enhance the lesson, students then applied their knowledge of main idea to their reading in math.

Getting Creative with Differentiated Learning

What do you do when some students get it but others don't? Collaborate. One PLC team addressed this issue by offering two lessons: one for remediation and one for enrichment. The two teachers team taught the struggling students in order to provide more instructional support. Then, the teachers enlisted Jenna Wright to teach the enrichment classes throughout the day.

As a beneficial aside, notice that these social studies teachers are remediating writing skills for their DBQs. What a great authentic learning opportunity to increase literacy!

Classroom Decor Using Student Work

Ask yourself, how much do students see themselves reflected in your classroom? Do they see their work? Do they feel valued?

The more students see their work displayed in the room or halls, the more comfortable they feel.

Shy Students? Try Edmodo!

Students use Edmodo for online book discussions instead of the traditional small group discussion. In this case, the teacher set up five groups per class (one per book), and students asked questions and commented on others' comments/questions. Students were held accountable for the page number of where they found the information as well as relevance of the commentary.

This s a great example of using technology to provide variety and engagement in the classroom. Students didn't want to stop!

Do You See What I See?

Look at these pictures of students on 6 Gold.  What do you notice????

Do you notice student ownership? YES! 

Do you notice student collaboration?  YES!

Do you notice student engagement?  YES!

Do you notice authentic learning?  YES!

Do you notice interdisciplinary learning?  YES!  But, you may not see it in these pics, so go easy on yourself if you didn't get this one right away!

We do amazing things at TMS!  In this one period of learning, I saw students in...

Social Studies becoming sharecroppers by agreeing to a contract, growing crops (okay, so they drew them instead), earning payment from the overseer (it was a piddly payment if I must say), and being attacked by a live boll weevil.  The students had a blast as they role-played these events with live bodies.

Science growing plants and investigating which methods result in successful "crop" growth.

English Language Arts comparing and contrasting tenant farmers and sharecroppers.  Then, they used post-it notes and Wallwisher to discuss the main idea of their related readings.

Mathematics subdividing sharecropper plots, estimating percentages of land for each sharecropper and evaluating their accuracy.

In each of the above examples, students were applying knowledge from all of their core classes and engaging with the content and their peers.  Students used their knowledge of plant growth from science to help them become good sharecroppers in social studies.  The subdivision of land in math directly correlated to their understanding of the sharecropper's contract learned in social studies, and in English, students compared what they'd learned about sharecroppers to other types of farmers from the historical time studied.  And, don't even get me started on the student ownership....determining the complexity of their crops and plots of land.  I feel like I could go on and on and on......

Let's Talk About Main Idea

Here's a great way to infuse two CCSS literacy standards: dialogue and main (central) idea. In this lesson, each group member read an assigned article and identified the main idea on their whiteboard. Once each member was finished, they discussed their ideas and developed a group answer. What's great about this activity is the focus on engagement (all kids were accountable) and dialogue as kids debated which main idea was accurate.

Do They Know What You Know?

Ask yourself this question: Can my students tell me what their learning objective is and why it's important?

Objectives should be embedded in all of our instruction and transparent to students. To make this simpler for you and easy to remember, find a consistent way to communicate objectives to students. By making it part of your habit, students will benefit from knowing what you want them to know. Check out this example...

A Day in the Life of BYOD

What can BYOD look like at TMS? Let's take a hypothetical look at what a student's electronic device could do in a given day.

1st hour: PE - the QR reader links the student to classroom workout videos
2nd hour: Tech Ed - the calculator figures square footage for architectural assignment
3rd hour: Math - with partners, students watch videos from "Flipped Classroom" to support new learning
4th hour: English - connect to Socrative to demonstrate mastery of tone/mood (see pic)
5th hour: Digital Literacy - use camera to take pictures for the electronic book being written
6th hour: Science - connect to Internet to identify heat transfers into PollEverywhere (see pic)
7th hour: Social Studies - the dictionary confirms an inference on an unfamiliar historical word in a primary source document

Throughout the day: use calendar app to record homework assignments

Notice the variety of tools available when we encourage BYOD. I can't help think of the potential to expound on the uses identified above.

Flippin' Out with BYOD

Watch the evolution as 7th grade math teachers begin teaching advanced math students using a "Flipped" classroom model.  In this model, student homework consists of direct instruction using videos of problem-solving in action.  This frees up classroom time for engaging instructional activities and teacher support for those more challenging problem.

Stay tuned for more on flipped classrooms in action...