beyondbasicteaching

[beyondbasicteaching]

Back to School is Upon Us

School starts in a few weeks, and instagram has been reminding me of some things that I feel the need to share, in no particular order:

1. How you decorate and design your classroom can affect how well (or poorly) students can focus. Neon rainbow everything with every square inch of wall covered in 14,000 “cute” but illegible fonts will likely be overstimulating for your students and will definitely be more of a distraction than a help.

2. Rewards, points systems, prizes, and other extrinsic motivators are bandaid methods of managing behavior. They are not classroom management. They will not last. They will undermine your students’ motivation to do the right thing because it’s the right thing. And when one system stops working, it becomes an endless cycle of trying to find the next shiny thing that will keep some semblance of order and productivity in the room.

3. BEHAVIOR MANAGEMENT IS NOT CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT. Behavior management is not classroom management. Behavior management is. not. classroom. management.

But classroom management IS behavior management.

Classroom management means having a plan for ordering the classroom and how students will accomplish various procedures throughout the day. Classroom management means knowing how you want things done: how do you want students to enter the room in the morning? Where do they put their things? Where do they sit? What will they do when they get there? How will they get materials? How will they turn in work? What are the expectations for behavior in the room? What happens when expectations are not met?

The more structured and clear your expectations and procedures are, the more consistently you teach and practice and follow through on them, the easier they are for students to accomplish. Students NEED structure. Anything you want students to do must be explicitly taught.

Points and rewards and punishments undermine student ownership and motivation. Rewards are fun every once in a while, but let’s be honest, do you really want to have to manage all of that every day?

The best classroom and behavior management is to a) know what you want students to do and how you want them to do it; b) explicitly TEACH them what and how, and then practice until it’s automatic; and c) be consistent.

Consistent, clear expectations and follow-through will trump every other behavior management involving prizes and bribes and punishments.

4. Just because something is on Instagram, Pinterest, or TikTok, just because something looks cute or fun, doesn’t mean it’s effective, good for kids, or best practice. There are evidence-based practices that are both effective AND engaging. Be judicious.

[beyondbasicteaching]

Teaching Reading is More Than Phonics

The body of research spanning decades that's now known as "the science of reading" is gaining traction among public schools.

The research and evidence for best practices in reading instruction, including systematic, structured phonics instruction, is becoming more accessible to teachers.

This is a very good thing: NAEP reading scores in the United States have been largely stagnant for nearly 30 years.

This shift toward science- and evidence-based instruction means teachers are moving toward alignment with the National Reading Panel's report, stating that effective reading instruction contains 5 key elements:

Phonics

Phonological Awareness

Vocabulary

Comprehension

Fluency

We're making great strides in addressing the gap in phonics and students' knowledge of letter-sound correspondence in print. New discoveries in neuroscience are helping clarify how exactly the brain learns to read print; it turns out it's not as natural a process as whole language or balanced literacy would lead us to believe.

The human brain is actually not evolutionarily wired (yet) for written language, which only developed around 6,000 years ago. Learning to read print requires children to actively build new connections in their brains.

But so far, the dive into the science of reading has come short of its full potential.

Teaching phonics, practicing phonemic and phonological awareness, and practicing fluency through repeated reading is only part of the process.

The other part is comprehension and vocabulary.

I've spent a solid amount of my teaching time using the Common Core State Standards as isolated lesson objectives, trying to build comprehension. After all, teachers have been told, if we teach these metacognitive skills and so-called strategies, children will be able to read any text about any topic and be able to comprehend it. We just have to teach the skills of the standards, and kids will get whatever knowledge they need.

At least, that's what the thinking has been.

This approach sounds good in theory, but has some problems in practice.

First, the CCSS were written and designed with the intention of being embedded in content-rich classrooms. The Key Shifts of the CCSS in ELA state that students should be "building knowledge through content-rich nonfiction."

This means "students must be immersed in information about the world around them if they are to develop the strong general knowledge and vocabulary they need to become successful readers and be prepared for college, career, and life."

In order for students to build the necessary knowledge to comprehend text and use the skills of the standards, more time must be dedicated to deeply studying a topic. This means more than a week on a topic: students should be deeply immersed in a topic for several weeks to a month at a time, with learning and knowledge about the topic as the primary goal.

Second, the critical thinking skills described in the standards are context and knowledge dependent. They really cannot be taught in isolation from specific information and content.

In his article Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?, Daniel Willingham sums up the problem perfectly:

Can critical thinking actually be taught? Decades of cognitive research point to a disappointing answer: not really. People who have sought to teach critical thinking have assumed that it is a skill, like riding a bicycle, and that, like other skills, once you learn it, you can apply it in any situation. Research from cognitive science shows that thinking is not that sort of skill.

Skills such as asking and answering questions (RI.1, RL.1) and identifying the main idea and key details (RI.2, RL.2) can and should be taught, but they are dependent on students' prior knowledge of the topic. The more knowledge readers have about a topic when approaching a text, the more they are able to ask and answer questions, identify important information, and locate supporting or key details.

Without background knowledge, students are only guessing at what information is most important, which questions are relevant to ask, and how the text can possibly connect to their lives and the world around them.

Finally, there's the practical problem of time. In the limited time available to teachers in a single school year, these standards must be taught, mastered, and reinforced. This is simply not possible with the sheer number of standards. Literature, Informational Text, Language, Speaking and Listening, Reading Foundations, Writing... These are the categories that make up the ELA standards.

The result is that standards that can be explicitly taught, such as Reading Foundations and Language standards, are left to fall by the wayside as teachers strive to address the more abstract skills of the Reading and Writing standards. In the process, Science and Social Studies also get the hook, as the literacy block takes over more and more of the day.

Instead, the Reading and Writing standards are more effectively used in strategic groups as teachers lead their students through exploration of science, history, literature, mythology, and the endless other topics needed for students to be knowledgeable, engaged citizens.

This is the shift that will improve students' reading, writing, and critical thinking skills: deepening and broadening knowledge of the world around them.

[beyondbasicteaching]

Beyond Basic Teaching: An Introduction

Starting with the basics When I graduated in 2014, I left college with a BA in Elementary Education and a crushed spirit. I wasn't sure I'd ever set foot in a classroom again, despite feeling called to teaching. Two years later, I began my first year as a classroom teacher. I had a room full of 2nd graders, an amazingly supportive grade level team and instructional coach, and zero clue how to manage a classroom effectively. Understanding the content was easy; making it accessible to kids while also managing behavior and holding consistent expectations was a different ballgame. College didn't prepare me for this. I had big ideas and I understood the basics of what I was teaching, but most of the year was spent just surviving. I thought I knew the basics; but something was still missing. After that first year, I knew I'd done my best but something still needed to change. My students' test scores were improving so they seemed to be learning, but whenever I'd stop to reflect on my instruction... I wasn't sure what I was teaching them. I constantly felt that my students were learning and growing in spite of me. Moving beyond  the basics In 2018, I started working on my Master's in Curriculum and Instruction. Halfway through the program (and my third year teaching), one of my classes included a video about the neuroscience of learning to read. My mind was blown. There's a science to teaching reading? We've actually mapped the brain and how it changes when students learn to read? Despite my best efforts, I'd spent the better part of three years struggling to teach my students to read better. Some grew in their reading ability; most made less progress than I'd hoped. Three years in, I still felt like I didn't know how to teach reading. I felt like a fraud, waiting to be discovered. Learning about the evidence a structured approach to reading, and reflecting on my increasing disillusionment with my district's balanced literacy curriculum, I went rogue. I'd spent too long not really teaching my students to read, and I could not – would not – continue what I can only consider educational malpractice. Starting with my students who were most behind, I decided to experiment. We started with letter sounds, decodable readers, and a lot of work on phoneme substitution. I still didn't know what I was doing, but it had to be better than the same old failures. It started to work. My non-readers began to read. My students who struggled to put sounds together began confidently decoding new words. This was the beginning, and I've only continued to dig deeper into what I'd been missing. The last two years have been unusual, but what better time to experiment than when everything in education is upside-down already? This is the goal of this blog: To share what I've been learning To reflect on the process of moving beyond basic, "good enough" teaching And, hopefully, to help other teachers do the same. My goal is to be a lifelong learner, continually refining and deepening my knowledge and practices. My goal is to clarify evidence-based practices and content knowledge so all students have knowledgeable teachers who value learning for its own sake.