Ep 33: 4 Things to Stop Doing in Your Classroom was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the latest audio-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors. Sonix is the best audio automated transcription service in 2020. Our automated transcription algorithms works with many of the popular audio file formats.
Hey, teachers, if you have a classroom and a commute, you're in the right place. I'm your host, Rachael, and I want to ride along with you each week on your ride into school. This podcast is the place for busy teachers who want actionable tips, simple strategies, and just want to enjoy their job more. Let's go.
Hey, everyone, Rachel here. I'm so glad you're joining me today for another episode of The Classroom Commute Podcast, Welcome! If it's your first time joining us, thank you so much for tuning in. Hopefully you'll stick around and we can become carpool buddies this school year. In today's episode, I'm going to give you a little tough teacher love. Everyone needs that friend that pushes them to be better and do better so I'm going to be that friend for you today as we ride along together in this episode. In every teacher's career, we all have those things that we do with our students, we do in our classroom, because simply that's just how it's always been done, right? Sometimes those teaching practices become outdated and we find better ways to engage our students and teach our students and meet their needs. A lot of the mistakes that we make as teachers, we get better with as time goes on, we can all think about those things that we did with our students, those first couple of years of teaching that now make us cringe. If you are a new teacher, you are going to make those mistakes and that's OK but we are going to learn from our mistakes, we are going to move on, and we're going to become better and better as we go. And of course, even as seasoned teachers, we're still going to make mistakes. We're still going to learn better ways to do things in our classroom to replace old and outdated practices. I'm not going to waste your time telling you about all the mistakes that I've made but I would like to share with you a few things that you can change about your teaching practices today to make a bigger impact with your students. I'm going to highlight four things you should stop doing in your classroom and what you should do instead. Let's dive right in.
The number one thing that you should stop doing this school year is stop having your students raise their hands to answer a question. You might be thinking, but Rachael, I can't have everybody just shouting out the answer. You're right, you can't. We all ask students to raise their hands to answer questions. It's a classic classroom management technique and it does prevent chaotic conversation but here's why you might want to consider stopping this particular participation strategy. When you call on a student to answer a question, you only assess one student's understanding of that topic and you only hear one student's thinking behind their answer. Everybody else in your classroom is off the hook for answering that question and it allows them to become passive learners in your classroom instead of engaged learners. Here's what you can do instead. Our goal is 100% participation, right? Well you can get 100 participation from your students by trying one of these alternatives.
The first alternative to raising hands is to have your students write the answer down on a dry erase board or inside a journal where you could easily glance at several students responses before discussing it with the whole class. You can easily see who understands and who doesn't. You could also have students point to the answer. If you're looking at an article together or reading something out of a textbook, another book, or you have an activity sheet on their desk where answers can be found, have all students point to where they find their answer if it's that kind of question that you're asking. Again, glance around the room and see what students are pointing to the right spot in your article, your textbook, and get an overall assessment of students understanding.The third alternative is to have students turn and talk, have students share their thinking with the person sitting next to them, and you can eavesdropping in on their conversations to hear what students are saying. Another alternative is to use what I call 'show what you know' cards. This is an easy tool that you can have on hand to quickly assess students understanding of a topic.
Here's how it works. I created several different cards for the different topics that I might teach about so I have a set of cards for social studies, science, math, and ELA, whatever it may be in on the cards were generic answers to questions that I might ask about the different topics to see what my students remembered and understood about what I taught them. For example, I had a card that had three answers on it. The first answer was greater than. The second answer was less than. And the third answer was equal to. That was all that was on the card. I would ask my students a question that either had the answer greater than, less than, or equal to. When I asked my question, the student would hold up their card with their finger next to the answer that they believed to be the right answer. I could quickly glance across the room and see which student answered correctly and then therefore understood the concept. I could ask multiple questions as long as they had these three answers. After your lesson about teaching greater than less than or equal to, you have them pull out their card greater than, less than, or equal to and do a couple quick review questions. You could do this for any topic. You could have a card that says complete sentence, incomplete sentence, and give them examples of both and have them choose the correct answer. You could have a card that says solid, liquid, and gas on it and have them choose the correct answer when you're asking questions about that acute obtuse right angle. True, false, magnetic, not magnetic. These are all answers that you could put on a card and have them pull that particular card out when you're talking about that topic. You could even have very generic answers like yes or no, true or false on the card and use those for any type of topic that you might be choosing. You could also have a card that says, I got it, still working on it, I need help. This card is especially helpful when you want students to evaluate their feelings about how they understood it, whether or not they think they got the concept or not. It's a great way to promote that self reflection at the end of a lesson. Now, if you're needing a visual of what this might look like, I know it's kind of hard to explain just by talking about it. I do have some images over on the website at classroomnook.com/podcast/33, where you can see what these cards look like. You can even grab a free set to use in your classroom. That is the first thing to stop doing in your classroom, to stop having your students raise their hands and instead require 100 participation by using one of the alternatives that I just described.
The second thing to stop doing in your classroom this year is round robin reading. I remember being in elementary school where my teacher would go around and have us all take turns reading out of the book that we were reading. All I can remember was, I was trying to figure out where in the text we would be when it was my turn. So what did that mean? It meant that I was paying absolutely no attention to the information that my classmates were reading, but instead I was practicing the portion of the text that I knew I was going to have to read out loud. It was terrifying because I wasn't the best reader and I had a lot of anxiety that came along with reading out loud to other students in front of other students. Round-Robin reading can be paralyzing to students who struggle with reading, and it only pushes them away from loving to read. So instead, here are some alternatives for round robin reading. You can have them partner read. Have students read with a partner so that each student can practice reading the text. They're still reading with another partner, but they're not reading in front of the entire classroom so it takes the anxiety level down a bit. You could do echo reading here. The teacher reads a portion of the text to first model pacing, fluency, and expression. Then have the students mimic the teacher while following along with the text. And of course, you could just have students read silently. If you're working as a whole group or even in small groups, just indicate the portion of text that you would like them to read to themselves. While students are reading, you can go and listen to individual students, read the portion before coming back together as a group. And finally, of course, you can just read it out loud to the students. Sometimes it's best for the teacher just to read out loud to the group. This is the perfect time where you can model fluency, expression, and pacing. Students should have the text in front of them so they can follow along but it's not always necessary for them to do the reading, especially when you're working in the content areas, when your goal is that they just understand the information and not necessarily be able to read it perfectly. Sometimes we need to just take out the hurdle of actually reading the text to students who may struggle and just give them the text and the information by us reading it out loud so that they can fully understand it.
The third thing to stop doing is stop making all the decisions in your classroom. If we want our students to learn how to make good decisions and good choices, we have to give them the chance. As a classroom teacher myself, I was petrified of letting students take the reins because I always assumed that chaos would ensue. Let's be honest, sometimes it did. I would often control the topics that they would write about, the books that they'd read, the students that they got to work with, or the projects that we would do. The list goes on and on. I was a bit of a control freak and to be honest, it's still really hard to let go of those reins. But the reality is, if we are always telling students what to do and how to do it, we're stifling their creativity and we're preventing them from becoming positive decision makers. It is a messy process teaching students how to make good choices and how to make good decisions about their learning but that doesn't mean that we get to make all the decisions for them. Instead, we can empower students to be active participants in their learning by letting them make more decisions in our classroom. This can be a gradual process. You can start with small little decisions first and then work and gradually release more responsibilities to your students.
Here are some ways that you might do that. Give students the choice of using technology, things like websites and learning apps versus traditional resources like books and articles. Sometimes we think students will always choose the technology option, and that's not always the case. If we give them that choice, it lets them take ownership of their learning. We can also allow students to have choice in showing how they've learned with the use of things like choice boards. I have a collection of choice boards with a variety of reading activities that I will link to in the show notes. We can offer choice in the form of flexible seating during your day, maybe not all day long, but sometimes during the day allow students to choose where they are going to sit to complete a specific activity. Give students choice in their assessments by providing multiple formats of how to show they're learning. Allow students to participate in things like reading partnerships where they can choose a partner to explore a new book with. I did an entire podcast all about using reading partnerships in your classroom. It was episode 20, I will link to it in the show notes. I also have another resource all about giving students more choice in the classroom, so I will link to that resource in the show notes over at classroomnook.com/podcast/33.
OK, you ready for number four? The final thing to stop doing in your classroom this school year is to stop wasting so much paper. I realize that this last tip is not 100 percent possible for every classroom as not all teachers have the same amount of technology. However, if you are in a school where you have access to more technology, I encourage you to take advantage of it as much as you can. If you don't have a ton of technology accessible to you, do what you can with what you have because developing technology skills such as researching online, typing and completing activities on a digital device is a crucial 21st century skill that our students need to have. In this pandemic era that we are living in right now, we've kind of all been forced to embrace the technology so hopefully this tip won't be as difficult to get behind as we move into this next school year but even more than that, more schools are becoming one to one, and they're making it so that every student has access to a personal digital device like iPads, chrome books, and tablets. So even if you are not in a virtual setting this coming school year, still consider using online learning platforms like Google Classroom and See-Saw and Microsoft Teams to have students complete activities in your classroom. Now this does not mean that you replace every paper in your classroom. It just means that you are providing more opportunities for students to learn through technology. But of course, there is a learning curve here and not all of us have the same level of comfort when it comes to creating digital resources. So in that case, you may need to rely on the expertise of other educators that you know, that have already created resources that are in digital formats. You may need to attend some training's or do some online training's to help educate yourself about how to use digital platforms for teaching your students.
And of course, I've always been hard at work creating Google Classroom compatible resources for teachers who either aren't yet comfortable with creating their own digital resources or just simply don't have the time. I will link to my entire Google Classroom Compatible Library over at the show notes if you're on the hunt for some Google Classroom compatible resources. I have things like novel units, science, and social studies units. And of course, I have my activity, interactive learning guides for a variety of topics. You can get your hands on a free activity to kind of get your feet wet and test it out with your students. This particular activity is all about teaching nonfiction text features so if you might find that topic helpful, make sure you head over to the show notes at classroomnook.com/podcast/23 to get that free resource.
So there you have it, four things to stop doing this school year, spoken to you in love of course, there's no judgment here. We all make mistakes. We all learn from them and we all become better teachers because of it. And remember, you can get all of the resources and ideas that I mentioned over at the show note at classroomnook.com/podcast/33. Thank you so much for joining me today and I will see you again next week. Bye for now.
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