Friday, April 1, 2016

Baby Steps

When I was a child, my friends and I regularly played the game, “Mother May I?” Although I don’t remember all the rules (they probably changed as we went along!), I know we had to make our way across the room with steps of different sizes. “Mother, may I take two giant steps?” we’d ask the mother designee. “Yes, you may,” was the answer she’d give, and then we’d stride forward. For some reason, we also had to include baby steps in the game, closing the gap little-by-little to reaching our objective.

I’ve been thinking this week about the role of baby steps in coaching. I met with a teacher who truly wants to improve the discussions in her classroom, but she has quite a distance to travel. The change that is needed felt daunting to me, and I sensed that if I shared all the things I’d been thinking about in terms of improving class discussions, the teacher would become overwhelmed. What she needed, I thought, was baby steps to move her in the right direction. So I suggested a very concrete idea -  something to avoid. Somehow working on not doing something seemed far easier than working on doing something.

So, I said, “Do you think you could totally do away with the sentence stem, ‘Who can raise their hand and tell me __________?”

To hand-raise or not to hand-raise wasn’t the issue here. It was posing questions as thinking invitations for everyone that I was going for. This teacher’s habitual question-starter, while aimed at classroom management and think time, was turning students’ brains off as they seemed to reason, “This question doesn’t have to be for me if I don’t raise my hand.” Rather than suggesting that the teacher work on getting all students engaged in the thinking, however, it felt more manageable to nix eight words from the instructional lexicon. It’s easy not to use eight words, right? There are so many others to choose from! Eliminating this phrase was a baby step, and I could tell by the way the teacher’s face lit up that she felt confident she could do it.

There will be many baby steps on our journey to improved classroom discourse. And there may be giant steps, too. But for now, we both feel happy that things are moving in the right direction!


This week, you might want to take a look at:

Organizing assessment data:



Conditions for high-performing teams:


How to coach for authentic literacy-in-math learning:



Get students writing about writing!



Using doodling as part of taking notes:


That’s it for this week. Happy Coaching!

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2 comments:

  1. Hi Vicki,
    I'm a third year 5th grade teacher, and just read your blog for the first time. Thanks for a great article! I love your suggestion to get rid of the "Who can raise their hand..." question. I fall back on that often, partly as a time saver, but also because I really hesitate to put students on the spot. I also use think-pair-share, but find that even with this strategy I have students who are not engaged, and participating half-heartedly at best. What alternatives do you suggest to encourage effective, successful classroom discussions?
    ~ Michele

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Vicki,
    I'm a third year 5th grade teacher, and just read your blog for the first time. Thanks for a great article! I love your suggestion to get rid of the "Who can raise their hand..." question. I fall back on that often, partly as a time saver, but also because I really hesitate to put students on the spot. I also use think-pair-share, but find that even with this strategy I have students who are not engaged, and participating half-heartedly at best. What alternatives do you suggest to encourage effective, successful classroom discussions?
    ~ Michele

    ReplyDelete