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!
Hi Vicki,
ReplyDeleteI'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
Hi Vicki,
ReplyDeleteI'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