Kim Petty - Instructional Design Coach
 
Once students have conducted research that has been scaffolded from beginning to end, 
it’s time to remove some of these supports for their next project. 
 
An old proverb tells us that the right word at the right time is like a custom-made piece of jewelry. Providing support for the research process through mini-lessons will be the right word at the right time.  Mini-lessons are effective because they consider a student’s working memory, they provide “just-in-time” learning, and they demand that the teacher plan lessons very thoroughly and concisely.  
 
Give yourself a 5 - 15 minute time frame for each mini-lesson. Following the mini-lesson, give students a 5 minute assignment to  demonstrate their understanding.
Petty’s Pointer:  No extraneous fluff in the mini-lesson. Present need-to-know information for that lesson’s task.  Then make the lesson stick with a quick application for students to do on the spot. 
 
Chronological Order of Mini-Lessons

• Choose a Topic
• Find Credible Sources
• Read, View, Listen Broadly (gain general knowledge of topic)
• Narrow the Focus (and the topic)
• Determine what you want to know
• Read, View, Listen Deeply (gain specific knowledge of topic to answer what you want to know)
• Record Your Learning: Note Taking
• Cite Sources
• Visually Display Your Learning
• Write about Your Learning
• Present Your Learning

 
After each mini-lesson, display the instructional nuggets in the room for later reference (humongous post-it notes work great).  With each mini-lesson, you’ll add a new poster.  Making the information constantly visible fosters students’ interdependence with the lesson, not dependence on you.  That frees you up to do more differentiation in small groups or 1:1 as students need it.
Petty’s Pointer: For maximum effectiveness, develop the unit of mini-lessons around a light-hearted topic, something familiar to students. The lessons will flow more easily, and the connections to the learning will be concrete.   
 
I’ve listed eleven separate mini-lessons; these obviously won’t be one-a-days.  You will decide before the unit how many class periods to devote to each piece of the unit.  Students’ choosing a topic might take a couple of days.  Reading, viewing, and listening deeply will take students much longer.  Plan which days you will begin with a mini-lesson and which days you will devote to student work time.
 
Remember, this is not a one-and-done process. Research tends to be messy, sometimes dead-ending in one direction before making a hard right toward more useful information and thinking. 
 
Your role as instructional designer will be to help students navigate the journey, which will start with the mini-lessons and continue with the personal and small group differentiation as needed.
 
Good luck with your unit! 

Written by Kim Petty NRHS Literacy Design Coach

​Today's post is PART 1. It's meant for teachers of novice researchers, struggling readers, or students new to the content.
 
If a student has limited background knowledge as she heads into a new project requiring research, her useable material may be scant. Oh sure, she can drink from the Google fount (not unlike a firehose), but chances are, the ratio of useable content to found sources will be lop-sided toward quantity over quality. You can avoid that waste of time for your kiddos by scaffolding the process. 


Step 1: Build Background Knowledge. (Zoom Out)
Provide 2-3 general background sources for student viewing, listening, and reading to build their knowledge foundation. Without background knowledge, there's nothing to build on.  Ask students to read broadly first. The sources you provide at this point should zoom out. Additional texts (Step 4) can narrow the focus.
Petty's Pointer: Actively Learn has Knowledge Sets that may be just the ticket for this step.


Step 2: Make a Personal Word Wall
While reading the provided general background texts, students should annotate or highlight for key concepts, phrases, and vocabulary. Provide a template (Click here) for students to post their terms into a personal word wall. 
Petty's Pointer: The word wall will  help them kick the fanny of academic vocabulary. Academic vocabulary is often the gatekeeper for higher learning. 


Step 3: Provide Question Stems
Before students begin their own research, they can make a list of want-to-knows using scaffolded question stems provided by you. Alternately, students can work in pairs to compare word walls and write their questions together.  If you choose this route, you should pick the partners.  They should be homogeneous  pairings. The better the students’ questions, the more effectively they will read and learn.  
 
Step 4: Provide a Mini Library. (Zoom In)
Curate a slam-dunk mini library of credible, content rich sources for your students to use.  The sources you provide aren't just the basis for their research. They will be the ONLY sources kids can use. This level of scaffolding provides safety and structure.
Petty's Pointer: My guess is your Media Coordinator is a research rock star! Give her your topic(s) and essential questions. She can create your curated source list or at least help you find particular items to get your list started. (Be sure to buy her a candy bar to thank her for the help.)


When you provide students the vocabulary, broad familiarity with content, and a mini-library of curated sources to access, you are setting them up to succeed with their research. Look at you! You are on it!

Check back in a few days for Part 2!

Kia Creamer - NRHS School Counselor

​My college roommate had an incredible ability to balance a social life whilst staying focused in her studies, while I struggled to overcome a World Civilizations class that conflicted with my strict 2 p.m. nap. She was the model student and a good friend as she helped me through my freshman year to keep a healthier schedule by accompanying me to meals and having a weekday “lights out” routine. While walking back to our dorm room one afternoon we shared stories of our childhood. I was surprised to learn that for a the last couple years she had struggled significantly with depression and anxiety. While still attending high school, she was ashamed to share her struggles with her parents and even her most trusted coaches. It wasn’t until she took an introductory psychology course that she began to reframe her experiences. 

“The real turning point for me,” she said, “was when I learned about how different parts of the brain work. You know, people that are depressed have smaller hippocampuses. So there! I’m not crazy!” We laughed a bit nervously and quickly moved on to the next topic. That last comment stuck with me. What she was saying is that for the first time her depression was no longer a figment of her imagination. She could point to a real part of her real brain and say, “Here! Here it is. This is where it hurts.” That small piece of education was a powerful turning point.

Educators often identify by the subjects they teach - as we should, because after all, we’ve spent all this time perfecting lesson plans and developing professionally with our peers. Still, we understand at the end of the day we teach children, teenagers, people - not subjects. When I think about my roommate and how her revelation about her own brain development changed the way she treated herself, I can’t help but to think as educators and school personnel, we have a tremendous responsibility to understand how trauma affects brain development in our students. Beyond lesson plans, beyond technology, even beyond classroom management techniques, the student-teacher relationship is the foundation of the classroom. How can we expect them to learn from us if we have not developed a relationship of trust and respect? How can we build relationships with our students before learning who they are? How can we fill their brains with knowledge before learning how their brain is wired? 

Centuries worth of educational observations will tell you students with difficult home lives typically exhibit difficult behaviors, and as a result, poorer grades. What we know now is that this isn’t just a cultural phenomenon but a scientific one. Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) alter and redirect neuron pathways, changing the physical structure of the entire brain. During one of these adverse experiences such as domestic violence, abuse, and/or neglect, levels of adrenaline and cortisol (stress hormones) skyrocket. The older part of the brain is to determine their next actions. The brain tells the body to increase the heart rate and create tunnel vision around the threat at hand. Fight or flight is in full effect. As adults, we have a lifetime of experiences and coping skills to navigate these situations and bring our body back to a point of homeostasis. A child’s brain responds, “This is how life is, and I’d better be ready for next time.” 

The same physiological response happens around prolonged stressors such as poverty, the absence of a parent, or having a family member with a mental illness. The truth is our experiences and the experiences of our students are more than just distant memories. They are hardwired into who we are and how we make decisions. We get so caught up in having this bootstrap mentality that we forget some of these kids never had boots to begin with. As an educator, it is frustrating to know there is nothing I can do to make past traumas go away. And for many students still experiencing these traumas, they will need the behaviors they have learned over time to continue surviving in the current environment. 

So what can we do? We still have our precious subjects. We still have graduation requirements. We can’t just allow students to have zero behavioral expectations. So as a start, I would like us to consider these questions:

• What might be the most common trauma faced by students at our school? In your classroom?
• How might the environmental conditions in your classroom affect students with trauma? 
• How might the culture and climate in our school affect students with trauma?

 

I have been reading Clive Thompson’s Smarter Than You Think, and though only a third of the way through, I am thoroughly enjoying the experience.  In his Public Thinking chapter, Thompson sets out a description of a digital role that struck me as apropos to the responsibility of teachers during the class period in a 21st century classroom.
 
Thompson lauds Ta-Nahesi Coates’ personal blog that addresses sensitive and challenging topics, but receives hundreds of comments that are “amazingly abuse-free.”  Thompson cites “the work Coates puts into his discussion board” as the reason comments on his posts are insightful, and the debate “transpires civilly without name calling.”  Thompson describes the work of Coates as that of a tummler, a term coined by Deb Schultz, Heather Gold, and Kevin Mark.  Thompson explains a tummler, like Coates, manages a social (often digital) group through a “mix of persuasion, listening, and good hosting, like someone skillfully tending a bar.”
 
Creating my own marginalia, I underlined the phrase “like someone skillfully tending a bar,” and added “or a skillfully managing a classroom.” 
 
So often I walk through classrooms observing teachers struggling to find that critical  balance between the independence given to students through technology, the modern movement of the student role from passive consumer to active participant, and the students’ Vygotskyian need to receive direct instruction or feedback from a more knowledgeable other.  
 
Instead of teacher, we embrace the role of instructional designer, which essentially describes the work of planning and preparation done before students ever enter the classroom. But exactly what – in this new era of instructional design – are teachers supposed to do when students are in the classroom, and the well-designed plan is being implemented?
 
In my observations in many schools and across many classrooms I find instructional practices are mixed.  I observe some teachers giving way to the computer.  They place all student work online and then fall into focus on their own screens.  Or, as students work with near complete independence on devices, teachers take the mantle of warden - actively monitoring the room for any student who may need to be reminded to “get back on task.” Conversely, some teachers, believing students can access information on a device “on their own time,” take full rein of the classroom, lecturing for entire class periods to “tell students everything they need to know.”   Some teachers, in an effort to be everything to everyone, move through each of these approaches within a given period.  
 
It feels as though we’ve yet to fully find that “sweet spot” as we wrestle with the new descriptions of teachers in the classroom.  Are we facilitators who put all information in front of the students and sit back hoping they are independent enough to pick it up?  Are we sages on stages, waving our own expertise in front of students like a banner to assure they “get it all?” 
 
Perhaps the best explanation of a teacher’s role during class is exactly like the work Thompson describes - that of a tummler.  Tummler is a Yiddish term describing a person who gets things going, keeps everyone engaged, and even helps connect people.  In the book, Schultz is quoted describing tummlers as “catalysts and bridge builders.  It’s not about technology.  It’s about the human-factor.”  Thompson explains tummlers “know how to be empathetic, how to draw people out.” 
 
Just like Coates’ monitoring and actively engaging in the comments on his blog, the role of teacher tummler is one of active work- not a state of being.  It takes effort and tenacity to keep all students engaged by managing the human side of learning.   It’s much easier to require students to sit and do work, assuming no noise is success.  It’s easier to criticize students at the conclusion of a period or project for “not getting things done” as the bell rouses us from our own internet searches. It’s easier to outline our roles as the “provider of instruction” and let the effort stop with the lesson plan. It’s easier (and often personally enjoyable) to lecture on topics that stir our passion to students who are willing to tolerate the time until the bell.  
 
Perhaps because we’ve never clearly defined the role of the teacher during the 21st century class, we aren’t able to communicate what it means to do it correctly.  On their weekly podcast, Tummelvision, Schultz, Gold, and Marks explore how to connect people in a networked (educators read 21st century) world.  Although all episodes are exciting, the earlier episodes develop the idea of tummeling, and can help us flesh out this idea of strategically spending our time with students fostering engagement.  I encourage you to check it out!
 
Over the next few weeks, we’ll create our own rubric for the teacher tummler.  We’ll look at the social side of students including trauma informed training, the role of students and teachers in Schlechty’s learning organization metaphor, and data collection through peer observations. Together, we’ll create the definition of what it means to get everyone engaged in learning as a teacher tummler.