Quotes from Kid-Inspired Teacher: Organizing Wildly Productive ELL Classes by John Carlson
Weak and average students need to take responsibility for themselves, and parents and teachers are going to have to teach them how to accomplish this. It may take them longer to learn the material. They may need to use different methods or strategies than their peers. They may need a lot more support. But they can do it! They can do it if—and this is a big IF—we include them, if we get a lot of active participation out of them throughout each and every class. We have to remember, the students who practice are the students who learn. As teachers, we need to find creative and interesting ways to get all students engaged and working to master the material individually during every class. We need to encourage every student to apply critical thinking as they work through problems and exercises. We need to motivate every child to participate as much as possible, throughout the entire class...every class! That’s what “no student left behind” truly means, and that may require some hard thought and introspection about how our classes are structured. If only your strong students are participating during class—answering, winning, and completing assigned exercises—that should be a warning sign that something is wrong.
Teaching is one of the most—if not the most—important job in the world. Our kids need you to be at your best. They need teaching to be effortless for you so that you have room in your heart to be there for them, to care about them, and to inspire them.
If we want all of our students to succeed, there needs to be a lot less talking by the teacher and a lot more practicing by the students. Our classes need to become student-centered.
My comment: But then we also need to make sure that students are using that practice time productively. With the proliferation of computers in classrooms and anything can be accessed on them, that time is often not used productively. Thus, there is a need for parents and schools to do what is in the best interest of their kids - use web filtering methods like GoGuardian and Securely to ensure that students are using their time productively. We also must set up our classrooms to minimize distractions so that the practice time is used productively (assigned seating, seating arrangements, classroom management, noise level, etc.).
The following is an overview of the structure I recommend for your classes in order to make them both effective and efficient. We'll cover each point in depth in the following chapters.
1. Set manageable and measurable goals for each class period.
2. Practice those goals as a group, in pairs, and then individually gradually passing responsibility over to the students.
3. Each student needs to individually pass a final Challenge (or Challenges) in order to demonstrate that they have achieved the goal(s) of the class period.
4. When students have met all of the required goals and have finished all of the required work, they get some reward time.
5. Reward time—or “the Area of Awesomeness,” as I like to call it—is an area of the classroom where students can engage in “free play” with board games, word searches, iPads
6. The faster students complete the Challenges, the more reward time they earn.
Each of these guidelines depends on the following premise: Less teacher, more student. The students, not the teacher, need to master the material, just as the coach needs to coach, not play the game for the team. Too many students spend all day at school and then go home afterward without having learned what they needed to learn. We must be much more efficient and effective than that.
My comment: I like the idea but when computers are involved in the reward area, students can really rush their work and not give quality work because they are rushing to get to the computer. The goal and focus is on completing the assignment instead of learning. Devices create an addiction drive. Other things create an incentive but not a crazed incentive. But I can blend this approach with my new policy now. It’s pretty similar - can’t get out of your assigned seat and be on couches or bean bags till you finish your assignments and all previous TSWs. With these incentivized approaches, the teacher must have a clear idea and rubric for what is counted as quality work in order to maintain the standard so that students don’t rush through their work and thereby deliver a poor quality product.
Let’s work with the content goal example from above. Here it is again:
The students will understand how birds adapt to different environments.
Let’s create language goals for this content goal that are manageable and measurable. First, we need to confirm that our students—English learners and native speakers alike—have understood and can remember the vocabulary words. Second, we need to confirm that they can summarize the concepts verbally. Finally, we need to confirm whether the students are able to respond in writing. Our new tiered goals would then be:
1. Each student will be able to identify and explain the following target vocabulary words: adapt, environment, city, forest, desert, and grassland.
2. Each student will be able to say 3 examples to the teacher about how birds adapt to new environments using the target vocabulary words.
3. Each student will be able to respond in writing to the exit ticket question: What are some of the ways birds adapt to new environments?
These are what measurable goals look like. A student can either do them or not. If not, he or she needs to spend more time practicing. If so, he or she can move on to the next goal or to reward time. These goals are also manageable.
My comment: The ultimate assignment/goal could be given. Then after a period of time has passed (maybe a class period), then you can implement the tiered assignments with the students who are not complete. The students who are complete can move on to A-level assignments or the reward zone (couch and bean bags)
We can explicitly teach a lot of the knowledge our students need directly—we can provide our students with the brushes, the paints, and the paper—but in order for our students to benefit from that direct teaching, they need to actually listen and remember what it is you are trying to communicate. For this reason, we need to set up manageable and measurable goals for our students to achieve so you can be sure that they have, in fact, listened and remembered. Then they can use that knowledge to learn more knowledge from the texts they are reading, think critically about the concepts with which they are engaging, and create their own responses in speech and in writing. Our manageable and measurable goals then are usually going to involve helping students build this framework of vocabulary, concepts, and academic grammar for a topic they need to engage with. After they have that framework, we can teach them useful comprehension skills in less time and with greater impact while avoiding “the risk of turning ‘relatively simple and intuitively obvious tasks into introspective nightmares.’” Used in this way, our manageable and measurable goals themselves become “internalized scaffolds.”
If we think of our manageable and measurable goals as “internalized scaffolds” that can boost a student’s ability to understand, engage, and be creative with the target material, we’ll be on the right track. As discussed above, while practicing, students can use whatever they need to help them understand grade-level materials: graphic organizers, translations, sample texts, sentence starters, etc. but when they go to demonstrate mastery of a manageable and measurable goal, they need to do so on their own without help from you or any of the scaffolds you have provided them.
Create manageable and measurable goals for your students each class
My comment: This works well with A and B level work. The A level students can finish the B level work without scaffolds on the first day. Then the next day they move on to A level work. And then the scaffolding can begin for the B-level students. But then they need to complete the assignment eventually without scaffolding.
Achieving manageable and measurable goals builds confidence. All of the students, and especially the weaker ones, feel good when they achieve the goals that were set for them them (or the goals they have set for themselves). They feel good about themselves. The more those weaker students accomplish the goals, the more their view of themselves improves. They begin to think of themselves as more capable. They don’t give up so easily... and they’re more interested in class. Set manageable and measurable goals for every class, ideally within each language domain.
In addition, redesigning competitive games so that students are able to moderate them on their own, are divided into small groups, and are all participating productively has the following added benefit: There isn’t as much pressure on each student to perform in front of the entire class. Many students are very shy about speaking in front of everyone and are often slow to respond. The longer each individual student takes to respond, the longer all of the rest of the students end up waiting around. Struggling through a response in front of the whole class can also destroy a shy student’s confidence and cause them to shut down.
Group projects are often dominated by a couple of strong students. Average and weaker students end up participating very little. They wait around until the stronger students finish and then copy everything they’ve done. It’s important to redesign group projects so that every student in the group is required to produce something. Here are a few suggestions:
Often, teachers put students into small groups and ask them to come up with ideas. Instead of coming up with ideas after the students are already in their small groups, have everyone come up with three ideas before they get into small groups. That means every student has something to contribute when the small group finally meets. A common version of this is the activity Think-Write-Pair-Share where students think of a response to a question or topic, write it down, get together with one or two other students and share.
When in small groups, teachers often ask for one student to do the writing for the group. Instead, consider telling the students that no one can write while the students are in a group. The goal of the group is to decide on three ideas and make sure that everyone in the group can remember them. Groups can then separate and each student can write down the three ideas on their own.
Each student in a small group produces a final report, presentation, or poster individually, even if their small group is going to choose only one with which to move forward.
We can redesign reading times so that no one is waiting around with nothing to do. Ask the students a comprehension question from a passage in a textbook or a worksheet and give everyone a few minutes to read the passage or worksheet individually and write down an answer.
My comment: This could be turned into a think pair share. They read and answer the question individually, check with their desk partner, then discuss with the class. There could be two questions: one question that is a lower ordered recall question and a higher ordered thinking question. The lower-level student can then spend more time reading and finding the answer to the recall question. While the lower level student is doing that, that higher level student can be thinking about and writing on the higher ordered question. The assessment could then be all of these questions together with the A level being the higher level questions and the B level recall. But students have to be able to remember the discussions over a number of days of discussion. I could also coach the class on how to peer mentor their partners. They shouldn’t just give them the answer. If their partner is having trouble finding the answer for the recall question, they could show them the part of the text to look at as well as ask questions to get the peer thinking. For the higher level, the student who has written more/something can start off the conversation with one insight and then the partner needs to offer an insight and go back and forth. Hearing one insight from the partner can give the other partner more context and a foothold to make a contribution as well. If the partner still can’t offer a contribution, then the higher level partner should just ask questions to the partner to help him/her along as well as pointing out parts of the text. Emphasize to the class that the best way to help your peers is to allow for productive struggle instead of giving them the easy way with simply an answer. We improve with struggle within our zone of proximal development. And the peer is helping his/her partner get into that zone of proximal development (with the student still struggling)with the questions and pointing out text. Then in the whole class discussion, students will be prepared to talk. I as the teacher can point out the section of the text that goes along with the recall question and how it matches the question. Students can then all discuss the higher ordered question. Students can also take notes. For the assessment I can give these same questions and students can also review their notes before the test.
Very often when you ask a question of your class, you will have only a student or two raise their hands to answer. Everyone else is passive.
You can try some of the following options instead.
Let students start calling out answers while you make a list on the board.
Think, write, pair, share. Get everyone to write down their thoughts or answers on a scrap sheet of paper and then share them with a partner.
Put a few questions on the board and have students go around and interview each other.
Have students discuss the answers to questions in small groups of two or three.
Printed board game: One student asks the other student a question. If the other student gives a correct answer, he can roll the dice and move his playing piece, or, alternatively, a student explains a target concept before taking a turn. With each round, students become increasingly fluent with the vocabulary and concepts. Chutes and Ladders, Battleship, and Connect Four all work well for this. You just need to have enough of these games for each group of two to three students to have one.
Flash card race: This is one of my favorite activities to review target vocabulary (or anything else with flash cards). Have a set of printed flash cards ready, enough for every three students to have a set. Put the students in groups of three. One student is the caller. The caller holds up a card and the other two students race to say the word. The first person to say the word then makes a sentence with the word in order to get that card. The person with the most cards after all of the cards are gone gets to be the next caller. With a little training, you can even get kindergarten English learners who speak absolutely no English playing this fun, student-centered game.
Charades Race: This is another vocabulary activity. Put students in groups of three or four. Each group lines up in front of a chair. Place vocabulary flash cards face down on the chair. The back of the chair should be facing the line of students so that the students who are in line are unable to see the flash cards. When the teacher says go, the first student from each group runs around, peeks at the first flash card, and then either acts it out or describes it without saying the word. When a student’s team guesses the word, that student grabs the card, puts it under the chair, and runs to the back of the line, while the next student on that team comes forward. The first team to get through all of their cards wins.
After practicing together as a whole class and then with a partner or small group, we come to the individual portion of the lesson. During their individual, independent time, students work toward achieving the manageable and measurable goals you have set for them; the goals that you’ve been preparing them for during the group and partner sections of the class. After students have practiced individually and feel they are ready, they need to pass a Challenge(s) individually and without help to show that they have achieved the goal.
You can also provide them with any scaffolds they need, but, unless they are really struggling, I wouldn’t let them use a scaffold when they are attempting to pass a Challenge. By giving them scaffolds such as words banks, graphic organizers, anchor charts, sentence frames, or example answers, they have something they can work on until they gain enough English proficiency to complete Challenges without those scaffolds.
The Open-Close-Write-Check method is helpful because the student is required to pull concepts, sentence structures, and vocabulary from memory using a technique called spaced repetition,
My comment: Could print out flash cards or have the student(s) create their own flash cards
The Open-Close-Write-Check method is also helpful because the teacher is visually able to confirm that a student is using the time efficiently by opening and closing the book and writing on a scrap piece of paper. Otherwise, some students may spend their independent time “spacing out.” They may tell you they’re just thinking, but when they have to demonstrate mastery of the material, it becomes clear that they hadn’t been thinking much at all.
The goal of the group and pair activities is to prepare the students to individually accomplish the manageable and measurable goals you have set for the class.
You should be aware of a few things when you’re structuring your class in this way— moving from the whole group to pairs (or very small groups) to individuals:
If the first half of the class is a failure, the second half will be as well. If the students haven’t understood or practiced the material well enough during the group activities, they won’t be able to complete the Challenges when it comes time to do them individually. You will not have time to teach all of the students one-on-one. You may need to simplify your goals, spend more time practicing as a group, or work to motivate your students to participate more during group time.
Regardless of how efficient your group time seems to be, there will always be a few students who struggle during the individual portion of the class. They’re your weaker students, and they will probably need extra help to complete the Challenges individually. But at this point, there shouldn’t be more than a couple of students who are struggling. For these students, you will want to have ways to break up the goals to make them a little more manageable.
You’ll want to have some extra Challenges or activities for the stronger students to work on if they complete their Challenges quickly.
My comment: Those extra challenges for the stronger students are the A-level projects.
By moving from the class as a whole to pairs and then to individuals, you’re setting all of your students up for success, not just your stronger students. You will have also had the chance to check in with each student individually to ensure that they have mastered the material for the day.
Option 4: The students show mastery in writing in a separate quiz area. If the students need to write something to pass a Challenge, you can place some quiz tables in one section of the room, which are positioned away from the rest of the tables. Students can practice at their own tables until they’re ready to go over to the quiz tables to take a stab at the Challenge. The students can then take their papers to the teacher. This method is helpful as a way to prepare English learners for English proficiency tests like the WIDA Access many need to take each year.
If the students pass, they can move on to the next Challenge or reward time. If they don’t pass, that’s not a problem; they can just go back, practice some more, and try again.
The main issue with this method is ensuring that the students don’t cheat by copying off each other or from their books. You can’t have them trying to pass a Challenge at the same table where they're practicing—not without making your life as a teacher quite difficult. This is why you need to separate the Challenge area and probably limit the number of students who can take the Challenge at the same time. Even then, you have to station yourself in such a way that you can monitor students at the Challenge area to ensure that they aren’t just copying off each other. You can also consider stationing a trustworthy student in the Challenge area to monitor students attempting to pass the Challenge.
Have a teacher’s helper run interference. Let one of your stronger students be a gatekeeper for you. Students can go to the teacher’s helper first. If the teacher’s helper says they're ready, the students can then go to the teacher or put their name card next in line to meet with the teacher. If the teacher’s helper says they’re not ready, the students need to go back and keep practicing. This method allows your teacher’s helper to handle some of the administrative duties of checking in with students and frees you up to go around and work with students individually while they’re practicing.
Have students write out the Challenge if they don’t pass. This is good practice for everyone but particularly for students who haven’t tried very hard. Unfortunately, many students want to give the Challenge a try without having practiced much at all. These students get to the teacher and can’t even begin the first sentence or else they make tons of mistakes. If you help them too much, you reward them for being lazy. If there’s a little extra work involved when a student doesn’t pass, students are more likely to try harder when you give them individual time to practice. You can also wave this extra writing if you have seen good effort from a student, which further encourages them to keep trying.
My comment: I see this with mathematics. Students will come up with their assessments, but they make many careless mistakes. This quick carelessness then bites them on the MAP assessment at the end of the year because the assessment does not let them retry to their assessments and show them where they went wrong. I think that is why I and other mastery learning teachers need some method for preventing carelessness and laziness. Maybe have students write a reflection at the end of their assessment, which was mentioned earlier. The reflection should state what their mistakes were, why they made them, and how they were able to correct them. They could then see that a lot of their mistakes were due to carelessness, and they would need to discuss this carelessness for each careless mistake. They then need to turn in a handwritten reflection with their assessment, and you can check that they discussed everything since you can see your pen markings on their assessment. You could mark on their assessment to make it easier for your tracking - careless 1, careless 2 to make sure they and you can recognize each point that needs reflection. You could be more specific and write addition 1, division 2, combine like terms 3, etc.
My comment: Applying this idea and adding the break down an assignment into smaller objectives for students who don’t get it … maybe those who don’t master initially will be given broken down easier objectives as objectives. It’s more assignments to build them up to the original assignment. That will give all students some urgency in completing assignments because they don’t want to do all the scaffolding assignments to build up their knowledge when they can just do the original assignment with no scaffolding. They are just lazy. And if the student is still lazy and doesn’t do the scaffolded assignments, that can be shown to parents and administration to show them that you are doing your part as the teacher and the student is just really lazy or is extremely below level and should not advance to the next grade or put on a learning support plan.
I used to have a lot of trouble keeping students motivated. I dreaded asking students to do anything because they would groan, drag their feet, need to go to the bathroom, or suddenly lose the ability to understand English.
The more students improved, the more confident they felt and the more motivated they were by the desire to learn. But that wasn’t enough, especially when students were struggling. I needed a compelling and efficient way to keep my students motivated.
The best way I have found to reward students for working hard and completing Challenges is what I like to call “the Area of Awesomeness.” The Area of Awesomeness is a reward area in one part of the classroom that’s filled with fun things to do.
The Area of Awesomeness should be separated as much as possible from the practice and test areas. When the students have completed the Challenges for a class, which usually involves demonstrating mastery of the material one-on-one with the teacher, they get to go to the Area of Awesomeness and choose what they would like to do. The faster they complete the goals, the more time they have to play, which motivates them to work hard and finish quickly.
My comment: I have seen this work with my policy of sitting at tables till finished with assignment. The problem though is that students can rush the assignment, particularly higher ordered thinking assignments in order to get to the “reward area”. I’m thinking that maybe if computers are not allowed, it will not be as much of craze to finish and just an incentive to finish. Even if you have a clear standard of what you are looking for and have a rubric, you don’t want students just trying to finish an assignment so that they can get to their computers to be on social media, play video games, etc. They should be engaged and in the flow of thinking academically and creatively, without the shallow thinking of trying to finish quickly with enough quality to pass the rubric.
You can also remind the students that if they can’t handle themselves responsibly in the Area of Awesomeness, they’ll have to go back to their seats and read. The teacher’s priority will be on the students who are still working on their Challenges, and playing in the Area of Awesomeness is a privilege they will lose if they can’t control themselves.
I tend to make iPads available only once every week or two because I don’t want to overuse them. I also like to save them for more challenging days when I need the extra motivation for the students.
I have three rules for the Area of Awesomeness:
1. Be nice.
2. Be quiet.
3. Speak English.
You can create your own rules, but if for any reason, students are not following these rules, everyone needs to leave the Area of Awesomeness, head back to their desks, and read.
If the disruption is mild, such as when they’re being too loud, you can use the 1-2-3 method (I cover this in more detail in Chapter 17). If students are being too loud, you simply say from wherever you are in the classroom, “That’s one.” If you get to three, all of the students in the Area of Awesomeness need to return to their chairs. The same applies if there is a prolonged disagreement over who gets what color playing piece, or who goes first in a game, or whatever other situations kids manage to disagree about. When you reach the count of three, the students have to head back to their seats.
You need to be strict. Everyone goes. You don’t want to get yourself tied up in a long debate about whose fault it was and who was or wasn’t being too loud or fighting. You tell them that the teacher’s priority is always helping students complete their Challenges.
If students in the Area of Awesomeness can’t be mature enough to remind each other to follow the rules, then no one gets to be there. You can take a moment the first couple of times this happens to explain why everyone must go back to their seats. This explanation will help with the groaning and the frustration and the students saying that it’s not fair because, of course, they weren’t the ones being too loud.
After five minutes, if the students have been reading quietly, they can go back over to the Area of Awesomeness.
Stronger Students in the Area of Awesomeness
If you're organizing your classes in the ways I have described in this book, after a while, you will find that your students are working harder and completing Challenges more quickly. You’ll be pumped about how hard they’re working, how independently they’re working, and how much more of your class is gaining mastery of the material than ever before.
But then you will have another problem. Your strong students will drastically outpace your weaker students. They will sometimes have completed the Challenges for the day before your weaker students have even found the page they’re supposed to be on. You don’t want your stronger students to quickly complete all of the tasks and then spend too much time playing. That would actually be letting down those students. You also don’t want to raise the difficulty of the goals too much, or the rest of the class will never complete them. Again, your goals should be tailored to the average student, and then you should have a plan for the stronger students and a plan for the weaker students. We’ll talk more about this in the next couple of chapters.
One option is to provide extra Challenges for the stronger students. You can designate the base Challenge as a bronze medal Challenge. You can then add on to that Challenge to create silver and gold medal Challenges. This is one of the ways the materials in the Kid-Inspired ESL Curriculum Membership are set up, which makes it easy to differentiate for students who work at different speeds or who are at different levels in the same class. At times, we have students who choose to continue practicing the material in order to achieve a higher medal rather than go to the Area of Awesomeness to play.
Another way to manage this problem is to set a start time for the Area of Awesomeness. When it’s 3:30, for instance, any students who have finished the Challenges can go over to the Area of Awesomeness. Until that time, if students have already completed the Challenges, they can keep busy with extra optional Challenges or reading.
Earlier in the book, I recommended tailoring your manageable and measurable goals to your average student. You may have been wondering at that point, well, what about the stronger students? Won’t they be bored and unchallenged?
It’s true that when our stronger students tackle those average Challenges and goals, they will complete them two to three times more quickly as everyone else. We don’t want them to be left unchallenged or sitting around with nothing to do (or playing games for half the class) while they wait for everyone else to catch up. We owe it to our stronger students to keep them challenged.
Fortunately, this problem is not that difficult to solve. You can consider using one or more of the following:
* Bonus Challenges
* Reading
* Teacher Assistants
The only important thing to remember is that these extra activities, which are geared toward the stronger students, need to be autonomous. They shouldn’t require a lot of extra attention from the teacher. The teacher should be able to explain the activity succinctly, and students should be able to proceed on their own. This way you remain freed up to work with those students who haven’t completed the day’s goals or Challenges.
My comment: I’m not so sure I completely agree with this. Higher level students need to be challenged too. They are not challenged on the initial work and now you are recommending that they just do more of that unchallenging work or do an interesting project, which is better. But the project is still not challenging. I think it’s better if you give them more challenging A-level work and they also just have more time in the awesome area/the periphery doing what they want to do as a reward. I agree that the project should give them more autonomy, but it’s still good to have some time with those students and give teacher feedback and accountability.
If you give extra activities to stronger students, most don’t mind going the extra distance. Some students, however, may complain that they have to do more work than the rest of the class. They may feel as if they’re being punished for working hard and completing the Challenges quickly.
My comment: That’s why the additional work should be A-level work. They are recognized with A’s for their superior academic performance, and they are challenged more at their level.
Encourage them to take pride in doing good work for its own sake and not for the praise of others, not for stickers, not even for the Area of Awesomeness, but just because learning is one of life’s best experiences—even better than video games or sharing what they ate for breakfast on social media.
You’ll never have a “perfect class” in which all of your students are at the same level and everyone works hard. Therefore, in order to make the most of your class time, set your goals for the average students and then have a plan in place for how to further challenge the stronger students. You’ll also need a plan for your weaker students.
Characteristics such as talent and effort are not static. People change. Students can change. In fact, the more confidence a student feels, the harder she will usually work. The harder she works, the better and more efficient she gets at working. The more efficiently she works, the more her “natural” talent begins to increase. The more her natural talent increases, the more confidence she feels, and the more interested she becomes in learning even more.
When we first begin setting manageable goals, they should be easier rather than more difficult to achieve.
Training students to understand how to remember—on their own—something they learn, and then how to start something and not stop until they finish, are probably the most important skills we can teach; even more important than math, science, English, social studies, or any other subject students need to learn.
By initially creating goals that are more easily attainable, we’re able to focus more on training students how to learn, not just what to learn. We need to train students to work hard, focus, and not give up. These are the traits of grit, self-control, and endurance. Training students in grit, self-control, and endurance—which are described in the book How Children Succeed by Paul Tough—takes time. Many of our stronger students already possess some of these traits, which is why they're strong and don’t necessarily require further training in them. On the other hand, our average students, and especially our weaker students, need this training in order to succeed.
Giving students the answers isn’t a solution either. It only perpetuates the problem. If they get the answers without working for them, not only will they not have learned to think, their self-defeating habits will just be reinforced: “If I wait long enough, someone will give me the answers.”
“If I wait long enough, someone will help me out and I won’t have to take responsibility for myself.” “If I wait long enough, I won’t have to do the things I don’t want to do.” These Life Lessons will obviously fail them in the long run. Part of what makes us successful in life is not giving up when things get hard. Grit. Perseverance. If children find that whenever they give up, someone else gives them what they want without them having to work for it, they will always give up.
My comment: I may help too much when students do math revisions. Maybe it would be best to just mark a problem wrong and then they need to find how they messed it up. Before I would mark where they went wrong. And then if they still didn’t know, I worked an example problem. That’s still much better than leading them to the answer, but it doesn’t represent mastery as much. I could just mark it as wrong. The student needs to figure out where they went wrong. If the student still doesn’t know, I could just write the point on which they messed up, like addition or combining like terms. Once they finally master the assessment, they would need to write a reflection on what they learned. They would need to hit on the points that I jotted down on their assessment, and it would be easy for me to check if they hit on those points in their reflection. This would be a good metacognitive exercise that would help to solify their learning. It would also put the ball more in their court for figuring out where they went wrong and help some more in preventing careless mistakes. Too many times students make careless mistakes and do not feel the full consequence like I did in mathematics class. It would just be counted as wrong. So I double and even triple checked my work, but in a mastery learning system too many students do not check their work because the teacher will check for them.
It’s because on this side of Heaven, and probably even on that side, you don’t get better at things without working at them.
Most teachers understand this idea of natural rewards or consequences. You can hear it in the logic they offer to a procrastinating student: “Jimmy, if you just keep working, then you will be done.” Or again with a misbehaved student, “Jimmy, if you're shaking your butt in Sam’s face, he can’t learn anything.”
Unfortunately, that isn’t usually enough for weaker, unmotivated, or misbehaved students. We need to layer in further consequences and rewards to emphasize the natural consequences and rewards. We can add something like this: if you complete your classwork, you're done and you get to play this fun board game.
Also, notice that the consequence does not involve yelling, lecturing, distancing, gesticulating, or anything else emotional or relational. We need to remove the emotional reaction we often have to our students’ behaviors and choices. You can even explain that there is a time for butt-shaking, maybe at home with Gettin’ Jiggy wit It playing on the radio, just not in class while everyone is trying to learn.
Too often, the consequence for a misbehaving student is a lecture from the teacher, or an angry look, or relational distance. That almost inevitably makes things worse.
We need to separate our relationship with our students entirely from the consequences and rewards of the class. The consequences are outside of us, over there somewhere, a system that is out of the teacher’s hands.
The teacher needs to enforce the system, but that’s not an emotional decision on the teacher’s part. The rewards and consequences were made very clear to the student in advance, and the teacher is just as sad that the student is experiencing the consequences rather than the rewards.
Before starting any activities, be very clear about the expectations, consequences, and rewards, and then resolutely follow through.
My comment: A consequence can be not going to morning recess if no work is being done, and the student has to sit at the front table where I can see his/her work/computer. Another consequence is that they have to sit up on that front table next to me so that I can see their computer/work. Another consequence is that I print off what they currently have and have to work with pencil and paper.
Counting makes it clear to them and to everyone else in the class—as well as parents if you have to explain yourself later—that fair warning was given. Here are a few examples of situations where you might want to use the “count up” method: A student keeps getting up and wandering around the class.
If the students should be in their chairs by the time you count down to zero, then there needs to be a consequence if they aren’t. But the consequence should never be nagging, threatening, shaming, lecturing, whining, accusing, arguing, or yelling. Many teachers seem to hold out hope that they can nag their students into behaving well or possibly frighten them into compliance by yelling or threatening them. These methods almost always have the opposite of the desired effect. In addition, yelling and anger actually result in diminishing returns; with each successive round you go with your students, you will be required to yell louder and get angrier to accomplish the same results.
My comment: The consequence can be for every second they are not in their seat when the bell has already rung, they stay in from morning recess that amount of minutes.
After you’ve decided on the consequences, you have to be 100% consistent about following through. The system is only as reliable as you are. If you let students off the hook a little here and let some things slide a little there, the more the students will feel free to take liberties. They will keep pushing the boundaries until the boundaries don’t exist anymore and you’re back to yelling, threatening, lecturing, and generally wasting tons of time focusing on behavioral issues.
If you’ve already given fair warning, if you’ve already made your expectations and consequences clear, then just follow through and move on. You can remind a student again briefly about what they did to receive a consequence, but you don’t need to lecture them. You can stop mid-sentence, put a letter next to a student’s name, say something like, “Don’t sit on the table, please,” and then finish what you were saying.
Also, it’s important to talk nicely and respectfully to your students. Say please and thank you. Praise them for making good decisions even when you feel that they “ought” to have made those decisions without having to be told. You set the tone for the class. Model the way you want your students to talk to you and to others. Whether you like it or not, they have a choice about how they’re going to behave; you’re not in control of them. And they will be far more likely to make better choices if you treat them with kindness, gentleness, and respect.
Imagine your disciplinary system lies outside of you. After you’ve explained it, as far as your students are concerned, you can no longer change it. Regardless of whether the student is generally well behaved or not, or whether the student gets angry or upset, you must follow through. This will free you up to connect with the misbehaving child. You can stand next to the student, pat him or her on the shoulder, and say things like:
“That’s no fun. I wish you could get all your points today.”
“I’m sorry. I really wanted you to be able to play the game with everyone.”
Provide clear expectations and structure incremental consequences. This gives you somewhere to go if the student continues with the undesired behavior.
Instead, if you say that you will take one point each time the student misbehaves, you can do this all day long—and the student knows it.
My comment: This could also be minutes of morning recess, sitting at the front table next me, paper and pencil work instead of computer, writing a note on my success orientation chart, email home, etc. When I taught English at a language school it was something like: 1) warning 2) 3 minutes out of the classroom in the hall 3) 10 minutes in the hall 4) talk to reception about talking to parents 5) step 4 and sit the remainder of the class next to reception. When I taught in public school it was 1) warning 2) talk in hallway and call home 3) write-up (for admin to deal with). At my current international school I have not had to deal with much behavioral issues, more just motivation and procrastination issues. That is why I have mentioned the methods with missing morning recess, working next to my desk so I can see their computers, and working with pencil and paper instead of the computers. As you can see, distractions from computers is a main culprit, which is understandable since they have to do classwork on the same object that they get so much pleasure from. (Tangent: This is a reason that I think a webfiltering subscription like GoGuardian or Securly is good for schools, which gets rid of the temptation and trouble for everyone.) I had to deal with behavior a few times at my current international school, and I either had a talk with the student and/or had the student write a 500 word essay describing what they did wrong, why it was wrong, and what they will do better in the future. If it was not complete, they would have to work on it during morning recess.
vocabulary retention - My comment: The whole process is interesting so I am not highlighting the whole chapter. But I have been thinking about how working on vocabulary is important for building verbal and reading skills.
If you have students at very different English proficiency levels in your class, they may each be learning entirely different grammar. It’s not a problem to have students working on completely different grammar points. Give each group or student the speaking practice for their level. As a group, you can have all of your students practice everyone’s sentences. For the higher-level students, saying the easier grammar with the lower-level students is good review. For the lower-level students, saying the harder grammar with the higher-level students is good exposure. Afterward, each group or individual works on their individual goal.
The other option is to skip the group time with the class practicing together as a whole. Instead, put the students into small groups based on the grammar they're working on. Give each group an activity to practice their grammar structure. As they’re practicing, go around and work with each group individually. Then during individual mastery, each student works on his or her own goal.
Recommend reading the whole reading comprehension chapter (23)
Recommend reading science and social studies at 94%
What if a student has a question while I’m listening to another student completing a Challenge? I like to make myself available for questions, so I tell students that one side of my desk is for questions, and the other side of my desk is for those who are completing a Challenge. Students who need to ask a question need to wait respectfully at the right side of the desk for the person completing a Challenge to finish. When a student completes a Challenge, I answer questions from those students who are waiting. At their tables during independent time, students can also discuss problems with each other, work together, or help each other.
Train a stronger student to be a gatekeeper. Students first try the Challenge with the gatekeeper student. If they pass, they can do the Challenge for the teacher. If they do not pass, the gatekeeper asks them nicely to continue practicing until they're ready.
Also, as stronger students complete the list of tasks and move on to the Area of Awesomeness, you're free to go around and check in with those who are still working. It’s a great opportunity to connect with your students, give them a little one-on-one attention, encourage them, practice with them a little, and then cheer for them when they attempt to complete a Challenge.
If you need ESL teaching materials that were designed to make using the methods in this book easy, you will want to check out the Kid-Inspired ESL Curriculum.