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Make Your Instruction Memorable—Here’s How

The instruction we provide to students results from significant investment of thought, time, and effort. We carefully sort what’s most important for students to hear about a topic or a focused lesson skill. Organized sequentially, our presentations provide a logical and understandable path for students to follow. And we’re committed to providing students with a professionally designed and delivered learning experience. Yet, experience and research demonstrate that students don’t retain a sizable portion of our instruction. In fact, estimates show on average that students retain about only 10-30% of a typical lesson. Unfortunately, what students retain may not be the most crucial aspects of what we taught. Of course, instruction covers only one component of the learning experience we offer to our students. Discussion, guided and independent practice, review, and application activities also support their learning. Still, initial instruction typically comprises the center of learning experiences we offer. Our obvious challenge? How do we ensure our students retain, as much as practical, our instruction to guide, build, and stabilize their learning? Fortunately, we can integrate several practices with our instruction to make it more memorable and accessible to students. Here are six techniques we can tap to build longer term recall more effectively. First, we can limit lesson length to 10 - 12 minutes, followed by brief mental breaks. Regardless of how compelling our instruction may be, students’ brains need time to absorb and process information to remember it. Giving students time to turn and talk, review their notes, contemplate a question, or simply reflect increases shared information retention. Second, we can customize content to connect with our students. We might use examples that draw on their experiences. We can respectfully use students’ names in examples we share. Further, we can create explicit connections between focused instructional concepts and skills— and their uses, needs, and purposes important to our students. Students more effectively recall information that feels personalized. Third, we can shore up with stories. Before we had the ability to write and record information, stories served as a primary vehicle for transferring information within communities and across generations. Our brains are conditioned to pay attention to and recall stories. When stories support our instruction, they tap emotions, create connections, and embed themselves in other ways to facilitate recall. Fourth, we can inject images. When our instruction includes relevant pictures, graphics, diagrams, charts, and other visuals, we add dimension to information we share, making absorption and recall easier. Additionally, when students draw pictures, create diagrams, and develop other images representing information they receive, their understanding and recall grows. Of course, images students create also provide informal formative assessment insight, so we can examine and discuss with them whether their visuals accurately reflect information we shared. Fifth, we can mix in motion. When including physical activities in our instruction, we add another dimension to experiential learning. Having students clap to the rhythm of poetry, use hand signals to indicate their understanding or having students “huddle up” - think Dead Poets Society - for essential information, we embed memory markers creating greater recall value. Sixth, we can unveil the unexpected. Surprises deliver powerful brain stimulants. The unexpected engages our brain’s hippocampus area key to memory. Further, surprises break up routines and provide a focal point around which we can construct our instruction. For example, dressing up as a character or concept, unveiling an image of a new idea or skill, or even having students turning to face a new direction for the lesson creates easy-to-recall memories of our instruction. While these six techniques help students recall our instruction, they’re also fun. And having fun builds memorability. Now may be a suitable time to loosen up a little and create some especially memorable and fun learning experiences.

October 28, 2022

The Friends Students Make Today May Determine Their Future

Friendships play a key role in the development of children and adolescents. They help young people learn to form and maintain relationships. Friendships present circumstances to assist in the acquisition of problem-solving skills and conflict resolution strategies. Young people can also gain a sense of identity and connectedness through friendships. Obviously, friendships play significant roles in young people’s social growth. However, they can also exert important influences on their school success—even their lifelong career opportunities. Young people whose friends comply with school behavior expectations are less likely to violate school rules and find themselves in trouble. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. Friendships can keep young people behaving responsibly or distract them from doing so. Research studies have documented the positive impact friendships have on the academic effort students give and the success they achieve. Young people whose friends value and invest in academic learning achieve at higher rates than similar agemates whose circle of friends invest less in academic pursuits. Now, a series of studies by Harvard economist Raj Chetty and colleagues found that friendships and other social connectedness play a key role in raising career aspirations and pursuits. When friendships cross socioeconomic lines and include others who hold higher career and life aspirations and who have greater access to social capital, new options and opportunities emerge. For these young people, friendships contribute toward upward mobility and expand life and work opportunities. Alternatively, when friendships remain within social class networks, young people tend to remain within their networks and assume work roles common in their communities. The researchers noted that economic connectedness offered through friendships that cross socioeconomic lines is a strong predictor of economic upward mobility—more so than school quality, family structure, or race. Further, the impact is often career long. Individuals build new skills, become aware of expanding education and career opportunities, and form relationships with people from diverse backgrounds and in a variety of settings. What implications does the importance of friendships hold for our work with young people? Here are six actions we can take:

We can share the important life consequences their decisions can produce when counseling and coaching young people about their choices of friends. Parents, too, may find this information helpful as they support their children’s development and encourage friendships.
We can nurture and monitor the culture of our school and class to ensure that all students are accepted and valued, and that wealth, race, and other factors don’t determine success in social groups and activities.
We can break down the school into small, diverse groups of students for advisory, service learning, and social activities, and provide other opportunities to form relationships that might not otherwise occur in large school environments.
We can structure class activities to encourage interactions and relationships among young people that cross socioeconomic and academic groups. For example, we can design class activities and place students from various groups and levels of academic performance to perform tasks and address challenges that tap the talents and interests of all students, not just those with strong academic skills.
We can encourage students to join co-curricular and extracurricular activities that attract the full spectrum of student interests—such as Esports, the arts, and sports—and are less dependent on traditional “feeder” systems. However, we also need to ensure that economics is not a barrier to student participation.
We can reduce stratification of students in school and increase opportunities for students to interact across social and academic lines. High numbers of Advanced Placement classes and formal gifted and talented classes can work against such interactions. Special attention should be given to ensuring that these opportunities are well-populated with students from the full socioeconomic spectrum and fully reflect racial and other demographic characteristics of the student population.
We can create experiential learning opportunities such as career pathways, internships, and job shadowing to expose students to a wide variety of experiences, expectations, and connections.

The friendships students form can have much greater and longer-lasting implications than they might imagine. We need to do our part to help students make good choices and support the development of friendships that can well serve our students now and in the future.

October 21, 2022

The Debate: Have Textbooks Outlived Their Usefulness?

Textbooks have been ubiquitous in American classrooms for generations. Yet, the debate over the future of textbooks intensifies with complaints of outdated information and politically objectionable content, especially with the availability and ease of Open Education Resources and other growing technology-based options. Despite this, textbooks remain a staple of lesson planning and serve as guides for curriculum development. The special place textbooks occupy in traditional education makes it more difficult to retire them than we assume. Abandoning longstanding practices in education often proves more challenging than anticipated. Consider that textbooks:

Provide an efficient and consistent way to present curriculum content that aligns with state and local standards for instruction and learning.
Supply well-researched information collected, compiled, organized, and presented by discipline experts.
Match and align students’ levels of academic and social development with target content based on grade level. Calibrate vocabulary, readability, and other learning supports to match the average student’s anticipated grade readiness.
Require no additional devices or connectivity for basic use.
Represent a one-time purchase often used over multiple years.

On the other hand, textbooks present serious limitations:

By the time content is collected, organized, written, published, then made available, the textbook is out-of-date.
Textbooks are often treated as one-size-fits-all support for classroom instruction.
Textbooks provide limited perspectives regarding events, problems, or controversies.
Textbooks become susceptible to political agendas and dominant culture interpretations, especially those among politically powerful groups.
Chosen textbook approaches can conflict with the needs of students’ curriculum and learning paths.

As this debate unfolds, the considerations given most weight should relate to learning, not to teaching ease or to content control. Arguments should focus on students’ learning future and their learning needs. Consider these ideas to enhance debate:

Learning is best stimulated through engagement and experience, not exposure to content. Limited in experiential depth, textbooks cannot provide the growing number of tools and approaches available for richer learning experiences.
Stimulus for learning must integrate students' unique learning rates, learning paths, and their responses to diverse experiences.
Students should be exposed to issues from a variety of perspectives if we hope to nurture careful, informed, and critically thinking citizens. Exposure to a single or limited set of views shutters students from rich, important, and engaging learning opportunities.
Students deserve access to the most current information possible. Textbooks rarely expose students to real-time content. Better alternatives and richer options capture and deliver current issues, developments, and insights.

Make no mistake: Transforming our traditional instruction-driven system to a more learner-centered system will demand releasing long-held traditions and unexamined assumptions about teaching and learning. Educators should commit their informed voices and professional expertise to this debate.

October 14, 2022

Six Ways to Assess Learning in an Era of Siri and Alexa

We know that many traditional assessment approaches, such as true/false and multiple-choice questions, prove ineffective in measuring depth and breadth of knowledge. A short answer assessment format is better but still reveals little about depth of understanding, ability to make connections, and ability to grasp concepts. For many of us, the written essay has been the preferred choice for understanding student comprehension. However, recent and emerging advances in artificial intelligence alarmingly call all of this and other assessment strategies into question. Today, if students need to access historical facts, they can consult Siri or Alexa. If they need an answer to a math question or access to a formula, Siri, Alexa, and other sources quickly provide it. The same is true for many other fact-based assessment strategies. Now the stakes have been raised with the release of an essay-writing technology that responds to a prompt by searching the internet, organizing information, and writing a multi-paragraph narrative on the topic. Developed by OpenAI, Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3, also referred to as GPT-3, has access to 540 billion words and operates using 175 billion parameters. And these resources mark only the beginning. Driven by artificial intelligence, similar technologies continue to be developed and made available, naturally tempting students to use them whenever they can. So, how can we understand what students have learned when true/false, multiple choice, short answer, and now even essays can no longer be relied upon to provide credible information about what students know? The good news is that there remain many useful assessment strategies from which we can choose. In fact, these strategies have been around for as long as or longer than the approaches technology currently renders less useful. Here are six strategies that can give us information going well beyond whether students know basic facts to reveal understandings of context, connections, and consequences. First, students can participate in dialogue on a target topic. Prompts, queries, and probes invite students to reveal what they’ve learned in the context of a conversation. Dialogue also gives students opportunities to share information learned beyond core objectives—information that tends to be overlooked in a more traditional assessment format. Second, we might arrange for students to partake in debate on a concept or perspective related to their learning. Debates give students opportunities to synthesize and share what they’ve learned while also considering how others might view the same content. Further, debate encourages students to delve deeper into a topic, improving their opportunities to prevail in a competitive context. Third, students can demonstrate a learned skill or concept. Demonstrations give students opportunities to share their learning with an audience, thus making the learning and assessment more authentic. The process of preparing a demonstration helps students integrate and sequence their learning in ways that deepen understanding and increase retention. Fourth, we can ask students to take a position on something they've learned and prepare to defend their perspective. This approach encourages students to move beyond facts to consider the value, significance, and consequences of what they learned. Like debate, this activity helps students learn structures of argument. Fifth, students can produce a diagram explaining their learning and how it relates to other concepts and applications. Diagramming relationships among people, events, concepts, and consequences helps students display learning while placing it in context. Sixth, students can perform a dissection of an event, piece of writing, or oral presentation to demonstrate understanding of individual parts, their relationships to the whole, and their implications. While we might think of dissection as an activity performed in a biology class, the same concept applies in a variety of settings with an array of content. Artificial intelligence presents many implications for how we teach and assess learning. Obviously, we’ll have to continually evolve and modify our strategies and techniques. There also remain times, conditions, and roles for the use of traditional assessment strategies, including essays. We must remember that learning occurs with the individual student and the meaning they assign to it. Our assessment strategies must reflect this reality.

October 06, 2022

Five Things to Notice in Your Classroom That Will Make Your Week

During the morning math lesson, Jonnie notices an elaborate spider web in an upper corner of the room and asks how spiders can possibly create something so beautiful and deadly. Later in the morning, Rogan proclaims that it’s magic how the sun creates a spectrum of color in the rainbow outside the window. Then, during the math lesson, Shondell suggests that the base-10 number system was invented because combined, we have ten fingers. Each of these comments might be considered off task and not part of the day’s academic agenda. Yet, they open possibilities for rich discussion and learning. We can ignore them, or we can seize the moment and explore with students the meanings and implications they introduce. Unfortunately, the pace and focus of activities playing out each day in our classroom make it easy to miss some of the most delightful, amazing, and important—but not on the agenda—happenings playing out before us. We tend to see what we look for and pay attention to. If we become too focused on what we planned and want to accomplish, we can miss or even become impatient with the unexpected, unscripted, and serendipitous around us. Yet, these spontaneous incidents can offer humor, pleasure, and stress release, if we pay attention and appreciate them. They also can add to student learning and make our work more satisfying and rewarding. Just because we didn’t notice something doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Our attention and actions interpret for students what matters and what they should pay attention to. Of course, a lot happens simultaneously in classrooms. We can’t catch every comment and observation, then leverage them for learning. We also can’t always set aside the intended lesson and learning to take advantage of the unplanned. Still, recognizing teachable moments, meaningful inquiries, and surprising insights can transform the learning experiences of our students and make our teaching more significant and pleasurable. If we want to ensure capturing these serendipitous opportunities for learning, laughter, and lifting spirits that can lie hidden in our classrooms, there are at least five places we can look:

Watch for the off-hand comment that reveals a quiet sense of humor. Listen for the ironic observation; connections made between two seemingly unrelated statements, actions, or happenings; or a surprising twist on situations or relationships.
Listen for the surprising answer that reveals a creative perspective worth exploring, or a comment that suggests a novel application of information. Listen for questions, such as “Is this like…?” or “Might this be…?”
Pay attention to unanticipated questions that suggest a curious mind. We might find cues in questions, such as “Why?” “What if?” “Why not?” or “How might…?”
Notice questions that reveal a rich imagination. We may hear statements and questions beginning with “I wonder…” and “Could it be possible that…”
Be ready for comments regarding a detail or related issues that point to a gift for observation. Some students see what others miss or ignore. These students may not say much, but they see much.

Our noticing and valuing the unexpected, serendipitous, and humorous happenings in our classroom can create delightful discussions, compelling discoveries, and day lightening laughter. They can lessen our stress, lighten our mood, and lead us to appreciate the opportunity to work with such sensitive and gifted children and young people. In short, they can make our week.

September 30, 2022

Finding Success and Staying Sane with Difficult Students

The realization that we have one or more difficult students in our class raises our levels of anxiety and stress, tests our patience, distracts our attention, and challenges our skills. But this doesn’t have to be a source of worry and dread. Often, defiant, manipulative, or volatile students turn out to be bright, talented, and engaging. Though they can be frustrating one moment, they can be delightfully entertaining the next, and even sensitive and vulnerable the next moment. The progress and success these students will experience in coming months will likely be the result of how we view them, how we engage them, and how we nurture them. The perspectives we adopt, the choices we make, and the relationships we develop will have a powerful influence on what lies ahead. Each of these elements is within our control should we choose to employ it. Here are six perspectives and strategies you can adopt to make your work with your most challenging students successful while preserving your sanity. First, approach the situation as a valuable learning opportunity. You might ask, “What can this student teach me?” Become an observer and learner. The insights you gain and skills you develop will help you to become more successful with the student and prepare you to be even more successful with similar students in the future. Once you learn lessons, you’ll not have to relearn them. Plus, you’ll have additional strategies and approaches upon which to draw. Further, your engagement with and learning how to work with a difficult student can be more energizing when you see it as an investment rather than as a trial. Second, separate the student from their behavior. When you accept the student, even when they misbehave, it allows you to care for and even love them without accepting their behavior. You need to help the student feel your regard for them despite what they say or do, and over time position yourself as advocate and coach while they work to change their behavior. Third, understand that at some level the student truly believes the behavior works for them. Therefore, some students continue in unacceptable, even destructive behaviors despite consequences. Help students see and experience how changing their behavior leads to better results that serve their interests. Your challenge is to help them to see and develop alternative paths to meet their needs and achieve their goals. Only then will they consider abandoning their old behaviors. Fourth, recognize the skills supporting the students’ behavior. Many behaviors you find unacceptable depend on well-honed skills. With some imagination and creativity, they can redirect and reapply these skills in more acceptable ways. As examples, they can recast manipulation into the ability to influence and even sell. Defiant behaviors might be transformed into self-advocacy if supported by different strategies. Through talking with them and coaching them, they can learn to reframe and employ their skills in a positive direction. Fifth, commit to never purposefully embarrass or “corner” the student without a valid, face-saving choice. When you create these circumstances, you risk severing your relationship with them, and they might lash out more destructively. The resentment resulting from these experiences can last a lifetime, prohibiting you from ever reaching them. Rather, give the student choices. Provide opportunities for them to decide. Invite them to offer ideas and suggestions regarding how to resolve challenging situations. Sixth, emphasize the purpose and relevance of what you teach, while noticing and reinforcing the importance and value of the student’s efforts and strategies. When you ask students to learn a skill or study a topic, explain why the learning is important and share examples of how they benefit from what they learn. Reluctant and resistant learners often are more open and responsive when they understand the “why” behind what you ask of them. As the student engages, make it a point to notice where they concentrate their efforts and strategies. This allows you to provide encouragement and coaching for continued progress. Difficult students don’t make our work easy, but they provide surprising opportunities for us to grow and learn. They also offer some of the greatest occasions to make a lasting difference in the lives of young people who need us most. For more information and resources on managing behavior, check out our You Can Handle Them All… Courses Book App

September 23, 2022

Share Your Tips & Stories

Share your story and the tips you have for getting through this challenging time. It can remind a fellow school leader of something they forgot, or your example can make a difficult task much easier and allow them to get more done in less time. We may publish your comments.

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The Secret of Generating Better Learning Outcomes

Our society applauds, respects, values, and compensates the final product of successful effort. We might think that preparing students for the “real world” means focusing attention on perfection and the final products students submit. While time allows for this focus, we must consider that our primary work is in helping students learn. For example, when new employees undergo training, often emerging ideas are refined and new products or services result. True ability focuses on learning growth, best processes, and progress toward success. Excellent processes create quality products. When preoccupied with students’ final products, we risk students losing perception, appreciation, and value for the learning process. Not surprisingly, copying someone else’s work and other graceless actions that fail to generate learning and build learning paths become the unimaginative and desperate options students consider. When focused on processes rather than preoccupied with results, learning accelerates, and students become more invested. Unless we help them to become aware of learning processes and how they lead to success, we risk students thinking that what matters most is the grade, not the learning journey. Here are four reasons to help students focus on the process as much as the destination. A focus on process:

Gives students permission to reflect on and learn from mistakes. Risks present less scary when students see them as part of the learning path.
Helps students see that learning emerges as the result of a journey. The destination may be a beacon for direction, but the journey to learning is what matters most.
Provides greater focus on what leads to learning rather external rewards. Approval and other symbols of success become a reflection of rather than the purpose for learning.
Offers students greater control over decisions, steps, and strategies that lead to learning. Students gain greater ownership of and gain increased sense of efficacy about their learning.

So, how can we help students increase focus on the processes of learning and be less preoccupied by grades and other symbols of accomplishment? Here are four strategies to consider. First, break down major assignments and projects when introducing them to students. For example, begin with students contemplating potential topics, generating questions worth exploring, or engaging in other generative processes. Students might develop draft outlines for the learning work they want to do and seek feedback from classmates and you to refine and clarify their work. Next, students might develop portions or drafts of their work to share for further feedback and suggestions. As the work unfolds, the learning journey can be captured in successive decisions, drafts, and other documents that tell the story from initial exploration to final presentation. Second, have students keep a log of their thinking, initial attempts, mistakes made, learning gained, and how what they have learned is applied to and integrated with their evolving work. This level of reflection helps students become more aware of their thinking and learning as the work unfolds. Their learning reflections also will fill with meaning and likely will be remembered long after the work is finished. Third, focus guidance, support, and feedback on the process of learning. When you focus engagement on what and how the student learns, you reduce preoccupation with grades, while valuing the learning journey. Your questions and observations about what students notice, how they adjust, and the difference their thinking makes in their learning provide powerful stimuli and foster focused influence for learning. Fourth, display learning journey evidence. Students might create bulletin boards, write blogs, or create graphic images with artifacts to document their learning journey. Posting, sharing, and documenting their learning journey sends a powerful message about the purpose and value of what they have accomplished without distraction from artificial symbols, such as grades. There’s no question that quality learning outcomes are integral to the long-term success of our students. However, learning outcomes result from decisions, strategies, and other processes that lead to the success our students deserve. Attention to the processes of learning inevitably leads to learning products that reflect the quality we seek.

September 23, 2022

Give Students a “Leg Up” to the Next Level of Learning

The future will demand more from our students than being able to follow directions, comply with expectations, and perform standardized tasks. Repetitive tasks and standardized processes increasingly can and will be performed by machines. The World Economic Forum recently projected that within eight years more than half of the tasks for which humans are paid will be performed by technology. Meanwhile, more than half of the jobs today’s students will hold do not yet exist. Learned skills that used to have a life cycle of three decades now have utility for five years. Future success requires constant learning and unlearning, adaptation and upskilling, curiosity and imagination, and confidence and grit. Workers proficient at managing standardized processes, applying learned formulas, and employing established protocols likely will find themselves falling short of expectations and at risk of being held back from success they seek. Meanwhile, opportunities for motivated learners possessing skills necessary to learn independently will fill the future. It is they who will take responsibility for growing their knowledge, will be curious and imaginative, will be prepared to test assumptions and question perceptions, and who will possess the courage and confidence to engage what is yet to be understood. Yet, the truth is that the schools most of us experienced and most students experience today were designed to prepare proficient students, not develop skilled learners. If we hope to make the transition necessary to prepare young people for their future, we need to change their learning experience. Four shifts can help us move beyond simply preparing proficient students to preparing skilled, motivated, independent learners. Here is how a student might describe learning experiences these shifts can highlight. Shift #1. I spend less time and energy doing what I am told and give more time and attention to taking responsibility and ownership for my learning. I have more choices in what and how I will learn, a stronger voice in my learning experience, and more control over the goals that guide my learning. I am open to receive more timely, descriptive, focused, and actionable feedback on my learning before a grade is assigned to my work. Further, because I have more control, I see more purpose and value in what I am learning. Shift #2. My learning is shifting from dependence on being motivated by and engaged in teacher directed activities and instead to giving more attention to building learning and problem-solving skills and strategies, making decisions about approaches and resources, and organizing and managing my work. Though making more mistakes than I used to, I am actively learning more from them. My learning involves more open-ended activities allowing me to plan, schedule, and monitor my work. Spending more time reflecting and adjusting my thinking and actions, I am learning to enlist the support of others by asking questions, tapping resources, and exploring perspectives other than my own. Shift #3. I spend less time waiting to be instructed and following directions and more time and energy dealing with ambiguity and figuring out how to solve problems. When I need help, my teacher is more likely to share potential models and suggest alternatives approaches than give me answers to the problem on which I am working. Not having a set-by-step process to follow can be frustrating, but it also gives me more control over my learning. Meanwhile, solving problems in this way gives me more confidence and pride than when I simply follow a given path. As a result, I learn more self-discipline and patience. Shift #4. I am less preoccupied with simply finding the correct answer and more committed to focusing on the best processes and finding the best path to an insightful and responsible outcome. I am discovering there is more than one way to find a solution, even though some approaches work better than others. I often must make multiple attempts, but I find I can learn a lot from what does not work. Focusing on the learning experience and process, I know if my work is good, the grade I receive will take care of itself. Of course, proficiency will continue to be important; it is just not enough to prepare students for their future. The good news is that we do not have to choose between proficiency and skilled learning. We can build proficiency while also nurturing skilled, independent learners.

September 02, 2022

Unlock an Unstoppable Force for Learning

There is little question that poverty can exert a heavy influence on student learning and school success. In schools across the nation, the level of poverty experienced by students nearly predicts achievement scores. Yet, a longstanding and growing body of research points to a school-based, culture-driven strategy consistently demonstrating power to overcome poverty’s influence on student learning outcomes. The power of this deceptively simple approach resides in the understanding that the nature of our commitment, effort, and persistence determines, or at least marks a noteworthy influence on learning outcomes. Commonly referred to as efficacy, 1970s psychologist Alfred Bandura popularized this construct. Recently, efficacy’s role in schools received renewed attention among researchers. Specifically, researchers now seek to examine the relationship more closely between what teachers believe about their collective capacity to influence student learning outcomes and its effect on student achievement. This strand of cultural research, known as collective teacher efficacy, recently yielded surprising and important findings. As early as 1993, Bandura concluded that the effects of collective teacher efficacy in a school could more than outweigh the negative learning effects of low socio-economic status. In the early 2000s, studies conducted by Roger Goddard (University of Michigan) concluded that collective teacher efficacy had a stronger relationship to mathematics and reading achievement than socio-economic status. Studies also show that when teachers create high levels of collective efficacy, parent relationships tend to be stronger and more positive. Even more recently, John Hattie’s meta-analysis of research on collective teacher efficacy concluded that it ranks at the top among the most powerful influences on student achievement. Obviously, this is great news for educators as this strategy has its roots in the school and is not dependent on families or even students. Thus, regardless of external school circumstances students face, the presence of collective teacher efficacy can powerfully and positively influence their achievement. Researcher and author Jenni Donohoo in her book, Collective Efficacy: How Educators’ Beliefs Impact Student Learning, describes six enabling conditions that support high levels of teacher efficacy. The six conditions are:

Advanced teacher influence. She describes advanced teacher influence as opportunities for teachers to participate meaningfully in important school-wide decisions.
Goal consensus. Donohoo notes when there is strong consensus on key goals that greater consistency and alignment of effort result, thus synergizing everyone’s impact. Interestingly, this condition, even by itself, shows to increase student achievement.
Teachers’ knowledge about one another’s work. This condition highlights the importance of collaboration, sharing, and mutual trust among staff members. Its presence also provides teachers with more frequent opportunities to learn from the effective practices of colleagues.
Cohesive staff. Cohesion does not necessarily mean that everyone always agrees, but it does imply an agreement on fundamental educational issues. Disagreements more likely inhabit tactics and methods for addressing important issues, not the issues themselves.
Responsiveness of leadership. This condition speaks to the importance of respect and concern demonstrated by school leaders, including protecting teachers from issues that distract from and compete with teaching time and focus.
Effective systems of intervention. These processes and practices ensure students receive timely, effective, responsive support when they struggle or need additional assistance to be successful.

Importantly, each condition identified by Donohoo as supporting collective teacher efficacy consist within the collective control of schools and educators. They do not necessarily require additional funding, waivers from regulations, or specialized outside expertise. However, they do require commitment, effort, and a strong belief in ourselves and our ability to make a difference.

September 02, 2022

Four “Mistakes” to Make in the First Weeks of School

We may think the best way to start the year is to have everything be smooth, predictable, and absent of any surprises. We plan, prepare, practice, and anticipate what will happen—we try to think of everything. Yet, while predictability and precision may feel comfortable and reassuring, too much focus on getting everything perfect can work against our long-term success as the year unfolds. In fact, some mistakes and missteps early in the year can create a path to greater success and satisfaction. The key is to use our experiences to inform our thinking, adjust our strategies, and learn key lessons. Rather than becoming preoccupied with perfection, we might consider making a few mistakes to gain important information, build understanding about what we may need to rethink, and open the door to some new behaviors. Here are four “mistakes” to embrace: Try a new engagement strategy with students, even if it does not work. Your effort may not work as you intended, but you are likely to gain important information about what your students might find more engaging. You may also discover that it was not the strategy that was the problem; rather, the students may not have been properly prepared, may have been reluctant to try something that was unfamiliar, or may just need to become more comfortable with classmates and you before fully engaging. Regardless, you will have gained information that can guide future engagement strategies and activities. Give students a little more responsibility than they can handle. At first, this mistake may seem like one to avoid. After all, the project or assignment involved may not have led to the outcome you anticipated and hoped for. Yet, by giving students a little more autonomy and accountability than they could handle, you now know their current capacity to handle responsibility. Your goal to increase students’ capacity to become more independent and self-leading must start where students currently are. The information you gain can guide you in where to focus your attention and build going forward. Let a lesson plan go in favor of something in which students are highly interested. It can be difficult to let go of the plan you have developed for the day. You want to stay focused and on track with instruction, and getting behind early can create pressure and stress. On the other hand, occasionally following the interests and passions of students can lead to insights and discoveries about them that can make future teaching and learning more effective. Further, you will have sent a message to students that their interests matter. You may even find that the serendipitous learning that occurs during the detour is as useful and important as what you had planned for the day. Take an evening or weekend day off, even though you have lots of work to do. Intentionally making this “mistake” may be difficult because we have deadlines and want to stay caught up on our responsibilities and tasks. However, research and experience consistently point to the benefits of taking breaks, refocusing, and engaging in non-work activities. We may feel as though continuing to press and push is what conscientious professionals do. However, doing so means that we cannot replenish our energy, clear our minds, and gain perspective. The year ahead will ask much; it is important to set a healthy and sustainable pace now. Of course, we want to avoid unnecessary mistakes, missteps, and setbacks. Still, mistakes can be the most productive learning experiences we encounter. The key is to understand that mistakes are opportunities to learn and move forward, not reasons to pull back and avoid risks.

August 19, 2022

We’re In Your Corner!

We might think that working long hours is the best way to be productive, but cognitive science paints a different picture.

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