Category: Instructional Coaching

Candy in My Mouth

~ Sarah Powley ~ 6 Comments

April is National Poetry Month, so it was a perfect time for my colleague (a middle school English Language Arts teacher) and I to plan and present a lesson on how to read a poem. I’d been talking about one of my favorite methods for unraveling meaning in poetry, and she invited me to demonstrate for her 6th graders.

Offer me a chance to teach?  It’s like giving me candy.

I selected three poems, two from the textbook, and a charming one I remembered from a  long time ago, Eve Merriam’s lovely invitation to enjoy poetry, “How to Eat a Poem”:

Don’t be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that
may run down your chin.
It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.

You do not need a knife or fork or spoon
or plate or napkin or tablecloth.

For there is no core
or stem
or rind
or pit
or seed
or skin
to throw away.

I have always loved this sweet, delicious comparison between a poem and a piece of fruit—especially juicy fruits, like peaches and pears and watermelon, where the deliciousness runs like a river, all down your front. The poem seemed like a great hook.

The second poem I chose was from the text: Gary Soto’s “Ode to Family Photographs.” Soto’s poem is a list of images—descriptions of bad family photos—images gone awry because the photographer was no good with a camera.

This is the pond, and these are my feet. 
This is the rooster, and this is more of my feet. 

Mama was never good at pictures.

This is a statue of a famous general who lost an arm, 
And this is me with my head cut off. 

This is a trash can chained to a gate, 
This is my father with his eyes half-closed. 

This is a photograph of my sister 
And a giraffe looking over her shoulder. 

This is our car’s front bumper. 
This is a bird with a pretzel in its beak. 
This is my brother Pedro standing on one leg on a rock, 
With a smear of chocolate on his face. 

Mama sneezed when she looked
Behind the camera: the snapshots are blurry,
The angles dizzy as a spin on a merry-go-round.

But we had fun when Mama picked up the camera. 
How can I tell? 
Each of us is laughing hard. 
Can you see? I have candy in my mouth.

I expected opportunities to talk about the individual pictures; to notice the two switches to italics (not italics, here) whenever the narrator stops to explain about Mama; to look at the possible meanings of that last line, candy in my mouth; to examine the writer’s tone—nostalgic about those family moments, kind—even amused—in his assessment of Mama.

The third poem was Emily Dickinson’s 4-line nugget, “Fame is a Bee,” all about the allure of fame, its glamour, its backlash, its transitory nature. Perfect for kids in thrall to performers on American Idol.

Fame is a bee.
It has a song–
It has a sting–
Ah, too, it has a wing.

As I planned it, we’d do the Merriam poem first, then the Dickinson one, and end with Soto. I’d lead the students to learn and use the words ode, stanza, image, voice, metaphor, and tone. The objective—beyond making the terms a part of their working vocabulary—was to show them a method they could use on their own to figure out the meaning of a poem. What I wanted above all was to excite the students about poetry. I planned to leave them at the end with a little present—a personal poetry reader for each child—a bright yellow card decorated with a fruit sticker and the words, “Bite in!” A reminder of Merriam’s poem; a reminder of our class period together.

My sequencing of the lesson would have been good—it would have worked—but when I met with my colleague to fine tune the lesson, “good” turned into “outstanding.” That’s the beauty of instructional coaching—two heads are better than one. I knew the strategy and I picked the poems, but she had the genius to put it all together in a way that would capture the kids.

When we started talking about the lesson, we knew we’d need a hook. My colleague had just the idea. She loves games. In fact, her classroom is decorated with boxes of games, game boards, game pieces. And she had a wonderful one she had grabbed at a garage sale: Awkward Family Photographs, a collection of perfectly awful family pictures. Her idea was to have a handful of cards on each table when the kids came in. We’d let them look at the photos for a few minutes, talk about why they were funny or scary or stupid, and then launch into the Soto poem. P1020407

So that’s what we did on the appointed day. She set up the hook and after a few minutes of laughing together at the pictures, I read the Soto poem aloud. The kids followed along.

“I don’t get it,” Daniel said flat out at the end. We loved that. It was the perfect entrée to the slow reveal.

I moved to the interactive whiteboard, the centerpiece of the strategy. The “screen block” tool would cover the poem and I would expose one line at a time, asking questions of the students to show them how the poet constructed meaning, line by line by line.

And the technology failed. It had worked in the morning before class. What had happened?  No time to twist our hands, throw them up in despair. Gamely, we went on, directing the students to look at each line of the poem in turn until we reached the end.

Of course, because of the Awkward Family Photographs, the kids caught on to the images immediately. That meant a lot of fun conversation about what was happening when Mama snapped the picture—what she intended to capture with her camera and what she actually got. Favorite line? This is me with my head cut off.

“How could he take a picture of himself with his head cut off?”

“But remember the line, Mama was never good at pictures?

“What new piece of information did you get there?”

“Oh! Mama’s taking the pictures!

We lingered on the stanzas about Mama. “How does he feel about his mama?” I asked at the end of the second one. “What’s his tone when he talks about her?”

“He isn’t mad at her!”

“He thinks she’s funny. He says, Each of us is laughing hard.”

One girl said, “It’s kind of like when people say, ‘You gotta love her!’ when they mean a person drives them crazy but they love her anyway.”

And what’s this last line: I have candy in my mouth?

Silence.

Think metaphor, kids.  Poets and words…children and candy.  All sweet.

“The experiences were sweet and he’s writing about them.”

“Uh-huh. We call that ‘nostalgia,’ when you look back on something and remember it so fondly.”

“He enjoyed those times.”

“Maybe it’s just candy in my mouth.”

“Either way.”

We looked at “Fame is a Bee” next.   The poem seems so obvious that I was surprised the kids were puzzled when I read it through. But they remembered the word metaphor, could tell me it was a comparison, so I called on them to brainstorm the pros and cons of fame.

“Money!”

“Limosines!”

“Mansions!”

“Paparazzi!”

“No privacy!”

“Stuff on the Internet.”

“And what if you don’t make it on American Idol?”

“People forget you.”

And then we started brainstorming the attributes of a bee: the buzz, the sting, the pollination—good for the flowers—honey…and…

“I got it!” Clayton shouted out before we even finished. And line by line, he explained the connection. He was popping up and down in his seat he was so excited.

Alyssa, the thinker: “But you know, wings can carry you anywhere. The wing doesn’t have to mean ‘forgotten.’ It could mean carrying you to another place…”

I love an independent thinker.

Finally, “How to Eat a Poem.”

An implied metaphor, we said, when they saw there was no “one thing is another” as a metaphor lays it out.

One boy was sure the juice was from a cheeseburger, but the unraveling strategy worked like it should when someone else pointed out ripe. “Cheeseburgers aren’t ripe.”

“And ready when you are! It’s always there, just waiting for you.”

“It’s definitely not a cheeseburger. Cheeseburgers don’t have pits or seeds or stems!”

“But the poem isn’t like a fruit because there’s nothing to throw away.”

Not a word or a punctuation mark or a break in the page to spare. Yep, they got it.

My colleague and I had a ball. I did the lesson myself the first time through, but with the next class, she was asking the kids questions, too. The third time around, even more so. The technology never did work. No matter. She did the next two presentations solo (I was somewhere else in the building), but for the last period (she has six classes and 170 kids!), by which time I had returned, we decided to function as a tag team. By then we had expanded the lesson so much that we only got through two of the poems! That was okay. She would do the third the next day. The students would be reading more poetry, using their texts and the poetry readers I’d made for them. P1030329

“I wish we could always be two heads on a lesson,” she said. “What’s our district thinking, not hiring two teachers per room?”

What are they thinking, indeed?  That’s what coaching is all about.

It was sweet all day.

Always the Kids

~ Sarah Powley ~ 3 Comments

The final bell had rung, the halls had emptied, and a small 6th grade boy struggled with a Trapper Keeper, three heavy textbooks, and his trombone case. One or the other kept falling out of his arms.

“Can I help you with some of that?” I asked.

“Yes, please,” he answered.

“Are you trying to make the bus?”

“No, my mom is waiting for me. “

So we made our way together down the long hall, chatting about school, his homework, his family’s plans to celebrate his grandmother’s birthday that evening.

He was open and trusting because even though I was a stranger, I was obviously a teacher.

I delivered him with a smile to his mother.

It was a small encounter, but a significant one for me. When I turned away, I felt that I was part of the staff, a teacher of children again.

In another school, a teacher came to me and asked if I could help an 8th grade girl in her study hall find a library book. “She’s read all the Wimpy books, but she says she doesn’t like to read. I know it’s not in your job description, but could you help her? I’m not an English teacher.”

Of course I would try. The student and I went to the library. I had never seen a Wimpy book, but quickly learned that the series features engaging graphics and fairly large text in a font that replicates a child’s printing. The Wimpy books are humorous stories about a middle school boy whose struggles are the same as the ones the kids who read these books experience.

“What kind of stories do you like?” I asked. And she responded in the way I expected.

“About real kids. I don’t like made-up stuff.”

So no Harry Potter (She didn’t even like the Harry Potter movies), no vampires, no princesses, no science fiction. The school’s library had graphic novels—but only classics like Robin Hood and King Arthur.

“Can you tell me why you don’t like to read?”

She was unusually aware. “It’s the way the print is on the page,” she said. “It’s all blocky and together.”

Sure enough. Every book she rejected had conventional print. In every book she liked, the spacing between the lines was wide and the right margin was not justified.

We found several books that met her requirements. She picked one, and I took her back to study hall. On the way, she told me she is supposed to get glasses.

In my own high school, where just a few months ago I was the one at the front of the room, I had a chance to co-teach with a colleague. It was an AP history class, and we were working with the students on writing thesis statements, the first step in learning to write the elaborated but precisely constructed essays that will be required for students to earn a high score on the tests they’ll take in the spring. We had planned the lesson well, and my colleague is a star, so instruction unfolded like a ballet: perfectly choreographed, graceful and smooth in its delivery.

And yet, my very favorite moment came when a student who had grasped the concept of a thesis and the way each part of the statement previews a point that will be developed in the body of the essay, raised her hand and asked, “But what if you don’t know the information?”

My colleague and I chuckled.

“That is what all this means. You will have to do the job of learning.”

And we, the job of teaching.

In my new role as an instructional coach, I have met with teachers in secondary schools throughout my district. I’ve talked with them individually, in small groups, at whole faculty meetings. I have met outstanding educators and seen some spectacular teaching. I have been warmly welcomed, my calendar is full, and I feel valued and productive. I love supporting other teachers. I love my new job.

But there is something I have to get used to.

I wrote in August about my “phantom limb”—my impulse to plan lessons, develop units, create curriculum. Now that school has started, I’ve discovered another missing limb—and it’s the kids. Interacting with them makes me feel like a teacher. So I’ll grab every chance I get to co-teach, to find library books, to carry trombone cases.

I am a teacher.

I always will be.

What’s the Point?

~ Sarah Powley ~ Leave a comment

Last year, I began experimenting with learning objectives. I wrote them on the whiteboard every day all semester long. (I first blogged about this topic last February in a post entitled The Last First Day of School.)

The experiment started because my district began requiring teachers to post their learning objectives every day. The objectives, it was explained, should be clear, concise statements, written in kid-friendly language, of the learning goal for any given day in each class.

I wrote objectives all the way to the end of the year. In fact, I even took photographs of my whiteboards so I could use the examples when I was working (this year) as an instructional coach. I wrote some dreadful learning objectives and some good ones, some long ones and some short, most of them for the one day and a few that extended for several days.

Here is what I learned:

1. It isn’t as easy as it sounds.

For example, distinguishing between the activity and the learning objective sometimes tests one’s own understanding of the lesson. Consider a few simple objectives first:

Using examples from Huckleberry Finn, students will identify and explain three kinds of irony. Specific. Concrete. It’s easy to write because it’s at the recall/comprehension level on Bloom’s Taxonomy. What did we do in class? Students already had the definitions of three kinds of irony. I gave them a sheet full of examples and they had to match a type of irony with an example. The tricky part was explaining to me why an example was a certain kind of irony. Comprehension.

Or this one even: Students will understand how a sentence outline sequences information and clarifies the relationships between and among ideas in the outline. [Kid-friendly language, by the way, would have that reading this way: Students will understand how sentence outlines work.] I started by showing the students a topic outline that one of them had submitted to me for feedback. I had no idea what the student was going to say about any of the topics in the outline and no clue how one idea related to another. So, to show them how a sentence outline would have communicated the student’s ideas more clearly, I xeroxed and then cut a sentence outline into strips of paper, gave each table a set of strips, and asked the students to reassemble the outline by following the internal logic of the sentences. This one is also at the comprehension level of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

But what about something more abstract, something at the analysis level? What if the assignment is to read, say, Chapter 11 in To Kill a Mockingbird? If I write Students will read Chapter 11 of To Kill a Mockingbird, then what I am writing is the assignment. If I write, Students will discuss Chapter 11 of To Kill a Mockingbird, then I am describing the day’s activity. I need to write something like this: Students will understand how Atticus’ definition of courage is the standard he will have to live up to. Or, if that is too explicit and gives away the discussion, Students will identify the key idea in Chapter 11 and be able to explain how it sets up a standard for behavior. Or whatever you or I, the teacher, want to emphasize. In other words, I have to think through the discussion and figure out what I want the students to take away from it.

I started to think of the learning objective as a purpose statement, or the point of the activity, and that made articulating the objective easier. It also took me longer then because it required more thought on my part.

2. The activity is the means to an end, not the end in itself.

Well, most of the time. In truth, sometimes the activity itself is the point. Write a bibliography. Park a car. Practice the music for the school concert. Dribble a basketball. In all of these activities, perfecting one’s performance is the goal. The student learns by doing: application level on Bloom’s. The clue to these is the “how to.” When you start writing The student will learn how to…, you know you’ve got a performance. The student will learn to dribble a basketball. Purpose and activity.

3. Sometimes, students shouldn’t see the objective ahead of time.

Science teachers especially have taught me that you don’t always want the objective up on the board at the beginning of the class period. In inquiry learning, they tell me, students figure things out for themselves. I, with my biases about constructivist learning, certainly appreciate that! Given our mandate about posting objectives, what can the teacher do in cases like these? My advice has been to write the objective on the board, but cover it up—or put it at the end of the PowerPoint presentation on the lesson—or write it in the plan book. Somehow, have it there so that the principal can find it if he (or she) comes in. Have it there so that, at the end, the students can check their perception of what the day’s learning was all about. As one teacher suggested to me, put it under the pull-down map. Just remember to pull the map up at the end of the lesson.

4. The learning objective is really there for the kids.

We make the mistake of assuming that kids get the point of a lesson. We know why we have them do whatever we have them do. We know what they should take away from the day’s activity. But do they? We can’t be sure even if we tell them. But stating the purpose in writing goes a long way toward assuring that understanding. Of course, the objective has to be written in letters large enough for students to read from across the room, and it does need to be written in kid-friendly language. The teacher also has to make the connection to the objective: Point it out, refer to it, match it to subsequent quiz questions. We know we have to alert students to assignments that are written on the board. Objectives are no different.

I am still learning about learning objectives, but so far, here’s my response to the multiple choice question I posed in February:

So on with the experiment. Stay tuned. I’ll let you know if A) I can keep it up, B) the principal finds it helpful, C) the kids benefit from the explicit statement of the goal, D) it continues to be a challenge to me to focus my thoughts and articulate them, E) all of the above.

The answer is E.

Going for Gold

~ Sarah Powley ~ Leave a comment

• The bell rings before you reach the lesson’s close.
• A befuddled question from a student translates into a moment of clarity for you: The student doesn’t understand. You’ll have to back up and start over.
• Kids aren’t listening, so you interrupt the lesson to redirect them. But then other kids lose the thread because your intervention is far more interesting than the lesson.
• Your explanation is unclear. You’ve even confused yourself.
• Three boys are spending more time fooling around than completing the task at hand. You shouldn’t have put them in a group together. But too late now. The lesson is underway and there isn’t much you can do.
• The technology fails–the ENO board won’t work right, perhaps, or a bulb blows on the overhead–and your lesson depends on the technology. You spend 10 minutes trying to get it to work. It never does. Worse than that, you lose your cool.
• Eye rolling and snickering from teenage girls: it’s unnerving and makes your knees jump. You can’t shake them off, and you can’t concentrate on your lesson, either.
• The activity you planned is too complex–the kids are not moving into and through it smoothly.
• A parent calls to register a complaint that seems to come out of left field. How could you have anticipated that?

Plenty of things can go wrong every single period of every teaching day. A teacher is a human being interacting with thirty other human beings every period. That can mean 150 kids—sometimes even more—in the course of a day. There’s a text to be understood, a concept to be explained, or a skill to be taught—and an array of technological supports that can fail at any time. When any one of the infinite number of variables goes wrong, any teacher is troubled.

I have experienced every one of the scenarios sketched in the text above.

Imagine if all them (or even just several) happened on the same day. A novice teacher could easily be thrown: her confidence shaken; her resolve, dissolved. Even one such incident can haunt a beginner, and one hour that goes badly can color the whole week. You can feel like a failure within a very short time.

I remember spending one whole weekend, when I was a beginning teacher, obsessing over something that happened on a Friday afternoon and second-guessing my response to it. I had had a “horrible week,” I declared to my husband, but in reality, I’d had one bad incident on Friday. By Monday, whatever had happened had been completely forgotten by the students, and I felt silly for letting it ruin my weekend.

This fixation on failure happened to me more than once. I’d let one or two “disasters” during a week dominate my assessment of myself as a teacher. The optimism and confidence I’d started the year out with were soon gone, and I really was in danger of failure. What was I going to do? I wanted to be a teacher. I wanted to make a difference in the lives of children—and not a negative difference, either. After a lot of fretting and frustration, I hit upon a strategy for dealing with disaster: I created a mental calendar to set the record straight.

It was like this: I taught six classes a day, five days a week, so (I told myself) there were thirty chances for success. Each week began with—in my mind—a blank white page gridded like a calendar: five squares across, six squares down, one for every period I taught. If a period went well–nothing spectacular, but nothing awful, either—the square remained white. If a class went badly, I colored the square black. But if the class went well, I made the square yellow, a cheerful color, one most people associate with happiness.

The object, of course, was to achieve a solid yellow page. In the beginning, I was gratified if there were no black spots on the grid. A page that was still white by the end of the week was a huge relief, and on the few intermittent yellows, I rode high. Gradually, my grids started looking like a case of measles—my yellow squares were sprinkled throughout the week. A whole day that was solid yellow was cause for rejoicing; a week of yellow–which took a long time to achieve—provoked a celebration equivalent to the Fourth of July. As time went along, the black days disappeared and the yellow ones dominated. Occasionally, one of those dreaded black marks did occur, but because of the grid, I could put that period into perspective. It was one period in a matrix of thirty opportunities. Not the whole picture, not a portrait of failure. My confidence increased, square by square, and with the confidence, guess what? More and more yellow squares began to appear.

Naturally, as the years passed by, I raised my standards, expected more of myself. Yellow became the new norm. I started going for gold. My explanations became clearer and were illustrated with examples kids could understand. I learned how to structure groups and keep students on task. Through trial and error and a lot of deliberate action, classroom management moved from nightmare to second nature. I learned about learning styles, adjusted my instruction for students at various levels, developed better questioning techniques and pacing strategies. And so on.

I got to gold. One square at a time.

I tell this story now to beginning teachers and others who are temporarily off their stride. Be gentle with yourself. Don’t let one bad day spoil the weekend. Don’t let one bad hour define you. You’ll get to yellow. One square at a time. And then you’ll go for gold.

Phantom Limb

~ Sarah Powley ~ Leave a comment

In August every year, teachers—just like kids—get  excited about the opening of school. They go into their classrooms in the sweltering heat to arrange the furniture, decorate the walls, organize seating charts and other materials, and most of all, to plan their units of instruction. It’s not unlike preparing for the arrival of a newborn. You get the classroom ready and then start imagining all the wonderful  adventures in learning that you’re going to experience with your students, most of whom are still, at this point, abstract.

I am not immune to the exhilaration of August either.  Last year, when I accepted my new position as a full-time instructional coach for my district, I joked with colleagues that this was “voluntary amputation.”  I said that because I knew that I would miss being in the classroom, even though I was—and am—excited about this new opportunity.  I thought I was being funny, talking about dismemberment, but my quip was more on target than I realized.

I have a phantom limb.

During the Civil War–and probably before that–amputees began reporting that they could feel sensations in their missing arms or legs. Today the phenomenon is well known.  No one knows for sure what causes the phantom limb sensation—some neuroscientists think the feelings are evidence of the brain reorganizing itself—but the illusion of feeling in a severed body part is real and widely experienced.

A few days ago, a colleague recommended a link to a great site for art, history, and science visuals to me and all my colleagues in the English Department on our Facebook group site. My mind started spinning, and soon I had a long list in my head of ways to use these images.

Then, while we were driving home from vacation last week, I read an apt and amusing editorial in the New York Times out loud to my husband: Auto Crrect Ths. The article was about the author’s  frustration with “auto correct” and his ruminations on the trend toward loss of spelling skills. I thought it would make a good starting place for a discussion in my College Composition class about the importance—or unimportance—of competence in spelling.  I couldn’t resist the urge: I emailed the article to my colleagues.

Then I received a notification from an online educational products company hawking ready-to-purchase units organized around primary documents, the use of which is a huge component of the new Common Core State Standards that everyone is scrambling to understand and implement. The units looked pretty good—perusing them gave me ideas for organizing my own instructional units.

These and other starting places for new units of instruction (or enhancements for existing ones) get me pretty excited.  But each time I feel my heart racing and my cheeks turning pink from the thrill of anticipated academic adventure, the phantom limb phenomenon brings me up short. I remember that I won’t be in the classroom this year.

Still, just as the severed limbs seem more real to amputees than their intact ones, teaching my 9th graders, my American Lit classes, and my seniors in College Comp seems more real to me than what I’ll be doing next.  To be honest, I don’t know what to expect.  That’s why, as I begin in my new position, I’m going to resume this blog by describing some of my past experiences as a teacher and sharing some instructional strategies that have worked for me.  And, since my new job is all about passing along  experiences and strategies, this is fitting.

I know I will be adding to an already huge store of creative teaching strategies for To Kill a Mockingbird, but I’m going to start with some lessons from this modern classic, a book taught almost everywhere in the country. However, while the lessons are in the context of TKM (as English teachers often abbreviate it), the strategies are widely applicable. I hope they are helpful to someone.

You see? The excitement about learning, and the urge to construct units and share resources, ideas, and lesson plans doesn’t go away even when someone leaves the classroom.

You don’t believe me?  The colleague who sent the link to the visuals?  She retired last year, too. Guess we both have a phantom limb.