• How to identify predictable classroom triggers (like students walking around) and design routines that prevent small issues from escalating into conflicts

• How schools can support new teachers to reduce turnover as they deal with the steep multi-year learning curve of teaching

• How to reduce escalation by not taking student behavior personally, keeping your tone calm, and addressing the specific behavior rather than labeling a student as “bad”

• Why teachers should anchor corrections in shared expectations (“school rules, not my rules”) and clearly name the next step (e.g., office referral) so compliance is tied to predictable boundaries, not emotion

• How to build in a face-saving “out” by stating the expectation, then physically walking away—instead of staring a student down—which lowers the likelihood of public defiance

Links:

Follow @TheClasroomManagementGuy on Instagram and @TheClassroomManagemetnGuy on YouTube

Visit Gabriel Vigil’s website, TheClassroomManagementGuy.com

Full Transcript:

Justin Baeder:

Welcome, everyone, to The Teaching Show. I’m your host, Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to welcome to the program Gabriel Vigil. Gabriel, welcome.

Gabriel Vigil:

Thank you so much for having me.

Justin Baeder:

Well, I’m excited to talk about classroom management with you, and I know this has been a passion and an area of expertise of yours for quite some time. Take us into what you do on classroom management.

00:30 Gabriel Vigil:

All right, okay, well, so a little background by myself. I’m a teacher in Southern California. I’ve been teaching for 23, I think 23 years now. Mainly at middle school, 8th grade, but I haven’t done anything from 6th to 12th grade.

Justin Baeder:

Oh, the easy ones—all the easy grades. 😅

Gabriel Vigil:

Yeah, you know, definitely the easy ones.

00:47

I never taught elementary. I covered a sixth grade class one time, and I made the kids cry, so I’m not sure I should be promoting that, but...anyways, eighth grade is my field, so... and then about five years ago, I started a YouTube channel. I rebranded it. It is now called The Classroom Management Guy.

01:04

So, if you need to find me, that’s where you can find me on YouTube, The Classroom Management Guy, but my... My mission, probably within the past couple months, is really to help out new teachers, any teachers, honestly, but mainly new teachers, just kind of make it past those first couple years, because those are the ones that’ll either make it or break it for our teachers. So, that’s been my mission here for the past couple months.

01:23 Justin Baeder:

Yeah, absolutely, and I can certainly relate to that importance of classroom management in the first couple of years, and it was, I mean, it was a real challenge for me, especially my first year, and I’m grateful to have made it through that. But I think there is a very large learning curve when it comes to classroom management.

Before we talk about the needs of new teachers in particular, I wonder if you have any thoughts on what has changed for everybody in recent years? Because you’ve been teaching for a long time, you’ve got a lot of perspective, I’m sure you have colleagues who’ve been in the game for a while. How has the landscape changed, even for veterans?

01:55 Gabriel Vigil:

Well, here we go. Taking it back way back. I remember when I was going through school, discipline always seemed to be different than it is now.

02:07

The tools that teachers could use in the past to discipline are no longer there. I’m not sure exactly where we’re located at. I’m in California. But the game has changed. It’s no, no longer can you just issue a detention. Many parents aren’t there to support you.

02:22

Suspension, very rarely. And expulsion, pretty much unheard of. And so those were the tools that we, you know, teachers and administration used in the past, but they’re no longer there. And, and so for that reason, we kind of have to change the game that we’ve been doing. And so, when I first started teaching, up until now, It’s just been a learning process. It’s been a learning process trying to figure out what works in this new education system that we have.

02:49 Justin Baeder:

So take us into some of your frameworks for thinking about the challenge of classroom management. So we’ve got a different set of tools to work with. You know, there’s not the same fear of one’s parents that maybe kids had when we were kids. There’s not the same, maybe, fear of school-based consequences. So what’s currently in your toolkit in this kind of evolved climate?

03:11 Gabriel Vigil:

You know, and what’s interesting, when I started my YouTube channel, like I said, five years ago, it forced me to think what I’m doing. Because, you know, you just go through the motions. As a teacher, you put things in place, and you’re doing things, and you find out what works, and you keep doing it. But you never really, very rarely do we sit back and actually think, what are we doing? Why is this working? Why is this not working?

03:30

And when I started my YouTube channel, it forced me to take account of everything I’m doing, and why I’m doing it, and why does it work, and how can other teachers use this as well. And what I realized through... Oh, and I’m trying to think where I heard this. I’m not sure if it was on Instagram or TikTok.

03:48

I don’t know. One of those things. But someone mentioned that rules and procedures is kind of like the pre-discipline, you know? If you have things in place, a lot of the negative outcomes can be avoided altogether. I was interviewing Mr. Dr. Woodley, I think his name was, and he mentioned something about triggers.

04:10

I’m like, what do you mean by triggers? And he was talking about how... The classroom has triggers in it. If you can somehow avoid those triggers, or mitigate those triggers, you’re gonna have less problems down the road.

04:22

And I listened to it, and I thought, what... How do I apply to my classroom? I realized that that’s what...

04:27

When we first started teaching, you’re always gonna hear rules and procedures, rules and procedures, that’s it, rules and procedures. And I said, okay, that’s...I didn’t understand rules and procedures, but what exactly is that? And you put those things in place, those rules and procedures, to try to get rid of as many of those triggers as possible.

For example, if a kid walks around the classroom, that’s not the worst thing in the world, walking around the classroom. But almost always, that walk around the classroom leads to them talking to somebody, which leads to them poking somebody, which leads to an altercation.

And so if you take care of the problem at the very beginning, you avoid that outcome to begin with. So kind of for me in my class, I really take it down to the basic thing.

I have solid routines, solid procedures, and it pretty much runs on its own with me just kind of the background, you know, taking care of things here and there.

05:16 Justin Baeder:

I remember, as a new teacher, going to observe someone else who was much more experienced, very good at classroom management, and I remember thinking, this guy has a totally different job than I do, because his kids just don’t misbehave. And if my kids would just act the way his kids would, then I would be just as good a teacher as he is, but, like, we’re just not doing the same job here. This is unfair comparison.

And I think what was really hard for me to pick up on as a new teacher was all the things that you’re talking about, like the preventative, the subtle things, the solid routines and procedures that prevent the kinds of things that I was having to deal with more than I wanted to, and that didn’t come up at all in this peer observation. What are some of the things that you do in the moment? So, yeah, we know about the routines and procedures.

06:01

We know about the kind of systems in place that are supposed to prevent behavior. What are some things that you do in the moment that keep things from bubbling up? You know, like, if something is in the microwave and it’s bubbling up, you stop the microwave and you let it simmer down. What do you do in the classroom? Like, how do you see that happening and what do you do?

06:21 Gabriel Vigil:

Well, first, back to the rules and procedures, and I know exactly what you’re talking about, because I was in the same boat. I mean, I almost got fired my first year. You know, the principal came up to me and said, you know, we need to talk. You never want the we need to talk thing. He said, I don’t think this is working out. And I’m like, oh, man, I got a family, I got kids, a house.

06:39

I got to figure this out. And he connected me, like you mentioned, with a mentor and somebody else to kind of guide me along. And it’s been a process. It’s been a process. And what was my weakness, I would say now is my strength. But, you’re right.

06:52

Those rules and procedures, and I was talking with a new teacher, and he’s, like, three years into it, and I asked him how things are going. He says, much better this year. And I go, what’s the difference? Because, you know, like you mentioned, you walk to that classroom, that teacher that you observed just seemed to have it. Whatever it is, they had it. I’m like, how do you quantify it?

07:08

How do you explain it? And he actually said this. He says, you know, I knew about rules and procedures. I had rules and procedures in my classroom, but they weren’t part of me. They weren’t the, they weren’t part of the classroom. It was something I was doing in the classroom, but they weren’t built in, baked in.

07:24

And that’s the difference. But that, that takes time to get in there. And so when you, the question was, you know, what do I do if something really does bubble over, you know, pop off? Once again, you lay everything to the foundation to hopefully avoid that as much as possible. If something does come up, and it does, I mean, we’re humans. I mean, I have my moments where, you know, I kind of lose it a little bit.

07:46

But the best thing in the classroom is when you’ve been doing this a while, you find your little, the tricks that work. You know, you’re able to dig into that little cookie jar and find out what worked in the past, and you’re able to apply it again. And what you’re going to find out is the things that work, first of all, is you’ve got to make sure you don’t take it personally. Which is hard to do. I mean, it’s hard to do if a kid’s calling you something, not to take it personally, but you gotta learn not to take it personally. And then that’s the first thing, because if you don’t take it personally, then you don’t get all worked up and emotional about it, and you’re able to keep it calm.

08:17

And then the next thing is, when I address the student, I don’t address... the student directly, meaning that I don’t call them out as a bad person or a bad student. I address the behavior. And the ultimate goal in all of this discipline and dealing with the students is to change that behavior.

08:34

That’s the ultimate goal. It’s not to vent and not to seek revenge, not to get into that. It’s just to change behavior. And so you lay the foundation, the routine procedures in, to hopefully...

08:44 Justin Baeder:

Yeah, absolutely. It sounds like one thing you’re getting at here is the idea of avoiding a power struggle, right? And I think maybe the old school way of approaching classroom management was to just, you know, wield the most power to, you know, to be the scariest voice in the room. And of course, that’s, you know, that’s not what we do. That’s not how it works anymore. And often, kids will try to get us into a power struggle. They’ll try to push our buttons and see what happens. You know, for their own entertainment, if nothing else.

09:31

What are some of your recommendations for getting out of that power struggle mindset and avoiding those power struggles that students may be perfectly happy to engage us in?

09:40 Gabriel Vigil:

So, regarding the power struggle, I do everything I can in my classroom not to make it a power struggle. Once again, the ultimate goal is to change the behavior. And you’re not going to change it by going head-to-head, you know, with somebody. You’re just not. As adults, I have a student that we were talking, and I basically made a thing. I said, it’s easier to make a point than it is to make a difference.

And so, with your students, you can make the point of trying to be right and tell them what they’re doing wrong, but it’s not going to make the difference. And so, the best thing for me that I found is I have something called progressive discipline, where you kind of just catch a behavior at the very beginning and try to do a small correction with it, maybe just a quick name, call the student out, maybe put the name on the board, maybe see if the classroom, and it kind of just escalates.

It’s a little bit each time, because it hopefully gives them the out. And you always want to give the student the out. For me, the most extreme case, the most time, would be, let’s say, a student, cell phones. They have a cell phone out. And so I’ll tell the student, hey, please put your cell phone away. And they don’t.

10:44

So now, we kind of start the power struggle, the defiance. I can immediately just lose it, and I can’t believe you’re treating me, you know, but you don’t do that. So, I’ll go to them, maybe a minute later, they haven’t done it, I’ll go to them and say, hey, maybe you didn’t hear me. Real soft, actually get down to their level, on their desk, and say, hey, maybe you didn’t hear me, but...

11:00

We’re not allowed to have cell phones in the classroom. Could you please put it away? And then I walk away. Because I could be in that moment just going back and forth and not getting anything. So you have to give them that out. And then 90% of the time, they’ll, like, and they’ll put it away.

11:13

If they don’t, then I’ll go back to them a third time and say, hey, I gotta let you know the rules of the school. It’s not my rules. It’s, you know, the rules of the school is you can’t have cell phones. If you don’t put it away, I gotta send you to the office. Can you please put it away? And then walk away.

11:26

Quiet. The tone is there. It’s not saying they’re a bad student. These are the rules. We gotta follow. And so each time...

11:33

You’re trying to give the student, because they don’t want to lose face in front of their friends. And so this, by doing this approach, hopefully gives them the out, and eventually they put it away, and then you change the behavior. Now, the other part of it is, how do you do that long-term? You’ve just got to be consistent with it, and that’s a long-term perspective. But that’s how I would deal with students where things seem to be more of a power struggle.

11:55 Justin Baeder:

Yeah, so you’re literally walking away. You’re saying, here’s my expectation, but you’re not then, like, staring them down, waiting for them to comply, inviting them to challenge you. Like, you’re giving them an out, as you said. They can kind of save some face. They don’t have to just give in, but they might as well give up on the cell phone, put it away, or else you do have a next recourse. And I think that’s a really crucial piece, too, there, is you’re not just asking and hoping, and then that’s it, right?

12:18

You do have a next recourse in your progressive discipline system.

12:21 Gabriel Vigil:

100%, 100%. Oh, I like how you break it down. You think what’s up here and you make it make sense. I love that.

12:27 Justin Baeder:

Well, and I think that progressive discipline idea has become unpopular in recent years, or people have kind of pulled back from that because they think, well, I don’t want that student to go to that next level, right? The next level is worse for the student. I don’t want the student to go to the office. Sometimes the office says, we don’t want you to send the student to the office. We want you to keep him. And I feel like that doesn’t really work because there has to be that next recourse.

12:48

If I’m going to not get in a power struggle, if I’m going to set my expectation and walk away, when I come back... I have to have some sort of recourse, right? So you feel like you, you can send students to the office, you can have that next recourse if a student is, is really gonna not, you know, not do what you ask them to do.

13:05 Gabriel Vigil:

I know for me, for my school, for sure, for sure. And that’s because I have a good relationship with the administration. But here’s what I noticed. For a while, that actually was, I think, for three weeks, the dean left. I had to take the dean of students role on for three weeks. It was the most exhausting three weeks of my life.

13:22

Besides having a baby at first, with a wife. But beyond that, it was the most exhausting thing. And what I noticed is that most of the referrals, we call them, came from a few select teachers. And so, what I would think from administration’s point of view if they see that there’s only a few students that you ever send to the office, then they know that, okay, this kind of went to the next level. He did his best to handle it in the classroom. And so, for me, I have that luxury of having the rapport and the relationship with admin, and they know how I, you know, my classroom manager, my classroom, so I do find the support from them.

13:58

But for many teachers, you’re right. That becomes a problem. And you hear about this all the time, you know, how the administration sends it back with lollipops and everything else. And so that’s why it just becomes so critical to really master this classroom management thing. And what frustrates me so much is...

14:17

I’ll see new teachers come on our campus, and there’s all this talk about curriculum and testing and everything else. I’m thinking, my gosh, this new teacher’s just trying to survive. They’re just trying to make it through the day. The biggest thing on their mind is the students and their behavior and how they manage that behavior. And I think we’re doing such a disservice to teachers and definitely our new teachers if we don’t help them with that. Because until you get that down, nothing else matters.

14:40

It just doesn’t.

14:42 Justin Baeder:

And I want to acknowledge something kind of remarkable. Having this interview, we’re talking at the end of your school day, right? Like, you taught all day today?

14:48 Gabriel Vigil:

Yes.

14:49 Justin Baeder:

So, if you’re a new teacher right now, you know how amazing that is, because as a new teacher, I remember just the, like, the full-body exhaustion. Like, I fell asleep on the floor of the living room one day after school, like, it was a Friday, and, like... Just the fact that you’re able to have a conversation with me at this time of day tells me that you have figured out a lot of those things about just, you know, just managing the day, managing energy, managing the personalities, not taking things personally. So for someone who is in the midst of that learning curve in their first year, their first two years, their first three years, they do feel the exhaustion.

15:22

They do feel the strain of dealing with behavior and dealing with all the challenges that kids like to throw at us. What would you say is some of your kind of starting point advice? Like, throw us a little bit of a lifeline, if you would, if we’re in that stage.

15:37 Gabriel Vigil:

All right, first of all is...

15:41

You gotta have grace for yourself. I mean, you have to. One thing, my story is, first year of teaching, almost got fired. Second year of teaching was not that much better. Third year of teaching, it was a struggle. I was so many times, I went home crying.

15:55

I was, I’m a grown man. I go home... These middle schoolers make me cry, you know? And so, as a new teacher, the first thing I would want them to know is they should give themselves grace, because this is extremely hard.

16:06

And... Most likely, they probably feel like they’re alone in this, you know, because they’re in the classroom by themselves with these students to think, what’s wrong with me? Why is this not working? And it’s not the case.

16:17

The number I hear over and over again, and we kind of briefly mentioned before, is 44% of new teachers never make it to year six. That just tells you how hard this is. And you mentioned... It was extremely hard for me those first couple years.

16:32

So, the first advice I have for teachers, give yourself some grace. Just do, and just know, hang in there. Nothing’s wrong with you. It is a learning curve. It took me, honestly, about seven years before I finally felt comfortable being in the classroom. But then once you hit that learning curve, it just, it gets better.

16:49

So, just hang in there for that part. Just hang in there for that part. And the second bit of advice I would have is just know that each year you want to kind of just take something away with you, positive, whatever that might be, because you’re going to find yourself getting back to that as the years progress. It may be something wonderful a student said to you, maybe it’s something that worked in the classroom. You’re just going to find yourself holding on to that and bring it back out again when you need it the following year. And just kind of keep building upon that.

17:17

So that would be my advice for new teachers is focus on classroom management. You’re going to hear a lot of talk about everything else. You’re going to hear a lot, and you have to kind of play the game. You got to play the game. You got to go through the motions. But honestly, classroom management, that’s what you should be focused on 90% of your time, working on that, improving that, making the tweaks, learning from it.

17:38

And then by year two, three, once that’s locked in, then you can bring everything else in that the district and the school really, really wants you to have.

17:45 Justin Baeder:

Love it. So you said a couple of things there that I think are really worth echoing because they’re so powerful. Have grace for yourself. You normalized the fact that there is a substantial learning curve to this job, a multi-year learning curve. It’s not like, you know, any previous job people might have had where you get, you know, you learn the ropes in a couple of weeks and then you’re good to go. I mean, it is a multi-year learning curve in this job.

18:06

And then the third thing I wanted to highlight that you said was, you know, about kind of building your bag of tricks, building your repertoire of strategies that you use. and celebrating what you’ve accomplished in that time. Did I get that last one right? 100%.

18:20 Gabriel Vigil:

I didn’t use the word repertoire because I can never say it correctly, but that is right. That’s exactly what it is.

18:26 Justin Baeder:

Well, I love the hope that you’re giving people there. And I wonder if you could tell us, Gabriel, a little bit about what you teach in your course. I understand you have a course on classroom management. What are some of the things you cover in there?

18:39 Gabriel Vigil:

All right. So, here’s where it gets hard, is how do you help... teachers that are struggling, right? And I developed a course to give the best I could for students to, or for teachers to take what they can from it and hopefully transform their classroom.

18:53

It’s called Classroom Transformation, to transform the classroom in 20 days. And it kind of just gives them the foundation of everything so they can hopefully get in the right trajectory, you know, so that’s it. But I’ll be honest with you, probably the best thing I would recommend to stay in contact with me or to pick my brain is go to that YouTube channel. I mean, hundreds of videos on there. Any teacher can always reach out to me if they have any questions. I’d be more than happy to help.

19:16

And that is truly where I feel my calling is the next 10 years is just try to get as much as I can, help as much as I can. And so, I definitely hope people reach out to me, watch the videos, the Classroom Manager Guy YouTube channel, but... Yeah, anything I can do, I’m happy to help out with.

To maintain comprehension, she uses a three-part strategy:

• Brain dump—everything you remember from the past few pages

• Turn & talk—share with a partner

• Gist statement—10 words summarizing the section

Here’s the template:

Gist Statement Google Doc

More Links:

Literacy Lab with Faith on Facebook

Literacy Lab with Faith on Substack

Literacy Lab with Faith on Twitter/X

A Period in the Life of a HS interventionist: FASE Reading, Retrieval Practice, and Gist Statements, in Science of Reading Classroom on Substack

This Pinedale teacher’s approach is helping high school students fill reading gaps—news article by Katie Klingsporn

FASE Reading & Vocabulary in the Science Classroom with Marcie Samayoa

Full Transcript:

Welcome everyone to the Teaching Show. I’m your host Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to welcome to the program Faith Howard. Faith, welcome.

Faith Howard (00:16):

Hi Justin. Thanks for having me.

Justin Baeder (00:18):

Well, thanks for being here. And tell us a little bit about yourself and then we’ll get into the strategy you have for turn and talk gist statements and brain dumps for reading comprehension.

Faith Howard (00:28):

Sure. My name’s Faith Howard. I am a sixth through 12 literacy specialist and former high school English teacher and I also teach seventh grade English language arts. I am in Pinedale, Wyoming, and a current Goan fellow as well as a board member for the Reading League, Wyoming.

Justin Baeder (00:45):

Wonderful. So you work directly with students in your own classroom, is that right?

Faith Howard (00:49):

I’ve created a really unique model which has caught some attention called Literacy Lab. Essentially these classes are their own freestanding elective courses that are offered for middle and high school students who are below grade level readers.

And it’s an innovative approach where we’re using science of reading those key components, but in a teen friendly way with novel studies and they experience immense growth.

And I think part of that is just due to the science of reading approach and then the ability to have them in protected time in a legitimate class, which a lot of schools really struggle to find that time to work with kids.

So yeah, it’s been a journey. It’s been my passion project since I stepped into this role four years ago and really excited and happy to share about Literacy Lab more with anybody that’s curious of what reading interventions can look like in secondary.

Justin Baeder (01:42):

Absolutely, absolutely. So is this a class students take in addition to a regular ELA class?

Faith Howard (01:47):

Yes. Yes they do. And they qualify based on universal screeners and then diagnostics. So we have kind of a whole process. So it’s an elective that’s sometimes not optional.

Justin Baeder (01:59):

I’m excited to talk about the strategies you use in that class, but I just wanted to point out there the immense power of that extra time because often we look for things that will work in zero time for students who are behind.

And I think often when we do have students who need extra support, that support takes time. So I think it’s a very smart foundational piece that you’ve actually built in that time. So these students are essentially getting twice as much ELA time as everybody else. Right?

Faith Howard (02:24):

Yeah, and I think there’s been a lot of talk kind of on the social media sites and through some of the big wigs in the literacy world lately about two things like distraction and how a lot of young people now just don’t have the time or the focus.

And so building in that time for a lot of these kids who have potentially have habitual absences and we literally have to make up for lost time. And then the other side of it is reading whole books and you have a lot of these, you’re competing with their core content and even in secondary English classes now, it’s really hard to protect time to read whole books, and that’s not happening across our country in a lot of classrooms.

And so having a class like this in addition for some of my students, it’s the first book they’ve ever actually read cover to cover because they found ways of sneaking and not really reading throughout their educational career.

Justin Baeder (03:15):

So they’re reading whole books in this lab class and we’re going to talk about a strategy that you use to support them and to guide them along in that. But I think what you said there is really important that often students may look like they’re reading but often are just not reading whole books.

And one of the, as a sidebar, one thing that I came across recently that was pretty surprising was that independent reading often just is not a good strategy for struggling readers because they don’t do it. They might sit there quietly, but they’re not necessarily reading.

So what we’re talking about today is a somewhat social practice, it’s something you’re doing as a class. Take us into that process of reading novels and then you have a particular tool that you sent me that we’ll share with people for a brain dump turn and talk and just statement. So let’s get into that.

Faith Howard (04:00):

Yeah, so I think when you’re reading a novel with struggling readers or really anybody adolescent readers as a class, the temptation is either to only play audiobook and assume that they’re not going to be willing to read, or the assumption is I’ll read aloud to them as a teacher or I’ll assign independent reading, but how do I hold them accountable and know that they’re actually reading it?

And if they do read it as a teacher, and I think anyone who’s taught students and asked them to read would admit that often you’ll get students and especially those who have working memory issues or those struggling readers who will say, I just read those five pages or those two pages and I have no idea what I just read. I don’t remember any of it.

That’s really unfortunate, and it feels like a huge lost opportunity and a waste of time.

(04:46):

So they have to be taught and kind of coached through how to do that better so that they can actually retrieve that information and remember what they’ve read because there is no point in reading.

I was just listening to a podcast with Doug Lemov this morning and he talked about the purpose of reading is to remember what you read and then to gain empathy from it. And you can’t do that if you don’t recall anything that you’ve read.

And it’s really frustrating for my students who basically admit that their whole life it’s been this like, okay, I read whatever’s been assigned and then I don’t remember it. So for me, a huge goal was like we’ve got to have a concerted effort toward remembering what we read, so that retrieval practice, but at the same time, reading is, it should be social, right?

And it should be this group effort and I think a community practice.

(05:32):

And so the FASE reading really helps with that. So I’ll talk about that. But also working on their fluency, how we read aloud is often how we read in our heads. And if it’s broken and choppy and they’re not honoring punctuation and using voice inflection, then that’s a part of why they’re not understanding what they’ve read.

And so by focusing on all of these pieces, it creates this really cohesive process that hopefully what we’re doing is training students’ brains to do this organically while they are reading on their own. And so I’ve kind of been testing that theory in my classroom.

So the approach, because I know that’s kind of what you’re wanting me to talk about, is a marriage of three different things that I have been reading about and learning about lately that I decided to incorporate into one reading strategy. So the first step of it is doing FASE reading, which Doug Lemov talks about in his new book, Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading.

(06:26):

So FASE reading is fluent, accountable, social and expressive. And so the idea is that you start modeling as a teacher and you’re reading as we move through a novel, we’re going to mix up our format and style of reading, but with my students, then we open our books.

We’re in chapter 12, and I’m going to start by modeling some reading and I’m going to also content and background knowledge and vocabulary is really important.

So I want to make sure that I capture that, that that’s all a precursor to this because we’re not just reading for comprehension as this nebulous idea. It’s reading for a specific focus and purpose as well.

And so there’s always an application piece that they’re doing in writing a discussion afterwards as well. But anyways, so I start with modeling and I’m reading fluently out loud with them. We talk about prosody often in my classroom.

(07:18):

And so we’re talking about our voice, not just pausing it commas, but actually making a scoop so that you go up, down, up again, all of those kinds of ticky tacky things that really increase your comprehension. And so I model that for a while and then I start cold calling.

And in my classes we have about eight to 12 students. These are smaller class sizes for a reason, and it really holds them accountable. They don’t know when they’re going to be called on. And this idea of no one is off the hook, but it’s a safe space.

We build that community to where it’s okay to read aloud and it’s okay to make mistakes. I even make mistakes in front of them then, but the key is that I correct them, I notice it.

And so as they’re reading, it provides this beautiful opportunity. And they might read for a paragraph, they might read for three paragraphs.

(08:01):

They might read for just one or two sentences. They might even get cut off midway through a sentence because what I’m asking the other students to do is to follow along and pay attention.

And as soon as I call on the next students to pick up, they’re picking up where the other student left off. But that beautiful opportunity is coaching them in the moment in their fluency.

And so I have a couple of videos I’ve recorded that we’ll share, but where a student is really struggling to decode a multi-syllabic word and I’m able to not just tell them how to say the word, but actually coach them through the syllabication process that we also work on and that I teach in that class so that they are successfully working through that difficult word.

Everything from that to—in another video, I have a student who typically reads in a monotone higher register and their voice never drops at the period.

(08:50):

So that impacts comprehension because they’re not able to recognize that that’s the end of an idea in the beginning of the next idea. So coaching them through that where I might pause them, redirect that and say, I want you to reread that again, but listen to what my voice does.

And I model that sentence and then have them reread the sentence with their voice going down before they keep going. And so they feel that feedback, but also success in the moment after we read a designated amount of text and I build up to longer chunks of text. So it’s important to know we started by just doing one page at a time, then two pages, then maybe a little bit more.

So the next step is a brain dump. And so I set a timer for two minutes and on there and I created a worksheet.

(09:34):

I started doing it with mini whiteboards, and that works great too. I still mix it up and do that, but I wanted somewhere to have it captured in note taking forms so that they could refer back to it at the end of the chapter for some of our writing tasks. And so the brained up is essentially that it is, okay, close your book. This is really important so that they’re not overly relying on a text. Close your book and I want you to think back and write down anything you can remember about what you’ve just read. And so

I model that under the document camera initially and then have them compare their brain dump to mine to see how much am I remembering? Am I actually writing for the entire two minutes? And so for some of them it really pushes them and I explicitly show them that it doesn’t have to be complete sentences, it’s keywords and phrases even that are just anything in your brain.

(10:23):

And so it offloads that working memory before we go on to reading the next section of text. And I watched a really amazing webinar by Brett Benson about that exact practice.

He talks a lot about the science of learning and retrieval practice, and then recently read the book, Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning by Patrice Bain and Pooja Agarwal.

And they, both of them kind of talk about this idea of brain dumps being low stakes. It’s not for a grade, it’s not a quiz, but it’s like holding students accountable and really tapping into their memory while also then it’s written down so then they can free up that working memory space for continuing to read on. And what I hope is that over time students learn to be good note takers. They could easily do this while they’re reading stop intermittently to check in on their own monitoring of their comprehension, which is what good readers do.

(11:15):

That’s what we do while we’re reading. So after the two minute brain dump, then they do a turn and talk. I think verbal expression and the ability to compare notes with a partner is really important. They’re actually providing a verbal summary of the text then, and there’s a lot of value in that, and it kind of is a checks and balances.

So often I build in engagement, have them move around the room, find a partner from a different table to share, and then they do, there’s little games you can build in thieves and robbers where they have to steal one idea that they didn’t have in their brain dump from a partner.

So they do that, they add that to their brain dump. And then as I was creating this process, the last step that I thought about, I had been doing a lot of Matt Burns and Lindsay Cheney’s approach, which is partner reading paragraph shrinking.

(12:00):

And that’s a wonderful strategy to have students reading in pairs fluently and then stopping along the way to do some annotating and summarizing of the main idea.

And I thought, how could we do that as well? Because objective summaries summarizing the text, not just verbally, but then in writing tends to be a real struggle point for a lot of my adolescent readers that I have in Lit Lab specifically.

They’ll either write me, I ask them to tell me the main idea of that section of text, and they’ll write me massive chunks of text. They’re writing basically, they’re just paraphrasing the entire passage.

They can’t disseminate what’s important and not important. They can’t put it all together. And so they only focus on one detail that they remember from the text, and it’s like that’s not actually the main idea.

So the really cool part becomes with partner reading paragraph shrinking, one of the approaches is when they’re writing the main idea for that little section of text that they’re doing it in 10 words or less.

(12:55):

And so you’re capping it and really having them focus on what they highlighted in the partner reading paragraph shrinking. It’s like who or what is the paragraph or section of text about what are the most important pieces of information we learned about the who or what they’re doing that essentially, so the last step, I actually have 10. I made it this way so that it held them to that 10 words or less.

So they have 10 blanks for words with a period at the end, after the turn and talk they have to work. We start off where I model it, then we do it in small groups, and then we come back together to share out and compare notes.

And then eventually they do it independently and they summarize the gist. So the gist is like, what’s the point? What was the point of that small section of text?

(13:34):

And the awesome part is that they use their brain dump notes to look back and say, okay, how could I summarize that in 10 words or less? And what’s been really interesting in working with my students is that from that I’ve been able to coach them and give them feedback even on sentence construction at the syntactical sentence level of, well, how would you want to start that sentence?

It doesn’t always have to be subject verb, and we have to be really thoughtful about where we add those conjunctions. And so yeah, it’s been a journey and I sort of tested it out and put all of these pieces together and I’ve had so much success with my students and it’s clicking for them, and they’re saying for the first time, I actually remember what I read, but then I wanted to test it and say like, is there data that supports this in my classroom?

(14:18):

Kind of action research model. And so I had given them a traditional reading comprehension quiz earlier in our novel, and the average scores were about a five out of 10, just multiple choice basic comprehension questions after we had read a chapter of the book.

Then we did this process and we practiced it for a few weeks. And then I had them do that process in pairs and independently, so releasing them to more of it less led by me. And then I gave them a similar reading quiz over that chapter, and the average scores were a seven out of 10. And I had many students that were an eight or nine out of 10 who before had gotten a five out 10.

And so I mean small level research there, but there is incremental growth in showing that they’re retaining more information of what they read through practices like this,

Justin Baeder (15:07):

You’re modeling and teaching them how to be good readers and getting them through a book that they would not otherwise probably get through.

Faith Howard (15:16):

And they really love the book. I mean, I’m really thoughtful on the books, but they’re really on which books we read and why we read them. I have students who didn’t meet the exit criteria and are in my class again this year who are high schoolers, and some of them talk about the books we read last year and they’re like, “That’s the best book I’ve ever read. I missed that book. Can we read that book again?”

Those kinds of questions. And for a struggling adolescent reader to say that I think is pretty remarkable.

Justin Baeder (15:42):

And just for context here, to kind of recap some of the situation. So these are students who are below grade level, maybe struggle with working memory often have not read many books at all as far as age appropriate, full length novels.

Are they reading on grade level novels that you’re choosing for them? These are not at their independent reading level,

Faith Howard (16:02):

Right? Leveled text, leveled lives, right? That idea. So these are grade level complex texts, if not higher. We read the other We Moore by Wes Moore for my high school lit lab. Right now we’re reading a Long Way Gone by Ishmael Bay last year. We read Just Mercy by Brian Stevenson.

So we do a lot of narrative nonfiction because I can pull in informational texts often through our fluency to build background knowledge because as we know, knowledge building, background building is a huge part of their comprehension as well. But these texts are meaningful, they’re impactful, they have a lot of dialogue about the human experience.

They can develop empathy. And often for small town Wyoming kids, it can educate them about a part of our world that they don’t have a lot of exposure to otherwise. So it hits a lot of pieces that make them really powerful.

And yes, the whole point of this is it has to be grade level complex texts. That’s what they’re going to be facing anywhere else. They go in their day. And so you don’t do them any favors by let’s read a upper elementary level book.

And quite frankly, they laugh that off. I mean, they don’t want that. I think that’s dishonoring to them because what they ultimately want is success in content that is appropriate to their age and grade level.

Justin Baeder (17:20):

And one more clarification. They are reading the entire book aloud as a class, is that right?

Faith Howard (17:25):

Yeah. I mean, obviously we mix up the formatting of the reading, and so some chapters or portions of text they’re reading independently and then other parts we’re reading as a whole class.

Sometimes we do listen to the audio. So I think it’s all about mixing that up. And sometimes they’re reading in small groups, groups of two to three, and then other times we’re doing whole class with these approaches. But yeah, cover to cover, we don’t cut out sections at all.

Justin Baeder (17:48):

I love how this just addresses so many of the challenges that teachers feel about their students who are below grade level that maybe the fluent reading is difficult and FASE reading addresses that so well and give students that opportunity to practice prosody and to hear fluent reading modeled and to get a chance to read but not have the whole class be kind of dragged down by a monotone.

You’re addressing so many of the reasons that often the kids who come to you just have not read, they just have not read books and you’re giving them that opportunity.

So thank you so much for sharing these strategies and we will link to the videos that you mentioned and to the template that you provided. Anything else you want us to know about this approach?

Faith Howard (18:28):

Not really this approach, but I would just say that if paired with this approach, you can do daily oral reading fluency in addition to this. This doesn’t have to be the end all be all for their fluency work.

And then strategies like explicit vocabulary and morphology work where you’re front loading key vocabulary terms that are going to be coming out of that text that they’re reading.

And then a strategy for decoding multi-syllabic words, which Melissa and Laurie on their podcast, they have some really great stuff about that specifically and that approach and strategy for teaching students.

So I leveraged that approach while we’re doing the FASE reading. So I think if you can piece all of those together and add them in, layer it that that’s really where the magic happens because you’re essentially hitting at all of the parts of the science of reading that many of these struggling adolescent readers have gaps in virtually all of them. So yeah,

Justin Baeder (19:23):

If people want to see some of your videos or find your Substack, where’s the best place for them to go online?

Faith Howard (19:27):

Yeah, I’ll keep it really simple. Literacy Lab with Faith, I have a teacher Facebook page, a Twitter account, and then a Substack all under that same handle.

Justin Baeder (19:36):

Great. We’ll link them in the show notes. Faith Howard, thank you so much for joining me on the teaching show. It’s been a pleasure.

Faith Howard (19:41):

Thank you, Justin. Pleasure is all mine.

• How retrieval practice is distinct from reading and reviewing notes

• Why erasers are key for low-stakes retrieval

• How to use retrieval practice over time, so students retain beyond the short term

• How retrieval practice works with higher-order questions—not just factual recall

• Why “metacognitive judgment” makes us think retrieval practice isn’t working, even though it is

Strategies to Learn and Upskill More Effectively on LinkedIn Learning

Visit Dr. Blunt’s page at RetrievalPractice.org

Full Transcript:

Dr. Justin Baeder (00:09):

Welcome everyone to The Teaching Show. I’m your host, Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to welcome to the program, Dr. Janell Blunt, to talk about mini whiteboards for retrieval practice. Dr. Blunt, welcome to the teaching show.

Dr. Janell Blunt (00:20):

Thank you.

Dr. Justin Baeder (00:21):

Well, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do, and then let’s get into talking about retrieval practice and using mini whiteboards.

Dr. Janell Blunt (00:27):

Yes. I am a cognitive scientist, which means I have a background in research, understanding best practices in the classroom. So conducting controlled experiments, both in the laboratory and in the authentic classroom. I am also an educator. So I am in the classroom. I teach about four classes, so probably like most of you in the classroom most days of the week.

Dr. Justin Baeder (00:48):

Good deal. And you teach at the university level, is that right?

Dr. Janell Blunt (00:50):

Yes. Associate professor at a university in Indiana.

Dr. Justin Baeder (00:54):

Wonderful. And I was reading your chapter that you contributed to the book, Smart Teaching, Stronger Learning. And I was intrigued by the fact that you are using mini whiteboards with college students in a psychology class that you teach. Is that right?

Dr. Janell Blunt (01:07):

Yes. Love the whiteboards.

Dr. Justin Baeder (01:10):

Yeah. Tell us a little bit about that, because I think probably we’ve all seen that maybe at the elementary level, maybe kindergarten, or maybe middle school math. But college, honestly, I’ve never heard of anybody using mini whiteboards at college. Are you the only one or has this caught on among your colleagues?

Dr. Janell Blunt (01:24):

It is catching on. I am preaching the good word about whiteboards to pretty much anyone who will listen. And it has been a great success. So my area of research in the chapter that you’re mentioning is all about retrieval practice.

And so retrieval practice is calling information to mind instead of, say, rereading something, which is kind of our default. And so I use whiteboards as a way to encourage students to practice retrieval on their own.

So the number one thing I have observed in the classroom is that students are going to do what you model for them in the classroom outside of the classroom. So if I’m standing there in the classroom saying, “Okay, we’re going to learn about the neuron today and I want you to go home and practice retrieval.”

Well, if I’m modeling for them just sit and listen, then when they go and study on their own, what they’re going to do is just sit and read the book or re-watch a lecture video.

(02:14):

So I brought in whiteboards as a way to get them to practice retrieval in the classroom.

And what I have found is that it’s like a disease in a good way. They start using these whiteboards everywhere.

I actually teach a section to the nursing students at my university about how to prepare for the NCLEX. And several of them had had me before in an intro psych class.

And when I told them about whiteboards, those who had had me actually whipped out their own whiteboards because they just love using the whiteboards.

And what you can do is you can simply start a class by saying, write down three things you remember from last class. You can pause a class 10 minutes in and say, “What are three things we just talked about? “

Or you’re going to have more focus questions, which is what I do.

(02:56):

I might say, “What does SSRI stand for? “ And they have to retrieve selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, a concept in neuroscience.

I might say, “What is the death ritual practice in this custom?” I’m thinking about that nursing class right now.

So the whiteboards are versatile and can be used for any kind of retrieval practice.

Dr. Justin Baeder (03:15):

So a crucial thing here that I’m starting to pick up on is that this is not about taking notes or looking up information.

The critical thing here for retrieval practice is students are retrieving it from their own minds and writing it onto the whiteboard. Is that fair?

Dr. Janell Blunt (03:31):

Exactly. And the whiteboard really, on one hand, it’s not magical, but on the other hand it is because when I do this on paper, the students don’t seem to see as much value in it.

And from my experience, it seems to be that the whiteboard eraser is key. So students are a lot more comfortable making mistakes because you’re going to make mistakes.

I just asked you, we spent five seconds on the neuron and now I just asked you, draw a picture of the neuron. Where’s the axon hillock? You’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to forget.

And so having the whiteboard at their personal desk helps make it easy to say, “Okay, I missed it this time. I’m going to erase it. It’s gone. No problem.”

Dr. Justin Baeder (04:10):

Right. It’s not a permanent record. It’s not a test that they’re turning in. It’s always going to get erased. So there’s kind of a lower stakes. Is that part of in?

Dr. Janell Blunt (04:16):

Yeah. And we know that low stakes retrieval is really important.

So any retrieval where you’re actively recalling things from your memory is going to find some boosts in your learning, but a lot of times people think, okay, that means more exams. And that’s not what I’m saying.

And that’s why I like the whiteboard is because there is this transient nature about it.

So you can retrieve something, erase it, move on. Mistakes, they’re gone.

Learning has happened. Let’s move on to the next thing, because what we know is that retrieval practice actually reduces student anxiety.

And so by incorporating the whiteboards, that helps reduce anxiety, increases retrieval practice, and that boosts their final learning.

And it’s also had this bonus side effect of improving engagement with students.

Dr. Justin Baeder (04:59):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s a busy place, the classroom when students are writing on their whiteboards. Absolutely.

And talk to us a little bit about the timing of the retrieval, because one of the things I’ve been reading about as I’ve learned about retrieval practice over the past year, (completely outside of my formal education, I will say—I’ve never, ever heard of retrieval practice in all of my years of school).

And one of the things I’m hearing is that retrieval over time matters. So on what time scales, are you asking students to retrieve something you taught them five seconds ago, five minutes ago, five days ago?

Take us into some of the utility of the various timeframes there.

Dr. Janell Blunt (05:34):

All of the above. And what I love the most about retrieval is that it’s not expensive.

It doesn’t require revamping anything that you’re doing and it can be used at any time point.

So you’re going to get the most benefits from retrieval after a delay.

So if you wanted someone to know something for a minute from now, then retrieval isn’t your best strategy.

But if you want something to stick, not just in this moment, but tomorrow and a week and a semester, or even as students move up from second grade to third grade, that’s where retrieval is useful.

It’s really good for long-term meaningful learning. So in the classroom, that might look like starting off a class with a retrieval of something that we did last class instead of saying, “Okay, last class we talked about A, B, C.”

We say, last class, three things, what were they?

(06:20):

I’ve also used it to say, all right, last month, what are some things we talked about?

Because I want students to be able to be successful, not only in this course, but in the courses that require the foundational knowledge from this course in later years.

So it could be minutes ago, it could be yesterday, it could be weeks or months ago. I might even in upper division classes say, “Think back to your intro psych class.”

I know that’s a long time, but remember what we learned about this and students will practice retrieval on those whiteboards, erase their mistakes, practice again, and then we’re smooth sailing.

Dr. Justin Baeder (06:55):

I wonder if one of the barriers to implementing this kind of very obviously beneficial practice is that we think it’s too low level.

Do you ever get pushback on that, that people say, “Well, I don’t really need students to just recall information. That’s low level. We needed to be doing higher-order thinking.” What’s wrong with that argument against retrieval practice?

Dr. Janell Blunt (07:14):

I certainly get that. And there’s a couple of responses that I have to it.

And the first is back in 2011, I conducted an experiment where I looked at a really good technique, concept mapping, where you make nodes and diagrams and you kind of connect those things. Really good for elaboration, and compared that to retrieval practice and found that retrieval practice produced more learning on verbatim questions like you’re saying.

Okay. So I told you this, can you remember that? Great. But we want to see students not just regurgitating stuff, but applying it. So for that reason, it also included questions that were inference questions.

Now, this is requiring you to make connections between two concepts. You’ve got the content, but can you bridge that gap? We want students to do that.

You could see how concept maps might be really helpful for that because that structure is kind of making you think that way, but how could retrieval just repeating from memory, could that possibly do the same thing?

(08:07):

And yes, it does. We also used applied questions. So here’s this new concept you learned about the setup of your digestive system. How might we apply that to bath towels? I mean, it’s like really a stretch.

And we see for both verbatim, for inference and replied questions that retrieval practice produces long-term learning. So not just not in that session, but two weeks from now we call people back and they do really well on all three questions.

Dr. Justin Baeder (08:33):

Love it. Well, that makes sense to me because the higher order tasks aren’t instead of the lower level information. They require that information, right?

You’re synthesizing the information that you know, and if you don’t know the information, you’ve got nothing to synthesize.

Dr. Janell Blunt (08:47):

Yeah. And there’s this other piece that we know about retrieval is that it does not ... When you practice retrieval, you don’t have the feeling that it’s working.

And we call this metacognitive judgment. So when you’re thinking about your learning and you’re practicing retrieval and you think, “I don’t think this is really creating this meaningful long-term learning. This isn’t doing it for me.”

And that is actually incorrect. We ask students in the lab and in the classroom, how much do you think you’re learning with retrieval practice or a variety of other techniques?

And time and time again, we see that retrieval practice makes students feel like, oh, this isn’t working, but yet it’s the exact opposite.

So in this case, we’ve got to not trust our gut and not rely on intuition when choosing strategies because it doesn’t feel like it produces learning, but time and time and time again, that’s the pattern that we see.

We feel like it’s not working, but long-term meaningful learning on a variety of different questions, we see big boosts.

Dr. Justin Baeder (09:38):

I think we’ve made a great case here today for mini whiteboards.

If people want to actually get some for their class to use, students may ultimately decide they want their own as your student did, but presumably we’re going to start with a class set.

What’s the best way to get ahold of some class whiteboards?

Dr. Janell Blunt (09:55):

My personal recommendation is just to go on Amazon and they’re actually not that expensive. And I was kind of surprised at first that they’re really inexpensive to get the eraser, the marker, and the board all for pretty good price.

If you are a real low budget, another thing you can do is take a sheet of white piece of paper, stick it in a sleep protector, get some dry erase markers, and you’ve got your own whiteboard that can even fit into a notebook, which may be handy for students.

So you can have this very portable, very low budget way. So what matters is not the material, but that you’re practicing retrieval, so doing things from memory.

Dr. Justin Baeder (10:30):

Dr. Blunt, if people want to learn more about your work or find you online, where are some of the best places for them to go?

Dr. Janell Blunt (10:35):

I have a LinkedIn course, and so you can find that on LinkedIn.

It has a variety of different strategies that we cover there, including retrieval practice, sleep, interleaving, expertise.

I also highly recommend RetrievalPractice.org. There is a collection of cognitive scientists there, and we are all happy to help you be the best teacher that you can be, be the best student that you can be.

And so RetrievalPractice.org also has free resources for the book that Justin was talking about. So there’s sources.

If you don’t have time, you are so busy as educators. I know we’ve got a little cheat sheet for you that gives you fast tips if you want to get started right away with the science of learning.

Dr. Justin Baeder (11:11):

Well, thank you so much for joining us on the teaching show.

Dr. Janell Blunt (11:15):

My pleasure. Thank you.

But interdisciplinary teaching isn’t all-or-nothing. Even small moves can have a big impact on students.

In this interview, Lauren Brown shares lightweight approaches—like making a spreadsheet of what everyone is teaching each month—that any teacher can use.

Links:

Strategies to Improve Writing in History Class, by Lauren Brown in MiddleWeb

Teaching with Colleagues Expands Kids’ Learning, by Lauren Brown in MiddleWeb

Substack: Lauren Brown on Education

Lauren Brown’s articles on MiddleWeb

Lauren Brown on Education

Thoughts on big education issues from a history teacher for educators, parents & concerned citizens. Plus a new section especially for U.S. history teachers working to improve their craft.

By Lauren S. Brown

Full Transcript:

Justin Baeder (00:09):

Welcome to the Teaching Show. I’m your host, Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to welcome to the program Lauren Brown to talk about interdisciplinary teaching. Lauren, welcome to The Teaching Show.

Lauren Brown (00:20):

Thanks so much, Justin. Pleasure to be here.

Justin Baeder (00:22):

Well, tell us a little bit about yourself and then we’ll get into our topic of interdisciplinary teaching.

Lauren Brown (00:27):

So I’m a history teacher, US history primarily. I’ve taught middle school, high school, and also at the college level, teaching pre-service teachers. And now I’m writing on Substack and putting those 20 plus years in the classroom to work to help other teachers teach history ways that are more meaningful and memorable for their students.

Justin Baeder (00:51):

And I saw your article, Teaching with Colleagues Expands Kids’ Learning, which talks about an idea that’s certainly not a new idea, but one that I think maybe is having a renaissance or deserves a renaissance. Talk to us a little bit about that, about teaching with your colleagues.

Lauren Brown (01:06):

Sure. I think “deserves a renaissance” is probably more accurate. So my first year of teaching, I actually did not teach US history. I taught world geography and I worked with a team of teachers. I was the newbie and everyone else was more experienced.

And so we did this big interdisciplinary unit. The first one we did, the science teacher had initiated it. I was in central Wisconsin and he was talking about prairies in his class. And so we pulled together a whole big interdisciplinary unit. And then we did a lot of others after that. We did one on rivers. We were in a town with a river. We did one coming out of my curriculum on Africa, looking at science connections with biomes in Africa, and then obviously literature. The math connections were always a little bit more challenging, but still there. And they required a lot of work and a lot of effort.

(02:00):

And when I shifted to high school teaching and US history, I found that there was all these potential opportunities, particularly with ELA. I mean, with English, that’s the natural sort of connection. And then when I went back to middle school, again, thinking about these opportunities, there wasn’t the bandwidth to do big interdisciplinary units like the ones I had first started off with, but there were all these little moments. And so I think it’s those little moments. We have all heard so much about teacher burnout and all the things going on with that. It’s a big ask to put together interdisciplinary units, but even in these very small ways, we can start that process and then see where that takes us.

Justin Baeder (02:48):

Yeah. And you’ve seen some remarkable response from students, even if the connection was fairly small. How do students respond when they see connections between classes? So

Lauren Brown (02:58):

Yeah, that’s what led me to this. There was this moment, I could count on it every year when I was teaching about World War II and US entry into the war and what was going on in Europe at the time and how did Americans respond to that. And I had made a brief mention of the Spanish Civil War and like clockwork. There would be a student or two or three in every class would say, “Oh my God, Ms. Brown, we did a whole thing on that and Ms. So- and-so’s class in Spanish.” And it was like all of a sudden what I was saying mattered and it was real. And anyone who’s ever taught in any grade, you know when you have a student who maybe something with their parents or they were reading a book and they read or hear about something that you had talked about in class.

(03:48):

They’re so excited. Have you had that experience where kids are like, “Oh my God, Ms. Brown, we were at the such and such museum or my grandmother was talking about blah, blah, blah.” And she mentioned that book that you had talked about in class and they’re excited to share that. And that was what I saw happen when like I mentioned the Spanish Civil War or in when I was teaching about a certain poem, like The White Man’s Burden by Rudyard Kipling is a classic poem that you talk about when you’re talking about US imperialism and students who had been moaning and groaning, I heard them in advisory class or in the moments before class complaining about their poetry unit in ELA and then all of a sudden we’re doing this poem and you could see them kind of like strutting in their seats a little to sort of share things like metaphor and simile and patterns and rhyming things that they had learned about in ELA.

(04:45):

So this subject that was maybe boring or isolated in ELA, all of a sudden when they saw, oh, that’s a real thing analyzing poems because now this other teacher in another class is talking about it or when we do Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus, a classic poem, when you’re talking about immigration, the one that’s on the Statue of Liberty.

And so when things ... It’s like they become real to students and they’re excited to make those connections. And we know from the science of learning that the more connections that you have, the greater the learning sticks.

Justin Baeder (05:27):

Yeah. It seems like there’s the cognitive science layer where kids are developing schema, they’re getting introduced to different topics from different sources over time and their kind of network of knowledge builds and things have more to stick to so they retain more and they understand at a deeper level, so kind of the traditional cognitive science view.

But then it also strikes me that there is kind of a credibility view whereas as adults, kids don’t necessarily care about the same things we care about or take us seriously when we say, “This is really important, you need to know this.”

But when they hear somebody else talk, even if it’s another adult that they would see the same way, if they have multiple adults seemingly independently bringing up, “Hey, this is an important thing. This is an important skill. This is an important topic to be knowledgeable about,” that creates some sort of credibility with them that I just don’t think we can reproduce any other way.

Lauren Brown (06:21):

Exactly. It becomes more meaningful. I mean, I can’t even tell you how much my students always complain about the vocabulary they have to learn for English class and yet when they are able to use a vocabulary word in one of my essays, they are so proud. Ms. Brown, did you notice that we use that vocab word because I made it a point to talk about those and use those words in my class. And when I do use a word, sometimes I don’t even know because I’m not looking at that every time. So I’ll be talking about something and I’ll use a word that’s on their English vocabulary list and some student will invariably say, “Oh my God, that’s one of our vocab words from this week.” And all of a sudden it makes that connection. And so they learn the words more. And we know that learning vocabulary, it’s better to do it in context.

(07:09):

Kids are more likely to learn it in context rather than memorize words for a vocabulary test in a class, in isolation.

Justin Baeder (07:18):

Well, Lauren, in your middle web article, you talk about some kind of in depth examples of interdisciplinary teaching, but you also talk about how it can be pretty lightweight. And you have some ideas on how teachers can kind of communicate and coordinate and maybe identify ways to line up what they’re doing with one another that aren’t such a heavy lift and that don’t require months and months of planning. Take us into that a little bit.

Lauren Brown (07:42):

Yeah. So I was thinking about it and how much work it was to create those interdisciplinary units that I did as a young teacher and recognizing how challenging it is, particularly if you work in a larger school, it’s very departmentalized, it can be very difficult, but there’s some really easy things that I think could be done and it maybe requires some leadership from administration, maybe as simple as creating some sort of spreadsheet and giving teachers the time, perhaps at a staff meeting or something to sort of fill in what are the topics that they teach and then giving time for people to look over that list and seeing where there’s some intersection. So for example, is there anything I do in my US history curriculum that ever mentions a piece of music ever? Is there something that the music teacher, the chorus teacher or the band teacher or somebody could use there and just think about that.

(08:38):

And of course there are, when you get to the jazz age in the 1920s or if you’re doing slave spirituals or things like that. And then maybe you write that down and then the music teacher looks and it’s like slave spirituals. I’m not sure what I could do with that, but like, oh, the jez age, there’s that one piece that we play in band, blah, blah, blah. And same as it is with like with art, with science. I think in my article, I had pointed out something about Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee University and the Tuskegee experiments and students were really excited when they heard about something like that in science class. So is there anything that, say a Spanish teacher does that has anything to do with history? Oh, well, I do this thing about the Spanish Civil War or I’m the French teacher and I have my students do a little bit about French history.

(09:25):

And so that might intersect the French and Indian war or Napoleon or the French Revolution. And maybe they don’t know, but they know it has something has to do with history. And then I’m looking at it and I see, oh, well, sure. When we talk about the American Revolution and then afterwards and these ideas about freedom and liberty, then I can remind them about the French revolution. And then you can add dates to those things too so that teachers can make it a point. And then maybe at several points throughout the year of allowing space or time in a staff meeting for people to look on that and make connections and have time to talk to each other. We don’t have a lot of time during the school day to run down the hall necessarily and talk to the Spanish teacher, but if there’s set aside time in a department meeting where people can have those conversations, then maybe they can happen ... It’s not going to happen completely organically, but if you give them the time and the space to do it at a staff meeting, then maybe you can.

Justin Baeder (10:26):

Yeah, absolutely. As simple as a little bit of time, a Google Doc spreadsheet, something like that where people can coordinate. I’m also thinking about not only topics like wars and history and things like that, but also some of the skills, if we’re teaching in language arts or math, at certain times of year, sometimes we want raw material or real examples to use. And on the other hand, in other content areas, we want to know when the students are learning these skills. When are they learning about perimeter so that I can use that in my class a bit, knowing that it’s not going to probably be a month long collaboration. We’re not going to do an interdisciplinary unit on perimeter and farming or something, but little connections can go a long way, I think, for kids.

Lauren Brown (11:11):

Yeah. Two things I want to respond to that. One, you’re right. Little connections go a long way. It just enriches the curriculum and enriches those connections and synapses in the brain or whatever.

And the other thing is about the skills. If I had a dollar for every time a student said to me, Ms. Brown, this is an English class as I’m talking to them about their writing, I think we need to remember how much reading and writing are the responsibility of every single adult in a school.

And so if we have common language about how we do that, I’ve really loved The Writing Revolution by Judith Hockman and Natalie Wexler that talk about ways that you can write. And these are things that are really accessible to every discipline. And so, and I have a MiddleWeb article on that too, maybe you can link to in the show notes about using words like but because and so, and talking about a positives and these are grammar terms that we don’t ... It’s not that we care if students know what a certain part of speech is, but that we understand how it enriches their writing and it can enrich their writing, not just in English class, but in any class where they’re doing writing or asking to do writing.

Justin Baeder (12:32):

Absolutely. Absolutely. Love it. Well, Lauren, if people want to find your writing, where’s your Substack and how can they find you there?

Lauren Brown (12:41):

It’s called Lauren Brown on Education. And I write there about broad education issues in general, and I have a subsection of it called the US History Teachers Lounge that’s for US History Teachers in particular, where I’m really digging deeper into topics for US history teachers. So check me out there. Lauren Brown on Education on Substack.

Justin Baeder (13:04):

We’ll put a link in the show notes as well as a link to your MiddleWeb articles. Lauren Brown, thank you so much for joining me on The Teaching Show.

Lauren Brown (13:11):

Thank you.

You can visit his website at DailySTEM.com and find him on Twitter/X @DailySTEM

Key Takeaways:

• Teaching students how to take notes is crucial—students often lack note-taking skills due to digital learning..

• Handwritten notes improve retention and understanding.

• Colored pencils can enhance engagement in note-taking.

• Normalizing creative note-taking fosters a positive classroom environment.

• Checking and grading notebooks reinforces the importance of note-taking.

• Using color helps students visualize processes in math.

• Encouraging artistic expression in notes can boost confidence.

Full Transcript:

Justin Baeder (00:09):

Welcome everyone to the Teaching Show. I’m your host Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to welcome to the program today Chris Woods. Chris, welcome. Tell us a little bit about yourself and then we’ll get into it.

Chris Woods (00:18):

Hey, Justin, great to be on with you and real privilege and honor, and yeah, I’m a teacher. I teach math. I teach high school math and science and STEM class, and I just really do a lot of things to as much as I can, help other educators incorporate some STEM into their classrooms easy ways. It doesn’t have to be five day projects, it could be five minute things you do every day in a class.

Justin Baeder (00:40):

I love seeing what you post on Twitter at daily stem or X as it’s called these days. And one of the things I saw recently was you have an approach to student notetaking where you give out colored pencils and you said that makes a big difference. So let’s talk about it. Tell us about the colored pencil notetaking.

Chris Woods (00:56):

Yeah. Well, first of all, even to back up beyond that, I’m an old school math kind of teacher, and notes are so important. When a kid is actively writing their ideas, it helps ‘em to focus. It helps ‘em to concentrate, also helps ‘em to summarize. And even if they’re not required to do it, I want my kids to learn that in their other classes. Let’s make sure that we take notes of the technique for helping them to study. I think we also see, with the proliferation of Chromebooks in classrooms, it’s easy to let kids just start taking notes on a Chromebook there you’re just typing a key and you make one keystroke and that’s a G. You’d take one keystroke and that’s an X, and your mind can’t tell the difference. It’s just one keystroke either way. So as much as we can to get kids back to writing is huge.

(01:46):

This year I’ve done more of just grabbing colored pencils and handing ‘em out, putting a couple on each desk. And especially in the math class, I’m sure you remember Justin, when you’re trying to follow all those steps and you look back through your notes, you just see a bunch of writing, you don’t see that kind of process that it took to get from the start to the end. So that color kind of shows those kids when they look back at it. Plus it also helps ‘em. They’re engaged a lot more just picking up, dropping this pencil, picking up this one without making an extra big deal or a lot of extra time in class too.

Justin Baeder (02:19):

I love it. So we’re three layers deep here. The first layer that I think is really worth emphasizing, and I’m glad you started there, is kids should take notes now. Do you have to teach note taking? Do your students come in knowing how to take notes?

Chris Woods (02:30):

So the years that I’ve taught ninth grade math, like algebra one, I really have to kind of dive into that. Here’s how to take notes, especially those first few weeks, couple weeks, I’m checking that notebook and I’ve always given the kids a grade for their notebook. I always counted in whatever participation category or whatever an educator has at their district and their school. But I’ll check their notes. I’ll say, Hey, these are looking good, 10 out of 10, or you can improve on this five out of 10, or things like that. Yeah, kids often don’t know how to take notes, especially because more and more the textbook is digital. The learning is virtual and different things like that. So I’ve had to more and more, even in my algebra two and pre-calc classes, still make sure that I’m encouraging and checking those kids’ notes, still giving ‘em a grade because I think it’s a great way to reinforce that this is important because when they go to college or off into the career and whatever, I mean, you and I, Justin, even for a podcast, we’re making notes ahead of time to think about what do we want to talk about?

(03:34):

Everybody takes notes. Helping those kids to learn that valuable skill at a young age is so important. Absolutely.

Justin Baeder (03:43):

So that’s the first layer, and you added a ton there about just the teaching and the building on that note-taking skill over time. And then the second layer is that these are handwritten notes. And I don’t think I started taking typed notes until very late in my college education, but that’s probably a good thing because I’ve seen a lot of research lately that says typed notes are just not as good on a lot of fronts. So you don’t have your students use laptops at all to take notes?

Chris Woods (04:05):

No. And again, the reason, I mean, number one, a math classroom, it’s really tough to make notes virtually, but again, with using touchscreen or using a pen or on digital screen, it is possible. And you know what? Maybe in that situation, some digital notes would be fine if you’re using an iPad with an eye pencil or something like that, but not every kid is going to have that. And so often it’s much simpler to just paper, pencil, tactile. I mean, it was over a decade ago that I read an article and it was the difference between handwritten and keystrokes and just that simple research and it completely makes sense. A P and a W and an R, it’s exactly the same button so your mind doesn’t connect them any differently. But those three different motions to make the W or the two different motions to make that letter P, it ingrains differently into all those neurons and pathways in your mind.

Justin Baeder (05:05):

And I think that research has held up very well. I’ve continued to see articles and studies on just the power of handwritten notes and their advantages over type notes. And then the third layer is the colored pencils. So tell us a little bit more about how students use those colored pencils and how they help make the notes better and more useful to students.

Chris Woods (05:22):

And this can apply across a wide variety of subjects. I’m coming at it from a math and even in a science classroom, I do the same when I teach chemistry or eighth grade science or whatever, if a kid just has a page full of pencil or pen or whatever color they’re using, and you look back at that page, it’s just a page full of just writing. You don’t see, if you were to make, think of the difference between a picture and a GIF online, or you could say Jif if you want Justin, I don’t care. But if you see that motion, that picture is worth a thousand words. That is worth a thousand times a thousand. If you just have a page full of all the same color, you can’t see what happened. And so just putting a couple of different colored pencils on every desk to start a class, I’ve seen other teachers where they’ll have just a red pen, and that’s kind of partly for correction purposes and partly for adding that extra color to your notes, but just mixing up those colors so the kids can, okay, now we’re subtracting eight from both sides.

(06:24):

Now we’re dividing both sides by three. Now we’re square rooting both sides. And once you give kids that little bit of color, they’re bringing in their own pocket full of extra colored pens and highlighters, and it almost like it makes it okay for that kid to show off all their artisticness while they’re just taking some notes. And then when they look back at it, it helps them to see and summarize. They’re highlighting the main points, and I’m not even telling ‘em to, they’re just naturally doing that on their own. I think it’s a valuable thing that educators, across the spectrum of courses, subjects, I think it’s a simple thing to do instead of just having those colored pencils sitting in a cabinet for four months of the year and you pull ‘em out this week when you do a project, and this week when you do a poster board, have ‘em out all every time, every day.

Justin Baeder (07:20):

Love it, love it. And kids bring their own, you said they’re using their own pens and highlighters once you’ve given them permission. We probably all went to school with someone who used highlighters and color pencils and pens, and it seemed like they were kind of showing off in their note taking. And I think there’s that. This isn’t a normal thing to do feeling, so I love that you’re making that normal and expected for everybody.

Chris Woods (07:39):

And it’s the same thing as making that thing normal of a kid having a book on their desk because when they finished, they like to read, pointing that out and reassuring that kid, it’s okay to be a bookworm. That math kid, Hey, it’s okay to be a nerd. Those aren’t putdowns. Those aren’t negative things. We should want to be bookworms and nerds and geeks and hard workers and all the other names that kids come up with that they think it’s a putdown, but man, those are the people that are getting way ahead in life. I love it.

Justin Baeder (08:09):

Well, Chris, thank you so much for sharing your strategy and what goes into it and what makes it work. If people want to follow you, find you online, where are some of the best places for them to go?

Chris Woods (08:17):

Yeah, I am always sharing stuff on Twitter or X @DailySTEM. You can also check on my website dailystem.com. I got tons of great free resources to help and just reach out if you want to email me dailystem@gmail.com. Always happy to help

Justin Baeder (08:30):

Chris Woods, thank you so much for joining me on the Teaching Show.

In this episode, veteran instructional coach Kelley Garris shares her 8 S’s of Clear Instructions, which she uses to coach teachers on this foundational skill:

1. Strategically Embed Instructions into Lesson Plans

2. Stand Still and in a Location that Allows for Everyone to See You

3. State Instructions that are Simple, to the Point, and Sequential

4. See your Instructions in Action

5. Set a Time Limit

6. “Show Me” a Signal

7. Share Instructions Visually (if possible)

8. Shhhsh!

Full Transcript:

Justin Baeder (00:08):

Welcome everyone to the Teaching Show. I’m your host Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to welcome to the program today, Kelley Garris to share with us from her article Getting It Right, the eight Ss, to providing clear instructions. Kelley, welcome to the Teaching Show.

Kelley Garris (00:24):

Thank you for having me, Justin.

Justin Baeder (00:26):

Thanks for being here. And Kelley, tell us a little bit about yourself, your professional background, and then we’ll get into the eight s’s of clear instructions.

Kelley Garris (00:36):

I started off as a English teacher at the middle school level and quickly started moving into the instructional coach role around 2005. Didn’t know a lot about instructional coaching at the time, and there wasn’t a lot out there, so I really realized very quickly how much I enjoyed it and started working with some mentor instructional coaches, and we did that in California for quite a while. Then I moved back home to my home in Michigan where I continued coaching and I did a little full-time faculty and adjunct work at the local community college, and I’m still instructionally coaching today.

Justin Baeder (01:12):

Wonderful. And I know you work with a lot of new teachers and a funny thing about educators is that we were all new teachers once, so we’ve all been in that new teacher situation where often things don’t seem to work for us like we thought they would because we saw other people teach successfully and then we try things for ourselves. And you say in this article something that resonated with me very strongly, the idea that I’m going to multitask, I’m going to get my papers organized or passed back and I’m going to give instructions at once, and you say, that does not work. So why is it that multitasking while giving instructions does not work?

Kelley Garris (01:49):

This was one of those moments that I think we all have in teaching where it changes us, and I write about it a little bit in the article that I went to a training and somebody had modeled ferociously going through papers and doing this, and while she was doing it, she was trying to give instructions and it felt so overwhelming as a student at that moment that it hit me that I’m a multitasker. And I know research now says it’s probably not a great idea to do that, but I really was, and I probably still am in some ways, and I had a moment of, oh my goodness, what am I doing for my students? We’re not doing, I am coming across chaotic and rushed and I am not making those instructions be the priority, and thus, why are they then treating them like the priority?

(02:37):

And oftentimes they would be talking or they would be do at something and then I’d stop and go, why are we talking? Well, look what I’m doing. I’m acting all chaotic. I’m trying to get things done quickly because we don’t, we never have enough time. I had to learn that those instructions needed to be treated like you were about to give an Oscar to somebody and you were going to stay steady, were going to talk clear, you were going to be very present. You were going to ensure the audience had your attention, and that was one of the biggest game changers in my entire career.

Justin Baeder (03:09):

I would say the same when my mentor pointed that out to me and said, Hey, Justin, you’re moving around the room. Yes, they can hear you. You’re loud enough. But that’s not what this is about. They need to actually see that you expect them to pay attention and that you’re giving them your full attention. You’re not updating attendance because a kid just came in late. You’re not passing out papers. You are focused on the directions that you’re giving, so they are focused. So let’s just go through the eight essence. I think you have a great framework for helping people give clear instructions. Take us very quickly through the eight Ss.

Kelley Garris (03:43):

The first one is kind of one of the precursors to giving good instructions, and this is something that was given to me as an idea, and the first S is strategically embed instructions into your lesson plans. So as you’re writing your lesson plans or if you’re already using something that’s prescribed, find the places where you need to put the instructions and actually write them down. That’s how important clarity of instructions is, is that we are going to take moment to actually write out exactly what we want to say because the way we say it, how we say it, ensuring that it’s not convoluted matters. So one of the great ways that we can do that is making them just as important as the lesson itself, the content itself. So that’s what I mean when I said strategically embed instructions into lesson plans. The other one stands still, and we just kind of talked about this, a stand still and in a location that allows you to see everyone and everyone to see you again.

(04:39):

We have to make sure that you have everyone’s eye contact and that they can see you and stand still. You are delivering the most important piece of information in the course of this class. So you want to make it count because if you give instructions that are not heard all the way seem convoluted and confused, we can’t assume the student’s going to go and follow those instructions explicitly. We want them to. So another one we talk about is state instructions that are simple to the point and sequential. So I give a great example in here because, and you can all read it, but it talks about a math teacher who’s simultaneously talking about math and also doing other things and kind of jumping in and out of stories and saying, oh, we, let’s not forget about our test at the end. Oh, while I’m reminding you, please do this, and by the way, get out your book and turn to page 63.

(05:33):

And also, I really want to say the student can’t navigate all of that, that input coming at them. That’s a lot to try to discern exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. Then at the end, we all say, well, why aren’t we getting started? Come on. And then we realize, oh my goodness. We have to look at ourselves sometimes and say, did we provide very, very simple, concise instructions and are they in order? Are we asking them to open a book and turn to a page that they’d still have in their backpacks? Are we asking them to go to something on their computer and they haven’t even opened their computers yet? We have to be really mindful that the way in which we give instructions matters and the clarity and the conciseness really does matter for any age of student, not just our elementary school students.

Justin Baeder (06:26):

Yeah, and you say fourth point that you should be able to see those instructions in action. They should be visible in a way that is, you can tell if kids are following those instructions.

Kelley Garris (06:37):

Yeah, I mean, to your point, you just said, if I was to say follow along, unless we’ve acknowledged that or established that maybe at the beginning of the school year what that means, what that could mean for one student could be inherently different than another student. So we really want to be careful about these kind of broad gray terms and instead say, I need you to follow along by whatever strategy you want them to do. Another one is get ready to start class. That could be so different student to student because maybe in the previous class they were in getting started looked this way, so they tried to do it that same way here, but that’s not what you want. So tell them exactly what you want and make it so clear that you can use your own eyes to see exactly what is or what is not occurring for that instruction.

(07:34):

One of the other ones we talk about is set a time limits. Setting a time limit and giving students a certain amount of time to work in this transition or work to complete these instructions is crucial. It’s crucial anywhere really to keep us timely. Remember that idea? We never have enough time. The timer just keeps us on track, but it also gives them that sense of urgency that I think some students need. If they only know they have 10 seconds to do X, y, and Z, that will give them a little more sense to complete it a little faster. And that’s going to close our transitions a little bit more and make ‘em a little tighter. One of the other pieces is show me a signal at the end of any series of instructions, again, we lean on that observable piece too. Come up with something that the student can say, I’m done. I’m ready to roll. Let’s do this kind of thing. It can be a thumbs up. It can be something really small but observable. Something that you can scan the room and say, okay, how many do we have ready? Okay. Oh, we have everybody ready and you’ll be able to go. That’s really for both of us. Keep those things moving. And also I can check and I have a really great visual of something that shows I’m done and that I’m done can become a habit not only with that instruction, but throughout the entire class.

(08:52):

Share instructions visually. I said if possible, sometimes when we end up with too many instructions, that’s a lot of load to put on a student to remember everything. So I always think about if you’re already going to be embedding some of these instructions into your lesson plans and really thinking thoughtfully about how to write them out, why not throw them on a Google slide while you’re doing it just to make sure that students not only hear what you have to say, but also then if they forget, which it’s okay if they do, they have something to refer back to where they don’t have to go, what do we do? What do we do? What do we do? Now they have, all I would have to do as a teacher is do a nonverbal gesture to point up to the board. And if they aren’t at that reading level yet, that’s okay.

(09:34):

Maybe some symbols could help. Most teachers at that age have certain symbols for things. Why not incorporate those into the instructions as well? One of the other ones is simply, so this is another piece that I really draw from my own experiences because as I was growing in this space early on, I was doing okay with the concise steps, but then what would I do that I would say, okay, you have 10 seconds, go. And then what did I do? In those 10 seconds? I would pull a student aside. I would say, oh, don’t let me forget about this. So who wants to erase the board today? Oh, don’t let me forget to, and what am I doing? What am I doing? And I kept just going, Kelley, honor the space. It’s almost like honoring a good wait time. Honor that space as silent because we don’t want to put too much load. We don’t want to give them too much cognitive load to take on. We’re already asking ‘em potentially to do multi-step instructions independently with none of my help, and here I go talking. So now they have to make a choice. Do I complete what the teacher, which he just asked me to do or do I listen to the things that she’s going to say? Either way, no one wins when that happens. So honoring that quiet space though, sometimes uncomfortable, that quiet space will move them through the instructions faster.

Justin Baeder (10:58):

Very well said. Very well said. If we want kids to listen, we’ve got to show them by staying focused ourselves, not multitasking, but really maintaining that presence in the room as we give directions. And really everything builds on that, right? Everything that we want kids to do to learn depends on them getting clear directions from us. So there’s huge leverage here in helping teachers get this right and helping people develop habits that will get their kids on track with whatever the instructions for the activity are. Well, Kelley, I think this is a great framework for anyone, but especially for people who are helping new teachers figure out their routines and procedures and those fundamentals of running the classroom. Tell us briefly just how you coach newer teachers through the practice of learning the eight S’s and mastering the art of giving clear directions.

Kelley Garris (11:46):

Well, I have the pleasure to be an instructional coach at sme, and I get an opportunity to work with new teachers and seasoned teachers and instructional coaches. But when we work with new teachers, I really take on the thought about small goals, big wins. So those eight s’s though, all important, and I hope that they would use all eight. I really like to start our teachers with the small goal after they read the article. For example, pick one or two and let’s set a goal around that. Let’s set a goal to what that’s going to look like. Let’s set a measurement for success, and then we can, as we achieve those small goals, we can keep adding to them so that by the time I am done talking with them about classroom management, that they’ll have all those eight s’s down pat and be able to apply them in all different facets of their teaching practice

Justin Baeder (12:38):

Goals. One at a time, one down, and move on to the next one. Love it. Well, Kelley, thank you so much for joining me on the teaching show. It’s been a pleasure.

Kelley Garris (12:47):

Thank you, Justin.

Full Transcript:

Justin Baeder (00:00):

Welcome everyone to the Teaching Show. I’m your host Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to welcome to the program Sean Morrisey. Sean, welcome to the Teaching Show. Thank you.

Sean Morrisey (00:09):

Glad to be here.

Justin Baeder (00:10):

So Sean, I’ve been following you for quite a while on Twitter or X and have been really impressed with the kinds of things that you share around vocabulary and morphology. So tell us a little bit about yourself and then let’s get into it.

Sean Morrisey (00:23):

Yeah, so I’m a fifth grade teacher. I’m a former school psychologist as well. So I worked in that field for about 10 years, but I’ve been teaching for almost 20 years now. First, fourth and fifth grades, mostly fifth and outside of Buffalo, New York.

Justin Baeder (00:37):

Good deal. And there are some things that you do with vocabulary with upper elementary students that seem to get quite a bit of response online, quite a bit of interest. Talk to us about your approach to teaching vocabulary and morphology.

Sean Morrisey (00:51):

Yeah, I think my approach is just trying to scale up more than what’s typically done. I think when we think about knowledge, vocabulary is a big part of knowledge. Vocabulary is a big part of reading comprehension. I mean, I think some experts say you can’t really even tease apart what’s reading comprehension and what’s really just vocabulary. So I try to just embed it in my day all throughout the day. I think one of the big things for the past couple years, I’ve been doing a lot more morphology work in ELA, and we’re talking about not just ELA, but we’re talking science and social as well. So when we’re thinking about scaling up words, just in general, the root NOV meaning new, you could kind of scale up and teach kids while using a morphology matrix where you have NOV and like a suffix, so, so you have words like novice or you have renovate or innovate and kind of always linking those words back to the base. The root nav meaning new, I think it really scales up how many words kids can learn at one time. For sure. This

Justin Baeder (02:03):

Sounds familiar in a sense that I’ve been aware for a long time of the concept of root words and prefixes and suffixes take us into some of the additional dimensions of morphology. I feel like I have some things to learn there that maybe weren’t part of the conventional thinking on Latin roots, Greek roots, prefixes, suffixes.

Sean Morrisey (02:24):

Yeah, I think it might be kind of the structure, how you’re presenting. So I am a fan of Pete Bower’s work. So when he puts roots, prefixes and suffix in a matrix, and it’s hard to visualize, we’re just talking about it, but I’ll just do a simple one, like the root tracked, meaning to kind of drag or pull, you could put that kind of in a middle of a diagram, and on the left hand side you could put all of the prefixes that you can build with the root track, and then you could put the suffixes as well. So one of my favorite words is to teach is contract, or sometimes we pronounce it contract depending on the context. So you’re teaching the prefix there in the matrix, meaning together and track meaning pull. So you can be contracting muscles, muscles are pulling together or contracting an illness, or even contract, two parties are being pulled together to sign something.

(03:25):

So it gives, people are saying morphology ties everything together now. I think it really does, for sure. And then I think it’s thinking about science and social. How can we get kids to remember things in those core areas more we silo, especially the secondary level, we just teach social studies or science and we’re not really teaching the language as much as we probably could. Even a root like side, CIDE, meaning kill genocide. I just taught a unit on the Holocaust in World War II in fifth grade, and genocide is a word that comes up throughout middle and high school and social studies. So just going back, oh, then kids are like, oh, herbicide and then homicide, and thinking about it in that way, I think it really gives kids, kids an anchor and they won’t forget it as much, for sure.

Justin Baeder (04:33):

Yeah, and I think much teaching with a knowledge rich curriculum across multiple subject areas, it gives kids the sense that there’s coherence here, that how to spell a word is not entirely random. And I think for a lot of our struggling learners, they just feel like everything is random. I don’t know. I feel like there’s not any sense of coherence to it, but you’re giving ‘em a structure to make sense of spelling. And English is of course a fairly irregular language, but there are a lot of patterns to it still. And you’re explicitly teaching vocabulary and morphology as part of your school day, is that right?

Sean Morrisey (05:07):

Yeah, so it’s honestly throughout the school day, I have a certain time in my day where it kind of gets lumped together. I’m working on actually my own curriculum where morphology, academic vocabulary, fluency, spelling, it’s not all siloed, it’s all taught together. So we only have so much instructional time. So when we decide to teach something, there’s a huge opportunity cost, and I think we need to be teaching what has the best chance of kids actually learning it. Morphology impacts spelling greatly. I’m a true believer you have to start with phonetics. You have to start with, even in fifth grade for my fifth graders, we’ll segment words by syllables. But when we talk about prefixes and suffixes, morphology is so important to the word congregate, Greg, meaning the root greg, meaning flock, meaning together like congregate, and then spelling congregation, you’re just adding another suffix to congregate. So spelling wise, when you’re really thinking about and teaching the suffixes, especially morphologies, very, very helpful for a lot of kids. It really makes it stick, for sure.

Justin Baeder (06:27):

Well, Sean, if people want to find you online, maybe learn more about the writing and the resources that you put out. Where’s the best place for them to go?

Sean Morrisey (06:36):

Yeah, I guess mean the only social media I’m on is on X, so @SMorrisey, so that’s where you can find, I like to post a lot. I think teachers want to see, we have so much research and we talk back and forth and it’s all kind of this conceptual stuff, but teachers really want to see how are we applying that research into everyday classrooms. So that’s where I just like to post a lot, Hey, this is what I did today. And I think with doing that, teachers very, very happy with that. So I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback.

Justin Baeder (07:13):

Yeah, I think it’s some of the best content out there because we’re seeing into your classroom, we’re seeing your actual things that you’re doing with your students and what you’re getting back from them. So really appreciate you doing that and putting in the work to share that with the world. So thank you and keep it up.

Sean Morrisey (07:30):

Thanks.

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Choralosophy.com

@Choralosophy on Twitter/X

Full Transcript:

Justin Baeder (00:00):

Welcome everyone to the Teaching Show. I’m your host Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to be joined in this episode by Chris Munce. Chris, welcome to the Teaching Show.

Chris Munce (00:10):

Hey, thanks Justin. I’m a big fan. Thanks for having me.

Justin Baeder (00:13):

Well, I’m excited to be on your podcast and to trade airtime with you here a little bit, but I was very excited to speak with you because I saw you demoing a technique in a video for having students read music. So you are a choral music teacher and an ensemble music teacher, and I got to see some pedagogy that we very rarely get to see and hardly ever talk about. That was just very, very specific to your subject.

Chris Munce (00:41):

You’re going to get nothing but the starting pitch. We’re going to memorize phrases without singing them, and then test to see if our ideation skills allowed us to do that.

Justin Baeder (01:08):

So tell us a little bit about yourself and then take us into that practice that I saw in the video.

Chris Munce (01:14):

Yeah, I’m happy to do that. So my name’s Chris and I am a veteran, I guess you could say now because I’m old music teacher outside of the Kansas City area, and I’ve been teaching for over 20 years, and my entire career has been at the high school level in a large high school in Missouri, and my whole career has been in that world. So I don’t have any elementary school experience or anything like that, but very, very specific to what I do. Mostly ensemble music. I also teach a music appreciation class, and then of course I do the Choralosophy podcast, which is a music education professional development, but also current topics and issues we discuss on the show, including controversial ones, but also ones that are meaningful to the lives of teachers. And there are things that we deal with all the time.

(02:05):

So I do all of those things and I wear lots of hats. Now in the video you’re referencing, best way I could explain this to you would be like I am a huge believer. Not all choral s music teachers are, but this is one of my crusades, is that we are one of the best weapons that a school district has to advanced literacy because the same parts of the brain light up when a person is reading music as when they’re reading any other language. So I’m a big music as a language person, and that it is a language that is very complicated in comparison to almost all other human languages because of the specificity that you have to have in terms of exact frequencies and durations. So the frequency and duration of the pitch, the time, the rhythm, all those things are more specific than other languages, but at every other aspect of it, it’s the same.

(02:58):

So if you think if I read English, I open up a piece of paper or a computer or whatever it is, and I see a bunch of symbols and squiggles and lines, and I look at those squiggles and lines and I hear a sound in my head, and it might be the word the right, but I see it, and as soon as I see THE on the page, I hear that sound and I also can contextualize it. For example, if I ask you what does mean? Well, then you would be like, that doesn’t mean anything. I need context. But as soon as you put the after it, well, that’s the word, and here’s how I would use that. And so I teach students that music does the same thing and we’re going to learn to look at these symbols on the page and we’re going to learn to read it with as much fluency as we would if it were English or Mandarin Chinese or whatever language we’re learning to read, which is also a pitched language, by the way, Mandarin’s a language.

(03:55):

And so there’s very similar concepts there. And so in the video you saw, those were, in fairness, my advanced kids, because I teach in my program, we have beginning level music for kids who have never done music before. They can jump right in and start, and then they can get all the way up to advanced level, which you saw in that video where I passed out a piece of music, a relatively complicated piece of music for them that they had never seen before. And I had them open it. And because music requires specific pitch, I play a particular pitch which represents the key, the songs in, but that’s the only information they got. This is the key we’re in. And then I asked them to try to hear the music happening in their head by simply looking at it.

(04:42):

And then I asked them to memorize the music, but we had never sung it before, so they had to then close their eyes. And I said, okay, one, two, ready go. And they had to sing the music from memory that they had never sung and heard out loud at all. And what I was demonstrating to them and to other teachers in that video is that you can actually teach kids to do that with the music, which is mystifying to people, but if it was English, nobody would be mystified because you would look at it like, oh, well, they just read C Spot Run and they memorized it and they closed their eyes and they said, C Spot run. And everybody can do that. That’s easy. But the weird thing about my pedagogy I guess, is that I’m teaching kids to do that with music as well.

Justin Baeder (05:24):

I love it. And I love the opportunity for understanding that an observer gets from just kind of knowing what you’re going for, knowing what your instructional purpose is. And I think so often we second guess or we try to copy or we try to make some sort of decision about what we’re seeing without really understanding the internal logic of it. So you’re saying music is a language and is taught in many ways that are similar to teaching other languages?

Chris Munce (05:55):

Yeah, no, absolutely. And these are kind of innovations that through this platform on Oscopy that I’ve been developing, because again, this is not, what you saw is not normal, that’s not how most music classrooms operate, but we’re kind of creating a trend in the profession to go more towards this linguistic basis. So for example, when students are new in my program from the very beginning level, so ninth grade for us for the most part, or other kids who just decide to take it later, 11th graders even can take my class as a beginner. But what I do is I bring them into a private setting so that they’re not on the spot in about October of every school year. So when they’re brand new, we establish certain safety and trust In August, September and then early October, I bring them in and I screen them because by the high school level, nobody’s really taught them to read music before in my district for the most part.

(06:55):

And so I screen them very much like a young kindergarten teacher might screen a young student for literacy readiness and just like they might have leveled readers, for example, in a kindergarten class or a first grade class, I have a software that I use that is music reading by level. And so I determine, okay, this kid should be a level one reader right now. This kid should be a level two reader, and I assign them based on what I see in that evaluation. It’s like a pretest. And then their grade in my music class comes from their ability to progress through those levels by doing the practice assignments that I give them. And it gets to the point where in that video you saw those kids have all been through that process for three or four years. So they’re all reading at a level that would be considered professional level or collegiate level, but they’re doing it by 10th, 11th, and 12th grade because they’re doing it alone.

(07:53):

They’re doing it by themselves. And they’re getting that feedback from me about very much like a reading student in any other language would get, which is that, oh, yeah, so your fluency is not quite there yet. You’re decoding just fine, but you’re not moving through the music fluently. And so I use a lot of the same language that a science of reading type approach would. And I use that same type of language with music instruction as well. And it helps the kids a lot because then they start to demystify the music instead of saying things like, oh, I’m bad at music, or I’m good at music. Like, oh, I just need to work on my fluency. My kids will say stuff like that. And it impacts, I guess their psychology about the learning. Even if they mess up, they feel like, oh, well, I just need to work on this, this and this and I’ll be fine. That kind of thing. And so it really helps.

Justin Baeder (08:46):

I love it. And it seems like probably the more typical thing to do would be to tell students to read the music and then sing it or play it, right. Would that be the more normal exercise for reading music?

Chris Munce (08:58):

Yeah, of course. And we do that too. What I try to do is I try to change the way they interact with the music as much as possible so that they’re having to come to it from different angles. So for example, again, I’ll just keep using metaphors for written language and other things. If you were to say, oh yeah, I’m totally fluent in English, but then I start talking to you and you can’t understand anything I’m saying, then I would question whether or not you’re literate. And then you say, or would there not? You’re fluent and you say, well, but I can read it off the page. Well, okay, but then you’re not really fluent because I was fluent in French when I was younger, but then I stopped speaking it, and I can still read it off the page because I can go at my own speed, but if someone starts talking to me, I can’t understand French anymore.

(09:49):

It goes by too fast. And so I would no longer claim to be fluent. I’m literate. I’m moderately literate in French, but I’m no longer conversationally fluent. Music operates in a similar way. So not only do we do activities like you saw in the video, but I also do things like where I will simply play a song for them on a piano and ask them to write down what they heard. So they then have to notate the music that they heard, which again, a language fluency person would have to be able to do that. If I say C spot run, you should be able to write down “see spot run.” And so we teach the kids to go from that angle too, or sometimes it’s just error detection where I’ll show them music and I’ll play something or sing something wrong on purpose and have them go through and find where the error was, those types of things.

(10:40):

And by approaching it in all those different ways, they’re getting what I call the whole language of music approach. And then when we try to learn music that we perform, because we are a performance based curriculum, ultimately the goal is to get up on stage and do a song. But what we then do is because they’re getting all that approach that when I hand them a song, they’re no longer scared of it. They have the tools to go learn it themselves. And one of my big philosophies is that I don’t want to be the high priest of music in my classroom. I don’t want them to have to go through me to get to the music. I want them to have the tools for me to hand them the music, and then they can go off and learn it and get as much of that from their own skills as possible. Their pride in the final product is greater. At that point too, I did that. Mr months didn’t do that for me. I did that. And that’s one of my big things.

Justin Baeder (11:33):

And you’re really adapting to some extent, but you’re really developing new pedagogy that is not out there already, it sounds like.

Chris Munce (11:42):

That is correct. Yeah. And it gets me, I have enemies as a result. I mean, I’m really challenging the profession because there are certain kind of tried and true methods that I’ve made certain arguments against based on the way that I do it, but also because many teachers now over the last seven years, I’ve been kind of preaching this curriculum. People are doing this all over the country now and it’s working, but one of the reasons that I’m preaching it is that I believe that there’s an old way that we used to do music, and I grew up under this old way, which is that you basically, we were unwittingly privileging the kids in public school music classes that were coming to those music classes with prior music knowledge, and then we were lifting them up as the most talented ones and also lifting ourselves up as really good teachers.

(12:42):

But really it was just because somebody had learned music outside of school and they had come and then made me look really good as the music teacher because they were in my group and I taught under that model. And so when I say that I’m not criticizing others, I did it too. When I was a young teacher, I essentially was talent scouting. I was looking in the school building for the kids who have the most natural ability, and I was trying to pull them into my class so that we could make this good choir. And now my pedagogical approach is so different. It’s more like I want every kid because I believe that I can teach every kid to know how to do this. And if we can all do this, then that means that the kid who doesn’t have piano lessons, the kid who doesn’t have a mom who’s a stage mom, who puts them on stage from age four and makes them do all these things, those kids have always been privileged in music classes. But the kid, I want the kid to be successful in my class who’s shy, who stands off to the side and is not the stage kid. I’m a father also of a special needs learner who she’s dyslexic and has all kinds of learning challenges. I want her to feel smart in my class, and she’s currently an 11th grader in my class, and she feels like she’s smart because she can do it, because I’ve figured out the pedagogy I’m approaching. But it’s basically we’re grading on growth. I don’t care where you start.

(14:11):

Every kid in my class is going to get an A based on whether or not they’re getting better at all these things. It’s not how good they get. It’s whether or not they’re getting better at those things. And I’ve developed a system for tracking that and for keeping data and proving it and all that kind of stuff too. So I’m getting animated. You can tell I’m very passionate about this, but you’re right, it is a new approach to pedagogy.

Justin Baeder (14:34):

Well, Chris, if people want to learn more about that approach or about your podcast, where can they go online to find you?

Chris Munce (14:40):

So Choralosophy.com is the website. I’m on TikTok. I’m on Instagram Choralosophy, and I’m on Facebook. A lot of it is pedagogy stuff. And so on my website, I’ve created a place somebody could go and just hear episodes about teaching kids to read music, and so I’ve got that all on a sub page. It’s just Choralosophy.com/musicliteracy

Justin Baeder (15:00):

Wonderful. Chris, thank you so much for joining me on the teaching show. It’s been a pleasure.

Chris Munce (15:05):

Thank you so much.

Recent topics:

• Science of Learning in the Classroom

• Cognitive Load Theory, Pt. 1

• Cognitive Load Theory - Attention

Follow Laura on Twitter

Full Transcript:

Justin Baeder (00:00):

Welcome everyone to the Teaching Show. I’m honored to be joined today by Laura Stam to talk about knowledge building for teachers. Laura, welcome to the Teaching Show. Tell us a little bit about yourself and then we’ll get into it.

Laura Stam (00:14):

Hi Justin. Thanks for having me on the show. I’m really excited. I am Laura Sam. I teach third grade in Thermopolis, Wyoming, and I’ve been a Goan fellow last year. I’ve helped start our reading league in Wyoming chapter, and then I’d like to do podcasts and things like that. Yeah, mostly teaching though.

Justin Baeder (00:45):

Well, I think we’ve first met through your writing primarily on Substack and perhaps on social media as well. You’ve been working on a series since the beginning of summer on knowledge building for teachers. Tell us just how you got into that and what motivated you to start producing that series.

Laura Stam (01:03):

So I had been doing a lot of my own knowledge building. So we teach a knowledge building curriculum at our school, and there were several topics that I didn’t really feel like I knew very well, that I had not learned very well, and I really wanted to understand it more than just what the curriculum provided for that grade level. And so I started doing a lot of reading and studying myself, and I was noticing on social media that there was, because I think this is becoming more common, that we are bringing in knowledge building curriculum into teaching now. And I saw a lot of frustration from other teachers that they just didn’t really, and I think some of it was they just didn’t really feel prepared with the content either. And I thought, well, maybe I could start sharing the things that I’ve found and share this with them.

(02:06):

Because a lot of stuff out there and some of it’s great, some of it’s not. So I thought maybe I could then they’re not having to search everywhere. And then maybe, and I would have loved to have opened up a conversation as well with teachers, like what they’re learning. That was part of it too. So I just started building in these resources and specific to certain content areas. It started out mostly with history stuff, social studies type topics, and that’s what I did mostly over the summer, but it’s also morphed now into pedagogy and topics like that as well.

Justin Baeder (02:46):

Yeah, so you’ve got several articles on cognitive load theory and reading fluency and retrieval practice and different kind of science of learning topics. But yeah, a lot on specific social studies, content, math, content, the constitution, medieval Europe, colonial America, the Vikings, the War of 18, 12, things like that. Tell us a little bit more about your curriculum. You said you use a knowledge building curriculum in your district?

Laura Stam (03:11):

We use Core Knowledge. We started with Amplify, but I also bring in the original core knowledge content as well. I really like their history and geography content, and so I use both of those. I married both of them, but we’re also bringing in just with what they’re showing with the importance of reading whole books in school. We’re also bringing in literature which Core Knowledge has as well as part of their scope and sequence. They also have whole books that you should read as part of the curriculum, and so we’re bringing that in as well. It’s not just history and geography or just excerpts. So yeah, that’s what we use at our school, and it’s been a lot of fun. I started teaching in second grade using that, and then I’ve moved up to third grade. So it’s really fun to see that progression and that what you start in second grade builds into third grade, and what they got in first grade builds into second.

(04:15):

So what’s really neat is when you’re doing it as a school, seeing the students’ growth from year to year and the knowledge that builds on itself and how what they learn in first grade is important for them to understand in second grade and things like that. So we’ve been really enjoying it, and the children really enjoy it. It’s really neat to see the conversations that they’re having outside of school, or even at recess, they like to reenact some of the battles at recess. They go home and they do more research at home. It’s part of now the conversation that they have outside of just the lesson. So that’s really exciting to see.

Justin Baeder (05:00):

Well, Laura, this might seem like a strange conversation for us to be having to a time traveler from the eighties or nineties who might say, well, what’s special about this? What’s different about this? Why are you talking about building knowledge? Of course, that’s what schools do. You’re just talking about normal school, but of course we know today this approach is actually a little bit unusual. What do you see as the kind of default that differs from what you’re doing with building knowledge?

Laura Stam (05:26):

I think what’s where we kind of went was, especially when we got common court, especially in literacy, it started to focus on skills. Skills and skills are important. And so I’ve had to wrestle with this because our school is especially, we tie everything to a standard. It needs to be tied to a standard. And so I’ve had to wrestle with this and figure this out, but so with reading, it doesn’t have specific content that you should be learning like the ancient Rome and Ancient Greece or African Kingdoms or War of 18, 12 specific content like that. It doesn’t have that spelled out in there, but I think that really needs to be the focus is those, or even literature, we want them to be able to read these whole books like Charlotte’s Web or other books like that. And so trying to mesh those together in a way that is productive for both things. So when I’m reading a whole book, the goal is that they understand all the nuances of that story. They know the characters and what they’re doing and what that story was trying to tell them. But those standards are also important to help bring a focus to what you wanting them to get out of that book. So both of those things are equally important.

Justin Baeder (06:50):

I’ve been thinking about just the emphasis on skills and the reluctance to emphasize specific content. I saw an article from I think Australia the other day where a group of students had accidentally been taught about the wrong Caesar, and now they were worried about a test that they had to take at the end of the course. And I thought, we wouldn’t have that problem in the US because we don’t test kids on specific Caesars. We couldn’t even have that problem, but why are we not testing kids on specific content that we’re teaching? It’s just a strange thing that’s happened over the last couple of years. And I think you’re right that the skills that are in many of our standards now, the Common Core state standards, the next Generation Science standards, largely, those are good skills. I haven’t seen any that I think are objectionable, but they’re not things that we teach directly. We teach them through the content. But I think we kind of missed that memo as a profession and started trying to teach the skills directly and leaving out the content because we got this idea that content doesn’t matter. What matters is the transferable skills. Well, now we’re realizing, oh, you actually can’t teach those skills without any content. So the curriculum you’re using is very, very content rich.

Laura Stam (07:56):

So bringing back in whole books too is very important. I think that we took that out. They’re just reading excerpts and we’re finding that that’s a stamina piece. But the whole purpose of it is that we want them to understand the whole story, the characters and what they’re trying to get out of that story. And so those skills are important for understanding that and helping focus because there’s so many directions you can go. Right now we’re doing Charlotte’s Web and I mean, it’s an amazing piece, but there’s so many places we could go. So those standards and skills really help bring a focus. So the teacher isn’t trying to teach everything, but at the forefront should always be, I want them to understand Charlotte’s Web. I want them to know ancient Rome and who Julius Caesar was and who Caesar Augustus was. And I want to know how did it progress from a republic to an empire?

(08:55):

Then how did that fall? And then how does that tie to what they learned in ancient Greece? How does that tie to the Athenian government? And then how does that tie to our government when we’re learning about American history? The main idea learning, main idea or learning historical progression isn’t going to help them learn that without the knowledge to work with. What is that saying? You can’t connect dots if you don’t have any dots to connect. And so those skills are useless without content, but content is served very well by those skills. And so I think I finally found a good marriage between those two because it felt like they were in conflict. But I think they are important. But I think our focus so much was on, well, all we have to do is focus on just teaching the main idea, and then they’ll be able to find main idea.

(09:50):

And I feel like all our tests are, it’s on main idea and inferencing and character development, but that should not be the goal of our test. Our tests should be, do they understand ancient Rome and can tell you about it? Do they know who all the main players are and do they know who Charlotte and Wilbur are and what dynamic they have in this story? So it’s a big mind shift, and I see it a big struggle too, to try and weed that out. But I think when we put the content forward, then it’s also, you just really see a difference in the students and how they interact with that knowledge. They love knowing things, and they love being able to talk about the knowledge that they have. And you’re not going to get that if that is not your focus, if your focus is on the skill.

(10:49):

And so that’s what the point of my substack was, was just to really help teachers. Well see. And that’s the problem, is it’s hard to teach that well if you don’t know it well, and I don’t feel like I really got that very well, and my education, and I have a feeling that’s probably true for a lot of teachers. So we’re having to teach ourselves and we need to know it a lot more in depth than the curriculum gives us. And so that’s what I was trying to do with my substack is give them those more in depth resources. And some are quick. I wanted to give them a quick podcast or a quick webinar, but also really, really nerdy stuff if you really like it. So anyway, just give them a mix of resources that really quick, they could just get a good quick overview of what’s going on at a teacher level, but then if they want to really dig deep, then they can, I heard this really good webinar just to help you grow your knowledge over time.

(11:55):

One summer, just read this really thin book and here’s this little quick book. Read that on the American Revolution. And then the next summer, then here’s this fatter, more in depth, more specific book. And then the next summer, you have these two volumes that are really research based, really in depth knowledge about that topic. But just over time, you can grow your own knowledge. We don’t have a lot of time. Plus, if you’re an elementary teacher, you also have to do math and all the other topics. So there’s a time thing in there. So that was my goal with it, is to, here’s some resources on however quick or deep you want to go. Then you can have these, and you’re not having to search for them yourself, because that’s hard too.

Justin Baeder (12:42):

I noticed you’ve aligned each of your articles, your collections of resources to specific units that you’ve taught from the Core knowledge curriculum. Is that right?

Laura Stam (12:50):

Correct. Yes. And so all tied to that, but I’m hoping, I feel like there’s some similarities between other knowledge building curriculum. I’m hoping. I haven’t really looked at other ones, but I’m assuming, especially with history related stuff, it feels like we all kind of have the same kind of topics. So the goal is if you do teach Core knowledge, it ties specifically to these lessons. But if you have another curriculum, if you teach ancient Rome or you teach the American Revolution, then those resources should be accessible to you as well. Yeah, yeah.

Justin Baeder (13:29):

Well, Laura, you mentioned earlier that kids love learning stuff. Their faces really light up when they get to learn this specific content that maybe it’s not so common to teach anymore. What has been your reaction personally to delving into this content knowledge and going deeper with things that maybe you knew about but are really taking to a new level in terms of your content knowledge?

Laura Stam (13:49):

Well, I love it. I’m a total nerd. I think the reason is because I just felt like I was missing a lot of things. And so I think because of that, I’ve always had a deep hunger for wanting to fill that gap. I didn’t like that. I didn’t have certain knowledge that I wanted, and I felt like when I would listen to conversations of other people, that I was really lacking some information that I wanted to have. And so it has been a lot of fun for me. I kind of spend my whole summer digging really deep into specific topics since, like I said, I’ve moved from second to third, and because I learned Move to Third is a whole new content area. So one of them is Ancient Rome and Carthage, Hannibal and Carthage. So I just found a book about Carthage, this really thick book, and it was a lot of fun.

(14:44):

And you learn so much good stuff. And what’s really nice is there are a lot of really good writers out there. It’s not just facts and information, really good storytellers. So when you’re reading these stories, real history stories, but they’ve written them in such a way that it’s like reading a novel. So that’s a lot of fun. I really like that. But there’s a lot of good podcasts where people talk about these things that are really short, but you get so much out of them because they just have a lot of knowledge. So that’s a lot of fun. And then some really great webinars too that I’ve really enjoyed. And they’re only 30 minutes, but it’s a lot of fun, I think, because the people who are teaching it love it. And so they exude that excitement for their content that they are really passionate about. So then you kind of pick up on that passion, and then hopefully what you’re doing is you’re also sharing that passion with your students. So that’s kind of the whole goal too, because when you know something and it really well, and maybe it’s not your most favorite topic, but even if you know it well, that comes out for your students. And then that makes them excited to learn it too, because this really well, and you are excited about it. So that’s my journey. Yeah.

Justin Baeder (16:08):

Well, Laura, thank you so much for joining me here on the teaching show. If people want to find your substack or connect with you, where’s the best place for them to go?

Laura Stam (16:15):

On Substack, I think it’s just my name, Laura Stam, but the Substack is called The Knowledge Exchange. And then I’m also on Twitter.

Justin Baeder (16:25):

Laura, thank you so much for joining me. It’s been a pleasure.

Laura Stam (16:26):

Yeah, thank you. Thank you. This was great.

Dr. Jake Downs Linktree

Promoting Fluency Through Challenge: Repeated Reading With Texts of Varying Complexity—Full paper in The Reading Teacher + direct PDF link

Synchronous Paired Oral Reading Techniques: Supporting Developing Readers in Connected Text—Full paper in The Reading Teacher

Full Transcript:

Dr. Justin Baeder (00:00):

Welcome to the Teaching Show. I’m your host Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to be joined today by Jake Downs to talk about the Read Like Us Protocol. Jake, welcome to The Teaching Show.

Dr. Jake Downs (00:11):

Hey, thanks, Justin. Great to be here.

Dr. Justin Baeder (00:13):

Well, tell us a little bit about yourself and then we’ll get into talking about the Read Like US Protocol.

Dr. Jake Downs (00:18):

Yeah, I’m a former fourth grade teacher, instructional coach, literacy coordinator as well for a school district, and currently I’m an assistant professor at Utah State University, and I also host a podcast called The Teaching Literacy Podcast for folks that might be interested.

Dr. Justin Baeder (00:34):

Wonderful. And I was first introduced to your work because of a paper that you published, and we’ll put a link to that for anybody who wants to read the full paper about the study you did, the pilot you did on the read Like Us Protocol, but let’s get right into the protocol itself because I think there is quite a lot here that people can take and run with. What was the purpose of the protocol and what does it consist of?

Dr. Jake Downs (00:57):

Well, the idea of the protocol with Read Like Us is repeated reading has been a technique used to support fluency performance or support students’ oral reading fluency for a really long time, and we wanted to take a fresh take on that over the last decade with the common core state standards and other things. There’s been a push for using more complex texts, but we know from research that just sort of throwing more challenging texts at students is actually a way for them to have lower fluency and lower comprehension in that specific text. So we wanted to explore, read like Us as a way to scaffold students up to the task of challenging text, and we did that through using a repeated reading protocol that progresses through a series of readings that also remove scaffolds, has a little bit of gradual release to it to help students be able to access the text and be able to read it accurately and with little cognitive effort to be able to move it automatically.

Dr. Justin Baeder (01:50):

Love it. So a couple of key things here. We’re talking about challenging text. This is not necessarily at the student’s independent reading level. This is potentially above their independent reading level at grade level or possibly above. And it is also read aloud.

Dr. Jake Downs (02:05):

Yes, yes, for challenging text and then the group reading aloud. We did it in a small group format, which lends itself nice for a small group format, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t be adapted to a whole group format as well.

Dr. Justin Baeder (02:20):

Good deal. So let’s go through just the five reads. So we’re building fluency, we’re helping students understand how to read this text fluently over the course of these five reads. What are those five reads? We’re not just talking about doing the same thing over and over five times, right?

Dr. Jake Downs (02:35):

Yeah. So I’ll just go through all the reads really quick. The first one is a model read where the teacher is reading the text out loud, students are following along and tracking. The second read is an echo read. So teacher reads sentence by sentence or phrase by phrase, and the students echo it back and with more challenging text. That does tend to be phrase by phrase just because sentences start to get really long and complicated. The next one’s a choral read. So the group is reading the text out loud together as a group. Fourth read is a partner read. So students pair off, and the way we structured it is that the partners were synchronously reading at the same time, so it wasn’t, we wanted to maximize engagement, maximize volume in text. So partners were split up and they were read together out loud at the same time.

(03:17):

In the case of an odd number of students in the small group, the teacher would coral read with one of the leftovers, so that way everyone had a partner to Coral read. And then the last one, we structured it as an independent read. And then a lot of times it was also a performance similar to a reader’s theater. So the students, it was a little thing, they just would stand up and they would perform that text their reading group teacher. But there also were occasions where the teacher would snag the principal to come by, or two groups in the same room would perform for each other, just something small, a small way to have some authenticity to the reading, to add some engagement, to have a purpose for reading that in the final read that the reading would be performed. And then other times when there wasn’t a performance, the students would just whisper, read that last passage, the passage to themself on their own for the last read. So that’s how the five reads progressed from very high teacher responsibility with modeling the text to, in the end, the students performing the text on their own.

Dr. Justin Baeder (04:19):

So they’re hearing it red the first time they hear all of the words, they hear the diction, they hear the prosody

Dr. Jake Downs (04:26):

Just making the text sound like language, like the way you would converse.

Dr. Justin Baeder (04:31):

So they know what to do, they’re hearing it, they’re practicing it, and ultimately they are performing the reading or part of it themselves. And we can’t get into the whole study right now, but that had a pretty big impact on fluency, right?

Dr. Jake Downs (04:45):

Yeah, it definitely did. We did get longitudinal effects at, we did pre-post assessment at the post students where they were more automatic. And with our group of fourth graders that we looked at specifically, they actually had increases in vocabulary as well, which would make sense with the challenge of text they’re reading. But we also did a breadth of text across a lot of different genre areas. So they were getting a diverse array of academic language structures and different vocabulary words in different domain areas.

Dr. Justin Baeder (05:12):

I wanted to ask about that because certainly people could think of lots of different possibilities. What were some of those genres that people could potentially use? The Read Like Us Protocol with

Dr. Jake Downs (05:25):

The genres we used in this one, and there’s a second iteration that we did as well that we’re currently writing up, but we used things like poetry. We had folk tales in there. We had a genre that was strange state laws, which the kids really got a kick out of different things that you can or cannot do in different states. We had another genre of types of engineers was another type of genre. So in this sense, we were aiming for breadth that sometimes repeated reading and wide reading sort of get looked at as being in these two separate buckets. And we actually said, well, what if it was the same bucket? What if we repeatedly read in texts? But over the course of time, we covered a lot of different genres and a lot of different complexities. So these were third and fourth grade students that we used in our pilot. The texts ranged from most, some of them were third grade, most of them were more in the fourth grade, but they even had middle grade texts that were in the six seven Lexile grade bandwidth. So it was a range of texts of varying complexity, but also a lot of different genres as a way to provide students support with the academic language and the vocabulary and the being able to consume a text really productively was the goal of what we were trying to do.

Dr. Justin Baeder (06:39):

So everybody gets to be successful with it, right? Everybody reads it, everybody reads it fluently. Even if they couldn’t have necessarily done that on their own to start with, everybody gets across the finish line and has read the text fluently multiple times at the end.

Dr. Jake Downs (06:53):

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that’s the goal.

Dr. Justin Baeder (06:56):

Well, we’ll link to the full paper and the study that you did so that people can read that for themselves. Let’s see. Any last words? Anything else you want me to ask about or anything you want to plug here?

Dr. Jake Downs (07:08):

I just would plug that, I mean, that’s the basic protocol, but there’s a lot of different directions you can head with it. Like, okay, if the echo reading is too clunky, then skip the Echo reading and do two choral reads. Or five isn’t necessarily the magic number here. It could be four, it could be six, it could be three. But just trying to say, can we get repeated reading in with a text? Can we have it move from more of a teacher scaffold at the beginning to students being more independent with the text by the end? And there’s also lots of opportunity to integrate comprehension with it as well. What if this was a science text that’s aligned with NGSS standards you’re working on? So to build background knowledge with each subsequent read, you have a different text purpose, you have a different thing you’re trying to harvest from that text. So read one, we’re looking for big idea number one, read two, we’re looking for big idea number two, and then by the end, you sort of stitch those together. So yes, we built it as a basic fluency protocol, but we know that being accurate and automatic in a text can lead to comprehension. So there’s a lot of opportunities to integrate word learning like vocabulary and also comprehension within that protocol as well.

Dr. Justin Baeder (08:13):

Love it. Well, Jake, if people want to listen to your podcast, where can they find that?

Dr. Jake Downs (08:17):

You can find the podcast at teachingliteracypodcast.com, and it’s also on wherever you get your podcasts. I do one episode a month and I interview reading researchers about work they’ve conducted and what it means for practice. So very much in the same vein of what you’re doing on your platforms, Justin.

Dr. Justin Baeder (08:32):

Wonderful. Well, Jake, thanks so much for joining me on the teaching Show. It’s been a pleasure.

Dr. Jake Downs (08:36):

Hey, thanks for having me. It’s been great.

Visit Marcie’s website ScientistsInTheMaking.com

Follow Marcie on Twitter/X @SciInTheMaking

Teaching Tier 3 Words in Science—thread on Twitter/X

FASE Reading from Teach Like A Champion

Teach Like a Champion

FASE Reading: Bringing Reading Back to the Center

Hi Champions…

Read more

6 months ago · 21 likes · 6 comments · Teach Like a Champion

Schools Are Accommodating Student Anxiety — and Making It Worse, by Ben Lovett and Alex Jordan

Concept Maps: A Tool for Strengthening Background Knowledge and Boosting Comprehension—by Marcie Samayoa, Scientists In The Making Blog

Brett Benson: @SoLInTheWild on X & on Substack

FASE Reading Plug and Play training from Teach Like A Champion

Additional notes, quotes, and links on tiered vocabulary instruction

Full Transcript:

Justin Baeder (00:00):

Welcome to the Teaching Show. I’m Justin Baeder and I’m honored to welcome to the program Marcie Samayoa, AKA. Ms. Sam on X.

Marcie, welcome to The Teaching Show.

Marcie Samayoa (00:11):

Hi. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Justin Baeder (00:14):

Well, I’m excited to talk about some strategies that you have been sharing on X or Twitter lately around FASE reading, F-A-S-E, reading from Teach Like A Champion and teaching Tier 3 vocabulary. So tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do, and then we can get into it.

Marcie Samayoa (00:32):

Yeah, so I’m a high school chemistry teacher in Los Angeles, California. I have been in the classroom for 10 years, and for the past, I would say five years, I have been trying my best to implement cognitive science principles into my lessons, and I have seen a huge academic gains, so I’m more than excited to share those practices with others.

Justin Baeder (00:57):

Wonderful. Well, let’s start with FASE reading or faze reading. Just briefly tell us what that is and how you use it in your classroom.

Marcie Samayoa (01:05):

So FASE reading is a way where we encourage students to read, and the way we do that is the teacher models joy and expression when they’re reading. That way that joy can be transferred to the students.

And also I think it’s very important to show students how to express reading. For example, every time you see a comma, you pause. Every time you see an exclamation point, you say it in an excited tone, or every time you see a question, you read it as a question if you see the question mark. So it’s something that you need to model to students because unfortunately they haven’t had that model to them as much previously.

So that’s what I do, and while we do the reading as a class, I maintain attentiveness by cold calling students. That way they know that they all have an equal chance to be called upon to read out loud.

Now, I know this might be controversial for some educators. They bring up anxiety and that sort of stuff, but I think if we do it in a safe learning environment, we can encourage students to try to read out loud and therefore eventually get them to become better readers because the only way they will get better is to actually do it. Yeah, that’s pretty much what FASE reading is. I could go into more detail if you want me to.

Justin Baeder (02:39):

Yeah, well, I’m glad you mentioned cold calling and anxiety. I was just reading an article from Teachers College Columbia about how when we avoid calling on students out of a concern for anxiety, often we make that worse. And there’s of course a lot of research on this and a lot of experience in the teach, like a world about setting students up for success so that we’re not making students suffer in any way by calling on them.

We’re being thoughtful about that, but we are getting them involved. We are calling on students to actively participate and FASE is an acronym: Fluent, Attentive, Social, and Expressive, in the Teach Like a Champion lexicon. And I know Doug is an English teacher, and some of the descriptions of how to use that practice are written with literature in mind or other types of text. But you’re using this with pretty heavy duty science text, is that right?

Marcie Samayoa (03:38):

Yes, I am. And the reason for that is because we do want to expose students to rigor. That’s the only way that they are going to get better. But you do it in a way where you provide them support, and that’s where FASE reading comes in. So for example, by modeling how to read it through expression, you show students exactly what is expected of them.

So when students know what is expected of them, their anxiety goes down. And then in addition, if students still feel anxiety, what students can do, or what I can do is I can prepare them ahead of time. Usually you don’t want to let students know that they’re going to be called upon, right? Because you want everybody to be attentive. You want everybody to just know that it’s equal.

However, when you have students with IEPs or students with severe anxiety, what you can do to calm that down is you can tell them, Hey, let’s practice reading this one sentence together and let’s practice it over and over and over, and then during class I’m going to call on you. Okay. And you’re going to do so good because we practiced, and that way you can get buy-in.

Now, I just want to be very straightforward. This was not my idea. I actually got it from another educator, a fabulous educator on X. His name is Brett, and he has a blog known, I think it’s .

So yeah, so that’s where I learned that strategy. So just because you’re cold calling students doesn’t mean that you’re making them experience more anxiety, we’re just setting them up for success.

Justin Baeder (05:20):

Absolutely, absolutely. And there was a question that I saw your response to from a British educator, Joel. He was talking about how often with vocabulary, especially vocabulary that would be very unfamiliar to students, if we’re going to read through say, a chunk of a biology textbook or an article about chemistry, often there is very dense vocabulary, and so much of it may be new to students that we worry that kids are going to get lost immediately.

If we start reading this, the fluency is going to be difficult. And there was some discussion back and forth about pre-teaching and things like that, and Joel said, if I pre-teach this vocabulary, that’s essentially going to be pre-teaching the entire curriculum. So how do I do that? And then you had this beautiful response about Tier 2 and 3 vocabulary that I think set that up really well.

So how do you think about that issue of pre-teaching versus other ways of getting students familiar with more and more advanced vocabulary knowing that they’re starting often without a lot of that?

Marcie Samayoa (06:24):

Yeah, so I think pre-teaching is basically just giving the students a preview of the content and what some teachers can misinterpret that as is like, well, I need to teach the whole thing. And then I tell them, well, if you’re teaching the whole thing, you’re no longer pre-teaching it, you’re teaching. So we really want to be careful as to how we approach that.

I actually start with Tier 2 words. I’m a high school teacher, and even my students have a hard time understanding Tier 2 words. I explicitly teach them that by asking them to repeat after me. That way they know how to pronounce it. I’m in Los Angeles, so we have a huge ELL population.

Then afterwards, I give them a student-friendly definition. I think this is really important. It’s really hard to do. It’s not an easy thing to do, but you need to provide students with a student-friendly definition because if you pair the word with a difficult definition, the kids are just going to check out.

(07:22):

And then afterwards you want to put the Tier 2 words in context. So what I sometimes do is I give students everyday scenarios and I tell them, okay, from these list of words, which word best describes this everyday scenario? And so by doing that, you’re putting the words in context instead of just having them memorize the definition. Because you can memorize the definition and that is an important part, but if you don’t know how to apply it, then that’s where it starts to fall apart.

So I start with Tier 2 words, and then I introduce Tier 3 vocabulary through FASE reading. And through the FASE reading, the students get a preview as to what the Tier 3 words are, and they’re better able to understand it because now they understand the Tier 2 words. So that cognitive load has decreased. They’re like, well, I already know what Tier 2 words are, so I don’t have to focus my attention as much on Tier 2words as I’m reading.

(08:20):

I could focus more attention on Tier 3. So through the FASE reading, students get a preview of the Tier 3 words. And then after we do that together, I tell them to create a concept map using these words. That way they can make the connections and they’re applying the words instead of just memorizing the definitions. And then afterwards, we use it in context.

So now that students have gotten a preview of Tier 2 and Tier 3 words, and they have used it, now I’m able to use it in my lessons without overwhelming them because they already have an idea what those words are. And obviously students will forget, right? If we don’t give them a chance to retrieve the information.

So I include the Tier 2 and the Tier 3 words in a knowledge organizer. And throughout the unit we revisit that, and I have them study through retrieval, we do independent studying, and then they study with the partner for accountability and pairing all those strategies together.

(09:19):

I have seen huge success when it comes to teaching vocabulary, especially in science because science is filled with vocabulary. So when you do these strategies, you really want to focus on the words that are very, very important, and then the others just follow. Because if students understand the main words, then they slowly start to understand the other words. And so you don’t have to pre-teach all of it, just choose the important Tier 2 words, choose the important Tier 3 words, and slowly as you start applying these words, you can add more. And that’s how I approach vocabulary instruction in my classroom.

Justin Baeder (09:57):

Love it. And it really starts to chip away at this problem of, I have a word that I’ve defined, but all the words in the definition are unfamiliar too. Exactly. Tier one, tier two, and tier three words. Because I think we’re concerned about teaching the more advanced words in language, as you said, in student friendly language with vocabulary that students already have. If we’re trying to teach unfamiliar concepts, we have to anchor that in things that students already understand. So it sounds like tier one words are the words that students come in with, they use in everyday language, but tier two are a little bit more specific.

Marcie Samayoa (10:35):

All right. Tier 1 is words that students use in their everyday language, and they’re very familiar with it, so you don’t have to explicitly teach it. Tier 2 words are more specific, but it applies to all disciplines. So for example, the words apply, analyze, explain. Those are more academic terms, but they’re able to be used in all sorts of school subjects. Then there’s tier 3 where it is more specific to that subject. So for example, if I were to identify tier 3 words in chemistry, it would be proton, neutron, electron, very specific to science. So those are the differences between tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3 words.

Justin Baeder (11:23):

Those tier 2 words equip them to understand that reading better,

Marcie Samayoa (11:28):

And it gives them more confidence to read out loud too.

Justin Baeder (11:32):

So at this point, they don’t necessarily have clarity on all the tier 3 words they’re going to read about—the reading itself is their first introduction.

Marcie Samayoa (11:40):

Yes.

Justin Baeder (11:41):

And I think that gets around some of the paradox of how do I pre-teach this? When you really need to understand cells to understand what eukaryotic means, how do we unwind this a little bit? So you’re starting with the reading in that sense.

Marcie Samayoa (11:52):

Yeah, and again, it’s just to give them some background knowledge on it. And I think what educators need to understand is that vocabulary takes time, right? There’s no one activity where students are going to understand it 100% of the time because it needs to be used throughout the unit for students to eventually master tier three words.

So what the reading does is that it gives them the preview, and then after the preview, I also teach it through retrieval. I ask them to retrieve the student friendly definitions, but then we use them throughout the unit. And the goal is that by the end of the unit, we’ve used the words so much in context that students are familiar with the terms.

Because if you’re just focused on the definitions alone and you don’t ask students to apply those words, then it’s not really going to stick. It is really important to teach the words through context.

Justin Baeder (12:51):

Absolutely. And then you said that you’re layering on additional meaning by having students do concept maps. Is that right?

Marcie Samayoa (12:57):

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I’m a huge fan of concept maps. It’s not an easy skill to teach. I have a whole blog as to how I address that. But once students have that knowledge on how to create the concept map, it is very useful.

I like it a little bit better than reading comprehension questions because what I found is that if you give students a list of questions and you tell ‘em to answer it using the text, what ends up happening is that the students just skim through the text and they find a word that matches with the question, and then they just copy it verbatim.

You could say, until you’re blue in the face, you need to put it in your own words. You need to put it in your own words. And what ends up happening is that students still try to test boundaries with that, but when it comes to concept maps, they’re forced to think about the relationships between the different words.

And so there’s not really a way to just copy it verbatim. They really need to think about the relationships when constructing a content map. And in addition, because no two content maps are the same, what can happen is that you give students time to independently create their concept maps and then have them share afterwards.

They have to do it on their own first, though. That’s the key thing here. And then you have them share after. And what ends up happening is that the discussions are rich because they’re explaining why they connected one word in one way, whereas a student connected it in another way, even though they’re both correct. So it really encourages a rich discussion between the students.

Justin Baeder (14:36):

Marcie, thank you so much for your time on this today. If people want to learn more about your website and figure out where to follow you, where’s the best place for them to go online?

Marcie Samayoa (14:45):

So I’m very active on X or Twitter. I like to refer it as Twitter.

Justin Baeder (14:49):

I still call it Twitter.

Marcie Samayoa (14:50):

Okay, good. So the handle on my Twitter is @SciInTheMaking, and my blog will be www.ScientistsInTheMaking.com. Originally, I started that blog to help science educators, but in my opinion, my humble opinion, cognitive science principles applies to all subjects. So everybody is welcome, and if they have any questions, they can always contact me through email, which can also be found on my blog.