Making Your Classroom New Year’s Resolutions

Fall Quarter is over and done. Maybe it was a good one, or maybe it wasn’t so pretty. But it’s over. Time to reflect on the quarter and make some resolutions about what you’ll do in your classes in 2017. To help you get started, I’ll share some of my resolutions for 2017.

Resolution #1 – Listening with Intention

This is one of my resolutions that crosses over both my professional and personal life. Just before sitting down to write this blog post I had a meeting with a colleague. We decided to get away from our offices so agreed to meet at a nearby coffee shop. It was quite noisy (you know that sound that an espresso machine makes? It seemed to be amplified today!) which made it hard to listen carefully. But here’s an even bigger problem for me -I don’t know about you, but when I am having a conversation I tend to be thinking about my response even before the other person is finished talking. I’m sure I miss a lot of what the person is really trying to say, so I am going to practice looking at the person and focusing on them rather than my own responses. I have time to practice with family over the holiday, so I hope to come back to campus having sharpened this skill.

Can you see how this would be a good habit to work on in the classroom? I don’t think our students necessarily expect us to have an immediate answer to every question, so why not start a response with, “I like that question. Let’s unpack that some more.” That gives you a bit of “stall” time to formulate a response or to ask a clarifying question. Can’t tell you how many times I said to myself, “Oh, I’ve heard this question before” and my response was totally automatic. But sometimes I missed what the student was really asking so we had to start over again. Practicing listening with intention will be my homework over break.

Resolution #2 - Reflection

I think that building a practice of reflection is critical to good teaching and every aspect of my job. But how much time do I spend doing it, and how well do I do it? I bought myself a small notebook, and my second resolution is to make a note every day before I go home about something that happened that day. In fact, I am going to put this on my calendar so that I get a little reminder to do it!

What do I think the benefits will be and why do I think this is important? Terry Heick, founder and director of teachthought says that “reflection is a fundamental tenet of learning…to reflect means to look back at how something ‘went’ in all of its available parts and patterns.” What are those patterns? Strengths and weaknesses, comparisons and contrasts, and cause and effects among others.  Reflection will allow me to think about planning for the future (even if the future is as close as the next day) by reviewing the past. So my little black book will have a special place on my desk next quarter, and I am committing to writing every day about how at least one thing went.

Reflection #3 – Revision

I have been in my role as the Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning for 2 full years now. Most of you know that there is a steep learning curve when you start a new job, and because this is a newly created position, it seems like there is always more stuff that gets added to my position description. As it is, there are lots of moving parts, and as I begin every quarter it (almost) feels like a new job. But there are some activities or parts of my job that I feel like I have a good handle on now. So, do I just continue doing them in the same way for another year when things seem to be going well? I’m thinking about ways I can infuse some innovative practices into my work.

If you have been teaching the same class for a while, maybe it’s time to do some revision. While I do not recommend completely revising a class (especially only weeks from the beginning of a quarter), why not try a new assignment? Or introducing students to transparent rubrics if you have not been using them? Start small, and then measure the effects. If you use an assignment but create a new rubric, are you seeing an improvement in student grades and understanding of the material? Remember that revisions should not be taken lightly. They require substantial planning – even for something as “small” as a new assignment or rubric.

So if things don’t go well, reflect on what happened (see Resolution #2). Actually, even if things did go well, reflect on it! It could be that the assignment was a great one, but the directions were not clear. Ask students for feedback (using formative assessments) to help improve your work. And take a look back at September’s blog post, “What to do if you’re having an off day.” Learning from failure is an important task to master!

I hope that you had a great fall quarter, and are looking forward to the New Year, new classes, and new students. There is nothing more satisfying than the look on a student’s face when they begin to comprehend the material. I hope you have that experience many times in 2017!

- Peg Balachowski, Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning

What to Do if You’re Having an Off Day – Learning from Failure

Boy, oh boy. When I think back to my first year teaching (I was a new math teacher at a high school just outside Washington, D.C.), I wonder what kind of damage I might have inflicted on those students!! I was brand new to teaching, had just moved to the area and didn’t know anyone, and my daughter was just entering her teenage years – sounds like a recipe for disaster, doesn’t it? I had a mentor teacher from a different high school - and she was a wonderful mentor - but there were lots of days when I felt like a complete failure and just wanted to wallow in my own misery. Don’t get me wrong – there were good days, too! Seeing the light go on for students (remember, it’s math!) is what kept me going back everyday. So how did I learn to deal with those off days?

My mentor teacher gave me lots of hints. The first and most important was to learn from any perceived failures in class. I still use this lens when I have the opportunity to teach a class. Here are three recommendations from Josh Stock who wrote about failure in this article on the Edutopia website:

1. Before the lesson goes wrong, always have a backup plan. 

2. Ask yourself: "Why did that lesson fail?" 

3. Come up with a plan for the next day. 

Number 1 supports my recommendation of “over prepare” in case things do go wrong. Have short activities that you can insert which will bring things back together. Remember that formative assessments “take the temperature of the room,” and you should have a few “back pocket” techniques, as author James Lang calls them, that you can whip out and check on how things are going.

Numbers 2 and 3 fall into the category of reflecting on your practice. As Josh Stock says, “Having a bad lesson doesn’t make you a bad teacher. We all have off days. It’s what you do afterwards that makes the difference.” Bring mindfulness to your teaching and make room for reflection. This is where YOUR learning takes place. Even though at the end of the day there is grading and MORE planning to do, take several minutes to review what happened (or didn’t happen) in class. Were students not engaged? Were they not responding with correct answers? Did you get looks from them telling you they had no idea what was going on?

Sometimes it’s possible to recover during the class, but if not, at the end of class – in the last 5 minutes – ask

students to do a 5-minute write on the class. I like to raid the recycling bin and find all those rejects from the copy machine that are printed on just one side. I cut them in half and then have a stack in the classroom. Grab a couple and ask students to summarize the class as an “exit ticket.” You could ask something like, “What was the most important take-away for you today?” After class it’s important to read the responses (as much as you might not like the responses, students are EXCELLENT sources of data!) and then report back to students what you learned. Closing the feedback loop will let students know that you heard them and are truly interested in their learning. Tell them what will happen as a result of what you heard. You can begin the next class with, “looks like I need to review the quadratic equation today, so let’s begin with another example.” That tells students that this is an important topic and you are willing to spend a bit more time on it. Of course, it may be the case that the class wasn’t as bad a failure as you thought! Using a formative assessment like this helps students to be more reflective, too. A win-win all around!