By Sara Finegan

         I’m teaching a general education math class this year that includes many of my own kids with learning disabilities as well as kids who do not have IEPs.  We’re  about six days behind the other class at the same grade level, and both of us finished the first two units well before the district’s first math benchmark assessment. 

          Greg Roy, my general education colleague, has, as I have said before on this blog, taught me a great deal about math and math instruction.   He and I disagree about mastery, by the way, but that doesn’t impair our ability to collaborate.   He moves at his speed, and I move at a different one,  but we’re both moving forward.

          Anyway, Greg’s a proponent of math routines, and he does them at the beginning of the day as well as at the beginning of a math class.  Routines are great, for several reasons. 

          • First, they provide kids with ongoing practice of previously-learned skills.  My routines always have problems from lessons we have worked on since the beginning of the year – usually types of problems the kids struggled with mightily, so that the skills will become firmly embedded. 

(A recent math routine had a word problem involving adding negative numbers, 2 fraction simplifications, 1 changing from mixed fraction to improper fraction, 1 changing improper fraction to a mixed number, and 2 dealing with multiplying decimals by 10, because my kids bombed that area on the last unit test for some reason, as well as a problem from yesterday’s lesson.)

         The kids get to use their notes and math encyclopedias on the routines, and we go over the results really quickly.  The whole thing takes about 15 minutes each day. 

         • The second benefit of a daily routine is that they give you a snapshot of each student at that moment.  This is particularly helpful as you plan your instruction.  I can tell at a glance how many of the kids in my class have mastered yesterday’s lesson or skill, and what the next steps might be.  Because I make my kids show their work on each routine, I can pinpoint where in the process of problem-solving they are struggling. 

          • Finally they give kids a terrific sense of competence.  As they experience over a series of weeks and months the increasing ease of solving problems using skills they’ve learned, they realize that they can do it, that they are actually good at it. 

         The other day, a parent of one of my general education math students told me that her daughter, who has always struggled with math, is coming home saying “hey, mom!  I’m smart at math!”  This student is the first to raise her hand in my class, the first to want to show the class how she solved a problem, the first to ask questions, and the first to finish her work these days.  It’s not because of me; it’s because every day, when she starts learning math, she is reminded that she’s already got terrific skills.

          Many special educators neglect daily routines, or don’t make their routines as comprehensive as they should be.  We need to recognize that our kids should have multiple opportunities, over a long period of time, to practice newly-mastered skills, or those skills will evaporate like steam after a shower. 

          We need to challenge our kids daily, while at the same time reminding them that they have ability already, or they will never challenge themselves, and never remind themselves of how far they’ve come.

          We need to push, push, push our kids, using all of their strengths, innate and learned, or they will never catch up to their general education peers. 

          In a demanding classroom, mastery is not something to be admired and then ignored; it’s about skill sets we use, reuse, and apply in newer ways on a regular basis.

demanding classroom · high expectations · learning disabled · mastery · math instruction · proficiency · rigor · rigorous instruction · routines · Sara Finegan · skills practice · special education · standards · student monitoring · supports

By Sara Finegan 

         My colleague, Laurie Vierra, is a Special Education Intern this year with a special day class of third and fourth graders, having taken advantage of our district’s offer to pay for general education teachers to move into and obtain a Masters in Special Ed.  

         A background in the general education standards, pacing, and instructional methods are great assets in the special ed classroom.  Laurie knows what her students need to be able to do in order to function at grade level, and she’s interested in lifting them up to that level.  She has no sense of comfort with student dependence or any belief that a learning deficit is a static thing that can never be repaired. 

         She certainly isn’t under the impression that a learning disability prevents anyone from doing grade-level work.

         This was, at first, a little bit disconcerting to the students in her class and some of their parents, who are used to the program of the teacher she is replacing: 

• Gone are the days when the teacher and the teacher aide (para-educator) will go into student backpacks to retrieve homework:  she will not accept assignments turned in by anyone other than the student.   
• Nowhere in her classroom does the aide sit with students and follow a written script for instruction and support. 
• Students don’t get candy for behaving or finishing their work.   
• Students in Laurie’s class have homework every day, including weekends.  And parents can’t do it for their kids.
• Kids have to get their own pencils and paper; the aide is no longer running across the room to bring the students supplies.
• The work the kids do at home and in class is meaningful; there’s no such thing as “sponge work,” and every lesson and assignment is directed toward a reachable educational goal.  

         I’m interested to see what will happen as the year progresses, and Laurie alters her students’ IEP goals to better reflect state standards.   Almost all of the kids in her class had identical goals during the past couple of years, regardless of what their needs and strengths were.  

         I have a feeling that Laurie is already redesigning and reworking the expectations for each child; I know for a fact that she’s got a clear idea of what each child needs to learn in order to reach higher objectives.  If I know Laurie, she will be custom-creating goals that will actually move her students toward grade-level work.

         That class is moving, kicking and screaming perhaps at first, but more and more confidently into demanding, high-quality work.  I’m delighted, because it means that when the kids come my room for fifth and sixth grade, I won’t spend a year working to develop independent learners.

It was not always this way… 

         A few years ago, I opened my classroom to five new fourth graders, three of whom were GATE (gifted and talented) certified and all of whom, the teacher told me, were proficient in math, reading, and writing. 

         They’d scored high on the state’s standardized tests the previous spring and were just wonderful kids.  She advised that they should all be mainstreamed for math, and that four of them could attend a general education social studies or science class. 

She was right that they were wonderful kids.  I adore them.  But they were not wonderful students, not yet.

• During the first week, one of them spent six hours in the classroom crying because she wanted the lower-grades special day class (SDC) aide to come and sit with her. 
• During the first week, all of them failed the beginning of the year math inventory which reflected what they had learned the previous year.  Only one of them demonstrated anything close to mastery of some of the math modules for the previous year.
• During the first month, I discovered that they had no idea how to talk or think about what they were reading:  their idea of reading comprehension was to parrot back what the text said. 
• When I administered an On-Demand writing assessment that asked them to describe their favorite experience the previous summer, none of them wrote more than three sentences. 
• Three of them lasted less than two weeks in a general education math class because they weren’t able to follow the lessons.   
• None of them were able to participate in science or social studies, because they couldn’t get accustomed to the concept of active, engaged learning.  They sat passively through instruction, and waited during independent work time for someone to tell them what to do instead of reading the directions.
• I discovered on their first benchmark test that they were used to having all assessments read to them, even though four of them read at the third grade level or higher.  When they did in-class assignments, they expected me or our aide to sit with them and tell them what to do next.

The children were shorthchanged…

         Their previous teacher did them a grave disservice.  She sent me five very intelligent kids who hadn’t a clue how to learn.  It wasn’t their fault; they’d never been taught how to think or had thinking skills modeled for them. 

         My former colleague never worked in general education, never entered a general education classroom, and felt safe only in her cocooned Special Day Classroom, where she could nurture her students and coddle them.

         Laurie’s work is already showing results, and it’s just the beginning of November.  She’s participating in a fourth-grade team with two other general education teachers:  she took on social studies, and has a reverse-mainstreaming thing going on in her classroom; she teaches a rigorous math class to her students and some of the lower-scoring kids in general ed (and three of my students, fifth and sixth graders who are still needing support with basic math skills in a very small group situation). 

         When you walk into her classroom, it’s student work you see, not artwork done by her or her aide. 

         Laurie and I can finish each others’ sentences when we discuss rigor and independent learning.  This shorthand is based on a mutual understanding of what special education is:  a service designed to bridge the gap between ability and capacity, not an educational system to protect kids with special needs.

         When we smother kids with support and don’t teach them how to think for themselves, even the brightest of them will atrophy as learners.

demanding classroom · GATE · high expectations · homework · IEP goals · learning disabled · para-educator · reverse mainstreaming · rigor · rigorous instruction · special day class · special education · standards

 By Sara Finegan

           Way too many Special Education classrooms are quiet rooms where kids remain at their desks and do seatwork, supervised by staff who either sit at the front of the room monitoring behavior or roam the room, monitoring the student work. 

           I believe this teaches kids to be passive receptors of information, regurgitating facts on demand. 

         I believe this enables kids in their expectation that learning is when someone gives you knowledge.  There’s no impetus to go and get knowledge, or to use it other than to show that you learned a fact.

           Passive learners are not successful students.  Productive lives do not get lived by people who wait for things to come to them.  Critical thinkers do not develop from children who believe that a teacher’s job is to give them information.  

         In a demanding classroom, the teacher is the facilitator, and the kids are the ones doing the work.

         In a demanding classroom, there’s movement.  Kids are asked to physically get up and go find information, and to physically gather facts and evaluate them or apply them.

         There’s engagement in this way with the world they are studying, and the concepts they are mastering.  They perceive a relationship between themselves and knowledge that involves action on their part.

          We create not just the opportunities for movement in learning, but requirements for it in a variety of different learning formats.

• Kids have to get up and move around the room to read charts and find information with which to answer worksheet questions. 
• Study and reading or writing groups are assigned to different areas of the room to congregate for cooperative learning activities. 
• In math, the kids look forward to me creating equations all over the two room white boards and allowing them to come up and choose one or two each to solve. 
• We have centers set up for kids to revolve through, fifteen minutes at a time:  a table with history sorting cards to organize; one with paper to create a mindmap or analogy list from a set of listen facts; a table with scenarios for them to respond to using knowledge they have learned about a civilization or culture. 
• In math, we study multiplication facts on the playground by bouncing a ball to one another as we skip count or recite numbers. 

         We see great intellectual growth when our students are required to move through learning, not absorb it.  In a demanding classroom, intellectual movement is often accompanied by physical activity.

action · active learning · centers · demanding classroom · engagement · finding information · high expectations · kinesthetic · learning disabled · movement · passive learning · rigor · rigorous instruction · Sara Finegan · special education · standards · thinking maps · white board

By Sara Finegan

         There has long been a debate about the issue of teaching to mastery.  When districts and states set up learning modules on a schedule, or a series of standards to meet each year, the inclination of many teachers is to get through as many of them as possible. Some schools and districts place a great deal of pressure on teachers to move forward, and to keep moving through the year.

         I’m not averse to having a set of outcomes to work toward and achieve each year for each grade level. I am against moving forward before our kids really have become proficient at new skills, strategies, and knowledge.

         In a demanding classroom, we don’t get stuck in a routine of doing the same work over and over, and we don’t adhere to other people’s schedules about when learning should be accomplished. Instead, we focus on cementing new skills, step-by-step, concept-by-concept, so that when the foundation of math, science, and other learning is complete, there are as few weak spots as possible.

         If you think about it, if we move kids forward before they really get the previous unit or skill, you are building a house of cards on quicksand. Nothing is going to really stick and the child is going to be aware on a pretty consistent basis that he or she is missing something.

         And what are we teaching kids about learning if we do it this way? It seems to me that we are saying to our children: Learning isn’t about mastering information and strategies; it’s about zipping through lessons to completion rather than to skill.

         Given that one of the major issues for kids with special needs is that they rush through work, getting it done rather than getting it right, aren’t we re-enforcing their own poor learning habits when we teach to completion over quality?

         Many will argue that teaching to mastery takes too much time, and that we don’t have the extra hours or days to ensure that all of our students become proficient at each new lesson.

         I disagree. It isn’t necessarily so. It all depends on how we teach the new information or skills, and what kind and what quality of practice we give our students.

         It also depends on the manner in which we release responsibility back to kids as they work. If we jump too quickly from “I show you” to “you do it,” mastery will take much longer than if we move, increment by increment, from “I show you,” to “I show you again,” to “we do it together,” to “we do it together more,” to “you and a partner do it,, to “try it again, and I’ll be right here,” to “hey, try it and I’ll step back a bit,” to “hey, you can do this!”

         All of that, by the way, doesn’t take place in math, for example, for weeks and weeks; it’s really a matter of days.

demanding classroom · high expectations · learning disabled · mastery · modules · proficiency · rigor · rigorous instruction · Sara Finegan · special education · standards

By Sara Finegan 

         The other day I was reminded anew of the most powerful inspiration and teaching tool in the classroom:  peer sharing.

         We’re still at the early stage of learning how to write a paragraph describing a character that is the second part of our standard Response to Literature.  We’d done a lesson on the “how-to” where I modeled and charted the steps.

          We’d done a guided lesson  on the first several steps:   collecting facts about the character from our reading; organizing them by numbering them in the order we would write them.  For the purpose of this activity, we were all writing about the same character.

         Once kids had organized their data, I sent them off to try their hand at writing the paragraph.  They were thrilled when they realized that the writing part was soooo much easier if you had prepared the list and put numbers next to it – all they had to do was turn the jotted notes into actual sentences.  As their writing continued, they felt better and better.

They found two partners to share out with

         Since we had time left over before the bell rang, I asked them to find two partners and share out their work.   I didn’t think this was going to be particularly powerful, since everyone was using essentially the same facts about the same character.  But even in a demanding classroom there are those dead moments when things have gone faster than you’d anticipated, and there’s still instructional time left. 

         Boy, was I wrong

         Within about 7 minutes, every single one of my students was back at his or her desk, writing furiously.    As I passed by him, Robert raised his head and asked “Is it ok if I write more?  I read what Drew wrote and I realized I had more to say.”

         Was it okay if he wrote more?  I gave him the “DUH” look and a thumbs up.

         At the other end of the room, Antonio was reading his own piece, pausing to think, and then drawing arrows down to free lines on the page and adding more sentences.  “I forgot that I could write about an inference I have about the character,” he said.  “That’s what James did.” 

         Now, we all know of groups of kids with limited independent thinking skills whose interaction with the work of their peers pretty much involves copying each other, or copying off each other.   In that stage of the learning process, peer sharing is still valuable, but perhaps in a different format.  (For example, showing the whole class one student’s work at a time on the document camera and having discussions as a group about the writing often works to show kids that many styles of writing are good writing, or how one of the students handled a particularly difficult writing task.)

My guidance wasn’t needed! 

         In this case, it was perfectly fine to allow the kids unstructured time to gather in small groups and share out without my participation or direction.

         This worked because the kids are confident in their ability to learn and to improve, and their understanding that opportunities to enhance their skills exist all over the place.  They trust one another and allow themselves to be inspired by each other in ways that teachers cannot emulate. 

         In a demanding classroom, the kids sometimes demand more intellectual work of one another than the teacher!

demanding classroom · high expectations · learning disabled · peer inspiration · peer sharing · Reading · response · rigor · rigorous instruction · Sara Finegan · special education · standards · Writing

By Sara Finegan

         In a demanding classroom, student work isn’t just the work they produce themselves, but also their  thinking and talking about other people’s work.  If our students aren’t able to evaluate the job that others are doing, they won’t be able to discern the quality of their own work, and make the appropriate adjustements.

         In my classroom, students know what constitutes a Proficient Level job on any given assignment.  (In California, achievement is based on the following levels:  Proficient, which indicates mastery, Advanced, which indicates that the work is too easy for the student, Basic, which is the minimal standard of competence, Below Basic, and Far Below Basic.) 

         My students are always aiming for Proficiency Level in their work and that is the standard upon which we base evaluations of our work.

         When my students engage in reading, writing, social studies, science, or math activities, they become quickly involved in helping to create a checklist or rubric for each type of work.

          We all know, for example, that a Proficient Level math assignment involving word problems has the following components:  the student has underlined the key vocabulary that tells us what type of operation to use; the student has drawn a diagram or picture of the problem; the student has created and solved a numerical equation, and the student has written the answer in a complete sentence.

         When assignments are completed, other students go over the work using the checklist we’ve created and determines which of the components are present and which are missing.  It’s a quick and easy way for both the worker and the evaluator to get a picture of how close to Proficient Level the work is.  If the work has been done in class, the student has the opportunity to immediately add in missing components.  If the work was done at home, it is sent back to be done as additional homework.

This practice can be done with almost any grade and competency level.  In younger kids, perhaps the checklist has clip art and just a few words for each item to be evaluated.  I’ve also seen instances where the teacher prepares a model assignment and highlights the required features, so that student graders can easily see and compare student work to the standard. 

         I usually type up the checklist on three columns of paper and cut them in strips.  My Peer Checkers staple the checklist to assignments as they are turned in.  We aim for a one-day turnaround. 

         Evaluation activities done by Peer Checkers takes several different forms.  When we are learning a new skill, my preferred method for going over work is have all students exchange work with someone else.  We each get a copy of the checklist and staple it to the work we are evaluating.

         Then, using the document camera, I will take a blank worksheet or one student’s work and we will go through the checklist together.  Students have the opportunity to ask me and the other students questions.

          This is particularly important in writing, science, or social studies worksheets where students use their own words to answer questions.  There are, of course, many ways of stating the answer, and the kids need to see that proficiency can look like several different ways.  They also need help sometimes to see that even though an answer may appear to be content-correct, if our standard for Proficiency is that the answer be written as a complete sentence, a one or two word answer, or one without a pronoun, will not match the expected level for work.  

Proficient, Basic, or Below Basic

         Once we’ve gone through the checklist, Peer Checkers will determine whether the answer is Proficient, Basic, or Below Basic (P, B, or BB) and mark it at the top of the paper before returning it to the original student for review. 

         At this point, we take a quick survey of the class to see how many achieved Proficiency for that assignment, and talk briefly about what the next steps might be to improve.  It’s important that each student be able to verbalize what he or she will be focusing on the next time around.

Later in the unit, as the kids are more competent and confident about the concepts or skills they are using, I will assign small groups of 2 or 3 students per day to evaluate assignments.  This is a classroom privilege, as it indicates our trust in them to objectively review the work, be supportive of others rather than tearing down, and notify us all when a celebration is in order.

          And celebrations are important.  Because we are all evaluating one another’s work, students are very aware of who is struggling and needs support, and who has surmounted an obstacle and needs recognition.  Our class Celebrations Committee keeps track of those sorts of things and provides peer mentoring and extra help as well as notifying me that it’s time to bake cupcakes or dig out the dance cds.

         The benefits of these systems are many.  Kids see numerous examples of the type of work they and others are doing, and have ownership of their work product.  They have a yardstick by which to measure their progress and immediate feedback, quite often, about their product.  Grading in this way helps the kids see what things they need to do to improve in a safe and inspiring way.

         When our grading process is a mystery to students, they become dependent on our feedback for their work.  The longer they remain dependent on our valuation of what they do, the more difficult it is for them to develop an objective internal measure of themselves. 

         If we involve them in the standards-setting, support them in the evaluation process, and keep challenging them to do better, they will take on more responsibility for their own work and learning.  They also will develop the confidence that they can achieve high things.

         This process also helps me as a teacher.  When we are all looking at student work and measuring progress in this fashion against a pre-determined standard, I can easily see when it is time to design a new or better intervention to boost skills that aren’t moving up the ladder towards Proficiency.

         I often think I’ve done a terrific job teaching a lesson and go home celebrating the fact that ‘everyone seems to be getting it’, only to discover over the course of the next few days that actually, they did not get it, or if they did, it didn’t stick.  At that point I can step back and rethink how I teach that skill, and try again. 

We never lower the bar, we re-teach

         It’s important to remember that we are never going to compromise the standard of Proficiency.  When kids aren’t meeting the mark, it’s cause for more practice and re-teaching, not lowering the bar.  We’re pushing each other up, not pulling the standard down.

          To begin to incorporate student evaluation of the work of others and their own work, you need to make sure everyone in the classroom knows what the standards are for each type of assignment.

         This happens naturally if you spend just a little time working with the kids to go over the components of a good example of any type of assignment.  I do a lot of charting in my class, with step-by-step procedures for most new skills and types of assignments.  We use those charts to create a new chart called “What does a Proficient Level ______ look like?”  The kids participate in making a list of the features or components of the assignment, and we keep it visible in the room as we work.

         I also will type up a copy of the chart to paste into student journals or folders.  There’s no point in assigning kids home practice if they can’t remember when they get there what their practice is supposed to look like. 

          So what happens with all of this involvement in one another’s work?  Well, in a demanding classroom, students are engaged in one another’s work in a positive way, they internalize expectations and quality standards, and they know what they need to do to improve.  There is less focus on what they can’t do and far more on what the next steps are along the road to mastery. 

         And that makes all the difference in the struggle to learn.

checklists · demanding classroom · high expectations · learning disabled · peer evaluations · proficiency · rigor · rigorous instruction · rubrics · Sara Finegan · special education · standards

By Sara Finegan

          My colleague Colleen hates word walls and recently told our principal that she refuses to have one anymore.  What bothers her about word walls is the discrepency between the amount of time and energy she devotes to creating one and the amount of time and energy used by students when they are there. 

          As Colleen points out, there’s something incredibly irritating about a kid in June, who’s known about the existence of the word wall since October and still asks the teacher how to spell one of the words that is RIGHT THERE, not 10 feet away!

         I agree.  If the purpose of a word wall is to create a visible list of words to use for spelling, I want nothing to do with it.  In my classroom, we post several different kinds of words, for several different uses.

Sight Words 

         One of the first lists of words you will find in my classroom are the month’s expected sight words.  The words are some years written individually on index cards and some years typed onto colored paper, taped (blue painters tape, sticks well, won’t leave residue when removed) on our cupboard doors. 

          The kids keep each month’s list of sight words in a notebook as well, but we like a big list to be visible in the classroom for partners to go read during free or unstructured time. 

Tip:  I create a list of approximately 80 words per month for the kids to learn.  They are multi-syllabic words, and usually all fit into a phonological pattern – October’s words this year, for example, all use the “e” sounds, both long and short.  Every student tries to learn 20 of the words per week, so that by the end of the month, any kid in my classroom can walk up to the word wall and quickly read off every single one.

          Several years ago, I became frustrated by the fact that although I was teaching powerful vocabulary, my students weren’t using it, or if they were, they were  using it awkwardly.  After about a  month of gnashing my teeth and lecturing my kids about their lack of attention to my teaching, I stepped back and began to observe how they did use language in both written and oral expression.

         Turned out, although they knew the words if they saw them in text, they didn’t know how to use them on their own.   It’s  one thing to recognize a word; it’s quite another to retrieve it and  apply it in speech.

          In order for a student with special needs to be able to  use the vocabulary I teach, they need to be able to have a context.  And that is what led to the second kind of word wall you might find in my classroom.

Words in Context

         When I create a context-based word wall, I am setting up a system for kids to be able to see and practice the use of the words.  This kind of word wall will group words by category or topic, rather than in alphabetical order or by grammatical form.  Thus, you might find the following word groupings:

 Synonyms and Precise Choices 

We all know how difficult it can be to direct kids away from what I call “cotton ball words,” by which I mean the soft, fluffy, and really imprecise vocabulary they so willingly employ in speech and writing:  words like “stuff”, “things”, “had”, “was”, “can”, “went”. 

         When we teach students that the use of precise language to convey ideas demonstrates intelligence and proficiency, we cannot expect them to be immediately able to retrieve the more powerful nouns and verbs we’d like them to be using.   We have to show them their choices.

          Thus, another type of word wall is one which is developed over time in the classroom, and customized based on the needs you see in your students.  This wall of words will contain a topic heading and a list of words that can be  used.  For example, “Say”:

          Or, we might have an entire section about “getting from one place to another quickly,” that has words such as:  gallop,  slide, run, trot,  jog, race, fly, canter, zip, skate, roll.  Or perhaps we need to use words that are more interesting than “good”, so we have a list that contains these words:  excellent, fabulous, wonderful, terrific, lovely, magnificent, beautiful, fresh, tasty, sweet.

          Now, Colleen’s complaint can still be repeated with these kinds of word walls.   A list of words in and of itself is not going to lead to use or knowledge.  But if we use the word wall regularly, so will the kids. 

We Model How to Use the Wall

           Kids are not as likely to look to a list of words for spelling help when they can just as easily ask someone.  But they are likely to look to a list of words for vocabulary choices if we model how it’s done and get them in the habit. 

           When we are talking or writing, I will frequently pause as though I can’t think of a word.  I use my “teacher is puzzled” face, and tell the kids I’m having trouble thinking of the right way to say something.  They are always willing to help. 

            If I can describe to my students the kind of word I need, they will almost invariably go to the word wall in context and help me find one.  Thus, for example: 

• If I say “well, I want a word that shows how the Egyptian farmers made canals,” more than one student will glance at the wall and yell out “dug!” or “excavated!”
• If I indicate that I’m looking for a precise way to describe the kind of person Draco Malfoy is, I’ll get plenty of offers of “evil”, “nasty”, “cruel”, and “viscious”.
• And if I say I don’t want to repeat the word “important” in a paragraph, someone will help me find “essential” or “crucial”.

         Once we get kids in the habit of looking to word walls for choices, they are far more likely to use them in their partner and independent work.

          Of course, you just KNOW they will still ask you how to spell them!

demanding classroom · high expectations · learning disabled · modeling · rigor · rigorous instruction · Sara Finegan · sight words · special education · standards · synonyms · vocabulary · word wall

By Sara Finegan

         One of my ongoing beefs with our math textbooks is that they don’t provide enough problems for the kids to practice with. 

          For years, I’ve been writing my own math worksheets and developing my own list of math problems for the kids to attack each day.  It’s time-consuming, but it also is a valuable part of my instruction, because, now that I’ve developed fluency in the task, it’s easy for me to create a set of practice problems that addresses exactly what task the kids are struggling with at any given time.

         And that is what “rinse and repeat” is all about for me.  

          My students do more math problems, more writing activities, and more different kinds of reading tasks per day than most kids do at our school.  They have to, because they know, and I know, that for them, mastery of new skills requires 20 times more practice than other kids. 

Pacing of instruction 

           Although I promote the idea of aiming high and moving the kids upwards from wherever they are, I refuse to move too quickly, because that will defeat the entire purpose of instruction in a demanding classroom.  Likewise, I don’t want to go too slowly, because I don’t want the kids to become too comfortable and complacent about learning.  We teachers have to find exactly the right balance for our group of kids – and that will change from year to year and also from subject area to subject area.

         Thus, when we learn a new math skill, I am not going to rely on the 25 problems in the math book.  My kids will use the skill 50 times in the classroom, and probably have another 20 problems for homework. 

         The more they repeat an action, whether it be identifying the setting in a story or decomposing a number in order to multiply it more easily, the more fluent they become, the more the concept is embedded in their minds, the more easily they will be able to retrieve it in the future a the need arises.

         Now, this doesn’t mean that my students are all going to stay at their desks and do worksheets all of the class period.    I want them to be active learners, and that means I can’t let them get stuck in a dull routine where everything becomes by rote.

Practice in a variety of ways

           Opportunities for practice need to be varied in nature, size, and extent.  Identifying the setting in a story can be done with a partner in a book talk, in a guided group, in a multiple choice worksheet, with a matching game, and in writing journals. 

         Solving math problems can be done on the class white board, in individual white board activities, worksheets, using manipulatives at a table, and by teaching someone else.  All of those can be done during the day, or separated out over the course of several days. 

         This year, I’ve been working with my students on writing daily responses to independent reading in journals every night at home.  Each part of a reading response needs to be taught separately, and practiced repeatedly until the student is able to perform the task independently.  

Guided writing of a paragraph describing a character

          On Friday, I taught the kids in a guided writing activity how to write a paragraph describing a character.  Their weekend homework calls for them to do at least one more before Monday:  I have no expectations that the results will be exemplary, but they will tell me what I need to emphasize in subsequent lesson and practices. 

            We will probably do at least two more guided writing activities on this very topic, followed by some partner writes, and, by Friday, the kids will be able to work on independent writing of character descriptions with a minimal level of  intervention from me and our aide.  Even then, the kids will need to practice this type of writing activity for at least a month before it becomes automatic.  

           In the meantime, I’m not going to lower my expectations or require less than excellent work from my kids.  Each day, we’ll go over some examples of their work, and together, as a group, determine what could be improved, what is missing, or what the student forgot to do.  (example:  Jay forgot to number his list of facts in the order that makes most sense; Roberto didn’t combine two facts in each sentence to form complex sentences; Darren’s paragraph reads like a list rather than a thoughtful description – he needs to use more powerful vocabulary, and a better voice). 

         There’s no shame in not meeting the standards; there is always an emphasis on doing better the next time.

 Lather, rinse,  repeat.  And repeat.  Again.

demanding classroom · high expectations · learning disabled · math practice · reading response · rigor · rigorous instruction · Sara Finegan · special education · standards