Using Gantt Charts to Visualize Your Class Throughout the School Year

It's a new school year! Do you know what you're teaching in May?

I am very interested in the world of capital-p “Productivity,” and I read and listen to (what some might consider) an embarrassingly large amount of content relating to personal productivity and efficiency. One tool that consistently crops up in discussions around productivity, and the one that has served me and my students the most (though they don’t realize it), comes from the world of project management and is known as the Gantt chart.

Gantt charts, at their most basic, plot vertical lists of tasks along a horizontal chart showing the progression of time, giving a visual representation of how a project will unfold over the course of days, weeks, or months.

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A Gantt chart of my Unit 1, plotting the unit's 11 lessons along the days/dates between the last week of August and the first week of October

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I’ve been plotting my lessons out using Gantt charts for years now, a practice I started on paper. Every August, I would sit down for an hour or two and write the ten months of the school year along the top of a horizontal page, then list the six units I teach along the left side, and draw a box alongside each unit under the weeks I planned to teach them. It helped to see the scope of my entire year, and it also helped me to work around major disruptions, like Winter and Spring break and statewide testing.

While this was a useful exercise for planning, there were two major drawbacks to writing these charts on paper: first, there was no way to adjust the chart if students needed more time in a unit, or if there were snow days. Second, I felt locked into my plan from the start of the year, and anytime I wanted to do something different (responsive teaching means integrating current events, or in my case new album releases, into your class tomorrow).

So, for the past three years, I’ve been using a program called Merlin Project Express (I have it as a part of the spectacular app subscription service Setapp, which I highly recommend), which is a Gantt-charting powerhouse. I probably only use 10% of its features (leave the rest for people who do this for a living), but it helps me keep track of where I am supposed to be in a unit, and how changes I make now will affect the rest of the year.

The first advantage of using software rather than paper is that Merlin Project Express lets me be much more granular, planning by the day rather than by weeks. My classes only meet twice a week (Monday/Wednesday or Tuesday/Thursday, with Fridays having a monthly rotation that I just use for extra work time), so in Merlin I can set my working days to only be on M/W or Tu/Th, and it will only count those days, skipping over the rest, as it plots my lessons.

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The lessons in my Gantt chart skip over days that aren’t marked as “Work Days,” so I only make Monday and Wednesday available for my classes that only meet on those days, and vice versa for my Tuesday/Thursday classes. The white columns on the Gantt charts above reflect these Regular Hours settings, and all days not set here are marked as unavailable, and the Gantt chart skips over them as it plots my lessons

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Similarly, I can enter holidays in the global calendar, and it will skip over those days on the Gantt chart too:

Merlin Project Express also skips over days marked as holidays (which it calls "exceptions"), even if they fall on work days - it marks them unavailable just like non-work days. I set the holidays in one document with the work days on M/W, then I just copy the document, duplicating the units and lessons as well as the holiday calendar, and then I just change the work days to Tu/Th. This way, my plans reflect the actual meetings of my class

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The second advantage of software is that I can change the amount of time or the day on which I plan to teach a lesson, and if I set up dependencies between my lessons (and units), the entire Gantt chart will adjust itself accordingly. This makes it possible to teach responsively - giving my students more time on a lesson by adding another day when they need it or even adding a whole separate lesson into the sequence - while seeing the effect this will have on my plan for the entire rest of the school year. If I extend a one-day lesson to last two days, Merlin will push out all subsequent lessons by one available day, skipping over any non-work days or days I set as holidays.

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You need to set up "dependencies" between your lessons or your Gantt chart will show all of them being taught on the same day - if you do set the dependencies, though, they'll distribute themselves automatically based on their length (which I set to one day, usually) and the available days on your calendar

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Extending a lesson by a day in Merlin shifts all subsequent lessons over by one allowed day, skipping over non-work days and holidays

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These Gantt charts have been incredibly helpful for me in estimating how long my units should take (which is always, without fail, longer than I expect). They prove their value to me each week as I check my progress, orient myself in terms of my time frames, and make adjustments as needed. Every time I extend a lesson, I push the rest of the year out, going past the end of the school year, which means I need to pare down my upcoming units, remove lessons, or skip over them and make them “aspire-to-do” activities for students to do on their own time. This perspective is incredibly useful in September and October, and it helps me finish out the year without feeling rushed in May and June, as I've had my eye on those months for the entire school year (well, with the computer's help).

There are many Project Management and Gantt Charting applications out there; again I use Merlin Project Express because I get it for "free" with Setapp, but there is also the free and open-source Project Libre, the ridiculously-priced-but-possibly-available-if-your-school-has-a-Microsoft-subscription Microsoft Project, and there is the polished and macOS/iOS exclusive Omniplan, among others. I strongly encourage you to try one of these out, plot out your units and lessons, and see how the school year calendar will affect your plans. It is both illuminating and functional, and absolutely worth the time invested!

Diving Further into Data-Based Teaching: Elapsed Time Since A Student’s Last Submission

TL;DR: I discovered how to use my Google Sheets pacing tracker to monitor how long it's been since a student's last submission! You can check out (and even make a copy of) the fully-functioning spreadsheet here, or you can read on if you want more detail on how this works and some context as to why I wanted this feature and how I use it.

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Lately I've been thinking about better ways to keep students accountable while also keeping my class (and my demeanor) as friendly and welcoming as possible. The more objective data I keep, the more I can make judgement-free assessments of my students. All this has me thinking about what data I keep (special thanks to Emily Johb for getting the wheels turning on this on Episode 75 of the MCP Podcast), and what sorts of data-based thresholds I'll use to trigger certain actions (like targeted interventions, scheduling in-class checkins, parent contact, requesting that a student attend tutoring, et cetera).

Recently, a new data point occurred to me: it would be useful to keep track of how much time has passed since a students' latest submission. As more and more time passes since a student's most recent submission, it is increasingly apparent that this student is becoming disengaged, and keeping tabs not only on their overall progress but also on the consistency with which they make progress has really helped me identify students who were slipping through the cracks.

Now, I don't have the bandwidth to track these times myself (with the number of students I teach, manually noting the date each time I review a submission feels like a burden), so I started poking around in Google Sheets to see if there was a formula that would do it for me.

What I wanted was a cell that would automatically show the date on which I last updated the a specific row in my tracker, so any completed mastery check that I checked off by a student's name would cause this cell to update with the current date (i.e., the date of the submission), but if a day passed without any updates to the row, the cell would not change - the cell would always show the date of the most recent submission. I could then use date math formulas to subtract that date from today's date and fill another cell with the difference - the number of days since the student's previous submission.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any built-in formula that perpetually monitors one row and update itself with the date of most recent change to that row. I did, however, find this video that explains how to use Google Scripts (from within Google Sheets) to create a Javascript applet that does.

Frankly, this is way over my head - I can't say I fully understand what's happening here (and I certainly couldn't have come up with this myself), but I tried it out on some mockup spreadsheets (which are linked below), and it does seem to work solidly (and, it's worth pointing out, I feel confident enough in my understanding of the Javascript to conclude that there's no malicious code or anything that would compromise the privacy of the spreadsheet).

Once the applet was in place, I was able to use the date math formulas. In one column, I used the =today() formula to display the current date, and in the next column over I used the =days() formula to subtract the latest submission date from today's date, which gives me the number of days since the last submission. Then I used conditional formatting to flag any students who haven't submitted a lesson in five days or more (for some teachers, that number may seem quite high, but keep in mind that I only see my students twice a week - five days is not an unreasonable lapse between submissions if I don't see a class from Wednesday until the following Monday). It works!

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If this interests you, you can make a copy of this mockup pacing tracker and try it out (here's the link again) - having already written up the steps (which are below), I can tell you that it's rather involved, and the mockup already works, so you can just make a copy. However, if you're technologically inclined and want to try it in your own sheets-based progress tracker, here are the steps:

1. Create three new blank columns, titled something like "Latest Submission" "Today" and "Elapsed Time"

2. In the Extensions menu, select Apps Script.

Change the text on Line 1 "myFunction()" to read "onEdit(e)" (don't change anything else). Then, copy this code into the editor on line 2 (in between the curly { } brackets):

3. In the editor, note the two instances of "XX." Change the first one to the name of the specific sheet (the name in the little tab at the bottom of Sheets) that contains your three columns. Change the second "XX" to the index of the "Latest Submission" column. If it's Column A, use the number 1. If it's Column G, use the number 5. Mine was Column Y, so I used 25.

If you have multiple sub-sheets, just copy and paste the "if" statement of the code again in the editor (not the "var" statement), and update the name of the sheet in all subsequent instances. Save again.

Back in the spreadsheet, you should now see today's date appear in this column in any row that you update! The hard part is over.

4. In the first row of the "Today" column, type =today(), then corner-drag this formula to every row with a student's progress (i.e., any row in which you want to calculate elapsed time).

5. In the first row of the "Elapsed Time" column, type =days( and click the "Today" cell, then click the "Date of Most Recent Submission" cell, then close the parentheses. Think of it as a subtraction - today's date minus the most recent submission equals the difference, or elapsed time. As an example, if your "Last Submission" is in the Y column, "Today" in the Z column, and you're calculating elapsed time in the AA column, the formula for the first row should read =days(Z1, Y1), and when you hit Enter, it should display the elapsed time.

6. If you want to, you can apply conditional formatting to your "Elapsed Time" column to highlight students who haven't submitted any work in several days.

One thing to watch out for is that some of your "Date Since Last Submission" cells may be blank (if you only just implemented this, and some students haven't submitted any lessons since you activated the applet, no date will display until they do). In this case, I found that the elapsed time displayed as 44,609 days, which, as of the date on which I'm writing this, means that this student submitted their last assignment on January 1st, 1900, which must be what Google Sheets considers the beginning of time.

Also, the automated calculation looks at any and all updates you make to the row, meaning that it doesn't differentiate between an update showing that the student demonstrated mastery and an update showing that the student needs to revise. My priority, however, is to make sure kids are keeping on top of their lessons - as long as they're submitting work consistently, I can use other data (and teaching strategies) to make sure they're revising and actually learning the lessons.

Those issues aside, though, after a few days of submissions from most students, the "Elapsed Time" column should quickly show an accurate readout of the days since each of your students has submitted work. When that number gets too high, you know it's time to kick into gear and use those teacher tricks - conference with the student, reteach, contact home, etc.

I've really been liking this metric of elapsed time since a submission - it's one thing to tell a student "you only have two weeks to complete four lessons," but it carries a little more weight to say "you only have two weeks to complete four lessons, and you haven't completed any lessons for the past seven days!" I encourage you to give it a try! If you think of other data points that would be good to track, I'd love to hear about them and see if I could find a way to automate them into this tracker.

var range = e.range;
var spreadSheet = e.source;
var sheetName = spreadSheet.getActiveSheet().getName();
var row = range.getRow();

if(sheetName == 'XX')
{
var new_date = new Date();
spreadSheet.getActiveSheet().getRange(row,XX).setValue(new_date).setNumberFormat("MM/dd");
}

3. In the editor, note the two instances of "XX." Change the first one to the name of the specific sheet (the name in the little tab at the bottom of Sheets) that contains your three columns. Change the second "XX" to the index of the "Latest Submission" column. If it's Column A, use the number 1. If it's Column G, use the number 5. Mine was Column Y, so I used 25.

If you have multiple sub-sheets, just copy and paste the "if" statement of the code again in the editor (not the "var" statement), and update the name of the sheet in all subsequent instances. Save again.

Back in the spreadsheet, you should now see today's date appear in this column in any row that you update! The hard part is over.

4. In the first row of the "Today" column, type =today(), then corner-drag this formula to every row with a student's progress (i.e., any row in which you want to calculate elapsed time).

5. In the first row of the "Elapsed Time" column, type =days( and click the "Today" cell, then click the "Date of Most Recent Submission" cell, then close the parentheses. Think of it as a subtraction - today's date minus the most recent submission equals the difference, or elapsed time. As an example, if your "Last Submission" is in the Y column, "Today" in the Z column, and you're calculating elapsed time in the AA column, the formula for the first row should read =days(Z1, Y1), and when you hit Enter, it should display the elapsed time.

6. If you want to, you can apply conditional formatting to your "Elapsed Time" column to highlight students who haven't submitted any work in several days.

One thing to watch out for is that some of your "Date Since Last Submission" cells may be blank (if you only just implemented this, and some students haven't submitted any lessons since you activated the applet, no date will display until they do). In this case, I found that the elapsed time displayed as 44,609 days, which, as of the date on which I'm writing this, means that this student submitted their last assignment on January 1st, 1900, which must be what Google Sheets considers the beginning of time.

Also, the automated calculation looks at any and all updates you make to the row, meaning that it doesn't differentiate between an update showing that the student demonstrated mastery and an update showing that the student needs to revise. My priority, however, is to make sure kids are keeping on top of their lessons - as long as they're submitting work consistently, I can use other data (and teaching strategies) to make sure they're revising and actually learning the lessons.

Those issues aside, though, after a few days of submissions from most students, the "Elapsed Time" column should quickly show an accurate readout of the days since each of your students has submitted work. When that number gets too high, you know it's time to kick into gear and use those teacher tricks - conference with the student, reteach, contact home, etc.

I've really been liking this metric of elapsed time since a submission - it's one thing to tell a student "you only have two weeks to complete four lessons," but it carries a little more weight to say "you only have two weeks to complete four lessons, and you haven't completed any lessons for the past seven days!" I encourage you to give it a try! If you think of other data points that would be good to track, I'd love to hear about them and see if I could find a way to automate them into this tracker.

Google Classroom Tip: Using Grade Categories to Display Lesson Classifications

... and we're back - again!

Part One, In Which I Explain My Absence from the Blog:

I have to confess that the first semester of this school year has completely exceeded both my expectations for just how stressful, challenging, and unmanageable a semester could be, and my personal threshold for accomplishing anything besides making my way to school, working with kids, teaching them, and additionally helping them navigate the constant changes that uproot their routines and radically disrupt their sense of what is normal and constant (room changes, schedule changes, switching between in-person and virtual, teacher changes, daily subs, getting sick, staying healthy, all of it). So I haven't had it in me to sit down and write much.

But, behind the scenes, the heart is still beating here at LTT, and I've got a few things in the works, not the least of which is the YAMM tutorial which I hoped to finish over the summer, then hoped to finish during the first semester, and now intend to finish by the end of the school year. I have other projects in the works as well.

However, I can no longer forgive myself for neglecting the regular blog posts, so I decided to put up a quick tech tip (low effort, but high reward!) for those teachers using Google Classroom.

Part The Rest: Using Google Classroom's Grade Categories to Display Lesson Classifications

If you're familiar with Modern Classrooms' approach to classifying lessons as Must-Do, Should-Do, and Aspire-To-Do (on which I've written and hosted an entire episode of the MCP Podcast), you know that the "optional" lessons can and should still be included and presented to students who may want to deepen their understanding, but with the option to skip over them if they feel overwhelmed or want to prioritize work for other classes at the moment. If you're implementing a structure of Must-Do's vs. Could-Do's like this, it's important to make it as obvious as possible to students, who deserve to know what work they should prioritize (and which work they can deprioritize) without having to speak with their teacher.

Google Classroom has a feature called "Grade Categories" that ostensibly serves to automate point values for certain assignments (and, I believe, allows for weighting). However, back in the summer of 2020, a teacher and MCP community member on Slack pointed out another very cool feature of the Grade Categories (which she discovered in this video): when assigned, they appear in an otherwise empty spot on the Classwork page right next to the assignment post, and in a slightly different font and color to boot, so they stand out. A more obvious visual there could not be!

I started implementing this immediately, and I thought I'd share it here as well, as it's become an integral part of my workflow - every post in my Google Classroom has one of these labels.

To enable them, head to the Settings page for your Google Classroom and scroll to the bottom where you'll find the Grading settings. Here you can create your Grade Categories - mine are "Must Do" and "Aspire To Do."

You can set a default grade for each of these categories (I set mine to 1, since all of my mastery checks require 100% mastery, and this is a nice little automation that saves me a few clicks and keystrokes when I create my assignments), but you don't need to set this default, and you can also override it and change the point value of assignments when you create them.

Then, when you create an assignment, you can select one of the grade categories, and its name appears in a very obvious spot on the post itself. If you do this for all of your assignments, your students can easily see at a glance which assignments they must prioritize.

I don't know if Canvas, Schoology, or other LMS's have a similar feature to this (if you use an LMS besides Google Classroom and it has something like this, I'd love to hear hear about it - let me know at zach@learningtoteach.co!). But if you do use Google Classroom, you might want give this a try!

You Should Be Using Instructional Videos, and You Can Start Today

... and, we're back!

After a summer hiatus, I'm back in the saddle and ready to go here on Learning to Teach. The YAMM/Mail Merge tutorial is coming along (I promise), and I have tons of new ideas and topics I'll be exploring here on the blog. I'm also, like many teachers, back in a school building for the first time in nearly two years, and as I ponder the vast uncertainty that shrouds nearly everything about this coming year, I'm finding a surprising amount of comfort in one of particular teaching strategy that I have been honing over the past two years: instructional videos.

Instructional videos have many, many benefits for teachers and students, but as I've discussed on multiple episodes of the Modern Classrooms Podcast, they truly proved their worth to me in March of 2020 when school suddenly shut down, and we abruptly (and with almost no preparation) shifted into distance learning. For those of us using instructional videos, this transition was significantly smoother (though not entirely without challenges, of course) because we did not have to change our instructional routines at all - we were under much less pressure to learn to teach over Zoom, and students already knew how to access and learn from our video lessons. And I, like many other teachers, underwent further transitions as well - back into the building, back into remote, and then into hybrid, and so on - all of which were made simpler by the fact that my instructional modality did not change. Instructional videos were a constant in a sea of shifting practices - I'm comforted knowing that one of the most basic and essential elements of my teaching practice is robust and can withstand nearly any curveball that may find its way to the plate this year.

For those even remotely familiar with the Modern Classrooms Project, the notion of instructional videos should be a very familiar one; they in fact comprise the bulk of one of MCP's three foundational pillars, which is blended learning (the other two being student self-pacing and mastery-based assessment). However, after a summer of mentoring nearly 40 new Modern Classrooms educators, I know that there is quite a lot of apprehension around the idea of building (specifically recording and editing) instructional videos, and rolling them out.

I'm here to tell you: you can create an instructional video, and you can do it today.

In the first place, I have personally seen even the most reluctant, tech-hesitant teachers build high-quality instructional videos, so I know it can be done. More specifically, though, in my experience as a teacher mentor, there are three primary reasons that teachers are apprehensive about instructional videos, but each of them, I think, can be addressed by reframing the idea of what instructional videos are and shifting the mindset we bring to the process of creating them, which tends to focus on technical skills (editing, recording, etc) rather than pedagogy.

Apprehension #1: "It will take too long to plan, rehearse, record, and edit"

In fact, it should not take you any longer to plan and build your instructional video than it does a traditional lesson. Many people think that building an instructional video requires slick transitions, snappy editing, and recording over and over until you get a perfect take. We tend to become perniciously perfectionist with ourselves when we record our voices and faces, and we find ourselves wanting to produce a pristine specimen - but we can't possibly hold ourselves to these standards when we're live. Consider, the experience of a student when you deliver a live lecture - they'll hear you say "um" and "ah" countless times; you'll likely be interrupted; you'll likely make mistakes and have to correct yourself, and so on. Delivering a lecture to a group of 25 pre-teens is significantly harder than creating an instructional video, and if you can do that and make it engaging, your videos, with the same content and with fewer interruptions, will do just as good a job.

This comparison is a useful one, I think, because some teachers may forego instructional videos, and all of the benefits they bring, out of concern over the fact that the video might not come out "perfectly." However, the alternative of reverting to traditional lectures doesn't result in "perfect" instructional delivery either, so we needn't hold ourselves to that standard - a simple instructional video recorded in a single take will suffice. We don't need to be professional videographers or produce professionally polished videos, and our students' learning will not be hindered by little mistakes or imperfections that would have happened in a live lecture anyway.

Apprehension #2: "I Don't Know How to Edit Video and I'm Bad at Tech"

A lot of teachers shy away from using instructional videos specifically because they're worried about the tech. While there certainly are some very complex and technically advanced video production applications out there, there are also some very, very simple ones (remember, we're not producing professional video here - perfection and polish aren't the goals, instruction is).

Screencastify has done some incredible work to become more accessible to teachers who just want to screen record quickly (Screencast-o-Matic is also very popular). Many of us are now familiar with virtual meeting platforms that allow for screensharing and recording (I developed this tutorial for Modern Classrooms on using Zoom to record instructional videos, but Hangouts and Teams also allow for screensharing and recording). You can even use your phone to record video (if you can deliver the lecture live to students, you can deliver it to your phone as well). Video production tech is only a barrier if you want to produce polished, professional videos - but again, that's not our goal.

Apprehension #3: Kids will always be on screens and I'll sacrifice the community I build in whole-group instruction"

Some teachers are concerned about the pedagogical shift from live instruction to asynchronous instructional videos. However, as I often remind teachers whom I mentor, instructional videos are only one of the many tools we can use to facilitate learning; we are still in control of how we run our classes, and making one or two instructional videos doesn't mean transitioning every aspect of your class into a virtual experience. Additionally, even if every lesson is taught via instructional video, this doesn't mean that we can't also conduct full-group activities, like critiques, socratic seminars, labs, etc.), nor that we make any changes to the tasks, activities, and other classwork we normally assign.

Also, and perhaps even more crucially, delivering brilliant lectures to silent, compliant students isn't (and shouldn't be) our primary job - content instruction is one of many jobs, and using instructional videos opens up opportunities to build relationships, spend quality time in small-groups or working 1-on-1 supporting students, and facilitate self-pacing. We've all been advised (and I believe we all aspire) not to be the "sage on the stage," and instructional videos quite literally allow us to step down from the stage and support students in a more tailored and flexible way.

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In a school year as uncertain as this one, I can't think of a better time for teachers to give instructional videos a try - but even putting aside the need to teach hybrid classes and the unsavory yet certainly possible return to remote learning, instructional videos allow us to streamline our content delivery and spend more time having meaningful interactions with our students - ultimately becoming the guide on the side we've always wanted to be.

My Take on Homework

My first year teaching Middle School left me with many questions that went something like "Do we really have to ..." or "Why do we do ... if everyone agrees it's not useful," or "Is this really the way this goes?" Now that I'm in my fifth year teaching, I feel a bit more confident taking a firmer stance against stale practices and a status quo that is clearly, demonstrably inequitable, and teaching in a way that is more responsive to what my students say and feel than it is deferential to the performative expectations of "good" teachers (which many agree aren't the best practices). As a result, I have many opinions about school that may seem controversial when viewed in relation to the traditional ideas of teaching we're all accustomed to, and one of them is that I am firmly against assigning homework (in the sense of work specifically designated to be completed outside of class).

I am against homework for a number of reasons, not limited to:

1. I believe that school should respect students' free time, simply because they deserve to have their free time respected, period. Kids deserve to play and do whatever they want as much as adults do (and many have other responsibilities). It is harmful to presume that our class is more important than their free time.
2. With regards to academic growth, my own experience tells me that true learning is most likely to occur when I am having a discussion with a student or a group during class, and while it's important to ensure our content is accessible to students who may miss in-person classes (for whatever reason), tacking on extra work feels inauthentic and less useful than finding ways to work directly with the kids to support their learning
3. We can use the already-preset blocks of class time to proactively teach students to better manage their time by compartmentalizing the work they need to do into their daily schedule. You do your math work during math class. You do your music work during music.
4. We can teach kids that, if they mismanage their time in class, the consequence is that their classwork becomes homework, and the lesson is very clear - you borrowed against your future free time by doing non-class activities during class (I myself will sometimes borrow against my future free time if I'm not feeling up to a task on a given day, but I do so knowingly; this is a type of reflective understanding I'm working to impart to my students).

I have never met a student who wanted more homework. Even students who enjoy doing schoolwork for it's own sake (and these students are clearly not the majority) aren't asking for more because they also have other things to do; they live a life of which school is only one part. As a parent myself, I want my daughter's afternoons and evenings free so we can spend time together.

When so many are in accordance in not liking something, it's often a cue that there may be an opportunity for critical reflection around whether that something is necessary. If an adult wouldn't appreciate being asked to do something, I can think of no reason why, as a society, we would decide to impose it on students. There are excellent ways to support students that are empathetic, welcoming, and strengthen their academic self-concept, but presuming to fill up their personal free time with more schoolwork sends the message that school is more important than whatever they want to do, which alienates students, silences their identities, and underplays (or overlooks) their out-of-school responsibilities.

As an adult who lives in a world of self-help books and advice on achieving and maintaining a solid "work-life balance," I know that we (adults) struggle to disentangle our jobs from our personal lives. Students are not exempt from being treated with basic human decency (i.e., respect for their free time) just by virtue of being students or children; if everyone agrees that something is not useful, the fact that school isn't a quote-unquote "job" doesn't justify forcing kids to do something no adult would tolerate. My hot take on this is that homework is conditioning our students to expect some of their non-school time to be taken up with extra schoolwork, which clearly sets up an antagonistic mindset toward school, and maybe even instills a sense that school should be the driving force in one's life and identity (even during free time), and that work is something that crosses personal boundaries - they will carry this mindset into their careers as adults, rather than learning the self-management and organizational skills we purport to teach them.

But putting aside what attitudes homework may or may not be subconsciously conditioning into our students, my primary concern is that homework continues to exist in a modern world where adults are striving to leave their work at work and enjoy their free time without anxiety or stress. I struggle to see why we would impose this anxiety and stress on our students, especially when there are opportunities for actively teaching time management skills by limiting the work in our class to our actual class period.

This is an opinion I hold strongly. I am interested to hear from teachers who do assign homework how they find it beneficial; but for my part, I currently see no benefit that could be gained in my class by sending extra work home with my students, and I do not intend to.

A Reminder About Classroom Culture

For several weeks now I've been planning a post on classroom culture, which is a pretty big topic on which I am admittedly not an expert. I'm reading and researching and will circle back to this in the future. But today, rather monumentally, my school began Hybrid learning, and it was my first day teaching in a physical classroom with students in over a year, and I was reminded of what it actually feels like to participate in a classroom culture, and the emotion and excitement of being there with students is still resonating with me.

My own understanding of a classroom culture grew out of an observation I made in my first year teaching, which was that each different group of students had a wildly different emotional "valence," or just a different feeling in the room. As a middle school teacher, I teach the same class to many different sections, and while I didn't personally change and neither did the curriculum, some of my sections were joyous, others were boisterous, others felt bored (or boring), and others downright spiteful. My ad-hoc take on this is that each individual in the room contributes to an overall group dynamic; I've seen the difference that adding or removing just one student can make in the way a group feels.

This feeling is what I mean when I talk about classroom culture. I do think it comes predominately from the diversity of personalities in a group of 20-25 people that become a small community over the ten months they spend together. However, I also think that one of our main roles as teachers is to ensure that community is one of kindness, respect, and safety, as well as one of academic rigor and curiosity. When students walk into my classroom, I want them to feel comfortable taking risks, asking questions, making mistakes, and also being themselves - I mean that in a very tangible way, referring to the actual feeling of walking into the room, into a space, and that's what I think classroom culture is.

Developing a culture in which students feel like they can learn and be themselves takes work and intentionality. On the other hand, anyone who's read my writing knows how strongly I feel that everything we do in the classroom should feel authentic and clearly contribute to whatever outcome it's in service of, and I feel awfully self-conscious standing in front of a group of kids and asking them to sit quietly while I lecture and explain to them how our community will run. Of course, I still recognize the importance of messaging and modeling the behavior of a respectful and mature participant in a strong classroom community. One of my biggest struggles as a teacher and a group leader has been balancing the authentic with the new, and finding the sweet spot in which a positive, productive, safe, and fun community can develop and thrive organically - and it continues to be a struggle for me, even today as I welcomed small groups of 12 kids into my undecorated classroom, I felt conflicted between pressuring students to finish their work (it was a graded final reflection assignment, a pretty big deal) and letting them live out in real life the relatively informal, open-chat community we've had on Zoom up to now. We can't decorate the walls because we share classrooms - it's fine this year, but the posters and record albums that go up on my walls are chosen with an eye toward the decolonization of the curriculum experienced by my students, and I chose very intentionally who is venerated and held up as a positive example, which also shapes the culture of my classroom.

Generally, I land on the side of "Relationships before Rigor" (a phrase I first heard from Brad Johnson and one that succinctly sums up just about everything I think about teaching). Today, I didn't sit them down and give them a long (or short) talk about how our class community would run now that some of us were in-person, because what matters most to me is that we maintain the really positive, cheerful but also productive community we've had up until now and that grew organically out of thousands of tiny interactions I've had with students and they've had with each other. I think some of my students were surprised that I wasn't more strict - that I didn't become angry when some people talked during work time, or that I engaged some of the seemingly unrelated questions that they saw other students asking me in a room that, I presume, they expected to feel much more locked-down socially. I could probably have done a better job keeping my students from distracting one another, but I followed up with them afterward and reached out to families as necessary (not that my room was in chaos, or even unproductive - actually, more students submitted complete assignments than any previous reflection we've done this school year, all of which were done virtually).

There's a lot we can do to shape our classroom culture, and I have more to say (and write) on this, and I will. But today, my first day back in a physical classroom in 14 months, was a reminder for me just how much it matters that we intentionally craft the emotional and social environment we want our students to walk (or log) into. It didn't go perfectly, but like I said, I'm still finding the balance.

How Dark Souls Taught me to Value All Learning, In and Out of School

Video games have always been a contentious topic; since time immemorial (or 1958), kids have been judged by their parents and teachers for wanting to play (and learn, and improve at) video games, and the debate rages on over whether or not video games can be an artistic medium (like books, movies, symphonies, and the other miscellaneous and somewhat insular media of "Fine Arts"). I myself feel strongly that yes, a video game can be a legitimate and meaningful artistic expression, certainly as much as any other medium. And furthermore, because they are interactive and require decision-making, skill, and critical thought, video games can inherently teach us lessons that we may not learn from passively consuming other media - lessons that teachers often try to shoehorn into their classes in ways that feel out of context for students who may be more apt to learn them (or may not even realize that they're learning them) in other, more familiar settings. To illustrate my point, I'd like to share my own experience with one particular video game (actually a series of games), the brainchild of director Hidetaka Miyazaki, the infamous and endlessly scrutinized Dark Souls.

The original Dark Souls, released in 2011.

I say infamous because the Souls games are notorious for their unforgiving difficulty. Just Google "Dark Souls Difficulty" - in a word cloud of the results you'd see "punishing," "too hard?" "extremely" and "brutal," stand out. Despite the frustration and immense challenge, players who enjoy these games (myself included) consider them to be pinnacles of the video-game medium: peerless masterpieces that have perfected a particular type of very difficult gameplay, and literary exemplars of unparalleled storytelling and world building (more on that shortly).

The reason so many of us enjoy this challenge (and the primary response to the argument that Dark Souls is too hard) is that by trying, over and over, to beat a tough area or boss, we gradually learn its mechanics and attack patterns, and eventually we can overcome the immense difficulty and beat it, which is one of the most viscerally satisfying experiences I've ever had while consuming media designed, ostensibly, for "entertainment."

But examine that point more closely - by learning the game's patterns and mastering certain skills, we achieve victory after having failed (many, many times, in some cases). In fact, it took all the failures, all the many deaths to the same boss, to learn how to beat it. The Souls community inducts new players by telling them to "git gud," because the games are designed in such a way that you really can't get past the tough parts without learning (presumably by dying - failing - several times). I think that the "git gud" loop, while rather snarky, in fact captures the essence of Carol Dweck's well-renowned growth mindset concept - a topic on which I have taught countless lessons to my students in a rather fruitless attempt to help them see failure as a learning opportunity.

The fundamentals of the growth mindset (in particular, openness to failure and the understanding that mastery requires effort - both of which lead to persistence in the face of challenge) are echoed in the "git gud" gameplay loop. Miyazaki himself lays it out for us in this 2011 interview on difficulty in the early Souls games: "The difficulty is high, but always achievable. Everyone can achieve without all that much technique – all you need to do is learn, from your deaths, how to overcome the difficulties." ¹

Playing Dark Souls - a game recommended to me, incidentally, by a student ² - I find myself literally acting out perseverance, patience, and openness to failure as a learning opportunity that I've been trying to teach my students all these years. This led me to ponder the experience of failure, patience, perseverance, and growth that my student probably had when she played Dark Souls, and became so enamored of it as to recommend it to me. Perhaps, I realized, rather than teaching the growth mindest from the front of the classroom without any context, it may be more productive to present these mindsets and habits of thought in school by connecting them with the non-academic learning experiences our students are already having.

This take isn't limited to the growth mindset, nor to Dark Souls. I would argue that Dark Souls is also worth considering as a piece of literature, a masterfully written story set in a fully-fleshed-out fantasy environment, beautifully told through prose as well as gameplay. Dark Souls is uniquely obtuse and cryptic in it how it presents its story, unlike most linear games that guide the player through the story checkpoints (much the way a book or movie lays out a story with a beginning, middle, and end). Instead, the main story of Dark Souls, its background lore, and even many of the actions required of the player are only revealed in optional conversations and in the descriptions of various items found in the world of the game.

In this way, the game encourages the player to compile information and connect many, many dots to understand the complexity and depth of the story, requiring interpretation, interpolation, analysis, and even speculation in order to piece together the central themes, the plot, and in some cases even what to do (there are several successful video series devoted to it, such as youtuber ENB's highly regarded "From the Dark," which dedicates nearly 40 hours of commentary to discussing how subtle details revealed in-game may hint at story elements left untold). If I were an English teacher, I would be overjoyed to see my students putting in the kind of critical and analytical thought I put into the story of Dark Souls - I had a field day browsing the Common Core standards for ELA and discovering how the same skills that go into literary analysis can be applied to uncovering the plot of Dark Souls.

Beyond Dark Souls, I think it's clear that the particular media a teacher chooses to teach skills or patterns of thought in his own class, unbelievably specific and limited to his own amassed experiences in the medium (however broad that may be), are not the only media upon which those skills and patterns of thought can be exercised. Beyond valuing student voice and honoring their preferences in media (which, of course, we should), we must also recognize that the type of thought they put into understanding the things they like (play, watch, listen to) can be equal in substance (if not downright identical) to the thinking skills we want them to apply in class. Our students are developing growth mindsets and critical and creative thinking skills (among other skills) every day, but they're doing it ways that we may miss if we lash ourselves too closely to the content we chose for our own classes and disregard the intellectual validity of the thought that goes into enjoying and engaging with other media or activities.

In forcing me to "git gud" - to fail, learn, and grow - Dark Souls reminded me that my students, like myself, are already developing growth mindsets and other thinking skills in contexts both entirely legitimate in their lives, yet entirely foreign to school. This is fantastic news, because it means they can exercise those same skills on the media we put in front of them. Alternatively (and maybe preferably), if we leave our curriculum open-ended enough, we (teachers) can support them as they practice and improve those skills in school by discussing or analyzing the very games, books, or music upon which they've honed them.

But first, we need to help students see this connection, to recognize these skills in themselves and practice applying them on diverse topics both in and out of school. This can only happen if we raise up and resonate those experiences in our classrooms and show our students that we value not only their interests, but the learning that they do while engaging with those interests. If we do, we can bolster their confidence and academic self-concept, so they can see school as a place to explore their curiosity and expand their intellect, no matter what form it takes.Every teacher wants her students to transfer skills and knowledge from the classroom to other walks of life and to see the relevance and benefit of what they learn in school, and what better way to do that than by showing our students that they already have these mindsets and supporting them as they develop them further, rather than trying to teach them in an experiential vacuum devoid of emotional resonance? Imagine if your teacher taught you by helping you persevere in Dark Souls while showing (teaching) you that you were developing a growth mindset by playing it! You'd certainly stop wondering about the point of school and what it will ever be good for.

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¹ Learning from deaths is so deeply woven into the gameplay design of Dark Souls that, if you play online, you can even see the places where other players have recently died in their games, and watch short clips of their actions leading up to their death to get a hint as to what may have caused it, and prepare accordingly.

² This student, it's worth noting, was a high school senior. While I'm generally in the pro-video-gaming camp overall, I do feel compelled to disclaim that Dark Souls is a relatively violent game, with a rating of "M" for "Mature." Even as a middle school teacher I hesitate to recommend or even discuss this game with my students, although I certainly wouldn't shut them down if they brought it up with me. I also don't think my argument here is contingent upon Dark Souls specifically, nor is it in any way wrapped up in the debate over whether violent video games are harmful for kids, although my positivity toward gaming in general may be tipping my hand with regard to that issue as well.

Automating Emails to Families with YAMM

Several weeks ago I published a post exploring the tasks teachers can effectively automate, and in the days after posting it I participated on an episode of the Modern Classrooms Podcast discussing strategies for managing grading in which we touched on the topic of parent communication. Looking back, I can't believe I overlooked parent communication in my automation post, and in particular the incredible mail merge tool I use, YAMM (Yet Another Mail Merge).

For those unfamiliar with mail merges, YAMM integrates with the Google Sheet I use to keep track of which lessons my students have completed, allowing me to send an email with text from one cell to an email address in another cell. The magic happens when YAMM replicates this action row by row, so for each student in my spreadsheet, a unique email is sent to their parents - their name is in Column A, the number of lessons they've completed is in Column B, and their parent email address(es) are in Column C, and YAMM goes down the list, sending emails to the parents that say "[Column A] has completed [Column B] lessons," filling in the template with each student and their completion. It took a bit of work to put the parent emails in and to write up an email draft, but that preliminary work was significantly less than the time it would take me to send an individual email to every parent even just once, and having set it up I can now easily repeat the mail merge weekly!

Sending a personalized email to 151 families is simple with YAMM - this is the entirety of its user interface!

YAMM checks nearly all of my boxes for a "good" automation:

• It allows me to quickly and easily complete a repetitive task only once, taking care of the repetitions for me (in this case, it sends an email to over 200 parents with a single click)
• It integrates with what I'm already using (Google Sheets, in this case)
• It saves me massive amounts of time (literally hours) requiring only a small investment of time on the front end to set it up
• The email is personalized, providing individualized information without asking parents to look up their own students' progress elsewhere (also, the email is technically sent by me, not by YAMM, so parents can reply to me directly)

YAMM has improved my parent communication dramatically, perhaps more than any other tool or strategy I've employed or been taught. Reaching out to families is such an important aspect of teaching other people's children, but it can be daunting or even intimidating for new teachers, especially when we have bad news. The families who receive automated emails from YAMM are under no impression that the message is personally written by me, but I would argue that this actually softens the blow of receiving bad news because it is objective, and parents are consistently appreciative of the bi-weekly progress reports I send telling them how their child is performing. And, because the information goes out to all parents, I can focus my efforts on more personalized communication with the parents of students who need more support, or send notes of congratulations to students who are excelling.

Several good things happen when I send out a mail merge. First, I quickly get back several replies from parents who simply thank me for the information, or let me know they'll talk with their child, or otherwise express their appreciation without asking me for anything more. Second, I get responses from parents who ask me how they can help, how they can engage with their child's learning in my class, and this allows me the opportunity to clarify what the student needs to do and to engage in dialog with families. And finally, in the one or two days after I send out a progress report with YAMM, I see a flurry of submissions - students who were behind work extra hard to catch up, while others go back and revise lessons they hadn't completed or made mistakes on. Some students even reach out to me to ask for help; whether they saw the report and were motivated to reach out themselves or were pressured by their parents doesn't matter to me - this level of engagement and buy-in with my class (triggered solely by the simple progress reports) is unprecedented for me, and I simply can't envision any possible way I could have achieved this level of frequent and consistent family communication (and the benefits that came with it) without automating the progress reports home.

Finally, the mere fact of generating these progress reports means that my pedagogy must be data-driven in order for there to be a spreadsheet from which to generate a progress report in the first place. I've written before about how I structure my gradebook as a progress tracker, but in addition to a strong pedagogical-philosophical approach to educational record-keeping, it also facilitates clear and objective progress reporting, without which my YAMM emails would be much more ambiguous and likely less useful.

YAMM, I should point out, is not free. I am fortunate that my school (a public charter school) pays for my subscription, and I think there's a pretty rock-solid argument to be made that it's worth the small investment, given the benefits. There are other mail merge options as well, although I am not familiar with them.

Reflecting on my own practice, it occurs to me that this automation has become such an integral part of my teaching workflow that I didn't even think to include it in my post on automation. But YAMM is such a simple tool that takes a task I would have to repeat literally hundreds of times and reduces it to a 5-minute task I can do almost mindlessly on a Friday afternoon. If there's interest I might make a tutorial - this is a practice I think teachers, particularly new teachers, would benefit from greatly.

Google Updates its Education Suite

Last week, Google announced a rebrand with some sweeping changes to its education-focused products, and as a teacher at a Google Suite school, my interest was piqued.

The changes to Google Classroom are presented, unsurprisingly, as a response to the needs of teachers and students working remotely, but I was a bit struck by the focus on monitoring engagement and analytics. I certainly won’t deny that engagement during the pandemic has decreased, but I also feel like the engagement (and disengagement) of my students is already apparent in the work they do (and don’t) complete, and I don’t need an algorithm or analytics to keep me apprised of who’s doing what. A strong, data-driven classroom approach provides that for me anyway (and, of course, I’m referring to the Modern Classrooms model, which allows me to keep tabs on all of my students and their progress myself).

I’m not opposed to increased data or data-based interventions in the classroom (on the contrary, I think data should drive everything we do in the classroom!), but I am a bit wary of the heavy focus on monitoring and oversight, which makes Google Classroom feel a little like “Big Brother,” and I’d rather see Google making smaller, more technical improvements to the platform.

To be sure, there do seem to be some important security updates and quality-of-life and feature improvements coming to Google Classroom, with a focus on 3rd-party integrations (with both teaching tools and SIS’s/gradebooks) and accessibility (the offline features in particular seem promising, and I hope the Android-based mobile submission and grading improvements find their way to iOS soon - the photo scanner seems very cool). I’m a bit surprised that we still can’t batch-edit assignments and questions (if I want to set the same due date on multiple assignments I have to change them one by one, rather than being able to change them all at once); perhaps this will come with the improvements later this year (this feature would be immensely more useful to me personally than the Rich Text options that were announced).

Still, my biggest takeaway from these updates, which appear to be motivated by feature requests and feedback from teachers and administrators, is that people seem to want more and more ways to monitor students and teachers, and I’m just not convinced that’s the best way to actually promote the engagement we want to see - it feels more reactive than proactive, and the implication is that students (and teachers) aren’t trustworthy and require vigilance. I’ll be curious to see how these features look and work in practice - I may be wrong, and they may provide useful analytics, gathered in a sensible and respectul ways. I only know what I read in the blog posts, and I didn’t attend the live sessions. But based on what I’ve read, I’d rather see updates and improvements to the platform and refinements to the already fully-featured educational suite than a push for increased monitoring and greater oversight.

Can Teachers Find A Better Term Than "Relationships?"

Teachers, especially new teachers, are bombarded with buzzwords, and perhaps the one that comes up the most is "relationships." I've heard the term at every PD I've ever attended; I myself use it liberally and even hosted an episode of the Modern Classrooms Podcast on the topic.

When I was a brand new teacher, this was one of the buzzwords I most struggled to decode and translate from theory into practice. As a pretty mediocre (to put it very, very kindly) first year teacher, I didn't really understand how I was expected to forge "authentic relationships" with over 180 different kids, many of whom really didn't like me. Relationships take time; they require trust and commitment from both parties, and being told to undertake that journey with 20 different young people at the same time, five times a day, while also teaching content, was not only daunting but also demoralizing as I constantly found myself grasping for control or getting into petty arguments with kids, utterly failing to develop anything resembling positive relationships.

I wonder if the term "relationships" is part of the problem here. I'm at a point in my career where I understand what is meant by that term, but I also remember the feeling of emotional overwhelm around how to build up so many relationships in such a short time, again and again, year after year. Perhaps the focus on the individual relationships between teacher and students has us missing the forest for the trees - some students will resist relationships with some adults, and this is something we can't control, so the term itself establishes a fail-state. What we can control, however, is our attitudes and the way we interact with our students in general, and we can measure our progress here by our own actions rather than staking our success (or failure) on the particular relationships we develop with each student.

The secret isn't in the development of the individual relationships themselves; it's in the mindsets, the attitudes, the way we respect our students and value their voices each day that can create an environment, a classroom culture of tolerance, empathy, and open-mindedness in which authentic relationships can be formed. I can't control who chooses to form a positive relationship with me, but I can control my attitude and broader approach to interacting with the young people who, for better or worse, learn from me as I model positivity and emotional maturity, and respond best, just like we all do, to kindness and warmth.

I've made relationship-building my central focus, and the defining aspect of my identity as a teacher, because I've seen how beneficial positive interactions with students can be (as well as the importance of modelling active listening and positive ways of dealing with disagreement). Kids seem to like me and my class, despite the fact that my curriculum is rigorous and my grading is unforgiving, which I think speaks to the incredible value of sheer, unrelenting kindness. This isn't something that comes intuitively to young teachers who just want to be popular. We all want our students to like us and our class, of course, but when we're more focused on getting our awesome content into the kids' brains than on hearing and valuing whatever is in those brains already, we wind up, despite our best intentions, grasping for straws amidst a large group of people who want remarkably little to do with us.

What shall our new buzzword be, then? What umbrella term can encompass those strong relationships we develop with kids but also the broader mindsets we adopt in order to transform our classrooms into positive environments where they can flourish? "Kindness" does the trick, but it doesn't have the same buzzword-worthy ring to it, since kindness is a virtue in all walks of life. But then again, our classrooms are no different from the rest of the world, and our students are just as deserving of kindness as anyone else in our lives. As we gather experience and learn to forge positive relationships with our students, perhaps we can broaden our horizon and take notice of how we're able to forge those relationships, and the conditions that make them possible, so that new teachers can better learn that kindness and respect should be a higher priority, a more central focus, than any individual relationship.

What Can Teachers Automate?

This post is shorter than my prior writing here, and won't be recorded as an audio podcast. I'll be putting out more of these shorter posts, but the longer posts with podcasts will continue as well!

In my personal search for ways to improve my productivity and focus as I integrate new and varied elements into my work life, such as mentoring and consulting with the Modern Classrooms Project, editing their podcast, and writing for this blog, I've been exploring ways to use technology to automate tasks that don't require my full, creative attention.

Teaching is a repetitive process - we plan, we teach, we assess, and we repeat this cycle ad nauseam, taking stock and making changes as necessary. In all three stages, there are clearly elements of the work that require us to think critically and creatively, which cannot be automated. Indeed, one big concern I have in the realm of Ed Tech is that a lot of teacher tools automate the wrong aspects of teaching, effectively removing the teacher from situations in which they really do belong, and nothing is more important to me than that my student facing materials (and my student facing self) be authentic and reasonable. The kinds of automation I'm after are much less flashy and much smaller in scope.

For instance, the process of planning follows nearly the same sequence for each unit (decide topic, research, design summatives, write objectives leading to summatives, create presentations for lessons on objectives, etc.), and therefore we can use templates to pre-populate both the materials we develop and the outline of the plans themselves. We complete the same tasks each time and can therefore reuse the same to-do's or checklists.

Our computers can remember and automatically generate these templates and checklists, saving us valuable time that we can spend actually researching and creating. My two most-used automations at the moment are an action I created using the Mac app Alfred to automatically copy a Google Slides template for a new lesson (it just automates the keyboard shortcuts to make a copy so I don't have to click through the menus), and a macro in the jack-of-all-trades app Keyboard Maestro (also Mac only) that sets up all the required materials for a new MCP Mentee (the document I'll use to give feedback, a dedicated folder for all their materials, and a checklist of every task I'll need to complete for that particular mentee) - all I have to do is type a short string ("set me up an MCP mentee" - it rhymes, and it's saved me hours). In both cases, I skip the overhead of setting anything up and just get right to work. An honorable mention goes to Text Expander, the phenomenal snippet expander I use constantly to save and deploy common written feedback (if I ever type the same sentence twice, it goes into Text Expander).

Automation has other benefits besides saving time, too. Filling in a template entails a much lesser cognitive burden than generating something creative from scratch. Staying consistent by automatically generating our materials (our LMS layout, the format of our documents, etc.) can help our students more easily navigate the logistical aspects of class (which are always the same) and spend more time and focus actually learning.

I certainly don't have all the answers - after all, I'm still learning to teach, and I will be for as long as I am a teacher. There is also degree of computer nerdery here and I'm only recently finding my way into that world, but the investment of time and research into these tools has paid huge dividends for me, so I'll probably write up and post new techniques here as I come across them, and maybe even develop some tutorials. For now, I'm keeping a keen eye on the work I do every day to see which parts of it I can potentially hand off to my computer to do for me.

Why Arts Classes Matter in Schools

(Or, Why Arts Classes Are a Model for Teaching Creativy Across the Curriculum)

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I recently rewatched Ken Robinson's iconic TED talk, "Do Schools Kill Creativity" (a pillar of innovative thought on why schools need to change, and how), and it got me thinking about why I am still a music teacher. The crux of his argument is that the structure of school, as it operates today, prioritizes certain patterns of thinking (particularly those of academia, or scholarship for its own sake), while educating students out of their youthful creativity. While I am the kind of person who nods his head vigorously and agrees vehemently with Sir Robinson's every word, I think there's an even deeper argument to be made about not only preserving, but centering Arts classes in schools, which is that they provide a training ground upon which to learn the skills, patterns, and actions of creative thinking that students (and adults) will need in any field they choose to pursue.

It's not very contentious to point out that Arts education is lower in the curricular hierarchy than other, more "academic" subjects like Math and English, because it's true. The most obvious expression of this hierarchy is budget cuts to Arts departments, which are tangible and, sadly, quite extensive. But money isn't the only way our schools show us what matters and what doesn't - as another example, our classes are often used as a buffer or placeholder that helps facilitate schedule changes; while "core" classes are preserved (kids just change Math sections if their schedule is changed), a student may be moved from Music into Theater, or Visual Art into Music on a whim at any time. This is particularly concerning when it happens late in the year: imagine putting a kid into a math class for the first time in January - they'd be totally lost, and so it is with music, yet it's quite common for me to receive several new kids at the beginning of Semester Two, implying that the content they missed is optional, or that it's more important to check the "Arts" box on their schedule than that they actually learn the content. And, of course, our society's educational priorities are on full display when it comes time for me, a music teacher, to proctor high-stakes tests like MAP and PARCC, and Math and ELA reign supreme, while the Arts are nowhere to be found.

It's also not very contentious, I don't think, to stand firmly against the reality that the Arts are deprioritized in this way, although then again, I am a Music teacher, and I'm surrounded by Arts teachers who think about this every day. The audience at Ken Robinson's TED talk require no convincing at all - they cheer and laugh, and it's clear that he's expressing the shared sentiments of a community whose creativity, in all its manifestations, was stifled in school (that community is all of us). Many scientific minds have spent time and effort discovering the very real psychological and neurological benefits of the Arts for children. Arts education associations like NAfME, the National Association for Music Education, actually provide advocacy resources and argumentative strategies that rely on this science designed to help us "promote and protect" our programs (although I suppose the existence of these advocacy kits could be construed as an argument against the idea that most of us would favor more arts in schools - if we did, there would be no need to advocate in the first place. A topic for another time).

The point, though, is that all of these arguments focus on the elevation and/or relegation of content in a curricular hierarchy, which I think is a misguided approach. Advocacy kits seek to elevate the arts by arguing that students benefit from a creative outlet for self-expression, and I agree with that, but I also think that these rosy proclamations may not resonate with someone who hasn't personally spent a lifetime feeling the joy of skillfully making music or art and experiencing the positive benefits of personal expression for themselves - they sound overly idealistic to me, and I think people aren't convinced by what I call the "butterflies and rainbows" argument that everything is wonderful in the arts. Furthermore, I think there's a more important point to be made, which is that creative thinking can and should be expressed in all of the disciplines, including Math, Science, and ELA (the "A" stands for "Arts" - also, if you need convincing that Math can be a beautiful expression of creativity, check out the fantastic Youtube channel Numberphile).

The focus on content (and the bickering over which types of content we elevate/relegate) obscures the higher-level development of broader creative skills, problem solving skills, which I'd argue should be the top priority for our kids because these are flexible and adaptable skills, which will allow students to grow into mindful adults who can pursue and build a successful career in whatever interests them. Most Arts teachers understand that our goal isn't to pump out musicians and artist from schools. We're after creative skills, and this is an approach that other classes can take as well. On paper, the content of my class is actually very simple, and my students expect my class to be easy (they expect that of most Arts classes, or "specials"), but they discover that, while the tasks or even the concepts themselves aren't particularly challenging, it's the many, many opportunities for productive failure (and the fact that we need to embrace failure in the Arts) that make the creative process so tough. It's incredibly easy to make a terrible song that follows the rules, but to make something that's actually good it takes perseverance, creative and critical thought, and a willingness to explore, make mistakes, and discard failed attempts. And, kids care! They feel upset with themselves when they make something mediocre because they know (and they say this to me, and they write it down on reflections) they could have done better if they stuck with it and dedicated a little more time.

Unfortunately, though, the focus on content is what drives our educational world right now (the Common Core, of course, being the culminating exemplification of this approach). There's a messiness to the creative process that Math and English teachers are probably wary of, since they feel pressured to efficiently cover the content that will show up on the test. I can understand why schools that prioritize results on high-stakes testing would cut Arts education first¹ - in the model of different teachers inputting different types of content into the children (a conception of pedagogy famously critiqued by Paolo Freire as the "banking" model), the stream of content coming from the arts department isn't as valuable as the stream coming from the Math and English departments. But this whole setup reveals that, no matter what schools say, they're focused more on teaching specific content than on the development of broader patterns of thought.

My argument, therefore, isn't that kids need more Arts content in their day so they can become better artists, but rather that Arts classes provide them with a place to experiment, fail, and practice the creative skills that will make them better at every other discipline, even if it comes at the expense of learning some of the content in those disciplines (actually, my experience is that creative pursuits lead to kids finding gaps in their own knowledge, what teachers call a "need to know," and they wind up asking you to give them the content anyway). In fact, let's blow the lid off this entire thing and forget the Arts entirely - every class our students take should prioritize creative thinking and problem solving over content. It's not more Arts that the kids need (that would be the content argument), but rather the opportunity to explore, to fail, to revise, to ask questions, to be curious, and most important to be creative in all their classes.

In a (rather unsurprising) plot twist, I suppose I've built my argument back up to Ken Robinson's, which held the umbrella over all of my disparate opinions and reflected my own take all along (and it would have been quite presumptuous to think that I understood this better than he did). If we take our gaze off the different types of content we're teaching our kids and instead focus on bigger, broader thinking skills, it doesn't matter what discipline we teach. Arts teachers may have a keener sense of this than most, but that doesn't mean that Music, Art, Dance, and Theater are the only classes where creativity can thrive. I do think our classes can provide a model for what a strong education in creative thinking can look like for other teachers, but as we look forward to an innovative and revolutionary educational future, I think we should look very closely at what our actions prioritize and consider liberating students and teachers from the grip of content and allowing them to flourish into creative practitioners and critical thinkers in any discipline to which their passions and interests lead them.

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¹And I can understand why they would prioritize high scores on statewide tests because that'swhere the money comes from.

Upgrade your Gradebook

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"Simplify, simplify"

- Henry David Thoreau

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In keeping with the grading theme from my last post, I'd like to delve a little further into the structures I use to keep my assessment as objective as possible and eliminate, the personal, emotional connection that students often perceive between their grades and their identity. I've spent many, many hours discussing this topic with my coaches and supervisors and trying to discover new and better ways to grade, and I think that's because, quite simply, grading is hard. As is usually the case, I've found that the best solution to the challenging problem of grading isn't to work harder, but rather to adopt an entirely different approach - to change the underlying structure of my gradebook and my grading scheme. Before diving into the solution (which is to use binary, mastered/not mastered grades on single tasks arranged in a sequence; a process strongly influenced by the Modern Classrooms Project, of which I am a fellow), let's explore what makes grading such a difficult process.

When you grade something, your task is to examine a piece of student work and, from it, determine objectively how much the student has learned of the topic at hand. There's a lot to unpack in this seemingly simple task: we must find a way to quantify learning in a way that applies to all our students, but each individual student brings so much to bear on each task that it's nearly impossible to come up with an objective heuristic, rubric, or measuring stick of knowledge and learning that can be calibrated to produce a true and fair grade in every individual case. Furthermore, if teachers haven't thoroughly considered and designed a system for objective grading, they may not be able to assess work without unconsciously surfacing other considerations. In my first few years, when I was presented with a piece of student work, I would consider the student's personality and how they may react to the grade I gave; I would consider the student's previous performance and whether this submission was an improvement or a decline; I brought to bear unexamined biases and even prejudices (that, frighteningly, may have been borne out in the patterns I saw in my gradebook demographically). While none of these things are on the rubric, they would pass through my mind as I graded, and I felt that to be "objective," I needed to learn to just ignore them, which would create a sort of cognitive dissonance that made grading a difficult and stressful series of decisions I had to make while factoring in some considerations and discarding others.

Now, there are tools and techniques for dealing with this by objectively describing whether and how the piece of work conforms to certain standards (rubrics are one of the best); but even so, there is always ambiguity in assessing the quality of a product if there are multiple levels that we have to choose between (especially if some aspects of the work conform to one level, but other aspects conform to another level, lower or higher). Grading this way is mentally exhausting and time consuming - I teach between 160-200 students whom I see every two days, so daily grading means putting myself through this intellectual and emotional wringer 90 times a day, which was not something I could conceive of as a young teacher (it was one of those "ok, but how on Earth do you actually do that" questions). And I was right - without careful planning and an intentional approach, daily (or even weekly) grading is not sustainable; neither the world's greatest rubric, nor any amount of hard work, planning, or time management could have made this possible without burning me out. There is a better way, and, unsurprisingly, the solution is not to grind harder, nor is it to learn to ignore the conflicting thoughts and feelings that swirl around as we seek to land on a perfectly objective grade; rather, we need lean our ladder against an entirely different wall to approach formative assessment in an unambiguous way. The solution is progress tracking.

Through the self-pacing structures of the Modern Classrooms Project, I've learned that the best way to address to this problem (and the key to in-class grading) is to limit my formatives to a simple task that requires mastery of one single skill or piece of knowledge. Importantly, the task must be so simple as to negate the need for a grade at all. Rather, a simple "mastered" or "not mastered" must suffice to determine whether the student can move on to the next lesson or assignment, and there is no ambiguity as to the quality of the product - either it's done or it's not, and no rubric is involved because the task can only be successfully completed if the student has mastered the content.

My upgraded gradebook, therefore, is an ordered sequence of binary switches, of 0's and 1's, and when a student submits an assignment, it takes only a few unambiguous and stress-free moments to glance at it and see which they get (i.e., whether they mastered the lesson and can move on or should go back and revise). Each assignment is a single step toward completing the project; for example, in my current unit students are making a remix and the initial sequence is: 1) Choose a song (which is very easy for me to tell if the student did or didn't), 2) Set the tempo and key in our DAW (again, easy to tell at a glance), 3) Import the song into the DAW (easy to tell - you get the idea), 4) Line up the song with the DAW grid, and 5) Add new loops and sounds from the DAW loop library. These steps may seem inane and overly simple, but that's actually the point - chunking the lessons into incredibly small steps makes them both achievable for students and very easy for me to "grade." The ease with which I can evaluate these tasks also allows me to transform my role from grader of quality into gatekeeper of content - if you haven't mastered this task, you can't move on to the next one until you do. This means students who are moving along have demonstrably learned something, and the progress data quantify that learning rather than me having to try to figure out how "smart" a student is from what they've produced (in other words, achievement is measured objectively by progress, rather than subjectively, by quality, and a student who is struggling is behind, not dumb which is a huge distinction in terms of developing a growth mindset).

My upgraded gradebook - a progress tracker!

But the benefits don't stop there. My gradebook is more of a progress tracker than a record of each student's performance, and as such it serves more roles than just record-keeping (although it serves a record-keeping function as well - a student who has completed 4 of the 5 steps has learned 4/5ths of the content in an objective way). A student who is behind stands out on my tracker; without having to delve into their work and try to determine how much they know through interpolation and divination, I can very easily narrow my focus on those students who need help to catch up. Extrapolated across the entire class, the progress tracker provides actionable data on how the entire group is performing (traditional grades don't provide this data, because if there is any more wiggle room in assessing a piece of work than yes/no, the aggregate data of how every individual kid does on that particular piece is ambiguous; every kid in the class might get a 4/5 on the same assignment, but the missing point may be different for each of them, indicating a different misunderstanding in each student! I would separate those 5 points into 5 separate, tiny assignments). Furthermore, having this aggregate data on where every student in the class is at in the unit allows me to strategically group them together and find effective student helpers (since I can see who's ahead).

It's important to note that a gradebook set up as a progress tracker has implications for the very structure of your curriculum, and requires careful planning to establish a sequence of tasks, each with a clearly demonstrable and binary (mastered/not mastered) response, that leads students to the final outcome of possessing the knowledge and skills required to pass a unit. In my music class, every lesson represents a single step in the process of creating a song, and their learning is represented quantitatively by how far into the sequence they progress: if they complete all the lessons, they will have a song that meets all the requirements (and therefore demonstrates full mastery) of the unit, whereas if they fall short of completing the sequence, the song will be missing some components from later in the unit. More practically, every aspect of my class is structured to guide students linearly through the sequence, which is canonized in my gradebook - the first "grade" (i.e., 0 or 1) is Lesson 1, the second is Lesson 2, etc., and everything about my class (my gradebook, my LMS, and my actual teaching) is purpose-built to ensure my students can follow this path and to make it easy for me (and them, and also their parents) to tell how far along the path they are.

Of course, at the end of each unit I do grade the final product as a summative assessment, using a rubric, and by that time I have a very good sense of where each student is in their learning process; the quality my students' songs tends to hew closely to how far into the sequence they've advanced. More importantly, however, the overall quality of my students' songs has improved since I implemented this structure because the data in my gradebook give me the opportunity to intervene more frequently before we get to the end of the unit. As a young teacher, so much of what I did felt reactive, like I was constantly putting out fires that had already engulfed my classroom (and my students' learning, and my relationships with students, and their parents), and the transition to a gradebook that provides unambiguous data as to where my students actually are (not data based on a hunch or a vague sense of learning that I came up with myself) has allowed me to support my students proactively, which is one of those things young teachers are told they should do but rarely told how (if you're relying on your own observation to come up with the data, it's very easy to miss kids who are slipping through the cracks until it's too late). There are ways to improve our classes, but sometimes they look different from what we're accustomed to - certainly the idea of a progress tracking checklist feels different from the traditional conception of what a gradebook is - but if we open ourselves to change and adopt new practices (like upgrading our gradebooks and using progress rather than quality to measure achievement), we learn to teach, and we can do a better job of supporting our students.

What Grades Actually Mean, and How to Interpret Them

One of the most difficult things about being a new teacher was that I often didn't know how to respond to a student who leveled criticism against me - kids can be ruthless, and I remember countless nights that I actually literally tossed and turned in bed replaying conversations and wishing I had come up with better retorts to my 13-year-old students who were rude to me! One of the things more experienced teachers (and I now consider myself to be on the cusp of becoming one) understand is that there is no perfect heuristic or logical flow chart of interaction that will provide the best response in every situation; rather, as one increasingly clarifies their understanding of what matters and becomes more confident, it becomes easier to find an appropriate response in the moment. This is the substance of learning to teach, and to that end this post is a deep dive into my own learning, in particular the understanding and perspective I've developed in discussing grades.

Some of your students will inevitably receive bad grades, and some of them (and even some of their parents) will be very vocal about it (follow my meaning - they're not going to be nice to you), so report card season can be emotionally charged. My school sends home quarterly report cards, but we only report final grades at the end of the two semesters, which means that the 1st and 3rd quarter grades are more like a progress report, or a check-in to see how students are doing so they can course correct if necessary. I find, however, that this distinction is difficult to tease out with families. In the 18 parent-teacher-student conferences I gave last Friday (what was that about teacher workload?), this topic came up quite frequently, and having these discussions over and over again, I had to clarify for parents and for myself just what the progress report does represent.

In a mastery-based grading system (which, in my opinion, is the gold standard all educators should aspire to), a grade represents what you know, period. In a completely idealized and objective interpretation, mastery-based grades are like inches on a measuring stick: in the same way I can report how tall you are in feet (or meters), I can report how much you've mastered using a grade in letters or numbers. I brought up this analogy in my conferences, and it helped parents to disentangle their emotional reaction from their understanding of what grades meant - if you measure how tall someone is, he probably won't become upset or take the measurement personally because there is not a normalized emotional association with such a measurement. Grades, on the other hand, are interpreted as deeply personal, and bad grades in particular tend to feel like an appraisal of character and intelligence (especially for students who get low grades in most of their classes and consider themselves "dumb" - easily one of the most pernicious and anti-productive manifestations of the emotional importance we associate with grades, and one that works at cross-purposes with students seeing themselves as learners, which is what really matters).

The measuring stick analogy was particularly useful in looking at cases in which students received low grades from teachers whom the student (and family) felt had failed to teach the content effectively. While for the most part families respectfully reserve judgement and use kind language when describing situations like these, the underlying implication is that such a grade is not fair. The notion of fairness suggests that the student was somehow entitled to a higher grade (or at least should not have been subjected to a low one), in part due to the fact that it wasn't her "fault" that the grade was low. Tumbling further and further down this logical rabbit hole, the absurdity of this emotional attachment to grades is (hopefully) becoming clearer - the fact of the matter is that if the student didn't learn something for whatever reason, she doesn't know it. If her math teacher did a poor job of teaching her how to divide by fractions, she may be absolved of some of the responsibility of having learned it, and feel vindicated defending herself that way, but that responsibility isn't what the grades are measuring.

Looking at grades this way has implications for students and teachers. The hypothetical student described above may make a fuss about her teacher not having taught her well, but the grades don't evaluate who was responsible for her learning, or even how hard she worked to learn, but rather the knowledge she acquired (or didn't), so complaining about it isn't a productive use of her time or mental energy. Instead, she should look carefully at her lowest grades and focus her attention there in the coming weeks until she masters that content. Now, it's quite difficult for a 6th grader to look at low grades without an emotional reaction: if they feel the content wasn't taught well, the reflexive "but it wasn't my fault!" defensiveness is quite natural for young kids (and even some adults!); alternatively, if the student knows that he himself was responsible for the low grades (perhaps he was slacking off or forgot to submit an assignment or two), coming to terms with one's own failure in an objective and unemotional way is staggeringly difficult, and it's our job as teachers to help students recognize that emotional reaction (and indeed still feel it), but separate it from the more useful lens of viewing failure objectively as an opportunity for growth.

But there's more to the teacher's role in the measuring stick analogy - in particular, we (the teachers) need to ensure that our measuring sticks (our grading schema and our rubrics) are being applied consistently and, yes, fairly. Imagine telling a person how tall they are in inches, but using a ruler graded in centimeters - the measurement isn't unfair, it's just wrong. One excellent practice to combat this issue is rubric norming, in which multiple teachers apply the same rubric to the same piece of work - by discussing aspects of the sample and hashing out the particular language of the rubric, we normalize our approach to grading (in my measuring stick analogy, we calibrate our inches to all be the same). Furthermore, if the assessment criteria are clear and precise, we can better communicate them to students, who, with so much on their plates, need to be told clearly and precisely how to meet our expectations of learning (i.e., how to master the material and have it measured accordingly, resulting in high grades). I have a whole other set of opinions on the importance of standardization for assessment (i.e., consistency in how we measure "inches" on our metaphorical measuring stick) and its implications when looking at medium- and long-term trends in grades data (these trends are meaningless if we're not measuring on the same scale from class to class or from year to year), but that's not my focus here.

Finally, while there are many, many factors that are beyond our control (and frankly we should learn to cut ourselves a little more slack), it is nonetheless incumbent upon us to teach our content effectively so that our kids can learn it ("effective" teaching is obviously a massive topic, and one I won't address here, except to say that it involves a close partnership between teachers and students in which the responsibility for learning is shared, not placed entirely on either party). It bears repeating that systemic, societal issues and other mitigating factors such as behavior, trauma, and truancy, for which teachers themselves are not responsible, can be the cause of low grades (although in an ideal world, these should not be barriers to effective learning). Still, if the students' grades are an objective measure of how much they know, then in a sense they are also an objective measure of how effectively they were taught, which means the grades, in part, reflect back upon us as the teachers. Low grades are a red flag that we may need to critically address some aspect of our teaching.

I'm cringing a little thinking back to all the failing grades I gave out as a first year teacher, but let me be crystal clear: it is not my intention to further stress out young teachers who are struggling to coax better performance out of their students - quite the opposite in fact. I hope that dissociating emotional reactions from value-free measurements helps first-year teachers adopt a growth mindset. Just like our students, it is not productive for us to wallow in our own failures, regardless of who or what is responsible for them. However, it's even worse to shrug off a student with low grades and place the responsibility for success entirely on their shoulders, defending ourselves behind the "if you don't do it, you get a zero" mentality - we do have a responsibility to intervene where we can. Even in the classrooms of the world's greatest teachers, students receive low grades - it's part of the reality of teaching, but the best teachers (many of whom are striving to change this reality) recognize low grades as an area for targeted intervention and improvement on their own part (not the students').

Again, this is the substance of learning to teach, which is an ongoing and never-ending journey: a confident teacher who gives out low grades will reflect objectively upon her own practice and also upon the practice of the student (or the class in general) and consider what may have gone wrong and needs to change (change = growth = learning [to teach]). Where possible, she'll develop improvements to her teaching or her curriculum, or interventions with specific students to address shortcomings revealed by low grades, which she views purely as data. If we adopt this growth mindset, we can instill it in our students by articulating to them that grades are not a reflection of their character but rather an objective measurement of what they've learned (or haven't). If we do, they'll not only be better learners who get higher grades (since they'll know to target specific misunderstandings, which they can easily identify on their report cards); they'll also grow up into rational, reasonable adults, bringing a growth mindset to their practice (and in particular their mistakes), and thus be poised to innovate and improve in whatever field they chose to pursue.

How Self-Paced Classes Reduce Stress as Distance Learning Reaches a Tipping Point

The last few weeks of an academic quarter are always challenging and stressful - grades are due (and, therefore, assignments are due), and the workload ramps up for everyone involved, and this year I (and many of my students) found the pressure to be overwhelming and all-consuming.

A few weeks ago, my school surveyed the student body, and the kids overwhelmingly voiced their frustration with the work load. “Too much work,” “too many assignments,” and “not enough time,” et cetera, dominated the responses. There are really no lines to read between here - this isn’t our students being lazy: they’re unified in their message, and now the teachers need to figure out how we can reduce the workload without compromising their learning. This amounts to killing our darlings, so it is a difficult, emotional task.

I’m of two minds on this. My “learning to teach” mindset, which is one of radical and revolutionary growth, would suggest that perhaps we’ve been overloading our curricula anyway, and this is an opportunity to pare them down. On the other hand, my “empathy first” mindset (not mutually exclusive with the growth mindset, by the way) centers on the teachers who have been tasked with choosing between (and discarding) lessons and materials that they developed with time, effort, and care.

I had a long conversation with one such teacher - a department coordinator - who reached out to me because of my (well established and outspoken) connection to the Modern Classrooms project, which utilizes a lesson-classification scheme as part of it’s self-pacing structure. The workload reduction process he’s undertaking with his team reflects the “Must-Do,” “Should Do,” “Aspire To” system used by MCP, and he wanted to ask me, of all the different materials they had planned to use, which struck me as “should do’s,” or, in other words, could be cut from the curriculum.

As we talked, it dawned on me that the missing piece wasn’t prioritizing and cutting material, but rather the logistical structure for dealing with assignments that were “optional” (“Should Do” assignments).

(As an aside, one of my biggest struggles as a first-year teacher was discovering these logistical, classroom structures - and to be clear, I didn’t discover them on my own; it was other teachers and, in particular, Modern Classrooms that taught them to me. Anytime I was taught anything about classroom teaching - differentiation, relationship building, content delivery, in-class grading, accountability - my response was always “ok, but how do you actually do that?” With regards to learning to teach, data and project management and classroom workflows seem, in my uninformed-except-by-having-attending-lots-of-unhelpful-PDs opinion, to be one of the most useful and highest-leverage sets of skills and knowledge that excellent teachers posess, yet also one of the aspects of teaching that is focused on the least when training teachers. Expect more from me on these skills in the future.)

Returning to my conversation with the department coordinator: we discussed several different issues - would the optional assignments be graded? Would kids even do optional assignments at all? The conversation focused on these abstract questions, but the turning point came when he asked me a much more practical question: “what will my students do in class if they choose not to do the ‘should do?’ They won’t have anything to do.”

The crux of the problem lies in the fact that he wasn’t accounting for students working at different paces, and he needed to consider and implement a self-pacing plan to meet some of their needs. The solution is to instruct kids who are up-to-date with the class to complete the Should Do (for them, it isn’t optional), while instructing kids who were behind to complete last class’ assignment (or whatever they’re missing), using class time to get caught up, and getting a little boost by skipping today’s Should Do. This provides the students who are feeling overwhelmed with some time (actual class time, no less) without cutting curriculum except in the most extreme cases of specific kids who need it to make it to the end of the unit .

Stepping back onto my soap box, this is the kind of concrete, action-based problem that I think teacher training should prioritize. There are structures and workflows like this facilitating all of the wonderful things happening in effective classrooms, and they are a result of strong planning, but can be easily shared and implemented by all teachers, new and veteran alike. This particular one related to pacing, but it also differentiates a unit by providing a path to success for students with particular needs (i.e., kids who need more time to work).

Suffice it to say, allowing kids to do work from a previous lesson during today’s class relieves some of that pressure our kids were so vocal about at the end of the quarter. If the stress of distance learning is keeping our kids up until midnight just trying to get their work done, we need to show them we’re able to prioritize and make concessions for them. But that doesn't have to come from curriculum design; it can also come from the way we structure our classes. Allowing for some self-pacing and giving students the time to catch up in class not only helps them to succeed academically, it also shows them we hear their voices, we care about their wellbeing, and we are willing to put students before content, as every teacher knows they should.

What Really Matters in the Classroom?

Spoiler Alert: It's not teaching content.

On a recent episode of the Modern Classrooms Podcast, my cohosts and I discussed of the shifting role of the teacher, both in a Modern Classroom, and in general as we strive to improve our teaching. The discussion was rather cathartic, frequently returning to the frustrations the three of us shared in our early careers - principally, the frustration with feeling like we knew what we wanted for our students, but also feeling unable to provide anything even close to our ideals of student-centered, authentic learning environment. As the discussion developed, it dawned on me just how much teachers seem to agree on what actually matters in a classroom, but how much we universally struggle to implement it - and that it's not necessarily teaching our content all the time.

Actually, let me not hedge or bury the lede any further: teaching content is not my priority, especially right now. But even putting aside the pandemic (and the myriad swirling uncertainties and anxieties to which my lessons pale in comparison, making the point of my argument rather obvious), I still think that our biggest priority - what really matters - should be to foster a love of school, a strong academic self-concept, and for our students to feel nurtured and cared for in our classrooms and see school as a part of their identity.

I don't think this is a particularly contentious opinion, but many of the struggles we face as teachers arise from the fact that we focus our time in class pushing our kids to succeed academically when they have other things going on that may or may not be a bigger deal, but are certainly more important to them in the moment. By forcing our content upon them and positioning it in opposition to what matters to them, we degrade its importance in their minds; even if we purport to care about them, we contradict ourselves if we constantly redirect students away from their interests in pursuit of success on some test we wrote. After 13 or 14 years of being told implicitly that their interests (and maybe their trauma) are less important than some numbers and symbols or some grammatical structures, it's not hard to understand why many people don't feel so fondly about school.

Responsive music educators recognize that our job isn't to churn out hundreds of professional musicians every year, and likewise it shouldn't be the job of a Math or English teacher to churn out professional mathematicians or authors or critics (students, of course, will follow their own path after school). I think (maybe I'm wrong) that most teachers know and feel this at least subconsciously, but external pressures are placed on us such that we tend to forget. We seek out strategies for classroom management rather than teaching for mastery or building relationships, focusing on what works without questioning (or at least, without listening to the nagging internal critic who questions everything) whether this is what matters.

There's a disconnect between the amount of professional development we receive on trauma-informed teaching, authentic relationships, and the buzzwordliest of all, Social Emotional Learning, and the way we're evaluated based on student achievement, or more specifically, classroom compliance (classroom management) and grades, which take a great deal of nuance to achieve without alienating students or silencing their voices (this disconnect also plays out in the types of PD teachers prefer and the types they actually receive. I have a future post planned on the kinds of PD I find most valuable, but the data in this report certainly validate the idea that we're evaluated on different standards than what we're trained on - poor pedagogy indeed!).

Of course the tricky bit here is that we do still need to teach our content, and our students need to learn it. While I think that systemically, we might be stuck in a loop where school only exists to teach students how to succeed on tests (particularly high-stakes tests) that school itself imposes on them, teachers themselves do aspire to develop kids' critical thinking skills and impart to them the knowledge and understanding that will bring them success as adults. It strikes me that our priorities (and the world of standardized testing) tend to focus on teaching students what to know rather than how to think. It feels like ubiquitous, common knowledge that kids just forget content after the test (and it might be true).

So, what does really matter then? How can a teacher, in his classroom or in her Zoom call tomorrow, put their students' needs before their content, while still pushing students toward mastery and academic growth but without pushing them away from a love of learning? I know how frustrating it is as a new teacher to hear "build authentic relationships with kids," and it's taken me until now (my fifth year) to actually understand what it means, so let's avoid that buzzword and get right to the nitty-gritty. Here's what to do: if a kid wants to talk to you about soccer during independent work time on some practice problems, listen to her for a few minutes. If some kids start blowing up your Zoom chat asking "who's the imposter" (it's from Among Us), play along for a little. If a student wants to tell you all about Fortnite or asks you who your favorite rapper is but you know she has a sentence to diagram, let it go and indulge her, even just for a bit. Listen to them. It humanizes you, and in their eyes, you are school, so you'll be modeling what it looks like when school becomes a place to be heard. Afterwards, you can direct these kids back to work, but they'll remember that you made their interests compatible with learning by making some time for them during class - time spent building relationships is not time lost . After 13 or 14 years of that, I can only imagine the kinds of curious, inquisitive young adults we'll see coming out of our schools and taking on the world as truly lifelong learners.

You can listen to this post as an audio podcast, here:

Learning to Teach

Hi! Rather than continue struggling to find the perfect first words to publish on my new blog, I'll get straight to the point: welcome! Here's why I'm starting this blog:

I am a teacher. Specifically, a middle school music teacher at a public charter school, although I've also taught private music lessons, university music lessons, and English as a Second Language to adults. As no schoolteacher will be surprised to hear, my first year in K-12 teaching might as well have been my first year teaching out of college; no amount of experience or training prepared me for the challenge. No conversation with veteran teachers managed to convince me that it could very well be the worst year of my life. The life of a first year teacher, it's well documented, is perhaps the truest definition of hell; I can't remember a more difficult time in my career, perhaps in my life, than my first year teaching middle school.

Teachers, resilient creatures they are, mostly get through their first year and carry the experiences into their second, and they grow and improve. But growing and improving, any good teacher will tell you, is a lifelong process. It can be difficult to grow and improve, especially if best practices or the focus of the educational zeitgeist shift away from what we're used to. Certainly, in October 2020, distance learning is throwing us for a loop, even the most seasoned teachers have very few experiences to look back on that may have prepared them for this.

But that's not unique to 2020. There's not an endpoint to learning and growing and improving, and, pandemic or not, we should always be looking for ways to revolutionize, innovate, and improve our teaching. Every student we teach, every class we manage, every paper we grade, every administrator we work with, is different, and we bring our past experiences to bear as we try to be the best teacher we can, in every situation. This is very, very hard. 

My first year teaching left me with so many unresolved questions, and my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th years gave me experiences that started to answer them. Professional development and training in my first year filled my head (and my notebook) with buzz words like "differentiation" and "relationships" that teachers are so used to hearing, but it wasn't until my 4th year that I had even an inkling of what I could do as a teacher to turn these buzz words into actual practice. 

Still, a month or so into my 5th year teaching K-12, the year I had originally believed would cement my legitimacy as a teacher, I still feel like I have more questions than answers. I still worry that much of what happens in schools actually works at cross-purposes to teachers' and administrators' intentions for learning, most of which are noble. I still wonder why students' legitimate desire to learn (and they all want to succeed) are sacrificed at the altar of classroom compliance. I still question whether we're right to prioritize content without asking why our students aren't seeing themselves as scholars, and I don't believe that any amount of well-taught content can cram the identity or self-concept of a scholar into a student's brain. I still struggle with the best way to communicate with parents, who are ever-appreciative to receive updates from me on their kids' learning, but don't want (nor should I expect them) to learn the complex, nuanced systems I employ to help their kids succeed in my class. While my first four years have taught me a lot, and I've (mostly) overcome the imposter syndrome and the first-year feeling that I'm a complete failure in the classroom, I still don't feel like I, or anyone I've asked, has all the answers. 

This blog represents and chronicles my adventure learning to teach as I continue to address these uncertainties, as I acquire new experiences, develop new opinions, learn to transform the buzzwords into real teaching practice, and continue to grow and uncover new questions. The idea to write about learning to teach came to me in my first year, as I wished I had someone to demystify and help me tackle the incredibly hard work of teaching, and I hope that this blog may guide younger teachers as they rise to the challenge. But this blog isn't only for new teachers - my hope is that my experiences reflect yours, regardless what stage of your teaching career you've reached, and that through our shared experiences we can catch a glimpse into what really matters in the classroom, and perhaps shed some light on what new teachers (all teachers) should be doing to ease the burden of learning to teach.

Listen to this post as an audio podcast: