A Cycle: When I Grow, My Students Grow

The following blog post is the latest in a series written by teachers who are in our Next Generation Instructional Design cohort. These posts describe the process by which these teachers are collaborating to create units that transform teaching and engage students in their own learning.

By: Kari W. Patrick

“I’m sorry.. this is English class right?” a parent quizzed me over the phone.

“Yes, ma’am. The students are making podcasts of their written work and research.” I replied proudly, but also hesitantly. What if she responds negatively? My heart started racing and I began questioning myself “Why am I doing this?”

Thankfully, my self-doubt was unfounded. The supportive reply I received from this inquiring mother helped me to refocus and remember that students creating podcasts is one of the most collaborative and effective strategies I have used in my classroom.

Over the past semester, I co-designed an ELA (English Language Arts) student performance unit with my colleagues at Shelby County High School and fellow cohort teachers of The Fund for Transforming Education’s Next Generation Instructional Design initiative (NGID).  Working with the NGID cohort has been an intellectual and professional venture. It has led me to a level of synergy that I hope all teachers get to experience in the future. When teachers make peer to peer collaboration a priority, we create the expectation that all future educators, as well as students, must embrace collaboration as a way to learn and grow.

In a society that demands professionals work in teams to produce solutions to complex problems, our students need the real world skills of working collaboratively and cohesively enough to produce and publish a permanent project. Through my own professional growth as a member of the NGID cohort, I am developing and honing the same 21st century skills that we want to foster in our students. When I grow, my students grow.

In the unit that our NGID cohort created, our common performance assessment task was for students to create a narrative podcast. At first glance, it’s easy to assume a podcast is next generational solely because of the technology used, but I challenge that assumption. In our planning work, my NGID cohort and I discussed this at length. Why are we using this as our common performance task? What makes it a task worthy of a student’s time? How does it prepare them for the real world?

The use of technology was not what made for next generational learning; instead, the technology fostered critical thinking, increased communication, and created platforms for collaboration to come to the forefront of their learning experience (Framework for 21st Century Learning).  The use of Google Docs, Vocaroo, Audacity and Google Classroom created conditions for students to develop 21st century skills.

Figure 1: Coincidentally, this image represents the workflow of both the student process and the NGID cohort’s work.

Throughout the entire project, technology was an enhancement to the traditional writing process; I saw students peer editing, asking questions, and challenging each other’s thinking at every step. Students gave and received immediate feedback from their peers and I was able to expand on it in real time. For me, the most exciting part of this process was watching students hold each other accountable. Not only did students hold each other to high standards, they were also supportive of the work process. They worked at a level of collaboration that can only be described as next generational.

Just the other night I sat at a parent teacher conference (with the aforementioned parent) and listened to a poignant podcast about police brutality against African-American teenagers. The parent and I looked at each other in awe of how insightfully and critically a team of 15 year olds handled such a sensitive and meaningful topic.  

My professional journey with NGID created an opportunity for students to perform at high levels and they definitely exceeded my expectations. When my students grow, I grow.

Part 2: My Messy Vocabulary System

By: Summer Garris

If you did not read yesterday’s post, please click here to read Part 1 of Summer’s blog. 

What It Looks Like: It’s Messy

A typical week goes something like this:

Friday: After a quiz on vocabulary words (from the previous week), students individually write at least one new word on a piece of chart paper hung on one wall in the classroom. It cannot be a word that is already written on the chart, so students must cross reference their own word lists with the list on the paper.

New words for the week are collected on chart paper.

Monday: Students decide on master list of words. A student “leader” goes to the chart paper, and students discuss, hone and justify the list of words. In doing this, students have conversations about the words. Which words are most useful? Which words sound cool? Which words have we seen other places? Which words come from a portion of the passage that sound profound or important or especially beautiful? In these conversations, students are using the internet to clarify meanings of the words. They talk about roots, prefixes and suffixes. They remember other places and contexts where they’ve heard the words. 

Ultimately, through process of elimination, students settle on a list of ten words. I randomly distribute ten notecards throughout the class. Small groups are assigned one word and given the task of using internet and other resources to find the following information: 1) the pronunciation of the word 2) the part of speech 3) example of the word from original text 4) a sentence with the word used in context 4) any other “fun facts” about the word. 

On one side of the notecard, a member of the small group writes write the word in large, bold print. On the other side of the notecard, they write the definition and other information. Groups present their words to the whole group, and students individually make a collection of notes. Often, if the word is tricky to say aloud, the class will say the word together a few times to “feel it in the mouth” and hear it aloud. Conversations are lively and engaging. Students find associations to help them remember the words. For example, when defining “turgid” (which means swollen), a student associates old celery. “Did you know,” she explains, “you can put celery in iced water, and it will become turgid again?” When defining “peritoneum,” a student quips, “the membrane lining the cavity of the abdomen and covering the abdominal organs.” “Ewww,” another one chimes in, “you mean like a gut sack?” Students scratch “gut sack” into their notes.

The words are pinned on a bulletin board to hang for the rest of the week that has the heading, “Word to Ya.” Some students make their own set of flashcards to study.

Words to on the “Word To Ya” board to hang for the week.

Wednesday: Among other class activities, random students are given the front face of the cards and have to say the word, define the word, and use the word in context. Students don’t know who will receive a card for the impromptu quiz, so all students have to be ready to present said information on all the words. Students correct each other and agree on contextual sentence accuracy. 

Thursday: Students participate in seminar about the passage, often citing passages that contain their new words.

Friday: The words are moved from the “Word to Ya” wall and onto the “Word Wheel.” This is round wheel that can be spun. We spin the wheel and choose three random words from the week’s list of ten. With these three words, students must construct a sentence and define the word. 

Words are chosen randomly for the week’s quiz
on the “Word Wheel.”

Assessment of the “quiz” ensures mastery. The definition must be accurate, though it can be in a student’s own words (“gut sack” counts as a definition). The sentence must be completely accurate, demonstrating the proper part of speech and enough detail to “prove” the definition is understood. Students receive 10 points per word, 5 for the definition and 5 for the sentence. 

When they finish their “quick quiz,” they put new words on the board from the new reading selection.

At the end of each nine week grading period, all of the notecards are stacked. I perform random card “tricks” to select 10 random words from the stack of all the words. 

What I Love about this System:

• It is fun. From the conversations, games, and immersion in the words, students are engaged and often amused. (Who wouldn’t giggle at the concept of a “gut sack” or when a scorned girlfriend describes her ex-boyfriend as an example of an “inimical dastard”?)
• It enhances the other literary experiences happening in the classroom. No longer is vocabulary time a time to move away from other literacy experiences in the classroom. 
• Students hear and speak the words. They consult dictionary pronunciation guides and use the internet to listen to the correct pronunciation of the words.
• It is student driven: students select the words, discuss, argue and define the words. Student learn the words however they see fit (flashcards, word webs, lists, whatever works for them). 
• It’s easy to assess. Flipping through the three word definitions and sentences per week is a breeze. I am no longer taking home multi-paged packets of worksheets and spending my time mentally hearing, “1-A, 2-E, 3-G. . . “ 
• I’m getting to know my students even more. As I read student sentences, I am getting an inside look into their personalities. Their sentences are creative and often witty or figurative. I comment with little notes and share with the class when I see word usage that seems especially profound. This week, I delighted at one music loving student who wrote how the “DJ could ‘posit’ that beat.”
• Students make the words their own. Because they choose the words and create their own sentences, students often have favorites. The words are showing up in their writing and in our class conversations like never before. 
• I’m learning new words, too. So often, I stop during my reading to look up the definition of a word I don’t know. This system with such immersion with the words really makes the words usable. 

My system isn’t neat and tidy, and it’s not quiet. There are moments of intense laughter and cheers and boos. Since students are leading the discussions, it’s never certain where these discussions might go. For my classroom, though, it’s OK to be messy. Messy is fun!

Summer is a High School English teacher in LaRue county and is a NGID Participant. Currently, The Fund is featuring blogs from teachers in the Next Generation Instructional Design network. They will share their journey, their ideas, and their collaborative work related to being in the network and with building units of study with LDC modules embedded.

My Messy Vocabulary System

By: Summer Garris

In the film Most Likely to Succeed, teachers utilize Socratic seminar for deeper learning and comprehension of text. In today's blog post, read about how NGID teacher, Summer Garris, also uses Socratic seminar in her English classroom. Summer shares her vocabulary approach, which she says is "messy," and we appreciate messy because we know authentic learning experiences such as the one Summer describes are the way students experience deeper learning.

I spent years trying to acclimate to a vocabulary system for my students. I tried vocabulary packets with worksheets for students to learn sets of random words by matching them to definitions, working out clues to cross word puzzles, and completing sentences. I tried a variety of graphic organizers, charts, webs and matrices; students connected words to prior knowledge, finding synonyms, antonyms, examples and non-examples. I tried individual word journals; students made independent lists of words replete with contextual information and paraphrased definitions. All of the systems failed me.

My students inevitably became bogged down with packet completion deadlines, bored through “check your work” sessions, and covered in too many copies to organize. I struggled with student accountability and engagement. I found myself spending precious class time, and too much home time, sifting through stacks of papers and worksheets. Students were frustrated, and I was frustrated. What is an antonym of the word “vortices” anyway? None of the systems felt like an embedded part of my literacy instruction. All the systems felt inefficient, and all the systems lacked what I really wanted for my students – not just mastery of a list of random words on a weekly quiz, but ownership of words they could use in their writing and speaking experiences.

It occurred to me one day at home as I cleaned up the remnants of a fun Saturday afternoon with my young children: often good times are pretty messy. In fact, it’s hard to have fun and not make a mess. From this epiphany, I began to hone what I call my messy, but effective embedded vocabulary instruction.

Satisfying Student and Teacher Needs

First, I had to really decide what a good vocabulary system would look like. My vocabulary system had to:

• Give students authentic experiences with the words. Learning the words needed to make sense. The words couldn’t be from a random list. The words had to be necessary from the student perspective.
• Allow students to attach their schema to the new words. Students need opportunities to relate to the words and connect them to concepts they already know. 
• Give students opportunities to speak about and with the words. They need to pronounce the words and recognize them when spoken. 
• Engage students in the learning process and hold them accountable for learning. This means it has to be fun. That’s a tall order when thinking about learning vocabulary words with teenagers. 
• Ensure mastery and ownership of the words. A system must provide assessment data (both formative and summative) to ensure students have learned. It isn’t enough to match words to definitions on a Friday quiz. Students need to use these words on their own and recognize these words when they encountered them in pieces both in and out of class.
• Enhance the other course work, so that any class time spent learning the words is not at the expense of some other important aspect of the course. The vocabulary has to be part of an overall literacy experience, enhanced by and enhancing other literary experiences happening in my classroom. 

Making it Work: The Logistics

Each week, students are assigned a rather dense, rigorous reading piece. Usually, these are 6-7 page essays or excerpts from books. I use and English and Composition textbook and various essays and texts, but any reading assignment will work, as long as it is rigorous and contains elevated vocabulary. Students have the following assignments:

1. Close read the essay and annotate. They are given a set of discussion questions that often include questions on rhetoric and style. As students are collecting notes, they are collecting talking points related to the discussion questions, creating their own questions, and collecting new vocabulary words from the essay. 
2. Prepare for Socratic Seminar. Usually on Thursday, the class will hold a Socratic Seminar about the particular reading selection. To participate in seminar, students must show their annotations and list of words they encountered and defined during their reading. During the text based discussion, students are required to speak and reference text as they engage in conversations about the text. 
3. Write an annotated bibliography entry that rhetorically analyzes the text. They create MLA citations and answer questions about author’s purpose, claim, focus, intended audience, literary devices, diction, and syntax using textual evidence to support their contentions. 

Check back tomorrow for “What It Looks Like” and “What I Love About This System”


Summer is a High School English teacher in LaRue county and is a NGID Participant. Currently, The Fund is featuring blogs from teachers in the Next Generation Instructional Design network. They will share their journey, their ideas, and their collaborative work related to being in the network and with building units of study with LDC modules embedded.

When A Teacher’s Vision Gets Cloudy...Go Back to the Basics

by Ellen Kenimer

Ahh….the beginning of a new school year….the anticipation, the goal setting, the fresh, new bulletin board that welcomes students to start a new journey with me -- a journey I aspire to be meaningful, fun, life-changing, and unforgettable. And then, reality sets in. The routines, the paperwork, the data, the hustle and bustle of each day can easily cloud my mission. I’m often left feeling, how do I manage this? How do I make a difference? How can I make learning occur for my students?

This summer, I had the opportunity to be a part of work led by The Fund for Transforming Education. I worked with a team of teachers and leaders from all over the state of Kentucky who were passionate about helping their students succeed. We spent two days creating and refining a meaningful unit to be taught in our classrooms this fall. During our work sessions and discussions about how to engage students in learning, I was reminded of a few basic principles of good teaching and purposeful learning. On days when my vision gets cloudy, I find they are helpful to revisit.

1. It’s All About Relationships. On the morning of our first meeting day this summer, I entered a room full of people I didn’t know. I had no idea what to expect. I had no idea what the schedule for the day would be. I had no idea how our work sessions would be organized. Needless to say, I felt a bit nervous, much like a child on the first day of school. Now, I am fairly shy and not outspoken, so for the first half hour, I took on an observer role which fit nicely in my comfort zone. But then, something happened. Our leader got up and began the “program” for the day and her introduction included a key element...laughter. It was then that I realized just how powerful laughter could be! Laughter brought together an entire room of strangers. Laughter helped me begin working relationships with people I had met 30 minutes prior. And I thought, “Laughter should be present every day in my classroom.” Laughter builds community and in turn, builds a place for students to invest their hearts, effort, and lives. When a student has a genuine relationship with a teacher and peers in his or her classroom, the student feels safe enough to explore new concepts, make mistakes, engage in productive struggle, and ultimately, achieve success they can be proud of. As part of our work this summer, one of my favorite activities was interviewing a student about what he liked/disliked about school. This activity gave me insight into just how powerful relationships with students can be. By listening to this child’s ideas about ways he learns best, I was able to refine my instruction. In summary, when my vision gets cloudy, it is important for me to remember relationships with my students are foundational.
2. Work With the End Goal in Mind. In our instructional design work this summer, we used the process of backward design - essentially identifying the end goal first and working backward. While this wasn’t a new practice for me and my colleagues, it was an essential reminder that designing instruction this way really does result in tight alignment and focused instruction and classroom activities. This is positive for two reasons: (1)It focuses my questioning and instruction in my teaching. When I know the end goal and am continually directing my students toward it, it helps me in my reflect on and refine which activities are the best to get students there. (2) It shows students a clear path for their learning. In my experience in the elementary classroom, I’ve found that the best learning occurs when students are able to make meaningful connections. By working with the end goal in mind, students can see the connection between the activities we do and the learning that should be taking place. Using the LDC template and the CAS template fostered the backward design thinking within our team this summer and it is a tool that I will continue to use in my classroom. When my vision gets cloudy, I try to refocus on the end goal.
3. Set Up for Authentic Learning. One of the most thought-provoking experiences with The Fund occurred about a month after our summer work when I viewed a documentary titled “Most Likely to Succeed”. I won’t take the time here to give a detailed description of the movie, but I will say it is definitely worth watching. For the most part, the movie walked viewers through a close-up look of a school called High Tech High, located in California. The authentic learning that occurred in this school was nothing short of incredible. At this school, instead of test scores measuring student success, a public exhibition night showcased authentic learning and hard work of the students. The ownership of learning the students showed was what captured my attention the most. Since I teach elementary school, the implementation will need to be drastically different, but the basic premise is something I want to continue to explore. When students begin to take responsibility for their learning and begin to own their progress, true authentic learning begins to happen! When my vision gets cloudy, I can ask myself, “How can I make this learning authentic for students?”

As an educator, it is easy to get overwhelmed with new initiatives and feel defeated by constant changes. However, I’ve found that by starting with these 3 basic principles, I am able to get refocused and refreshed, which in turn, directly benefits my students!

Ellen is a third grade teacher at Rosenwald Dunbar Elementary School in Jessamine County and is a NGID Participant. Currently, The Fund is featuring blogs from teachers in the Next Generation Instructional Design network. They will share their journey, their ideas, and their collaborative work related to being in the network and with building units of study with LDC modules embedded.

On Being a Student of Reading

By: Janice Bullard

As teachers, we know the importance of reflecting daily on our own teaching. We look carefully at the teaching moves we make, so that the next time we teach, we are a tiny bit better. But how often do we do the work we are asking our students to do, and then reflect on how it went? How often do we “give it a go” ourselves before evaluating their efforts to learn? This past summer, I was lucky to be a part of a virtual book club that did just that.

I learned of the book club from Julieanne Harmatz’s blog To Read to Write to Be. I had been following Julieanne’s blog for months, so I knew that participating in a book club with her and others would be an amazing experience. I was not disappointed! The goal of the book club was to read the book A Handful of Stars by Cynthia Lord, write in our journals, and share our journals and our thinking in Google doc. We read and wrote both as students and teachers. As students, we responded to the reading with writing, in whatever way felt authentic. As we read and responded, we also listened to our teacher voice, and asked ourselves “Is the writing growing my understanding of the book?”, “How does it feel to be a student?” and “How might this work in the classroom?”

As a teacher, my takeaways from this experience were many:

• Sharing my thinking with a group of teachers that I didn’t know was intimidating and a little scary - a reminder of how important it is to develop a trusting learning community in the classroom. By collaborating, though, I deepened my understanding of the story and ways I might help my students learn. 
• My first reader’s response was in the form of a letter to the other readers. This form of writing was helpful to me, because it personalized my purpose. I could think of it as beginning a conversation. Might this also help my students?
• Having choice in how I responded was huge!
• Using an anchor chart of sentence starters helped me kick start my thinking and writing. I need to make sure these are available for my students!

This was a great exercise in making my thinking visible and learning from the visible thinking of others. The wise words of Dorothy Barnhouse and Vicki Vinton, in What Readers Really Do, come to mind: “What’s needed is a willingness to peer into the recesses of our own reader’s mind, attending to the work we do internally that frequently goes unnoticed or that happens so quickly it often feels automatic…”

Perhaps the most helpful insight was this (interestingly, this was shared by many of the readers in the club!) - I wanted to just read. I wanted to get lost in the story and not have to worry about writing on sticky notes or in my journal. A reminder that while we need to push students to deepen their thinking through writing at times, much of their reading needs to be for personal enjoyment. Otherwise, we risk turning them off to reading!

To check out my final entry to the virtual book club, click here.

These insights and lessons stay with me as I begin another year with my fourth grade students. The power of learning and collaborating with others is an experience I look forward to repeating when I work with teachers through NGID. And as I plan my LDC unit, a first priority will be to “give it a go” as a student.

How will you learn by collaborating with others? What are the ways you gain insight as a student?

Teaching With Purpose in Next Generation Instructional Design

By: Anna Brannen and Susan Strait

Teaching with purpose! That is what comes to both our minds as our biggest take away so far during this process of creating our unit for Next Generation Instructional Design. This process is making us both more purposeful teachers which we hope will lead to more engaged and successful students.

We have just finished our first week of our three-week unit of teaching students to be able to identify the character and setting in a story. The first part of our unit was to complete a student interest inventory on each of our students. Getting to know our kids and their interests is not new to us. Every year we send home a student information sheet for parents to complete so that we can learn more about our students. We want to learn more about their likes and dislikes. In addition, we are always taking time during morning meeting and meal times to have one-on-one conversations with students to establish a stronger relationship with them. The student interest inventory served as a good starting point for establishing these relationships. Not only did we ask students about their likes and dislikes and how they learn, but we also used the student inventory to plan our instruction. Our objective here is to make our lessons more engaging. We also used this information to help us choose texts that are based on student interests.

After our student inventories were given, we gave an initial assessment on the students' ability to identify character and setting. Here are our results:

Susan: 16 knew characters, although only 7 could remember a name; 2 knew the setting

Anna: 14 knew characters, although only 1 could remember a name; 1 knew the setting

From these results, we made adjustments in our planning. We were initially going to have students identify any character in the book. Since so many students had identified a character on the initial assessment, we decided to dig deeper and have students learn to identify the main character in the book. We also decided to have students focus more on giving specific names of characters since in our pre-assessment many students identified the character but not by name. Our pre-assessment reflection allowed us to see how we could expand the students’ knowledge further. Without this, we would have just skimmed the surface and perhaps bored many students leading to less engagement and perhaps even behavior. This is a great example of why pre-assessment is so important and useful.

Texts were chosen based on student interest.

Overall, our intention on using student interest and reflecting on pre-assessment has made a huge impact on engagement as well as on our ability to take a concept much deeper. We both chose our books this week based on what we learned about our students--their favorite books, TV characters, and play activities. We have read texts this week about princesses, Sponge Bob, and Paw Patrol. These texts were not super “meaty.” They would not be texts we probably would have chosen in the past. Instead we would have searched for texts that have stronger story-lines and are more well known as read aloud kindergarten texts.

Spongebob is not a typical text we would choose.

However, choosing texts based on student interests had students more engaged and able to recall and have much deeper-level conversations. This process has made us both aware that choosing student interest to lead our text choices can lead to more engagement than a text we choose based on content. Our first week, implementing our Next Generational Instructional Design unit certainly is showing us how it promotes more purposeful teaching.





Source cited:
 Burns, L. D., & Botzakis, S. G. (forthcoming, 2016). Teaching on Purpose. New York: Teachers College Press.

Anna and Susan are Kindergarten Teachers at Jessamine Early Learning Village & NGID Participants. Currently, The Fund is featuring blogs from teachers in the Next Generation Instructional Design network. They will share their journey, their ideas, and their collaborative work related to being in the network and with building units of study with LDC modules embedded.