Monday, December 18, 2023

The Cultural Power of Report Cards: Harvard Graduate School of Education

 FROM: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/edcast/23/12/cultural-power-report-cards?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Gazette%2020231218%20(1)

EDCAST

The Cultural Power of Report Cards

The evolution and significance of report cards in the American education system
Report Card

Questions about the power of report cards led high school history teacher Wade Morris to dig deep into how these pieces of paper came to carry so much weight in the world. In his book, Report Cards: A Cultural History, Morris uncovers the evolution and significance of report cards. “Since the birth of report cards, report cards have had critics and they've had reformers that have tried to create alternative systems,” he says.

He traces the origins of report cards to the 1830s and 1840s, revealing how teachers in common schools grappled with the challenge of gaining parental support and controlling unruly students. Morris emphasizes that the emergence of report cards was a grassroots development, with teachers documenting their intentions and experimenting to find effective means of control. Over time, report cards have come to be more than just academic assessments and carry profound impact on students, parents, and teachers. 

“[Report cards are] effective at motivating students even though it's an extrinsic motivation that has all kinds of unintended consequences like anxiety and sometimes bitterness and neurosis and self-loathing.” Morris says. “And it's also extremely effective at still today winning over the support of parents. … I still save report cards of my kids. Now they're digital. They're in a Google Drive now, but we still save them. And because there's something deeply rooted about our psyche … report cards are a great way of controlling people because we like it.”

Morris says reports cards are instruments of documentation and surveillance, having a unique role in shaping power dynamics within the educational landscape and also influence college admissions, job applications, and even juvenile corrections systems. 

In this episode of the Harvard EdCast, Morris shares how understanding the historical context of report cards can provide a sense of wisdom and perspective. He encourages parents and educators to navigate the complexities of the educational system with a deeper awareness of its evolution and the inherent challenges associated with grading and assessment.

Transcript

JILL ANDERSON: I am Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast. 

Wade Morris knows few pieces of paper from school hold more influence over us than report cards. He's an experienced educator and researcher whose journey into understanding the evolution of report cards started with his own struggle as a parent during COVID online learning. Report cards have a long history in the educational landscape, beginning as a teacher's experiment to control unruly students in the 1830s to their current role as influential documents that impact college admissions. I wanted to learn more about report cards interesting past. First, I asked Wade to tell me what interested him in report cards. 

WADE MORRIS: As we were transitioning to online learning, which you've written about, how difficult it was to be a parent in the age of COIVD online learning, my own kids were going through the challenges. And my middle daughter in particular was having a hard time with online worksheets and my wife and I considered, "Okay, let's just drop the worksheets and let her go outside and play." But then we concluded that the missing work would appear on her report cards and that would ultimately impact her long-term prospects. And she's only in second grade. And that's when the light bulb went off that these pieces of paper have a strange power over us, and that could be the literary device through which I try to engage in the nearly 200 years of formal public schooling in American history. 

JILL ANDERSON: You call report cards tools of control. What do you mean by that? 

Wade Morris

WADE MORRIS: I'm sure a lot of your listeners are familiar with Michel Foucault, he is this French intellectual in 1960s and seventies. He argued that the last 200 years of Western civilization had seen this shift. The shift was how power was exerted. Prior to the 1700s and early 1800s, power according to Foucault would've been exerted through force. But then Foucault noticed and he particularly focused on prisons, and he focused on insane asylums. He noticed that power now was exerted through documentation and surveillance. He dabbled in talking about school, but I'm not aware of him ever mentioning things like report cards. But to me it was just an obvious Foucauldian disciplinary tool, as Foucault would say. And essentially what started the whole process of this project was trying to figure out if Foucault was right, trying to figure out if these pieces of paper that emerged in the United States in the 1830s and forties, if they actually were intended to be a tool of control as opposed to a tool of learning and a tool of tracking progress. 

JILL ANDERSON: I love the beginning, what you uncovered about where these came from because when you reflect on the way people are about assessment right now, and there's a lot of strong disdain for it, even among teachers, it's interesting to see that report cards essentially began with a teacher, it sounds like. 

WADE MORRIS: Yes. This is one of those empirical, historical arguments that I'm trying to make. That this is not me projecting onto the intentions of teachers. This is teachers documenting their intentions themselves. And teachers in the 1830s and 1840s and 50s in this antebellum period at the birth of the common school, these are these new public schools in which the government, state governments were trying to encourage kids whose parents had never experienced school to try to enroll. And these teachers in the trenches of these new common schools were dealing with this common problem across different states, which was teachers and parents were not getting along and the kids were resisting teacher control. It was sometimes violent, it was sometimes deeply intense, even more intense than you could argue than it is today in this period. Because fundamentally parents at this time, most of them are rural farm workers, do not understand what the purpose of these new public schools are. 

And you have these teachers documenting in education journals, documenting in the minutes of their meetings and letters to each other, even in their journals and their diaries, the personal journals that they wrote. They're documenting about experimenting with different ways to try to win over the support of the parents in an attempt to try to control the students in the classroom. It's very explicit, it's very tangible. It's not a lofty, abstract purpose to the origins of these things. And it's invented at the grassroots. It's not pedagogues, it's not administrators that are coming up with this. It's just the daily interactions that teachers had with students experimenting, trying different things. And then fundamentally, as the decades progressed, they coalesced around this one idea of report cards is really the thing that works the best. 

JILL ANDERSON: Can you talk a little bit about the period over the 20th century when we start to see report cards become this broader tool where we start to see them being a part of college admissions process, job applications? They really took on a life of importance it seems for people. 

WADE MORRIS: It's crazy. And I think it even starts before the 20th century. In the post-war era, 1870s, and even during the Civil War, you saw a lot of things. You see advertisements from private companies trying to sell these new standardized report cards. People are making a buck off of this. And then in the 1870s with the growth of institutionalized school, you see superintendents, you see districts starting to get more organized. If you're curious more about this, David Labaree talks about this a lot in his great books. But anyway, you see these superintendents emerge and the superintendent starts to impose the report cards from the top down, and then all of a sudden the narrative switches, these teachers who invented it 30 or 40 years before start to resist it as an additional part of their workload. To your point, the audience, the intended audience of the report card expands at this time. 

Also, you start to see in the 1880s and 1890s that employers were looking at report cards. It's not just about the parents who are looking at this. And then in the early 1900s, juvenile corrections systems start to use them. Teacher written report cards being submitted to parole officers and to judges to decide about whether or not a kid should be incarcerated. Now all of a sudden, these report cards have a lot of power and dictate whether or not a kid actually has literal freedom. And then in the 1910s and 1920s, with the growing importance of college admissions and the growing competition for college admissions, then it starts to be a litmus test for getting into university. 

At first, it's not really for the kids who have wealth. In the 1910s and 1920s, what you typically see is that if a kid can pay for college, if a kid comes from a family that's been going to that college, there were no college admissions department, but the universities and colleges would essentially just look for completion, not necessarily for specific grades. They don't care if you have A's or B's, just, "Did you pass?" But then the kids that want scholarships, that's when it becomes really, really important for the working class kids looking to get into university. And that's when you see this new era of anxiety about these documents, the anxiety that we still live with a hundred years later. 

JILL ANDERSON: Do you think report cards are effective? 

WADE MORRIS: Yes, Jill. Yes, they're incredibly effective. That's why they never go away. Since the birth of report cards, report cards have had critics and they've had reformers that have tried to create alternative systems. Really look into this with the alternative school movement, the 1960s and 1970s when there was this wave of zealotry to try to get rid of grades and get rid of report cards. And a lot of your listeners may remember this era. They may have come up through school during this era, but you had at the peak of the alternative school movement, the United States had 5 million kids enrolled in these schools that were supposed to be more democratic, more inspired by Dewey with student interest driven. And the big one is to eliminate grades. That was a universal principle for a lot of these alternative schools. But fundamentally, the alternative school movement burned out, and then it gave birth in the 1980s and 1990s to the testing movement and a return to the basics of traditional school. 

And there's a lot of reasons why alternative school movement ultimately failed to change the mainstream American education. One of those reasons is that grading in systems of reporting is just really effective. It's effective at saving time for teachers, who don't have to write narrative reports, who don't have to make home visits. 

It's effective at motivating students even though it's an extrinsic motivation that has all kinds of unintended consequences like anxiety and sometimes bitterness and neurosis and self-loathing. And it's also extremely effective at still today winning over the support of parents. And I don't know, Jill, maybe you're like me, I still save report cards with my kids. Now they're digital. They're in a Google Drive now, but we still save them. And because there's something deeply rooted about our psyche, this all gets back to Foucauldian stuff, that report cards are a great way of controlling people because we like it. We fundamentally want more of it. We want more data. We want more rankings. We want more surveillance of ourselves. The inward gaze that Foucauldian disciples talk about that a lot of education does, it forces us to look back on ourselves as opposed to pausing to reflect on the bigger system. 

JILL ANDERSON: What you're saying is you can't really imagine or fathom a world where report cards wouldn't exist in the traditional school system? 

WADE MORRIS: Maybe one of the big flaws of history is that we're not very good at imagining things. You've had a lot of great guests, Jill, over the years that can imagine a better system. But what history does is look at the evidence from the past, and fundamentally, it makes us reject any sense of nostalgia that there was any alternative that we should live up to. But secondly, we also in the history field, look at the attempts that have failed in the past, and we fundamentally conclude that a big drastic change, a big revolution that'll remake all of American education, which a lot of your brilliant guests have talked about, isn't really practical because it's been tried before and it hasn't worked. Now, that's not to say that we can't reform the system and make it marginally more humane. I hope we can. 

And Ethan Hutt and Jack Schneider have just published a new book that's brilliant on this. It's called, Off the Mark, and they come to the same conclusion. They suggest that maybe we can make report cards less permanent, can go back and change a grade after a kid shows progress. That's a creative solution that maybe deserves some more exploration. There's things that have been tried before that might help, narrative reports, teacher comments, more narrative driven report cards that maybe either replace grades or supplement the grades. 

There's problems with that. There's trade-off. One is teacher time. The second is teacher ability. Do we have the ability to actually convey specific meaning and dig into each child's psyche in just a single paragraph? What ends up happening with a lot of narrative reports is that they turn into lacking substance and wrote copy and paste kind of things. There's portfolios, there's been generations of schools that have tried to create portfolios of student work. It could be written, could be art, could be math portfolios even. But the problem there is on the receiving end of this information, do the universities and do the parents have the time and the patience to actually look at the portfolios and try to understand the gradual growth that a student or a learner actually shows? And back to your point, report cards are efficient. They convey specific meaning very quickly, and it saves us time. 

JILL ANDERSON: It sounds like report cards aren't going to go anywhere, even though this tension exists between assessment grading, people love this topic, love to hate it, and report cards. It just seems like this will always exist in some manner in modern schooling. 

WADE MORRIS: And that's why I get very bored with the Foucault point very quickly. After I researched the Antebellum period, it was clear to me that, "Okay, Foucault is onto something here." Then the question was, how do ordinary teachers like me and parents and students carve out meaning or try to carve out meaning within the classroom and even joy in the classroom? And this is an existential question for me as a career teacher in the middle of his career, I got another 20 years left of teaching. What's the point? Is it just about control? Or can I live with a certain degree of cognitive dissonance and still try to give my students space to actually love what we do even within this system that is fundamentally about discipline, I think? And that's what the rest of my research has tried to be about is how people in the 1870s, a formerly enslaved person in the 1870s, carves out meaning during reconstruction in the classroom, how do parents balance the neurosis of and the anxiety of having children come home with report cards while also trying to encourage their children to love learning? 

How do parents do that in the 1880s? The turn of the century juvenile corrections, how does a kid who really hates the system in Colorado fight back against it? And then can he actually resist the system all the way through his adolescence? And then you get all the way through the alternative school movement, which ultimately is a tragic failure, I think. But there is still a kernel of alternative school movement idealism that's still out there, and there is still space for these schools to exist. It's just really hard. It's really hard for parents and students to find them and then find the resources to actually attend them. This is what I think is more interesting to me than just the question of discipline and control. It's the existential question of how do we find meaning in all of this? 

JILL ANDERSON: How do you balance something like grading your students, which is something everyone has to do in most teaching professions, and that what you just mentioned, the joy of learning, because the two don't always feel like they are aligned? 

WADE MORRIS: I hesitate to ever suggest to teachers what they should do, but I know what I'm trying to do. It might not work with other teachers, but one of the things I do is just admit it, name the thing that grades are with the students, and maybe turn it into a discussion. As a history teacher, I can incorporate into the content of the course. 

I teach politics also, there's a lot of political theory that this stuff is relevant to. You can turn this into a metaphor. And by naming it though, by describing it to the students and the students instinctively feel it, a lot of times the fact that this is reductionist, it's fundamentally reducing human beings to numbers and letters. The fact that we can name it for them, maybe it helps them a little bit. Maybe it helps them understand that they are normal and they're responding in normal ways to an abnormal system. And the abnormal system hasn't been around for centuries. It's been around for almost two centuries, but it doesn't go back millennia. And then this is what a lot of pedagogues say is critical consciousness, the self-awareness, the awareness of how we got where we are today. And maybe that helps. 

JILL ANDERSON: Have your personal and professional views of report cards changed as a result of doing this research? 

WADE MORRIS: I'm at peace with it now. I'm at peace with report cards. I went full circle. I spent 15 years in the classroom before doing this research, and I hadn't really paused to reflect on the context of where the system emerged and how it emerged. And then I went through my critical theory phase where it's about oppressed and oppressors. And then there's the crisis where you think, "I'm part of the oppression." And now I'm at peace with I can be a really good teacher. Maybe not the greatest, not the greatest for every kid, not the one that every kid needs, but I can be a good teacher that can help kids balance the pressures and anxieties of grades with a genuine joy for learning. The thing I figured out is that I've got to demonstrate it myself and also admit and explain that what they're going through in the broader context of how they feel, feeling oppressed by grades, is normal. It's essentially like this middle age cognitive dissonance that maybe a lot of teachers like me might feel. 

JILL ANDERSON: Do you think parents should look at these documents a little bit differently knowing the history of them? 

WADE MORRIS: Yes. This might sound cheesy, and it's also self-serving as a historian and a history teacher. Learning about the context of how the system emerged gives you a sense of self-awareness and wisdom. And what comes with wisdom is knowing that twas ever thus, and therefore, I'm not going to overreact. And I think we do need some more wisdom amongst parents in perspective. It doesn't necessarily mean that I know the answer of how to manage any given situation, but I do think that that's the great gift that history gives us is just to take a deep breath. We are living through a 200-year epoch and we can't control it, and we can deescalate when things don't go well for our children. That's my instinct at least. 

JILL ANDERSON: When you see that D come home on your kid's report card, not to panic… 

WADE MORRIS:
Or Google "American History of Education" read a little bit and then go confront your kid. Sorry, Jill. I'm being sarcastic. 

JILL ANDERSON: Don't put as much weight into them basically. 

WADE MORRIS: I suppose so. We will get through this, and we're all going through this together. 

JILL ANDERSON: Wade Morris is a high school history teacher at an international boarding school in Moshi, Tanzania. He's the author of Report Cards, A Cultural History. I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast, produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.



 

Sunday, December 17, 2023

Making Classroom Participation More Equitable With Hand Gestures: Edutopia

 From: https://www.edutopia.org/article/using-hand-gestures-classroom-participation?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Fall+23&utm_id=Fall23&utm_term=fall+school+season&utm_content=equitable+participation&fbclid=IwAR0zTkoTMvKhsEm2L0FGX0Ob88sOjoBXsnnr1ODu7jMKoMb8SpHFg96K-9Q

 

Making Classroom Participation More Equitable With Hand Gestures

Not all students feel comfortable participating verbally in class discussions, and these tools invite everyone to contribute.

December 11, 2023
Illustration of different hand gestures
Alexey Yaremenko / iStock

As teachers, we can ensure that “all means all” by introducing, modeling, and providing opportunities for students to use hand signals or gestures in the classroom. Gestures are a tool that can support equitable classroom participation by increasing engagement and allowing us to read the room to assess who understands a concept and tailor instruction accordingly.

When teachers ensure that all students are responding, we show that we value every student and have high expectations for every student to contribute. Gestures can prove helpful during independent, partner, small group, and whole group instruction. Below, I offer ways to implement them.

USING GESTURES WITH LARGE GROUPS

When used in whole group situations, hand motions enable every student to respond at once. For example, “Show me with your face and body how the character was feeling at this point” or “Show me with your thumb how well you understood that strategy: thumbs up for ‘I understand completely’ and sideways for ‘I’m getting there.’”

Using gestures is great for all and necessary for some, including quieter students, students with anxiety, multilingual students, and students who communicate without speaking. A student may be hesitant or unable to share with the whole group using words, and a hand motion allows them to express their thinking. 

As a result, gestures are a huge equity move.

ASSESSMENT AND ENGAGEMENT

When I hold all students accountable for participating, energy and engagement increase. I can take a quick assessment of understanding. For example, “Show me with your fingers how many sounds you heard in that word.” I reteach or scaffold as needed, either in the moment or during conferring or instruction at a later time. 

Interactive read-alouds are an excellent time to use gestures. With younger kids, I have students act out the story with their hands, to retell it. Students can turn and talk briefly and use a variety of gestures depending on the question; for example, “Tell your partner the two different perspectives” might allow them to hold one hand flat, palm up for the first perspective and to raise the other hand for the second perspective.

SMALL GROUPS

When partners and small groups use gestures, they are more likely to bounce ideas off each other. For example, when using the American Sign Language (ASL) “agree” motion, one student can encourage their partner to continue and then build upon what their partner said, using the “I have something to add” gesture.

To assess partnerships and small group dialogues, I glance around the room to see which gestures are being used and get a quick idea of how the conversations are going; I can visit students who need coaching or a check in. 

I have also seen students use hand motions when working independently to remind themselves to add detail (place one fist on top of the other), focus (hold two hands parallel with palms facing), or try a different strategy or word (start with palm flat then flip it over), showing how these moves become internalized and enhance learning.

SOME OF MY MOST-USED HAND MOTIONS

Two of my favorite signals are agree and disagree. A sense of connection builds when classmates and/or the teacher agrees with a student. Teaching the disagree gesture and modeling how to respectfully disagree deepens conversations as we consider different perspectives.

When a listener uses the elaborate gesture, the speaker feels heard and is encouraged to say more or clarify. The speaker responds with more precise language, an important communication skill. By modeling and asking students to paraphrase, we teach one of the most important listening skills. In order to paraphrase, a listener needs to deeply listen and rephrase to summarize what has been said.

When teaching sound articulation, teachers ask students to point to where sounds are articulated to help students distinguish phonemes, for example: “say /th/ and point to your tongue between your teeth or feel the vibration in your throat.” One of my colleagues teaches or asks her kindergarten students to make a gesture for important high-frequency words; they love to show me their gestures as they warm up by reading the words.

When I introduce sentence stems, I emphasize certain words. For example, when using “I think this strategy is the best because ___,” students use a flat hand extending out from their bodies with the word because. Recently, I saw a teacher use a connect signal with students to show how facts in nonfiction reading connect. As soon as she introduced it, students honed in on the instruction.

SUPPORTING CLASSROOM CULTURE

In addition to ensuring that all students have the tools to communicate and respond, we can use hand signals to keep instruction flowing. A student using the ASL signal for bathroom allows a teacher to know they are heading to the bathroom without having to stop instruction. Similarly, if a student needs to reset and reflect on classroom expectations, the teacher can give an inconspicuous letter R signal.

Start simple with gestures and introduce them with a sense of playfulness and a clear expectation that all will participate. Then, over time, go deeper and layer on complexity. Be responsive to what students need next. This will increase a sense of novelty and new learning. Using hand motions is such a powerful teaching move, a huge equity tool, and a way to increase engagement.

 

Calm Down Tools for Kids

 From:  CALM DOWN TOOLS FOR KIDS

How to help kids with brain breaks, proprioception and calming techniques.

 CALM DOWN TOOLS FOR KIDS

https://www.andnextcomesl.com

 




Saturday, November 18, 2023

22 Unexpectedly Effective Teaching Hacks: Edutopia

From: https://www.edutopia.org/article/22-effective-teaching-hacks

22 Unexpectedly Effective Teaching Hacks

Teachers across the country share the most useful teaching tips they’ve learned—everything from the utility of Velcro to the power of periodically faking amnesia.

November 17, 2023

Have you ever received a piece of advice from a colleague that made your life as a teacher so much easier? Maybe it was a recommendation that fundamentally reshaped how you deal with disruptions in your class—or something much smaller, like a hack for how to get marker stains off your whiteboard. We bet that advice has stuck with you and made you want to high-five your colleague every time you pass them in the hallway.

Edutopia wanted to crowdsource and bottle that feeling so that teachers everywhere could celebrate little changes that feel like big classroom victories. On social media, we asked our audience of teachers to share the most unexpectedly helpful teaching hacks they’ve discovered over the course of their careers. We heard all sorts of advice, from assigning pencil sharpening as homework to the benefits of periodically faking amnesia, and collected them into one list.

As you look through this resource, keep in mind this bit of wisdom from educator Coleman Bruman: Not every single tip will work for you, nor will any one individual hack turn your classroom into a utopia. For the greatest chance of success, try combining a variety of strategies. 

“That strategy from PD will pick up 5 kids, while that closing from the book you read will get 6 more, the joke you said grabs up 2, and the connection to real life brings in 10,” Bruman writes. “Everything you do helps kids grow.”

STUDENT ENGAGEMENT

Rephrase how you ask for questions: Educator Megan Battle says a small shift in the way she asks for student questions has worked wonders. Instead of “Are there any questions?" she now uses the prompt, “Okay, what are your questions?” A number of educators in our comments agreed that this tiny change in wording can show students that it’s natural—and expected—to have questions about newly learned material.

All kids love stickers: Want a quick motivator for students? Look no further than stickers: “All ages love stickers. *All* ages. 🤣,” emphasizes educator Christina Cawdery in a well-received Instagram comment. Eighth-grade math teacher Megan Williams adds fragrance to the mix: Her students took their time jumping into warmups “until I started handing out scented stickers to kids who finished.”

Challenge students to complete a task without asking questions: Periodically giving students problems just beyond their reach can “activate prior knowledge and motivate students, clarifying what they know and what they don’t know,” learning scientist Manu Kapur told Edutopia in 2022. Twitter user wondercentric suggests allotting five minutes at the beginning of an in-class activity when students must attempt the activity for themselves without talking or asking questions—which “builds autonomy and gives students a chance to rely on themselves before others.”

Try faking amnesia: If you want to elicit deeper responses from your students when asking them to explain or summarize what they’ve learned, a bit of playful deception might help. Educator Maliha Akbar feigns amnesia: “I walked in one day telling them I was totally blank and didn’t remember what we had learnt in math class since last week. They taught me the whole concept.”

Call on a student to repeat your instructions: Want an easy way to ensure that students are listening to your instructions? When you’re finished, “ask a couple of students to re-explain the instructions to the class,” writes educator Connie Radbourne. “They never know who I will ask! It helps them to listen closely.”

ASSESSMENT

Pair up students for peer review based on grades: “Next math test or quiz, correct and rank order the papers,” suggests teacher Denise Oh. “Grab the top and bottom scores, and pair them up” for peer review. Do this through the entire stack, Oh suggests—middle scores paired with middle—so that striving students can help struggling ones, and students in the middle can learn new approaches from each other.

Try creative reading summaries: Summaries of a text are a staple of ELA classes—but students don’t always find them particularly engaging. Instead of asking students to summarize a text like Beowulf, educator Barbara Murray suggests “reinventing” your assignment to something more engaging—like asking them to write a eulogy to deliver instead. “They write summaries without realizing it, add flourishes, get good grades, and we all have fun,” Murray writes.

Have books ready for fast test-takers: If younger students finish an assessment quickly, they can tend to become a distraction to those around them. So, during a test, “have books the fast finishers can read so they don’t disturb the others who are still working,” writes educator Louette McInnes.

REDUCING DISRUPTIONS

Use hand signals: To decrease verbal disruptions during class, teach your students hand signals associated with particular needs. For example, use distinct hand signals “to indicate restroom, tissue, and pencil needs,” suggests educator Beth Pierce. Holding one finger up might indicate a request to use the bathroom, for example, while two fingers up means a student needs to sharpen a pencil. 

Get quiet, not loud: When students get loud and rambunctious, teachers can be tempted to get loud right back. But many teachers say the opposite approach is more effective. “When they are talking too much and it’s too loud, I start whispering and they quiet down,” writes teacher Bethany Meyer.

Assign pencil sharpening as homework: Tired of pencil-related disruptions? In educator Anne Craddock’s classroom, students’ homework includes sharpening six pencils at home. “This cut down on disruptions and excuses for not working,” Craddock writes. 

CLEAN AND ORGANIZED CLASSROOMS

Give class objects human names: Several teachers in our community pointed to a post from English teacher Miss B that recently went viral, suggesting that teachers should name classroom objects: “Does a student care if a glue stick goes missing? No! Do they care if DEREK the glue stick has not been returned? ABSOLUTELY. It’s like a manhunt until Derek has been returned to his rightful spot.”

Save your knees: One of the awkward moments of teaching is figuring out how best to position yourself when interacting one-on-one with a student. Should you crouch over their desk, kneel down next to them, or what? “I carry a small folding camping stool when my students are doing independent work,” writes educator Austin Pinckney. “When they need help, I pop it open and sit next to them.” Other commenters opt for rolling stools or even yoga balls. Ultimately, use whatever helps you protect your knees.

Velcro is your friend: Are you hanging stuff this year? (That’s a rhetorical question—for a teacher, hanging stuff is kinda part of the job.) Well, if you haven’t already, consider Velcro. PE teacher Cindy Colman says Velcro makes “changing out signs, posters, etc.” a breeze. Likewise, Candyss Woodberry uses Velcro to make an easily reordered lineup chart for her students.

Use electrical tape for labels: Tired of sticky residue from labels? “Put down electrical tape on mailboxes, cubbies, desks,” or anything else that needs a label, writes teacher Bri Miller. “At the end of the year just pull the whole thing of electrical tape up and no residue or half peeled labels!”

Use a utility belt: If you’re tired of not having the stuff you need on hand, it might be time to take a page out of Batman’s playbook. “I wear a gardening belt and carry everything I need as I help students in my STEAM lab: pencils, dry erase markers, a few pens, sticky notes,” writes educator Mary Phillips. Or, instead of a utility belt, you can opt for a deep-pocketed apron, comments Elle Be Cee Zee.

TECH TOOLS

Use a “hyperdoc” to compile all assignments in one place: Middle and high school teachers have probably heard this excuse before: “Oh, I didn’t know we had homework.” To ensure that students know what’s due, compile a “hyperdoc”—“a running Google doc that everyone has access to with the day’s assignments” and relevant links, writes educator Misti Gil. Besides helping all students keep track of what’s expected of them, this document is particularly useful for students who miss class, Gil writes.

Compile a document to support substitute teachers: Teachers can make life easier for their subs, too, by creating a running document with all the key information they need to know. “It included all the info the sub would need about my room, school procedures, the schedule, resources, etc.,” writes educator Colleen Windell. When crafting this document the first time, make it reusable by leaving a blank section for the day’s lesson—then you only have to fill that part in each time you’re out, writes Windell.

Create a forum for anonymous questions: Teacher Kate Lizzie recommends “having a place where students can ask questions anonymously.” There might be some important questions (about class content, class structure, or even their relationships with peers) that students are too embarrassed to ask face-to-face; an anonymous Google Form can be a great way to field those questions.

TEACHING ADVICE

Steal from colleagues: “Theft is my best hack, like a bandit 😆,” writes Facebook commenter Rin Tin. “Walk into my colleague’s classroom... Oh I like that, I’m stealing this idea. I’m the Thomas Edison of teaching. Brilliant at theft of great ideas. 💰💡😆”

Watch yourself teach: A great way to improve your craft is to film yourself teaching and watch it back, writes educator Laura Miller. You might be surprised by what you find: “It’s eye opening to see what your habits are,” Miller says—like starting too many sentences with “So” or “All right.” “I also learned a lot about the frequency and type of questions I was asking,” Miller writes, which allowed her to adjust accordingly.

Save lesson planning for Monday night: Rather than planning your weeks in the traditional Monday-to-Friday sequence, consider planning Tuesday-to-Monday, several teachers in our community suggested. That is, rather than doing your lesson planning over the weekend, you can do it on Monday night. “It’s lessening my ‘Sunday scaries,’” writes educator Mary Beane, and the slight shift—covering new material on Tuesday—turns Monday into a helpful day to review the material from the previous week.

HELP OTHER TEACHERS OUT!

We’d love this article to be an evolving document of best practices, so please use the comments to add any unexpected teaching hacks of your own. If we see something we love, we may well add it to the list!

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