Rediscovering the Golden Oldie

I posit that one of the best feelings in the world is when you’ve forgotten about something that you previously treasured, something lost to the clutter and chaos of life, and then you discover it again. That comforting piece of clothing still fits. That handy tool still works. That beloved dish is waiting for a new recipe. 

You ask yourself: How haven’t I used this? Or worn this? Or displayed this in so long? And I think the answer is that we are surrounded by so many things, so much information. It’s too easy to lose track of the really great stuff when it becomes buried by the more and new stuff.

Returning to the classroom after eight years has been a whole study in this phenomenon. When I first became a vice principal, I described the experience like watching video from a drone as it speeds upward, making greater and greater amounts of space visible. What’s lost is that cool little dot over there in the corner. 

Now, I have the chance to go back and examine those little dots.

Case in point: I recently attended a professional learning opportunity on writing instruction. As pretty much a toss-off statement, the presenter said, “I don’t see many Word Walls these days. We should bring those back. They’re really effective.”

And I thought, “Indeed! Challenge accepted!”

At the time my students were working toward a culminating writing project on fake news in which they argue who is most responsible for stopping the spread of misinformation. It was a meaty unit, covering lots of text, video, visuals, etc. Tons of academic vocab. Perfect for a Word Wall.

To determine the effectiveness of this strategy, I observed students as they wrote. I saw at least a third of my students glance over to the Word Wall while writing.

And then, in typical Ms. Leoni fashion, my data-focused self kept track of how many essays used words from the Word Wall as I scored them. But I have an extreme sticky note addiction, and made hashmarks on sticky notes instead of using - oh, I don’t know - a spreadsheet? And of course, in the chaos and clutter of life, I lost a few sticky notes.

So, yeah. At least 50% of my students’ writing projects used words from the Word Wall, absolutely elevating the academic vocabulary of their work. 

That’s definitely a sweater that still fits and a crockpot that still works.

Music to My Ears

For as long as I can remember, music was a big part of my classroom. I played intros, I play outros. I had music for firing everyone up and music for chilling out. I had playlists with particular beats per minute for gallery walks or writing sessions. And my favorite - videos of pop music, performed in American Sign Language. All these playlists were a thing of beauty, and that was three jobs ago, so none of it is at all accessible.

Super bummer but also a great opportunity to lean into the main reason I wanted to return to the classroom - to become much better at being student centered.

I did curate music previously, but what I did was ask adults for music in other languages, especially Spanish, that I could add to my classroom playlists.

This time around, I asked the kids.

It’s amazingly simple. I sent Google forms to each class, asking for song suggestions for our playlist. I organized each spreadsheet first by class period and then I made one copy of all songs I didn’t know and sent that to my new AVID/Spanish teacher friend for review. (AVID teachers are automatically friends. I don’t make the rules.) She was able to green light the Spanish songs for me.

For songs in English that I didn’t know, I checked lyrics. And good thing because a child in one of my classes suggested a song so inappropriate my head almost spun. When I asked him why he felt the lyrics were OK, he said, and this is a direct quote: “What?” We had a laugh about it, but I cannot emphasize enough - Google the lyrics.

However, checking lyrics was a quick task. Then I created playlists on YouTube for each class period. It will warm your heart to learn that so much of what students suggested is music from previous generations.

The Beatles - “Anything. It’s all good.”

The B52s

REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling”

Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses”

Queen

Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind”

I mean, people, we’re doing something right if this is what students want to hear in class. My theory is that students spend so much time on TikTok, and the only silver lining is that they are being exposed to a wide range of music. Take wins where you can. It’s beautiful.

Case in point: Friday afternoon. Halloween. The day after the big rivalry game. Students had a writing assignment, and for the most part, they were writing. At one point, while a fun song in Spanish was playing, a student said, “Turn it up!” I responded, “If everyone is quieter, you’ll all be able to hear it better.”

And then all I could hear was this excellent Tejano tune, whispering about the task, and the lyrical sound of pencil upon paper, due at the end of class.

The kids are all right.

Wait a minute, Mr. Postman

It really hasn’t been long since I left admin to return to the classroom, just roughly four months. So I’m certain I’ll discover a difference between these two roles that is much more profound and insightful in the future. But so far, the biggest difference is this: Emails.

As an administrator, especially at the district office, I received literally hundreds of emails a day. More than 50 each Saturday and Sunday. It was a mountain of correspondence that I set aside official quiet time every morning to review, but continued to check throughout every seven days and nights of the week. I know I would have been more productive if I completed my 30 minutes of email time each morning and then left subsequent messages unread until the next day.

But two things: 1 - An urgent issue at the district level has the potential to seriously impact hundreds of teachers and thousands of students, and I couldn’t miss the opportunity to respond quickly because the emergency happened after 9 a.m.

And 2 - I started my professional career nearly 40 years ago as a young newspaper reporter. No email, no text messages, no social media. I had a mailbox. Scribbled messages left in that wooden cubby were my bread and butter, and I’ve never recovered from obsessively checking messages all day every day.

(Edna Buchanan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning hilarious and extraordinary Miami Herald crime reporter, writes about the same unbreakable habit in her book Never Let Them See You Cry. Or maybe it was The Corpse Had a Familiar Face. Both great books.) 

I just checked: Since Friday afternoon, when my principal sends out her weekly update and celebration newsletter, I’ve received five emails. Before her newsletter arrived on Friday, I received a total of 19 emails that day.

Emails are interesting because, unlike letters and text messages, all of them seem to carry an air of urgency. Especially since email migrated from living exclusively on the desktop to being a 24-hour presence on my phone, each message seems to yell for attention.

As a site and district administrator, I often received sensitive emails that were sent to me just to keep me in the loop. Absolutely necessary. If you work in a system of more than two people, you should document important things and include your supervisor. I very much appreciated folks who understood to cc their managers, and then explicitly stated they were keeping me in the loop, not expecting a response.

However, I didn’t realize how much these dozens and dozens of emails took up space in my brain and soul. So much real estate and energy, and when I walked away, I felt that weight slowly dissipate. Four months in, I don’t feel it at all.

It’s like when you have a bad cold, and you might find momentary relief but remain congested for weeks until one day you wake up, and you can breathe. 

My plan for re-entering the classroom is to fill that real estate with focused, personalized lessons and interventions, targeting the exact young humans that sit in my classroom this year. It’s a different kind of urgency, one that sits so much better on my soul.

Taking Station Rotation for a Spin

Here’s what I love in life: You want something, you get it, and it turns out better than you imagined.

When I daydreamed about all the good reasons to return to the classroom, at the top of the list was the opportunity to become really good at the station rotation model. This is my own little passion project, and I am so darn lucky to have the chance to implement this structure with students. I’ve run weekly station rotations for six weeks now, and the biggest surprise has been how effective this structure is for responding quickly to students’ academic needs.

I’ll continue to wax poetic on station rotation for as long as I’m teaching, but so far, the most compelling element is how well this model streamlines quick, small-group interventions for students. 

(I’ve stolen ideas from relied heavily on Dr. Catlin Tucker to build my capacity. Check out her work here: https://catlintucker.com/2021/10/station-rotation-model/)

Nuts and bolts:

• Mondays and Tuesdays are short periods, and those days are for mini-lessons.

• Wednesdays and Thursdays are block periods, so those are station rotation days. The 90-minute period allows for rotations every 18 minutes or so.

• Stations are designed as opportunities to apply skills and ideas from the mini-lessons.

Here’s how I arrange groups:

1. Each of the four groups is about eight students.

2. I created a quadrant template that I update every week to assign students to their starting point in the rotation.

3. On Tuesday afternoons, I review who is missing assignments, with a focus on practice tasks from Monday and Tuesday. (I will also go back and see who is missing earlier assignments, especially those that impact their grades.)

4. Station 1 is designated as the Make Up Station, and I group kids based on missing assignments. They start in this station.

5. Once the class is up and running, I spend most of my time monitoring this group in this rotation. This gives me time to answer questions, determine points of confusion, and say “do this right now” and then stare at a kid/kids until they do it.

6. Students who have completed all tasks and are showing mastery for that week start in Station 2. They end up in Station 1 on the last rotation, and that allows for an enrichment or challenge activity for these excelling students. Or simply 18 minutes to chill out and chat.

This quick intervention has been the big payoff so far. Also, the student who walked into my class on a block day and said, “I’m ready for station rotation!”

There’s so much more … stay tuned!

Collaborative Classroom Expectations - Eating Strategy Every Morning

Educators can learn so much from business experts and successful entrepreneurs (and vise versa). When I’m really at my best and most impactful as a teacher, I’m essentially running a small business and the profit is student growth, in academics, in confidence, and in connection with others. And one idea that feels true down to my bones is this:

If you’ve ever tried to make an impact in a toxic culture, you probably feel this in your bones too.

That’s why I spent a not small chunk of time at the start of school intentionally building culture. A few tech tools make this so much easier than it’s ever been.

And it’s not too late to implement culture building! Indeed, it should continue all year long.

Here’s what I did this year:

Step 1: Build a Class Description - Students describe themselves in a quickwrite, things they like, goals for the future, etc. Then they share in pairs, and then in groups of four to find similarities. All groups then share out, and the list of similarities is compiled.

Next, put the whole class list into the generative AI tool of choice, and request an overall class description:

Before posting in class, students have the opportunity to edit the description.

Step 2: Seek Student Voice - Use a digital survey of choice to ask students what they need in order to maximize learning. I had students brainstorm and share with partners before taking the survey so that they had time to think about their specific needs.

Step 3: Create Unique Classroom Expectations - Copy the survey responses into the generative AI tool of choice, and ask for a list of three statements that declare what students need to learn in class. I also asked for any outliers to ensure I wasn’t missing a single but compelling response.

Step 4: Post and Sign - Having each student sign ceremoniously is a way to publicly declare their commitment to the expectations, and also a little silly and fun, which is completely my jam.

Step 5: Review, Reflect, Refine - Take the opportunity to review classroom expectations and reflect on how I’m doing and how they are doing in upholding the expectations. I also periodically discuss how our classroom expectations are different from school rules, but definitely aligned. Cell phones are a real problem so far, and the rule is no cell phones in the classroom. That’s 100% aligned to commitments such as “engaging fully in discussions”. 

Building a culture of respect, shared values, common goals, and a commitment to learning together takes a little time, but classroom culture underpins everything we try to accomplish as educators. So worth the time!

Practicing What I Preach

One of the loveliest and most challenging perks about returning to the classroom is the opportunity to put my money where my mouth has been for the past decade. I’ve been training, coaching, and supporting teachers since before I went into admin, and now that I’m a full-time teacher again, it’s time to exercise those teaching chops. Now, that’s fun. But also a little scary because I’m not 100 percent every moment. Let me tell you where I have been struggling.

Using my resources: I’ve been preaching to students and teachers and colleagues for years to use the tools around them. Dictionaries, websites, notes, textbooks, and so many other resources are just waiting for us to use them. But I’m truly overwhelmed by how many resources I have now, and I’m working to figure out when to use which resource. Case in point: While planning a mini-lesson on citation practice for this week’s station rotation, I tried all sorts of generative AI tools, and the results were, in a word, garbage. Then I remembered the treasure trove that is university websites, and within a few minutes, I had the resources I needed for this week.

I truly need to remind myself why I’m using these resources. My intention is to use the time I’m saving by not creating everything from scratch to know exactly how my students are progressing and then differentiating appropriately and quickly. Definitely need to sharpen this particular saw.

Slowing down to speed up: One of my favorite admin colleagues (Hey, Langton!) used to say that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. But I have so many ideas I want to implement and so many structures and activities from the past I want to revive! And I’ve been very intentionally building culture in my classroom - most likely my next blog post - and working on taking time to make decisions in my life, so I’m adopting Mr. Langton’s wisdom and reminding myself that slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

I tend to walk fast and talk fast and eat fast and change fast, while telling folks about the benefits of slowing down. This journey is really forcing me to look critically at my own speed, in the classroom and in my personal life.

And every day in the classroom is another opportunity to practice what I preach.

Running on Muscle Memory

If I were inspired more than I plan to be, I could do a cartwheel. That’s because I did about a trillion cartwheels from the time I was in preschool through adulthood. Haven’t done a cartwheel in a decade or so, but I trust that my body just knows what to do.

Turns out, for me anyway, launching a school year in the classroom seems to be the same. My muscle memory has pulled me through these past two days. This is, mostly, a really good thing. But … there is at least one drawback so far to relying on automaticity. 

The good news first: Kagan groups, over planning, and lots of student talk still work. Through the middle of next week, it’s all team and classroom culture building before we dive into content. I’ve intentionally planned too many activities because there will be no downtime, and I really need students to connect and engage with each other before we do difficult stuff together. 

Their happy chatter warms my heart, and kids are still so darn funny, but what I’m really trying to do is lower their affective filter and build a foundation of safety and support. A couple classes are still pretty quiet, and I’ll keep coaxing them until they are ready to share their voices.

The bad news: Muscle memory cuts both ways. I automatically do the effective things I used to do, as well as the practices that are no longer effective or necessary. Case in point: I needed to prep lessons for co-creating classroom expectations. I opened a blank doc and took off. And about a minute later, I remembered that I don’t need to spend a couple hours making lesson plans and materials. I clicked over to Diffit, asked for lessons on co-creating classroom expectations, instantly received a bunch of stuff, reviewed and edited that stuff, and five minutes later, I had everything I needed. Early on in this journey, I declared that I would use AI well, but these tools didn’t exist when I left the classroom, and it will take a while for this old dog to learn that particular trick.

Also not great, I wore one of my favorite outfits on the first day of school because that’s what I do. Here’s a tip for new teachers: Don’t wear the colors of the rival school on the first day back. I didn’t even think about that - just muscle memory - but I certainly will from now on!