I Love Teaching Teachers

One thing I have learned about myself over the past couple of years is that I really enjoy teaching teachers. I love getting to share what I’ve learned through my 5 years of experience teaching, as well as what I’ve learned throughout my masters degree in instructional technology.

And teaching teachers isn’t just telling them what I do and suggest that they do they same. It’s more about coaching them to help them figure things out for themselves and deduce what will work best for their teaching style, their classroom, and their students. April, my principal, gave me this great book to study up more on being a good coach called Leadership Coaching for Educators. 

Our school is trying some new Professional Development styles this year that include teachers offering workshops on PD days over various topics. Before they can teach a workshop they have to go through the workshop-workshop to learn best practices in teaching adults. I have given several of these workshops this year, mostly about technology, including one about the SAMR model. You can access my presentation for that here. (Feel free to steal and tweak as you desire, knowing that I do not own the copyright for the images and infographics I used. I take copyright somewhat loosely when it comes to education. I’m making a mental note to blog about that later.)

My next workshop endeavor is teaching about my classroom. I have had so many staff members catch me in the hall and ask how things in my “crazy” classroom are going, and I have been dying to give them all a better answer than the “really great” I have time for in the hall between classes. I’ve also been tiptoeing around the subject so far this year because I knew I had to go about it the right way. I definitely couldn’t teach a workshop about getting rid of all your desks if April wasn’t okay with that. And anyway, that wouldn’t be what’s best for a lot of teachers.

So the focus of this workshop is more on how teachers can relinquish some of the control they hold in their classroom over to their students. I also incorporate a lot of research from The Third Teacher, which is a fabulous book. A lot of it deals with what to think about when designing/building a school or buying furniture for a school, but there are still a lot of things I can apply to my already constructed classroom. 

Here is the link to my Google Slides presentation I will use at my classroom workshop. (Again, feel free to steal or tweak.)

 

Be The Change

We watch the world constantly changing around us, keep our education system the same, and can’t seem to figure out what the problem is… 

This quote below said by Gandhi couldn’t be more true. If you want things to change at your school or in your classroom you need to do something about it. Complaining and whining never changed anything.

Make sure you think it through and have everything you need before you try to start a movement.

Above all else, do not fear failure.

  

The Third Teacher

A lot of my research that I did before I went into my “deskless” classroom came from The Third Teacher.

Much of what they discuss in the book and in the following Youtube video would be impossible for me because I don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars to completely re-design my classroom and my school. Some of it still applies and I worked with what I had. It is still really cool to see at an extreme level what could be accomplished and it makes me want to change little things to work my way in that direction.

Here are some more resources about The Third Teacher. It is definitely a book I recommend buying if you are even remotely interested.

I also got a lot of my ideas from a workshop I attended given by Scott Fuller of the Personalized Learning Dudes. They have lots of great ideas. Here is their Facebook and their website.

Reflection on Student Behavior

My students have had really great behavior this year, much better than my previous classes. I’m sure there are many factors involved in this occurrence: the combination of students I was given, my deskless classroom, having my masters degree completed, my increasing knowledge and experience as a fifth year teacher, and I’m sure many more.

However, I was curious if this good behavior was exclusive to my classroom or if it carried over with my students to other places throughout the school. So I collected some anecdotal data from the other teachers that see my students every week.

Library- I take my language arts class to the library, so it’s slightly different, but our librarian says that all our third grade classes are about the same level of good behavior.

Science Lab- Our science specialist said that all our classes are about even, but she has noticed that some of my students choose to stand behind their chairs in the lab.

Art- Unfortunately for my kiddos we have art on Fridays and we always seem to have fridays off for some reason or another, so my students haven’t gotten nearly as much art as the other third grade classes this year. But our art teacher said that my class compared to the other third grade classes seems more calm.

PE- gym is a little difficult to guage because we have PE twice a week always with 2 classes together, but our PE teacher said that Thursdays, the day my class and Mrs. Ziebold’s third grade class have PE together, is one of the classes she looks forward to the most.

Music- Our music teacher said that my class is one of her best classes, so that was exciting to hear.

Technology- In tech we have more tangible data in that Mr. Stout keeps a class point system and my class was the first to reach the top and earn a free day in tech class. My kid’s rocket ship is the one right in the middle.

So overall I’d say that my class is comparable if not better than other classes. There are so many factors: I will definitely need to keep collecting data on this.

 

Start a Movement!

 

So apparently my little experiment is going so well that I’m starting a bit of a movement. All the other third grade teachers have done away with students keeping things in desks and instead they keep everything in their cubbies. Two of my teammates have taken it a step further. They both still have 25 desks, but some have been raised to standing and some have been lowered to sit on the floor. The students also do not have assigned seats, but are instead encouraged to make good choices about where they think they will learn best.

More Data

 

The previous post contained data from my students about our classroom.

Now, a few of my teammates are starting to move towards having a room like mine. They will be lowering some desks to floor level, raising some to standing level, and creating more floor space to work. They will still have a desk for each student though. Before they decided to do all this they wanted to collect some data from their students.

The following graphs are the results from the 75 other 3rd grade students who are not in my homeroom class. Some of the students are in my classes for math and language arts though.

A little over a third of students said they would like to stand. In my room the kids sometimes stand at the standing tables, they sometimes sit on a chair at the standing tables and they sometimes kneel on their knees at the standing tables. I’ll be curious to see how these numbers play out in the other classes. 

 

I very much expected the below result. I have always found that kids like to work on the floor. They can lay down, they can spread out, they can work together. 

I was surprised at how many kids like having their own desk. I wonder why this is so. Maybe they like having their own space that is just theirs, maybe they don’t like having to go back and forth to their cubby to get their supplies. I think I’ll have to collect further data to determine why. 

This was a given. Of course the kids want to be able to choose. My question is whether they will be able to handle the choice. We shall see 😉 

Data Data Data

I give my students surveys regularly so I can assess the state of my classroom and if I am meeting my objectives in not having individual desks. Here is the latest set of data from students in all three of my classes: homeroom, language arts, and math.

I really wanted to teach the kids to be self reflective and figure out how they learn best. The graph below shows generally in what position the students feel they learn best. It is a pretty even spread across the board with laying on the floor as the highest number. This even spread supports the theory behind my classroom because there is not one way I could have my room set and please all of my students. Having variety and letting the students choose is part of what makes my classroom successful. 

 

This graph also has a fairly even distribution, which always surprises me. I would expect the kids to fight over what I see as the most desirable spots. But I suppose those spots just show my personal preference and not all the kids are like me. I still have students that like to sit at individual desks and tables. The most popular is the floor including the green rug. Lots like to stand. The rocking chair is also highly sought out. 

My teammates have been slowly changing little things this year to relinquish some of their control. They’re currently toying with the idea of giving more student choice in seating without completely getting rid of desks. So I was curious to see what the kids thought about the idea. 

 

Things have been going so well in my classroom, then last week I started to have a panic attack that I was setting my kids up for failure in 4th grade because they were not used to sitting in desks anymore. I was very shocked by the results of the following graph. I thought for sure more kids would have been a yes, 4th grade will be hard with a desk, but it was about half and half. I will need to ponder what to do at the end of the school year to help my kids transition back to regular classrooms for 4th grade. 

 

Why Should I Worry?

My students are always surprising me. My job will never be boring because I just never know what the kids are going to do! Part of my experiment this year is to relinquish control of my classroom bit by bit. When I designed my room there were several things I was concerned about, but decided to do anyway. And it turns out that I had no reason to be worried.

Here were some of my initial concerns:

I thought that the kids would be forever knocking over the desks since they were free standing and not in pods, but *knock on wood* we have not had one desk go down so far this year. The kids have more room to walk around and don’t bump into the desks as often as they did when I had 25 desks.

Last year my kids were always shoving random stuff into their desks: trash, worksheets, pencils, toys. The kids keep all their belongings in their cubbies so the few desks I have out are empty. I thought for sure I would find stuff in them all the time, but that is not the case! They are always empty.

 

I was very nervous about this, but I created a nook behind my library. Normally I wouldn’t have a spot in the room I couldn’t see with just a quick glance. I was sure my “troublemakers” would hide out back there. But I have not had any issues in this corner at all. In fact, many of my students that could potentially be trouble makers choose to sit in the corner by themselves so they won’t get distracted. YAY!

So my point is keep your expectations high and hold your kids to them, and don’t assume your kids can’t handle something until they prove they can’t. They just might surprise you 🙂

 

 

Inconsistant Expectations

Normally, having inconsistent expectations in the classroom is a very bad thing. It gives the kids license to do whatever they want and find loopholes to get away with it. My expectations for my students are not inconsistent normally. My classroom, to the untrained eye, looks like a chaotic free-for-all, but that is far from the truth. I have so many systems and procedures in place and the kids know what to do. However, I have discovered that my expectations for my students are not consistent for every situation.

Yesterday our wonderful elementary counselor came in to teach a friendship lesson to my students. As I watched the lesson, I took a step back and put myself in the counselor’s shoes. From her perspective my kids looked super disrespectful, disengaged and even downright bored. They were using the room the way I had trained them: sitting at desks, laying on the floor, or standing. I know how each of my students learns best and I know that even if a particular kid is laying on the floor with their head down they are still listening because they are an auditory learner. But the counselor doesn’t know that.

Here my kids are reading, but this is about what they look like during a lesson as well.

So I had a discussion with my class about how we have to behave a little differently when there is a guest teacher. I had the kids help me come up with reasons why having different expectations is important and what that looks like in my classroom. Having the students help me come up with those reasons and making it more of a discussion made them more invested in their own behavior.

Math and Language Arts Class

At the beginning of the school year I spent a week with just my homeroom class and in that week I really worked hard to set up the no desks arrangement with my students. And that hard work has paid off. My kids really have my room down. They know the routines and procedures well. Then we started switching classes for math and language arts.

My math class is comprised of mostly students from other third grade classes. My language arts class, on the other hand, is half students from other classes and half students from my homeroom. I predicted this making a difference in how I present expectations since my language arts kids that are also in my homeroom can help the other students along.

My math and language arts classes aren’t badly behaved, but they are not as good as my homeroom. I wonder if this is just the different mix of students I have, or the way I introduced the procedures. I did not have as much time to go over them as I did with my homeroom kids.

On another note, I have observed interesting differences in how the kids utilize the classroom. In my language arts class the kids sit/stand all over the room, but more than anything they love to be on the floor. There will be kids laying down lined up all the way across the carpet. My math class on the other hand, loves to stand. My standing tables are always jammed full. I will need to do some more observations and take some data to predict why this phenomena is occurring.