A brave new thing

Day 16 of 31 at TWT!

"How do you envision your classroom culture? On the best days, what does it feel like?"

It's late in the afternoon on the day before winter break, but my brain is on fire.

I'm tired of seeing kids flounder because they don't have the necessary academic skills to be successful. I've stepped up my work with goal-setting and reflection every year, and something is still missing. More kids with more problematic backgrounds are muddling their way through school, weighed down by innumerable challenges combined with a concerning lack of work ethic.

Sparks that have been smoldering through months of Tuesday morning R-Factor sessions are blazing bright as I sit in my new colleague's office, furiously typing a blend of notes and my own fluttering ideas.

"I want it to be like a family, where we're all working together to learn and grow. I hope my kids could all tell you our motto is 'Be Your Best Self'," I answer him.

"When it feels that way, what's happening?"

I try to describe my favorite times of the year: Global Cafe, the March Challenge, some of our goal-setting and reflection work. I wish he knew my teaching better... this is not what I came here to talk about. I'm a little annoyed to be finding myself trying to prove that I'm a good teacher. I work so hard to create so many authentic learning experiences, and the kids respond well to them. But it's not good enough!

"How many of your kids do you think are actively working to be the best version of themselves?"

I start counting on my fingers, naming them in my head. "Um, like 20%?"

"That's pretty good! Better than 10-80-10!"

Yeah, but it's more like 20-60-20, or even worse on the bottom end too... I want so badly to make more of a difference, to find a way to reach those struggling kids better. And to not have them ruin things for everyone else!

"How can you leverage them to lift everyone else?" He tells me how Urban Meyer stopped letting one of his hardest working linemen come in to lift weights early in the morning until he brought a teammate with him. "What if you created groups in your classes, with your elite kids as group leaders? The power of the unit?"

Ummm. That sounds like a daunting shift. But I really want to truly create that classroom family focused on learning and mutual support that I've always dreamed of. Something starts to awaken in the part of me that was a five-year member of The Best Damn Band in the Land.

By the time pretty much everyone else in the building has zoomed off to enjoy their breaks, he's convinced me to try it. A Brave New Thing. I will dig back out my TBDBITL squad leader self and implement a "squad" group structure in my classroom. My hardest-working students will be MY "squad leaders", responsible for leading and inspiring their classmates.

As I spend winter break wrangling a toddler and grading exams, my brain is spinning. I haven't been this pumped up since I was head squad leader of my row my last year in band. I get my head into gear, knowing that our class culture is fully my responsibility, and I need to establish the line better and hold it better. I am determined to RISE and take my kids with me.

I come back from break, begin typing a frighteningly long email to my colleague with way too many questions and thoughts, delete it, and ask instead if we can check in soon. We get snowed out. I almost talk myself out of rescheduling because I'm afraid to take up more of his time. I pour over his R-Factor slides and his notes from Urban Meyer's Above the Line, order the book even though I've always been way too loyal to Jim Tressel to be much of a Meyer fan, and end up devouring it in less than a week once it arrives.

I choose my squad leaders and approach them individually, explaining what I want to try, why I've picked them, and what their responsibilities would be. 2 of the 9, natural leaders in the traditional sense, are excited, honored, and raring to go. The other 7, the kind of quietly hardworking students who sneak through their school day being awesome without sticking out, look at me like I'm completely insane, shake their heads, and try to refuse, firmly convinced that they won't be good enough. "Come on," I cajole. "You can do this!" I talk about leading by example and explain how I was fairly shy and timid, and how I never would have taken on leadership roles that eventually lead me to teaching if people hadn't believed in me. "It'll be good for you." After varying amounts of gentle nudging, they all agree to give it a try.

I plan to pull them all in for a meeting one morning before school with doughnuts. We get snowed out. I scramble to grab them the next day during homeroom instead, feed them the day-old doughnuts, give them my best TBDBITL-esque speech, and introduce the idea to my whole classes later that day. It's hard. There's heavy resistance from the bottom. The middle are disappointed to lose their comfort. The squad leaders need training. I have to create all kinds of new materials to get it all going. Two weeks into the new semester, I'm running on empty and winter break is a distant memory.

But something amazing is happening. And my classroom, my kids, and I will never be the same again.

Reflecting and reaching

Monday.

What did you just think of when you heard that word? Sluggishness? Reluctance? Trying to shake yourself out of a fog? Yeah, me too. Until I get to class.

Mondays in my classes, more than any other day, run like a well-oiled machine. Smooth, simple, with gears turning purposefully. Going somewhere.

Every Monday, our warm-up is the "idiom of the week". Idioms are everywhere (Seriously. Have you noticed? Tomorrow, pay attention to all the idiomatic phrases you hear and read, and then imagine not having grown up with them!), they're hard to figure out if you don't just know them, and they can be pretty silly and fun! (Today's was "to sling mud", and an astute student pointed out that it's a lot like "throwing shade" -- they might not know traditional idioms, but ELLs sure don't struggle to pick up slang!) It's a light, non-threatening way to start the week... and I always smile to see one of our past idioms find its way into a student's writing months later!

Every Monday, we also check in about our academic goals. For the past several years, we've used the WOOP framework to set a goal that we want to work on for about a month. Teaching students to proactively realize what obstacles are standing in their way and plan how to overcome those obstacles has been incredibly powerful. Now that we're also using R-factor concepts, the language of default actions vs. disciplined actions has fit in perfectly with this structure.

This student's current goal is about reading, but it just has to be some academic skill. We fill out the top half when setting a new goal, then one row on the bottom every Monday to check in over the next month.

I used to have students share their progress with a partner, but now that I've shifted my class to a "squad" unit format (posts on that coming soon, I promise!), they share with their whole squads, and the conversations are much more powerful. These check-ins only take a few minutes, but their impact is incredible. Students are leaning forward, nodding, reflecting, and encouraging each other as they honestly share about why they are struggling to meet their goals or how they were successful.

And every Monday, we time ourselves reading for exactly 15 minutes, noting our starting and ending page numbers. When the timer goes off, we enter those pages into our reading goals spreadsheets (template 1 / template 2) to set our page goals for the week (based on Penny Kittle's idea from Book Love) and do a little thinking about our reading. I do my own as a model, and it's fascinating to see how my reading speed changes between and even within books and how much more purposeful I am about my reading when I know I have a specific goal.

thinking boxes

page goal (light green & yellow boxes calculate automatically)

Fingers fly on clicking keys and flip gently through book pages in a settled, nearly-silent hum: purposeful, thoughtful, spinning the foundation for a new week of reading. I could sneak out of the classroom and I'm pretty sure almost everyone would just keep typing. On Thursday, we'll check back in to see what progress we've made, but for now, the invitation to push ourselves forward as readers stands open.

Too much routine can be boring, but on Mondays, our routines anchor us and drive us, using reflection, goals, and community to focus on what matters most: reaching toward our best selves, one week at a time.