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Participation Diamond - Supported Accountability

2/16/2016

I had the good fortune to visit a co-taught classroom in Menasha, WI where I saw this on student desks.

Each student in the group of 4 was expected to participate in discussion about a text, offering two predictions and sharing an idea at least once. The teachers, rather than just telling this direction, created a reminder for the students, and a place for them to initial when they had completed the assignment. This provided the prompting some students needed, and the accountability that others needed.

I loved how well this worked, but wanted it to be easily reusable. I played around on my computer to line things up, and came up with this generic form, which I then laminated.

The teacher can direct students to write on the lines with a dry erase marker, then initial in the boxes. For example, the teacher may want students to offer 2 ideas and 1 question, use the word "variable" twice in the discussion and the word "equivalent" once, or use two different talking stems. This diamond can also be used for raising your hand, offering help, praising a peer - all kinds of behavioral goals. So flexible!

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Are you Saving Time with Micro-Lessons?

2/8/2016

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Picture this:

Thirty students are sitting in a co-taught history class, desperately trying to keep up with their notes as the teacher is lecturing. The co-teacher, recognizing the futility of this, jumps in and asks everyone to freeze. She briefly explains the importance of abbreviating and identifies two words - Democrat and Republican – that are good examples of multi-syllabic words that should be abbreviated while taking notes. The co-teacher writes a few abbreviation options on the board and directs students to pick one and use it for the remainder of the period. The lesson then continues on its original course.

Micro-lessons are the perfect solution for the co-taught classroom. A micro-lesson is a brief, targeted lesson that is embedded in the content instruction. Brief really means brief – no more than three minutes in length. Micro-lessons are typically inserted by the special education co-teacher with a focus on the complementary skills needed at the moment.

Complementary skills, also known as access skills, are the skills students need to be successful as learners, but aren’t typically a part of the common core or curriculum standards.

Examples include:

Note-taking
Study process
Time management
Turn-taking
Hand-raising
Paper organization
Sustaining attention

A lucky few students seem to have been born with these skills and need no direct instruction. Other children learn them through observation and incidental teaching. And then there are the unlucky many - students who struggle with the behaviors and skills that are needed to succeed in a fast-paced, subject-oriented classroom. Micro-lessons are an efficient way to provide instruction in complementary skills in a way that allows students to immediately apply the new skill in the general education setting.

Tips from the Trenches

Co-teachers who successfully use micro-lessons offer the following tips:

"Talk with your partner about the concept of micro-lessons and give each other permission to do this. Otherwise, it might feel like interrupting or going off task."

"In our planning time, we try to identify the complementary skills that most students need. These are the ones we use for micro-lessons. The complementary skills that only a few kids need we can address through a small group."

"Brevity is key. At first, some of our micro-lessons went on too long – really becoming more like mini-lessons. It was slowing down our pacing and stressing us out. Now we agree to monitor each other and stick to less than three minutes, and only a few each week."

For more ways to boost your co-teaching, check out "Co-Teaching that Works: Structures and Strategies for Maximizing Student Learning."

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Tear and Share for Reading Comprehension

2/1/2016

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Cooperative comprehension strategies are on the rise. As more and more classrooms are engaging in cooperative learning structures, asking students to work together to solve problems, teachers are developing ways to ask students to cooperate in understanding complex text.

A few months ago I came across a post of Aurelia McNeil about the Tear and Share reading strategy. This week I tried it out, with just a couple of minor tweaks to fit my needs.

How to:

Develop 4 questions about the text and place one on each quarter of the page. You can either number them or color-code them as I did. If desired, questions can be at different levels of difficulty and students can be assigned questions based on readiness level.
Place a green, yellow, red and blue piece of construction paper on the wall in 4 areas of the room.
Place students in groups of four, each assigned a color. (See my post about how we used colored rubber bands to do this!)
Students read the text silently and answer all 4 questions on their own.
When everyone has finished, students tear the 4 questions apart, giving all the green to one person, all the yellow to another, all the blue to another and all the red to the final team member.
Students then took the four answers to their color question and joined the other same color students at the colored paper on the wall. As a group, they read and reviewed the answers, synthesizing the best into one answer to write on the construction paper.

Discussion at the walls was so rich as students analyzed and synthesized the answers to decide on the best answer. The principal happened to stop in and was impressed with the level of discussion occurring - so much better than just answering a paper and pencil question and moving on!

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Participation Diamond - Supported Accountability

Are you Saving Time with Micro-Lessons?

Tear and Share for Reading Comprehension

Anne M. Beninghof

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