Hey, educators. This is Jordan with the Innovative Schools Podcast. This episode is gonna be a little bit different, but don't worry. We're still gonna give you some great things to use in your classroom. This episode is actually going to replay a session from our innovative schools summit in New York.
Jordan Bassett:This past winter, we had a summit in New York where we had a bunch of different teachers and educators come, all these different sessions and things to learn. And we wanted to share this one session with you guys. This is our fifty and fifty panel where we have several different experts in the field of education who are all giving strategies around this one topic. And that topic for this time was creating a positive learning environment. So this panel is gonna give you 50 different strategies and ideas to create that positive learning environment in your classroom.
Jordan Bassett:You'll hear from Kevin, who's one of our hosts here on the podcast. I don't think you've heard from him yet, but we have an episode with him coming soon. You'll hear his voice along with our panelists. So grab a piece of paper, grab something to write with or your phone or whatever so you can jot down some of these ideas. I'm not gonna take any more time.
Jordan Bassett:So come on. Let's learn together.
Kevin Stewart:But our hope is that when you leave here, you'll have 50 strategies to walk away with. So I'm gonna ask them to introduce themselves real quick, and, we'll get started.
Jospeh Diaz:Good evening, everybody. My name is Joseph Diaz. I'm the owner of mister Math Education, and I work with schools and principals, teachers on improving learning outcomes in math.
Blake Clark:My name is Blake Clark. I'm a superintendent and executive director of an independent school district in St. George, Utah.
Katie Trowbridge:I am Katie Trowbridge. I'm a retired teacher and CEO and president of Curiosity to Create, which is all about infusing classrooms with deeper thinking.
Dr. Marquita Blades:My name is oh, I'm sorry. Give her her applause. My name is Doctor Marquita Blades. I'm the creator and Chief Empowerment Strategist at Powerful Teaching Strategies, and I'm from Atlanta, Georgia.
Edward DeShazier:And I am Edward Deshazer. I'm the executive director of a k to eight school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And I was also shout out to Milwaukee in the house. And I was also a kid that was kicked out and expelled from school. So full full circle now.
Edward DeShazier:I lead a school.
Kevin Stewart:Alright. Come on. One more hand for our presenters. So, we're gonna start here with Joseph and, he's gonna kick it off for us. Are you ready?
Kevin Stewart:Yeah. Alright. Here we go.
Jospeh Diaz:Alright, guys. So my first strategy is show the kids the side of you that people like.
Jospeh Diaz:Not that people love, but that people like. Right? Your mom has got to love you. Your sister's got to love you. And oftentimes when we're dealing with like behaviors, I ask these teachers, hey, what makes people like you?
Jospeh Diaz:And sometimes the answer is I don't know. Ask, ask your friends why do you like me? Once you know that, show your kids that side of you. They'll appreciate it.
Blake Clark:Culture changes when we invite everyone's voice to be heard. So this strategy is called the I wonder wall, where in every classroom, in every school, you have a place where students that are too nervous or maybe don't feel like they can share their voice at that time have a place where they can go and ask their questions knowing that the teacher will answer them either individually or if they see a lot of repetitive I wonders, then they can reteach and talk with them in the whole entire group ensuring that even though their hand maybe wasn't up, their voice is still impactful.
Katie Trowbridge:See, that's why I had multiple ones. Check. That's a good strategy. Okay. So I have a help wanted board, kind of similar.
Katie Trowbridge:But a lot of students need help, and this can be done in your classroom or school wide. So we have a help wanted board where students can say, I need help in this or that area, maybe in math or in spelling or in, I don't know, even working on my basketball skills. Students can then look at that help wanted and find that student to kind of create a peer atmosphere of helping each other. So it can be done in your classroom where I need help with topic sentences, right, or school wide. And what a fun way to build that positive helping each other out, getting to know people outside of your own classroom or better inside your own classroom.
Dr. Marquita Blades:Alright. Y'all are gonna notice a pattern with my strategies. Hopefully, you'll pick up on it by the third one. But the first one is called thinking caps and it's based on Bono's six thinking caps where you give the students six different baseball caps they are colored in six different colors and you assign each cap a thinking perspective And students are only to give feedback from that perspective whenever you're debriefing throughout your class period. This helps your students learn how to give and receive very specific feedback.
Dr. Marquita Blades:It helps them to learn to look at the work that was done and not the person who did it, and it helps them to communicate their thoughts.
Edward DeShazier:Mine is more geared towards your staff. They're called rainy day notes, and what you do is you hand out note cards to all of your staff members. Say you have 50 staff members, hand out 10 note cards to each staff. In the teacher's lounge or in the office, you put manila folders with every staff member has their own folder. You ask the staff to write something positive or nice about one of their coworkers.
Edward DeShazier:You try to gear them to do it to someone that they don't spend a lot of time with. And then different times of the year, staff can take their folders home. You can do it twice a year. They take those folders home. And on those days where, you know, you get home from work and you're worn out and the kids did what kids do and you're just stressed out, you can open that folder up and pull out a card and just remind you, you know, that you're doing a great job.
Edward DeShazier:And you can see some of the things that you may not even realize that you're doing are great that other people in your building have noticed you're doing a great job of. So they're called rainy day notes. All
Kevin Stewart:right. Model, not set high expectations for yourself before you do with students. We always talk about setting high expectations, but do you actually model these expectations? So, before we blame kids for not studying, not doing their homework, are you doing that? Are you going home and studying your standards?
Kevin Stewart:Are you going home and trying to improve every day? So, before you ask kids to do that, make sure that you're doing that as well.
Blake Clark:Vertical learning on a non permanent surface creates culture in your classroom, as well as even having this done for assessment. As students who struggle, especially in the area of Math, they think that everything is very concrete. They're either good at Math or they're bad at Math. This changes that whole entire paradigm when you're able to collaborate with completely randomized groups that are physically randomized, not like class dojo or anything randomizing because kids still think that you had something to do on the back end of that. But physically randomized so they know that they're paired in a random way with different types of learners where it's completely erasable their thoughts.
Blake Clark:So nothing is permanent, but you can see the learning progression.
Katie Trowbridge:Going off of your collaboration, I'm gonna go to having table tasks. So when students come in, I have little boxes of table tasks. It can be puzzles. It can be games. It can be Post it notes.
Katie Trowbridge:It can be Play Doh. But where students come in, and instead of them immediately going to their cell phones or sitting quietly, they actually have something they can work on. Even when there's dead time, which happens in our classrooms, they can go into that box and do something collaborative, and they can work together and have fun and play. I don't care if it's old made. I don't care if it's just something go fish.
Katie Trowbridge:Something that's there readily available for them to have fun and play and collaborate together.
Dr. Marquita Blades:I wrote that down for me. My next one is SWOT analysis, s w o t, SWOT analysis. This is a corporate strategy used to measure comes and to think about how you can move forward and improve. But I found this to be helpful with my students first with their grades. Every three weeks we would do a printout and I would have them conduct a SWOT analysis so they could list their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats with respect to the grades that they were earning.
Dr. Marquita Blades:Later, we progressed that into a group discussion technique. So following any type of large group activity, the students would conduct a SWAT analysis so that they could figure out what did we do well, what did we not do well, what opportunities did we not capitalize, or what resources did we not maximize, And then threats, what outside factors impacted our ability in this process so that they can, next time they're faced with a similar task, they would already know some of the things to avoid so that they could have a better outcome?
Edward DeShazier:My next one is going to be a happy hour cart. So it's kind of corporate, but it's not very corporate. But a happy hour cart is a cart that you can take around the school to your teachers, energy drinks, water, snacks, do it once a month where you can bring it by the classroom, admin can cover the classroom, teachers can come out, take a quick break. I'm just a firm believer that a positive school culture starts at the top, and it starts with if your teachers are happy, more than likely your kids are happy. So you'll notice a lot of my things are teacher gear because it being in leadership, but a Happy Hour Card is something that works wonders.
Edward DeShazier:It gives them a break, play some music, the kids get excited even though they don't get anything, and it's just a great way to build positive culture.
Kevin Stewart:Alright, for admin and teachers, don't make everything a non negotiable. Everything cannot be important. And when everything is important, the teachers and the students will decide what their non negotiables are, and you usually don't want that. So limit what you're expecting out of your teachers and your students and inspect only that.
Blake Clark:Student master class. As they're going around on these vertical boards and you're able to really gauge their proficiency, as soon as you see a group of students or even one student that you feel like has mastered that concept or the standard that you're currently working on, stop the class and say hey, we're gonna take a master class on fractions right now, a master class on main idea and key details, and focus your attention on those students. So everyone puts down their marker or pen, whatever they're working with, and this creates a space where you're not the teacher, you're not hiding all the information, and they're receiving the information, but everyone in the classroom has genius, and how are we gonna pull that out?
Katie Trowbridge:My next one is the shadow leader. So choose one student in your class secretively, and have them their mission in the week is to be that secret leader who is uplifting other students, making sure they have the compliments, kind of modeling the risk taking. So it's not always you, but that student is kind of the secret leader. And at the end of the week, the mission is to guess who was that secret leader of the week. So that is kind of fun, it's kind of a mystery, it's kind of a game, but that leader has a chance to be a leader without having to be in front and center, but can take a step back and quietly uplift the class and bring the class together.
Katie Trowbridge:So it's called the secret leader.
Dr. Marquita Blades:Okay. Next is defend or destroy. Are y'all onto the pattern yet we're gonna give students two claims that could potentially be true we're also gonna give them one piece of evidence whether that's a text data video documentary whatever And the students will choose which claim they are going to defend. They have to use their evidence to defend that claim. And then they will use the very same evidence to destroy the other claim.
Dr. Marquita Blades:So we're helping them learn to analyze information, to see both sides of a situation, which is a skill that can benefit them outside of the classroom, and again, just build that academic discourse.
Edward DeShazier:My next one is a kindness chain for those football fans. When defense make a big play, they get this big, like, oversized chain they get to wear on the sidelines. You can get a a chain with your, like, school logo created. You can get them on Etsy for, like, $35. But when you see you have a kindness chain, it could be for a classroom, it could be for an entire school.
Edward DeShazier:When you see kids do something that is kind or nice, you can present them with a chain. They get to wear it, whether it's for the hour, for the day, but it just shows and acknowledges them for doing things and knowing that people are watching even when you don't know what they're watching.
Kevin Stewart:Partner assessments. We often do partner work, but how often do we partner kids up on an assessment? And I love doing that because what happens when you have students having discussions for a common goal, you're going to increase your dialogue, you're going to increase questioning, student self questioning. I have found a lot of success when we partner assess more often than just collaborative work.
Blake Clark:Creating data stories instead of grades. I want you to think about that for a minute of remember the first time that you got maybe a c, a d, in my case an f in math and how that was the opposite of empowering. When we create data stories instead of these finite grades, students are able to explain themselves and how they've seen growth towards that standard or growth towards that specific thing that you want them to learn. They're able to explain the data story to you, explain the data story to their parents, but also it's time that we start learning that assessment doesn't have to just be paper pencil. And offering to the student, would you wanna communicate this with me as part of your data story and I'll take that down as proficient.
Blake Clark:Any way you can demonstrate your learning I'm going to take that down and put it in your data story so that when we send out grades if your school does the traditional base or standards based whatever that is, there's a story backing that up, and that story is empowering instead of finite.
Katie Trowbridge:You know, so many of our students are afraid to ask for help. They're afraid of judgment. They're just afraid to fail. So one of the techniques that I've used before that's really helped is having color coded. And it's if you've ever been to some of the restaurants where, you know, you flip it over and, oh, stop and help me, go, I've used the just Post it notes or something like that where a student can quietly put on there, I need help, or I'm doing fine.
Katie Trowbridge:And what's fun about that with building community is that your neighbor can look over and say,
Dr. Marquita Blades:do you need help with something?
Katie Trowbridge:And then you're encouraging them to help each other before you can step in. And so it can be very simple, so it's not the, Oh, oh, oh, I need help, and you're all of sudden, all the eyes are on you. A student can just quietly put either a yellow or a red or a green or whatever color you want, index cards, something like that, on their desk. You know they need help. Their neighbors know they need help, but they're not drawing attention to themselves, and it's building a nice community within your classroom.
Dr. Marquita Blades:I want to add on to the data stories and suggest student led conferences rather than your parent teacher conferences hosting student led conferences allows students to communicate their own progress. So they have to keep those artifacts. They have to track their data. They have to, in my case, do a SWAT analysis so that they can analyze where they went wrong and where those numbers took a dip and also look at how they were able to come back up. And they invite their person, maybe not their family, but some concerned adult, to come in and listen to them give a full analysis of what they did in each of their courses and how they ended up with the outcomes that they did.
Edward DeShazier:My next one is a two by 10 method. I know people are probably familiar with it with your students where you spend two minutes for ten days just getting to know and connecting with your students and very informally, it doesn't have to be sitting at your desk, it could be walking down the hallway, it could be at lunch, but where it's more out of the box is encouraging school leaders to that with their staff. I think that's the biggest gap that I see in a lot of schools. Spend a lot of time getting to know our students, but do the staff in the building know each other? So finding ways to be able to get your staff intentionally connecting and learning that we're more than just people that wake up and show up to a school.
Edward DeShazier:Like, we have lives. We like sports. We like movies. Really getting your staff to do a two by ten, two minutes informal, ten days straight, strong relationships can be built very simple with that strategy in a school.
Kevin Stewart:Alright, admin. Make leadership decisions based off your best teachers, not your worst ones. Oftentimes, we're making leadership decisions based off our bottom 20%. You should always make decisions off your top. They're the ones that you want to keep happy.
Kevin Stewart:They're the ones that you have to protect, especially in this state. So, make decisions off your best.
Blake Clark:Defronting the classroom creates more of a collaborative culture instead of a basic teaching sit and get model. So going back to my previous one, when you walk into this room, you know where you're going to face and you know who's going to be speaking. And sadly it's not you because you have as much genius as we do, but your classrooms are set up like that. So how can we set up the classroom in a collaborative way that defronts the class and that the teacher isn't leashed to their Promethean or their whiteboard, they're wandering around facilitating these brilliant discussions and leading them towards proficiency.
Katie Trowbridge:One of the things that we need to do is start increasing our students to be more curious and to think in deeper and more critical ways. So just a fun way to bring your students together is to have a mystery box. And what you put in that mystery box, there's a couple of things. You can have students choose something, like that student of the week. But what is also really fun is to have something that pertains to your content area.
Katie Trowbridge:Put something in there, and then throughout the week, students ask questions. What do you think could be in this box? And you give them clues. And you get them to be curious about what's in the box. And you tell them, well, maybe if you're studying World War II or if you're studying a short story or you're studying something in math or science, you give them clues.
Katie Trowbridge:Again, having them work together to discover and have a mystery of what's in that, building community, building curiosity, getting them to think. And then at the end of the week, here's what's actually in here, and here's how. What do you think? How does this pertain to what we've been learning all week long? Again, building that community, building them to get thinking, and just having some fun in communicating and collaborating together.
Dr. Marquita Blades:So I wasn't going to even say this one, but I have to now. When I'm sorry. I can't remember your name right now. But he mentioned, don't make decisions based on your lowest performing teachers. Make them based on your highest performing teachers.
Dr. Marquita Blades:And it made me think about raising the rigor and relevance in our classes so that we teach to the top and not to the bottom. We can always scaffold for those who are not at the top yet, but we do a huge disservice to our students who are at the top, but we make all of our instructional decisions based on those who are at the bottom. So we do this by providing more open ended activities where students have more opportunities to be right than having just one right answer where a lot of students then have an opportunity to be wrong and then discouraged for further participation.
Edward DeShazier:So my next one is classroom jobs with leadership roles that are actually relevant to the students, not just like line leader or floor sweeper. Some of the ones I have written down are creative director, tech manager, study consultant, because this is preparing kids for jobs that are relevant to them in the world. Like one of the ones, a study consultant is nice because you can take those kids that are doing a great job. The best way for kids to learn is by teaching. So they can work with those kids that are struggling because we all know that we're short handed in school.
Edward DeShazier:So now you have you're leveraging your kids, but you're teaching them leadership, teaching them responsibility, while also building community within your classroom all at the same time through relevancy.
Kevin Stewart:Alright. So I'm gonna piggyback off that one. So oftentimes, and I go to a lot of different schools and I see different classroom setups. And one of my favorite is groups of three. And I always put a higher student in the middle of two other students, and that could be higher behavior, that could be higher English language speaking, it could be higher academic.
Kevin Stewart:And I'm driving what Ed just said, where those kids that are in the highest in the middle, they're many yous. Right? You might be able to beat me, but you can't beat eight of me. Right? If I have eight teachers in the room, it's very, very effective.
Kevin Stewart:It creates a very good environment when students are collaborating. They always have that support every single minute of the day. So, it might not be academic, but it might just be behavior. I do that as well.
Blake Clark:In terms of academics, I'm gonna go back to randomized groups. I don't mean to disagree. It's okay. Randomized groups that students can see can happen on emojis that you have printed out that pair the two sadnesses with each other, they can happen on playing cards, or guys keep teachers pay teachers in business and get stuff from there for this one. But really being able to see okay when they come in from lunch and they're walking in, you're handing a random card or a picture or something to them that then is going to go to a vertical learning space.
Blake Clark:It randomizes it because sometimes when it comes to instruction, I was never the high level learner but I could see them constantly getting frustrated with me as a low level learner that I wasn't understanding. To really create this culture and community in your classroom, students are now able to meet all various types of learners, and when you talk to the students, they're able to say, now I understand how their brain works different than mine, creates a culture of trust in your classroom.
Katie Trowbridge:And I'm gonna just build off of that for a second because I think one of the things that we need to facilitate and and use as a strategy is called productive struggle. And I was just talking about that if you've ever put together an IKEA piece of furniture, then you know what productive struggle is. And we have to encourage our students to do productive struggle. And one of the things that I talk about in my classroom is the strategy three before me. So before you come to me to ask me for the solution, go to your peers.
Katie Trowbridge:Right? So they immediately it's the please write a paragraph, and immediately they say, I wrote a sentence. Is this right? And instead of that, try struggle and ask people around you. Build that community so that you can know that there's other people in class that you can go to, and then come to me.
Katie Trowbridge:So three before me. Did you go did you try three other strategies before you came to me and asked me for help? And if not, who can you go to? Where do can you go? Do that productive struggle first, then come to me.
Katie Trowbridge:Three before me.
Dr. Marquita Blades:Okay. My favorite mistake. My favorite mistake. When you're introducing a new concept to your students, you may give them some practice. And instead of asking who got this right, if you pass the papers back, ask for who all did some struggle, who all got this wrong or who struggled with this one, who needs help with this one, and then you pick your favorite mistake to highlight and walk through it with the class.
Dr. Marquita Blades:You'll call on different students as you go through each step if it's a stepwise type of problem and have them talk out loud their thinking. Why did you put this here? Tell me the exact reason it's gonna help you identify the misconception that led them to making that mistake in the first place.
Edward DeShazier:My next one is a classroom soundtrack. So I know when Ron Clark was talking about during the keynote, playing the music before and after class, it get kids moving with a sense of urgency, but allowing your kids to pick the song that they get to walk into class on every single day, obviously appropriate songs, but you can pick a song that they can walk in with and also a song that can be played during study time. I'm one of those people that when we're studying, I like to have music playing and helps me. Then the cool part if you do one every month at the end of the year, your classroom will have about a 18 song soundtrack that you could I almost put I almost said put on a CD. But what do you put it on Apple Music?
Edward DeShazier:You know, what put it on something digital, the playlist. There we go. I'm not that old. Put on a playlist to give your kids something to remember the classroom by the end of the year.
Kevin Stewart:Alright. Admin, spending two minutes in 10 classrooms is way more impactful than thirty minutes in one. You guys have done a lot of observations. What you see the first five is what you see the last 20. Be mobile.
Kevin Stewart:Right? And we always talk about moving around, but you can know more about your school going to 10 rooms two minutes apiece than one room. One, you'll be seen, right? You know that, which is always good behavior, it's good for the teachers to see you, but second, you're going to get a quick pulse check on your campus. So, keep in mind, you don't have to sit there for thirty minutes and do those long observations.
Kevin Stewart:Pop around, you'll learn a lot.
Blake Clark:I don't think Anita Archer is here because I'm going to flip her whole research with current research of flipping the I do, we do, you do model. When we flip that research and students are able to walk in and every class is as engaging as science, even in a different content, students are grappling hypothesis and tasks and how are we gonna solve this together collaboratively while the teacher is wandering around and putting it now in a we do where the teacher may circle things that yeah, this is leading down the right path, keep doing this, keep asking questions like this. And then at the very end of the lesson, the teacher pulls back the whole entire class and says this is exactly what I saw today. You guys are crushing it. I'm gonna spend three minutes to clarify one thing before your task tomorrow that you're going to need to have before you grapple that.
Katie Trowbridge:I'm just gonna tell you that I use that strategy, and it is dynamite. So, yeah. Exclamation point on that one. I I just wanna know why recess is just for the littles. I have done right?
Katie Trowbridge:Okay. I have done, even with my high school students, a one minute recess where it's when you can tell that the kids are just they're not there. They're not having it. And I know sometimes we call them brain breaks. But even that, the kids are like, no, my brain is broken, so I don't need a brain break.
Katie Trowbridge:I just do a one minute recess. And it is do whatever you want for one minute, no cell phones. And it's fun to just see them do something silly and crazy for one minute with each other, watching each other, because it's not fair that the little ones just get the recess. Why don't we? So one minute recess, ready, set, go, and we just have a blast doing it, and it builds a lot of fun community just for the heck of it.
Jordan Bassett:Hey, everybody. We're gonna take a quick pause or recess for a short little break, but we'll get you back to that fifty and fifty in just a minute. Alright. Now that we're back from the break, we're gonna get you back into that panel from the New York Innovative Schools Summit.
Dr. Marquita Blades:Reverse engineer. Reverse engineer. Give students a solution and have them work backwards, think backwards, ask questions, research, collaborate to try to figure out what the initial problem could have been.
Edward DeShazier:My next one is a staff swap day where you can have teachers swap into different classrooms starting low level, doing it for a class period throughout the building, but there's a school that I've seen in Utah that they do a whole presentation where they do a big draft, all the kids are in the auditorium, and every teacher pulls which teacher's class they're gonna go in for the whole classroom, and the kids enjoy it, they get a new face in front of them, the teachers get some new faces in front of them, and it also gives teachers an opportunity to see what else is going on in the building and spend time. Sometimes we get in this mundane of it's the same thing over and over, where it's a nice break for everyone to be able to experience something new, get around some new faces, and then see some other great things that are going on in your school building.
Kevin Stewart:Alright, this might not be a strategy, but more of a mindset. It's very lonely at the top. Have you ever been a very high performing person? It's very lonely. You're different than most people.
Kevin Stewart:Okay? It's so easy to, you know, vent and complain about your students, the parents, the admin, and that doesn't do anything. It doesn't fix anything. So being a model of excellence all the time, that creates a positive learning environment. Right?
Kevin Stewart:And, that's lonely. I mean, you're usually going to be a lone wolf in that until you get others to follow suit.
Blake Clark:My next one is student led proficiency trackers. And, you're gonna see that I have a bias towards traditional based grading, that it doesn't work and it doesn't empower anybody. But, when students can see based on the standard where they're at in their learning trajectory of developing, approaching, proficient and extending, they're more likely to come the next day wanting to learn because they see it more as a video game where they're going to the next level instead of as a grade that's defining who they are, at least that's what they're thinking. So really being able to break down the standard of focus or the essential standard that you're working on into those four categories, developing, approaching, proficient, and extending, and after every lesson students are able to rate themselves as they're getting closer to getting the flagpole on Mario or overcoming something and that's going to be a huge part in their student led conferences that she talked about, but also part of their data story of where did you start and where are you at now.
Katie Trowbridge:You know, so many of our students just don't believe that they are creative. They just don't think they can. They're afraid to take risks. And simply, there is a bunch of studies out there that simply say, by you giving them permission, by you saying, be creative, take a risk, can increase by 2% their ability to do better on those testings, by them to do better on standardized testing, for them to do better on what you would like them to do. So just simply, a simple strategy, two words: Be creative.
Katie Trowbridge:Just try it, and you will see your students excel because you have now given them permission, and you have now shown them that you believe in the fact that they can be creative. Just try it. Say, be creative.
Dr. Marquita Blades:This will kind of piggyback off of the last two, but it's called a cash in. This is where you give the students an open ended formative assessment, allow them to show you what they know in whatever fashion they choose, and you give them substantive feedback so I do suggest only do this when you can give the feedback in a timely manner that they have time to actually address it and do something about it but the students have to address the feedback they have to address your comments they have to come back with corrections new thoughts new questions and then they cash that in for the actual grade
Edward DeShazier:champion classrooms. You can do these once a quarter, once a semester, once a year. You have all the staff vote on their champion classroom for the year, and you can have actually, I'm a WWE kid. So you can have wrestling belts made with your school logo for like $130 and then you play We Are The Champion, you present the belts to those teachers in their entire classroom. The kids get because they're excited that the teachers won, or if you just want to do a trophy, but I was I was a wrestling kid, so, having the teachers have a belt that they can put somewhere, take home, they can wear it for the day, and they get to keep them, but it's a great way for staff to be able to acknowledge other staff, so it's not an admin vote where many times favorites get seen or the only people you spend time with.
Edward DeShazier:This is voted on by the entire school, so champion classrooms.
Kevin Stewart:Alright. So, you all know I'm a fan of my groups of three that I brought up. I'm anti four. Kids can't read backwards, by the way. Just kind of think about that.
Kevin Stewart:So, with my groups of three, I will spend time with those kids during lunch, extra time after school, and we'll have master classes where we are training them how do you talk to a kid who's defiant? How do you work with a kid who doesn't like you? How do you get a kid who's lazy to work? The upcoming content, how do you get ahead of that so you know the misconceptions? That type of leadership skills that I'm putting into those kids, I've had kids eight years down the road remember being the middle kid.
Kevin Stewart:And, that's really impactful. I mean, I think it's really important to see how life changing that can be when you trust a child enough to lead that.
Blake Clark:My next one is morning meetings using Cico, c I c o, which is check-in and check out. Carve out a time at the very beginning of your period, if you're in secondary, the very beginning of when your class starts, if you're in elementary, to have everyone sit together. I've seen it done in circles, I've seen it done on a rug, I've seen our seventh graders at my school sit on a rug, and they really come together and say what are the goals that we have for today based on our actions of yesterday, which is the check-in part. We create goals together and we're going to say okay before I release you today we're gonna check out with each other as well. It creates this accountability and there's nothing like managing behaviors that's easier than when a peer is the one that calls out behaviors.
Blake Clark:And a peer says to them, yesterday we talked a lot during math, we have a goal today to remain focused in our groups focus on listening to mister Clark, whatever it is, that has much more impact than the teacher constantly just reviewing the expectation.
Katie Trowbridge:Start your day by asking your students what do they think. Instead of you jumping right into, here's what we did last night for homework, or here's what I think, or here's what the story is about, take the time to ask them what they think, and then stop talking and just listen. It's amazing when you allow them to get their little minds going, get them thinking, get them talking, and don't interrupt, which is hard, because they might have this way off the point answer. But just go, Okay. And just let them keep going.
Katie Trowbridge:And asking them, what do they think first before you jump in is a key to get them to start thinking and being creative and critical thinkers.
Dr. Marquita Blades:Faculty led PD, faculty led PD. There should be opportunities for teachers in the building to show what they do really well because often it's not seen in the annual observations. So as you are observing throughout the building and then I also recommend peer observations where we give students and give teachers an opportunity to rotate to each other's classrooms and just see what is going on. But once you have highlighted those things that teachers are doing really well, give them twenty, thirty minutes in a faculty meeting to model that for everyone else to provide them with the resources and templates they need to repeat that strategy in their own classrooms. It gives us a chance to just highlight the strengths that exist in the building and it gives teachers an opportunity to feel like they are positively contributing even when it's not being seen.
Edward DeShazier:Yeah and I I can jump on the back of that where you are doing walk throughs with your admin and bringing teachers throughout the building. A great thing that to do is super simple, have a stack of Post it notes. And as you're in a classroom and you have the other staffer with you, they get to write down something really good that they saw and just stick it on the teacher's desk so you're not disrupting the class. And then when the teacher's done teaching, they walk over and they see the note on their desk, and it was given to them by their peer. I think peer to peer feedback is one of the things schools miss most often, and it's also why you have to bring other people in to do PD because you don't understand how dynamic the talent you have in your building already is.
Edward DeShazier:So allowing the peers to be able to give them a quick sticky note on their desk, just saying, hey, was awesome when you did this or you did this was great. And then teacher can see the feedback from one of their peers, which I think is important.
Kevin Stewart:Alright. This seems pretty simple, but reward and praise heavily. The kids only really work for you anyway. You don't work for free. Why should they?
Kevin Stewart:Sometimes we expect them just to have all this intrinsic motivation. Most of us don't have a lot of intrinsic motivation. Right? I mean, if they say, well, they're not gonna pay you anymore, would you still show up? So, just remember that they're kids, and before you can get intrinsic motivation, oftentimes, there needs to be a little extrinsic to get it going.
Kevin Stewart:Reward them, and they'll love you for it.
Blake Clark:Stay in the game conversations, and this is pertinent to behavior. Sometimes we get caught up, and I've seen many schools get caught up of this incident happens, I'm immediately gonna send them to the principal's office. And when teachers do that, they lose a whole lot of their power. So we will agree there are there are a few things that you should do that, but sometimes these stay in the game the game conversations can happen one on one, in the back of your classroom, in the hallway really quickly, when you're really seeking to understand what was the purpose of that behavior, where it comes to throwing something, hitting somebody, language, whatever it is. The stay in the game conversations helps you create a relationship with that specific student, but your class also gets to see the culture that you've created in your room that you're not immediately just going to leave the room.
Blake Clark:We're going to be able to talk through this and stay in the game together.
Katie Trowbridge:Yeah. That's a good one. I I would my next one I was going to say is to take time to find out what they like to do. And it's interesting because I think so many of us jump in on a Monday morning or end up quickly on the end of a Friday afternoon with, oh, and I forgot. You need to do this, this, this.
Katie Trowbridge:But we need to pause and say, how was your weekend? What did you do? Because there's a couple of things. One, we need to build that community. We need to see what our students like to do.
Katie Trowbridge:What are they interested in? What is it that they did? Did they go see that latest Marvel movie? How was it? Because especially if we're not going to go see it, we need to see how we can then learn, for us, what is it that they're doing and they're interested in so that we can work it into some of our curriculum, and so that we can relate to them.
Katie Trowbridge:Going back even to the playlist so that we know we can work in those the music, the references, and we can stay relevant as well. Because one of the best things we can do is find out how do they like to learn so that we can then relate to them and bring that relevancy into our classroom and make it a place that is positive and learning, and that they're not looking at us like we looked at our teachers. Like, they're what are they? 85 years old now? When we were related, they probably were 50.
Katie Trowbridge:You know? But we thought they were 85. We need to stay relevant by asking. How was your weekend? What did you do?
Katie Trowbridge:We care about them. We don't just care about our content.
Dr. Marquita Blades:Three by three vocabulary. You're going to create a three by three matrix and inside of that matrix you are gonna put words that are closely related and some that are loosely related you want to write them in randomly The students are required to choose any three words that are touching vertically, diagonally, or horizontally. And they have to tell the relationship between those terms. If they don't see a direct relationship, then they have to explain why there is no direct relationship. And they absolutely are not required to give definitions.
Dr. Marquita Blades:They can only show relationships and connections. This will get you more valuable information than giving them a vocabulary quiz where they can easily just guess the right answer and still not know the meaning of the word or how to use it. But with three by three vocabulary, you're gonna see what their thinking is as it relates to how one word might connect to another.
Edward DeShazier:Classroom YouTube pages. So this is a great way to get kids working together. Again, preparing kids for the world that they're walking into. You can do it once a week. You do it every two weeks, but you're going through.
Edward DeShazier:The kids are talking about the things they've learned, and then you can make the link private because, obviously, we wanna protect our kids so it's not out there. But then these are great links that can be shared with parents because now kids can go home and watch with their parents. So you're getting parents involved. You're getting kids working together, involved in learning process, and it's more relevant and easier than just you sitting and typing a newsletter every week. You're allowing the kids to be productive and to create the page themselves and take ownership and then share with their parents.
Jordan Bassett:I hope you enjoyed hearing all of those different strategies from the Innovative Schools Summit that happened in New York this past year. I hope you learned at least one thing that you can start using in your classroom immediately. I'm so thankful that they let us share all this with you. If you enjoyed this special edition podcast, let us know. Maybe we can do some more in the future.
Jordan Bassett:If you liked hearing all of those different strategies and you wanna know more about the Innovative Schools Summit, you can hop on over to InnovativeSchoolsSummit.com. At the time of the release of this podcast. The next summits are in Las Vegas and Nashville in July, and there's all the details on the website. We'll put a link down below if you wanna look at, register for that, or anything like that. There's a bunch of different people who come to these, and present and have all these ideas and provide encouragement and everything for all the things that you guys do because teaching is hard.
Jordan Bassett:We've said that on this podcast before. Teaching is hard and it's difficult, but it's super rewarding when you see your students succeed. So if you enjoyed this, leave a comment. If you didn't, leave a comment so that we know how we can improve. Take some time to follow, subscribe, rate, review, all those different things.
Jordan Bassett:That helps us know how to serve you guys best and helps us reach more educators, which is ultimately what we wanna do. So I won't take up any more chat of your time today. I hope you learned something new, and we'll see you on the next Innovative Schools podcast.