For many of us, minilessons seem like a "been there, done that" kind of topic.  However, here's a list of simple pointers that will help you stay fresh in your teaching of minilessons.

We have to tell kids what we want them to do (that's the skill...like show not tell, predict, challenge their theory), but we don't give them the how of it (that's the strategy).  We look at them and say, "Grow a theory already!"  But we haven't really taught them how.  They're probably willing, but don't know how to do it.  Make sure you include telling them how to do this. 
For example, don't say, "Say something new about your character (in reading)."  Instead, tell your students, "Say something new about your character by sketching them, labeling the sketch, and then writing long about the label."  Of course, there are other ways to say more about a character.  There are many strategies for any one skill.  It's in giving our students many tools for their toolbox, or many kinds of maps of how do get somewhere, that we really prepare our kids to become independent.

Another quick tip is to tell why something is important.  You should try to almost sell your minilesson, making it feel urgent...that this is such an important new thing they are about to learn.  More of your students will see the purpose and want to try what you just taught them.  Falling back on the previous example, you can say, "Say something new about your character by sketching them, labeling the sketch, and then writing long about the label.  This will make you really see your character and understand new things about him!"  Try it out.  Talk it up.  You'll see some success with it.

When thinking about your active involvement, you should make sure your students are doing the same thing you did in your teach part.  For example, if you demonstrated making your writing long using certain phrases, students should do the same thing on a different piece of writing.  Don't change the strategy or make them do the next part of the strategy.  They should do exactly what you did, but on a different text.  Also, when planning your active involvement, you should provide the example.  This way, when you're listening in on partnerships talking, you know the context and it's easy to assess.  You can dive right in, and comparing one partnership's work to another is easy.  Another reason for this same context argument is that if kids were going to use their own book or their own writing to try out the minilesson strategy, what would you do if it didn't match what they happened to be working on?  Set up your teach and your active involvement so that they mirror one another!

While demonstrating, you should voice over what you are doing.  While you might be providing a really good example of how a strategy works, you should voice over (like on a DVD director's cut or bloopers section) what's going on, so kids understand how or why you're doing something.  Instead of just performing the strategy, think aloud to say what you're doing.  Do it before your demonstration.  "Watch as I show not tell by naming things I see or hear in the setting."  Do it during your demonstration.  "See what I'm doing?  I'm naming things I see or hear in the setting."  Struggle.  Suffer.  Show them it's not easy.  "I can't really think of anything else.  What else do I see?"  This will show them not to give up, and what to do when they have trouble.  Do it after your demonstration.  "Did you see what I did?  I named things that I see and hear in the setting."

Finally, treat your minilesson like an invitation, not an assignment.  Tuesday's minilesson is not necessarily Tuesday's work.  However, if a student is ready to do it on Thursday, that's when it should be done.  We use this terminology, "Whenever you're reading and..." or "Something you can try is..."  You should have the expectation that they learn it.  You should have the expectation that kids are making decisions about their work.  You shouldn't have the expectation that kids are jumping because you said jump.  Otherwise, they'll never do anything thinking, unless you're around to prompt them. 

Hopefully, these five tips will help reinvigorate your minilessons.  Try them out and see what you can add this list yourself!

Let me introduce you to dobostorta (pronounced DOH-boash-TOR-ta).  It's a Hungarian dessert with about 15 layers of very thin cake with chocolate buttery cream between each layer.  The same chocolaty cream goes around the outside, and there is a caramel "drum" top.  Many Hungarian bakers don't even attempt to make this, but my wife can!  If I've been good to her, then every second or third Father's Day or birthday, I can have one of these. It takes hours and hours to make one, and probably weeks to burn the calories in one slice. 

The word "dobos" is a Hungarian word meaning "drummer," and many people might think it's called that because of the top layer. It's actually named after Jozsef Dobos, who invented it.  In a time when cooling techniques were difficult to come by, Dobos needed a kind of cake that could last for a longer time without refrigeration.  It took him a long time, experimenting with different ingredients that would satisfy both flavor and resistance to melting.

So it is with the greatest thinkers and inventors. Albert Einstein once said, "It is not that I'm so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer.” They ponder a problem, posing hypotheses, until they get them right.  Thomas Edison said that his hundreds of attempts to create light, he didn't experience countless failures, but one long process to experience success! 

It takes a long time to achieve greatness.  We have to teach kids to pose their thinking and live with it for a while. 

This happens as they allow their thinking about a character or an issue to unfold in a chapter book.  They go from seeing Opal's relationship with her father taking dramatic turns in Because of Winn-Dixie.  Story events add up and they create new understandings. It's even cooler when you see different readers in the same text debating their ideas in a read-aloud or a book club.  That's the stuff of real reading!

When we confer, whether in reading or in writing, we walk a fine line as not to play the ancient game of teachers called, "Guess the word that's in my head!"  Cory Gillette says, "The one who does the work does the learning."  If the word that's in our heads is so important, why don't we just tell them what it is?    We have to lead students to arriving at how they can improve this piece of writing without trying to get them to make the writing sound the way we hear it in our heads as a revised piece.  Instead, we have to teach in the realm of strategy, knowing full well that they won't make it sound exactly as we would, and that it may not be as good as if we were writing it.  But that's normal isn't it?  They're just kids! 
In reading, we shouldn't push our interpretations onto kids, or they're not doing the interpretation.  They're not the ones who are doing the learning!  However, this is a leap of faith.  In a recent blog, Vicki Vinton writes about the need for us to give up control a little bit and allow kids to think and talk in a very open-ended way.  We need to trust our own teaching so well, that looking at it long term, it will pay off.  We need to trust our students' learning so well, that looking at it long term, it's like a carefully constructed Lego castle.

What are some ways to do this? 

We have to be careful not to over-scaffold in our teaching.  It usually leads kids down a dead end of ideas where they aren't free to explore to the point where they discover an important theory, a light bulb, or a dobostorta.  We have to also teach them to pose fewer questions, but to pose a hypothesis. Instead of asking, "Who else will Opal meet because of Winn-Dixie?" we need to state, "It seems like Opal is finally making friends, and it's because of Winn-Dixie."  As we read on, we start to see this is true, but that the friends she makes are just as lonely as she is.  However, if we give students thinking-proof questions to answer, we really hold them back. 

Often, even the student-generated questions and wonderings are so low level, that if they're answered at all, they're just low level recall types of information. If they're not answered enough, then we teach kids to leave a bunch of loose ends to their thinking in books. Sometimes I say to kids, "Don't ask questions when you're thinking. Give answers, even if they're just 'for now' answers."  Some really smart people might disagree with this, but I've seen kids writing post-it's with questions that don't get answered, or even if they do, they're such tiny details that they don't really lead anywhere near interpretation.

Another way is to expand their reading repertoire from just predicting.  How many of us have seen kids whose main type of thinking is predicting? They can be on the second to last page, and they're still predicting. Instead of trying to guess what happens next, so that the author doesn't outsmart us, we have to get kids to synthesize what's going on in the big picture of the story. 

I'm not bashing predicting here, but often it overshadows other types of thinking.  One teacher I know said it nicely, "Don't only think about the future in your book.  Think about the past and the present of it."  Try to move kids away from exclusively saying things like, "I think Opal will have lots of friends."  Instead they should be saying things like, "Winn-Dixie is making everyone less lonely in this story."  Rock crushes scissors.  Scissors cut paper.  Synthesis beats just prediction!

The same principles go for conferring in writing. While it's good advice to have a few strategies in your back pocket before each conference, partly based on your knowledge of this kind of writing, and partly based on your knowledge of this student, you probably don't want to go into it with a map of what it's going to look like when you're all done.  Even if you have a goal, leave yourself open to discovering anything with the student.  Even if you are firm in knowing that you need to teach into zooming in on a moment, don't decide ahead of time what the zooming will look like exactly.  If you do, you're probably closing the possibilities before you can really start.

Teaching reading and writing for real is very difficult.  You can't just "cover" teaching points and say you're done.  It takes a long time to create learning with any kind of depth.  The teaching moves outlined in this post are just a part of the solution of how you can create learning that lasts.  Imagine what the world would be like if Edison, Einstein, or even Dobos had gone for a quick fix?

Like most everyone on the East Coast, we've been snowed in.  The other night, I was taking the garbage out.  The can is in an area where no one walks otherwise, so the snow should be pretty untouched.  In walking by, I saw this!  Animal tracks left by a visitor who probably had very cold feet in the middle of the night. 

Our students are just like that.  When we teach them, and we have to choose our words carefully, as they make a specific and lasting impression.  When you have a conference in reading or writing, be sure to use language that is strategic, meaning you use words that can apply to many situations. As many wise teachers have told us before, "Teach the reader, not the book.  Teach the writer, not the writing."  We want to teach students ideas that go beyond the exact book they're reading and the precise piece they are writing.

I'm sure that when whatever animal it was that left these prints dashed away quickly, because its feet were cold.  Upon arriving at its home, it probably did a quick scurry to get some snow off its feet.  Don't we all stamp our feet when we get back inside after a hearty round of shoveling, sledding, or a nice healthy snowball fight?

As teachers, we need to walk away covered with the snowflakes of what our kids taught us in each conference or interaction.  As much as we like to think we taught our students something, each time we talk to them, we learn a little bit more about what it means to be a teacher.  You should approach each conference listening as closely as you possibly can, so that your mind is just as stimulated by what students say, as you hope theirs will be from listening to you. There are some teachers I know, who I always tell that they are very good listeners, staring into the learning part of a child's soul when conferring. After watching them, I push myself to do the same, trying to walk away with what they teach me about good teaching and learning.

So as you finish digging yourself out of a wintry mess, ask yourself if you've had the kind of conferences that have left an imprint on kids, and if you've been left with a little bit of snow on your teaching from what kids have said to you.

This post was originally an email in December 2013.  I hope you enjoy it!

When you cross over the Tappan Zee Bridge, you can be totally overwhelmed by the immensity of the bridge, of the traffic that’s sitting on it, by the width of the Hudson River underneath you, or by the idea that you have to pay how much for the toll.  However, as you approach the bridge, you should take a moment to safely look around at the little details that are just sitting there, never noticed because they live in the shadow of this huge monster…

Last night, I want to tell you about three moments in the Marshall house. 

I came home after a long day.  Kende had just woken up from a nap, something he’s been trying to give up now that he’s almost 5.  I asked him how his day was and he said he had something to show me.  He took out a piece of paper filled with his handwriting and started reading to me.  “Milk, flour, eggplant, zucchini, milk, toys, dinosaurs, flour, cereal, something for Grandma.”  I asked him what this was.  “My shopping list,” he said.  “Did Mommy ask you to write a list?” I asked.  “No. I just thought about things I’m going to get next time I go to a store.”

The next moment came after dinner.  My battery was starting to wind down, so I sat down to do a quick round of Sudoku, and I could overhear Marta in the dining room with Kende.  Timi was running around, busy being a 2 year old.  Marta was reading aloud a Hungarian chapter book.  They were in the middle of the book.  It was a fantasy.  With my English major head, I started thinking about good vs. evil, the effects of magic, and the awesome world of this story that my son was so wrapped up in.  Of course, he’s not listening to it the same way I am, but it’s cool.  A few moments earlier, Marta had started it off by saying, “We didn’t have a chance to read today.  I have to get back into this story.”  I remember feeling the same way in my own classroom when in the midst of one of my favorite read-aloud’s.  It wasn’t just for the kids.  Timi kept poking her head in sporadically, and sometimes came to fill me in on details that had just happened in the story, wanting to sound like the important messenger of what was going on in something that mysteriously seemed important.

The final moment was shortly before bedtime.  I was cleaning up a bit in the kids’ room.  Timi was sitting on the floor, reading a book upside down (the book, not the child), babbling words that sound like story words.  “And then…(character’s name)…until…(character’s name)…happily ever after,” all this while frantically turning the upside down pages.  I smiled and said, “Come put on your pajamas.”  She closed the book, hid it under the covers of her awaiting bed, and came to put on her pajamas, probably sure that she would get a chance to sneak a peek in the last few moments before prayers and sleep.

Three moments.  Sometimes I worry that amid all the hustle and bustle of work, of helping other people’s children that I’m not doing enough for my own kids.  It’s true, most of their learning habits come from my wonderful Marta who is home with them all day teaching them to love life. 

We’ve been focusing a lot on bridges this year at Stony Lane, talking about how we cross them, how we use them to connect ourselves to others and to new learning.  It’s nice to think about all the little things around the bridges, the little details in life that sometimes go unnoticed because of the bridges themselves.  I invite you to notice these things, too, and share them with all of us, to help us connect with each other in whole new ways.

December 2013

Norman Webb's Depths of Knowledge has begun to revolutionize the way we look at thinking.  Webb, a protege of Benjamin Bloom, created a new scale to look at the complexity of student thinking that emphasizes the act of metacognition, or thinking about your thinking.  It's very important, isn't it?  How can you make changes that improve your learning, unless you think about it?

One of the tools that helps you do this is the learning progression.  It's a collection of skills, often linear in its layout, that helps you assess where you are in learning something, and lets you see the next step so that you can make it there.

Below you'll find some great learning progressions made by some teachers at our school.

This from Kristen Greco's 1st Grade class, and helps kids work toward reading with fluency.  It puts fluent reading into clear (and memorable) steps.

This one about opinion writing is from Matt Kimbell's 2nd Grade class.  Notice the red text shows the cumulative nature of the progression.  To be at #3, you have to have done #1 and #2.  Also, the blue and green text shows real examples of what writing like that looks like.

This is from Erin Todd's Kindergarten class.  It describes the behaviors related to reading workshop.  The picture help make the progression easy to understand.  Students put their names on post-it's and place them where they feel their work was.  They can then look with their partner at what the next box says and make plans for the next day.

This is a learning progression about the architecture of the minilesson that I created for teachers who want to improve in their ability to teach a focused, short minilesson in reading or writing workshop.  This works for student learning, professional learning, or any kind of learning!