Owning It. Alex Kajitani
are three steps for clearly communicating a lesson’s purpose to students.
1. Write it: Have your objective clearly posted in the same, accessible place each day. Make sure it is in student-friendly language! For example:
• Objective—The students will be able to calculate measures of central tendency. (Not student friendly)
• Objective—We will calculate mean, median, and mode, and be able to describe each to a friend. (Student friendly)
2. Say it: In a straightforward manner, say to your students, “By the end of class today, you will be able to calculate mean, median, and mode. You’ll know you can do this because you will be able to tell a friend how to do it, as well as do it by yourself when I’m not in the room.” (This is most effective if you say this while pointing to it in the written form as in step 1.)
Here is where you can also connect the lesson to a larger purpose in their lives by saying something like, “Believe it or not, you will use these skills when you are doing real things in your life, such as shopping for houses and negotiating salaries for a job.”
3. Ask for it back: Make the students tell you why they’re there. After completing steps 1 and 2, ask a student aloud: “Hey, Brandon, please tell us why we’re here today.”
When you take these three steps, you help your students see the purpose in what they will do at the beginning of each class. Establishing this connection is part of your job—your students need to know why they’re there. As assessment experts Rick Stiggins, Judith A. Arter, Jan Chappuis, and Steve Chappuis (2004) state, “Explaining the intended learning in student-friendly terms at the outset of a lesson is the critical first step in helping students know where they are going” (p. 58).
Cut the Hypocrisy
Would you trust a server at a health-food restaurant who looks run down and out of shape? Or one at a five-star restaurant who dresses sloppily and speaks incorrectly? This isn’t about cosmetic appearances. It’s deeper. It’s about authenticity. We can’t truly sell what we don’t truly embody.
Often, I see teachers chatting in the halls, texting, or running to or from the copy machine as the final bell rings. Admittedly, I’ve done all of these things as well. However, when we do, we severely weaken the power we have to insist that our students get to class on time, be ready to learn, and stay attuned to what we’re asking them to do.
The key to our students being well-prepared, curious, and passionate human beings begins with us, as teachers, also displaying those characteristics. For me, the following paraphrased, oft-told story (Mehta, n.d.) perfectly illustrates our role as teachers:
A troubled mother took her daughter to see Mohandas Gandhi, who was world-renowned for his great spiritual discipline. It seems the young girl had become addicted to eating sweets, and her mother wanted Gandhi to speak to her about this harmful habit and convince her to drop it. Upon hearing this request, Gandhi paused in silence and then told the mother, “Bring the girl back to me in three weeks and I will speak to her then.”
Just as she was instructed, the mother returned with her daughter, and Gandhi, as he had promised, spoke to the girl about the detrimental effects of eating too many sweets. He counseled her to give them up.
The mother gratefully thanked Gandhi, but was perplexed. “Why,” she asked him, “did you not speak to my daughter when we first came to you?”
“My good woman,” Gandhi replied, “three weeks ago, I myself was still addicted to sweets!”
Summary
The next time you step into your classroom, notice what you do in the first five minutes of your class to make an impression, think about how your choices and routines set the tone for student success or failure, and consider how some simple changes could reap huge benefits for you and your students. By serving your students some appetizing learning from the moment they walk in the door, you encourage them to be focused throughout the session!
Reflection Questions
Now that you have completed the chapter, consider and reflect on the following questions.
1. Why is it important to see your students as your customers? How does this outlook help you better serve your students’ interests?
2. What are the first three things your students should do immediately upon entering your classroom? Write them down, and then ask students to do the same thing. Are your answers the same?
3. What are some ways that you can grab your students’ attention at the beginning of a lesson?
4. What’s something that you do as a teacher but ask your students not to do? (Be honest with yourself!)
Owning It © 2019 Solution Tree Press • SolutionTree.com Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction to download this free reproducible.
3
VISIBILITY IS EVERYTHING
Increase Your Classroom Presence to Seem Like You’re Everywhere at Once
Every teacher with classroom experience knows that simply managing your classroom can be an everyday challenge that often overshadows instruction and learning. One of the keys to ensure your classroom stays on track is to create the impression that you are always visible and aware of what goes on within its walls.
When I was a new teacher, I really struggled. All the typical new-teacher clichés applied: my students were constantly off task, I shouted more “be quiet or else” warnings than I had time to enforce, and I left school each day feeling disrespected. Too often, I didn’t feel my students learned anything that day. I found this frustrating because, in my credential program, I’d excelled in all of my teaching-theory classes and had been a pretty decent student teacher. But all of a sudden, on my own in a real classroom, I was sinking.
Then, my dad gave me a book that had seemingly nothing to do with teaching, yet it changed my teaching forever. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (2002) outlines the work of two sociologists, James Wilson and George Kelling, and their broken-windows theory. In this chapter, I explain the thinking behind this theory and how it applies to education. I then present five strategies you can use to ensure there are no broken windows in your own classroom.
The Broken-Windows Theory
The broken-windows theory is quite simple. It’s based on the contested belief that crime is the inevitable result of disorder (Kelling & Coles, 1996). Thus, if you walk by a building with a broken window (or several), you make the connection in your mind that nobody cares for that building and that, if you choose, you are free to go into the building and commit more (and more severe) crimes, with very little potential for punishment.
Gladwell (2002) paints the picture of New York City in 1990, when crime was at an all-time high, and twenty thousand felonies per year were being committed on the subway system alone (Kelling & Coles, 1996). Believing that the city’s history of letting seemingly small, insignificant crimes go unpunished had created in peoples’ minds the perception that they were free to commit more serious crimes, the mayor and police chief decided to implement the broken-windows theory. They ordered the police to crack down on two of the city’s most visible crimes: graffiti and subway turnstile jumping.
Although they received much criticism for putting so much energy and so many resources into these smaller infractions, by 1996, felonies on the New York subway system had fallen by 75 percent, and murders dropped by 66 percent. To be fair, there were many factors at work, and there is justifiable debate regarding the correlation or causation regarding