Last month some colleagues and I ran a workshop for teachers at my school on differentiation. In preparing for it, I came across the idea of anchor activities. Unfortunately, many of the resources I found giving examples actually list a lot of the traditional time-filler busy work (extra worksheets, copy and define words from the dictionary, coloring pages, etc.) and slap the “anchor activity” label on them. In her book The Differentiated Classroom, Carol Tomlinson defines anchor activities as

meaningful work done individually and silently. This could be journal writing, free reading, foreign language pattern drills, seatwork in math, or sketchbook assignments. It’s something useful and important for students to do…. (p. 97)

The key words I see here are meaningful, useful, and important. We have to put as much thought into selecting what we ask students to do in their unstructured time so that it never actually becomes down time.

At the same time, it’s important to keep in mind that students’ brains cannot stay in high academic gear all day long. They need frequent short “brain breaks” (as Eric Jensen calls them) to be able to stay alert and focused throughout the school day. The real trick is finding the balance and making sure that the breaks are built into our instruction so that students are more able to continue academic work during their unstructured time.

As with many differentiation techniques, though, anchor activities should be just a starting point. Tomlinson herself explains that setting up anchor activities as a routine in your classroom should be a way to train students to expect that there will be times when different people are doing different things so that some students can break off from the group.

What do you do, then, when you have students who are ready to break off? Perhaps you have a few gifted students who have compacted out of part of a math unit. Or you have several students who routinely finish their work quickly and accurately. Here are a few ideas for ongoing, long-term activities they can do that are meaningful, useful, and important:

• Independent Study. This is of course the tried and true traditional approach, and much has been written about it. What I recommend is that you always give students a way to share their results or integrate it back into the classroom community. I had a student once who was fascinated with folk tales and fairy tales. Her fourth grade class was learning about Africa that year, so her independent study project was to find and study some African folk tales and adapt one into a play (another interest of hers). She then selected student volunteers and put on a very simple (just a few masks and props) production in the classroom.
• Classroom yearbook. Have your regular early finishers form a “yearbook committee.” Their job is to plan, design, and prepare a classroom yearbook to go home with your students at the end of the year. They would need to interview each member of the class, prepare a page about each, take photos, record important classroom events, and so on.
• About Our School video. Have your kids take snapshots of activities around the classroom (and around the school if your situation permits and your students are trustworthy). Use Animoto to put together an introductory music video that the principal could use during Back to School night presentations or post on the school website.
• Unit reconnaissance. Enlist the aid of your better researchers to help you find good materials for upcoming units. Tell the students what the next unit will be in one subject area. Give them some guidelines and some topic suggestions, then give them time to explore the library and the Internet for materials that will support what you will be doing. Use online tools like Diigo or a classroom wiki to gather the information in one spot.

What are your ideas for keeping anchor activities and bigger projects connected and meaningful? How will you work to eliminate busy work from your classroom and school this year?

References:

Tomlinson, C. A. (1999). The differentiated classroom: Responding to the needs of all learners. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Yesterday I shared some thoughts about pretesting that were prompted by a year-old post by Scott McCleod. Today, I came across another year-old blog post, this time by Angela Meiers. In this article, she talks about how comprehension is not something that can be contained in a discrete list of facts and skills, but rather it is an ongoing, recursive process of applying those facts and skills to build a picture of the world.

It occurs to me that what we often do in school is something like handing the students a birdhouse kit. The pieces are pre-measured and pre-cut, and everything we need is already there. We walk them all step-by-step through the assembly of the kit, focusing on their technique in hammering and gluing. It doesn’t matter that some of the kids have designed and built their own birdhouses, and others haven’t ever seen a bird before. At the end of the lesson, everyone in the class has an identical birdhouse–though perhaps we allow them to choose their own colors for the paint.

Rather than giving a pretest that runs through all of the discrete skills in a unit (“explain how to hammer a nail without bending it”, “which goes on first, the roof or the base?”), consider giving your students a one-question pretest that gets at the most important aspects of the unit you are going to teach: “Draw a design for a birdhouse and explain how you would build it.” Here are some sample One-Question Pretests that might work in various subject areas:

• Explain how America became an independent country
• Pretzels come in bags of 24 and you want to give one to each of the 473 students in our school. Figure out how many bags we need to buy and show how you computed the answer without a calculator.
• Where do new plants come from, and how do they grow?
• Tell me what grade you should get for this class, and write a paragraph that convinces me you’ve earned it.
• Read the beginning of this story and write what you think will happen next. Explain why you think so.

While you wouldn’t get discrete data on what specific skills and knowledge your students have, a careful reading and analysis of the students’ responses can give you a wealth of information that would be immensely helpful in planning your instruction. It wouldn’t take any more time than a traditional pretest. If you embed it into other activities, such as including the pretest as a learning center activity that all students will complete over the course of a week during normal rotations, it might even take less time.

How can you apply the One-Question Pretest idea to your own subject and grade level?

Teachers frequently complain about debate the need for the plethora of tests that we administer on a regular basis, and I have to admit I’m right in there with them. It seems like there is so much testing going on that we have little time left for instruction.

The reality of course is that there is plenty of instruction going on, we just don’t have time to teach everything we would like or even are supposed to teach.

In this article, Scott McCleod proposes doing more testing, not less. I can almost hear you saying, “You have got to be kidding!” But hold on. He has a great point, and in fact if we do more of the right kind of testing, we can actually save time and have more time for the quality instruction we want to do.

Pretesting like Scott is suggesting is something that I heartily advocate. As a teacher of gifted students, I’m often called on to help classroom teachers figure out how to meet the needs of students who have already mastered a large chunk of the material they are about to cover in class. Though some teachers are open and willing to learn how to compact the curriculum by letting kids “test out” of some things they’ve already learned, many are reluctant. They are afraid they won’t have enough “scores” for the child to adequately calculate a report card grade, for example. They have a hard time justifying allowing a child to “skip” an assignment that others have to do because it’s “unfair.”

But as Scott points out, how fair is it to the child who has to sit through instruction they don’t need? Consider taking the time to pretest every unit you teach, and you will gain much:

• Pretesting can help you identify content that everyone in the class has mastered, which means you can skim over or skip it completely.
• You will also note the areas that are most broadly misunderstood so you can plan the most intensive instruction around those topics and avoid skimming over things you “knew” they already had last year.
• You can identify patterns in the errors that students make so you can select specific exercises and instruction that will correct those misconceptions.
• You can use the data to group students according to need, designing small group instruction or learning center assignments that are targeted to supporting their particular weaknesses.
• If you team teach or co-teach with someone who isn’t in the classroom with you every day, pretest results can give that co-teacher a more complete picture of your students
• If you are basing instructional decisions on pretest data, you have something objective you can point back to if you are challenged by a parent or administrator about why you are doing a particular lesson, activity or assignment.

What have been your experiences with pretesting? When is it most useful? When do you find it not as helpful?

(A shorter version of this article originally appeared in Grandé With Room.)

Image by kevindooley via Flickr

Yesterday, I shared some questions that I often use to help create an atmosphere of thinking in my classroom. Unfortunately, when I ask a student to explain their reasoning, they often aren’t able to reflect back on their thought process and verbalize what took place. In some cases, the best they can come up with is “it just popped into my head.”

In order to train students how to do this, I scaffold the process for them at first to give them a structure within which they can build their own responses. They need to learn three skills to allow this to happen:

1. Focus on the process before they start
2. Monitor their reasoning as they are working
3. Reflect back and explain to someone else what they were thinking

Each of these skills needs to be modeled and practiced, and students need many opportunities to use them. These thinking skills are learned best when they are integrated into the regular flow of instruction rather than explicitly taught as discrete topics. One way to do that is to build one or more of these scaffolding activities into every lesson:

• Think-Alouds
• Leveled problems
• Graphic organizers (e.g. T-chart)
• Using “magic words” that students can use which require explanation of reasoning
• Asking prompt questions (such as those in yesterday’s post)
• Give part of the solution, then have students complete it
• Give the answer, students write the solution
• Give the explanation, students write the solution
• Give the solution, students write the explanation
• Checklists or mnemonics to aid recall of processes
• Journals to practice informal writing about problem solving
• Vocabulary games to build language skills and improve communication about reasoning
• Allow students to rewrite weak explanations to improve them
• Show sample student papers that demonstrate good skills
• Teach students to score responses using a rubric
• Have students score their own work or a partner’s work
• Trade papers with another class and have students score

In my job as a gifted teacher, parents often come to me with concerns about their children having appropriate learning experiences in school. Many times, the first clue that a student is bright or gifted and needs extra challenge is when he or she says, “I’m bored.”

As adults, when we are in a learning situation that’s boring, it is often because the content is something we already know and don’t need to practice more.

It’s important for us as parents to remember that children often don’t have the vocabulary or introspective ability to explain what they are feeling, so they may fall back on “boring” as the closest approximation. They also may not understand the root causes of their feelings to be able to describe for you where they are coming from.

Certainly students will be bored when the work they are asked to do is too easy and they have already mastered it, and it is one of the first things we need to consider. But there are many other things that might be contributing to the feeling that a child associates with boredom. When a child says, “I’m bored…,” it could also mean…

• The work is too hard
• The work isn’t interesting to me
• The work is…work
• I’m afraid I can’t do it
• I don’t like the subject
• I don’t like the assignment
• I don’t like the teacher
• I don’t like my classmates
• I don’t understand
• I don’t want to understand
• I’m tired
• I’m distracted
• I’m preoccupied
• I’m uncomfortable
• I’m angry about something that happened this morning
• I’m worried about something that might happen tomorrow
• I’d rather be at recess
• I’d rather be at home
• I’d rather be at the movies/pool/park/etc.

If we are too quick to assume that “bored” always means “too easy,” then it won’t take long for our children to learn that when they don’t like doing something, just saying those magic words will make it go away

It’s up to us, then, to be sure we don’t take this kind of statement at immediate face value. Instead, ask questions and probe deeper into the situation to find out more about what is going on and why. Then we will have the information we need to address the problem and fix it.

(Originally posted June 5, 2008 at Grandé With Room)

In strength training, so the common wisdom goes, if you want to tone the muscles you have, use moderate weight and many repetitions of the same exercise. If, on the other hand, you want to bulk up and build more muscle, higher weight and few reps will do the trick. I’m no exercise physiologist, so I can’t tell you whether this is actually true, but I’ve been thinking lately about how the principle should be applied to learning new skills in school.

Think about the typical classroom math lesson: introduce a skill, model it, walk the class through an example or two, then a set of eight or ten problems to practice the skill. This is not arbitrary or simply traditional. For the average student, it takes at least five to seven correct repetitions of a new skill before it begins to become automatic. Most students in your classroom, then, need to be guided through this process each time a skill is taught. And we need to use the same process each time a new variation in the skill is added. (Think subtracting without regrouping, then with regrouping, then regrouping across zeroes, for example.)

There are students in your class for whom this approach is inadequate, however. Some will need more practice before they begin to master the skill—these are the ones who you pull aside for extra help from time to time. We often forget, though, that there are students in the class who not only got it the first time they tried it, they are already extrapolating the variations you’re going to teach for the next three days.

So what happens to these kids in a typical lesson? They start the classwork before they’re instructed, they finish their homework before it’s assigned, and they start to daydream because they’ve already finished the thought that you haven’t finished explaining yet. And typically we treat this as misbehavior: students who aren’t on task, aren’t following directions, and are disrupting the flow of the lesson and the learning of the students around them.

The reality, though, is that these kids are ready to move on and do something new, and being asked to continually repeat over and over what they already understand is actually disrespectful. Here are two strategies that can help you address these kids’ needs without undue stress and extra work on your part:

Stay With Me or Go Free

A colleague of mine recently explained this strategy she uses with her class. After introducing a skill to the class, she will pause before starting the practice session and tell the kids, “You can stay with me, or go free.” Students who feel confident with the concept may choose to use the time for other work. Of course, she has already established routines in the classroom which are conducive to this, such as wait-time folders and extension menus with challenging activities for the students who can handle them.

Most Difficult First

This strategy, described by Susan Winebrenner in her book, Teaching Gifted Kids in the Regular Classroom, is appropriate for situations where you need more accountability for the students. When planning an assignment, identify the four or five most difficult problems in the set. When it is time for independent practice, any students who feel ready may opt to do the most difficult ones first. If they are all correct, the students are excused from the rest of that assignment and also are given a reduced homework set.

When you see students who are off task, working ahead, or seem to be daydreaming, consider the possibility that they may already get what you’re working on. What are some other things you do for students who are able to finish quickly and move ahead? Share your ideas in the comments.

The New York Times this weekend posted a fascinating interactive feature at their web site: Inaugural Words – 1789 to the Present. (Thanks, by the way, to Angela Maiers for pointing me to this, via Larry Ferlazo’s blog.) The site gives a word cloud based on the inauguration speeches of each president.

Here are a few ideas about how you could use this with your gifted students:

• Select one of the speeches and have the students infer whatever they can about the historical context in which it was given.
• Research the historical period and compare/contrast what was mentioned in the speech with things that were left out.
• Compare how vocabulary has changed over time. Figure out a way to illustrate these changes (perhaps with a graph or timeline).
• Combine the text from several speeches (perhaps all the speeches over a 50-year span, or all the speeches from the top-ranked Presidents) and create a Wordle to look for broader patterns of words.
• Create a Wordle from President Obama’s speech and compare it to those from other Presidents. (Thanks to Lee Kolbert for this idea.)
• Imagine you’re elected President. Which other Presidents would you emulate? Use words from their speeches to begin building your own.
• Research which Presidents wrote their own speeches and which used speechwriters. Is there any difference in the vocabulary?

This is admittedly a very rough list of ideas, and none of these are fully fleshed-out lessons. What other thoughts do you have?

My youngest son has some very specific food preferences—think “Mikey” from the old Life cereal commercials. Meaning that most of the time, when we sit down at the dinner table, the first words out of his mouth are, “I don’t like that.” My wife and I have slightly different views on how to handle this. Often, she will make something special for him just so that he’ll eat. That’s what moms do, especially an Italian one. My view more often than not is that he’s just being overly picky and he can eat what we put in front of him.

Now before you start writing your comment chastising me for being a cruel dad, most of the time when we insist he taste what we’ve made, he likes it and will eat it. And he has yet to go to bed hungry. So my wife and I actually balance each other nicely. Don’t tell her I said that, though.

My attitude towards my son’s eating habits would change, though, if it were a matter of health and nutrition rather than preference. If he had a condition that required a specific diet, I would go out of my way to provide it, even going so far as to cook special meals for him. I would give him supplements to replace deficiencies in his body and keep the nutrients at optimum levels.

We tend to treat education like nutrition. The regular curriculum is designed around the recommended daily allowance of reading, math, science and social studies. The content is nutrition, and we provide the amounts that are needed to keep children’s brains growing and learning. Some students have deficiencies, and we spend extra time, effort, and money to customize their diets to bring them back to optimal health.

But what about the gifted students? I fear that many people look at them in the same way as the child who likes to eat a lot. We’re worried that if they eat too much, they’ll get fat, so we carefully regulate their diets, keeping them to the recommended amounts, making sure they don’t go overboard. It’s the same thing my wife and I do when our kids equate being bored with being hungry. Instead of giving them snacks every half hour, we redirect them and give them something else to keep them occupied.

But this model is wrong. Instead of looking at gifted kids as overeaters, we need to realize that they actually have an entirely different kind of metabolism. They consume more not just out of preference but out of necessity. They have a condition that requires much higher amounts of complex and different nutrients just to stay healthy. But when they balk at eating the same diet we’re giving to the rest of the family, we tend to see them as whiny brats and respond just as I do to my youngest son: “It’s good for you. Just eat it. And if you clean your plate, then you can have dessert.”

It’s not a matter of keeping their appetites under control. It’s recognizing that their nutritional needs are completely different than ours. The learning they crave isn’t dessert, and forcing them to eat the meal first doesn’t keep them healthy. Withholding the challenging content, or keeping it carefully controlled, or ignoring the messages they give us about what they want and need isn’t actually preventing obesity, it’s malnutrition.

After writing about 1000 Things That Matter and describing how I would use it with my students, I spent the week doing that activity with several groups in the three elementary schools where I work.

The results were fascinating. In every group, the students were thoroughly engaged and personally invested. Their analysis of the comments already posted at the site was particularly interesting. Though there were some slight differences in the vocabulary they used to describe it, they consistently identified the same themes recurring in most of the comments:

• Love
• Joy
• Peace
• Relationships

It was also interesting to notice that the students’ own thoughts about what matters to them tended to fall into these same themes, with family being by far the most commonly mentioned idea.

I think what I found most exciting about this was seeing the kids debating the relative worth of all of the things different people thought were important. Their insights were rather mature, actually. When I first planned this, I was concerned that the students might not take it seriously. But they did, and when I closed the class period by recommending they have the same conversation with their parents, they seemed eager to do so.

The power of this activity came from the way the students could readily access opinions of people from around the world. What I would really love to do is take this even deeper by sharing their work with other students in other schools. If you have used the 1000 Things That Matter web site and you’re interested in sharing your students’ work with mine, post a comment here.

When I saw the site 1000 Things That Matter this morning, my first thought was about what I’d post there. I decided to give it a couple of days and ponder what really matters before putting in my two cents.

Then I considered how I might use this with my gifted students. The obvious application would be to have students write ideas they’d post there. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and I could even have the students post their ideas to the site. But I want to stretch my gifted students, and I’m sure that if I just put this question to them as is, they’d choose the first things that came to their minds. I’d rather take them into higher levels of analysis and evaluation.

One of the interesting things about the site is that the things people are sharing are available as they are posted. I think it would be rather enlightening to have students do a 3-phase process with this site:

1. First, answer the question individually: If you had to tell what matters to you in two sentences, what would you say?
2. Then, look at a sampling (or perhaps all) of the ideas that have been shared already. Consider some of these questions:
   • What do you notice?
   • Are there any patterns?
   • Are there any common themes that keep coming back?
   • Is there anything that seems to be missing?
   • Is there anything surprising?
   • What can you tell me about the people who are submitting their ideas?
3. Now look at what you wrote originally. Would you change it? How? Why?

I encourage you to try this process yourself and contribute a comment to the site. I’d also be interested in what other ideas you have for using 1000 Things That Matter with students. Share your ideas here in the comments.