Hello Friends~
I’m back for another week of our book study: Teaching with Intention. Amanda at The Primary Gal has organized this for our little group of online friends & I’m loving it!
If you have missed the past few weeks, you can catch up here:
Part II: Taking Action
Chapter 4 is all about classroom teachers building culture in their classrooms. The chapter starts out with a great example of the tone Mrs. Miller set in a classroom in Kansas. It was a great story that shows how a few simple acts can create a classroom where students believe they can do anything & they can prove how.
It is essential for teachers to create a culture that promotes student thinking. Three things to help you do this are:
- putting our thinking on display;
- the intentional use of language; and
- making thinking visible, public, and permanent.
(Debbie Miller, 2008, p. 48)
What teachers sometimes forget is students learn from everything we do… Teaching & non-teaching… So we are human & we forget, but we need to remember these little minds are like sponges so we need to be on our game at all times.
When we are putting our thinking on display, we are continuously modeling through think alouds, oral comprehension, written comprehension & artifacts of lessons taught. When students see their teachers going through a thought process they are always more willing to do the same on their own. We need to be consistent when modeling instruction through all content areas, especially when modeling our thinking to students using comprehension strategies.
When reading the section about the intentional use of language AKA teacher talk we need to remember that the content & academic language we use daily will be a powerful piece in students work & comprehension. Everything from the positive words we use to the questioning words we use, will help students be able to ask themselves critical questions as well as others along with answering the oral & written comprehension questions they will see. It all boils down to encouraging students to develop meaning through the vocabulary you consistently use in your classroom.
When it comes to making thinking visible, public & permanent the main example for students comes from anchor charts for me at least. Our learning is public in the classroom as a reference which will then become permanent in my students minds. Anyone who walks into a classroom with anchor charts can see exactly what teaching & learning has been going on. Students are visual learners & this will become a mental image in their mind that they can reference to in their memory for a long time to come. This is also goes along with posting student work samples, pictures of students working & more.
