Workshop Strategy Learning from Stevi Quate

Last week Stevi Quate returned to our school for another round of in-house professional learning. This time, she did a couple of demo lessons as a way for us to lift the level of our workshop teaching. I always learn so much by watching master teachers teach, even if it's just a new management technique or a quick formative feedback strategy. This time was no different. Here are a few things I picked up from Stevi's visit:

image from Into the Marchand Archive

1. Pre- and post-assessment of the learning target: The learning target for the lesson was on the board and read aloud. Then Stevi had students line up depending on how well they could do the lesson: 1) I have no idea, 2) I think I can understand what to do, 3) I understand it but I can't do it, or I can do part but not all, 4) I understand it and can do it, 5) I really get it and can teach others with new examples. Once students were lined up at the beginning of the lesson, it was obvious how much scaffolding was needed to teach the lesson. By the end, it was clear how much learning had occurred and whether a follow-up lesson (whole group, small group, or individual) was needed. Quick, easy, no frills, and it got kids moving and thinking about the learning target.
2. Use visuals as models in minilessons: We are in the midst of a nonfiction reading unit, with an emphasis on summarizing and answering thematic social justice questions. We have a model text that we've been reading through to teach summarizing skills (see my April 19, 2014 post about this), which was unfamiliar to Stevi. She turned to a visual image as her model text to teach her summarizing minilesson. It was engaging, short, and worked for two different minilessons: choosing the most important details for your summary ("I have my main idea; now which details should I include that best show it?"), and using relevant details to build an answer to a thematic question ("I see all these details; now what do these details tell me about the extent that power affects an individual?"). 
3. Have students take notes on the teacher's thinking during a Think Aloud demonstration: After explaining the learning target, Stevi demonstrated doing it using a Think Aloud. While she was demonstrating the process, she asked students to take notes, not on the text, but on her thinking as she went through the text analysis. The goal was for students to pay closer attention to the demonstration, as well as having students construct the steps themselves instead of being told the steps. This was new to my students, and I think they were so caught up in the image and her analysis that they didn't get anything down. They also were not used to being asked to do that much noticing. At the end of her lesson, only a very few had anything down on their papers. However, despite the lack of response, this is a technique that I'd like to use more. Once students practice doing it a little bit, I think it will be a more valuable "brains-on" method than demonstrations without it.

Stevi demonstrated two lessons. After both, she said she felt she had scaffolded too much. Neither my teaching partner nor I thought the lessons were over-scaffolded. In fact, I thought she did less scaffolding than I usually do. I want to keep thinking about this comment because I think there is a bigger message here. Our students do ask a lot of questions and want very small, discrete, modeled steps to follow. The more open-ended the task, the fewer the students who succeed at a high level. I could look at this in two ways: 1) they need the scaffold to succeed, or 2) they need practice at open-ended, less directed tasks so that they can learn to be more self-directed and independent. I don't think I can drop all the scaffolds and go "cold turkey", but I do think I could do more (like the notes during the Think Aloud) to expect them to be more self-directed and better problem-solvers.