0 Friday Favorite: My Planner

I was so very excited when I received my planner, a la Sam Shah, in the mail.

I am simply not able to hold very many things in my brain at one time. If I try, I get stressed out and overwhelmed. I manage my life by putting everything on paper. I have never found a planner that meets all of my needs, so I had started trying to create my own. I was having trouble with the execution until I read Sam's post, and now here it is!

Here is a blank page.

In addition to all the usual stuff, there is a little letter representing each item that I have to check off on a daily basis:

T -- look over the lesson plans for TODAY and make sure all supplies are ready.
G -- Grades recorded for that day.
3 -- look 3 days ahead and prepare pages for my aide to copy.
S -- Summarize that lesson (specifically, what went well & what didn't)
N -- email a copy of the day's Notes
V -- upload the Video from the day's lesson
A -- Absent students' makeup work

Here's what it looks like at the beginning of the week. I have written the topic of each lesson, additional items that I need to do each day, and appointments and such.

And here's what it looks like at the end of the week.  I have written a little summary of each lesson in a different color. These are the notes I will (hopefully) use when I am planning next year. And everything is crossed off. If it doesn't get done, I cross it off anyway and re-write it on the next week's calendar. You know, because I can't turn to the next page if something isn't crossed off.

OCD, maybe, but it helps me live my life a with a lot less stress.

Detail: Friday Favorite: My Planner

0 Happy Moment

I am so tired of myself writing about supplies, but . . .

 . . . Today I put skinny (9 oz.) plastic cups inside my supply caddies. They are much more organized now. It made me so happy I had to take a picture . . . and share it with someone.

Detail: Happy Moment

0 I Heart My Seating Chart

Due to a snow day right before break, I am spending the first day back watching my students take final exams. It stinks for them that they have to take exams after a two-week break, but I am enjoying a day of collecting my thoughts before our new semester begins tomorrow.

So what am I doing? I am making up seating charts. And I am sitting here thinking about how much I love my seating charts. (I know, I am such a nerd!)

I am sure that there is a more sophisticated way to do this . . . but I just can't stop myself from using sticky notes and multiple blank printouts of my seating layout.

You could use sticky flags, but I like to make my own by cutting off the bottom half of a small stack of sticky notes and then cutting them into fourths.

I use pink and blue so that I can see at a glance if I have a somewhat even gender distribution.

Best of all, it is super easy to manipulate your arrangement until you get it just right.

And it all fits in a nice folder.

Ok, time to start grading those final exams.  :(

Detail: I Heart My Seating Chart

0 Bell Work Bliss Gone Bad

I am testing out a new bell work procedure this year, like so:

1.  Student picks up the bell work when she walks in the room. It's right by the door.
2.  Student works out bell work and raises a hand to check.
3.  I check the bell work and give out a green star. Student receives a green pen of her own.
4.  Student checks in with partner to assist as needed and gives the partner a green star.
5.  Student checks in with people sitting nearby to see if green stars/assistance are needed.
6.  I continue passing out green stars and green pens until pretty soon, the green pens and green stars have branched out through the whole room and bell work is done.

The first three or four weeks of this method were completely blissful. Students were self-starting.  Students who understood the problem were coaching the struggling students. I was super proud of myself for putting the responsibility of bell work completion into the hands of the students. Yay for me doing less while students do more!

Weeks 4-6 started going downhill a bit. There is a little lag time between the first and the last students who finish. Students started finishing and chatting. Loudly. Then they started chatting before they got started.

Now, at the 8th week I am frustrated and wondering where it all went wrong. What was different about the first few weeks compared to now? Is the honeymoon over? Or did something else change?

I realized that during the first few weeks I had an extra step at the end of the bell work . . . I directed students toward the few problems I'd put on that day's practice assignment that were review. These were problems they could work on right away without any instruction. So they were doing the bell work, coaching and starring their neighbors, and then moving on to those extra problems. Since it was part of the day's assignment, they were motivated to keep moving along and get that done.

The moral of the story is that if I want to continue to do bell work this way, I need to supply my students with something to do after they finish all the steps. Not busy work. Something worth the time. Something productive that will fill the short gap.

I am thinking I might start using some type of guided questions where they could go ahead and start thinking about the day's lesson, or some ACT practice questions, or maybe just continue with review like before. Maybe some extension or challenge problems for them to think about?

I am not sure which way I will go, but writing this post helped me identify the problem so that now I can figure out a solution.

Yay for blogging!

Detail: Bell Work Bliss Gone Bad

0 8 weeks, 8 pencils . . .

I've tried a variety of responses to students who show up to class pencil-less:

1.  Refusing to give them a pencil, so they can learn to be responsible.
(Doesn't work, and I feel like a jerk.)
2.  Providing them with a pencil.
(Pencil is usually gone for good.)
3.  Trading them for something valuable.
(Works, but it is inconvenient.)

This year, I just put out a cup of pencils for students to use as needed.

8 weeks later, I still have all the pencils I put out at the beginning of the year.

It turns out, a plastic spoon is a very affective anti-theft device.

Then I came up with a use for the forks.

(Green pens for checking bell work.)

We figured out right away that the spoon-pencil has a major design flaw:

You can't use the eraser.

So, then I really got carried away . . .

I would recommend attaching the eraser to the handle part instead . . . 

Detail: 8 weeks, 8 pencils . . .

0 Confessions of a Scatter-Brained Teacher

Ask my students or anyone who knows me, and they will tell you that I am extremely organized.  Unless you ask someone who has lived with me, like my husband or my college roommate.  And they will tell you that I am as absent-minded as they come.  I lose misplace things constantly.  I forget to complete tasks that I haven't written down.  If I bring my laptop home from school, I have to attach my keys to the laptop bag in order to avoid leaving without it the next morning.  Even then, I could end up at school with an empty laptop bag.  I forget names of people I know.  The list goes on.  It is a really unfortunate problem.

My hyper-organization is actually my attempt to compensate for my lack of proper brain activity. So here are a few things that help me function like a regular person:

A binder (or two) for each prep:  All the materials I have ever used and could possibly need are here, tabbed by unit.  This is an absolute essential, even if you have a regular brain.

Summaries:  At the end of each day, I type a quick summary of that day's lessons.  This information could be as little as a sentence or as much as a paragraph.  I tell what I did that day, and include a short reflection of what went well and what did not.  I summarize at the end of the unit as well, telling myself whether the unit was perfection or a gut remodel.  If you think you don't have enough time to do this yourself, I encourage you to try it for one unit.  It literally takes me about five minutes a day, and having the information available saves me ten times that when I teach the same unit the next year.  I teach three preps in the fall and add a fourth in the spring, so I do not have time to re-invent the wheel.  I'd love to start from scratch each year, but that just isn't feasible.  Having this information at my fingertips helps me isolate the areas to focus on for improvement in the future.

Folders:  Current -- holds everything from the binder for the unit we are currently working on. Next -- holds everything from the binder for the next unit.  That way, I can go ahead and read the summary and do some tweaking as I have time.  File -- at the end of each day, the materials for that day go in here.  Everything from this folder will go back in the binder at the end of the unit.  I have one set of these three folders for each course, and I keep them on my desk for easy access.

And all this is just the beginning . . .

Detail: Confessions of a Scatter-Brained Teacher

0 Anatomy of a Lesson

I love to be organized!  In a perfect world, I would always have everything students need for an entire lesson all together.  Two pages, two-sided, stapled, and hole punched.  I am just a little OCD that way.

I keep the copies right by the door. Students know to pick it up when they walk in the room.

I had to slip in a pic of our new school.  Beautiful, no?

Here's what one of those pages looks like, and a breakdown of its parts. 

1.     Unit # and Day # -- This helps students keep everything in the right order in their binders.

2.     Bell Work – I have tried to use Harry Wong’s strategies for starting class.  “I don’t start class, YOU start class”, but my students don’t always jump right in and start without me like I wish that they would.  What has worked best is to play music between classes – when the song ends they are supposed to end their conversations and get started on the bell work.

3.     Notes – Here’s the lecture notes with blanks or whatever type of progression I have planned for that day.  On this day, it is simply a couple of examples for them to follow along as I explain them.

4.     Practice Problems – I try to structure every day so that students have time to practice before they leave the room.  Some days they might do all the practice in class with no homework, but usually there is some in class and some to finish at home.

5.     Answers – These are the answers (in no particular order) to the practice problems on that page.  I do this because I think it is really important for students to be able to self-check and make corrections.  I teach them to work the problem, and then look for the answer and cross it out.  If it isn’t there, they need to find their mistake and fix it.  Steps are required to be shown for credit.  I spend a lot of time teaching them how to use the answers for good and not for evil, but that’s for another day . . . 

6.     More Notes – Whenever possible, I like to break my lessons up into small pieces.  I talk . . . they practice . . . I talk some more . . . more practice.

7.     More Practice.

8.     One Lonely “Application” Problem – When it comes to showing them how this stuff is used in real life, I have much room for improvement.

9.     Review – Most days include some review problems, some more than others.

One of my goals for this year was to incorporate more variety of practice structures and partner-type activities.  But I still try to use this format no matter what.  I want them to have something they can keep as a record of what they learned and/or practiced that day.

Detail: Anatomy of a Lesson