The Bookends of Learning

This past week, our instructional coaching team led several professional development sessions in a district professional learning day.  The day was designed so that participants could choose their own path:  they had several sessions to choose from for each time slot.  It was a day packed with learning and choice.  My only frustration with the day is that I didn’t get to attend all sessions.

A Little Help from Artificial Intelligence

My session, The Bookends of Learning:  Creating Powerful Lesson Beginnings and Endings, lends itself well to a blog post, so here we are!  This topic aligns well with one that I have written in the past:  Beginning With the End in Mind.

I wasn’t entirely happy with the description I had written for the session, so I threw my written description into ChatGPT which gave me just what I was looking for:

“How can we keep our learners actively engaged and motivated from start to finish, every day? The key is sustaining their energy and enthusiasm throughout the entire lesson. While we often focus on the “meat” of the lesson—the middle section—each phase of the lesson is equally important: the beginning, the middle, and the ending. In this session, we’ll explore proven strategies for building and maintaining student engagement during the “bookends” of the lesson, ensuring that the excitement and energy you ignite at the start of the lesson remains high until the very end. Together, we’ll learn how to “seal the deal” with every student, every day.”

I’m still dabbling in the world of Artificial Intelligence, but am definitely onboard with using it myself, and teaching our students how to use it responsibly.  AI has tons of potential to advance and to destroy.  As with all technologies that came before it, we will find a path forward that maximizes its positive potential, and minimizes its downfalls.  Thank you, A.J. Juliani, for writing so frequently, thoughtfully,  thoroughly about AI!

Opening the Session

After reviewing two learning targets for the session (“I can develop a powerful beginning to my lessons.” and “I can develop a powerful ending to my lessons.”), I shared a quote from Teach Like a Pirate author, Dave Burgess:

This is one of my favorite quotes, and it did just what was intended – it sparked lots of conversation!  In the spirit of using total participation techniques, I asked participants to “Turn and Talk” to discuss the following two prompts about the quote:  “What reaction do you have to this question?” and “What can you conclude about the author’s intention?”  In the spirit of consistency, I used the same two prompts with each quote that I shared throughout the presentation.

The Bookends of Learning

In the first image below, if we think of the books in the middle as our content, and the bookends as what holds all of that content together, we can see what would happen if we remove a bookend…  the content falls down – it has loose ends – it is not a solid chunk of understanding.  The way we begin and end a lesson will determine the effectiveness of the lesson.  Without strong bookends, we may end up with floating bits of knowledge, rather than securing them with a strong beginning and end.

           

The challenge I presented to my session’s participants was this:  consider planning the beginning and end of your lessons before planning the middle.  Further, you might even consider jumping back and forth between the beginning and the end during planning, as you think of the components contained in each.

The beginning of a lesson likely contains a bell ringer, behavior expectations, learning targets, and an introduction to learning.  The end of a lesson likely contains a review of content and behavior expectations, an exit ticket, and a bridge to upcoming lessons.  It is often helpful to plan beginning and ending components in tandem.

The Beginning of a Lesson

We learn from those we like.  Each of us can make an argument to refute this statement, but at the end of the day, when we provide consistency and build relationships with students, we are making great strides toward ensuring that they want to be in our classrooms and that they will learn with and from us.

Character Strong illustrates the importance of letting students know that we care about them as they enter our classrooms:

We cannot control student behaviors, but we can control how we structure the environment to influence student behavior.  When we structure the environment to engage and empower our learners, we see a sharp decrease in many frustrating behaviors.  I utilized CASEL’s “Practices Playbook”, The Teaching Channel, and Burgess’s Teach Like a Pirate to share ideas for impactful lesson openings:

• Movement – one way to avoid apathetic learners is to engage them in movement.  Activities like “Four Corners” and Arrow, as described by CASEL are perfect for this!
• Start with a Video – Video clips can serve as a quick way to pique students’ interest in a topic or to teach a simple concept.
• Start with an Object – Use a seemingly random object to kick off a lesson:  have students make predictions about how it might relate to today’s lesson.
• Start with a Question – Find out what students already know about a topic, or use a question to spark curiosity about a topic.
• Start with a Mistake – Rather than using an exemplar, use a mistake (anonymously) made by a student to have other students analyze how the mistake was made and how it can be fixed.  My Favorite No is a fantastic example of this!

The End of a Lesson

As we close lessons, we want to be sure that we provide feedback to our students with how they performed on behavior expectations.  In addition, we want them to partake in self-assessment of the Learning Targets as we also provide an assessment to formally, or informally, check in on the learning that occurred.  There are several activities that allow us to use these checks for understanding (also taken from CASEL’s “Practices Playbook”):

• Human Bar Graph – students stand in rows depending on their response to a prompt
• Give One, Get One – students record ideas they have gained from a lesson, then move around the room to share their ideas with classmates
• 3-2-1 – students record 3 things they have learned, 2 questions they still have, and 1 key term from the lesson
• Start, Stop, Continue – students record something they will start, stop, and continue doing as a result of the learning
• Suit Yourself – students tie their reflections of the learning to suits in a deck of cards

It’s Not Supposed to Be Easy

By my last count, I had over 15 hours dedicated to planning the Bookends of Learning session.  15 hours… for a ONE HOUR session.  Clearly, that kind of time is neither feasible or sustainable for teachers who teach multiple courses or subjects, all day every day.  I recognize that the amount of planning time was excessive because the content is critical to the heavy focus our district is placing on lesson planning right now.  It was also excessive because I get incredibly nervous about presenting to my colleagues and I wanted the session to be “just right.”  (It wasn’t.)

It wasn’t perfect, but the lesson objectives were met (according to my informal assessment at the end of the session).  It wasn’t perfect, and it certainly wasn’t easy, but very few things about education are easy.  And that’s OK – public educators are an immensely caring and committed group of public servants.  We care deeply about the students we serve, and are committed to doing whatever it takes to ensure high levels of learning for all of them.