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Happy Monday!

As always, I hope this finds you happy, healthy, and loved.

As you may know, gardening is a passion of mine. I can get lost in gardening for hours. It is a safe space for me to be creative without the pressure to be perfect. I do it for myself, but I do hope it brings joy and awe to others who walk past my garden.

Spring begins this Thursday, and it is already bringing gifts. Please take a moment to indulge me and look at the first flowers from my bulb garden below. What was once a concrete bed of weeds and rocks has become this. It is what my daughter sees when she looks out her window.

It makes me pause and say thank you, thank you, thank you.

Where do you go to be creative and free?

It is time for the handoff.

If you teach in grades three and above, you are probably moving into state test preparation mode. Most schools have an average of four to eight weeks until testing begins.

If you haven’t done it already, I beg you to start preparing your students by handing them more responsibility for learning and problem-solving.

When a teacher models and pro-
vides direct instruction at the start of
a lesson, it rarely enables students to
explore mathematical tasks or engage in
productive struggle (Munter, Stein, and
Smith 2015).

Many teachers are still reading word problems aloud to or with their students, modeling how to solve a problem, even if it is a review, and drilling and killing to ensure their students are prepared.

I believe that if we are still holding students’ hands and guiding them through the steps of the problems, we are doing them a  disservice.

Professional Development Opportunity

Misconceptions

Many of us believe we are helping students by reading to them (when they can read themselves) and guiding their choices, but we are delaying or denying our students’ need for independence and growth.

When all students
are given opportunities to think
critically about important mathematics
content and concepts, they have higher
achievement than their peers who
are not afforded such opportunities
(Marzano 2003).
Your students will benefit most from learning and practicing survival skills that can help them with the problems they will encounter today, next week, and in five years.

Students need to test out reading a set of directions, experience frustration or confusion, and practice backing up and rereading. They also need to experience failure, reflect on it, and come back with a new plan. This can’t happen if we don’t leave space for failure, reflection, and learning.

Students need to experience analyzing models independently and annotating them before answering questions. We can provide students with models and give them time to think.

Students can learn to access and search through their survival kits independently. We can notice their mistakes and coach them to point, read, analyze, and annotate.

Book of the Week

Read about the women many of you may never have heard of who helped to improve our world.

ELA

What are three characteristics these women have in common?
Who are you the most curious about and why?

Is there something you would like to shake up and bring about change?

MATH

Study the timeline.

How many years passed between ______ and ______.

How many years passed between Molly Williams fighting the New York fire in 1781 and hiring the first female firefighter?

A two-thirds majority is needed to pass a bill in the House of Representatives. If there are 435 people in the House of Representatives, how many represent two-thirds?

Stop!

Last week, I was analyzing test problems with a group of teachers. The presenter put grade-level problems up on the screen, and we, the teachers, studied them to ensure we had taught the concept to students and determined whether or not students had the strategies for making sense of the problem.

One of the teachers consistently quickly spoke up before all the other teachers and said, “All the kids have to do to solve this is blank, blank, and blank.” There was no commentary on what kids might think, what mistakes they might have, or new strategies for their survival kits.

What became apparent to me is that this teacher had a habit of consistently interrupting their students while they were thinking and telling them how to think about the problem before they had a chance to process it for themselves and test out strategies.

In that classroom, the students are told what to think rather than learning and practicing how to think for themselves.

The Best Intentions
Link to a great article.

We all have the best of intentions for our students. Of course, we want them to succeed and do well. For that to happen, we have to let go and let them learn from their mistakes now while they still have weeks to practice in a safe space.

Let them go, let them learn. Notice where they are weak and throw them a survival skill, not an answer.
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