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No Time for That

As I continued to grow as a teacher during my first three years in the profession, I stuck to the philosophy “Go Big or Go Home.” Seeing how I was a Texan, born and raised, it was only fitting. However, as a teacher, this is not always the best philosophy. During my third year of teaching kindergarten in Alabama, I learned this lesson in a big way. I learned that sometimes the big work we put into things does not always give us the reward we are looking for. In this case, it wasn't serving all my students, and it certainly was not serving me.

We all go through professional development that gets us thinking about how we can do things differently for our students. Some of the professional development that I participated in revolved around differentiating instruction in order to serve your students’ individual needs. Seemed easy enough. You make a little change here, do something slightly different for another, and now you're differentiating! This idea took me down a rabbit hole. I pulled small groups in kindergarten, as do many teachers. I had five different groups that I would meet with regularly.

Each of the groups were assigned a color: red, yellow, green, orange, and blue. As time continued with these groups, I began to contemplate whether I could differentiate their independent time at their Daily 5 stations. At the time, I had specific bins that contained word work stations that all students would choose from. This posed some challenges because Student A may have needed additional letter practice and Student B needed more focused digraph practice. I devised a plan to customize the word work stations to the color of the groups, but it didn't stop there! I then took each group and broke them into three categories: popcorn words, word families, and CVC words.

This meant that in order to keep my students engaged, I was planning out at least one new station for each bin. This totaled 15 new activities each week. Now, yes, I was able to take a lot of what we practiced in our small groups and place them into their word work bins, but I was still doing the work of creating stations. I had also placed additional pressure on myself to have themed activities that revolved around what we were learning in science and social studies. This only increased the amount of work and time that I was putting into creating resources for one small timeframe of my teaching day.

Did my students even notice the themed lessons? Was it benefiting them in any way? It took a few years to realize that the effort that I was putting in as a teacher was not impacting their learning in the most effective way. So why did I spend so much time creating these resources? How much of what we are creating and planning really benefit our students?

Before I started teaching, I had various jobs. I worked in retail, then became a waitress with a quick promotion to culinary manager. I worked as a teller in a bank and as a receptionist at a veterinary clinic. My time working in these various positions taught me a lot about input and output. The input is the work that you put into the position that you hold within the company, and the output is the reward or benefit that is reaped due to the input. Many within the business or productivity realm reference the 80/20 rule in determining where and on what you should be spending most of your time. The idea is that 20% of your efforts will give you 80% of your results.

I took this theory of productivity and began applying it to education. I wanted to find the 20% that was truly giving me the biggest impact when it came to my instructional and productivity practices. The more I worked to understand this principle the more I realized the importance of focusing on the 20% of my lesson activities that will give my students’ the greatest impact. In other words, there were certain components of my lesson that would help my students understand the concept far more than other parts. Take a simple lesson on informational text structures. During a 60‐minute time block, I might have a warm‐up, mini‐lesson, partner practice, independent practice, and stations or independent reading. Which do you think would offer the greatest impact? Depending on how long I spend on each component that day, the mini‐lesson and partner practice might give me the greatest reward. So why spend so much time on areas of our teaching that just don't help our kids move forward in their learning?

Parts of Your Literacy Block

Your literacy block will have many moving parts. Each of these parts should work in conjunction with one another to create a flow that makes sense and supports the learning of your students. As you read through the options for building your literacy block, keep in mind the timeframe and your own teaching style. You always have room to tweak items and make them work for you and your students. You will also notice that I stay away from including centers in the upper elementary classroom. Literacy centers take up too much time and give little to no flexibility to meeting the needs in the classroom. These centers discourage students from being independent by dictating exactly what students should be working on during each rotation. The goal of every upper elementary classroom is to help guide students to make choices based on the learning that fits them best. Many of the following options will help give you ideas of how to structure your block and build independence with your students.

Warm‐Up Activity

A warm‐up activity is a quick, 5‐ to 10‐minute review of a previous skill that will help warm up their brains for the lesson that day. It is meant to help focus them on the topic that you are discussing and give them an opportunity to switch their thinking. This is especially helpful if they are transitioning from a different subject or coming in right after lunch and recess.

Many teachers will use this time to do a spiral review or what some call “bell ringers.” While these may seem easy and beneficial for teachers to use, the problem is that many of these premade spiral practices do not align with the focus lesson of the day. If you have students complete a question on characters for their review but the content lesson consists of informational text structures, how does this benefit them? Instead, help create connections and meaning to your warm‐up activities. Think of specific content areas connected to your instruction. For example, if you are teaching the parts of plot, you may want to quickly review the types of conflict or questions related to the characters of the story you read. This process will allow students to start thinking about the content that you are going to introduce during your lesson.

In order to make this manageable and meaningful for you and your students, think about the delivery of your warm‐up activity. Are you going to have the questions premade and printed at their desk, or bound into a book? Will it be projected on your smartboard or projection screen, and will you have students complete it in their journals? Or will you have a foldable component to make the activity more interactive? Whatever you choose, think about this one question: What is your purpose? So often we give students extensive tasks that take away from learning. Foldables are a great example of this! While they increase engagement, make things look pretty, and allow students to effectively organize information, the cutting and gluing take away from the focus of working and discussing the content.

To give you a better idea of how this looks in my classroom, I post my question or questions on my projector using my iPad. Students come in, take a seat, and read the board. Each day the focus can look a little different. Here are some ideas to help get you started:

• Post a task card or set of cards that students complete on a whiteboard and then discuss.
• Have a short passage in which students read and then organize information in their journals. For example, completing a compare‐and‐contrast of the content.
• Post a sentence that students can diagram.
• Have a series of problems for students to practice a grammar skill: subject/predicate, compound‐complex, and so on.
• Have a journal prompt that will encourage them to brainstorm topics or write a poem.

The possibilities are endless when it comes to creating a warm‐up activity that will suit the needs of your classroom. As students work on the activity, this is a time to circle about the classroom and get an idea of how they are meeting expectations. This will give you an idea of what you will have to reteach or which kids to pull for additional practice. Review the question or questions by holding a discussion with the class. Don't go too overboard with the number of questions! You want to remember that this is not your lesson but rather a quick introduction. Keep the practice quick and the feedback short. You can even take notes of students whom you can pull for small groups to review the concept in more detail. When you are finished, students will easily transition to the next part of the class period.

Open Meeting

Think of an open meeting as a pep talk. At the start of any game, a coach will gather the players and give a quick pep talk to ensure everyone knows the strategy and are inspired and motivated to go out and do their very best. This is exactly the purpose of having a 5‐ to 10‐minute open meeting at the start of each class. If you meet...