Educators design meaningful learning experiences to enrich, support, and engage learners by using their time and space intentionally.
Time and space are the foundation upon which we build systems, routines, and procedures that enable us to feel safe. Once we know the boundaries and stay within them, we are more willing to take risks, innovate, and create.
Here are a few ideas for how to design a meaningful morning for you and your students, no matter the circumstances or constantly changing directives. Getting the day started on the right foot sets the course for a smooth and predictable routine. Check back for an additional post on designing the rest of the day.
Part 1: Design the Morning Time
Use Time to Design Meaningful Learning Experiences
When students arrive, we greet them by name and they enter the room knowing they belong and have responsibilities. There are no surprises and they aren’t waiting for you to tell them what to do. A task list is visible to set students up for success.
Meaningful morning experiences include self-awareness and self-regulation tasks, community and citizenship tasks, and mindset and metacognition tasks.
Every moment of the day is precious and carries with it a sense of urgency. A sense of urgency reinforces the message that our time is spent on purpose. And don’t forget that laughter and play can and should be a part of every day.
Set a timer for all tasks, and display it for students to see as well. Ask the students how much time they think they will need for the tasks at hand, then negotiate based on reality. A student timekeeper will be one of the most important jobs you give out, especially at the beginning of the year.
Self Awareness and Self Regulation Tasks
Use Light-Hearted SEL Check-Ins to Design Meaningful Learning Experiences
This Feels Like: Students are welcomed with a sense of belonging and ownership in the space, knowing being a learner is more important than doing the learning. Students know where to put their belongings and when to use them. They know what to expect and they have a say in how some decisions will be made throughout the process.
This looks like: Music playing in the background when students arrive creates a sense of well-being. There is a Social Emotional Check In available to encourage students to reflect on how they feel and how they can regulate those feelings ( Moods of Batman Meme.) There is a familiar schedule which is reviewed each day, with any deviations being clearly defined. Student questions are answered and students have smiled at least once before the learning day begins.
Community and Citizenship Tasks
Use Checklists to Design Meaningful Learning Experiences
Feels like: Having a sense of responsibility means being trusted and relied upon for an important task.
Looks like: Students have a job that is an important part of the success of the community and knows how and when to perform it. Class discussion is a regular part of every day, and all students will be held accountable for the unique perspective they bring. This also includes digital citizenship and how we participate online.
Mindset and Metacognition Tasks
Feels Like: Having a sense of purpose in the time spent on tasks, feeling challenged but not anxious in the material, engaged in curiousity and exploration in possibility and relevance.
Looks Like: A timer is running for all tasks, student work is gradually increasing in complexity, the teacher is listening and conferring, students are set up for success with work that connects and reinforces previous learning. Students are given thinking strategies to use when tackling challenging materials. Students use the learning space as a resource.
Designing the Rest of the Day
Use Time to Create Meaningful Learning Experiences
When you take the time to set up the environment, the environment will pay you back with time.
All of these morning tasks take 30 minutes or less once the school year is well underway. At the beginning of the year, these tasks can take much longer. Remember to put in the initial investment with time, and the space will take over after.
Everyone becomes more efficient when they know what to expect and how to be successful.
Once your morning tasks are complete, move into the Workshop, which is where students begin to dig into the more creative and innovative part of the day. This is where the real learning experiences happen!
Read Use Space to Design Learning Experiences to discover ideas for the remainder of the school day, including more Workshop ideas, mindfulness, and accountability.
Three years ago, I used the majority of my teaching budget (very small) to buy a Breakout Edu Kit. It was, and still is, one of the best teaching tools I have ever invested in.
If you still haven’t heard of this awesome teaching tool, the concept is a little bit like the popular escape rooms popping up all over the world.
Escape room victory photo! L-R my older sister, younger sister, mom, and me
My first Escape Room experience was mind-blowing, like going to Disneyland, super crazy fun.
After paying for our tickets, our little group was invited into a small room together, where we were asked to give up our cell phones. We listened for a few minutes as the game master explained the rules of the game, and also how he would be available for support if needed. We then followed him into another small room where we were left with one hour to figure things out and get our picture taken to admit defeat or claim ourselves geniuses.
Ok, now can you just read that paragraph again with your teaching lenses on?
I am resisting the urge to italicize the entire paragraph for emphasis. Is this not everything we want in education, maybe minus the small rooms?
My escape room experience left me with no choice but to find a way to recreate as much of it as possible in my classroom. Thankfully, I discovered BreakoutEDU!
So… here are my three BIGGEST reasons for loving Breakout EDU.
Stickers to decorate my box are on the way!
Backward planning
The more boxes, the better!
1. Reason #1- Competent and Connected
The way to motivate people to work hard is to give them challenging tasks that they can figure out for themselves while making them feel competent and connected.
Struggle doesn’t feel good. That’s why it works. Sometimes we just want people to give us the answers. Actually, I wish someone would please tell me what to do everyday to be blissfully happy, content, successful, and to finally have the carefully sculpted arms of an athlete.
We do have to work for things, especially the things I mentioned above. Work can be a struggle, but it can also be fun. There is nothing more powerful than knowing you can do something. Independence is not about never asking for help, its about being a good learner.
How much could you accomplish if you felt competent and connected? Feeling competent means you are willing to recognize that you do have skills and apply them to the current situation. It may take a loving nudge or an encouraging word, but you can do it! You got this.
Feeling connected means you can also appreciate and recognize that other people have skills and perspectives that can also be applied to the current situation. Collaboration is not just a nice thing to try, it is absolutely essential, especially when solving problems.
You have the keys inside of you!
Reason #2- Curiosity and Urgency
The concept for Breakout Edu’s kit is a bit different from an escape room in that you aren’t actually trying to break out of a room. Instead, you are working to break into a box.
Why would you want to break into a locked box? What could be so great about whatever is in that box that you need to spend all this time trying to get locks open to get into it? Aha! Your wondering right now aren’t you?
Curiosity. This is what led Alice down the rabbit hole. This is what killed the cat. This is what… ok, ok. You get the point.
This quote is one of my all-time favorites. I might have a thing for Godmothers lately, which you can read about in my previous post, How to Teach Like Cinderella.
Speaking of Cinderella, another important element that is a big part of the breakout experience is the sense of urgency.
Urgency makes things important. Cinderella had to get away from the castle before the clock struck twelve, or…her horses would turn into mice, and all that.
I currently have a Breakout Edu game going at a friend’s house. It’s been over a month now and they still haven’t solved the puzzles. This is not for lack of curiosity. The last game I set up for them had them working on it relentlessly and solved within a couple of hours.
This time, there isn’t a sense of urgency. There really wasn’t before, but it was new and novelty trumps most things. I guess I need to go get my box.
Reason #3- Backward Design and Failure
Every Breakout Edu game starts with backward design. Backward design is the first element of effective instruction and a best practice for planning. It provides the structure, and when you have structure you allow for creativity.
Solving all the puzzles leads to opening all the locks, which leads to getting the box open. When you plan your first breakout, you will start with the final box. You’ve got to think through the game from end to beginning. Now, don’t let your control freak come out here. You are simply setting up a pathway, the absolute magic happens when your players collaborate, problem-solve, create strategies, and fail. They fail and they fail and they fail until they get it right.
The funny thing is failing doesn’t feel so bad when you don’t have time for it. Sulking is a complete and utter waste of time and everyone understands that pretty quickly in a timed breakout.
However, your first breakout should be set up in a way that is building the stamina of your players. Even better if you have players that have done something similar in the past. Do you not love that we are calling our students players now?
Backward Design gives us the gift of a destination, while allowing us to creatively chart our own course.
#4 When Time Runs Out
Time. The thing we all want more of, and the thing we fear the most. You know that feeling when you have a room full of energetic kids and nothing planned to fill that time? Yikes.
When the time runs out on your Breakout Edu game, it runs out. Your players may not have gotten into that box, and this is actually a good thing. Kids, and adults, are so used to getting what they want, when they want it. That feeling you get when you realize its not happening is a healthy thing.
Its called following through with what you said, and also reality. We are not always going to solve everything. What we can do is play a new game and apply what we learned from the last one. This is one of the best parts of the game. Do not let your game end without a discussion about what went well, and what wasn’t working. This is called learning.
I can’t wait to hear about your experiences using a breakout style lesson in your classroom, or with your friends at your local escape room! What if we changed the way education is done by calling ourselves players instead of students.
Teaching students to be more self-aware through Metacognition, Mindset and Mindfulness will build them into more self-directed learners. Self-directed learners are more likely to engage and find motivation because they recognize themselves as learners, rather than participants.
Motivation
Motivation, or reasons for taking action, is a little hard to come by these days. Heck, motivation was a little expensive before the pandemic. Nowadays, you better have a whole lot of intrinsic drive saved up and a heaping tablespoon of purpose to push through to the other side. And what about your students? Purpose? Intrinsic motivation?
In my classroom, motivation was a sometimes thing. As in, sometimes my students were intrinsically motivated, and sometimes they were extrinsically motivated. As a professional, I knew it was a big part of my job to move them from extrinsic to intrinsic. Teaching is an art form in this way because this is where your creativity and enthusiasm can be powerful, and contagious.
Compliance
At the end of each day, my students were given 30 minutes of “Your Time.” Everyone understood that most of the day was considered “My Time.” Really, it was communicated this way: “If you will do the things I and other teachers are asking you to do for most of the day, you will be given a fraction of time at the end of the day to do whatever you wish!” The lines between motivation and compliance get a little fuzzy here.
Is that a bargain or what? It worked so well because I could use this last bit of our day to catch the kids who needed some reteaching, or who were just not able to complete something for whatever reasons they had that day. It also saved me from having to threaten to take away their recess time, which ends up working against you in the long run.
Incentives
Aside from the daily time compromise, there were other mostly successful tactics for getting kids to be compliant. Celebrations are an important part of life, and I wholeheartedly believe we should be celebrating our achievements big or small as often as possible. Incentives are pretty effective in the workplace, at home, and yes, at school. If I’m going to be at school every day, you can bet I’m looking for ways to make it more fun, and not everything is inherently fun. The possibility of earning an ice cream and movie party after learning all my math facts is just good stuff.
Of course, we are all finding ways to recreate what we were doing in the classroom before. We are digitizing as much content as possible, and striving for as much collaboration as we can get synchronously and asynchronously. However, engagement continues to be the missing piece. Even for those students who want to please, who will do everything they can to complete the tasks they are asked to complete, and even for the families who value everything their student’s teachers are sending out, the engagement gap threatens to grow at an alarming rate.
The Engagement Gap
As educators, we talk a whole heap about achievement gaps. Have you ever heard of an engagement gap? In the spring of 2016, pre-pandemic, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development published a report with the following profound statement about the purpose of said report.
Because achievement is unlikely to improve if students are not engaged in their education, finding ways to close the engagement gap is an essential goal to ensure that high school seniors graduate well prepared for the rigors of college and careers—and become well rounded, successful, contributing members of society.
Introduction, The Engagement Gap -Spring 2016
This report followed a previous report published in 2014 titled The State of America’s Schools: The Path to Winning Again in Education, where we come to the meat of my argument and the motivation 😉 behind this blog post.
The current focus on standardized testing assumes that all students should have a similar educational experience. We leave little time for students to figure out what they love to do and where their greatest talents lie. We waste time and talent.
Connie Rath, Gallup Education
The Self-Directed Learner
Students need to figure out what they LOVE to do, and WHERE their greatest talents lie. Let’s not waste any more time. Students can become more engaged, more motivated, and more successful, but they need to start with self-awareness.
It’s like the old parable of teaching a man to fish. Shall we continue to hope our students will be motivated to do the things we are asking them, or can we give them the skills to discover who they are, to value their uniqueness, and then to recognize their contribution?
This awesome student friendly rubric from Awordonthird.com identifies ways students can evaluate themselves as they move toward becoming more self-aware and more self-directed.
The 3 Ms: Metacognition, Mindset, and Mindfulness are just three of the many tools that are available for creating more self-awareness. These Ms were the foundation upon which I built my curriculum for each and every school year, and are also what I find to be most valuable as I continue to develop my own sense of self and purpose.
Metacognition
Metacognition is the awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes. I first learned about this concept in a PEBC conference a few years ago. This awesome article from Edutopia explains it as a way to “drive your brain.” When I first teach it to my students, I tell them it is just thinking about your thinking.
Teaching students about their brains, and how to have some control over its processes, is one of the most magical things we can do as educators. When we name and notice what we are doing or thinking, we are gaining self-awareness. I love the PEBC framework for teaching metacognition using thinking strategies. Visualizing, Inferring, and Determining Importance are a reimagining of the same reading and comprehension strategies teachers have been using for years. The captivating part comes when you notice yourself or someone else doing it and name it.
The naming and noticing that comes with teaching these strategies is where we start to uncover the real value in these strategies. When students understand that their brains are already doing these things, they start to see themselves as learners. They might even start to believe that they are capable of learning anything. Well, a teacher can dream, can’t she?
Mindset
Ever since Carol Dweck gave the world her research on Growth vs. Fixed Mindsets, our brains have never been the same. Again, it reminds us that we have the ability to control our thoughts, and maybe even to some extent, the course of our lives.
If this were the case, we would all be living the high life. (Is that still a saying? I live in Colorado, so I’m thinking the meaning of this phrase has changed.) The concept of control is so closely related to the concept of self-directed. When we understand ourselves, we can better organize ourselves. I’m not saying you must be organized to be successful, but I do believe it to be a skill we should all strive to develop in order to better care for ourselves and others.
Big Life Journal has a wonderful resource for teaching your students about growth mindset. Probably one of my favorite parts of teaching growth mindset is the fact that mistakes are critical to learning.
This unit from Angela Watson has several weeks of step by step instructions for teachers and a student journal. I love the videos that were selected for this unit because they include some very well known people who have made tons of mistakes before creating success in their own lives.
Mindfulness
Every day after lunch, my students would come in from recess with loads of complaints and problems. It could take up to 20 minutes of instructional time to resolve these issues. We decided to try something new.
As they entered the classroom, the lights would be low, and soft music would be playing. They could lay on the floor or sit anywhere in the room, but they had to be away from other students. They could doodle or write in their writer’s notebook, but they absolutely could not talk for ten whole minutes.
Here is one of my favorite videos to play on the Smartboard during this time.
We created an anchor chart showing the only reasons anyone could break the silence of that time. Some examples included aliens landing outside our classroom, someone was either bleeding a lot or throwing up, or if bigfoot walked into the room.
My students grew to love and look forward to this tiny bit of silence in the day. This became such a sacred time that they began to ask for it from their other teachers. What an awesome example of a student advocating for themselves and recognizing a need. All for the price of just ten minutes a day.
What are your students looking forward to each day? How are they motivated, and how do they engage in your lessons? I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments.
It is difficult to separate the teacher in me from the learner in me. Just when I’m not looking, my teacher self recognizes my learner self, and points out something kind of amazing. The teacher in me recognizes that I am naturally engaged in a learning cycle on a regular basis. I am consistently consuming-producing, and reflecting. Gold stars all around. I’m like my favorite student. (Its OK to have a favorite if there is only one.)
The elements of instruction can include several complex details, that I will not (probably cannot) explain here. The purpose of this post is to highlight the natural cycles of learning we may go through in some undefined amount of time, and how much it resembles how teachers intentionally design learning experiences in the classroom. Very scientific, I know.
Challenge to the reader: I have included pictures of my chickens, their eggs, and breakfast, see if you can figure out why and leave me a comment!
Start With Bite Sized Bits
One of my favorite books ever! That Workshop Book by Samantha Bennett
Breakfast aside, reading is my consumption choice first thing in the morning. My husband thinks I have a book addiction problem, and I agree. Nonfiction is my drug of choice, but I’m really trying to move into fiction. Most importantly, print is preferable to digital. I need to underline, highlight and make comments in the white space.
Effective lesson design actually begins with the end in mind, but I’m not talking about the planning in this post. ( If you want to see how I plan lessons, check out this post.) After a goal or objective is identified, the teacher presents something he or she hopes the students will consume. Hopefully, the teacher knows learners best consume things in bite size chunks. Even for me, the exemplar learner, I can only consume for about 30 minutes before I start to lose interest.
Thank goodness I’ve learned its more productive to produce something after consuming something, rather than wander aimlessly until I feel the urge to consume again. Doesn’t that sound a little cave woman-like? Anyway, back to me the exemplar learner, not the cave woman.
Build, Create, Write, Draw, Make Something!
The Worktime is the time where the learners make something. The process of making is where the magic is.
Anyone who has been in a second grade social studies lesson knows a good strong economy needs producers and consumers. Even if you don’t remember second grade, you at least recognize those vocabulary words from 4th grade science, right?
Now that I’ve got you thinking about decomposing carcasses and that ultra cool ecosystem you built, we’ll talk about products. While the goal may seem to be consumption in learning, what we really want, eventually, is a product. Now, I didn’t say it has to be a useful product. It is in the process of making something that we find the learning happening.
As I mentioned earlier, there is no shortage of things to learn. We could try to consume our way to knowing as much as possible, but if we never do anything with it, well, we could end up the opposite of full. Isn’t it ironic? A little too ironic? Like rain, on your wedding day? OK, I’ll stop.
After reading, watching, or listening to a bit of content, I usually try to produce something new, or modify something I’ve already started. In order to make something meaningful, its got to come from me. Because I am a good learner, whatever I produce will most likely be heavily influenced by whatever I just consumed. It may be a journal entry, a blog post, or a list. This is how I think, process, and apply.
This is the work of learning, and it is where teachers hope their students are spending the most time. It is the work time, and the biggest chunk of the lesson plan pie. Here is a full post on how I use a workshop wheel to plan lessons.
1.the throwing back by a body or surface of light, heat, or sound without absorbing it.
2.serious thought or consideration.
While I could spend some time on the first definition, which would be lots of fun, that’s not really why we’re still here. Thank you for still reading.
#2 Serious thought or consideration. I’m questioning the serious part, but yes, this is the gold. I’ve spent enough time in classrooms to know that it is in the reflection, the debrief, or the closing, where we find out what the lesson was made of.
I spent the better part of an entire year of instruction focusing on how to nurture an environment where student feedback was not only safe, but also expected. Goosebumps happen in a good closing discussion about the day’s learning.
There is always, and must be, time for reflection in any learning environment. How else do you know the time spent was valuable? I guess you could just tell yourself that, or you might even look at student work and make assumptions that it was. But how do you know? In my classroom, discussions were my first choice, but there are lots of other, quicker ways to do it.
While I sometimes do have discussions with myself, I have found lots of ways to be reflective in my individual learning cycles. One of the best ways to get myself seriously thinking and considering is to ask myself questions, and then I listen. Yes, I listen to myself. Its ok, I trust my opinion and think critically before I take any of my own advice.
Here is why this works for me, even if I never consult another human being anywhere in this cycle: I know myself. I know I will continue to learn, consume, ask more questions, produce, succeed, fail, reflect. It’s just who I am, and will always be. I trust the learning process.
Reflection, Feedback, and Coaching
And the cycle is complete, or I should say begins again!
Reflection is one form of feedback, in that it can inform your practice as you thoughtfully consider the value of whatever you have consumed and produced. However, if the feedback is the result of some thoughtful reflections of others, look out.
In my experience with coaching, I was always looking for advice. I practically begged people to tell me what to do to be better. However, the best coaches withheld their great ideas the majority of the time, and instead asked a lot of questions. They highlighted things that went well in the lesson or the learning and asked me why I thought that was.
To really explain this concept, I highly recommend reading The Feedback Fallacy from the Harvard Business Review. Here are two of my favorite sentences from the article:
Learning is less a function of adding something that isn’t there than it is of recognizing, reinforcing, and refining what already is.
We learn most when someone else pays attention to what’s working within us and asks us to cultivate it intelligently.
As a learner, teacher, coach, and a person with feelings, these two quotes make my heart want to jump right out of my chest. I want to make giant billboards and bumper stickers of this.
So, I guess the teacher in me is doing a pretty good job recognizing, reinforcing, and refining the learner in me. I hope I will continue highlighting the things I am doing well as a learner, because I love learning! If you are still here, you must be too! Gold stars all around.
Since we don’t have any way of knowing what the future will look like, let’s pretend. What is the best possible version of the future we can imagine for our kids? What skills do our kids need in order to be successful not only now, but in the best future we can envision for them?
More Than the 4 Cs
As a teacher, we were constantly talking about 21st Century Skills, and preparing kids for the real world. Our lessons were focused on state standards, and what kids need to be able to know and do in order to be successful.
Education places a heavy emphasis on the four C’s, the skills needed for learning: Critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, and communication. BUT did you know there are EIGHT other 21st Century Skills?
These eight other skills fall under two different categories: Literacy Skills and Life Skills.
While most of my blog topics surround literacy skills, most of my thinking lately has been around life skills.
Life Skills MUST Be Taught
Imagining the BEST possible future for our kids, and ourselves, makes me think about what I know as an adult to be most helpful. The Applied Educational System’s site does a wonderful job of breaking down the following list of Life Skills in greater detail, but here is a summary:
Flexibility: Deviating from plans as needed
Leadership: Motivating a team to accomplish a goal
Initiative: Starting projects, strategies, and plans on one’s own
Productivity: Maintaining efficiency in an age of distractions
Social skills: Meeting and networking with others for mutual benefit
You probably already know how critical these skills are, being an adult yourself. How did you learn to have initiative or be productive? What about those social skills? While I know many teachers are incorporating these skills into their lesson planning, I wonder if they are explicitly naming them for students.
Not only naming them as life and learning skills, but also describing why they are important, and how they use them in their own lives.
Envisioning the BEST Future
The cool thing about envisioning is that you get to use your imagination. When I imagine my future, I wish for a feelings of whole health, relationships that are fulfilling, a sense of participation in, and contribution to, society, and opportunities to explore and be curious. And lots of other things.
Notice those are pretty realistic. I must be all grown up.
If I were to make a list of skills I would need in order to ensure that my vision become a reality, what would they be?
In order to have whole health, I need to establish and maintain good self care habits.
In order to have fulfilling relationships, I need to have compassion, self awareness, and empathy. I also need to be vulnerable, maintain healthy boundaries, and practice being in relationships.
In order to develop a sense of participation in, and contribution to, society, I need to become self aware, reflect on my ideas and abilities, and seek out opportunities where I can make a difference.
In order to explore and be curious, I need to develop a sense of adventure. I need to pay attention to what makes me laugh, what brings me joy, and how to use my imagination.
What can you imagine?
We have a unique opportunity to use our imaginations pretty much whenever we want. This is why I love the words What if…
What if I could do something more to better prepare my own kids for their future? Maybe I don’t need to rely on the public school system so much, and complain that there is so much to be fixed.
What if I read aloud to my teenager, even if she hates it at first? Could it bring us closer together, and give us more to talk about? Could it give her the gift of learning to love to read?
What if online school really is better than public school for my child? Will he learn how to be more self reliant, trust himself to take initiative, and begin to build his own sense of self?
What if this is an opportunity to develop self care habits more deliberately into our own lives, thus communicating this absolute critical message to our families and students?
What can you imagine? What is the BEST possible future for our kids, and how can we start making it a reality today?
