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12 The Hook It’s a short introductory moment that captures what's interesting and engaging about the material and puts it out front.
Different types of Hooks:
1. Story - tell a quick and engaging story that leads directly to the material. 2. Analogy - offer an interesting and useful analogy that connects to students' lives. 3. Prop - jazz up one of the other styles of prop with a good prop: a jacket like the one the main character might have worn; a globe and flashlight to demonstrate the earth's rotation. 4. Media - use a picture or a piece of music or video (very short) 5. Status - describe something great: greatest of his generation; greatest to write about...; great work by a student. 6. Challenge - give students a difficult task, and let them try to accomplish it
Characteristics of a good hook
1. It's short - engages students in a few minutes - it's not the lesson 2. It yields - it quickly leads to the lesson 3. It's energetic and optimistic
"You don't need a hook for every lesson."
TEACH LIKE A CHAMPION
Structuring and Delivering Your Lessons - Chapter 3
"I Do" Techniques
Teach Like a Champion Notes
13 Name the Steps
Help students learn complex skills by breaking them down into manageable steps and giving each step a name so that it can be easily recalled.
Four key components
1. Identify the steps * Keep the steps to a limited number. People have a hard time remembering more than seven items in sequence. * Identifying the steps gives the students a map to refer to if they get stuck, especially if they have written the steps down in their notes. * Post the steps on the wall as a reminder after introducing them. 2. Make them "sticky" * Make the steps memorable and therefore stick in your students' minds. Create a story or a mnemonic device. * Use lots of catchy metaphors or write a song. 3. Build the steps * Equally as important is the understanding that designing the steps can be a key part of teaching too. * Give your students a challenge problem that becomes the basis of the next lesson where you derive the steps for handling such problems. 4. Use two stairways * Once students know the steps, classrooms can have two parallel conversations going at once: how to get an answer to the current problem and how to answer any problem like this.
"Sometimes you can solve a problem and ask students to explain what you're doing and why. Sometimes you'll make mistakes and ask them where you went wrong or what a better way to solve would have been. In short, teaching the steps makes the process legible and easily followed in a consistent way."
(^14) Board = Paper
One of the most complex and critical aspects of being a student: learning to take notes and retain a record of one's knowledge.
- Expecting students to make an exact replica in their notes of what you write on the board is the right starting point. Start by making your overhead a mirror image of the graphic organizer you give to students to take notes on.
- As students grow they can begin learning to make intentional decisions about how to take notes and what to include.
- It may take years before students are ready to own full responsibility for such a critical piece of the process.
"As you introduce the skill of note taking, guide students through the process, telling them what to title their papers, when to skip a line, how to make subheadings and headings."
Teach Like a Champion Notes
(^16) Break It Down
As soon as they recognize an error or a guess, champion teachers conceptualize the original material as a series of smaller, simpler pieces. They then go back and ask a question or present information that bridges the part of the material that they think was most likely to have caused the error.
1. Provide an example If you got a blank stare when you asked for the definition of a prime number, you might say, "7 is one," or "7 is one, and so is 11", or "7 is one but 8 is not". 2. Provide context Can be used with a vocabulary word you know the student learned but is having trouble remembering. 3. Provide a rule "A verb is an action or a state of being. Is indiscriminate describing an action?" 4. Provide the missing (or first) step If a student is unable to explain what was wrong with writing the number 15/6, cue them with, "What do you always do when the numerator is larger than the denominator?" 5. Rollback Repeat a student's answer back to her. Hearing your own error in another's words is often revealing. 6. Eliminate false choices "If the word owner were a verb, it would be an action. Is owner an action? Can you or I owner? Well, what about an adjective? Is it telling me what kind or how many of some noun?"
"It can be challenging to use because it is primarily a reactive strategy. You use it in response to a student error at the moment the incorrect answer happens."
"While one goal is to break things down to the least degree possible, another is to do it quickly, thus managing time and pace."
"We Do" Techniques
Teach Like a Champion Notes
17 Ratio A successful lesson is rarely marked by a teacher's getting a good intellectual workout at the front of the room. Push more and more of the cognitive work out to students as soon as they are ready, with the understanding that the cognitive work must be on-task, focused, and productive.
10 EFFECTIVE METHODS FOR PRODUCTIVELY UPPING THE
RATIO
1. Unbundle Break questions into smaller parts to share the work out to more students and force them to react to one another. 2. Half-statement Rather than speaking in complete ideas, express half of an idea and ask a student to finish it. 3. What's next? The fastest way to double the number of questions students get to answer is to ask about process as often as product, that is, addressing both how to solve a step and what step comes next. 4. Feign ignorance Pretend you don't know the answer. Make the student play teacher. 5. Repeated examples Ask students for another example, especially one that's different from the first. 6. Rephrase or add on Ask a student to rephrase and improve an answer she just gave or by asking another student to revise or improve a peer's answer. 7. Whys and hows Asking why or how instantly pushes more, and more rigorous, work onto students by forcing them to explain the thinking that solved (or failed to solve) the problem. 8. Supporting evidence This process of stating an argument and supporting it involves extensive cognitive wrestling that can push your ratio higher. 9. Batch process It's powerful for the teacher to strategically step out of the way at times and not comment on and validate every student comment and instead allow a short series of student comments to be made directly following, and ideally in response to, one another. More appropriate for high school students. 10. Discussion objectives Teachers who do this have a clear objective in mind for any open-ended discussion and use hints to steer their students back on task and, especially, head off distractions and unproductive topics.
The Participation Ratio describes how much of the participating - the answering, the talking, the writing - students do.
The Thinking Ratio gets more at the depth of the increased amounts of participating students do (the deep thinking).
You want a big Thinking Ratio
Teach Like a Champion Notes
OBSERVATION
- Observation is the second way to determine whether students understand a concept
- Observation, which involves circulating when students are doing independent seat work to observe mastery levels, requires a larger total investment of time but allows you to see more data points more rapidly during that time.
- One way to increase your capacity to gather useful data through observation is to standardize the format of what you're looking at, such as, looking for information in the same place on each student's paper.
- Provide clear spaces for work to be done or answers to be written. You might ask students to write a one-sentence summary of each page in a novel at the top of that page.
- Gather observable data on "slates" (whiteboards, scrap paper. The trick isn't so much in the tool you use to gather but in the way you gather and RESPOND to the information.
RESPONDING TO DATA
- The sooner you fix the error, the simpler the misunderstanding is likely to be
- It's far better to act quickly and solve learning problems while they are simple and can be addressed with an additional problem, a short activity, or a reexplanation that takes 3 minutes rather than 35 minutes. ACTIONS TO TAKE IN RESPONSE TO DATA TELLING YOU THAT STUDENT MASTERY IS INCOMPLETE
- Reteach using a different approach
- Reteach by identifying and reteaching the problem step
- Reteach by identifying and explaining difficult terms
- Reteach at a slower pace
- Reteach using a different order
- Reteach identifying students of concern
- Reteach using more repetitions
Teach Like a Champion Notes
(^19) At Bats Repetition (Practice, practice, practice) during independent practice
- It's repetition
- If it's true that people master a new skill on the tenth or twentieth or one thousandth time they do it, never the first time, it's important to factor that into your lessons. KEY POINTS
- Go until they can do it on their own.
- Use multiple variations and formats.
- Grab opportunities for enrichment and differentiation.
"Teach them the basics of how to hit, and then get them as many at bats as you can. Practice after practice, swing after swing after swing: maximize the number of at bats."
(^20) Exit Ticket A single question or maybe a short sequence of problems to solve at the close of class.
- They're quick: one to three questions.
- They're designed to yield data.
- They make great Do Nows. Start the next day's lesson by analyzing and re-teaching the Exit Tickets when students struggle.
"Collect this from students before they leave and cull the data."
21 Take a Stand
Involves pushing students to actively engage in the ideas around them by making judgments about the answers their peers provide.
- One student answers, but every student has to decide is the answer is right, and to do that, they have to solve.
- Can be whole class ( "Stand up if you agree with Alexis" ) or directed to an individual ( "She said 9 times 9 is 81. That's not right, is it, Valeria?" ).
- Can be evaluative ( "How many people think Dashawn is right?" ) or analytical ( "How could she check her work to see if she's right, Alaina?" ).
- Can be verbal or signaled through a gesture ( "Show me on your hands which answer choice you think is correct." ).
- The key to maximum effect is not so much asking whether students agree but following up on their answers to inform your teaching and make students accountable for mentally engaged judgments rather than empty and obligatory participation.
- Ask student to defend or explain their positions.
"The key is to make sure that students are truly doing cognitive work when they do so, and to do that, you have to check up on their answers."
"Remember to have students take a stand both when the original answer was right and when it was wrong."
"You Do" Techniques
Teach Like a Champion Notes
