Taking the 'Do Now' to the next level

Word cloud of responses to our text-to-text connections
with a current events article from the BBC on banning slang in school.

The "Do Now" might have been the first teaching strategy I ever was subject to in teacher-training. While many of the strategies and activities I learned early on have since been left by the wayside, the "Do Now" has remained. It's impact on classroom management cannot go understated - how you start class is how you'll spend class, so the saying goes - as it pushes students to urgently dive into an academic task that gets their mind humming and spirals in and reinforces prior lessons. 

Allowing for students to share, compare, and relate their work on the do now, however, is typically limited to turn-and-talks and share-outs. To take this a step further, I wanted two specific outcomes - to allow students to see their classmates responses to a question on the projector (without getting out of their seat and walking up to the board to read a sticky-note, which could have been effective in their own right), and to examine the answers we developed together as a whole body of students. 

To do this, we used a combination of old-school and new-school: annotate a short article using text codes with paper and pencil, and identify a text-connection to the title of the article on Polleverywhere.

Polleverywhere is a web-based assessment/inquiry program that allows students to respond to a prompt via the web, a smartphone or device, or even via text message. It runs similarly to Socrative, another such assessment program. What makes Polleverywhere really stand out, however, is how it allows the teacher to use answers in more useful ways. Instead of discussing answers individually, we’re able to aggregate answers and analyze at a deeper level. 

For our do now, as the students' answers came rolling in each one appeared on a large screen on my laptop, each with its own box. When most of the class had contributed their thoughts, we looked at the board of answers now being projected for the class to see. Students shared out what connections they made to other students' answers, and we identified themes among all the answers. 

Beyond making connections to each other's answers and identifying new answers to the prompt, we were also able to easily export a word cloud of the entire group's answers via Tagxedo. Many students connected the article (about censoring the use of slang in a school) to our study of Banned Books, specifically with Nat Hentoff's wonderful novel The Day They Came to Arrest the Book. 

Unfortunately, since we were moving into the next activity, I waited until the end of class to create the word cloud - a missed opportunity, in my view. However, there was an obvious next step that we will take on Monday (which would have been made all the more effective had it followed the activity immediately): analyzing why certain words were used by the class more often than others. What connections were classmates making? Which ones were they missing? One wonderful feature of Polleverywhere is the ability to have students simply go back to the same question and answer again given their discussions. Asking students to identify a second connection they had not noticed, or pushing them to fill in the 'missing connection', could have pushed us even further up Bloom's. And all that in just the do now.

One piece of caution here is obviously timing. Do nows are meant - in most classes, on most days - to take up no more than 5 minutes of class time. I believe this number to be a pretty smart limitation. This activity can easily push 20 if you're taking it that far. But who knows, maybe that's exactly where you want to take your lesson.

What do you think of this activity? How would you change it? How are you taking your do nows to the next level?

We can do better

There are so many charlatans in the world of education. They teach for a couple years, come up with a few clever slogans, build their websites, and hit the lecture circuit. In this fast-food society, simple solutions to complex problems are embraced far too often. We can do better. I hope that people... realize that true excellence takes sacrifice, mistakes, and enormous amounts of effort. After all, there are no shortcuts. 

Rafe Esquith  

Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire

Before beginning to discuss the ins and outs of my teaching life through this blog, I'd like to start with Rafe - and a dose of humility. I have much n common with the 'charlatans' described above (minus the clever slogans and lecture circuits), and I can't help but address the inherent complication that arises when non-experts such as myself decide to promote their beliefs and experiences to the world at large. 

As Rafe explains, "true excellence takes sacrifice, mistakes, and enormous amounts of effort", all of which can only be achieved through experience and time - two areas lacking in the 'teach for a while' world I've existed in thus far. My father is a testament to this, a teacher of 40-odd years in the classroom, a man with volumes of sacrifice, mistakes, and effort on his shelf. It is only through the true grind that we actually come to understand - a lesson, I've learned, that applies quite well to our students, of course. 

And yet it's just that reason that I find myself not-so-humbly publishing my (not-so-genius) thoughts to the web. While I feel that my years in the classroom have thus-far given me a small wealth of experience and knowledge to at least fill a short chapter of my father's volumes, I write instead in an effort to be better. Reflecting on my experiences as a young teacher will only push me to be better (as it's been shown time and again the importance of taking the time to reflect). And perhaps in the process, my sacrifices, mistakes, and efforts can benefit others reading it.

"We can do better." I couldn't agree more.