Literacy Builders

For the Love of Learning

Effective Instruction

A Joyful Close to an Unprecedented Year

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As I talk with colleagues at my school and educator friends around the country, I have noticed many of us are carrying around feelings and stories prompted by the overwhelming responsibility of teaching in the era of Covid. We all want to do more than limp across the finish line of the school year, yet the weight of our beliefs about this year are slowing us down.

This made me wonder what we can do to free ourselves of at least some–if not all–of this heaviness. I spoke with Lisa McCourt, bestselling author and Joy Trainer, who offers us important insights about what we can do to let go of some of our limiting beliefs.

Joy School with Lisa McCourt

Kim: This year, which has been a mix of online, hybrid, and in-person teaching, I’ve heard some of my teacher friends say things like, “I feel like such a failure,” and “I just don’t think I’m cut out for teaching anymore.” What do you think is beneath these sentiments? Why are they saying things like this?

Lisa: Teachers—bless their souls—want to be the absolute best they can be for their students. I mean, we all want to be good at our jobs, but my experience of teachers is that they deeply recognize how especially imperative it is for them to be at the top of their game, never letting up in patience, compassion, creativity, improvisation, and resilience—day after day, no matter what unprecedented obstacles are thrown at them. Sigh. It’s exhausting just thinking about it.

That said, feeling like a failure wasn’t the exclusive purview of teachers this past year. Employment challenges, financial stress, and fears for the health of ourselves and our loved ones brought a great many of us from all walks of life to this point of feeling like failures.

Beneath this failure feeling, we’re all just experiencing the sting of our vulnerably uprooted (albeit unwarranted) shame. Our egos have been tarnished. Most of us get a hefty degree of our self-esteem from our perception of how well we’re doing at life, and when some new, unwieldy factor thrusts us into a long phase of feeling less effective, less successful, less in control, less safe, less prepared, less competent, less financially secure, or any other “less” feeling, it creates an uncomfortable tension in us.

Part of my job this past year has been to point out the many ways that all this seeming chaos can be retooled for opportunity. When the status quo crumbles around us, it always provides an opening for building something new out of the wreckage. Even before the bizarre challenges of this past pandemic year, you may have been settling for a day-to-day existence that was below what you deserved. You may not have been stopping to consider your level of joy and what you might be able to do to raise it. It may never have occurred to you whether repetitive thought patterns could be limiting you unnecessarily, consistently diminishing your capacity for joy and the highest expression of your true self.

And now, after being sucker-punched in the emotional gut by seemingly endless and insurmountable challenges, maybe you are a bit more inclined to look into these things. The gift of contrast is that it provides an opportunity to identify what we truly want. And right about now, we’re all pretty clear that we want some peace, clarity, and, yes—joy—back in our lives. I’m seeing lots of evidence that our collective experience of contrast has poised many of us for claiming joy well beyond our pre-pandemic setpoints.

Kim: How do you think a regular diet of sentiments like “I am a failure” impacts educators?

Lisa: Failure is a story we tell ourselves, and the more often we tell any story, the more solid it feels to us. The truth is that in every moment of every day, we have the opportunity to look at our careers (and any other aspect of our lives) through a lens of failure or through a lens of wild success.

There are always going to be teachers who seem to be knocking it out of the park in comparison to you, and if you’re honest, you know that there are always going to be teachers who lack your skills, talents and influence in the classroom. Where you place yourself on that spectrum is entirely your choice (though it may not feel that way) and the truth is that the more you tell yourself you’re a failure the more you’ll attract and create evidence to shore up that belief. That’s just how energy works. We think it goes like: “I see evidence that I’m a failure, so I believe it.” When, in reality, the reverse equation is far more accurate: “I believe I’m a failure, so I’m creating evidence in my life to shore up that belief.”

This goes on below the level of our conscious awareness, of course. We create the circumstances of our lives through our behaviors and actions. Our behaviors and actions are born of our thoughts. And the vast majority of our thoughts stem from unconscious beliefs we hold about ourselves and our place in the world. The unique challenges of pandemic times have nudged those unconscious beliefs up to the surface for many of us. Fortunately, that’s exactly where we need them to be so that we can work with them. Yay, Covid!

If you want a crystal-clear report card showing you how well you’re doing at honoring your precious self with all your perfectly human imperfections and living in alignment with your soul’s wisdom, all you need to do is look around at the results you’ve been creating and how much joy you’re experiencing. Improving the report card means focusing on bringing up the grade on your “inside” belief system, then allowing that improvement to create new evidence on the outside.

Kim: What could my teaching colleagues and I do to shift these beliefs?

Lisa: I’m so glad you asked it that way because shifting your beliefs absolutely is the one and only answer, and it’s completely doable with some tools and practice. You can get started with just a basic understanding around energy and quantum physics. Put as simply as possible, the attention you give to anything affects that thing.

Like everything in your life, your thoughts and beliefs are made of energy. That means you have the power to expand or reduce the presence of anything you experience by taking charge of the energy you feed it. (That includes the perception that you’re a failure.)

You can think of your focused attention as the water you sprinkle on everything that exists in the garden of your life. The more you water it, the more it proliferates, and that goes for the things you want as well as the things you don’t. Maybe you’ve heard this concept before, and maybe you even accept it intellectually. But for most of us, making it the solid, unwavering paradigm through which we live our lives takes more than an intellectual understanding. Making that leap generally requires some study and commitment to a deliberate, consistent practice.

If you’re seeing yourself as a failure, it’s a leap well worth your time and effort. To take the first tiny step, practice becoming an observer of your thoughts, particularly the thoughts you have about yourself. Observing your thoughts allows you to detach a bit from their energy. Ask yourself: “Is this thought I’m having about myself true in any objective sense? Is it possible that the opposite of this thought is also equally true? If I were a lawyer in a courtroom presenting evidence for the opposite of this thought, what could I come up with?” Make a list of evidence you could present to argue the case that you’re not a failure. It might feel silly, but it’s an easy, basic tool for turning your attention in the right direction. Focusing on evidence that you’re a success opens the energetic valve for more successful circumstances to unfold.

Kim: What advice do you have for those who feel stressed and tired from managing online and hybrid models of teaching for over a year?

Lisa: Whatever you’re chasing—whether that’s being a superstar teacher, some situation you believe will give you some other kind of joy, or any other goal that you’ve put out there in front of you—the key is to stop chasing it. As long as you’re seeking it “out there,” it will remain its same distance from you. The solution is to change what’s inside you, so that you become the magnet that gently, effortlessly pulls your desired circumstances to you. That’s what working with your personal energy is all about.

To stay with this example of you teachers feeling like failures, my advice would be: Darlings, it’s time for you to get serious about your self-love. You are the shining, glowing gems of this thing. (Well, you guys and the healthcare workers.) Everyone knows it but you. Everyone in the world with a halfway healthy sense of compassion has been pulling for you, appreciating you, and wanting to buy you a pony. If ever there were a valid time to give yourself a break, it’s now.

You’ve been through a tremendous upset to your systems and routines. You’re weathering a wicked, unprecedented, unexpected storm. You never signed up for that. So, show your sweet self some long-overdue affection. You don’t have to be all the things to all the people. You don’t have to “get it right,” whatever that’s come to mean to you.

Be brave enough to say no when you’re overextended. Be brave enough to rest. If there are people who don’t understand, be brave enough to let them have their unrealistic expectations of you as you lovingly dismiss them.

You may have temporarily lost your spark, but it’s still a glowing ember waiting for you to fan it back to life with a steady course of well-deserved self-honoring. Say yes to things that bring you joy and no to things that don’t. Watch yourself become more and more a match to your own precious soul.

Maybe it’s true that you’re not the teacher you used to be. But maybe this whole ordeal is making you a deeper, wiser, far more evolved, and expanded one. Ordeals can do that for us when we let them.

An Important Note from Kim

If Lisa’s words resonate with you, I want to let you know that you can soak them up regularly by joining one of her Joy School Circles. These amazing, weekly, virtual meetings are filled with wisdom, insights, strategies for positive living, and warm, fuzzy feelings. I have been participating since October and am not exaggerating when I say they have changed my life!

What’s Working? Prediction Pyramids!

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No time to read? Listen instead!

Hey Everybody!

As many of you know, I went back to the classroom this year. While that journey, in and of itself, is blog-worthy, it is not what is on my mind today. Today, the thing that I am thinking about is this pattern that we humans sometimes get stuck in–when something bad happens, we just continue to think about that bad thing. So, for example, if we have a bad lesson or a bad observation or a parent gets cranky with us, we kind of begin to perseverate on that. Maybe you don’t do this–and if that’s the case, I envy you–but I know I do this and so, I’m thinking about what to do about it.

There is a personal growth principle that says, “Where your focus goes, your energy flows.” So, if we were to take the example of perseverating on the bad things that happen in our professional lives and apply this principle, it means that our energy is flowing toward our less than desirable lessons, events, and interactions. And by giving energy to these things, we inadvertently create more of these things! Ahhhhh! I don’t know about you, but I definitely do not want more bad lessons, events, and interactions. I want good ones! And I’m betting you do, too. So, how do we make that happen?

Answer: We focus on the good stuff!

So, here’s my question for you. What have you done lately that worked really well?

For me, it was this thing I called “Prediction Pyramids.”

I’ve been reading The Egypt Game with my sixth graders. In case you’re not familiar with the story, it’s about a sixth-grade girl who moves in with her grandma because her mom is off trying to be a movie star. She’s not super happy to be there and is displaying all sorts of attention-getting behaviors until she meets her neighbor who shares her interest in Ancient Egypt. Together, they invent “The Egypt Game,” which they play in an abandoned field near their apartment complex. All is going great until one day, they are frantically summoned home early. Something has happened.

When we got to this part in the story, my students, very naturally, were dying to know what was going on. But, before proceeding onward, I had them check-in with their turn-and-talk partner to brainstorm possibilities. Next, they considered which of their predictions were most likely and wrote it on a sentence strip.

Once each pair had something to contribute, we cleared the desks out the middle of the classroom and laid each of the predictions out on the floor. Then, I challenged the students to organize their predictions by putting the one that was most likely to happen on top and the one that was least likely on the bottom.

Students were jazzed about this task. They quickly rejected some predictions altogether and debated the merits of those that were left. Without me even asking them to, students grabbed their books off their desks and started flipping through pages to find evidence to support their thinking. There was jumping up and down and “Ooh, ooh, oohs,” and “Ohhhhhhhsss!” All the while, I just stepped back and said pretty much nothing.

When all was said and done, they were begging to read more because they just had to know–why were the kids in the story called home early?

So, that’s my story of what’s working to increase motivation and purpose for reading. Now it’s my turn to ask: What’s working for you?

Reclaiming Joy in Professional Learning

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Deanna KruegerToday, join me, Kim Yaris, in warmly welcoming my good friend and colleague, Deanna Krueger, a literacy specialist in Bismarck, North Dakota, to the Literacy Builders blogging family. As I have been struggling with the many demands of being back in the classroom, Deanna’s words were just what I needed to hear and I suspect that they will resonate with many of you as well! 

A few years ago, I began teaching kindergarteners to read. I was nervous. As a teacher of older grades, I really didn’t know the beginning stages of literacy development well. Out of necessity, emerging literacy became my focus. I dug in, reading books and articles, attending training sessions, watching countless recordings of expert early literacy professionals. I engaged, experimented, reflected, contemplated, and sought additional information. 

In the process, I learned the critical importance of phonological awareness activities, such as rhyming and syllabication, and the subset of phonemic awareness. In kindergarten, students build phonological awareness through activities such as rhyming, clapping syllables, and sorting words by initial sounds, which lead to phonemic awareness tasks like segmenting the sounds of consonant-vowel-consonant words. 

Because I work with students in kindergarten through fifth grade, I was delighted to recognize that these early skills provide a scaffold for more sophisticated literacy competence in older children. Work with phonological awareness and phonemic awareness provides a platform to phonics and word study instruction and practice. When young students break one-syllable words into onset and rime, they set the stage for the ability to visually scan and recognize word parts in multisyllabic words. This is crucial for older children because multisyllabic words make up a large part of grade level equivalent text. As children advance to late elementary school and middle school, they must visually pluck Greek and Latin roots and affixes in order to decode words and decipher meaning. 

Because of my singular focus on learning everything I could about early elementary literacy, I started to see the link of those early literacy milestones with the next stages of development, allowing me to more efficiently provide stepping stones for advancement. This understanding has been extremely beneficial as a literacy teacher of kindergarten through fifth grade. 

My latest refinement in understanding may seem insignificant, but it satiated my curiosity regarding whether or not children really needed to know the terms consonant and vowel. I knew that children needed to know the functions of consonants and vowels and how words were built with them, but I really wasn’t sure that they needed to know the labels of consonant and vowel. As I prepared a word study lesson, I realized that if children knew the difference and could attach the term, word study would be easier. In the lesson, I would teach that if one knew consonants and vowels, it would be easy to know whether or not to drop silent e when adding an ending. If the ending started with a vowel, such as -ed or -ing, one would drop the silent e. Easy! 

BAM! I had a deeper understanding of why young children should spend time differentiating consonants and vowels. In kindergarten and first grade, it is worth the time to sort letters into consonants and vowels in order for students to be fluent and flexible as they advance through the literacy continuum. 

So much joy in teaching has been snuffed out due to our unrealistic expectations of ourselves. We are in a constant pursuit of perfection, trying to do many things well, feeling, in the end, like we’ve done nothing well. This can suck the life out of teaching, leaving us weary and demoralized. 

However, we can indeed make it joyful again by doing one thing differently. We can choose an area of intention and focus. We can choose ONE THING in which to achieve excellence – not perfection, but quality and distinction. 

Let that settle in for a moment. Just…One…Thing.

Focusing on just one thing allows us to hone skills and gain knowledge and what’s more–there’s the extra added benefit of the spill-over effect–when your new learning and understanding branches into other parts of teaching. 

You cannot be perfect at everything. That is too much to ask of yourself. But you can do one thing. What are you curious about? Choose one thing this year to develop, polish and refine. 

One thing. You can do that. You’ve got this!

One small thing

Teaching in the Era of COVID–Navigating the Minefield of Emotions

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A few weeks back, I shared with you my news that after 20 years of working in other people’s classrooms, I decided to scale back my consulting work and return to my own classroom. August 13th was my first day back and I am deeply humbled by the number of you who have written, called, and texted asking how my first few days have gone. From the bottom of my heart, thank you, friends.

If I were to sum up the beginning of the year in a word, it’d be this: overwhelming.

I can honestly say that I had forgotten many of the details required to get a school year off the ground. One of the most challenging details? Learning my students’ names! Remembering the first and last names of 80 students is hard, but add to that my students are all wearing masks which, for me, makes the task infinitely harder!

Getting to know my students has been my priority, but as I toggle between the students sitting before me and those attending virtually via Google Meet, I struggle to figure out how to do this well. In addition to this strange back and forth, students are required to sit in rows facing the same direction which feels wrong and limiting, especially when the heart of my teaching is about growing student thinking through a sea of talk. Depending on the moment, these circumstances are confusing, challenging, frustrating, and at times, downright disheartening. As I drove to work on the first Friday of the first full week of school, my eyes welled with tears. It felt like no amount of effort would be enough to mount the challenges before me.

So, I began that day with a heavy heart but beneath my mask, my eighth graders couldn’t see my despair. I took attendance and began the lesson that I had planned and as I faced the class I realized that one of the students that I had marked absent was sitting directly in front of me. I laughed out loud and told the students how I had received an email from this girl’s mom saying that she wouldn’t be in some of her classes and because I had received that note, I just assumed it would be mine. This led to an impromptu conversation about confirmation bias which happens to be the theme of our upcoming literature study. As students talked, I coached them to “say more” and “add on” to their classmates’ ideas. Their conversation was inspired and insightful. As I listened to them talk, again, I got a little teary but in this moment, instead of despair, I felt hope. I felt love. I felt the energy and excitement of learning.

As your school year begins, you, too, may find yourself on a similar roller coaster of emotions and if you do, I want to say to you this: be kind to yourself. What you’re doing is hard. Hard things take time to figure out. Trust that you are doing better than you think you are and consider accepting that there may be only one way to experience this year: moment by moment.

Best wishes to you all! If your school year has begun, I’m curious to know how it’s been going so please, stop by the comments and share!

Be Kind to Yourself - Teaching in the Era of COVID--Navigating the Minefield of Emotions

The Energizer Bunny Problem

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If there is one thing that I have learned about teaching writing through the years, it’s that we cannot assume anything. If we’re talking to students about writing sentences, we cannot assume that they understand that the word “sentence” implies a subject and action working in harmony to formulate a complete thought. When we talk about paragraphs, we cannot assume that children know that topic sentences set the stage for what is to come and that everything that follows should be organized and focused around a central idea.

It is for this reason that when planning mini lessons, I try to look at the components of writing through a child’s eyes and try to figure out what pieces they will need to know in order to best build their understandings of how to compose text. I know that writing volume and pleasure are contingent upon success and so I try to figure out how to make the building blocks of writing tangible and concrete.

This week, I worked with a group of third graders working within a unit of study of compare-contrast essays. My charge was to help these students develop their ideas into well rounded paragraphs. When I looked at a paragraph through a child’s eyes, it occurred to me that paragraphs appear to be ideas stretching down the page so when I began my mini lesson, I talked about how a single sentence leaves readers wanting for more and paragraphs step in to fill the need by providing the details that “stretch” an idea down the page. Knowing that understanding “what” writers do would not be enough, I searched for a way to show students “how.” I settled on telling students that writers accomplish the work of stretching out ideas within paragraphs by asking themselves, “What would my reader want to know next?” and set about the work of composing a paragraph together.

Our paragraph went like this:

Lunch is one of kids’ most favorite times of the day. They love lunch because they can talk to their friends and they don’t have to do school work. With busy mornings, kids get hungry so kids love lunch because they get to eat.

From there, children paired up to write a paragraph about another school day favorite: recess.

As they talked, they wrote, and as I circulated the classroom, I heard them asking one another, “What else would my reader want to know?”

At the end of this guided practice exercise, the classroom teacher and I observed that all of the children had successfully written a detailed paragraph about recess. However, when we looked closer, we noticed something. Take a look. Do you see it too?

In case you’re having trouble reading, Angie and Jake’s paragraph goes like this:

Recess is loved by kids, too because you can run around crazy. They can spread out and play games like tag. There is a lot of things to go like slides, swings, monkeybars, and soccer. You can also play on the blacktop and play games like jump rope, hop scotch, and hula-hoop. Recess is fun for everyone! Kids think recess is cool and fun and awesome. Another thing you can do is go on the spider web. You can play sports like baseball, basketball, tennis, ping-pong, and exercising. Recess if fun!

Perhaps the verb tense and pronoun switches are glaring at you, but we were looking at this from a stretching the paragraph point-of-view and what we saw was a paragraph that kept going and going and going and going…It felt like this paragraph could have or should have ended at the first “Recess is fun for everyone” but in asking “What else would my reader want to know,” these writers marched forward, just like the Energizer Bunny.

So what does this mean? Can we call ourselves effective teachers if in the course of teaching one thing, we create the need to teach another?

When children are learning new skills and strategies, it is not uncommon for them to overgeneralize. What has happened here is not unlike when children first take note of apostrophes and periods: they sometimes appear where they belong but they often turn up where they don’t belong. In this case, children have stretched the details down the page to craft a paragraph, but they’ve stretched it a little too far. Now we get to teach them the next part of a paragraph which will be how to know when enough is enough because after all, when you stretch a rubber band too far, it will break and no longer be functional.

So was this lesson effective? Well, it all comes down to instructional decision making. If tomorrow I decide to return to the teacher’s manual that says that on the day after “how to write a paragraph,” I need to teach “how to write a good beginning,” and do it because the books says so, then yes, I have been ineffective. If, however, I decide to teach that lesson about how to know when to end a paragraph, well, then, that is a different story entirely. Effective instruction is teaching children what they need when they need it.