Earlier in the Spring I spent a Saturday morning at the new football stadium in Katy, Texas listening to football coaches speak about various aspects of the sport. That’s right, in January, high school football coaches get together to talk football… for fun.
The speakers presented their philosophies of offense or defense and talked about schemes and personnel. I loved how, universally, they were: bright, confident, and eager to share their knowledge.
Just like with teachers, collaboration helps grow the profession. Coaches know the importance of sharing insight. Its something I love and appreciate about the profession.
One speaker, from a school down here by us, presented on the topic of “Tempo.”
Tempo is the offenses ability to change how fast or how slow they snap the football. In layman’s terms, its a way for an offense to give themselves an advantage over the defense and can be brutally effective when used to full effect. Often times, tempo can dictate who is going to win or lose a contest.
The same can be true in our classrooms.
Often times, I find myself racing along, pushing the students through this concept or that; when necessary circling back around to re-teach when needed or tie-in an idea that supports our current work. I like to think of workshop pedagogy as weaving a tapestry made of many different threads of many different types and colors. Sometimes we pull in this string or that one. Whichever combination of threads that most effectively addresses our students’ needs.
I’m continuously amazed at how well the students facilitate this complexity in their learning.
Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher talked about their process in ” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>this amazing podcast. They explain it far better than I ever could.
Momentum
I am a big believer in using momentum in my instruction. When the students see success in their literacy, I want to capitalize on those feelings of success by moving on to the next idea quickly. Any lull or pause in our movement forward is an opportunity to stop and lose focus. I don’t like “catch up days.” Every day, in my mind, we should move our literacy forward.
Tempo
What I don’t do often enough, is take a deep breath and slow down. I’ve found, this year, that I don’t take time to do the “fun” workshop activities. I’m talking about activities that build morale and allow the kids to laugh and, dare I say it…. play.
When they get to approach an activity as “play,” they can find success they haven’t found before:
Or they might find a fun way to learn its okay to come up a little short:
Either way, they are engaged in facilitating their own growth!!!
The assessments I’ve asked them to complete show me so many gaps in their skill sets that I can’t ever find enough time to address them all. But being hard-headed and driving forward without ever taking a moment to relax, we miss out on some of the fun that workshop can facilitate.
I have quantitative data that shows my students are reading and writing more than my previous senior classes and I have the anecdotal information they share with me about reading and writing more than any previous year in their education. This is important to consider and it is valuable data to analyze as I work towards the end of this year and start thinking about next year.
The data tells me something else. My students are burned out. They are done; not just with their writing and reading, but with their thinking. Maybe I moved them too fast through our work in the fall and early spring. Maybe the world they exist in is so far removed from the one I experienced at that age, that I have no real understanding of their stress levels.
I have to ask myself, what am I trying to accomplish and can I get that done operating the way I operate right now.
“Tempo,” I tell myself, “slow down.”
I have to do a better job keeping our tempo in mind as we finish out their high school education.
I’ll mix in more Poet Moments. I’ll take more time to let them explore their own voices through narrative work that isn’t for a grade and is for fun. I’ll change the mode from individual drafting of language to more group feedback. Generally, I’ll ratchet down the intensity of our work and lighten up on the speed with which we attack it.
What are some of the “fun” workshop activities that I can mix into my lesson plans that still hold value and have rigor?
Charles Moore is currently reading Before We Were Yours and The Glass Sword. He spends his newly freed up afternoons waiting to get his kids off the bus and tending to his beloved pool. He just completed the GRE and hopes to start graduate school in the fall at U of H. One more thing, he recently took his Student Council class to a ropes course leadership facility and it was one of the best days of his teaching career. Two of the many videos he took are included in this post.
By ditching homework students have more opportunity for self-reflection and practice without the pressure of having every piece of their work graded. Students take more risks and ask more questions, because there isn’t the fear of failure. For example, student practice work and homework becomes less about getting the right answer and more about the exploration of the process. In the day to day students are meeting in small groups, reflecting on learning using rubrics, and analyzing strong mentor models. 
ng fluency and the value of “self-prompting,” and he included a list of a dozen+ prompts that foster such fluency. For Tom, these prompts “swirl in his head” as he writes. For our students, we need to build the habit of prompting questions into their process. Whether through daily writing, regular conferring, or sheer faith in the possibility, many students this year have discovered the true generative nature of writing — a sentence begets a sentence, begets a sentence, and so on. Alas, too many have not.
to tell, proving we’re capable of what others believe we are not. Then they got students up out of their seats in parallel lines or inside-outside circles, so humans faced other humans, screen-free. First, students shared one-sentence stories based on prompts like “I felt [insert emotion] when …” or “Tell about a time when you … broke or ruined something … told a lie … received a gift you really wanted (or not) …” Lines and circles shifted and rotated to maximize the quantity of faces in contact.
elaborating on one of the prompts from the first part of the exercise. I could hear the energy in the room even before I was fully in the door. Moving through pairs of students, I could hardly hear the stories themselves, but no matter. 
What mattered was that students were hearing them from their partners, many of whom started out as strangers (different classes were blended into one workshop). And not just hearing, but listening. They began, literally, to lean in, closing distances through shared stories and the natural empathy that results. When we return to our regular classrooms this week, students will begin recording their stories on FlipGrid, listening to and commenting on one another’s without the high stakes and vulnerability (even unfamiliarity) of face-to-face, real-time human interaction. Which reminds me …
I’d like to pause briefly to offer this qualifier: On-demand, face-to-face, forced interaction with strangers is not every 10th grader’s cuppa tea. (Heck, it’s not every adult’s cuppa, either.) In fact, several students literally waited it out on the sidelines. But even these reticent, reluctant, and even recalcitrant folks couldn’t help but listen — and be drawn into — the stories of others. And maybe even, as a result, classmates who were still strangers became less “other” than they had been 90 minutes earlier. I’m even holding onto the possibility that the stories heard that day will sustain their generative power and elicit even more — not only more stories, but more listening, more “leaning in,” more empathy, even more inspiration: not from any divine spirit, but from engagement with each other and with the work of writing — and speaking — their truth.
While Sarah and I loved the story of her classroom those two days, we experienced less success the next attempt. But we’ll try again. We’ll schedule the AP Lit. students more specifically, we’ll partner students according to need, we’ll invite the AP Lit. mentors to support the sophomores throughout the writing process. We’ll even explore digital mentoring through Google Docs. Sarah’s optimistic that increased access to our living mentor texts would increase confidence in her writers, helping them to grow. And, I am too.
Three Teachers Talk 