The following is a blog post written by lead teacher, Heather Studdard! Great job Heather!

Educators often get stuck in their own ways and lost in the world that is their classroom. Getting stuck in a rut can compromise your teaching which sets up a snowball effect of classroom trouble. The best way to get our of your comfort zone is to go and observe in other teachers classrooms. This is important for both new teachers as well as seasoned teachers. We are a community of learning and the only way to instill a love of learning in our students is to show them that we learn too.

I had the opportunity to spend the day exploring other classrooms within our school, examining classroom culture, expectations, teaching strategies, and classroom management. While roaming the school I focused on ways that I felt validated and take aways (good ideas that I could implement in my classroom). This is always an eye opening experience to look at yourself and see where your faults and flaws are as well as ways you can improve.

The list of take aways was much longer than the list of validations, however, it is important to note what you feel you do well in this can guide other teachers to your classroom to observe the areas in which you feel comfortable sharing. My validations were related to classroom management and my students awareness of rules, procedures, and expectations. While I did feel validated in these things I also saw several things in my takeaways that would help improve even the things that I felt validated in. My final validation was the use of interactive notebooks and the use of anchor charts. Anchor charts are a teaching strategy that I love to incorporate into my classroom, in fact if I could teach a professional development on them I probably would 🙂

Now the takeaways.

• Hooking students into reading a book by showing them the first 10 minutes of the movie based on the book (These were AP students and they were dead silent during this clip and ready to get the book.)
• Students can explain what they are working on and expectations of the assignment (This is something that I need to work on, giving more explicit instructions.)
• The control of the teachers within some of the classrooms (These students didn’t move or do anything without being told to, these are the same students I teach and I was amazed at the behavior for the other teacher!)
• Wait time and waiting on ALL students to put their hands up to answer before calling on someone, finally questioning in multiple ways (I like the idea of waiting on ALL students because you know they have looked for and considered the answers.)
• Anchor Charts (Real world application of topics, ideas, subjects and expectations for when someone is speaking.)
• Corroboration of multiple sources to help in essay writing and researching (This is something we are just starting to work on in history! I am excited about giving the students this tool to make them better historians.)
• Don’t be afraid to make a mess (I am a little bit of an organization queen so this is sometimes difficult for me to do, but students learn more by digging in and getting messy with ideas and topics.)
• Finally, MY FAVORITE TAKEAWAY: always answer yes or no questions with only a yes or no and force the students to figure out the why of their question. So many times a student’s second question is why but they learn more when they research the why on their own!

Hopefully, in the coming weeks I can start incorporating some of the strategies that I observed through our school. Every teacher should be given the opportunity observe within their own school and have an open mind when looking at others while be willing to examine themselves. If we don’t continue to learn we won’t grow as educators and stagnate educators create stagnate students.