mikerashidblog

Three for the Week

Saturdays are my time to reflect on what I read, heard, and discussed throughout the week. It is my “exit ticket” for the last seven days. So here are three ideas that made me think this week. (They are not in any particular order.)

1 – The overall health of teachers is so important. We work in a very emotionally, physically, and mentally demanding field. It is critical that we take care of our bodies and minds in order to better take care of our students. So I was doing some digging for the best exercises and workouts. I love running but know that the impact is not great for your body. I found an interesting article which outlines exercises to do at every age group. For example, they recommend boot camp in your 20’s, high-intensity interval training in your 30’s, and running in your 40’s. Guess I don’t have to stop running quite yet!

2 – An article from The University of Virginia really caught my attention. It is a Q&A with NCTM President and UVA professor Dr. Samuel Braley Gray. He outlines what effective math teaching looks like in our schools, touches on some inequities in math education, and even talks about why children should use their fingers in math. (That last point alone got me wondering why we would encourage students to use printed ten frames, but discourage them from using their fingers – which are ten frames.) What really struck me was what Dr. Gray said about the effective ways to teach math. “These ideas are a shift from focusing on memorization. Mathematics is more than getting an answer quickly. Effective mathematics teaching engages students in explaining why their answers make sense and why the strategy they used is appropriate.” Well said, Dr. Gray!

3 – Last week I chose something lighthearted as my third point for the week. I’ll keep that trend going this week. Two ridiculously cute boys show up to a Canadian airport to pick up their grandmother. The boys decide to play a trick on grandma and dress up in full T-Rex costumes. Grandma, as grandmas always seem to do, was one step ahead of the boys. She appeared wearing… a full T-Rex costume of her own. The video is well worth the 2:29 of your time and will definitely put a smile on your face.

What Should We Eat?

What should we eat? That’s a question I never really seem to be able to answer. Usually I fall into paralysis by analysis and just eat a pint of Ben and Jerry’s. I’m pretty much a novice when it comes to understanding diet and nutrition. Honestly, in my early 20’s I would drink a Coca-Cola for breakfast on the way into work. Not in addition to anything of substance. A can of Coke was my entire breakfast. So clearly I had a lot to learn.

My father used to always tell me, “Wait until you turn 30. That wonderful metabolism will slow down in a hurry.” Thankfully, the turn wasn’t as dramatic as he implied, but I did start to pay more attention to how I was treating my body.

I started reading about nutrition and wellness a little more. The more I read, the more confused I became. It seemed like everything I read contradicted the last article. Eat this… no, that’s bad for you, eat this… no wait, that might be bad for you if you’re over thirty… you should eat meat with every meal… no, don’t eat meat at all… wait, you can eat meat, but only if it grass fed and free of antibiotics… on second thought, you can only eat chicken that listened to classical music and did pilates twice a week prior to the butcher… Ugh! It was utterly confusing.

Then somebody told me about Food Rules by Michael Pollan. It is an extremely quick read that tries to unpack some of the confusion around eating and nutrition. The first sentence of the introduction says, “Eating in our time has gotten complicated – needlessly so, in my opinion.” He was reading my mind!

Food Rules is broken into three parts: Part I- What should I eat? Part II – What kind of food should I eat? Part III – How should I eat it? In each section, Pollan gives very practical advice that is easy to understand. Each tip is accompanied by a brief, often one paragraph, explanation of the suggestion. Here are my ten favorites:

Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize.
Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human being would keep in their pantry. (Xanthan gum, anyone?)
Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce. (Boys and girls, can you say “Xanthan gum?”)
Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.
Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.
Stop eating before you’re full.
Eat when you’re hungry, not when you are bored.
Buy smaller plates and glasses.
Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does. (No hotdogs off the rollers at the gas station. That would have been shocking to my twenty-year-old self.)
Break the rules once in a while.

There are so many wonderful thoughts in this book, and Pollan presents them all in a way that is easy to understand and hard to forget. For a person like me, it was the perfect place to start thinking about what I was putting in my body.

Pollan shares seven words he believes are the answer to that incredibly complex questions of what to eat: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

I try to think about these seven words as much as possible. It’s hard, especially when I walk into the faculty room to a table overflowing with donuts and other baked goods. There’s got to be some Xanthan gum in something on that table. Sometimes I follow the rules; sometimes I break them. At least I’m thinking about food rules at all. That’s got to count for something, right?

Vocabulary

Today I was reading a text with my students and wanted to preview some of the vocabulary. I decided to use a graphic organizer with a “Prediction” and a “It Means…” column. Students would make predictions about the meaning of each word, and then we would talk about the actual meaning.

Before students started, we had a conversation about the importance of trying to make your best guess based on what is known about the word, or its parts, but that it was okay for your prediction to be incorrect. We also talked about strategies that would help predict what the word might mean – word parts, hearing the word used before, etc.

After the three minutes I gave students to make predictions, we whipped around the room and listened to a few predictions for each word. We talked about how students got the prediction and then shared the meaning of the word. Students added the meaning to their “It Means…” column. What was really valuable was the conversation that happened after students made the prediction.

One of the words was disassemble. A student said his prediction was, “take apart.” I asked him if he’d ever seen this word before and he said no. He said, “I knew if you assemble something you put it together – like ‘some assembly required’ on commercials. So, I guessed the dis- meant to do the opposite, so I guessed that dis… assemble meant the opposite, take apart.” He even added the pause between the dis- and assemble. I couldn’t have asked for a better response, and part of me wanted to let him finish teaching the lesson.

This was a very simple way to preview the vocabulary. Students were engaged because they wanted to see if their predictions were right, and the rich conversation made the time spent extremely valuable.

As I said, these words were preselected, but choosing which words to teach is critical. We can’t teach all the word which might be unknown to students. So, how do we know which words to teach? Isabel Beck, Margaret McKeown, and Linda Kucan broke vocabulary words into a 3-tier system:

Tier One – Words used everyday which require little instruction (building, car, parking lot)
Tier Two – Words are high frequency academic language used across domains (formulate, analyze, specify)
Tier Three – Words specific to a field of study (denominator, insulator, legislature)

The biggest impact comes from teaching the Tier Two words because they are used across content areas, but we also need to teach the Tier Three words within units of study. Teaching prefixes and suffixes also has an enormous impact because knowing one prefix or suffix can unlock so many words. For example, our discussion of dis- meaning “not” or “opposite of” lead to a conversation about other words with the same prefix – disapprove, dissatisfied, etc.

After you’ve chosen the best words to teach, you need to determine the best way to teach them. One strategy in Robert Marzano’s Vocabulary for the Common Core is Six-Step Process for Vocabulary Instruction:

Provide a description, explanation, or example of the new term.
Ask students to restate the description, explanation, or example in their own words.
Ask students to construct a picture, symbol, or graphic representing the term or phrase.
Engage students in activities that help them add to their knowledge of the terms in their vocabulary notebooks.
Periodically ask students to discuss the terms with one another.
Involve students in games that allow them to play with terms.

There are tons of resources out there with ideas for vocabulary activities. What are some of the strategies that you use in your classroom?

How to Increase Positivity

“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.”
Abraham Lincoln

This quote always makes me think of how looking at something from a different perspective can help us see the positives in almost anything. (There’s some debate as to whether Honest Abe really said it, but it’s still a good quote.) Recently I was talking to a colleague about fostering positivity in our work, personal lives, and relationships. She shared The No Complaining Rule by John Gordon with me and said it had some great ideas about being more positive. She was right.

There are many wonderful ideas in this book, but one that stuck out to me was the No Complaining Card. The card has three strategies to create more positivity in your life.

The But –> ____ Positive Technique
Focus on “Get To” instead of “Have To”
Turn Complaints into Solutions

I’ve already found myself using some of these strategies in my personal and professional life. Over Christmas Break I had an eight-hour trip in the car. I was able to use the But–> ____ Positive Technique to make the trip more positive. Instead of thinking about the negatives of sitting in the car, I thought, “I don’t like sitting in the car for eight hours but I’m grateful I have all this time to listen to an audio book.”

It has also helped with areas like exercise. Focusing on “Get To” instead of “Have To” is especially helpful for me. There have been times where I said, “I have to go for a run.” Now, I’ve started saying, “I get to go for a run.” This one is especially powerful for me because I wasn’t able to run for three years because of a hip injury. I didn’t get to run for that entire time, so it is powerful and motivating to think that I get to run now.

Turn Complaints into Solutions doesn’t imply that complaining is eliminated entirely. The idea is to eliminate mindless complaining, which doesn’t serve a purpose. Instead, focus on justified complaining which move towards finding solutions to problems. A mindless complaint might be nobody around here understands me. A justified complaint might be I need to find more ways to effectively communicate with my coworkers.

This is not a book written specifically for educators, but the principles certainly apply to educators and the classroom. I reflected on each strategy and how it could be used in education.

The But –> ____ Positive Technique – I can’t believe I’m getting another student on my roster, but this is an opportunity to impact another student.
Focus on “Get To” instead of “Have To” – It is easy to say, “I have to cover cafeteria/recess duty.” Instead say, “I get to spend time with students outside of the classroom and continue to build strong relationships in a new setting.”
Turn Complaints into Solutions – A mindless complaint might be, “These students just don’t get this!” A justified complaint would look more like, “What steps do I need to take to help my students understand this material?”

This isn’t to say these three strategies will make everything magically better, but hopefully they’ll help us see more roses in the thorn bush.

Start With the Answer

My students have been working hard this year to improve as problem solvers. We consistently take time to talk about what makes effective problems solvers and practice the skill of problem solving. Last week I talked about the Three Reads strategy we use in our classroom.

Another strategy I like is giving students the answer and having them create the problem. Recently I gave my students three prompts:

Write a division problem where the quotient would be 6r3.
Write a division problem where the answer would be 5 1/3.
Write a division problem where the quotient would be 7r3 but a mathematician would add one to the quotient to report the answer as 8.

Students had the option to brainstorm with a partner before writing. Each student had to create their own problem. My goal was to get students to think about the structure of math problems – narrative and expository text combined.

One of the first things I noticed was students struggled to create the complex narrative structure that exists in most fourth grade word problems. This made me wonder if one of the obstacles for young mathematicians is they struggle with the narrative component of a word problem.

Most of the problems students initially wrote for #2 were similar to this: There are are 16 cookies for 3 kids. How many cookies does each person get? These problems lacked the character names and any extraneous information that often appears in rigorous problems. They also lacked the need for multi-step problem solving.

The conversations with students after they wrote their problems was wonderful. I had some of the students go into their math books and look at similar division word problems. This helped them better understand the structure. Other students practiced writing some problems with me. In both cases, we talked about the “story” at the beginning of problems with characters and a scenario which creates the necessity to solve a math equation. One student actually said, “Ahhh!” The lightbulb went off.

This exercise made me realize the value of students looking at math problems to analyze the structure of how a problem is put together instead of trying to solve it. All of the problems we revisited had already been completed, so the student could focus on how the problem was written.

It’s another tool in the problem solving toolbox which I hope will continue to grow for me and my students.

Be Somebody’s Mrs. Davis

A few years ago I was sitting at my daughter’s swim lesson and struck up a conversation with a very nice lady sitting next to me. She told me she was a retired teacher, and we shared stories about life in the classroom. I told her I switched professions because I wanted to make a difference.

What made me think of this encounter was an article I read recently about the importance of teacher-student relationships. I could tell in that brief interaction that this woman was a phenomenal teacher and probably had life-changing relationships with students. I wasn’t really sure how I knew that, but I did. We’ll get back to her in a minute.

Recently a colleague asked if I could touch base with one of her students. She told me he could use another positive relationship at school. So, eventually this student started coming over to my room at the end of the day to play chess with me. He didn’t know how to play, so we used the beginner’s board pictured at the top of the post.

The first few times we played, we barely talked. I wasn’t sure if it was because he didn’t want to talk or was just using all his energy to learn the game. He kept coming over to my room at the end of the day, so I figured he was enjoying the time. After a couple weeks he started to talk more during our matches. He would wave to me in the hallway and even stop by in the morning to say hello. Then one day, I was in the cafeteria, and he came all the way across the room to give a fist bump. He had a huge smile on his face and said, “Hi, Mr. Rashid.” Maybe our simple 5 minutes of chess at the end of the day meant more to him than I realized.

I don’t just value student-teacher relationships because I’ve read the research showing their importance. I value student-teacher relationships because I know first hand how important those relationships are to a struggling student.

I moved around a lot as a kid – four elementary schools between kindergarten and fifth grade. It was tough, and the last move was halfway through fifth grade. We moved from a community that I absolutely loved and was devastated to leave. The last half of fifth grade in my new school felt like wearing a pair of shoes that didn’t fit.

Over the summer I was pretty down about returning to school and was dreading the first day of sixth grade. Then, I walked into Mrs. Davis’s sixth grade class at Paxtang Elementary School. To say Mrs. Davis had a greater impact on my life than any teacher I’ve ever had would be a colossal understatement. I can think of only a handful of people who have had a greater impact on my life, like my parents, wife, and daughter. In fact, Mrs. Davis is one of only four people who called me Michael. I prefer Mike, but I didn’t mind. It became common, even comfortable, to hear her call me that for the better part of a year.

Mrs. Davis made me feel at home in my new school, in my new community. She was always so caring and compassionate. She knew school wasn’t a strength for me and always made me feel supported and successful around other students.

There is one day in her class I will always remember. I was extremely nervous about an assignment we were completing. I’m not sure how she sensed that anxiety, but she came over and asked me if I was okay. I reluctantly told her I was nervous and not sure I was capable of completing it. I can still feel the sensation in my eyes as they started to water. Mrs. Davis gave me a hug and said, “Michael, I know that you can do this. I will never ask you to do anything I know you can’t do.” I’m sure to her it was just one of the many things she did over her career to make a student feel comfortable, but to me it was the most important thing any teacher ever said to me. From that moment, and for the first time in school, I believed in myself academically. To this day, more than thirty years later, when anything is academically challenging, I hear “Michael, I know you can do this.”

That’s what I hope to be for students – somebody who believes in them. Somebody who inspires them. Somebody who makes them believe anything is possible, just like Mrs. Davis did for me.

Which brings us back to the pool and my daughter’s swim lesson. I finally asked the lady sitting next to me where she taught. She mentioned some schools where she was a teacher and administrator. Then she smiled at me and said, “And I taught sixth grade at Paxtang Elementary School.” My mouth practically dropped to the wet, tiled floor. “It’s great to see you again, Michael.”

I wish I had told Mrs. Davis right then how much she did for me and meant to me. Then again, I have a feeling she already knows.

What Do You Need at This Moment?

Last week I posted my One Word for 2020 – intentional. It seemed the perfect tool to help guide and focus me this year. Just a few days later I read a blog post by Mandy Froehlich titled “Why I’m Not Choosing A #OneWord.”

In years past she chose one word for the year because that was what she needed at that time. Ms. Froehlich didn’t chose a word this year because she’s “doing different things that work for [her] at this time and that is totally okay.”

She shares an alternative idea to the #OneWord which is a 3-2-1-2-3 pattern:

3 Places I want to go
2 Ways I can help others
1 Thing I want to get better at
2 Things I am looking forward to
3 New things I want to try

I love the idea of a 3-2-1-2-3 pattern, but it’s the reasoning for her change that really caught my attention – doing what works for you at that time. We should all do what works for us, and our students, at any particular time. It’s easy to get caught up in what others are doing, but that might not be the best thing for you at that moment. It’s important to be intentional with what we’re doing in our personal lives, our classrooms, with relationships, and with our downtime. That’s why I chose intentional as my #OneWord, but there’s a good chance I’ll think about the 3-2-1-2-3 a little more as well.

Three for the Week

1 – This is an older post from Angela Duckworth , but I found it so wonderful. It is easy to forget that extraordinary writers have to work extremely hard at their craft. Duckworth shared a picture of edits Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Caro made to one of his manuscripts. What a powerful image for a young write to see!

2 – My graduate school advisor used a term that I will never forget – misplaced empathy. Misplaced empathy is when expectations are unnecessarily lowered for students in a group which typically does not perform at a level of their peers. (This is often done by a teacher with good intentions.) I was reminded of that conversation when I read the article “How Our Language Feeds Inequity” by ASCD. The authors discuss inevitability assumption which is the “belief that some students will succeed and others will not, simply because that is how it has always been.” This article is a fascinating read about how our perceptions and language affect our students and their performance in school.

3 – This last one just brought a smile to my face. It is a video of two boys playing in the mud. They are living their best lives and don’t seem to have a care in the world. It shows how the simplest things in life – a mud hole in this case – can bring great joy to our lives. A reminder I need every now and then.

Healthy Teachers

If you’ve ever flown on an airplane, you’ve seen the flight attendants explain what to do in the event of an emergency. (I’ve always thought this was an unsettling, yet necessary, way to start a flight.) In the event that the cabin pressure should drop, oxygen masks will drop out of the overhead compartment. If this happens, the flight attendants say, “Please place the mask over your own mouth and nose before assisting others.” The point is, you can’t take care of others unless you’re taking care of yourself.

This is a great metaphor for teachers. A teacher can’t take care of others, primarily students, unless he takes care of himself first. We need to put the mask on before we can put the mask on our students. So, if we’re not taking care of ourselves physically, emotionally, psychologically, and even financially, we’re going to be in the best condition to take care of our students and teach at our best level.

With that in mind, I’m setting off on a mission to learn how teachers, myself included, can take better care of themselves. Personal care has not been a great quality of mine in the past, but I’m determined to change that over the coming months.

I found a fantastic article in the New York Times titled “How to Be Healthy, in Just 48 Words.” As the title suggest, it contains health tips in just 48 words. It is such a wonderful, concise article to get started. I decided to use it to reflect on whether my habits are healthy or not and identify where I can start making improvements. Below are the 48 words from the article and my personal rating for each. I scored myself as excellent, okay, and needs to improve.

Don’t smoke (2). Excellent

Get vaccinated (4). Excellent

Avoid trans fats (7). Needs to improve: I’ll be honest, I don’t really pay attention to labels as much as I should.

Replace saturated fats with unsaturated if you can (15). Needs to improve: Same as trans fats.

Cook from whole ingredients — and minimize restaurant meals (23). Okay: I do try to use whole foods as often as possible, but could improve in this area.

Minimize ultraprocessed foods (26). Okay: I do like to eat ice cream but otherwise not too bad.

Cultivate relationships (28). Need to improve: There are many times I put other areas of my life above taking the time to cultivate relationships. It’s a definite weakness of mine.

Nurture sleep (30). Needs to improve: I’ve always been a night owl. Typically I go to bed around midnight and wake up at 6 a.m. This is definitely an area where I need to improve.

Drink alcohol at most moderately (35). Excellent

Exercise as often as you can enjoy (42). Okay: I love running but haven’t been great about getting out as often as I’d like.

Drink only the calories you love (48). Okay. I recently quit drinking Coke. Trying to only drink water and tea right now.

Identifying areas where improvement is needed is the first part. Now comes the real work.

Problem Solving

I was walking into work one day and a colleague literally came running across the parking lot. She was frustrated and asked, “What in the world is going on with these math word problems?” I looked at her waiting for more detail and trying to not drop my smoothie. “These aren’t math problems,” she said. “They’re reading problems.” She had no idea how correct she was.

Word problems are as much reading problems as they are math problems. One of the challenges with younger mathematicians is getting them to slow down and read problems multiple times to understand the complex structure.

The higher-level thinking problems students are asked to solve go far beyond basic computation (5 x 5 = 25). Students have to read a complex problem, understand the context, know based on that context that they have to multiply 5 x 5, then multiply 5 x 5 to get 25, and finally write an answer of 25 with the correct label. Talk about challenging!

Math word problems are especially challenging for readers because the structure is unlike most of what we teach in reading. The authors of Routines for Reasoning state, “Reading in math – especially reading a math word problem – is different from reading in other subject areas… word problems combine both narrative and expository text… Therefore, word problems must be read several times with a different focus each time…”

In reading, we generally teach narrative OR expository text. In math, students often encounter both types swirled into one problem.

There is another challenge with the structure of math word problems. Students learn in reading that the main idea is generally at the beginning of a paragraph or section of text. Think of the main idea of a math problem as the question being asked. The main idea – the question – is at the end of the paragraph or section of text.

So how do we help our young mathematicians become effective problem solvers? Routines for Reasoning shares a strategy called the Three Reads. This approach requires mathematicians to read a word problem multiple times and sets a purpose for each read.

Three Reads
Read 1: Understanding the Context – Focuses on the general idea of what the problem is about.
Read 2: Interpreting the Question – Determine the question or questions being asked in the problem.
Read 3: Identifying Important Information – Look for the important information or words in the problem.

Let’s say students are solving this 4^th grade released problem from the Pennsylvania state assessment, known as the PSSA:

David started his coin collection with 14 coins. He added 3 coins to his collection at the end of each month for 5 months. How many coins were in David’s collection at the end of the 5 months?

Three Reads
First read: David is collecting coins (Don’t worry about any expository text right now. Focus on the narrative. Save the numbers for later.)
Second read: How many coins were in David’s collection at the end of the 5 months?
Third read: Collection started with 14 coins; added 3 coins each month; 5 months total

This is a great technique to begin creating effective problem solvers. First, I create an anchor chart, which is pictured, for my students. The anchor chart is displayed in the classroom throughout the year. Next, I model the Three Reads and think aloud my thoughts as a problem solver. This cannot be a once and done process. Students need to see and hear this process multiple times throughout the year with a variety of problems.

I’d love to say that creates problem solvers over night, but it takes time. It takes repetition. It must be persistence and grit. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither are problem solvers.