Using Chalk Talk to Set Distance Learning Norms

From Hybrid to Distance

After roughly 10 weeks of teaching fourth graders in the hybrid model (half the class in-person, two days a week), our county has superseded the COVID infection rates that make it safe to continue in-person teaching and learning. So, we're shifting to distance learning, which will mean new routines, new procedures and new norms.

Essential Agreement

Just like at the beginning of the year when we collaboratively created our classroom norms, we needed to collectively develop agreements about how we would behave in our new online setting.

At the beginning of the year, we agreed to be empathetic, responsible, helpful and trustworthy.

Chalk Talk

During our last days of in-person learning, we used the thinking routine "Chalk Talk" from Making Thinking Visible (Ritchhart, Church and Morrison) to get our thinking out on paper about how we will continue to honor our essential agreement in our new distance learning setting. This routine worked particularly well as the two cohorts of students contributed their ideas on two different days. I enjoy this routine because it is a silent conversation; it gives time and space for students to think, contribute their own ideas and respond / react to others.

To facilitate Chalk Talk, follow the directions from the book Making Thinking Visible:

Looking at the topic or question written on the chart paper:

• What ideas come to mind when you consider this idea, question or problem?
• What connections can you make to others' responses?
• What questions arise as you think about the ideas and consider the responses and comments of others?

The following four charts represent my class's collective thinking about how they will be on Zooms so that we can continue to learn, think and grow.

Respond in a happy, clear voice
Mute yourself when others are talking
Think about other people's feelings
Golden rule
Use the blue hand
Have a nice and loud voice when you talk
Don't blurt
Listen to other people
Wait to talk. It could hurt someone's feelings if you don't.

Make sure you don't do funny business on Zoom
Do not unmute when its not your turn
Listen when someone is talking
Stay muted unless called on
No backgrounds
Do your best
Try your hardest
Keep your head in front of the camera
Be in a quiet place
Be on time
Do what the teacher says
Use the buttons instead of talking
Come prepared

Listen
Sit still
Raise your blue hand button
Do your best to not screw off
Don't do funny business
Remind people to grab something if they forgot it
Help kids that are stuck
Don't interrupt and talk nice
Help others
Only unmute if you're allowed to

Do all assignments
Be on time
If the teacher asks you to do something, you do it
Don't play with the buttons
Do not unmute yourself if someone else is speaking
Don't do funny business
Be ready before the call
Always be nice and just unmute yourself if someone says you can talk
Be prepared
Don't lie
Be prepared

Making students' thinking visible helps me as a teacher because it allows me to respond appropriately. and in a timely manner. Using the thinking routine "Chalk Talk" to set distance learning norms gives students voice in this process and helps me best understand their thinking as we shift from hybrid to distance learning.

Don't teach concepts to children

Yep! You read it right. Don't teach concepts TO children.

Instead, give your students opportunities to EXPLORE concepts.

Let them DISCOVER the complexities of concepts by INVESTIGATING concrete examples from a variety of times, places, and situations.

In doing this, children will CONSTRUCT UNDERSTANDING of these timeless, abstract, universal, and transferrable ideas that we call concepts.

Letting students construct their own understanding of life's BIG IDEAS is known as inquiry, which is more than question asking. Teaching in this way doesn't come naturally to me, so until it does, I've been trying to follow these five steps.

1. Start with a concept.
2. Pick a specific, concrete example of a person, place, situation, or thing that illustrates that concept.
3. Create an opportunity for students to explore that concrete example. 
4. Check for understanding by having them write a concept statement.
5. Reflect on their thinking and decide next steps.

If you think using these steps could help your students construct their own understanding of life's BIG IDEAS, try them out and let me know how it goes. That is exactly what one second grade teacher did recently. Here is her story:


1. Start with a concept.

In grade 2, teachers collaboratively decided to have their students explore how people influence the world. During this unit of inquiry, students also explore the genre of biography, as they read about various heroes.

2. Pick a specific, concrete example of a person, place, situation, or thing that illustrates that concept & 3. Create an opportunity for students to explore that concrete example.

During the last several weeks, students in second grade have read, listened to, and watched biographies and have learned a lot about specific heroes.

After all this learning about individual heroes, the teacher posed two questions to the students: "Who is a hero?" and "What is a hero?"

Students responded using the Chalk Talk thinking routine (for more on Chalk Talk, see p. 78 of Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison). In the last step of the thinking routine, when students were sharing the thinking, they identified common themes and ideas that emerged. Those were notated by the teacher and are written in black marker and boxed in the pictures below.

4. Check for understanding by having them write a concept statement. (This step is very similar to the thinking routine Headlines found in Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison, p. 111)

The next day, the teacher simply gave students a blank piece of paper and prompted them to write all they understood about heroes. The following were the student responses:

They stand up for people.

(they) doing awesome

Then, the students worked collaboratively to create one, concise concept statement.

When each individual statement was read, the teacher confirmed with the class if it was true or not. Then, students had to decide if the statement had any new information to be added; if it said anything different.

If it did have some new and different information, students had to work together with their teacher to revise the existing concept statement. The images below show the progression the concept statement went through as the class collectively constructed their understanding of the concept of hero.

First, the students started with ...

Next, they added a couple of attributes and took out the pronouns.

2nd graders then added how heroes did this.

To fit better with the vocabulary of the IB Learner Profile, they decided to replace kind.

2nd graders realized that heroes don't just help people.

The students struggled with what is the "right" thing. That value-laden statement is based on one's perspective and is not an absolute truth, so they knew they had to get rid of it.

But the students felt something was missing when they took out that phrase, so they put the idea back in, while acknowledging that "right" is subjective, based on the perspective of the "hero".

At this point, the teacher invited me into the conversation to see what a fresh eye could add. To make sure that "hero" was front and center, I suggested moving the dependent clause to the end of the independent clause.

Then, I suggested to the students that they change some of the wording so that it sounded more like a second grader. Often times when crafting concept statements (sometimes called generalizations, central ideas, or enduring understandings) we create hard-to-understand statements that don't sound like how we normally talk. Concept statements should be written in language that is easy to understand to all who read it.

Finally, I had the students test the statement to see if it was true in any time and in any place. To do this, we briefly brought up "heroes" from different times and from different places that they had already learned about. We decided their definition of a hero held up when applied to all those heroes, so it was indeed timeless and universal.

The students were comfortable that their concept statement encapsulated all the learning they had done up until that point, so the teacher wrote it down on their whiteboard.

5. Reflect on their thinking and decide next steps.

The second graders' understanding of hero is certainly deep and complex. The next step now is to continue to explore the concept of hero: read more biographies, watch age-appropriate biopics, read age-appropriate news articles, interview heroes local to their community, reflect on how their own actions could lead others to believe they themselves are heroes, etc.

As they continue to learn about other "heroes", second graders should be encouraged to continually revisit and revise their definition of hero as needed.

After reading about how one second grade teacher set up opportunities for her students to EXPLORE the concept of hero, instead of directly teaching this big idea to her students, how could you or have you had your students construct understanding of life's BIG IDEAS, known as concepts?

Got Grit? Writing a conceptual statement with 4th graders

In her TED Talk, Angela Lee Duckworth describes grit as:

• passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.
• having stamina.
• sticking with your future, day in, day out not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years and working really hard to make that future a reality.
• and living life like its a marathon, not a sprint.

As I was planning a learning engagement where students would be able to construct a conceptual understanding of grit, I originally had thought of reading them a picture book in which the main character perseveres in the face of adversity and eventually achieves a formidable goal.

But instead, I planned for students to play a counting game* so relatively difficult that it would be impossible for them to succeed. I imagined that this experience would allow students to demonstrate the necessary soft skills to succeed at any challenging task; in other words, I wanted students to show grit.

To add another dimension to the learning activity, I split the kids into two groups and led the game in completely different ways. With the second group of kids out in the hallway, I quickly introduced the game to the first group of kids, did not let them ask questions about the instructions, and showed great impatience whenever anyone made a mistake. As we played the game, students grew agitated and nervous and their performance reflected that. After five minutes, they hadn't been able to count past 17. Visibly frustrated, I told them we would have to give up because it was time for the second group to go.

When the second group returned to the classroom, I completely changed the way I acted and spoke. Adopting a growth mindset perspective (Carol Dweck), I clearly explained the instructions, asked them if there were any questions before starting, and showed great patience when the students made mistakes. I continually reminded them that the game was difficult and we might not reach our goal today, but we must work hard, remain focused and work together to see how far we could get. Every time a student messed up, we'd analyze what happened and make sure everyone understood the error so we could learn from the mistake. Within minutes, the kids exceeded the first group, reaching 22 before we had to stop.

To continue our investigation of grit, I had the class answer three questions using the visible thinking routine Chalk Talk (from Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison).

After students had the opportunity to discuss on paper, we synthesized their responses together by examining what everyone had written.

To provide students with one more concrete example of grit, I read Shel Silverstein's The Little Blue Engine (Where the Sidewalk Ends, p. 158), a poem that teaches the idea that when taking on a challenging goal, one must do more than just THINK you can.

Finally, I asked the students to consider the game, the responses to the Chalk Talk questions, and the poem as they came up with a single statement summarizing what they should do when they face a challenging goal. 

Each color represents an additional idea students wanted to add to the statement, which started with "Keep on trying". After students were done collectively editing and revising their statement, we tested to see if it was Timeless, Abstract, Universal, and Transferrable.

After reading about how students in fourth grade wrote a conceptual statement, synthesizing what they had learned about persistence, resilience, and grit, how could you lead your students through an investigation that would allow them to construct understanding of this complex concept?

*For those who are curious, the seemingly impossible game we played was Buzz. To play Buzz, students take turns counting in sequence out loud. Each player says one number. Every time a particular number comes up (see which numbers below), the student says "buzz" instead of the number and the order reverses direction. For the version we played, students needed to "buzz" on the following numbers:

• numbers with a 7 (7, 17, 27, 37, 47)
• numbers divisible by 7 (7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49)
• numbers with a repeating digit (11, 22, 33, 44)

The game is "won" when the group reaches 50. Every time someone makes an error, the group must start over at 0.

Step Inside

At a recent book club where we were discussing Paul Tough's book, How Children Succeed: Grit, curiosity, and the hidden power of character, someone pointed out that "Chapter 4 says these character traits are hard to teach as students get older and lack of motivation affects GPA for many students." He then followed up with the question, "Should character education start in elementary school and how could that happen and why is it important?"

After working in a Primary Years Program of the International Baccalaureate for the last three years, I feel that our school does a wonderful job with character education, since much importance is placed on students' development of the attributes of the IB Learner Profile and the PYP attitudes. To answer the question then, from the perspective of the book's author, I boiled character teaching and learning down to these three steps:

1. Teach character.
2. Expose kids to "child-sized adversity" and (sometimes) let them fail.
3. Let them make their own decisions.

Quickly though, I realized these steps follow a traditional teaching model. From an inquiry stance though, a teacher would inversely follow the steps above:

1. Let students make their own decisions in authentic situations.
2. Thereby exposing kids to "child-sized adversity" and (sometimes) letting them fail.
3. Teach character by providing students with feedback.

These steps don't just work for character education though. In a PYP, teachers are charged to teach this way all the time. In a blog post dated February 13, 2014, I wrote about the power of providing feedback to 4th graders on their personal narratives. I wrote about how Professor John Hattie found that providing students with effective feedback has a high influence over student achievement (for a summary of his findings, check out this infographic but to read more in-depth about feedback, check out pages 129-154 of Hattie's book, Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing impact on learning).

Paul Tough, Angela Duckworth (a researcher whose TED talk about grit is amazing), and MANY others have referenced Carol Dweck's research when discussing the key to students' success. Overly simplified, Dweck's idea is that a growth mindset involves believing that one's intelligence is not fixed and that growth and learning require effort.

Therefore, for students to be truly open-minded enough to receive the feedback Hattie is promoting teachers give, which will undoubtedly help them grow and learn their character AND their intelligence, students must adopt a growth mindset.

In order to investigate this mindset with students, I guided students through the thinking routine "Step Inside" multiple times. This thinking routine comes from Making Thinking Visible: How to provide engagement, understanding, and independence for all learners by Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison (p. 178-184).

During this thinking routine, students are asked to think about a person that is connected to what they are examining. They are instructed to "step inside" the situation to see things from the person's point of view. To do this, students answer the following:

1. What can this person see, observe, or notice?
2. What might the person know, understand, hold true, or believe?
3. What might the person care deeply about?
4. What might the person wonder about or question?

Following the simple inquiry cycle developed by teachers at my school, I first wanted to INVITE students into the inquiry by answering the above questions from the perspective of a person with a growth mindset.

I showed them this:

http://lanaalattar.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/mindset.jpg

Together, we created this.

The next day, we entered into the INVESTIGATE stage of the inquiry cycle. To investigate a growth mindset, I showed them this video:

http://youtu.be/hqh1MRWZjms

Again, we used the Step Inside thinking routine to dig deeper into growth mindset, coupled with Chalk Talk, another thinking routine from Making Thinking Visible: How to provide engagement, understanding, and independence for all learners by Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison (p. 78-85).

And then synthesized all their ideas into this:

Lastly, we entered into the DEMONSTRATE phase of the inquiry cycle, the step where learners are given opportunities to demonstrate their newly gained understanding.

To see whether or not they truly understood the concept of a growth mindset, I had the kids "Step Inside" themselves and record their thinking in their notebooks. Below are a few samples.

After reading about how sixth graders used the thinking routine Step Inside to better understand the perspective of a growth mindset and thus ready themselves to receive feedback which has proven effective at increasing student achievement and success, how could your students use the thinking routine Step Inside?