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10 weeks of teaching fourth graders in the hybrid model (half the class in-person, two days a week), our county has superseded the COVID infection rates that make it safe to continue in-person teaching and learning.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.

Teaching Conceptually using Tug-of-War

Currently, our G4 students, with the help of their teachers, are trying to understand that maintaining health requires knowledge of body systems and the diseases that affect them. They are trying to understand this big idea through the conceptual lenses of causation and responsibility as they inquire into one’s personal responsibility for health.

To guide students through this inquiry, a G4 teacher recently used the Tug-of-War thinking routine from Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Church, & Morrison (p. 199). After working through this routine with her students, the teacher invited others on her team to analyze, discuss, and reflect on her students’ thinking. Here’s her story:

1. Start with a concept.

For this particular learning engagement, the teacher wanted the students to understand that choices individuals make not only affect the individual, but others around them too.

2. Pick a specific, concrete example of a person, place, situation, or thing that illustrates that concept.

This teacher decided to guide her students through an exploration of the recent measles outbreak in the United States. Investigating the facts around this concrete situation would allow her students to construct understanding of the big idea that choices individuals make (particularly about their health) not only affect the individual, but others around them too.

3. Create an opportunity for students to explore that concrete example.

First, students read and viewed a diverse variety of complex texts.

• LA Times: Disneyland measles outbreak: Infected woman took 2 flights before diagnosis
• The Guardian: Measles outbreak spreads in US after unvaccinated woman visits Disneyland
• Public Radio: Disneyland measles tally rises, unvaccinated OC high school students kept home
• National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC): Vaccine Laws

The students went through the texts as a whole group, a format appropriate for reading such complex texts. To understand more about how to support students as they read complex texts, learn from the experts: Fisher & Frey’s article “Close Reading in Elementary Schools”.

After learning more about the facts around this recent outbreak, the teacher drew a tug-of-war rope across the middle of the whiteboard. The class identified and framed the two opposing sides of the dilemma that they were exploring. They labeled one end of the tug-of-war rope “Yes, all people should have to get a vaccine” and on the other end of the rope they wrote “No, people should be allowed to file an exemption.”

Students then generated “tugs” or reasons that “pull you toward,” that is, support each side of the dilemma. The students wrote their ideas on individual sticky notes. Because this was the first time the teacher had led the students through this thinking routine, she required each of them to write a tug for each of the opposing sides.

After, as a class, the students determined the strength of each tug and placed it on the tug-of-war rope, placing the strongest tugs at the farthest end of the rope and the weaker tugs more toward the center.

4. Check for understanding by having them write a concept statement.

The teacher did not have her students write out a concept statement at the end to check for conceptual understanding. She did say that having the students make their thinking visible on the sticky notes and listening to the ensuing discussion was one way to check for conceptual understanding. However, to be assured that she knew what all of her students understood about the concepts of decisions, their consequences, responsibility, and causation, the teacher decided that next time as a follow-up, she would want the students to draft some statement at the end to check for their understanding of these timeless, abstract, universal, and transferable concepts.

5. Reflect on their thinking and decide next steps.

During the reflection meeting, other important points came up:

• The students were very engaged during this thinking routine.
• The thinking routine “I Used to Think …, Now I Think …” could have also been used in combination with Tug-of-War to be able to show students how their own thinking about this topic had changed.
• Right now, students are learning about determining what is fact and what is opinion during their focused literacy lessons. As students were determining the strength of each tug, they naturally started classifying tugs with facts as stronger and those that had opinions as weaker. The teacher noticed that students were applying their understanding of fact and opinion in a real-life context, thus solidifying their understanding of this literacy concept.

After reading about how this teacher used the thinking routine “Tug-of-War” with her students to examine perspectives, reason, identify complexities of a current event and construct a deep understanding of concepts, how could you or have you used this thinking routine with your own students?

Student Engagement: more than being busy

Educators in our school district are focused on increasing student engagement. We intuitively know that if students are going to learn, they must be captivated by what they're learning. But being engaged is more than just being busy. So how do we define student engagement?

The Science House at the Science Museum of Minnesota uses this formula to define engagement:

Talking on Task + Manipulating Materials = Student Engagement

They surmise that if students are engaged, students will learn.

Our Teacher Growth, Development, and Evaluation System plan relies on the following components of the Charlotte Danielson's 2013 The Framework for Teaching to define and measure student engagement:

• Domain 2 
• Component 2A: Creating an Environment of Respect and Rapport 
• Component 2C: Managing Classroom Procedures 
• Component 2D: Managing Student Behavior 
• Domain 3 
• Component 3B: Using Questioning and Discussion Techniques 
• Component 3C: Engaging Students in Learning 
• Component 3D: Using Assessment in Instruction 

These components give educators helpful parameters and strategies to engage students in "discussion, debate, answering 'what if?' questions, discovering patterns and the like," (p. 69). I acknowledge that if teachers implement such strategies, specifically Visible Thinking Routines that I have relentlessly promoted on this blog, students will be more engaged and more will be learned. However, if teachers want to truly engage students, it will take more than teaching strategies and techniques aimed at captivating student attention. For students to be authentically engaged, curriculum must be relevant, challenging, and significant.

Currently, in our the elementary school, students are often asked to learn literacy and mathematical ideas outside the contexts that these ideas are really for. Getting all students to engage at high levels proves to be extremely difficult, no matter the engagement strategy, when we teach these complex ideas in abstract, decontextualized terms.

Ron Ritchhart, in his book Intellectual Character: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Get It, tells the story of teachers who connect their course activity to big ideas to enhance the purpose and meaning of the work for students. He writes that by doing this, "students become clear about the larger purpose of the class and what the teacher wants them to understand and learn more about. This makes it easier to engage students in thinking because the work itself demands thinking and active exploration." He continues, "the thinking demanded of students is authentic in that it serves particular ends, unlike certain one-size-fits-all thinking-skills programs that might introduce a thinking skill in a discrete context disconnected from anything else students might be doing," (p. 150-1).

Ritchhart thus is advocating for curriculum that is based on students constructing understanding of relevant, challenging, and significant ideas, not delivering insignificant curriculum using engaging activities.

So, if we can agree that to authentically engage students, we need the right combination of engagement strategies and relevant and significant curriculum that is based on understanding big ideas, what are these ideas that are worth knowing about?

In the International Baccalaureate's (IB) Primary Years Program (PYP), the answer is to design a concept-driven curriculum; a curriculum where the understanding of significant ideas is more important than the memorization of isolated facts. H. Lynn Erickson writes in her book Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction for the Thinking Classroom that concepts are timeless, abstract, universal, and transferrable (p. 31). But there are many big ideas worth knowing that fit this description. How are we to know which ones to teach?

Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe suggest a list of transferable concepts in their 2005 book Understanding by Design (p. 74). They also give tips for finding big ideas within the state academic standards. Erickson echoes this idea by suggesting using the stem, "The student understands that ..." to identify concepts in state standards. She notes that this lead-in phrase "sets up the structure for a generalization sentence - two or more concepts stated in a relationship," (p. 52).

The more I work with teachers at identifying concepts - that is, ideas worth teaching - the more I think that another way to "test" to see if the idea you're considering is a concept is to consider how important the idea is to adults. If adults are continuously wrestling with the particular idea, chances are you're working with a concept.

The bottom line is this: as long as our elementary curriculum is exclusively delivered separately in reading and math blocks with little time dedicated to learning literacy and mathematical processes and strategies in the context of constructing understanding of key and related concepts within the PYP units of inquiry, our students will never truly be engaged with any of it and standardized test scores will continue to lag.

Engagement is more than students paying attention and being busy. In order for students to internalize literacy and math processes and knowledge concepts, they must be taught in the context of learning real-world big ideas; ideas that are timeless, abstract, universal, transferable, and still being discussed by adults.

When we begin to deliver this kind of engaging, authentic curriculum, coupled with employing engagement strategies designed at getting students actively and meaningfully thinking, talking, and working, we will start to see increases in levels of authentic student engagement and increases in standardized test scores soon will follow.

Making Mathematical Thinking Visible with The Explanation Game

In Minnesota, third graders need to be able to represent multiplication facts by using a variety of approaches, such as repeated addition, equal-sized groups, arrays, area models, equal jumps on a number line and skip counting (3.1.2.3).

For students aged 8- and 9-years-old, this mathematics benchmark is quite dense. Even the "I Can" statement, written in kid-friendly language, is still fairly complex and abstract.

To help her students understand the concept and be able to successfully demonstrate the skill described in this benchmark, one third grade teacher used the Thinking Routine The Explanation Game (from Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Morrison, and Church.)

This teacher wanted her students to look closely at features and details of the different ways to show multiplication facts, so The Explanation Game seemed like the perfect thinking routine to elicit that type of thinking from her students.

During the Explanation Game, students take a close look at something they're trying to understand and:

Name it. Name a feature that you notice.
Explain it. What could it be? What role or function might it serve? Why might it be there?
Give reasons. What makes you say that? Or why do you think it happened that way?
Generate alternatives. What else could it be? And what makes you say that?

With her students, the teacher made six posters, each with a different way to represent multiplication facts. The teacher purposefully left off the name of the particular multiplication strategy shown on the poster.

The students then had to answer these questions:

• What is the multiplication equation shown? 
• What strategy are you using to show that equation? Explain the strategy to a partner. 
• Write another equation and solve it using that strategy. 

Finally, the students labeled each poster with the name of the particular multiplication strategy. By allowing the students to independently construct their own understanding of the multiplication strategy first and then naming each strategy, the teacher was guiding her students' learning with inquiry, a powerful vehicle for learning in the IB Primary Years Program.

Below are the posters after the learning engagement.

Teachers in other grade levels could use this same Thinking Routine and lesson structure to address mathematics benchmarks at their particular grade level, particularly when the benchmark requires students to represent a number or a mathematical operation in a variety of ways. The list of benchmarks below is not an exhaustive list, but is only provided to show the variety of settings in which this Thinking Routine and lesson structure could be used.

Kindergarten (K.1.1.2): Read, write, and represent whole numbers from 0 to at least 31. Representations may include numerals, pictures, real objects and picture graphs, spoken words, and manipulatives such as connecting cubes. 

1st grade (1.1.2.1): Use words, pictures, objects, length-based models (connecting cubes), numerals and number lines to model and solve addition and subtraction problems in part-part-total, adding to, taking away from and comparing situations.

2nd grade (2.1.2.1):Use strategies to generate addition and subtraction facts including making tens, fact families, doubles plus or minus one, counting on, counting back, and the 
commutative and associative properties.

4th grade (4.1.2.1): Represent equivalent fractions using fraction models such as parts of a set, fraction circles, fraction strips, number lines and other manipulatives. 

5th grade (5.1.1.1):  Recognize that quotients can be represented in a variety of ways, including a whole number with a remainder, a fraction or mixed number, or a decimal. 

6th grade (6.1.1.4): Determine equivalences among fractions, decimals and percents; select among these representations to solve problems. 

Step In & Back

Since the beginning of the 2013 school year, teachers at our IB PYP school have been investigating about how students think and what routines we can use to help our students think more deeply about big ideas (called concepts in the PYP). One way we've been exploring how to do this is by reading and discussing the book Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Morrison, and Church.

Recently, as a 6th grade teacher began the transdisciplinary unit Who We Are (for more info about this unit, see our school's POI), she used the Understanding Map to identify what kind of thinking she wanted her students to do. The Understanding Map was developed by the Visible Thinking and Cultures of Thinking Project at Harvard's Project Zero.

At the beginning of the unit, she wanted to give her students the opportunity and time to wonder what they were curious about regarding health, decision-making, and interactions with others. So, she decided to use the thinking routine Think-Puzzle-Explore. This routine allowed her to identify what students already knew, what they were wondering, and where students thought they could go to find answers to those questions. For more information about this thinking routine, read my post from May 2014: Think-Puzzle-Explore.

As students thought through what they knew and wanted to know, the teacher quickly began to see that many students were curious about Ebola. Wanting to leverage this curiosity, the teacher planned to teach the metacognitive and comprehension strategies from her reading curriculum unit with texts related to the current Ebola epidemic, which she found at the site Newsela. 

As students began to read, identify main ideas, and find details that not only supported the articles' main ideas but also answered their initial questions about Ebola, they seemed to come up with even more questions. It is important to point out that it was when the teacher gave content that was meaningful and worth knowing about, students suddenly were engaged in reading, understanding, questioning and most importantly thinking!

Now that the students had some background knowledge on Ebola, the teacher and I began to collaborate and we returned to the Understanding Map to decide that our next step was to ask the students to consider different viewpoints regarding this global issue. To help students do this, we decided to use the global thinking routine Step In & Back, developed by researchers working in Project Zero's Interdisciplinary and Global Studies Project (Veronica Boix-Mansilla, Flossie Chua and Melissa Rivard).

Since we expected students to consider a viewpoint different from their own, we selected a radio interview of Patrice Juah, a Liberian woman who recently traveled to the United States. As students listened to the interview for the first time, they took notes on what Ms. Juah saw, thought, cared about, and wondered. We also listened and took notes, modeling for the students how to listen carefully and think deeply.

After, students interacted with each other, noticeably showing respect for and valuing others' thinking as they listened carefully to each others' ideas. Once students had initially shared their thinking, we listened to the interview again. After the second time, students again shared their thinking. Below is some documentation of some students' thinking from the Step In part of the global thinking routine.

Next, as a whole group, we had a debriefing discussion on the process of using Step In as a framework for considering another perspective. Student responses included:

• "It helped me know what I should be listening for. Without it, it would have been hard to listen to."
• "Listening to the interview twice helped, because if I was writing down one idea the first time we listened, I probably missed another important idea. When I listened to it the second time, I could hear other important ideas I had missed."

Then, students were asked to Step Back and examine their own perspectives. Students were given two prompts:

• What questions do you have for/about this person? Who could you ask?
• What doubts did this raise about your ability to take this person’s perspective?

Students were given a couple of moments to write down their thinking and then shared with the group. The students' thinking regarding the 2nd prompt was:

What doubts did this raise about your ability to take this person’s perspective?

• The interviewer and the interviewee were speaking quickly.
• The accent was hard to hear and understand.
• I haven’t lived through the things she’s lived through.
• She didn’t talk about all the little details - we still have more questions!

With regards to the first prompt, we wrote down all the students' questions, synthesized them, found Ms. Juah on Twitter and posed the questions to her. Our interaction is below:

Click here to read Ms. Juah's poem, The Ebola Ride.

After reading about how one teacher had her students consider different viewpoints by using the global thinking routine Step In & Back, how could you use this routine to get your students to think about other angles of a particular topic?

NOTE: The words in red above are some of the cultural forces that play a part in creating a Culture of Thinking in our classrooms. To learn more about these Cultural Forces (there are 8 in all), read Intellectual Character, Making Thinking Visible, Creating Cultures of Thinking (all by Ron Ritchhart) or visit the page on his website that talks about these cultural forces.

Zoom In

A fifth grade teacher recently used the visible thinking routine Zoom In (from Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison) with her students to help them describe, infer and interpret multiplication arrays.

Read about the experience in the teacher's own words:

Beforehand, I created a simple picture array of identical plants, 3 rows by 6 columns, 18 total plants.

To start off, I told the students that we would start digging into our first math unit and we would be using the visible thinking routine Zoom In to help us do that. I explained that we’d start by looking at a small part of a picture and we’d reveal a little bit more each time. Their job was to observe and jot down what they noticed on their whiteboards.

First, I showed them just one plant.

The students focused on observations of what was in the picture - describing the plant.

Between each round, students shared out their observations and I recorded them on the SMART board. By having students share their thinking, it allowed their classmates to hear what others were thinking and noticing. This helped in making their own observations as they added on to what other students had shared. It also allowed me to ask students to tell more and explain what their thinking meant or how they came up with their predictions.

The next zoom moved across the row to show one more plant, doubling the plants but not yet revealing a full row or column. I asked them to again observe: "What did they see? What new things did they notice? How did their thinking change based on the new parts of the picture they were seeing?"

There were still many plant-based observations and a few mathematical words started to pop out (doubling, multiplying).

Again, I recorded their thinking on the board, as students shared their thinking.

Round 3 revealed two full columns. I reminded students at the beginning of this round that we were looking at the picture as mathematicians and asked them to think about their observations with a math mindset.

Again they wrote down observations, noting how their thinking had changed and how they might think about the picture mathematically. During this round, students independently began predicting what they thought might come next in the picture without any prompting from me.

A synthesis of the class's thinking:

Round 4 revealed a full row, in addition to the 2 full columns they had seen in the previous round. 

During this round of observations, students had discovered the pattern of rows and columns, and most observations focused on predictions of how many plants were going to be in the full picture. Some students were observing using row-and-column strategies, while others were using multiples of 3 or 6.

Everyone's thinking together:

In the last round, the full array was displayed.

By this point, all students could name it as an array and write the corresponding number sentence.

Everyone's thinking after the last Zoom In round:

To wrap up, I asked students to draw another array for 18. All students were able to create another array, which showed me they all understood the concept of a rectangular array and equal rows and columns.

After reading about how this 5th grade teacher used the visible thinking routine Zoom In to help her students describe, infer, and interpret in math, how could you use a visible thinking routine to help your students think deeply about mathematical concepts?