Top Tips

If you implemented strategies and techniques that paid off—big time—and if you attempted activities and schemes that flopped…

Then you take comfort in knowing that this is how your year should have developed, progressed, and played out.

This is the learning, experienced "up close and personal." This is the strategy that is guaranteed to transform "failure" into "success." This is how your performance improves from "adequate" to "genius."

Application "Genius"

A teacher that never tries new strategies and techniques is stagnant, even petrified; and fails to rise even to the level of "master-teacher-wannabe."

Sidebar

Only trying the "tried-and-true" is the perfect mind set for the Industrial-age shop floor, factory-based learning.

Modern education, focusing on Twenty-First Century learning needs requires dynamic, open-ended, forward-thinking models of instruction.

Modern learning requires that teachers and students experience the freedom, the empowerment, and the luxury of "making mistakes."

"Out of the Ordinary" End-of-Year Review

The ordinary method of post-school-year review is to build (or add to) a "Recycling" file. This is a "paper dump" and a "computer hard drive file dump" of every instructional activity. The theory for this "salvage operation" is that, if assigned to the same (or similar) grade level next year; the materials can be reused.

The "extraordinary" method that we propose is to sort these papers and computer files into three categories. These categories are:

• What produced high levels of student learning and outstanding student outcomes…worked well


• What produced mediocre levels of student learning and ho-hum student outcomes, but might be salvageable with major changes if used again…flopped, but not hopeless


• What produced no learning (maybe even hindered the learning process)…dismal failures

Definitions

What "worked well" means that students learned a lot from the activity, strategy or method; and that you were able to measure and assess each student's level of improvement.

What "flopped but might not be hopeless" produced significant, measurable learning for some students, lackluster learning for most.

What "dismal failure" means is that, even with massive changes, the strategy or activity is counter productive and counter indicated.

Meta-Level Thinking

Once all strategies and activities are sorted into these categories, the real work begins.

The ordinary teacher crates these file folders in an hour and burns the computer files to one or more CDs. By doing so, the ordinary teacher subjects themselves to hours of tedium during the next school year sifting through the "archive" and sorting and resorting the activities and resources.

You, the extraordinary teacher, are going to spend a day or two…

• Sorting activities


• Analyzing activities

The "meta analysis" that you need to perform is a discovery expedition from the high-level vantage point of…

• Discovering trends


• Discovering patterns


• Discovering repeatable processes

What you want to do is identify ways that you can turn successful, measurable outcomes-based activities into reusable templates, modules, checklists, forms and generic tracking materials.

Think "Strategy," Think "Streamlined Materials," Think "Flexible Materials Design"

Here is the math:

One generic, reusable template, checklist or form that you can use every other week throughout the school year provides you with approximately 18 re-uses. If development of this reusable tool took one full hour, then the tool would pay back your investment by 1,800%. A strategy that you build that could be used every week of the school year that took one hour to create would return your investment by 3,600%.

Sidebar

This is the focus that sharpens your thinking.

Think "payback" instead of wilting under the thought of how much you have to do.

For example, an elementary teacher with six classes per day over a 180 day school year would need to prepare 1,080 learning activities, if each class only required one activity per day. (Of course, many classes require multiple activities per class period.)

In addition, teachers must modify standard lessons to account for Special Education students, Gifted and Talented students, At-Risk Students, Bilingual Students, Dyslexia students; and who know what other category that might be invented.

Time Invested Now Pays Other Dividends

After one or two months, the freshness of your memories fade (much like your students' skills. Remember the students that you labored so hard to teach? In two months, thinking of anything but academic tasks, the retrieval from short-term memory for over 67% of those "hard-built" knowledge skills will have degraded. Less than one third of the previous year's learning will come to school with students at the start of the next school year.)

In addition, your memory will play tricks on "what really happened" reality, and you might end up building a re-usable modular system based upon strategies that were not really top producers.

And beware the temptation to pick strategies that were easier to do in favor of strategies that produced better student outcomes.

Focus upon student achievement first and foremost. You will be saving so much time with this modular strategy that you can afford to work a bit more (during these final school year days) on strategies that pay off all of next year.

Frosting on the Cake

Also, plan to build in as much computer automation, self-checking, and other shortcuts to each template, checklist, form or strategy.

This step is not necessary because you can continue to stay up until 11:00 or 12:00 p.m. each night correcting student artifacts.

Of course, if you are strategic—really strategic—you might avoid taking papers home most evenings, and especially avoid taking work home on weekends.

Invest time now. Have more time to spend on yourself throughout the next school year.