Get Moving

I recently coordinated shadow a student days at our middle and high schools. These days didn’t go perfectly for reasons within and outside of my control. While there are many things I would do differently in the future, I believe this was a valuable exercise worth doing in the future.

On these days, teachers followed students through the entirety of their schedules – from start to finish. The purpose of this experience was not to evaluate individual teacher performance but rather to understand more deeply what it’s like to be a student in our school system as work to make our school system even more student-centered.

It was fun to hear teachers talk about conversations with kids at lunch and about participating in gym class. They also described how it felt to take a test unprepared and about what this experience had them thinking about what they wanted to try or do differently the next day in their classrooms.

Overwhelmingly, the most common take away from our teachers was this:

Our students aren’t moving enough.

Secondary teachers don’t often get to experience the scope of a students day. So, it’s easy to make assumptions regarding how much our students are reading, writing, and moving. The teachers who participated in this experience said they felt like they needed more opportunities to get out of their seats to keep their energy levels and thinking levels up.

This was helpful learning for me. For many reasons, but one being that as Katie Martin says, “Teachers create what they experience.” So, if we want teachers to incorporate movement in the classroom, we need to incorporate movement into our professional learning and meetings. \

Therefore, on Friday at our ELA course of study meeting, upon reading something with a lot of research-heavy content instead of continuing to sit and talk about it, I asked participants to find a partner who did not work in their school and to walk the building for 10 minutes talking about what they read. When they returned, I invited them to quickly share their biggest takeaways from their conversation.

Additionally, our high school admin team recently asked students from our Teacher Academy to offer professional learning to teachers on movement during a PD day. It’s inspiring to think that that these students used their off day to come back into school and to bravely lead professional learning with current teachers. If you want to be filled with hope for the future, spend time with students and staff in schools. I’m inspired by our students. I’m also inspired by our staff’s openness to learning from current high school students.

In his book, Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Peter Liljedahl talks about the value of standing and working with others. I was so inspired by his research that I included the following in my upcoming book, Legacy of Learning: Teaching for Lasting Impact, “In the 15 years that I have been engaged in the thinking classroom research, nothing we have tried has had such a positive and profound impact on student thinking as having them work in random groups at vertical whiteboards.”

If we are serious about implementing systems for transformational change in our schools, we must start by taking a closer look at what our students currently experience and what they have to say about their current realities.

In the meantime, we will be moving a lot more in my meetings and professional learning sessions. 🙂