Meaningful Routines: The Key to Sustained Student Growth

I've been thinking about and talking with my colleagues and friends about the importance of meaningful routines and their roles and purposes for teachers and students. For clarity, let's dispense with any misconceptions. I am not talking about taking roll, collecting papers, distributing materials, though these are important aspects of classroom management. What I want to explore is how teachers can create regular, flexible, and repeated tasks that increase knowledge, understanding, and skills, while simultaneously evolving in complexity, perspective, or difficulty over time. These types of routines offer teachers the ability to scaffold learning, use time effectively, and establish regular and predictable avenues of activity and feedback, all of which are sound pedagogical practices. Examples of meaningful routines fall into several categories, or types, including:

• routines that build discrete skills (fluency, spelling patterns, phonemic awareness)
• routines that foster meta-cognition/reflective and/or critical thinking (journals, group discussions, Socratic circles, blogging)
• routines that promote connections, ideas, comparisons and insight (essential questions, graphic organizers, chat rooms)
• routines that promote social interactions and expand perspectives (cooperative groups, literature circles, role-playing, wikkis)
• routines that require the use of a specific strategy (Questioning the Author, sorting, summarizing, graphic representation of texts)

In reality, a good routine may have many of the above characteristics. Regardless of the type of routine, the key word is meaningful: that which creates meaning. To be meaningful students have to learn about new ideas or concepts, process and/or evaluate this information, and apply the newly learned material in new contexts. The essential questions about meaningful routines are, then:

• What do meaningful routines look like in the classroom?
• How do they help students grow and make meaning?
• What is the teacher's role?
• How do meaningful routines remain meaningful, or vital?
• What are some examples of meaningful routines?
• How do meaningful routines fit in with planning?
• How do we assess our students' growth with regard to meaningful routines?

I think the best way to answer these questions is to take a look at a concrete example of a meaningful routine, one that I have used in the classroom. As a classroom teacher, one constant challenge is to get students to examine anything, be it literature, a scientific concept, or a historical event, in depth, and, moreover, with an eye toward subtleties and details. One way I motivated students to look at literature in this manner was to use a literary response journal. One version I used was to ask students to: 1) read a piece of text carefully 2) identify and excerpt a piece of text that resonated with them and correlated in some manner with current or recent class discussions and lessons 3) comment on the piece of text in a way that reveals new/and/or sophisticated insight into the text. Through modeling of the kinds of desired responses and sharing in small groups and in whole-class discussion, as well as through individual and written feedback, students gave increasingly sophisticated and nuanced responses. Because they practiced this task on a regular basis, students became comfortable with the format and more focused on the quality of entries, which helped them create meaning. Moreover, in order for this to not become a static process, I had to infuse the experience with novelty, depth, and complexity. My role, then, was to: provide a variety of insightful responses to be used as a models; use literature that was challenging, captivating, and relevant; ask thought-provoking questions; require responses that went beyond the text and fostered thematic connections; and create activities that helped students apply the ideas from the journals (compositions, enactments, speeches). Routines are also a boon for teachers when it comes to planning. They become a flexible template upon which we hang our ideas and activities. While highly flexible, they also allow for a comforting degree of predictability for teacher and students. Furthermore, having meaningful routines allowed me to identify what my weaknesses were and to address them more systematically. Assessment also became more meaningful because I was able to assess students on more than one level. Pedagogically, I ensured my routines built in specific academic skills that had to be mastered. Simultaneously, I was able to get feedback on a meta-cognitive dimension. In other words, I could assess how students were learning, what their roadblocks were, and what they needed help on in terms of process of procedure. This made it easier, though not necessarily easy, to help them with their learning. Academic routines, when based on best practices that embed strategies and skills, are the single best tool a teacher has to raise achievement and foster understanding.

Peace

gman

Incoherency: The Fatal Blow to Education

I won't pretend I know all of the answers to all the problems in public education, but I can say with certainty that there is one overarching problem, with an obvious solution: a lack of coherency, both at the state, district, and campus levels have rendered our schools ineffective and inefficient. Put simply, schools are bogged down in a morass of initiatives, programs, and goals, many of which are moderately effective at best and counterproductive at worst. Teachers find themselves beset by a host of imperatives, all of which must be accomplished, all of which take precedence, to the point that none can take precedence! Moreover, many initiatives or programs conflict with each other in their directions, approaches, and objectives. And complicating matters further is the fact that any teacher, no matter how accomplished , effective, or efficient, has only a certain amount of time to accomplish the myriad of tasks, many of which are inherent in teaching, others not so much. Choose your cliché: there are just some many balls teachers can keep up in the air without letting them drop, or so many irons they can keep in the fire without letting some melt. Either way, teachers end up losing momentum, and if bombarded enough times, will develop a "wait it out attitude." The feeling among many teachers is that this (program, initiative, etc.) will pass if we just outlast it. This is not to say that initiatives or programs or inherently wrong; this would miss the point completely. There are many worthwhile approaches to improving education. In fact, we have any array of options to choose from, all of which have benefits and drawbacks. What I am saying is that less is more, and that schools need to take stock of what they already have actually going on their campuses before layering another goal or monumental task. To do this, a set of essential questions should be asked in an open and honest manner. These include: 1. What programs/initiatives do we have in place? Are we actually doing them? If not, why not? 2. Are any of these programs/initiatives ineffective or ill-suited to our student population? If so, how can we adapt or change them? 3. Is there great resistance to our programs/initiatives? If so, why? Which barriers can be removed? Which cannot? 4. Is each person performing a role he or she is comfortable with or equipped to do? If not, how can administration and colleagues address this? 5. Are there just simply too may programs/initiatives to sustain? Which can be eliminated so others can be supported or bolstered? 6. Are any of the programs/initiatives conflicting with another? If so, how can this issue be addressed?

These are surely not the only questions to ask, but they provide a starting point, as many connected questions and issues will surface as a result of frank discussions. I invite all educators and administrators to complete the one task that will start the ball rolling toward real change: take an inventory of programs and initiatives on your campus. You might be surprised by the results.