This past school year, I had some of the best Socratic Seminars of my entire teaching career in my English 11 Honors classes. In each section, I had at least 2 students who were skilled at developing thought-provoking questions, inviting quieter students into the discussion, and managing the flow of conversation so that their student colleagues not only delved deeply into interesting analysis of the texts but also avoided spinning their wheels on less productive lines of discourse.

A key element of my teaching philosophy is that discussion is key to understanding our own and others’ views. So, second semester, I focused on helping more of my students develop their discussion skills, using a lesson on Costa’s Levels of Questioning (or Costa’s House) that I learned about during the AVID Summer Institute many moons ago. The process went like this:

1. Introduce the concept of the three levels of questions.
2. Each table group chooses a text (ex. book, movie, videogame, story, celebrity relationship) that they all knew fairly well.
3. Each student writes a Level 1 question on a sticky note.
4. Students rotate sticky notes. Each student writes a new Level 2 question based on the Level 1 question on the sticky note now in front of them.
5. Repeat step 4, but students write a Level 3 question based on the Levels 1 and 2 questions in front of them.

Students had fun choosing the texts, which included books we read first semester (The Great Gatsby), kids movies (Moana, Puss ‘n’ Boots), and TV shows they liked as kids (Jessie). The sillier choices helped take the pressure off the activity, and students were freed up to come up with some pretty good questions.

We used this as a warm-up to our mini-Socratic prep work to introduce The Things They Carried. In those seminars, a greater variety of students asked their own questions and the quality of questions was overall much higher than in my first semester Socratics.

I plan to introduce this idea much earlier next school year to help students dig deeper into their table-group discussions about the novels we read. Since we wrap up each novel with a seminar, I also plan to revise my Socratic prep so that students draft questions and categorize them into Levels 1, 2, and 3 (and convert the Level 1 questions to 2 and 3).

Resources:

• Lesson slides with warm-up, Costa’s lesson, and Socratic prep

Fresh quarter, fresh seating chart. When I create a new seating chart, I usually ask students who they want to sit with or who they work well with, then try to put together heterogeneous groups (my students sit in tables of 4) so that there’s a balance of skill level and personalities, but also so that everyone has someone they feel comfortable talking with.

This time, I asked my Honors English 11 students to not only tell me one person they wanted to sit with (and why), but also someone they admire or would like to get to know better. I had no idea if this was going to work.

In a word, the results were heartwarming. Students wrote thoughtfully about their admiration of classmates who expressed their ideas clearly, had good insights, thought similarly to them, seemed interesting, etc. While on cafeteria duty, I walked up to a student who was named by several of his classmates as someone they admired. When I told him, he was genuinely shocked: “Me? No way. I would never have thought that.” Next time I do this, I’ll have to find a way to share (anonymously) the positive feedback.

One frustration that I personally and selfishly have had with online teaching is that, four years in, I had FINALLY developed a pretty solid toolbox of instructional strategies. Then COVID-19 came, and it was like someone dumped all those out and I was a credential student again — well-versed in what I wanted to achieve but ill-equipped in the tools required to achieve it.

One of my go-to strategies my first two years of teaching was Dividing Lines. I read a statement, if you agree with the statement, move over to the windows; if you disagree, move to the doors. Share why you chose your position. It works well because it is a visual indicator of how many people take one position versus another. It gets students out of their seats and moving around (something I am not normally good at doing), and it invites some good debate.

The visual indicator and good debate are the parts we can easily keep with distance learning.

My new district uses Zoom (my old district used the less fully featured Google Meet), and the other day, I used the “yes” “no” buttons to digitally recreate dividing lines. I revised my statement into a yes or no question. Students click “yes” or “no,” and Zoom automatically tallies the number of votes on each side, so you can still quantify the different sides (and, in fact, do it with a degree of accuracy). And you can still call on “Someone from the ‘yes’s,’ why did you choose that?” Or say, “We had five no’s,” and then read the list of names (each student’s vote appears next to their name in the Participants’ list) to encourage accountability.

The downside, of course, is that we lost the kinesthetic part: students stay in their seats and are unwilling to get up (for example, to move to one side of the screen vs. the other). But this distance learning era of education is an era of compromise. I feel that we teachers have been thrust back into the position of beginning teachers: trying to first identify ANY tools that work reliably before we can be more discerning about the best and most effective tools for our students in our class this year. This is one technique that will do for now.

I’m sure most normal teachers use Winter break to relax and avoid thinking about school. I relaxed, for sure, and did many, many fun things with my family. But I also use these breaks for big-picture thinking. Here are two things that have been running through my mind:

• These “Top 5 Organizational Hacks for Teaching High School” need a better descriptor than “top” to show how awesome they are. I have gone back to this post repeatedly over the past few years, and every time I get something new to try from it. Here are three of the things I took from this post and how I use them:
  • The BGT: Mine is brown. The top two shelves are for my two English preps, and I label them Today, This Week, and Next Week. I store all my handouts in there, binder-clipped together, so I’m all set for the day.
  • Black Binder: I use her approach to setting up my grading pages (check mark=turned in, then put in the grade). I also geek it out further by putting on time grades in blue or black ink, late grades in green or purple. Once I enter the grade into PowerSchool, I highlight it in yellow. If it gets entered in after the original batch, I highlight it in orange. It sounds complex, but before I did this I really struggled with tracking late work. Oh, and I have a dollar-store 3-ring binder pencil case with the pens and highlighters I need (decorated with washi tape, so they don’t get mixed in with my other supplies).
  • Table bins for materials: Last year, I created annotation boxes for my students because far too many didn’t have basic supplies like highlighters, etc. Also, I was using Marisa Thompson’s TQE discussion approach and AVID techniques, which involve reviewing and annotating notes. The boxes worked brilliantly. Since I am 60% this year, I moved classrooms to share with another teacher. She has art boxes, with colored pencils, scissors, glue sticks, and other supplies. Even better! Now, when students work on a project or have to engage in a special task, I have students distribute the appropriate boxes, and everyone has the supplies that they need.
• The 40-Hour Teacher Workweek Club: All my good organizational and productivity ideas come from Angela Watson’s thorough online class/club. Not only are here materials well-organized and focused on results, but she also links to great blog posts (such as the one above) that have helped me make immediate improvements — big and small — to the daily teaching tasks. After my year in the program, I reduced my work time and regained a significant bit of my sanity. I am in the graduate program now, and although I still work too much, I use the materials at least monthly to work better or to refocus my time on the aspects of my job (and life) that really matter. Angela is offering a fast-track 6-week version of the club that I was very tempted to sign up for.

My yearbook staff is considering selling signing pens this year at our distribution event, and I, being the detail-oriented person I am, decided that we needed to figure out which pen will smudge the least and look the best in a yearbook.

In case you haven’t signed a yearbook in a while, the coated stock that’s used for yearbook pages is meant to make photos look great. However, it makes most inks smear. If you have the patience to let the ink dry, it’s no big deal. But for left-handed writers or middle- or high-school students (i.e., a yearbook’s target audience), that whole waiting part is not going to happen. Think about what it’s like when you buy the perfect greeting card, then as soon as you write your name, it smears right off, leaving a blue mess where your heartfelt message once was. Now, imagine if you paid $100 for that card. And held on to that card for, say, 50 years. You don’t want to see smudges. You want to read memories.

So a few of my fellow pen-obsessed yearbook staffers and I dug through our pencil cases and tried the pens we had on hand on a signature page in one of our old yearbooks. We wrote the name of the pen, the word “wait,” then “immediate.” I immediately ran my finger over “immediate” to see the smear situation lefties might run into. After waiting a few seconds, I ran my finger over the word “wait.”

One Pen to Rule Them All

As you can see, the clear winner is the Sharpie Ultra-Fine Point. In a previous test, the red Sharpie smudged more than the black did, but in this one, they fared equally well. Gel pens, the favorite among artistic or otherwise pen-aware students, were clear losers. Even the quick-drying InkJoy (my beloved InkJoy!) took too long to dry.

Also in a previous test, the Uniball was a clear second place, but it smudged more here. Maybe we waited longer in the first test. We tested the Pigma Micron, which is archival, previously, but it smeared too much to bother repeating the test here. The “blue pen” is probably a Jot pen, but the name has worn off and my Art Director is no longer certain.

Since we have had an increase in graffiti on campus, we’ll probably go with the Uniball. But it would be really cool to sell Sharpie Ultra Fines in our school color…

As an editor, I have owned many dictionaries, from paperback collegiate versions I packed and unpacked countless times through my college years and early 20s to the hardbound unabridged version my brother gave me one year for Christmas that, packed in its own box, probably would have been over the weight limit for a single item of luggage. (That one, too, made it through about six moves before I just couldn’t bear to lug it around anymore.)

Dictionaries can be amazing treasure troves of words and meanings and nuances, leading to a deeper understanding and a confidence that, at any particular moment, you are using the absolutely perfect word. Or they can be, well, dictionaries, that beat down the spirit of the curious reader with their dull, unsatisfying, workman-like definitions.

This article, “You’re Using the Wrong Dictionary” by James Somers, made the rounds back in May, but I recently reread it after forwarding it to a colleague. My two-paragraph description won’t convince you that you owe it to yourself to use a good dictionary, but this post should. And, even better, it tells you how to install a good dictionary on all your devices. I did, and I am so much happier.