Today’s post is a guest post from Jeremy Chiappeta, Executive Director at Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy. Jeremy took us up on the challenge set by my daughter in her viral post to shadow students in order to feel their experience of school.
Every day I get to work right before our scholars, but on January 26, 2015 things felt a little different. Inspired by the original blog post, I was participating in a “scholar shadow day,” and my nerves had me popping out of my skin, kind of like the way I was the morning of my first day of my first year of teaching.
As the Executive Director and co-founder at Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy I really had no reason to be nervous. My total job for the day was to simply follow around “Julian” – to truly experience what he experienced. My bosses – the board of directors – weren’t going to be there, so it’s not like I could really screw anything up so badly that I would get fired. But, I was still an emotional mess.
For the past six years I have spent crazy hours working and building our school network. What if all of this hard work was for naught? What if I hated what I saw and felt? What if the BVP teachers, the very same teachers that I tell other people are “good enough for my own children,” prove not to be very good? Worse, what if my experience made me believe that our scholars were miserable at school? As the buses unloaded, I really started to wonder if this project was the right thing to do….
Almost instantly, my mind shifted from nervousness to focus. I worked hard to notice every detail of what Julian did throughout the day. While many minor details throughout the day were, in fact, remarkable (e.g. the classroom was surprisingly cold), ultimately much of the day was a blur: reading, writing, math, science lab, health, lunch, breakfast, break…without my notes I wouldn’t even be able to remember the order of the day.
It was not until later that evening after putting my own kids to bed that I was able to review my notes and allow my thoughts to coalesce. Not surprisingly, some of my take-aways were similar to those in the original blog, while others were more unique to my experience.
Here are my two biggest take-aways:
First, like the original post, I declare that scholars must get up and MOVE! As a lover of all things data, I decided to wear a Fit-bit to track my movement (the same as Julian’s movement) for the day. The recommended target is 10,000 steps per day. Based on the blog, I predicted it would be far less and set the Las Vegas over/under at 4,700 steps. Eight-and-a-half hours later, the under wins! Julio and I, from 7:45-4:15, only made about 1,400 steps. And yes, it’s amazing how tiring sitting can be…
Second, personal connections matter. Connections lead to focus. Connections lead to happiness. Connections lead to learning. Throughout Julian’s day (and not just Julian: I tracked this for several of his peers), teachers checked in with him. From small taps on the shoulder to ensure focus, to quarterback crouches to look over his work, I counted seventeen different occasions teachers made sure Julian was engaged in what he was supposed to do. While I didn’t count every interaction with every scholar, Julian was not alone, and his great teachers were checking in all over the place, and the scholars reacted. Julian had no choice but to feel attention, push, and love.
A few weeks later, a team of 14 members of our network support team came together to share our experiences with shadow day. We saw lots of things, but the two giant take-aways above definitely resonated. Many other projects also grew out of our share-out (including white-boarding our elementary class schedule and re-examining new teacher support practices).
All of us were invigorated by what we saw and experienced, and are as urgent as ever to improve our program.
Ultimately, a hat-tip to Grant for sharing this blog and to Kim Marshall for writing about it in his weekly memo. We are grateful and getting better because of it!
As the Executive Director and co-founder at Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy I really had no reason to be nervous. My total job for the day was to simply follow around “Julian” – to truly experience what he experienced. My bosses – the board of directors – weren’t going to be there, so it’s not like I could really screw anything up so badly that I would get fired. But, I was still an emotional mess.
For the past six years I have spent crazy hours working and building our school network. What if all of this hard work was for naught? What if I hated what I saw and felt? What if the BVP teachers, the very same teachers that I tell other people are “good enough for my own children,” prove not to be very good? Worse, what if my experience made me believe that our scholars were miserable at school? As the buses unloaded, I really started to wonder if this project was the right thing to do….
Almost instantly, my mind shifted from nervousness to focus. I worked hard to notice every detail of what Julian did throughout the day. While many minor details throughout the day were, in fact, remarkable (e.g. the classroom was surprisingly cold), ultimately much of the day was a blur: reading, writing, math, science lab, health, lunch, breakfast, break…without my notes I wouldn’t even be able to remember the order of the day.
It was not until later that evening after putting my own kids to bed that I was able to review my notes and allow my thoughts to coalesce. Not surprisingly, some of my take-aways were similar to those in the original blog, while others were more unique to my experience.
Here are my two biggest take-aways:
First, like the original post, I declare that scholars must get up and MOVE! As a lover of all things data, I decided to wear a Fit-bit to track my movement (the same as Julian’s movement) for the day. The recommended target is 10,000 steps per day. Based on the blog, I predicted it would be far less and set the Las Vegas over/under at 4,700 steps. Eight-and-a-half hours later, the under wins! Julio and I, from 7:45-4:15, only made about 1,400 steps. And yes, it’s amazing how tiring sitting can be…
Second, personal connections matter. Connections lead to focus. Connections lead to happiness. Connections lead to learning. Throughout Julian’s day (and not just Julian: I tracked this for several of his peers), teachers checked in with him. From small taps on the shoulder to ensure focus, to quarterback crouches to look over his work, I counted seventeen different occasions teachers made sure Julian was engaged in what he was supposed to do. While I didn’t count every interaction with every scholar, Julian was not alone, and his great teachers were checking in all over the place, and the scholars reacted. Julian had no choice but to feel attention, push, and love.
A few weeks later, a team of 14 members of our network support team came together to share our experiences with shadow day. We saw lots of things, but the two giant take-aways above definitely resonated. Many other projects also grew out of our share-out (including white-boarding our elementary class schedule and re-examining new teacher support practices).
All of us were invigorated by what we saw and experienced, and are as urgent as ever to improve our program.
Ultimately, a hat-tip to Grant for sharing this blog and to Kim Marshall for writing about it in his weekly memo. We are grateful and getting better because of it!
14 Responses
I think we should call these student “moccasin” days and put a call out to gather as many as possible to help enlighten teachers. Who’s game??
Love the title!!
I love this. I always tell the pre service teachers I have the pleasure to supervise that shadowing their class for the day, gives them insight into so many parts of their students day.We always need to connect with our students and to remember what it is like to be a student, to live a day in their shoes.
Great – I love how you tracked your steps. I did a similar shadow a few months back, inspired by that same post. I appreciated a teacher who worked activities into the lesson that made students get up and move around. A couple other teachers also put in breaks suggesting students get up and move, but many students just sat through it. That mandatory physical activity made a big difference.
I had some other take aways from this too, specific to my school, and I think more teachers should give this a try and share their findings with their colleagues.
About four years ago I started teacher training at our private school in Istanbul. Developmental observations are a critical part of a great institution. As I was preparing a second lesson observation form to help teachers understand they could be noticing while observing their peers, I also made a third form, a student observation form. At the time my director couldn’t understand the purpose of observing a student and just getting teachers to observe each other was a mountain to climb as it was so it never panned out. , But my take is making student observation part of every new teacher’s training, as well as peer, classroom observation. The checklist, as far as I recall, was for how actively involved the student was, how many opportunities he had to share his thoughts, how much time he was on task, opportunities to get out of his seat -movement and so on. The aim was to raise teacher awareness by focusing attention on just one or two students watching what they are doing for 40 long minutes, so that they develop their skills in a way that promotes better engaged learning for all students and respects their need for movement, energizers, varitey, peer work, to not accept that is it ok to have some students just sit there inactive, and that there is a lot that they can do about it. All teachers, no matter what level of expertise can appreciate a critical friend. The next step is helping teachers use the results by thinking, ” How can I make it happen,” from their mindset of “It can’t happen because…”
I wanted teachers to live through how the student spends his time, to feel the long 40 minutes of student reality. It can be surprising, painful and sad.
The beauty of your approach is that it focuses on the experience of the learners and thus gets us away from thinking only about the teaching and teacher talk. This is something that should be routinely done as part of walk-thus, learning walks, as well as supervision.
Reblogged this on How can I control my class? and commented:
What’s it like to be a high school student today? Do they get enough movement to keep them awake? Here’s a blog from Jeremy Chiappeta, who “walked a mile in their shoes.” Fitbit wouldn’t be happy to be a student today!
I have enjoyed reading about the shadowing and how sitting still, thus numbing one part of the body is supposed to stimulate another part.
I look forward to more stories noting how a little movement from time to time promotes focus. I shall share the insights with my student teachers. I regret not being explicit about this important insight earlier in my career, even if I unconsciously have done some of this in my classes.
A simple fact I read when I first started teaching-, probably in brain-based learning-made an impact on my teaching from then on. The spinal cord is connected to the brain stem. We all know this fact but I somehow had viewed the brain as a separate organ! It makes perfect sense that learning and physical movement work together. Active learning.
Interesting that there’s no discussion of the pedagogical choices Julian experienced other than sitting still. As someone who needs to walk and move to think, I understand the importance of movement. But as someone who can also be absolutely riveted and stilled by exciting learning and true intellectual engagement, I think incorporating more movement is a start but the real work is ensuring that the rest of how we teaches engages students’ minds as fiercely and fully as moving engages their bodies.
I fully agree. I think ‘engagement’ is poorly understood by many teachers – in part because far too many teachers never had an intellectually riveting education themselves and so extrinsic motivation becomes the way they too often think. I have conducted Socratic Seminars that lasted 90 minutes and not one kid looked or acted bored; same is true in a good lab (though there there is some movement, too). In my way of looking at it, any education for true understanding as opposed to coverage is really interesting.
Active means active thinking as opposed to passive by way of engagement; moving is also active but bodywise. Even when they are highly engaged I need to purposely plan and incorporate an added element in because it isn’t naturally in the forefront of my mind.
This just in. Obviously.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/22/kids-adhd-treatment_n_7110910.html