Teaching With the Instructional Cha-Chas - LeAnn Nickersen

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(2001) seminal research revealing that the brain responds to enriching environments. She was the first to prove that the brain can change and improve with experience. She examined some of Albert Einstein’s brain, where she found an abundant amount of support cell—more than average. And her research with rats that showed novel toys (rotating the type of toys), companions, healthy food, space in a cage, and other factors changed the anatomy of the brain. Her research concludes that impoverished environments can lower capacity to learn, while enriched environments increase plasticity, learning, and memory. The bottom line is that much research, the past and present, supports how important environment is. (There is even an ongoing conflict regarding whether we can grow new brain cells, known as neurogenesis in the hippocampus. The implications are important.)

      This book will explore cognitive and behavioral sciences as well as other evidence-based research that help us determine how to reach students more efficiently and effectively. This scientific basis is our book’s foundation along with the formative assessment process and

      differentiation efficacy—which back the multitude of strategies we offer.

      The formative assessment process says the following (Schimmer, 2018).

      • Learning never ends. It is an iterative process.

      • Assessment is for evaluating information and moving students forward faster with their learning. It allows the teacher and student to partner in the process of closing the gap between the student’s current work or thinking and the desired learning.

      • Teachers and administrators don’t discipline students for not learning something by a certain date but rather, they partner with them to update the growth toward the standards.

      • The latest assessment is the most accurate—no matter what quarter.

      Learning is all about students reaching the learning target, goal, outcome, or objective in an engaged, enjoyable manner. Learning is a rough draft and can be quite sloppy at times. This is to be expected, and formative assessment is part of it.

      Differentiation and the formative assessment process go hand in hand. You can’t separate them. They have the same goals for student learning, and they mirror our goals for students as well.

      • We want students to joyfully learn the curriculum and more.

      • We want students to be active learners with opportunities to make the content more meaningful and connected to their lives and their world.

      • We want students to be independent thinkers, so they can use powerful strategies that allow them to learn faster and more efficiently.

      • We want to partner with our students to guide, facilitate, help, support, and cheer them on to do their very best thinking daily.

      • We want students to take on the responsibility of monitoring their own learning, reflecting on it, and determining next best steps with our guidance, teaching, and facilitation.

      • We want students to be prepared for life outside the classroom and to be productive citizens who help lead us successfully into the future.

      To that end, we’ve included dozens of strategies so K–8 teachers around the world could see effective instruction and differentiation as doable and as a must do. You will see templates filled in as examples throughout the book. Elsewhere in the book, and online at go.SolutionTree.com/instruction, you can access blank versions of these templates. Here, teachers see the brain-based evidence that proves that using daily formative assessment and differentiation is not a choice, but rather a necessity. As teachers, we put this process into play in our own classrooms with great success, and as educators and consultants, we saw teachers’ mindsets and toolkits, as well as students’ engagement and achievement, change throughout the years we coached. This book is a mindset changer. Teaching With the Instructional Cha-Chas: Four Steps to Make Learning Stick will introduce four steps into your instruction: (1) chunking, (2) chewing, (3) checking, and (4) changing. Content mastery and greater student achievement will result.

      Each strategy in chapter 2 through chapter 6 includes the grouping method (whole group, small groups, partners, or individual), directions, an example or template (or both), simple suggestions for differentiation (ways you can change the lesson by bumping it up for advanced students, breaking it down to scaffold for learners who are struggling, and specializing it for some of the other challenges you face in your classroom), and how to incorporate technology (including links to useful websites and apps). Because websites frequently change, you can visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction for a list of current websites.

      Every strategy we included addresses a variety of learning preferences, and literacy components (reading, writing, listening, and speaking). While you won’t see those features specifically called out, you can use the strategies in confidence knowing they are there. Also, be aware that chapter 7 addresses more purposeful differentiation strategies.

      You shouldn’t give the strategies independently as worksheets, but rather use them as thinking and discussion templates, and as part of the gradual release of responsibility model (Fisher & Frey, 2015; Pearson & Gallagher, 1983), which requires the teacher to model each strategy (I do), provide opportunities for guided practice (we do), and small-group or partner practice (two do) before expecting students to demonstrate the strategy independently (you do).

      Chapters 4 and 5 talk more about this model, but table I.1 shows how our four-step instructional cha-chas cycle correlates with Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey’s (2008) gradual release of responsibility. While most lessons follow the gradual release in the order here, a teacher may choose to change this. For example, a lesson might start with a you do that has a question to activate prior knowledge. Either way, the goal in each lesson is to have all four types of release, done gradually and based on the checkpoints and data received from those checkpoints.

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      Source: Adapted from Fisher & Frey, 2008.

      During each phase of the gradual release of responsibility, as the students chew on the content, you will check their understanding and change instruction as you need to. We’ll go into this in more detail in chapters 6 and 7 (page 117 and 159, respectively).

      We firmly believe this book will enhance your teaching in many ways. You will enjoy the strategies that are in line with high-quality standards. They are rigorous, highly engaging, and easy to implement with any topic in grades K–8. They are not suppositions. They have and are producing results in classrooms across the world.

      Because we know that dancers never step on stage without choreographing their routine and effective teachers never step into a classroom without first choreographing their instruction, we’ve split the book into two parts, the first of which guides your planning. The second guides your step-by-step instruction implementation.

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