Teaching Thought #65

Teacherscribe's Teaching Thought #65

Turn pits into peaks.  

In Chip and Dan Heath’s book, The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact, the authors focus on two interesting types of moments we all have.

The last teaching thought, focused on how we can reframe our perspectives on our classes to view what kind of ‘pits’ we have.  Remember, a ‘pit’ is a difficult moment, something we don’t look forward to, something that is a serious problem.

An example from my room – absences.  Any time a student misses a class period, it is not just an inconvenience to me, but it’s a pain in that ass.  I have to find a way to re-teach the student what they missed that day in class. Moreover, to look at the ‘pit’ from the student’s perspective, now they have ‘make up’ work to add to all their other work.

Due to technology, I try to turn this pit into a peak.  One way I do this – and I’ve been doing this for years now – is to give out my cell number.  Students can text me 24/7. This way if a student is going to be gone, they can text me as soon as they learn of this, and I can begin filling them in on what they are going to be missing.  

Usually, again, thanks to technology, I can often share the very things we are doing in class with them.  So if we are going to be reading “The Yellow Wallpaper” and filling out reader response starters on it, I can share a link to a free pdf of the story on line and then also share the reader response starters via Drive with the student.  

The next day in class is where we always listen to “The Yellow Wallpaper” again via audiobook.  I have students list all the new things they ‘see’ or realize the second time through the story.  Finally, I choose one student to help me re-enact the final scene in the story.

If a student misses this day, again they can text me to let me know and I can give them immediate information on how to stay caught up with what is going on.  I can send them a link to the audio version of the story and instructions to mark down new things they realize the second time through. And whenever I have my student ‘creep’ about the room, re-enacting the final scene in the story, I have students film it and upload it to social media, so I can refer the absent student to those areas to see the actual final scene.

In this way, I try to transform a pit into a peak.

Think about using technology to do the same thing in your class.