Knowing Your Students Inside Out!

Social-Emotional Learning

Social-emotional learning is the ability to recognize and manages one's own emotions, solve problems, and build positive relationships with others. In the classroom, this looks like daily check-ins, reflections through art and writing, collaborating, sharing, and understanding, and community building games and activities. The teacher should use student-centered discipline practices, be supportive and inviting, set high and attainable expectations, and encourage responsible decisions. 

Activity Examples:

• Dail Check-ins: This could be written, a wall-chart, or even a google survey.
• Calm Down Corner: Choose a secluded area, add visual supports, and refocusing activities (breathing exercises, stuffed animals, coloring book, journals, calming bottles)
• Calming Bottles: This is a great bonding activity for the entire class! All you need are bottles of some sort and things to fill them with!
• Morning Meetings: This can include greetings, sharing, activities, GoNoodle, and routine rundowns. 

Conscious Discipline

Conscious discipline gets rid of reward and punishment. This type of discipline allows teachers to address the emotional and social issues of their students. Instead, it includes empathy, composure, choices, positive intent, consequences, composure, assertiveness, and encouragement. An example of this being used within the classroom is the "Time Machine" method. To begin this method, have students "roll back time" by rolling their hands and wish each other well to set positive intent. Then, ask the students if they are willing to go back and solve the problem at hand. Have them take some calmin breaths and use conflict resolution sentence starters to begin the process of solving the problem. 

Apps:

• Superbetter- sets goals, uses games to progress healthy behavior
• Smiling Mind- guided meditation
• Peekapak- four-week curriculum to help build self-regulation and empath
• Avokiddo- learn essential emotional skills through dressing and taking care of characters

Seriously Awesome Student Led Conferences & Digital Portfolios

Student-led conferences are a great way for students to showcase their work, take responsibility for their own learning, and lead their own learning. Autonomy is key. This is very different than a teacher-led conference. In this situation, the teacher is only the facilitator and the students are the leaders. It is student-centered and student lead. Students are able to lead discussions, be in their own process, pick out and prepare the materials to be shown, and are able to reflect on their own work. The teacher is there to facilitate, mediate, provided support if it is needed, provide expectations for the meeting, and may even provide a script for the student if needed. Parents are able to listen, engage, encourage, and ask their child questions.
In order to prepare for this, teachers need to keep students' work samples, give the student autonomy to choose what they want to include, structure the work for the student, and LET GO!
What is I have an ELL family?? Well, I'm glad you asked! If the teacher can have a translator present, that would be great! There are also translating apps, such as Google Translate that could be used. The teacher should also try to incorporate the diversity in your classroom and encourage the use of native language!

Digital Portfolios are a collection of student performance and assessments over time in the digital form. This should be standards-based and show significant student engagement. Work that is showcased is chosen by the student and should include the students' reflections and comprehension.

Apps to use:

• Artsonia Kids Art Museum - empowers students to exhibit their work
• WeLearnedIt - allows students to showcase, reflect, and comment on student work
• Sesame - Custumizable rubric creation

Benefits of Digital Portfolios:

• Great way to express and show student growth over time and provides a record of their educational career.
• Gives teachers the opportunity to see students' learning and areas of improvement.
• Gives students an audience! 

ACTIVE Learning

An instructional method that helps to engage students in the learning process is active learning! Active learning gives students the opportunity to be active participants in their own learning process and become metacongnitive. Active learning increases students' involvement, engagement, critical thinking, independent thinking, and creative thinking. It also increases students' collaboration with
one another and their motivation and performance.

When Should I Use Active Learning Strategies?

• When students work in pairs or small groups
• When in need of pre-assessment data
• When accessing prior knowledge
• To discover misconceptions and misunderstandings
• To set a purpose
• To check for understanding
• To build movement

Examples:

Biopoems - This acvtivity helps students make a personal connection with characters or concepts, helps to increase creative thinking, and gives the students an opportunity to use descriptive language. 

Guidlines for each line:

1. First Name
2. 3 or 4 adjectives that describe the person/object
3. Important relationships
4. 2 or 3 things, people, or ideas that the person or object leved, was attracted to or interested in
5. 3 feelings that the person/object experienced
6. 3 fears the person/object experienced
7. Accomplishments
8. 2 or 3 places, people, or experiences, the person wanted to see or wanted to have
9. His or her residence
10. Last Name

Think, Pair, Share - This activity helps to build wait time, increase participation, check for understanding, provides time for the teacher to prepare. 

Process:

1. Ask a question
2. Tell students to think quietly, allow for at least 30 seconds to a minute of think time
3. Tell students to pair up with a partner and discuss their thinking, allow 2-3 minutes

Signal Cards - This activity gives students a chance to express their understanding of something or express that they are in need of more help. Students are given cards to signal this understanding. 

Differentiation is a MUST!

Differentiation is the act of tailoring and modifying inctruction based on the needs of individual students. By differentiating your lessons, your are giving students from all walks of life and with all differnt learning abilities the best chance to learn and succeed.

Lower-level Students
Students with lower academic abilities often need more supports for their prior skills to help build a firm and solid foundation for any future learning. They need hands-on activites and a diversity of learning modes. They may not also be able to show their understanding through standard tests or assessments, sometimes they may need different forms of assessment ot trully show what htye know and are capable of doing. These students most likely already feel discourage because of their academic struggles, it is our job as teachers to constantly and continuously encourage them and help them feel valued within our classroom.

Strategies:

• Anchor charts
• Visuals
• Video Modeling
• Demonstrate think alouds and the thinking process
• Lists
• Sensory Activites
• Google Doc Collaboration
• FlipGrid
• SeeSaw
• Limited answer choices
• Verbal Exams
• Drawings instead of writings
• One-on-one meetings
• Classroom Jobs

Average Level Students

These are students who are in the middle of the spectrum, not overachieving, but not necessarily underachieving, just meeting the standard right where its at. These students usually need reinforcment of strategies and need misconceptions to be corrected. They tend to be more successful with specific strategies. These students often can show understanding in many ways. Sadly, these student get overlooked the most because they do not need extra help, nor do they need extra challenge. 

Higher-level Students

These students are the ones that are not only meeting the standard, but are exceeding it. They need more challenge and may want to use different strategies than what has been taught. The can show their understanding in many ways that demonstrates their strengths. Many times these students get bored in the classroom from a lack of challenge. 

Success of English Language Learners

English language learners (ELL) are students that are unable or have trouble communicating or leaning in English. Most of the time these students come from non-English speaking homes or environments. These students usually need specialized or modified instruction for both the English language itself, but also for their academic courses.

Relationships and Responsiveness 
Build personal connection! Know your students! Do they have pets, play sports, like superheros? Bring these personal interests into your lessons. Also, bring their culture into your lessons and activites. These little things make a huge difference to your students.

Incorporate their native language and cultures by using tools, such as Google Translate to enhance communication. Use YouTube to show the class aspects of their culture to help build a family among your class. Find multi-cultural and diverse books to help represent their culture and other cultures in the classroom or community.

Time To Process
Increase you wait time by 3-5 seconds! Allow time for the student to process what you are asking, what they are thinking, and what their answer will be. When teaching, speak slowly. Be consistent with what you say and how you say it. These strategies will help to increase the students participation in the classroom!

Fair is NOT Equal
Every single one of your students are different. Even if you have mutltiple ELL students, they are not the same and will not need the same teaching styles and modes of learning. Offer support for your students that vary from student to student. Create lessons to be FAIR not equal. Equal is giving every student the same thing. Be fair by giving every student what they need to be succesful.

CoDiNg & rObOtIcS

Helpful Tips

• Let students explore! Give the time to play with it and come up with their own codes.
• Let students be the teacher! Let the students learn own their own and teach YOU!
• Encourage failure! Let students know that this classroom is a safe environment for them to try, fail, and try again!
• Coding and robotics is NOT only for science!!!

Coding with Bee Bots:

Math:

• Adding & Subtracting: have the students roll two dice, add or subtract, code the bot to go to the sum. 
• Mapping: code locational coordinaates to navigate a map.
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• Even & odd numbers: have students roll the die, if they get an even number they code the bot to go up the ladder, if they get an odd number they code the bot to go down the ladder. 
• Colors & Shapes: code the bot to go to certain colors and/or shapes.

Literacy:

• Spelling words: one student draws a card and the other spells the word on the card using the bot to move from letter to letter.
• Short stories: prepared drawings on the board and have students tell the key events from the story using the bee bot.
• Retell: have students to use the bee bot to retell events from a story
• Letters and Sounds: have students to identify letters and sounds useing the bee bot. 

Super Assessments for Super Teachers

Assessments
Assessments are the key component of learning. When students can see how they are doing, they will be able to see what they are able to understand. Assessments help to motivate studets by setting goals and being able to see when they achive those goals.

Formal and Informal Assessment
Informal assessment is catagorized as non-standardized and is not taken for a grade. This type of assessment is formative, meaning it is taken throughout the learning process and is used as a way for the teacher to further specifiy their instruction so that it is meeting students' needs throughout the process. This type of assessment is individualized to the student and is used to motivate student learning.
Examples:

• Think-Pair-Share
• Discussions
• Journal entries
• Kahoot!
• Hand signals
• 4 Corners
• Stop/Go sticks, cards, or cups

Formal assessment, on the other hand, is standardized, structured, and taken for a grade. This type of assessment is taken after the learning process. For example, an end of unit test of end of semester comprehensive exam. This assessment is testing the students knowledge and comprhension of the skills that have been taught to show what they know.
Examples:

• End of chapter/unit tests
• Midterms/Finals
• Projects 
• Presentations
• Term Papers

Assessment Tools:

• Kahoot!
• Prodigy
• educreations
• FlipGrid
• goformative.com