Have you ever found your class period stretched too thin because you squeezed in too much? Have you ever tried a new activity meant to engage your students and then resented it when there was little impact on their growth?
If you answered “Yes” (or a hearty “Heck, Yes!”) to any of these, you’re like me—and so many other educators I work with—who long to hush the hustle in their classrooms.
In his best-selling book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Greg McKeown argues that throughout their lives and careers, most people make a millimeter of progress in a million directions.
They try to make it all happen.
I argue that teachers are leaders of this pack.
We hear about a new idea on Twitter, from a colleague, or at a conference, and we feel obligated to implement it into our classroom.
Maybe it’s our Type-A strive for perfectionism or the “supposed to” shame of comparison, either way, we spread our energy too thin when we do this and lessen our impact on student growth.
He urges readers to “give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all [and] make your highest contribution towards the things that really matter”
Now, McKeown’s book focuses namely on the business world, but we can pair his call to action with the work of Mike Schmoker, one of my favorite ed-gurus. In his book, Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning, Schmoker makes the same plea:
“If we choose to take just a few well-known, straightforward actions, in every subject area,” focusing on the things that really matter, “we can make swift, dramatic improvements in schools.”
Rather than hustle after every method of engagement and opportunity for student growth, we should focus on what is absolutely essential and ignore the rest.
As a part of my consulting workshops, I ask teachers across content areas to narrow their content down and list the absolute essentials (i.e. what they believe students need to excel in their course and beyond). Without surprise, the essential mission of an English Language Arts class is always the same. Even those that haven’t read Focus agree:
“Every student needs to spend hundreds of hours actually reading, writing, and speaking for intellectual purposes.”
The instructional time in an English class varies depending on the unit, but regardless of the overall study, students should be doing the following three essentials every day.
1. Read
Every day, my class starts with a book talk and at least ten minutes of independent reading.
Students either read their choice novels, book club selections, or whole-class texts, depending on the season we happen to be in at that time. I basically follow Kelly Gallagher’s 20-80 model balancing shared with choice texts. {Read more about my call for balance here.}
My students share four core texts throughout the year (The Other Wes Moore, Othello, The Great Gatsby, and To Kill a Mockingbird). They are also “challenged” to read 20 choice novels including a WWII book club text.
Students are held accountable for this reading through reading conferences, analysis essays, quick writes/quizzes, tests, and Kittle’s Reading Ladder assignment.
2. Speak (+ Listen)
After independent reading, there is always mini-lesson where students practice speaking and listening skills.
In the ELA classroom, dialogue marries our separate roles as readers and writers. When we analyze writers’ craft and mentor texts with others, we create a transfer from simply noticing to a practice of emulation.
In these mini-lessons, we primarily use Think-Pair-Shares to discuss a mentor text because—well why not!?—T-P-S is essentialism at its finest. It is a powerhouse strategy that has such major impact with little effort.
As a whole-class, we practice Make it Stick strategies using our Latin word chunks or Doug Stark’s mechanics lessons.
Aside from the mini-lesson, if students are reading…
A) choice books,
I confer with them individually, and they discuss what they’re reading in Book Waterfalls as a class.
B) book club texts,
they create their own discussion questions or use a stack of Table Topic cards to ignite the student-led conversations.
C) a whole-class text,
we use a Socratic Seminar format or participate in a Pop-Up debate.
3. Write
Students are always somewhere within the workshop model: I may be modeling some particular skill; we could be studying mentor texts; or they might be in the thick of composition.
Sometimes students are working on free writes or independent writing invitations {I love Gallagher’s prompts in Write Like This}.
Other times, they’re working on more structured process-written essays, like their Gatsby literary analyses or “Is the USA Still a Land of Opportunity?” rhetorical analyses.
Both assignments stem from complex shared texts that require rigorous contemplation.
If I only used our reading conferences or quick quizzes to measure students’ comprehension, I’d find a major gap. Donna Santman addressed this so well at NCTE this past fall when she spoke with Kittle and Gallagher. She said,
“We get mad at students for not thinking deeply when they read, but mostly we just grunt along the way. We think when we write.”
In other words, it is essential that students write about what they read in order to fully comprehend the material.
To spin that on the flip side, we can see that when we’re filling our lesson plan with the non-essentials, students aren’t actually thinking deeply.
Whether it’s standardized test prep or “language arts and crafts,” we need to reject those activities that get in the way of authentic reading, speaking, and writing.
McKeown says, “Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done.”
We have to make trade-offs for what really matters.
And that’s the question I have for you:
Your Turn . . .
When you get down to it, what do students need to flourish in your course and beyond, and what can you get rid of?
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