Educators design meaningful learning experiences to enrich, support, and engage learners by using their time and space intentionally.
Time and space are the foundation upon which we build systems, routines, and procedures that enable us to feel safe. Once we know the boundaries and stay within them, we are more willing to take risks, innovate, and create.
Here are a few ideas for how to design a meaningful morning for you and your students, no matter the circumstances or constantly changing directives. Getting the day started on the right foot sets the course for a smooth and predictable routine. Check back for an additional post on designing the rest of the day.
Part 1: Design the Morning Time
Use Time to Design Meaningful Learning Experiences
When students arrive, we greet them by name and they enter the room knowing they belong and have responsibilities. There are no surprises and they aren’t waiting for you to tell them what to do. A task list is visible to set students up for success.
Meaningful morning experiences include self-awareness and self-regulation tasks, community and citizenship tasks, and mindset and metacognition tasks.
Every moment of the day is precious and carries with it a sense of urgency. A sense of urgency reinforces the message that our time is spent on purpose. And don’t forget that laughter and play can and should be a part of every day.
Set a timer for all tasks, and display it for students to see as well. Ask the students how much time they think they will need for the tasks at hand, then negotiate based on reality. A student timekeeper will be one of the most important jobs you give out, especially at the beginning of the year.
Self Awareness and Self Regulation Tasks
Use Light-Hearted SEL Check-Ins to Design Meaningful Learning Experiences
This Feels Like: Students are welcomed with a sense of belonging and ownership in the space, knowing being a learner is more important than doing the learning. Students know where to put their belongings and when to use them. They know what to expect and they have a say in how some decisions will be made throughout the process.
This looks like: Music playing in the background when students arrive creates a sense of well-being. There is a Social Emotional Check In available to encourage students to reflect on how they feel and how they can regulate those feelings ( Moods of Batman Meme.) There is a familiar schedule which is reviewed each day, with any deviations being clearly defined. Student questions are answered and students have smiled at least once before the learning day begins.
Community and Citizenship Tasks
Use Checklists to Design Meaningful Learning Experiences
Feels like: Having a sense of responsibility means being trusted and relied upon for an important task.
Looks like: Students have a job that is an important part of the success of the community and knows how and when to perform it. Class discussion is a regular part of every day, and all students will be held accountable for the unique perspective they bring. This also includes digital citizenship and how we participate online.
Mindset and Metacognition Tasks
Feels Like: Having a sense of purpose in the time spent on tasks, feeling challenged but not anxious in the material, engaged in curiousity and exploration in possibility and relevance.
Looks Like: A timer is running for all tasks, student work is gradually increasing in complexity, the teacher is listening and conferring, students are set up for success with work that connects and reinforces previous learning. Students are given thinking strategies to use when tackling challenging materials. Students use the learning space as a resource.
Designing the Rest of the Day
Use Time to Create Meaningful Learning Experiences
When you take the time to set up the environment, the environment will pay you back with time.
All of these morning tasks take 30 minutes or less once the school year is well underway. At the beginning of the year, these tasks can take much longer. Remember to put in the initial investment with time, and the space will take over after.
Everyone becomes more efficient when they know what to expect and how to be successful.
Once your morning tasks are complete, move into the Workshop, which is where students begin to dig into the more creative and innovative part of the day. This is where the real learning experiences happen!
Read Use Space to Design Learning Experiences to discover ideas for the remainder of the school day, including more Workshop ideas, mindfulness, and accountability.
Teaching students to be more self-aware through Metacognition, Mindset and Mindfulness will build them into more self-directed learners. Self-directed learners are more likely to engage and find motivation because they recognize themselves as learners, rather than participants.
Motivation
Motivation, or reasons for taking action, is a little hard to come by these days. Heck, motivation was a little expensive before the pandemic. Nowadays, you better have a whole lot of intrinsic drive saved up and a heaping tablespoon of purpose to push through to the other side. And what about your students? Purpose? Intrinsic motivation?
In my classroom, motivation was a sometimes thing. As in, sometimes my students were intrinsically motivated, and sometimes they were extrinsically motivated. As a professional, I knew it was a big part of my job to move them from extrinsic to intrinsic. Teaching is an art form in this way because this is where your creativity and enthusiasm can be powerful, and contagious.
Compliance
At the end of each day, my students were given 30 minutes of “Your Time.” Everyone understood that most of the day was considered “My Time.” Really, it was communicated this way: “If you will do the things I and other teachers are asking you to do for most of the day, you will be given a fraction of time at the end of the day to do whatever you wish!” The lines between motivation and compliance get a little fuzzy here.
Is that a bargain or what? It worked so well because I could use this last bit of our day to catch the kids who needed some reteaching, or who were just not able to complete something for whatever reasons they had that day. It also saved me from having to threaten to take away their recess time, which ends up working against you in the long run.
Incentives
Aside from the daily time compromise, there were other mostly successful tactics for getting kids to be compliant. Celebrations are an important part of life, and I wholeheartedly believe we should be celebrating our achievements big or small as often as possible. Incentives are pretty effective in the workplace, at home, and yes, at school. If I’m going to be at school every day, you can bet I’m looking for ways to make it more fun, and not everything is inherently fun. The possibility of earning an ice cream and movie party after learning all my math facts is just good stuff.
Of course, we are all finding ways to recreate what we were doing in the classroom before. We are digitizing as much content as possible, and striving for as much collaboration as we can get synchronously and asynchronously. However, engagement continues to be the missing piece. Even for those students who want to please, who will do everything they can to complete the tasks they are asked to complete, and even for the families who value everything their student’s teachers are sending out, the engagement gap threatens to grow at an alarming rate.
The Engagement Gap
As educators, we talk a whole heap about achievement gaps. Have you ever heard of an engagement gap? In the spring of 2016, pre-pandemic, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development published a report with the following profound statement about the purpose of said report.
Because achievement is unlikely to improve if students are not engaged in their education, finding ways to close the engagement gap is an essential goal to ensure that high school seniors graduate well prepared for the rigors of college and careers—and become well rounded, successful, contributing members of society.
Introduction, The Engagement Gap -Spring 2016
This report followed a previous report published in 2014 titled The State of America’s Schools: The Path to Winning Again in Education, where we come to the meat of my argument and the motivation 😉 behind this blog post.
The current focus on standardized testing assumes that all students should have a similar educational experience. We leave little time for students to figure out what they love to do and where their greatest talents lie. We waste time and talent.
Connie Rath, Gallup Education
The Self-Directed Learner
Students need to figure out what they LOVE to do, and WHERE their greatest talents lie. Let’s not waste any more time. Students can become more engaged, more motivated, and more successful, but they need to start with self-awareness.
It’s like the old parable of teaching a man to fish. Shall we continue to hope our students will be motivated to do the things we are asking them, or can we give them the skills to discover who they are, to value their uniqueness, and then to recognize their contribution?
This awesome student friendly rubric from Awordonthird.com identifies ways students can evaluate themselves as they move toward becoming more self-aware and more self-directed.
The 3 Ms: Metacognition, Mindset, and Mindfulness are just three of the many tools that are available for creating more self-awareness. These Ms were the foundation upon which I built my curriculum for each and every school year, and are also what I find to be most valuable as I continue to develop my own sense of self and purpose.
Metacognition
Metacognition is the awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes. I first learned about this concept in a PEBC conference a few years ago. This awesome article from Edutopia explains it as a way to “drive your brain.” When I first teach it to my students, I tell them it is just thinking about your thinking.
Teaching students about their brains, and how to have some control over its processes, is one of the most magical things we can do as educators. When we name and notice what we are doing or thinking, we are gaining self-awareness. I love the PEBC framework for teaching metacognition using thinking strategies. Visualizing, Inferring, and Determining Importance are a reimagining of the same reading and comprehension strategies teachers have been using for years. The captivating part comes when you notice yourself or someone else doing it and name it.
The naming and noticing that comes with teaching these strategies is where we start to uncover the real value in these strategies. When students understand that their brains are already doing these things, they start to see themselves as learners. They might even start to believe that they are capable of learning anything. Well, a teacher can dream, can’t she?
Mindset
Ever since Carol Dweck gave the world her research on Growth vs. Fixed Mindsets, our brains have never been the same. Again, it reminds us that we have the ability to control our thoughts, and maybe even to some extent, the course of our lives.
If this were the case, we would all be living the high life. (Is that still a saying? I live in Colorado, so I’m thinking the meaning of this phrase has changed.) The concept of control is so closely related to the concept of self-directed. When we understand ourselves, we can better organize ourselves. I’m not saying you must be organized to be successful, but I do believe it to be a skill we should all strive to develop in order to better care for ourselves and others.
Big Life Journal has a wonderful resource for teaching your students about growth mindset. Probably one of my favorite parts of teaching growth mindset is the fact that mistakes are critical to learning.
This unit from Angela Watson has several weeks of step by step instructions for teachers and a student journal. I love the videos that were selected for this unit because they include some very well known people who have made tons of mistakes before creating success in their own lives.
Mindfulness
Every day after lunch, my students would come in from recess with loads of complaints and problems. It could take up to 20 minutes of instructional time to resolve these issues. We decided to try something new.
As they entered the classroom, the lights would be low, and soft music would be playing. They could lay on the floor or sit anywhere in the room, but they had to be away from other students. They could doodle or write in their writer’s notebook, but they absolutely could not talk for ten whole minutes.
Here is one of my favorite videos to play on the Smartboard during this time.
We created an anchor chart showing the only reasons anyone could break the silence of that time. Some examples included aliens landing outside our classroom, someone was either bleeding a lot or throwing up, or if bigfoot walked into the room.
My students grew to love and look forward to this tiny bit of silence in the day. This became such a sacred time that they began to ask for it from their other teachers. What an awesome example of a student advocating for themselves and recognizing a need. All for the price of just ten minutes a day.
What are your students looking forward to each day? How are they motivated, and how do they engage in your lessons? I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments.
