structures,+routines,+...+learning

What does it look like when students are doing the work of thinking? The work of learning? The work of Achieving? The work of becoming better human beings?

What happens inside classrooms is the most intriguing, grueling, exhilarating, life giving, energy sapping, heart breaking, joy filled, complex, and intellectually demanding work in the world. In order to study what happens inside, we need classrooms with wide-open doors where we can gather together and listen closely to the words of students and their teachers. We must study the things that happened between the inputs and the outputs.

Graves says it is the everyday teaching that matters: the daily systems, structures, routines, and rituals that help children become better readers, writers, problem solvers and thinkers. Truly better adults we need to engage in and lead our world. These are classrooms you want to linger in because students are doing the work of learning. To create this culture certain things must be in place: structures, routines, rituals, and systems

Structure: Something arranged in a definite pattern of organization Routine: A regular course of procedure; habitual performance; ordinary Ritual: A system of rites; a ceremonial act customarily repeated.
 * Structure class time…. Bulk of time to learning
 * Chunks… three parts
 * Teaching as listen… part of the structure and allocating time accordingly
 * A daily routine that is at the core of practice; regular order of events where students are doing the work.
 * Ordinary way teachers make time to listen
 * Essential for both teacher and student
 * Daily 15 minutes to build what knowledge and how… it should be learned.
 * Informs planning for next day.
 * Setting up predictable… so great things happen
 * Way kids know and feel comfortable with what to expect
 * Kids feel secure frees up brain space for learning. No anxious questioning…
 * Ceremony is at the heart… of a ritual
 * Filled with predictable patterns
 * Emotional significance
 * Celebrating and labeling student thinking
 * Conscious sense of the importance of the ritual…. Makes it work
 * Cant fake it…. Have to do it

System: a regularly interacting interdependent group of items forming a unified whole; serving common purpose.
 * All three parts… read write talk… mini lesson, worktime, debrief…
 * Cycle, of assessment, planning and instruction…