Student-Centered Routines
Change Package: Student-Centered Routines
Impact on Teaching
Building a learning community takes more than filling a room with students and a teacher and asking the class to meet the learning goals set forth by a particular curriculum or set of guiding standards. For classrooms to work as communities, teachers set the expectation from the beginning of the school year that teachers and students are co-owners of the learning that takes place daily. In classroom communities, students trust each other and the teacher and expect to work together in different ways and with different peers to make sense of curricular materials. Students know that the teacher isn’t there to fill students’ heads with correct answers or to impart his or her wisdom, but to be a facilitator and guide of the learning taking place. This is true for both in-person learning and learning that takes place online. Establishing a trusted learning community is essential for student-center routines to take hold.
Impact on Students
Through exit tickets, students indicated that student-centered routines have helped them to both understand texts and be successful with high-level comprehension, ananlysis and, interpretive tasks. Teachers have noticed that when utilizing student-centered routines, "[Students] push each other to think, and not just think of the very first surface level idea that they come up with…. They think more thematically....They’re thinking beyond the text essentially.”
How To
Planning
As you begin to plan the sequence of student-centered routines, it's important to note that there are a couple of critical components necessary for students to find the routines useful. The first is a relevant and engaging text that has content to talk about. If there is nothing to work with, students will quickly see that there really isn't much to write or talk about. The second is an open-ended, text-based question that invites students to do the heavy lifting. These types of questions invite students to wrestle with the ideas in a text, even at the comprehension level, and provide space for students to make sense of content, write about the content, talk about the content, and revise their thinking when necessary.
Additionally, students benefit from having a task sheet to guide their engagement in routines. When we say task sheet, we don’t mean a worksheet that asks students to fill in a correct answer. A task sheet provides students with the critical information they need to successfully complete the task and is a great tool for preventing the inevitable “What are we doing again?” from students.
The sequence of student-centered routines should include:
A high-level, open-ended, text-based question that asks students to make sense of the big ideas in the text
Opportunities for students to write about the text informally through quick-writes
Opportunities for students to discuss their ideas with their peers
Opportunities to metacognitively reflect on how their thinking about the text changed through talking and writing
Student-centered task sheets should:
Help students understand the purpose for the work that they will be doing
Lay out the steps in the task
Provide some insight into how to complete new activities or skills, such as providing tips for completing a quick write if that is new for students
The sequence of student-centered routines shouldn't be static - they should vary based on the text and the task. For example, there might be times that students can indepdendently read and complete a quick write before sharing with a partner. Other texts might require students to read independently, stopping to answer some smaller text-based questions along the way, and then work with a partner to put those responses to the smaller questions together to develop a quick write in response to a question that helps students develop an understanding of the text as a whole.