I’m a Learning Booster!
“5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1 - Zero,” I call. Kids come running from all corners of the gym and we sit down together. They’ve just finished a round of follow-the-leader as a warm up. They all took turns leading and following; galloping, jogging, skipping and running. Some of them come in breathing hard. “How did that go?” I ask them. I hear “good,” “OK” and see some head nods. “What made it good?” I ask.
Some of their responses:
We worked together?
We took turns.
People were doing what the leader was doing.
Nobody crashed.
I had fun.
I’m learning to take more time for these kinds of conversations with my classes. We are developing a practice of noticing. In between activities or near the end of class we get comfortable with taking stock of what we all just experienced. Sometimes when I interrupt an activity because the plan has gone awry, I share my observations about what I found distressing or frustrating. Students may respond by naming their own frustrations or try to explain what went wrong. These conversations become part and parcel of community and relationship building. We’re getting to know each other: Defining and revisiting boundaries, identifying successes and progress.
In a recent chat with a parent, I realized something I had previously never fully considered. When I asked if she was following the class Seesaw account, she said, yes and her son also enjoys watching the videos. I have largely thought of Seesaw as a teacher-to-parent communication portal. I share videos and pictures from our classes, parents have a look and occasionally leave a comment. How could I have neglected to think of how much kids might like watching themselves alongside their caregivers? The parent went on to describe how her child often took the opportunity to explain the activity and comment on what he found funny in watching himself and his classmates.
Upon hearing that, something clicked. Of course! When we are directly engaged in activity, it’s hard to notice everything that’s happening around us. How interesting life becomes when we can see ourselves from a distance and take in all the details of the surrounding context! Being removed from the action offers space for us to notice things differently, about ourselves and others. Which is precisely what a pause for reflection is designed to do: to create a bit of distance between ourselves and the action.
In my elementary Physical Education classes, one of my goals is to help students build their capacity for active reflection. That means creating breaks in the action. It involves offering a vocabulary to get us started. It means developing lenses through which we can see ourselves. It means pausing to listen to each other.
At the beginning of the year our exchanges are very teacher-directed. While we agree on some basic rules (Stay safe, Be kind, Solve the problem), I use our first lessons to establish the parameters of our shared time and space. I highlight positive examples and we discuss which behaviors and attitudes will help us enjoy our time together the most. We talk about why stopping and starting on the signal helps us stay safe or how important it is to maintain space around us as we move. The youngest learners practice these concepts in play. There’s silly music and we use animated movements. We pretend to be bears, crabs, horses and seals. Older students spend more energy developing independent routines that task them with reading the agenda on the board to get started as soon as they arrive.
This school year I decided that I wanted to be more accountable to my students and myself in terms of tracking our progress from lesson to lesson. During distance learning and later, the adapted program we constructed for Covid-aware in-person instruction, my colleagues and I all compromised on our pursuit of the routine demands of the written curriculum. Without being able to complete activities in standard fashion, we also adapted our assessment criteria to meet the moment. Some of what we did felt a bit like survival teaching—managing distance and masks, teaching outdoors, while also monitoring our own health. Logically, our capacity to focus solely on the subject of Physical Education suffered.
Being able to return to teaching our curriculum without significant adjustments, it felt and feels appropriate to re-engage the topic of how my students and I evaluate and make sense of our sessions together. To do that I opted to repurpose a system I used in the past for tracking student progress and assessing performance. Developed in the early 2000s with my previous colleague and mentor, Patty Richards, our ticket system at its peak included 7 colors representing positive reinforcement and 4 that served as “reminder tickets.” During or after class students would put in tickets (laminated colored strips) that were assigned to them into library book pockets with their names, affixed to a poster board. They might have 3 to 4 tickets after a class, each of which was a form of feedback. I would then record each student’s tickets, making colored dots on a chart with a note of what was done that day. On the one hand, it was concrete and accessible for elementary students but somewhat cumbersome and time intensive for the teacher—as a new colleague pointed out after following the process for a couple of years.
Tickets and the class board.
By the time the pandemic hit a lot of our performance recording had gone digital in several respects via Seesaw, a department blog, and other tools. We were no longer lugging boxes full of colored laminated tickets and stacks of cardboard to class in hopes of capturing student performance and feedback in this time-tested and familiar way.
With the return to more traditional teaching structures this year, I recognized that I was not entirely satisfied with my reliance on Seesaw to record skills and standards addressed. Although it was possible to tag video and photo evidence of our lessons with the appropriate standards, this data was only visible to me as the teacher. What I missed was the transparency and immediacy for students in the moment. How do students know how they are doing? What opportunities do they have to evaluate our performance as a learning community? And what can I do to ensure that I am truly keeping track of each individual student and not only those who demand the highest levels of attention? I decided to give the ticket system another try.
I simplified it, however, and focused only on positive behaviors and outcomes. There are only five colors now and they represent broad categories of actions or behaviors that are open to interpretation. As it turns out, they provide an excellent opening for reflective dialogue.
Like so many other iterations of this initiative, I am running an experiment. I am trying to see what works and how. By using I-statements and placing the corresponding ticket in an individually labeled pocket, students are asked to make the connection between themselves and their engagement. Of course, because it is public (i.e., visible to all members of the class), there are all kinds of dynamics that accompany the act of placing, collecting, and choosing tickets. I suppose, in many ways, the ticket system reflects the rather public nature of our learning in the gym. How do I and my students shape this tool to meet our needs to be both individuals in and responsive to a learning community?
When I introduced the tickets we had brief discussions defining the ticket colors and their meaning. The most common and also broadest color is green: “I’m a learning booster.”
“Learning booster” is my shorthand term that means “with your actions and behavior, like following instructions and listening, that you are helping yourself and everyone else learn.” Students often demonstrate their understanding by describing the opposite:
“It means you’re not bumping anyone.”
“It means you are not talking while the teacher is talking.”
Over time, we can take opportunities to ask ourselves, “What would a learning booster do in this activity?” or “How were you a learning booster just now?” These are conversations to be had with all of my elementary students from PK through 5th grade. At the beginning of the year, I assigned tickets: “Put in a green ticket.” “You and your partner, please put in a purple ticket.” Now that we’re a few weeks in and our routines are steadier, I often take the opportunity to ask them which tickets they feel apply and why. These conversations are even more valuable than my class charts of colored dots that emerge over time. Case in point: when I recently asked 4th graders to choose 1 or 2 out of 3 possibilities, one student came to me and explained why they felt that none of the tickets applied. They were incredibly honest and specific. I was actually blown away and then suggested that they might consider taking a green “learning booster” ticket for demonstrating exceptional thoughtfulness. The student agreed. That’s not a dialogue I could possibly plan for. With regards to my overarching goal of building reflective capacity, this exchange represents the true measure of success.
What’s also interesting is discovering which groups are most interested in the fun ticket. 2nd grade: Definitely! 1st grade: Sure, why not? 5th grade: perhaps as an afterthought. Again, all of this is a work in progress. Of course, by putting “fun” there among the other possibilities, I’ve identified it as an undisputed student priority. In the process, we learn that fun, meeting the standard, and/or being a kind partner can go together. None of the tickets excludes the possibility of the others, just as neither students nor I represent one single dimension of performance or affect. Further, by acknowledging the affective angles of learning, I can engage students’ “life-texts” or the wealth of experiences that each of them brings to the class.
In “Curriculum as Encounter, Selves and Shelves,” Emily Jane Style describes the importance of such an approach:
Academic knowledge needs to be seen in relation to the human experience already present in the classroom rather than as something apart from it. There is a huge mountain of inner stories already existing in any classroom, not just one large and virtually unassailable “objective” mountain of material to be learned. In fact, any physical mountain itself can be seen from many angles and measured in many differing scientific ways.
In my classroom, I am regularly confronted with the “mountain of inner stories” of previous movement experiences. Any plan that I offer for students’ exploration must take these variations in ability and enthusiasm into account. When we gather to reflect on what happened (or didn’t happen) in terms of skill or performance, each student has their own internal measuring stick. Chatting about how they felt about skipping rope or stretching in groups or playing tunnel tag allows us to integrate past knowledge with the present in meaningful ways.
As students grow accustomed to this system of feedback and reflection, what I am finding most valuable goes well beyond better record-keeping and general accountability. Even when we are talking about meeting the given standard (i.e., performing a forward roll on a wedge), we have the means to talk about what it took for the student to get there or, if they are advanced, how they challenged themselves to keep it interesting. We’re moving past binaries or limited scales defining proximity to a given standard and instead having very real conversations about who we are and what we bring to the process. The assessment is not the point, students’ capacity for reflection is.
I expect the new ticket system to change and evolve again, as it has in the past. What will be different is that student input as to what they feel might be missing will form the basis of those adjustments. I will not go back to “reminder tickets” because they do not serve us as a learning community. When individuals need redirection or a break from the action, we can make use of those options without formally recording them or making them part of a public display. Misbehavior is going to be part of the mix in the class, guaranteed. However, when being a “learning booster” is framed as a choice, I work with students to help them understand how their individual choices may impact the wider class community. Again, we have a basis for dialogue that is accessible and familiar.
There’s plenty about this system, like all systems, that raises questions. The public nature of it, does that create a distraction? Until the novelty wears off, maybe. Doesn’t it reinforce extrinsic motivation? Possibly, but there’s no attached reward beyond whatever value the individual assigns to the process. What about kids who put in the wrong or too many tickets? *Shrug* The tickets and their assigned meanings are one process tool to help me and my students gain a more solid sense of our accomplishments and challenges. We don’t need it to be an exact science. Rather, we have a useful springboard for conversation and an adaptable method for tracking our progress as learners and community members.
I will also add that while few of my students give much thought to what information will appear on their trimester report cards, they very much value being heard. When we focus on assessment as a means of communication with and alongside our learners, it leaves space for their inner stories to be told and included. We have a remarkable opportunity to develop relationships that extend beyond the norm of teacher-student. We are building the foundation for robust student-to-self and student-to-material relationships that can serve well beyond the confines of curricula and classrooms.
Sherri Spelic teaches elementary physical education at American International School Vienna. She has written extensively on topics related to education, identity, and power and, among other things, publishes a monthly social justice newsletter for educators: Bending The Arc. Check out her book of essays, Care At The Core or find her on Twitter @edifiedlistener.