12.08.14Academic Systems: A TLaC 2.0 Preview
Just about a month now and Teach Like a Champion 2.0 will be out in stores. Here’s a tiny little preview: a discussion from the Systems and Routines chapter on the power of routines on the academic side. Basically when you have a procedure and routinize it you make what you do more efficient (so you can do more of it!) and you build culture into the task. That’s perfect for core academic tasks.
I’m also sharing this preview because tomorrow I’m going to share a post about observations from two of the best urban schools in London, King Solomon Academy and Mossbourne Community Academy. I visited both on the same day and my biggest takeaway was how intentional they were about the same academic system! Stay tuned for more. In the meantime here’s this:
Systems and Routines: Getting Beyond Behavior
It’s not just tasks like moving to the carpet and passing in homework that respond well to routinizing in the classroom. Key recurring academic tasks are ideal as well. In fact, the more a behavior occurs and the more central it is to what you seek to accomplish in the classroom, the more responsive to routine it is. Think, for example, of the power of having a routine for making annotations or marking-up text. You tell your class, “Every time we read, we do so with pencils in hand—we underline key details, circle vocabulary words, and summarize important scenes in the margin,” or something along the same lines. You practice that until students can use the system with near-automaticity. Then for the rest of the year you can simply say, as Rue Ratray of Edward Brooke Charter School in East Boston did in a lesson I recently watched, “Take five minutes to read and annotate this passage. Go.” One of your key academic tasks ensues without further explanation or instruction. The same principle applies for text analysis, math, or any number of academic tasks.
And, of course, a virtuous cycle is in play here. Once you have a system, it’s easier to enact—the transaction cost for starting goes down; the efficiency goes up—so the better and better students get at it. You increase the rate of improvement at core tasks by systematizing them.
In math you might use a “mad minute” to reinforce automaticity with fundamental skills, for example; or consider the power of a routine for text analysis in language arts: “When I give you an excerpt from a text we’re reading and ask you to ‘analyze it,’ you’ll do four things: (1) identify the characters who are present and the setting, (2) explain the passage’s place in the plot of the novel, (3) describe how the scene exemplifies or challenges a key theme from the book, and (4) compare the scene to another from the same book or another we’ve read as a class this year.” If your students could do that in five minutes, you could practice it as part of the Do Now (another routine!) or seamlessly drop text analysis practice into your lesson several days a week.
Systematizing any activity lowers its transaction cost and increases the efficiency of its output, and that’s critically important when you know what your core academic exercises are.
