[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.
[00:13] SPEAKER_02:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Leanne Nicholson and Melissa Dixon. who are teachers, authors, education consultants, and change agents, and the author of the new book, Teaching with the Instructional Cha-Chas, Four Steps to Make Learning Stick.
[00:33] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:35] SPEAKER_02:
Leanne and Melissa, welcome to Principal Center Radio.
[00:37] SPEAKER_00:
Thank you, Justin. It's great to be here with you. Thank you, Justin. We appreciate you having us on.
[00:43] SPEAKER_02:
Well, it's an honor to speak with you, and I'm excited to talk about your book because I tend to think in metaphors, and you have kind of a central metaphor that shows up right in the title of the book. Take us into that, if you would.
[00:56] SPEAKER_00:
Leanne and I both love to dance. That has a little something to do with it. And when we were working with teachers, we were trying to, just like we do when we're working with kids, they need some kind of a hook. or a mnemonic device to kind of remember what we're trying to help them do. So as we were working with teachers, trying to help them understand what effective instruction should look like on a daily basis in the classroom, we kept trying to come up with something that clicked. And all of a sudden that cha-cha hit, which is the four steps, ch-chunk, ch-ch-choo, ch-ch-check, and ch-ch-change, and that kind of went into ch-ch-cha-cha.
[01:35]
And we kind of put it together into a mnemonic device and that kind of led its way into the book so that the entire book became a metaphor for the classroom instructional dance that we hold in every day, trying to get kids to learn. Absolutely.
[01:51] SPEAKER_01:
And I can guarantee everyone who's listening to this podcast right now, we've all had some type of training in cognitive science. We've all had some training in the formative assessment process. We've all had some training in differential instruction. And there were very few people who pulled all three of those gigantic concepts together. And we were frustrated by that as educators. And as we started consulting schools, we brought them together.
[02:15]
We actually created a lesson plan template that made it super easy to bring some very high impact I'm going to say instructional concepts all together so that we're teaching with the highest impact tools. So more kids get it to got it. It's called really teaching smarter versus harder. And of course, Melissa and I had a lot of fun creating the movement, the dance. And I have to say, Melissa's from Texas. She does the cha-cha dance better than I do.
[02:42]
I will give you credit for that, Melissa. It's fun.
[02:46] SPEAKER_00:
It's fun as teaching should be, right? Absolutely.
[02:50] SPEAKER_02:
So I love the metaphor. And what we're really talking about here is high quality tier one instruction, right?
[02:57] SPEAKER_00:
Absolutely. You'll still see this. You'll still see the cha-chas in a tier two or tier three classroom because it is how you should instruct. But the truth is, if we do a really good job in tier one, we will have fewer students needing tier two and tier three. And a lot of times when we went in and out of classrooms and we're coaching and we're observing, we're realizing that teachers are frustrated, students are frustrated because they can't fit it all in. We've been asked, we have so many new initiatives that are coming down from here, there and everywhere and trying to feel like, how do I teach my tier one instruction and provide those tier one interventions and differentiate and make sure I'm doing what's best for the brain and, and, and.
[03:45]
And so when we started putting this all together, we were able to find out that if you follow these four steps consistently, routinely in your care one classroom for a couple of things happen. One, you can double the speed of your students learning. And two, you have fewer students that are going to need those tier two and tier three interventions. So it just makes sense. And it's a doable thing that teachers can grab hold of.
[04:09] SPEAKER_01:
I want to piggyback off of what you said, Melissa. When it says double the speed of learning, it doesn't mean we're teaching faster. It actually means if a child is two years behind, we can get that kid caught up in one school year by teaching this way. And it's not like some brand new method. It's just using the highest impact tools that John Hattie has declared are high impact tools, cognitive science, Robert Marzano, some big names in research. We're bringing them together to say, wow, when we teach with these four steps in mind on a regular basis, on a daily basis, we will have less kids get behind, period.
[04:48]
We'll get them caught up.
[04:50] SPEAKER_02:
Well, let's get into the four steps, the chunk, chew, check, and change steps. And I love the way that you've, as you said, merged the findings of neuroscience, of the research on formative assessment, the research on differentiated instruction into those four steps. So let's just jump right into the first. What do we need to think about in terms of chunking instruction and information for students?
[05:15] SPEAKER_01:
When we chunk information, first, we're looking at even like a whole unit and we're taking a gigantic unit and we're chunking it into smaller sections, cohesive content, cohesive skills, and then we're chunking it into daily lesson plans. And then that one daily lesson plan, we still have to take the, I'm going to say, copious amounts of content that we're supposed to teach these kids and break it into even smaller chunks. And we can't just give it to the kids all at once in one hour. We give them a small chunk and we allow them the opportunity to chew it. Chewing is where learning occurs. Chewing is the consolidation of the content.
[05:54]
So Melissa and I like to say small little chunk and give them an opportunity to chew. The chew could be a quick turn and talk. It could be a dry erase board moment. It could be a writing, a quick write. It could also be some research that they start diving into. So we call them little bitty chews and we might call them main chews, main formatives.
[06:18]
But chews are really formative assessments that students are engaging in that makes the learning visible. So whatever they're learning, they're digesting and they're showing us what it looks like. So chunk two really go well together. There's a lot of cognitive science that go behind both of them as well. For example, while we're teaching the chunk, we want to use the highest impact memory tools, such as connecting to relevance, having kids act out the content when they can. We also want to make it as emotional as possible so that the students are remembering it.
[06:50]
So that's the chunk and chew piece. Melissa, you can talk about the check and change.
[06:54] SPEAKER_00:
Okay. Check and change is while students are chewing on it, while they're making that learning visible, then that is the opportunity for the teacher to be going around and checking, whether it's observation, whether it's looking at whatever the students are making, doing, saying or writing with that content. Every way that students make the learning visible, the teacher is checking and the teacher is constantly checking to see how close is that student to that learning target. Are they at the learning target? Have they exceeded the learning target? Are they behind the learning target?
[07:29]
And then by what you see as a teacher, you are making those immediate educated guesses to change and differentiate even further for the students. The students who have exceeded the learning target need to be accelerated and moved on and enriched. The students who are at the learning target, they need to be moving on to that next step. The students are a little behind. And so that gives the teachers the opportunity to either make a immediate change, which is right there in the classroom, changing pacing, changing grouping, changing strategies, whatever, or a next day change. Like if we had taken exit tickets as our check, we would make the next day change by looking at the results of the exit ticket and possibly coming in with a tiered assignment the next day.
[08:15]
Or we might make an end of unit change where we realize before we get ready to do an exam, we need to do like maybe some learning stations or set something up. So there's opportunity for change that happens on the fly or the next day or maybe toward the end of a unit.
[08:32] SPEAKER_02:
I love the, you know, the relationship, the integral relationship between formative assessment and differentiation. You know, we have to know where students are in order to figure out how to adjust to meet their needs and the connection between chunk and chew, right? And I think we've all experienced biting off more than we can chew or giving our students more than they can chew at once. And it seems to me that if we're thinking about RTI, we're thinking about effective tier one instruction, often what seems to push too many students up into needing tier two and tier three supports is when we have given them too much at once. We've not given them an appropriately sized bite to chew on. And perhaps we've also delayed the assessment.
[09:18]
Like we wait too long to figure out Are they getting this? How are they doing? What do they need? So I love just the clarity. So chunk, chew, check, and change. Those are so at the heart of just effective practice in any subject, in any grade level.
[09:33]
It makes me wonder why these are not universally recognized. So let me ask you that. Why is this not happening? Why did you even need to write a book about this? The metaphor is wonderful. But since these are things we know, these are things we have found in the research for many years, what did you see happening across the profession that made it clear that people needed help with this?
[09:53]
Why are these pieces not in place in every classroom across the profession?
[09:58] SPEAKER_01:
Well, when Melissa and I would go into schools, we often had principals say, hey, these teachers need to learn how to differentiate. But as we started looking at their instruction, we're like, but the instruction wasn't effective. Differentiation happens in the chunk. Differentiation happens in the chew. For example, with my EL students, before the chunk is even delivered, I'm pulling three or four or five of them off to the side based on a pre-assessment I've already given them. And I'm priming their brain with some vocabulary words that the other students don't necessarily need.
[10:29]
They're going to learn some other different words that they might need. But we're differentiating in the chunk. We're differentiating the chew. We're differentiating the check. Even how we check, who we are checking, how often we're checking students' work. And so it's an ongoing, I'm going to say, process.
[10:45]
I guess you can say that we started seeing instruction where teachers were winging it. And we've all been guilty of that as educators, but he who fails to plan plans to fail. And so we're thinking, how can we help teachers maximize learning every single day in a simple, easy format? We don't have much time for planning. And Melissa and I in our classrooms, we had our own little templates where we blended cognitive science, formative assessment process and differentiating instruction. And when we got together, we started tweaking it and making it simpler.
[11:19]
So I would have to say the big red flag that I saw in the classroom was the lack of planning. And when we're not planning with our student needs in mind, we will forever go in circles. We won't be closing gaps and we certainly won't be preventing gaps.
[11:35] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, I'm going to agree. And I'm going to piggyback a little further. Another thing that we saw, one of the other things we talk about in our chunk is the importance of the timing of your chunk. knowing how long your students' brains can take in information before their brains shut down. And often we saw teachers that were chunking longer than the student's brain could chew. And so getting teachers to learn when to stop talking and stop the chunk and move into the chew was a huge piece.
[12:06]
I think that for me personally as a teacher, I tended because maybe because I'm the mother of boys, I always got the boy heavy classroom. And I learned very quickly that boy brains don't operate the same as girl brains. And I also taught, I had the inclusion class. And so I had lots of students that were coming in with other alternate needs. And you learn pretty quickly that the things that you can't just follow the curriculum guide the way it says. That's great in theory.
[12:37]
And if all your kids are on grade level at that point, you can just open the book and follow the directions. but many students aren't there. And so as classroom teachers, we have to get creative. We have to tweak it. We have to know our kids, know our content and make the match, but teachers don't know how. I think that's what we saw.
[13:00]
And as I moved into a job as a literacy coach, I realized that that was how I helped my teachers. If I could give them some easy hand holders, some tools, And some, this is, if you're going to teach vocabulary, let's let go of this. It doesn't work. And let's replace it with this. Teachers never get told what they can let go of. They get told, here's a new idea.
[13:24]
Here's a new strategy. And you add strategy on strategy. And nobody ever gives you permission to let go of anything. So our time gets too booked. We're too busy, too much to teach, very little time. And I think that our lesson plan template And the strategies we give teachers are we know are high impact and we give them permission to let go of the things that don't work and replace it with things that do.
[13:50]
And somehow it's an easy transition to help teachers plan, which is what we see they're not doing.
[13:58] SPEAKER_01:
And I'll piggyback one more time. So many teachers believe they have to follow that curriculum guide day after day after day, and they have to stay on quote unquote track or they're going to get in trouble. Therefore, they are not teaching with daily data in mind. And daily data must drive our instruction, must change what we do the next day or even the next minute. That's really what chunk to check change is all about. The teacher has to decide, am I going to make this change right now for these three kids?
[14:28]
Or maybe I'll make this change tomorrow for these five kids and give them a higher quality reteach lesson based on the error that they're making. So it's making those types of decisions and having the flexibility of time to do that as well. A lot of times that's what principals are asking us to do. Help the teachers master the formative assessment process in the time that has been allotted. Help them create a way to plan for it. help them to create simple little processes that help them take those exit tickets and determine who's getting it, who's approaching, who's not getting it, and create a quick little plan as to how they're going to respond either that day or like Melissa and I always say, the near future.
[15:12]
It's a process. It takes a lot of time. It's not just training. It really is coaching and guiding and celebrating the achievement they will see when they get these four steps mastered in their daily lessons.
[15:25] SPEAKER_00:
And for many of our teachers, one of the things that I noticed as we moved into this virtual setting with the pandemic, we all recognize our students' learning gaps are just increasing drastically. And teachers got panicked. We got thrown into these 30-minute Zooms. What we saw was many teachers were saying, I know if I had kids in my class, I would never teach the way I'm teaching right now on a Zoom. And yet...
[15:50]
we got so panicked that we just, we threw all of the good instruction that we know out the window and teachers were literally chunking for almost the entire 30 minute. And so I spent time on many of my sessions when I was coaching my teachers, let's go take our lesson plan That is a full day lesson plan or maybe even a two day lesson plan. And let me show you how to make that lesson plan a 30 minute Zoom plan where you still have a chunk, a two, a check and a change. And so they can see even in 30 minutes. Yes, you still do this process because this is what we know works. And we just needed to coach teachers.
[16:30] SPEAKER_02:
Love it. This is such good stuff. So I wanted to ask an issue that I think that instructional leaders, especially administrators, have kind of created through one of the bad habits that we have. And that is the tendency when we're observing in the classroom, whether it's a full formal observation or a brief kind of walkthrough observation. I've noticed that we tend to focus on the things that are easiest for us to observe and see. So if we're looking at the Danielson framework, domains two and three are very easy for us to observe, right?
[16:58]
What's the instruction? What's the classroom management? What's the environment like? What strategies is the teacher using? But what's not as readily apparent to us is the planning. What we spent a lot of our time talking about today, just the critical...
[17:12]
aspect of planning those chunks of instruction and the questions that we're going to ask and how we're going to assess and what we're going to do with that assessment information. What would be some indications to an administrator or a coach that what they're seeing, even if what they're seeing in the moment has its own problems, or even if it's perfect, what would be some indications that the real opportunity for improvement lies at that planning stage? Because I feel like we're biased against noticing that we're focused on, you know, what strategy could you use right in this moment to, you know, to get students to understand or to get students to engage. And sometimes that's not the first leverage point, right? Like sometimes we have to back up and say, this is a planning issue and it can only be fixed through better planning. How do we figure that out?
[17:57]
Where do we look?
[17:58] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I don't know if this story is relevant, but I remember when I was teaching my first couple of years of teaching, I knew my principal was coming in to observe me and I was all excited that we were doing a social study simulation. And I had my learning target on the board. I mean, zero disruptions. It was like the perfect lesson. And then, of course, I had the post-conference and my principal's first question, Leanne, what was the learning target? And I shared it.
[18:26]
And then he said, and what were the students doing? And I told him and he goes, now, Leanne, what the kids were doing, how is that really going to help them reach that learning target goal? And I stammered my way through it and I found a million reasons why, but it was not correlated. They were not connected. The verb that I use had nothing to do with what the kids were actually doing. Therefore, when he asked me the next question, so how many kids really did get it to got it today?
[18:53]
Oh, I said, oh, all of them. He goes, well, how do you know? He goes, where's your evidence? And I said, well, it's right here in my brain. I saw them smiling, giggling. They were doing it as a group.
[19:06]
They were so successful. I didn't have evidence. I didn't have a formative assessment that would directly give me the evidence and the students the evidence to determine if they truly got that learning target. And so I'll tell you right there, that is one of the biggest problems we see. We also see a formative assessment in place where there aren't many details. And so the teacher gets DS, which I call diddly squat.
[19:34]
And we don't have time for diddly squat in the classroom. So we are helping teachers design criteria for success for that opinion writing. So for example, if we really want our kids to write an opinion, what do we want in that opinion writing? And this is where we study our standards and we determine what does opinion writing look like in fifth grade. There are so many teachers who don't really read the full standard. So they're not asking the students to incorporate every one of those elements and aspects into That's part of that fifth grade writing standard for opinions.
[20:09]
I truly believe that if we took the time to plan for alignment and had people check it, we could really make the foundation of the lesson powerful. Therefore, chunk to check change gets so much easier.
[20:24] SPEAKER_00:
Right, Melissa? Absolutely. And I know for me as a coach, I had my teachers, I had them take sticky notes that they put up by their computer or in their lesson plan that just said, what do you want the students to learn today? How will you know that they've learned it? Those two questions are your guiding questions every single day. And when I walk in your room, I had my teachers give me, and I did this for myself when I was a teacher.
[20:52]
And when I coached them, I just asked them to give it to me. We have what we call cruising clipboards, which is basically just a list of our students' names and then the learning target at the top. And then the teacher can either circle the kids that didn't get it or they can put a tally mark when they see evidence. I don't care how you want to document what you see, but document it in the easiest, simplest form that works for you as a teacher. Because if it's too hard, they aren't going to do it. If it requires too much paperwork or too much time, they aren't going to do it.
[21:24]
So I need to make this something that you can do on the fly constantly. And then that way, if I walk in your room, so if I'm an administrator or I'm a coach walking in a room, I want to be able to look at yesterday's, you know, your cruise and clipboard. Because when I can look and see that yesterday, none of your students got it, then I fully expect that you're going to be teaching whole class instruction today. But if your students, if only three students didn't get it yesterday, tell me why you're teaching whole group instruction. They don't need whole group instruction today. So we use that data to decide how are you going to instruct?
[22:03]
What are you actually going to do? Why not go ahead and let these kids get working on it while you pull the three that didn't have it? Or during a warmup, if I walk in and I see that the teacher has three kids that she's working with during a warmup while all the rest of the students are doing the warmup, I can grab that cruising clipboard sheet and go, oh, those three didn't get it on the exit ticket yesterday. She's reteaching immediately while these kids are sealing the deal on the warmup. Totally makes sense. Way to go.
[22:30]
And I can give that teacher the props they deserve for using data to drive what they do.
[22:37] SPEAKER_01:
Oftentimes, Justin, we'll get the question of, OK, when do you grade then? You just keep talking about the formative assessment process. So when do you grade? And here is our response. We're going to give our kids so many formatives and so much feedback and time to correct their work based on that feedback. And then we can grade.
[22:59]
And then after we grade, we're still going to treat that summative assessment like a formative. And we're still going to give them opportunities to redo, to retake for full credit. That's a Rick Formley statement for full credit. But we really believe in the power of more formatives and more feedback. You're going to get better summative assessment results. We can guarantee it if you allow your students the time to take that feedback and change their learning.
[23:25] SPEAKER_00:
Which is a change in a teacher mindset because the teacher has got to make up their mind that the goal is not to say, I know I taught it. The goal is to say, I know they got it. And that's a huge difference. That's a mindset shift for teachers. And the kids celebrating it too, Melissa.
[23:42] SPEAKER_01:
Yes, we just got it. And that student self-assessment actually is what we're probably most proud of in almost every single one of our activities in the Cha-Cha book. We have a way to differentiate each strategy. We have a way to bump it up, break it on down. The scaffolding that's also included in each strategy. We also have that student self-assessment component and technology tools.
[24:10]
So to me, we actually know now why it won the 2020 Teacher's Choice Awards. Teachers love it. And Melissa and I, we were excited to write it because we saw the energy in the classroom as the teachers were using it. The students love these tools. And the teacher said, you made this easy to use. So thank you.
[24:29]
Anyway, we were beyond thrilled and excited that it won that award. Just beyond thrilled.
[24:35] SPEAKER_02:
So the book is Teaching with the Instructional Cha-Cha's Four Steps to Make Learning Stick. And Leanne and Melissa, if people would like to find you online or get in touch with you, where are the best places for them to go?
[24:45] SPEAKER_01:
I'm at maximizelearninginc.com. So maximizelearninginc.com. That's Leanne Nicholson. And Melissa Dixon is at melissadixon.com.
[24:56] SPEAKER_02:
Wonderful. Well, thank you for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.
[25:00] SPEAKER_00:
Thank you, Justin. Thank you, Justin. Keep dancing.
[25:03] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
