My experience in helping students become more confident learners begins with building a relationship. Students need to trust that their teacher is there to help them learn. As Zaretta Hammond tells us while teachers focus on Information Processing, they need to create a community of learners, forming learning partnerships that build student-teacher relationships. I want to model the positive self-talk that students need to hear to stimulate their parasympathetic and polyvagal nervous systems so that they feel comfortable approaching me and connecting to me and their classmates to satisfy their need for social connection. I want to be on the alert to stem social and physical danger that triggers the sympathetic nervous system that causes students to stress out and shut down. I use the SEL curriculum provided by Second Step to keep us all on track.
So much of fourth grade is motivating students to produce original work, rather than waiting to be spoon fed. It is impossible to teach a person to ride a bike if they won't get on the bicycle. It is the same with all fourth grade content. So providing scaffolds and removing supports as the students begin to stretch themselves and produce visible work is my goal. Clarity and positivity help my students stay on track and become more confident learners. I use Michael McDowell's strategies of teaching growth mindset with the visual of the "Learning Pit", sharing exemplars aligned to the levels of the rubric that I used to assess student work. These examples help students to self-assess. This gives the students ownership of their work and allows them to reflect on what they have produced. I must say that this is much more difficult to do while teaching with the distance model. It is difficult to get students to read directions, or listen to directions, modeled and repeated several times to get them to self-assess and edit their first draft of any work. This is why the content has to be even more engaging. I was so happy to find "Prairie Lotus" by Linda Sue Park and "Land of the Cranes" by Aida Salazar. These stories have provided the mechanism for cognitive growth and building an academic mindset within a culturally responsive pedagogy.
Technology helps students become more confident learners too. Practicing Universal Design for Learning (UDL) with technology provides students access to content that has been assessed by developers to determine where the student's proficiency lies. Apps that provide Intelligent Adaptive Learning meet each student where they are and lay out a progression of lessons that will give the student practice that reinforces specific learning goals. In this way rigor or high achievement and access are obtained. Apps such as Khan Academy, Dreambox, NoRedInk, Imagine Learning give students instant feedback that builds confidence and provides individualized differentiation. They also do not waste student time by allowing the practice of errors. As Hammond says "errors are information, not confirmation of low intelligence" but we do not want to reinforce misinformation. It is important to remember that technology enhanced lessons are not meant to replace the teacher. Students need to know that there is a live person with which to build a relationship that will guide their technology enhanced lessons. The teacher serves that role.
Lastly, I want to spotlight the strategies that I have used and will continue to use, albeit with modifications, due to distance and hybrid teaching. I believe these strategies build resilience and improve brain power. AVID, GLAD, YouCubed and ClassDojo all have lessons that develop growth mindset and academic focus so that students learn goal setting, question making, organization, reading, writing, collaboration, speaking to aid them in the attainment of 21st century skills. In the words of Zaretta Hammond "cultivating the unique gifts and talents of every student".