Focus on Engagement

students will start the building and learning processes themselves, and you will be there to fill in the gaps and provide the proper support.

Focus on Engagement

Work by educators like Phillip C. Schlechty (2002) and Heather Lyon (2020) help explain not all engagement is the same. Just because students look busy or engaged in an activity, it doesn’t mean they’re learning. In this phase, you’re doing important teaching work. You’re constantly collecting formative assessments to ascertain the space between where students are and where you want them to be, learning-wise (Wiliam, 2011, 2018). I’m a big fan of clipboards with checklists—nothing complicated. Student names go in the first column, boxes for standards go across the top, and there’s space to write notes. I recommend jotting down things like whether students’ measurements are correct, whether students are attending to the main problem, whether they are reading the correct sections of the story to find the proper information, and the nature of what they tell you when you ask what they’re learning or working on. These one-on-one conversations are essential to discerning if students are engaged in productive work. Stepping on, but not over, that line between monitoring and hovering takes some practice, and it takes a while to learn what each students’ productive struggling looks like (Blackburn, 2018). For many students, this means teaching through letting learning take its course. For others, it means direct instruction in particular content or skills. My classroom routines and structures include helping students understand that when I sit down next to them, it doesn’t mean they’re in trouble. Rather, I’m helping. Everyone needs help sometimes.

Thinking Like a Designer

Iterate. Iterate. Iterate. Constant iteration is a good habit to develop as a design-minded teacher in a cardboard classroom. This makes instruction more accessible for students who may have trouble with focus, memory, or hearing. Educational institutions should, and increasingly do, make it a universal goal to incorporate more practices from Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to ensure all students, especially those with sensory issues, feel comfortable in the classroom (Posey & Novak, 2020). A feature of UDL that speaks to me is the idea of designing to the edges— that is, ensuring everything in the classroom is accessible from the get-go rather than modifying or adapting to meet students’ needs. Consider adopting the same goal to make it so no student with a disability, or their parent, needs to ask for an adapted assignment because everything will already be accessible.