Go with the Flow

 

    I recently started to do yoga more often.  I was always intimidated by it because I'm really not very coordinated.  My favorite is Vinyasa or flow yoga. I feel like a get a workout because I work up a pretty good sweat because you go from pose to pose in a nearly dance-like movement. (honestly others look more dance-like.  I look clumsy). You breathe through each movement with inhalation or an exhalation.  You keep going through the class in a flowing rhythm.  I started thinking about Vinyasa as a metaphor for guided instruction recently. I also felt that it's a great analogy for "Going with the Flow" an euphemism for managing what life throws at you. Going through the yoga class or the sequence you "go with the flow" naturally.  You feel stronger and accomplished.

    Going with the flow in guided instruction is all about saying just the right thing to get the learner to do the cognitive work.  Specifically, telling doesn't result in learning. You are the yogi as you guide children through the learning.  Learning occurs through interaction with others and when these interactions are intentional learning occurs.  Guided instruction is a teacher behavior or flow.  It's not a resource or classroom structure.  The flow occurs through questioning(checking for understanding), prompting(facilitating students cognitive and metacognitive processing), cueing (shifts attention to focus on specific information, errors or partial understanding) and explaining and modeling (providing the knowledge to complete the task). 

Scaffold to Learn
NOT
to complete a task or activity

The flow is guided by:

1. content (common core standards, learning intentions, and success criteria)
2. Teaching (use of strategies and resource)
3. A system of assessment (how you monitor whether kids know the content independently.)

When you flow through guided instruction you influence what is in the students brain.  You use scaffolds that will be gradually dismantled as students master the content and gain conceptual understanding.

    You have direct and indirect explanations based on the standards.  You model and highlight strategies for the learning to use.  You monitor for productive failure and use questions, prompts, cues and direct instruction to facilitate learning.

    This week you will be analyzing your flow of guided instruction and using student work to determine if you are getting students to do the cognitive work.  Our purpose in PLC and professional development will be to support you in understanding the complexities and helping you to go with the flow fostering rising achievement.

    When you go with the flow you are allowing yourself to experience things as they arise.  When you allow yourself to go with the flow you can become more present and allowing yourself to accept what you encounter.  It gives you the presence of mind to address issues as they happen.  There are so many reasons that it's productive and efficient to go with the flow but let's highlight three of them.  Let's compare these elements with the specific pillars of our school improvement plan.

1.  You experience more and trust your intuition (Know thy standard, learning intention and success criteria): When you experience more you are more prepared because you are planning, comparing and learning.  Your instinct is critical because it guides you through unexpected twists and turns.
2. You are resilient (Reflect on teaching strategies, efficient use of the resource):  When you go with the flow you learn to realize that not everything will go in your favor but you accept the challenges and navigate through them.
3. Realistic Expectations (A system of assessment using student work as the vehicle for analysis): Knowing where you want to end is very important.  Collecting and noticing allows for adjustments to help you realize your goal.

    Guided instruction serves as a linchpin across three areas: building background knowledge, introducing new information and linking it to prior knowledge and working in productive groups work.  It builds student confidence and competence.

Guided instruction, then, is not something that occurs only during a fixed time of day.  It is the bread and butter of what we do as teachers. Fisher & Frey

    Teaching like yoga is an art and a science and it's not something that we accomplish with 100% effectiveness every time.  Knowing the moves and "Going with the Flow", however, will help you and the students accomplish more that day than they did the day before.