How did people teach before post-its? How did they have students organize their thoughts? Record their notes? Participate in silent carousels? Explore resources? Monitor their own behavior? Yesterday alone, I went through roughly two post-it pads before lunch. And that was just math and social studies.

Post-its let me be spontaneous: what began as collection of review notes became a comprehensive web. We were just supposed to collect three facts about Jamestown to jog our intersession addled memory. But we noticed connections between our notes. We wanted to share them. Some of us needed to organize them. Our required three notes became 4, 5, and even 6. We stopped reviewing and began researching. Our notebooks replaced by library books, an impromptu research project inspired by post-its.

What I Want

My goal as a teacher is to make myself an after thought. More like the couch cushion that serves as the door to an elaborate sleeping bag, sheet, chair, table, and couch fort, and less like the couch. I am not the structure that keeps the sheets up, I am the door that invites visitors in.

I want the learning to happen without me. I want my students to initiate their learning, use their resources, and share with each other in order to build their understanding. They take the inspiration from the rug of sleeping bags, they find the extra sheets needed to complete their compound, and they use their chair and couch support system to hold it all together. I am upstairs, eating freshly baked cookies. I am forgotten, until tummys begin to rumble.

However, I, as the teacher and cookie maker, need to consider the social and academic lessons that bring my students to such an independent level. Lessons that need to be taught directly, lessons that need to be repeated in small groups, and lessons that need to be modeled on a daily bases. My goal is to empower my students so they see me as foot steps upstairs. I may iron the roof, but I will not hold it up.

Elementary School Teaching If My Students Were Learning to Be Professional Chefs

You could make the argument that my classroom is any of the following:

• Communism (in theory, not the Soviet or Chinese practice) - everyone, teacher and student, pull their resources together for the common good.
• Chaos - no one is ever quite sure where the marker or post-it bin is. Only the same one student can ever find the stapler. Even if she hasn't used it in days.
• Anarchy - it is every learner for themselves when finding an expo marker.

I am well rooted in constructivist ism. My classroom falls just shy from hand built hippie commune and is closer to communal living. Without, of course, me actually eating with my students. That would be gross.

Lately, however, I envision my classroom as a kitchen and my students as line cooks. I am the chef. And yes, maybe I am internalizing the lessons from Heat a bit too much.

But sometimes, my students need to watch me make the pasta in order to understand the rhythm of rolling the dough. Other times, they need to burn 50 steaks in order to understand the difference between done and well done. Observation of the master and repetition of the mundane. Want to be proficient on the computer? Watch me as I tell you all my secrets about word formatting, Library of Congress research, and ways to make Excel do the thinking for you. And then type up your stories, change the font because the teacher said, and find (and cite) 25 different images on the web. Observation of the master, repetition of the mundane. Learning is mimicked and mastered.

Reading Recovery - Misnamed?

What is it we think these kids are recovering from? Reading recovery isn't a 12 step program, unless I've missed a key component.

I observed a reading recovery lesson recently and found it fascinating. As an upper grade teacher I know that I have very limited knowledge of primary development. As a general rule all of my students are able to decode quite well and make sense of their reading most of the time. My goal is to help them think more deeply about text, become comfortable with various types of text, move on to more complex text, and make connections between reading and writing. To some extent, all of this is happening in reading recovery as well. It is truly astounding what can be accomplished working one-on-one with a child every day for an extended period. I haven't yet determined what that means for me as a fifth grade teacher, but I'm sure it means something!