It is truly a marvel to watch an experienced teacher facilitate anywhere from 30 to over 130 students in learning together and moving safely around often small and cluttered learning environments. Teachers use specific routines to organize information, materials, and movement. Let’s explore example organization routines. These routines are essential for implementing all other learning routines. Organization routines communicate implicitly the teacher’s values and shared beliefs among learning community members. Therefore, it is imperative that organization routines are discussed with students. Whether created by the teacher or collaboratively built with student input, organization routines are explicitly taught (i.e. students are given direct actions and an explanation of the actions’ importance. Routines are practices with feedback and adjusted throughout the school year in response to student learning needs). Explore information, movement, and materials organization routines.
Information: Gathering Student Responses
The Zoom In durable learning routine generates a tremendous amount of student thinking. During Zoom In, an image is revealed one piece at a time as students make inferences about the image and the meaning of each piece. Teachers need a routine for gathering student response that ensures all student voices are heard and valued. In addition the organization of information, in this case gathering student responses, teachers provide help resources (e.g. vocabulary lists, sentence frames, or fact sheets) or change the routine element structure (e.g. change an individual thinking tracker to a free discussion and partner completed thinking tracker) to ensure 100% of the students are engaged and benefitting from the organization routine. Read more about a handful of different strategies for collecting student responses in the Zoom In: Gather Responses Guide.
In the following video Rhonda encourages teachers to stop calling on individual student hands first. Instead, she describes four different organization routines for gathering student responses.
Movement into Groups
Imagine a teacher reading a story or providing a short mini-lesson with students gathered on the carpet. The teacher needs students to move into different sizes of discussion groups with clear purposes quickly so that the students can stay focused on the lessons topic. If students have to stop thinking about the story to listen to directions on forming groups then the story is lost in working memory. So, teachers explicitly teach movement organization routines and establish partnerships for at least four different types of discussions that occur during lessons. In this way, the students can move effortlessly into different discussion groups. Note that teachers must include a rule for what happens when a student’s partner is absent (e.g. if your partner is absent then come to the board for reassignment to a new group).
In the following video, Mary explicitly teaches how to move into different discussion groups. Many thanks to the Reads Lab and the MORE curriculum for our collaboration.