Great ways to get started with Learning Routines
- Define and practice different structures. Most importantly, ask students to complete individual tasks for a short time period (e.g. 20 seconds to read directions and the complete Check & Circle routine (i.e. check familiar things and circle one word or problem that seems new), without speaking with peers. Individual tasks and Individual Regulation routines are important enabling students to determine their questions and what they know.
- Implement Organization Routines first. Gathering student responses using Show and Share or Domino Discover are essential to shift a culture of competition, reinforced by teachers calling on individual student hands, to a culture of equity, where there is room and an expectation that every person’s voice contributes to our collective learning. Collecting responses from all and student reporters representing groups enables teachers to gauge student learning and adjust teaching toward more precise outcomes.
- Describe your vision for learning routines to students. Make sure both you are your students share a common vision of the purpose and process for learning routines. Stop a routine that is too loud or if students are not taking turns or staying on task. Explain, “I envisioned the routine would look like this….”. Ask students how to get toward that vision – for example, together you might decide to: adjust the routine directions to add Rules for engagement, assign a help resource, or clarify the action steps.
- Encourage standing and movement to new groups – away from “Home Base” desks. If students are reluctant to move during class then invite students to begin class at standing groups around the room. Ask students to discuss an engaging prompt (e.g. figure out the vocabulary word represented by a gif, explain what object doesn’t belong to a set, wonder about a painting or image) and then return to their “home-base” seats for the lesson. Ask students to return to their standing group at least once during the lesson or near the end of the lesson. Once a habit is established that students discuss with three or more different groups during each lesson, students will look forward to the movement and talking with peers. This is a very new idea for most students, so expect moving into purposeful and different discussion groups to take some time to establish with students. It is impossible to have an inclusive community if students don’t know each other and the strengths that each individual brings to the community – so they need to interact with more peers then those closest to their seats.
- Collaborate with grade level colleagues to all use Show and Share or Domino Discover to gather student responses and to all use one standing group discussion during every lesson. Find out what routines were used in earlier grades and bring those into your own teaching practices, too. Leveraging routines taught and used in other classes saves times and focuses student on the topic they are studying because the procedure to achieve a certain type of thinking is embedded in the action steps of the routine – so students don’t have to think about the actions. For example, 2x2x2 can generate questions – so the thinking product is questions.