Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021

Technique 25: Circulate
Lesson structures

Where you stand as you work is a critical aspect of your teaching. It shapes the information you gather about students and helps determine the types of interactions you can use to guide and support them.

Can you stand naturally at a student's shoulder as she solves a problem correctly for the first time, quietly encouraging her and preserving her privacy: “Yes, that's it,” or “Much better,” or “Now you've got it!”?

Can you subtly move to a spot near another student as you explain the homework, and therefore provide just enough gentle accountability to keep him on task and writing down the assignment?

Only, perhaps, if you can work the room simply and easily—if you can get anywhere in your room at any time without navigating a pile of backpacks or asking for the pushing in of chairs. In fact, if you have to ask for permission to get to any spot in the classroom or if it seems unnatural for you to stand anywhere, it's not really your room and, more importantly, you may not be able to shape it optimally to support student learning.

Circulate describes rules and habits for a teacher's strategic and intentional movement around the room during all parts of a lesson.

Step 1: Break the Plane

The “plane” of your classroom is the imaginary line that runs the length of the room, parallel to and about five feet in front of the board, usually about where the first student desks start.

Some teachers are slow or perhaps hesitant to “break the plane”—to move past this imaginary barrier and out among the desks and rows. They might spend the entire lesson moving back and forth from one front corner to the other. Or just leaning on their desk in front of the board. But breaking the plane adds energy to your teaching and allows you to observe what students are doing. You can linger beside a student's desk and subtly raise your eyebrows as you ask an intriguing question or place a warm and gentle hand on his shoulder as you progress around the room.

It's important to break the plane early—within the first few minutes of the lesson, if possible. (One benefit of technique 20, Do Now, is that it creates a natural opportunity to circulate and observe what students are doing right away at the outset of class.) You want it to be clear to students that it is normal for you to go anywhere in the classroom at any time, and the longer you wait to break the plane, the less natural and normal it seems for you to come wandering by at any moment.

Being able to naturally and easily get near students increases the range of tools you have in interacting with them. Technique 9, Active Observation, for example, is dedicated to the critical role that systematic data-gathering via circulation plays in checking for understanding. The tools it discusses require breaking the plane as a matter of course.

So, too, do a series of more mundane interactions. You can be far more private with Alfred, for example. All class long it seems like he's been fussing with something on the floor, leaning under his desk and moving his chair back and forth in order to … well, you're not really sure. But he hasn't got anything in his notes or completed any problems. And now he's distracting the students around him. If you're only positioned at the front of the room, you're limited to a question that is likely to distract (and possibly yield a more distracting answer), such as “Alfred, what are you doing?” or “Alfred, please sit correctly in your chair.”

But wandering over to investigate as you call on a student on the other side of the room, you notice that someone has spilled something sticky on the floor beneath Alfred's desk. It's getting on his shoes and he's struggling to stay focused. “Alfred, honey, move to this desk,” you can now say in a low voice. Or perhaps you can bring Alfred a few pieces of paper towel a moment later as the class discussion continues and say, “Try this, sweetheart. Wipe it up and then I'll be back to make sure you've started problem number 1.” Or perhaps there is no sticky something on the floor, and Alfred just needs a reminder to stay on task. Now that you're near him you can do it with a whisper. He'll appreciate that. And just maybe he will be more likely to get going.

A whisper solution, a hand-you-what-you-need-while-I'm-still-teaching solution, a stand by you to help you complete the task or understand what the problem is solution. These are only possible if you can get anywhere in the classroom and get there naturally, without attracting undue attention from the rest of the class: Look! She's moving toward Alfred! Your approach to Alfred is much better if he appears to be on your natural path of circulation around the room—your route. In other words, your interaction with Alfred can't be the first time in the class period you've broken the plane.

Breaking the plane, in other words, allows you to gather information constantly—even when you don't know you need to gather information; if you circulate more you will see more of what's happening in the classroom, especially from your students' perspective—and to use privacy and proximity to solve problems and communicate with individual students.

But it only works as a norm, a teacher habit. If you move out into the classroom to establish proximity only when you need to (for example, to address a behavioral situation), it will heighten attention to your actions, making it almost impossible to interact with the subtlety and finesse you sometimes need.

Full Access Required

Once you break the plane, you must have full access to the entire room. You must be able to simply and naturally stand next to any student in your room at any time, without interrupting your teaching, listening, or observing. When you do this, you can create a climate of loving accountability.

Loving accountability means, for example, that when students are writing short responses they can predict that at some point you will glance encouragingly over their shoulder—but also that you will see whether they are doing their best work. Loving accountability means students not taking out their smartphones, in part because you have asked but in part because there is a plausible chance they'd look up from a secretive glance at their messages to find you standing there.

If moving between any two points requires the shuffling and dragging aside of backpacks or the moving of multiple chairs, you have already ceded ownership of the room. If you have to say “excuse me” to get around chairs and backpacks and desks to reach the back corner, you are asking for student permission—or interrupting their work—to stand in that space. This means there will be places safely insulated from loving accountability.

Ensure your full access in the room by keeping passageways wide and clear. Find a place for backpacks that does not impede your movement, for example, and consider seating your students in pairs rather than long arcs or rows so that you can stand directly next to anyone at any time.

Engage When You Circulate

It's good to be proximate and present everywhere in the room, but it's better if you work the room a bit. If you're actively teaching, make frequent verbal and nonverbal interventions (a smile; a hand subtly on a shoulder; “Check your spelling” to a student as you gaze at her notes). If students are completing independent work, glance thoughtfully at what they're doing.

In those cases it can be useful to try to mix and match these types of interactions as you Circulate:

· Simple walk-by. You walk by a student's desk slowly enough to show that you are monitoring what she's doing but without engaging more extensively.

· Tap/nonverbal. You have a brief, unspoken interaction, perhaps just adjusting a student's paper by a fraction of an inch to show you are observing his work, say, or perhaps using a quick nonverbal—a thumbs-up for good progress, a traveling gesture for “C'mon, keep going.”

· Basic read/review. You stop and make a point of reading or reviewing what a student is working on while it is on their desk. You might comment on what a student has written, but you don't necessarily have to. Reading a student's work, alone, is a powerful message.

· Pick-up read. You stop and pick up a student's paper and read what she is working on, intimating an even greater level of interest in or scrutiny of her work. They will be watching you now so your facial expression is critical. Generally, I think, benign interest is best. I am reading this because I care about your ideas. Manage your tell (see technique 12, Culture of Error) and don't give too much away until you decide to give feedback. If you can't think of anything to say, try: “Keep going.”

These last two options are especially important. Reading, assessing, and responding to student work in “real time” are indispensable to checking for understanding, showing your interest in students' work, and setting a tone of accountability—all functions that are critical to your ability to provide academic support and rigor (“Try that one again, Charles”; “Just right, Jamel”; “You haven't shown me the third step”).

Dot Round

Recently, a colleague from the Netherlands, Carla van Doornen, shared an idea for giving feedback while circulating that I thought was fascinating: a “dot round.”

The idea is simple: you assign students independent work, and as they are working, you Circulate to observe. If their work contains an error, you put a dot on their paper. It is very subtle, and it's not a permanent “wrong” mark—just a reminder that there's something that needs checking. The best part is that that's all you do. No verbal commentary. No directions to “check again.” The idea is that the dot reminds students, subtly, to find their own mistake and, in time, encourages self-reflection and self-correction. You could then even ask students to discuss—Who got a dot and found their mistakes?

Later Rue Ratray, then of Edward Brooke Charter School in East Boston, took the idea of Dot Round and moved it a step further. Instead of using one general dot to indicate a wrong answer, Rue used three colors—green, yellow, and red—to indicate different degrees of accuracy. After Circulating for ten minutes or so and marking thesis statements, he would then ask several “green” students to read their work followed by several “yellow” students. This allowed students to discern subtle differences between work that was complete and work that was “almost there.” For the students receiving red dots especially (who now knew they weren't on the right track), it was helpful for them to hear models of successful answers. This adaptation “made a huge difference in their writing right away,” Rue reported, perhaps because it draws on Dylan Wiliam's observation about the benefits of models compared to rubrics and other abstract descriptors (see technique 21, Take the Steps) and the “Law of Comparative Judgment” to more accurately and quickly differentiate key aspects of work quality.²⁸

Move Systematically

As you move around the room, your goal is to be systematic—to cover all parts of the room and be aware of what's happening everywhere, and to show that your movements and any interactions when you Circulate are universal. You are likely to engage anyone at any time by checking his work, nodding at him, or sharing a smile.

In the video Denarius Frazier: Remainder, which figures prominently in Chapter 3, you may recall how systematically Denarius moved around the room to give every student feedback and even designed his room so that his typical route of observation revealed more data.

Recently my team and I noticed how some top teachers tended to “walk the circuit” when approaching students they needed to correct. Let's say in this case it's Alphonse, who's off task and distracting the student next to him. If you march too directly toward Alphonse, you intimate that you are anxious and tense. This is counterproductive in the long term. Moving too directly can also cause other students to watch your interaction with Alphonse. Taking a bit of a circuitous route to Alphonse can make your interaction more private and just might buy you a few seconds to choose your words carefully before you arrive.

Systematic is not the same as predictable, though. It's often beneficial to avoid using the same pattern every time (left to right; clockwise around the room). Vary your pattern, skip interacting with some students, and invest heavily in time spent with others unpredictably as you Circulate.

Position for Perception

As you Circulate, your goal should be to remain facing as much of the class as possible. That way, you can see what's going on around you at a glance and with minimal transaction cost. You can lift your eyes quickly from a student's paper and then return to reading in a fraction of a second. Turning your back, by contrast, creates a blind spot and may even invite opportunistic behavior.

A bit like the Earth itself, it helps to turn on two axes at the same time: revolving (moving around the room) and rotating (turning to face the “center of gravity”).

This may require you to consider what side of students you stand on as you Circulate, or to reorient yourself as you take a student's paper off his desk and read. Second, a bit of mystery can help. It's often beneficial to stand where you can see students but they cannot see exactly what you are doing, standing just over a student's shoulder as you peruse his work, for example, or standing at the back of the classroom as a class discusses a topic.

In addition to Denarius Frazier's exemplary circulation in Denarius Frazier: Remainder, several of the Keystone videos in the book are excellent examples of circulation at its best. I particularly recommend watching Christine Torres: Keystone; Gabby Woolf: Keystone; Narlene Pacheco: Keystone; and Nicole Warren: Keystone. Notice how they move easily around the class as they teach naturally. Even when classroom space is tight you'll notice teachers moving around to teach from most areas of the room, going front to back, and interacting with students as they do so.