Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021
Technique 28: Brighten the lines
Pacing
Nicole Warren's pacing in the video Nicole Warren: Keystone is masterful. Class starts with incredible energy that draws students in and makes them active and engaged: a song; a Turn and Talk; a discussion of student reflections from the Turn and Talk; and a longer stretch of focused independent work, with students locked-in and focused partly because of the energy of the preceding activities. Part of what makes Nicole's lesson work is her careful design of the flow from activity to activity, in other words, but also watch her release her students into the Turn and Talk just under a minute into the video or the independent practice just shy of four minutes in. There's a clear and engaging task. Then a tiny delay for suspense. Then, suddenly, a crisp and quick signal to start, with students leaping into action. Part of what makes the pacing so powerful is the quality of the transitions that begin each activity.
When you take steps to make the beginnings and endings of activities visible and crisp, you Brighten the Lines. By calling attention to changes in activities, you ensure that your students can perceive mileposts clearly, and make it easier for them to notice and be attracted to new activity. You're essentially harnessing their novelty bias in a productive way.
Step 1: The Go Start
The first way to Brighten Lines is with a go start—shifting from one activity to another on a cue. Starting everyone at the same time with a statement such as, “Okay, scholars. You have three minutes to write a response to this question. Ready? Go!” has several advantages.
First, making the beginning of an activity “pop” makes the activity itself feel a bit like a special event. By using the phrase “go,” you build excitement and anticipation—much like a footrace—causing students to start together, as a team. Not only does this implicitly frame the forthcoming activity positively, but it also causes everyone in the class to start exactly on cue. That half-second delay causes students to work more industriously once they are “allowed” to. Plus, students see all of their peers snap to it—normalizing the idea of making productive use of time.
The cue doesn't have to be “go,” of course. There are dozens of options you could use (e.g. “off you go”; “give it a go”; “begin,” etc.), but as Peps Mccrea explains in Motivated Teaching, the cue is an essential part of the routine. He describes the ideal cue as “distinct,” meaning it won't be misinterpreted, “multimodal,” combining language or speech with action or position, and “punchy.” With cues that fit these criteria, Mccrea argues, we make the norms more visible and thus more widespread across the class. If it's unclear whether everyone else has actually started something, there's a potential incentive to take your time so as to avoid being the outlier (the first to start). If everyone begins on cue, there are no grounds for strategically managing the optimum starting point. Everyone else just started. Better catch up!
Previously, I mentioned that you can use pacing tools to make “slower” work more reflective and engaging; some simple adaptations to the go start can help. You might, for example, encourage deeper, more reflective thinking by prompting students with a slower, quieter cadence, “Ah, a fascinating question: Just who is the hero of this book? You have three minutes to reflect in writing. [Pause] Who is the hero, and how do you know?” Now perhaps you've dropped your voice to a whisper and you say in a slower cadence: “Begin. . . .” This approach still socializes efficient use of time by getting students started right away and as a group, but your slower and quieter delivery of the start cue can communicate something about the tone of reflection you expect. Even using the cue “Begin” as compared to the cue “Go!” suggests less a race and more of a journey. This way, you get the benefits of everyone starting on cue and making good use of time, but also clear and efficient communication of the idea, “I want you to think deeply here; I am looking for thoughtfulness as much as productivity.”
In Christine Torres's class, we see her cue a go start in several different ways. During the vocabulary rollout section of her lesson, her cues to Turn and Talk are high energy and crisp—“Fifteen seconds with your teammate, go!” Students jump into conversation without a moment to lose. Her goal in this section of the lesson is high engagement and participation ratio; she wants to boost the energy of the room and make this section of the lesson feel fast. For a slightly more challenging question, she gives a little more time and slows the pace of her delivery “How does this image demonstrate the word ’caustic’? Look carefully at the image. Thirty seconds with your teammate to discuss. How does the image demonstrate the word ’caustic’? Ready, go.” Later in the lesson, as she guides students through a rigorous discussion of Annemarie's bravery, her cues are even slower and reflect the thoughtful focus she hopes students bring to a writing task: “With a teammate … answer questions 2A and 2B. Three minutes, if you're not done, that's OK … Three minutes, go.” In all three instances, students have a clear cue to begin working (as well as a precise time limit, which we'll talk more about in a moment), but the subtle variations in her tone and the speed with which she gives the directions reflect the type of energy she hopes students will bring to the task.
To see the range of ways in which teachers use clear in cues to Brighten the Lines (while signaling the type of work they expect students to engage in), check out the video Montage: Brighten Lines of teachers launching their students into independent work. First: Hasan Clayton. “Four minutes, silent solo. Let's see what you remember. Eyes in,” he says. His calm, steady tone and presence indicate that this is a moment for thoughtful reflection. Even the pace with which he begins to move around the classroom signals that this activity is meant to be completed with sustained, quiet focus. In contrast, Tamesha McGuire's warm, crisp directions to her kindergarten class—“Ready … set … go to work!” (complete with a bright smile)—infuse the independent work with energy and excitement. As students begin working, her cheerful narration maintains the energy of the launch. Jamila Hammett's cue to her small group of third graders is more muted—a student reads the question and she says simply, “Go ahead, take one minute.” She remains silent as students' pencils begin to move to give students space to begin grappling with the challenging Art of the Sentence prompt. In each example, the teacher influences the pace and energy of the room through the tone and language of their in-cues; at the same time, all three cues are clear and specific enough to Brighten the Lines between activities and ensure that all students are prepared to begin at the same time.
Clean Finish
Being able to end an activity reliably on cue is also a critical skill for several reasons—the most obvious being time management. How many meetings have you been in where the person running it was unable to say, “Okay, we're done with that; now we're moving on to this,” as it became increasingly obvious that the meeting would run over time or that other topics would be truncated? Time use in the classroom can be done a similar disservice when a teacher can't reliably end one activity to begin the next.
There's more value in making activities end crisply and clearly—a skill I call the clean finish—than just time management. Ending on cue establishes a clear and discernible transition point from one activity to the next and can actually help students maintain the continuity of their thinking across tasks. Students are better able to carry what is in their working memory from one activity to the next if the transition is efficient and our language is clear. Consider the example in the previous paragraph. You've said to your students, “You have three minutes to reflect in writing: Who is the hero, and how do you know?” If you're going to transition from writing to whole-class discussion or a Turn and Talk, you want to minimize disruption in the shift between activities so students can remember the insights they just developed. You want the writing to end on cue, in a single moment, so that you can immediately start looking forward to your next step without anyone losing their train of thought. If your transition from writing to discussion is fast—a few seconds at most—then the ideas that students had before the transition are more likely to cross over to the second activity.
As the three allocated minutes of writing come to a close, you might provide a preliminary reminder that you'll be wrapping up soon: something like “I'll need pencils down in twenty seconds. Try to finish that last thought.” When you get to the end of the allocated time, ideally there'd be a signal. The timer would go off and you'd say, “I hear the timer, and that means pencils down and eyes up, please.” The icing on the cake is that crisp, visible transitions also affect pacing. The milepost is bright and clear, and students can see it passing. Better still, when the milepost is clear, you can also connect the pieces of the lesson together through use of segues, language that highlights the most important threads of the lesson that tie multiple activities together. (For more on segues, see Chapter Five, Lesson Structures.)
A final note to observe here: The same tools used to speed up pacing, lightly adapted, can slow things down as well. For example, you might say to your class, quietly and with a slow and reflective tempo: “In thirty seconds, your journal writing session will come to an end. At the beep, please close your journals and give me your eyes.” Then you might let the timer beep for a few seconds or leave a silent pause of a few seconds and add, “Good. Now we're ready to discuss.” It's still a clean finish with bright lines, but it establishes a slower pace and quieter tone. In fact, you could argue that Brighten the Lines is most useful for this kind of slower, more thoughtful task, where stepping in to be more directive is also more disruptive to the quiet, reflective mood of the room. Crisp transitions are often most useful at exactly the time you would least expect them to be, and where their use is least intuitive.