Why is Your Classroom So Noisy Mrs. Hoyt?

There is singing, dancing, clapping, and movement going on in here! How in the world are your students learning Mrs. Hoyt? 

I call this being engaged in your learning. I typically have a messy, noisy classroom where kids are talking and moving. This is not always a comfortable place for adults to be if their expectation of a classroom is this:

Source: http://hannah321.edublogs.org/

I became more adventurous in my classroom management when I realized I was becoming a witchy teacher trying to keep order in the room at all times. I thought I was supposed to have a quiet classroom where students worked alone on their worksheets and quietly read. I thought I was supposed to be in control and in charge at all times! While there is definitely a place and a time for this type of quiet activity, I was having a hard time maintaining this status the majority of the time. So, I started to question where this vision had come from. My answer: probably the same place my concept of what a teacher had to dress like came from- my credential program teachers! Most of them had been out of the classroom for quite a while and were teaching theory, not practice. 

It was a good thing I started questioning why I did things that way, because I started to have a lot more fun teaching. There were still portions of my day that were devoted to quiet, individual work (like right after lunch recess), but more and more of my lesson content was delivered through song, movement and discussion. I really became inspired when I saw two teachers talk about this style of teaching on Oprah. They were from a KIPP school, and I started studying their videos. 

Their classrooms look like this:

This teacher is having fun teaching, the kids are totally into it and they are practicing content. It is loud in there, but it is also controlled. That is not your typical flashcard practice!

When I began my study of Common Core standards, I noticed that a lot of the content involved student collaboration. As I started studying lessons on The Teaching Channel, I noticed a lot of interaction and student talk as opposed to teacher talk. 

This is one of my favorite Teaching Channel videos, not because of what the teacher is doing, but because of what the students are doing.

Video: Reasoning About Multiplication and Division

As I began crafting my own Common Core lessons, I made sure to incorporate speaking and listening standards into every lesson. I resonated with the feeling of being the Guide on the Side instead of The Sage on the Stage. Blog link to: Is it OK for Teachers to Not Know the Answer?

Students need to have a chance to hear from each other and express their own ideas in order to form the best opinion. When the lessons also incorporate technology, student energy increases as well. Collaboration + technology use = a noisy classroom. 

A well crafted Common Core lesson is not neat, clean and orderly. It involves reading, discovering, discussion, evaluation, synthesizing, and creation. It does not involve one standard per lesson, but includes multiple standards. Sometimes you have no idea what the students are going to come up with, but you go with it as long as the lesson is moving toward your goal. For example: in the 3rd grade demo lesson I have been teaching this year, the question I ask students is: Would you want to live in Antarctica, or not? We explore Google Earth, a Time for Kids article, and watch a video in order to form our opinions. There is always something new to discover on Google Earth, and I can't predict what their reasons for saying yes or no might be. As long as we are keeping our focus on that question, the conversation we generate is right on track. At the end of the exploration, the students are ready to dive in and write about their opinion and they have plenty of reasons from our three sources to back their statements up with. It is fun to teach this way, and students feel successful because they are involved in the learning each step of the way. 

Here is my class from a few years ago practicing their multiplication facts "KIPP style." It's noisy, and the kids are learning.