A tiny click echoed in the quiet before first period. We will call the student Greg. He was new to this school, new to this way of learning. After he checked a box on his daily to-do list; he paused. Just for a second. Long enough to let the feeling land: Proud. Not...
If you want more student-to-student talk (Academic Dialogue) without losing instructional time, Think, Ink, Pair, Share is a reliable go-to routine, that can serve multiple purposes and settings.
I’ve been having a series of amazing conversations lately about the nature of collaboration, in an effort to define exemplary collaboration.
The Arts do not decorate literacy instruction:
They deepen it.
They expand it.
They entangle with it—beautifully.
A student’s high school transcript shows their grades and credits, but it doesn’t show their mastery of skills. It doesn’t tell a college admissions officer or a potential employer what they can do. The skills they’ve spent years building, the very competencies that employers are so desperate for, get lost in a sea of GPAs and standardized test scores. This is a massively missed opportunity for our students, and it’s a problem that we, as educators, have the power to solve.
Without a clear way to see and track progress, these skills can feel like a fleeting exercise, something we do in class but that disappears as soon as the bell rings. For skills to stick, students need to own their growth.
This is the heart of what we call a “micro-routine.” These are tiny instructional practices that take just a few minutes of class time, but when done consistently, they create a powerful shift in student learning and skill mastery. This approach is the essence of Pillar Three of the CTL model.
