S2: E2- Chairs and Cheers: Engage and Excel with these Teacher Tips!

That was SUCH a fun episode to record! I hope it gives you lots of ideas for tracking all the amazing things happening in your classroom every day! Below are the many links and references I talk about throughout this juicy episode:

Tuesday Tip 39 - Seating Chart (a visual for you)
Interpersonal and Interpretive Communication Rubric Blog!
Mary P Overton Blog
Positive Phone Calls home blog (read it!)
Positive Phone calls home podcast (OMG SO GOOD!)
10 Day Brain Break Challenge! (YAY!)


Let's connect!

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Transcript

Welcome! 

Welcome back to my podcast teaching la vida loca for season two. I'm Annabelle, la maestra loca, and I am ready to kick off season two with even more enthusiasm, magic, and tips and tricks for your classroom. Get set for a ride of inspiration, unapologetic authenticity, and ideas to spark more joy in your teaching journey. I'm turning up the excitement and elated to have you right here with me. I'm not just your host, but your cheerleader, I am thrilled you're tuning in, buckle up, and let's do this. Let's tackle teaching la vida loca together. Hi there, welcome to episode two of season two of my podcast, teaching la vida loca. And I am just realizing that it's February 1 tomorrow, which is my mommy's birthday. Oh, my goodness. And February 2 is the next day. And if I wait to publish this, it would be episode two, season two on two to 2024. And I'm freaking out about it. But I'm not going to destroy that dream for myself and publish it tomorrow. Anyways, sorry, that's my brain. I'm not sorry. That's my brain.  

Tuesday Tips 

Welcome to episode two. I'm so glad you're here. I'm really excited about this episode. I didn't ever intend to record this. But I do this thing on Instagram called Tuesday Tips with La Maestra loca. And every Tuesday, I post a video that includes some sort of teacher tip. And sometimes it's something practical and easy. Sometimes, it's a brain break. Sometimes, it's a tip on how you can set a boundary for yourself. Sometimes, it's a tip on loving yourself, and sometimes it's a tip on an organizational hack, or, you know, whatever it might be. And I shared one recently, I think it was number 45. Tip number 45. That was about seating charts. And it was huge. It blew up, it very quickly gained a lot of views. There were tons of engagement, over 80 people saved the post for later. There were like nine shares to stories, tons of comments. And I was like, wow, this is so much better than I thought it would be. And some of the questions made me realize that I could really do a whole podcast, a whole blog on this. And I might do a blog later. Timewise, I don't have time to do one right now. But I do have time to share on a podcast about how I do my seating chart, and how I make it very useful for myself and how I use it as a grading hack, and a parent communication or a family communication hack. So, I want to share that with you today. And I'm super excited about it. I had to pause and go back and look because I was like What number was it? I haven't even done 45. I think I'm up to 43 Tuesday Tips, but it was episode or tip number 39, which is my favorite, second favorite number. My favorite number is 33.

Tip #39 

It was tip number 39. In case you want to go back and watch it on my Instagram. And basically, the first thing I want to tell you about, just briefly, because you can watch the video of how I make my seating chart super-duper easy for myself. I start by making a layout of the room, you can do this, by drawing it on a piece of paper. I used Canva. I just grabbed squares on Canva and put them on a blank document and arranged them in the same rainbow horseshoe format that my class is seated in. Then, I put the number of chairs that I use. And that's all I did. You print that, or you print seven copies, however many copies you need. And then you grab sticky notes. I learned this trick from Mary Overton I used to work with Mary over at Tennant, Skinner Middle School in Denver Public Schools, and I miss her so much. She's an incredible human, a mommy of two now. And this is just a great hack.

Seating Chart 

You grabbed some sticky notes like the small ones that you might flag a book with, or you know, I don't know, just the tiny ones, and you write students names on those. Okay, so you're not writing the names directly on the paper, write the names on the sticky notes, arrange the sticky notes in the way that you want them to be seated. And then make a copy of that. So, your paper is full of sticky notes. You make a copy of that and then you save that paper in one of those plastic sleeve thingies so that you can come back to it if you need to. And that way the sticky notes stay intact where they're supposed to be, etc. Now, you have a copy of your seating chart. This is beautiful because let's say it's a brand-new seating chart. If it didn't go so well and you needed to move five people around, all you must do is pull that back out of the sleeve, move the sticky notes around and recut, copy it, then you can use that same seating chart for several weeks or four weeks, or however long you're using it.  I usually must make new sticky notes every three or four months, just because the stick kind of wears off. That's just the reality. If you find extra, super strong, sticky notes, that would be amazing. You should let me know where to buy those. But I remake them every now and then. The point is, it's really, easy to rearrange kids and then make a new copy. I make a copy every week, at the start of the week. I make it at the start of the week because it is so beautifully easy to track student participation and engagement on my seating chart as it's happening in the moment. I have this in front of me, so yes. Do I carry around a clipboard? As I'm teaching? Yes. Do I set it down? Sure, absolutely. I let my students know this is where I'm tracking it. And I'm tracking positive things. Go figure, I'm sure that doesn't surprise you about me. 

Questions? 

This is where people have the most questions. So, I really want to share this with you today. I'm trying to remember if I covered everything. I think I did. The ease of being able to copy that is beautiful and that you can easily move people around is beautiful. And then you make a new copy each week, and you have something to work off. Now, when I am tracking participation, engagement, and student investment, whatever, every day, I'm choosing a different color. So, like Monday, this week, I used pencil. I usually don't use pencil, I'd rather not. I usually use whatever writing utensil I can grab on any given day. And then yesterday, I used purple; today, I used green. I like to use flare pens because they bring me joy. It's the tiny things in life, right? So, grab your favorite color flare pens, and choose a different one for each day. I am never consistent, like Monday is not all the same color. I'm sure there are people who could do that, but I am not organized enough for that. It doesn't matter to me if it's a different color each day. And what I do at the top of the page is that I write the date in that color. So, I know Monday was written in pencil, Tuesday was written in the purple and today was written in green. Tomorrow will be written in whatever pen color I grab.

Seating Chart Codes 

The date is important because I know that the codes, I'm writing all over my seating chart is going to be linked to how I input their interpersonal and interpretive grade for the week. If you don't know about how I grade, using an interpersonal and interpretive communication rubric, I'll link a blog for you with a free rubric resource that you can make a copy of and edit as you see fit. You're welcome to it. I'll link that in the blog. I blogged about it like eight years ago. So, what I'm doing is that I'm really tracking their engagement on here. I'm tracking lots of different things. I'm using shorthand codes for myself to know what I'm tracking. And, because if anybody looks over my shoulder, if a kid gets sees it, or if I set it down and a kid sees it, they don't really know what they're looking at. And they're going to quickly move on because they won't understand what it is they're seeing.

My Codes 

I wanted to share some of these codes with you today. So, in case you wanted to try this out for yourself, you could. It makes, at the end of the week, when I go to input grades, really, easy. I'm able to add comments easily. And, I'm also able to make those positive phone calls home super, super impactful, because I'm able to give evidence and remember exactly what it was that they were doing, or why it was that I wanted to call home about this child, because I have the notes and they were all shorthand notes for myself made in the moment during the class, I can say, you know, it was on Tuesday because I saw that it was marked in that purple color that I used on Tuesday, right? So, what I mean by shorthand notes, I write an E anytime a student uses empathy towards another child; it could be helping them with something, it could be encouraging them, it could be giving them some sort of boost or praise if they need it when they're working on saying something out loud in Spanish and taking a risk. Anytime they're using empathy to care for one another, I write an E next to their name for that day. R is for risk taking anytime a student is really pushing themselves to take a risk in Spanish. I also make a huge deal about that, obviously in front of the class, unless it's a student that I know doesn't like the public praise, but I'm still writing an R regardless to remind myself that hey, the student is taking huge risks. Speaking out in Spanish, this is a big deal for them. I do a question mark anytime they're asking questions because I love when students stop me and ask questions. I do a plus anytime they're contributing to the conversation. Sometimes they use our super-secret hand signals, even though they're not super-secret, I can link to a blog on hand signals for you, too. If they use a super-secret hand signal to build on to somebody else, I'll just do a quick plus mark, so I remember that they were contributing to the story or to the conversation or to the precise questions and the answers etc. I do an exclamation mark anytime they use rejoinders. I don't do this for every single time. It's more like when they instigate the use of a rejoinder within a certain context, and then it kind of snowballs from there, like everybody realizes, oh, this is a great story to be able to use it. So, exclamation mark, for rejoinder, I use a C for curiosity, specifically, it's different from questioning; curiosity around other people's other cultures, like really showing intrigue about culture, or product or a person. I really want to encourage that curiosity because I want to build curious, empathetic, globally open-minded humans in my classroom, right? So, acknowledging that curiosity and shouting that out. A C plus, when they're close together and forming a connection between my class and another class. This is powerful, because when I am referencing things to my admin, I can be like, oh, man, it was so cool. In fourth grade, in Chile, today, they made a connection to art class. So, kids know that they get points, like community class points, anytime they make a connection to another class. But then I also want to indicate it on my sheet so that I can prove to whoever I need to prove to that the students are finding connections between my class and other classes. I do T A B, tab, if they opted into taking a break. Or if I asked them to, you know, just take a break chill, it's fine, do some breathing exercises. A lot of my kids will self-opt into that. So, I just indicate on my spreadsheet or not on my spreadsheet, on my seating chart, in that day's color, if they took a break, I use B for bathroom. And that's just important because I haven't had any issues at the school. But I have at previous schools where there were issues of vandalism in the bathrooms. We ended up needing to track everything. So, it's just out of habit making sure that I know who is using the bathroom during my class period. And it hasn't been an issue at all the school, this is just out of habit. And anytime I notice a student is absent, I mark it with an A, this is helpful for me, especially when I'm going to input their interpersonal and interpretive communication. If there's consistent absences, I'm able to let families know. It’s, "Hey, it's really hard to understand what the heck is going on in my class if you miss a lot, because we're like building on and building on." Can they catch up? Absolutely. That's the nature of what I do. It's language. But you know, if, for example, a kid was out, I think, nine of the last 10 days and he came in and we were wrapping up a story that we had heard, we had read, in like five different reading games. We had already done output activities, and he was coming in on the last day and was like, Wait, what's the story about. I was like, dang, you know, that's hard. So, A is for absent. And I do have one mark that I do for struggling and it's just a little tick. It's just like a little negative mark, a minus. And I try and stay away from that because again, I'm trying to emphasize all the great things that they're doing. But I noticed that a student is really struggling to self-regulate, really struggling to engage, really struggling to maybe stay awake. The negative mark isn't necessarily negative. They're not doing it. It's so that I can keep a mental record or know the student is really struggling. And normally, anytime I mark that down, it's with a little note over what's like going on. And sometimes it's literally like hey, they came in and they had a really hard time in the class before, or, hey, they're coming in, something happened at recess that really triggered them and upset them. And so, they're really struggling engaging today. So, if I don't see a lot of question marks and pluses and R's next to their name today, that's why my students know that I'm tracking engagement on here. They love that when I make those positive phone calls home, I can literally reference exactly what happened in class. And I'm able to do that because of having this seating chart with me, these tiny cliff notes for myself. What I do at the end of the week is I take the three holes, punch it, and I put it into a three-ring binder, so I can access it again if I need to. And then it's just a three-ring binder that always has every single class seating chart. It's stapled together, I teach nine classes a day. So, it's stapled in there. I can go week by week, we're in week 24 of school right now. I believe it's the week I wrote at the top.

Also Helpful For… 

The last thing that I wanted to tell you is that if you struggle remembering to do brain breaks, put the brain break that you did that day in that color. So, you remember, like what brain breaks you've used because that can be helpful. It is 10 o'clock at night, and I am exhausted. And remember, I'm pregnant. So. I'm going to listen to my body and my brain and go to sleep rather than giving you a brand-new brain break today. But remember, anytime you're looking for new brain break, go to my website..., what? Put a hold on, Paul's coming in? It's okay, we'll just pause it. It's an authentic podcast, hang on one second. Okay, now I'm forcing him to say hi, because if he's gonna interrupt, he might as well say hi. Sorry for interrupting. Get back to your scheduled listening program. Okay, thank you. He was cleaning and he found my air pods. So, as I was saying, if you ever need a new idea for a brain break, you can go to my website, you can see them there. I shared one on a Tuesday tip or not a Tuesday Tip, a reel today on Instagram. I'm always sharing brain break ideas. And I'll go ahead and link my 10 Day brain break challenge in case you haven't already participated in that. I'll link that in the show notes for you in case you want to do that with your students. And it's a good one to revisit. If you, did it like a year ago or two years ago and you forgot it. Maybe your students have, you could redo the challenge. I'm sending you so much love teacher, thank you so much for supporting me in this podcast. If you love this one, do me a favor, send it to another teacher because it doesn't have to be a world language teacher who would benefit from hearing this seating chart hack and this engagement tracker hack. Send it to a teacher who would benefit. I would be so grateful. And then go ahead and give my podcast review. Only one person did it last time. I was like what the heck here. I am begging y'all for reviews. No, but seriously, if you have the time. Take a second to review it on Apple podcasts. It really does help me out, and it helps Google recognize me. Until next time, I will be teaching, and I am sure you will be too. Take care, teacher.