Briarcliff School District Teachers Making The Most Out Of Summer Break

Press release from the Briarcliff Manor Union Free School District:

Summertime is when teachers at Briarcliff School District can relax and unwind. Many use this opportunity to pick up new skills that can be implemented in the classroom.

The ongoing goal of encouraging students to be curious, engaged critical thinkers, was recently discussed in a Professional Development session on Zoom which was facilitated by Dr. Peter Liljedahl, the author of “Building Thinking Classrooms.”

The session, called “Building Thinking Classrooms Across the Curriculum with Peter Liljedahl” showed teachers how to use vertical whiteboards in classrooms or a digital app called Jotboard for virtual learning in ways that can help students become more engaged in the classroom, while promoting critical thinking skills.

Dr. Liljedahl presented two tasks for teachers to complete in which they first used their own knowledge and only afterwards received information.

“First you think, then you receive information, and then you know,” he said. “This method heightens curiosity and allows students to absorb information in a more meaningful way.”

In the first task, teachers were placed in breakout rooms in pairs or groups of threes and had to put 12 sentences in the correct order to create one text. They had to work together to form the text that made the most sense.

When they completed this task, they had to do it again and re-arrange the sentences in a different order that still made sense.

Dr. Liljedahl occasionally “visited” the breakout rooms to see what teachers were doing.

After 30 minutes, everyone reconvened to discuss what they noticed.

“I noticed that we were fully engaged, and the time flew by. It didn’t feel like 30 minutes,” said Briarcliff Middle School ELA teacher Ali Mazza.

“It was so easy to communicate and work together, it’s as if we were in the same room physically,” said BMS science teacher Jessica Loprieno.

“When you are engaged, time seems to pass faster – this is also true for the classroom,” Dr. Liljedahl said. “Notice that when I visited the breakout rooms, I did not offer any help, I just observed. This is similar to when a teacher walks around when students are working in groups, allowing the students to figure things out on their own.”

Some teachers discussed how they can use this method of piecing together a text in their class.

“I recently got whiteboard magnets for my classroom, so I plan on doing something similar and have students rearrange steps to scientific processes on whiteboards,” said BMS science teacher Jodi Shearer.

“This strategy can also remove one of the biggest barriers to writing – the writing itself,” Dr. Liljedahl said. “It breaks down the writing into segments and it can also be done with reading large texts.”

“In science class, we do a lot of text reading, so this can be helpful to break the text into chunks,” Ms. Loprieno said.

BMS math teacher Gina Cotone plans to use this method in her class as well.

“When students are writing equations, they can rearrange the steps to solving them and then I can talk about why the steps are in the order that they are,” she said.

For the next task, Dr. Liljedahl showed the teachers a video of a scientist dropping pieces of dry ice into a flask of water and “pouring” the fog that they created back into a bowl.

Teachers went to the breakout rooms to answer three questions: what is the smoke? why is it white? And why can the scientist pour it back into the bowl? They used a note catcher with two columns: “I think” and “I know,” and recorded their initial ideas in the “I think” column to start.

They were not allowed to look up answers on the internet and those who already knew the answers were not allowed to give them away.

Next, they read a short article about dry ice and why it can make fog to create special effects.

After reading the article, teachers wrote new answers to those same three questions based on what they learned from it in the “I know” column.

When they reconvened, Dr. Liljedahl showed the video again and paused occasionally to ask teachers what they noticed.

“Now that we completed both tasks, I would like to ask you all a question,” he said. “What could have been done to make these two tasks worse?

“Instead of me talking at you, you worked together and figured things out on your own,” he said. “Listening to me talk would have made things worse. We want to give students the opportunity to figure things out for themselves.”

The first task had teachers complete a ‘we think’ task, by assembling the sentences in order, then do a ‘we think again’ task by rearranging them. After the teachers received information about the text, they were able to think again about the order of the sentences.

The second task was a science experiment; it had the ‘we think, we get information, and then we know,’ format.

“The difference between the two tasks was that the first was subjective,” Dr. Liljedahl said. “It was an opinion and there was no right or wrong answer, so all you can do is think and then think again. The second task was an objective science experiment with facts; it was non-negotiable and objective,” he said.

Teachers had one final opportunity to share how they plan to implement this in their class in the breakout rooms.

“This fits into the English literature class paradigm because we talk about our opinions of the text that we read when we analyze it,” said Briarcliff High School English teacher Jamie Mandel. “I can see this being a pre-reading exercise, especially when the text is dense.”

BHS science teacher Kim Dyer thought this would be a great format in science class.

“The basis of labs is to do them as inquiry-based and to ask what would happen before conducting the experiment,” she said.

“I think putting students in small groups can get students to think on their feet,” said BMS English teacher James Ryan.

“Classrooms were originally designed for students to conform and to comply, not to think,” Dr. Liljedahl said. “If we want student to think, we need to do things differently, such as putting them in small groups to allow them to collaborate and to figure things out on their own. Thinking before reading an article can heighten their curiosity and get them to think critically, while keeping them engaged.”

This press release was produced by the Briarcliff Manor Union Free School District. The views expressed here are the author’s own.