The Debrief

I have an awesome idea, Colleen, because I was hanging out in Detroit in the Archdiocese of Detroit and sharing good ideas amongst teachers.

And this is super applicable across the board, every classroom.

So everyone be ready.

We got something here that you can all use.

We were doing a pretty complicated

concept for the day

in a PD session of training teachers on station rotation model.

And Colleen and I have done this kind of training before together.

But teachers are like three years into doing station rotation and they were starting to teach other teachers how to do this type of Okay.

Replacement for direct instruction.

So the actual strategy doesn't matter, but here was the cool tip that came out.

The teachers at Christ the King Catholic Microschool in Detroit, beautiful little school, they shared that when they do something new as a teacher for a few days and they're like teaching the procedures around a new unit or a new like, hey, we're going to do group work or we're going to do this project or we're going to do this new thing.

they do what they call debriefing afterwards, which is super fun to think about little kids doing, like young classrooms.

So after the station rotation, so like the bell's ringing and they're doing go to station three, go to station four, go to station five, and kids are moving into their small groups around the room.

At the end of the stations, the teacher's like, okay, time to debrief.

And then everyone goes into metacognition mode and the students are with the teacher talk about how did that go as a procedure? So we're super good at describing procedures.

We've done lots of episodes on classroom management, strategies and procedures and all that.

But when you're giving students new instructions and they've been practicing it, It was very rewarding for these teachers at Christ the King to share, students share out how it was going during a debrief session.

And then the teacher had a lot of insight about things because kids love solving problems.

So the teacher's like, OK, we've been doing stations for a few weeks or a few days or a few sessions.

How did this go? And then the kids start sharing like, oh, you know, I'm kind of antsy and that's a lot of minutes or I don't have the supplies I need when I'm over in that station.

Hmm.

Or I don't think I can work next to these people who are too noisy for me.

And so they're starting to like problem solve how we want people to problem solve in workplaces someday or in church ministry someday or whatever it is.

But we're giving our learners the opportunity to create better conditions for their learning.