I attended the WBT seminar in Phoenix last week with the aim to come back to school with new, fresh strategies for my difficult 5th grade class. My main concerns were engagement and retention.

WHAT a DIFFERENCE two days of WBT has made in my class! There are 4 or 5 students who always seemed to be causing me some kind of trouble, to the point where I thought how much better things would be if they weren't in my class. Now, with WBT, a few of them are practically thriving! I can look out and see them paying attention, following directions, teaching each other, and actually DOING their work!

It's too early for me to tell where the whole class will be with retention (I hope they will retain information for longer), but the engagement is through the roof. I haven't been scolding or raising my voice -- my whole attitude has changed. Instead of getting peeved with students for breaking a rule, I just cue the rule and use the scoreboard. The kids think it's fun, and the energy in my classroom feels truly positive and happy for the first time all year. A student even said, "The first two quarters of school were boring" compared to now. I just said, "Aw well, give me an 'it's cool'."

Alison Sternal
5th grade
Pueblo Elementary
Yuma, AZ

Alison this is great news. You'll find that it is not going to change that much over the next few months. The only thing is that you may need to make a few tweeks here and there to your rewards to make them keep wanting to play, but for the most part, you'll get through more allowing them more time to learn and retain.

Welcome to the rest of your teaching career!

Alison, hooray for you and your students! Your Pueblo team was a riot in Phoenix, and now you are going to have 33 at the upcoming conference in Yuma! Every parent is going to want their child in your school because the kids are having so much fun while learning!
Be ready to share on the 22nd!
See you soon!
Deb Weigel
WBT

Hi Alison!

I'm so glad you are feeling this way! I am feeling the same way this year with my tough class. I love WBT for this!!! Your post gives me energy!!!

Liann
WBT Intern

The engagement is still working for MOST of the class. Two of my most difficult students are backsliding into talking and breaking the rules. I've made them Independents, but maybe I haven't used that to my advantage enough. Any suggestions out there?

My worries about retention proved true. I taught how to find the are of a triangle this week, and we did gestures and Mirror and Teach-Ok to learn and review it. But almost all the kids got that problem wrong on our test today! So I'm thinking that I need to combine the gestures and words with pencil-and-paper practicing...like, do a worksheet together and for each problem, review the appropriate gestures we learned. Maybe that will help?

What have you WBTers done when you see kids slipping?

Our first goal in WBT is to get as many students to go along with the system as possible ... so, continue on as you are using the Scoreboard ... and putting a few difficult students into the Independent group this soon into the process probably won't be effective. Look carefully at the progression described in "Whole Brain Teaching for Challenging Kids" our free, core manual available above under "Free Ebooks" ... you've made a huge gain in a few days ... keep building unity among the kids who are following you ... which is almost everyone. Give peer pressure ample opportunity to work its magic. If necessary, once everyone has learned the rules, use the rule "cue" as described in the manual.

As to the test grades on area of a triangle, the odds are that most of the class didn't have enough repetitions on the formula and/or its application. We are moving toward an approach in which students are given practice multiple choice problems, usually shown on an overhead or projected by computer, of math and language arts word problems and then asked to prove which answer is correct and then also prove which answers are incorrect. This is a method developed at 6th Street Prep in Victorville, CA ... a school that employs a number of WBT techniques and has test scores over 950.

I also use testing strategies that students prove or disprove all answer choices. For lower level questions that students understand and feel confident about, it could be as simple as writing true by the correct answer and false by the incorrect answers. Helping students identify choices as "half true and half false=false" and "completely true=true" helps, also.

For the really challenging questions, or any questions they are not sure about, students go through each choice, proving how they know the answer is either incorrect or correct by stating where they learned something.

Which landform is made from constructive forces?
A. delta (This is true because deltas are triangluar shaped landforms that form at the mouth of a river from deposition of sediment, deposition is a constructive force)
B. cave (destructive forces form caves because weathering & erosion of rock occur)
C. arch (arches are upside down u's, I remember the gesture for this, the open part is weathered away)
D. valley (valleys are formed from glaciers carving out valleyes or rivers eroding land)

This is just a simple example, but what is in parentheses is what a student could write down to prove to himself why he picked A and why he didn't choose the other choices. I've learned when students do this, they are less likely to go back and erase their first choices because of overanalyzing. If they prove what they know, they trust their instincts and feel more confident when turning in their test. However, I sometimes have a few students who do tend to overanalyze anyway.....and sometimes they will not pick what a teacher would see as a clear choice. I use example questions as models for think alouds and use a camera onto a projector screen so they can follow what I am thinking/writing. You can even have students show their work as think aloud models to the rest of the class. That's a good way to motivate them to use all their strategies, so they can teach the rest of the class!

I noticed a dramatic change in test scores after implementing this particular strategy about three years ago and I have used it ever since.