|  by Harvey F. Silver  |  June 1, 2023  |

Look at these two structures.

What’s the difference between the Great Pyramid of Giza, built more than 4,500 years ago, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which started tilting five years after it was built? Clearly, a key difference is the foundation upon which each of these famous structures was built.

The strength of a structure lies in its foundation. Of course, strong foundations do not just support buildings; strong foundations allow businesses to thrive, families to flourish, and sport teams to compete at the highest levels.

UCLA basketball legend John Wooden has won more National Championships than any other coach. According to Coach Wooden, “Any structure must have a strong foundation. The cornerstones anchor the foundation. For some reason, the cornerstones that I chose to begin with I never changed.”

What’s true for builders and businesspeople and basketball teams is every bit as true for educators: The strength of any classroom lies in the foundation—in the cornerstones that a teacher builds collaboratively with students. But wishing doesn’t make it so. To build a strong classroom foundation for successful learning, teachers need to engage in “wish craft,” which is certainly not to be confused with witchcraft.

What is wish craft? Well, it starts with the end in mind, with visualizing what you want your classroom to look and sound like. At the heart of your vision should be student success—and student success, as we know, doesn’t come through wishing. Setting a foundation for student success begins on day one when you first greet your students at the door of your classroom. It’s something you plan for and build. It’s not an overnight task. After all, it takes a builder longer to lay the foundation than it does to raise the walls of a structure.

So, what are the most important foundations of a highly effective classroom—the kinds of built-in learning supports that help turn our wishes for student success into everyday reality?

A few years back, we sought to answer this question. We started with the research, looking for the commonalities across a wide range of literature and frameworks related to successful learning environments. And then we brought a large group of educators, parents, business leaders, and students together, with the goal of “making the research real.” After generating dozens of specific indicators of highly successful classrooms drawn from the research and from our team’s experience, we grouped and labeled those indicators. What we uncovered through this process are four universal attributes that characterize all successful classrooms. We call these attributes The Four Cornerstones of Effective Classrooms (Silver, Perini, & Boutz, 2016). These are the Four Cornerstones:

1. Organization, Rules, and Procedures
2. Positive Relationships
3. Engagement and Enjoyment
4. A Culture of Thinking and Learning

For each cornerstone we developed an essential question that began with the word “How.” Why is this important? Because we didn’t want The Four Cornerstones to be to be a “what” framework that simply laid out indicators for defining classroom success; we were more interested in engaging teachers in a conversation about how they go about building these Four Cornerstones.

Here are the Four Cornerstones and their essential questions:

1. Organization, Rules, and Procedures

How can I organize my classroom to enhance learning and establish rules and procedures that clarify expectations?

2. Positive Relationships

How can I build meaningful relationships with students and among students to promote learning?

3. Engagement and Enjoyment

How can I motivate students to do their best work and inspire the love of learning?

4. A Culture of Thinking and Learning

How can I develop a classroom culture that promotes serious learning and sophisticated forms of thinking?

Notice how every one of the questions not only begins with how, but also includes the most important word of all—the word that is the very reason for what we do: learning.

Our next step was to think through what the ultimate goal of each cornerstone is. For Organization, Rules, and Procedures, the goal is to develop a classroom that helps students become competent and self-directed learners. The goal for Positive Relationships is to help our students become caring contributors to the classroom culture, and ultimately, to their communities beyond the classroom. For Engagement and Enjoyment, our goal focuses on developing curious students who learn because they want to, because they are inspired by thinking and discovering and adding to their understanding. And for A Culture of Thinking and Learning, the goal is to foster the habits of mind and thinking skills that students need to be critical thinkers and active meaning makers.

Even more important to our concept of a how model is that The Four Cornerstones framework is more than a framework. It’s also a toolbox. To help teachers develop and reinforce the Cornerstones so they can achieve these ambitious goals, we identified specific instructional tools that can be easily  integrated into any classroom.  These tools are collected in our bestselling text, Tools for A Successful School Year. And more recently, we have developed The Four Cornerstones of Effective Classrooms Online Suite, which provides schools with a powerful way of designing  professional development around the The Four Cornerstones and instructional tools for putting them in place. Whether the format is print or digital, the big idea is the same: With the right tools, teachers can establish the foundations that support positive behavior and high levels of learning all year long.

We end with the words of Pramila Srivastava, a renowned organizational specialist, who reminds us that without strong foundations in place, “the skyscrapers of our dreams will not stand. Our achievements depend upon the foundations we build.”

Using Tools Makes a Difference in Garnering Teacher Support 

|  by Harvey F. Silver  |  April 10, 2023  | 

The most adept instructional leaders recognize the importance of gaining teacher buy-in before making any meaningful changes in teachers’ instructional practice.

However, in the Educational Leadership article, “Getting More Urgent about Change Leadership,” Douglas Reeves and Bob Eaker write that this “… model of change that depends upon buy-in has failed education leaders because it’s based on the premise that ‘belief precedes behavior’” (Reeves & Eaker, 2023). In fact, the authors note that the latest psychological evidence reveals the opposite: “behavior precedes belief” (Milkman, 2021).

This is why the use of instructional tools and “A Problem of Practice” approach is so important in developing teacher buy-in. In this approach, belief is generated by trying out a simple instructional tool to address a problem of practice. Tools are simple research-based instructional practices that are easy to implement and put into practice in any grade level or content area.

Trying out a tool does not require the teacher to commit to an instructional belief. The success that many teachers experience is the proof, as they say, in the pudding. The result of using the tool becomes the evidence that pragmatic teachers need to see that it works: When students become more engaged in their learning and their thinking is deeper, the belief follows the practice.

Our instructional tools address four questions:

1. What is it? Never more than a sentence.
2. What are its benefits?  Never more than a paragraph.
3. What are the steps? Never more than working memory can handle, 7 steps.
4. How to use it? Lastly, examples are shown in different grade levels and content areas.

Many tools have a Teacher Talk section as well, which includes real advice from other teachers who have used the tool and found ways to make it work in their classroom setting.

Our award-winning Tools for Today’s Educators series of books have been used by thousands of educators in hundreds of schools.

My friend and colleague, Bryan Goodwin, president of McREL International, says that the use of instructional tools is one of the best ways to accelerate teacher growth.
Bryan raises the question:

“Imagine if every year, every teacher in America got a little bit better at teaching. What would be the impact?”

He proposes the change in schools would be greater than any other initiative we have tried to improve teaching.

Tools make a difference!

|  by Harvey F. Silver  |  September 13, 2022  |  

Visit most classrooms and you will see that one kind of dialogue dominates: recitation. Recitation is a teacher-directed process, where the teacher presents information, incorporates questions to check that students are listening, asks students to respond, and evaluates the responses. We call this “the TIRE approach”: Teacher presents, Incorporates questions, students Respond, teacher Evaluates. And the TIRE keeps rolling along.

Despite concerns about the effectiveness of this approach, it’s an approach that’s frequently used—especially at the secondary level. John Hattie and Gregory Yates, authors of Visible Learning (2014), note that in many classrooms, instruction follows this pattern around 75% of the time. Recitation dominates, while discussions are used sparingly. Even when teachers sit students in a circle, pose a discussion question, and open things up to students, the “discussions” that result are often just recitations in disguise. Instead of authentic dialogs among students, it’s often just two or three students responding directly to the teacher’s query.

One reason why recitation dominates is because it’s easier for teachers to control student behavior and control the delivery of content. But releasing some control to students and inviting them to do more of the talking can have a real impact on learning and engagement.

A simple way to make this shift is to shift the primary form of classroom discourse from recitation to discussion. When students are engaged in discussion, they can’t just sit back and listen; they have to process and make meaning of classroom content for themselves. They become active thinkers and participants, rather than receptacles of information. And they learn more—and more deeply—as a result.

High-quality discussions offer other benefits as well. They help students develop core literacy skills, like respectful listening, comprehending, and communicating. They also engage the highest levels of thinking on Bloom’s taxonomy, by requiring students to compare, analyze, synthesize and evaluate information. Even more important, establishing a “culture of conversation” communicates to students that they have a voice—that their ideas are valued and that they’re an important part of the learning process.

What does it take to get quality conversations going in the classroom? Like all student-centered activities, discussions require clear procedures, time to practice, and student ownership in order to be successful. That’s why I believe that our Community CIRCLE discussion tool (Silver, Perini, and Boutz, 2016) is such a powerful one—because it delivers on all these counts.

The tool’s CIRCLE acronym spells out concrete steps for fostering productive discussions and for helping students connect the content to what they know best—their personal knowledge, beliefs, and experiences. Specifically, it has teachers Create a prompt that gets students thinking about relevant personal connections and then Invite students to share their thoughts. Teachers then help students Review and Compare key ideas, Look for patterns, and Extend or apply what they learn to the content.

When we invite students to share and compare personal connections to the content, we spark rich and lively conversations where all students can contribute and all students learn. We put the brakes on teacher-dominated conversations, we stop that recitation TIRE from rolling, and we let students drive the learning.

|  by Harvey F. Silver and Matthew J. Perini  |  August 8, 2022  |  

To understand the challenges we face, just scan the headlines, which in state after state, sound like this:

Schools Lament Teacher Shortages for New School Year

State DOE Easing Certification Process, Increasing Incentives for New Teachers

As an educator, you probably don’t need to read the headlines to know that many experienced teachers are leaving the profession and that recruiting and hiring new teachers has become more difficult than ever. Clearly, the need to prepare a new generation of teachers is critical—especially since many who will be entering the profession this year may have received less training than the previous generation of teachers. How can we prepare these new teachers for success? How will they acquire the basic tools of the trade?

To help answer these questions, we look to Bryan Goodwin, a leading education researcher and President of McREL International, one of the foremost education research organizations in the world. Among Goodwin’s research interests is another, but highly related question: How do teachers move from novice to expert? In examining how experts in all fields get better at their craft, Goodwin highlights the importance of “mirroring,” or consciously mimicking what experts do. For example, athletes analyze and copy the moves and techniques of top performers; artists replicate, in detail, the work of the masters; and so on. Mirroring shortens the learning curve because, as Goodwin (2018) puts it, “Instead of spending countless hours casting about to figure out how to do something well, we learn from others’ hard-earned experience and insights” (ix).

We are especially proud that Goodwin is a strong proponent of our Thoughtful Classroom tools, which are informed by the insights and experiences of thousands of teachers, as an ideal way to accelerate teachers’ learning. In fact, when Goodwin and McREL were looking for new ways to help teachers apply McREL’s world-renowned Classroom Instruction that Works research framework, they partnered with us to develop classroom-ready tools for putting their research to work—resulting in Tools for Classroom Instruction That Works. According to Goodwin (2018), working to adopt classroom-proven techniques like our tools “may be the single best way to grow professionally” (x).

As you can probably gather, we are tools people. We have been working with teachers to develop and refine tools for over 45 years. And there is one specific collection of tools that is particularly well suited to helping new teachers build positive classroom cultures that support high levels of learning: Tools for a Successful School Year (Silver, Perini, & Boutz, 2016). Tools for a Successful School Year contains over 20 classroom-ready tools designed to help teachers address some of the most important “Hows” needed to build a highly effective classroom:

To further accelerate the learning curve of teachers, we have been working to develop new ways beyond the print medium to help teachers put tools to work in their classrooms as quickly as possible. As a result, we are proud to offer a new line of multimedia online learning suites, which include video tutorials of our tools. We call these video tutorials “Tools in Twelve” because they provide teachers with the knowledge, steps, and expert-teacher tips they need to use a tool effectively—in approximately twelve minutes. All of the tools in Tools for a Successful School Year are now available as “Tools in Twelve” in our new online learning suite, The Four Cornerstones of Effective Classrooms. In addition to video tutorials, teachers also receive on-demand access to a wealth of planning guides, reflection forms, and classroom resources that make it easier than ever to bring new tools into the classroom.

The challenges that schools and their new teachers face are real, but we have a far better chance of overcoming them quickly if we can equip our new teachers with proven techniques that are easy to integrate into the classroom. Taking this idea to heart, a number of the schools we work with have chosen to use The Four Cornerstones of Effective Classrooms online suite and its tools as the basis for their New Teacher Academies. Working with a coach, new teachers identify common challenges, establish priorities, identify the tools they will focus on, learn and plan collaboratively, and commit to reflecting regularly on the results. We can’t think of a better way to focus new teachers’ learning on what matters most for classroom success and accelerate professional growth.

Harvey F. Silver is the co-founder and President of Silver Strong & Associates and Thoughtful Education Press. To contact Harvey email him at TrHarvey@thoughtfulclassroom.com.

Matthew J. Perini is the Senior Director of Content Development for Silver Strong & Associates and Thoughtful Education Press. To contact Matthew, email him at mperini@thoughtfulclassroom.com.

|  by Harvey F. Silver  |  March 17, 2022  |  

Almost exactly two years ago, I was packing my bag and getting ready to go to Los Angeles. Jay McTighe and I had a large pre-conference session at the 2020 ASCD Annual Conference and also a special session on our new book that had recently launched, Teaching for Deeper Learning. We were excited to share the important concept of deep learning with passionate educators.

And then the world shut down.

As I write this, I’m preparing to board a plane to Chicago, where this year’s Annual ASCD Conference will once again be held in person. Two full years later, Jay and I will finally conduct the workshop we planned more than two years ago. And as I think about what the last two years have meant for teachers, administrators, students, and families, I realize that the need for deeper learning—for learning that actively engages students in making meaning and thinking deeply about content—is more important now than ever.

A goal of our workshop is to make sure that participants are actively engaged in deep learning. We plan to begin the workshop by posing four questions that we have asked so many educators over the years:

Whenever we ask these questions, many hands go up. The reason is that we have all experienced shallow learning. Shallow learning is the kind of learning that doesn’t stick, and it’s a symptom of the content-coverage model that predominates in too many classrooms. We can teach faster than students can learn. The goal is not to get the content out. The goal is for students to make meaning of the content so that they understand it and can apply it. Anything else is fool’s gold. It may sparkle for a bit, but it doesn’t have any real value.

On the other hand, we work with many schools who have made the commitment to deep learning and know how much of a difference it makes. That’s why Jay and I are so excited to share the skills and tools from our book, Teaching for Deeper Learning, in our preconference session in Chicago this weekend. We know that integrating deeper-learning skills into your curriculum will promote active learning and deep understanding. We also know that the deeper-learning tools we’ll be sharing make it easy for teachers to integrate these skills into the lessons and units they’re already teaching.

Well, looks like my plane is about to board—I hope to see you in Chicago!

But more important I hope you are inspired to make learning deep for all your students.

Tr. Harvey

Harvey Silver is the co-founder and president of Silver Strong & Associates and Thoughtful Education Press. To contact Harvey email him at TrHarvey@thoughtfulclassroom.

Harvey Silver presents on Teaching for Deeper Learning at ASCD’s Annual Conference March 18, 2022 in Chicago

Margaret Searle presents on Reading for Understanding at ASCD’s Annual Conference March 18, 2022 in Chicago

|  by Harvey F. Silver  |  January 18, 2022  |  

Do you know the feeling of being stuck in the mud? Wheels spinning, can’t get any traction, unable to move forward . . .

The reason I ask is because I recently had a conversation with an educator who shared that this is how she’s been feeling all year long.

And she’s not alone. Many educators have told me that this year has been even more challenging than last year, when they had to abruptly shift from teaching in person to teaching online.

Clearly, the expectation that things would be “returning to normal” in September was misguided. But why? Why has this year been more challenging than expected for so many educators?

For one thing, many students have been out of school for over a year and have lost touch with what I call “the school gene.” Expectations inside the classroom are very different from what students became accustomed to at home, and some have simply forgotten what being in school entails. It’s even harder with first graders, many of whom never set foot in a kindergarten classroom, and never had the chance to build a school mindset in the first place.

But there are many other challenges as well—veteran teachers retiring, social-distancing requirements, disruptions when teachers or students are quarantined, learning gaps that have been widened by time at home. I could go on and on.

With all these roadblocks in their way, it’s no wonder that so many educators feel like they’re struggling to move forward. Yet if we look back at our stuck-in-the-mud analogy, I believe it maps out a path for getting going again. When we’re stuck in the mud, frantically stepping on the gas doesn’t help. We often need to rock back before we can move forward. And stepping back is exactly what I believe we need to do to respond to this year’s challenges.

Instead of pushing more content and new initiatives, we need to step back and focus on building a solid foundation for learning—the kind of foundation that will enable our students to thrive under even the most challenging of circumstances. Building such a foundation will help our students succeed not only academically, but socially and emotionally as well.

What does it take to build this kind of foundation?

Years of research and experience have taught us that effective learning environments share four common features:

• Rules and procedures that support successful, self-directed learning
• Positive relationships among teachers and students
• A culture that encourages deep thinking and learning
• Lessons that promote student engagement and enjoyment

We call these features “cornerstones” because they’re critical components of a successful classroom culture. And with the challenges today’s educators are facing, putting these cornerstones in place is more important than ever. As our friend Robert Wilson, an educator for 27 years and principal of Cherokee Bluff Middle School, shares in the heartfelt video below, “This has certainly been one of the toughest school years. We’ve got to get back to what we know works.”

This is why we’ve been working with our partner schools to make reinforcing these cornerstones a manageable priority. We have seen the impact that this focus on cornerstones can have on teachers, students, and the entire school culture. And we believe that there really is no better or more effective way to regain traction and move forward again with renewed energy.

Harvey Silver is the co-founder and president of Silver Strong & Associates and Thoughtful Education Press. To contact Harvey email him at TrHarvey@thoughtfulclassroom.