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On the road training schools in Trust-Based Observations trainings, we periodically see absolute teaching brilliance during our 20-minute observations. It dawned on us that we have an obligation to share this brilliance with all teachers so they can learn and grow from one another. Each episode is an interview with one of these teachers where we explore their strengths as they share their tips and tricks. Tips and tricks that definitely lead to improved teaching and learning.
11 Liz Smith
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[00:00:00] Hi, and welcome to another edition of 20 minutes of teaching brilliant on the road with trust based observations. Today I have with me Liz Smith, who is a fifth grade teacher at Robertson Elementary School in Yakima, Washington, the first schools that I've done in my home state. So it was an extra special week for me to get to spend a week out there. just knocked my socks off with her formative assessment, descriptive progress feedback, relationships, classroom management, really just the whole shebang. And so I was really excited that she agreed to come on. So, Liz, will you do us all a favor, say hi, introduce yourself, tell us about yourself, your background, how you got to where you're at, all that good stuff.
So hi, I'm Liz Smith. I am a fifth grade teacher in Yakima, Washington. I've been teaching for 10 years in the fifth grade. I became a teacher cause I come from a family [00:01:00] of teachers. My mom's a teacher. My grandparents were teachers and I was raised in schools. And I was lucky enough to have phenomenal teachers.
That's great. So I'm going to ask you a quick question then. So growing up in a family of teachers, what did you learn growing up about teaching? I mean, cause you, you're hearing shop talk,
Yeah. So, my mom is a phenomenal teacher and it just really was impressed on me growing up that when you're the teacher, those kids are your kids and you care about them and you worry about them and you do everything you can for them. And you know, I saw her so many times making phone calls, doing drop offs, checking in on kids.
And she, talked about her kids in a way that I knew she really, really cared about each one of them as an individual. I also knew that it was going to be a lot of work, which I think some teachers don't know going in, but I knew that it was going to be hard work and good work.
That is, you are so spot on, on [00:02:00] with all of that stuff. I love hearing it is one, I just love hearing care, right? You have to care about them and they have to know you care about them. It's just, it's such a vital, vital component of. of success, right? If they love you, they're going to do more for you, right?
And, and you want to care for them. Each one, whatever they bring to the table or don't bring to the table, they all deserve that. And we we want to do our best to give it to them every day. And then the other thing is work, just that, that it takes work.
Teaching is hard work. You want to talk a little bit more about that and, and maybe planning and, and I think there's a generation now, and I think it's really, really amazing, that the work life balance, like, the whole thing of being a workaholic is, to me, is off putting.
And, but, you do have to work. And with work life balance, sometimes there's a sense that, well, I can leave it just at the end of the day at 3 o'clock, And that's it. And I want to find balance, but like, especially as a new teacher, man, the amount of time and [00:03:00] work you have to put in and, and to be prepared because it's because out of care, right?
Like you just said. So, I've thrown in my two cents ahead of time, but you go ahead, please, and talk about work.
You know, when I first started teaching, I had terrible work life balance. I will fully admit I was one of those teachers that first year of school where I was here until 6 PM. But I've, I got that figured out. You know, I had really good teammates you know, who gave me permission that you don't have to grade every single thing or not everything has to go in a grade book.
Some things are just practice. Some things are just formative. And then recognizing where to put the most energy. You know, when I, my first year of teaching, I was talking to my brothers and I was talking about bringing papers home to grade. And some people really disagree with that. My brother said, what?
Teachers work when they're not at work. I said, what house were you brought up in? Cause even when you're not or lesson planning, you know, it's hard not to think about your students or, you [00:04:00] know, as you're laying in bed at night to be thinking about, okay, so what am I teaching tomorrow? How am I going to teach it?
How am I going to help this and that student? What am I going to do to differentiate? I think it is hard. It is hard to leave school at school. And it's hard to get all your work done. Within the day, I think a really good team helps with that when you can split up the work. You know, when you can really You know, take those tasks and say, this is something that really needs to happen and it's okay if this doesn't happen.
And I think that takes, that takes time.
It does take time and I think, and I think sometimes whether we like it or not that first year when we haven't done it before, you do have to put that time in and maybe still learning things you're saying about prioritizing and stuff. But, but if I haven't created those plans before and they're not all laid out before me. They're not going to happen automatically, and if it's not a well planned class, it's not going to function well. And I'm not saying there shouldn't be balance, and I'm not saying we shouldn't have prioritization about what we [00:05:00] do and don't do, and that's like you're talking about the power of having mentors that can help show you, but it's tricky, right?
And I so I nannied for all of the teachers at my mom's school. I was kind of one of the older kids of the teacher kids. And so I got to actually be in the homes of a lot of teachers and see, you know, how they made family time and work time, family space and workspace. And you know, the decisions that they made.
for their family so that they could have that balance. And I think that was really powerful to me to be able to see those really strong examples of prioritizing and teaching.
(ad here) That is such an interesting gift, Liz, to have not only in your, in your own house, because we're always going to look at that through whatever lens that might be slightly subjective, but but then we did, we're the babysitter or the daycare person for my mom's friends, basically, at the school, and I'm seeing all their examples and how they're [00:06:00] doing it.
That's a gift.
Yeah. I learned how to grade papers really young,
also see non examples? Okay,
I think my mom was probably the one who was the most working outside of work hours or had the hardest time putting, putting aside work. But for the most part, you know, I worked with these really phenomenal teachers who really had great priorities in their life.
You know, they made time for their families and they They also made time for their students. And I I went to a special school and it was much more project based. And so I never really was raised around the idea of just reading out of your curriculum. That never was a, something that I was taught and I'm grateful.
Because I, that's something that I think new teachers hear sometimes is just read out of the book. And curriculum isn't made to fit every kid. And it's not made to fit every teacher. And you need to be able to, you know, look at [00:07:00] curriculum and see what's going to work and to try different things. And to know how to do the things in the curriculum yourself.
which is trial and error too, right? I mean, you've had good experiences, but it's also trial and error and knowing what does and what resonates with me because we can be successful teachers in so many different ways, right? And so we have to pick and choose all that as we're doing it. Do you, I have a question coming back to a little bit more about what you were saying earlier about because you said talked about like at night I find myself thinking about my kids and my kids in my class and and and differentiating and what this kid needs and what that kid needs and there's a line in which that can go unhealthy right where I'm not it's getting in the way of my own health and my own like how do you manage to balance that piece?
You know, you, you do have to set boundaries for yourself, even in your own mind. You know, you have to set the time and you have to have to [00:08:00] have certain activities, you know, that you tell yourself, this is what I'm going to do this, and I'm not going to do it past that. I really struggled my first few years with really putting my students behavior on myself.
Everything they did wrong was a mirror of me, of what I was doing wrong. And it took someone just giving me permission to say, you know, someone saying to me, It's not really about you. That behavior is not really about you and it's okay for you to not carry around that guilt with you. So yeah, on the one hand, you know, being in charge of my own feelings and being able to say like, okay, I can't control that.
I'm going to think about something I can control. And then also, you know, having those activities in place for yourself that you recognize help you to center and focus on other things. I love to bake. So I'll go and I'll, I'll bake a cake or I'll do yoga. I'll do those things that I, that take me a little bit out of school and help me to focus back on myself.
So I'm hearing self care and I'm also [00:09:00] hearing the classic Serenity Fair, the things I can't control and the things I can't, and then recognizing that, and then also coming to peace with that at the same time, right?
Sorry. We're on motion. Yeah.
Yeah, I know. I get it. We're good. So let's we've been talking all kinds of. important things that are around the teaching. But when, when I was in that class that day, one, I loved your formative assessment. I love when we were in there, the kids had, well, let's start off with the very beginning.
When we walked in there, they were finishing up a little SEL activity with these scenarios and problem solving scenarios. We could talk, that's a regular part of what you do. Do you want to just talk for a minute about that? Because I thought it was really fun to watch.
So we we do. Explicit SEL, and then of course we also build it into our other lessons and we like to take things that we really notice our kids might be struggling with maybe it's leadership opportunities, or just [00:10:00] how they're acting on the playground, socialization with other students, and teach explicit lessons on how they should behave.
One thing. I've really noticed that students, when they are the person in the situation, don't always have a clear head. So, the day that you were visiting, we were actually, we just taken some common scenarios that are things that we see
like adults too.
and you know, put other names to them and having the kids actually problem solve.
Okay, if you were outside of this situation and you were the, the adult or the person who was trying to mediate, how would you handle this? And helping kids because You know, I was really taught growing up, if you know how you're going to react ahead of time, if you know your boundary ahead of time, you're more likely, in the moment when something's happening, to act that way.
And so we, we really try and help kids understand, like, if you know ahead of time, if you've already planned how you're going to react to a situation, you have a higher chance of actually reacting that way when you want to. We also do a lot of brain science in my class. [00:11:00] So, we talk a lot about being in your prefrontal cortex and staying out of that amygdala zone.
I love that. I love that. I mean, so I hear, I'm hearing you talking about topical issues. So that thing means things that are that are coming up that are relevant to the kid, putting themselves, so thinking outside themselves, if I was the teacher in this case, or if I was somebody else, how I'm going to do it to actually get more to that prefrontal cortex, right?
And away from the amygdala. And, and then yeah. Well, I lost my train of thought on that one. Sorry about that. But it was, it was really, really fun to watch the kids come up with those solutions.
Yeah, it's really fun to hear them learn from
So, let's, let's jump up to then, like, when we were there, you had talked about, like, they'd had next, yeah, yeah,
No, I'm sorry. A little bit of camera lag.
just that, Oh, it's okay. Okay. They'll edit that out. So we're good. The, the lag anyway. So when we were in there, we, you would, and especially when you're in the reflective conversation afterwards, you had talked about that there had been an exit ticket the day [00:12:00] before on, on this kid's skills in math, because we were in math class in a 5th grade math class.
And so then. They had, you'd noticed some struggle areas. And so then there was a, a follow up little formative quiz that was going on that happened next. And as that quiz is going on, it was just full of you formally assessing the kids and providing descriptive progress feedback. So do you want to talk about that role in, in, in your class?
And then I just think that formative assessment in the form of an exit ticket is so valuable, but then even listening to what you were doing afterwards with it, Because it's what do we do, doing it's one thing, but then what do we do afterwards, right, to really then get to where, help get them to where we want is really the most important thing.
Do you want to talk about your process with that, especially related to when we were in there that day and the day before?
Yeah, I'll do my best. So we had done an exit ticket on LionPlot after a couple days of learning and I try and score things right away whenever possible so the kids can have feedback pretty immediately. And then [00:13:00] my students track their own data and progress and we just weren't really happy with the results.
The students had felt really confident in class, but then the exit ticket Just wasn't very good. And one of the things was, you know, I had evaluated the exit ticket and I thought, you know, I actually can't separate whether they're struggling with fractions or with the line plot. So I need to go through this again and make sure we're really confident and rebuild that confidence.
So I do a lot of informal assessment in the class. And then just a lot of engagement strategies as well when we're reviewing. So one thing I like to do is just having the kids doing a lot of choral response, or repeating back, or responding at their table throughout. And then one of the strategies we did while you were in the room we call it the balloon answer.
So, This is just a really quick, easy way in your classroom to have your kids all share out. So you have them put their hand into a fist and then they, they blow their answer into their hand like they're blowing up a balloon and then they let it float up to the sky and then [00:14:00] We pop the balloons at the same time.
You go one, two, three, and they all pop the balloons and say the answer. And so it gives you a chance to, you know, see that everyone is participating and has put their answer up. But it's a little fun and engaging at the same time. And then just having that chance to go back through and review with students to double check that they did actually understand.
And then we retook the exit ticket and I was able to see, you know, But it had actually been a problem with the original exit ticket and not in their understanding, and we've been able to, we were able to clarify that a little bit better. But I really like students to be able to clearly see where they're at on a skill, and to feel confident that, yeah, that is the level they're at, and where they should go to go to the next level.
I love that, Liz. I really, one of the things that really stood out with me, one, that balloon pop, I think it's so cool because as you're talking about listening to core responses or group response, sometimes people I think can get a misperception. But as that's happening, you're gauging every single person at [00:15:00] that table or everybody in the coral because if somebody's not answering or if you hear an answer that's the wrong answer, you immediately know where that's happening.
I'm not just listening to it just in a broad sense. You're really looking at that and listening for each individual student's answer within that, and I think that's a really, really important piece that sometimes people don't really realize that core response can be used really, really productively as a form of formative assessment.
Do they get it or don't they get it? And I think you're really good at using that that
Yeah, and you have to pay special attention to certain students,
The other thing that I
you know, to make sure, but I also,
No, you go ahead. Sorry, we've got a little time lag. You go ahead.
But I also find, you know, watching their nonverbal signs as well. Are they slow to raise that hand up? Are they really thinking about it? Was it automatic? So you're paying attention to, yeah, that response they give, but also their body language that they're giving during that time as well.
Liz, I love hearing that because it's, it's, it's, [00:16:00] the answer can tell us one thing and even a curl answer can tell us something, but there's more that we can look at that goes into assessment than just their answer. Deer in headlights look. Or, or a pause, or the looking down, or, or those things that mean, and then it's, it, then when it's like that, then it's like, that's where I'm bulls eyeing to, to go help those students, because that, now I know, right?
Is that really what's happening?
And you know, when we first start out in the year, there's those kids who aren't willing to answer at all or who are just so nervous. So you also, it's about, you know, building that, environment of you might say the wrong thing and I'm not going to attack you. No one's going to call you out. We're going to use that to help you, but it's never going to be punitive if you're giving the wrong answer.
And that really helps for kids being willing to just say, okay, no one's going to hear me. Because everyone's talking it's just for the teacher, no one's paying attention to me, and yeah, it really gives an [00:17:00] opportunity to be able to quickly go and check in with students, see who might need a little extra help or a little extra reminder.
Yeah, I, I I think that's, and you know what that's really tying into, to me, Liz? That's relationships, and that's building relationships with kids, and understanding each individual kid, and learning that kid, and building that. Slowly with time for those that are less confident, building that relationship so they feel more comfortable to share as well, not just with you, but then ultimately with the class even, because that, that's building them up just as a whole, right?
Not just in their math skills or their English skills or whatever.
Yes, there really is nothing more important in the classroom than having a relationship with your students. They have to see you as another person. And you know, I think in my room that really comes down to honesty and respect. And just being really open with my students and, you know, it's how I react to my mistakes and their mistakes.
And it's how I handle my emotions. And you know, [00:18:00] really finding genuine interest in your kids because relationship makes. all the difference.
You, you, you're right on, and it really is understanding each kid, and it's even like, Modeling, I think you, without saying it, you did talk about modeling because it's teachers showing mistakes and like, you would accidentally have the wrong paper on the board, remember that? And and then you, whoops, and you, and then you admitted your mistake in front of the kids, right?
And when we, we show our own humanity in front of the kids, that makes it so much easier for them to like, mistakes aren't, aren't horrible things that we need to be embarrassed about. They're opportunities, right? And you're modeling that, that sends that message to the kids. You want to talk about that at all?
Yeah. So, that was actually, that came from my babysitting days. Someone pointed that out to me at one point that she wants. She wants you to be her babysitter because you don't talk to her like she's six, you talk to her like she's a human. And I've really taken that with me, you know, into my adult life of [00:19:00] students, yes, you need to be obviously age appropriate, but They need you to be a human being.
And when you are too afraid to make mistakes or to have a bad day or to show emotion, that makes them feel like they, they can't do those things. So when I'm having a bad day, I tell my students and then I tell them the things I'm doing to try and overcome that. Or if I'm, if I make a mistake, I have to think about how I respond to that.
We talk about, you can laugh, Or you can cry and you get to choose how you respond to something not going the way you wanted it to. So, you know, when I make a mistake, and sometimes I don't have the right response, but I'm getting better at having the appropriate response. And when I don't have the right response, it's apologizing to my students and telling them why that wasn't the appropriate response.
Because they need to see that. They need to see that. adults are still making mistakes [00:20:00] and learning from them.
I think that's such a powerful message to send that we're making mistakes too. We're not perfect because sometimes I think as kids we think of our parents as perfect, our teachers as perfect, and we role model that we're never going to be that way. I think that's a valuable message to send to kids as well.
I want to come back to the, the tracking progress in the formative assessment because there's one other thing you said that I thought was really, really important and that you talked about them self assessing their progress and tracking their progress. And look, I mean, as you know, I'm in classes observing people a lot, probably more than anybody I think on earth, perhaps.
And, and. I see teachers formally assessing their kids and and sometimes I see exit tickets and value and using that in the way that I'd like to see it, not as much as I want, and sometimes I'll see peer to peer assessment and self assessment, but I definitely don't see those as much as ideally I'd like to see it.
And so, Hearing you talk about having the students self [00:21:00] assess their progress on their work is really resonating with me on a deep level. So, will you dig into what you're doing with that more? Because I think there's, there's things to be learned from you on
We have really a growth focus and I talk about that starting the very first day of school that I'm not focused on, you meeting, you know, reaching some specific end goal. I'm focused on you making growth and progress. And that's what I want you to focus on as well. And so we really have like progress.
We actually started out with the metaphor of the map. You know, if you traveled from Washington to Florida, you've gone a really long way. That's a hundred percent, but if you've made it 50 percent of the way and you're in Kansas, have you still traveled really far? So throughout the year, this, well, actually throughout the week, students track how they're doing confidence wise and how they're doing on an academic level.
So from assessments whether it be, you know, post assessments, but also just small little [00:22:00] checks, I'll have them check in with, okay, are you growing in this skill? What level are you in at the skill? What percentage are you at? And then also having them assess for themselves. What's your confidence level on this skill?
Are you feeling like you're a level four when you're really, not, or are you feeling like you're a level one, but you really are a level four. So it takes a lot of practice for kids to get confident in knowing where they're at. And I used to get really bogged down with trying to have my kids track what they were doing.
It felt like it just took so much time, but I found at this point I can get into a routine pretty quickly. With having the kids track, we use a color system, so they, they put their percentages and they do colors that match our report cards but what we look at is the percentages of, are you making growth?
Have you stopped making growth? Are you inconsistently going up and down? And helping kids understand what that means, why it might be happening. And what they can do to improve in that area. (ad here)
[00:23:00] So, how do you, because I think that the thing that's going to be most useful for other teachers is how do you build that into what you're doing in the process? How do you get from the beginning of starting to do, you know, One, you're self assessing the work, and it sounds like it's a combination of actually looking at the work, but also a feeling of how I'm doing at the work.
But then the confidence in that. How are you going from the beginning of teaching them that to making that a proficient part of what you're doing in your practice?
so well, we started out kind of small, just doing overall skills. At this point, my kids are tracking standard by standard, so they kind of get down into the nitty gritty. But we started out just kind of. broadly, you know, looking at math overall or science overall or a whole category. I, our report cards use a one through four system.
And so I decided that, you know, for their self assessed system, it needed to match that. It needed to be familiar. So I came up with, you know, what would each of these levels actually [00:24:00] mean or look like confidence wise. And so we have a poster and we just kind of. Start at the beginning of the year.
And the beginning of the year, I don't make a very big deal about it. We don't do much reflection into it. It's just, you know, like asking like, okay, how are you feeling? And then once the students start to know me better they've heard me reflect about things. Then I start asking for reflection of, okay, you said you were at a three.
Why do you feel like you're at a three? Or what's keeping you there? And then data tracking. I find that it's most meaningful when it happens pretty quickly after. We've done an assignment or done an assessment. One thing that I was getting kind of bogged down in the past is I was letting it pile up cause it was like, Oh, we have to get out our data tracking materials.
Yeah, at the beginning of the year, it might feel that way a little bit, but it takes time, but at this point they're so fast, you know, when I say we're data tracking, they are opening the standards and the awesome thing about it too, is they know all the standards because they're looking at them so regularly, they know [00:25:00] exactly what's expected.
The next step that we're taking as a team that we have just started the process of, is we are creating proficiency scales for every standard so kids can really make sure and see very clearly how they are traveling along that spectrum of learning. I'm trying to make that really apparent for kids.
It's, you know, been years of creating materials, but we're also discovering that a lot of these materials are out there. You can go and find them. That doesn't have to be something you create for yourself. There's a lot of things out and available to teachers to help them be tracking this data with their students, to help them be helping their students understand what learning looks like and what growth looks like.
That is there's so much there. It, it, like you, the students becoming so aware of the standards, in essence, really what they're doing is they're becoming aware of the learning targets, right? It's almost reinforcing the value of, of learning targets when we know we're supposed to learn and then we're assessing that and even self assessing on it, that increases the likelihood that we're going to achieve success [00:26:00] when we're doing it regularly.
And like, like any, like peer to peer assessment, we have to teach kids how to do that. So there's front loading that happens, but you're saying the same thing with We have to front load and at first it might feel a little bit cumbersome, but then you're at the point now where the kids are like, yeah, we got it.
And so that front loading pays off in their, in their work on the end. But then the other thing I hear you talking about is with them, with the confidence piece is you've actually like, You've named and labeled and identified what 1, and 2, and 3, and 4 look like super specifically. So it's not really left to chance.
You've given them real clear, I mean they could perhaps give themselves a 2. 5 or whatever, but you've given them the clear outlines so they have a sense of that. And so, just even the thought of like putting in the time to do that, I think you're going to get people who are going to want to reach out and steal your stuff.
And I'll just say, I always say, show me a good teacher and I'll show you a good thief. Liz, this has been awesome. Would you mind sharing your contact information for anybody out there that [00:27:00] is interested in reaching out and and, and finding more about what you're doing and some of your ideas?
Yeah, sure. I can give my school email, so it's smith dot elizabeth YSD seven.org and that's probably the best way to to reach out.
Super. Liz, this has been so fantastic. I love that, you know, we get the reflective conversations right after the school, but now when I get to have these ones, I learn so much more about you and your process. And and I knew it was awesome then, but then I get all the ins and outs, so it's just like. The details of it are just so fun for me to listen to.
So thanks so so much for being a part of 20 Minutes of Teaching Brilliance. We really appreciate it.
Thank you so much for having me.
Take care.