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Chelsea Rachiele says to teach students to reflect on their understanding
95 Plays1 year ago
Chelsea Rachiele 7th grade math teacher, The Collegiate School of Memphis in Memphis, TN. Originally from Florida, got my undergrad in Actuarial Science but all the while knew I had a stronger passion for teaching. After getting married in 2017, my husband and I moved to Memphis where I was accepted into the Memphis Teacher Residency program - a 1 year residency program where you teach in a classroom 4 days a week and go to grad school 2 days a week. By the end of the year I had earned my Master’s degree in Urban Education. Since then I’ve been teaching in Memphis - I taught 11th grade math for 2 years and the past 3.5 years I’ve been teaching 7th grade math.
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Transcript
Introduction to Learner Centered Spaces Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to the Learner Centered Spaces Podcast, where we empower and inspire ownership of learning, sponsored by Mastery Portfolio, hosted by Star Saxton and Crystal Frommer. In each episode, we will bring you engaging conversations with a wide variety of educators, both in and out of the classroom.
00:00:22
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This podcast is created for educators who want to learn more about how to make the shift toward learner-centered spaces for their students, schools, and districts, or education at large.
Partnership with Teach Better Podcast Network
00:00:33
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The learner-centered spaces podcast is now a member of the Teach Better Podcast Network.
Meet Chelsea Richelli
00:00:41
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We are so excited to have Chelsea Richelli on the show today. Chelsea is a teacher at the Collegiate School in Memphis, Tennessee.
00:00:56
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Good evening, Chelsea. We're so happy to have you on the podcast. Can you please tell us a little bit about yourself, your role, your location, some parts of your journey, and maybe an interesting fact? Sure. I am a seventh grade math teacher.
Chelsea's Teaching Journey
00:01:11
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I teach in Memphis, Tennessee at the Collegiate School of Memphis.
00:01:15
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And I've been here at collegiate for, um, this is not going to be my fourth year as a seventh grade math teacher. And before that I taught for about two, uh, two years and 11th grade math here in Memphis. I got started in teaching through the Memphis teacher residency program. So through that program, I not only got to student teach for a year, but I also got my master's degree in urban education and
00:01:41
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have been doing it ever since. Interesting fact about me is I'm really into escape rooms and strategy board games.
Chelsea's Teaching Style Influences
00:01:51
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And so I think that kind of comes out in my classroom with just what I value and what I try to inspire kids with, with their critical thinking and problem solving and making math engaging and fun and trying to teach them that these skills are very applicable to many, many parts of our lives.
00:02:11
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I love that. I love a board game. So I could totally appreciate that. I think that when my son was really young, I started playing Scrabble with him like before he could spell as just like a way for him to start engaging with language. And by the time he was like six or seven, he could beat adults already, like thinking, you know, just thinking strategically, not just
00:02:36
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with words or whatever, because I did let him look things up on his phone if he couldn't spell them. But just how he was strategically able to play a board, I think that it's amazing if you could bring that into a math class. I think kids probably really respond well to that. How do kids respond when you bring things like that to
Incorporating Games for Critical Thinking
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them?
00:02:57
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they really love it. So we at our school, we're required to have a bookshelf full of books for when kids finish early on anything. They're supposed to pick a book and read it, but I've kind of taken a spin on that. And so in my bookshelf, I also have a shelf full of just like critical thinking games. And so they're games like Blockus and
00:03:22
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What else do I have? A lot of 3D mazes that they have to work through, like a gravity maze, I have a competitive Rubik's Cube game. So whenever they're done early with whatever assignment they have, if they've proven that they understand what they're doing, then they have free reign to go to the bookshelf and pick out any
00:03:47
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board game or strategy game that they want to play with each other. And they can play independently like a canoodle and just kind of challenge themselves. Or they can, if someone else near them is done early too, then they can start a two or three player game. And they just love it. They gravitate towards it all the time. It kind of brings some competitiveness into the classroom. And I just love the conversations that they have.
00:04:12
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about what they're doing and they don't even realize that they're doing critical thinking that they need for just a regular math assignment as well.
00:04:22
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I think that's absolutely amazing. And I think that's
Vision for Learner-Centered Spaces
00:04:25
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right. The more that we could kind of build those critical thinking skills into like intentional play situations in the classroom is such an opportunity. And it's also a great way for us to kind of lead into our next question about what a learner-centered space really means to you. What does it look like, sound like, feel like? Sure. Yeah. I really think that
00:04:51
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When you think about a learner-centered space, you have to think about how students are all different kinds of learners. And there shouldn't be one specific way to show your learning or experience your learning. So what I try to create in my classroom is a very flexible, free-flowing space for students to work.
00:05:16
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I mean, when you walk into my room, students might be working independently silently on assignment, but there's kids sitting at couches at a coffee table working. There's kids working at a whiteboard working. There's kids sitting on wobble stools working. I'm able to work one on one on students with students that are struggling.
00:05:35
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maybe a student has paired up with someone else to give some support. So it kind of looks like organized chaos, but kids are working in a way that helps them to learn better and it makes the learning more engaging. And I think that's also tied to what it sounds like. So students
00:05:55
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are encouraged in my class to dialogue about math all the time. I'd prefer that my voice is heard a lot less than their voice because I think who's doing the talking is who's doing the learning. So I really feel like my voice is heard less and the students' voices are heard more. Yeah, so that's kind of what it looks like and what it sounds like.
00:06:25
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When you say dialoguing in a seventh grade math class, what, like, can you say a little bit more about that as a high school English teacher? And I have this idea of what it means to have, you know, student to student talking kind of happening. But what does that look like in a seventh grade math class?
Fostering Dialogue in Math Classes
00:06:45
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So the majority of my time with introducing new content is I really like to just activate prior knowledge and give students a jumping off point. And then they're tasked with just wrestling with problems they've never seen before. And so when they're talking to, they're working at whiteboard standing up with each other and they're talking about, um,
00:07:11
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sometimes sounds like arguing, honestly. They're talking about a problem, how they want to do it, how their classmate wants to do it. They're asked to talk about precision, like is this answer really precise? They're using language that we've talked about in class before, like today we were talking about
00:07:29
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absolute value in using that term rather than saying whether a number was bigger or smaller than another number. So they're having these conversations with one another and really trying to just wrestle through the problems. And we've built a strong enough relationships with one another that there isn't this fear of, well, what if my answer is wrong or what if I
00:07:53
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I don't really know what I'm doing. It's just kind of, we just kind of talk. We kind of just, we just kind of talk about it until we can figure it out. They can ask questions from me or from each other and it just kind of organically happens from there.
00:08:09
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And I think our math teacher listeners will probably recognize a lot of what you're saying, um, to model the building thinking classrooms. And that is where Chelsea and I met. We met at a building thinking classrooms conference in, um, outside of, uh, Indianapolis. And when I, when I heard Chelsea present, I was like, okay, this is the kind of teacher I want to be like, this is what I want to do in my classroom, uh, as a math teacher. So, um, thank you for, for that wonderful presentation and
00:08:39
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And I completely agree with you.
00:08:42
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that the kids who are, the classroom that's talking, the classroom that's doing, that's the classroom that's thinking. And I think that works across all disciplines. But one thing, I've said this before on this podcast, so everybody who listens regularly knows that Crystal struggles with assessment. And I struggle with being a building thinking classroom's teacher and being learner-centered, but also doing the testing and the quizzing
00:09:10
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and the assessments that I'm required to do. So I'm curious how that works in your classroom and how it works at your school. How do you assess what they're learning?
Reflective Assessments in Learning
00:09:19
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So this year I've kind of over the last few years built and morphed what I view assessment as. So I really think that at its core assessments need to be a way for students to understand their own understanding. So they need to be able to tell
00:09:40
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is this, do I know what I'm doing based on this test? And historically, when we give students, especially a math test, like a unit test, and they get this grade back of an A or a B, students don't really know what that means about their own learning and their own understanding. So this year, I've been really working with students and teaching them
00:10:07
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this score, what does the score tell me about my own understanding? And where do I go from here based on that understanding? And so assessments and grades specifically are very fluid in our classroom. They can change constantly based on a student's understanding. And that's kind of the main line I tell them is your grade is going to reflect what you understand in this class. If it takes you a week, great. If it takes you six weeks, that's fine too.
00:10:35
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And I don't want students to feel like they have to be fast to be considered good at learning. So what I've noticed, especially about seventh graders, and I'm guessing this is true about high schoolers too, is they've never really been taught how to reflect on their understanding after an assessment.
00:10:54
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So this year I've been implementing a lot of reflection tools after most assessments where students have to take their grade and they have to figure out what does this tell me about my understanding? Do I understand this very well or do I not understand it very well? And there are
00:11:19
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Based on that, they're making choices on what they need to do next. So we call them action steps. So if my score is, most of my scores are out of six. Six is a full understanding on this one specific skill. If they understand that skill with a four, okay, well, where do we go from there? What should we do next? And students actually write about it, and then they figure out what they should practice next based on it.
00:11:45
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I really like that reflection piece. I do the same thing. We do a test reflection. And I tell them just because we test it on a certain unit or a chapter, it doesn't mean that the learning is finished. We still need to carry the skills on and the concepts on to the next learning. So I love that you're teaching them that in such an early age. It's such a good thing for them to learn the metacognition of their own learning.
Encouraging Independent Learning
00:12:08
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My next question is for our listeners who
00:12:11
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want to be more learner-centered in their spaces and in their classrooms or at their schools, what advice do you have for someone who's trying to do that?
00:12:20
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So I think it's chunked into two categories, my advice would be chunked. One is when you're trying to get your classroom to look and feel more learner-centered, letting go of some of the control and saying, what small bits of prior knowledge can I activate?
00:12:41
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and give students a starting point and then just let them run with it. And you'll be surprised with what students talk about, what they come up with, the connections they make, and be willing to and be prepared to further the dialogue around those connections rather than going on this one specific path of teaching something one specific way. So when we let students have control over the way
00:13:10
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that you come to this conclusion of learning, they're much more invested in it and it is more meaningful to them.
00:13:19
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giving up some of that control of how your classroom looks, right? Giving students the ability to feel more comfortable in their space when they're being asked to do really hard things. So maybe that looks like students working on a whiteboard or maybe that looks like having a more, like a more casual area of learning that students can kind of rotate through and around. And then the other chunk of advice is around assessments.
00:13:45
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So I think that what I kind of spoke about before is that we really have to teach students to understand what assessments mean and what they tell them about themselves. That's not just a skill that they know. They just come in knowing and that's not been a skill that's been taught to them in younger years.
00:14:03
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So taking the time to analyze data with students and talk about what can we do to study at home? What does studying look like? How will that help us understand better? Why does this matter for what's coming next? And building those connections with them and making it purposeful for them.
00:14:25
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Wow, Chelsea, so much of what you're saying really resonates with me. As a high school English teacher, I definitely also had the same experience as you described a lot of times.
00:14:36
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By the time I had my 12th graders, nobody had specifically taught them to reflect. But when I started implementing different scaffolded strategies for helping them to be more thoughtful about their learning, it not only helped them articulate and advocate for their own growth, it gave me an opportunity to really adjust my expectations as well as my feedback to truly differentiate for what they needed.
00:15:05
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which really changed the dynamic in our learning space. So that's awesome to hear, but you're starting with kids as early as seventh grade in math, which would be a class that most folks would typically say, maybe it doesn't look the same. I know that when I work with math teachers, they're always like, but you're an English teacher. It can go both ways. It can cross contents. It's important everywhere.
00:15:33
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totally agree with that. So if you had the opportunity right now to shout out people you think really do a great job with learner-centered spaces or doing really awesome things that empower kids in the classroom, who would you like to shout out?
Book Recommendation: Building Thinking Classrooms
00:15:49
Speaker
Well, we've talked about it earlier, but a lot of what I'm doing in my classroom stems from Peter Liljedal's book on building thinking classrooms. And I think that, I mean, it's initially written for the math classroom, but there's so many insightful things that can be gleaned for all contents. Even if you just try a few of the things in your classroom, I think you'll be so surprised by how it engages students in the thinking process and the learning process rather than just
00:16:19
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sitting back and experiencing it as a passive learner. Well, thank you, Chelsea. Are you active on social media? Is there a place where our listeners could follow you? I'm not really. That's okay. Yeah, I pour a lot of what I do into what I make for my classroom, and I don't have much time for social media.
00:16:44
Speaker
Well, thank you for your time. I think this will be so helpful for our listeners and just keep doing the great work that you're doing. Thank you. Thank you for having me. This has been awesome. Thank you for learning with us today. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. If you'd like any additional information from the show, check out the show notes.
00:17:06
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Learn more about Mastery Portfolio and how we support schools at masteryportfolio.com.
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00:17:12
Speaker
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