Craft Category: Artifacts

Roots teacher, Mackenzie Wagner, discusses the structure of her school day

Transcript: Mackenzie Wagner: Our day is broken up into a lot of different parts, and so it’s basically a matter of organizing those different parts of the day in your head. So, in the morning, it starts with morning circle and breakfast. And then after that, basically, the day is broken up into grove stations – so, flex time is what we call it, and then content rotations. So as a teacher, I know I always start with 45 minutes of flex rotations. And during that time, I’m always conferencing with kids. So that’s the first chunk of my day. The next chunk is content. So, when you have the more – what you guys saw in there, the more typical like, about 25 kids, whole-group instruction, which then goes into another flex, and then another content. And the same thing repeats itself in the afternoon. So, it’s basically just a matter of like, organizing the different types of instruction between like, small group one-on-one and whole-group throughout the day.

Roots teacher, Samantha Gambino, talks about how teachers use Google Calendar to schedule time with students.

Transcript: Samantha Gambino: all of us are able to just like, in Google Calendar – once every scholar has an e-mail address, like you would have that’s connected to your calendar as a grown-up. And so, we can pull up just their calendar to see where they are for the entire day. So, if I particularly want to schedule a child for a reading small group, I can say okay, here’s your master calendar where you should be for your small groups. Are you free during this time? And I can pull them there. There’s also a teacher master calendar where we can pull up everywhere teachers are at all times. So if we need to conference quickly with Ms. Wagner or something about a literacy skill, I can go and find her calendar and find her, and see where she is.

Roots ED and Founder, Jonathan Hanover, discusses the norms and routines used for scheduling student and teacher activities.

Transcript: Jon Hanover:basically what we did is we split our content team as – for growth, there’s four different content teachers, two that are kind of – that we talk about as the humanities team, and one that we talk about as the STEAM team, which is STEM plus arts. And basically, we structure it, we split the day into two halves, and the humanities has dibs on scheduling the first half of the day, the STEAM team has dibs on scheduling the second half of the day for scholars. And then every Wednesday night, dibs is up for the next week, which means then anybody can go wherever and schedule kids. And the reason to do that, and it’s been working well for us is, all of our content teachers have a handful of lessons that they are going to be planning pretty far out in advance that might be recurring. You know, you do one round of competency-based data assessments and say okay, for the next six weeks or so, I’m gonna – I want to do guided reading with these six kids, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 8:30 to 8:45 with these eight kids from 9:45 to – you know, et cetera. And, within your dibs time, you can just schedule those recurring lessons out indefinitely. And then, once dibs is up for the next week, you can then do the more kind of – okay, you know what? I want to get a double-dip with these guys, and I want to meet with this scholar and we can kind of see who’s free to plan that.

This teacher view of an individual Roots student calendar allows them to check in with a student’s progress or goal throughout the day in a seamless manner.

This is a screenshot of an individual event for a student at Roots. The color tells the student where they need to be, a picture of the teacher tells them who they should be working with, and the activity tells them what they need to be doing. Students only see one “appointment” at a time and will not see their next learning activity until the next transition.