SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well survey results for and teachers are saying there's just not enough time to do everything I have to do in a school day. Thousands of teachers have reported doing work outside of school in order just to stay afloat. And I know that's not news to you, but you're among hundreds of thousands of teachers that took this survey who are saying, I expect me to give today's lesson to assess today's lesson to prepare for tomorrow's lesson. All during a planning period that's already too short and probably is gonna be taken up with a meeting that probably could have been an email. There's gotta be a better way, and there is, which is why today in this episode, I'm gonna help you understand how to assess student data and prepare for an upcoming lesson in seconds so that you can get your time back. Impact begins now. New teacher Big Impact. As you know, I'm huge on teacher retention. I help those teachers who are saying, listen, I'm I want to be here, I want to make a big impact. I'm passionate about student learning, but sometimes, if I can be honest, this work gets really hard. I help you realize that you've got what it takes. There are three main drivers of student retention. Sorry, the three main drivers of teacher retention, and I call it the system before strategy framework. The system is goes like this one is how leaders see teachers, two, is how teachers see themselves, and three, it's how the school feels to be a part of when those three things are working together. We see X we have schools where teachers stick around and thrive and increase the student success. That's what it's all about. In every episode, we dive into one driver, and I'm gonna let you guess what today's driver is as we're talking about getting our time back. Teachers want to be effective in the classroom, but based on recent survey data from the North Carolina Teaching Working Condition Survey, listen, I teach in North Carolina or I live in North Carolina and uh we do this working condition survey every year. We had over 100,000 educators complete this survey, and they're reporting over 30% of them say that they spend about 9.3 hours of unpaid schoolwork every week just to overcome things that should have been taken during the school day. Things like planning, things like grading, things like preparation and and other upcoming responsibilities that they often do during nights and weekends. They're complaining that planning time is just not enough. How many of us resonate with that? Planning time is just not enough for all the things that I have to do. So what ends up happening is I start to cut corners. Not because I'm not good at my job, not because I don't care, not because I don't want to be effective, but because uh there's I have a life. I have a life outside of school. I'm spending about 10 hours a week. No, I have a family, I have kids, I have a dog, I have myself, I just want to relax. And the time that I'm supposed to be spending throughout the school day is being allocated or pulled to different directions, and the things I need to get to, sometimes I have to neglect. And when we neglect it, especially things like exit tickets, what ends up happening is it becomes a routine instead of an effective tool. So I'll give the exit ticket. Maybe some days I may not even give the exit ticket, but I'll give an exit ticket just to say that I did it, and we move into the next lesson. But it doesn't become an effective piece of information. But exit tickets are crucial, they're critical, they're definitely things that can be used in order to push student learning and inform future instruction. But when the teacher feels like, listen, I there's no way I can get around to doing this, no way I can make it happen, then that is one of the areas where we cut back. And the teacher ultimately feels like I should be better at this. I I should if if I was better at what I was doing, I should be able to get this exit ticket done and get it done effectively. And now the teacher is starting to feel inadequate, and in actuality, it's not the teacher, it's the system, which is why today we're gonna dive into driver number two, which is how teachers see themselves. Because my goal is to help you see yourself as capable. You've got what it takes, you are capable. There's just a couple of tweaks that we can make, and when we make those tweaks, boom, you're gonna make it happen, right? You hear me say it all the time. I believe that confidence comes from the evidence of competence. So if I can give you strategies that help you build that competence, then when you see evidence that things are working and you really feel competent, that's what fuels the confidence for future success. So let me give you the strategy and the framework that I would use to you do exit tickets effectively and quickly, so it doesn't take you a lot of time, but gives you the accurate data that you need to inform future instruction. I call it organize, analyze, prioritize. And it's my three-step framework. Now, anytime I give you a framework, if you would like it, let me know because I can give it to you in the description below. I have a Google Drive full of resources that is a it's a living, breathing document. So even if you checked it before, check it out again, there's some new things in there. And if you're ever saying, wow, that sounded great, I need that framework, let me know and I'll drop it there and I'll drop it in there for you completely for free. Just go ahead and go get it. But I like to call it the organized, analyze, prioritize framework, and it's how we use exit tickets to inform future instruction quickly. Teachers are burning out faster than ever. Confidence is dropping, imposter syndrome is rising, and too many classrooms feel like survival instead of transformation. But what if it doesn't have to be this way? Great teaching isn't magic, it's the method. And inside the Impact Playbook, you'll discover the six principles that thousands of teachers are already using to reignite their passion, engage their students, and build classrooms that thrive. This isn't just another book that collects dust on the shelf. It's a complete system that helps teachers step into their strengths, prevent burnout, and create learning that sticks. If you're looking to see a drop in teacher turnover and a boost in student engagement, the principal is the right-hand side of the book. So if you're a teacher ready to reclaim your confidence or a district leader ready to transform entire schools, click the link to get the Impact Playbook today. Because when teachers win, students win and entire communities win, and the world has changed forever. It's super critical. The funny thing is, a lot of us, it's not super hard to implement, but the reason why a lot of us don't do it is because we feel like it doesn't necessarily have to take all that. Right? Like sometimes we feel as if the edu ticket is just a routine. There's edu ticket, just get it done, and I'm moving on, I have to listen to the pacing guide anyway. So it doesn't matter if students got it or not, we're moving on to the next lesson the next day. And as we know, that's not the most effective way to approach instruction. We need to not blindly follow the pacing guides, but we need to understand where our students stand. I always like to say, you have to determine what students know so you can decide what they need. If you don't know what they've comprehended or what they understood from this lesson, I believe it's malpractice to blindly move forward and spray and pray and hope that something else sticks. You gotta know what they have understood as so that you can move into the next lesson, which is why exit tickets is something that I did in every classroom. Um, even when I was a struggling terrible teacher, right? I I would not do it effectively. I wouldn't do it the way I'm about to teach you right now, but I was like, I know exit tickets are important, I'll put it out there, and sometimes I'll collect the data, sometimes I wouldn't collect the data. But once I during my transition from that terrible teacher to a two-time teacher of the year, I would hang my hat on the fact that an exit ticket is critical for informing future instruction. And today I'm gonna show you how to do it. I told you the three steps organize, analyze, prioritize. Step one is to organize. Organize the exit ticket in such a way that it is easy to gather the information. We're basically saying, I know I'm not gonna have enough time. I know it's gonna be hard, I know it's gonna be tough, I know it's gonna be no time during planning, I might have to cover class, there might be a PLC meeting, there's gonna be a meeting that should have been an email like this, something is gonna happen, and I don't necessarily want to do this at home. So, how can I set it up so that it's easier to analyze? We're already thinking about step two. I kind of think about it like this my children are seven and four, and one of the things that we struggled with a couple of months ago is that they were wetting the bed at night. I'm gonna try to be quiet because they're in the house and they don't like when I tell this story. But they were in they were wetting the bed at night. So my wife and I were reviewing the data and they go to bed about 8, 8:30, and uh normally we have dinner about seven o'clock, and we were looking at what is the catalyst. Well, oftentimes what would happen is we would have dinner, after dinner they would drink their water and go bath in bed. So drink maybe like eight o'clock and then get into bed at 8 15 and went to bed at 11, right? So we're saying there's just not enough time between drinking time and bedtime. Let's change that. So we shifted it. So now the rule is there's no drinks after 7. I know it's crazy. I'm a terrible dad. Boo, right? But since we've implemented the no drinking after seven rule, we haven't had a wet bed. Now maybe we'll maybe we'll revisit it as the children get a little bit older. But hey, drink, drink your water. Uh listen, we let them know at six o'clock, you got an hour, get all your drinking in, um, and they'll drink their water and they'll get a bed. But here's what I'm saying. I noticed that this there was something that was causing an issue. So my wife and I we looked at it and we said, how can we preemptively come up with a solution that is going to circumvent the issues that we are seeing? Boom, no drinking after seven. Once we implemented it, we're good. Same the same thing with exit ticket. If I'm noticing it's taking me too long to grade, I have to ask myself, is there a way that I can change the way that I'm asking questions? Is there a way I can change the amount of questions I'm giving? And the answer is yes. An exit ticket just needs to address the lesson objective for this lesson. Clearly address that lesson objective. You don't have to do that in five questions. You can do it in one. With one clearly written, direct question, you can address the lesson objective of that day. I promise you can because I've done it. It can be done in just one question. I'll take it one step further. This is this is the next level. You're really gonna want to pay attention to this. I'll take it one step further to say, depending on how the question is written, you can even bake in the common misconceptions so that you can tell when students answer the question what their error was. For example, say there's a multiple choice question, and you put the question out there and the correct answer is B. But if they would have made a common mistake, they would have gotten C. And we're gonna talk about this when we get to the next phase. Now, as you're going through and analyzing the data, you can see okay, B is the correct answer, but I've noticed that 25% of students chose C, and that's because this is the mistake they made. Are you are you seeing that I'm you seeing what I'm saying? Based on the intricacy of how the question is written, it's not just a random question we're pulling just for compliance sake, just to make sure students do a question before they leave the class. It's aligned to the lesson objective, and also you can bake in some you know common misconceptions that would lead to a different answer and allow that to be one of the answer choices. So now, in step two, when you go to analyze, now as you quickly analyze the data, once students do the assessment, you can look at the answer and see boom, they got it right because they understood this, boom, they chose this answer because they got tripped up by the misconception, or they chose a different answer because they were all over the place or they did something incorrect, right? So now we're in step two, analyze. Step one, organize, set up in such a way that's gonna be quick to assess, quick to understand, and quick to analyze. Step two, now we actually analyze. You can do it without even having to pick them up. Sometimes that takes time. What I would do uh when I was in class is I would have them do it on their paper in their book. I had like an interactive notebook, I would have them do it in their book, and as I'm walking up and down the aisles, as they're doing the exit tickets silently at the end of class, I'm just looking over their shoulder. I have my clipboard right here, and I'm checking if they got it and if they didn't. I can quickly see if they got it and if they didn't. I'm looking at it, I say, oh boom, they got B, that is the correct answer. That means they did it correctly, or they got C, they got tripped up by that misconception, or they got A, I'm sorry, what'd they do there? They got D, they just chose a random number because D wasn't even a good choice. They completely lost, right? So I'm going to banana aisles up and boom, A, B, C, and then just checking it down. That's analyzing. And that can be done quickly so that now I have the data with me before the bell rings. Now, when the bell rings, or once the class is over, now that you have all the data, now we slide into step three, which is prioritize. And we're going to prioritize what to do in the upcoming lesson based on the data that we just received. So now as I'm going through it on my clipboard, I'm looking at the 29, 30 names that I have, and I see okay, 18 of them chose B, seven of them chose C, we got two A's and a D, right? I don't know if that was 29. I just made up numbers off the top of my head. Don't come from my math, right? But now I can see boom. What that means to me is there's about 20 students that got tripped up by the misconception. So I'm gonna prioritize cleaning up that misconception before we go into tomorrow's lesson. Maybe that's my do now for tomorrow. Maybe we do a mini lesson tomorrow morning. But I have the data to say, here's where students are making a mistake and uh or here's the gap that I need to close. Or I go through it and 29 out of 29 students chose B. Okay, well, 29 out of out of 30 chose B. There's always that one that chose D. We're just like, You weren't, were you, were you here today? Were you were you present, right? But we say, okay, boom, I got it, I'm confident, they're moving on. Or notice this I'm saying, this is this is important. This is why step three matters to prioritize. Or we go through the data and 25 students chose C, which was the misconception, three students chose D, which is somewhere way off the wall, and we only had one student choose A or B. And I was like, man, if you would like for your school district to be empowered as well, you can click the link down below and our team will reach out to you. That's why I said it's malpractice to move forward just blindly following the pacing guide. Because if you were to move forward with only one of your students being able to show proficiency over that lesson objective, how can you expect that students are gonna be successful on the next lesson? Right? So we don't want to blindly follow the pacing guide. But check this out pacing guides are a real thing. Like we do have to stay you know in alignment because you don't want to get to the end of the year and it's just like boom, I have no idea how I'm gonna teach all this stuff. So, as a matter of fact, I've got a framework for how you can stay aligned to the pacing guide over the course of the year. If you're interested, again, let me know or check the description down below where I have my um document, my living documents inside of a Google Drive. I try to make it super easy, super accessible for you. Check it out. The framework, uh the pacing guide framework is called PACE, PACE. But moving forward blindly is not it is I again I consider it to be malpractice. So at least if I am gonna move forward and I know that 27 out of 29 students got it incorrect, at least now I know that I'm not gonna move forward full steam ahead. I'm gonna move forward slowly, I'm gonna move forward with spiral spiral review, I'm gonna move forward intentionally reteaching this objective. Do you see what I'm saying? Okay, I'm not saying throw away the pacing guide. I'm saying know where your students are before you move forward. And the exit ticket is not just a compliance ritual where we just give it to say that we did it, but when you do it like this, when you specifically organize it, when you take time to analyze it, and when you decide what to prioritize, that is a quick way that you can use the data to inform future instruction. Again, you first have to determine what students know so that you can decide what they need. It's hyper and super critical. Okay, you definitely gotta understand that. And and for the teachers that are saying, listen, there's so many ways that you can do this, and we can use technology, right? It can be tech enabled. Maybe you put questions on on online on the near pod, quiz uh way ground, socratic, whatever, and students respond immediately. Maybe you're saying we don't have that type of time, we don't have that type of technology, my students don't have that type of attention spare, right? Maybe you put it on a sticky note, maybe you put on an interactive notebook, maybe you give them an exit ticket that is already pre-cut out that they turn in and about. I it doesn't matter, right? But you organize it so that it's quick for you to be able to analyze. You analyze it quickly, being able to tell what they did right, what they did wrong in a snap, in a quick snapshot, and then you prioritize what to do as a result of that, whether or not you have all those flashy things. And leaders, I hope you understand uh as you're as you're listening, there's leaders that listen to the podcast, there are teachers as well. I'm speaking directly to teachers today, but leaders, I'm modeling for you how to help teachers see themselves as capable. That's the goal. We want them to see themselves as capable. The way we do that is by giving them this, helping them learn the skills that they need in order to feel competent, which is gonna fuel their competence. Right? But remember, it all starts with belief. Teachers, you first have to believe that you're capable. You first have to believe you can. Once you believe that you can do something, then you put you will put in the work that is necessary to acquire those skills. And when you acquire those skills, that's going to infuse, that's going to fuel your confidence. Because you said, boom, I can do this. But it first starts with belief. And I just need you to believe that you've got what it takes, not because of your resources, but because of your resourcefulness. A couple of days ago, I was watching um AD, they were going to reality, sorry, celebrity homes. I was watching Alicia Keys and Swiss Beats. First of all, I didn't know they were married, but they are. So Alicia Keys and Swiss Beats, they were going through their house. And she walked to this one room where she had a old-looking piano, and she said, This is my prize possession because this is the first piano I ever got. Now, if you know who, if you don't know who Alicia Keys is, she's an award-winning, Grammy-winning musician, she's a singer-songwriter, plays the piano. And she said, This is the first piano I ever got. And Swiss Beast laughed, he said, because you know, when I first met her, I said, you know, we can upgrade your piano. Like they have a lot better pianos nowadays. They have pianos that look really good and play really good. And she said, No, no, no, this means something to me. Because this is the first piano I ever had. I got this piano when I had nothing else. I got this piano, and I still play on this piano. And now, her son is learning how to play using that same piano. Alicia Keys, the winning Grammys, Alicia Keyes on the voice, Alicia Keyes doing all types of things through her music on an old piano is what she uses to practice. Why? Because it's not about your resources, it's about your resourcefulness. It's not about having the finest piano, it's about knowing that you've got what it takes to play it. And what I need you to understand is you might not have all the resources, you might not have all the technology, you might not have all the post-it notes and the index cards, but you also don't have to have excuses. You can have results or you can have excuses, you can't have both. Okay? But you've got what it takes to implement this effectively. I promise you that. I promise you that you do. You've got what it takes. Old piano and all. Keep playing. Alright? So you organize, you analyze, you prioritize, and I'll help you cut down on the exit ticket time frame, but will still allow you to use the data to inform future instruction. I promise, I've got you, and you got this. Alright. So saying all that to say, before we land the plane, you know, I always like to answer a question. So I'm gonna answer a question from a community member this time, and sometimes wherever you want to asks a question, you ask a question, and uh I'll find it and I'll put it here on the podcast to respond to it. This question comes from Lois inside of the community. Uh, I have a host of the Impact Community, which is thousands of educators, well, over a thousand educators now, where we just support each other, we encourage each other, we let us each other know that you got what it takes, and it's just a great place for educators to be. Um, consider joining. The link should be in the show notes as well. But the question she asked is what PDs do you recommend that I take at this early part of the school year? And I think that's a great question to ask, and this again, I see why she asked it in the community because a lot of people are gonna chime in and say, do this, do this, do this. I would say I can't answer that question without asking more questions and without having the ability right now to ask more questions. I'll just say it like this. The PD that you should take should satisfy the pain point that you're experiencing. And sometimes we say to ourselves, I don't know what I don't know. I don't know if I need help with different differentiation or scaffolding. I don't know if I need help with classroom management or student engagement. I don't know if I need help, you see what I'm saying? So here's what we do. Pay attention to the indicators. Because the indicators will help you determine what you need. You don't need to know what you don't know. You just need to know what you're experiencing, because then you can find a solution to that problem. I I always put it like this, you may have heard me say this before, but here's how we pay attention to indicators. Imagine if you have a group of friends that always invite you to potlucks because they love your company, they love your energy, they love your personality. But every time they invite you, they ask you to bring the cups or the plates or the ice or the forks, right? They're indicating something to you without even saying it. They're indicating that we don't trust you cooking, or we don't think you can cook. Do you see what I'm saying? Nobody, they don't have to clearly state that, but based on those indicators. You can deduce, hmm, they don't think I can cook. Or I can't cook. So the same thing can be said in the classroom. How do you know which professional development to pursue? What are the indicators that you're seeing? Are students being aggressive to each other? Are students falling asleep in class? Are students looking like they're paying attention, but when they take the assessment, the grades are terrible? Like, what is the indicator that you're seeing? And my favorite way to do it, especially at this time in the Earth's history, is to take those indicators and drop it into your favorite AI LLM. I'm not gonna name any of them, but I'm sure you're familiar with some of them, right? Drop it into your favorite AI LLM and you ask the question, or sorry, you give it the indicators. Hey, I'm experiencing that uh my students are paying attention in class and they are silent, they're taking notes, but whenever we give the assessment data, uh whenever we give the assessment, the data is terrible. What is a professional development that I need to be focused on, or what is a skill that I need to develop? By asking that question, you'll be able to uh see the indicators. And of course, you know how AI LLMs work at this point. The more information you give, the better response you'll get. So that's my way of seeing how do I know which PD I need to focus in on. Okay. Hope that was helpful for you, Lois, and for everybody else who's listening again. If you have a question, just drop it anywhere, right? But even where you're watching this podcast, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, all those great things, just let me know. You know that I'm gonna let you go with an exit ticket. And our exit ticket, it's funny. We're talking about exit tickets, and today's exit ticket is about your exit tickets. And here's the question that I have for you: how are you gonna set up your exit ticket in such a way that it's easy to analyze? Okay, I want you to review your current exit ticket setup. If you don't have an exit ticket setup, it's a great time to start from scratch, but either review your existing exit ticket setup or start building an exit ticket, but ask yourself intentionally this question: how am I organizing it in such a way that is going to have an uh that's priming me or allowing me to have an easy analysis? Okay? Was that a confusing question? Do I need to ask it a better way? Boom. Let's get this on the screen. Let me say it one more time. Here we go. How are you organizing your exit tickets to be easy to analyze? That's the question. That's what I want you to respond to. That's what I want you to ask yourself over this week because ultimately we want to organize our exit tickets in a way that are easy to analyze so that we can definitely prioritize what to do next with it. You can't determine what students need if you don't first decide what they know. That's why exit tickets are important. And I know you don't have a lot of time. I know it. If you're like the thousands of educators that took that survey, you're saying, like, listen, I don't have a whole lot of time. This will help you make that happen quickly, easily, and still highly effectively. When you keep learning strategies like this and you keep believing that you've got what it takes, I'm sure that not only will be you will you become the teacher you've always wanted to be, you'll make the impact our students deserve. I'll see you in the next one. I help new teachers become the teachers they've always wanted to be and make the impact our students deserve. Because I've been there. I know what it's like to struggle, to feel like I'm not enough. But I also know what's on the other side: excitement, fulfillment, and the ability to change lives. Every great teacher was once a new teacher, and new teachers are often excited and eager and anxious. But a lot of times, new teachers lack the foundational skills of effective instruction. Every teacher that I work with, I carry them through this journey, helping them master the principles of effective instruction so that they know how capable they are. I can't wait to see these teachers enact. They're 1% amazing and make the difference that only they can. If you would like for your school district to be empowered as well, you can click the link down below and our team will reach out to you.