We're bringing back a favorite guest, Leah Cleary, to share her tips on preparing students to transition to high school smoothly. This conversation includes everything from critical thinking, writing, scaffolding, organization, mindset, and collaboration. Stuff your teaching toolbox with fresh ideas from Leah, today.

Connect with today's guest

Teach students to annotate standards. It’s the first step toward teaching them how to focus their attention, guiding them toward independent learning.

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Social-Studies-Literacy-Templates-for-Independent-Learning-Standard-Annotation-11886528

How to teach students effective note-taking skills using standards as a basis.

https://leahcleary.com/teach-effective-note-taking/

Teach students a consistent paragraph frame. It’s expandable into multiple types of writing.

https://leahcleary.com/mastering-cer-paragraphs/

Option for giving students consequences for late work without making them dire.

https://leahcleary.com/solving-the-late-work-problem/

The latest blog post, Teaching the Power of Context: https://leahcleary.com/context-getting-to-know-you/

Related Episodes

You might also enjoy Leah's episode 2 conversation about scaffolding: https://teachingtoolboxpodcast.com/show-notes/scaffolding-learning-in-various-subjects/

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This episode may contain affiliate links.

Amazon links are affiliate links from Brittany Naujok and The Colorado Classroom, LLC®. I earn a small amount from your clicks on these links.

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[00:00:37] Leah: Hi there. I'm eager.

[00:01:00] Leah: I'm Leah Cleary, and I'm going into my 25th year. It doesn't seem real.

[00:01:20] Ellie: Mm-hmm.

[00:01:26] Right now I am department chair at a high school and I teach AP world history, general World history, and International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge. So those are my big three right now. I'm missing sociology and psychology. It's so sad. I blog at leahcleary.com. Have lots of tips for teachers there, lots of great ideas about AI integration and literacy integration.

[00:01:57] Ellie: Your background is so amazing, like wow, you have so much going on there and so much experience. But that just makes me think we should have you come on another episode to talk about technology 'cause you've got so many great ideas there too.

[00:02:11] Ellie: I'm well. I'm so glad. Yeah,

[00:02:19] Ellie: for sure. Well, I'm so glad you could join us today.

[00:02:24] Leah: Let's do it.

[00:02:35] Leah: It's two different worlds and part of it is the stage in life that they're in. They're two different stages and that's a big reason I think for the different approach in middle and high school. But I think academically, students are pretty shocked when they get to high school by the pace.

[00:03:15] That's a huge shock for the kids. I think another shock for the kids is credits.

[00:03:22] Leah: The whole concept of having to earn credits to graduate, it's brand new. I, I know when I was teaching middle school, and this has been a long time now, but students could maybe if they failed two classes, they had to make up one in summer school, and it could be any course, it didn't have to be one of the courses they failed, just something that was available in summer school. And in high school you have to have the credits for very specific classes. So students have a hard time with that at first. I think also the level because a lot of times they're going from the what in middle school to the why and the how in high school. So we're kind of trying to up their critical thinking, which is a natural progression, but I think it's a little bit of a shock to them at first. And socially, well, I mean, middle school's a social nightmare. I kind of feel like high school's probably easier socially than middle school. Just it's a bigger environment usually and there are more niches for them, you know,? They can find typically, not always sadly, but they can typically find their group in high school where that might be a difficult thing in middle school.

[00:04:52] Leah: My hope is that they're working on these things in middle school, but I know that a lot of times they are, and they come to us in high school and they don't remember, or they act like they have no idea, you know, how kids are.

[00:05:05] Leah: My biggest wishes as far as literacy goes, that they would come to us

[00:05:38] but you know, it's that critical element that I'd like to see in their reading. As far as their writing goes I really would love, and we're kind of working with the feeder middle school on this, in my district, but I think that it's great when they come to us knowing how to write a CER paragraph, claim, evidence, reasoning. Because if they can do that and they have their claim, they have their argument, they have their evidence to support it, and then they explain how that evidence or why that evidence supports the claim, if they come to us able to do that, we can build on that. Oh my goodness. We can turn that into research writing.

[00:06:25] Brittany: That's interesting. Yeah. We used RAP: restate, answer, prove. So kind of along the same.

[00:06:54] restate. Because you kind of have to restate the prompt in order to make a claim about it, if that makes sense. So that's a natural element. So you know, we get the claim in there, they're making their argument, and that's key. And then they have to have specific evidence. Text, if they're doing it based on reading, or whether it's just based on their own historical knowledge.

[00:07:42] And then my hope is that, you know, the kids will come to us and when I'm teaching them how to write, say a long essay question or an extended essay. I'll say, Hey, your introduction is gonna be, you know, you come up with some contextualization. Let's work on that skill. That's something that we teach them in high school.

[00:08:28] Ellie: That makes sense.

[00:08:29] Leah: But I mean, if rap is what your district uses, use it.

[00:08:53] And so we end up with all those different levels. What strategies can high school teachers use to support students who are maybe not fully prepared for the rigor that they're gonna face?

[00:09:08] The onus is on the teacher in that case , to scaffold. And I think a lot of times, uh, grouping, you know, flex grouping is good for situations like that. So you might have one group working on a full essay while one group is just working on a CER paragraph. And you're using, you know, frames like the CER or rap, , you know, for some students they might even need sentence frames, things like that. You know, think about writing revolution. I talk about writing revolution a lot 'cause I use it a lot. It's a good program and it starts at the sentence level. And a lot of times I will pull the sentence exercises into a bell ringer so that everybody's working with those sentence frames for a bell ringer. And they might watch a short video or read a short reading, and then they're just really focused on what they're writing about. And it's one sentence. And then cold call, you know, I draw names from index cards

[00:10:26] Ellie: Mm. Mm-hmm.

[00:10:27] Leah: is supposed to be in a positive sentence. You need the noun, comma, definition, comma significance. So where you have the noun is take out that is and just add commas, right?

[00:10:49] Ellie: Okay.

[00:11:07] Leah: Yes, I would say that there are three things that that middle school teachers can do. One is organization. Organization is huge because, you know, it's hard for middle schoolers to be organized. It's hard for me to be organized. And so I've really hit that hard with my students. Probably about five years in, I started setting up my notebooks the same way. At first it was the interactive notebook format, and I love those and I'm still a big advocate of those because I think that those encourage organization, but nobody in my department uses those. So I've turned my interactive notebooks into binders,

[00:11:54] So students have year long binders and each unit is separated with a divider and each unit has a table of contents and every unit has the standards that go along with it on a page. Every unit has an organizer that talks about the topics and the vocab that they're gonna need to know and a study guide, uh, well bell ringer sheet and study guide.

[00:12:39] now. I'll have it up on the screen and I start class with that up, not the bell ringer. And so we look at the day and, okay, this is what we need. You don't need your Chromebook, so put that up. You need your binder. Take out your binder. Uh, we're gonna start with a bell ringer. So what page should you be on? Page four.

[00:13:17] And so we'll also put the due date on there next to it if there's a due date and that's really helpful for organizing.

[00:13:29] Leah: yeah, it really helps with the cognitive load.

[00:13:41] Ellie: Oh, awesome.

[00:13:43] So hopefully we see, some consistency. 'cause I think consistency is key. The next thing that I think I said, I don't remember, and I didn't write it down, focus note taking standards, you know, basically no matter what assignment that I'm giving my students, whether it's a reading or whether it's a presentation, I want for them to be able to structure their own notes. There are always gonna be days that I hand them note templates.

[00:14:33] underlining key things in the standard and use that to format their notes. And so we'll do it together. I have a little whiteboard easel, and I think I gave you a link to, um, a blog post about how to do this.

[00:14:46] Leah: And so then, you know, you can put up anything. You can put up a video, you can put up a presentation, and students know what their focus is gonna be.

[00:15:01] And then they're learning how to abbreviate what they do write down. And it's a skill that they can carry with them to college and beyond.

[00:15:24] And read as much as you can and discuss it. Discuss it. Discuss it, and discuss like model critical thinking in reading for them. So you know, they're explaining to you on a surface level what a reading is about. Yeah, that's what it's about. But let me tell you something about this author. They were, you know, a dictator of this country and their big goal was to do this.

[00:15:50] Ellie: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:15:53] Ellie: That's awesome. . Good ideas. So it sounds like you do communicate with your middle school teachers some.

[00:16:02] Ellie: you're trying. ,

[00:16:08] Ellie: yeah. Do you have any tips for how other middle school teachers and high school teachers might be able to collaborate to make that transition smoother? If they're not already talking in a district, do you have any ideas for how they might be able to get that started to make it smoother for kids?

[00:16:45] Ellie: Yeah. And I guess even if middle school teachers are feeling like they want to help their kids transition as successfully as possible, they could reach out to somebody at the high school and just ask for, you know, three tips, kind of like you've just given us. Can you gimme three tips that will really help my kids with transitioning and being ready for high school?

[00:17:11] Ellie: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:14] Brittany: Um, since you teach a lot of social studies, based on your experience, what areas of social studies do students typically struggle with the most when they move to high school? Are there any common gaps in proficiency there?

[00:17:53] You need to look at the three Cs, right? Understanding contextualization, which that might be a skill that they're just not ready for in middle school, but you know, you could play around with it. Give them a scenario. Uh, this is, this is, this is a bad one. This is gonna sound bad, but I'm gonna do it anyway 'cause I haven't had enough coffee and this is all that's popping into my head going, Hey guys, I killed my husband this weekend.

[00:18:22] Ellie: Don't anybody take that outta context.

[00:18:46] See? That was a really bad example. You can think of something better, but you know, just little things like that so that they start to understand the importance of context. Yeah.

[00:18:58] Brittany: I would always ask my kids like, uh, I need a volunteer. And then 20 of them would raise their hand

[00:19:08] Leah: Um, oh, that's a good one. Yeah.

[00:19:18] Leah: Hey man. It's better than class. I hope not. I really hope not. I'm just thinking about my students.

[00:19:32] Leah: Yeah. Context. So yeah, we'll start the year my Getting to Know You activity that I do in AP World History. I model one, and then students, do one and they share it with the class and it's on a presentation. And so it's circles. So like there's a circle in the middle, and then it's, you know, like a bullseye, right?

[00:20:04] Right. And so I show that and students are like, what? What's that? Oh, that's me. You what? You had a black eye and Yeah, I started the 2021 school year with a black eye. And students are like, well, how did that happen? And so I'll click again and it zooms out on a picture of my glasses on the concrete, and they're shattered. I go, okay, so this is, you know, this is another piece of the puzzle. Uh, and then they try to guess what was going on. Did somebody punch you? Were you brawling, Ms.

[00:20:59] Ellie: Oh man.

[00:21:09] Ellie: Mm-hmm. Yeah, definitely. It's engaging for sure.

[00:21:27] Ellie: Nice.

[00:21:40] Leah: Mindset shifts outside of academics. This really is tied into academics too, but it's also is tied into the social aspect of things. Students need to learn how to build resilience.

[00:21:55] Leah: It's not the end of the world if they don't get invited to a party or if their best friend breaks up with them or their, boyfriend or girlfriend breaks up with them.

[00:22:24] I do know that academically, a lot of that comes in, I think through giving them space to make mistakes.

[00:22:32] Brittany: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:49] You know, I can tell you on the first long essay question we wrote one year, one girl, and she thought, well, I did it, I should, you know, get a hundred. And yeah, it's not affecting your grade in the grade book. But she didn't like the feedback I left on it. I thought it was nice, it was very specific, but she didn't like it 'cause she felt like, because she had put so much time and effort into it that she should get a gold star. And so she was so mad.

[00:23:57] Ellie: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:11] Ellie: Mm-hmm. Awesome.

[00:24:27] Leah: That's a hard one because kids are coming into high school in all different places and every kid is so different.

[00:24:36] Leah: but. I would advise parents, and I'm a parent myself, so I know that this can be very difficult. Gradually, you know, not at first, not when they're in ninth grade, but gradually make the shift from manager to mentor.

[00:25:14] Ellie: Hmm.

[00:25:35] Instead of, did you study?

[00:25:37] Leah: Um. This, I think encourages ownership while still keeping the lines of communication open, if that makes sense.

[00:26:16] Ellie: Okay.

[00:26:32] Ellie: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:41] Now's the time. The stakes are small and I know that this is hard for parents, but, Hey, mom, I got it. I got it, I got it. Okay. And then they got it. But what they got was an F right?

[00:26:59] Leah: Have consequences for that

[00:27:04] Leah: So that it doesn't continue, uh, talk through strategies for maybe improving it, but don't try to change that f.

[00:27:25] Ellie: Right. That makes sense. So before we wrap up, do you have any final words of wisdom that you would like to share or do you just wanna let our listeners know where they can find you?

[00:28:15] I guess my store is mostly for ELA and social studies, but my website's for all secondary teachers.

[00:28:23] With all those technology things on there too,

[00:28:25] Leah: of that. Lots of good tips for, uh, grading essays faster with ai.

[00:28:32] more. So

[00:28:36] It's

[00:28:39] Leah: It's amazing.

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