I have the incredible privilege of spending most days in the field in classrooms like yours (with teachers like you!) studying their professional practice. After a day of study together, a common conversation is often, "Okay, Renee - I understand the work we did today…but what about tomorrow? What do I teach tomorrow?”

My thinking partner, Gravity Goldberg, and I hear this often, which is why we wrote a series of resource books to offer some framework to help answer that very question! As part of our research and process for writing those books, Gravity and I rolled up our sleeves and conducted quite a bit of research. Among many interesting findings, the most common was how many of us (educators) suffer from decision fatigue daily. Ever go to the grocery store when you’re hungry? Humans encounter decision fatigue on a daily basis. It's normal - and when we study it in our teaching practice, we find that our decision-making protocol is impacted when our willpower is depleted. When our brains are fatigued, we typically:

Splurge
Make impulsive decisions
Take shortcuts
Accept tradeoffs

These impulsive decisions involve scouring the internet (Teachers Pay Teachers, Pinterest, or the like) for a quick fix fad. We can all agree on the realness of decision fatigue, but can we also agree we chose the profession of education because we believe in students' brilliance? And students deserve the very best teaching from us? I'm going to argue that a resource found on a website doesn't consider each student's quirky brilliance and will inevitably miss the mark of what students really need to succeed. Or perhaps an even worse scenario, students feel that they are not seen, do not feel known, and become frustrated and disengaged in their learning. What if, instead, we pause. Breathe deeply. Look around. Listen. What if all the answers we needed to figure out what to teach tomorrow were in the classrooms we teach today…every day? It’s true - all the answers you need to decrease decision fatigue and answer “What do I teach tomorrow?” are within…you guessed it, the students in your classroom!

So, let's think through our current decision-making framework so that we can:

Center students in our curriculum
Reclaim the time spent looking for teaching hacks (i.e., Teachers Pay Teachers, Pinterest, etc.)
Decrease decision fatigue

When we streamline our framework, it ultimately saves time, centers students, prevents decision fatigue, and our teaching transfers to student independence. Win.Win.Win.

Let’s imagine simplifying our decision-making framework in four simple steps:

Part One: LOOK

Look at what students are doing well. Look at what they are reading (their book choices), what they are writing, and how they talk to fellow readers and writers (for example, do they make eye contact?). When we look at students, we look with curiosity and, what my friend Gravity refers to in her book Mindsets and Moves, an admiring lens. We look at what students are doing well - and then we jot it in our teaching notes!

Part Two: LISTEN

We listen to students with a sense of curiosity. We listen to how they read (for fluency and accuracy). We listen to how they discuss their process (for selecting books or figuring out how to say a word). We listen to how students discuss ideas with one another, how they work through goals, and how they reflect on their journey as readers, writers, and thinkers.

We listen. We notice. We note it in our note-taking system.

Part Three: IDENTIFY

Next, we read the notes we collected in our note-taking system and analyze the information we’ve gathered from looking and listening to students. We identify the type of thinking work they are doing. For example, are they thinking about a process to build a habit of building stamina, reading with volume, and with independence? Do they think about character relationships within or across texts? Are they studying the bias and perspective of an author in a nonfiction text? Are they thinking about one section of the text or stacking multiple sections? Our work is to analyze what students are doing well and then identify that type of thinking work. This analysis serves as student-driven data that we can use to determine the next steps.

Part Four: CHOOSE/ DECIDE

Last but certainly not least, in this four-step process, we choose and decide what to teach next. This final step is in two parts. We first choose what type of thinking to teach next. For example, suppose a student has developed a process for thinking about one particular character. In that case, we might choose to teach the reader to track characters across the text in multiple parts of the book to study the complexities and changes of the character over time. This eventually leads the reader to explore the process of how characters can lead us to interpret themes and big ideas in fiction texts. Part two, the ‘decide’ step, is to decide how you want to teach the student. You might select from one of the following:

Name for the reader what they are doing well.
Model a strategy for the reader
Coach the reader.

Here’s a helpful flyer to refer to when you need to overcome decision fatigue

Download flyer

When we simplify our decision-making process we:

Reduce decision fatigue
Spend more time teaching students (insourcing) and less time searching the world wide web for quick fixes (outsourcing)
Ensure a student-centered curriculum

Give this a go and let me know what you think! Make it your own!