Monday Motivator #11 2025-26

 

Using Daily Attendance Questions to Build Community and Communication Skills

A typical beginning to one of my high school class periods might go as follows: “Do you prefer pancakes, waffles, or french toast? I’m definitely a pancake person; the fluffier the better. And I need lots of butter and syrup on top. How about you?”
A couple of years ago, my school started requiring us to take attendance each class period through our learning management system for the office to double-check. I was inconsistent at best. It was hard for me to remember; I was eager to get class going, since I have only 42 minutes with each group of students, but I knew I had to do better. I had seen teachers posting on social media about using a daily attendance question. It looked fun, and it seemed like a good way to solve my attendance problem: I could go through my roster and take attendance as the students answered. 
I put the daily question on a slide that I project as students are entering the classroom, which allows them to begin thinking about their responses immediately. Once the bell rings, I have a student volunteer tally the results on the board as their classmates respond. It’s simple, easy, and takes only two or three minutes.

The obvious benefit of this practice is that I’m consistently taking attendance each class period, but as time went on, I realized there were many more benefits I hadn’t even anticipated, which cemented attendance questions as a best practice for me that I will continue to use.

Community

An important aspect of building an equitable classroom is building a classroom community where all students feel included and valued. I was surprised by how quickly the daily attendance questions aided in community building. It helped us all learn about one another, seeing what we had in common as well as where we were different.
Answering the questions each day created a sense of camaraderie and fun at the beginning of each class period. It may seem silly or superfluous to know whether a person would rather have the ability to speak 10 languages or the ability to speak to animals, but different aspects of a personality come out in those answers, and I found that over time all of those silly answers really compound to give a deeper understanding of a person I may not have gotten otherwise. My favorite part was that no matter what happened in the rest of the class period, the attendance questions allowed me to look each student in the eye and hear every student’s voice every day.

Communication

For many reasons it seems like there is less and less verbal communication in today’s world, and with so much focus on tech tools, there is even less of it in the classroom. Even though the attendance questions were just a tiny part of our day, I think the repeated practice of speaking aloud each day had a positive effect on students by the end of the year. I had no requirements for how students should answer each day: Some simply answered with one word, whereas others expanded on or justified their responses, which then sometimes sparked a mini debate that I was happy to let unfold.
I could even see where some of the shyest students became a lot more comfortable with speaking aloud. For instance, at the beginning of the year, Paige, whom I would describe as painfully shy, conveyed through her body language just how uncomfortable it was to give even a one-word answer aloud. But by the end of the year, new body language had developed that let me know she had conquered that feeling at least somewhat, and when she stayed after class to talk to me one day in the spring, I wondered if she would have been able to do that had it not been for the repeated practice that the daily attendance questions provided.

I began the school year with simple questions that would help me get to know students, such as these:
    Are you left-handed or right-handed?
    When you are working, do you prefer silence or music?
    Are you a cat person or a dog person?
    Do you prefer cold weather or hot weather?
As time went on, I got a little more creative with questions and began asking students for suggestions. For example, I posted a Google Form at the top of our Google Classroom where students could suggest questions whenever an idea popped into their heads. Also, since all of my students celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas one year, I had them submit their picks for best Thanksgiving food and favorite Christmas song or carol. I paired the selections for daily voting in a bracket style, so by the end of November we would have a winning Thanksgiving food (pumpkin pie) and by the end of December we would have a winning Christmas song (“Mistletoe” by Justin Bieber). 

Whether you need a system to help you remember to take attendance or not, using a daily question is a small habit that has a big benefit. So tell me, are you a morning person or a night owl?
https://choiceliteracy.com/article/using-daily-attendance-questions-to-build-community-and-communication-skills/

Monday Motivator #10 2025-26

 

Between stimulus and response there is a space. And in that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
—Stephen Covey, summarizing from an unnamed source

Choose Your Response

Wednesday. The middle of the week. This was always the day during my childhood family vacations when I felt things change. Saturday through Tuesday, I would feel energized and full of life, building sandcastles with my sisters on our daily visits to the beach. We were making plans and putting them into action. 
Then poof! Wednesday would show up, and it was as if a cloud drifted over me for the remainder of our vacation week. Building a sandcastle from the wet sand by the shore just didn’t have the same feel as earlier in the week. You see, the end of our vacation was in sight. What was the sense in having fun when our vacation was ending soon? I recall sitting next to my mother in our beach chairs, sharing how down I was feeling at the continuous thought of our vacation coming to an end. Her response to me always sounded something like this: Live in the moment and be your best self in the moments we still have!  
Stephen Covey wrote that he was captivated by the idea that “Between stimulus and response there is a space. And in that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” 
Our lives are filled with starts and stops, pauses and breaks. When we know change is ahead, we may think, Why put in all the effort now if things are just going to change? Whether it be a new initiative or the upcoming transition to a new curriculum, we have the power to choose how we respond. We owe it to ourselves to continue giving each day everything we’ve got despite the impending change or the future unknown. 
We can choose to phone it in and listlessly go through the motions. Or we can choose to dial it in and give it our best performance and effort. Let’s use our power for the latter and respond with confidence, competence, and clarity in each moment we still have in sight.
Wednesdays. The middle of the week. This is the day during my family vacations as an adult when I watch my children splashing in the pool, smile, and think, We still have three more days of vacation together! 
https://choiceliteracy.com/article/october-17-2025-playful-learning/

Monday Motivator #9 2025-26

Engage and Motivate by Satisfying Student Needs

https://www.middleweb.com/49809/engage-and-motivate-by-satisfying-student-needs/

 

Have you ever considered how life experiences factor into your teaching practices? Before I entered education, marketing was my first career. They may seem worlds apart, but the parallels will surprise you. This second article in my series connects to one of marketing’s 4Ps – promotion. Let’s look at a head, heart, hands approach to promoting students’ engagement and motivation to learn.

Tired of decluttering irrelevant spam from your inbox? Why is a company promoting pool cleaning services to you anyway? You don’t even swim! They should spend less time hyping how to clear murky water and more time filtering their target audience.

Marketers and Motivation

Marketers aim to understand consumers’ internal motivations because motivation drives purchasing decisions. For example, let’s say someone is hungry. They’ll be motivated to consider lunch options. Salad, pizza, sandwich? The goal is achieved through behavior choices that fulfill the need to eat. The challenge for marketers is figuring out what makes consumers tick. Once they do, they’ll happily greet consumers at their goal line with a product perfectly matched to those needs. Ideally, it’s a win-win!

Teachers and “Needs-Satisfying” Classrooms

Every year, we get to work with a new group of students. What worked with one class may be a dud with another. Teachers are constantly changing and adapting to meet students’ needs. That takes strategy, planning, and research. But what are we searching for each time we do a 180? Likely, we’re trying to make our teaching more relevant. Psychiatrist William Glasser explained that all human behavior is purposeful. Our behavior is our attempt, at that moment, to use resources and people around us to satisfy a need (Sullo, 2009). Glasser said we’re motivated by five basic needs: safety, belonging, power, freedom, and fun. So think about your period 2 jokester from a different perspective. That student may actually be fulfilling the need to connect with peers or feel more powerful and in control. If students have these needs and act on them, how can we channel them – engage them – in positive and productive ways?

► Student-Centric Learning

We teach in an age of frequent data-producing experiences. Social and emotional learning (SEL) activities are also increasingly integrated with content teaching to grow students’ self-management skills. When considering ways to promote more motivation and engagement in our classrooms, let’s look through the lens of a HEAD, HEART, HANDS approach.

► Self-Reflecting Engages Students

Introspection encourages students to think about their own thinking – the HEAD part of the model. Plus, it involves students in their own learning. Students who monitor their own behaviors can increase their control over those behaviors. InterventionCentral.org has a Self-Check Behavior Checklist Maker that quickly allows teachers to individualize checklists for students. Do you have a student who needs to reflect on choices made at the start of class? Voila! There’s a bank of self-monitoring actions. Choose those that apply, then print. Or do you have a group that needs to reflect on behaviors when working with others? There’s one for that too … and many more. This checklist maker is super easy to customize to your students’ needs.

Colleague Shawn Lawn added some dazzle to her InterventionCentral.org self-monitoring checklists.

► Connect to Students’ Interests

Students are the HEART of our teaching. We teach students, not curriculum. If we want students to be emotionally invested, it’s important to tailor teaching to students’ passions and interests. Not just during start-of-the-year icebreakers. Throughout the whole year. An easy way to keep the get-to-know-you’s going is to connect new skills to students’ own lives. It’ll lighten the cognitive load, allowing students to focus on the newly-introduced academic skill before combining it with new content. Later, layer on applications to your unit. For example, before teaching students how to sketchnote within our literacy unit as a note taking strategy, we all sketchnoted about ourselves. This allowed students to dive deeply into exploring the techniques associated with sketchnoting without having to process a new story’s plot twists too.

Similarly, before a unit highlighting contributions by famous influential individuals, it helped students to understand what it means to be influential.

To apply that understanding, students created a statue honoring someone who is influential in their own lives. Again, the dual purpose helped accomplish the unit’s learning objective, and students fulfilled the need to connect to others in their class and community. Middle graders’ need to belong is strong. Take any chance you can to personalize learning!

► Declutter the Classroom

Classroom layout and the ability to interact with materials appeals to the HANDS part of the model. It relates to the resources and tools at the students’ disposal. It may be easier to pare down sensory overload than you may think. For example, look around your room. Do you have to shimmy sideways to get around because you’ve hung onto too many free “treasures” found in the faculty room? Is there dust on boxes that haven’t seen the light of day in years? Maybe it’s time to get rid of those faded pet projects. In addition to physical clutter, classrooms may have visual overload too. Years ago, I visited a literacy classroom with a clothesline strung the width of the room. Clothespins clipped an endless sea of handmade anchor charts. The teacher’s beautiful penmanship and comical character sketches all blurred together. It was so overpacked with charts, none stood out. Imagine how students may feel.

A bare cork base sans the frills of background paper and jazzy borders may be all your pinned displays need to speak to students.

To declutter, think about Glasser’s Basic Human Needs again. Middle graders crave choice and autonomy in a learning space where they feel like they belong. According to studies from the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, each feature of the architectural environment influences certain brain processes, such as those involved in stress, emotion, and memory (Klein, 2016). Intentionally arrange your classroom layout while considering these two questions:

    How do students shape the design of the space?
    How does the design of the space shape the student?

Colleague Carmella Battoglia offers differentiated seating and standing options in her classroom.

Adults frequently talk at middle graders. With so much riding on classroom design choices, why not talk to students and ask for their input? What a way to build a sense of agency and shared ownership of the classroom community!

It Comes Down to Knowing Your Target Audience

Do your research to understand your students. They’ll enjoy having a hand in crafting their learning experience. And reprioritize your planning focus. Teachers spend disproportionately more time concerned with whether content gets covered. Students mainly care if it has meaning. Relate to students’ present and future goals, and show that the learning process is fun. It goes back to the classic question: Why do I need to know this?

References
Klein, E. (2016, August 2). Decrease Classroom Clutter to Increase Creativity. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/blog/decrease-classroom-clutter-increase-creativity-erin-klein
Sullo, B. (2009). The Motivated Student: Unlocking the Enthusiasm for Learning. ASCD.

Monday Motivator #8 2025-26

 

3 Habits of Highly Effective Coaches

https://fullfocusplanner.com/effective-coaches/
How to Step Back, Ask Questions, and Get Results

If you’ve ever had the benefit of a great coach, you know just how powerful coaching can be. But leaders know it can sometimes be difficult to coach the people on your own team.

It’s one of the main reasons people are reluctant to delegate work in their Drudgery and Disinterest Zones. It takes so much time and effort we’re tempted to throw in the towel, even though it would save us tons of time in the long run.

But it doesn’t have to be so frustrating.

I recently spoke with coaching expert Michael Bungay Stanier about his new book The Coaching Habit, which can help us all to get the most out of coaching for the least effort.

“Your job as a leader and a manager is to help people become more competent, more confident, more capable, more autonomous,” he says. “Because that helps them, but honestly it helps you. Because I’m betting nobody here is going ‘Well thank goodness I can just coach people all day because I’ve got nothing else to do.'”

Bungay Stanier warns there’s something standing in the way of good life coaching: our own instincts. We often approach coaching in exactly the wrong way.

There are three habits we must adopt to make coaching better for us, better for those who we are coaching, and better for our organizations: give less advice, ask questions instead, and ask the kind of questions that help our teammates learn and grow.

1. Give Less Advice
The first change is something we need to stop doing, or at least drastically slow down. When members of our team come to us seeking feedback, we jump in with advice. That’s the wrong reflex to have, but it’s all too common.

“We are all advice-giving maniacs,” Bungay Stanier cautions. “We love it. We don’t even know what the problem is, but we’ve got some thoughts about how to go around fixing it.”

All this rampant advising “feels pretty good,” he admits. It flatters us, and sometimes it even solves specific, small problems. But it creates a bigger problem: Our teams, those who we are coaching, become too dependent on us for answers. It stymies their development and it frustrates us as more and more requests for help mount.

The blame here often lies with ourselves. Our quick answers have sent the wrong message, training them to rely on us and not work things out for themselves. It’s “debilitating for them, exhausting for you,” Bungay Stanier says.

The first habit we must adopt is becoming slow to offer advice. What do we offer instead?

2. Ask Questions Instead
Bungay Stanier looks to science for how our brains are wired for success or failure. He learned,

Neuroscience says that if people are feeling autonomous, feeling that they are important, feeling like they are clear on what’s happening, feeling like you’re with them, they’re much more likely to stay engaged and actually bring the best of themselves.

Asking questions is the best way to promote those feelings. That’s the second habit.

When a team member pops in your office or Slack channel to request help solving a problem, probe them first. Say, “That’s a great question. Before I share my ideas, what ideas do you already have?” and listen.

I’ve done this myself and so often it works. People usually come up with the answer that I would have given them, but it’s ten times more powerful because they come up with it on their own. They feel brilliant. They feel smart. And the problem gets solved.

But what if their first answers clearly miss the mark? Should you jump right in with the right one? No.

3. Ask Better Questions
Try something else first. Ask, “What else could you do?” Bungay Stanier calls this the “best coaching question in the world.” The point isn’t to grill your team member but to force them to expand their thinking on the subject and to show them that you actually value their thinking and would like for them to do more of it.

Asking questions designed to help team members learn and grow is the third habit.

Some expert coaches go so far as to take a purely Socratic approach. Bungay Stanier doesn’t say that. He acknowledges that your experiences are useful too, and can be shared. But he says it is hugely important that we ask questions and that we learn to ask better questions as we go.

“People do not learn when you tell them stuff,” says Bungay Stanier. “It goes in one ear. It goes out the other ear pretty quickly.”

Experience is a great teacher, but it’s limited by itself. Our people really grow “when they have a moment to reflect on what just happened.” You can help put them in that state of mind by asking a very specific question: “What was most useful or most valuable about this for you?”

It’s a great question in an unbelievably useful book. And there’s so much more to it than what I can fit in one blog post. These days coaching is my No. 1 job. If I had read The Coaching Habit earlier in my career, I’m confident I would have seen better, faster results with far less frustration.

Which of these three habits do you need to adopt in your coaching?