The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Best practices, tips, and stories to help you be extraordinary in your classroom and beyond, featuring Curriculum Associates' Director of the Educator Community Sari Laberis.
The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Unlocking Classroom Engagement with Brian Benavides
Unlock the secrets to classroom engagement that go beyond academics, setting up students for real-world success! Join us for an enlightening conversation with Brian Benavides, National Director of Content and Implementation at Curriculum Associates, as he shares his experiences from diverse school districts. Together, we explore the power of teaching essential life skills like turn-taking and conversation extension, and the crucial practice of resetting social skills after breaks. These strategies not only energize classroom environments but also elevate students' communication skills, preparing them to thrive both in school and in life.
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Hey everyone, it's Sari. Welcome back to the Extraordinary Educators podcast. Today I am joined by my wonderful colleague, Brian Benavides, who is a National Director of Content and Implementation at Curriculum Associates. And Brian wrote an awesome blog about engaging students, which we will link in the show notes for you, and today we really talk about how all of these practices that you're using in your classroom every single day, how you engage your students, is not only helpful for you and your students now, but how it is setting them up for success in life, and so Brian really dives into strategies and practical tips that he followed when he was a teacher, and I'm really excited for you to hear them. So here's my conversation with Brian. Welcome, brian. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Brian Benavides:Thank you so much for having me.
Sari Laberis:Of course, so we're going to dive right in. You wrote an awesome blog for our listeners. We will link it in the show notes about student engagement. Tell us what else is on your mind as you think about student engagement this time of year and all of your work you've been doing with educators across the country.
Brian Benavides:It's so funny you ask that because I've seen at least four different school districts in the last couple weeks in very different parts of the country. I was in Florida, I was in Missouri, I was in Detroit and thinking about engagement. I think the biggest thing I was thinking about recently is how does all this work with engagement translate to what the kids can do outside of the classroom? Visiting all these schools a lot of things that comes out of visiting these schools is conversations, and when you, when you take a look at the blog, a lot of the skills that you see embedded in that blog are things that you need for everyday use. You know turn taking, you know turning and talking.
Brian Benavides:We we put an educational lens on all these strategies for engagement, but it really is life skills, right, I remember I started off as a self contained power professional, so I was in a self contained class and everything in the self contained classes life skills, life skills, life skills.
Brian Benavides:And then those life skills are things like how do you form partners, how do you turn and talk, how do you extend the conversation, how do you interview a classmate and those are all life skills Beyond really creating a really exciting environment for your students in the classroom. Having those skills really enhance the experience that you have in the outside world just walking out to the bakery, walking over to the coffee shop, you know, I happen to really volunteer a lot in my town, so you know, even just those experiences, once you have those tools for engagement and it's, it's nice when teachers can guide us through it, because it's like a place where you can experiment and mess up and try again, it becomes a lot easier out in the real world. That's what I've been thinking about. That was my long answer.
Sari Laberis:I love it. It's so, it's so kind of inspiring and empowering to hear you say that, because I think, again, it's so hard when you're following the scope and sequence, you're preparing your lessons, you're thinking about standards and standardized tests and assessments and IAs and all of that. But every teacher wants their students to succeed in their classroom and beyond right, and so it kind of gives more meaning to the things that you, our listeners, are doing every single day in your room. Is there anything that you would encourage educators to think about, as they're kind of engaging their students or perhaps re-engaging their students after the upcoming winter break?
Brian Benavides:Sure, A lot of times I would do a reset at the beginning of the year Once they're back from winter break. It may seem silly, but you know we would go back All right. So let's practice a little bit of those social skills that we have when it comes to interactions in the classroom, and what I love about teaching, what I love about this topic in particular, is that we all need a reminder. You know out in the real world, like sometimes you need your own friends and loved ones and family members to check you. Sometimes they're like Brian, the way you did that or said that that wasn't necessarily the most effective way to have that discourse. Same with kids, right, you know?
Brian Benavides:I think for educators is think about yourself, right, think about when you know you're going through things, you're going through life. We often need reminders of what are the most effective ways to communicate with others. You know, you don't we aspire to a certain set of principles that we set up for ourselves and goals that we set out for ourselves, but it is important to get those reminders. That's why it's important to choose the right people to be in your circle. But it's the same with the kids, right?
Brian Benavides:It's the same with the kids when they come back from that break. They come back. We know how they come back. You know preaching to the choir, but those reminders are really helpful for the kids and also fun. You know, I used to come back and I would embed those strategies with questions that I think I would have about what their break was like. How did you celebrate the last two weeks? What did you do? Let's turn and talk, boys and girls, you know, and just practicing those skills again and maybe I used to do a lot of that stuff just practicing it, reinforcing it all throughout the year. Really helpful.
Sari Laberis:Yeah, I love that. There's so many benefits to this small example that you just gave right, because you're giving them at-bats with the routine. You're giving them a seemingly you know answer or question they should know the answer to you can find out more about their personal life. You can, you know, you're building that relationship, maintaining the trust and giving them time to socialize and learn from each other, which they might not have the opportunity to do in a really structured environment or, if they're not, with the same you know peers the whole day in middle school, for example.
Brian Benavides:Kids don't like that first day back from from the vacation any more than you do. Kids don't like Mondays any more than we do. I'm sure kids get the Sunday scaries too. That's how I always look at everything when it comes to the classroom and engagement. They're just like me, just younger, less experiences.
Sari Laberis:I was just having that same conversation with someone about. I forget what I was asked, but I said, like I just treat people the way I want to be treated, whether that's how I taught, whether that's my colleagues, whether that's my kids or my husband, right, and that's exactly what you're describing. You want, like that sense of community and belonging and the transparent like. Hey, I know it was hard for you to get up this morning. Here we are, let's make the best of it. Here's what we're going to do today. Do you think it's helpful for teachers to be transparent, going back to the life skills about naming things, especially as students in older grades? We're going to do this today and this will also help you in the future, because X, Y and Z or do you think this is something that they should kind of learn on their own time?
Brian Benavides:I think with my kids and I don't want to just say kids, I want to say with humans and in this case, especially as a teacher, I'm always the kind of person like okay, I don't really like to name it directly, right? So if I'm working with kids and I'm like, you know, this is what we're doing today, this is the agenda today, this is the student objective of the day, let's say the learning objective, and this is how it helps you out in the real world or whatever, how it might help you down the line. I really wasn't set on that because I always felt like let them tell me, right, how they think it might. Um, because the skills that you embed may be helpful for them in very different ways than you would imagine, right? Um, I never want to limit possibilities, but the moment that you're naming it, you're kind of putting a limit on it. Um, we always want to kind of allow them that kind of openness of thought right or you're shutting down an idea that they had.
Brian Benavides:That might be very well true for them, but we didn't consider ourselves, we didn't consider yeah, like I used to joke, like the one of my favorite engagement strategies with kids, especially when it was when we're when we're working with text. It didn't have to just be text, it could be visuals, it could be, could be a topic, it could be whatever it's having them interview one another. And the trick about interviewing one another was essentially not just okay, let's have a topic to talk about, and then you ask them the question. That's easy, anybody can do that. It's the follow-up question. What makes the conversation interesting is that you're able to take the response of the individual speaking to you and extend that response with a follow-up question. I always let the kids tell me how they think those things um, you know would would apply to their lives in the future.
Sari Laberis:But even when I would set up those engagement strategies.
Brian Benavides:It was always built on letting the kids have that openness, like when when we did something about engagement too is you have to. I can't control. I never had a small class, so my classes were 20 or more kids and so I needed those kids to help me with discipline. There was no way I could do it alone. And the way I would do that, because that will destroy your engagement. I think any teacher listening to this is going to know misbehavior is going to destroy any engagement. That's like it's just not going to last, right, which then you won't get in through your lessons and then you're not going to get out of that session, that class, what you'd like, but every single class would set up.
Brian Benavides:When I would do engagement strategy, especially the social skills, explicitly with them. I would ask them how do you make a good impression on other people, right? What do you do so that the other person feels safe with you, is willing to collaborate with you, is willing to be vulnerable with you? Because in the classroom we're asking students to be vulnerable we don't really use those terms, but when we're asking them about, when we're activating prior knowledge, what are we doing? We're asking them to be vulnerable. We're asking them to share their personal lives. That can't happen in a setting where they're it's slow engagement and kids don't feel safe.
Brian Benavides:Um, so, but I would always have to ask those kids, and it was very important for me to not just get to know them on an individual level, but have those kids hear one another talk about how they form partners, how they make a good impression. Some kids might shake hands right, some kids don't, depending on what their cultural backgrounds are. So always very important for me to I could be the guide, but, um, allowing the kids to tell me what, what is, what is your best mode of engagement? What works for you when it comes to engagement? Letting them tell me you know and it's more fun.
Brian Benavides:That way. You as a as a human, not just as a teacher you learn from those kids. They teach you. They've taught me more than I've taught them.
Sari Laberis:I always, I always say yeah, well, thank you so much for sharing all of that. Unfortunately, that is all the time we have for today, but I think that's a really nice way to wrap up the episode. So thank you so much for being here, brian, and sharing all of your expertise with us.
Brian Benavides:Thank you.
Sari Laberis:Get inspired by following us on social media and please tag us in your posts on x at curriculum a Asoce and on Instagram at my Eye, ready. If you have feedback about the podcast, a topic of interest or if you want to be a guest email extraordinaryeducators at cainccom. Please subscribe where you listen to podcasts and if you'd like to help more educators, just like you, join the conversation and please leave a review. Remember, be you be true, be extraordinary. The Extraordinary Educators podcast is produced by Curriculum Associates, editing by Shane Lowe, social media by Atsiti Hanan, guest booking by Sari Labaris and production by Haley Browning. This podcast is copyrighted materials and intellectual property of Curriculum Associates.