Two Intentional Minutes: A Series on the Teaching Habits That Shape Great Teaching
The Paper Lantern
It was a Wednesday, three days into A Streetcar Named Desire. I had asked students to talk with a partner about the significance of the paper lantern, and I was walking the room listening in.
Almost every pair was saying the same thing.
Blanche is vain. She does not want to be seen clearly because she does not want to look old.
That is not wrong. Vanity is there, but I wanted them to go further, and I knew exactly how I was about to do it. I was going to say something like this.
I am hearing a lot of you talk about Blanche’s vanity. And vanity is part of it. But let us look at the wording when she talks about the naked bulb. Why is the glare of that light so hard for her to be near? What does light usually stand for?
None of that is bad teaching. It is what a well-prepared teacher does, and I had the play in front of me and a reading I was confident in. But it takes my interpretation and hands it to them in pieces, and then their job is to go collect evidence for an idea I already had.
I almost said it.
What stopped me was recognizing the answer I would get back and knowing it would be mine.
So, I paused, long enough to fill the moment with something I had been picturing most mornings for weeks. Hold silence. Give them room. Do not close it down for them.
Instead of guiding their thinking, I shared what a few pairs had said without ruling on any of it. Then I asked them, “And what else? What else could she be trying not to see under that bare bulb?” Then I sent them back to the scene, to two specific lines, and asked again. “And what else?”
I waited. I redirected without answering. It is a small thing to describe, and it was hard to do. Everything in me wanted to walk them toward the reading I had. Instead, I had to give them a place to look and then be quiet long enough for them to find something I had not handed them.
A Menu of Good Intentions
To explain why that pause mattered, I have to back up.
By the time that Wednesday happened, I had been visualizing before school for a while. Not every single morning, but often enough to call it consistent practice. Before anyone came in, I would sit down at a student’s desk and spend two minutes picturing the teacher I wanted to be during that day’s lesson, not the lesson itself.
Those two minutes felt good. They made the morning calmer, and they made me feel prepared. Visualization was changing how I entered the room, and I wanted to keep that. But as I kept practicing this purposeful pause, I hit a problem I did not expect.
I could not tell whether any one of the moves I pictured was actually becoming something I would do when the moment came.
I tried to reflect on my practice, but all I had to go on was what I could remember, and that was thin. It left me with questions I could not answer. Was I actually staying curious when a student gave me a first answer, or did it just feel that way? Was I letting students finish their own thinking, or was I finishing it for them and not noticing?
It was not that I was being vague about the teacher I wanted to be. That larger picture had already turned into a handful of moves I pictured myself making. Say a student’s name at the door. Wait a little longer after a question. Praise a pair for building on each other’s thinking. Meet a wrong answer with another question instead of a correction.
The trouble was not the menu. I still needed that larger picture. But a menu is not a target. I was picturing four or five moves every morning, none of them chosen and none of them checked. Because I never picked one, I never knew exactly what moment I was watching for. And if I did not know what I was watching for, how was I supposed to know whether anything was changing?
That is what made the paper lantern different, and I want to be honest about why. Nothing about that redirect was planned. Give them room was one of five things I had pictured that morning, and it was the one that happened to have somewhere to go. This time, I noticed the move and the moment coming together. But how could I learn to look for that moment on purpose?
Three Words on a Sticky Note
At the end of that day, I knew I wanted to do it again. But remembering this one was not the same as seeing the next one.
So, I wrote down the three words that had worked, on a sticky note, with the question mark. And what else?
I left it on my own desk, and the next morning it was the first thing I saw when I sat down there. I still had the larger picture in my head from the student desk: the teacher I wanted to be, the room I wanted students to experience. But now one move from that picture was sitting in front of me. Where in my lesson is my question big enough that students will hand me a first answer, and what will I send them back to when they do?
When a question has room in it, students answer from what they noticed first. Not every question has room. If I ask what year the play was written, there is one answer, and asking for another is just a game students learn to resent. But when a question can hold a second answer, the first one students give is almost never the last one available. It accounts for what they noticed, and nothing has pushed on it yet. That is as true of a second grader telling you the wolf is just mean, or a middle schooler insisting there is only one way to set up an equation, as it was of my tenth graders and the paper lantern.
Which meant the note was quietly asking something of me too.
Before I could ask what else, I had to have asked something that had a what else in it.
Some mornings the honest answer was that my question was too small, and time went to fixing that instead. Two minutes at my desk was usually enough. When it was not, it was because I had gone looking for the moment and found that my lesson had not made room for one. That was worth ten minutes of my morning.
What the Note Was Actually Doing
Within a couple of weeks, something had shifted. Students had started to expect the question, which was its own kind of evidence. They stopped treating a first answer as a finished one. Somebody would offer something, and then somebody else would go looking, because they knew the room was not done.
I still missed opportunities. I still caught myself doing too much with a student’s first answer. But I was catching myself more often, too, and “And what else?” was starting to show up without nearly as much effort.
I want to be careful about what I am claiming. A sticky note is a square of paper. But this one did two things for me.
The first was narrowing. Not the whole visualization. I still wanted the larger picture: how I wanted students to feel, what I wanted them to hear, the teacher I wanted to be. The note did something more specific. It narrowed that picture to one move, so I could practice looking for where it might belong.
The second was reminding. It sat where I could not miss it, and that mattered more than I expected. I did not have to remember to remember.
I wrote in “Making the Bed Didn’t Change My Teaching… Until It Did” that those moments did not happen because I remembered a checklist, and I still think that is right. A checklist is something you consult while you teach. The note was read in an empty room. By the time the moment arrived, the paper was behind me on the desk, and I was not thinking about it at all.
I did not have a name for what I was doing then. Later, I learned that researchers call this an implementation intention, a specific if-then plan that links a trigger to a response (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). My general good intentions had not given me a specific moment to watch for. An if-then plan did.
Written out, mine was this: If a student hands me a first answer to an open question, then I ask what else and send them back to the text.
That is more than the note said. The note said three words. But the three words were the visible end of a plan I had rehearsed before students arrived. I had already thought about the move and the moment it belonged in.
The Next Note
Here is the part I did not expect. I did not need a new note every day. I needed a new note when I started needing the old one less.
There was a morning when I looked at my desk and realized I had not actually read the note in a while. I was still asking the question. Not every time. But I was no longer having to remind myself to look for the opportunity. The move had gotten quieter. The paper was still sitting there, but I was depending on it less.
That was enough. I did not need this move to be finished. I needed it to be established enough that I could give the next note to something else.
I know now that there is research behind what I was doing. In Expert Teaching, Peps McCrea explains that teachers have to automate large parts of their practice simply because there is so much to notice and decide in a classroom. The more that can run on habit, the more attention a teacher has available to monitor learning, make decisions, and respond to students.
What I knew then was much simpler: I was reading the note less and making the move more.
So, I asked myself what the smallest next move would be. Not a new philosophy. Just one move I could practice.
I thought about the way I praised pairs during discussion. I would tell them they had done a good job, but often without naming what had been good about it. If I wanted them to build on each other’s thinking again, they needed to know what they had done. So, my next note said this.
Name what they did.
The plan was simple. If a pair builds on each other’s thinking, then I say out loud which move one of them made.
That note stayed for a while too. Eventually, I noticed I was reading it less and doing it more.
And that is how the notes kept going, although not in a perfectly neat line. Sometimes an old move needed my attention again. Sometimes a note stayed longer than I expected. Sometimes I picked the wrong thing to work on and changed it. But each note named a move rather than a goal, and I kept each one in front of me long enough to start seeing where the move belonged and using it when the moment came.
Two Desks
What started as one small pause before school had become two different kinds of practice.
At a student’s desk, I pictured the teacher I wanted to be and the classroom I wanted students to experience. That practice kept the bigger picture in front of me.
At my own desk, with the lesson open and a sticky note nearby, I got more specific. I chose one move, looked for where I might need it, and practiced using it when the moment came.
One helped me picture the teacher I wanted to be. The other helped me practice becoming that teacher, one move at a time.
Two Intentional Minutes: A Series on the Teaching Habits That Shape Great Teaching
Teaching Habit: Looking for the moment to practice one move.
“And What Else? The Sticky Note That Gave Me a Moment to Watch For” is the second article in Two Intentional Minutes, a series exploring the small teaching habits that shape great teaching. Each reflection examines one intentional habit that has influenced my own practice, not because I’ve mastered it, but because I’m still learning from it. My hope is that these reflections encourage you to discover the habits that are shaping your own teaching.
References
- Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1
- McCrea, P. (2018). Expert teaching: What is it, and how might we develop it? Institute for Teaching.
