Two Intentional Minutes: A Series on the Teaching Habits That Shape Great Teaching
Two Minutes, Every Desk
One of the first classroom management techniques a new teacher is handed is to circulate.
Do not teach from the front of the room. Do not sit behind your desk. Move, get close to students, and keep moving. It shows up in student teaching, in new teacher induction, and in the first observation feedback most of us ever get.
I did it without fail.
By my second year I could get around my whole room in about two minutes. I had a lap, and I ran it. A hand on the back of a chair here. A nod there. A quiet word to the pair who had drifted to weekend plans. Then on to the next desk, because the next desk had been waiting two minutes for me and I could feel it.
And it worked. Proximity does what people say proximity does. Students who might have coasted didn't, because I was about to stand next to them.
Twenty-eight desks, about two minutes, every period. As far as I knew, that was the job, and I was doing it well.
The Question I Could Not Answer
In my fourth year of teaching, my third at the high school, an assistant principal observed me. In the conference afterward, she asked me a question.
How are you tracking what you hear during student discussion?
I paused. I didn't have an answer.
Not because the question was hard. Because I could not find the part of it I was supposed to answer. Tracking it. I had been listening. I listened every day, in every class, the whole way around the room. I thought the listening was the tracking.
What I said out loud was something about knowing my students and having a feel for where they were. That was true. It wasn't an answer either, and I was starting to realize what her question was really getting at.
So she asked a second one.
What kinds of responses did you hear today? Not in the whole class discussion. In the partner talk. What was typical?
That one I could answer, so I started listing.
I knew who was on topic and who was not. They used the vocabulary we had been working on: symbolism and motif. They were agreeing with each other and building on what their partners said. A few pairs had gone further than I expected them to.
She let me finish. Then she asked a third.
What does that evidence tell you?
It told me they were talking. It told me they were on topic, and that the words I had taught them were in the room.
I was collecting proof of life. It did not tell me what any one of them understood.
It is not nothing. It is just not much. And it was not what I had built those lessons for. My students talked to each other every day, on purpose, because I had designed it that way. The best I could tell her about what was inside that talk was that it had happened.
She did not hand me a fix. Instead, she asked me to walk her through my circulating routine, start to finish.
So I described the lap. The circuit, the timing, the hand on the chair, the nod, the quiet redirect.
Then she asked what I would have to give up in order to hear more.
I told her I did not know. She said that was worth sitting with, and asked me to think about what more I could do with the routine I already had.
The Clipboard
What I came up with was not clever. If I needed to track more intentionally, I would write it down.
So I carried a clipboard, and I wrote while I listened.
It did not go the way I hoped.
I realized early on that I was struggling to do both things at once. A student would start a sentence, and somewhere in the middle of it I would begin deciding how to write the first half down. By the time I had the words on paper the conversation had moved, and the part I had missed was almost always the part that mattered.
I was capturing the beginnings of thoughts and missing the ends of them.
For a while I thought I needed to write faster or abbreviate better. But it was not a speed problem. It was an attention problem.
So I made a decision that sounded small: I would listen first, listen longer than I ever had, and not write a single word until I stepped away.
What I Heard When I Stopped Moving
The first time I tried listening first, I put a two-minute timer on the board, stood near one pair, and wrote nothing.
It was uncomfortable at first. Two minutes was my usual lap time, and instead I was staying still with one pair.
I tried this once. Then again in another period. Eventually a couple of times a period. I did not try to make it to every desk. I was choosing a moment when hearing one conversation all the way through would tell me more than a pass around the room.
In “Making the Bed Didn’t Change My Teaching... Until It Did,” I wrote that making the bed was never “one more thing.” It was two minutes I already had, spent differently. This was the same trade, but I moved it into the middle of a lesson.
I did not find two minutes anywhere; I took them from the lap.
And here is what a hurried pass had never given me:
· I heard a student start an explanation, get most of the way through it, and stop. Not because she didn’t know, but because she lacked the specific word for the next part and went looking for it.
· I heard a partner say something incorrect and heard the other student pause before agreeing. He did not correct it, but he had heard it. That pause was evidence, and it would have been gone the moment I walked away.
· I heard a prediction. I heard a student connect a character to her own grandmother.
· I heard someone skip the middle step, the one that makes the whole reasoning work, and land on a right answer anyway, which I never would have caught from the answer alone.
I was missing all of this when I ran my lap.
Six Words
Listening longer gave me more worth keeping. It also gave me more to lose. I did not need all of it, but I needed enough to tell one pair from another by sixth period.
So I kept it simple. After listening to a pair, I wrote about six words beside each student’s name on a seating chart, with the date. Each note captured one partner’s thinking about the same discussion question.
I landed on six from a strategy I already used with my students. Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser launched Six-Word Memoirs at SMITH Magazine in 2006, inspired by the six-word baby-shoes story often attributed to Hemingway (Smith & Fershleiser, 2008). I taught the strategy explicitly and came back to it all year. Six words is accessible and manageable, but it will not hold everything. A student has to decide what the key evidence is before she can write it.
I had been assigning that constraint for years before it occurred to me to turn it on myself.
It worked on me the way it worked on them. A few steps from the desk, I had already answered the only question that mattered: What about that conversation was worth keeping?
Confused suspense with dramatic irony.
Quoted Hughes to illustrate shifting tone.
Refuted claim using last essay’s evidence, unprompted.
Called narrator unreliable, offered no evidence.
Sometimes it came out as five words. Sometimes seven. The exact count was not the point; limiting my notes to key evidence was.
After I Wrote It Down
A few pairs a period, six words next to each name, on a chart that told me who I had heard. I was tracking.
Then I had to work out what the evidence was actually for. That part took longer than the listening did.
The notes I was collecting were a check for understanding. But a check for understanding is not formative assessment on its own. Formative assessment is the whole cycle. I gather the evidence, and then I do something with it, for the student and for me. The chart never assessed anything. I did.
I stopped at the gathering. I could tell you that a pair had confused suspense with dramatic irony, and then the bell rang, and the note sat in my chart doing nothing for them and nothing for me.
I brought it to my PLC. What came out of that conversation was a suggestion rather than a system: Connect it to the next day. Use it in the bell-ringer when it fits. Make it the warm-up question, or the writing prompt, or the question I put to a student who had more to give on it.
The notes did not tell me what to do. They gave me somewhere to begin.
If I heard a misconception that was going to get in the way, I taught into it before the period ended. But what I saved for the next day was the pattern rather than the single moment. Putting it back in front of students brought the thinking forward, set the purpose for the day, and handed me a second round of evidence.
The seating chart did the other half of the work. I could see at a glance whose square had writing in it this week and whose did not. Without it, I would have listened to the same confident pairs near the front every time, and tomorrow’s opener would have been built on them.
What I did with any of it depended on what I heard. It was not always possible, and it was not always pretty. But it was actionable.
What the Research Helped Me See
At the time, I was focused on changing my practice, often one habit at a time. Years later, research helped me put a name to what had been missing from my lap.
Researchers studying mathematics classrooms across six cities use the Japanese term kikan-shido, or “between-desks instruction,” for the time teachers spend moving among students as they work. Across more than 180 videotaped lessons, they describe four functions: monitoring student activity, guiding student activity, organizing materials and the physical setup, and engaging students in social talk (O’Keefe et al., 2006).
The word monitoring made me pause.
I had been watching students closely, but most of what I noticed was whether they were on task.
I had mistaken that for knowing what they understood.
Circulating could serve both purposes. I could still redirect and support students, but I also needed to hear what they were making of the lesson.
That was the question my assistant principal had been asking. What could I bring back from the discussions I had designed?
Karin Brodie’s (2000) study of a ninth-grade math class working on area shows how much can remain unheard. The teacher questioned students carefully, but they encountered counterexamples and expressed different understandings while she was away from their group. They did not bring those ideas to her, and their misconception about area persisted. She was in the room the whole time, like me.
Presence was never the hard part.
Bringing something back was. That is what the writing was for.
The Pattern Behind the Practice
Writing down what you hear while circulating is not a new idea, and no one owns it. I found my way to it in my own classroom. Doug Lemov built it into a technique, and in Teach Like a Champion the writing happens while he walks (Lemov, 2010). Reading him again, years later, affirmed what I knew from firsthand experience: that a teacher’s working memory is under constant pressure, and recording observations frees a teacher from trying to hold everything in mind (Lemov, 2024).
My working memory struggle wasn’t only remembering, but writing and attending simultaneously. So the timing was the part I had worked out for myself. Writing preserved what I heard, but only after I had listened long enough to hear it. And the note was only the middle of the process. Before it came attention. After it came a decision about what the evidence meant and what to do next.
Writing preserved what I heard, but only after I had listened long enough to hear it.
Researchers call that larger process teacher noticing. A review of the research describes it in three parts: attending to what students are doing, interpreting what it means, and deciding how to respond (König et al., 2022). My routine had begun to follow the same pattern:
1. Attending: Staying with one conversation.
2. Interpreting: Deciding what the six words needed to preserve.
3. Responding: Choosing the next instructional move.
That routine was what I brought to my assistant principal later in the year, when we talked again about how I was approaching student discussion. I showed her the chart and walked her through how I had gotten there. She asked what I did with what I wrote down. It was the same kind of question as the first one, and this time I had something to say. I was coming out of partner talk with evidence of thinking instead of evidence of compliance.
Two Minutes, Any Room
I sit on the other side of that conversation now. A teacher tells me she tried a strategy and it did not take, and I can hear that she is ready to move on to the next thing.
I know that feeling. My first attempt did not take either. A strategy can be sound and still be hard to carry out in the middle of a real lesson. The principle may be right while the timing, the sequence, or the support still needs work. This is what I mean when I tell teachers to adapt, not adopt. I did not need to abandon the clipboard or the evidence it preserved. I needed to separate the listening from the writing.
This is what I mean when I tell teachers to adapt, not adopt.
I have watched the same need surface in rooms far beyond tenth-grade English. The grade changes. The subject changes. What is easy to miss changes. The need to stay long enough to hear it does not.
I had not abandoned circulation. I had refined it, one small decision at a time, until movement became attention, attention became evidence, and evidence became action. The same two minutes were still there. What changed was how much of the learning I could carry forward from them.
Two Intentional Minutes
A Series on the Teaching Habits That Shape Great Teaching
Teaching Habit: Listening long enough to hear thinking.
“I Thought I Was Listening... Until Someone Asked What I Heard” is the third 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
Brodie, K. (2000). Teacher intervention in small-group work. For the Learning of Mathematics, 20(1), 9-16. https://flm-journal.org/Articles/2F306993D75E744392A48E370DC8E.pdf
König, J., Santagata, R., Scheiner, T., Adleff, A.-K., Yang, X., & Kaiser, G. (2022). Teacher noticing: A systematic literature review of conceptualizations, research designs, and findings on learning to notice. Educational Research Review, 36, 100453. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2022.100453
Lemov, D. (2010). Teach like a champion: 49 techniques that put students on the path to college. Jossey-Bass.
Lemov, D. (2024, January 3). Working memory, teachers and tracking data. Teach Like a Champion. https://teachlikeachampion.org/blog/working-memory-teachers-and-tracking-data/
O’Keefe, C., Xu, L. H., & Clarke, D. J. (2006). Kikan-shido: Between desks instruction. In D. J. Clarke, J. Emanuelsson, E. Jablonka, & I. A. C. Mok (Eds.), Making connections: Comparing mathematics classrooms around the world (pp. 73-106). Sense Publishers.
Smith, L., & Fershleiser, R. (Eds.). (2008). Not quite what I was planning: Six-word memoirs by writers famous and obscure. Harper Perennial.
