Empowering teachers to transform drained classrooms into dynamic spaces of risk, energy, and renewed joy.
When you put in great effort but don’t see the results…you need a reset! The Engagement Reset is happening soon and I don’t want you to miss this opportunity! One hour a week, and a community with resources and support is waiting for you! Comment CALL and I’ll send you my availability to schedule a zoom call to see if this 4-week experience is the right fit for you.
Most students will push up against a boundary, some more than others. This is not a good vs naughty student situation. They are learning and so boundaries get pushed up against. We can predict that. So we should plan our response. P.E.P. is my go to for every lesson. It keeps me and my response predictable, which keeps the boundary clear as well. Clear expectations and consistent responses from the teacher holding students to those expectations reduces friction in the classroom.
Students slump in their chairs and opt out. It feels too risky, socially and intellectually, to participate. So we must plan for building their trust and dignity into our classrooms. We must scaffold their engagement so that students lean in and take risks hidden in structures and activities that feel accessible and build confidence! When this happens we stop pulling students into the lesson, and instead we invite them to the learning. Then we get to do the thing we love to do, and feel the joy of doing it!
Join me in The Engagement Reset! Register for the live, free webinars remaining this month. Let’s do this together! See the link in my profile or comment WEBINAR and I’ll message you the link.
At the end of a school, I like to thank Past Bri who planned for a moment as satisfying as this! Planning ahead is my favorite kind of planning, otherwise I’m just reacting. I do a better job reacting to the unexpected when the expected is taken care of already. I know I have to take off the labels before summer break, so why not make it a 3 second job. A more seasoned teacher taught me this trick and I’ve been grateful for over a decade. What little tip have you learned from a colleague that has become common practice?
Modifying games in my life for the classroom is one of my favorite hacks. Anyone else remember the sound of the timer from this game? 😂 Catch Phrase is one person giving hints for the word in the wheel. As soon as their team guesses the word, they click the button and pass the wheel to the next player. Teams are every other person so the game is like hot potato. You don’t want to be holding the wheel when the timer goes out. Not everyone loves this game, but it is a choice I love to offer for review. Type a list of terms related to the unit, print, and tape them over a copy of the original cardstock discs. Once made, you can use them over and over again! What game have you modified for the classroom? My kids shared their art teacher uses the game Hues & Cues in art class.
So how do you do Quiz-Quiz-Trade?
A recently posted a reel of my students playing Quiz-Quiz-Trade with fraction cards and a praise phrase card in hand. I got a lot of questions and shared files of directions and resources via DMs, but there were still some other questions that I wanted to address. So here’s the tutorial walking you through the process. Check out my reel a few posts earlier to see it in action.
Comment below with any questions or if you need the files shared with you (type LINKS). I don’t have an automated response but I will do my best to get back to you in a timely manner. Send me a DM for the fastest response if you need something for a lesson the next day.
Jen Jones (Jen Jones | Literacy | Science of Reading) had the 87 Praise Phrases card I started with, and it has turned into my students making their own with their favorite phrases.
Graham Fletcher is all about conceptual understanding of math and has a lot of free resources.
I love sharing resources and supporting teachers who are tired of students slumping in their chairs and instead having students lean into learning and find the joy of learning & teaching in their classrooms.
How you start the day with students matters! Morning meeting has been a part of my classroom culture since Day 1. It has looked different based on the schedule and the year, but it has always held the main components: greeting, sharing, game, & message. When I departmentalized one year and only had a group of students for 50 minutes, I found ways to get all the meeting components in across the week. It was worth it.
One of my students’ favorite games to play and now teach to their own students is coconut. It is a variation of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Everyone is involved the whole time.
1. Everyone crouches down and starts as a coconut. Kids just waddle around; adults can do a slight squat.
2. You always walk up to someone who is on the same stage as you. So when you are all coconuts, you find the nearest coconut and you play Rock, Paper, Scissors.
3. If you win, you evolve to the next stage. If you lose, you stay a coconut.
4. The second stage is a palm tree. You stand tall and wave your branches in the wind. You find the nearest palm tree and you play Rock, Paper, Scissors.
5. If you win, you evolve to the third stage. If you lose, you go all the way to a coconut. Every time you lose, you go to coconut. This ensures there are always plenty of people to go to coconut and evolve up. Some variations just go down a stage.
6. The third stage is a volcano. Walk around pretending the top of your head is shooting out lava with your hands. Find the nearest fellow volcano and you play Rock, Paper, Scissors.
7. If you win, you become the fourth stage. If you lose, you go all the way to a coconut.
8. The fourth and final stage is the island king, or Big Kahuna, and you walk around with a crown on your head. Place your hands on your head as a large ring/crown. Find the nearest Big Kahuna and you play Rock, Paper, Scissors.
9. If you win, you stay the Big Kahuna with a crown on your head until someone faces off with you again. If you lose, you go all the way to a coconut.
10. Continue until time is up. (However long you want.)
The progression is:
🥥—>🌴—>🌋—>👑 (I post/draw this for the class to reference.)
What games does your class love?
In the 3 with Bri podcast studio I can release my frustration audibly. I can edit the recording and polish it all up before anyone else has to see or hear anything. This is not the case in the classroom. When lessons take unexpected detours, I become a duck: calm on the surface and paddling frantically below the surface. You’ve been there. When you play out scenarios in a split second, make decisions and determine careful words to use in each specific circumstance within moments. You almost rise above your body and see it from a third person.
Staying calm in unexpected lesson detours becomes easier with practice, and with experience I have to do that less. There are of course still detours but I can anticipate them better. Now I can oftentimes predict the exits and plan to avoid them. I use an audit on my lessons to expose the exits and replace them with entries. I’m still a duck paddling at times, teachers are really good at it, but if I can ride the current and just be calm above and below the surface, my inner critic stays quiet and I can guide the whole classroom to feel the flow and get pulled into the current together.
How do you keep lessons on track? What do you do when the detour happens? How do you plan to avoid them?
06/12/2026
The most surprising thing to me this spring has been how intentional actions shift identities. As someone looking to help teachers transform classrooms with passive students into engaged learners in joyful spaces, I see how teachers shift their classroom identities when provided with support and resources.
This shouldn’t be a surprise since I’ve done some research on this in my classroom. My students are future elementary teachers, so they are generalists, learning enough about everything. It takes a lot of work, and sometimes they come with baggage from their own K-12 experience. They usually have preferred subject areas and then oftentimes do not think of themselves as a math person, or a science person. I teach math and science content and methods courses for elementary education majors. I bump into an identity crisis often.
Studies suggest that teachers should have well-developed, coherent subject matter knowledge so that they may efficiently support the content demands of teaching (Nixon, Toerien, & Luft, 2019). Subject matter knowledge must be built and thus their self-efficacy and identity around that subject increases. This in the end increases student outcomes as well. No matter the age, I believe learning is about the content and how we feel about it. Building knowledgeable and confident learners is essential to take on bigger questions!
Prior to each of our science and math units, I have my college students self-assess their understanding of a content area. We do this through a “Circles of Me” inventory. The Circles of Me and Space Science Content below is a modified 7-point visual scale from McDonald et al. (2019) called the STEM Identity Overlap Measure. Students shared their starting point or prior knowledge (1-7 with visual) and their ending point or learned knowledge (1-7 visual) at the end of the Space Science unit. We repeat this for other units as well. (Continued in comments)
How do you respond to the unexpected? I shared this videos with some friends and I got varied responses:
*I’m screaming
*Amazing
*So cute!
*Get out of there!
*Did you get sprayed?
*Skunks make good pets.
My heart was thumping but I backed away carefully, observing, looking for mama in case she came to defend her babies. I, of course, recorded because it seemed so special, humorous, and absolutely surprising.
I try to handle the unplanned well, but to be honest, I love things going according to plan. Teachers with plans fare better. Teachers with intentional plans based on the students in front of them fare even better. The days I’m poorly planned feel extra draining because I’m reacting the entire day. I feel better when I have a well-designed plan that is proactive, and d students feel that. When the surprises come, which is easily done with a group of people, I am better set to handle them. I can grab those teachable moments because I’m clear on what students need to experience in the lesson and where we can play. Planning is never about restrictions or control, but about a direction for an objective that gives better response times. I value the plan that personalizes that response.
Without planning for skunks, I handled it well.
I didn’t get sprayed.
And I can’t wait to see what my students say when I share this video with them.