3 Resources to Help Focus on Process over Product

2 Curriculums that Focus on Process over Product and Old Faithful, Reading Strategies that Work

When we switched to Common Core Standards, teachers scrambled to have an example or curriculum to understand how to teach in a student and process focused manner. I found Units of Study, Writing by Lucy Calkins http://www.heinemann.com/unitsofstudy/writing/ . It is hard to explain, but all the components including, a revamped writing process to included repeated, repeated, repeated revisions, lesson format, lesson delivery, organization of unit plan, and especially teacher and student writing conferences helped me make process focus mind shift. Teaching writing is NOT my strength, but I ended up enjoying  teaching writing because of this program.

The second program my principal found which helped our school switch to process focused teaching was Engage NY Math. They used math diagrams for students to really understand math concepts. The tape-diagram caused students to think about components in math word or computation problems, identify their relationship, then input and label them to tape diagram. Creating the visual representation of math problem was student goal not necessarily the answer. Engage NY helped me understand the shift because I saw my students focus change.

Reading Strategies that Work has been around awhile.  It transformed how I teach reading comprehension, years ago. Metacognition helps students tremendously with process. It's awesome when students can explain to other students HOW they think about something.