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17,000 Classroom Visits Can't Be Wrong: Strategies That Engage Students, Promote Active Learning, and Boost Achievement
Most educators are skilled at planning instruction and determining what they will do during the course of a lesson. However, to truly engage students in worthwhile, rigorous cognition, a profound shift is necessary: a shift in emphasis from teaching to learning. Put another way, we know that whoever is doing the work is also doing the learning—and in most classrooms, teachers are working much too hard.
Authors John V. Antonetti and James R. Garver are the designers of the Look 2 Learning model of classroom walkthroughs. They've visited more than 17,000 classroomsÑexamining a variety of teaching and learning conditions, talking to students, examining their work, and determining their levels of thinking and engagement. From this vast set of data, they've drawn salient lessons that provide valuable insight into how to smooth the transition from simply planning instruction to designing high-quality student work.
The lessons John and Jim have learned from their 17,000 (and counting) classroom visits can't be wrong. They share those lessons in this book, along with stories of successful practice and practical tools ready for immediate classroom application. The authors also provide opportunities for reflection and closure designed to help you consider (or reconsider) your current beliefs and practices. Throughout, you will hear the voices of John and Jim—and the thousands of students they met—as they provide a map for shifting the classroom dynamic from teaching to learning.
265 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 1, 2015
38 people are currently reading
349 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
October 14, 2018
1. I had the pleasure of hearing John speak at Missouri Teacher Academy last month. I am so glad that I did because I got to see the examples in this book come to life. John was hilarious, engaging, entertaining, helpful, and nice. I could not take my eyes off of him except when I was laughing so hard I was doubled over. While the book isn’t funny, I was able to mentally see the time and place I was taught the concepts and it was really helpful for me while reading this book because reading informational text isn’t my favorite thing.
2. I’m so excited to implement many concepts from this book. (And have already done some.)
3. I attended this meeting with the other high school English teacher. I’m 9-10 and she’s 11-12. It’s great to be able to refer back to the text with her as we teach our students together.
4. This teacher and I also brought this information back to a building wide meeting and it’s been a good conversation to have with our colleagues.
2. I’m so excited to implement many concepts from this book. (And have already done some.)
3. I attended this meeting with the other high school English teacher. I’m 9-10 and she’s 11-12. It’s great to be able to refer back to the text with her as we teach our students together.
4. This teacher and I also brought this information back to a building wide meeting and it’s been a good conversation to have with our colleagues.
January 25, 2016
17,124 classroom visits have convinced John V. Antonetti and James R. Garver of the need to write a guide for assisting teachers in developing learning-focused plans in order to shift the focus in classrooms from teaching to learning. Their learning walks revealed too many classrooms in which the instruction was teacher-directed and the levels of student thinking and engagement generally low. Hence, their book presents “strategies and tools … [for] moving classrooms toward deeper thinking, more engaging work, and higher levels of student achievement.” (17)
The design of 17,000 Classroom Visits Can’t Be Wrong is tailor-made for teacher book clubs and PLCs as each chapter presents a specific part of the lesson planning process. Components of each chapter include data collected from the authors’ learning walks, relevant research, practical strategies, school success stories, dialogues and debates between the authors, and a closure activity for teachers and school leaders.
The authors begin Chapter 3, “Thinking and The Brain”, with sobering data accumulated from their classroom visits with respect to the lack of attention given to higher level thinking skills development: 87% of the instruction they observed was focused on knowledge and comprehension – the 2 lowest levels of thinking. The authors maintain that “The key to raising thinking in a meaningful way [in the classroom] is to focus on the middle two levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, application and analysis.” (31) They suggest that authentic application skills development occurs when students can call up from memory, for use in appropriate situations, appropriate strategies, ideas, and information. For authentic learning opportunities related to analysis, they recommend Zip it and Flip it!, whereby students are presented with examples, and then are encouraged to find for themselves the pattern(s) in the examples. The teacher’s role is to remain silent and not give the pattern(s) away.
In Chapter 4, “Learning Targets”, the authors emphasize that it is not enough that teachers simply post learning goals and success criteria; instead, students must be able to articulate them and make them their own. Unfortunately, the data from their learning walks indicate that only 33% of students they encountered were able to articulate the learning goals, and a miniscule 4% of them could explain what success “looks like”. (52)
“Know Your Learners” is the title of Chapter 5. What teachers should come to know about their students includes:
• their cultural background;
• their experiences (vast or limited);
• their working vocabulary (extensive or limited); and,
• their interactions and opportunities
The teacher’s task is to adapt the learning opportunities based on the specific profiles of the students, including compensating for areas of deficit and meeting their specific needs. From their classroom visits, the authors concluded that most teachers feel that written responses by students, followed by whole-class discussions, is an effective way to get to know their students and develop relationships with them. They add that “it’s also important for our learners to know who we [their teachers] are.” (73)
Chapter 6 opens with “horrifying” data on engagement levels drawn from the 17,124 classroom visits: Only 6% of students were found to be engaged. The authors make an important distinction between the many students who were observed to be merely on-task and those truly engaged. Eight “engaging work qualities” they identify are as follows:
• personal response;
• clear/modeled expectations;
• emotional/intellectual safety;
• learning with others;
• clear sense of audience;
• choice;
• novelty/variety; and,
• authenticity (real-world connections).
Chapter 7 explores effective instructional strategies. The authors list 9 categories of strategies identified in Classroom Instruction That Works, including cooperative learning; cues, questions, and advanced organizers; nonlinguistic representations; identifying similarities and differences; and generating and testing hypotheses. (98) The bad news is that their data indicate that strategies in these categories were seen in classrooms only between 4% and 12% of the time.
Antonetti and Garver offer their own commentary for many of the 9 categories of instructional strategies. For instance, they argue that graphic organizers (a type of nonlinguistic representation) are far more effective when the "elements of personal response and middle level thinking are part of the activity.” (106) They also conclude that generating & testing hypotheses is the strategy that most demands that teachers shift from teacher-directed to student-centred learning. When it comes to cues, questions, & advanced organizers, they caution that they must always precede posting of the learning goal; otherwise, the depth of student thinking will be compromised.
Differentiation is the theme of Chapter 8. The authors begin by pointing out that differentiation will inevitably occur in classrooms in which there has been a shift from teaching to learning. The problem is, though, that there is little opportunity for student-focused learning to occur when between 70% and 81% of classroom time, according to their data, is spent listening, watching, and completing identical seat work. The authors elaborate on 2 of Tomlinson’s 4 classroom elements that allow for differentiation – process and product. With respect to the former, they support Marian Small’s idea of parallel tasks for students. Differentiation of product allows students to personalize the evidence of their learning.
In Chapter 9, “Learning Pathways”, a graphic organizer is provided showing the possible pathways students may follow once an initial assessment is made of the progress toward a learning goal. Those who demonstrate mastery take an extension or enrichment path, while those well below standard move to intervention. Those near standard follow a guided and independent practice route.
The authors, in Chapter 10, define closure for the learning-centred classroom as students as “active agents … summarizing and analyzing what they have just learned.” (141) Noting that they observed closure activities in the classrooms they observed less than 1% of the time, they provide several closure strategies, including:
• Exit Ticket – Students post a short note explaining the main idea of the day’s lesson and a
personal connection to it;
• Post Card to an Absent Student – Students explain to the absent student what they learned.
• I Used to Think/Now I think
• Tweet Me – Students, like a Tweet, use only 140 characters to comment on or react to what
they learned
In the chapter on reflection, the authors offer a 4Rs approach for reflective conversations. The student:
• Restates the key information in his/her own words;
• Reacts on a personal level to the information;
• Remembers how he/she experienced similar information in the past: and,
• Responds with What if? and Why questions that extend the learning.
The design of 17,000 Classroom Visits Can’t Be Wrong is tailor-made for teacher book clubs and PLCs as each chapter presents a specific part of the lesson planning process. Components of each chapter include data collected from the authors’ learning walks, relevant research, practical strategies, school success stories, dialogues and debates between the authors, and a closure activity for teachers and school leaders.
The authors begin Chapter 3, “Thinking and The Brain”, with sobering data accumulated from their classroom visits with respect to the lack of attention given to higher level thinking skills development: 87% of the instruction they observed was focused on knowledge and comprehension – the 2 lowest levels of thinking. The authors maintain that “The key to raising thinking in a meaningful way [in the classroom] is to focus on the middle two levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, application and analysis.” (31) They suggest that authentic application skills development occurs when students can call up from memory, for use in appropriate situations, appropriate strategies, ideas, and information. For authentic learning opportunities related to analysis, they recommend Zip it and Flip it!, whereby students are presented with examples, and then are encouraged to find for themselves the pattern(s) in the examples. The teacher’s role is to remain silent and not give the pattern(s) away.
In Chapter 4, “Learning Targets”, the authors emphasize that it is not enough that teachers simply post learning goals and success criteria; instead, students must be able to articulate them and make them their own. Unfortunately, the data from their learning walks indicate that only 33% of students they encountered were able to articulate the learning goals, and a miniscule 4% of them could explain what success “looks like”. (52)
“Know Your Learners” is the title of Chapter 5. What teachers should come to know about their students includes:
• their cultural background;
• their experiences (vast or limited);
• their working vocabulary (extensive or limited); and,
• their interactions and opportunities
The teacher’s task is to adapt the learning opportunities based on the specific profiles of the students, including compensating for areas of deficit and meeting their specific needs. From their classroom visits, the authors concluded that most teachers feel that written responses by students, followed by whole-class discussions, is an effective way to get to know their students and develop relationships with them. They add that “it’s also important for our learners to know who we [their teachers] are.” (73)
Chapter 6 opens with “horrifying” data on engagement levels drawn from the 17,124 classroom visits: Only 6% of students were found to be engaged. The authors make an important distinction between the many students who were observed to be merely on-task and those truly engaged. Eight “engaging work qualities” they identify are as follows:
• personal response;
• clear/modeled expectations;
• emotional/intellectual safety;
• learning with others;
• clear sense of audience;
• choice;
• novelty/variety; and,
• authenticity (real-world connections).
Chapter 7 explores effective instructional strategies. The authors list 9 categories of strategies identified in Classroom Instruction That Works, including cooperative learning; cues, questions, and advanced organizers; nonlinguistic representations; identifying similarities and differences; and generating and testing hypotheses. (98) The bad news is that their data indicate that strategies in these categories were seen in classrooms only between 4% and 12% of the time.
Antonetti and Garver offer their own commentary for many of the 9 categories of instructional strategies. For instance, they argue that graphic organizers (a type of nonlinguistic representation) are far more effective when the "elements of personal response and middle level thinking are part of the activity.” (106) They also conclude that generating & testing hypotheses is the strategy that most demands that teachers shift from teacher-directed to student-centred learning. When it comes to cues, questions, & advanced organizers, they caution that they must always precede posting of the learning goal; otherwise, the depth of student thinking will be compromised.
Differentiation is the theme of Chapter 8. The authors begin by pointing out that differentiation will inevitably occur in classrooms in which there has been a shift from teaching to learning. The problem is, though, that there is little opportunity for student-focused learning to occur when between 70% and 81% of classroom time, according to their data, is spent listening, watching, and completing identical seat work. The authors elaborate on 2 of Tomlinson’s 4 classroom elements that allow for differentiation – process and product. With respect to the former, they support Marian Small’s idea of parallel tasks for students. Differentiation of product allows students to personalize the evidence of their learning.
In Chapter 9, “Learning Pathways”, a graphic organizer is provided showing the possible pathways students may follow once an initial assessment is made of the progress toward a learning goal. Those who demonstrate mastery take an extension or enrichment path, while those well below standard move to intervention. Those near standard follow a guided and independent practice route.
The authors, in Chapter 10, define closure for the learning-centred classroom as students as “active agents … summarizing and analyzing what they have just learned.” (141) Noting that they observed closure activities in the classrooms they observed less than 1% of the time, they provide several closure strategies, including:
• Exit Ticket – Students post a short note explaining the main idea of the day’s lesson and a
personal connection to it;
• Post Card to an Absent Student – Students explain to the absent student what they learned.
• I Used to Think/Now I think
• Tweet Me – Students, like a Tweet, use only 140 characters to comment on or react to what
they learned
In the chapter on reflection, the authors offer a 4Rs approach for reflective conversations. The student:
• Restates the key information in his/her own words;
• Reacts on a personal level to the information;
• Remembers how he/she experienced similar information in the past: and,
• Responds with What if? and Why questions that extend the learning.
August 7, 2019
I felt that this book gave great advice to teachers who feel they have been doing the same things, or mixing it up, and still feel their students aren’t “getting it.” Many of these things we know, but forget, and many seem like common sense we just haven’t taken time to slow down and look at our Instruction.
April 2, 2022
I was given this book as part of a workshop and conference I was part of. John Antonetti spoke at the conference and used a lot of this book in his workshops. He is a very charismatic and dynamic speaker. While I did find a lot of the research in the book interesting and useful, I was hoping to find more usable strategies that I could take to my classroom.
January 8, 2025
17,000 visits is a book that has something valuable for teachers, administrators, and instructional coaches. The idea behind the title and the book itself is that the authors have done thousands of classroom visits and have collected data about what works and what doesn't. The biggest conclusion they have reached is that teachers must focus their thinking not on what is being taught, but on what students are learning. The chapters in the book are short, but in each chapter, the authors examine some aspect of teaching through the lens of being student focused. For instance, there are ideas for increasing student engagement, for differentiating instruction, and for effective lesson planning. The book is short, and the chapters have a number of features that are of minimal value, like a dialog between the two authors at the beginning of each chapter or journal entries from a middle school student. Although this already short book could probably be 40% shorter without losing much value, the other 60% of the book has important insights and data. If I can find four or five things that I can use in a book about education, I feel it was worth my time to read. This book easily met that criterion, and I would highly recommend it.
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May 19, 20215/5 Educational Stars
I really enjoyed this book. It wasn't what I thought it was when I picked it up {Tiktok made me buy it}. I thought it was going to be a book of strategies/tools to use in class. While it does have those in it, it is more about moving your practice (as a teacher) from being teaching focused to learning focused. It is all about how to build lessons with the learners in mind and becoming not only more effective, but more engaging.
I would definitely recommend this to fellow educators (k-12). It would be amazing to see this implemented at a school-wide level and I see myself using the Powerful Task Rubric all through-out next year.
I really enjoyed this book. It wasn't what I thought it was when I picked it up {Tiktok made me buy it}. I thought it was going to be a book of strategies/tools to use in class. While it does have those in it, it is more about moving your practice (as a teacher) from being teaching focused to learning focused. It is all about how to build lessons with the learners in mind and becoming not only more effective, but more engaging.
I would definitely recommend this to fellow educators (k-12). It would be amazing to see this implemented at a school-wide level and I see myself using the Powerful Task Rubric all through-out next year.
February 20, 2023
To be fair, I haven't truly finished this book. I'm pausing it for later because I wasn't super motivated to finish it. I don't think it is because there is something wrong with the book. It's writing is pretty charming. Its insights are, well, insightful.
Sometimes, a book just doesn't hit you at the right time. I think that is what is happening here.
Sometimes, a book just doesn't hit you at the right time. I think that is what is happening here.
July 17, 2017
I am still thinking over the ideas presented in this book since they go against many of the things I have been taught about good teaching. Who is correct? Could the idea presented really be the BEST? The verdict is still out...for me.
August 19, 2018
As an overview of teaching strategies this is a worthwhile title for educators. I have been a public school teacher for 26 years and I've seen a lot of "new" initiatives in that time. This book references a lot of them - differentiation, learning by design, the work of Ruby Paine, SMART goals, multiple intelligences, and more. In fact, I started keeping a list of all the prior theories that were going to revolutionize education as they were mentioned in the book and that list was long! So in that respect, this book provides a decent summary of many teaching philosophies and strategies. But when it comes to laying out a coherent new idea, I am underwhelmed. I read this book because my school district started learning walks last year. I was highly skeptical of what the walks were supposed to do to improve education and I asked several questions for clarification of the people in my building who were charged with training the rest of us. The responses I received were either snippy or vague and not illuminating. I went along with the walks for the rest of the school year, but this summer I decided to read this book, assuming I had been missing something or that my trainers had not been able to articulate the practice clearly so getting the information directly from the source might give me insight to what I should be learning. Obviously, that didn't happen and I feel that the reason I couldn't get my questions answered this year is because there's not a clear program spelled out in the book. But now I can say that I gave it my best shot to grasp what I could and I can move on with my life. I'm also annoyed by the totally fake journal entries from Jerrod that were presented as observations of a real 7th grader.
April 20, 2015
At 180 pages, this was a very good reference book on teaching. The most important piece I remember after reading this book is that teachers are doing too much of the work and talking in the classroom. If we truly want the students to learn and retain their knowledge, we have to have them engaged and involved so that they are absorbing and using their knowledge in practical ways. Then they will have a greater understanding and ability to transfer their knowledge in other areas.
They only con would be that the book spans from preschool to 12th grade classrooms. I found myself speed reading to get to the lower elementary classroom feedback. I would have loved to have had this book be broken down into more detailed examples by grade level, but then the book would have to be several books.
I received a complimentary copy from Goodreads giveaway program.
They only con would be that the book spans from preschool to 12th grade classrooms. I found myself speed reading to get to the lower elementary classroom feedback. I would have loved to have had this book be broken down into more detailed examples by grade level, but then the book would have to be several books.
I received a complimentary copy from Goodreads giveaway program.
April 11, 2015
This is easily the best overview of instructional strategies that I have read. While it is grounded in research and provides a brief synopsis of research on each of the topics covered, it goes beyond that to give practical advice on how, and why, teachers should change their instructional practices. Whether it is understanding brain science, learning targets, differentiation, or a number of other educational topics, this book is a good starting point.
June 5, 2015
Although the organization was a bit clunky at times, I really enjoyed this book and can't recommend it enough to all other teachers. This focuses on how to move from designing lessons to be taught to designing ways for students to learn. I only wish I had read it earlier in my career.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews