Time to Flip Out

by Tara Seale
Dan Bruno, who also publishes on the High School Matters blog, wrote a post about flipped classrooms in December.  Although I didn't explore this instructional method at the time (re-doing two National Board entries, taking a graduate class, teaching 90 AP Lang students, and trying to be a mom and wife - as teachers - you, best of all, understand why I didn't get around to it:) I recently found the time to explore the flipped classroom concept, and Tech & Learning has a great post explaining the positive effects of flipped classrooms.
Simply, a flipped classroom is one in which students watch a video lecture at home and complete classroom activities, or what would normally be considered homework, in class. This set up allows teachers to act as both a lecturer and a facilitator.  I watched the Flipping the Classroom Tech & Learning video, and one comment made by a student really stuck with me.
He said that he didn't have to stop the whole class if he didn't understand.  He could pause the video and re-watch what he didn't get the first time.  We all know that we have students who will not raise their hand, and unfortunately, they miss out on important information.
A teacher comment in the video also stuck with me.  When students come to class ready to complete classroom activities, the teacher is not the only one helping students.  Students who watched the video and easily understood the lesson serve as peer tutors.  Students who have additional questions can ask not only the teacher but also a classmate, and the students who understood the lesson reinforce the concepts of the lesson as they assist other students.

If you did not read Dan's post, he provides a basic outline to organize flipped instruction in an English classroom.  I encourage you to read Flipping Out.

Several websites support teachers implementing the flipped classroom model:

1. Sign up for the online community The Flipped Class Network
2. TechSmith has printable tutorials
3. Best of all, TEDTalks has signed on to support teachers in facilitating a flipped classroom.  Check out TED's Beta TED-Ed site.  Read the press release here: TED-Ed Launches Groundbreaking Website with New Tools for Customized Learning.

National Common Core Standards

by Tara Seale
According to the Education Week Blog Post, forty-one states have adopted the National Common Core Standards. My own state, Arkansas, has also adopted the Common Core Standards, and my school district adopted the standards in the draft stage even before our state adopted the standards. The teachers in our district began writing out a curriculum to match the national proposed standards. I am proud of the hard work by the English teachers in my district, and our ideas are similar to the draft curriculum that is now available online. I wanted to share this draft curriculum in case some of you are not aware that it is out there.
The Curriculum Mapping Project is sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and it is an impressive draft document. Click on this link to view the English Language Arts Curriculum Maps for all grade levels.
If you click around and thoroughly explore the website, you will find wordles (word clouds) of the curriculum maps for each grade level. The largest word in a word cloud is the most repeated word; therefore, the largest word should be the most important element in the word cloud. See the high school word cloud below or click here: Common Core Wordle

Precis Writing

by Tara Seale

At the June 15, 2010 Common Core Standards meeting in Arkansas, Dr. Sandra Stotsky from the University of Arkansas discussed several areas of the new National Common Core Standards for English Language Arts. As part of her presentation, she discussed precis writing and shared an article by K. D'Angelo titled, "Precis writing: promoting vocabulary development and comprehension" Journal of Reading. Dr. Stotsky emphasized the importance of summary writing as a key writing and comprehension assignment in classrooms of all ages.

Last year, I incorporated precis writing into my 9th grade English curriculum, and I believe it helped my students develop reading comprehension and writing skills.
Kelly Gallagher in his book Readicide addresses the problem that English teachers struggle with when they try to balance literature and nonfiction. Gallagher has a weekly reading assignment that he calls "The Article of the Week." This assignment addresses real-world writings and forces students to consider ideas that affect them today. You can access Kelly Gallagher's suggested articles at: www.kellygallaher.org. Gallagher refers to Ed Hirsch's Cultural Literacy as a reason students must read nonfiction in addition to literature. Students need prior knowledge of texts that are part of our culture to understand allusions that will appear on standardized tests and throughout their lives. Kelly Gallagher, on page 50 of Readicide, lists several ways to create assignments that evaluate student reading comprehension of nonfiction Articles of the Week.

For Example:

After reading an interesting article, create a t-chart. On the left side, bullet the key points of the article. On the right side, list what the article doesn't say. What has been left out?

OR

Pick three articles and rewrite their headlines. Explain why your headlines are better.

I incorporate nonfiction article reading into my classroom, but instead of using a variety of methods to test reading comprehension, I have introduced my students to precis writing. In four well-written sentences, students demonstrate that they comprehend the big idea, the tone, the audience, and the purpose of the article.
If you Google precis writing, you will read several versions of precis or summary writing. I adapted what I could find from teachers and professors on the World Wide Web to my classroom.
Because most 9th grade students are usually confused when they read a satirical piece, I decided we would all read an article from The Onion first, and then we would write a precis together. After reading the article (see below), I realized I wanted to use it, but I also wanted to edit out some of the words that were inappropriate for my 9th graders. I took the liberty to do so, and here is a Google Doc (G version) of The Onion article, "Underfunded Schools Forced to Cut Past Tense from Language Programs."
Next, I walked my students through annotating the article and answering important questions, such as, Who is the audience? What is the author's purpose?
Finally, we wrote a 4 sentence precis together and used it as a model for further nonfiction articles. See the yellow highlighted model sentences: Precis Model Sentences and Directions.
I was surprised by how many assignments students returned in which they adequately wrote out four well-written sentences that demonstrated their understand of the text. I used this assignment for homework during the 2009-2010 school year, and I plan to use it again this year.

Some of the articles I used during the 2009-2010 school year are below:

"Cassandras of Climate Change"

"The New Sputnik"

"Is Your Baby a Racist?"

"The Teen Brain: It's Just Not Grown Up Yet"

Common Core and the 21st Century Student

by Tara Seale

On June 15, 2010, The Learning Institute brought a panel of experts to the Bryant School District to discuss the National Common Core Standards. Educators and educational leaders in Arkansas attended the event to listen to Carol Jago and Dr. Sandra Stotsky discuss the English Language Arts Common Core and Dr. Stephen Wilson and Nancy Livingston discuss the Mathematics Common Core.
NCTE President Carol Jago's presentation focused on the 21st Century student. She said that webpages are teaching us to read in an F pattern. We read across the top, down the side, across the middle, and down the side again. Quick skimming works for online content, but not for great works of literature. Jago also referred to an advertisement that said, "Read Less, Know More." I Googled this ad and found out that it is the slogan for a company called Newser. I am not sure if this is the same ad that Carol Jago referred to, but it seems like it could be. Newser summarizes news stories for people who do not want to struggle through a lengthy article in the New York Times but only want to know the gist of the article as summarized by an employee from Newser. The founder of Newser, Michael Wolff, claims that he is going to put newspapers out of business, which seems to contradict the strategy of his business enterprise. You can view Mr. Wolff explaining the value of Newser in this CNBC interview below.






Carol Jago said that this generation may be too distracted to read. She provided a handout that included startling statistics from the Kaiser Family Foundation Study, such as, the average 8-18 year old spends approximately 7 1/2 hours utilizing electronic media during a 24 hour period. Carol Jago claimed that our youth is paying a "mental price" as they "twitter away their focus," but the National Common Core Curriculum may provide some hope by bringing what Mark Bauerlein called the The Dumbest Generation back into focus. Jago shared several lessons aligned with the National Common Core Curriculum that would force students to focus. For example, she used artwork from Jacob Lawrence This is a Family Living in Harlem and the poem "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden to compare the details and images used by the artist and poet. This lesson corresponds with the National Common Core Reading Standard for Grades 9-10:Literature on page 38 of the Common Core:

7. Analyze the representation of a subject or a key scene in two different artistic mediums, including what is emphasized or absent in each treatment (e.g. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" and Breughel's Landscape with the fall of Icarus).

In my classroom, I've discovered that this multi-tasking generation would prefer not to focus and would rather read short snippets and move on, but when provided direction and encouragement, students maintain concentration as they try to decipher difficult text, and the Common Core looks promising for providing a curriculum that encourages students to deepen their comprehension. Unfortunately, this skill is threatened by Newser and other 21st Century distractions. If Newser has its way and manages to change an entire generation into skimmers who let others do the heavy thinking, I wonder who they will employ to condense those lengthy articles?