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.

Project for Awesome

by Tara Seale
Have you ever wondered how YouTube chooses the videos that are featured on their website? I just visited YouTube, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out.
Look at the bold titles: Trending, Most Popular, Featured Videos, and What's New.
What would it take to create a YouTube video and have it featured on the front page? Who would even endeavor to have their video featured on YouTube's front page? I can tell you who. The NerdFighters and their Project for Awesome (P4A).
On December 17, P4A will once again try to take over YouTube and the trending topic of Twitter by promoting videos that represent charities. This is truly an awesome project because it brings attention to the needs of our world. I first learned about this project from Lee Ann Spillane, a high school English teacher from Winter Park, FL. At NCTE's National Convention 2009 in Philadelphia, she told me that her class was participating in P4A by creating one video that they would promote on December 17th. I didn't really understand what she was talking about, but when December 17th rolled around, I found myself remembering our conversation as I followed her numerous tweets and shout outs that proclaimed something great was happening, so at this year's NCTE National Convention 2010 in Orlando when Lee Ann and I both showed up to an early Sunday morning session to hear Kelly Gallagher, Penny Kittle, and Jeff Anderson present, I asked her about P4A again. I paid closer attention to the details this time. This year, each of Lee Ann's students is creating his or her own video to promote a charity on the P4A day. The students will embed the P4A logo into their video to designate it as part of the P4A project. She is also working with the technology department to gain access to YouTube for a day so that her students can participate in commenting, viewing, favoriting, and promoting their videos to propel P4A to the top of the YouTube and Twitter trending lists.
What an incredible experience for these high school students. Congratulations to Lee Ann for creating a genuine authentic audience that brings attention to worthwhile causes and involves students using 21st century technology. Imagine the connections the students will feel as together they unite to take over cyberspace for a day with something they have created.
Lee Ann first became involved in P4A when she realized that one of the founders was a former student, Hank Green. Hank and his brother John grew up in Winter Park, FL, and John is a young adult author of several books including Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns. The two brothers are responsible for the popular VlogBrothers Channel on YouTube and for creating the Nerdfighters.
What are Nerdfighters? They do not fight nerds, they actually promote nerds and fight World Suck which they explain in the video below. I encourage you to watch their video because I learned so much. For example, I now know the difference between an acronym and an initialism. They also brought to my attention that I sometimes have a high puff level, which I knew, but I just didn't have a phrase for it. Thank you John and Hank for putting this all into perspective for me, and thank you Lee Ann for being a teacher who takes risks to engage students in something as amazing as Project for Awesome.
Project for Awesome Website (This website will update to the 2010 P4A in December).

Updates for P4A: Video Announcement about 2010 P4a

Education vs. Training - To Think, Learn, or Both?

As teachers of English, we know words have power. The two that lead this post are two I have been thinking about a lot lately. Let me explain why.

I did not have TV for a number of years. My wife and I had trouble with our cable provider and, since no resolution could be reached, we turned in our equipment and said see ya later. That was two and a half years ago. (I find it interesting in a country run on a "free market system" that we could not get cable from any other provider unless we moved miles from where we were. Just a side thought.)

In any case, when we moved into our home in May, we had TV connected. (This was mainly for guests. You won't believe, when you have not TV, how many people will come visit and ask about the TV. "You don't watch any TV?" "Some DVDs." "No cable?" "Wow." [Insert shaking head].)

Since the box has been back on, I've been distracted, not by gratuitous sex, violence, and police procedurals, but by commercials for the University of Phoenix online. The crux of many of these commercials has been that the University of Phoenix has technology...and they know how to use it. Oh, and they have professors who still work in their field. (Feels a little bit like the old "can vs. do" argument.)

Believe it or not, I started asking myself questions about these commercials. I know what you are thinking: This stuff gets this guy thinking...whatever. The commercial goes on and emphasizes the University of Phoenix's ability to make people ready for careers in the 21st century. That is what got me. Is that why we get an education? We learn Shakespeare, the quadratic equation, the scientific method, and Pearl Harbor so that we can get that cubicle with the view?

If we look at an education as solely job training, we serve a false idol. The student who will become the CPA for Microsoft probably doesn't need Shakespeare. The student who works as a preschool teacher probably doesn't need the quadratic equation. The student who will stay-at-home probably doesn't need the scientific method. The student who will do research on non-Hodgkins lymphoma probably doesn't need to know about Pearl Harbor. I only have one question: Who are we to decide that students should not be exposed to certain cultural capital?

On the TV today, I saw an episode of Cash Cab featuring two of the most vapid people I have ever seen. When asked what "level-headed pamphlet" Thomas Paine wrote, the gentlemen in the cab were stumped. They used a "mobile shout-out" and called a friend of theirs who had Dr. in front of his name. What did these three gentlemen give as the answer to that question? You guessed it...The Declaration of Independence.

This all leads me to what I think I will use as a theme for the month of August. As we get ready to (duhn duhn duhn) go back to school, I am going to make each of my posts focus on the relationship of content knowledge to critical thinking.

Education has, at its heart, the goal of encouraging critical thinking skills. Training is about knowledge alone. If I am training for a certificate, I am not being educated; rather, I am being inducted into a set of terms, ideas, and concepts related to a specific field. When I am receiving an education, I am learning to seek knowledge and do something with it. When I say "do something" I mean in a way that will affect that body of knowledge. I worked at a school once where a colleague's nephew, a lawyer, was published in a prominent legal journal. The article talked about a particularly difficult legal matter; he used a literary allusion to Scylla and Charybdis in the title. Not only did he communicate his point, but he did it with style.

On the other side of the issue, there are people who say that we don't need to teach knowledge, but how to think. If we follow this logic, the thinking becomes very difficult. What are we to think of if we have not learned what things are. But seriously, the argument on this side is that students graduate with a lot of facts, but no context. The context and the abilities to synthesize and evaluate information are the hallmarks of higher-order thought. Teach those skills, they say. Who can argue with that.

So, as we get ready to (duhn duhn duhn) go back to school, I will ask this question: How much of our content do we give up to focus on critical thinking skills? What should our focus really be? If we teach thinking skills instead of knowledge, can we blame anyone but ourselves for the shallow thoughts that result? I don't know, but I look forward to the discussion.

Assuming Too Much or Too Little?

Oftentimes, I hear my colleagues talk about how little students seem to know. They complain about how little students are able to retain. The bottom line: They are complaining about how little content knowledge students have and retain. Is content knowledge important? Does it have anything to do with making students college- and career-ready?



The answer to both questions is yes. According to E.D. Hirsch, Jr., content knowledge is essential to understanding a text. Since the 1980s, Hirsch has been advocating the necessity of having content knowledge. In Cultural Literacy, Hirsch and his colleagues provide a very detailed list of basic cultural knowledge students must possess to be proficient readers of Literature, etc. More recently, in The Knowledge Deficit, Hirsch outlines the loss that students suffer from not gaining content knowledge. According to an international study of productivity in schools, US schools are one of the least productive in the world; our students decline 38 normalized points in reading achievement (Hirsch, 2006, p. 82).



By comparison, Hirsch's schools-Core Knowledge Schools-offer an alternative curriculum to the traditional American public schools. In Core Knowledge Schools, teachers follow a set K-8 cultural literacy curriculum. Despite the many critics (more on this in a second), these schools show a remarkable, steady rate of achievement from Grade 4 to Grade 6; meanwhile, the traditional schools show a higher starting point, but a stagnant trend over time. Perhaps teachers aren't too far off when they feel that students seem to have the same knowledge gaps year-to-year. Core Knowledge Schools seem to know how to be efficient; students start at around a 640 on the Stanford 9 in the sixth grade and they end somewhere around a 710 (Hirsch, 2006, p. 90).



So, who would oppose such success? Educators who identify themselves as "naturalists" or "formalists" or just those who think learning "just facts" is a waste of time. Naturalists believe that learning is a natural process. This theory is just not true. People are naturally curious, but they are not naturally good thinkers (Willingham, 2010). Cognitive scientists have shown that engaging interest is easy, but promoting thought is hard. Formalists believe that once students know the forms of learning, they can learn anything if presented in the preferred form. What will students learn? Without the purpose and direction of a learning goal in mind, thinking critically can be very difficult. (Some writers, like the late David Foster Wallace, could literally critically think about anything. I don't think everyone is quite so talented.)



We need information because our brains are built of schema. These schema are built of information. The more schema, the more quickly we can read and assimilate a new text (Hirsch, 1988). Teaching students information is not useless; teaching students information is an efficient and constructive use of time.



This idea leads me to the next consideration in preparing a college- and career-ready students. How can teachers present a series of regimented information pieces without giving up their autonomy in the classroom? My home county has been trying to develop a new evaluation protocol intended to bring administrators into the classroom. Instead, we've been getting a narrow interpretation of The Skillful Teacher masquerading as an evaluation system. I believe that we are being placed in the position of teaching with the "pedagogy of direct command and absolute control" (Kozol, 2005, p. 64). In Shame of the Nation, Jonathan Kozol recounts the efforts of a program called "Success for All." This system seeks to create "the establishment of 'faultless communication' between the 'the teacher, who is the stimulus,' and 'the students, who respond'" (Hirsch, 2005, p. 64).


This monotonous give-and-take is what all good teachers fear will be implemented in their classrooms at any moment. Regimentation and a lack of flexibility do nothing to help students gain the knowledge and understanding they need for college; however, learning is not something that can be held up as though it were some type of new Apple gadget you must have in order to be tragically hip and cool-you know...like Justin Long.



What needs to be done is for us to remember that content knowledge is not just mere facts. Teachers should have deep content knowledge of their subject area in order to be the most effective. They cannot be in charge of the dynamic energy of a classroom if they must grasp for straws whenever they are asked an insightful question.

Teachers also need to be given the flexibility to achieve results on all levels. Massie Risch, Deputy Assistant Secretary for External Affairs and Outreach at the US DOE, said it best on Advocacy Day: "We are looking to tighten up on the goals and increase flexibility in how you get there." Students need the hard and fast learning goals that show them and us that they are learning; however, the strict order described in Kozol's book only helps to deaden a student's approach to the content. The monotony of teacher give, student take only makes education look like mechanical schooling. If teachers are no more than purveyors of information that students are to assimilate, then teachers need not be in the classroom and TVs and computers can take their places. But, if students are more than empty vessels, they need living, knowledgeable, and dynamic people who can and will challenge them to be the best people they can be, regardless of how they reach that goal.

The Data Driven Aughts

by Tara Seale

I titled this post the Data Driven Aughts, first because educators and students alike have been driven by data accumulated from the NCLB assessments, and second because I wanted to use an Urban Dictionary word because I am hip like that. Aughts refers to the decade between 2000-2010. Even though teachers frequently complain about standardized testing, and I am a proponent that believes much of what we are testing and how we are administering the tests (Please - a paper and pencil?) isn't relevant in the 21st Century, I still pour over the data produced from the NCLB assessments. Maybe it is my competitive nature because I want to know that what I am doing in the classroom is really making a difference, maybe it is because I haven't seen a way to use data to indicate growth through project based learning portfolios, but I currently depend on standardized testing to determine if my student has moved, hopefully in an upwards direction, or unfortunately, maybe he or she has not moved at all.

In a recent blog post by Lisa Nielsen at the Innovative Educator titled 21st Century Educators don't say, "Hand it in." They say, "Publish it!" Lisa spells out why standardized tests are not reliable indicators of what students are capable of achieving. She advocates publishing student work for an authentic audience, and she also provides six ways for an educator to move from a classroom that hands it in to a classroom that publishes it. I highly recommend reading this post, and I completely agree that this is the best environment for students, but I also believe that standardized testing is not going away in this next decade either.

Data is even becoming more flashy. I recently checked out data on the NAEP website to discover that they were using the Google's data in motion gadget as a visual graphic to demonstrate how 4th grade and 8th grade math scores have changed between the years 2003 to 2009. As a literacy teacher, I quickly noticed that only the math scores are using the cool visual motion graphics, and most of the scores move in an upwardly direction. I wonder what direction the literacy scores move?

This is my real worry. There are many articles out there suggesting that students growing up in this Googlized Century cannot maintain focus long enough to read a full length novel or write a lengthy prose, I don't necessarily believe that (read my response to one of these article at Sharing the Solitary Self for a Greater Mind), but I do have some concerns that arose when I read an article about the NAEP data from Detroit.

Ryan Beene wrote an article at Crain's Detroits Business titled Detroit's public schools post worse scores on record in national assessment. At the fourth grade level, only 3 percent tested at the proficient level and at the 8th grade level, 4 percent tested at the proficient level. This is alarming. Even if we should be moving towards project based learning and a publish it instead of turn it in classroom, when less than 5 percent score proficient on a basic skills test (even though they did use a pencil in a texting world), this is alarming. Do I think the scores would have been different if students created a portfolio and took a digital assessment, probably, but there is still obviously some serious issues and deficiencies in this urban area. When I went to the NAEP website to see how the rest of urban America performed on this test, it was better than Detroit, but scores were still very low. The highest 8th grade reading score was
in Charlotte with 29 percent of students scoring proficient.
The blog comments at the bottom of the post in the Ryan Beene article list a variety of reasons why the Detroit scores were so low: lack of parenting, politics, economics, inadequate teaching, inadequate classroom equipment, etc... but what emerged for me as I read the comments is that there are numerous problems without a clear plan to fix it.

If nothing else, the data driven aughts have shown us that something needs to change, but I also see change. The NAEP will have a digital component in literacy by 2011, and we are moving in the direction of adding 21st Century equipment in all schools. I am not sure if this will all be enough, but I hope when I click back onto the NAEP website in 2020, I will be able to see the literacy scores set to motion, but of course, there will be another gadget by then, something even more visually dynamic, something not even invented yet, something that one of our students will create.

The Year of Twitter

by Tara Seale

So did you try out Twitter in 2009? If you didn't, then apparently you weren't one of the 18 million who did. Several websites claim that 2009 was the year of Twitter.

Mashable's How Twitter Conquered the World in 2009

Yahoo! News: The Year of Twitter and Facebook

and Time Magazine explains "How Twitter will change the way we live"

I tried Twitter in early 2009, and I really didn't get it. I left a few measly tweets and thought there was nothing I could possibly say in 140 characters that anyone would want to read. I picked it back up again after a few months, and I lucked out by finding and following teachers who shared links to great resources that I could use in my classroom, so I began to share my ideas and to learn how to abbreviate and convey what I wanted to say in 140 characters. I currently use Twitter to keep in touch with teachers from all over the world @tseale.

As I began to use Twitter effectively, I wanted to share this powerful communication tool with my students. Luckily, I am in a school district that allows me to experiment with Web 2.0 to enhance my classroom curriculum. I created a teacher account @bryantenglish, next my students signed up for a Twitter account, and then we followed each other. We began by tweeting about outside reading, and I used Twitter to send out homework reminders.
I decided to use Twitter to engage my students while we read Edith Hamilton's Mythology, required for 9th grade students at my high school. Some students love the book and enjoy mythology, and some students think I am trying to torture them by forcing them to read about Greek gods and goddesses, so my hope was that students would want to read about Greek mythology if I connected it to a fun web tool, and I also decided it could help me teach one of our 9th grade required literary terms: persona.
I began by creating a list of mythological characters spread throughout Edith Hamilton's Mythology. I did not use any of the major gods or goddesses because they are all covered fairly quickly in the front of the text. I then gave the list to my students and asked them to look up the characters in the index and decide who they most wanted to be on Twitter. Students picked their top three, and I used their preferences to assign each character to one student. The students were sworn to secrecy to not share the identity of their Twitter persona. Students, over a period of ten days, created ten tweet clues in character as if they were their actual Twitter persona. They even changed their Twitter photo to match their character. The first student to correctly guess everyone's identity received the incredible award of sitting in my big comfy rolling chair for the day. I was surprised that this award was so appealing and inspired so much competition. By the second day, students were already on to me though. They claimed that I came up with this assignment so that they would have to read through the whole book to discover everyone's identity - busted- but it didn't matter because they kept participating. Plus, students learned how to create a persona. In the beginning, student tweets were rather weak. See some examples below:

I am the master builder.

I made the god's angry.

I labored long and hard.

Students tried their best to follow the rubric I provided in class, but I realized I had to create better models of a Twitter persona. I became Apollo and added my tweets to the rubric as an example. I also have to recommend the book Oh My Gods! by Scholastic for example tweets. The book even provides example Facebook pages for the Greek gods. I began to post my favorite student tweets on our class blog page to inspire students to create better tweets. See a few of my favorites below:

Shoot...you think you have a big mouth... you apparently haven't seen what I have eaten. (Cronus Persona)

Ha Ha King Minos you can't catch me now. (Icarus Persona)

Hey Theseus you know I am a better hero than you. (Hercules Persona)

I am so selfish...How could I have let it get this bad... a war over me... It's really not that worth it. =( (Helen Persona)

I can't wait to open my gift! (Pandora Persona)

I used a Google spreadsheet to create a list of each Twitter account and a word bank for each persona that students had to research. Students filled out the spreadsheet as they guessed each identity, and they shared the spreadsheet with me when it was complete. If you are interested in seeing the links to my rubric, spreadsheet, and the directions I gave the students, visit the link to the Twitter Assignment on our class blog page.

I am considering how my students might use Twitter next. I like NPR's recent use of Twitter. They asked people to tweet about the year 2009 in one word; participants could also Facebook the word. Then NPR created a wordle out of the words they received. In a wordle, the most repeated word is the largest. I am going to steal this idea because I am Hermes, the God of Thievery (all of the good teachers are Hermes), so I think I will ask my students to tweet the one word that sums up 2009 for them, and maybe they will also find 2009 full of change and challenge, but somewhat awesome and hopeful too. See the NPR wordle below:

Read the NPR article here: NPR's The Year 2009 in one word.

The Seven Personae - English Journal Nov. 2009

In the November 2009 English Journal, Jim Burke outlines the seven personae students will need to learn to master the future. These seven personae are “necessary [for success] as students, employees, and citizens” (Burke, 2009, p. 13) in the 21st century. Burke (2009) claims that these personae are derived from Gardner’s Five Minds for the Future. I mention this bit about Gardner only to make sense of my next thought. Often when I read Gardner, I find myself looking for a way to connect it to classroom practice. Despite Gardner’s frequent assertion that Multiple Intelligences are not intended for educational assessment or lesson design, I, like many other teachers, see potential for a way into students’ minds. That is why Burke’s article was so intriguing. His framework is simple, yet developed in a way that invites discussions of implementation in curriculum and lesson design.

Burke’s idea is unassailable. These personae represent many extant frameworks for new 21st century job skills. Take Daniel Pink’s (2006) book A Whole New Mind, wherein Pink outlines the six senses of the right brain and how to develop them. His reasons for these new skills include the usual trifecta of “Abundance, Asia, and Automation” (Pink, 2006, p. 30). The jobs that people could get without a college diploma are being reduced dramatically. Students must be educated to think, but they need more than the typical left-brain approach that is given high value in the test-score driven high school system. If students are to be successful, they must go to college; if they are to go to college, they must know what we ask in the academic standards and be able to imagine new possibilities and uses for this information.

Let’s look at the seven personae. Burke’s (2009, pp. 13-14) framework outlines the following:

• Storyteller: “everyone must be able to use a range of means and media to tell the story of an experience, an event, a situation, or a problem and its proposed solutions;…we must be equally able to understand and analyze the stories…others tell us.”
  
• Philosopher: “[students] must be able to understand and grapple with [complex ideas] by posing questions and considering a subject from multiple angles;…they must be able to convey their own perspective on and response to these ideas through words, images, numbers.”
  
• Historian: “we must know how to gather, assess, and apply background knowledge relevant to the text or task at hand in order to comprehend its ideas and arguments…[students] must also know how to reason like a historian.”
  
• Anthropologist: “[students] must all develop the ability to understand not only our own but also others’ cultures…developing the ability to observe, examine, and communicate insights about these cultures, for such skills are fundamental to our personal and economic success.”
  
• Reporter: “Everyone today must be able to watch for, locate, evaluate, and analyze a remarkable amount of data from different sources;…we must develop and continually refine our ability to investigate, research, and navigate…[the] sea of information…[and] convey the results.”
  
• Critic: “We all need the skills critics use to evaluate and analyze a text…[and] now it must also…examine retirement plans, medical options, and competing products and services.”
  
• Designer: “Design is such a crucial aspect of any text…we need to know how to ‘read’ for it, noticing the features used to invest the text with meaning…we must consider design when we compose documents, create online content, produce videos, or otherwise communicate with people.”

These personae are well-framed and highly adaptable. I can think of a number of lessons and assessments I use that feed into one of these. This fusion of Gardner and educational practice is easily understood, seems to be perfectly suited for thinking about the goals of instruction, and can be used to design assessments.

The first thing I notice is that there may be a way to streamline the seven personae. For example, the Reporter persona seems as though it could be the Storyteller persona; also, the Anthropologist seems as though it could replace the Historian. This overlap could be beneficial for the implementing instructor or it could hinder implementation. The benefit would be the specificity with which each persona discusses the outcomes of English education. Thus, a Storyteller becomes a creative writer while a Reporter becomes a non-fiction writer or journalist. The hindrance of the overlap comes from the openness of each persona. An Anthropologist could not study culture without understanding that culture’s history; moreover, the “thinking of a historian” is part of how Anthropologists make sense of their findings. Perhaps some streamlining could make these personae easier to keep in mind when thinking about how to design lessons that develop each one.

I assign some projects built on a rubric I constructed from Daniel Pink’s six senses of the right brain (2006, p. 65-67). This rubric assesses student creativity in each of the six areas: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning. Jim Burke’s personae represent a set of right brain skills that can be used to create a classroom consciousness of assessment and assignments. In these creative projects, I could use the skill set Burke presents to even more specifically describe what I am looking for within each rubric heading. For example, my design column could have varying levels of “considers how the features of his or her project invest it with meaning” or some such.

Think about essays. If these seven personae were part of how you approached creativity and imagination in assessment with your students, you could remind them that the narrative essay should draw most on their Storyteller skills, while the expository essay (depending upon the content) should draw on their Reporter and Historian skills. Using these personae to discuss imagination and creativity in student assessment and assignments could result in much more insightful and developed papers that would allow students to demonstrate how much they really understand.

My head has been buzzing with ideas since I read this article. These personae offer such an opportunity to discuss how we approach creativity and imagination in the era of the standardized test. Using these personae when we think about lessons and assessment can help us honor the right brain while still educating the left. Education does not have to flatten out; students can be well-rounded in an era of standardized testing.