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.

Glogging - not Blogging

by Tara Seale

Have you heard of a Glog? I recently used Glogster in my classroom to allow students to display a short, descriptive paragraph before we embarked on a long narrative.

I wanted my students to be able to describe a place to create a setting, usually essential for a great narrative. I do not teach Pre-AP or AP English, so for regular 9th grade English students, a model sentence is usually the best way to start.

The sentence below, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is absolutely the best model sentence that I have found to use in describing the location of a place.

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about halfway between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I like this sentence because it starts with three prepositional phrases, and most 9th graders can write prepositional phrases even if they do not usually incorporate prepositional phrases into their writing. I also like that this sentence starts with a general idea of the location and moves toward a more specific location, so I instruct my students to do the same. After the prepositional phrases, this sentence has a verb. Hopefully, all 9th grade students can supply a verb. Then the sentence uses adjectives that describe the subject, which allows me to teach comma rules related to adjectives. The last word in the sentence is the subject. Most of my students do not write sentences in which the last word is the subject. It is usually the first word in most of their sentences. This model sentence forces my students to explore how to end a sentence with the subject. I usually have great success with students who are trying to duplicate F. Scott Fitzgerald's sentence. See some examples below:

• At the top of the wooden stairs and down the hall to the right, the loud sound of music filling the air, waits a large, cologne-filled room with clothes and junk all over the floor.
• Through the wide turns around beautiful trees, about seventy-five miles from Little Rock, stands the two-story house, aging.
  
• In the dim light of the afternoon sun, just through the back door, is my old, warm kitchen.

There are a few minor differences but basically the same structure. Next, I discuss the difference between showing and telling sentences. I always share Mark Twain's famous quote:

"Don't tell me the lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream!"

After my students are satisfied with their descriptive paragraph, we record their voices reading the paragraph. I am fortunate enough to have a class set of ipods with voice recorder capablities, but if you aren't, you can always use Audacity, which is a free open source software used for recordings. This assignment made me realize how important it is for students to hear themselves reading out loud. Even though my students read their own writing, they still had to read it several times to develop fluency.

Next, we uploaded everything to Glogster. Students selected images that best represented their paragraph. I discussed Fair Use and Creative Commons Licensing. We practiced using Google's Advanced Search by clicking on Google Search > Images > Advanced Search and under usage rights, we changed the default to labeled for reuse.

I am very pleased with the Glogster results. Click on the links below to see some of my favorites (be sure to click on the player to hear the student read his or her paragraph):

1st Student Example Glog

2nd Student Example Glog

3rd Studnet Example Glog

4th Student Example Glog

5th Student Example Glog

I try to model every assignment I provide for my students, so see the Glog I created below:

Link to the teacher model Glogster

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.

So You Think You Can Read? Rigor in Reading

“About two-thirds of those who enter high school graduate. About two-thirds of those who do go on to some form of higher education. About two-thirds of those who go on to higher education take remedial courses in college (so they are not doing college-level work; they are really in high school). Fewer than half of those who go to college get a degree of any sort. Yet virtually all analysts agree that those who do not have at least two years of real college-level work will be in real trouble as adults” (NCEE, 2008, p. 35).

The following scene may be familiar to some of you:

It is a hazy weekday morning. You pull into your parking space at school, open your car door, sling on all your gear, and enter the building. You pray you balanced all of your things correctly because you must sidestep a zillion teenagers who will, and have, run teachers down on occasion. You make it to the office, sign in, sigh at the mountain of mail in your mailbox you wish you had a hand for, and then you head to your classroom. The smell of freshly-brewed coffee drifts slowly down the hall, welcoming you to another morning at school. You drop the gear in your room, run back to the office mailbox, grab your mail, and then return to your desk. (They should call it your castle since the numbers of student papers piling up in the corners are beginning to look like parapets.) You grab your mug, head across the hall, and fill up your cup. Then, you walk back across the hall, grab a legal pad and a pen, and head for your weekly department meeting. Your serene morning is about to end.

At the meeting, you and your colleagues debate over the use of materials in the classroom. The honors/Advanced Placement/Dual Enrollment/ International Baccalaureate students get short shrift. The special education students get mentioned and the special education liaison takes them on by him or herself. Then there are the standard students. I have found that whenever these students come up, people get weird. Once motivated and intelligent people become work-o-phobic. Teach them Shakespeare, you say? Make them do homework, you say? Do I look like a miracle worker? Yes, you do. You are a teacher—time to start acting like one.

If this scene is familiar, then perhaps the quotation from the National Center on Education and the Economy’s report Tough Choices or Tough Times also struck a familiar chord. Our standard students are being fed fairy tales of the power of education. They are being told of the empowerment an education can provide while some teachers quietly exchange rigor in the curriculum with easy-to-read books and easy-to-grade assessments.

At our school, the newest drive is for literacy. We have been adapting all sorts of new methods (new to us that is) to raise students’ vocabularies. We have adopted root word strategies, interactive reading strategies, cross-curricular classrooms, ad nauseum. What we haven’t added is the rigor. What possible vocabulary growth can tenth grade students get from To Kill a Mockingbird? What a fantastic novel; its simple language makes it all that much more powerful. The problem is that that may be the only major work students read all year. The rest of the time, students read short stories, poems, and the phenomenal, yet equally simple, Night. Where is the challenge of Shakespeare? Some of our teachers teach Julius Caesar to tenth grade, others try to find ways to run out of time. Where is the challenge of at least one difficult novel? I mean, my AP Literature class will read A Tale of Two Cities because we have it for twelfth grade. Some districts use that novel as a freshman text.

The bottom line is what the bottom line always has been in a meaningful education: effort. Many teachers do not want to struggle with their students to teach them Shakespeare. They would rather pull out Harper Lee or Elie Wiesel and get a powerful story with little linguistic development. Learning language is hard, but I’ve never thought it was optional.

So, what is to be done? The answer is simple. Next time you consider what to teach next, think about the numbers. Do you want half of the students you teach to be unsuccessful? I think the answer to that question will give you all you need to know about the importance of a rigorous curriculum and whether or not you should push your students to become better readers. They will need two years of college to be successful. Could your students make it that far?

I know mine will; we just started reading The Merchant of Venice as an anticipatory piece for The Great Gatsby. The play is the thing for a comparison with Gatsby. Considering its discussions of wealth, dangerous conflict, and forbidden loves, The Merchant of Venice could be Gatsby’s long-lost cousin. The students are using many of the tactics offered in the Folger’s Shakespeare Set Free collection to become comfortable with the language. I am not worried about them getting the story…yet. Right now, I am tackling the task of getting students excited about reading Shakespeare. Turns out, with the Folger’s help, it is not all that hard.

How do you inject rigor into your curriculum? What are some strategies you use when teaching a difficult text?

Remembering Reading

The developmental writing course I teach requires that the second test of the course be on the apostrophe. Yawn. Of course, the first test focused on capitalization--wow! The canned curriculum leads up to a state exam in the end. Big surprise, right?

So, it’s three weeks in, and I’m trying to weave magic with the apostrophe. (My best apostrophe joke? I put the sentence, "The class earned three A's, five B's and twelve C's on the test." Then I rub out the apostrophe on "A's" and say, "See if you take away the apostrophe, it looks like "as." If I say it quickly enough, they mishear me and we can all laugh. That's as good as it gets, folks.) In an effort to spice up the apostrophe's introduction, I asked students to open up their books to the twelve rules of the apostrophe. I linked to a selection of the Top Food Bloggers on the Internet and asked students to peruse the sites in search of six examples of the apostrophe in action. Of their six examples, they needed to find at least four different apostrophe rules. (Our state exam is on the computer, so we teach these courses in a lab. I think this assignment could work for homework or in groups at stations, too.)

It took most students over forty minutes to complete the assignment. They could find examples using the apostrophe from the blogs quickly, but differentiating between a singular noun being made possessive or a singular noun that ends in “s” being made possessive or an indefinite pronoun being made possessive or a contraction—well, that took much longer.

I know that reading enhances writing, but I’m continually surprised at the hefty academic contribution of a reading activity like this one. By the time we went to a practice test on the apostrophe, students could better understand what differences to look for in the sentences. Arguing that the apostrophe couldn’t possibly be that varied seemed out of place since they’d already found it in action. Unlike our textbook, in “real life writing” the apostrophe doesn’t sort itself into sets of ten examples that all use the apostrophe as a contraction. A few students mentioned wanting to revisit the blogs for fun—always a bonus—and no one complained that the reading content didn’t matter. I guess food, written about and photographed beautifully, is a universal.

Next week, I’m going to try introducing subject/verb agreement through some selections from RollingStone.com. Here’s hoping reading from life continues to root these grammar lessons in application and contextual interest…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Differentiating for High Fliers

True Life Dialogue:

Student: “How strict is the five page minimum for the research essay?”

Me: “I’m looking for at least one line on the sixth page; it’s a full five page minimum.”

Student: “Really? Because I’ve completely exhausted my argument in three and a half pages…I think I’ve fully addressed the issue.”

Me: “Well, feel free to pose a deeper, more complicated argument if you need to…”

Student: “Oh, really? I didn’t know we were allowed to exceed the parameters of the assignment. It seemed pretty basic.”

Me: “Teaching you is an endless source of pleasure.”

Okay, so I didn’t say that last part. I said something like, “Absolutely.” My memory gets a little fuzzy because my blood pressure rose in response to the student’s last comment. Exceed the parameters of the assignment, indeed…

I could blame this issue on the fact that I’ve drafted off beat assignments in an effort to side step plagiarism. I could defend the fact that my off beat assignment is vague enough to permit deep and thoughtful answers for those who seek them. However, I’ve decided to confront myself with a more uncomfortable truth this student put a finger upon: I differentiate better for developing students than I do for high flying students.

As a student, I flew high academically. I know, no one wants to see my transcript now, but for a good portion of my life, I drew considerable self esteem from that sucker. I know first hand that high fliers can provide teachers with a challenge, and quite frankly, I’ve shied away from said challenge. In my experience as both a student and a teacher, high fliers are often tracked. By deciding not to teach honors classes, I mostly avoid high fliers and the challenges (and rewards, to be fair) that they present. I’ve focused my energies on teaching “average,” “on-level, “parallel,” or whatever a school district calls the “regular kids.” In those “regular” classes, I often teach developing students, and I’ve worked hard to develop content and methods that meet those students’ needs quietly and effectively. In those “regular” classes, I sometimes teach high flying students, and I’ve not addressed their needs as effectively.

High fliers usually show up in my classes because of choices that took them off the honors track when they were younger or because they don’t want to diffuse their energies from their high level math and science classes. Why haven’t I differentiated effectively for them? Well, for the most part, they do well. It’s easier to ignore the unmet needs of students who earn A’s.

Besides the fact that their boredom and lack of challenge doesn’t manifest in a measurable way, I’ve gotten this far without successfully differentiating for high fliers because I don’t know how to do it covertly. They’re wily, these high fliers. I don’t want to give them “extra” work. I don’t think they’d roll over for more difficult variations of essay assignments. My differentiation for developing students happens in collusion with the student: “Pssst. Here, do this extra worksheet and meet with me after class, and we’ll make sure you pass this class.” How do I make the work more challenging without it seeming punitive, especially if a student has purposely taken my class to avoid English class challenges?

Ugh. I need to give this one lots more thought. I know that challenges make me and my teaching grow, but sometimes complacency looks soooo much more relaxing…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Calculating Conversions

This summer, I’m teaching a hybrid class for the first time; we meet half in the classroom and half online. Traditionally, the “seat time” for this course would be about six hours a week. I’ve tried to design online lessons and activities for three hours a week, plus there’s the usual amount of homework.

It’s really made me sit and think about how “teaching and/or learning time” can be calculated. I’ve taught this course many, many times in the traditional classroom setting, and I’ve taught fully online courses, but I’ve never tried a hybrid before now. To design each week’s online module, I took a week’s lessons and considered what would work better in the traditional classroom and what would work better online. It’s a huge consideration, and one on which I’ll need to spend quite a bit of time debriefing myself.

What’s caught my initial consideration is how to measure “teaching and/or learning time.” If students sat in the traditional classroom for thirty minutes while I alternately lectured and led a discussion, calling on various students for intermittent responses, students could spend a good portion of that thirty minutes passively listening about the text. (Or perhaps surreptitiously texting… Ahem, I mean never…) If I create an online discussion thread where students have to post two questions and then answer the two questions posted by three other students (essentially answering six questions), students may spend fifteen to twenty minutes actively writing about and responding to the text. (While listening to music and talking on the phone? No. See, in a hybrid, I only imagine the online session behavior, and I imagine it is spent rapt. Some pencil chewing…Lots of text referencing…Shush. It’s my imagination, and a girl’s gotta dream…) So does that fifteen minutes of writing count as less than the thirty traditional minutes of listening? Do I try to calculate three literal hours of online work, or because the nature of the online work is more active (students have to “prove” they’re there by producing something), is the time calculation converted somehow? If hybrid students accomplish the same amount of assignments in a week I previously gathered from students during a fully traditional teaching of the course, can we call it done? Is time spent in class letting one or two students (or even ourselves) dominate a group discussion time better spent? What about the time spent waiting while late students are caught up or people without materials are assisted? It’s forcing me to look back at my traditional teaching and consider how well I spent that time…

I won’t really know my own answers to these questions until I finish the course and see these hybrid students’ research essays and final exams. Kind of a “the proof is in the pudding” philosophy, I guess…It’s funny. At first, teaching a hybrid kind of felt like getting away with something, but in truth, I’m more accountable for my time than in the traditional classroom. In the traditional classroom, I taught for six hours because I kept them six hours. Now I really have to think about what those three online hours need to look like to constitute me having taught them…It’s certainly a growing experience.

co-posted Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

The Other Side

I have mumbled, grumbled, and struggled to design interactive media that appeals to my Generation-So-Don’t-Think-Like-Me students who thrive in a non-linear environment. Yet I feel about teaching the way the dancers on So You Think You Can Dance describe movement—I just have to do it. (They would use an exclamation point. I certainly gush less than they do.) I’m a teaching creature, truly. So I have sucked it up and taken my linear laden self and waded into the world of online education and media. This effort has born my own blogging and the development of my online reading. As I read a recent article on Time Magazine’s website, I realized I have become more similar to that which I once could not understand…

Listen, I have trash taste in media. I read Gawker as faithfully as the Washington Post. I cry over One Tree Hill as loudly as I weep for characters in Richard Russo’s Empire Falls. (That book killed a part of me. I dare a public school educator/parent to be unmoved by that narrative.) Link by link, I have found myself some funny and inspirational places. Lately, I’ve been drawn to coverage of Governor Sanford. Ugh. Gosh. The emails--really? (What part in me is voyeur and what part is a grad student glad to have confirmation from a primary source?) At any rate, my Internet habits recently brought me to Caitlin Flanagan’s “Why Marriage Matters” via Time Magazine’s website. I’m not a regular on Time’s site, so I was surprised to see Flanagan’s piece littered with links: “See the top 10 regrettable emails,” “See the top 10 mistresses,” “Watch a gay marriage wedding video,” “See snapshots from a very special wedding,” and those are just the ones I clicked on. I’ve read a number of Flanagan’s pieces in The Atlantic over the years, and her writing tone doesn’t suggest she’d take kindly to constant interruption. It kind of made me giddy to click away and click back to her text. I was halfway through her article before it dawned on me—I’ve become one of “them.” I’m not reading an article from beginning to end. I am “she who segues.” The culture I waded into, just to learn some ways to relate, has sung its siren song to me and drawn me in. Interrupting Flanagan’s prose to go look at photos of famous mistresses feels like gesturing to my mother with my index finger to be quiet for a moment while I listen to the television. (Quite frankly, it just isn’t done.) Oh, the indulgence…Oh, the naughty pleasure…

It’s given me a reader’s buzz. I don’t regret it. I’m not sorry. I’m glad I know how to be linear should the situation require it, but oh glory be, the intermittent attention technique to reading a long article might be something I underestimated. Maybe I’ll add commiseration to the tools I use as an educator come the fall…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Preparing for the New MLA

When I first heard the news that MLA launched an updated system, I felt a little sick. I’ve created tons of interactive online and hard copy activities to help my students navigate reading and writing MLA Works Cited entries. Because of the hanging indent spacing and variability of monitor size, each online Works Cited entry needs to be imported as an image. (I cheated with my samples here, so if the spacing looks funky, please forgive me. The OWL Purdue link above is dandy!) Days of work await me. Yikes.

Once I looked at the new MLA, however, I began to feel better. The changes make tons of sense, and I think students will understand the format more. Perhaps they will start to understand why I think being able to flip to a reference page and assess the quality of research from the entries is such an important and empowering kind of academic literacy. But now I’m getting ahead of myself…a new documentation style can only promise so much!

The big changes? No more underlining—like APA, MLA now puts publications and book titles in italics. The electronic resource formats have been streamlined somewhat, (We no longer have to identify a database “service”—hooray!) and entries now use “Print” if they are hard copy and “Web” if they’ve been accessed electronically. Here’s a little sample of old versus new:

Book with One Author, old MLA:

Miles, Felix. The Civil War. New York: Random House, 2007.

Book with One Author, new MLA:

Miles, Felix. The Civil War. New York: Random House, 2007. Print.

Journal Article from a Subscription Database, old MLA:

Homiak, Kathleen. “Six Strategies for Taking a Patient’s Health History.” Patient Care Weekly 8.2 (2008): n.p. Academic Search Elite. EBSCOhost. Seminole High School Library. 7 July 2009.

Journal Article from a Subscription Database, new MLA:

Homiak, Kathleen. “Six Strategies for Taking a Patient’s Health History.” Patient Care Weekly 8.2 (2008): n.pag. Academic Search Elite. Web. 7 July 2009.

Well prepared activities help me teach students how to read and write research documentation effectively, so I’m going to put the time in to update my materials. My department has agreed to go with the new MLA this fall, so I’m working on the changes, one exercise at a time. It’s certainly helping me internalize the new format…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Mind Bend

I’m a lucky girl. When I create content for online learning activities, the educational technology experts who work for my school system collaborate with me. Last week, I went to them with a dream. My students still struggle with reading their Turnitin.com reports; they don’t understand when a “match” constitutes plagiarism and when it’s incidental. To help them practice, I imagined creating an activity that branched. If students answer a question correctly, they would continue to a different question than if they answer incorrectly. This way, the activity can provide extra help to students who misunderstand a concept before layering on the next complex circumstance.

The experts greeted my dream with calm nods. “Yup. We can build that. Send us the content.” Oh! Okay! All systems go, right?

Since these magical people agreed to do the technical side, I started sifting through last semester’s Turnitin.com reports for screen shots showing the kinds of matches I want to help students distinguish. After I assembled half a dozen images, I started writing the first question. Question…feedback for correct answer…feedback for incorrect answer—Wait! Stop! I can branch out! Instead of writing feedback for an incorrect answer, I could write another question. In my better teaching moments, I greet student errors with follow up questions, trying to direct students towards the thought process that will yield greater comprehension. Now I could try and structure this computer activity to model that practice. (It’s not that I think the computer can replace me here, but as things currently stand with my students, I am not getting this Turnitin.com report lesson across to everybody. I decided to go down this road because I think students need to process this kind of critical reading independently to fully internalize it.)

Deciding to write a branching activity turns out to be very different than actually writing a branching activity, at least for my non-millennial brain. It hurt as much as my earlier attempts to be non linear. Flow charts and diagrams started to swim in my mind’s eye. How many branches would there be? Would the students answering follow up questions to incorrect responses ever get back to the trail blazed by students giving correct responses? Within half an hour, I felt hopelessly snarled in all the potential variables. My pedagogy bases itself on adaptability, so here I am knee deep in branching online activities when I love linear structure. Gosh, I miss the days of constructing linear activities exclusively. Sigh.

So I spent a few days feeling panicked every time I opened up my attempts at drafting this activity. Finally, I decided to write the activity from beginning to end as if a student answered every question correctly. What would the tree trunk of this branching exercise look like? What breadth am I trying to cover here? I needed to know the answers to those questions. Then, I looked at each question and imagined my follow up questions like traffic pattern clover leaves, looping out from the main trunk only to touch back again with a review loop of that concept planned for later in the sequence.

Will it work? Will it make any sense? Time will tell. I hope this kind of effort yields a differentiated learning tool that serves students well. Right now, I’ve turned the draft over to my tech wonders as I sit in a sweaty heap, exhausted by thinking outside my natural thought patterns. Do my students feel this way all the time? My goodness. No wonder they want to sleep through first period…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Lookin' for Lit in all the New Places

This summer, I’ll be teaching a literature survey course. I expect my students to be ready for the course to be over the day it begins. I’m sure they’ll also be pleasant about it, but I can imagine their palms facing me, thought bubbles above their heads saying, “Nothing personal here, lady. I just want this course to be over.”

Dragging students through literature that I love makes me nutty, so I’m already ruminating about how to approach the course. I construct all my teaching around student ownership, but I’m more successful fostering student ownership of writing than of reading and close analysis of text. Often, my students approach literary analysis wearily, like it’s an endless shell game: “Ms. K, just tell me where the answer is!” Our department also requires a final exam, a multiple choice affair that confirms knowledge of literary terms and basic cultural literacy. Preparing students for this test often elicits lots of “When will I ever need this stuff?”

Traditionally, I use literary circles, and I plan to do that again in this course. I’m also playing with the idea of opening the course by asking students to write on the pink elephant in the room: Why is it required for students to take a literature course? Why would the powers that be think such a course would be important for students?

I want to find a meaningful way to use Wordle, and I’ve got six months of Poetry magazine I want to work in, too. On the Poetry website, they have this fantastic Poetry Tool that searches poems numerous ways, like by occasion! I’ve got to find a way to work that in…When poet Terri Witek spoke at a conference I attended this past fall, she recommended teaching contemporary poetry along with our personal favorites. She reminded us that poetry changes with the times, so we should be sure to include the voices of our students’ times amongst the pieces we feature in lessons. As a student, I know the poets of the eighties and nineties touched me more viscerally than the historical giants, so her point made sense to me. I’m also thinking about how to craft an assignment that asks students to prove whether or not poetry is still relevant, to see what modern incarnations they discover to support their points.

Right now, the ideas are still swirling around in my head, waiting for a specific lesson plan in which to land. The course starts off at the end of June, so I’ve got a little time to play with my plans. Part of me believes lessons planned with excitement and anticipation are bound to work better than any other kind…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Do They See What I See?

As I graded students’ products from my shiny new unit, I realized many of them gathered all the research assigned, but they didn’t get how to combine those elements into a new product. Like players in a game of fetch, they went out and did an interview, looked up information online, and recorded their own opinions in neat, separate little piles, which they stacked end-to-end into a final written product.

After successful completion of this course, students move on to an argument and research writing course, a course which makes up the majority of my teaching load. I designed this unit in part to prepare students for that class, but I really forgot that at this point in their writing development, their concept of an integrated writing product is fuzzy at best. My shiny new unit really needed a model of the finished writing product for students to see before they got started.

I knew my students would be disappointed that their efforts garnered mediocre grades; I really wanted a way to show them the difference between what they gave me and an integrated, synthesized new writing product. I considered the question as I prepared to bake cupcakes. Voila! Cupcakes are a favored writing metaphor for me anyway, so it makes sense for me to call upon them for this. First, I showed students this picture and explained how they gathered elements with lots of admirable individual integrity:

However, I really wanted them to combine those elements into something new, to choose more of some elements than others, and to blend them together:

They nodded. Students recognized that their efforts had been more like piling the ingredients on the table than combining them into something new. I think if I start with this metaphor (complete with visuals!) and a sample product next time, my shiny new unit has a good future ahead of it.

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Dialing down the Bling

We started the new unit. The one I mentioned being excited about…Yeah. Well. I guess for every great lesson like the “Here is New York” copy/change, I owe the teacher karma universe a dud. Mission accomplished!

What went wrong? Well, for starters, I think I oversold it. Too much, “Guess what, folks? We’re about to start the most exciting thing ever!” Too little, “Look, here’s the deal. You may have passed the state exam, but until you pass this class, it isn’t over.” In fact, I think all my mistakes designing and launching this unit fall under the category of overkill. See, I’ve made “engaging and educational” units for this course before, with tepid results. Students struggle to maintain motivation once the deal breaker exam has passed. My teacher narcissism tells me that with the perfect unit, I can counter this emotional backlash. To woo students into focused attention, I dolled up a unit with group work, technology, interviews, and real life case studies.

I think my unit’s academic core got obscured by all the bells and whistles. As I explained the three day activity, I could feel students shift back in their seats. I could taste their determination of “busywork” in the air. I purposely put this showoff unit before a more old school read-n-write unit because I wanted to appeal to students’ appetites, to see their eyes light up with interest. (Whenever I reach for the emotional payoff, I lose ground on powerful lessons. Apparently, I seek to prove this to myself over and over again.) I know not all is lost; students will trudge dutifully through the assignment and meet the writing and critical thinking objectives. It just didn’t engage them the way that I’d hoped.

In hindsight, I think I’ll put a sensible shoes kind of unit after the exam next year. Instead of trying to create a level of engagement after the state exam that might not be psychologically realistic, I’m going to reassert the quiet purposefulness of our writing work with a more standard unit. Maybe students need routine after the big emotional upheaval of the deal breaker exam. Like coming home from school and finding Mom dressed up for a big night out instead of khaki pants and a pocket tee, my students started at all my lesson glam at 9 a.m. in the morning. I guess my own post exam emotional backlash, after weeks of mundane test preparation, makes me want to dazzle students with my ability to make learning fun. I’ll need to measure out my lesson bling with greater moderation next time!

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

S-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g Students' Prose Style

Well, the state exam is over. After two full days of testing, I had one day’s lesson to fill before any results came in. Like an island, this single day sits between psychological oceans: preparing for the test on one side and relishing the test being successfully completed on the other. My students trooped in dutifully, but in truth, they simply wanted their tests results, which I didn’t have to give them. As I prepared for this single day’s lesson, I went through old piles for a good, reliable, sturdy writing exercise that would foster both focus and confidence, provide both distraction and satisfaction.

What did I find? Aha. An oldie but goodie as the saying goes…Copy/change writing. A poet first introduced my college Teaching Writing class to the technique of copy/change poetry years ago. Essentially, the teacher provides a professional poem with a clear structure and syntax, walks students through identification of the key elements of that structure, and invites students to write their own poems, with original content, borrowing the structure and syntax of the original poem. I’ve used the technique to help students write poetry, and I found it to be a good exercise there. Somewhere around 1999, I decided to try the technique with prose, and I almost always do the exercise with the first paragraph from E.B.White’s “Here is New York.”

First of all, students usually recall Stuart Little and/or Charlotte’s Web (be it the books or the movies) fondly. Unlike other authors I mention with rapture, White’s name is greeted with grudging enthusiasm. As a full-blooded city person, I cannot help but read the first paragraph of “Here is New York” with excitement. I used the round-robin technique for the first reading, so students could roll the prose around in their own mouths, and then I re-read sentences as we highlighted the patterns in the prose. I used a website to introduce the concept of copy/change and gave them my own example: “Shakespeare wrote, ‘To be or not to be, that is the question,’ but my copy/change could say, ‘To eat or not to eat, that is my refrigerator dilemma.’” In my experience, explaining the technique at length confuses students and makes the assignment sound more difficult than it is. Instead, I put a copy of the excerpt on the big screen and marked which parts of the original structure/syntax should remain the same once students copy/change it. Students marked their own handouts. Then we brainstormed on the board kinds of people students could divide into groups of three. I encouraged them to think about customers where they work, fellow fans or team members of a sport, or even the citizens of their own communities. Then I set them going.

My students amazed themselves with their efforts. White’s prose in this paragraph (well, let’s face it—in lots of paragraphs!) is so well-structured, that a mimic can’t help but look good. I explained to students that this exercise gives them a chance to “try on” more sophisticated prose stylings. Maybe they’ll want to consider the dash in the future! The clean rhythm and juxtaposition in the sentence, “Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion,” has an easy cadence for students to shadow. Their own copy/change sentences (with three clauses!) came out strong and clear as well. I almost always read that one aloud from their drafts as I walked along. They sat a little straighter, grinned a little, and often mumbled, “Yeah, that does sound good!”

Alas, like Cinderalla’s midnight, our single day’s lesson came and went. The test results will be in next time we meet; some students will need to shoulder bad news and work again for a re-take. Other students will have to reach down deep to still care once the “big exam” has passed. We’ll start another unit, one I’m also excited about, but I don’t know that we’ll experience the quick elation of the copy/change prose exercise we experienced with White soon again.

* In courses that integrate writing and literature, I often would assign students a single sentence from the current text we were studying for copy/change as a warm-up activity. (Works great with Fitzgerald’s Gatsby...) We would identify the parts of speech, even sometimes diagram the original sentence, and then students would write their own shadow. I think it’s a great way to help students internalize great writing, be it poetry or prose.

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Using Resources as a Way of Life

Recently, I’ve been trained in a curriculum review process that uses a rubric to assess content as part of a cooperative peer learning opportunity. Everything about the process is fairly standard, but as I worked my way through the rubric, one point caught my attention. It asked if the course content ensured students understood the services provided by the school itself that could assist students in reaching their educational goals. Hmm. Do my courses do that for my own students?

In the past, I’ve taught classes where the guidance department came in and did a short orientation of its services, and I’ve had entry-level classes I’ve taken on a tour of the library facility. However, in the majority of the courses I currently teach, those orientations and tours occurred over a year ago. One of the things I enjoy about teaching is the small bubble I build with my students for an hour or so each class period; lots of the resources my students need, I provide or direct them to within the walls we share. As I reflected upon this rubric question, I realized I don’t teach my students to access the resources that surround them in our school community by themselves. What if they think they might need to be tested for a learning issue? What if they really need a part time job to keep coming to school? What if they have a problem with someone on the bus that just won’t go away? What if they want to research something privately, without my help? As maturing adults, shouldn’t they know how to access these resources independently?

I find this omission of mine especially ironic because during the research essay process, I teach about finding and evaluating useful resources. (Ahem.) Would it be so difficult to point out that not all resources come via the library database? That some of the resources students might need could be found right where we stand?

Since my years as a Pollyanna are behind me, I know part of why I don’t routinely send my students to other parts of my institution. Dead ends, busy lines, or miscommunication between school professionals and my students have led to tales of woe as well as me ditching lesson plans reliant upon survey questions for Career Services or the Testing Center. How can I emphasize school resources to my students without sending vacant foot traffic that creates busywork for my peers? What’s a meaningful way to fulfill that rubric question?

It’s something I’m thinking about as I prepare lessons this semester. My first idea goes to the Web. I think I might ask students to brainstorm some student issues that impede educational goals as part of a “Let’s get off to a great start!” initiative. After we record the issues on the board, we could try to identify what parts of our school could help with each of those problems. I’ll assign one of the issues to each student and send students to the school website to see if they can find the answer or a contact person for the problem they’ve been assigned. This process would be a micro-version of a research process. I also like the idea of modeling research and activation of resources as a way of life. I’ll be interested to see if this process seems meaningful…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Seriously, There's More?

After grading and returning the research essays, I am always stunned to find I need one more short unit before the holiday break. It reminds me of how everyone wants to eat again on the weekend after Thanksgiving. Really? But didn’t the meal I spent weeks planning, preparing, and cleaning up for buy me some free time? What’s the lesson plan equivalent of ordering pizza?

My students greet a new assignment at this point with genuine shock: “But we just finished the research project!” I would joke with them and tell them I got special permission to not meet for classes the last week because they worked so hard, but I’m confident half of them would be out the door before I could stop them. I’m especially fond of my note taking unit at this point in the semester because it requires concrete skills and classroom focus. Also, it doesn’t create lots of complicated grading for me because after finishing the research process, I, too, feel like my IQ has been diminished.

However, sometimes I want a pre-vacation unit with a little more pizzazz. This year, I’m adapting an activity from Discovering Arguments, edited by Dean Memering and William Palmer which uses the Pulitzer Prize website. Students select an award-winning photograph or political cartoon about which they feel strongly. (They pick by the year menu at the top, scroll down for images, and then select the “Works” tab to actually see images.) I ask them to explain what the artist is using the image to convey and what choices the artist made to emphasize that message. Sometimes I’ve done a mini-lesson with some photographs before we begin, showing examples of the use of light and dark, perspective, framing, etc. Students write a few paragraphs about how the artist’s choices reinforce the message he or she wants to communicate via the piece, complete with the MLA Works Cited entry for the image off the website.

That’s the core assignment, but I’ve used a couple iterations. I like the basic assignment because it uses “an image as text.” Essentially, students must explain elements about the image similarly to how they’ll be expected to discuss literature next semester. I’ve put students in teams for this assignment, and then had each team present their image and conclusions to the class in presentations. Students could also hang small posters of their pieces, complete with the image and then complete a “gallery walk,” going around and filling out a questionnaire on the images, with questions like “Which image did you find most powerful? Why?” “Which image could serve in an ad campaign? Describe what message it would reinforce.” I haven’t tried it yet, but I’ve considered asking students to build their product on a web page and add a soundtrack with lyrics they think accentuates the artist’s message. Then the “gallery walk” element could be completed by a web tour…

I like this unit because it’s different, it’s multi-media, and it incorporates the socialization that is inevitable at this point in the semester. Students genuinely want to share the images they discover off the site, and we end up having lots of “teachable moments” about the historical, medical, or political stories being told in the images. I like the energy it fosters as we ride out the last days…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Prophylactic Grading

Over the years, I’ve learned to use grading to prevent bad writing instead of using it to record the grievances dealt by bad writing. Ever since I started teaching, I have believed in writing as a process, especially with a big project such as a research essay. It took me years, however, to realize that I should stretch my grading energy and investment across that process, too. In the early years, I gave students a folder with a checklist, and I gave them points for finishing each step, but I thought my time for detailed grading came at the end, on the final essay product. I would pour energy into marking those final essays with margin notes and thought-provoking questions. I then spent too much time feeling frustrated and hurt that my students didn’t even seem to read those markings, let alone reflect upon them.

By choice, I teach writing to people who have yet to identify themselves as writers. Many of my students write because writing has been assigned. Therefore, my grading comments best serve students when they come during their process. Mentor teachers taught me this technique, and I think after spending the better part of two decades grading, I may be polishing a system that is working. I think I finally get that if students cannot use my feedback to improve their grade, they don’t spend much time processing it. It may sound silly, but it helps my own enthusiasm to know my grading feedback can be “part of the solution” instead of just a record of the problem.

Here’s a run-down of the assignments throughout the research essay process that I grade:

· a potential topic discussion thread, complete with a potential source

o At this point, students reply to each other’s ideas. I make comments if potential topics seem like a dead end, but mostly I just keep track that this assignment has been completed.

· a finalized proposed topic, complete with an initial source

o I provide individualized responses to each student, approving each topic.

· an Annotated Bibliography

o I grade this assignment closely; I mark MLA mistakes and provide directed guidance for correcting errors. I evaluate the quality of the sources, ensure that some balance is represented, and encourage students to look for additional information where necessary.

· an essay proposal, stating why people should care about the issue and what problems the student anticipates with the essay

o I read these and respond to students about the problems they identify. Mostly, this assignment asks questions that get students thinking more deeply about the essay they plan to write.

· a thesis statement

o I grade this assignment closely; many students write this thesis statement several times. I want to be sure each student has a strong argument in third person voice; sometimes students are slipping into writing a report instead of a persuasive argument, and I’m usually able to determine that problem (and fix it!) at this stage. Once students have actually written an entire report, they are much more reluctant to revise it!

· a loose outline, which identifies a specific audience, the opposing point of view, and main points

o I read these and respond to problems. Mostly, I make the grading equivalent of reassuring noises: “Looks interesting!” “I can tell you’re really starting to think here!” Yadda Yadda. This assignment falls in the category of activities that help students think.

· a rough draft and the peer review of another person’s draft

o I don’t line edit rough drafts. I scan each of them, looking for flagrant problems: the wrong voice, tragic MLA format, too few sources, lack of quotation integration…If I see a big problem, I write notes back to the student. Most often, I look at all the drafts and create a “Checklist before the Final Draft” document, identifying all the various problems I saw throughout the drafts, which I distribute and go over with students. Students provide each other feedback about arguments at this stage. (With various degrees of success…I’m still working on the perfect peer review process…)

· the final essay

o I use a grading chart at this point, including a personal note to students about their argument. Do I mark lines throughout the essay? Yes, sometimes. I’ll write a question in the body of the essay or circle problematic prose. But I really try to restrain myself and save my energy for writing a more detailed personal note at the end…

Does all this effort improve students’ products as well as their process? I think so. To be completely honest, I think how well a student writes a research essay depends most upon how much research writing experience he or she has before the assignment, an element I don’t get to control. Mostly, I think investing more of my grading energy on the process (rather than saving it all for that final essay) helps students replicate the process in other classes, which is one of my goals—a teach a man to fish kind of thing. It also puts my energy more in parallel with students’ energy. They care about the essay before the end. Putting more detailed feedback into the process allows students to immediately apply my feedback, too. The entire effort has more momentum, more meaning. Here comes the stack now, so I’ll see how well it worked this time…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher