Balance Happens

Last November I attended a clinic during the NCAA Division I Women’s Field Hockey Final Four. It was sponsored by US Field Hockey and taught by the men’s and women’s National Team coaches, Nick Conway and Lee Bodimeade. We talked strategy all weekend and one of the first things that Nick said was, “At the start of the game, look at the defense of the opponent and decide how you are going to attack.” Seems simple. To me, it was a complete shift in thinking; when I started games, the first thing I looked at was the opponent’s offense and decided how I was going to defend them. A simple shift from defending to attacking and you view the world in an entirely new way.

This past weekend the same happened for me in the way I see the teaching of writing. For the past few weeks I have been involved in the English Companion Ning’s discussion of Maja Wilson’s book Rethinking Rubrics. The exchanges have been akin to an invigorating graduate school debate without the extra homework and inconvenient class times. In Chapter Three, Wilson writes:

“When our purpose in reading student work is to defend a grade, we do not apply any of our natural responses to text. Encouraged by the performance levels on the rubric to rank students against an external standard, our readings of student work are based firmly in a deficit model. We look for mistakes, inconsistencies, and unclear thinking to justify which square in the matrix we will circle” (30).

While this seems obvious, it was as big of a shift of defending to attacking in how I coach. When I look at student essays, I am looking for mistakes to correct and not potential to develop. Instead of approaching their work as a reader, I approach it as a corrector.

She goes on to say:

“The consequences of this skepticism are great. In our search for mistakes, we often miss potential. We should never assume that student papers will be perfect; our job is to help students realize what they cannot yet do. This involves a subtle but important shift in our view of the texts they create. It means that we articulate for them what they have succeeded in doing, explore the meaning in what they have written, and help them connect what is not yet there to what could be there” (30).

I now need to think how I can best achieve this shift, how I can balance my need to produce effective writers who can create complex sentences with proper agreement and punctuation with this newly introduced understanding of how I can be developing these writers as well. This becomes even more vital and intricate as so many new types of writing come into play. As I have been reading this book, much attention seemed to be paid to personal essays, but we have students creating wikis, blogs and participating in nings. How do I help them see the potential of their writing in these contexts as well? Sometimes that seems easier with the increased ability to provide instant feedback, sometimes harder since I can’t get my pen on their screens to point out the errors, but maybe this is where the balance happens.

Twon Over

Okay, so I did it. I can’t believe it, but I did it. People kept pushing and I kept reading articles about how great this was, but I couldn’t pull the trigger, didn’t want to be a follower, couldn’t see the function. I want to go on record that I fought valiantly for almost two years until I finally crumbled…I joined Twitter. I have Lance Armstrong to thank for this. Once he announced his comeback and then crashed out of Vuelta Castilla y Leon breaking his collar bone, I found out I could follow his comeback and subsequent recovery via Twitter. I was sold. Sure I would like to tell you that I joined so that I could build my own PLN, but I would be lying. Now the happy side effect is that I am building my own PLN. Today solidified my understanding of what so many folks including Alec Couros, Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis are talking about when they encourage educators to embrace this tool.

While I am new to Twitter, I was a pretty big fan of the Google Reader’s ability to help me keep track of quite a few blogs including Susanne Nobles’ blog “Still Learning.” I remember her discussing using a Ning to aid her class’ work with Othello but couldn’t find that link. Well, I sent Susanne a message via Twitter and had a response and the link in just a few hours. Being able to connect the dots that fast is amazing and keeps the momentum going on something that could have easily gotten bogged down or lost for me as I look to new tasks and projects.

So all of this didn’t just show me the power of this tool, but also the kindness of so many of the educators using it. I have been struck by this before as I have seen presenters ask for a “shout out” on Twitter and they have received a multitude of responses from all over the world in a matter of moments. Twitter is not simply a group of people announcing the most mundane of details about their lives, but a group of people sincerely willing to help and share whenever they can. Susanne Nobles didn’t know who I was or what I do, but she was perfectly willing to share. It is forcing me to think about the argument of those concerned that we spend so much time looking at screens that we don’t know how to connect with people. Well, I just got more connected and now I am a Twonvert.

TPCK is Alive

Sandra Day O’Connor, Benjamin Zander, Greg Mortenson, Rosalind Wiseman--these are just a handful of speakers that I have been fortunate enough to hear speak at my school. In addition, we are so lucky to have countless professional development opportunities right on campus including Alec Couros, David Jakes, and the delightful Flat Classroom women Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay (I truly enjoyed reading about their recent Flat Classroom Summit in Qatar). This past week featured a day with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach that was a terrific way to frame the way we should be thinking as the words of 21st Century skills and literacies buzz in our minds and often make our heads spin. What I liked about the day was the way she essentially tried to reframe the way we approach things and, in the spirit of Benjamin Zander, forced us to think of all of the possibilities. Her emphasis on sharing, cooperating, collaborating, and collective action as stages of what we should be developing with our classes is exciting and daunting, but she left us with plenty of examples of people who started small and made it big.

Alongside of these stages was an introduction to something called the TPCK model, which I affectionately call the Tupac model. This visualization is helpful in describing, and conceptualizing, the perfect storm that has to occur in teaching in the 21st Century. Before, a solid handle on your content was all you needed in an Independent school, add some pedagogy if you were teaching in a public school (a distinction I have never quite understood) and then recently, we have been asked to dabble in some technology. But as I have struggled to frame the role of technology every time I learn more, this model truly helps me see where I need to be aiming my work day after day.

Mishra and Koehler in their work “Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge” state: “Though not all teachers have embraced these new technologies for a range of reasons—including a fear of change and lack of time and support—the fact that these technologies are here to stay cannot be doubted. Moreover, the rapid rate of evolution of these new digital technologies prevents them from becoming ‘transparent’ any time soon. Teachers will have to do more than simply learn to use currently available tools; they also will have to learn new techniques and skills as current technologies become obsolete. This is a very different context from earlier conceptualizations of teacher knowledge, in which technologies were standardized and relatively stable. The use of technology for pedagogy of specific subject matter could be expected to remain relatively static over time. Thus, teachers could focus on the variables related to content and pedagogy and be assured that technological contexts would not change too dramatically over their career as a teacher. This new context has foregrounded technology in ways that could not have been imagined a few years ago. Thus, knowledge of technology becomes an important aspect of overall teacher knowledge.”

In essence where teachers were asked to be experts in one area or maybe even two, they are now required to be proficient in all three areas of content, pedagogy and technology. Consequently, the stages of sharing, cooperating, collaborating, and collective action in concert with the Tupac model has shifted my paradigm on how I view my daily work and has moved my insular classroom of academic rigor, to a broader classroom that may be even more rigorous due to the diverse thinking skills I will be demanding from my students.

The Breaking Point

My colleague Scott and I teach a class called the Sudan Project. It is a year-long course with the goal being to take over forty hours of footage provided by photojournalist Karin Muller and create a documentary about Sudan and specifically the crisis in Darfur. We spent the first semester trying to lay some groundwork for the students covering the history of Sudan, the nature of the conflict, other geo-political conflicts, documentary film making and training them on the video editing software they need for producing this film. We’ve have our had ups and downs, but for a team-taught, interdisciplinary class with no blueprint, I have been fairly pleased with our progress…until today. Today was our first production meeting and the power of the mob ruled the day. Students were broken up into groups to produce ten mini-documentaries that will then be sifted through for the final product. As groups began reporting, we heard the start of grumbling: it took a long time to download the footage; the timecodes aren’t matching up with the shot lists; there is so much footage to look through; there is no way to do this task in sixteen school days. The frustration built as each group reported to such a point that when a young woman wanted to report the success she was having with aligning the shot list and the clips, students were literally shouting her down. Normally my colleague and I play a bit of good cop/bad cop, but in this case we both put the hammer down. When the students left disgruntled, we simply stared at each other and realized that this was really our first hurdle that the class had to overcome. Sure there were technical glitches with their documentaries from first semester, but the gravity of their job was finally hitting them. Their frustration and anger had two sources. One was the overwhelming work of sorting that few anticipated because they simply did not know the process: They were not used to the idea that there was no easy solution to this problem. The other was the realization that they were responsible to the people they were seeing in their film. As one student said, “I don’t want this to be a show on Animal Plant looking at some weird place. I want my audience to be able to connect with the humanity of these people.” I know that meaningful learning is born out of frustration and while I would not wish such discomfort on my students regularly, in the midst of my own aggravation, I was lucky to witness one person’s triumph.

Reflections on Readicide

My colleagues joke about my “inner German,” but to be honest, my German is pretty much on the outside too. I don’t apologize for my love of order and my dedication to rules. If there is a rule, it should be enforced. We need structure: It is a building block of society. My students often don’t understand what this has to do with chewing gum, but they kindly acquiesce and consequently my trashcan is a pile of gum at the end of each day. This love of order also instructs how I teach English. There are ways for us to approach texts; we will have homework and we will analyze together. Kelly Gallagher’s new book Readicide: How Schools are Killing Reading and What We Can Do about It challenges my inner German. His argument that in order to fuel the love of reading that is often lost in students sometime between third grade and seventh grade, we need to have unstructured reading time with texts that will not be closely examined. He wants students to experience the “flow” if reading. This much freedom would send me into a swivet. How will I know if my students are actually doing the reading? How will I hold them accountable? How could I possibly take classroom time to let students sit around and read and not feel like I am reverting to elementary school tactics? Despite this discomfort, I really think he has a point.

Right now I am trying to drag 43 reluctant 10th graders through A Tale of Two Cities. I think it would be easier to take them all to the dentist and then off to do some yardwork. They literally have looks of physical pain while we are doing this. And that leads me in two directions. First it is causing me to articulate my approach to this novel more carefully and secondly, seriously consider Gallagher’s suggestion. These students would not be in so much pain if they were better readers. Dickens’ is tough and, as Gallagher argues, they should not be tackling this text alone, but when this may be all they read, their skills are not improving. It is like trying to train a high school pole vaulter by setting the bar at the world record. They aren’t going to like the sport for long.

So Gallagher’s 50/50 suggestion makes sense to me. We need to find a balance between structure and the freedom to explore. And I hope my discomfort will lead to some newly engaged readers. I still will not be about to embrace this with 100% certainty. I look forward to the online discussion with others across the country. Locally, I would like to try to invite the other members of the 10th grade team into this challenge and perhaps create some Nings that are moderated by each of us. Each semester we can select a list of books that we have read and then moderate these groups throughout the entire 10th grade class. I can get to know some new students; the students can engage with each other across the classes and we can all read some books together.

Fear the Fear

“Our greatest fear, in bringing computers into the classroom, is that we teachers and instructors and lecturers will lose control of the classroom, lose touch with the students, lose the ability to make a difference. The computer is ultimately disruptive.” Mark Pesce “Fluid Learning”

When I first read this about a week ago, I thought that Mark did a nice job representing the rest of the world, but it no way spoke for my school who was just finishing our first semester of 1:1. We were cruising our way into exams and everyone was feeling fine and then, disaster struck. On our first exam on the computer we had chaos with the exam login, monitoring software and, to hear some tell the tale, keys just started flying off of computers. Tablets were abandoned and we reverted to paper. Despite this return to an old stand bye, chaos continued. Scantrons were handed out; scantrons were aborted; questions were clarified; clarifications were altered. Things never really settled down for this doomed exam and our first semester of smooth sailing crumbled into distant memory. And then it was time to ask if we were willing to do it all again in just 48 hours on the next exam scheduled on tablets. The debate raged and fear took strong hold. Since our students test in their advisories, there were 28 rooms which could not simply be controlled without sending out an e-mail entitled “URGENT” and there was no question that we would be out of touch with our own students. But all of this forced us to look at a few things, primarily, if we walk the walk on exams. We state that our best classes in English are the ones dedicated to exam preparation when we pull everything together and watch the synapses fire in heads we long thought were lost to our passion.

Which brings me to my primary purpose in this post, what really is our roll if we give control and knowledge over to the computer? My answer: feedback. It is clear from Mark Pesce’s piece that education is changing and he makes a good argument for whether or not students should just outsource their collegiate education, picking and choosing the best opportunities and creating their own unique experience. Outside of the joys of dorm life (and dorm food) and the vast array of trouble one can get into on a college campus, I don’t know that you would miss anything going about it this way and you may end up with a superior education. But on the high school level, this answer is easy enough, feedback.

Malcom Gladwell’s article in a recent New Yorker entitled, “Most Likely to Succeed” discusses strategies for identifying individuals who will become exceptional teachers. He explains the amount of material that can be covered by a poor teacher compared to a strong teacher and suggests that students can lose almost one year of learning under the tutelage of a sub-par educator. Identifying, along with our President-elect, that our future in this world economically, geo-politically and environmentally, is directly linked to the improvement of our nation’s education system, Gladwell points out the vital nature of this search for strong teachers.

Discussing an educational talent scouting session, Gladwell examines the commentary by the dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, Bob Pianta who points out the positive attributes of successful teachers. According to Gladwell, “Of all the teacher elements analyzed by the Virgina group, feedback—a direct, personal response by a teacher to a specific statement by a student—seems to be most closely linked to academic success.” So no matter the new information that students are able to collect at lightning speed, they still need us to offer them the feedback and direction: To help them know they are going in the right direction, to redirect them when necessary and to simply provide them with the universal human need of acknowledgment. Despite the number of messages in their inboxes or comments on their Facebook walls, nothing replaces another human being affirming their value each day.

So maybe the first exam was a disaster, but our best work was achieved in the days that led up to that exam where we looked at each student and affirmed the connections and insights he came to over the past 14 weeks. And I am grateful that our school decided to try again. As I mentioned to one colleague, if people didn’t try a second time after crashing the first, we would never have the pleasure of airplane food. So far, so good on this exam, by the way. My friends are happily typing away dreaming of two weeks of video games and instant messaging and Facebook and soon as they turn in this last exam.

Lights, Camera, Original Title?

Several years ago when I started having students take scenes from Hamlet and reinvent them in their own forms (inspired by the Leonardo DiCaprio Romeo and Juliette), my project seemed pretty forward-looking and progressive. Nowadays, it is a run-of-the-mill tech project, but I continue to be pleased with the results. I come from a fairly traditional school of teaching English and when I first started, the thought of giving the students so many “unstructured” days of class almost made me hyperventilate. The chaos of having to help with so many projects where students could get themselves into tech binds that I could never reproduce if I tried, was enough to keep me up at night. But we did it. And it worked. Students who were only remotely engaged in our study of Hamlet, were now rehearsing lines, arguing about their meaning and creating visual concepts that reinforced the themes of their scenes. Additionally, it provided the opportunities for collaboration, problem-solving, and creativity which were almost completely overlooked in my classroom. I know that the students enjoy having a final product they can be proud of and many come back and ask if I have shown their film to the new classes.

Every year I tweak the project, but here are this year’s set of observations:
1. This year we attempted to use Final Cut Express rather than iMovie. While our students have tablets, their work on these films would be limited to the iMacs in my room. We had to add time to the project to instruct the students on the software and there were turf wars over computer time when groups who were sharing a machine both wanted to work on it. With Adobe Premiere on their tablets, is it better for them to be mobile in their film making or does the power of Final Cut Express trump mobility? Also, is there any benefit to the “studio” atmosphere that was created in my room over the past two weeks. The place is trashed, but good work was done.
2. I added a story board/preproduction report component this year. I wanted them to do more work on the front end and really think about what they were doing and why before they got their hands on a camera. I think this paid off with better shot selection and creativity, but I am still not happy with the amount of planning. Many of the students would not stick to the production schedule they created and still got behind. I also toyed with the idea of using storyboard software.
3. Production and post-production report: I have always had this writing component because I think it is vital for them to explain their choices, but some are better than others. I am thinking I need to give a more formalize rubric for this rather than just telling them the topics I want them to cover. Highlights from the reports are below.
4. Film education: I would love to find time to add some education on the influence of text, audio and visual tracks in film and how all of these combine to create meaning. While many of the students did some of these things intuitively, I think they could have benefitted from a closer look. I was pleased, however, with their cooperation and relative ease with my enforcement of proper copyright use of music. Once we actually figured out that since you own it on your ipod, it isn’t really yours to use however you want and worked through the complicated math of 10% of a song that is 3:20 isn’t really 32 seconds, things went pretty well.

Student comments from Production reports:
“Animal behavior is extremely different from human nature, humans are more developed and have a better understanding of common sense whereas wild animals are harsh and live under the precept of survival of the fittest. Therefore animals are almost desperate to survive that they will do anything to succeed. This idea connects with the play Hamlet because the characters in it are reckless enough to do whatever it takes to achieve what they want.”

“Darth Vader (Laertes): We decided to cast Laertes as a parallel to Vader because in many ways, Vader’s character mimics Laertes’. Both begin as generally “good” characters but allow their anger to overcome them, and both become minions of their respective leaders. Also, in the end, both turn “good” again, and confess their sins and try to repent. Playing into this, we decided to use Vader’s clothing to show his change of heart. During the duel and wounding of Hamlet, this character wears his signature mask, and talks in a deep, almost robotic voice. However, once he is mortally wounded, he takes off his evil helmet to signify his change of allegiances and talks with his normal voice.”

“Although we initially didn’t want music, we took Ms. Mittler’s suggestion that we could find appropriate pieces to enhance the mood. We choose part of the opening movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, ‘Eroica.’ It is in a minor key, which gives a more negative and suspicious feeling, and it is classical. To reinforce Hamlet’s emo style, we chose some hard-core ‘screamo’ from a song by Slayer called ‘Raining Blood.’”