Tag: reading

Things I Know 14 of 365: I need to give students choice

“It is our choices that show who we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

– J.K. Rowling

Not every job moves you to embrace hitting your head against the wall. Teaching is a concusive experience.

My students have been exploring science fiction for the last few weeks. From 24 available titles, they researched and selected 6 they wouldn’t mind reading. From there, I worked my teacherly magic to fit them into groups of 4-5.

They set reading schedules, engaged in book talks and wrote discussion reflections to focus their thinking and investigation of a much-maligned though historically significant genre.

After 5 weeks, I was in a familiar spot of moving from group to group trying to convince them they liked their books. Strong was the temptation to label their reading as lazy and surface. It beat the alternative of acknowledging they might just dislike the books.

“If the Reader’s Bill of Rights tells us we can stop reading any time we want, Mr. Chase. Why do we still have to read this book?”
Stupid student choice combined with empowerment.

“Because sometimes people will make you read things you don’t like, and I’ve decided to help you grow a lifelong love of reading by highlighting some of the most regrettable parts of the act,” seemed a poor reply.

Last week, we studied James Gunn’s “A Worldview of Science Fiction.” The kids played cat’s cradle with the ideas so intently that our discussion carried over to this week.

They were starting to see science fiction could include ideas other than those at work in their respective texts.

I was starting to see, again, students’ thinking about what they read grows anemic when they’re forced to read something they don’t like.

In Thursday’s class, I opened by having the students learn all they could about Battlestar Galactica. We collected notes, I fielded questions, and I queued up episode 1 of season 1 “33.”

At the opening credits, I paused and answered questions about details of the cold opening.

When the show hit the tail end of the unusually slow download and the class let out a collective, “No!” I knew I had them.

Today, we welcomed the former head of PR for the SyFy Channel who now works at SLA’s partner organization The Franklin Institute. A lifelong reader of science fiction and English major in college, she talked about what it took to sell science fiction on contemporary television, the creative process behind shows like Battlestar and Farscape and how she made choices as a reader.

The students talked about what they liked about the previous day’s partial episode and what they wanted when they picked up science fiction.

When Andre, who has been railing against his book for two weeks, raised his hand and asked, “How do you come back after reading a bad sci-fi book?” I knew we were making progress.

The progress came when I remembered what I believe to be true:

  1. Give kids choices.
  2. Show real-world models.
  3. Connect them with passionate adults who know what they’re talking about.

Forcing them to read books they didn’t care about that hadn’t been organically recommended and that they didn’t much care for was really more a test of our rapport than their abilities.

Next time I decided to run repeatedly into walls, I’l try to see the dents I’ve left this time and take them as reminders.

Classy: Communal notes in gDocs

As I’ve written, Google Apps for Education is truly changing my practice this year.

We’re studying Jung’s idea of archetypes as they pertain to literature in my Sexuality & Society in Literature class. For an introduction, today, we read a simple introduction.

While the students were reading, I took my notes on key information and put them in a new gDoc.

On the side, I included comments on the ideas found in the notes. (We’ve been working on summarizing before offering up commentary.)

When the class was done reading, I had them close their computers and share their initial thinking on the ideas from the write-up. It was slow going. One of those moments where I can see the bigger picture and am thereby inherently more excited about the ideas we’re investigating.

When it felt like the conversation had reached critical mass, I moved to the screen and pulled up my gDoc of notes.

I pointed out that I’d included the title of the article (linked to the original text), author information, my name and notes on the key ideas, and notes containing my thinking and questions.

From there, I set them free to find more information with the directive of “build notes about archetypes in literature that work to answer our questions.”

The link to the editable gDoc was posted on the class moodle page. They logged in and started building notes.

As they built, I asked questions via the commenting tool to prod their individual investigation.

In the doc’s chat sidebar, I asked questions of the entire class to make sure our notes took on greater breadth.

Soon, the class will be writing essays with the help of their notes. Because of what they’re building, they’ll have the benefit of many minds as points of reference.

Next semester, when I’m teaching Storytelling, I’ll be able to produce the gDoc to introduce archetypes in conjunction with The Hero’s Journey.

Here’s what I didn’t do:

  • I didn’t build a wiki. I’m not interested in worrying about architecture, and a wiki would have required more click-throughs than seemed logical.
  • I didn’t have them blog. Though I’m making the work public here, the notes were meant for in-class use. Additionally, I wanted everything to live in the same place. While a common tag would have allowed the gathering of the posts, it wouldn’t serve the purpose of notes.
  • I didn’t use a discussion forum. The goal was putting the information in one place and allowing for the common culling of ideas. A discussion forum would have, again, required clicks. As the ideas within the students’ courses found connections at different points, threading discussion would have limited the intertextual connectivity of the reading.
  • I didn’t use guided notes. With the goal of exploration and investigation of dynamic concepts, guided notes would have put the onus on me and prevented one student’s uncovering of the periodic table of archetypes.

Though not perfected, this approach will be one I take again.

Classy: Long-form journalism, writing in digital margins and class discussion

A few months ago, my friend Max and another friend of his launched a site called longform.org.

A week ago, Ben tweeted out a link to reframeit.com.

I noted each site in the cache of my mind as something that could be useful in class.

I like the cache because it’s a place where ideas can marinate. (Pardon the mixed metaphor.)

My G11 students are completing a benchmark project right now. It’s one of those pieces where they have a bunch to work on, and we hand over class time to that collaboration. Doing only that can be monotonous.

To break the monotony this week, we’re playing with longform.org and reframeit.com.

Last week, I ask each team of kids (they sit in tables of four) to head to longform an find a piece of journalism they thought would hold the class’ attention and produce thoughtful conversation.

The directions were simple:

  1. Work with your team to come to unanimous approval of the article you’d like to lead discussion on.
  2. Tell me.
  3. Using reframeit.com, read the article and draft discussion points and questions.
  4. Prepare to lead discussion for 35 minutes of one class period.

That’s it.

The discussions and debates about which articles to select were as interesting as the comments that started showing up in the digital margins. One team of all girls made it halfway through an article they agreed was highly interesting, but too mature for some of their classmates. I’d made the same judgment when they told me what they’d selected, but they needed to come to that conclusion on their own. Choice means realizing when you’ve made a bad one. They shifted and all is well.

Over the next two weeks, we’ll have a shared reading experience of some amazingly diverse and high-quality long-form journalism. The students will collaborate on how they interpret and question what they’re reading. The class will build their abilities to converse about a given text and build comprehension, analysis and intertextual reading.

My role will be that of a reader and thinker.

When I showed the class reframeit.com the first time, all I did was give them time to play and told them we’d be sharing our first impressions at the end of play time. Several times, their evaluation danced around the idea that they could see it as possibly useful if they had a clear purpose for using it. Its existence wasn’t inherently useful.

That’s what cache marinading is for.

Classy: Modeling Marking Texts

As the Grade 11 students are reading books of choice for the most part this year, I’ve been working to incorporate types of texts outside of novels into our reading. This has taken the form of long form journalism pieces, op-eds, short stories or anything else. Part of what we’re working toward is endurance in reading. Part of what we’re working toward is reading as a social experience.

I’ve known about the Think Aloud as a reading strategy for a few years. I’ve tried to stay away from it for the sheer boredom of it. It doesn’t ask much of my strongest readers and can feel as though I’m patronizing those students reading at lower levels.

I decided to take my voice out of it. Here’s how it worked:

  1. I posted the link to this article on moodle along with four questions:
    1. What is the purpose of this article?
    2. What is the evidence the author uses to support his claims?
    3. What do you think the future of paper as a medium for transmitting writing is?
    4. How does this article shape your understanding of the world?
  2. Students had time in class to begin reading and thinking. What they didn’t finish became homework.
  3. When they entered class the next day, I handed them printed copies of the piece with the notes that came to mind as I was reading.
  4. The students had approximately 7 minutes to mark up the text with any thinking they had and wanted to add to my notes.
  5. We gathered in a circle where I set ground rules such as, “If we get off topic, ask a question,” “Tie it to the text,” and “Challenge thoughts you don’t understand or agree with.”
  6. Conversation began with each speaker calling on the next.

What happened was a great reminder of the kind of conversation our students are capable of. It’s what they were hoping for when we went to the Town Hall Meeting. At one point, it occurred to me we could benefit from adding our school librarian’s voice to the mix. I called and invited him.

Matt, a grad student completing some observations in our class, commented afterward on how the students had kept the conversation moving even when I was on the phone. I’m hoping it’s because they owned the conversation and I didn’t. In fact, the rules within discussion are that I too must raise my hand and wait to be called on when I want to contribute.

That was classy. What do you think?

Youtube is killing my students[‘] [work]

The Gist:

  • My students created some amazing pieces of scholarly analysis using youtube.
  • The wider audience can never see it because of poorly-thought restrictions our systems and youtube’s systems have put in place.
  • It’s time for us to stop choosing ignorance over what it possible.

The Whole Story:

I’m actually supposed to be grading right now, but I’m angry, so I’m stopping.
I’m not even angry for the usual reasons.
My seniors completed what was their ultimate project of their English Studies at SLA.
The assignment was easy to explain:

  • Choose one of the top 10 most viewed youtube videos of all time.
  • Choose one of the six critical literary lenses (reader-response, gender, socioeconomic, new historicist, postcolonial, deconstructionist) we’ve explored over the last four years.
  • Apply that lens to the video and post it to youtube as a critical literary analysis.
  • For the created product, work in iMovie or use the annotation function of youtube.

The full project description can be seen here.

The work required them to utilize skills as readers, writers, and thinkers.
The problem, youtube – the algorithm, not the people – sees the work as a violation of copyright.
You would too, if you weren’t actually watching the videos to see what they actually are.
I wanted to make certain my thinking on this lines up with the legal requirements, so I went to Kristin Hokanson.
She said it all came down to two questions:

  1. Did the unlicensed use “transform” the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a different purpose than the original, or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original?
  2. Was the amount and nature of material taken appropriate in light of the nature of the copyrighted work and of the use?

She followed up with:
Fair use considers FOUR factors:

  1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
  2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
  3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
  4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

In answer to the first question, yes. Rather than being a video for entertainment, the video is now a non-profit scholarly educational work. As for value, it’s the work of high school students. Some of the value is more, some of the value is less. Will any of these analyses break 1 million views? No.
In answer to the second question, yes. The students used all of the videos because they needed to show how the entirety of the text worked toward supporting their theses. In some cases, they augmented the work with outside slides in order to more fully make a point. Again, the idea here is for the viewer to experience the text concurrently with the analysis, pausing as needed to think more deeply. In the case of something like Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the U.S.A.,” I’m thinking this is a definite repurpose.
Realizing youtube would likely not discern between actual re-purposed non-profit educational work and a simple copy of the original work, I asked the students to submit their work as private videos and then share them with my account.
It was an attempt to keep their work authentic as well as alive.
For the most part, it worked. Then, students started coming in to class telling me their work had been taken down.
Let this be what I say:
For those who complain youtube is destroying culture or thought or any of the rest, this project re-purposed not only the videos, but the medium into a place for scholarly consideration of some of the most globally popular contemporary texts.
For those who argue the blocking of youtube in schools, look at this as a rudimentary example of what can happen when we empower students to think critically about and within online social spaces.
Many of the students worked diligently and thoughtfully on this assignment. If nothing else, they’re more thoughtful and aware of what they view and what it means for a text to be popular.
I’d show you this student work, but then youtube’d have to kill it.

I won’t be telling them what to think

The Gist:

  • My G11 students are reading The Great Gatsby.
  • After the choice afforded them in the last quarter, I can’t be every other English teacher.
  • We’re challenging the Academy and having numerous books vie for the title of Great American Novel.

The Whole Story:

Monday, I tweeted out the link to a simple questionnaire. It contains two statements: 1) What is the Great American Novel? 2) If you’d like to make your case, do it below.

My G11 students also received their copies of our latest class novel Monday. Maybe you’ve heard of a little book called The Great Gatsby? Apparently, it’s quite popular. In fact, many argue it qualifies as the GAN.

Narrowing down the results of the questionnaire, my classes will be pitting 8 contenders against one another. The final contender will face off against Gatsby.

I’ve written about this before. The original idea was to put Gatsby on trial for libel and slander against other novels. After consulting with many people whose thoughtfulness and opinions I greatly value, I was left with a sort of literary March Madness.

I won’t be walking my students through Gatsby. I won’t be indoctrinating them to the symbolism of that light at the end of that dock. I won’t be talking about the American dream or gender roles and the power of adhering to them.

Instead, I’ve given my students some simple instructions:

Read this book with the idea that you will either have to argue against its status as the GAN

or defend its standing as the GAN.

If the American dream and gender roles and symbolism are really key and keen in the text, they should pick up on them. If something else is there, they’ll pick up on that. Is the symbolism important because my teachers told me it was there or because it’s important? I want to start clean.

We’ve talked about some strategies for tracking their thinking. They can use the tried and true sticky notes. They can make a bookmark for each chapter where they track positives on one side and negatives on the other. They can take notes in a notebook. Turns out I don’t care.

They’ve until April 5 to finish.

During classes, they’ll frequently have time to read, about 20 minutes. Tomorrow, I’ll help them decide how to schedule their reading. They’ve 180 pages of 9 chapters and either 12 or 7 days depending on if they want to read over Spring Break. Their pace and rate are up to them.

During the remaining 2/3 of class, we’ll be debating and deciding the qualifiers of the GAN as well as practicing discreet reading and writing skills using other texts.

April 5, they’ll compile their notes, hand in their copies of Gatsby and find out which text they’ll be reading over the next two weeks. This will, be the text on whose behalf they’ll be arguing.

Rather than discussing qualifiers of the GAN, we’ll be using non-reading class time to examine literary lenses they can use to make their cases – Feminist, Marxist, Reader-Response, Postcolonial, Deconstructionist, New Criticism. Throw in some more discreet skills, and you’ve got a hopping time.

The results coming in on the questionnaire are backing my decision to head this direction with things. Largely, the texts suggested line up as canonical standards. It seems dead white guys were really in touch with how to write in a way that resonated with the American spirit.

My goal for this is not to have my students look at any of these texts as the GAN, but to look at these texts and ask why they hold the status they hold and then ask whether or not they deserve that status.

I’m curious to see what they think.

You’re probably asking, “Wow, Zac, that’s great. But, what can I do to help?”

Great question, you.

If you haven’t already, take about 2 minutes to complete the questionnaire and nominate your contender for GAN.

Starting Friday, we’ll be seeding the top 8, check back then to help fill out our brackets.

Oh, one other thing, talk about your nominee with someone. The conversations I’ve had in the last two days have definitely enriched my appreciation for literature. If nothing else, twitter’s seemed less monocultural for a day or two.

Wave in an English Classroom (beta)

The Gist:

  • Group work can be messy.
  • Collaboration is a key.
  • I’m playing with Google Wave to try to make these work together.

The Whole Story:

If you want to see a myriad of responses, tell a room of seniors at an inquiry-driven, project-based high school that they’ll be working in groups in their final semester. The kids who are aces roll their eyes. They don’t want to carry another group across another finish line.

The kids who don’t do much breathe a sigh of relief. (Thank you, aces.)

The kids who get lost are lost.

The teacher of these 32 crosses his fingers and rolls the dice.

Collaboration is one of SLA‘s core values. I attempt to build it into every primary and secondary element of my classroom. Collaboration in the form of group work in a more relaxed, mid- to long-term assignment gets messy.

Sometimes I manage to create mechanisms that hold group member individually accountable for their contributions to the final product.

My attempts to monitor contributions during the projects has often created a paperwork fiasco that tells me a lot of but doesn’t tell the kids much.

In my G12 storytelling class, we’re dealing with a unit around the question, “How do stories tell us who we are?”

I’m having kids read multiple works, take notes, share notes, have conversations in class, see what they can learn.

I decided to use Google Wave to manage the unit’s study. Here are the basics:

  • SLA has Google Apps (incl. Wave) installed so that every community member has an @scienceleadership.org sign-in.
  • I created a wave and invited every student across both sections of the class as a participant.
  • One of the blips on the wave listed the 3-member groups (with sections intermingling across sections).
  • Each group was assigned to create their own new wave for the group adding me as a member.
  • I post the readings to the main class wave, students copy the assignment to a new blip in their group waves and take their notes.

The first reading went up last week.

This might come across as creepy, but I was able to watch students do their homework. I was able to poke, prod, question and suggest as they were working to head off problems before they became problems.

Before class, the day after the assignment, I knew who was prepared and who wasn’t. I was able to needle the kids who hadn’t done anything. I’d already helped the kids who didn’t get it.

The endgame of this assignment is for the students to create a product that answers the essential question as their knowledge stands.

With each successive reading, they’ll add blips and build their collective knowledge.

Ideally, they’ll begin poking, prodding, questioning and suggesting within their group waves prior to class. Ideally.

Here’s what was messy:

  1. Some of my kids were early attempters with wave and (not unlike many people I know) had decided wave wasn’t worth their time.
  2. It’s something new. As intuitive as much of wave is, there’s a learning curve.
  3. They didn’t realize #2 and signing up, adding contacts, etc. ate up a chunk of one class period.

I’m sure there will be more mess, but that’s learning.

My aces asked me, “What if I read my article, but my group members don’t read theirs?”

My answer, “I’ll know and work with them.”

In the end of the beginning: My aces were accountable for their work, and I was able to help them make it better as they did it. They only had to worry about carrying themselves across this finish line. The kids who don’t do much had done some more. Not all of them did something, but more than usual. The kids who get lost had been given re-direction as they cut their path into the unknown. Maybe they got lost once we got to class discussion, but they made it to class discussion.

I really like learning.

“The Whole Story” behind “The Gist”

The Gist:

  • A few months ago I changed the way I format posts.
  • This article influenced that decision.
  • The resulting format is a blend of writerly intent and an attempt to help readers.

The Whole Story:

Just before winter break, I started a project with my G11 students that asked them to research and blog about their findings. It was the first phase of three in this project. Their work is here and here. You’re welcome to read and comment (but this isn’t one of those posts).

In prep for the project, I did some research about reading and writing online. That led me to this Slate article by Michael Agger. It’s a great read.

I learned a lot.

When I showed it to the classes, we walked through it in a “I noticed. I wonder. What if?” sort of way.

From their the blogging commenced.

Before all of this, in the prepping phase, the article influenced my own online writing.

I get what Agger says, I definitely do. Anyone who’s had a conversation with me or seen me teach knows my brain likes shiny – ideas, objects, etc.

Still, when I write here, it’s partially for me and it’s partially for whoever happens by.

You’ll note, I don’t follow all of the rules / guidelines Agger presents.

I don’t want to.

It did, however, force me to examine, once again, my intent as a writer. I process here. I refine here, I spitball here. Later, I come back and see where my thinking was a week, a month, a year ago.

As for those who happen by, my intent is to spark some sort of thinking. I’m fairly certain that’s my intent in life.

I don’t know who subscribes to this space. I don’t know whose feed readers I’m in. I don’t want to know. To know would be to subvert the thinking process.

Conversation is great. Comments are superb. They make me think more.

“The Gist” lets you know whether or not you want to move on. “The Whole Story” makes certain I do not.

Putting a Great American (novel) to the Test

The Gist:

  • My G11 students will start reading The Great Gatsby soon.
  • I’m not the biggest fan.
  • I’m thinking about putting the book on trial for slander / libel against other books.
  • I’m looking for suggestions.

The Whole Story:

One of the things I noted at the end of my last post was the importance of nailing my approach when I have my students reading a common text again. That will get underway come March. One of the anchor texts in our G11 English curriculum is The Great Gatsby. The theme for the G11 year is Change, so Gatsby certainly works. The thing is, I’m not a huge fan. Truly.

In all honesty, I made it through high school without encountering what many people (English teachers especially) count as the pinnacle of American letters. Not until my first unit whilst student teaching did I come into contact with Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. In subsequent readings, I’ve found value in the book, but it doesn’t make me feel weak in the knees.

I see overlap and relevance in the text, but I’m hesitant to be another English teacher unpacking this book and making my students understand the symbolism of all those damned shirts.

Here’s the thinking:

  • Every student in the class reads Gatsby.
  • In small groups, the majority of the students (minus a Gatsby group), read one other text per group.
  • Each of the other groups build a case for how their text is equal to or better than Gatsby, thereby proving claims of Gatsby’s place as the ultimate American novel as slanderous and libelous.
  • The Gatsby group is given a heads up by the other groups as they read on what passages of the other books will be important in making the case against Gatsby and the Gatsby group reads those passages.

This all culminates with a trial or debate which I’m envisioning as something similar to a class action suit.

Here are my trepidations / questions:

  • Is a trial / debate played out?
  • Should the other texts have a common theme such as “the American dream?”
  • Do I select other texts from across all time periods?
  • Does this pass the authentic learning muster?

I’ve been mulling this one over for quite some time. I’m writing about it here, before the fact, because I’m looking to cast a wider brainstorming net.

Thoughts?

New Old Reading (and it’s working)

The Gist:

  • I’ve been frustrated for years with trying to force books on kids.
  • This Fall I got an indirect nod to try something new.
  • My kids are reading whatever they like.
  • It has changed reading in my classroom.

The Whole Story:

I taught Cam when he was in 9th grade.

Cam is a story you’ve heard before. He’s crazy bright, enlivens class discussions and does a lot of nothing on the assignments front. This made Cam incredibly frustrating as a student.

Cam is back in my class as a G11 student this year. I watched him trudge piece meal through

The Things They Carried and The Taming of the Shrew. In the end, I’m not sure how much he actually read of those texts.

Six weeks since we’ve been back in school, Cam is reading his second book of the year, Our Boys Speak after burning through A Long Way Gone.

Coming back from Winter Break, I changed the way we do things in my classroom. I’ve always moved from activity to activity to mix things up and keep things interesting.

Now, though, at least three times a week, my students are reading whatever they like for 20

minutes. I intend no hyperbole when I say it’s amazing to watch.

I’ve wanted to try this since I started teaching. The seed got planted earlier this Fall when this New York Times article reminded me of the reading workshop popularized by Nancie Atwell.

At the time, I found the reaction to the article quite humorous. It’s not a new idea.

I’m not running things according to Atwell’s program. Well, not on purpose.

In trying to describe what’s going on to people, the most frequent question is “How do you hold them accountable for what they’re reading?”

At once, this question seems logical and sad.

The answer is two-fold.

Students are required to write a review of any book they read and post it two places. If the book they’ve read is available in our school library catalog, they are to post their review online via Koha. Without exception, they must also post their reviews somewhere public like bn.com, amazon.com, borders.com, etc. and then send me the link to their published review.

This has led to some great discussions of writing for a specific audience. To gear up for the task, we spent time reading reviews from the NYTimes and read this post from UK freelance journalist Johnathan Deamer on the secrets to writing good reviews.

The general consensus was that the NYTimes writers use too many words.

The second bit of accountability is just coming online now. Through a partnership with UPenn’s Reading, Writing and Literacy Master’s program, I’m fortunate enough to have Hannah interning in G11 classes this semester.

Using information she gathered through a Google Form we pushed out to the kids, Hannah is breaking the class into genre groups and sitting down with them to discuss what they’re finding in their books, what they like and dislike and what they’ll be looking for in their next text.

Though Hannah won’t be with me forever, I’m planning on picking up where she leaves off when her time with us is done.

Some things I’ve noticed:

  • They’re going to the library.
  • They’re seeing our library in a new light.
  • We’ve had to review Daniel Pennac’s “Reader’s Bill of Rights” – specifically #2.
  • When I next ask them to read a common text, I’m going to have to totally rethink my approach.

Cam’s mom helped out with EduCon this year. We struck up one of those informal parent-teacher conferences as she was helping to clean up after Saturday’s dinner.

“Is Cam supposed to be reading every night for class?” she asked.

“Not as a requirement,” I said.

“Well, he is. Whatever you’re doing, it’s working.”

I hope so.