Category Archives: agency

A Writing Class Disguised as a Podcasting Class

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In the first few weeks of each of my English classes, I always open up a real-talk discussion about writing. I start by acknowledging that writing is one of the most challenging tasks that students are asked to do in school, which usually elicits vigorous nods throughout the room. Writing is nuanced and abstract, and requires students to consider ideas, structure, evidence, arguments and precision all within the great messiness of language and syntax. Many students lack confidence in their writing abilities, and their approach to writing assignments often consists of suffering through the process, like a trip to the dentist, with the assurance that it will be over eventually.
While I am aware of the challenges my students face, time constraints often reduce my instruction of the writing process to a series of steps: brainstorm, research, thesis, outline, draft, revisions, final draft (with consideration for audience, voice and tone thrown in if time allows). Sometimes I fly through all of these concepts in a matter of days, hoping that something will stick to each student. Sometimes I have my students turn in each part of the writing process for points, hoping that this will inspire some sort of epiphany, like “Mr. Schooler, some really unexpected ideas came up in my mind map that I never would have seen if you hadn’t reviewed the process of circling ideas and drawing lines between those bubbles!” At the end of this rushed process, the essay is turned in and I boomerang it back to each student within two weeks with a grade on top and feedback that is skimmed and tossed away.
 
But the writing process is so much more sacred than what I often reduce it to. In its highest form this process can produce clarity from abstractions, allow for discovery of new insights and can actually transform one’s understanding of themselves and the world around them. Writing is often a big messy struggle that can teach lessons of resilience and perseverance that transfer to so many aspects of life. My approach to many projects in life mirrors my own writing process, whether it’s building a chicken coop, cooking a holiday meal or redesigning my back yard.
Two years ago, I attended the CCCC (Conference on College Composition and Communication), and one session that stood out to me was given by a professor who shared his experiences teaching a podcast project in his class. At first this seemed somewhat out of place for a conference that focused mostly on writing instruction, but I started to wonder whether a podcast wasn’t just another form of writing. A podcast producer must work with ideas, organization, evidence, tone and word choice all while considering the audience at the other end of their work. This idea stuck with me for a while, germinating, until I decided to create a Podcasting and Storytelling class.
When I started telling people I was teaching a podcasting class, they often asked me about recording. As someone whose recording experience is limited to making mix tapes and CD’s in college, I started to wonder whether or not I was in over my head. In fact, my knowledge with podcasts is pretty limited too – I have spent hours listening to them running the trails of Mount Diablo, but I have never tried to make one.
But I took solace in the fact that I do know quite a bit about the writing process, and that this class is really just a writing class disguised as a podcasting class. And, while in the first few weeks, many of my students thought that it would just be a chill, blended class where they would listen to interesting podcasts, I knew what the class would turn into, and I was thrilled that I had successfully duped them into an extensive writing project.
After an introductory unit in which we deconstructed the art of storytelling, my students formed teams that would work towards the long-term goal of producing a podcast. The first phase of the project was to identify a topic that everyone was interested in and research all they could about that topic. Each team member was responsible for documenting their research, and writing reflections on how it would direct the team’s project. One of my teams started out by wanting to do a podcast on the Byron Hot Springs, an abandoned building in Byron that teenagers sneak into since it is supposedly haunted. Over the next few weeks, this team went into a full deep dive, learning all they could about this location. They discovered that it had originated as a train depot, then became a luxury hotel that stars like Marilyn Monroe visited, then served as a satellite Japanese internment camp, then burned down twice mysteriously and now stands as just a shell of a building. One student read about how Charlie Chaplin used to visit the hotel and she decided to watch one of his films. This team even found the owner’s name and the current value of the property on Zillow. I like to think that this team got much more out of this research experience than simply searching for usable quotes from the internet, which is what many of my students do when I assign research papers.
As we shifted from the research to the production phase of the project, each team had to brainstorm and determine a central idea for their podcast. They had to give a quick two-minute pitch to the rest of the class, then receive feedback on their ideas before writing a formal proposal. As we have now shifted to the production phase, the goal is to create original content that can be used in the final cut. This involves writing scripts and monologues, conducting interviews, and considering the best organizational structure to tell their specific story. This has turned out to be a spontaneous process full of dead ends, revisions, regrouping and improvisation. But the attention that these students are putting into their work is greater than the attention my students usually put into a rushed essay process. Most of our class sessions are collaborative workshops, and I bounce from team to team listening to them discuss various rhetorical choices, like word choice, structure, tone, audience and voice. Instead of me flying through these skills that I have always tried to instill, these students are implementing these skills within the context of their projects. They have determined that these are the important qualities of their writing that they need to consider.
My ultimate goal for this class is to create a Carondelet podcast channel that gets thousands of subscribers, and becomes something our school is known for. But I still have no idea what these final projects will be, and I expect that some will be better than others. This class has made me consider which is more valuable for my students, the process or the final product, but that’s a subject for another blog. One of the great things about teaching a semester class is that it allows me to make my own revisions, and I don’t have to wait a whole year to do things better. And while I still think it is important that students write essays in school, it has been invigorating to reimagine the different forms essays can take. 

The Value of Student Agency

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At this point in the school year, I am starting to see some of my students emerge from the pack. These are the ones who write five engaging paragraphs when I ask for a 300-word response, the ones who listen to every episode of Serial when I ask them to listen to the first one, the ones who find it fun to write an original “form follows content” sentence. These are the ones destined for the parking lot banners, our showroom students. They seem to shrug off the notion of points and grades, and are just bursting with intrinsic motivation to learn for the sake of learning.
In high school, I was never this type of student. I was a diligent homework doer, and was lucky enough that school always came pretty easily to me. But my primary motivation to achieve was instrumental – I wanted to go to college so that I could get out of Yucca Valley, the small desert town where I had lived my whole life.
When I started college at UCSD, I tried to employ the same academic approach that had always been successful to me. I was a structural engineer major, mainly because I had been good at math in high school. But I only had a vague sense of what exactly a structural engineer did – I figured it had something to do with structures or buildings, maybe something like architecture. I persisted through, doing my homework and taking tests, and by the end of my freshman year, I was struggling to earn C’s in some of my engineering classes. I trusted my professors and expected the learning to just come to me, and with each subsequent semester my frustration bloomed. 
One of my favorite places at UCSD was the bookstore – I spent hours browsing the walls of books that had nothing to do with structural engineering. I took it upon myself to read all that I could, starting with the Beats then Gabriel Garcia Marquez then Dostoyevsky. I aspired to fill in some of my knowledge gaps of the human story, and even if I could not understand what Faulkner was saying exactly, I knew that if I persisted, I could see his vision of the world.
At the end of an especially dismal semester as an engineer major, I decided to try something different. I registered for introductory writing classes and decided to take a break from engineering. I figured at worst, I would take a sort of vacation and earn a minor in English. But the whole course of my life changed that semester. Even though writing was challenging to me and I did not find immediate success, I discovered that I had deep internal motivation for the written word. I remember feeling stunned that I could earn a college degree for something that I had genuine passion for – it sort of felt like I was pulling one over on everyone – I was finally learning for the sake of learning and getting credit for it.
Now as a teacher, I identify this concept that I found in college as student agency. A quick Google search of student agency will lead to several definitions that have to do with autonomy, engagement, self-efficacy and being self-directed. In short, it seems to be the concept of students taking the control of their own learning. Students who have agency are those who are internally motivated to learn in their classes. They are the ones who stay after class to continue the conversation, the ones who read on their own, the ones who make us feel like we must be doing something right.
Lately I have been wondering whether the concept of student agency is largely undervalued in high school classes. We all have our curriculum and content that we want to impart into our students, and our students have numerous motivations for why they do what we ask of them. Many of these motivations are extrinsic though – from parents to grades to the fear of not getting into their top college. I wonder what happens to these students when they leave us, if they can keep it up, or if they run smack into their own versions of my structural engineering wall.
This semester, I’ve been considering what a class would look like if student agency was the most valued skill. What if the coursework and the daily lessons were crafted to promote student autonomy first? What if course content was not the main priority? What if the development of content-specific skills was not even the highest priority? What if I put all of my attention and energy into creating conditions that would promote student agency above all else? What if the goals of becoming a strong writer, reader or lover of literature became secondary in my class to becoming someone who learns for the sake of learning?
After sitting with these questions for a while, I came up these four characteristics that I would prioritize in an agency-first class:
·     Choice
Students would be able to choose their own academic pursuits within the scope of my class. They would choose what they read, what they write and determine the pace that works best for them. I would create a curriculum structure that articulated the goals of the course, and give students the freedom to demonstrate their mastery of those goals. I would be a collaborator, constantly checking in with their progress, and they would be responsible for documenting their progress. 
·     Authentic Engagement
While it is easy to leverage points and grades to get students to do work, it is much more of a challenge to make course material engaging. When planning my classes, I generally operate under the assumption that none of my students would choose to come to my class if given an option for how to spend this block of time. They mostly just want to do the work to get the points to keep their parents happy. To create a class that is authentically engaging requires me to be attentive to my audience, to relate to my audience and to earn buy-in from my audience. It is constant work to cultivate intrinsic engagement, but it needs to be a starting point.
·     Accessible Entry Points
To nurture intrinsic motivation for a subject requires me to make the connection between the individual student and the course content. If I ask them to read a book that they don’t care about then give a writing prompt that they don’t care about, the results will be expectedly uninspired. All of our students can and should be challenged to learn new things, but these new things need to be put in the context of the world as they know it first.
·     Ban “Should”

Being a teacher can be frustrating, and sometimes I find myself saying that my students “should” know this or “should” be able to do something. As soon as I start “shoulding”, I defer my responsibility to meet that student where they are at. When I ban the word “should” from my thinking, I stop looking at the class as a whole, and am forced to see my students individually and differentiate my instruction according to their individual needs.
If these were my primary objectives for an English class, I wonder if it would be enough. Where does academic rigor fit in? Would this class be negligent in teaching course content and course-specific skills? Is my head so far in the clouds that my students would be unprepared for college reading and writing? 
Or maybe students in a class like this would actually get more out of my academic content than they would otherwise. Maybe they would become stronger writers and readers because I had created a space where they could engage with my instruction better. Maybe they would find internal motivation for reading challenging works of literature, crafting arguments, or even using semi-colons.  

Is this too idealistic? Maybe. Is it possible given the current system of college admissions? Maybe not. But as a teacher, I never have the delusion that I will find the magic lesson plan or book that solves all of my issues. This work is messy and beautiful, and the only thing I can ever hope is that I get better at it from year to year. The world is fundamentally different from when I was in high school and will be fundamentally different 25 years from now. One of the most invigorating aspects of this profession is that we get to be visionaries and look beyond how everything has gone up until now. 

Authentic Reading vs. Mastery Mimicry

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The summer reading book for my A.P. Language and Composition class is The Great Gatsby, which in my opinion is the closest thing to a perfect novel that has ever been written.  I’ve read this book about twelve times in my life, and every time something new emerges.  
When I taught this book in my twenties, I liked to chronicle the arc of Nick’s first party at Gatsby’s, focusing on the purpose of partying in life, the abandonment of the day to day, the momentary invincibility of youth.  
In my thirties, I loved teaching the scene where Gatsby is trying to impress the Sloanes and Tom Buchanon, and Nick snidely observes how pathetic Gatsby looks in the face of such arrogance.  The short line “As though they cared!” is one of my favorite lines in the book, and I used it to point out how much could be said in such a few words.
Last year when I read this book I was struck by the line: “. . . there is no difference between men, in intelligence or race, as the difference between the sick and the well.” As a man in my forties, who now has to think about things like cancer screenings, this line is much more profound to me than it ever was when I was younger.  I sometimes wonder what will resonate when I read this book a decade from now, and am confident that something new will emerge.  
When my A.P. Lang students come to class in August, they are usually pretty eager to impress. These are the go-getters, the ones who insist there are “good” colleges and “bad” colleges and they are going to do everything in their power to avoid the bad ones. While the expectation for this class is that students do the required reading, I do get my share of fake-readers, who believe (sometimes correctly) that they can get everything they need to pass an English class from internet resources. But even my actual-readers in this class often believe that the primary purpose for reading is to extract the information that the teacher seems to want so that it can be repeated back in an essay or on a test.
One of the first assignments I give in this class is an evidence-based presentation about a theme or topic in The Great Gatsbythat my students find compelling.  While there is so much possibility for this assignment (the love triangle, the affairs, the parties, the car accident, the murder/ suicide, the empty entitlement of white men, and that awfully uncomfortable scene in the Plaza Hotel), I invariably get some student who want to tell me about the colors in the book. This student will go on and on edifying the class about green, yellow and red, about what each one symbolizes, like a teenage lit professor whose mission is to confound and bore. As if colors is what this book is about!  This is the type of student who believes that a response to a book should be clever above all else, and that there is “hidden meaning” that needs to be found (generally by looking in the right corners of the internet).
I often cannot tell whether or not these color-symbolists actually read the book, but if they did, they certainly did not read it in the way I wanted.  I want them to find the intersections between this book and their own lives, to consider the human condition, to let the book chisel a bit at their worldview. Anything but Sparknotes and Shmoop regurgitations! But I also understand that they have spent much of their school lives being asked for the correct answers, so it makes sense that they would apply this mindset to reading literature as well. I have also come to realize that any time I point out something in the book that I find compelling, that my students make the assumption that my interpretation is the one I eventually want repeated back to me in writing.
Last spring, I spent a day talking to my A.P. Lang students about their reading habits and practices before we began The Scarlet Letter. I made a conscious effort in my messaging to explain that I did not expect them to become experts on their first reading The Scarlet Letter, which is a very challenging book.  I also told them that I did not expect them to memorize small details of the novel for a multiple choice reading quiz – I don’t know anyone who reads for the purpose of repeating small details back to someone who might ask.  What I wanted the most, I said, was for them to read the book attentively, and for them to have an authentic experience while reading.  I wanted them to embrace the struggle of reading a challenging work, and to get better at articulating their own clarifying questions.  I wanted to see what they noticed about the book and found relevant and interesting.  I wanted them to collaborate and listen to each other’s ideas and use these insights to enhance their own understanding.  What I did not want was for them to skip over the struggle and dive into internet resources so that they could mimic someone else’s mastery. 
These students and I brainstormed some ways that they could demonstrated this authentic understanding of the book. We came up with some great ideas (like Schoology discussion groups, Spiderweb discussions and Think Tank Sessions), and I also stripped away much of the context building work (or in their eyes “busy work”) that I have traditionally given with this book. There would only be suggestedreading deadlines and no reading quizzes or tests. In the weeks that we read The Scarlet Letter, I was astonished by the high level of engagement. It truly felt like a learning community with students having the freedom to read the book on their own terms, in their own time, and to use each other to clarify and construct meaning. In those days I was busier than ever, running around from group to group sharing my own ideas about this book, but emphasizing the fact that my own ideas were just the ideas of one person. The feedback I got was overwhelmingly positive, and the vast majority of these students read this book in its entirety. I even had a couple students collaborate to write poetry about how pathetic they found Arthur Dimmesdale!
I don’t know whether this kind of release of responsibility can cross over into every subject in this same way. Teachers still have to teach content, and I don’t imagine that students could learn a chapter of Chemistry entirely on their own. But my greatest takeaway from this experience is that my students were far more engaged when I valued their own authentic understanding, as opposed to mimicking a standard for mastery. I never thought I would see a class full of seventeen-year-olds actually enthusiastic about Nathaniel Hawthorne!

A Student-Centered Approach to Teaching a Novel

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This past October, I went to the iNACOL conference in
Orlando, and spent three days in the humid periphery of Disneyworld learning
about blended classes, disruptive innovations, project based learning, place
based learning, student agency, personal pathways, individual assessment and of
course plenty of ways to leverage technology in personalized learning.  I even checked out the virtual reality booth
at the exhibit hall and a coding booth that involved programming robots.  I took pages of notes and felt like I was
bursting with ideas for how I could bring some of this back to my classes.
It is easy to get overwhelmed at conferences, but if I were
to synthesize what I got out of the iNACOL conference, it would be a renewed
faith in the concept of student agency. Over the years I have attempted to give
students choice in my classes by letting them select their own outside reading
books, giving them options for projects, or giving three essay prompts to
choose from instead of one, but I have come to realize that true student agency
is much more comprehensive than offering options.
When students are given a high degree of agency, the
traditional teacher-centered classroom model is blown up.  Metacognitive awareness is central to the experience.  Students are given the opportunity to
determine how they are going to learn the material best and how they are going
to demonstrate mastery.  The teacher is
no longer instructing towards the middle of the class, creating content that
reaches the most students possible, but is collaborating with every single
student.
With three weeks left in the semester, I decided to try
teaching the book Old School in my
English 4 class by giving my students complete autonomy.  Before assigning the novel I took a class
period to brainstorm with my students (seniors, who have years of experience
with ways that novels are taught in high school) to get feedback on what has
worked most effectively for them when they have read books for English
classes. 
The typical approach, in my classes and many English
classes, is to assign reading deadlines to get through the novel.  With each deadline there might be some type
of reading quiz or assessment.  While
everyone is reading the novel at the same pace, I always create activities or
projects that build context and promote deeper understanding of the different
sections of the book.  At the end, there
is almost always an essay.

After talking to my students, I wondered what would happen
if I put it in their hands, and gave them everything ahead of time.  So I wrote a very basic explanation of what
we would be doing with this book and gave it to them before we started
reading.  I told them that they were
responsible for doing the following three things:  having an authentic reading experience,
making connections between the novel and something outside the scope of the
novel, and producing a piece of writing that demonstrated their understanding of
the novel and made relevant connections to the world as they know it.  There would be no reading quizzes, no
lectures, no context-activities, and no prompts for the essay.  This would be their final exam for the
semester.
I also told them that the goal was to demonstrate mastery of
reading the novel and in their piece of writing, and that they would be
assessed on how close they came to mastery for the work that they produced.  Our classes would no longer be structured
with activities that I created, but every day that we would meet, they would be
responsible for determining the best use of their time.  I also told them that since it is a blended
class, only half the class would report on any given day, and that I would be
meeting with every student individually and taking notes on their progress.
This made me extremely nervous, letting go of the reigns
like this.  The book is only about 200
pages, but I suspected it would not exactly be a high level interest book for
many of my students.  I assigned this
Monday of Thanksgiving week and required that my students post a response on
Schoology by Sunday night describing their progress with the book so far.  When I checked Sunday afternoon, only one
student had posted.  I had a brief moment
of panic and scrambled to come up with a back-up plan which mostly included the
types of lessons and activities that I have always given when I teach
books.  I started to doubt this
idealistic notion of agency, and wondered whether my students could actually handle
such academic freedom.  I checked Schoology
again Sunday night, and when I saw that only about eight of my 50 students had
responded, went to bed feeling defeated.
But when I woke up the next morning, I checked Schoology
again to find that the majority of my students had submitted reflections.  I tampered my joy a bit though and wondered
what the content of these responses might be. 
After all, this is not a novel I chose for this class, and would not be
one that I would expect high levels of enthusiasm for.  But as I read through the responses, I was
surprised by the authenticity of the responses, and by the fact that students
were largely enjoying this book.  One
girl, who has never struck me as being a motivated reader, said that she had
gotten completely caught up in the book and was taking a break to write her
response, and anticipated that she would continue reading after she submitted
her reflection.
In the next few weeks, I met with every student individually
several times, discussing the book, their progress and their ideas for the
final written piece.  This is the beauty
of having a blended class where I can have small groups of students come every
day.  For the final reading assessment, I
met with each student individually and discussed the novel.  I looked at their annotations, and mixed up a
variety of questions from the book, trying to probe and ensure that they were
not simply reciting a second-hand plot summary. 
By the end, I was surprised to find that most everyone had read the
book, and that many attributed that to the fact that they were given the
freedom to read it independently, at their own pace.  One of my senior boys told me that this was
the first book he had actually read in high school, and that up to this point,
he had managed to get through all of his English classes by using internet
resources.
When we came back to school last week, I wanted to probe
deeper into this, so I gave my unit evaluations for the two novels my class
read last semester, The Bean Trees
and Old School.  While we spent months on The Bean Trees completing a variety of assignments along with the
reading, only 23% of my students read the entire book.  Almost 37% stated that they read internet
resources instead of authentically reading. 
My Old School evaluation, on
the other hand, indicated that 92% of my students had read the book in its
entirety.
I have been thinking about this for a few days now, and the
skeptical side of me remembers that this is a small sample size (two classes),
and that these are two very different books. 
Students might have been more inclined to like Old School more than The Bean
Trees.  Also, there are scant
internet resources on Old School, so
this probably had some influence on the data. 
But I think it is fair to be optimistic when there were such drastic
results with the same group of students in the same semester with the same
teacher, but two extremely different approaches.  Many of the comments that my students gave in
the Old School evaluation stated that
they appreciated being able to complete the work at their own pace.  Also, these are seniors who will need to be
able to complete their college work independently next fall.

I know that some classes and novels need more scaffolding
than others, but there also seems to be great power in student agency and
autonomy.  For most of my teaching
career, I have been an effective teacher-centered instructor, but I am
beginning to believe that I can be more effective when I create more
student-centered learning environments.