About a week ago, I asked my Classics of Horror class to create a visual map of the consequences of Victor’s fateful decision to play God. Ultimately, my goals were three-fold. I wanted to (1) assess how well students understood how elements of the plot related to each other, (2) deepen and challenge their thinking about an element of the plot that they might not have thought deeply about, and (3) prepare students for a class discussion on the topic.
I let students decide if they wanted to use a digital sketchpad or paper and pen. Half chose digital, half chose paper and pen. After 10 minutes of mapping, I asked some students to share their maps with the class as a discussion springboard. The digital sketches were inherently easier to share than the paper maps due to the bold, colorful lines. These digital maps were easy to scale up and to project. They were more audience-friendly.
Here are two students’ map:
From my students’ maps and how they talked about them, I learned that students had thought a lot about how Victor’s decision to create the monster affected his family but had not thought about the effect the decision had on Victor himself and his best friend Henry Clerval. In this sense, the maps were effective in allowing me to quickly assess student understanding. When I brought up the omissions I noticed, the class addressed the Victor/Clerval consequences in an ensuing discussion that (hopefully) closed a gap in their thinking.
Students seemed to enjoy mapping though it was hard for the perfectionist-types to be ok with a quick, imperfect sketch. Like any well-crafted “pre-writing” exercise, the drawing helped prepare students for discussion. I believe that mapping helped me achieve all three things that I hoped it would – assessment, engagement with novel, and discussion prep.
At the end of this unit, I will collect some data on students’ perception of this activity and another sketch activity I have planned. For now, I’m left wondering about a few things. Did students really learn more from drawing this map than they would have from writing about consequences? Sketching is fun and something different in English class, but has Cisneros overstated the benefits? How can I better measure the impact of this teaching method on student learning?
One of my greatest fears as a teacher is stagnation. This is a challenge in our profession
because there is great satisfaction in achieving mastery of a lesson or unit, only
needing to make minor tweaks and adjustments from year to year. My first principal, Sister Liam, recommended
that at the end of every year I throw out all the lesson plans I had created
and start from scratch again in the fall.
While I never had the guts to do that exactly, her advice instilled a
willingness on my part to be flexible and open to reinvention in my
instruction. So when Hayley asked me
last spring if I would be open teaching three sections of blended English this
year, I saw it as a great opportunity to get knocked out of my comfort
zone.
Over the summer I took an online class through Stanford on
blended teaching and read as much as I could absorb without feeling overwhelmed.One thing I realized early on is that a
blended class has many different appearances, and that it is important to
create a model that works for a particular school, subject and student
population.My starting point for creating
my own blended classes was to ask the question, “What problems in my current
classes can a blended model improve?” Often in education, we are pummeled with possibilities for what we can implement
into our classes, but it is essential to identify the problems first before looking
for solutions.After a bit of
reflection, I realized that there are two primary issues that I believe blended
English classes can address.
Issue One:The Bell Schedule
Last week I was sitting at the library desk working with
Joan when the bell rang. There are some
locations around our school, the library desks being one, where that jarring metallic
thought scrambler is especially amplified.
Throughout a seven period day, the bell rings 16 times, each one an
indication that our students should stand up, shift their attention and move on
to something entirely different. This
mass Pavlovian response to the ringing of a bell has always struck me as one of
the most unnatural behaviors exhibited in schools.
Throughout the day, students continually enter the realm of
the next class, and teachers, like me, often feel that every one of those
forty-five minutes is essential. Sometimes I can get so caught up in my own content that it becomes a
challenge to have empathy, or even recognition, for my students’ challenge of
pivoting from trig identities to a rhetorical analysis to an overview of
mercantilism, on and on until they get home and have piles of homework awaiting them. I
cannot think of any professions (with the exception of teacher) that require
such a halting, fragmented pace.These
days are exhausting for me, and I at least have the benefit of teaching the
same subject all day.While I still
believe that it is in our students’ best interest to learn a breadth of
subjects in school, the reality is that our current schedule allows for limited
cohesion in their learning.
A blended model can address this issue.My students meet twice a week, and complete
the online assignments on their own time. They are not required to do English work during the class period that
our days do not meet.This way, if they
want to work on their chemistry homework during third period because it is still
fresh in their minds, they have the freedom to do so.Or, they can even take a break if they need
to refresh after a challenging test.The
flexibility in schedule afforded by blended classes allows students more autonomy
in their learning.They can identify how
they work best instead of trying to fit within a uniform time model.Much like college, and careers, they are
expected to complete rigorous work, but are self-determining in how to pace
themselves.
Issue Two:The Challenge of Teaching Revisions and Differentiated Writing Instruction
One of the most important skills that I try to impart in my
students is to understand that writing is a process.Good writers understand this and are not
afraid of what Anne Lamott calls “Shitty First Drafts.”In fact, this blog entry originated with an
island conceit, blended classes being the island and me being some sort of intrepid
explorer.I’m ashamed to admit that there
was even a message in a bottle for a draft or so.Thankfully I have enough good sense to
identify my own garbage writing and vaporize it with the delete button.My students are still learning this though,
and sometimes struggle differentiating between their best ideas and their still
“emerging” ideas.With the stress of
deadlines and their own procrastination, they often shoot for good enough in
their written work.It is challenging to
get them to accept that deleting sentences that have already been written and
saved can actually be a step forward in their compositions.
I encourage, and often require, my students to go through a
process of prewriting activities that usually follows a course of brainstorming,
finding evidence and organizing before beginning to write.I tell them that they should write drafts of
their work and I encourage them to come meet with me to discuss the progress of
their essays.Some do, but many do
not.I would love to collect rough
drafts and offer individualized feedback before they turn in their final
drafts, but with the number of students I have this is logistically
impossible.I can either offer
superficial feedback, or get the drafts back days later when my students’
momentum and enthusiasm has fizzled.Not
to mention that I generally prefer sleeping at night over reading essays.
While a blended class is no panacea in and of itself, I am
trying to use the schedule to improve my instruction of the writing
process.My English 4 Blended students
are currently writing an essay on The
Glass Castle, and I am requiring that they meet with me for personal
writing conferences so that we can discuss their progress.Next week, my classes will meet on Monday as
usual then the other days are broken up into forty minute increments.During each time period I will have about six
to eight students in my class working on their essays and meeting with me to
discuss the drafts of the work that they have submitted so far.My hope is that not only does this reinforce
the idea of writing being a process, but that I can offer individualized
instruction to each student so that I can address their various skill levels.
At the risk of another overwritten blog post, I want to conclude
by articulating a few takeaways from my early days of teaching blended classes.
1. Planning is totally transformed.Instead of thinking week to week and filling
days with activities, I realize that I must plan long term in my blended
classes.This has forced me to put the
end of unit assessments and learning objectives in the forefront of my
planning, and create activities that build towards those goals.This has made me think, what are the specific
learning objectives in any given English class? We all want our students to get better at writing, reading and critical
thinking, but how do we specifically deconstruct those skills?
2. There is less student contact in a blended
class.As a teacher who understands the
salesmanship required in convincing students that they should want to read
literature and write essays (despite their strongest inclinations otherwise) I
have always made a concerted effort to connect to my students.I’m a mostly mellow dude in life, but I know
how to ratchet up the swag during class. I make an effort to talk to a few different students every day, ask them about their lives
outside of class and show them that I am invested in all of them as people, not just students. When I
only see them twice a week, it is challenging to build that rapport, and it
sometimes feels like we spend too much time going over a checklist of the work
that they are going to be completing online.
3. I need to improve my online presence.I am someone who uses technology minimally in
my personal life – I have never even had a Facebook account.So this is a bit of a steep learning curve
for me because I need to find ways to be present online.So far, I have learned the importance of
giving feedback to work submitted online promptly, and I sometimes participate
in online class discussions. I am also trying to contribute regularly to our department blog to get a sense of the type of online work that I ask my students to do. But I am a
novice and am open to any suggestions that anyone can offer.
On the first day of my blended classes, I told my students
that I will fail sometimes this year.My
approach is to be attentive, open myself to new ideas, push my ego aside and
learn from my mistakes. I tell my A.P. Language students over and over
again, it is necessary to write bad essays to learn how to write better ones.Growth mindset is not just for students – it
also needs to be embraced and modeled by teachers.
This summer we had great success sending out Kindle books to all the English teachers and Frosh English classes using Whispercast.
I decided to try to take the 2 readers we publish in house and convert them to a format that would allow readers to annotate them in Kindle.
After several failures in getting my Word document to insert Chapter Titles/Auto Table of Contents using styles. I found a guid on the Kindle Self-Publish page that actually made sense and worked!
I was excited to send out the Frosh Reader to Kate and Tiz and all their students. They can open it in their Kindle App (it actually is already there–sent by Whispercast) and highlight, bookmark, and take notes, just like any other Kindle book.
However, it wasn’t a complete success as while the Table of Contents is hyperlinked throughout the book so a reader can navigate to a chapter from the Table of Contents, it does not appear in the Kindle menu bar.
I will keep working on this–by next year–I might have figured it out.
When I started teaching English at St. Elizabeth, I was
dying to develop a Creative Writing class. Not having grown up anywhere near the inner city, I was intrigued by the
verve of East Oakland, by the different modes of expression that seemed to fill
the streets.I wanted to give my
students an opportunity to add their voices to the racket, to feel that they
were contributing to the mass.When I
got the Creative Writing class going, it was a hit – we studied hip hop, did big
circle critiques, learned how to support each other’s writing and took field
trips to Youth Speaks poetry slams.A
friend of mine who is an artist taught at St. Elizabeth for a few years, and we
collaborated to create an art show/ poetry slam night every May that would draw
hundreds of people from our school and neighborhood community.It was called Delivery Room, and it would
always coincide with the unveiling of the newest edition of Clatter, the
literary magazine I started, which featured student writing and art.I remember the students taking great pride
that their voices were published and celebrated, and actually reaching a broad
audience.I even took copies of Clatter
to cafés and businesses around Fruitvale because it seemed essential that this
work get out there.
After buying a house in the suburbs and starting a family, I
came to Carondelet where I inherited the Writing Club.It was a small, quirky bunch, who would meet
in my room once a week at lunch.We agreed that I
would give them a prompt, they would write for about fifteen minutes then share
their work with the group.It was in
Writing Club that I learned about fan fiction, and also realized how poorly I
understood the world of an all-girl school. Being moderator of the Writing Club was one of my greatest failures in
my time at Carondelet.The number of
members dwindled under my leadership, and by the end of the year we were down
to about four girls.One member decided
at some point that she would no longer physically write, but would imagine
responses while the others wrote and then share what she had imagined with the
group.Some weeks only one girl showed
up, and I would still give her the prompt and we would sit in an awkward
silence while she wrote.When I broached
the idea of publishing some of their work in a literary magazine, the girls
immediately asked if they could be anonymous, fiercely resisting the idea of
attaching their names to their work.I
thought it would be ridiculous to publish a magazine of anonymous writers, so
after a few weeks of me trying to encourage them to take pride in their writing
and own it, the idea fizzled and we tacitly agreed to not mention it again.
My experience with the writing club reminded me of the
inherent vulnerability of having an audience of peers at the other end of a
piece of writing. Out of a respect for my students’ privacy, and with a desire
to allow them to write in a safe space that was uninhibited by potential peer
criticism, this concept of anonymity seeped into my teaching.Like most high school writing assignments,
much of the work produced in my classes has been completed in solitude, with
encouragement and feedback along the way, only to be chucked out into the great
academic void at the end, from which it will rebound a few weeks later with a grade
and comments affixed.In my classes we
discuss the concept of audience, and how to most effectively convey ideas to
that audience, but it is generally an exercise in imagination.The reality, as we all know but don’t often
acknowledge, is that I alone am the audience, a busy, middle-aged man slashing
away with a red pen in an empty theater.
As I’ve gotten better footing at Carondelet, one of the
classes I have come to really enjoy teaching is A.P. Language and Composition.The project that I get the best feedback at
the end of the year on is the Controversial Topic Project.For this project, each student chooses some
current controversial topic that they are going to follow over the course of
the year.I try to encourage them to
find something that is relevant and complex, like the removal of Confederate
monuments in the South this year. They read books related to their topics,
analyze the rhetorical and argumentative strategies of op-eds that are written
about the topic, create satirical works, and share often with their classmates
so that we all become more informed about the world around us.In the first few years this project
culminated with a research paper that was handed in on the last day, but I was
always disappointed that these papers felt formulaic and lacked the enthusiasm
that my students had shown for their topics throughout the year.
Last year, in a conversation with Hayley, she told me about
a paper in college that she had been assigned that her professor required to be
sent out as a letter to someone.I loved
this idea, and for the final A.P. Language project last year, I had my students
identify some issue within their controversial topic that they felt strongly
about, and then write an informed, research-filled letter to someone who could
enact some change regarding the topic.I
encouraged them to keep it local and realistic in scope, not write a letter to
Donald Trump about why the border wall is a bad idea.One student, who studied transgender bathroom
rights, wrote a letter to a librarian at the Danville library to suggest that
their senior reading group read a memoir about a transgender person.Her rationale was that people who are older
and more politically conservative often do not have much exposure to, or
understanding of, transgender people. Mark DeSaulnier got peppered with about seven letters, and has so far
responded to two.He assured one of my
students that the next time the topic of public transparency regarding drone programs
comes up on the House floor, he will express some of the concerns the student
offered.Administrators and faculty
members from Carondelet and De la Salle received letters making informed
suggestions for small things that could be done that would improve our school
community.
Overall I consider this project to be one of the most
successful things I have done in my teaching career for the simple reason that
my students were writing something that they felt personally invested in,
knowing that their writing would reach a real audience.We were no longer going through the motions
for a pretend audience. They had become stakeholders in something larger than
an essay, and rhetorical choices like diction, sentence structure and
organization mattered because they were trying to communicate something to
someone who did not even necessarily see it coming.This is not to say that all of my students
were brimming with enthusiasm; I learned this past week that some did not
actually send their letters.But a number
of these students wanted to be heard, which struck me as similar to my Creative
Writing students at St. Elizabeth standing on a stage in front of hundreds of
people performing their poems.
This past week, I was again reminded about the importance of
authentic audience.I am teaching
English 3 Blended this year, and much of the work for this course will be
completed online, which is a little out of my comfort zone.I have been tinkering with how to have
effective online discussions in this class, specifically how to transfer writing
journals into an online format. Typically, I have my English 3 students buy a Composition book in the
beginning of the year, and many days begin with a ten to fifteen-minute journal
prompt, in which I try to push them to consider themes and ideas we will be
working with for that day.I have always
liked the idea of low stakes frequent writing practice, but unfortunately the
writing produced in these journals is often uninspired, and rarely goes into
the depth that I want.
For the first
journal of English 3 Blended, I had my students respond to a prompt on the
Schoology discussion board, and then required that they write responses to two
other students in class.I gave a
specific word count for the writing, and had them go through the process the
first time in class so I could see how it would go. While my students were silently typing away, I realized that this
generation is pretty comfortable expressing themselves online.Instagram posts, Snapchat stories, and even
text messages are intended for audiences to see.At the end of class, I asked the students how
the discussion had gone, especially compared to journals that they had done
previously that were not read. Overwhelmingly they responded that not only did they like posting their
writing to the class forum, but that they felt they got more out of the
assignment.I attribute some of this to
the presence of a real audience.What
they said suddenly mattered in a different way, and they had to own their ideas
and words.It’s a little
embarrassing to admit that my epiphany was based on something so seemingly
obvious, but we all know how easy it is to get set in certain routines as a
teacher.
My takeaway from this realization is twofold.First of all, real audiences need to be found
for student work.While it is
unrealistic that every piece of writing is read by an audience, I am going to try to create more situations where my students’ rhetorical situations have
authenticity.While there is
apprehension in writing for the real “other”, having an authentic audience can make
students more invested in their work.I
know our department has discussed writing contests, and maybe we could even
create our own.But at the very least I
can give my students more opportunities to read each other’s work, not
necessarily to critique, but to listen to each other’s ideas.
My second takeaway has to do with the challenge to reimagine academic life at Carondelet, specifically with the development of the new STEM building. As the English department, our role in the future of our school sometimes seems unclear to me. Will English classes continue to follow the traditional model of students primarily reading and responding to works of literature? How can we transfer the skills that we teach our students into a tech-centered curriculum in ways that are meaningful and relevant? Where does innovation exist in an English class? When I started teaching, I used to dream of my exceptional students becoming literary figures, writers of important books. Now I wonder if I should hope that they will be producers of meaningful content in this digital age. There are many exciting career opportunities for our students that exist in the realm of creating content on the internet, and the goal always seems to be to garner the largest audience possible.
I’ll finish with Arcade Fire’s song “Infinite Content”, an interesting commentary on the vast audiences of the internet.
I was inspired by Martin Cisneros’s Google Summit presentation (Carondelet, Aug. 5) “Making Thinking Visible.” Though his session was aimed at teaching ELL students, I’m convinced some of the sketching strategies he shared would benefit all students.
After Cisneros shared research that people are more likely to remember something if they draw it, I was sold on the idea of incorporating more sketching into my curriculum. What if we had all are students DRAW their notes? Or, as Martin more boldly posed, “What if we had them draw their final exams?” (I’m not there yet…)
For ELL students, drawing can be a powerful way to demonstrate knowledge. As Cisneros explains, drawing is also a fundamental element to learning necessary academic language. As his slide pictures below, learning is more than reading and writing – it is visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and emotional. To best equip ELLs to master their academic language, they need to have the opportunity to engage with the target language in these rich and varied ways.
Digital sketchpads can be a key ingredient to making learning more dynamic. There are so many digital sketchpads out there: Notability, Awwap.com. “Notes” app on iPad all work. My favorite is Google’s Autodraw because it has a machine learning feature that guesses what you’re drawing and actually draws it better!
My flower:
AutoDraw’s Machine Learning flower:
Exactly what I was going for. 🙂 I actually have mixed feelings about the AutoDraw feature. Not everything has to be perfect… But sometimes it’s nice to have your drawings “shine” as Cisneros says.
Here are three ways I think I’ll use sketchpadding after this session:
1. Have students sketchnote a passage from a text.
2. Have students sketchnote a portion of class discussion
3. Have students sketchnote directions, complex process to check for understanding
4. Have students sketchnote what they learned in class at the end of class.
Does anybody else use digital sketchpads in their classrooms? Would love to hear what you’ve tried out or are thinking of trying out.
