Category Archives: Michael Schooler

My Furniture Paradigm Shift

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On my last day with desks, I felt a bit apprehensive. Maybe even a bit nostalgic. It has been my ritual for years to walk into my classroom in the morning, put my bag down, and straighten the rows of desks. It gives me a sense of order, a good starting point for the day. But when I saw the maintenance guys that Friday afternoon sizing up the job of desk removal from my classroom, I wondered if maybe I had signed on for something I wasn’t really ready for.

 
In my 19 years of teaching, I have always had desks in rows, and I have gotten pretty good at standing in front of my students and getting them to direct their attention to me. I have cultivated the skill of reading a crowd of teenagers, getting a little louder and more serious if they get a bit squirrely, playing the fool if I need their attention, snapping students back into the lesson if they are turned around or sneaking Instagram. When I’m on, I’m an orchestra conductor, and I can get all the eyes in desk rows to stay on me and whatever I have projected on the board. I’ve even had moments, after finishing an especially riveting performance, where I have wondered whether I shouldn’t try to find a stand-up comedy troupe, or try out for a small role in a play at the Lesher. 
The class discussion has been my jam for years, and there have been plenty of days when I left school in the afternoon with my head held high, congratulating myself for the lively discussions I facilitated. Those upright arms are like a forest of engagement, and it’s thrilling to know this thing I created is rocking, like learning is happening. And for those 12 to 15 students, some learning has probably happened. But if I’m looking at the entire picture, that means there were 15 to 20 for whom I have no idea what was happening. At Carondelet, many of our students have cultivated a quiet learning posture that makes them look brightly engaged on the outside, but who knows what is going through their minds. I know I have sat through plenty of PD presentations (and let’s be honest, some faculty meetings too) maintaining an outward appearance of engagement while my mind is surfing from the things I need to get done that afternoon to my son’s little league game to the trails I plan to run on my weekend long run to the type of beer I like best at Calicraft. And I know I can dive even deeper if there is absolutely no threat that I will be called on.

So on the first day with new furniture, I wondered how much it would impact my teaching habits. Kevin came into my classroom in the morning, bursting with excitement. One of the first students who walked into the room said she felt like she worked at Google, and I told her there was not a more perfect comment she could have made in front of Mr. Cushing. As the rest of the students came in throughout the day, I told them that there would be no seating chart, and I watched to see which spaces each one gravitated towards. They tried out the wheels on the chairs by rolling around the room, they slouched on the couch (Kevin did this too) and they spun. They went on dizzy spinning sprees, the dancers and ice skaters knowing how to spot the front of the room to keep from getting nauseous. They were genuinely excited, but I left school that day wondering what exactly it was that I was missing.
In the next few days I studied my students’ interactions with the furniture surreptitiously, and I also noticed my own habits. The way I configured the tables and chairs has really taken away the front of the classroom. The only reason I stand where I do is because that is the direction the projector is aimed. I also noticed that I have a clingy attachment to my podium. I found myself drifting towards the podium – which is now shoved in a nook next to some cupboards – reaching out for it when I talked, propping my arm on top of it awkwardly. When I told Kevin about this, he pointed out that my podium is my stage, and I realized he is right.
Overall I really didn’t expect new furniture to affect my thinking about teaching in such impactful ways, and some of the realizations I’ve come to in the past few weeks have been unexpected. In an effort to be brief (which is a challenge for me), I’ve narrowed my experiences with the new furniture to these four takeaways:
1.    That boy who used to drive me crazy with his constant fidgeting and tapping actually needs to fidget and tap to focus. If fact it seems pretty counterintuitive that engagement (with a text, with writing, with a lecture) would happen best while sitting still and silently. Yesterday I asked a student why she always trades out the stationary high top chair for one with wheels, and she said that she pays more attention when she has the freedom to move around a bit. 
2.    This is actually a continuation of my first point, but learning is often noisy and chaotic. It has been a little bit jarring for me to realize this, but when students are interacting with one another, I can hear their ideas, which allows for more teachable moments where I can confirm, challenge, redirect, or expand. This reminds me that just because students are sitting silently with their phones put away staring at a text or assignment does not mean they are fully engaged. This has also transformed my thinking about the noise in the inner court during classes – there is a melody to it now.
3.    There is a big difference between group work and teaming. Students often perceive group work as the break – the fun or creative assignment that mixes up the minutia. I used to think of it in the same way. But now, with all the spinning and rolling and fidgeting, I have been very intentional to create a learning environment in which the majority of my class activities are conducted within team interactions. When teaming is leveraged effectively, students can learn much better from their classmates than I could ever hope to accomplish in big class discussions. It is a bit of a cultural shift for them to differentiate between groups and teams, and I need to be explicit about my expected outcomes for each project and about teaming dynamics. This is the puzzle this year that is constantly buzzing around my head, and I’m grateful to have Sarah and Rachel from Teaming by Design to advise.
4.    My presence is kind of diminished in the class. This chops away at the ego a bit because I have definitely cultivated my teaching persona over the years. But I can also acknowledge that this persona has been a bit of a crutch for me at times, and has covered up some of my weaknesses as a teacher. Even if I do feel like a bit of a ghost now, I am still able to develop rapport with my students, and enough of them still come bug me throughout the day that I think they still like me well enough.

If anyone wants to continue the conversation on furniture or the intersection between teaming and furniture, let me know. Also if you want to schedule a classroom swap one day to try out the furniture, I’m open to it. I’m realizing that timed writes do not work as well on tables so Tiz and I are trading spaces today so that my A.P. students can use desks. I think that having a variety of learning spaces for different types of activities would be ideal, but I’ll put that idea in the cue for a different blog.

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. 

Do I Teach Books or Students?

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I don’t remember reading books in high school.  While I am confident that my eyes did scan most
every word and page of the assigned novels, the only things I remember are a
handful of titles, a vague sense of kinship with Holden Caulfield and something
about Shylock’s humanity.  Granted at 42
years old, most high school memories are increasingly blurry, but I do vividly
remember reading books on my own in college. 
In high school though, I read books from afar, knowing that my brilliant
English teacher, Mr. Tilson, would eventually tell me everything that was really important about the book.
Mr. Tilson was probably the most erudite person I knew in
Yucca Valley.  He brought classical music
into my Honors English classes and got excited about Byron and Keats.  He was also personable and fun – I remember
the balled up sock he used to chuck at chatty students.  While I appreciated the cultural
sophistication that Mr. Tilson introduced, books became a mystery that I only
had superficial interactions with.  Mr.
Tilson would point out symbols, allusions and themes that had blown right past
me, and most of what I learned about books was that they proved my own
ignorance (which wasn’t a terrible lesson). 
I became proficient at repeating Mr. Tilson’s ideas back to him in
essays, and entered college a fairly weak reader and writer.
Years later, after a circuitous path led me to the front of
my own high school English class,
Mr. Tilson’s teaching approach became the primary model for
my own teaching.  I started an A.P.
Literature class at St. Elizabeth, and suddenly I got to be that guy, that
genius magician who could show my students what they had not seen.  Being in this position was great for the ego,
which is admittedly important for a new teacher. But it was also elitist; the
whole paradigm was elitist, something I might not have seen if it had not been
for the racial disparity in my classes. 
I could not ignore the fact that I was the white expert, telling my
non-white students the proper way to think about things.  After reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed and plenty of Noam Chomsky, I began to
rethink this central interaction in my classes.

As I began to dismantle my approach to teaching books, I
tried to place my students’ engagement with the text at the forefront.  I wanted to hear what they thought about
books, even if their ideas fell short of traditional literary analysis.  I tried to strike a balance between stoking
enthusiasm and providing a framework for academic understanding.  I began searching for entry points into books
that my students could access.  My
summative assessments for book units changed too – instead of asking for essays
that explained the symbolism of the cliff in The Catcher in the Rye, I had my students write first person
fictional accounts of a Holden Caulfield-like character in East Oakland;
instead of asking about the colors in The
Great Gatsby, I created projects that asked my students to make cultural comparisons
between the 1920s and the 2000s.
In creating non-traditional essay prompts and projects, I sometimes
wonder if I am somehow short-changing my students.  Nobody ever granted me permission for veering
off on my own, and I often hear friends talk about how their kids’ high school English
teachers do not seem to assign traditional writing assignments any more.  But the more I think about it, the more I
have come to realize that the traditional high school literary analysis essay
is dying fast, and for good reason.  A
take home essay on the symbolism of the colors in The Great Gatsby is simply a book report given the vast online resources
available to our students.  As are many
other essay prompts that high school students receive in their English classes.  I think it is beneficial for all teachers to
Google their own essay prompts and see what comes up.  If you’ve ever received an essay that seemed
like a patchwork of undeveloped ideas that is lacking an any cohesive voice,
this might be the reason.  Literary
analysis essays often become low-level thinking activities, and the process
that many students take to compose their work can actually make them less
confident in the expression of their own ideas.
Many English teachers that I know use the word Sparknotes as
a pejorative (although Shmoop seems to be taking over these days).  For a long time, the existence of these
websites offended me, particularly the idea that literature could be diluted
into easily digestible plot summary, character overviews, and lists of
applicable literary techniques.  In my
view, the whole purpose of reading books is to spend hours engrossed in the perspective
of another human being, to become immersed in a different worldview and gain
insights that could not otherwise be gained. 
Or to paraphrase Jeff Sutton, to gain a better understanding of the
world, and a better understanding of ourselves and our own place in that
world.  Books are not vessels of
information, but a quick scan of a Sparknote page might lead you to believe
otherwise. 
But I wonder if this the existence of internet resources
like Sparknotes is such a bad thing.  For
a struggling reader, or for a student who does not understand the context of a
particular chapter, this wealth of information can potentially supplement their experience
reading books.  They are probably getting
a better experience than simply struggling (or quitting) and waiting for the teacher
to illuminate what they read.  Best case
scenario, they are still reading authentically and looking things up that they
don’t understand.  Worst case scenario,
they just read the essential supplemental information and simply extract
information from books.  Either way, this
is the world that we live in, and I have come to accept that to fight against
it is to stand on the beach with my hands up trying to stop a wave from reaching
the shore.
I also have to ask myself, don’t Sparknotes do what Mr. Tilson
used to do, what I used to (and sometimes still) do?  Part of my disdain towards Sparknotes and
Shmoop might be that they get to be the expert, and it becomes a little less
clear what the English teacher’s job is. 
I have been reading my assigned books on the Kindle this year, and it
amazes me how much the supplemental material can alter my interaction with the
text.  When I ask my students to find
quotes about Myrtle Wilson, they can search her name and find them instantaneously.  I find myself having to quiet that gut
reaction that this is somehow cheating. 
Maybe it’s just a more efficient way to do what I asked them.  These tools exist and are very accessible,
and acknowledging their existence forces me to reassess my learning objectives
and assessments.  I still want my
students to read books for the same reasons I always have, and both eBooks and
the internet can ideally enhance that experience.  It just requires a conscious shift in
approach. 

Even though students’ interactions with books is
fundamentally changing, I still love teaching literature.  More than ever I need to create high
engagement opportunities for my students to interact with books.  We should still hold students accountable for
completing the assigned reading, but we have to be mindful of how we
assess.  Multiple choice reading quizzes seem
easy to cheat.  Asking students to write
about a passage from the reading that includes details and gives context seems
more authentic.  I also use unit evaluations to ask my students how much of the book they read, and if they did not read it
to give a reason why.  Even though I
believe the take home literary analysis essay is near death, elements of it can
be integrated into other assessments so that those same core skills are being
built.  I am also heartened that the
cousins of the literary analysis, namely the rhetorical analysis and the
argumentative essay seem to be thriving. 
When we focus on reading and writing as being experiential, there are
many possible ways to build upon the old model. 
The book never belonged at the center of the English class anyway, and
student learning should always be the primary focus.

Blended Thoughts, September

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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.

Writing for an Authentic Audience

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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.