Category Archives: student centered

Stepping Back and Letting Go

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We all want to move toward a student centered environment where the students take the lead and help lead and share their knowledge with one another.

I have been looking forward to Company this spring, since for the first time in 10 years, I won’t be designing the main stage production. Instead, Zoe Heilmann, will be in charge of the Costume Design and the Costumes Crew for Pygmalion.


However as Monday taught me, Zoe and I might both be ready for her to take lead, but the other students on the crew aren’t so sure about it. I spent most of the 2 hours after school telling students to “Ask Zoe”, “Show Zoe”, “Zoe come here and answer____ question.”

Since the show is a work in progress, I plan to give updates here all semester, so check back to see how we do.

Zoe Heilmann measures Dante Williams for his costume.

Starting a Rugby Team at Carondelet Is Like Teaching a Course No One Has Heard Of

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I won’t bore you with my background with Rugby, or even with the steps I had to get enough girls out to practice to learn the game. Rather I want to share my experiences with teaching a game that no one knew how to play.

Think about it, you have in depth knowledge of something, you want others to enjoy what you’ve enjoyed, but every time you explain something you find you’re using words they’ve never heard of (lol, it sounds like my classroom). Wrapping in the tackle is extremely important, as is protecting the ball in the ruck, but these words become meaningless without an understanding of the game. So we began with some fundamental basics and built upon it.

Our first practice we had one football (Rugby not Gridiron) and we were practicing catching and passing. It was funny because the girls didn’t want to pass the ball backwards (everyone want to pass forward like in American Football) and more balls were dropped than caught. Fast forward one month and you’ll see a team of young ladies and one or two dropped balls a practice. It has become quite amazing. And so we conquered a skill that is imperative to the game, and we moved forward.

Rugby is a contact sport and so tackling is something that has to be taught. Imagining that tackling is a natural skill is foolish. It can be dangerous to not position your body correctly, so again we started with basics. Now we are at the point where we are playing games against each other and they are doing really well. These skills are important, ordering jerseys is exciting, but the biggest victory is seeing that the girls are seeing growth in the game.

After the first practice we brought the team in to a circle to give a team cry (the cheering kind) on 3. Instead of the usual, “Cougars on 3”, one of the players came up with something different that has become somewhat thematic. She called out “Potentials on 3”. I thought this was cute. They realized they didn’t know how to play the game, but they saw potential in each other. Two practices ago this changed. I expected the potentials on three again (sort of like our unofficial name), but our team captain thought differently. She recognized that the team was actually playing the game, not just having the potential to. So the new cry became, “Skills on 3”.

These labels might seem small, but this shows what the girls know. and their growth. They’ve taken ownership of the team, which is the goal. I’m there to facilitate, but I’m not the one playing, they are. They’ve done what I can’t. They’ve made themselves a team and they’re proud of the progress that they’re making.

I’m excited for our first official game to see what these girls can do, but regardless I’m proud of the small family that they’re creating. I also excited for what comes after “skills”.

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. 

Kairos Letters: What’s your philosophy?

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Image result for live the fourthI spent Sunday night cranking out Kairos letters. I was lucky that I didn’t have a lot of grading or homework, so I was able to do them. As someone who went on and lead Kairos as a student here I TOTALLY get how important receiving these notes are to our students. But as a teacher with a full plate, how do you all tackle Kairos letters:

– Do you do generic notes to everyone?
– Do you only write to the students you really connected with?
– Do you not do them because it wouldn’t be possible to give every girl a personal note?
– Do you only do them if you have time?

I NOT am writing this to see who does it “best” just rather as a new teacher who teaches upperclassmen what are the various philosophies out there? Your thoughts are super helpful.

The Messy Nature of a Classroom Discussion

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I love a good class discussion.  The best class discussions are the ones where the students take ownership of the topic.  When I design a whole class discussion, my main goal is for students to have a forum to share what they have learned, test their ideas in a public forum, and then allow their ideas to grow, shape, and change as they participate in group idea sharing.  Usually, I prepare readings and resources for students to read and process, and develop discussion questions to be prepared for discussion.  For a recent class discussion on contemporary Islam, I decided to hand the reins over to my classes.  The results were fruitful.

To complete a unit on Islam, small groups of students researched contemporary topics such as the application of Sharia Law, women in Islam, the rise of ISIS and fundamentalism in Islam, the tension between Sunni and Shia, and discrimination against Muslim groups globally.  Students worked together to find resources, shared them with each other, and analyzed them according to bias and accuracy. I have given this kind of assignment in the past.  At this point, traditionally, I would ask groups to present their findings to the class.  Instead of this, I asked these small groups to choose the best resource they found, to develop a discussion question from this resource, and then to assign this resource and discussion question to the rest of the class.  Student groups chose a wide variety of resources to share including articles from the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, Time, The Pew Research Forum, and The Economist.  Videos were also assigned from a variety of resources like Vox, Ben Shapiro, Now this World, etc.  I did not limit them in terms of biased resources, asking that they acknowledge the bias presented. 

Overall, I felt that the discussion questions that students generated were interesting and complex. Here are a few sample questions:

  • Does political climate affect the way that groups of people, specifically Muslims, are treated and thought of in a country?
  • Why do you think that certain followers of Islam practice fundamentalism and participate in terrorist organizations, while so many other followers of the faith manage to follow it in peace?
  • Based on the empowering Qur’an verses, do you think that Islam is inherently sexist?
  • Do you think a secular state, such as the law of Western societies, is more beneficial to society as a whole as opposed to Sharia? Why?
To prepare for the discussion, students read the articles, viewed the videos, and prepared their thoughts on all the possible discussion questions created by their peers.  
On the day of the discussion, students took control, offering their ideas, and calling on each other.  I interjected from time to time to clarify a comment, move the discussion, or ask a follow up question.  As students discussed, I took notes on student participation and what was said.
Each class experienced a different discussion that expressed the chemistry and interests of each class.  
I felt that the discussions went well, students learned more about contemporary Islam, and were able to develop their own points of view.  On the summative quiz, I included a short answer question that asked students to talk about what they learned from the discussion and connections that they made.  Student responses did show that they liked hearing what others had to say, and that their knowledge and opinions did grow and change as a result of this activity.    I have included pictures of some student comments below.

Overall, I feel like giving my students more agency in the process of developing the discussion prep allowed for students to be more engaged in the process.  My learning goal that students develop and test their own thoughts and opinions in the public forum did happen, as most students offered a  nuanced position on their quiz, referring to the conversation (and sometimes outside research).
I want to play more with student centered research and class discussion next year.