I want to talk about my junior final. Tiz, Jeff and I just concluded a short, three-week unit to finish up the semester. We wanted to end the year with an SEL based unit, so we exposed students to literature loosely based on the theme of self-love. Over the course of the last couple of weeks, students read and analyzed various poems and pieces of literature. They practiced annotating and discussing how these types of shorter works are created, so there was heavy emphasis on writer’s craft/literary devices during class lessons.
I’m really happy with the writing they produced for the final, and I think that one reason the writing is decent is because of the process they were required to work through. Over the course of the last three weeks, students practiced this process several times. That helped. On the day of the final, students were introduced to two brand-new pieces of literature. Together we read through them; they had pencil in hand. Then, students had to quickly choose which piece of literature they were going to work through for their final writing piece. Once students chose which text they liked, they had about 6 minutes to annotate it by themselves. After that, each student had to find a peer, who chose the same piece of literature, and they discussed each other’s annotations/ideas. I think this is such a valuable step in the process; Tiz and I discussed how our best ideas often come from talking it out. After their talking time, they wrote. Once all the prewriting steps were completed, students had about an hour to write for the final.
I’m now grading these writing pieces, and they’re not bad. Students are talking about the tone of literature and how that tone was created. I’ve found that students were mostly successful in articulating these in a clear and concise fashion. I’m happy. Really, I feel like I won just getting 16/17 year olds to write for an hour, not on SnapChat.
Many of you are aware that I’ve been trying to follow 180 Days by Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle. Recently, I attended a day-long workshop by the pair, and they ended with the reminder that we can’t adopt their whole practice at once, but if we can try to get 5% better each year, that will be progress.
Good for me to hear, because at times this year, I felt the authors would be disappointed in me if they knew I had let some things drop. I still have to work against a tendency to see where my practices fell short of the gold standard in 180 Days.
Which prompted me to go back to my notes from last summer. I had jotted down a page of my favorite ideas from the book, the ones I would most want to adopt:
Quickwrites with mentor texts
Write in front of the students
10-minute reading time at the beginning of class
Have students write more volume but I grade less
Try using criteria instead of rubrics
Get students talking every day
Choice in research
Portfolio grade at the end
Of those eight favorites, I incorporated seven into my teaching practice this year. Woo hoo! Some of the daily activities such as quickwrites and reading didn’t happen every day, but an overall tone was established in my classroom that you are a reader and writer. At the moment, I have stacks of student notebooks on my desk. The volume of their writing makes me so proud of my students. I rarely collected notebooks and gave out nominal points for them. Yet even yesterday, they were writing book reviews and ranking all the books they’d read this year from easiest to hardest.
So yes, more volume and less grading on my part. I also tried out all sorts of single-point rubrics, criteria lists, and other ways to assess, and I tried out methods to reduce my grading time and to get them writing more. (Most recently, students wrote four drafts for a single essay and instead of grading each draft, I graded their overall process + metacognitive comments. More volume, less grading!)
I didn’t get to the portfolio at the end, and I was wisely advised to hold off on that. But I did use a new system of organizing student work in shared Google folders so that by the end of the year, they essentially did have a portfolio. They spent a couple days this week looking back over all their work to reflect on how far they’d come. Next year, I will have a better idea of how to lay the groundwork for a true portfolio project.
The good news is that I have a ton of experience to build on, plus a stack of teacher books to delve into, so that I can refine these wins and improve for next year. I have to fight my perfectionism in order to type this final line: I am proud of my progress.
Once or twice a year the Social Studies Department gets together for some professional development to help us teach our students to think like professional historians.
Background: about three years ago the Social Studies Department shifted the focus to a more skills-based curriculum. Writing and using discipline-specific skills are now emphasized as opposed to old-school rote memorization of names, dates, and events. The cognitive skills we want our students to master include cause and effect, change and continuity over time, etc., and are included in our department writing rubrics. If students effectively practice these historical thinking skills, they will learn all the necessary content in a more meaningful way while becoming coherent thinkers and stronger writers.
What does this sort of thinking actually look like? How do we know our students are demonstrating these cognitive skills in a fluent and meaningful way? How can we hold each other accountable to properly teach these skills?
Here is what we do: once every semester (or two) the Social Studies Department does the following PD:
One teacher is selected in advance to bring 3 previously graded student essays to our department meeting. The teacher pulls one high scored essay, one medium, one low, and then scrambles the order. Each essay was scored by the teacher as per our department writing rubric.
We blind-score the essays.
Each teacher shares out while the rubric is projected on the LCD projector. Here is what the rubric looks like at the end of the process.
The benefits of doing this are:
Our grading is calibrated so our students get a fair grade regardless of which teacher they have.
The process facilitates deep and enriching discussion in our department meeting. Some of us will disagree on one particular category, or we might comment on a passage in one of the essays. The rubric guides our discussion of student work. By the end of the meeting, we have gained more clarity on how we want our students to think about historical events and how to plan future units accordingly.
In general, this is the same methodology used by the College Board to train AP Readers to score AP exams. However, in our department meetings, we take it a step further with in-depth discussions of student work and our subsequent changes in the units we teach. Ask some of our history teachers what they think about this process and the value it brings to their instructional planning. You may want to try this as well…
I want
students to write more, but I want to grade less. It just so happens I found an
avenue to make this happen.
For five
weeks in a row, I’ve had my sophomores spend the first half of block writing
about a selected passage from Jane Eyre.
During the second half of block, they use a single-point rubric to peer edit in
a round-robin fashion.
After that,
each student decides which essay she would want to turn in for a grade. I
collect the “keepers” but I don’t grade them. The next week, after another
timed write and round of peer editing, I pass the keepers back out. Once again,
students choose between the essay they wrote today and the keeper from last
week. I collect the keepers again, and so on. It reminds me of being at the eye
doctor: “Which one is better? 1 or 2? Better here … or here?”
Today is
the last week, and at the end of the day, I will have a stack of keepers to
grade. They will have written five in-class essays and I only have to grade
one.
Here are some
of the benefits:
Students do not receive a letter
grade until the final one, so they have to look beyond “the bottom line” and
actually think about how they are doing
Students engage regularly with
the rubric to better understand how to write well
Students learn to rely on their
peers for feedback instead of seeing the teacher as the only expert in the room
Students rely on their instincts
and self-evaluative skills—they take ownership of their writing
Each week is another opportunity
to out-do the last keeper, so students are motivated to do their best each time
(you should see them scribbling away!)
If a student misses class or has
a bad day, she knows she will have four other opportunities, so it takes the
stress level down
In-class, handwritten writing reduces
cheating
It’s great for formative assessment:
I can quickly read through the stack of keepers and intervene individually for
comprehension gaps or writing skill gaps
Students are compelled to
consider key passages from Jane Eyre
that they may have glossed over in their reading
Students have choice in which of
their essays receives a grade
Students practice a type of
passage study they will see on the SAT and AP tests
Increased writing volume and frequency
Students receive instant feedback
on the same day from their peers
Students get to see how 2-3 other
students approached the same passage and prompt
Peer editing happens while the
writing itself is fresh in their minds
Students talk to each other about
their approaches while they do their round-robin peer editing
I’m so
excited about how well this works and hope to adapt it going forward.
My last blog
outlined some of my past struggles with finding enough time to inspire a joy of
reading and to provide relevant, timely feedback on writing—as well to get
students to do more of both. Now I would like to share some of the processes I
adopted from the book 180 Days: Two
Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents by Kelly Gallagher
and Penny Kittle (Heinemann).
The authors suggest setting the tone
on day one that we are a community of readers and writers.A daily routine is thus put into place right
from the start. The routine consists of regular reading time and writing time,
in addition to time for a passage study from a model text. Today’s blog will be
about setting the tone that “we are writers in this class.”
On the first day, every student
received a composition book. This is their judgment-free place to craft their
writing. Ideally, every day (but in reality, about twice a week), we do a
quickwrite in this notebook. We write about a short excerpt from a book, or a
poem, or a prompt that gets us thinking. First day of school, we wrote about
what empathy means because I wanted to establish empathy as an overachieving theme
for the year. Monday, we wrote “two-sentence horror stories” to get in the Halloween
spirit. A key feature of this method is that the teacher writes in front of her
students. New for me this year: I consistently put my own notebook under the
document camera and project my process. We share our first drafts in small
groups and whole class. Frequently, I model how I might revise my first draft
and then we go back to our notebook to try a revision move in a different color.
We share our revisions.
Over one quarter into the school
year, and I feel good about the reading and writing tone that was set on the
first week of school. My students are familiar with the routine and it gives me
pleasure to see them using their notebooks. I’ve made it clear that writing is
not perfect the first time, and that it is normal and desirable to revise. I
think modeling my own vulnerability helps. I regularly reiterate that writing
in a community benefits us because of the feedback we receive from our peers. (And
yes, I welcome student feedback on my own writing—more on that in a future blog
post.)
As a bonus, I have felt more
connected to myself as a writer from being forced to participate. I love the
crinkly pages of my notebook with poems and passages glued in and annotated. I
love the sketches and scribbles and colorful revision marks. I love getting in
touch with my creative side on a regular basis. I’m happy when I write.
I love that my students this year
are writing so much more than they did last year, and they write without
expecting a grade. They accept the exercise because my expectation was set on
the very first day.
On Back to School Night, a
repeat-mom approached me to comment, “You’ve changed, haven’t you? It seems
completely different … and she is responding.” These were encouraging words, and
despite many challenges in living up to the standards in 180 Days, I keep trying.On
my next post, I will share about another new practice for me: regular
one-on-one reading and writing conferences.
Toward the end of last year, I was
missing some of the thoughtfulness that my credentialing program had infused
into my teaching. I craved a more intentional approach and some backwards
planning. Not only that, I didn’t get a sense that my students were engaged in
reading and writing as much as I’d hoped. I think English teachers in general try
to solve the problem of students who “fake read.” (It hurts when students don’t
LOVE books the way we do!) English teachers also regularly reevaluate how to
teach writing effectively.
Time is a factor. Most teachers
would agree that students simply need to read more and write more, but that we don’t have unlimited time to
read in class or to collect and grade a constant flow of material if we want to
give meaningful feedback. We also find
that once there is a letter grade on an essay, written feedback is not as relevant
to the student; therefore, it is not as effective. Ideally, students should
receive feedback on multiple drafts before they receive a final grade. (Some educators
argue that the process ought to count for part of the grade because isn’t
process more important than product?)
I used to be an editor, and I came
to grading essays with an editor’s mindset. I thought it was my duty to circle
every single mistake. Of course, now I know how demoralizing it can be for a
student to work hard on articulating her ideas, only to have them thrown back
at her, all torn apart. But with each year of teaching experience, I’ve noticed
that I feel far more energized and effective when I meet with students on an
individual level. I’ve also noticed that the most effective time to meet with
them is not when they are “finished” (can you ever be finished with an essay
you’ve had less than two weeks to write?).
Rather, if I conference when their
ideas are in development, I can help them find their passion on the topic. And,
when they feel strongly about their thesis, they will take more care with their
craft. A little further along into the drafting phase, if I have time to meet
with students again, I can convey customized grammar lessons, pass on
compliments, encourage engagement, and have a conversation about writing. I think it’s a more positive experience all around.
Last year I felt stuck in a loop of
collecting essays, spending inordinate amounts of time marking them up, and
dreading the next stack of hollow arguments, especially when errors were
repeated. I tried grading on Turnitin.com to see if I could go faster and offer
more pointed feedback. I tried various rubrics and checklists. I tried asking
students to process my feedback and reflect on it. I tried giving them revision
opportunities. Still, I found myself crunched and wishing that the whole thing
seemed less chore-like (for both me and my students). Even more critically, I
found students wanted me to do the thinking for them: All they had to do was
implement my edits and receive a better grade.
Then, I saw an advertisement for a
new book. It’s called 180 Days: Two
Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents by Kelly Gallagher
and Penny Kittle(Heinemann). The
book is part creed (the authors make a case for ten “we believe” statements
about teaching and learning), part detailed description of how they structure
their year around those core beliefs. The authors’ philosophy resonated with me,
and its practical, organized approach to planning curriculum with the purpose
of creating engaged readers and writers, spoke to my angst and need for
direction.
I read it—and annotated it!—over the
summer, and what resulted was a major overhaul to several of my approaches. I plan
to blog about my changed approach as the school year progresses, both my successes
and challenges. Stay tuned.
Inspired by our own faculty blog and wanting to try something new with my unit on Jane Eyre this year, I decided to have me students blog about Charlotte Bronte’s novel as they read it. With support and guidance from Christina Ditzel, my sophomore students launched their own “Jane Eyre” blogs last semester.
My hope was that their blogs – shared with a group of three other students – would be a way for them to engage with the challenging book and make personal connections to the story. I also saw the blog as a substitute to the traditional reading quiz, which can historically be experienced and perceived by students as a stress-inducing “game” to win.
The blogs were successful in many ways. They gave students a platform and audience for their writing, they encouraged students to be reflective and by nature forced students to process what they read, they allowed students to be creative, and they equipped students with some useful digital media skills.
Even though, unfortunately, these blogs were still viewed by some as a chore, most were grateful for the opportunity to show their understanding of the book in their own words and in a new way. They also ultimately found the blogs less stressful than traditional reading quizzes. I will definitely be having by students blog more in the future.
As we move toward a more innovative and progressive curriculum, I feel called to continue to closely look at all of my assessments. Yes, there will always be a place in the classroom for quick, formative, low-stakes assessments. But if they require any significant amount of time, it seems to me that they must be more than just “assessments;” they should be treated as rich learning experiences in and of themselves. Journeys of knowledge, not just products of knowledge. My assessments still need a lot of work.
I also feel called to deepen my engagement with students on their learning journeys. Too often I pay them the longest visit only once they’ve reached the final destination of submitting their work.
The other day, the English education leader Carol Jago tweeted: “The Latin root for assessment is assidere, to sit beside. It’s the best seat in the house for any teacher.” I know that my sophomore bloggers, especially my reluctant and struggling writers, might have had better learning experiences had I made more time to sit beside them.
….
If you want to learn more about my pedagogical rationale and the expectations I established for their writing, you can read about it here in a piece I wrote for the February issue of California English.
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.
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.
