“Ditch That Homework”

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Homework
Ditch That Homework. 

 How do we define “homework”? Is it worksheets, and “busy work” that keeps students chained to the material even while they’re trying to watch The Bachelor at home? Is it a masterfully designed project that will stimulate students to delve into their passions, and exploit their creativity to potentially change the future of the world? Is it something in between? Is it necessary, unnecessary? Are we doing a disservice to our students if we assign homework? How about if we don’t?










There are a few questions that I have learned to ask myself before I assign homework for a lesson:
  • “Does it increase a student’s love of learning?
  • Does it significantly increase learning?
  • Does it stimulate students’ interest in the subject and make them want to delve deeper?
  • Are students able to complete the assignment without help?
  • Is it differentiated for ability or interest?
  • If the students didn’t have to do it, would they want to do it anyway?
  • Is it fair to all students, especially those from poorer families and less-educated households?
  • Does it avoid causing fights, parent/child division, and a lack of harmony in the home?

If you answer ‘no’ to these questions, maybe it’s time to ditch that homework and try something else instead” (Miller xvii).
I recommend the book Ditch That Homework by Matt Miller and Alice Keeler. They’ve also written Ditch That Textbook, which is also a thought-provoking read.
After reading this book (a few times, it’s a quick read), I have definitely come to the conclusion that worksheets and “busy” work are not effective for my class. With worksheets, many students either forget to do the assignment, they didn’t understand it, or simply weren’t motivated to do it (how can they be, The Bachelor???) so they copy their peer’s worksheet to get credit. Unless there is a ridiculously “off” answer, I don’t really have much of a way of knowing whether the student understood the material, or if the assignment is plagiarized. This assignment serves no purpose for me. I’ll admit, I assigned worksheets in the past. I KNOW, I KNOW, MEA CULPA.

I’m not judging anybody who assigns worksheets, they just don’t work for me anymore. I have switched to assigning other types of homework. Sometimes, I assign students to write sentences using the structure that we learned in class. This is not an extremely challenging assignment and most students can get it done in under 10 minutes. It reinforces the material so they at least had a chance to practice it the night before so we can work on it in class again. It’s a memory refresher and it’s a gauge to see if students can fly solo on the material that was taught in class. They can also get creative with sentences, and they can be funny too.

Other nights, I assign weekly video diaries where students are given a prompt and they have to spontaneously respond in spoken Spanish in a 1-5 minute video. Initially, students dread this assignment however, as time goes by, students become more comfortable with speaking and I get a glimpse into their thoughts, their life, sometimes their families, and it’s a different way to interact with students that isn’t just the classroom. The quiet students in class have a way to express themselves and practice their Spanish in a more comfortable environment.
I also assign video tutorials on Schoology, where students watch a video explaining a grammar or cultural lesson, and they take notes or write down any questions they have so that we can review it the next day in class. Students don’t mind watching the videos, they are usually pretty short and palatable. They also have the option to not watch the video if they feel they understand the material, or if they don’t have access to the internet (lol, yeah right).
I’ve also decided that if the students can show mastery in the classroom, then the homework isn’t as necessary. I implemented a “negotiation” that I made with my students in class. I have a cylinder full of 100 colored rocks per class. Each class has a different set of rocks. Historically, I have struggled with students being willing to actually speak in SPANISH in class. I ask a question and students ask “en inglés?” and I say “no, en español” and they become indignant and say “ugh. Nevermind”. Then students would proceed to speak in English, with no consequence. This is tragic. And so began the PIEDRAS (rocks). 
SOOOOO I cut them a deal. Every time I heard English spoken in class, students would lose 10 rocks out of the 100. If they were left with 30 rocks by the end of the week, (which means as a class they spoke 7 times in English) they wouldn’t receive homework over the weekend. Students were very eager, and I have to say, I haven’t assigned homework over the weekend in over 2 months. I haven’t even come close. Students are holding one another accountable and demanding that they speak in Spanish. One student asked “en inglés?” and I said “tienes que sacrificar 10 piedras” (you have to sacrifice 10 rocks) and sometimes they take the sacrifice, but most of the time, they struggle through the Spanish because they don’t want to lose rocks. These students are practicing the language so much in class, that I don’t find the need to assign practice assignments for homework. It’s become ingrained in their brains because they are using the language, which is significantly more effective than simply writing it.
These are just some things that I have taken away from reading this book. It’s a great read, and I recommend it to anyone who has struggled with homework. I have a copy of both books if you would like to borrow.

Getting to the Point: One Teacher’s Journey to Embrace the Single Point Rubric (Don’t Like Long Posts? Just Read the Memes!)

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To say I am a fan of rubrics would be an understatement. I am a rubric queen. I have rubrics for everything: discussion skills, text annotations, graphic organizers, visual rhetoric, and essays in a variety of genres. I am a little obsessed with rubrics because as I wade through the turbulent waters of planning a new unit or course, they help me tune out the sirens call of everything I would love to teach and help me focus on the criteria for success for my summative assessments. We only have so many weeks, days, and hours with our students each year, and I want to make every one of them purposeful to help them grow as people, readers, and writers. So, yeah, rubric writing: bring it on.
Don’t get me wrong, though. Writing rubrics (unless we are collaboratively writing about how to build a snowman) is not fun. But the process is so worth it. Writing or revising a rubric requires me to examine standards and models, and to identify a continuum of learning that helps me identify (and therefore proactively address) common misconceptions and challenges students may have for each sub-skill. And they provide concrete data points for me to measure and communicate students’ progress. I even used to refuse to enter a holistic grade for students’ essays, preferring instead to enter each rubric row skill individually so they could really see grades as a reflection of their strengths and areas to grow, and so I could use my gradebook to track the effectiveness of my teaching throughout the year.
Because this tool has been so useful to me in my planning and assessment, for years I have tried to make it useful to students as well. I invest time in breaking down each column and row of the rubrics with students, having students score models with the rubrics, having students score each other with the rubrics. It was my hope that having a shared language around common pitfalls that define weaker assignments and a shared language around how to exceed the standard would lead to increased student success. And yet, most students struggle to accurately self-assess or peer-assess using these rubrics, and the language of the rubric is still stubbornly elusive in their comments on each other’s essays.
Are they just getting circle happy and not really reading the rubric? Despite all the work with the rubrics, are they still not internalizing what this criteria means? C’mon people.  Just read it, read the essay, and circle appropriately. It sometimes felt like I was beating my head against the proverbial wall.
But since I focused my professional development goals around innovating to improve the quality of student writing by enhancing their ability to give each other accurate and supportive feedback, I began to reconsider. Over the summer I had read about single point rubrics in Gallagher and Kittle’s 180 Days, and decided they were a hard pass for me. They seemed antithetical to my practice for all the reasons listed above. However, what matters most isn’t what works for me: it’s what works for students. After hearing Tiz talk about doing single point rubrics with her classes and seeing her models, reading about them on a blog she recommended (The Cult of Pedagogy), and seeing a stray copy of a single point rubric Jenny was using with one of her classes, I decided to venture into new territory and try it out with both my English 2 and AP Lang students. I chose the simplest variation with one column of criteria flanked by empty space for students to comment on glows and grows.
And I’m so glad I did. While I loved the specificity of the analytical rubric, that all means nothing if student’s don’t actually read it, struggle to internalize it, or if their developing brains just can’t process it in all of its glorious complexity. What the single point lacks in specificity, it makes up for with giving students more room to process and communicate their thinking. Just giving the criteria for meeting the standard and leaving room for them to explain glows and grows allows me to see their developing understanding better (yay, more data!), and actually pushes them to internalize the criteria more than just circling a rubric row. They wrote SO MUCH feedback. Most of the students I informally surveyed after the pilot gave rave reviews, saying that they strongly preferred the single point rubric because they could really focus on what they were looking for in their partner’s draft, and they felt less socially awkward because there was room for glows and grows for each indicator so they didn’t feel like they were being mean.
So cheers to simplicity. They said they liked a rubric and were engaged in giving each other meaningful feedback! So much yay! We still have work to do. We will practice evaluating models with the single point to develop a stronger understanding of what good glow and grow feedback looks and sounds like, and continue to assess whether their feedback is aligned with mine (or the College Board or ACT or SAT standards), but for now I consider this a huge win. I want to experiment with having them rank without my explicit criteria and then task them with explaining their rationale. I am also curious to see if they can identify trends in their own comments that can define each level in a way that makes sense to them (and would approximate my detailed rubrics in student friendly language). I’m sure I will try out many variations, but from here on out I will keep the criteria as simple as possible.
Through innovation, I unlearned a key part of my practice. I will still always create my rubrics behind the scenes, but I am committed to learning from my students about what works best for them and taking action to meet them where they are.

The Quest for an Answer

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Since I feel like I have tried everything to get rid of my writer’s block, I thought that writing about my writer’s block might make me feel better. I have already warned everyone that my writing skills are not nearly as sharp as my speaking skills, so if you choose to read this, you’ve made your bed. Let’s see how this edited stream of consciousness goes.
One of my professional goals is to “Develop student leadership curriculum and programming that reinforces the ISOs of women of Heart, Faith, Courage, and Excellence.”

Since I arrived in 2017, I have tweaked the structure of our ASB (Associated Student Body) Council each year in an effort to accomplish my goal and to find the answer to the following question: how can we elevate student leadership from being about start to finish event planning to being about larger scale initiatives where events are a byproduct of long-term programs? A long and difficult question that brings up many issues.
When I started ASB consisted of 36 students. In the 2018-2019 school year, that number went down to around 30. Now, we have 24. I started shrinking the program because I remember in my first year that about two thirds of the girls said their primary role on ASB was to be “a helper”, and did not view themselves as leaders.  I thought that having less girls would strengthen each girl’s individual role, would reduce an individual’s ability to hide from responsibility, and that everyone would rise to each occasion due to scarcity of woman power. 
I have learned from sharing my experiences with faculty members that some of the experiences I have had are similar to those of classroom teachers. I learned that just because you make hiding more difficult, that means that some students will learn how to do it even better. I learned that when students are not given a “study guide” to planning an event that many students become paralyzed to not have the solution spoon fed to them. I learned that some students are so dedicated to looking good on their college apps that they will wake up before 6am to arrive to a class at 7:05am just to check a box.
And I learned that those girls that called themselves helpers were the closest people to actually being leaders on the council. They led by example by always asking if anyone needed help, or just went ahead and did things without being told because they knew they had to get done. 
There seems to be a communally held opinion that “a certain type of girl” wants to join student leadership. The stereotype of the girly-girl who thinks she is better than her peers, is a high achiever, and is an extreme extravert prevails when I talk to anyone about student leadership, adult and student alike. I have a student who constantly helps me with tasks who is not part of ASB, but refuses to join because of the perception of those who are on student leadership. 
I’ll admit, there are plenty of that stereotype present on my council this year, but I also have the shyest most introverted students, as well as ambiverts, artists, and self deprecating stand-up comedians. But my stereotypical students definitely make up the majority. I was, and still am, parts of that stereotype. I see myself in so many of the students, that I make sure that other people interview students to be on student leadership to make sure my own bias does not come through. But that is another part of the issue: who wants to be a leader.
I feel like each time I have made changes, a few of them have been great, and a few of them need to be refined. 
  • I went from having interviews for appointed positions to interviews for everyone. 
  • I went from three girls interviewing at a time to each girl getting her own time. 
  • I established a group interview where girls are challenged and assessed by how well they work with others. 
  • I allowed for students that have been previously interviewed to submit a video interview.
  • I have created Google Form upon Google Form to not only make the application process easier for students, but for faculty recommenders as well. 
  • I went from trying to figure out the changes by myself, to asking fellow Activities Directors and students what they felt were the best answers to our problems.
  • I switched the ASB model from individuals with unclear job descriptions to teams with slightly clearer job descriptions
Throughout the last few weeks, I have been preparing for elections season by looking at my structure, asking students how they feel, and trying to come up with yet another solution. Every time I think about making a change, a rush of questions floods my mind:
  • How do you find the student who is going to give their all and not try to coast?
  • If you shrink it again, will you be edging out the students who need this?
  • How do you validate having students arrive at school by 7:05am without concrete goals and initiatives?
  • How do you give individualized attention to such a large group that is working on so many different projects?
  • What have these schools who win awards for Outstanding Leadership Programs figured out that I have not?
  • Am I going to look incompetent because I keep changing my mind?
  • Am I not innovative because it keeps not working?
  • How will this structure work with collaborating with De La Salle?
As I have talked with De La Salle, and many other high schools, I have learned about how different schools structure their student leadership programs. All of them have shaped their student leadership programs so differently, and many of them feel like they haven’t figured out everything yet either.
I feel like I keep scratching the surface on what the issues are without exposing the true heart of it all. If you have any ideas of what you have seen, or something you think would be cool, swing by my office. I apologize in advance that I do not have any candy, the students keep eating it and I cannot control myself either.

All-New Flipgrid, Seriously!

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I used Flipgrid for a few lessons back in the day. My students and I were not overly impressed. If you
are a long time S.F. Chronicle reader you will understand our rating. We were paying attention, but not really excited. It was a little man politely sitting in his chair reaction.

When I stumbled across a web page “introducing the all-new Flipgrid curiosity forced me to to take a look. I could not believe what I was reading. The individual student time limit was raised from the old 1.5 minutes to walloping 5 minutes. What student can speak for five minutes straight about an academic subject? If you find such a student, these five minute segments can be linked together seamlessly for as long as you might desire.

Students can also create their videos in iMovie or some other video program and import their files by simply dragging them onto their Flipgrid. Another amazing new feature.

The teacher can sort and link the student videos in any way she wants simply by dragging them up or down, or by creating a new grid for selected videos. This is beyond cool. I just divided my class into six teams. Each team researched an example of United States imperialism. Each student read a segment of the example with inserted images. I ordered these sequentially to make coherent (sort of coherent for this first attempt) videos that covered the whole subject. When we played them back, bada bing bada boom (this set had more bing than boom). It’s a work in progress, but with such potential.

There’s more! Flipgrid has a rubric for grading built in. No kidding. Here is a screenshot of a custom rubric. Students can also see the criteria for the top level of each category. How cool is that?

Notice that you can email individual feedback to each student.  No one will have any doubts about their grade, especially after they read the comments section. How cool can you get without being redundantly cool?

I have become a Flipgrid aficionado. The possibilities are so many. The all-new Flipgrid really is all new and had me jumping out of my chair. Give it a try. I bet you will like it as much as the little man.

Cross-Curricular Projects: How??

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I always want to show the students how math is connected to other subjects and the real world.  Frankly, one of my big dreams for our math program is not to get more girls to calculus (but YAY! if that happens).  Rather my dream is that it starts to blow up the idea of “time” and “school day” enough that we can start to incorporate cross-curricular time in the day.  How cool would it be if instead of teaching dimensional analysis in physics and again in algebra, we taught it concurrently in the context of a bigger problem?  But how do we inch towards this?

This year I have tried two cross-curricular projects:

  1. Math (Financial Algebra) + College and Career: Ginger helped me design a unit about the realities of paying for college.  She taught the introductory lessons (on block periods) and popped in as I continued this mini unit through the following week.  The feedback was very positive and many thought that all of their junior classmates should have access to this unit too.
  2. Math (Algebra Readiness) + Religion: Adam and I got our classes together in the Innovation Center to explore examples of the Fibonacci Sequence in nature and discuss the implications.  Is this mathematical pattern proof of a common creator?  This was really fun, but the feedback that I got from my freshmen students was that it was awkward to work with a different class of students (in this case a mixed-gender class of seniors), especially for just one class period.  My personal feedback is that the lesson we designed should’ve been spread out over a week or more — it was really dense.
Moving forward I have questions:
  1. What is the most logistically efficient way to do a unit/project with another teacher/department?  Working with Ginger was easier than with Adam (no offense Adam!) simply because she did not have a classroom full of students that were expected to collaborate with mine.  I know my colleagues all have prep periods (which would eliminate the concern of having to join classes) but that’s a big ask and I’m just not there yet.
  2. Does a cross-curricular course make more sense than a cross-curricular lesson or project?  Yes, if the only concern is finding overlapping time and a similar student population.  No, because creating a new course feels like a huge barrier to cross-curricular work.  Also, if we keep increasing our course offerings do they eventually get watered down?  
  3. Anyone want to try another cross-curricular project/unit with me?

When the Magic Happens.

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I love experiencing magic, as I imagine most everyone does.  Today I experienced the magic that sometimes happens when reading.   A character entered my life. I know him now.  Isn’t that amazing?  If this isn’t magic I don’t know what is.

The book I am reading is The Lost Children Archive by Valerie Luiselli  This book was on a lot of Best Books of 2019, and I thought I would enjoy it.  The book is complex and the story is tough and those lists were right – it is very good.

What I want to describe is what happened to me today about 1/2 the way through.  I realized I know the boy (the boy’s name hasn’t been revealed yet).  I feel for him; I am worried about this decision he just made, but not surprised; I think he is smart and nice.   I like him a lot and know I will think about him in the future. He is real.  The author chose words and wrote sentences that led me here.  She structured the story, the chapters, the characters so I  could come to know the boy.  She researched history, geography, music, literature and graced that knowledge to me.  I am so grateful to her.

This book is amazingly well written and has lots to explore.  The author’s use of the family as unnamed characters,  a  description of sounds that help define moods, lists that are essential reading, repeated stories of Geronimo, a journey without an intended ending, a family in an unsettling time, a hard look at immigration; these all intrigue me.  But what has delighted me is the reality of the boy for me.   This is why I read.  This is what I hope for all readers.

Bravery and The Growth Mindset: Why is the Pool so Different from School?

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Today marks the end of the second week of spring sports.  As the JV swim coach I have a love/exhausted relationship with this time of year, but when I step on deck and get to engage with our students in this different arena, I am reminded why I keep coming back to it.

Now in my third season, my JV roster has increased from about 30 swimmers (in each of the first two seasons) to 50 swimmers.  For a reason I can’t quite identify, there was a huge influx of new swimmers this year, particularly freshmen and sophomores.  And, to be clear, when I say “new” I mean, “no swimming experience whatsoever”.

When I share my shock with people, the common reaction is, “Well then cut some girls.”  There are about 15 – 20 girls this year that are swimming competitively for the very first time and standard operating procedure would dictate that I cut them (suspending the reality that swimming is advertised as a “no cut” sport).  But I can’t do it.  I cannot bring myself to cut them.

First, we cannot minimize the vulnerable position a teenage girl is putting herself into by walking out in a swim suit in front of her peers and jumping in to try a sport that she has no idea how to do.  In a world that feels increasingly judgmental (especially of our young people), how and why are they able to muster this kind of bravery? … (and here is my connecting point) … how can I get them to be this brave in math class?  More often than not, when my students see a problem they do not know how to do, they shut down.  They say they don’t know how.  They say they were never taught.  They question my validity as a teacher for daring to put something in front of them that I did not explicitly teach them how to do.  And yet in the pool, they jump right in.

I am not exaggerating when I tell you, this group of swimmers knows next to nothing about how to swim.  Only a few know how to swim freestyle, a smaller few have attempted the other strokes before this season, and none of them know how to dive or turn.  THEY FAIL CONSTANTLY.  And yet, they keep trying.  They take every word I say to heart and I watch in awe as they try to incorporate my advice to the best of their ability.  I can actually see their brains churning as they try to figure out how the heck to do a flip turn and not come up in the adjacent lane.  They keep failing and keep trying again.  Over and over.  Belly flop after belly flop until finally they dive in clean.  It is everything I want to see in my math class.  How can I get them to apply to school the same growth mindset they have in swimming?

I am so proud of their bravery.  Cut them?  No way.

Heart, Faith, Courage

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Pray for Peace
By 
Ellen Bass
 
Pray to whomever you kneel down to:
Jesus nailed to his wooden or plastic cross,
his suffering face bent to kiss you,
Buddha still under the Bo tree in scorching heat,
Adonai, Allah.  Raise your arms to Mary
that she may lay her palm on our brows,
to Shekinhah, Queen of Heaven and Earth,
to Inanna in her stripped descent.
Then pray to the bus driver who takes you to work.
On the bus, pray for everyone riding that bus,
for everyone riding buses all over the world.
 Drop some silver and pray.
Waiting in line for the movies, for the ATM,
for your latté and croissant, offer your plea.
Make your eating and drinking a supplication.
Make your slicing of carrots a holy act,
each translucent layer of the onion, a deeper prayer.
To hawk or Wolf, or the Great Whale, pray. 
Bow down to terriers and shepherds and Siamese cats.
Fields of artichokes and elegant strawberries.
 Make the brushing of your hair
a prayer, every strand its own voice,
singing in the choir on your head.
As you wash your face, the water slipping
through your fingers, a prayer: Water,
softest thing on earth, gentleness
that wears away rock.
Making love, of course, is already prayer.
Skin, and open mouths worshipping that skin,
the fragile case we are poured into.

If you’re hungry, pray. If you’re tired.
Pray to Gandhi and Dorothy Day.
Shakespeare. Sappho. Sojourner Truth.
When you walk to your car, to the mailbox,
to the video store, let each step
be a prayer that we all keep our legs,
that we do not blow off anyone else’s legs.
Or crush their skulls.
And if you are riding on a bicycle
or a skateboard, in a wheel chair, each revolution
of the wheels a prayer as the earth revolves:
less harm, less harm, less harm.
And as you work, typing with a new manicure,
a tiny palm tree painted on one pearlescent nail
or delivering soda or drawing good blood
into rubber-capped vials, twirling pizzas-
With each breath in, take in the faith of those
who have believed when belief seemed foolish,
who persevered. With each breath out, cherish.
Pull weeds for peace, turn over in your sleep for peace,
feed the birds for peace, each shiny seed
that spills onto the earth, another second of peace.
Wash your dishes, call your mother, drink wine.
Shovel leaves or snow or trash from your sidewalk.
Make a path. Fold a photo of a dead child
around your VISA card.
Scoop your holy water from the gutter.
Gnaw your crust.
Mumble along like a crazy person, stumbling
your prayer through the streets.

Semester 1 Math Program Feedback

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One of the goals of our individually paced math program is to help our students develop skills in time management and goal setting while having them take responsibility for their own learning.  We’ve required students to fill in a quarterly pacing guide where they backward fill what they want to accomplish each quarter.  We have the students update this pacing guide every Friday.  Each student is assigned to a lead teacher who tracks their progress virtually as well as meeting with each student to check in with them and keep them on track.

At the end of the first semester we asked students to fill out a survey giving us feedback on how this process worked for them.  We asked the students what their goal was for the semester and if they met that goal.  We asked students to elaborate on why they did or did not meet their goal.  We also asked them how many topics (i.e. chapters) they completed in the semester.  Students who are moving at a pace similar to a traditional class should complete between 4-6 topics in a semester, depending on which course they are taking.

We also asked the students the following questions:  

My lead teacher took an active interest in my learning.
  • Did you choose to remediate any tests over 70% this semester?
  • Did you attend direct instruction this semester?
  • Did you find direct instruction helpful?
  • How much did this Math Program allow you to develop skills to become a successful student?
  • What skills did you develop to become a successful student?
  • How would you describe your engagement as a learner this semester?
  • How much does this Math Program allow you to develop your time management skills?
  • How much did this Math Program allow you to develop your problem solving skills?
  • How much opportunity were you given to learn in a way that works best for you?
  • How student-centered did this class feel?

We had 307 students complete the survey.  The results are fascinating and will take some time to really analyze but I wanted to get an initial sense for what the students thought.  I grouped the students into 3 groups based on the numbers of topics they completed in semester 1.  Sixty-six students reported completing 1-3 topics (technically off-pace), 177 reported completing 4-6 topics (either on pace or ahead depending on the course they are taking), and 64 reported completing more than 7 topics (moving faster than a traditional class).  I randomly selected one student from each group to study their responses.

Student #1 is enrolled in Geometry and set the goal of completing through Topic 4 by the end of semester 1.  She only completed 2 topics and did not meet her goal because she stated she had to remediate some tests before she could move on.  Student #1 says she developed better listening skills this semester and has become more comfortable asking questions when she is stuck.  On a scale of 1 (low) to 10 (high) she reports that her engagement as a learner is an 8 and her problem-solving skills are a 7.

Student #2 is enrolled in Algebra and had a slightly vague goal of being almost done with Algebra.  She completed 5 topics this semester.  She said through this program she learned how to set goals for herself and that following her pacing guide was really helpful each week.  Student #2 felt that she learned how to motivate herself to take responsibility for getting her work done.  She also rated the class a 9 out of 10 for providing an opportunity to learn in a way that is best for her.

Student #3 is enrolled in Algebra 2 now but began the year in Algebra and had a goal of being halfway done with Geometry by the end of the semester.  She completed 13 topics and surpassed her goal by completing all but 2 topics of Geometry.  She rated the program 9 and 10 on all questions and commented that she loved being able to move at her own pace.  Student #3 said she had to develop planning skills and fine-tune her working habits because she knew she had set a lofty goal for herself.

Just glancing at the spreadsheet of student results is fascinating and it gives the lead teachers additional information into how their students are working and approaching the program.  I hope it helps students connect their progress during the year to the goals they set for themselves.  The majority of students who did not meet their goal were very honest and specific about why they did not meet their goal.  We plan on surveying students again at the end of semester 2 and I wonder how many students who did not meet their goal after semester 1 end up meeting it by the end of the year.  We have really tried to let students know that their feedback matters to us (many changes to our program for this year were directly linked to student feedback) and I think it is important to survey them to hear what they have to say.  I plan on referencing these results to my students that I track when I meet with them this semester.  

Journaling and The Artist’s Way

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Journaling and The Artist’s Way



My students journal every day at the start of the class for five minutes give or take. I wish there was more time. They are encouraged to write about whatever they choose, whatever they want to flush out of their heads, no exceptions. They know they are not graded for it and that I will never look into their journals. I just need to see their hands moving.
There have been some complaining about this but it has become a habit for them and from a class management standpoint, a gnarly way to get the class settled before we start with the day’s business. Overall, this has been a positive. It gets my first period students very focused. My second period will need some heavy artillery, but I digress.
I got the daily journal idea from a self-help book by Julia Cameron called “The Artist Way.” Some of you reading this entry will be familiar with this title. It is currently in its 25th edition and it is almost required reading for artists and writers going through a “block”, wrestling with confidence issues or other demons. I must confess I was a little skeptical of this book, as I am with self-help books in general. I thought it was kind of corny.  I was however, intrigued by the “daily pages”, a ritual which is a little bit like what I asked my students to do only at a larger scale (you have to fill 3 full pages daily.) A few months after I was introduced to this book I had filled several notebooks with sometimes illegible written pages and I found the process to be very positive for a number of reasons that would require a new blog entry.


When we revised the results of the Panorama Survey in the last In-Service day, I joined the small group where we looked at results under the category “Social Awareness”. In every aspect, students scored really high except when asked the question: “In the last thirty days, how clearly were you able to describe  your feelings?” Look at the comparative results below. The percentage dropped sharply, almost half compared to the other response.


There seems to be a great need for effective channels of self-expression. Art in general and journaling in particular are perfect avenues for this. 

When I asked my students what they liked the most about journaling, being able to freely express their thoughts and feelings without prompt, judgement or direction seem to be the general response. This world bubble below gathers the words of the responses to the question: What do you like most about our daily journaling activity.

When we write our thoughts down they become a thing of their own, separate from us. This purging allows our mind to have more clarity. We are no longer “our thoughts”. They have the potential of taking an abstract form, outside of our identity and sometimes they can become raw material for new ideas and projects.



If you are more interested in “The Artist’s Way” here are some links to a the New Yorker Magazine article as well as one of my favorite blogs: Brain Pickings by Maria Popova.