Evaluating Web 2.0, sort of

I'm not 100% sure I need to do this assignment and I'm pretty sure I'm about to do it in the wrong way, but here goes:

Instead of hunting for a new Web 2.0 tool, I'm going to use the 2.0 evaluation form to assess my use (and my colleague Amy's use) of our school's own wiki/blog site to post instructional grammar videos as part of a "flipped classroom" experiment. We use our wiki daily to post homework assignments and important documents; this particular unit was/is more singular, though, and that's all I'm really discussing for the moment.

So...

1. How does this advance my curriculum and apply to my content area?
The wiki itself advances my curriculum in practical terms, because I use it to post assignments and, particularly, to post instructional videos designed to provide students with content (in this case, about grammar) outside of class so that they can practice applying it in class, where they can work together and I can help them. Amy and I made the videos ourselves, so we had control over the content and relevance -- the videos are just as relevant as class itself.2. Is it secure?
Yes. Students must sign on, and only those given direct permission by the tech department (class members and teachers, essentially) have access.
(easy to get to questionable content?)
No, because it's not a search engine. If I (but I wouldn't) or a student (rare but not unheard of) posted something inappropriate, everyone with access to the wiki would be able to see it until someone with administrative privileges -- not me, actually, but again, the tech department -- removed it.  (will the student work remain private?)
Yes, aside from the fact that it is visible to others with permission to access our wiki (65-100 people total, depending on the year).3. Does it enable students to gain a deeper understanding of the content in a critical, creative manner?
Yes, for the reasons listed above. Also yes because I believe that the flipped instruction model worked fine, even well, in our classes this year.


I also think that this tool (the wiki vehicle) and the model of instruction we're using it to foster (flipped instruction) could work much better if we took more full advantage of the interactive nature of the wiki. Our plans for next year include requiring both old-fashioned moves, such as evidence that each student took notes while watching the videos, and more new-fangled, such as daily or weekly discussion board participation that might take the form of posting questions about that night's new concepts or posting answers to other students' questions about those new comments. We will make other changes to flesh out the skeleton we developed this year. I'd be happy to explain them, should anyone be interested. 


For the moment, assume I'm pro-2.0.

EDMS 550: To love or not to love...that is the question.

EDMS 550:
This class was, in general, terrific...and I didn't enter the course believing that this would be the case; I had heard horror stories from students with a different instructor. I do think that much of what made the course great was shaped by our instructor's approach and choices. Every time we met, I felt like we were introduced to new technology, encouraged to discuss and ask questions and share, and steered away from unnecessary or obsolete work whenever possible. I work in a technology-rich environment and would describe myself as "on the sunny side but not on the skinny part of the sunny side of the bell curve" in terms of technology comfort and classroom use. Still, I did not feel patronized to, I did not feel bored, and I did not feel overwhelmed. As a Mac user, I also really appreciated the extent to which Sir Michael Becksfort (yes, I just knighted you temporarily, if you're reading this) nobly worked to help me find, learn about, and employ applications that would be the most useful for me personally, although Xavier, Mariemont, and most of my classmates are PC-oriented. I can tell from other posters that we all shared this same general feeling: we appreciated the relaxed atmosphere, we learned a lot, and we felt personally served and enriched -- differentiated instruction: so fashionable, so pedagogically sound!

The only downside of the course was the redundancy of the blog and portfolio. I don't have a great solution and I don't mind per se. Our professional lives are not always efficient. If I had to choose, I would choose the blog format, especially given that I am not on Xavier's campus regularly outside of class and it's not easy for me to get there and work freely. Editing my portfolio requires that I be there, of course. There's a certain amount of hassle in the Mac-PC conversion that portfolio documents require, and that's obviously a further annoyance. I can blog from my own computer, whenever and wherever I have access, which is clearly preferable. I don't particularly know the solution to this problem, in that the portfolio is required by Xavier as part of our licensure (still murky to me, but I am pursuing licensure, so I suppose I should both care and become more fully informed) and the blogging is more comfortable but also less controlled so perhaps not a great idea for all learners. What to do, what to do....

That said, I probably should have made that second paragraph shorter because its length suggests that I had real issues with this course, and I didn't. It has proven immediately relevant for me, it will continue to be helpful, and I enjoyed the course, my classmates, and the instructor's chipper company (can temporarily knighted people be chipper?) immensely.

PLN: So personal, so full of learning. No really, I mean it!

I joined the personal learning network English Companion, englishcompanion.ning.com, one of the PLNs that our instructor, Mr. BeckSfort (I made a typo and left out the S in his name the other day in something I wrote and he called me on it) in his infinite wisdom showed us in class. It's great for me. Even though I do not have immediate curricular needs, my teaching partner and I will be looking for a new play for our ninth graders next school year, and this PLN seems like a useful venue for seeking out good ideas. I even commented on someone else's post earlier today, offering up some ideas for non-fiction works that 9th grade English students might enjoy.

I love the PLN concept -- it is relevant, low-key (or at least can be if we wish for it to be), and useful.

By the way, you, too, should read Mark Salzman's Iron and Silk, the non-fiction work I recommended. While you're at it, read The Laughing Sutra, a fictional novel by the same author. I'll tell you in the fall what our students think of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, The Glass Castle, and The Other Wes Moore.

Blogs and comments and reflections: oh my!

I posted comments on a couple of my classmates' blogs today. It was pleasant and, at least the way I chose to approach the task, not too burdensome.

I enjoyed this opportunity in the sense that I had never had occasion to comment on another teacher's or professional's blog or other online written work before. Of course, my subjects, remarks, and audience were shaped almost entirely by my own choice, so the process didn't feel too burdensome.

I was struck by the artificial safety of the exercises, though. We are all teachers or past or prospective teachers, and classmates, even friends. We chose comfortable topics on which to make (minimal, usually) comments. Furthermore, our blog IDs keep our posts from being anonymous, or at least from being entirely anonymous. All these choices and circumstances feel right to me -- I am terribly uncomfortable when people do not claim their public written work and of course I'd rather comment on that which interests me -- but at some level, such an exercise is practice.

I have just the merest smattering of experience commenting publicly, by which I mean beyond the confines of my school's own wiki/blog network. Literally no more than five times, I have commented on articles that are part of an online publication of some sort. I have been tempted hundreds of times; I have regretted it the few times I caved to the urge. The reason I have wanted so badly to add my remarks, the reason I have resisted, and the reason I have regretted (even unnoticed) any commentary I have added are all the same: the vitriol. The two types of threads that I have struggled over the years, wisely, to avoid other than under the most extreme of circumstances are the following: threads directed at my mother or family, and threads that attack my almost-as-dearly-beloved Kansas Jayhawks and their sports teams and legacies. One of these issues is easier to explain and, I suppose, of less moral import. Sports chatter of all sorts -- at the bar, on a radio call-in show, in the stands, and on the internet -- is passionate at best; insubstantial and insignificant and illogical much of the time; hate-filled and slanderous at its worst. My mother, on the other hand, served as a public school board member in my hometown for 20 of the 24 years of my life that stretched from my eighth grade year until last summer. She never earned a dime doing so, I might add. While Lawrence is not a grand political landscape, it is a college town, disproportionately peopled with educated, invested individuals who have opinions. In so many years of work, my mom was, of course, part of decisions with which people, often many people, disagreed; for some individuals, specific decisions remained the defining element of my mother's character years and years after the matter in question was settled. To my knowledge, only one of those decisions was ever just her decision, and it was still hers and my fathers (a decision about my youngest sibling's high school enrollment, a choice I do happen to think I would have handled differently but that never would, under other circumstances, have mattered to anyone). Attacks based on that decision, made in 1997, cropped up again as recently as last spring and of course pertained to my whole family, or at least half of it, rather than just my mother. One of the two times I ever commented in a forum in my hometown were in response to some of those remarks last spring, because I felt helpless and angry and wanted to defend my mother, my sister, and public service in general. I identified myself in my comment, because that seems more honorable to me, and I wrote one detailed remark, never responding to any others. Still, to comment is to partake, and to partake is to support. It's gross to me that I even yielded: it feels like any impulse buy or late night food choice, only momentarily satisfying and then deeply mortifying. Had I jumped in earlier in the dialogue about this particular boundary or budget issue (I don't even remember which), I might have made the SMALL, DISTORTED, LARGELY VAPID ELECTRONIC maelstrom -- see that I have to remind myself that none of it matters a whit -- worse, not better. Even now, talking about it makes me feel like I need to take a shower.

Lesson: never comment...

...on that sort of discussion board. But these happy teacher blogs are A-OK, and so are all sorts of other happy Personal Learning Networks (more on that soon).

21st Century Skills: Yes please!

Every morning, before I go to school, I stare deep, deep into the mirror and ask myself, "Am I a 21st century teacher fostering 21st century learning of 21st century skills to 21st century learners? YES I AM."

OK, I don't do that.

But our school has been in conversation about 21st century skills for several years, to the point that among us as a faculty, the term has become something of a joke, as most aggressively employed teacher-speak terms do at some point (though the ideas are not a joke). I feel strongly that I have been encouraging this 21st century style of learning in my classroom since the 20th century, at least the last couple years of it. Further, I believe that by nature and by discipline, I am well equipped for a classroom structured to foster this sort of thinking.

Rather than write on and on, let me list a few elements of the English classes I teach or have recently taught that fall into this "21st century learning" model:

• Critical Thinking: Close reading exercises in which we explicate an excerpt from a work of literature; analysis of 'texts' from the broader culture (speeches, advertisements, political cartoons, propaganda posters); role playing exercises, such as when my students adopted specific roles in a "school board" debate about whether to keep Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a high school curriculum; students teaching class, as when my honors American literature students became responsible for a movement or era in American literature and had to formulate and post a handout and teach the key points of that movement's beliefs or writerly traits to their classmates; any analytical and argumentative essays
• Creativity/Problem Solving: Mimetic writing assignments, as when English 11 students write an original poem in the style or Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson; Creative extensions or alternate scenes, as when our English 9 students might choose to write "Book 25" of Homer's Odyssey; illustrations of literary works, as when, for the same Odyssey creative assignment, other students chose to make a comic book version of part of Odysseus' journey (Book 22, so gory!); group projects that pose a "problem" or creative task with high expectations and few limits, as when English 7 students have to make a poster illustrating a part of speech in several specific ways or English 9 students have to develop an advertising portfolio for a fictitious product or English 11 students have to design their own utopia or develop a biographical film celebrating the presidential qualifications of a faculty member.
• Communication: Daily discussion-based classes; extensive and varied writing assignments, described in small part above and below; class presentations and speeches and instruction, such as today when individual students had to stand up in front of the class, plug in their iPads, and explain how one of the advertisements they chose for homework exemplified rhetorical techniques such as logos, pathos, or bandwagon appeal; online commentary via wiki posts; group work (see above and below).
• Collaboration: informal small-group work (working together on grammar exercises, analyzing a poem or image, etc.); more extensive and formal group work, as is required by any of the group work described above, which is a mere smattering of the kinds of collaborative challenges our kids face.

As a part of our school's effort to be more conscious and intentional in equipping students with 21st century skills, I have also worked to do the following:

• Use technology in a meaningful, dynamic, not-unnecessarily-burdensome-and-not-superfluous way. My students all have school-issued iPads. We use them as often as makes sense for the classroom, for planning, notetaking, research, collaboration, writing...you name it. I have worked to equip them with information that will make them more informed, skillful consumers of the internet and captains of their personal iPads. Just in recent weeks, for example, we have used Explain Everything and Creative Commons, two options my students did not know about before I told or showed them (thank you, EDMS 550). I have also been experimenting with a 'flipped classroom' model for grammar.
• Help students gain greater self-knowledge so that each understands better what his or her individual strengths and weaknesses are. This kind of understanding is meaningful in many ways. It is most relevant in terms of 21st century skills because of the importance of successful collaboration (do I need to explain how? I hope not.)

I could go on and on. In fact, it would seem I already have. In short, when I look in the mirror, I can (if I so choose) answer the question Are you a 21st century teacher with "YES. YES, I AM."

Free Write: Yea! English class is fun today.

Late last week, my colleague Amy and I began our final unit in English 9: advertising as text, aka rhetoric in advertising. Our students are visibly excited. We're talking about advertisement, after all: shopping, flipping through magazines, watching TV, going to Reds games, playing around on the Internet, and chatting it up on Facebook are all relevant activities from a curricular standpoint. But now that I've heard my first handful of This is so much more fun than reading a novel-type remarks for the year, I'm going to write freely, a 'free write,' as it were, about my ambivalence.

To be clear, I'm not actually ambivalent about the unit itself or any of the assignments we have been giving or will give (these include readings from Picturing Texts, an advertising scavenger hunt, the task of finding advertisements that illustrate different types of persuasion, eventually a huge group project in which students develop a series of advertisements for a hypothetical product). It's a great facet of our course, in my opinion: interesting, new, relevant to the students' lives, sophisticated in its expectations, forward-looking in its design and principles. The students sharpen critical tools they were unaware they had and learn terminology and concepts that they will use as students, businesspeople, and consumers. The emotions I vent here will lead me to change exactly NOTHING of substance in this unit.

But I am torn about this pesky notion of "fun." First of all, my class is ALWAYS FUN. We laugh, we enjoy one another's company, I make silly jokes and do awkward things, the kids enjoy a reasonable amount of license to lead discussion (even astray) and generally to be themselves while being academic. Secondly, we have consciously designed the entire English 9 course -- which is only two years old in its current form, so it has maintained its original character -- with student engagement in mind. I'll grant you that engagement does not strictly mean or require fun. Reading Homer's Odyssey is not fun per se, although the issues the epic raises echo throughout literature and our own experiences; Much Ado About Nothing, while hilarious to comfortable consumers of Shakespearean English, may again not be fun for a more challenged reader. But we just read a comedy, for heaven's sake, and I don't mean Much Ado About Nothing! We read The Laughing Sutra! It's hilarious! Ridiculous stuff happens left and right! The title even says 'laughing'! How much do you need, people?

One more thing: Since when does English class, or any class, need to be fun? Academia is good for your soul, or something like that.

OK, somewhere in all of that ranting, I said some things that I don't really mean. I won't identify which those are.

What I really believe is that the sort of backhanded insult constituted by This is so much more fun than reading a novel (or reading poems, or just reading) is instructive and ultimately of only as much consequence as I choose for it to bear. It's great that our current unit feels fun to kids -- how often does school, work, or even day-to-day, get-the-laundry-done housework feel fun? I know this; the kids know it too. Secondly, kids have short memories, and the simple fact that we just finished a novel that was, in fact, a pleasurable read does not make them remember "f-u-n." The daily deadlines or final essay test involved in our study of that novel are also not particularly fun (in other words, fun reading and fun reading for school with deadlines are two different things), and in general one "fun novel" does not the new belief "It's so fun to read novels" make.

Furthermore and for the moment finally, looking at advertisement is fun. My students (and yours) are shoppers and magazine readers and TV watchers and sports consumers. So are we. It's interesting and valuable to learn more about how the advertisements we see in the venues work. Learning about this rhetoric in school does feel like a secret vacation in our lives outside of school -- fun, in a word.

So fun it is (imagine a curmudgeonly voice here).

PS: Novels and poems and plays ARE fun too. THEY ARE.

Seeing myself on film: "Oh dahhhling, I just LOVED it."

Obviously I'm kidding. Does anyone short of a full-blown narcissist enjoy seeing himself or herself filmed? I suspect that few enjoy it.

So first, let me address the many things I did not enjoy about this experience. I did not enjoy seeing my physical person on film. The camera angle could hardly have been less flattering. This is a personal issue, I know. In terms of the teaching itself, the main weakness that I noticed is something I already know about myself: that I repeat myself and fall into "verbal filler" habits. Usually, I tend to fall back on um and uh. In this case, for whatever reason, I clapped as a segue, which isn't something I particularly believe I do in the classroom unless I am trying to send subtle cues to a sleepy, chatty class. In this case, I was filming in front of...no one. I suspect I was behaving a little strangely because I was trying to present the appearance of my usual style and self without actual students there. I also repeat myself from time to time (see below). Finally, I noted at one point, in a segment that may have been edited out of the final product, that as I was modulating my voice, I emphasized an odd syllable or word that probably would have made the sentence harder for students to understand or follow had they been present.

Since I'm also supposed to discuss the strengths of my presentation, I think it's safe to call it "solid." My lesson made sense and was manageable; at the same time, it would have required some time to browsing the Library of Congress collection and editing the class wiki heading to students, and my video shows me in the midst of allowing that time.  I also worked hard, as I always work hard, to use the classroom space even when tied in many ways to the computer from which I'm projecting. I believe that I explained the process I was demonstrating clearly, with good volume, and that I pointed to the board and used other means to direct (hypothetical) student attention to relevant elements of the display on the board. I also believe that this assignment, although not an actual task for my class, would be a valid and meaningful assignment; I might well use it in a later year. The target audience for this lesson would be my English 9 students, in their first year at the upper school at Seven Hills, and so introducing them to important resources like the Library of Congress electronic collections serves a purpose for them as learners beyond the mere significance of this particular collection for this particular assignment. I would even say that points of weakness noted above are not wholly weaknesses: I do tend to repeat myself as I talk in class, but that is in part an adaptation because I seem unable to make myself consistently speak more slowly (when I repeat key ideas, that gives kids a second chance to catch that essential point); and my verbal modulation -- loud and soft, higher and lower pitches -- serves to draw and keep student attention and, usually, to help me emphasize key points.

All in all...it was fine to see myself on film, but certainly not a pleasure. I do believe that any teacher stands to learn from this sort of experience, every now and again.

My actual video lesson plan, should you be curious:
I had to record two lessons. When I recorded the first, the Explain Everything introduction I discussed in a previous post, something went awry in my recording and the timing of the sound and video became misaligned: the sound seemed to be missing snippets while the video had recorded my whole presentation. GRRR.

Then, when I went to re-record, it occurred to me that I had inadvertently left my iPad at home. Since my colleagues do not all have Explain Everything on their iPads, I was unable to borrow someone else's iPad. Time being of the essence -- I needed to record that very day, for good and all -- I developed a new plan.

So here is the new plan.... I invented a lesson related to what my students had been working on in class that day. I will film myself showing students (1) how to go to a Library of Congress print collection (WWI propaganda posters), browse, select, and download an image, and (2) how to edit the heading of our class wiki (as opposed to making comments on it, which they are familiar with) so that they can upload the image they chose before commenting on it.

Obviously a 1-2 minute film will only feature part of that conversation, so I will have to edit. As I recorded 50+ grammar videos this February, I'm not worried about doing so. I also plan to use text, opening and closing frames, transitions, and music. While the videos I recorded this winter only used the text-over and opening/closing frame capacities of iMovie, I'm not worried about managing the other parts of the film. Now that I use it regularly, I find iMovie pretty intuitive.

I'm not excited about seeing myself on film, though. Because I will be moving around and because of where the computer will have to be positioned to film (not on a podium, since I'll need to podium to hold the computer I'll be projecting from), I will be featured in less controlled ways that in the grammar videos I recorded. *sigh*

OK...to the studio!

My future video lesson

I plan to record myself explaining how to use Explain Everything, an iPad application. I have already explained this program to my English 9 students, actually, and unfortunately did not have the foresight to record myself, but what I record will be very similar to the four conversations I have already had on that subject. Specifically, I intend to record the second five minutes of that lesson, after I have explained the Explain Everything tools. During that second segment of the lesson, I began to demonstrate how to create an Explain Everything movie in order to teach how to diagram a sentence; I will recreate that discussion in my video.

As for the whiz-bang elements of my video, such as opening credits, voice-over, and music, I will make those choices as I am editing. I will be making my video in iMovie, a program I'm familiar with, so I don't feel a lot of trepidation.

Legally Yours

What legal concerns do I have as a teacher? Hmmmm.

I suppose the truest answer to that question is the following: I have no concerns about the legality of what I say and do...and thus I have many, even endless legal concerns.

I have the great pleasure of teaching at an independent school -- a private school without religious affiliation. Although in Ohio, we have access to some public funding (textbooks and school buses, for instance) and our students take the Ohio Graduation Test, both unusual compared to independent schools in other states, our school does not answer to the state or school district standards that shape the experiences of so many teachers and students, nor does it answer to the expectations of a faith community. I mention this because in general, Seven Hills is neither a litigious nor a punctilious place. Aside from specific expectations regarding quarterly and yearly reports, communication between teachers and parents is rarely narrowly defined or formal. The chain of command is not something many of us think about with regularity. The interactions between students and teachers are warm, trusting, and often affectionate: while I take pains to maintain the understanding that I am a teacher, an adult, a colleague of my fellow teachers, and a representative of the school, the time I spend with my classroom students, my advisees, and the editors of the literary magazine I oversee are fun, friendly, and defined by caring. I pat kids on the shoulder almost every day. I never think twice before offering a crying student a hug. And I'm not the only one: although each of my colleagues manages his or her own interactions with students differently, my approach and behavior are not unusual.

Furthermore, as an upper school teacher, I teach relatively advanced students, both in age and in thinking. Our school community is, especially in the relatively conservative context of greater Cincinnati, fairly open and fairly liberal in its thinking. I have considerable control over my curriculum, as do my colleagues, especially in disciplines like English (mine) and history, in which we are no more tied to a textbook than we wish to be. In our English department, we teach or have taught texts that some schools cannot or choose not to, including Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ellen Foster, Beloved, and Fight Club. I have used articles or excerpts from The Onion and The Devil's Dictionary; I have shown Dave Chappelle's Inside the Actor's Studio interview; next year a colleague and I will, in all likelihood, teach a multi-week unit on YouTube as a form of text in our culture. Any one of these choices might be problematic at a different sort of school, but at Seven Hills (especially if we discuss potentially controversial choices with our department head or head of curriculum before we head into the classroom), such selections are acceptable and even welcomed.

Amid such an atmosphere, we as teachers, or at least I as a teacher, give little consideration to legal issues. Frankly, I have at best a murky sense of when I would be thinking about legal issues if I taught in another sort of school. Certainly, there are those within the school community who do know more and worry more: our division heads, our head of operations, the counselors. If I had such a role, or if I worked in athletics, managed community service trips, or oversaw overseas study, I would need to have more knowledge, and of course I would give liability of all sorts more of my attention. But as it is, I know relatively little and worry even less...

...which is I have endless concerns, or should. My mother, who served on the public school board in my hometown for two decades, heard me chuckle once about teaching my favorite word, callipygian, to my eleventh grade English students. When I told her what it meant (having shapely buttocks), she was something just short of aghast: "Meredith, you would never, never be able to get away with that in a public school. Seriously, you should watch yourself." While I laughed off her admonition -- the environment I teach in is simply so different from the one she knew well -- I think regularly about her advice. Probably, I should find a spot on the "worry spectrum" somewhere between my mother's and my own as a young teacher. In fact, it's fair to say that in fourteen years, I have moved closer to that middle. All the same, I'm sure that every month (I hope not every week or day!), I do something that could, in the worst of circumstances, offer space for some sort of legal challenge or at least the threat of one.

Now that I've thought about it at such length, I'm actually quite concerned. I'm not being cute -- I really am concerned.

Legal Brief: Pickering v. Board of Education

Here, I believe, is my presentation on Pickering v. Board of Education, a Prezi:

Pickering v. Board of Education on Prezi

We'll see how this goes!

Technology in the classroom: article response

I enjoyed Jennie Magiera's "Redefining Instruction with Technology: Five Essential Steps." My students all have iPads this year, so I am in a similar situation. The students I teach are older -- 9th grade -- and they each have individually issued iPads, so most of them use these devices as planners, notebooks, and often textbooks.

Magiera's comments resonate with my experiences with the iPad and with technology in general. I have been teaching at Seven Hills for fourteen years. I got my first school-issued laptop at the end of the my first year. I use it daily, in lots of ways, and strive to make good and authentic use of the applications and opportunities it offers. I suspect that my technology use is middle-of-the-road: I am not phobic or without ability, but I don't live and die by electronic media and I rarely adopt a piece of technology or use software simply because I like the "whiz-bang" sound it makes. I suspect I could and should use it more, but I don't think I need to hang my head.

I do think that the best uses of technology are those that are integrated most naturally and fully into the curriculum, and sometimes to do that, we must upset the apple cart entirely, cut it up, and use it to build something different. It is difficult to embrace doing that, knowing that within a year if not a month, our "innovation" will be old news, old hat, or out of date, and we will find our efforts moot or at least ephemeral in their usefulness.

Still, I have found many ways to incorporate technology into my instruction and (more so) my assessments, ways that are better than the older, pencil-and-paper alternative. As a speaker who visited my school once noted -- I think it was Alan November and I am only loosely paraphrasing -- technology should give you less work to do, not more, i.e. it should make your life easier or your options as a teacher more easily accessible, or else you should not use it. I try to keep to that mantra.

November also pointed out that generally, our students will be more facile with computers than teachers will. I have found this to be true and liberating: so often, the kids can explain a piece of software or carry out an idea that I grasp but cannot facilitate very ably myself. I don't mind this sort of letting go. The iPads certainly lend themselves to student leadership in this sense.

One point of note in our iPad use: the English department that I am a part of has been slow to adopt or at least to mandate electronic texts. We have a variety of reasons, including availability. Plus, we love actual-factual books. I love books...and know that change is coming all the same. (I love my Kindle just as much.) It's interesting to be a part of such revolutionary times. I don't mind change, slow or fast, though I do think that change for its own sake is just that: change for its own sake rather than improvement. Call me old-fashioned.

Technology in the classroom:
One application I am suddenly using extensively in the English classroom is iMovie.

I am not entirely new to iMovie. My students use iMovie as a presentation tool from time to time. It is often an option, whether in response to a creative assignment or as a way of reporting their collaborative work during a group project. Once, three years ago, my honors American literature students used it extensively as they made "candidate biography" videos that presented faculty members in our school as presidential candidates. This assignment, while difficult for a variety of reasons, was also among the most interesting and satisfying (for me and for the kids in my classes) in my 15-odd years of teaching. Still, I was not actually making a movie myself in that instance -- we used YouTube to access the candidate videos from the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

In the last two weeks, though, I have undertaken an extensive experiment in 'flipping' our English 9 grammar curriculum. The concept behind a flipped curriculum, for those who are unfamiliar with this relatively new term, is that instead of lecture/discussion in class and "homework" or practice at home, the students watch an informative video (or videos) at home, perhaps do a little work to reinforce the concepts it presents, and then do the bulk of what would normally be considered homework in the classroom, whether in small groups or alone. The advantages, in theory, are great: when the student has questions or struggles, the teacher is immediately available to help; students can work at their own rates; students can help one another or work together in a supervised setting that prevents simple copying. The list goes on and on.

While I've been intrigued by the concept of flipping, I myself do very little lecturing or plainly informational presenting in class. The homework is often reading or writing, not exercises. My classroom model is generally semi-Socratic: I ask questions, the students lead the discussion or articulate ideas as they will, but at the same time I do have information that I want to convey and sometimes I redirect or intervene with a short explanation or 'lecture' amid a larger discussion. The kind of teaching that a flipped curriculum inverts is not the type I do.

In grammar instruction, though, there are more exercises, there is more explaining to be done, and the conversation feels more dry in content and lecture-like in format. Furthermore, the work that students do at home much more closely resembles an "exercise" (a form of homework more often seen in mathematics, science, or foreign language) than the work we do in response to literature. In fact, grammar learning -- the thinking it requires, the pattern recognition, the understanding of how parts relate to one another -- correlates closely to mathematics, and students who thrive or struggle in one often find themselves thriving or struggling in the other. The gap between those who "get it" and those who don't is often cavernous.

Thus, my teaching partner and I have been planning for months to apply for a curriculum grant that would facilitate flipping our English 9 grammar instruction. At my school, these grants encourage and reward curricular innovation by giving teachers some monetary support both to fund and to compensate for extra efforts, efforts that often take place in the summer or that are otherwise above and beyond the norm (redesigning a multi-week unit or even a whole course).

The deadline for these grant applications is this spring, but in the meantime, we teach grammar periodically this year; thus far, we have done so in the usual way, explaining, assigning homework from our text -- Sadlier-Oxford's Grammar for Writing, Level Orange -- and checking and explaining as best we could.

As we prepared to resume our grammar work a few weeks ago, I decided to give flipping a dry run, so to speak. Since then, I have made 28 iMovie projects (and counting). Our school makes wiki/blogs available for classes, and my teaching partner and I use ours daily to post homework assignments, share documents, and, at times, to support online discussion. Our 9th graders all have iPads, provided by the school, and next year all of our students grades 6-12 will have iPads, so accessibility is less problematic than it might be. I have been posting the videos to the wiki as homework assignments. The filming is incredibly low budget and simple. I write the information I am going to discuss on the board, I prop my laptop up on a podium and open iMovie, and I record myself talking to the computer and marking the board as I go. This wiki can only support about 6 minutes of video per embedded item, so often I have to split a 9-10 minute explanation into 2 videos. I edit the videos as I do so, taking out the worst of my verbal filler and typing important defining information as running captions so that students can see it clearly even if the image on the whiteboard is faint. At the end of a given explanation, I add additional screens with homework tasks, usually a brief writing task or a set of 8-10 sentences I have written that the students have to label or revise in specific ways. Once the kids return to class, they work in groups, writing these sentences on the board and then explaining their answers to me as a group. Another model we are trying is having the kids do their work out of the Sadlier-Oxford book (once upon a time their homework) in class, alone or with a partner, and I come around both to check their homework carefully and to intervene if they need help or reassurance in their work out of the book.

So far, the system has been an almost unqualified success. The kids generally like it. We are entertained, or perhaps I am entertained and hopefully they are entertained, by more interesting and comical sentences than those we find in our published grammar book. Just ask me about Humperdink and Ethel's thriving romance or Jacinda's humiliating public experience with Taylor Lautner or the various kinds of pets and foods that have graced our sentences thus far -- you get my drift. Moreover and more importantly, the weaker grammarians and more challenged listeners among us have said to me, individually and in class, that they learn better when they are alone, just listening and taking notes, able to stop or replay as needed. These are the very kids who needed the classroom discussion but had trouble accessing the information provided in class for a variety of reasons. The stronger grammar students are uninjured by the process and learning at least as effectively...and if they want to skip to the end of a video, I won't know the difference as long as their work is sound. I'm completely comfortable with that arrangement.

There is a downside: These videos are taking up almost all my work time at school, and I have a considerable amount and am working pretty efficiently at this point. Thus, once the experiment is over after we're done with this chapter and the next one, we'll probably hold off until the summer. Also, I'm in the videos. That's fine but not necessary or ideal, honestly. Over the summer we will probably explore other software, something like Voice Thread, that takes out my actual physical presence (and by this summer, my teaching partner's -- for now, I've just invited her along for the crazy ride in exchange for lots of photocopying help and the occasional Diet Coke) but leaves the voice.

All in all, though, it's going very, very well.

Teach Every Student: my philosophy of teaching

I wrote this philosophy for the course I took last semester and have been tweaking it ever since. I still don't feel satisfied with it -- it is (like much of what I say and write) full, full, full of words. But I do mean what it says.

*******************************************************************************
Meredith Loveland Brown
Philosophy of Teaching

I have been teaching for over fifteen years. I have taught at the middle school, high school, and collegiate level; I have tutored for a corporation, for the school that employs me, and privately; I have taught English, history, speech, study skills, creative writing, and Algebra II; I have taught the strongest students in a given setting and the weakest. Throughout these experiences and settings, I have tried to follow a single guiding mantra: Teach every student.

On the surface, this principle is self-evident, true by definition as soon as class members walk into a classroom and occupy the “student” space while I’m standing up front in the “teacher” space. My voice reaches each student, my handwriting is scrawled on the board in front of each student, my assignments are directed toward each student, my grading and written feedback apply reasonably equitably to each student’s work.

            But since early in my career, virtually its outset, I have believed that these facts alone do not mean that I am teaching every student. I have The Princeton Review to thank for this perspective. Of all the institutions I have worked for, it was this for-profit test-preparation company that articulated this fundamental principle to me. The paradigm is pretty simple: see the classroom like a photo negative, so that the shapes thrown into relief are not the students who are engaged and participating, but rather the students who are not. The motivation driving this emphasis was simple: business. At that time and probably still now, TPR offered a score improvement guarantee to every student who attended and completed the course work. Because of that guarantee and because of the fierce competition in the test prep industry, a teacher who did not successfully teach each student cost the organization money (free classes, “refresher” tutoring) and positive “word of mouth” – both bad for business.

Like many teachers, probably most, I do not particularly relish the idea of modeling education on a business model. Teaching, for me, is a passion and calling, not an occupation or the aggregate of numbers in the plus and minus columns. Some of best ingredients of true learning are equally ineffable.

That said, the goal of happy learning customers translates into a classroom approach that is, in my opinion, not merely sound but ideal. Please note that I mean customers figuratively. Teachers are not waitresses, vending machines, babysitters, tailors, or valets. In any work I do with students, I expect a level of professionalism and ownership from all my students, and I expect every student to engage, to invest effort and heart – non-contingent helping does not fuel learning, not of classroom content and not of the life-shaping lessons we gain from the experiences we face as students.

But I also find that too often, even at a school like the excellent one in which I teach, one that prides itself on an environment of caring and personal relationships, teachers are happy to teach each student…to teach each student who is happy to learn in ways prescribed by the teacher, according to the teacher’s individual, specific, firmly delineated rules and style: Leave your issues at the door, learn in my classroom, my subject, my way. I had many teachers of a similar ilk myself, and, if they were dynamic and funny and smart, I loved them. But as a student, I was capable of learning in almost any manner or environment – I could absorb the teacher’s subject, the teacher’s way. What about the students who cannot? They sit in our classrooms as well.

So what does it mean, in practice, to ‘teach every student’? First and foremost, at least in my opinion, a teacher must know every student. Observe, notice, question, inquire: How does he learn best in class? Does she participate or wait to be called up? Why does he thrive on homework assignments but fail tests and quizzes? Has his demeanor changed in recent weeks? Does she seem frustrated or defensive?  I make a point to try to hear each student’s voice at least once a day, even if just by exchanging salutations. I try to grade attentively rather than robotically. I read each student’s educational testing. I hunt endlessly for good learning support strategies to enrich my day-to-day classroom practices. And I ask. I ask students how the day or week is going, I ask advisors and colleagues when I’m worried about a student, I ask parents when I have the chance. I ask because students do not exist in the vacuum that is our individual classrooms: other coursework, social factors, home and work lives, and physical wellbeing all affect what takes place in my class. I also ask because I have found that through such conversations, especially with students themselves, I am mostly likely to find the gaps, whether in the what (the content) of the course or in the how (how to study, organize notes, etc.) The latter is just as much my responsibility, in my opinion, as the former. Helping students learn how better to learn another fundamental priority of mine as a teacher.

Furthermore, at least in my classroom, student learning is necessarily a social endeavor taking place in a social arena: my courses (in every subject I have ever taught) are discussion-based and semi-Socratic, feature considerable group work, and are girded with student-generated questions and answers and student-led paths of discourse. Moreover, my classroom style is more casual than structured – we can venture off into an unexpected topic of conversation and still find our way back to the general territory of the day’s planned class. A relaxed structure bears obvious dangers. It would be easy to devolve into mere play.

In order for it to foster learning as opposed to recreation, such an atmosphere must feature mutual trust. It must also rest upon clear, authentic source of authority: me. What does this mean in my classroom? It does not mean that we have a predetermined set of behaviors or a long list of punishments. It does mean that I must know not only the plan but the score. The day’s agenda, the activities and assessments on the horizon, the essential questions or long term goals – these are my responsibility at various times to determine and at all times to know and steer in light of. But some of the most important teaching that can happen in any school happens around the margins, as students come into class, walk down the hall, exchange casual comments en route to the pencil sharpener, and the like. Even among basically kind students, grade comparisons, “my-[whatever]-is-better-than-your-[whatever]” implications, petty barbs, “just joking” remarks, and miscellaneous moments of schadenfreude are ordinary fodder. Early in my career, I remember myself hesitating to step into the fray, afraid that missteps might damage my credibility with students. Now, perhaps by virtue both of more years of experience and of parenthood, I do step in, almost daily, “calling out” students for comments, hints, even facial expressions that seem to undermine the level of civility, trust, and emotional safety our classroom and school community afford. As I said to one colleague a year or so ago, “Someone has to be the grown-up in the room, and we’re the only ones eligible.” The moral tenor of the classroom and the academic aren’t just equally important; to my mind, they are different colors interwoven in the same cloth. Defending these two priorities, especially the notion of ethics, seems to me both idealistic and essential: whether at my current school or a spectrally opposite setting, these principles seem vital even when they are almost impossibly far from reach.

A last word about students with special needs: As a teacher who has worked in academic support services, as a teacher who is pursuing a graduate degree in special education, it seems remiss not to mention students with disabilities and with unique conditions and circumstances that differentiate them from their classmates. The teaching I strive to do, the teaching I discussed above, does serve such students, or at least it begins to do so. It allows for students of every level, need, and experience. The whats and wherefores of this approach depend on the level of student and the subject matter – I could go on and on about practice, but the philosophy remains the same. Understanding both key facts about how an individual student learns and what that student knows about his or her experience in the classroom make it easier to scaffold learning or, if appropriate or fair, tailor expectations to that student’s needs or level of current success. Knowing each student’s strengths, needs, struggles, and aspirations and establishing an environment of caring, kindness, and respect both facilitate that core goal: Teach every student.

technology and the English classroom

Article review:


I read the article "Expanding the Possibilities of Discussion:  A Strategic Approach to Using Online Discussion Boards in the Middle and High School English Classroom" by Sean Ruday, from Contemporary Issues in Technology and English Language Arts Teacher Education, the current edition. The purpose of the article is to provide information, advice, and other food for thought for current and future secondary school teachers of English who use or might use online discussion boards in the classroom. After analyzing studies and articles as well as interviewing teachers, Ruday offered a series of benefits to online discussion boards. Some of these benefits include an authentic audience that is not the teacher, more time for response, and more inclusive discourse. Ruday also suggests some guiding questions that teachers might ask themselves in order to determine both whether and how such discussion boards will align with specific course goals. Finally, Ruday also offers several points of caution. 


I chose the article because I have used online discussion formats and seen both their benefits and downsides. Certainly this article emphasizes the benefits. I am more skeptical (about online discussion boards, not the article per se) than I once was, largely for two reasons: (1) It is difficult to sustain an authentic discussion without eventual repetition unless you have a particularly small class and/or particularly motivated students without eventual repetition, or unless you write better questions that I do; and (2) I like to discuss in class as well, and I have struggled to find the right way to extend virtual discussion into the classroom and vice versa. I was intrigued to see this article's arguments in favor. I can't say that it offered anything I had not already considered, but I continue to use such boards periodically and remain interested -- there's always a chance I'll swing further back in that direction. On reflecting again in reading this article after taking a course this summer that used discussion questions (among adults) well, I am thinking that questions that are unresolvable, i.e. based on opinion or difficult to negotiate, work well in such a setting. I should do more!
http://www.citejournal.org/vol11/iss4/languagearts/article2.cfm

This.is.my.first.blog.post. Huzzah!

I have never wanted to blog, actually, or to be responsible for or even associated with a blog. My reasons for this are many, but they basically boil down to the things I fear about myself, based on the blogging I see others do.

1) I am afraid that I will just write a public diary. Private diaries are bad enough, or at least mine are. I have never written a personal journal entry that did not make me want to erase not only the pages themselves but the actual event of having written on them from the annals of human existence. The whining! The self-pity! The self-doubt so paralyzing even I don't see the sense in it (and it's my self-doubt we're talking about)! With a blog, if I turn tearful and drippy or wax faux philosophical, people will know.

1b) ...or perhaps worse yet, they won't know. Because who would follow me? But here I threaten to digress into terrible diary territory. I must move on.

2) I am not only afraid but feel pretty certain that I do not have post-upon-post worth of ideas that others would benefit from reading. I'm not saying "I have nothing to say" -- I prove that statement wrong every day, by talkingandtalkingandtalking. And I'm a professional with a reasonably unusual life; I do have things to say. But I'm pretty sure I do not have visionary observations or side-splitting humor that makes it worthwhile for some follower -- really? "follower"? -- to let the mac-and-cheese burn because they just.can't.stop.reading.

Still, I am happy to fulfill this requirement for my class and...I suppose you never know.

In the meantime, go check on dinner. I think your noodles are boiling over.