6th-Graders on Excellence

What do 6th-graders have to say on the subject of excellence?

Here is my recent work with a colleague's class. I asked these students to respond to photographs that suggested "excellence" (a photograph of Judith Jamieson dancing jubilantly, a photograph of a soccer player sitting on the field looking dejected). Then we moved on to voicethread.com , where they responded to photographs of students as well as their own drawings depicting excellence. Their observations are pretty marvelous!

They were excited about this project and eager to try all the aspects of the voicethread application. I could see this tool being used in all kinds of new ways in the classroom!

Speed Teaching Ourselves

At this past weekend's NMSA conference, I learned the concept of “Speed Teaching” from a session on "The Adolescent Brain: Reaching and Teaching" presented by David Vawter. So I've applied the basis concepts of the Six Rs -- Reflexes, Reflection, Review, Reteaching, Relevancy, Ready for what is next -- to how my colleagues and I might make the most of what we learned at the conference.

Reflexes: The brain is designed to add physicality to learning.
For Friday’s 2-3 minute presentation, use blocking or gestures to represent the most significant thing you learned at the conference. (Don’t be afraid to be silly.)

Reflection: “If you want long-term retention, you must have reflection.”
Blog (or journal) your responses to something powerful you learned at the conference. Share something valuable with a “neighbor” at the coffee station or at lunch or by email. Tell a story – let Susan videotape you? -- that makes connections to emotions to establish memories (or memory retention). Pass anything relevant along to me, and I will be happy to disseminate it.

Review: When the brain creates new connections, it immediately coats that link with a chemical to make it forget what it learned (this is to avoid a brain-wide meltdown). To overcome this, we must consciously create a coating of mylin so it won’t be forgotten. Thus, it is not a matter of how long we study, but of how many times we briefly review what we have learned or how many times we use a new concept. The first review creates one coat of mylin; the fourth creates four coats of mylin. Add up four reviews and you have ten coats of mylin, and a long-lasting connection.

So, review your notes from the meeting. Pass along what you have learned at the NMSA in more than one way: email a colleague, tell stories, teach via blogging, make school-wide proposals on the wiki (I’ve created a space for this), copy a handout for our shared file (to be placed by the copier) and write a note about its relevance. Each time you do something, you will be making the connections stronger in your own mind.

Re-teaching: Contrary to popular belief, it is not the same thing over again only louder and slower. Re-teaching involves new strategies or formats. Teach to a different learning preference each time: oral, auditory, visual, kinetic. Use students who “got it” the first time.

Don’t be afraid to tell people something they’ve heard before. Put it in a new format, perhaps a PowerPoint or iMovie?

Relevancy: This comes in two varieties – making it relevant to your life and making sense of why you are doing it.

Come up with a way you can immediately apply something you’ve learned in one of your classes (thus, making it relevant to your life). Remind yourself you are doing this because it helps you retain what you have learned (thus, meta-cognitively reinforcing your learning)

Ready for what is next: preview.

Give me a blurb of your “nugget” for Friday’s meeting? Pique our interest? I’ll create a trailer? Okay, maybe an agenda?

Colorful

At the Heart of Texas Fair, in Waco, last night. Forgot my camera, so I used my phone, and this is what I got. Looking for color where we can find it, adding color to our lives.

Okay, so I took this picture with the "colorful" tag at flickr.com in mind. I am aware of how social networking and blogging have given new importance to the still photograph.

I am looking for new ways to explore using visual photography in my teaching. In the spring, I'll be teaching "Creative Media" and will start to employ some of what I learned through the Literacy through Photography program at Fotofest here in Houston.

Has the advent of flickr and other ways to share photographs changed how we "see"?

Googling Advances, Web 2.0, and Michael Wesch

I was chatting yesterday with a private school headmaster about how the experience of googling has changed, say, over the past five years. We've gone from struggling to master the intricacies of boolean searching (does anybody use this anymore?) to come up with a few good sources to becoming spoiled by being able to put almost any word into a search, in any order, to find what we are searching for on the first page of results. Have we gotten better, or has Google gotten better, or has the Internet just gotten so vast that everything we want to know is out there somewhere? I think all of the above, but beyond considering the impact of tagging, we both found it hard to articulate just what has happened to our online searching experience over time.

Apparently, Michael Wesch found himself similarly stymied when he was trying to put into words, using a traditional text format, the changes wrought in the world of Web 2.0. According to the May 2007 of Wired magazine, which honored Prof. Wesch with one of its 2007 Rave Awards, the cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University was struggling with how to illustrate some of the changes in the way we live now, when he struck upon the idea of converting a conventional academic paper into a YouTube video. Here's the now classic video he came up with, so you can see for yourself.

Pacing vs. Racing

Here we are, out of the gate again, bumping into one another as we try to find a clear stretch down the track. And I want to pull up, as I watch the other horses blend into a mass of furious energy, and ask, "Why are we in a race?"

The students continually clue us in to how pacing affects their learning. Yes, they want something energized and going somewhere. They want to learn what we have to offer them. But they frequently tell us in all kinds of ways, "Slow down, so we can understand."

Likewise, we as teachers (and I'm as guilty of this as anyone) dive right into the semester (to switch metaphors here) and swim like we're drowning. Got to get to the shore. Got to cover that material. Got to deliver.

We do have a lot to address this year: new curricula, an accreditation review, new programs for integrating character education in our community. Let us not forget the importance of pacing, of slowing down and getting it right, of creating a healthy learning environment for our students. But I hope that we can all hold up and remember that it's not really a race to get everything in by the end of the year or a desperate swim for solid ground where we can come up for air.

"My Summer Vacation" Revisited

Yes, it's a cliche, but think about it. Summer is a time when we experience something other than "school" life. What we do on our summer vacations is important, whether we are remembering how to gear down and re-charge or taking off for adventures into the unknown. It's a time worth exploring with our students, worth tapping into to learn what matters in their lives, what their interests are. So I ask some simple questions below that might be used in a classroom, and give my own answers as examples. I'd love to hear your answers too.

1. What is your favorite thing to do in the summer?
That's easy. Read for pleasure. This summer I finished The Known World by Edward P. Jones and re-read Watership Down with my 10th-graders as summer reading. I've started Rand's The Fountainhead, which I've been promising my husband forever that I would read, and I'll be re-reading Black Boy, by Richard Wright, along with my seniors. I've also read some articles in The New York Times, a few issues of The New Yorker, some stage monologues, and lots of stuff on the Internet. For me, it's fun just being able to browse in this and that.

2. Describe something new that you learned how to do this summer.
My husband taught me how to play backgammon. He has yet to beat me at acey-deucey. It's rare for me to be interested in games that don't involve words, but I liked using my mind in a different way, strategizing and taking risks. It was fun.

3. Describe a place that you visited for the first time.
We stayed in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains for a week, on the border between Georgia and Tennessee. Our cabin was built into the steep bank of a creek, and we could hear the creek burbling constantly. At night, we left the windows open to let in the fresh mountain air and the sounds of happy frogs and crickets. We had no Internet or cell phone access, unless we went to town. We hiked to the top of Amicalola Falls (well, Larry did -- I wimped out about halfway). The mountain landscape was simply beautiful -- calm and relaxing, just what I needed.

If these were student writings, I would point out all the possible topics that might be worth pursuing. Plus, I would hope that readers might see a different side of me, learn something about my interests, or find further details about what you already know. Maybe we even have a connection we might not have guessed previously?

So, what about you?

Worth Watching

Occasionally, I will post education-related videos I've found on Youtube and Teachertube. Here is the first, "E-Teaching," about ways to incorporate technology in meaningful ways in a music class. There are lessons here for all of us.

Source information: Murphy, Elizabeth. "E-Teaching." YouTube. 13 March 2007. 1 July 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX94ws03o3o .

Everyone's a Critic

Having spent the past two weeks reading my own student evaluations, as well as those of our faculty, I picked up today's New York Times Magazine with interest to read David Holmberg's "On Language" column commenting on his own experience with student evaluations as a teacher of journalism at NYU and Drew University. He writes, "Sad to say, because Drew is such an exemplary school that in one of my three classes there I experienced the worst psychic injury in my university stint — from words I thought were severely lacking in intellectual openness and self-knowledge" ("Student Evaluations" 18). Not only do Holmberg's reactions and defenses ring true with any teacher who has felt the sting of his or her students' seemingly narrow and unconscious comments, but they also suggest to me the importance of teaching our students what it means to review and evaluate.

Yes, our students evaluate their faculty, but they are also roving critics on the Internet, rating everything from Youtube videos to their friends' comments on Myspace. To do this well, they need to learn the skills of critics -- the discerning eye, the questioning mind, the open perspective -- but they also need to learn how to effectively convey those views to readers, whether their audiences are the subjects of the critiques or it's subject's future viewers or users (a la "product" reviews on Amazon and elsewhere). Our students are just as likely to give rave reviews ("OMG!!!!!!!!") to something they haven't really thought about as they are to denounce something else ("It sucks!") that hasn't tickled their individual funny bones.

There's a responsiblity that goes with reviewing anything, and we have a responsibility to teach it.

Wiki Away!

I'm pleased to see that almost everyone is up-to-date on the curriculum wikis for English/Language Arts and Social Studies/History. (Hint: Use these hyperlinks, if you've forgotten how to get there.) As we see the year unfold in these disciplines, we can begin to make connections and see how we all work together to reach and teach our students.

Now it's time to take advantage of the discussion feature (see the tab at the top of the wiki page) and begin a valuable conversation about our courses -- how they work together, how they reinforce one another, but also how they leave gaps and sometimes work at cross-purposes.

Use the discussion feature as you would a "forum" in Moodle. You can post a comment or a questions and wait for a response, react to that response, and on and on.

Who knows, perhaps the wiki could make curriculum meetings obsolete?

Another Podcast of Soundscapes

Dickinson Soundscapes 3

You can sample more of the Soundscapes from my English II class by clicking on the link above. As with the previously podcasted interpretations of poems by Emily Dickinson, you may find it helpful to view the "lyrics" as you listen. To do so, use the links provided below:

Dying! Dying in the night!

There is a word

The Brain is wider than the sky

I took my power in my hand

A curious Cloud surprised the sky

Remorse is memory awake

Delight

I just had one of those wonderfully blessed teaching moments last Friday: watching as Sara, listening to her voice play back in GarageBand her rendering a poem by Emily Dickinson. She squealed in delight, put her hand to her mouth, laughed. At the end of class, she enthused, "Do you want to hear my poem?" Too bad it was late and she had to go. "On Monday," I said.

Already I had students who were teaching me as well as each other, going beyond the assignment, a poetic soundscape (based on th assignment designed by Dan Schmit for GarageBand Mechanics -- look for the sample chapter download). I feel bad because I have to hold them back, keep them from spending too much time on my assignment, rather than working on their other classes. Yet, it is this kind of desire to learn that keeps teachers going.

I can see why the movie Freedom Writers has such appeal. You see the Erin Gruwell character responding to the delight students have in expressing themselves. She is hooked. We all get hooked that way. And it is so sad when the "experienced," jaded teachers react territorially or jealously or cynically. They have lost the delight in doing their jobs every day; they have lost the ability to imagine the delight in their students.

And there it was again, in a section of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird assigned for my Creative Writing class, her advice to writers to be open to seeing the delight in every-day things, in whatever surrounds them. It is what keeps us human, and happy, and good. It's up to writers to delight in the world, even its wrecked sadness (because sadness and pain is so human), and to wake up the rest of the sleeping people out there to what they cannot even see.

Delight is catching.