Tag Archives: lessons

Video on The Benefits of Co-Teaching: A Blast from 2005

I don’t discuss my years as an English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL, a.k.a. ESL) specialist much on these pages, mainly because there are no ESOL students at my high school. But the experience of being a second teacher in the content-area classroom when I wore this hat? That’s some good fodder for thinking beyond school-as-usual.

Any of you who have co-taught or team-taught know the mix of factors that can make it a nightmare or a paradise. Working with fellow history teacher Michael Harvey (now in Abu Dhabi) was a dream. I discuss this in the movie below, and students weigh in on why they liked it too.

I still miss having a second adult in my English and history classes today. ESL aside, it just creates possibilities for better teaching – primarily by giving students the experience of hearing two “expert” adults argue about literary, social, political, and other issues. Michael and I debated such things as Castro’s Cuban revolution, American imperialism during and after the Cold War, the merits of economic, political, and religious systems, etc, with sincere differences. We fenced about them in free-wheeling debates whenever one of us disagreed with the other. We told the students to decide whose arguments had the most merit.

Then we had scotch and nice long talks as best of friends outside of class.

The students loved it. It was learning the family dinner-table way, with two reasonably intelligent, informed adults discussing and debating world events. “Kids” with ears learn a lot that way about thinking and points of view.

So this 2005 ESOL-in-the-Mainstream co-teaching training video I made at Shanghai American School is a good example of team teaching that worked. It’s received good feedback over the years. And notably, it’s about teaching, not about technology. Disclaimer: The dreaded Five-Paragraph Essay rears its ugly head here, but remember – it’s in the context of teaching academic essay-writing and organization for 14-year-olds. I always unteach the 5PE once students have shown they’re ready for organic writing.

It’s my first-ever iMovie, by the way. And enjoy the goofy Baptist preacher look I was playing with back then. I’ve since re-embraced my freak-flag.

Note: I’ve added this to my Teaching Gallery page.

From the Classroom Blogging Doldrums: What Would Teacher 2.0 Do?

Sometimes you just want to give up. Instead, I’ll go transparent and see what ideas, counsels, or commiserations come from sharing.

It’s about the “Visionary Student Blogging” connective writing project.

The problem? Little vision, little connective writing.

It’s partly senioritis, I think. College applications, SAT’s, too many commitments to too many extra-curricular activities (got to have those bullets for the college application, even if they come at the cost of destroying both my learning and my GPA), too many week-long sports trips, too many AP classes that were chosen not for interest but again for careerist reasons.

It’s partly Korean culture: parents sending students to night and weekend schools for SAT prep, AP prep, tutors. Students confusing memorization skills with academic excellence, trained to “be instructed” rather than to “construct” meaning themselves. Having no time to be, reflect, explore, wonder (or having no energy, rather).

And it’s partly my own fault: all the macho posturing of Advanced Placement courses as “college-level, rigorous,” etc – and Wes Fryer‘s etymolological connection, in Shanghai back in September, of “rigor” with “rigid” and “rigor mortis” echoes here – led me to buy in to what now seems a sadistic and pedagogically pathetic imperative to overload AP students with A Mountain Of Homework. I’ve stopped that and changed courses after seeing that Paradise Lost was over most of my seniors’ heads. Instead, I’m now trying to save Milton from being Hated by Association with AP by simply playing the Bard and reciting my favorite parts to them, with full bardic savoring of Milton’s high style, and then gushing explicative about those heights as if I was talking about it on a summer road trip with friends. Call it modeling the Oral Tradition. They’ll be given the wheel for the later books, and expected to do the same. (See Carolyn Foote’s “How Long Does It Have to Be?” post about homework load for more on this, and read Alfie Kohn’s The Truth About Homework for some research data.)

And it’s partly they don’t know how to be writers. They’ve ever only written what teacher tells them in school, by and large.

So. Again, the result: little vision, little effort, little connective writing. Little writing at all. (There are exceptions, blessedly.)

So they’ve pulled me back from Beyond Schooliness into Threatening Teacher mode. I don’t like it. Below is my schooly post to them. Tell me what you would do? Here it is:

You’ve seen the “What Makes a Quality Weblog” guide. It’s the one you used to give feedback on each others’ blogs a few weeks ago. Click here if you need to see it again.

I’ll use it to assess your blogs for two “test” grades – the “Composition” part of this “Literature and Composition” course. Writing schooly essay assignments is only one form of writing (and the least authentic one, at that. You’ll never write literary analyses in the real world).

Connective reading and writing is the other half of your writing development in this class.

This project started on September 18-ish. You just finished your eighth week since starting it. The finish date will be Friday, December 7. That’s 11 weeks of writing you need to show you were doing.

The “Quality Weblog” guide is meant to be just that: your guide. It tells you how to make an A (”mastery” on the guide), a B (”above average”), a C (”average”), or lower.

Biggest factors for your grade: frequency, connectivism (linking to and discussing BLOGS that match your interests), writing quality (titles, ideas, style, voice, presentation – photos, font, links correct, etc), and tags (organization). There should be evidence of “self-directed learning” – call it your chosen, interest- or passion-based research project – in your writings.

So here’s the math, with a bit of generosity*:

If you want an A for these two test grades: by December 7, you should have

45 posts; 10 “long-ish”; 22 “connected” (linking to posts you’ve found interesting, but more importantly, discussing WHY you found them interesting); 44 “short-ish”.
for examples of “longish,” see JoonPyo’s post (good, but not connective at all, so nobody will find it in the real world), Nicole’s post 1 and post 2 (both good AND connective – Nicole seems to “get it” more than most students, and is a real pleasure to read – much more pleasant than her schoolwork), Shim’s post (good, but connects to a website instead of blog, so nobody will visit and form a network relationship). Or for a non-student example, see this post on “Have Fun – Do Good” about “How to Get Someone Other than Your Mom to Read Your Blog” – connective, fun, informative, useful (you don’t need that many links in your “connective” posts – one or two is fine).

for examples of “short-ish AND connective,” see Jane’s post.

finally, too many 1- or 2- sentence posts really makes you look lazy

Think a paragraph or two.

If you’ve been writing regularly, you’re okay. If not, you’ve got some catching up to do. Or you can aim for a C by using the guide.

Finally: if you still haven’t found feeds to match your interests, I’ll say it one last time: see me and I’ll help. Or don’t, and get what you deserve for not having your act together enough to problem-solve.

Note: I will help you write more by scaling back the Paradise Lost reading load. But you must yourself make the time – key word, make – to write regularly. You won’t go anywhere if you never start, in writing or in life.

—
*the “generosity,” for those who didn’t do the math, is that I reduced 11 weeks x 5 posts/week = 55 posts to only 45; I also reduced “11 long-ish” to “10″.

The Long Preface:

“A teacher is only as good as his students.”

That’s how I prefaced my little “beginning to blog to the world” pep talk to my Advanced Placement Literature seniors. I already posted about the “Walden 2.0” idea – a grandiose name, granted, for a simple escape into the woods to film our “about me and my dreams for this seven-month blogging journey” clips.

“If you can’t be visionary, this isn’t going to work very well.”

I meant that. I believe that. But I knew when I said it, and still know now, that the battle was uphill. Either I was paranoid, or else their skepticism was palpable. And who can blame them? They get their fill of teachers trying to sell them irrelevant guff on a daily basis. Why should my snake oil be any different?

“Envision seven months of fishing for readers, comments, conversations, connections with experts out there in whatever it is you’re interested in. What does it look like?”

I tried to use my own blog as a datum – a real tightrope without a net, since first of all, I show it too them so often already, and second, it can be misconstrued as egotism regardless of how many times I state that it’s the phenomenon itself that’s the point, not me.

“Who do you want in your network? What teachers and helpers and mentors, what friendly supporters?”

I told them blogging has connected me with people who share my passion – education – and has enriched my understanding and practice of that passion beyond my own wildest dreams. And that it has encouraged me to dream even wilder. I told them about my own ten-month journey from a little in-school wiki collaboration in February, to a massive 12-country wiki collaboration attempt three months later, to Project Global Cooling now – how all of them succeeded, how all of them found caring audiences and partners, how all of these dreams, once articulated through simple, dogged self-publishing, became realities.

“So what reality can you dream for your own blogging journey?”

I told them I suspected dreaming their own pathway for their own journey would be very difficult for them, because twelve years of school had smothered any capacity for self-direction they might otherwise have developed. I told them about the student in the Danny Mydlack‘s Sudbury School “unschooling” documentary, Voices from the New American Schoolhouse, who spent his first year of unschooling “detoxing,” in his words, by doing nothing but playing video games – for an entire school year – while the unschool staff simply let him.

And how that same student, the following year, plunged into self-directed studies with a passion. He learned to script his own video games. He developed a passion for algebra. He found himself.

Oh what the heck – I’ve posted that student before, but he is so powerful, here he is again. Drag the scroller to exactly 4:00, and give him a five-minute listen. He’ll blow you away:

(The entire documentary is viewable on YouTube as well.)

I mentioned the girl in the school who signed out regularly to go to the stables and groom and ride her horse, because showing, breeding, and training horses was the future she already knew she wanted.

Their eyes got a far-away look in them during that part. Imagine being trusted to want to learn stuff, instead of being forced to – and being encouraged to decide which stuff for yourself.

The Story:

Shana loves chemistry. She seems to have the vision. She seems to be blogging in hopes of finding fellow chemistry types out there for conversations. And she does it beautifully in this post about the speed of modern life and . . . the strangely spiritual chemistry of autumn. And this from her second week of blogging.

Ask yourself – if you were a chemist, wouldn’t you appreciate the young mind that produced this work? I’m not a chemist, and I do.

The Epilogue:

A “teacher” is only as good as his “students.” Shana makes me feel good right now.

I’m not so much of a dreamer that I think all of my students will get it. We all know the law of averages dictates otherwise. But if those rarities with vision learn to strengthen that skill – and vision, the more I think about it, seems to rightly deserve the label “skill” — and to apply it? Well, then: over the next seven months, we might be in for something worth seeing.

Visionary Student Blogging: or, The Ghost in the Machine

It’s been a heck of a week, and it’s only Wednesday morning. So here are some updates about 1) attempting to inspire a visionary foundation in my students’ approach to blogging (via the “Campsite Seminars” in the woods around our school, as posted about earlier after watching Christian Long‘s segment of Dean Shareski‘s “Design Matters” K12 Online presentation); 2) shifting Project Global Cooling – our globally collaborative, never-ending “citizenship 2.0″ project – into second gear with a self-hosted website, a Ustream tv channel, and more; and 3) gearing up for the second annual 1001 Flat World Tales creative writing workshop with new classrooms from new countries joining this year.

In Dreams Begin Realities: Seeking a Vision for Blogging via the Walden 2.0 / Campsite Seminars

“Digital Natives” my bright white…board. My seniors have no idea about weblogs, connective writing, Technorati, embedding html, tagging, RSS, and so forth. It’s been a struggle teaching them these nuts and bolts, but those mechanical tasks are done. For the record, that was Stage One of my re-tooled attempt to integrate writing instruction via blogging in my high school (as the English department head, I was able to push through a four-year plan in which students would write from grade 9 to 12 on the same blog, and write a sort of biographical reflection their senior year based on the evidence in those blogs).

So to recap:

Stage One: “The Machine”

Create a blog on our hosted WordPress MU
Claim it on Technorati
Claim it on Clustrmaps
Claim it on Sitemeter
Install all these in your sidebar
Install the Oddiophile Technorati Tag Generator in your Firefox bookmarks toolbar, and tag all entries aplit and aplit07
Choose a theme (I’ve installed over 100 in our server)
Choose a name, tagline, etc
Write an “About” page introducing yourself to your readers and telling them what they can expect on your space
Create a Bloglines account
Create Bloglines folders for each category of reading you think a “well-rounded, cultured person” should do
Find at least three blogs in each category that you like, and subscribe to them
Embed your Bloglines blogroll in your sidebar

They’ve done all that, with a few digitally-challenged exceptions.

Next, I wrote a “Guide to Quality Weblogs” for students to use as a rubric to critique each others’ blogs. It addresed every trait I could think of that goes into a quality blog, from theme design to post design, from content on the levels of the whole blog to content of individual posts, from connectivism via links to conversationalism via invitational conclusions in posts, prompt responses to comments, and more. I assigned each student to critique three other students’ blogs using this rubric, and leave their critiques not in the comments – who wants a comment for all to see that says “Your theme is boring and so are your ideas”? – but as Diigo annotations that only members of our class Diigo group can see.

Again, “Digital Natives” my patootie: many students left good comments that rightly belonged in the “comments” section as Diigo stickynotes, again showing they have no idea of the very basics of this world. But they did it. We’ll keep returning to these criteria over the coming seven months.

I told the students that I will be grading their blogs only in the beginning, and only based on this criterion: “Are you writing regularly?” If they’re not, they’ve got trouble on their hands. Otherwise, any content is okay. After all, it took me a month or more to find my own feet in my own blog. Let them stumble about for a while, and trust in time. I’ll only grade them again at the end of the quarter, as a major writing project grade (this is AP Literature and Composition, after all.)

So: the machine is assembled. Now for the soul – “the Ghost”:

Stage Two: Putting the Ghost in the Machine by Dreaming Your Blog’s Future

I had four camcorders charged, tapes re-wound and ready for a shoot, when students entered the class today. The timing was perfect: both classes were after lunch, on a golden autumn afternoon. The woods around us were ablaze with color, as were the mountain ridges surrounding our horizon. Sunny, beautiful. Perfect temperature. A perfect day for “Walden 2.0″.

I assigned the poetry readings for the next class’ seminars and got that out of the way.

Then I gave them a handout and talked them through the rationale behind it: trying, for once in their schooly lives, to become visionary – to imagine where they want connective blog-writing to have taken them at the end of the next seven months. And to articulate that vision for a brief video interview that they will embed in their about page (if they want to extract the audio and only use that, or combine it with a slideshow or whatever, to protect their identity, etc, that’s okay too).

The handout is nothing special, but it’s linked here on Google docs, public, if you want to use it. This is what it says:

The Campsite Seminars

No. 1: Dreaming Your Future into Being

“In dreams begin realities.”

–anonymous

“Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.”

–Anais Nin (20th c. French writer, mistress of Henry Miller)

Directions: Real simple. Gather your thoughts about the following questions. Bullet points are best. You want to only glance at these as you talk spontaneously during your filming. (And don’t worry, we can always re-shoot. Just be you, and you’ll be fine.)

1. What I want you (my readers and visitors) to know about me is….
2. My thoughts and feelings — positive and negative — about connective writing via weblogs are….
3. If I were free to study or apprentice in anything in the world — to sit at the feet of the best talents in the field, and learn from them — they would be people in the field(s) of….
4. What you can expect to see me exploring on my blog — sharing what I’ve read, what I think, who I like who also explores this subject(s) — is the subject of …..
5. What I hope visitors to my web-log will do is …..
6. Beyond my wildest dreams, after seven more months of writing for, to, and in the world, my efforts will lead to these results (personally, socially, professionally)…..

I gave them ten minutes or so of quiet time to create that vision (oh, you factory school bell schedule), then gave them a quick lesson on how to frame shots in the camera with quality.

Then we went to the woods.

The groups of four filmed each other discussing their vision in this beautiful setting, while I laid down and watched the sky and trees for twenty minutes. Ochre, russet, azure, gold: an eyes-open power-nap. (And don’t we notice autumn differently as we age?) I heard snippets of their talks, and liked what I heard.

Then we returned to the brick walls, and called it a day.

I’m going to be late for school if I keep writing this, so I’ll stop here, after adding the Murphy’s Law postscript: I’m trying to capture the footage from our Canon ZR800′s into iMovie, and iMovie doesn’t recognize the camcorder. It did last week. I’ve spent hours troubleshooting with no luck. Pray for me.

I’ll have to save those 1001 Flat World Tales and Project Global Cooling updates for a later post, probably today.

Photo credits (via search.creativecommons.org):
Liquid Silver Melts the Surface by .supernova.
il mio punto di vista by fabrizio
Zero Gravity by [auro]ra

Beyond School

Dispatches from the War on Schooliness