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As part of their cumulative project, students in my Upper School (all 11th graders this year) US History class are responsible for researching the development of a particular area of US History and then teaching a class period on the topic.
This year I’ve been impressed by the way students who are teaching have gotten their classmates out of their seats and participating in learning activities. I think that this kind of learning, so prevalent in the lower grades, tends to fizzle out by high school. I confess it can be challenging for me to come up with these sorts of participatory activities without them feeling cheesy. I think what has worked so well in these classes is students are the ones who are leading the activities. They’re a great way to break up the lecture and discussion that have made of the other parts of the lessons the students have taught.
In addition, students have effectively used video in their lessons. They’ve chosen clips that are usually around 2-5 minutes long as a means for spurring discussion. Definitely a departure from some of my high school classes where a teacher would pop in a video that lasted the entire class period.
Here are just a couple examples of the students’ good work from last week.
One student taught on the evolution of household appliances. As an activity, she split students into two groups and challenged them to make cream cheese icing. One group hand an electric mixer, while the other had a whisk and a butter knife. I was put in the low-tech group and can testify to our frustration as we tried to make icing with what felt like woefully inadequate tools 
As part of her lesson, the teacher also showed us the following video, which gave us a sense of the novelty of electric appliances in the early 20th century.
Another student taught on the history of personal transportation. He created a homemade carburetor pressure monitor (it probably has a more technical name than this). He then invited other students to demonstrate how it worked by blowing on the two tubes that would have been hooked to the sides of a carburetor in the car.
As part of his lesson we also discussed the future of cars. He showed us a video of a Tesla, a new generation of electric cars that mirrors and even surpasses the performance of many standard cars.
Teachers head back to school tomorrow. Because we’re on a trimester system, the summers feel especially short to me. Ok, they might also feel that way because I tend to pack them full of work and travel.
The week and a half before students return is always a challenging time for me. One of the reasons I became a teacher was to avoid days full of meetings with adults Despite knowing that kids learn best when adults work together, I sometimes find it hard to remain engaged and focused. It’s like wanting to garden, but sitting in a room looking at seed catalogs in early Spring. One has to balance the overwhelming desire to start digging already with the needed dreaming and planning. Planting season’s just around the corner though, and I’m sure when it does come, I’ll be grateful for much of the planning.
On Monday, I’m doing one of the Ignite-style (20 slides in 5 minutes) presentations for the NCAIS 21st Century Teacher Academy. I thought about doing the presentation on Socratic Seminars I’ve used before, but I decided to put together a new presentation based on some of the things I talked about at the New Literacies Institute earlier this week.
I had fun playing with the inking feature in Powerpoint using my Lenovo tablet. (That’s not a paid advertisement, but if they sent me one of their new tablets, I wouldn’t send it back 
) I use the inking feature often when students are taking notes or when I’m explaining something in class, but I hadn’t ever really used it for a presentation.
The student-taught lessons are coming to an end in our US History class. After teaching, I asked students to reflect on the following questions. Below each question I’ve posted some of the student responses.
Did your lesson go according to your plan? If not, how did it vary? Was this a good or bad thing?
My lesson went pretty accurately to plan. There were a few times I needed to ad-lib due to the fact that some things took longer than I had anticipated. I did not get to send out the game I wanted everyone to play, and I did not get to show my video, but since the debate was going well, I asked another question for them to talk about because they seemed interested. It wasn’t necessarily a good or a bad thing, I just observed it as an obstacle that everyone is eventually going to need to overcome because not everything is always going to go according to plan.
My planned lesson ended up about 5 minutes early but I quickly thought up the idea of quizzing the students on “what food came first” based on the food timeline they had all looked at for their hw. Definitely ended up being a good thing, because it brought the class back to a more standard learning style (after the making of strawberry shortcakes), while still keeping the class fun and interactive.
The picture taking from the magazine took a lot longer than I had anticipated, so I didn’t get a chance to do the last couple of things I had planned. I don’t think this was good because the beginning was mostly reflection and I wanted to get into the video and scenarios.
Do you felt you engaged the students? How could you tell?
Sometimes engaging the students as difficult in the conversations because it wasn’t a very controversial topic. But I feel like I did a good job working with that, asked each person so say the major thing that hit them from the reading. Also, I think that giving every few people an event and putting it on the board in a timeline forced everyone to think and participate. I thought the game was a good way to participate as well.
Yes, I did. I felt like bringing candy was critical, primarily because when you announce people will be rewarded for their participation, it instantly spiked interest. Most of the people were talking during the debate that I started, which made me think that the people were interested in the topic I asked them to debate on. Also, people were talking and raising their hands whenever I asked questions, even though through the homework I learned that everyone did not particularly have an interest in baseball.
What would you do differently if you were to teach the lesson again?
First of all, I would have picked a topic that was more interesting to the class. Baseball was interesting to me, so it made the class very easy to teach, and made it possible for me to change the plans on the fly when something unexpected happened. I would have picked a topic that more of the class was interested in because it would have potentially led to more questions back to me, rather than just a couple of questions from the students, and a lot of questions from myself.
I would leave more time for discussion. I feel like that’s what everyone gets the most out of because it opens up different ideas and perspectives. This was also a topic that people are interested in talking about, so everyone was generally engaged during the discussion.
I would probably ask people to close their computers, because I realized they weren’t necessary, and was the source of some distractions. Also, I would try to figure out a way to bring more debate into the class.
What did you learn from teaching? How might you be able to apply this learning in other contexts?
I learned that teaching is a lot like putting on a play or a performance. Even though you are up there presenting to your friends and classmates, they mostly just stare blankly at their computers if you are not asking them direct questions. Teaching has to be difficult to constantly keep 16 and 17 year olds entertained for a block of time. I think i can apply this to other contexts when I am working with younger students for tutoring or volunteering and also in public speaking, be sure to keep the information straight forward and the important things at the beginning.
I learned that it is harder than expected to willingly engage everyone in a topic you find interesting. I also think that I learned that I need to directly ask questions to an individual and not the whole class. I think it gave me more respect to the difficulty that teachers have keeping a class engaged, especially when they are forced to teach on something that is particularly boring.
I learned that it is frustrating when people don’t listen or participate. From now on, I will definitely try more to minimize side conversations.
I learned that people are active when the topics are things that they are interested in, I could try to get people to relate to topics in various ways so that everyone can be engaged.
It’s pretty hard to keep everyone engaged unless the topic is really interesting. Also it’s necessary to keep debate going for the length of the whole period so that was a little challenging. I think being able to keep discussions going is important especially for job interviews and college interviews. They look for a person who is friendly and can keep a conversation, not someone who answers with one word.
Overheard in my high school blended learning class last week…
How do you teach someone something without just telling it to them?
I want to play a game, but what if everyone else plays games in their lessons and people get bored of games?
You’re not going to bail us out if the tech fails?!
What if people are looking at their tablets instead of me? I don’t want to look out and just see the backs of tablet screens. How will I know if people are paying attention?
This is hard! No, seriously, this is hard.
As the final part of their cumulative project, the students in my blended learning class are planning the learning experiences (lessons) they will lead for the class in the weeks to come. Over the course of that time, each of the students will be responsible for posting prep work for students to complete prior to their class, facilitating the lesson, and evaluating students’ preparation and participation. Students who are participants in the lesson will evaluate the facilitator/teacher. (We’ve had discussions about what makes effective teachers/lessons as prep for this part of the project.) The incredible thing about the project so far has been watching students become really invested topics and then wrestle with how to teach that to others.
I will act as a student doing all the prep work and participating in the lesson. I’ve told students that I will not be intervening as an authority figure unless something happens contrary to the code of conduct in the student handbook (violence, hateful language, etc.). As a teacher, it’s no small thing to give your class over to seventeen and eighteen year olds for six and a half weeks. I’m sure there’ll be occasions when I’ll have to resist the urge to offer a correction or bail a struggling student out. In those moments, I’ll try to remember my first days of teaching. The wonderful, painful, hilarious days of fumbling to discover what it was to be head learner.
A teacher working on her post-bac teaching certification wrote to ask me some questions for her Foundations of Education class. Below is my response. Feel free to push back/disagree or extend in the comments section.
Those are some big questions! I could write for pages on any one of them, so a caveat that this isn’t all I could say.
What do you think the purpose of education should be? I’m going to be a bit lazy (energy conserving) this one and point you to my philosophy of education. I think it addresses this question.
What knowledge do you think is of the most worth to students? I’m not 100% sure how your professor is using the term knowledge. I generally think skills are more important than knowledge, if knowledge is construed to be a particular set of facts. Perhaps the most important skill is how to learn. As a teacher, I don’t delude myself that students are going to carry with them the majority of the discrete pieces of information that they come across during the course of our classes, but I do hope they have built some habits and skills they can use forever.
(I was struggling a bit to formulate my thoughts on this question, so I tweeted it out. Here were some of the responses:
What values should teachers encourage their students to develop? Perseverance, self-discipline, curiosity, and joy.
What do you think is the best way for a students learning to be evaluated? I think students should play a role in the evaluation of their and their peers’ work. I wouldn’t advocate solely for self-evaluation because I think it’s often difficult to adequately assess our own work. (See Dan Ariely’s The Upside of Irrationality) That doesn’t make self-evaluations useless in my opinion; it just means I wouldn’t use them as the only measure of a student’s work. Ideally, the audience for a student’s work is larger than the classroom (through public presentation, posting it online, etc.), which opens up additional avenues for students to receive feedback on their work. I think many of the evaluation schemes used in education today are designed to be convenient for adults to grade and collect quantitative date from, not necessarily beneficial for structuring lessons and activities for student learning. I don’t think quantitative, standardized data should not be used, but I don’t believe it should be the sole evaluative strategy.
It’s been a long trimester. Not a particularly bad one, but a long one. Teaching an Upper School blended learning class has pushed me harder than I’ve been pushed in awhile. When I walk into a classroom of sixth graders, everything feels right in the world, but when I walk into a room of high schoolers who I only see twice a week, it feels strange. It’s also reminded me what an exhausting/humbling/exciting/crushing/rewarding/thankless/exhilarating job teaching and kicked up in my face (not always in bad ways) things that I’ve claimed to believe about teaching. It’s one thing to claim you believe in failure and cite a minor tech difficulty you had with a sixth grade class. Quite another to say you believe in failure and watch a debate you spent hours preparing materials for fall apart while you’re live-streaming it because you didn’t do a very good job of scaffolding and students haven’t done a very good job of preparing. Even harder than that is separating what part of the disappointed/angry/frustrated/tired emotion that follows is about you, and how much you like it when your kids look good (and make you look good). I like pretty (well designed/beautiful/clean), but learning is messy and sometimes it’s hard to be honest about the messy.
(I started thinking about this trimester while I was reading Dean’s recent post arguing that blogging would make better teachers. I think I agree, if they feel like they can blog honestly, but this public thing changes writing or makes it harder or something. Maybe a “natural transparency” emerges or maybe you just stop blogging about the hard stuff. That’s what I’ve done this trimester. I realize writing this post probably in some way acknowledges that Dean’s right. That’s ok; I don’t play golf. Now if he’d offered his iPad…)
I know a number of teachers who daily write such a vision in words and in their lives, even in the midst of difficulties- grieving students they couldn’t reach, attempting to engage those who have forgotten they teach children and not numbers, and battling their sense of their own inadequacies. To these, thank you. Your words and lives sustain me.
I didn’t intend to write a blog post tonight, but I read the following which Jim Burke posted on the English Companion Ning:
January is nice but it’s not when we teachers begin our year. Ours begins in August or, for a few, September. Now is to time to think about what Stephen Covey tells us: Begin with the end in mind whether we are thinking about our business or our personal lives. We have had this raging good post stream about what we will do the first day, the first week of school, but to what end? What will those first days lead to in June? And how will they do that?
Whether personal or professional, what do you want to be able to say in June and what must you do to be able to say or accomplish that?
My response…
In lots of ways, this year feels like it will be my first year teaching all over again. So many moving pieces, so many commitments. Next year will be my third (or fourth, depending on how you count) in teaching. I’ve yet to have the same preps for two years in a row (1st yr- 5th American history and 3rd grade, 2nd yr-6th grade Language Arts, 3rd yr-6th grade Language Arts and History) and next year won’t be any different. I’m piloting a blended learning (online and classroom) 12th grade US History course in addition to teaching the courses I taught last year. During my first year of teaching, I also worked 25 hours/week as a youth minister. It was a very busy year, but also an incredibly rich one. While I know some people think that kind of schedule is nuts and I do have to be careful about packing things too tightly, there’s something about a lot of work that reduces my anxiety because there’s not much time to sit around and let thoughts run wild. By June, I’d to have the sense of accomplishment of taking on lots of good work and doing it well.
In the first several years at my current school, I’ve kind of flown under the radar, doing lots of teaching and some presenting, but not really getting involved in institutional work (committee, extracurriculars, etc). I think I’ve not really sought out those responsibilities because so often I find them an energy suck. I don’t think that that is going to become an area of passion for me anytime soon, but I would like to find some of that kind of work that would contribute to the community while also being energy-giving for me by June. (There are a couple things in the hopper toward this end.)
On the personal side, I live in an area that seems to “turn over” about once every three years as people who have come to the area for graduate school move on for further study or new jobs. While I love the energy of college towns, it requires “rebuilding” a group of friends every so often. By the end of the year, I’d like to have strengthened ties with some of those who are still here and found ways to connect with new people.
I love contributing to conversations of other educators online. I’ve been the beneficiary of generosity of many, especially the members of the English Companion Ning in my first year of teaching English and several really helpful teachers and professors who use Twitter.
But recently, I feel like I’m not keeping up my end of the bargain particularly well. I’ve gotten direct messages on Twitter from people concerned I was angry/upset/ignoring them because I hadn’t replied to their @ messages. I’ve left discussion thread questions and emails unanswered.
I’ve also seen things from the other side of the fence. When a promised comment on a post I’ve written never materializes or an email goes unanswered for weeks, I feel a little disappointed.
Each of us has a limited amount of time. As a full-time classroom teacher, I have less time and less flexibility than some might have. A good deal of my time needs to be spent being present to my students. (Time spent interacting with colleagues online certainly enriches my subsequent interactions with students, but they are two different things.)
My time is going to be especially tight in the coming year because I’m adding a blended learning section of 12th grade American History to last year’s teaching load. To that end, I’ve started putting limits on my online time, as opposed to trying to respond to everyone I feel like I need to before getting off. (Off the internet by 10pm on weeknights and midnight on weekends and no answering school-related emails from Friday night-Saturday afternoon.) These limits seem necessary, but I also hate that they will limit the extent to which I can be helpful/keep in touch.
The voluntariness of digital communities and colleagues varies from face to face colleagues in that my school administration likely won’t step in if I fail to respond to queries or keep up my end of communication. But I do feel like being the one who fails to reciprocate has consequences. It’s also interesting to realize that some people perceive our online interactions differently than I do. The other curiosity with online interactions is that it’s often easy for people to see when I am online, but not responding to them and vice versa.
What, if any, responsibility do you feel toward those with whom you interact online? How do you balance that responsibility with other responsibilities? Does this responsibility vary from the responsibility you feel toward face to face colleagues and acquaintances?
*It may be a stretch to call the people with whom I interact online digital colleagues, but to me that term seems more apt than PLN (Personal Learning Network) or PLC (Personal Learning Community). I’m imagining the term applying to anyone with whom I interact with in a professional capacity online. The strength of these ties varies, as they do with face to face colleagues.
