Tag Archives: high school sophomores

Building Connections with Movenote

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Last summer I set out to “flip” my vocabulary instruction in order to save class time. Armed with the web-based tool https://www.movenote.com/presentation/record, a Chromebook with a camera, and lists of vocabulary terms for each unit, I created Google presentation shows with images from Pixabay to bring vocabulary terms to my students. While I was only somewhat successful at the original objective, a number of other magical things happened through these videos.

Screenshot 2014-08-02 at 6.40.48 AM

Each term’s slide contains a description for the term – not the “textbook definition” of it – as well as an image associated with it. In the presentations, I offer an example and non-example for each term as well. (Occasionally, the non-example is such a stretch that I omit it.) This is a method derived from Marzano’s vocabulary strategies.

In terms of instruction, this method accomplished the desired results and was actually more accurate than past methods in which – while presenting to multiple sections throughout a day – I would sometimes draw a blank for one class or come up with a better example for another class. To share the presentations, I used two methods. I posted links to them on our class website hosted on our school’s site and created QR codes for them. I had papers with the QR codes in our classroom and, on average, about three students preferred this method and would watch the videos on their phones.

While watching the presentation, students were to record the information provided. When I execute this in the future, I will definitely scaffold this with a pre-made form early in the year. Few students included columns for image, example, and non-example on their documentation when left to do so on their own. They overestimated their ability to understand the terms with only descriptions.

Most of my students had a technology device in this process, but timing and convenience factored in on how these presentations were used as well. When our course units lasted at least two weeks, I expected students to watch the presentations on their own outside of class. For units that were shorter, we would watch the presentations in class.

When we watched the presentations in class, I realized that my intentions of using this instructional method to save time represented a sliver of its actual benefit. I gained insight in watching students capture information during these time periods; normally, I am so busy “working” that I miss out on the intricacies of how students work. Rolling the presentation on the “big screen” in my classroom while I was there freed me to circulate, observe, and offer assistance. There was some natural discomfort in watching and hearing myself, which showed a human side my students don’t always see. On these presentation days, I would see necks crane to see the screen and that “What’s she going to do this time?” expression on my students faces. It struck me that this presentation method unveiled more than I expected. Students who didn’t usually laugh or display warmth in class reacted to these with smiles, laughter, and other symptoms of visible engagement.

By letting students see me in various settings for the filming locations – almost every room of our home, our yard, my classroom, the principal’s office (by permission) – I invited them to new places. I didn’t always wear my school clothes for these. One of my colleagues thought this was invaluable for reducing some of the intimidation students experience. I was just “being me” during the presentations. Our children made occasional “cameo” appearances in these. It might have been manipulative, but sometimes you need to give people what they want! Our nine-year-old son took the headset for this two times (with the assistance of a script) and was a HUGE hit! He captivated my students in a way that made me envious.

Screenshot 2014-08-02 at 7.22.35 AM

While attempting to streamline my class procedures, I discovered that Movenote didn’t turn me into an Oz-like voice behind a curtain. In fact, it gave students a new way to see their scary American History teacher. It also showed my willingness to employ new tactics to extend learning to them. I look forward to using this tool in the future. Teachers who use this will find that it integrates well with Google Docs, offers view statistics, and provides an option for emailing presentations to students individually. (This could potentially be employed with a sign-off for parents if students aren’t taking the responsibility to watch these on their own.)

A complete sample of one of these presentations I created is found here: https://www.movenote.com/v/whGFrSvl2PN . I hope that more teachers explore this pathway to their students’ learning, and I look forward to improving my use of it as well. It is a free tool and could also be used by students to create presentations.

 

Document Delights

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Over the past two years, I have incorporated documents in my American History 10 course. It has been a boon for advancing interest, building authenticity, and nurturing literacy skills. One of my perpetual struggles with this is knowing how often to ask students to write a five-paragraph essay that uses the documents to build a response to a question. Expecting this too frequently can lead to a student mutiny due to either fatigue or falsely capping one’s ability as well as running the risk of giving a teacher the equivalent of “highway eyes” while evaluating 150 of these in one weekend. This year I began implementing other ways of working with documents. With this post, I’ll reflect on using an image string, blackouts, and sequencing/speaker identification to allow students other means of interacting with historical documents. It is no accident that this series of alternative ways to work with documents occurred during our final two course units of the school year.magnifying-glass-97588_640

Two different lessons that used an image string maximized curiosity and extended themselves to a wide range of students. When helping students grow in terms of literacy skills, the use of words can occur either in reading or reflecting. By reducing the words on the “front” side of the activity, some students actually find more to say in their written and verbal representations of events. I used this National Archives lesson to show students images related to the call for school desegregation. These images stuck with students so well that I could reference “the dingy auditorium with a conglomerate of chairs that resembled the by-product of asking all of your aunts and uncles to bring a dozen for a graduation party” and see the memories ignited. An ingredient that helped this lesson flourish was the presence of questions, “How do you organize these four images? What do they reveal about school segregation practices?”

In a similar lesson (presented to learning clubs in the style of a silent debate),students examined photographs from this Washington Post gallery to explore the Watergate scandal. As students looked at four of the images, they chipped in on their group’s information-gathering sheets. Individually, the images didn’t reveal much; likewise, individually, a student might struggle to make sense of the event. Collectively, the images and group observations yielded a more complete story. After students worked with these, we pooled the thoughts of all groups in a full-class discussion in which I recorded what they had concluded from their examination of the objects of Watergate. Within about 40 minutes of class, they realized that this series of objects could have been used to gather information from a political opponent that would help Nixon develop counteractions. We proceeded to examine the event in the form of its impact on Nixon’s career and the nation.

As a follow-up lesson to the Watergate work, I started our class period of examining the Ford and Carter presidencies with this DocsTeach image: “Half Right and Half Wrong” letter. Employing the “blackout” technique, students were told that they would learn what this letter was addressing during the course of the lesson. Again, this built curiosity – once the impulsive students realized that the month and day of September 11 were merely coincidental rather than profound in revealing the message of the third-grader’s letter. I still recall the moment when one of my 2nd-hour students, upon hearing that President Ford pardoned Nixon, audibly gasped at recognizing the significance of that opening prompt.

Toward the end of the year, my husband (who teaches AP American History in our school) and I discussed how little we did to build student skills related to contextualization and sourcing despite knowing that our “industry standard” at SHEG encouraged these skills. After taking extractions from the documents posted on the 9/11 Memorial & Museum site, I challenged students to read these excerpts to determine the “speakers and sequence” of them. Student conversations began with statements like, “I feel like this must have been before September 11, 2001, because…” and “I think this speaker is reacting to the attacks.” Only a teacher puffs up and becomes teary-eyed when hearing students communicate like this! I was so proud of the way they justified ideas to each other and wrestled with nuances within the passages. It was interesting that my students didn’t get caught up in being right or wrong on this as much as they were recognizing that the series of documents shed light on the conception of the attacks, the call for American resolve in the wake of these events, and the military response in Afghanistan that followed. After opening with those excerpts, the foundation was set for further exploration of those horrific events.

As I look at ways to improve my American History instruction in future years, I know that I need to use more activities like this early in the year as well. I’ve been a believer in “whole-part-whole” instruction in guiding students to work with primary documents; however, I am convinced that using strategies like these early in the year would help generate greater awareness of the richness of documents while also building student perseverance rather than eroding it, as is sometimes a danger of churning out essays. It’s worth mentioning that building a culture of productive group work contributed to the effectiveness of these lessons. Each of them has a cooperative component that was instrumental in the lesson’s value because of the need for students to articulate ideas to each other. I’m excited to find new means of building engagement and understanding through documents in the future by adapting these strategies to fit other events we study.

What am I doing right?

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question-mark-213671_640One of my college friends used to caution us about being too content with our lives. She theorized that when people were overly satisfied, horrible events occurred to knock them down. I’m not sure that I ever bought into this thinking because it made me chuckle more than it made me pause; however, being able to recall it almost twenty years later suggests that my brain didn’t just dismiss this mantra. The wisdom in this, I believe, is that it deflects haughty actions and keeps a person grounded in all of the circumstances that contribute to success. While this warning about contentment might serve as a billboard for Midwestern thinking, (“Welcome to __ – We like this place, but we know darn well that it could be better. Let us be humble.”) I will dare to defy it by taking this moment in mid-December to identify the good things happening in my classroom.

One of my favorite pieces of wisdom from Top 20 training is to “keep curiosity alive.” When my teaching is effective, my students are curious. One of my favorite moments, that I can happily say occurs with frequency in class, is when a student enters the room with no intention of learning and ends up as a linchpin in the lesson by sharing his or her questions and skepticism. We all grow from this candid approach. I am so grateful for these students because they reward relevance. Some “usual suspects” for this have definitely emerged at this stage of the current school year, but I know I have really captured lightning in a bottle when this symptom spreads to students who don’t even like to call attention to themselves. While writing about primary documents we examine invites students to explore and express, the inquiry approach to daily lessons has been paramount in cultivating curiosity as a habit. In addition to that, building relevance is crucial within a history class because the curiosity has to help students understand their world better – without that incentive, so many of our topics are simply “nice to know.”

Another element at work is allowing setbacks. I get mad at myself for typos or oversights, but I own and communicate them. Botched test components, in a standards-based grading system, can be retaken. A verbal answer that is wrong is accepted (and validated with the way that it does resemble the correct answer or the kind of thinking that will lead a person to it), but an answer of, “I don’t know,” just means that I’m going to doggedly pursue what the student does know in connection to the question posed. Discomfort strikes the first time this happens, but it becomes enough of our class culture that students recognize that I wasn’t just picking on someone. Of course, a key to making that happen is asking questions with enough depth that the answers have layers and degrees of understanding within them. Our classroom environment needs to be safe enough to invite errors, so I sometimes need to wrangle the wide-open commentary that a discussion promotes when students get so comfortable that they react openly to all remarks. If I don’t do this, it stops reluctant participants before they are willing to start.

Relationships are a cornerstone to a functional classroom. As a classroom teacher, I see my students “live, in-person” on a daily basis. Some students plop their personality on their desk for everyone to see while others protect it. Likewise, teachers either project or hide themselves. I have to admit that I tread pretty carefully in this territory because I saw many high school classmates become alienated when teachers built relationships with a select few who were already openly invested in the various arenas of our school. Students who need our attention most rarely invite it. However, in teaching high school sophomores, I know that students might enter or exit with “ABC Conversations” (“C your way out of it, teacher”) because life doesn’t revolve around us, and helicopter teachers can produce ill effects akin to helicopter parents. Respecting students’ judgment enough to care without meddling is crucial when working with adolescents. I make a concerted effort to see the strengths of students in terms of their work, participation, and their interactions with others. In doing this, relationships develop. I suppose that, in a sense, it mimics how friendships start – people see your “best” side and accept the rest. Whenever I can, I communicate these strengths, but I try to do so with sensitivity. Public praise isn’t always the right card to play. Using our class Twitter account, @cardinaltry, to offer the #ThingsILikedThisWeek has been a public celebration of the weekly accomplishments as well as a way to convey some of the funny things that occur in class. Doing this has built the positive habit of mind to be a “gold miner” and look for indications that we are enjoying our journey together.

I dared to recognize some of the positives, and I’ll know that my friend’s assessment is accurate if – nah. That isn’t worth the worry. Within the confines of my classroom, I have the opportunity to enjoy 150 young people each day. It has been a pleasure to observe so much growth this year and to smile when my students express satisfaction with their experiences. We will continue wondering, taking risks, and relating to each other.

 

 

 

 

Lifting the Literacy Load

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Weightroom - from pixabay.com

Weightroom – from pixabay.com

We are all reading teachers. For all of the technological changes that have occurred, this may be the biggest shift in thinking for me in my time as an educator. When I started, I knew that I needed to make reading accessible and help students build meaning from it. However, the deliberate nature of teaching them how to do these things simply didn’t exist as a shared responsibility in the past. Common Core and reading test expectations have heightened the urgency of strengthening student literacy. Because of this, I will be the daily trainer guiding 150 sophomore American History students in their efforts to bear this burden in my class – part of a team of teachers assigning “reps” so that our students can lift the literacy load better in May than they can in September.

Last year was my first time exposing students to primary documents in American History on a regular basis. I’m so excited to see how my husband’s experiences in his 11th grade AP American History course differ because his students will be at least a little bit seasoned in the arena of document-based questions. The struggles in working with these documents – many of them written in a voice from hundreds of years ago and some of them purely visual – were numerous, but I am convinced that my students have a better grasp of history and do more constructive thinking because of these tasks. It definitely stretches them and builds more fascination than simply taking second-hand information as a cheapened litany of events all the time. Authentic history work demands this, and our students are getting a taste of it.

When students struggle with “regular” reading, these documents are beasts. I expected that last year, and it was definitely confirmed. Three instructional adjustments that helped my students whose reading was below grade-level last year were shortening the passages (to roughly two paragraphs for a written piece), working in heterogeneous groups to see how students who were already understanding the material, and crafting summative tasks with documents that were essays (a letter, a graphic organizer). [Note: we still used plenty of longer passages, individual work, and essays to evaluate students’ thoughts, but it seemed like students flat-lined when I didn’t deviate.]

I have two new tools I plan to employ in my efforts this year and have provided links to them here. I would appreciate feedback provided on these and certainly welcome others to use these and adjust them for their usage. This Primary Document Thought-Tracker is a way for students to trace their understanding of a document when I toss students into a document “cold,” or without background information:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QYWjBYXYv4HqjgQpo8gMjJXi1V3WcLqVsTvNbwe1U98/edit?usp=sharing

When we use groups to examine documents, I want to employ a variety of strategies – depending on the document, student familiarity with the topic, and other factors – that ask the students to do multiple readings or collaborate to simulate multiple readings. I see this as related to the process of close reading or perhaps as a derivative of it. Having a “well” of ideas for me to employ will be helpful and provide more variety for my students. It also models the practice of reading a document with a particular purpose in mind. This set of idea options, which I hope will be constantly “under construction” received a boost from a few members of my Twitter PLN in its creation stage. The tasks could be divided up among the students for just one read each or the students could do a different task over the course of multiple reads of the same document. Again, use this as you’d like, but I’d sure appreciate comments to guide me:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mcQjc-DxkTX3Z4e01g_BCdsnE4eajlBjzujIAZCYmF4/edit?usp=sharing

Early in my career, I tried to find ways to help students succeed in spite of their limited literacy skills. Embracing my role as a contributing member of a literacy cohort, I need to help my students’ reading skills grow. The weightlifting analogy is going to be one I use to encourage this. Having lifted weights off-and-on as exercise since my days as a college athlete (sometimes more “off” like during pregnancy and the months after it), I have been more consistent with this over the past year. It is how I like to battle falling metabolism, increasing fatigue, and other maladies that accompany “almost 40”. Besides the health benefits, I have a great sense of how we really do grow from our challenges. Part of this process involves “plateauing” or reaching a certain level of weight or repetitions that is a stationary thing for – well, sometimes months. Primary documents feel like this for students who struggle with literacy, and I need to be the literacy coach who acts as a spotter and gets them back to the bench to try it again. When we stagnate on the load but try to grunt through it, we truly do get stronger – and then one day it happens…the big push elevates the weights and elicits the “fulfilling pain” signaling growth. My students deserve to know that we are training for this, and I need to articulate the process to them along the way. Our physical and mental tools can move mountains – and we need to strategize each step of growth in this process if we are going to share the load.

 

 

 

My Time to Shine

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  • What matters enough to high school sophomores that it would sustain self-directed interest over the course of a school year?
  • How could our examination of American History define and deepen that understanding?
Spotlight - pixabay.com

Spotlight – pixabay.com

“My Time to Shine” is what I’m going to call my interpretation of Genius Hour, or 20-time, in American History 10. With ALL due respect to the phenomenal minds and hearts who have developed this and helped it take flight, I needed to take the step of branding it in a way that I think will frame our mission. Yes, I want my students to apply their genius – again, I totally respect that as being at the core of why this is worth implementing. However, I want to emphasize student ownership of this time. I believe that “my” – meaning them, not me – will resonate with my students. As an aside, I think it’s hard to say that phrase without doing a little shoulder shimmy and maybe even cracking a smile.

While I get a little nervous about boldly categorizing my students, I have noticed a few traits about sophomores that seem to be among their trademarks. They are bastions of social justice. Where the boundaries fall is not universal; however, perceived injustices stir their emotions. An example of this occurs when we study the internment camps used in the United States during World War II. Each year, it seems, about half of the students get rankled when they hear about the way our government put Japanese Americans into “protective custody.” Hearing that they were plucked away from their homes and jobs draws a few more into the fray, but what really delivers the punch is when they find out that Americans of German and Italian descent were not part of this executive order. “That’s not fair,” is a call to action.

Identity, while certainly part of the whole adolescent experience, during the sophomore year is a chameleon tied to accomplishments at this age. “I am…” and “I can…” are inseparable. It seems like school activities begin to have a more pronounced effect on sophomores’ mirror visions.  They see themselves as soccer players, speech participants, mathletes, tracksters, or kids who don’t do activities. If my students are to feel like “My Time to Shine” is a highlight (pun intended) of their year, I need to help them bridge their existence with new skills so that who they are morphs into something closer to what they can become. I will examine the layers of skill development more in a future post.

How can history be the vehicle for this growth? First of all, one of the early activities that my students will complete in their Learning Clubs (as described by Angela Maiers and Amy Sandvold in The Passion-Driven Classroom) will be interaction with someone who “does history” for a living. I’m in the process of contacting candidates for this. My plan calls for the Learning Clubs to develop a series of questions to ask the professor or historical society director to find out what historians actually do. Getting a sense of the “verbs” of these occupations will help generate some ideas for the students’ projects.

Ultimately, the passions – in what I’m sure will have audible arrivals (Is that too much to ask?) – will be found at the intersection of the verbs of historians, societal ideals, and student identities. Thus, I’m proposing that my students’ passion projects answer the following: What historical presence from our nation’s past (event, individual, group, era, etc.) shapes you, and how will you redirect your knowledge of this into something meaningful?

When my students are in the spotlight with their “big answer” then, they will provide us with insights about who they are in the context of our country’s history and why it matters. Fundamentally, they will show that history matters – more importantly, they will see that people count – and MOST importantly, they will show themselves that they have opportunities to project their light for others because they can use their gifts to help past occurrences become productive.