#bowtieboys - Jason Augustowski: Comfortable classroom built on positive rapport and student choice: April 2017

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Student Feedback (Round 1) - READING & WRITING

After finishing the middle school spring musical, getting my travel paintball team organized, and helping my brother with his engagement over spring break, it was finally time to meet back up with students and get a pulse as to what was happening and how they were feeling in general about English classes. Recharged from break, they were ready and willing to give their feedback (even more cavalier than before - I always love how students come back from spring break AS the next grade. Meaning, if they are in my freshmen English class, they return from spring break as fully blown sophomores. I love it). Anyway, my upcoming weekly blogs will be the presentation of these ideas, directly from the mouths of a diverse assortment of freshmen and sophomore students.

1. It's spring, turn the lights on!

No more talk about snow from this bunch (and after a very mild winter for us, I thought their whining about this topic would never end). Freshly back from their Caribbean or Hawaiian or Floridian vacations, these students are just thinking about the beach. They want their classroom to reflect this newly remembered inspiration, so for someone like me who ALWAYS teaches with the lights off, this was a surprise. I am blessed with three large windows, so we always go the natural sunlight route. When challenged about this, they simply said: "give us all the light." They want sunlight, overhead light, my funky lamps' light, all of it. Maybe they think it will give them a nice base tan before June. :)

2. More time to read - SSR!

This will probably be wildly unpopular with a lot of my English teacher colleagues, but I have to admit that I have always found SSR to be a bit of a waste of instructional time. To me, students need to be up and doing. Don't get me wrong, we read every class (whether short stories, poems, song lyrics), but students don't just sit with novels and read for thirty straight minutes. It's too passive. And I know, ACTIVE reading is a thing, but not being a huge reader myself, I have never structured my class in this way. Yes, you heard correctly, I am an English teacher who doesn't LOVE reading. I just LIKE it. It's fine. Well, regardless, these students want more time to dive into their books. Freshmen year in my county is "survey" which means we read a little bit of everything and I always save the tougher lit circles for the end of the year when the students are better prepared. With students reading The Odyssey, To Kill A Mockingbird, and Of Mice & Men, I can understand why they want more time. We just acted out Romeo & Juliet and Macbeth as a class (and they really enjoyed that) so it all makes sense. With spring sports and just "the spring" in general stressing everyone out, less homework reading probably isn't a bad thing either.

3. More discussion time and less in-class office work:

We always discuss the books we read - in fact we do them in full class, and smaller group circles. I believe I detailed the logistics of these in a previous blog post, but the long story short is: we have a talking piece and that piece moves either sequentially or non-sequentially depending on the style of question. This allows every student to share their opinion and builds an excellent classroom community. Typically our class involves a mini-lesson, a quick write/poem/song analysis (that we have in circle format), and "office time" for the students to work with their departments on their weekly "company expectations." See more at: misteramistera.weebly.com But recently, students have been wanting to spend that final third of class reading/discussing the reading with their office groups and saving their other expectations as homework. Naturally, I am totally fine with them pacing and organizing their own work - this was just definitely a switch from what they wanted earlier in the year. Once again, my guess is that they have gotten the "hang" of office work and they want to dedicate more time to the more difficult texts. I suppose this experience showed me that students change their needs over the course of the year and we must give them the space to allow them to do so. I could never read in a classroom as a student (I need my bed) - so as a teacher I tend to make reading homework. But I am not my students and need to support what best addresses their needs.

4. Face to Face Writing Conferences

One of the "coolest" things about my class is that students know they can get help WHENEVER they need. I am availble via e-mail basically from 8am-10pm on any given day. Students definitely take advantage of this offer and frequently e-mail their song or poem analyses, their pieces for their writing portfolio, or ideas they have for other stories and essays. Through this method, I have been able to meet with more students on a more meaningful level about their writing than I have ever been able to do in the past. I have been utilizing these e-mail conferences with students for the past four years of my teaching career and have really liked how much I have been able to see and record how much they grow over the course of a year. However, since I began this method, this year was the first time I have had students openly admit that they would like face-to-face conferences in conjunction with e-mail. In the past, students know that they can come in during their lunch block to eat and discuss writing, but as you can imagine, this isn't wildly popular (since lunch is the only time in the day during which high schoolers can properly socialize). So, students have requested more instructional time be dedicated to in person conferences. I have decided that I can meet with students to discuss their writing while others are silent reading, discussing, or working on their office work. I was curious as to why they wanted this and several said they don't feel connected with a teacher through e-mail. They agree that it is fast and effective, but they felt like they were lacking that rapport element that we spend so much of our class time developing. This is a viewpoint I would never have considered. I assumed students wanted the quickest and easiest way to complete their work, and although they are at times in search of this efficiency, they are also just as much looking to us to be people in their lives and to interact with them as such. Not just socially, but academically.

I have to admit myself excited to see how these student changes go. To me, fourth quarter is also the perfect time to implement changes. It keeps class fresh (especially at a time when school is stale for so many students (and teachers)), allows me to gain feedback from a specific group, employ their ideas, and see what works and doesn't work (thus allowing me to reflect over the summer and come back the following year even better prepared), and by quarter four, our students are hopefully prepared to leave our class in a few weeks. This means they have learned the majority of what we have set out to teach them and we can treat them more as equals than as students. You can have more advanced discussions, read harder texts, write with more mature tones and styles, and present in front of one another completely comfortably. As I stated in my post entitled "Seasons" - quarter four is also fun for all of the traditions. Everything is coming to an end in quarter four and we can really choose to harness this emotion and properly pace instruction to have the most impact on the students. My wish is that these student-created improvements, mixed with my time-honored fourth quarter traditions will create the most inspirational, effective, and enjoyable end of the year to date! :-)

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If you are interested in hearing from these students yourself - please follow their blogs/twitters as well. Even more shifts are taking place - and I can't wait to keep you in the loop of all there is to come. It is our belief that shifting the classroom paradigm to a 50-50 partnership between student and teacher will be the key in making learning engaging, enjoyable, and accessible to all. We seek to support teachers as well as students in this identity shift - all from the daily thoughts of teachers and high school students themselves. :-)

Jason Augustowski, M.Ed. @misteramistera http://jasonaugustowskibtb.blogspot.com (Blogs updated weekly beginning 1/31)

Ryan Beaver @RBeaver05 http://ryanbeaverbtb.blogspot.com (Blogs updated Mondays beginning 2/6)

Sam Fremin @thesammer88 http://samfreminbtb.blogspot.com/ (Blogs updated Fridays beginning 2/3)

Spencer Hill @spencerhill99 http://spencerbtb.blogspot.com/ (Blogs updated Tuesdays beginning 2/7)

Ryan Hur @RyanHur09 http://ryanhurbtb.blogspot.com/ (Blogs updated Saturdays beginning 2/4)

Joe O'Such @Joe_Osuch http://bowtieboyjoe.blogspot.com/ (Blogs updated Thursdays beginning 2/2)

Sean Pettit @seanpettit9 http://seanpettitbtb.blogspot.com/ (Blogs updated Sundays beginning 2/5)

Kellen Pluntke @kellenpluntke http://kellenbowtieboy.blogspot.com/ (Blogs updated Saturdays beginning 2/4)

Jack Selman @jacksel6 http://jackselmanbtb.blogspot.com/ (Blogs updated Wednesdays beginning 2/1)

Dawson Unger @dawsonunger http://btb-dawson.blogspot.com/ (Blogs updated Thursdays beginning 2/2)

Thursday, April 6, 2017

RESURRECTION

School is hard and it is awkward. No matter what age of children, it can be a traumatic place. In elementary school we snatch tiny children from their families and immerse them in a world of "strangers." In high school we do the opposite, we hold them back from the real world - just as they are chomping at the bit for new experiences and broader horizons. And middle school is, well, middle school: puberty, hormones, acne, and braces. The "cringey-est" (as the kids say) time of their lives. School, if done improperly, can completely ruin a young person's life. And whether through bullying, academic stress, authoritarian teachers, weak (or overly involved) administration, lack of resources/activities/sports, or whatever, we are hearing more and more that school isn't doing its job of preparing students for the "real world."

But in order to address this issue, I feel it is important first to look at and define the "real world." The difficulty here is, it is constantly changing. So in order to properly prepare students, we must be constantly adapting - to my mind, at LEAST every year. Although it is easy, we can't be re-using and recycling the same lessons, quizzes, tests, projects, year after year. Because if we do, one day we will have the children of our former students in our classes and will feel very strange assigning them the same work we had once assigned to their parents.

I tell my students all the time: "I am only double your age. I remember exactly what freshmen year of high school was like. I can still remember conversations I had with people. I'm still with it. I get it." And then I tell them: "oh wait, when I was in high school, students didn't get cell phones until they were seniors and about to go off to college. Social media didn't exist. Our home internet was dial-up. When you wanted to talk to a friend you called them on a (does this word even still exits) landline or you knocked on their door. The point is, although only fifteen years ago. The lives of students have changed drastically. I bring up technology because it is one of the focal points where real change is so incredibly evident. With students nowadays living on their phones (whether for texting, social media, games, music, or movies), these situations didn't exist when I was in middle and high school - and I am only now finishing my sixth year of teaching.

With the lives of our students changing so rapidly, we need to make sure we are keeping up. We need to be meeting their individual needs. And we need to be ensuring that school is a positive place where students learn and grow (and in doing so) are prepared for the real world - not our real world (which will no longer exist when they reach our age) but THEIR real world. One of the real tricks in properly navigating this is our age gap with the students. In order to best understand their world, we need to get to know THEM. Several of my past blogs have discussed getting to know students on a personal level, so this one will not - but it is the most imperative first step we must be building into our teaching at the beginning, and all throughout our year.

And while we teach each year, we need to be getting to know the students in a way that is shaping our thinking for the following year. Where every summer we must be re-inventing the wheel. Every break we need to be taking major reflective time (not just R&R) to ruminate over where we have been this year, what we have learned, and what we will be changing for the future. In English, our content is always changing because books keep getting written, because no two essays are the same (unless they are plagiarized), and neither are two oral presentations (unless we do students the horrible disservice of assigning their topics). This means we can always teach new novels, new writing projects, and new styles/types of presentations.

In six years of teaching, I have changed my entire instructional delivery system three times (and from here on I guarantee it will become even more frequently than that). In my first two years I taught "traditionally." We had units, literature circles, the occasional essay, the occasional oral presentation, vocab quizzes, unit tests, etc. I taught from the front of the room, students sometimes worked in groups, sometimes played games, sometimes worked individually, sometimes engaged in workshop, etc. In years three-five, I taught through an original system I developed called "the curriculum menu" - details of which can be found in my first blog. The basic idea behind this system was, students would work at their own pace to formatively learn every state standard and would then work with me to develop their own summative products to prove mastery of concepts. And this year, along with my colleague across the hall, I ran a classroom office (check it out at misteramistera.weebly.com - you can use the links on each tab to navigate through student work spanning the entire school year).

Next year I plan to teach my classes (I hope to be teaching freshmen and seniors) like graduate school methods courses. I have decided that I want to teach my students how to be teachers themselves - and in doing so, our English work will be woven through the experience. My thought process behind this is: if students know how to teach, they will be able to help themselves in any of their classes. I hope in doing so that they will know how to organize and prioritize work, how to study, how to get the most out of their homework and assignments, etc. I know from working with my #bowtieboys that giving them the textbooks I read in graduate school has given them a whole new understanding and appreciation for their teachers and school as a whole. They have also learned a ton of valuable "English" skills including tips/tricks for reading, writing, and presenting. I want to make this #bowtieboys experience broader next year. Rather than an elite group, I want all students to get to experience what these fine young men have been able to achieve.

This idea was born out of listening to my students and getting to know them. I like to talk to them when they are stressed - when school isn't going well, sports are monopolizing their time, they're having trouble with friends or family, and just nothing seems to be going right. In those moments, it is easy for them to talk about their stress. It is clear. One of their major fountains of stress (if not the number one) is obviously academics. They don't know how to organize, prioritize, manage their time, study effectively, visualize goals, step back, take efficient breathers, work truly collaboratively with groups. If they learn these skills in our class, they can always be practicing. They can immediately apply the information they are learning to THEIR real life. My hope is this will greatly reduce their stress because they will know "the secrets" we now know as adults. I remember thinking when I was a senior in high school (as many seniors do) "man, I wish I could go back to freshmen year and do it all over - I would ACE it the second time around." Let's give our students the opportunity to ACE it the first time around. Let's pinpoint their specific needs and make our classes the places where we address these needs (not make them more glaring).

Too often I hear about students hating school, whether due to the monotony, the never-ending workload, social problems left unchecked, or other issues - there are plenty. It is important to ensure our classes are safe havens for our students - and not just a place where they can "chill" - but a place where they can get prepared. Not for some mysterious future (that won't be the same when they arrive) but for the here and now. If students are having academic issues, let's address that in our classes and help them to solve. If the issues are extra-curricular, let's address that in our classes and help them to solve. If the issues are social (friends, family, relationships, etc) let's address that in our classes and help them to solve.

I haven't blogged in a while because I had the two production weeks of my musical at the end of March (and then needed to catch up on some end of the quarter grading). But our program (which has several won national awards many shows over) is one that helps students to love school. Every show, every year, I am humbled to listen to the voices of these middle schoolers (as they cry in front of each other during "circle") and discuss how musical is the place where they finally found their "peeps." They finally found the place where they belong. I am so happy our program can be that for them. And we work very hard to ensure we live up to their standards year after year. I know sports programs that do the same thing. I know classes that do the same thing. After school clubs etc. If we can all commit to listening to our students, learning from them, and actively shaping the places (over which we hold control) in our buildings to meet these diverse needs, maybe school won't have to be so hard and awkward for many. Many school can be a call to action, a resurrection, a benefit to all.