RETURNS

I feel like human beings (in today’s society especially) are obsessed with looking forward.  Whether planning our next vacation, our weeks, or even our next meal – it is surprisingly difficult to focus on the ‘now.’  I am guilty of checking these boxes and plugging along too, as I am an enormous planner.  In fact, I plan everything.  I can tell you what I will be doing from 7am-11pm every single day for the remainder of this calendar year (and I can also tell you what I will be wearing on that day).  Okay, so the degree to which I plan is a bit obsessive-compulsive, but it is by this plan that I live.

I’ll never forget learning the concept of ‘entropy’ in physics during my junior year of high school.  Entropy, or the disorder/chaos that surrounds us, is what I try to avoid at all costs.  I like everything I do to have a reason, to be working towards something, to be neat and orderly.  This way I can multi-task in several meaningful ways at a time.  For example, planning out the clothes I wear ensures that I wear all clothing equally.  As this may seem useless, the process has actually allowed me to keep my clothes looking brand new (since I don’t overwear anything and typically only repeat a shirt once or twice a year).  So, when I wear a button down shirt I bought in high school, it appears to be brand new (as I have likely only worn it twenty to thirty times in my life).  Also, knowing what I will wear each day eliminates huge stress in the morning.  I can just grab and go.  I use this method to pack my lunches, to grocery shop, and to plan my days.

On any given weekday, it can be assumed that I will be teaching from 8:45-3:45, will be engaged in an after school activity (whether musical from December-April) or another (extra help/tutoring) until about 6:00, and will be catching up over dinner with a friend (for business or pleasure) for the rest of the evening.  On the weekends, I coach paintball from April-December (because during musical season it is too cold to play and I am busy on those weekends holding rehearsals, building and painting sets, and presenting the finished productions).  In the summer, June is my month to travel, coach paintball camps, and/or teach writing seminars.  I spend fourth of July with my brother in Charleston, the following three weeks of July directing my high school summer stock theatre program, and the first three weeks of August directing my middle school summer stock theatre program.  These traditions will continue until some kind of large change occurs in my life.

When planning lessons, however, this style can be dangerous.  I feel like we as teachers get trapped in our plans far too often – sacrificing real student learning and engagement for checking our boxes and plowing through our curriculum.  I was recently talking to colleagues from another school who work in social studies and asked, “how long does it take for you to get through ___ unit?”  Their response was, “I’m not sure because I’ve always taught it with several snow days in between.”  With the mild winter we have had in Virginia this year, we are on a bit of a different schedule.  But has that changed our plans?

To me, a common problem in teaching English is the idea of “the unit.”  One of my #bowtieboys, Sean Pettit is famous for saying “units encourage forgetting” – and I’d have to agree.  We are really good at delivering information to students (especially in the upper grades).  We can do so quickly and efficiently… but how much are they actually retaining?  How much are they actually LEARNING?

We remember for our own school days.  We would take notes in class, engage in some kind of review activity the day before the test, cram what we could the night before, survive the test the next day, and promptly forget everything to make room for the next topic the following week.  This is why we spend so much time at the beginning of every year “reminding” students about what they were supposed to have learned in previous grades.  You never have to do that to someone who has learned how to drive or ride a bike.  I haven’t ridden a bike in probably a decade and I am completely confident I could get on and pedal away into the sunset with no problem.  Ask me now to take a test on sinusoidal waves and asymptotes from trigonometry.  The results would be disastrous.  So why do we still teach this way?

To me, a unit says, we need to know X material for Y amount of time before we move on to Z.  Within this style are several inherent flaws.  Let’s pretend I am teaching parts of speech to middle schoolers.  I may say we learn nouns on Monday, verbs on Tuesday, adjectives on Wednesday, others (like an introduction to Adverbs, Conjunctions, Interjections, Prepositions on Thursday), and quiz on Friday.  In doing so I have made a lot of assumptions.  I am plugging along with a plan, and am likely staying paced with some arbitrary curriculum guide, but I am assuming my students will KNOW nouns after Monday, verbs after Tuesday, and so on.  Simultaneously, I am assuming no one knows anything about these before they enter my class.  What happens to the poor students who have known parts of speech since first or second grade?  They are doomed to my busy work as we continue our “one-size-fits-all” pace.  This could leave those students struggling with these concepts in the dust, and students who are not, bored and unengaged.  This, as we well know, is a recipe for classroom management issues galore.

But units allow us to plan our quarters, our semesters, our school years.  It is so nice to look at a calendar (especially for someone like me) and say:  quarter one is content writing and reading nonfiction, quarter two is media literacy and grammar, quarter three is reading fiction and poetry while studying vocabulary, and quarter four is research and oral presentations.  In doing so, I have packed the entire ninth grade Virginia English curriculum into the school year.  Regardless of snow days, we are going to get this finished!  The same problem can arise when pacing class novels.  This is especially tricky because there must be pacing to ensure everyone is (forgive the pun) on the same page for Socratic seminars, fishbowl discussions, essays, and projects.  But what if the inauthentic pace of the teacher is slowing down the fast readers while moving too quickly for the slower readers?  My solution to all of this is to allow each individual student in a class to set his or her own pace.

As mentioned last week, we are piloting this idea in my current sophomore level English class.  My freshmen are still plugging away at their office work (mentioned in my first post) – but class wasn’t going as well with the tenth graders.  I knew mid-year I had to throw out my perfect calendar (and being planner extraordinaire – this was extremely difficult) because “reading” And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie and Animal Farm by George Orwell and “rushing” Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and 1984 by Orwell were very different experiences.  My original plan was to give each novel a month of class time – this way my students would be sure to have read all eight sophomore level texts.  Reading the first two books within their months felt authentic, but rushing the other two into their month’s time was a miserable and challenging task through which the students suffered.  We were analyzing songs and poems simultaneously and due to the brevity of these pieces, THAT aspect was going okay… and the students enjoyed the ensuing discussions, but there were still other elements of the class to fix.

Students did not like the way we were instructing vocabulary – having different units per week, working through the book, studying, and taking quizzes.  The scores were always dismal and students admitted that they barely glanced at the words because they didn’t believe they would need them in their real lives.  Being an English teacher, and having to re-familiarize a few of their words myself, I could see where they were coming from.  Because we still have to teach vocabulary, we decided to ditch the workbook and to pull vocabulary from our current class novel, Lord of the Flies by William Golding.  Now, rather than taking tests and filling in blanks, students are learning the skills of deciphering complex vocabulary in context – a skill they agree will definitely come in handy in the real world.

We have also created more of a writer’s workshop model for teaching writing.  Rather than forcing the students to write analyses of the songs and poems we analyze together in class, students are now able to dabble in a myriad forms.  Some are creative writing, others are writing presentations, some are researching, and some have decided to continue composing analyses.  During these class workshops, I have time to circulate and meet with each student, and in the mean time they are working with each other, asking for opinions to improve their writing from their classmates.  This new method is much more enjoyable for the students and is producing much more authentic results.  Not only is the writing quality higher, it is more passionate – because students are writing what they want.  It always comes down to choice.

I truly believe we will be better served in letting going of the schedules to which we so desperately cling and allowing the students to dictate the pace of the class.  This, once again, cannot be done in a “one-size-fits-all” manner – but in a way that reflects true student choice: creating an environment in which each student has the space to learn at his or her own pace.  Cynics discuss how students will take advantage of this style – choosing to work slowly in order to complete the least amount of work.  In my experience, I have found that boredom trumps all.  Eventually, that student spending a month writing a haiku will get tired of their own game and seek to move on, especially when the culture of the class is to move as quickly as one can (while actually learning the material) to ensure the greatest amount of coverage.  I know that at the end of the year, I would rather have an entire class truly understand 75% of the prescribed curriculum than have been exposed to 100% of the curriculum with less than 50% retention.

Within this choice, be sure to build in “doing.”  This isn’t about students choosing which lectures you deliver, but students choosing in which hands-on activities they plan to engage.  English is a content of skills.  Students should be READING, WRITING, and SPEAKING – not studying the rhetoric of these disciplines.  With the proper amount of time to work and struggle in each, students will see how these concepts apply to their real lives and why it is important that we study English.  This will be the kind of class that brings us the biggest “returns” for our efforts: returns in student growth, returns in mastery of concept, and returns in an overarching appreciation for a class that is otherwise commonly loathed by its population of students.  Otherwise, we may be able to follow our calendars and check our boxes, cover our curriculums and manage our snow days… but we will spend our Septembers re-teaching the grade before and wondering when we will finally see the returns we desire.  When we finally witness the fruits of our collective labor.

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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)

The Shifting Isn’t Over

“Okay, and if I had you in seventh grade two years ago, then you of course remember that Old Norse was the language of the … *silence* … Vikings, correct.  Remember, guys?  That was 7.4a?  The had all the short words like ‘axe, kill, die’?  *Students continue to copy what is written on the board regarding kennings and pay me no mind*

I think for a young and energetic teacher like myself, one of the hardest realizations I have been making in recent years is: maybe I am not the absolutely incredible teacher I have always thought myself to be.  Don’t get me wrong, I am a passionate teacher of kids and think I do a pretty good job of reaching them and giving them what they need on a human level – but content… how were they not retaining all the finer points of English instruction after I had taught them myself and in a myriad exciting ways?

When my students were in seventh grade, they engaged in a study of old languages, and based on this study composed an entire report guessing what original languages had derived their favorite words.  They worked with prefixes/suffixes and created an entirely new dictionary of made up, yet grammatical words based on this knowledge.  They kept track of every word they spoke for an entire day and then conducted an analysis of their lexicon’s denotation and connotation.  That was about as fun as I knew how to make learning roots, affixes, cognates – THAT standard that secondary English teachers know (and if you are like me, loathe).

The seventh graders engaged, learned, passed their state standardized tests, went to eighth grade, and by the time I had them again in ninth, didn’t remember a word of this “fun” we had had.  They remembered the experience of course – but couldn’t have told you the difference between Old Norse and Celtic or Dutch and Italian.  This truth, when I reflected, was quite a hard pill to swallow because I thought I had taught the content the “right way.”  I hadn’t “taught to the test.”  I hadn’t lectured, students hadn’t taken notes, we didn’t test rote memorization of said facts… and so, they shouldn’t have forgotten the material.  We had worked in groups.  We had hit the highest forms of Bloom’s Taxonomy.  We were analyzing, synthesizing, and creating – not merely understanding.  And yet, where did that leave them?  Maybe they remembered the information for more than a week, but they certainly didn’t for more than a year.

And thus enters my conundrum.  I am still searching for that perfect way of instructing and assessing.  In my first two years I taught the classic way: units and literature circles centered around texts that fit a chronological unit or essential question, I taught the standards pertaining to that unit, and we tested, wrote essays, completed worksheets or projects accordingly.  We had fun and students passed their state tests.

In years three and four I delivered instruction via an autonomous vehicle I had developed inspired by the work of Salaman Khan and Derrick Jensen called “The Curriculum Menu.”  The theory behind this style was “real learning” would occur at the formative level as students self-paced through the seventy required sub-strand of a grade over the course of a school year, completing formative assessments linked to each individual standard.  Once students had “mastered” all formative sub-strands, they could create a summative product that exemplified their mastery of the whole strand (ex: 7.4).  This method sought to address inherent problems of the system I was running in my first two years.  It negated the need for “re-assessment” as students were constantly re-assessing at the formative level.  No student created a summative until I knew they could ace it.  This also allowed for authentic pacing because students could quickly master content they had learned in a previous grade and spend more time on content that was giving them difficulty.  (This way I didn’t have to say: “okay we are learning nouns this week.  If you already know them, sorry.  If you don’t, you have this week to understand them before we’re moving on”).  We had fun and students passed their state tests.

In years five and six I have been conducting class like a business (offline in year five and online thanks to the inspiration and innovation of a colleague who is also passionate about real-world application in year six).  The idea behind this method was to immerse students in a “real world” situation so they could see how the primary English skills of reading, writing, and public speaking could apply in their real lives (especially within the adult world).  The problem with “Curriculum Menu” had been a pendulum swing towards focusing too heavily on standards.  In an effort to hit all seventy standards in a year, the onus was really on the student to properly pace.  With only two deadlines per quarter (one at the interim and one at the end) students had to complete an entire master strand within a month’s time.  This equated to approximately ten formative assignments per half quarter, plus the book they were reading outside of class, and their essays.  Some students had appreciated the autonomy and some fell hopelessly behind.  Also, as I mentioned in my previous post: the word was out.  Mr. A.’s class was fun, but the work was way too demanding and hard.  I am a big believer that students and teachers need to have a strong rapport to create a successful classroom and learning experience for all – so with half the school trying to avoid me and my accursed curriculum menu, I knew it was time to shift another way.  Thus, this classroom office secretly wove the state standards into authentic real world lessons very much the same way a mother may blend broccoli into her child’s smoothie.  My colleague had the idea of students running out of school online discussion boards about the texts we read, another group leading professional development activities for the class, and yet another group composing weekly newsletters that went home to parents.  I added my ideas of a research and development department that researched hot consumer products of multiple genres and using this information to develop a product of their own.  Then, using oral presentation skills, presenting their findings business style with charts and visuals to our class (or board room).  My information technology department analyzes media messages and maintains our company’s electronic image.  Our classroom marketing department looks closely at non-fiction texts in order to learn the skills of “selling” something.  Students are having fun and they don’t have standardized tests in ninth grade so I guess I’ll have to wait and see how they do in eleventh.  But the question keeps haunting me: are they REALLY learning?  They are certainly producing incredible work.  But is it sticking?

In reflecting mid-year, here is what I have realized IS and IS NOT working for the students in this regard:

1.      We begin every class with a “Literary Term of the Day” Students learn a new word for their reading/writing “toolkit” and are told how they can apply it to their life.  RESULT:  Some words that we refer back to a lot have stuck with the kids.  I would say 60% of the words they have “learned” have not.  They are not tested on these words – more just reminded of them in context.  It is just often when this occurs, students will go: “oh that was a… it was that a-word… oh it’s a… umm… an… allusion!” (only knowing the word once they have looked it up in their notebook’s glossary of literary terms).

2.     Next (alternating in three day cycles) students engage in a random quick write (usually used to create classroom community as students almost always share their writing during “circle”), analyze a modern song, or analyze a not-so-modern poem.  RESULT:  With quick writes, the prompt heavily dictates whether or not students will engage and share.  And although we have established wonderful classroom communities, some topics are just off-limits in a public forum for ninth graders.  Most students agree that they really enjoy analyzing and discussing the songs.  About half of the students enjoy analyzing and discussing old poetry (and the half that like it only do because we always relate the old words back to our real life situations of today).  However, regardless of level of enjoyment, students only remember the content of select songs and poems.  On the other hand, they have developed EPIC analysis skills – which I believe to be more important.  But still, I do confess myself shocked that the messages of some have evaded their memories completely.  I stand behind the quick writes because writing is writing and writers need to write.  Period.

3.     Finally, students engage in “office time” – the opportunity to work in small groups with their departments on their company expectations, silent reading of our class novel, or reading aloud from a group text.  RESULT:  The office work is going extremely well, students seem to be understanding group texts, and when they compose their in-class essays about out-of-school reading – the majority seem to have read and understood the important messages the novels have to impart.  But, will this follow them into tenth grade and beyond?  I wonder what I will learn from these two years and how I will once again shift my instruction accordingly.

I know, however, a major aspect of my year that wasn’t jiving for me or my students was my one sophomore class.  We actually had a class meeting on the first day of third quarter and agreed that we had just been “going through the motions and checking our boxes.”  We have since completely overhauled the class (all student ideas) – which I plan to share in next week’s blog: kind of a "before/after makeover edition."  

And this is where I invite you to be a part of the conversation.  I have spoken about this with my colleagues, and endlessly with my students (including the other #bowtieboys) but I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas.  Have you ever had an experience where you knew your students had both mastered the content (in a way you would be shocked if they later forgot) and had an enjoyable and engaging experience in the process?  Am I overthinking it?  Is forgetting okay and not even an indicator of lack of learning?

Feel free to comment here or chat with me on Twitter @misteramistera .  I would really appreciate your input – the thoughts of YOUR students – anything you offer as we explore this instruction/assessment enigma together.

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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)