Why Shakespeare? Project Update

My students have been working on the Why Shakespeare? project, so I thought I'd provide an update.

Last week, the kids worked in pairs to sort through the #whyshakespeare Twitter posts. The goal was to identify common threads and group the posts accordingly. Next, they selected one of those common threads as a potential answer to the question and began searching for evidence for support. This has also provided us with an opportunity to discuss fair use and citation of sources.

Graduation exam testing this week has interrupted our regularly scheduled programming, so we're having a Shakespeare film festival, watching selections including The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), Much Ado About Nothing, Ten Things I Hate About You, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and She's the Man.

The student pairs will present their research findings via Glogster next week. HUGE thanks to the folks who answered our Twitter question and re-tweeted!

Student BOE?

I recently posted a link on our class website to The New York Times' "A Diploma in the 10th Grade?".

This led to a discussion in our class on the direction education is headed - or perhaps I should say the many directions, since my students voiced the opinion that the adults and "experts" (those are their vocally-implied quotation marks) involved are running around with a million expensive fixes, many of which seem to have little bearing on what actually works for kids.

They asked why more people don't talk to the students, why no high school tenth graders were included in the Times commentary. This reminded me of Andrew B. Watt's response to Scott McLeod's question "What's wrong with the Edublogosphere?" Where are the kids' voices?

One of the points that many bring up when it comes to classroom tech integration is the power of turning over some of the authority to students. They're often more creative than we are, and quite frankly many of them are smarter than we are, so the end results have the potential to turn out better than we could have hoped with just adults running the show.

We have a student task force at our school that meets regularly with administrators to provide the student perspective on school issues, and their involvement has made a noticeable impact on the climate in the building. Are there any systems that have something similar to this at the district level? A sort of student board of education? My kids are interested to know.

In Need of Vertical Teaming Advice

Tomorrow I'm leading an English / Language Arts vertical team meeting at our school. It's the second of these meetings this year, and I'm looking forward to it because it's always cool to get to find common ground among other teachers, share strategies, and work to line things up properly for our kids.

I'm worried, though. While I'm certain that the teachers both at my school and our feeder schools care a ton about our kids, and everyone seemed open and involved at the last meeting, I feel like we've made little progress in continuing our discussion since. Face-to-face meetings are tough to schedule and expensive, so I created a Ning to allow us to share resources and carry on the conversation, and there's been some great participation from within our building. However, the teaming has felt far more horizontal than vertical, and that's not going to get the job done.

What can I do to get all parties fully involved and make our vertical teaming successful? I would appreciate any advice or resource suggestions.

An Evening with Neil Gaiman and a Reflection on Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Last Thursday evening, I - accompanied by several students, my husband and dad, @maporch, @theprofspage and her mom, and our school librarians - attended a reading and talk with Neil Gaiman sponsored by our local university. The author has been one of my favorites since my husband first introduced me to the Sandman series (my first comic books) when I was in college, so this was an exciting time, indeed :) It was also a HUGE experience for our kids. Their comments included the following:

"My adjective would have to be AWESOME!"
"I loved 'Orange'!"
"Can we make up a creative writing activity like that?"

And the adjective my husband picked was "charming." I'll try not to concern myself too much with the possibility that he's been bewitched by Mr. Gaiman.



The author mentioned that it was his first time in Alabama, and he touched on the notion that publishers don't really believe there's much of an audience here in the South. He discusses this further on his own blog.

Perhaps those publishers share a perception that literacy and love of language are somewhat spotty in this area of the map. And unfortunately that perception and the resulting lack of visiting authors, artists, etc. can lead to a dearth of cultural experiences for our kids. Thus, the potential for developing that love of language takes a bit of a hit.

So, nerd that I am, this self-fulfilling prophecy thing gets me thinking about my classroom.

I have a tendency to say to myself, "Let's try [insert cool new thing here] with the AP classes. They'll behave. Any other class probably wouldn't get it."

I am at times blocking my kids from things that could genuinely affect their love of language, appreciation for learning, ability to acquire new skills because of... what? Belief that the payoff won't be sufficient? My own laziness? Prejudice?

An experience from a few years back came to my mind Thursday evening. I planned to do a geocaching activity with my AP Lit class, so early that morning I enlisted a couple of my tenth graders to help me plant caches on our school grounds. These boys had very rarely expressed much interest at all in anything class-related, and the behavior in their class in general was such that I didn't want to venture outside of our room to try any different activities. When I handed them a couple of GPSs, however, they were immediately engaged, wanting to know how they worked and what they could do with them, asking questions, helping me... all the things we want from our kids.

Why did I forget about that morning? How did I so quickly fall back into practices that may guarantee lack of engagement and exposure to valuable tools for my lower level students?

Thanks, Mr. Gaiman, for helping me remember.

Goal #13: Give Students Reign

This goal presented itself somewhat unexpectedly.

We spent today in the library doing some study group reflections on the week, working on a couple of different research activities, making videos for the "Why Shakespeare?" project, and playing with my Kindle. Just before my AP Language students headed out for lunch, a few of the girls in the class called me over to their table. They looked... defeated.

The gist of the conversation was this:

1. They are frustrated with monotony in class after class.
2. Some of them are involved in an awesome program that gives them hands-on training in health-related fields, and they recently found out that to receive their one required health credit they must also sit through a semester's worth of a textbook-and-lecture type class. A semester of practical experiences, job shadowing, etc. alone won't count.
3. As part of a Sister Cities program, they traveled abroad last summer and were able to get a taste of student life outside of the U.S. Their assessment was that the practices they observed there made far more sense and seemed much more likely to prepare students for the real world than many of our current practices.

They said they didn't feel this frustration regarding my class, which was nice of them, but I know that I can improve in terms of providing them with what they need how they need it.

My response... First, I resisted the urge to make any preacher-choir comments. I told them that - while I can't become Queen of the Schools for a day and magically make things make sense in the world of public education (though I do wish for it with all my pennies, most of my stray eyelashes, and the occasional dandelion) - I might be able to give them a bit more say during the 98 minutes they're in my class each day.

I proposed a 3rd block student takeover, during which time they'll get to design a lesson that reflects what they want and need from an English / Language Arts class and how they think those things should be delivered. They shared the idea with some of their classmates, who seemed at least somewhat intrigued by the idea.

Next week, we'll be discussing the details of what they'll do for their block of time and when that time will be. I'm excited to hear about their ideas and to learn from my kids.

Why Shakespeare?

My kids have been required to read at least one of Shakespeare's works during three out of the four years they've been in high school. Many of them have no idea why.

Today they are starting a project to determine why it is that they should care about reading the works of the Bard. We'll be doing some research, interviewing students and teachers around the building, talking with people in the community, and sending the question "Why Shakespeare?" out into the world via Twitter and other means. Then they'll work together to develop a showcase of the responses.

We'd love to get as many perspectives as possible and see how far our social media tools can spread the word. If you'd like to offer your thoughts, please feel free to comment here or post on Twitter using the hashtag #whyshakespeare.

Thank you!

Alfie Kohn Chat Food for Thought

Author Alfie Kohn recently participated in a live online chat and answered questions from educators regarding his views on education. Though I was not part of the chat, I’ve been able to read some of the comments thanks to Shelly Terrell’s blog Teacher Reboot Camp.

I’ve worked with a number of pre-service teachers over the past several years, but because this is my first semester with a full-time intern in my classroom the following question and Kohn’s response particularly caught my attention:

Noah Geisel asked, “Most agree that quality teaching impacts student achievement but what makes for quality teaching and how to best prepare great teachers are quite contentious. This especially seems to be the case in looking at traditional teacher prep programs and the ‘alternative’ routes to licensure. What is your ideal teacher prep program?”

Alfie Kohn quote:
The mentor-apprentice relationship as a way of helping people to acquire proficiency in any career is something that is underappreciated in teacher ed programs as is the failure to look at the goals we have. Most schools have Methods courses, but I haven’t seen very many that have Goals courses that invite teachers to look at what is it we are really looking to get here and what are long-term goals for our students. When you don’t address that explicitly and collectively, you end up by default with goals like doing well on a standardized test, which is the least ambitious educational goal I can think of.

So I find that I’m asking myself the following questions:

Do I spend enough time addressing the big picture with my intern? It’s dangerously easy to be carried away by the everyday minutiae: Are the correct graduation exam objectives on the board for the state department visit? Have we filled out the forms for this afternoon’s meeting? But these things are not the job we’re really here to do.

Have I adequately discussed with her the things I want for our students by the time they leave us at the end of the semester? As a high school English teacher, I want our kids to become more effective communicators, both in speaking and in writing. I want them to know how to go out there in the world, gather reliable information, and do something with it. Something of value to them and hopefully to others. I want them to love language, understand how some may use it to manipulate, and participate actively in a world in which the ways we communicate continue to change.

Do the daily lessons in room 176 reflect these things, so that my intern sees how to become a teacher that sets priorities that will serve her students in the long run, or are we fixated on those “least ambitious” goals?