Justin


 * Reflecting on Hot Topics - 8 May 2011**

Standardized testing isn't going anywhere anytime soon, so doing the best we can within the standardized testing bubble really comes down to money. The more money gets sucked out of education, the lower quality of standardized tests we are going to be able to give the students. If teacher pay is really going to be tied to standardized testing then more money is going to have to be spent on things like essay questions that measure true comprehensive knowledge rather than the standard multiple choice questions which often only measure how many facts a student can memorize. The ideal would be to have teacher pay tied to year-long cumulative learning projects like the portfolios we talked about in class, but standardizing those would likely dumb them down and take autonomy away from the teachers where it should be. I think those kinds of assessments are still valuable to do, and if designed correctly can build the skills that students need to perform on the standardized test, but unfortunately I think a lot of teachers are going to see that standardized tests are the benchmark, so the standardized tests are what should be taught. Maybe things have to go that direction and get really shitty so the powers that be can see that such a model is ineffective, but as a parent with children who will be coming up in this system I'm hoping that change for the better in testing comes sooner rather than later.

I think that teaching students to be competitive in the 21st century is important (because why bother teaching them things they can't use?), but I think those skills can be taught without revolutionizing how and what we teach. A lot of the same methods we learned about can still be used, but the culminating projects can be centered around 21st century skills the students need, like creating a web-page. More access to computers will be absolutely necessary to effectively teach those skills, but even in the face of budget cuts we could still get creative in the planning stages of projects like that by having students work as much as they can on web design offline so that when the get online they are doing productive, almost-finished work. Another side-effect of teaching 21st century skills is that these are things that students should be inherently more interested in doing. Who wouldn't rather design a web-page instead of write a literary analysis? (Well, other than us English dorks, that is.) This is related to another of the hot topics we talked about, which is who will be responsible for teaching the students these skills. I sure as hell don't know how to design a web-page, but I would think that those are the kinds of skills that should be developed in a computer skills class (which should be so much more than just keyboarding) and then transferred into the content area classes. I'm just spit-balling here, but I don't think it is out of the realm of possibility to have a computer class devote each quarter to learning computer skills related to a specific content area project (say, English 1st quarter, History 2nd quarter, Science 3rd quarter, and Math 4th quarter). The content areas would have to get together to make sure each one had a culminating project for their quarter that was developing unique worth-while computer skills, but I think that would be a much better use of time than having students practice their typing skills. I didn't become a fast typer until I had to type a lot of shit in a short amount of time for the school paper at my Junior College. Get students using computers and creating genuine 21st century work and the typing skills will come.

What else? How can we make our voices heard? Don't be a doormat for other teachers just because they have seniority. I've seen some serious hacks at work in my observations. I don't care how long they have been teaching, I'm already a better teacher than those hacks, and so is everybody else in this class, and you shouldn't be afraid to stand your ground on something you feel strongly about. Sure, do it diplomatically, which is where I personally will likely run into trouble, but if you have an opinion it isn't doing anybody any good if you keep it to yourself and then stew about it when things don't go the way you hoped. Even if things don't go your way in the end, if you've said your piece at least you can look at yourself in the mirror and you've earned the right to continue to question the way things are done until they get better. Kind of like voting Democrat in Idaho. Sure, I'm not making a difference in who gets elected, but that ballot gives voice to my dissent and is my ticket to keep on dissenting. Shit or get off the pot, basically. Hmmm.... how did I end up at that statement? Am I even still talking about hot topics in education? Who knows, better stop here. This has been a great class, thanks everybody. Good luck and don't get lazy, because lazy teachers suck, and if things are going to get any better we can't suck. Put that on a bumper sticker y'all.




 * Modeling Successful Discussion ﻿ **- 27 Mar. 2011

The first thing that seems evident from all of our discussions about discussion and the videos we watched is that a discussion should be student-centered and student-driven. If a teacher takes too much of a role in discussion it isn't really a discussion, it's just direct instruction disguised as discussion. Just because students are talking doesn't mean a discussion is taking place, which is unfortunately all some teachers think is necessary to have a discussion.

I think McCann, Johnnessen, Kahn and Flanagan did a good job outlining a teacher's job during a discussion with their key roles as initiating the discussion, managing the order of contributors, asking questions, and paraphrasing for clarification (26). The follow this up by saying, "all of these teacher behaviors serve as models for the students who continue the discussion in small groups" (26). While all of the other points are certainly important, I think the idea of modeling both sums up and trumps all the rest. With our ever-present expert blind spot we forget how much students don't know, and one of the things many of them don't know is how to have a productive discussion. Discussion also isn't one of those things where you can tell someone how to do it and expect them to get it right, which is why the students need to see the teacher modeling how a discussion should take place before being expected to do so themselves.

As a bit of an aside, the point about learning by doing makes a lot of these readings frustrating sometimes because they have lots of great ideas, but there's a big difference between reading and doing. I'm glad we're getting a chance to work on some of these techniques in class because it helps make the theoretical world of the books seem more realistic and applicable. OK, tangent over.

Back to modeling discussions, this is probably one of the most important things we can do early in a school year if we plan on having productive discussions the rest of the year. My mysteries unit will be the first thing taught when school starts next Fall so I am trying to plan days around how to have discussions so that the precedent is set for the students very early in the year. I think I will start by asking students what they think makes for a good discussion, mainly because I am genuinely curious to see what they have to say, but also so that we can get a discussion started about discussion so that, whether they know it or not, they are engaging in meta-level thinking, which I think is important to really understanding something.

Because we have been bogged down so far this semester with PACE I haven't seen a genuine discussion in my 8th grade class, which has been frustrating. Now that we are moving on to the next unit I'm hoping I will get to see some real discussion taking place, but at least last week I got to see and participate in a great discussion when I spent the day at Mountain View High School. I was in Mrs. Sally Mitchell's 12th grade AP English class, and the discussion centered around Ibsen's //A Doll's House.// Sally did pretty much everything we've been reading about, from the modeling to the questioning to the clarifying and paraphrasing, and it was a great discussion. Sure, part of that may have to do with the students being AP students, but it was heartening to at least see some of what we've talked about taking place in a actual secondary English classroom.

Finally, I wanted to end on one of the most important things I think we can model for students when it comes to discussion: not knowing the answer and being wrong. Rachel brings this up every now and then and I think it is a great point because so much of student non-involvement comes from the fear of those two things. If we as teachers can show the students that not knowing and being wrong every now and then are OK, I think we give ourselves a much better chance of having successful discussions as opposed to an environment where students are afraid to pipe up because they are afraid of being ridiculed or judged. There is always going to be some element of that because we are dealing with adolescents, but the more we as teachers can do to alleviate that, the better off our discussions, and our classrooms as a whole, will be in the long run.

Thankfully these are rough drafts because I would be terrified to start the school year with what I have at this point. I feel like I could cover so much more, but that I will be pushing it to get through as much as I would like to, even in the six weeks I have laid out. Having to read stories and work on assignments in class really sucks up a lot of valuable instructional time.

I tried pasting it in here and it looked great until I saved and it freaked out on me, so a link to the file itself will have to do.




 * What the How Or How the What? - Reflection on Student Engagement ﻿ **- 26 Feb. 2011

I think sometimes engagement gets confused with interest. Even if a student is interested in what is being taught, they can be disengaged if it isn’t being taught effectively. A couple semesters ago I took a class on 20th Century British Fiction, which should be right in my wheelhouse, but I hated the class because the teacher insisted on a rigid and uninteresting way of teaching the texts. Interestingly, the flip side of that scenario is also true: even if a student isn’t inherently interested in what is being taught, they can be engaged in the learning experience if the teacher is doing their job correctly. I think this is an important thing to keep in mind, because oftentimes so much focus gets placed on the “what,” that we forget that the “how” is just as important when it comes to engaging students.

This is something I have personally struggled with in my classes at Lake Hazel, because nobody, not even hardcore English nerds like us can really get excited about in-text citations, and trying to get the kids engaged when teaching something like that is really hard. Hell, I have a hard time getting myself engaged in teaching a lot of the material related to PACE, and if I’m not engaged there is no way the students are going to get engaged. Sure, some of them do the work and will get good grades on their projects, but how much more would they have gotten out of the process if we could have figured out a way to engage them along the way?

I know when trying to think about planning my Mysterious Circumstances unit the hardest questions end up being personal in nature: what do I think the students should come away with, and why are those things interesting to me? After spending quite a bit of time really thinking about my Understandings for the unit, I was able to come up with some ideas that I personally think are engaging, which is an important first step in making the unit engaging for the students.

I think framing units around essential questions is a great way to start making material engaging for students because humans are naturally inquisitive creatures, and even the biggest slacker in the class can’t help but get engaged if what is being asked of him engages him on a personal level. One of the things I struggled with when writing my essential questions was coming up with questions that could be addressed without any texts; questions that were interesting in and of themselves that just so happened to fit in with the stories I wanted to cover. That’s how we get students engaged and activating their prior knowledge, even if they don’t realize that it’s happening: appeal to them on some unconscious level that says “this is important to you.” After that, reading stories about that question in class should be easier than it would have been had you just started in with the story without any reasoning behind it.

I hadn’t thought about it while we were doing it, but activities like the Animal Farm argument we did in class also get after this kind of prior knowledge. We all know how to argue and most people know from experience what makes a good argument and what makes a bad one, so they are ready to put that knowledge to use in relation to the questions being posed. I also liked the “What?/ So What?/ Now What?” prompts that Jeff Wilhelm suggested on p. 80 of his book because these are the types of questions that students are asking themselves and teachers all the time. The difference in this case is that they are being applied to what they are reading and should be getting after a specific purpose, hopefully related to the essential questions the story is addressing. There are a lot of interesting activities like this and I think an important thread they all share is that the students are the ones asking the questions, which means the questions matter to them, and it would follow that the answers should matter as well. The teacher in the class I mentioned at the beginning didn’t understand this. She asked all the questions, and they weren’t questions that had anything to do with what interested us as students in the texts. Hopefully this will be something I can keep in mind and apply when I start teaching my own class. Now if I could just figure out how to do it with PACE…


 * Annotated Unit Plan Portfolio Assignment One: Unit Topic Memo ** - 12 Feb. 2011

Mysterious Circumstances Unit - 8th grade at Lake Hazel Middle School


 * Resources**: This seems to be the short story unit with a number of suggested stories from folklore to Poe to Sherlock Holmes, all of which can be found in Prentice Hall's //Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes// (2000) textbook. About the only actual book I can find on the approved list that would relate to this topic is //I Know What You Did Last Summer// which is actually a seventh grade book, but is on the open list so I could use it for eighth grade if I wanted. Just not sure if I will have the time to fit in reading a book or not at this point. I've also never read it, so that may be a problem...

OK, so I started with about 13 standards, but have tried to boil them down to these two key standard-y ideas that will be addressed during the unit and should lead into the culminating activity. Students will: Acquire skills for comprehending a literary text with a focus on structure, setting, mood, and character. Acquire creative writing skills with a focus on structure, setting, mood, and character.
 * Standards**:

What is the difference between a good mystery and a bad mystery? How is a mystery different from other kinds of stories? How do we solve real-life mysteries (big and small)? When is the best answer to a question another question?
 * Essential Questions**:

My idea for a culminating assignment is inspired by the student papers we read last semester in Jim's class where the students had to write "The Case of the Missing...." stories. I think it might be interesting to have students write something like that near the beginning of the unit before we really learn what mysteries are all about then take that first draft and revise it at the end of the unit to incorporate all that they have learned. Part of writing it would also be a reflection on what they knew, what they know now, and how that is evident in the second version of their story. Part of the papers we read for Jim's class was focusing on the idea of means, motive and opportunity, each of which students were required to have as part of their story. As stated in my standards I think the most important things I will focus on for mysteries with the students is how the stories are structured (why is a mystery different from other stories) and how mood is created through specific settings and character development. The revised stories at the end of the unit should show an understanding of these principles applied to their own stories.
 * Culminating Performance Assessment**:


 * Reflection on Learning ** - 30 Jan. 2011

The main point I have taken from our week of learning autobiographies and readings is that learning comes in all shapes and sizes. Whether it happens at home or in a classroom, when we are three years old or thirty years old, there is something unique about us all that gives us this capacity to learn something from just about every situation we find ourselves in. But what does "learn something" actually mean or look like? I guess that depends on how you are talking about it. I see the"how" and the "what" of learning as somewhat distinct things, so I've tried to separate them out to really get at what is going on when we learn.

During the presentations I was interested to see the different situations people were in when learning occurred. One of the regularly recurring themes was that people learned when they were in uncomfortable situations. This is related to the zone of proximal development (ZPD) we talked about a bit where something is happening that we can't quite handle on our own, but can usually handle with a little help (ie, from the teacher). I think this can also apply to situations outside the classroom where something happens in our lives that we aren't ready to handle or cope with, and it isn't until later that we have had time to reflect on it and process what happened that it becomes a learning event. I also think this is related to those teachers a lot of people talked about who had high expectations of them, sometimes forcibly pushing them into that ZPD whether they like it or not, but as was the case with most people that's when they learned the most.
 * The How**

Big Idea: The "how" of learning happens when we are uncomfortable and in the zone of proximal development.

So, if what I talked about above is the environment in which the act of learning occurs, then what does that learning actually look like? I think a common element between everyone's learning experiences is that as a result of each experience the person is changed in some way. I was initially thinking that these changes would be positive, but I guess you would then have to define positive because negative things can be learned as well. The problem is, would learning something negative still be considered a positive learning experience? In the same way a positive learning experience can result from a negative situation, as we saw from the examples of bad teachers that many people talked about. The whole negative/positive discrepancy is probably a discussion for another time, but basically, learning happens when the learner experiences a change of some sort as a result of the learning.
 * The What**

Big Idea: The "what" of learning is a change in the behavior, knowledge or attitude of the learner.

How does understanding fit into all of this? I'm not actually sure, but for a point of discussion I will throw out there that maybe understanding has occurred when the learner is conscious of the learning having taken place. As an extension of that, maybe the learner should not only be conscious of what they learned, but be able to articulate what was learned as well. I don't know if being able to then teach the information to someone else goes past understanding and into mastery, but are those even different things? I'm just kind of spit-balling at this point. I'm interested to see what others have to say.
 * Understanding**