Sun Protection

I’ve had a lot of practice wearing “many hats” for the greater good of my work/volunteering, but yesterday was a new experience with a new set of hats.  I was both teacher and student at the MACUL conference. My feet felt firmly planted in BOTH realms as I sat in on the sessions; so when one presenter asked for a raise of hands from teachers, I raised my hand, but later introduced myself to him as a student.  When he started showing student work and talking about dropping rubrics and focusing on audience, my teacher ear perked up and I started thinking seriously about what he was saying and how I could bring this in to my own practice.  

David Theune teaches high school ELA at Spring Lake High School in West Michigan. He’s been teaching for over eleven years and started focusing on “authentic audience” about two years ago. His presentation,             Friday Night Lights: Connecting with Community, took us through his experience of giving less attention to rubrics, and more attention to providing his students an audience for their writing projects. Additionally, he shared a community engagement project he developed for his students that I would love to bring in to my future classroom.

“Authentic Audience”

What does that mean in an ELA classroom? In many classrooms the students write for the teacher, we call this “teacher as examiner” and it can be problematic and difficult for students. We experience that in our grad school classes regularly. We know how to write to the expectations of the teacher and remain focused on meeting/exceeding those expectations rather than writing the best and most appropriate paper based on the rubric. So, take away teacher as examiner, and take away a rubric, and replace them with classmates or some other audience who is not going to actually give a grade for the work. I interpret David’s “authentic audience” to mean someone who will read/see/hear student work for the sake enjoying the work, rather than with the express purpose of assigning a grade. I want this for my students. I want them to understand that there will not always be a teacher as examiner and that they will find their future selves writing to varied audiences. That is not to say that it isn’t important to know how write to that audience (college/job applications/testing), but I think it is more important for my students to be comfortable communicating effectively (written or verbally).

David told us that he felt rubrics were “forcing students to work toward a minimum grade, not their maximum potential.”  He dumped the rubric and changed to this practice after seeing students give personal time and effort to extracurricular activities like drama and sports - activities that do not earn a grade. He noticed that students were forming relationships, building connections, and collaborating in ways that he was not seeing in his classroom. He wanted to start giving his students a tangible result for their work and found that an authentic audience could do that for him. His students have produced work that they have shared with students at other schools, narratives that they have written and produced as videos on youtube.com, and other mediums. He admits that some students struggle without the rubric and explains that he works with those students during the one on one conferencing he does nearly each class period.

David gave a brief description of a project he did with his students that really captured my attention and imagination. Students are required to write research papers and he decided to give his students’ research PURPOSE. He had students research local non-profit organizations and write their papers about the organization based on research they did both with Directors who worked there and through other sources. While the students worked on their papers, he worked with his local community foundation to secure grant money that he would later give to the organizations researched by his students. The final drafts were shared with their classmates and the non-profits they profiled. The students then voted for three organizations to which they would donate $350 each. He said there was a case where students made impassioned pleas for their organization saying that $350 would “go further” at their small organization than their classmate’s more established non-profit. I could imagine this sort of activity in my future classroom. I want my students to feel connected to their communities, to experience making a donation, and to build an understanding of community engagement.

David Theune’s enthusiasm was contagious. It reminded me about the excited conversations I had with my classmates this summer, when we were riding high on the waves of our idealism. My excitement and idealism is alive and well, albeit a little dormant as I feel burned by the sun that is teaching, planning, and schooling. Spring is coming and I am re-awakening - ­my excitement is brimming. I feel energized and hopeful!

Dear Cool Cat, Can we be friends someday?

So I discovered two new blogs to follow and I’m very excited!

Wait, let me rephrase… I’m very excited to start reading these blogs sometime next June, it’s going to be great!

Vicki Davis, the Cool Cat Teacher

I found out about the Cool Cat Teacher blog through one of my classmates via the AIC class I mentioned in my previous post. Vicki Davis, the CoolCat, teaches one of the classes involved in the simulation but I had no idea she also keeps up with a blog and records a podcast every other week. She also keeps up with THREE CHILDREN, other social networking sites like Twitter and Google Plus which makes a pre-service teacher like we wonder HOW DOES SHE FIND THE TIME?! Well, I have a clue since I know she posted on my comment in the wee hours of the morning: she doesn’t sleep. OK, I don’t know that for a fact, but I know that she and many other educators work an unbelievable number of hours to get the good work done and I think EduBloggers provide a really incredible service to teachers by sharing their ideas and knowledge. They are a wonderful resource for us all, teachers or not.

I was drawn to Vicki Davis’ Cool Cat blog because I know her, but I was hooked when I saw the variety of content she was posting. One post in particular really spoke to me. Vicki interviewed another EduBlogger, Brian Page of FinEdChat, about teaching financial literacy in a high school setting. This is an issue that I’ve been keenly interested in for a long time. I first developed an interest in introducing this to high school students when I worked at a private school in Chicago. My colleague and I wanted to teach a seminar about financial literacy, resume writing, and job-hunting to high school seniors. We wrote a proposal but none of the students signed up for it so we never taught it (this was the week between their senior service learning trip and commencement). Now that I’m working with high school students I realize that this was probably not the way they wanted to spend their final week of high school, exploring serious “adult” issues. I’ve never stopped thinking about it though, so when I saw Vicki’s post I was really intrigued.

Vicki and Brian shared that most financial literacy occurs in the college classroom and that it leaves out students who don’t take the college route. In other words, the teaching of financial literacy is generally not equitable. Vicki asks a couple of pointed questions that align with my thinking perfectly – she asks if we are discriminating and if we are promoting financial ignorance by not teaching this content in high schools. In her podcast she unpacks these questions and asks pointedly if we are “… saying that only certain students are going to have money, because certainly if people don’t know how to handle money how can they keep it, how can they manage it? How can they pay bills on time?  Are we discriminating by not educating every child who goes through high school on how to do basic financial literacy?”

Excerpt form JA report on teen finance

She and Brian spend some time discussing how students who don’t go to college and, specifically, children with special educational needs tend to be “victims of predatory lending practices.”  Brian points out that there are only a handful of states in the US that require students to take a personal finance class. This made me think about the Junior Achievement (JA) program we had in my middle school. I found this little nugget that I’m not sure makes me feel good or bad but 20% of the participating teens are “somewhat or extremely unsure about their ability to budget successfully” and indicate that they will likely live with their parents longer because of this. So, I’m glad it’s not more than 20% but sad that it’s not only 5 to 10%.

In an effort to not simply recap their podcast (go listen to it!!) I am going to end here by saying that these two educators have tapped into something I think a lot of us are concerned about. I hope you will take the time to think about how you might be able to sneak personal finance/financial literacy into your teaching – I know I will.

I’m really looking forward to catching up on both of their blogs next summer! You?

Again:

Vicki Davis – CoolCatTeacher: http://www.coolcatteacher.com/

Brian Page – FinEdChat: http://finedchat.blogspot.com/

AIC

I am currently in a class that requires me to have multiple personalities. Fortunately for my family it’s not a United States of Tara situation, but it has made for some pretty great conversations.  My favorite at-home moment being the time I responded to my husband, “Give me a minute, I’m in the middle of an email to Hezbollah!” His response was to calmly walk to my home office and say, “What the [bleep]????” I laughed uncontrollably and explained.

I thought it would be fun to talk about a tech-reliant class on the blog I keep for my EdTech class. This split-personality class is actually a simulation of the Arab-Israeli conflict that exists 100% online and a really great experience for both the high school students, their teachers, and the game moderators. The split-personality characterization comes form the fact that each “game” has National Security Advisors who work with a certain number of teams, and a Game Mentor who oversees the entire game (we have 4 games running at once in our class) and we play both the Game Mentor and the NSAs. Shhhhh… the high school students don’t know this yet!!

I’d like to give you an overview of the simulation/game, from my perspective. The game consists of participants and moderators (for lack of better terms). The high school students are the participants, and we, the grad students, are the moderators along with our Professor and the classroom teachers. The participants are each assigned a real life human being who is somehow politically connected to the Middle East conflict. The participants must learn about that person and their political affiliations so they can act as them during the simulation. For example, one of my groups (that I act as the NSA for) is the Palestinian Hamas, which consists of three players: Ismail Haniya, Mahmoud Zahhar, and Kahled Meshaal; each person is being taken on by a high school student. In addition to the students not knowing that I sometimes play Game Mentor, they don’t (initially anyway) know that I am the NSA to nine other countries/governments/political groups. In fact, I am advising groups in conflict with each other (Hamas, Fatah, and Israel are all part of my “family” of players!). I’ll be honest; it is not always easy to keep track of it all. The term started with each group working together to research their country/group and to develop about three strategic goals that they think best represent their group. An example of a strategic goal comes from Iran:

“We want to drive a wedge between Israel and the U.S. through the public relations campaign aimed at the intelligentsia of the West before they form a united front against us and try take away our nuclear program.”

This is what the Strategic Goals page looks like.  These are Jordan's approved goals.

Pretty cool, eh? I’m not sure what grade they are, but both examples show their ability to analyze and apply knowledge, which I think is good stuff! Once their goals are approved the game begins. Participants develop Action Forms if their group wants some sort of event to occur; but they don’t get to choose which of the four options they develop actually play out – the Game Mentor does! There is always a “do nothing” option which is sometimes more fun to play than taking action. There are also required Weekly Reports, and Press Releases. All of which must be reviewed, commented on, and approved by the NSAs. In other words, there is a LOT of work involved but I think the experiences these kids are having are worth my time and effort.

My game partner is really wonderful and we’ve become better friends because of this experience together. She has really connected with the students in a way that has enriched the entire experience and I feel so fortunate to be her game partner! She has also kept us organized which is really important; we share a couple of google docs where we keep notes and parse out what needs to get done. Since we are sharing the Game Mentor duties we try to keep things even but between us, she’s doing more work. I mentioned that she is connecting with the students but what I didn’t mention is that they are sending her 3 page documents to review/edit on a somewhat regular basis!! I feel fortunate that I’m not getting those but I’m also a bit jealous that she’s developed this relationship with her students.

What I’ve really enjoyed about this class is 1) the Professor (and the reason I took the class in the first place), 2) the opportunity to see how an online simulation actually works, and 3) exposure to issues that I thought I knew something about, but didn’t. I would also add that it gives me some practice with virtual education, something teachers really need to know about since so many schools have online components.

I would highly recommend this class to anyone interested in how online simulations work and/or those interested in the Middle East. Do NOT consider this class because it seems like it will not be too much work – it is a lot of work but I think it has been a really wonderful experience!

Ask me about The Lemon Tree and how the Professor incorporated this in our class…

On Time Management

Flashdrives and iPads and Smartboards, Oh My!

The tech situation in my placement is, how do I put this, confusing? The teachers’ computers are from about 2002 and are probably workhorses but don’t have USB ports that can accept flash drives which results in,

“Sorry student X, you’re going to have to email that to me. Oh, you don’t have internet at home? Got it. Let’s see if the Media Center computers will accept your drive.”

This happened and I wasn’t surprised. I was bothered by it, but not surprised. What bothered me was that the school couldn’t support the student’s work, not that the student doesn’t have internet at home (hey, they have a flash drive and a computer, that’s more than a lot of other families). So, what do you do? Encourage your students to handwrite everything? Make them use their lunch (= break/social time that they need) time to go to the library? If only the library was open before and after school every day. Argh! Every time I think of a brilliant idea to solve this I forget about things like, human capital. Is it fair to have the Librarian ready for students at 6:30am and then expect them to stay sane until 3pm? Something has to give and it's your class instruction time. Unless of course you've saved every strange attachment for your CPU and know what goes where (see below).

http://weknowmemes.com/2013/03/if-theres-a-will/

Scenario II involves NWEA testing. It isn’t working as well as I think they hoped it would. This school has a couple laptop carts and a small desktop lab in the library. They both seem to get a heavy daily workout but are surviving. Unfortunately, I heard some tough stories in the teacher’s lounge about it taking over 30 minutes for some kids to log in to their tests. Teach support gets things moving but I have a feeling there are only a couple folks for the entire district and I can imagine that they are about to lose it. Some of the teachers were talking about how IT person Bob (name changed to protect the innocent) hates them because they are always calling.

One person talked about submitting a ticket (request for IT service) for something non-NWEA related during NWEA and getting this call, “We can’t process this until we have more teachers place tickets for the same issue. It might be user error.” This teacher tried getting this machine to work on different days, at different times, etc and finally had to get other teachers to try (and fail) so they could get tickets submitted. The machine and/or software isn’t working.

We have one or two Kindle carts and at least one iPad cart which I think is pretty cool. Unfortunately, the Kindles don’t do as well on the wifi as the iPads so they don’t get used often. Isn’t it ironic that they have the devices but the infrastructure isn’t supporting them? I’ve tried getting on their wireless with my phone and it times out every time. I have to rely on my smartphone’s 4G  3G  1G data when on lunch and wanting to check Facebook my homework spreadsheet on Google Drive (seriously, I check that more than Facebook!!). It takes FOREVER and it works better in the interior lunchroom than in the classroom that has exterior walls. CONFUSING.

Enough negativity. EACH ROOM HAS A SMARTBOARD! Also, the teachers are allowed to use them. Apparently there are some districts that are so concerned about the cost of replacing projector bulbs that teachers are afraid to use their projectors and smartboards. Not here, not us. In fact, the smart board caused a bit of panic the other morning because it wasn’t turning on. WHAT WOULD WE DO? I’m being dramatic, we would have used the chalkboard and… wait, I’m not sure we would have been able to play the AUDIOBOOK! Oh wait, we could have read it. So, chalkboards and humans can get stuff done that technology can also get done. But sometimes, for the sake of one’s voice, it’s nice to have an audiobook.

I think we’re lucky to have the technology and devices that we DO at my placement. I just wish that we were better able to use it to enhance student learning. NWEA testing took three solid days for some teachers, 2 for others. Taking time from a student’s lunch hour or other class instruction time to deal with a flash drive that is too new for the teacher’s computer doesn’t enhance anything.  I wonder if any schools out there have reached a happy medium? I’m looking forward to reading how my colleagues post about tech in their placements. I’m also curious about how this issue may or may not affect my opinion about schools/districts when starting my job search.