Ms. K’s Teaching Reflection Blog

I’m taking the next step in my adult life this weekend, July 26th, 2008. I’ll be marrying my best friend Mike Lux. We’ve been together for over 4 years, and have already had some great experiences together, but we’re looking forward to a lifetime of memories as we embark on married life. 

I’m still thinking about school and being a teacher, primarily as a distraction from the nerves. Kim Jasper posted this website to the list: http://wordle.net. I decided to try and make my own right away, and did so using words that are on my mind about the wedding.

Wordle gives the html to paste your wordle into your blog, but I couldn’t get it to work. Nonetheless, here is the link to my wordle.  

English teacher blogger Carla Beard also shared some great ideas for how to incorporate wordle into almost everyday life with some very creative wordles. See her blog for more ideas on wordle.

I’ve had a few ideas for how wordle can be integrated into the classroom. One is as part of a poetry unit. At the end of this past year when I had to do a poetry unit with my 10th graders, I set it up as a portfolio assessment. We read some poems but we wrote a lot of poems. Students then chose from their pile of poems three that they were going to spend more time on and turn in as their “best” work. We tried a lot of fun poems, and I can see wordle being used as a way to write some themed, fun poems. You can ask wordle to randomize the words or keep them in the same order - a great technique for a found or headline poem.

A second idea is to use wordle as a prewriting strategy during the writing process. I teach a lower-level writing class, and can see generating wordles as a great way to get students talking about topics for a paper. It’s interactive, colorful, and turns out looking pretty neat and can serve as a discussion point between students or a way to “borrow” ideas from each other if they post their wordle into a public space like their blog.

A third idea I had for using wordle is as a pre or post reading strategy. A teacher could generate key words from a text as a preview for what’s to come, which gets students’ minds on the same playing field for determining importance while reading. As a post reading activity, students could create their own wordles with key words and connections that they see between the text and their lives. Students could then discuss the commonalities or differences between their wordles, and argue for why they chose the words they did.

Overall, I like this tool as a way to quickly and easily integrate a fun teaching strategy that students should hopefully enjoy as well. I love adding visual aids to the classroom, with color, words, images, etc., so this is right up my alley

Introduction to Poetry PP

I used a PowerPoint, with credit to Art Bellieveu for compiling the great quotes, with my sophomores yesterday to kick-off our poetry unit. The quotes on the slide show are from famous poets expressing their definition of poetry. I put on some Coldplay in the background and just had the students read a few slides worth for about 4 minutes. Then we came back together as a class and generated a list of words that should be included in a definition of poetry - it varied greatly between the classes, which I though was interesting. One class got stuck on the rhyme, stanza, quatrain, haiku kind of terms, which are all components or types of poetry but don’t define it. I quickly steered them in a different direction. The students then wrote their own definition of poetry in their notes, which we will revisit at the end of the unit - which will go quickly as we only have seven class days left. I’m kind of running out of time here, but am going to do the best I can with the time that I have.

My first activity beyond the PP was to have each draw an object from the bucket. These included things like shoe, radio, guitar, pizza, clouds, rain, sun, hot wings, apple, ring, etc. Then students had to generate a simile, metaphor and personification example for their object. Here is my cloud list:

The clouds are like a fluffy pillow. Clouds are a blanket comforting us from the sun. The clouds sneak up on me and create a shadow that frightens.

With this activity, I’m hoping to show the students that the use of figurative language can come easier than they think - although my simile, metaphor and personification for clouds are nothing extraordinary, if I turned those into a poem, it wouldn’t be half bad.

OMM Final Project Choices

My students are diligently working on final projects to culminate our class reading of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. I’d like to post some of their work here on the blog, so I’ve made a page for their projects. I’m not sure how this is going to work or how quickly it’ll happen, but this is my goal.

One of the reasons I believe they are working so hard is choice. They were given 8 engaging project options and then given a final 9th option to come up with anything else that is creative and shows me they understand Steinbeck’s purpose (the big idea). My students have come up with some pretty cool ideas - I love it when they think of things I never thought of.

What is most rewarding about assigning projects that students take and run with is that I get time to watch them work independently with internal motivation. This means less classroom management, so I can actually spend time getting to know my students better and keep tabs on the progress of their project. All around, this unit has gone very well and I’m excited to see the results I get from this project - the learners will present on Thursday.

My Intermediate Composition course management page has had a rebirth. I have a few students who have already opted to create blogs and write their weekly writing prompts on the web for all to read. I am so excited about this, as I just spent the last half hour reading their posts and making comments. Prior to that, I passed my time reading the blogs of my peers,  getting updated on their literacy practices and technology integration. It is amazing the wealth of information available on the internet, and it’s imperative that students understand how to read that information critically and then add to it with their own expertise and experience.

The world may be getting smaller as we communicate more closely with people we may never meet in person. I will use the CHS Int. Comp. course page primarily as a management page. It will contain links to and descriptions of writing assignments and also a blogroll of my students’ blogs. 

Shakespeare’s birthday is tomorrow. In honor of the famous playwright’s birth, I thought I would reflect on how I’ve grown to love the bard and how that’s helped me introduce better practices to teach my students to also love his writing.I had a difficult time getting through my Shakespeare class in college. Don’t get me wrong, my professor was great and definitely a Shakespeare fanatic, but I was never really taught HOW to read Shakespeare. I also didn’t seem to have enough time or knowledge & resources to plow through a full play in a week on my own at home. The reading pace was too strenuous for me, and I found myself lost and falling behind, never gaining an appreciation for what Shakespeare has contributed to the literary world.

It wasn’t until I myself was asked to teach Shakespeare that I took the time to understand his longevity. Shakespeare is still famous centuries later because his themes cross those centuries. His characters still exist in real life today. The human condition and universal understandings have not changed in over 400 years. He just wrote in a “different” language.

Learning to love Shakespeare for me and my students meant overcoming his language. One of the best techniques I’ve ever done for my students is demonstrate how Shakespeare’s words are sometimes in a different order in the sentence than what we expect today. The trick was finding the subject and verb and then putting them in that order. Take the sentence: I lost my homework. Then write that four different ways, using the same words. My homework I lost. Lost my homework I. The idea quickly became clear to my students that even though the words were in a different order, the meaning of the sentence was the same. They just had to figure out where he placed the subject and verb and order them to make sense.

After students had some techniques to read Shakespeare on their own and understand his sentence structure, we were able to work on archaic language. I simply gave students a handout of some of the most common archaic words/language they would encounter while reading the play. Also, while reading aloud as a class, students who had completed homework or answered quiz questions at the beginning of class quickly and correctly “won” the use of a side-by-side modern translation for the day. It came with a catch - we counted on them to help us interpret passages we read but didn’t understand because they had the modern English translation in front of them.Once students get past the fact that Shakespeare wrote a bit differently than what we’re used to today, they can learn to love and appreciate his characters and themes that are still relevant today. I really wonder if he had any inkling how famous he would be today, and how widely taught, performed and read he is.  

Motivation comes from lots of different places. Today, I am motivated to look at my blog after I visited Dawn Hogue’s Polliwog Journal. I’m not going to get to it right away because I have an appointment I have to leave for, but some time today I will change my blog’s look and feel.

Motivation to be spending time on things other than planning and grading comes from the fact that I am on spring break this week. There is nothing more motivating to do extra work on school than having a few days away from regular school. As a first year teacher, I get so bombarded with all the state and district requirements, as well as the regular first year stuff like planning, management and grading, that I neglect time for things I’m interested in and want to spend time on. So now I can spend some time changing my blog, researching blogs and wikis in the classroom, listening to Dawn’s radio interviews, and preparing information to go to my administrators about 21st C literacy and how I want to take Clinton High School there.

Motivation, then, is both external and internal. External motivation for me comes from reading online sources, watching other English teachers’ steps in the cyberworld, and participating in the English teacher list-serv discussion. Internal motivation is my desire to bring my kids to a place they haven’t been brought before and where they need to be brought, which is why I’ll spend my spring break working on stuff for them (and a little bit of time on stuff for me).

Reciprocal teaching is a successful reading strategy that gives learners ownership and responsibility. It requires them to play the role of teacher (hence the title) and complete a reading assignment in charge of their own comprehension.

Here’s how it works. I put students into groups of four, with the understanding that if they perform well during a RT session, they may eventually be able to choose their own group members. When I group the students, I think about how well they will work together, depend on each other, and stay on task.  

Once in the groups, each member is given a pre-established role. The roles I typically use include predict, clarify, question and summarize. Those four “roles” are basically the four reading strategies the students are utilizing for the given assignment. All of my students are already aware of the benefits of predicting, clarifying, questioning and summarizing while reading because we’ve used them as reading strategies individually and grown to understand how they work. Each student is completing all four of the strategies while reading (the students document their use of each strategy on their own worksheet), regardless of their role.

The “role” factor comes in because one of the students in the group is assigned to be the predictor, for example. Once every group member has written down their prediction, the “predictor” plays teacher and starts the discussion about predictions. If a student is the “clarifier,” this means that student is responsible for checking with his or her group members about what needs clarification. Anybody can help clear things up. If a student is the “questioner,” this means that student is responsible for starting the discussion on what questions students asked about the text. If a student is the “summarizer,” this means that student is responsible for generating the sharing of summaries and working to form a cohesive group summary.

The end result and benefits of this teaching strategy include the students’ utilization of four strategies while reading, a dependency on each other for checking comprehension while reading, and a shared conversation about the text. Students lean on each other for discussion about the text; questions are generated from the learner and answered by the learner, rather than generated by the teacher and/or answered by the teacher.

Students walk away with the skills they need to be an independent learner in today’s fast-paced society that we won’t be walking hand-in-hand with them in. They lean on their peers for help with a difficult text. They remember to utilize their reading strategies to check for comprehension because they’re doing it themselves and not being asked to do it by the teacher in whole-group instruction.

To introduce this learning strategy to my students, I used a PowerPoint. To document their use of the reading strategies (making predictions, writing down things that need clarification, asking questions and generating a summary), I gave them a word document with a table. They set up stopping points before reading to talk as a group and complete their teacher roles - who needs something clarified? What questions can we ask about the text? What predictions have you made? What does a summary for this portion look like? - for each of the stopping points.

While the RT session is going on, I walk around and pop in on conversations. I help the students remember their job is to start the conversation for their assigned strategy. I hear amazing things from my students during a RT session. They actually say things like, “Can you clarify this part for me? I got confused when…” Their using the tools that each of them brings to the table to work through a text and comprehend it. They take charge of their own learning, rather than sitting back and waiting to hear it from the teacher.

This video, found in multiple versions on the internet, will be used as a journal prompt for my Intermediate Composition students. It’s meant to make them consider our existence on Earth, and how much we matter. Many of us think we matter so much, but in the big picture, do we really? What matters more than us?

Credit for the discovery of this video and the idea to use it as a journal prompt belongs to Greg Van Nest, talkie.

My Intermediate Composition students are also going to watch the film With Honors this week. Maybe they will start considering the existence of others around them and those less fortunate as equally important as their own lives. One can only hope…

A new set of students every 12 weeks is refreshing - like a breath of fresh air after being trapped in a locker room with a sweaty football team. Although I liked my students last trimester, the make-up of my classes this trimester seems to be more agreeable and manageable, so I therefore like my classes more. Overall, I am happier with the way my classes are operating this tri. For a lot of these kids, I’m sure a new teacher every 12 weeks is refreshing, too.

Having Angela Maiers come back into our school is refreshing. She brings with her so much knowledge and energy, I wish I could bottle it up and refresh myself when necessary. As an educational consultant, Angela brings ideas and strategies to inservice days and our classrooms to help students be more aware of their learning and teachers be more aware of how to show students how to learn. Eventually, students will be more independent learners, prepared for the shift in our global society. Despite some grumblings from a few faculty members not ready to jump on board with the philosophy and needs of a 21st Century learner she presents us with, Angela turns every lesson, comment and conversation into something positive. Her presence and passion is refreshing.

The coming of winter is refreshing. Although I dislike scraping my car, the static electricity in my hair and clothing, the icy roads, the dry, chapped skin and the shivering, I like the way the air is crisp and clean-feeling. I love coming home and warming spiced apple cider and sipping it while I reflect on the day and prepare for an evening of more schoolwork. I love the flannel sheets and sleeping in on Saturday morning because the world outside is frosty, as well as the bedroom. 

So, whether refreshing for you is a breath of fresh air after being trapped someplace smelly, or a new outlook on learning, or a cup of hot apple cider at the end of a long day, refreshing is just that: refreshing! Take a minute to refresh before you break down.

One of the first roadblocks I noticed with my Intermediate Composition students as writers is they thought they had nothing to say. I knew from my own observations that these students had plenty to say! Thus far, the daily writing prompt was chosen by me and sometimes submitted by students. We wrote for 5-10 minutes daily, and I used this journaling technique to help them develop ideas and get them down on paper. The prompts sometimes aligned with the weekly essay we read from the textbook. On Fridays, we went to the computer lab to type a paper they turned into me that was from one of that week’s journals, relating to the controversial ideas from the textbook essays.

So, although we write every day in that class, I’m not entirely finding it meaningful or motivational and only sometimes relevant and connected to their lives. They also are not greatly concerned about care and precision in their word choice, organization, grammar and mechanics (which is what we’ve been working on from day one). I am therefore providing my Intermediate Composition students with a larger audience. I created a blog space for us at http://www.chsintcomp.blogspot.com/.

Another component I am adding to the course is 10 minutes of daily reading a novel of their choosing. We went to the library on Thursday and chose books. Some were pretty excited about this, and I think they are all glad that we are mixing it up a bit. I was in a rut, they were in a rut, the whole class seems to be a rut.

It is on our blog space that we will write about the books we are reading. We might get into the lab twice a week, but for now I might just stick to Fridays. Students will journal about their books daily (summary, questions, predicting, making connections) and then they will synthesize these on Fridays into a larger blog post about their personal novel. They can also read and comment on other students’ books. I think this will be awesome!

It is on Fridays that they will still write a “paper” about the discussion topic from that week’s textbook essay. However, by posting their responses to the week’s controversial issue online, they should demonstrate more care and detail. They will also need to have evidence and support for the arguments they make. Often I find these students writing like they talk, and not showing concern for audience or backing up their viewpoints. We will work on these skills this week before they make their first blog post.

More to come on the successes and failures of creating a larger audience for my Intermediate Composition students…