Here are the 9 questions, not to be answered in numbered form but in a cohesive response:

1. How do you feel about writing? Include important information about yourself as a writer.
2. Why do people write?
3. Why do you write?
4. What is the best thing you have ever written? Why?
5. What is the worst thing you have ever written? What was difficult about it?
6. How often do you write?
7. What do you think a person needs to be a writer?
8. What do you expect from me as a teacher?
9. What are your writing goals?

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Then it was time for me to set them free. They picked a topic of interest to them, mostly from Greek gods and goddesses. The students could work collaboratively or independently – and were well aware of the benefits and drawbacks of each option. It was wonderful to watch them delve into research and rewarding to read their summaries and check their works cited entries. I think they did a great job of applying the skills we had practiced! 

The best part of this project is the online, public component. The students are creating pages on my wiki, posting their summary and works cited, and linking to a visual PowerPoint that represents their character or symbols of their character. The learners are very energized by using this new technology tool. Most did a very good job of exploring it and learning on their own. Some needed a bit more pushing to think for themselves and play around to learn. I set them up for how to log in, create a page, and upload files, but left the rest for them to discover. They realize the space is public, and therefore have more concern for the look and accuracy of their page. I just looked through them all again and don’t see any major problems.

Kudos to the learners for diving head first into a new project!

As a learner myself, perusing blogs on literacy, technology & learning, I came across the question “Why change?” on Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach’s blog. She wrote an eloquent response to this question (asked of her by frustrated teachers who see no end to the rigorous, changing expectations of teachers) detailing who we are as pedagogians. Her response to the question reminded me why I am a teacher and also why I feel both fired up and exhausted after these teaching practice conversations.

The “Why change?” question was a big roadblock I was noticing in our conversations with Angela at CHS about how teachers could make a few shifts in their teaching practices to better prepare the modern student for a modern world. I think the questions to ask instead of why should we change are: “Are we really teaching?” and “Are they really learning?” The answers to those questions might be “Not really,” for some of us, and if that is the case, then the “Why change?” has its answer – we’re not preparing our students to be independent learners and thinkers in a 21st Century society. We need to give them the skills to tackle anything that gets thrown their way in the real world, plus the content to support their understanding of that same real world.

It seems that Kaplan University is starting to get the idea of adapting to the learners and world we face today. We have to change the way we teach to change the way they learn. It is a shift for all of us, but one that reaps tremendous rewards. I noticed Scott McLeod, also an Iowa resident, posted the two new Kaplan University advertisments that demonstrate their shift in approaching post-secondary education on his blog, Dangerous Irrelevant. If you haven’t seen the advertisements yet, going to Kaplan’s website or the blog post linked to above will allow you to view them.

Now my mind is thinking – how can we apply the ideas of this university to a high school education? The first step is shifting our teaching practices, and there’s plenty of support out there to do it.

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.

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. 

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).

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…

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…

“Orchestrating Student Success”

Credit for that title is due to Angela Maiers, contracted professional development leader for Clinton Community School District. Her staff development topic today was teaching and learning in the new millenium. She welcomed us to the new literacy club by showing how basic literacy has changed since the older generations went to school and how we can teach these new literacies in our classroom.

New literacy competencies include: identify important questions; locate information; search, link, connect; critically evaluate that information; synthesize information; and communicate the answers to others. Seems easy enough….well, not to everybody in the room. I quickly discovered some shocked faces at the words blogs, podcasts and wikis. A simple example includes replacing writing or telling stories with digital storytelling. How about replacing a newsletter with a class website that could be updated frequently? Or instead of writing a journal, keep a blog? I love this – instead of presentations, do a podcast, or instead of a report do a Powerpoint or other multimedia presentation.

Technology and literacy go hand in hand, as Angela described for our eager, yet slightly quivering professionals today. There is a new world with new expectations – the tide is shifting every minute, and we need to prepare our students for this global, technological-based society. She mentioned Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat, which I have yet to read but has been mentioned on Dawn Hogue’s site as “what every teacher, administrator and parent should be thinking about!” If all of this globalization and flattening of the globe sounds foreign to you (as it sometimes does me), Friedman will break down the language and help you understand the fast-paced changes taking place in our society. More will come on this topic after I have read the book.

Hopefully with a little help, teachers everywhere and here at Clinton can adapt to the shift in literacy and learning and modify their teaching to meet the changing needs of our students and society. Then we can move from quivering professionals to confident, technologically savvy professionals who prepare individuals for a global society.