Mrs. Lux

The first step to changing is realizing that change is inevitable. It is bound to happen, and as educators, we inevitably witness and adapt to small changes multiple times during a day. We adapt a plan, modify an assignment, invent a lesson on the spot. Making a BIG change, however, seems to be more daunting. For some, it is overwhelming to consider making a change in a well-established curriculum that has been used for years.

Although my department members are capable of making small changes throughout the day – probably without even realizing they are doing it – they seem overwhelmed with our shift in curriculum. Our department is making a curriculum shift, and as a new educator, I’m excited about it. I realize that change of any nature – big or small – is necessary. Change is the nature of education because our learners will never be the same. We need to grow and adapt to best meet their needs, on a hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, annually basis.

In the future, I’ll post more about the specifics of this change in approach. Anytime we make a change, big or small, it is nice to have feedback. That is what I’ll look to you for.

My freshmen students have been working on a Greek mythology research project. I prepped them in the first few weeks of the trimester by practicing note taking and writing summaries. I talked them through the thinking process of reading information on the web or in books, taking down important information regarding the purpose of the notes, and turning those notes into a fluent, organized summary. I also prepped them with practice and knowledge on MLA citation for sources used in research papers. We gained background information on Greek culture and heroes while practicing these skills.

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!

I never was a cheerleader in school. Never got into the clapping, smiling, kicking, cheering. They wouldn’t have let me anyway – I was very uncoordinated and more suited for roles that didn’t require me to flip in the air while singing chants & cheers.

As a teacher, though, I find myself being a cheerleader. When students need the extra push to get going on a task in class, or when they need the extra push to make up assignments from an absence, or when they need the extra push to pass the class, I find myself being a cheerleader.

I smile, I cheer, I shout, I raise my arms in the air, I clap. Or, in other words, I stay late after school, create modified assignments, make deals with students, do what I can to get the students working.

Athough I don’t think being a cheerleader (motivator) should be a requirement of the teaching profession, it almost seems impossible to get through a day without doing any cheerleading. Students should motivate themselves, but sometimes they just need that extra push.

Where cheerleading got me this trimester – I lowered my course failures from nine last trimester to two this one (and those two were truant students who were absent much more than in class). So, hip-hip-hooray!

Image from: http://www.mgsd.k12.nc.us/emis/lib/emis/cheerleader.jpg

The falling action of Romeo and Juliet moves quickly but is pivotal to the play’s plot. Act 4 of this play can be read in one class period (70 minutes here at Clinton High). To ensure my freshmen students were paying attention to this important, but quick, act, I had them take Jim Burke’s episodic notes from Tools for Thought.

The episodic notes entails three parts.

• Students draw a picture to represent the six (or three, or however many you want to do) most important events, moments, or episodes in a reading piece.
• Next to the picture, they should jot a few notes about what happened (or maybe their picture covers it).
• Finally, they should write WHY the episode is important.

I discovered the WHY step most of my students didn’t do. We’ve done drawings and notes on what happened in a long story before, but I’ve never asked them to include WHY that scene was important. I don’t know if they were rushing or just plain forgot.

Anyway, the students who did all three steps really thought about the play’s events, especially Act 4. Because the ending of Romeo and Juliet is clear from the beginning and we are so far into the play, they could see why each step of Act 4 they drew out was important to the plot. They made some great inferences to the relevancy of each drawing (episode) - I’m looking forward to grading 100% quizzes tomorrow because they thought so hard about the Act.

Student samples:

“The friar is giving Juliet a potion to fake her death. This is important because this is where Juliet gets out of marrying Paris.”

“Juliet is going ‘What if?’ and worrying herself about the plan. This is important because Juliet is thinking of the ways the plan could fail, and we know it does.”‘

“This is a picture of Paris arriving to the wedding. This is important because the wedding is today and Juliet is gone.”

“Juliet is found dead the day of the wedding. Her family starts to plan her funeral. This is important because her plan is working.”

…killed the cat? Right, but it doesn’t kill the learner. Curiosity is one of the habitudes that 21st century learners need to possess.

Some of them have it naturally. Some people are born to ask questions and wonder about the world around them. For those who aren’t born with an innate desire to be curious, we need to develop that habitude within them.

As I was talking to my writing class about choosing a topic for an informative article citing resources, we talked about everything we should consider for selecting a topic:

• something you know about, but not too much
• something you care about
• something your audience will care about
• something that isn’t too broad
• something that isn’t too complex
• something that not everybody knows about

When I got to the one about something you care about, a student piped up. She asked, “Do we have to care about it?” I thought for a moment and said, “Well, yes. Wouldn’t it be hard to write about something you don’t care about at all?” Her response is something I’ll treasure for a long time. She very carefully said, “Well, how about if it is something we’re curious about? Wouldn’t that be like caring?”

I almost leapt out of my skin – Yes, Yes! I want you to write about something you are CURIOUS about! She got it, she got the point, and for that I am very grateful and excited to read her paper. She chose the topic of texting while driving – current, controversial, and it clearly affects her personally. Perfect!

There are those little things that happen in the classroom – the ones that give us the warm, fuzzy feeling inside – that remind us of why we are there. At least that’s the case for me. I’ve decided to share a few of those things that happened last week as a reminder that we do matter, even though there might be many other things trying to bring us down…

• I decided to do a thematic study of Macbeth, so the students chose outside novels (from a list) to read on their own as we read the play in class. The purpose was for them to make connections between the two texts, considering theme, motifs, literary devices, author’s purpose, character, etc. One student really got into the book Killing Mr. Grififn by Lois Duncan. He came to see me in the mornings or after school to see if the book was in (while we were awaiting the novels’ arrival from the AEA). Well, this student came to have many conversations with me throughout the week on what he was reading. I didn’t ask the kids to look for foreshadowing or irony because I wanted to keep it simple – but this student brought those things up to me anyway. He’d point to a passage and say, “Wouldn’t that be a great example of foreshadowing?” He read the part about Mr. Griffin coming back in the door and saying “I love you” the last time to his wife before he died and pointed out the effects of that on him. He LOVED the book, ate it up, couldn’t stop reading. This student might just go and pick out another book to read – and wouldn’t that be the day!
• For the same reading project, a girl was wrapped up in her book Abby, My Love. I’ve never seen this student so taken by anything I’ve put in front of her. Her classmates were busy making props to act out scene 1 of Act 4, but she was just going to read – and that is fine by me. I tapped her on the shoulder and asked if she’d like to go to my closet and read where it was quiet. She smiled and kindly shook her head no. As I was walking away, she called me back and said, “But this book is just so good. I can’t put it down!” I could tell that by her behavior, but it was so great to hear her say it!
• The acting out of Act 4, scene 1 of Macbeth was very enjoyable. I asked for three directors, eight prop makers, and 17 actors (every student had a job in our production). I had no trouble filling the spots. We had a half hour of class to plan and work. The next day, students came in excited to put it all together – although it wouldn’t win itself an Oscar, it won my heart!

I tried something today that I have never done before, but was prompted to do from the book Shakespeare Set Free. The suggestion was a choral reading of the prologue from Romeo & Juliet and the results in my room were amazing. Here’s how I did it (somewhat adapted from the Folger Library suggestion):

1. Go around the room, and have each student read one word of the prologue.

2. Do that again, with less pause between words.

3. Have each student read half a line (there are natural halfway breaks in the lines).

4. Have each half of the room, in unison, read half a line. The two sides go back and forth on each line, creating a chorus effect. One student said it reminded him of church, and I guess it did.

I just want to show how excited the kids were about the prologue. The kids burst into applause when we finished! Can you believe that? They were applauding the prologue of Romeo & Juliet! Once student was so inspired by the choral reading, he wanted to rap it for us. He called out for a beat (another student responded with the beat after much prodding from the class) and the two “rapped” out the prologue.

How often does a high school teacher hear his or her students ask for their books? Hearing this question from a few eager students this week gives me the energy to keep going…

The students are asking for their thematic personal novel choices I started talking about last week to go along with Macbeth. The problem is I came up with the idea and then had to wait for the books to come back from the local Area Education Agency (AEA). I can’t keep a secret, and I wanted the kids to have choices, so I presented the novels, they picked their top three, and then we sat and waited for them to arrive. The books came, today, at the end of the day and I was able to give one to a student who stopped by my room at the end of the day to ask again, “Are the books here?” his personal reading choice.

We’re trying to think about the best way to teach kids in the 21st Century world, and that means incorporating a variety of texts into our curriculum, exposing them to multicultural and contemporary pieces. Instead of reading Macbeth, we’re reading the themes presented in the famous Shakespeare tragedy and reading more than the play in outside literature circles.

Although the choices are probably endless, I quickly found a few texts that would work and engage students in the theme & motifs we’re studying with the traditional curricular content of Macbeth. We’re reading the play in school and the outside texts will be read outside of school. Students are keeping a reading log, focusing on a motif that appears in the play and possible in their outside novel, and considering the themes and how the characters in the play and novels demonstrate them.

If you’d like to more about this thematic study, just ask! It is still a work in progress, I must admit. I’ll let you know how it goes after we’re done…

I was inspired to ask these questions during a recent afternoon of English department conversations with Angela Maiers, who is employed by our district (and others around the Midwest) to inspire the teaching of 21st Century learners.

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.

PP that outlines our gradual release lesson: Renaissance Poetry Lesson 

uncovering author’s meaning on SmartBoard:poetrymeaning 

background PP: Renaissance 

Although the Renaissance is marked as a time of renewed interest in learning, where humanists began to question humanity & society, my students don’t ever seem to share the same excitement of the time period. 

We began with background on the historical period. We began with my PowerPoint, developed from the HRW Elements of Literature textbook, 6th course, which is linked to above. The students presented the background I didn’t cover in groups.

With some schema of the time period developed, it was time to tackle some of the famous poets – Sir Thomas Wyatt and Edmund Spenser. I decided to begin our study of poetry with a gradual release lesson. The PP that outlines this lesson is linked to above.

I first showed students how I uncover the poet’s meaning by putting the language in my own words. I used ee cummings’ poem “since feeling is first.” See the link poetrymeaning link above. Then we tried “Whoso List to Hunt” together. I thought through my process and thoughts aloud and students who volunteered contributed their thoughts and meaning. The next step was to have students collaborate on uncovering meaning, and we used “Sonnet 30″ by Edmund Spenser. We charted our steps to uncovering meaning with a visual and our own words on the SmartBoard. Finally, students were asked to try “Sonnet 75″ individually, writing the meaning for me in their notebooks and then contributing to the collective idea on the SmartBoard.

The use of gradual release when teaching the skill of uncovering meaning in poetry worked very well. Students were able to realize that not everybody is going to come up with the same interpretation, but if we are using the same process and can support our interpretation with poetry terms, then we are doing just fine. I hope my students feel more comfortable with reading poetry since we have done this together. Next week we tackle a few Shakespearean sonnets, and I will do a gradual release lesson on tone in poetry.