Slowing Down to Learn

At this point, we are a couple of days into social distancing and staying at home as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Michigan schools, like so many other schools around the country, are closed for the next few weeks. In response, educators are sharing an abundance of digital learning tools and home-schooling suggestions. I must confess, even though I am an educator and consider myself digitally saavy, this is all just a bit too overwhelming.  Too many suggestions, too many lesson ideas.  It's just too much! I love the passion and collaboration that is growing as a result of needing to quickly address our new learning landscape, but slow down!  My own boys, now 4th and 5th graders, have received messages and optional assignments from their classroom teachers, art teachers, music teachers, physical education teachers. And although they are communicating with the best of intentions, it is overwhelming my dudes...and me.

I want to encourage my own kids to pause and reflect on this particular moment in time. Yes, it is scary. We've never lived through something like this before, and so we don't know what to expect.  The adults don't have all the answers right now.  But, we have the gift of time. We don't need to rush. We don't need to try to replicate a traditional school day at home. We have time to reflect and explore and learn together. So rather than trying to cram in a science lesson and a math handout and history project and a writing activity each day, we're taking it slow.

Each morning, my boys and I get up, chat, make breakfast, and take the dog for a walk.  Then, I use the prompts above to guide our morning reflections.  We talk about the prompt, write a little, read a little, and make something.  Yesterday, after we talked about what we would like to learn in our next four weeks together, my boys and I went outside to build an epic fort.  We then came inside to figure out the best tools for learning how to code.  Today, we talked about the power of our hands after listening to Sarah Kay's spoken word poem "Hands." My boys and I completed a writing activity that had us writing our own poems about a something special that we've held in our hands.  After viewing the photojournalism piece posted by the BBC on Tim Booth's photography of hands, my boys wanted to take a black and white photo of their own to add to their writing piece. So we discuss, we write, we read, we create.  And that's enough for now.  We don't need to fill every moment.  We have time.

Feel free to join us and use the prompts above.  I will add new prompts each day.  We'd love to hear about what you are learning, reading, and making during this time.

Remember, we're in uncharted territory. It is okay to not have the answers. It is okay to slow down.

Amplifying Student Voices

For a few weeks now, Karter has been getting up earlier and earlier.  He'll wake at 3 AM and drive 40 minutes to the farm. He's helping to transition the dairy cows to a different milking time.  Every few days, they're moving the milking time back just a little more in order to transport the cows later in the month to a new farm. Dairy cows are very particular about when they are milked, and so a delicate, well-timed transition in milking times makes this move possible. Once the cows are moved, Karter's job on the farm will be over, and he'll have to look for a new job. He comes to journalism class after working a full morning on the farm.

Allen has been living on his own for the past two years.  He's an emancipated minor. In Public Speaking class last week, he gave a moving speech about what it is like living on your own at seventeen. Contrary to how much his peers complain about their parents, he described the alternative as a lonely, sometimes dark place.

Sara has a one year old daughter who's blood recently tested high for lead contamination. They can't figure out where her daughter would have been exposed to lead. She's just received her third doctor's opinion and has missed 29 days of our journalism class.

I cannot count the number of students that I have sitting in my classroom who at one point in time have been in "the system" with Child Protective Services.  "After you've been in 'the system'," Bethany says, "CPS follows you. They track you until you are 18, sometimes showing up at school to ask the same questions they did 10 years ago."

I have students working two or more jobs in order to help with their family's expenses.  I have homeless students, orphaned students, sick students, students teetering on so many different precipices. I work in a Title 1 school with over 50 percent of my students receiving free and reduced lunch.

I work in a rural school.

In some ways, the students that I work with are no different than those that I worked with earlier in my career in a more affluent area outside of Philadelphia. Students want to be heard, valued, and understood. They all are struggling to understand their roles, identities, and purpose. Rural or urban, suburban or somewhere in between, adolescents everywhere want to know that their voice matters.

It is the particulars of their experiences that have power. But my students are so in the thick of their own stories that it is hard to see outside of them.  They don't see themselves as unique, as having stories to tell. My students can tell you in great detail how to field dress a deer, how to restore a '57 Chevy truck, the best places to find refurbished auto parts, how to clip a goat's hooves, the best rivers to kayak, how to catch air snowboarding. But this is just what they do. "These are not stories," they tell me.

Until we start to unpack these experiences.  Why did you chose to restore that old Chevy? Isaac tells us that it was sitting in the yard after his grandfather passed away.  Together Isaac and his dad worked to bring it back to its former glory. Isaac tells us stories about what it is like to work side-by-side with his dad.  He has these memories that tie him with the men in his family. His grandfather, his dad, and now Isaac have all worked on this machine; their histories are tied to this truck. It is by far, the most memorable vehicle in our student parking lot, shiny robin's egg blue with wooden rails lining the back bed. "It's road ready, but I wouldn't say it's road safe. Kinda like my grandfather," Isaac says.  There's another story there just waiting to be shared, and you can hear it in his voice.

Opening up space for stories in our classrooms is powerful not only for the authors but for the community of learners in our classes.  Stories are powerful when they are shared. I have watched stories transform my classroom community, whether we are telling fictional stories or sharing our personal truths.  Yet by the time I see them in my high school English classroom, so many of my students do not see the value of their stories. "I have nothing," is a chorus I often hear at the beginning of the semester after introducing the first writing prompt.  My student writers shut down for so many different reasons. They have been told or shown that their stories do not matter, that their experiences are not valued. They do not readily trust my voice coaxing them to share.  They do not see their words as having any power.

Until they do.

It takes a few weeks, sometimes longer, until the stories start of pour out. And then they flood our classroom. They change our classroom. They connect us. About a year ago, I started to look for resources outside of my school that might help to amplify my students' voices. I want my students to not only see the value of their words inside our classroom but how powerful they can be for a much wider audience outside the walls of our school.  We work to publish our words on large platforms like TeenInk and Figment, both fantastic resources for students interested in publication.  However, they are large sites, featuring hundreds of new submissions daily. Stories change over quickly and can easily become lost.  So, we started our own space.

After connecting virtually with an editor at TeenInk in December of 2016, a group of students and I started MIteen Writers, an online and print literary magazine for teen writers in Michigan. We wanted to have a space to showcase the unique stories of writers from this state, to amplify the voices of mitten state teens.

The amazing MIteen Writers editorial board

So, the editorial team sat down and brainstormed what we wanted to publish, how our site should look, and who we hoped would access our online space. Our conversation with the editor at TeenInk helped us think through how we should design our submission guidelines, how many pieces we should post, and how we select pieces for publication. We launched our website in December of 2016 and shared it with the directors of most of National Writing Project sites in Michigan.  Within the first week, we had poetry submissions from Grand Rapids, Cheboygan, Portage, Kingsley, and more.  In fact, we were a bit unprepared for the number and quality of submissions that we received.  As we started to get off the ground, we had to meet regularly and figure out a system for who would review which pieces and how quickly we could respond to submissions. Our biggest challenge was not in getting the site started or getting the word out, it was in answering each of the submissions. To be honest, we are still struggling to keep up with the number of submissions that we've received but this is a great challenge to have.  It speaks to the need for such a space.  Over the past two months, we've received so many fantastic stories, essays, photographs, and of course, poems, which makes up the bulk of our submissions.

We've heard from students in small schools in northern Michigan, schools with graduating classes of under 100 students.  We've heard from students in the suburbs of Grand Rapids and from schools just outside of Detroit.  Students write about their experiences, their particulars, about what connects us as Michigan writers.  This great peninsula has so many stories to tell, stories of heartbreak and of joy, of harsh winters and sandy summers. Our stories matter. We're excited to have created a space to amplify the stories of our unique peninsula.

Interviewing History

I love how chatty they are when they come back into the common area at Green Acres Assisted Living facility. My Public Speaking students planned and prepared throughout our week together for this interview and have just finished recording their interactions with the residents of our local retirement facility.  Working in partners, they prepared questions to learn more about the childhoods of our local senior citizens. Then, my students used the StoryCorps app to record their interviews.  And now that their interviews are complete, they can't stop chatting about all they have learned.

"Did you hear that they have been married for 73 years?"

"Her husband died just a year after they were married."

"Her family's home burnt to the ground and her brothers, sisters, and parents all living together in a tent until they could afford to rebuild their home."

"He lived through the Great Depression."

"Did you see all the World War II medals he had."

It was easy to see they were nervous when we first entered through the double doors of the facility. They chatted nervously with their partners, a bit apprehensive.  But 20 minutes later as they emerged from their interviews, students could not wait to share all the surprising connections and stories they had heard. My high school students were excited to share the stories they had heard.

"Ms. Ward, I'm sorry we're late.  But when she mentioned that she had lived through the Great Depression, I just wanted to hear more, so I asked her a few more questions and lost track of time."

My students wanted to sit with our elderly residents and learn.

This is the value of connecting our local community to what is happening in our schools. We learn with one another, from one another. This is what school should be.

You can hear some of the stories that we've collected over the past year by rolling over the image below and clicking on the individual interviews you'd like to hear.

Why Project Based Learning?

Regular readers will recognize that I'm relatively new to the Project-Based Learning (PBL) method of inquiry outlined by BIE, but not new to the approach.  Looking back on the Cultures Projects my high school students completed nearly a decade ago when I asked them to research an issue currently facing a non-western culture, do something to help that issue by connecting with organizations working on it, and then present their research to our school community, I can see clear connections to the PBL approach in my earlier curriculum designs. Whether you call it project-based learning, authentic assessment, passion-driven inquiry, connected learning, or flipped learning - all of these approaches circle back to the idea that students are at the center of their learning. Students need choice in their inquiry topics and voice in how to share their work with a real audience.  Voice. Choice. Purpose.  These are the cornerstones of the project-based approach.

I have had the opportunity the past couple months to teach the PBL approach alongside my principal to interested teachers in my building during our faculty meeting time. We've crafted driving questions, discussed group dynamics, and brainstormed community connections for our authentic audiences. A number of teachers are getting ready to try their first PBL designed unit in the coming weeks. Excitement and anxiety are swirling. And not just for our teachers. This is not only a new approach for teachers in our building, but it is an entirely new approach for our students as well.

In anticipation of sharing the PBL approach with my colleagues, I designed a mini-PBL project for my tenth grade honors students as an example of what the PBL process looks like in action. In November, my students and I took a hike, circling around our school, wading through milkweed meadows and climbing pine trees.  Why? For our unit on texts focused on the theme of "The Natural World." We were looking for inspiration. Students read works by Barbara Kingsolver, Emma Marris, Walt Whitman, and more.  We used our texts as mentors to guide our thinking and inquiry. And then I presented our driving question: "What is a local environmental issue that you can address?"  We used our nature walks as inspiration to look carefully at what was impacting our local environment.  We noticed butterflies and bees, trees and bats, garbage and water pollution.  So we had to do something to help.

Why project-based learning?  Here's why:

Maddie, Camryn, Amanda, Trinity and Maddie researched and built bee hives with the help of their science teacher.

And, here's why:



Students have real purpose and real audiences for the research they took on. My students taught elementary school students, interviewed hunters, built beehives, made posters to stop littering and promote recycling, tested our drinking water quality, and so much more.

This is what learning should look like.

Getting our Hands on Nature

Emma Marris's recent TED Summit talk has me dipping back into Richard Louv's The Last Child in the Woods. I remember reading and connecting with Richard Louv as part of my summer institute experience with the Pennsylvania Writing and Literature Project. His book, asking how we can foster our future environmental stewards, remains vivid for me. Examples shared in his book of running through the woods as youngsters, imagination hand-in-hand with a do-it-yourself creativity, creating forts and capturing frogs, perfectly capture my childhood.

Back in June, I had the good fortunate of sitting just nine rows from the front of the stage to see Emma Marris share her talk in Banff, Alberta, at the TED Summit. I scribbled furiously in my notebook as she presented.  And there was this moment toward the close of her speech in which she mentioned the wild space growing on an abandoned rail trestle above the streets of north Philadelphia when it all clicked together.

I know this space.  I have driven by it without thinking of it many times.  You can see it when you are riding the Media - West Trenton train (although I still think of it as the R3 line). What Marris highlighted in her speech was the juxtaposition of all the life found in this abandoned space as compared to the concrete school playground that abuts the trestle.  And this got me thinking about my own students in rural mid-Michigan.

My students have a different awareness of nature compared to those students I taught in the suburbs of Philadelphia.  And yet, it is not quite as different as you might imagine.  Yes, the winters here are much more harsh.  My Michigan students are quite used to temperatures that dip below freezing and wind gusts that make it nearly impossible to see the road as a result of drifting snow.  Some of my students live on farms. In fact, there is a small farm on the campus of my school.  Students learn to cut the hooves of their goats, care for piglets, and even castrate the animals.  Many of my students are hunters or have family members that are. A good number of my students, boys and girls, know how to field dress a deer.  Teaching in the suburbs of Philadelphia for thirteen years, I know that I can count on one hand the number of students that had even heard of the term "field-dress".

But here's the thing. When I started my second unit with my current tenth grade students just a few weeks back, a unit focused on our relationship to nature, very few of my students reported spending a regular amount of time in nature on a weekly basis.  I asked students to think about how much time each week they spent in nature.  The response was overwhelmingly, "Each week? I'm not in nature each week."  But here's the thing. They are.  For as much time as my students report spending on homework, sports, video games, binge watching Netflix, they are also outside.  They are hunting on the weekends, waiting for the bus, practicing on the soccer field, running each afternoon on the country roads near their home.  My students defined spending time in nature as time that a person went hiking or visited the state recreational area near our school.  Nature was something that a person went to visit, not something found in our backyards. And my guess is that this is also true for how my previous students in the Philadelphia area would define nature.

This is the point that Emma Marris made in her TED Talk!

So as we started our second unit of study, we needed to get hands on with the nature around us.  And that started with a number of trips outside.  We walked through the milkweed meadow across from our school.  We played with the goats in the barn. We grabbed our writer's notebooks and went outside, exploring the impact our school structures made on the local environment.  Rather than focusing on dissecting the literary elements of the texts included in our unit's study, we opted to use our readings as mentor texts meant to help us explore our driving question: what is a local environmental issue that I can address? We turned our unit on the nature around us into a project-based learning opportunity that culminated in authentic research and local action.

It's research week for us, and we've been getting hands on with our research!  On Wednesday, our tenth graders used a Google Hangout to learn from Ms. Ondrea Spychalski, the Water Projects Coordinator at the West Michigan Environmental Action Council. Then on Thursday, we used a Hangout to learn from Ms. Emma Marris (check out the videos below). Students also interviewed staff and volunteers at Ionia's animal shelter on Thursday as they volunteered their time. On Friday, we have a crew of students cleaning the vacant lot in town across from our McDonalds, teaching Rather Elementary students about trees and bees, and we have a group canvasing local businesses about their recycling habits. We are learning hands-on!

Connecting with Ms. Ondrea Spychalski from the West Michigan Environmental Action Council


Connecting with Emma Marris

Mentoring Failure

I love these conference connections!

I am presenting at the Michigan Google Summit today at Lake Fenton High School on both teaching with TED-Ed and a session on mentoring passion.  I love the conversations that stem from my presentation on the work Christy Brennan and I did on our mentoring passion project, bringing together students of differing grade levels to share their inquiry experiences with one another.  In fact, I was hoping to scale this into a much larger project by putting together an online space to connect various teachers, students, and experts engaging in similar passion-driven inquiry projects across the country.  It was to be my TED-Ed Innovative Project.

But I failed.

Sharing my Mentoring Passion project with TED-Ed Innovative educators in June

I love this presentation, but so much of it is still in process.  It is not a finished project.  I am still reflecting on the role student ownership plays in the inquiry process. As I was presenting today, I revealed some of my pitfalls with my passion-driven inquiry projects and where I was still struggling. I need more time to reflect on where I am stepping into the student inquiry process.  I still spend too much time hunting down expert connections for my students, instead of facilitating opportunities to define and find those experts themselves. And as I shared, a conversation emerged that has me thinking more deeply about changes I want to make in the coming months to our inquiry projects.

Here is what I have learned: I need to open up more space in my classroom for students to talk about their failures. So much time is spent honoring the successes, the students who have done everything we have asked and have come to the conclusions that we expected them to have.  But what are they really learning?  Instead, I need to open up time and space for my students to share their struggles, like I did today, because the conversations that emerged from my admission of failure has moved me forward in my planning and thinking in important ways.  Imagine the power of those types of moments in our classroom.  Instead of teaching students to jump through hoops, we should be mentoring students on how to recover from initial failure.  This is a critical step in innovation. If we want to grow innovation in our classroom, we must open up spaces for failure.

Finding Time

I'll admit it. I'm guilty.

I'm a chronic over-planner.

Each class period starts with our opening routines and check-in, review of previous learning, daily lesson activity, and a launch to close the class period. I rely on routines to help my students move efficiently in our learning space and maximize our time together as a learning team. Like me, many teachers learned in our methods courses and classroom management classes techniques for grouping students; we were trained to manage how students interact with one another. A great deal of the art of teaching is managing how class time is used, how students move about the room, and how they interact. The classroom is a very structured setting.

But here's the thing, this might not be the best way to think about our time in the classroom. In fact, this might be one way that we are structuring students out of authentic collaboration.

Attending the TED Summit has me reflecting on the skills I want students to leave my classroom with at the close of the school year. And here's what I now realize: my micro-managing group work is stifling students' opportunity to truly connect and collaborate. Students will never become creative innovators if teachers continue to map out when, how, and with whom students connect. Ideas come in open spaces.

What I am most thankful for is the in-between spaces that this Summit allowed for. It was in the ample time given between sessions, after meals, and throughout the workshops that encouraged all the organic and energizing collaborations and connections. Moments of serendipity and innovation blossomed because we had time to reflect, to connect, and share our stories.

This is what I  hope to bring back into my classroom. Teachers must build in space and time for authentic conversation. No homework questions to answer or worksheets to fill out during a discussion, just space for the informal and the authentic. This is where connection happens, where innovation happens.

There were so many moments of serendipity at the TED Summit. The other evening while attending the cowboy dinner on a ranch in Banff, one of my fellow TIE teachers (we've started calling ourselves the TIE fighters) let me know that another attendee, Melanie, was looking for me. I've discovered this is not unusual at a TED event. Attendees are invested in connecting. When we found one another a few minutes later, it turned out that we had a mutual friend. We took a selfie together for our friend and ordinarily that might have been the end of the interaction, but neither of us had any place we had to be. We weren't eager to rush off. There was time and space to connect. Melanie asked about the TIE program, and I shared a bit about my innovation project for the program - Mentoring Passion. As I explained, I watched her eyes widen. "You're kidding!" It turns out that Melanie is also a high school English teacher, one who is passionate about helping students find their passion. We were able to talk a bit more about our shared passion and have plans to connect upon our return from the Summit.

We all have so many stories like these from the Summit.  In between sessions, we'd run into people relaxing on the lawn and discover a commonality. While in a workshop, we'd hear a presenter share something that we knew a fellow TIE member might also like. We shared our connections in order to build further collaboration. While in a workshop, my fellow TIE educator, Susan Herder, connected with a woman who works as an advisor to actors, athletes, and other creatives. Her role is to connect her clients to philanthropic organizations that support the causes her clients are most passionate about. In the open time between workshops, we were able to grab a picnic table and chat about her role in connecting her talent with the experts and organizations that her clients are interested in helping. It was striking how her work and my TIE innovation project are similar in a number of aspects. We each shared our process for helping people both understand their passion and then connect with the right people in order to learn more. She was able to help me thing through how best to build a network of experts willing to mentor students in the area of their passion. Her advice to look not for individual experts but for foundations and professional organizations with a diverse membership has helped to change how I am thinking about my project. And this connection happened because throughout sessions, in those in-between moments, we were encouraged to connect and to listen to one another's stories. We didn't need to rush between scheduled events; no bell to signal us to get moving. TED left spaces and time for connection. This is what I will take back to my classroom.

We do not honor student stories and ideas when we pack our class time tight with activities. Opening up time and space for students to share and connect is the fertile ground where ideas come into bloom. We need to consider how we are using our class time and spaces to foster collaboration and innovation.

I understand that secondary teachers are particularly limited by the amount of time we have with students each day. My 55-minute class periods are marked at each end by bells. I don't have the luxury of giving large blocks of time for open discussion each day. But there are a number of small changes that I can make in how I use my class time and space to foster organic connections and open up space for innovation.

First, I must consider the physical space and set-up of my classroom. Is my room arranged in a way to foster collaboration? Can students easily move about the room and find the supplies they need? Are there comfortable spaces for students to have small group discussions? Are there spaces for my students to work together on group projects?

Second, I need to consider how I am having students connect. How are students working in groups? Are groups engaged in purposeful activities that will lead to innovation? Am I opening up time for students to explore ideas?

Our class time with students is valuable, and we should be using that time to facilitate the activities that students cannot complete independently at home. Our classrooms need to be places filled with collaborative conversations. Our students need to learn how to speak with one another in order to grow an idea. We all need to make time for time. Let's make our classrooms spaces where students have time to make their own connections, collaborations, and creations.

Thank you to all of the TED community for inspiring me in so many ways this past week!

Not Just A Matter of Luck

It is our first full day at the TED Summit in Banff. Our group of 30 TED Innovative Educators (TIEs) from around the world is pitching our innovation plans. Mine has to do with mentoring passion. In preparing my pitch, I am reminded of a conversation a number of years back.

The year I first started teaching high school English, we piled into a friend's Honda and drove south to Williamsburg, Virginia, to spend Thanksgiving break with a group of friends from our college years. We spent all morning, afternoon, and into the wee hours of the morning cooking, eating, laughing, playing Boogle, and chatting. Sometime after three in the morning, one of my close friends turned to me and declared me lucky. "You've always known what you wanted to do with your life." And then she popped a question that many of my high school students have also grappled with:

"How do your figure out your passion?"

I didn't always know that I wanted to be a teacher. As a child, I remember declaring that I wanted to be an astronomer, namely because being an astronaut sounded scary and none of first grade peers seemed to know that an astronomer was. I thought it sounded cool. Secretly, I wanted to be a mermaid. But all the while, whether astronomer, mermaid, author, or teacher, I was writing. When I look back at what brought me joy as a child and what continues to bring me joy, it often involves writing. My passion for encouraging emerging writers to share their voice with real readers developed out of my own love for writing.

Luckily, I had teachers along the way that encouraged my writing. Tucked away somewhere in a trunk in my parent's basement is my very first book - The Amazing Talking Dog -  which I wrote as a fourth grader as part of the Young Author's initiative. In eighth grade, my English teacher, Mrs. Zeinstra, had us bring in notebooks which we wrote in every single day. We scribbled down lines from favorite poems which we found in her collection of anthologies lining the windowsills. We crafted stories that incorporated the hijinks of our peers as main plot points, taking joy in reading them aloud. We wrote every day. As a high school senior, my AP English teacher asked if he might submit a poem I wrote for an assignment to a regional writing competition. Before submitting it, we met after school to talk about the tone of one particular word I had used in the piece. Mr. Dik and I discussed how a single word can alter the feel of a text, but ultimately, he left the decision about whether I changed the work in my hands. Weeks later he took me into the city along with a couple of other classmates when the winners were announced. My name wasn't classed, but it didn't matter. I was lucky. It was this experience - playing with words, crafting lines, working with writers - where I was lucky to discover what I wanted to spend my life doing.

My good friend and so many of my students have not been as lucky, especially when what has brought them joy does not easily fit into one of the content-area silos of our current education system. What happens to the student who wants to design toys? What content-area does that fall under? Will that student be encouraged in our current system? What happens to the passion that does not easily fit into the curriculum of our algebra classes or biology or American literature?

We are educating students out of their stories. We are educating people out of passion.

That Thanksgiving conversation has haunted me, namely because I found my friend's question so difficult to answer:

"How do you figure out your passion?"

She wanted something more tangible, something she could do. Was there a class that I took in college that helped me discover a career path I am passionate about? Was there a book she could read? In my current classroom, I hear echoes of this same question. Is there a website I could look at? A test I might take to understand what my passion might be?

We have taught students how to look up the answers, but we have given them the questions. We have fed them questions that have right answers. My students, many of them, lack the confidence to struggle with the unknown, lack the practice of coming up with their own big questions.

I teach high school English in the third poorest county in my state. Our high school of about 900 students sits squarely in the middle of Michigan farm country. Over the course of this past year, I have had students struggle with food insecurity, homelessness, depression and suicide, broken homes, and broken hearts. Our teachers are fighting to raise our graduation rate and prepare our students for what lies outside the walls of our school. Unfortunately, our effectiveness is measured in how well our students pass the state tests. And so to prepare students for these tests and to take the college entrance exams, many of the writing experiences that my students have had in school have been in the form of timed essays written to a single prompt. As many of my students will be first generation college students, early exposure to the type of writing tasks that they will encounter on the SAT and ACT and AP test is helpful. To an extent. However, this cannot be the only type of writing we ask of students. Such high-stakes testing situations will not make up a majority of the writing experiences that my students will have over the course of their lifetimes. And yet, this is the type of writing they are most often asked to craft whilde in school. By the time I meet students as sophomores, juniors, and seniors, they are frustrated writers, frustrated by a lack of choice, lack of purpose, lack of writing that has relavence to their lived experiences.  They no longer see the purpose of writing yet another essay. Far too many papers have been returned with red circles and hash marks and a letter that looms large at the top of the page. Sure it is for a grade, but what does that mean? What has that taught someone about the purpose of writing?

I want my students to graduate high school as connectors, collaborators, and creators. If we don't facilitate more opportunities for students to do this inside the classroom, how can we expect them to be curious and critical learners outside of the classroom. As teachers, we need to facilitate possibility, potential, and passion. How can we help students not only discover their passion but pursue it as well? It shouldn't simply be a matter of luck.

We've Got Our Eye on Passion with #IonPassion

We've been talking about passion in my high school English classes for the past two weeks.

No, not quite like that.

Much like the unit I introduced last year, we began our tenth grade inquiry projects about two weeks ago, which this year we've dubbed our #IonPassion Projects (get it? "Ion"...for Ionia), with an exploration of the roots of the word passion.  Students explored how our passions differ from our interests or even our hobbies.  In our discussion, we returned to our very first day of school, where following a failed attempt at folding origami cranes, we learned the importance of failing. Students remembered me saying that I wanted them to fail. I did say this. I want them to take risks, try new things, and fail in order to discover just how resilient they are. We don't learn by staying inside our comfort zones; we learn when we try out new ideas, new ways of thinking. During our discussion of what makes something a passion, students returned to this idea. A passion is something that we will continue to pursue despite setbacks and adversity.  Our passion, as Angela Maiers has pointed out, is what we are willing to suffer for.

And it turns out, I have a variety of passions sitting in my tenth grade English classes!

So now we're looking to connect our passions with experts in a variety of fields. My tenth grade English students have carefully crafted their inquiry questions, found mentor texts, written their initial inquiry proposals, and outlined their action plans for our #IonPassion research projects. But now we need some help. You'll find my students' research blogs linked below.

Roll over each picture to find a description and link to each student's blog. We'd love to hear your ideas and feedback.

1st Period 10th Grade Honors American Literature


2nd Period 10th Grade Honors American Literature


7th Period 10th Grade Honors American Literature


In addition to consulting mentor texts, we are looking for mentors to help us learn more about our inquiry topics. Do you have a passion for photography or mixing music? We are looking to interview, either in person or via email, experts. Please take a few moments to review our inquiry questions below, and if you wouldn't mind if one of my students contacting you, add your name and information to the columns on the right on our list below.

CLICK HERE FOR ACCESS TO THE FULL SHEET.

What is the Opposite of Bullying?

I've had the opportunity to connect with Spring Lake teacher David Theune and his student Elise McGannon at a number of conferences around Michigan recently. When I saw that David was presenting with students at December's ECET2 Conference on Michigan State's campus, I knew it was a session that I didn't want to miss.  It was at this session that I was introduced to the Share Chair, a regular podcast David and Elise produce to introduce their learning community to the diversity of voices in their midst. In February, I was happy to see the pair presenting and podcasting a conversation live at NovaNow. And again last week at MACUL, the pair presented their work, introducing their project with a simple question:

"What is the opposite of bullying?"

Especially at the secondary level, teachers and administrators tend to focus more energy on addressing the negative consequences of bullying. However by focusing only on the negative, we leave a vacuum for the positive message. What are the values of our learning community? Rather than focus a majority of our energy on punishing the negative behavior, what are we doing to promote a positive culture in our learning community? Punishment is a reaction. What are we doing to create a community that it is not built on the shaky and destructive foundation of punitive reactions?

Prior to yesterday's professional development day, I posed many of these questions to my high school students. It began months earlier with our study of Arthur Miller's play The Crucible. Our guiding essential question for this unit was "Who are the witches today?" and I asked my students to consider who were the groups in our community that might feel ostracized and isolated. Our class discussed ways in which society isolates the elderly, refugees and immigrants, the homeless and poor. Many students identified the victims of bullying in our school community as being treated as witches, as outsiders. But our conversation didn't end there. Students wanted to find ways to help those in our community that felt isolated and had been victims of bullying.

Initially, our conversations revolved around how to best help the victims, but in allowing space for discussions and sometimes disagreements, the group of students also started to discuss our school culture and community. What were we doing to promote a culture of support, of kindness? What started as a unit project for our study of The Crucible became something much more.

Our unit has long since ended. Some of the students that were initially in my class, switched to other classes when the new semester began but continue to stop by my classroom regularly. Students brought friends into our discussions. This wasn't about a grade or a class project. Because the group was bringing together students from all grade-levels and a variety of classes, students started a Facebook group as a way to communicate with each other and with our larger community. They meet weekly in my classroom to spend time discussing and planning ways to promote kindness in our community. Based on an activity we did earlier in the year, the students have recently sought permission to paint a Kindness Wall near our cafeteria, a visual reminder of the values of our community. They have spoken with the assistant principal and high school principal about their vision and values. And then there was yesterday.

Yesterday was a professional development day for teachers in our district. Students had the day off. However instead of sleeping in, the core members of the Anti-Bullying group rose early in order to be at school by 7:30. Why? Because yesterday they taught the teachers.

The group has been working hard the past few weeks, researching, planning, and practicing a 30-minute presentation for our entire teaching staff on the topic of what bullying looks like in our classrooms. Initially, they started with a 12-slide PowerPoint.  However, after a bit of discussion about what they like to see happen in their own classes, they ditched the PowerPoint in favor of hands-on activities.  So at 8 am on Thursday morning, my students lead us through a quick round of warm-up jumping jacks before we emptied tubes of toothpaste and tried to unsuccessfully smash the paste back into the tube. We then created a Wrinkled Wanda and reflected on what happens when we don't address name-calling in our classrooms. The students also shared with the teachers that they had designed and would be selling anti-bullying t-shirts prior to their April presentation to our student body. Yes, the group not only presented to teachers, but they are also working on a 60-minute presentation for our student body. As the presentation wound to a close, something truly magical happened.

The assistant principal announced that he would be speaking with school administration in the coming days in order to seek funding to send these students to a leadership camp this summer. And that's when you felt the energy in the room build. These are our students, all of ours. How might we support them, their efforts, help them expand their ideas to others in our community?  A fellow English teacher volunteered the idea of having a dress down day for teachers. "I would pay to wear jeans, especially if the money helped to purchase the t-shirts for the students and would send them to leadership camp." This idea was quickly seconded. And then another teacher jumped up, literally jumped up, "Next week is the week before spring break; let's have a jeans week. If we all paid $15 we could buy the t-shirts for the students and send them all to camp." You could feel the excitement. Nods and affirmations flooded the room. I had goosebumps, which I quickly showed the student sitting next to me. She whispered back, "Wow, I didn't expect this!"   

At our mid-morning break, teachers came up to the students to share congratulations, share ideas, and share support.  When students came back to my classroom to reflect on the morning's activities, they were bubbling with energy and ideas.  They were excited to be heading to the leadership camp, but also had ideas for what they would like to do in the future. They want to run their own summer camp next year, a camp to help other schools replicate what they've started: a conversation about what's the opposite of bullying.

Growing Community Connections

It started as a conversation in my tenth grade English class last semester.

We were studying The Crucible and discussing how it applied to our world today. Who are the witches today? Who are the groups of people that we ostracize, isolate, push aside? My tenth graders reflected on the lives of refugees, homeless people, those who felt bullied. But one young man in my third period class made an astute observation - the elderly. We push older generations to the outskirts of our communities. This sparked an insightful conversation and planted a seed for how our high school community might connect with the assisted living facility just across the street.

Despite the snow and ice, that seed bloomed today. My public speaking students have been practicing interview skills. However, rather than sitting in our classroom and playing pretend, I asked my students to conduct and record real interviews using the StoryCorps app. Our purpose was to capture moments of our community's history. Students practiced their interview skills by asking their siblings, parents, and grandparents to share about their childhood.  And today, we took our skills on the road.

My students spent our class period interviewing the residents of Ionia's Green Acres Assisted Living Facility. Working in pairs, my students introduced themselves to residents who were eager to share stories of their childhood.  In arranging this opportunity, the Life Enrichment Director asked me about how long I thought the interviews would take. I guessed about 10 minutes. I was wrong.

My students and the residents didn't want these conversations to end. As my student interviewers emerged from their conversations 30 minutes later, they were eager to share. "My person went to clown school! Can you believe it?!" "My resident lost her husband just one year after he built their dream home." "My person was kicked out of summer camp, and when he came home, his family had gone on vacation!"

My students didn't just practice their interview skills today. they made community connections.  And in talking with my students, the residents, and the staff, this is a connection that we are all looking forward to growing.



Hover over the image below to find links to our interviews.

Keepin' It Real

Snow day #7.

This time, I have the house to myself. My boys had a two-hour delay this morning, so after scuttling them out the door, I parked myself in front of the fireplace to plan. And email. And follow-up. To make arrangements and get permission.

But this is not a bad thing. In fact, it is perfect timing. I laid out a challenge for myself at the beginning of this school year: each writing assignment I asked my students to complete needed to be for an authentic purpose, an authentic audience. This has been a passion of my since I began teaching and working with my regional Writing Project over a decade ago. But up until this year, I had been teaching in the Philadelphia area, rich with connections and resources. This year, I am teaching in a rural district in central Michigan. Would I be able to connect my rural readers and writers with similar authentic experiences? Sounded like a perfect challenge for me!

My students and I have been incredibly fortunate this year to connect with so many different experts in a variety of fields. We've had the local university newspaper editors in to speak with my journalism students, we've Skyped with the Salem Witch Museum while studying Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, and the last two weeks have been all about connections!

My tenth graders began our American Nightmares unit at the start of our new semester near the close of January. We've discussed what identifies a literary work as a piece of Dark Romantic or Gothic literature. We've read Poe's "The Raven" and "The Fall of the House of Usher," discussed T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men," reviewed "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "Young Goodman Brown," next week we'll read Stephen King, and all the while, we've been using these as mentor texts for writing our own Gothic-inspired short stories.  But the students are not simply writing a story for me to read, and they aren't putting together a simple class anthology. No. We are writing for publication.

Inspired by fellow Writing Project teacher Brian Kelly and his amazing group of eighth graders, my students and I are publishing our short stories in a collected book via Amazon's CreateSpace. I knew that when I began my year teaching American Literature that this is where we were headed. And it has taken all of the last 20 weeks to get here.

Each writing lesson has built to the past two weeks.  Early in our year together, students submitted work for publication in other venues. A number of my students were published a few months back after submitting creative work to spaces like Teen Ink and Figment, but now we are not simply submitting our work to an outside editor to approve or reject. I have asked my students to become the writers, the editors, the producers, and production managers as well.

In preparation, we needed to know a lot about writing Gothic and horror-inspired short stories. We needed expert help. So not only did we look to our texts as our mentors, but we opened up our classroom doors and invited the experts in. Last week we were so fortunate to have two fantastic Michigan horror writers, Peggy Christie and MontiLee Stormer, from the Great Lakes Association of Horror Writers (GLAHW) join our classes. Yup, multiple classes. These two women hit the road early to travel from the Detroit area to spend the entire day in rural, mid-Michigan and connect with my high school writers.  And we learned so much! They shared their inspiration for crafting stories, advice for building suspense, thoughts on current writers and movies (boo to "gore-porn"), and answered so many of our questions as we were drafting our own stories. Walking out the door at the end of the day, Ms. Stormer shared that the GLAHW also used Amazon's CreateSpace to publish their group's annual editions and offered to help with our process of using the space if we needed it. The whole experience invigorated our classroom of writers. Students have drafted and crafted in earnest. And the snow days helped. Over the course of last week's snow days, I had students return to class this past Monday with 9, 10, and 11 page short stories!

And then came Monday.  In an effort to better understand what makes something frightening, psychologist Dr. Robin Ward joined my tenth grade English classes to talk about the origins of fear, dread, and the uncanny.  Our stories are focused on psychological terror and dread, less on gore. We needed to better understand what triggered that sense of dread. Dr. Ward spoke about our innate flight or fight responses, what triggers those responses, and how the body physically responds to these sensations, all of which helped us add more concrete details to our stories. And no Gothic-inspired story would be complete with out a sense of the uncanny, so Dr. Ward shared a bit of Freud's essay on the uncanny, which he referred to as the unheimlich, or "un-homelike." And the students scribbled down notes in their writer's notebooks while he spoke. Were they listening? Heck yes! How do I know?

Today. I'm parked in front of my fireplace, laptop teetering on my knees as I enjoy my second snow day this week. My inbox is filling up by the minute with "So and So's Google Doc (Invitation to edit)." Story after story drops into my Google Drive folder. Students are spending their snow day writing, just like I am. What more could an English teacher ask for? Students have a "day off" and they are spending it as a "day on." They are writing and revising, using their mentor texts and advice from experts to craft clear narratives that employ the rhetorical strategies of Gothic literature. It has been an incredibly productive day off, if you ask me.

And me, well not only have I had time to write as well, but I already have my next connection planned. On Friday, my public speaking students and I will head over to our local assisted living center to interview elderly residents about their childhood for StoryCorps.  But that's for another blog post. Until then, we're keepin' it real.

Interested in my American Nightmares unit resources?  Find my unit materials HERE.

Who Are the Witches Today?

It started as a conversation at the Michigan Council of Teachers of English Fall Conference just a few months ago. Dr. Jeffrey Wilhelm was leading a group of language arts teachers through a session on inquiry strategies. Working with a small group of teachers, we brainstormed "sexy" essential questions designed to intrigue and inspire our group of learners.

I walked out of @ReadDRjwilhelm 's #mcte15 session with "sexy" essential questions, thanks to help from Jeff Garver! pic.twitter.com/wA5aeW3c50

— jenniferward (@jenniferward) October 30, 2015

"Who are the witches today?"

I was just starting my unit on conformity, and my tenth grade students would be reading Arthur Miller's play The Crucible. At the onset of the unit, a handful of my students were curious about the history of witches, but most of my students struggled to find relevance in a play about Puritans. Prior to reading the play, students read a series of non-fiction articles about group conformity, including the New York Times' article and follow-up on the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese as well as articles on the bystander effect. Students were ready to talk about group dynamics and conformity even before we read the opening lines of Miller's play. By asking students to read the play with a critical eye, asking students to make connections to our world today, the play took on new meaning for my
students and later for our school community.

Instead of reading the play as a search for metaphors and allegory, we used our essential question - "Who are the witches today?" - to drive authentic inquiry and project-based learning. Students crafted their own discussion questions about the actions of the play and used these questions to drive their inquiry about marginalized groups in our local community. After reading The Crucible, students took the initial essential question and developed their own follow-up: "What are we going to do to help them?"

Through multiple conversations and written reflections, students identified a variety of marginalized groups in our school and local community - recent immigrants, isolated and bullied students, homeless people, the elderly - who are treated as modern "witches." Using a project-based approach and blogging their reflections, students have planned and implemented new student clubs, presentations for elementary and middle school students on bullying, clothing and supply drives, and activities for our local retirement community.

The Crucible came alive in my classroom. I asked students to research, reflect, and discuss themes presented in Miller's play by making connections to our local community. These were not easy conversations. As we identified isolated and marginalized individuals in our community, personal stories emerged. Students shared hurt, fear, disgust, sorrow, and regret. These were difficult discussions. But necessary. Students wrote, discussed, researched, and reflected, all the while making connections back to the texts we had read in class. The Crucible spoke to our need to do better, to listen to one another, to connect. And after all, isn't that the power of a well-told story?

If you are interested in the using or adapting some of the materials that I used in this unit, you'll find my unit resources HERE. And please let me know if you have any resources, ideas, or suggestions to add!

Presenting with Students

Photo by Billy Krakower as we took our morning brain break at #TCT15

This past Friday, as teachers from all over the world started packing their suitcases for the annual International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference held in our own City of Brotherly Love, a group of excited and passionate teachers were getting up early, having scheduled their trips to arrive a few days in advance of ISTE in order to participate in the inaugural Tomorrow's Classrooms Today conference organized by the amazing team of Evolving Educators: Billy Krakower, Scott Rocco, and Brad Currie. The opening keynote by Cybraryman, Jerry Blumengarten (who really does have a web page for everything), and a crowdsourced lunchtime keynote by my friend Rich Kiker helped to frame an afternoon of learning that was filled with sessions on gamification, flipped-learning, project-based learning and assessment, blogging, and innovations of all sorts.

Christy Brennan's sketchnotes of Jerry Blumengarten's keynote

And perhaps my favorite part, presenting with my colleague and friend Christy Brennan and three of my students!  I was fortunate to present with Christy and a few of my students at this past January's EduCon in Philly, and it went so well that we though, let's do it again!  One of my former students, Jenna, who presented with us at EduCon, joined us again on Friday for our session on Mentoring Passion. Two other students, Kristin and Emily, who had just finished 10th grade English with me also joined to talk about what they each had learned when Kristin surveyed the student body to design an new elective course and Emily interviewed and worked with learning space designers to propose (and have accepted by our school!) a new design for our upstairs library space. And because we had a small group of teachers in our session on Friday, there was time to talk more collaboratively about passion-based learning, fostering mentorship opportunities, and for my students to share their experiences of what worked and what didn't as they pursued their inquiry. The teachers that joined us for Friday's session were able to ask my students about their process undertaking our #HavPassion research.

There are so many, many positives that come out of asking students to present at conferences. Perhaps the most obvious reason to encourage student participation in education conferences and workshops is that as a group of teachers sitting in a room talking about educational philosophies and practices we're not getting a full picture of what is happening in the classroom if students aren't also seated at the table.  For all our talk of student-driven learning and student-ownership, there are very few students presenting their work outside of the classroom. If our goal is to innovate, to change what is happening in education in order to help support more critical and creative thinking, students need to be involved in our conversations about what that looks like. My students showed up on a Friday during their summer vacation to present to a bunch of teachers. Hang on. Let me repeat that.

My students showed up on a Friday during their summer vacation to present to a bunch of teachers.

The students were not getting any points for showing up. There wasn't a grade involved. They were not getting extra credit. So why did they want to present? Because what they undertook in our classroom, authentic research that included contacting and conducting interviews and primary research, that involved finding mentor texts and becoming a mentor, that involved a lot of blogging, and time, and effort, was something they want others to hear about. They are passionate and proud of their work. So passionate that they took time out of their summer vacation, arranged their own transportation, and volunteered to talk in front of strangers about what they had learned. When was the last time a student got that invested in a multiple-choice test?

So here's a little more about what they presented. Below you will find our slide deck on Mentoring Passion. Be sure to check out the speaker's notes as Christy and I loaded them up with links and information.  Beneath that you will find the recording of our presentation shared live via Google Hangouts.