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.

Self Care Challenge

Wow!  What a week this has been.  Things have been moving very quickly, and in my Michigan school district, we suddenly find ourselves out of school through April 12th, a full month away from school.  The impact of COVID-19 is unprecedented, and as a result, we are all in uncharted territory.

During our time away from school, we have an opportunity to reconnect with our families and take care of ourselves and one another.  For those that are interested, I created the self-care challenge for my high school students.  Feel free to make a copy of this document for yourself and your students.  Highlight each of the challenges as you complete them.  Use the comment box below to tell us how your self-care challenges are going!

Speed Dating to Find Your {Book} Match

I've got books on the brain.

During the second week of class, when not everyone in our tenth grade English class knows each other well, I surprise students with speed dating. Speed dating books, that is.  The students walk into our classroom to find the desks grouped into tables, covered with tablecloths, and decorated with centerpieces featuring flowers, candles (LED candles), "menus," and a large stack of books. This is our speed-dating day to find our {book} match. Not only do students get to know one another better through this activity, but they also learn more about specific genres found in our classroom library and select their first independent reading texts. At the close of the semester, this activity was rated by students as one of their favorites, so I thought I would share how I set up this activity with my high school students in case others want to give it a try with their students this fall.

One of the first questions that I've got from other teachers about this activity has to do with the books themselves. How did I select my genres? Where did I get all my books?  So let's start with the most important aspect of this whole activity - the books. Looking at my classroom library and what my students have been gravitating toward the past few years, I established "menus" for each table featuring a different genre.  I have seven tables around my room, each featuring a different genre - realistic fiction, historical fiction, dystopian novels, poetry, graphic novels, self-help, and creative nonfiction. The "menu" gives a brief description of the genre, which the students will record on their handout in addition to taking their own notes about the genre based on what they notice about the commonalities found in the books at their selected table. But where did I get all these books in the first place?

It can be difficult and extremely expensive to stock your classroom library with high-interest YA novels. New books are expensive.  So, here's where I've picked up many of mine.  First, hit your thrift stores.  During August, the local thrift store near my home used to have $1 bag days.  You pay $1 for a paper bag and stuff it with as much as you could. I would show up the first day of the sale and pick through all their books. During the summer months, it is easy to pick up inexpensive books at thrift stores, yard sales, and block sales. This was how my library got its start.

Later, one of my former students became the teen librarian at our township library. And Shelly hooked me up!  Librarians go through their collections two or more times a year, and if a book hasn't been checked out for an extensive period of time, that book needs to go in order to make room for new titles.  Shelly, my local hook-up, would call me up any time she had collected five or more boxes of books.  She'd let me pull any titles I wanted and the rest the library would sell.  Your local librarian is not only a fantastic resource for helping you learn about emerging authors and new titles, your librarian might also be able to help you stock your library! Invite them into your classroom to give a book talk to your students. Get to know your local librarians!

My most recent discovery is FirstBooks. If you are a teacher or librarian in a high poverty district as I am, you likely qualify for deep discounts on books through FirstBooks. It will take you between 10-15 minutes to complete your application, and if you qualify, you can order individual titles or titles in bulk. My first order is arriving this week. I ordered 13 books - everything from The Book Thief to I'll Give You the Sun, Lily and Duncan to An Ember in the Ashes - for just under $60.  And through their bulk book program, you can get a bulk order of one title for FREE!  You just pay for shipping.   Right now you can get a carton of 24 copies or The Maze Runner for $8.40!  

So, now that you've got all sorts of books and genres in your classroom library, what else are you going to need to set-up your Speed Dating Books activity?  I purchased a few rotating picture frames from Ikea to use on each table as the "menu" holder to display the genre found at that table.  If you are near an Ikea, the Tolsby picture frames comes in packs of 2 for just $.99. Then, I created a "menu" (I print out two so that I can display them on each side of the frame) for each genre using Canva.  Here are my menu cards.

Then, to add ambiance, I picked up a pack plastic table clothes, some small LED candles, pulled a few candle holders from around my house, used a JoAnn Fabrics coupon (and my teacher discount) to get a bunch of fake flowers, some Hershey Kisses sprinkled on each table (get it? Kisses? Dating?) and viola! You have a restaurant-style setting for your classroom, perfect for your speed daters!

The room is set up, your books are carefully displayed, now what?  As students walked into my room, I handed them a Speed Dating Scorecard. I let my students self select the tables they moved to first, but you could easily copy the scorecard sheet on different colors of paper to establish groups. If you need six groups, copy the scorecard onto six different colors of paper. Students find those with the same colored sheets to become a group.  I let my students self-select their first table, and then they moved as a group to the next table.

On my projection screen, I show a classroom timer.  Students have about five minutes to record notes about the genre at their table by looking at the "menu" cards and by perusing through the books and talking with their group members.  In that time, they need to select one book on the table to "date."  Then, I start the timer.  Students have five minutes to flip through and read some sections of the book to figure out if they would like to "date" it further.  At the close of five minutes when the timer goes off, students complete the ranking section and notes for their "date."

By the close of class, students will have delved into five genres and "dated" five books. In the following class days, I go over our independent book reading, how we log our pages, and how we will be completing book talks, all inspired by Penny Kittle's book Book Love. We return to our Speed Dating handout throughout the semester when we are looking for our next book to read.

If you do a similar activity with your students, I would love to learn from you! What works for you? How do you inspire independent reading in your classroom?

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

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.

Simply Incredible Week

It is Thursday, and the week isn't even over, but I'm confident in saying that this may just be one of my best weeks ever!

Please forgive this not-so-humble-but-totally-excited brag:

Sunday afternoon I received an email invitation from Fox News to attend and ask a question at the Democratic Town Hall hosted in Detroit. So on Monday afternoon, my husband and I hopped on the road to Detroit.

As we were driving, I learned that my classroom was one of the selected recipients of a 1:1 grant by the EdTechTeam. We have 36 Chromebooks on their way! I couldn't resist. I immediately texted my students when I found out.  When I returned to the classroom on Tuesday morning, the excitement was palatable.

Yesterday, a reporter from the Ionia Sentinel-Standard visited my class to do a story on how my students started an anti-bullying group at our school. I could not be prouder of the students who have spearheaded this initiative. Their worked stemmed from a project-based learning activity connected with our reading of The Crucible last semester. And although the project has long since been completed, the students are still working hard to address issues of bullying and promote kindness in our community. 

Today I am presenting with four of my students at the ‪#‎MACUL16‬ conference in Grand Rapids.  Together with Brad Wilson of WriteAbout.com, we are sharing how writing for authentic purposes and audiences changes how emerging writers engage with the process of writing. And of course, I needed to take my student presenters out for Philly cheese steaks as a way to say thanks!

Not sure what I did to deserve so many blessings, but I am certainly grateful!

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!

Crucible Connections

I love how easy ThingLink makes it to both share resources and also collaborate with others to build a resource. At the start of my current unit with my honors American literature students, a unit on group identity and conformity, I started to build a unit resource using ThingLink.  The core text of our unit is Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, so many of the resources linked are those that we've discussed in connection with our reading.

I'm using our ThingLink unit resource in a couple of ways. First, the collection is easy to share out with others. Initially, I have been the sole person adding to the ThingLink, but next week I'll be opening it up and asking my students to share their finds.  Not only will students be actively involved in building our unit resources, but they will also be unknowingly practicing the research skills they will need for an upcoming project.  In the coming weeks, students will be building their own similar resource for an independent reading novel they have been immersed in this semester. In contributing to our unit ThingLink, we'll have an opportunity to discuss what makes a resource valuable and credible. They will then apply these skills to the creation of their own ThingLink.

So stop back in the coming weeks to see how the ThingLink below has grown and changed thanks to the collaborative input of my students!

Contentious Crucible

The Crucible has gotten contentious.

I'm two months into my new teaching position, and my 10th grade honors American literature students have finished their first unit. We have started our online portfolios, written personal essays, delivered an in-class speech. We have read together, laughed together, and cried together. And although every day is not perfect, our classes have formed learning communities, connections where we support and challenge one another.

That is until we started our study of The Crucible.

An underlying tension started to ripple last week during our opening activities.  As students walked into the classroom, I had five large posters hanging around the room, each with a different position statement that would connect to our reading of The Crucible in the coming week. Apathy is worse than ignorance. Everyone is capable of cruelty. Everyone behaves differently in a group. Silence = consent. It is important to always follow authority. As homework the previous evening, students read the New York Times' article about the murder of Kitty Genovese titled "37 Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police."  Students were primed to talk about group dynamics and the bystander effect.  As they circulated about the room to read and respond to each statement, students were already discussing, disagreeing, bringing up examples to explain their rationale. Everything was going as I had planned.  To follow up with our initial responses, students annotated an article titled "We Are All Bystanders" knowing that we would be using the article as a basis for a more in-depth full class discussion on group dynamics in the coming days.

As we briefly discussed the article in class the following day, students in one particular section focused more on the what the article had to say about when people chose to break from groups to help.  The article mentioned a study done by professor John Darley at Princeton University which found that people were more likely to help those in need if the person needing help looked like the person offering help.  My students wanted to talk about this, wanted to analyze how we judge one another based on our appearance.  We were off to a good start.

I then had students read the opening act of The Crucible, and in particular asked my readers to pay attention to who the witches are and how they were judged and reacted.  What does The Crucible help us understand about group behavior? Students then answered a series of pre-discussion questions to get them back into our article reading looking for evidence to support our responses during a full class discussion of why people act differently in groups.  Students were ready. They wanted to talk.

My plan was that we would discuss group thinking, and students would bring in evidence from our various readings.  My hope was that I would be able to hear students making connections to current events. Where else do we see group-thinking and witch hunts happening in our world today?  And for two of my three sections of honors tenth grade English, this is exactly what happened.  We have spent two days discussing the various groups we are members of, how social norms are established, why people judge one another, connections to recent social media reactions to the attacks in Beruit and Paris,  connections to scenes and characters in The Crucible.  For two of my three sections, students were excited, jumping up, leaning forward, eager to share and discuss and argue different points of view. These were fruitful conversations where students left the classroom wishing we had more time to discuss. But then there was my other section.

They are my largest tenth grade honors English class. Thirty-one students sitting in a very large circle.  At first, our class discussion started out strong.  Students began talking about how fear and judgement from others impacted how people behaved in a group.  We discussed how social norms and conformity can be found in our hallways, classrooms, in every aspect of our life.  Students wanted to talk, to share, the multitude of ways they felt judged. We began to discuss how privilege and money impacts how we interact with others and with other groups.  And this is where the conversation got difficult for some in the room.  Suddenly, thirty-one voices weren't talking.  Instead, a handful of students, from each side of privilege began talking about the pain felt when others judge them.

This is an important conversation but also a very difficult one.  I have recently moved from a more economically stable district outside of Philadelphia to a Title 1 district in rural West Michigan.  And although I am working with tenth grade honors students in my new district as I have for most of my teaching career, the population is night and day different from some of my previous experiences. My previous district had great economic differences.  Last year I had a student in my class who was essentially homeless, living week to week in a motel with his family, who sat near a student whose home had seven bedrooms and an electric gate.  My new district does not quite have the same gap in economic difference. Sixty-five percent of the students utilize the free and reduced lunch program. The difference between those with little and those with more is slight. So it was apparent that the conversation that was happening in my classroom was not necessarily about money.

Before starting the conversation again on day two, I tried to get it back on track with an activity that asked students to think about the groups we each belong to.  I asked students to stand if they were comfortable when I called out a group that they were a member of.

I am… 
______ a member of a sports team. 
______ a member of an club or religious organization. 
______ someone who can play a musical instrument. 
______ someone who has traveled to another country. 
______ someone who has a large circle of friends. 
______ someone who has siblings. 
______ someone who works an after-school or weekend job. 
______ someone who drives my own car. 
______ someone who lives with a family pet. 
______ someone who lives with both of my biological parents. 
______ someone who has moved homes more than twice. 
______ someone who has felt insecure about the way I look. 
______ someone who has lost a loved one or family member. 
______ someone who lives with a parent or guardian that works more than one job.  
______ someone who lives with at least one parent who has graduated college with a bachelor’s degree. 
______ someone who has felt silenced. 
______ someone who has been teased because of my clothing. 
______ someone who has felt discrimination because of the color of my skin. 
______ someone who has felt discrimination because of a physical or medical condition. 
______ someone who has felt discrimination because of my perceived sexuality or gender. 
______ someone who has felt discrimination because of my religion and/or beliefs. 
______ someone who has felt isolated at times.

By the close of this activity, students reflected on how much more we had in common than they thought.  We are connected in more ways than we are different.  This was a promising start. But as we started to discuss group behavior, again students wanted to talk about privilege. Two students walked out frustrated. However, pretty quickly the conversation shifted and students began to talk about how everyone has a story that we don't see. We are not just want others see on the outside.  Okay, so the conversation didn't go quite the direction I had hoped, but this wasn't bad.  Yet, at the close of the discussion, I noticed three girls in tears. They still felt judged, felt as though classmates were pointing fingers.  They came from families of privilege and felt misunderstood.  And I was surprised.  I didn't see their reactions coming. Weren't we just talking about how we needed to remember that everyone has a story that we don't see? But the students in front of me in tears seemed to have participated in a different conversation. Other students in the class noticed the tears as they walked out to go to their next class.  The class left riled up, still wanting to talk. And suddenly the conversation which I thought was about understanding one another's story was once again about privilege, who was wearing name brands and who was not.

There are clearly tensions between two groups in my one section of tenth grade honors English.  On the surface it has to do with privilege, but there's so much more going on here.  Some of the students in their written reflections at the close of the second day of discussion pointed this out. But they were the students that did not participate verbally in the class discussion. They chose to remain silent. Remain bystanders.

I have the story of The Crucible being recreated in my classroom.  Particular students are on a witch hunt, wanting to point fingers at who is judging them. Others elect to remain silent, either figuring the conversation doesn't directly impact them or out of fear of being judged themselves.  And I am unsure how, or if, I should point this dynamic out to our class.

The ThingLink Summer Challenge for Educators

If you've been following my blog recently, you'll know that I've become obsessed with ThingLink as a creative curation tool. I have Christy Brennan to thank for this. She introduced me to ThingLink about this point last year when she used it in one of our professional development workshops. I've been hooked ever since.

A few months ago, I shared how my students have also been using ThingLink to share their research and writing on their independent reading novels. And as a teacher, ThingLink is a perfect tool for sharing out student work. So when ThingLink announced last week that they would be hosting a summer challenge for educators, I signed up as soon as I learned about it.  And you can too! (Plus, you'll earn a free 3-month upgrade to the educator level of the platform!)

For the first challenge, participants used ThinkLink to design a digital portfolio. I used my existing avatar from FaceYourManga and added some graphic details by importing and improving the image using Canva (another of my favorite tools). Then I uploaded my image to ThingLink and started layering on my links. Having completed my own digital self, I can see that this would be a fantastic first week activity with my high school students. Not only would it help me get to know my students better, but it would also help us start conversations about digital responsibility, privacy, and transparency.

I'm looking forward to week 2 of the #TLChallenge.  Hope you are able to join in the fun!

More details about the challenge can be found by following #TLChallenge on social media and on...you guessed it, the ThingLink below:
 

Questioning?

I'm just starting my first online graduate course for a grade. I've participated in MOOCs but not for graduate credit. This class, a requirement by the state of Michigan to move from my Provisional License to a Professional Certificate, focuses on reading strategies. And our course reading has me reflecting on the role of questioning in class. But let me first describe where I am now.

I am 83 minutes into the first day of proctoring our state literature exams. I'm covertly jotting notes because for 90 minutes I am to stare intently at the nine students currently testing in this room. No grading, no reading a book, no writing, no. I am to walk around and monitor these nine...now eight students as one just finished her test. Closing her test book, she put her head down to sleep. While monitoring, I am not to look at what they are reading or writing. I am not to answer questions that will clarify anything in any way. The walls are to be free not just of content specific posters and artwork, but of all motivational posters. Rooms should be sterile. Proctors should stoic. What does having all these protocols in place ensure? How does this impact the test takers?

The questions these eight students are grappling with have a right answer that can be bubbled into a form. As fast as they can, these eight students are reading four excerpts from longer texts. Stripped of context and plot development, this excerpts are literally only part of the story. These students darken bubbles for seven or eight questions on each passage and then write a one-page response to each. All in the span of 90 minutes. What is this test purporting to measure? What is this test actually measuring?

What are we telling our students when we realign our curriculums to better prepare students for this type of testing, tests which feature only excerpts and ask students to scribble down responses as fast as they can?

My students will sit in a desk from 7:30 to 9:30 each morning for six days in order to bubble in responses on the Pennsylvania Keystone exams, and then they will have a short five minute break before they are asked to head to their first block class and go through a shortened schedule of their regular classes from 9:40 am - 2:22 pm. Their graduation is dependent upon their success on these tests. My teacher evaluation is dependent upon their success on these tests. It will be a long six days. And by the end of the six days of testing, everyone - teachers and students alike - just want to get back to learning. I question this type of questioning.

Reading through the opening scenarios of Peter Afflerbach’s text, Understanding and Using Reading Assessment K-12, I was struck by a sentence he used to describe the ideal reading instruction given in a fourth grade classroom: “Reading assessment that gives students useful feedback while shoring up their self-esteem is important to the students and the teacher” (2). That is certainly not happening in our classrooms this week. Afflerbach writes, “Teaching to the test is, in effect, teaching to an impoverished notion of what questions can tell us,” (55). I could not agree more! If you can Google the response to a question, then you likely shouldn’t be asking it. So, why are we putting so much emphasis on these tests? What is the purpose?

When they finish their state tests and head to our first block class, I will ask my tenth grade students to think about the role of questions. As we wait for some of our classmates to finish testing, we will critically questions the types of questions asked by our state assessment. What is the purpose? And I will give my students an opportunity to creatively respond. And then I will ask them to come up with better questions for the texts we are currently reading. I will share with them the Webb's Depth of Knowledge chart, asking them to reflect, much like I am for my graduate class, on what makes a good question. I'll ask them to anticipate the responses and consider their purpose in asking. And then I will give them the opportunity to post their questions to the class, selecting a couple of students each day to become our in-class discussion leaders and our online discussion leaders.

And in questioning questions, we'll together craft better questions and more critical responses.

20% Time Projects: Resources for Teachers

Image from Pecha Kucha

The basic premise of the 20% Time Project is that it is student-driven, passion-based learning. The idea gained traction as more people read Daniel Pink’s book Drive. In the book, Pink cites an idea that started with the 3M company and was expanded by Google. Google encourages its employees to spend one day each work week, 20 percent of their work time, focusing on their own projects. Why? Well, it turns out that when people have autonomy over their work, time to master their skills, and a clear purpose, they are more motivated to learn. And scientific research supports this claim. In fact, Google’s philosophy of 20 percent time is how we now have Gmail!

Introductory Resources:

• The 20 Time in Education website, put together by a great group of 20% time and Genius Hour gurus, is a wealth of resources and planning guides for putting together your first 20% project.
• On Twitter? Here’s a list of educators who have incorporated 20% time and Genius Hour into their curriculums.
• A.J. Juliani hosted a 20 Time Academy in the summer of 2013, which lead to the creation of this editable manual
• Cybrary Man's resource page on Self-Determined Learning contains a variety of resources for teachers both new and familiar with Self-Determined Learning (SDL), 20% projects, and Genius Hour.
• Joy Kirr’s LiveBinder of Genius Hour Resources is likely the most comprehensive resource you will find on 20% Projects and Genius Hour projects.
• Kevin Brookhouser is currently working on a book about his use of 20% Time projects with students in California. His website and his blog, i teach. i think are great resources.
• The Global Genius Hour Project is a wiki connecting teachers from all over the world who are implementing 20% time and Genius Hour projects and collaborating with one another. It is a fantastic place to see just what is possible.
• Choose2Matter was started by Angela Maiers as a way for students to share their genius and inspire others to get involved.

Resources for Introducing 20% Time to Students:

• Kevin Brookhouser’s Letter to Parents and Students is a fantastic way to think about introducing your 20% Time Project to your class.
• Handouts and planning resources prepared by the 20 Time in Education collaborative of teachers help to frame how you might introduce your project to your students.
• This infographic of 20% Time was designed by one of A.J. Juliani’s students and is a great visual for helping you consider how to organize and assess the work your students will be engaged in.
• How I organized my 20% project with my high school English students.

How I Introduced 20% Time to Students:

I posted a YouTube Playlist to my class website with videos from other teachers, from Google, and from Daniel Pink which explained the premise of 20% Time. I asked students to watch a couple on their own time as homework and try to come up with an explanation of what 20% Time Projects entailed. We used the videos to frame out opening discussion and to kick-off our initial brainstorming session.

FROM MY WEBSITE: MsWard.org

DISCOVER  •–  QUESTION  •˜  REFLECT  —•  TRANSFORM

THE PROJECT

What do you want to learn? One day each week during the second quarter we will be using our time to research the topic of your choice.  You goal is to become an expert on that topic.  But this project is not just about researching…it is about doing something with what you learn.  To complete this project successfully you will

• Pick a topic you are passionate about, something you want to learn. You may work alone or in small groups of no more than four students.
• Find a book on your topic to guide your learning.
• Pitch your project idea in a project proposal to the class for topic approval. You will submit both a written proposal and produce a video proposal to be posted to our class site for our community of learners to vote on.
• Connect with an expert on your topic to interview.
• Blog each Friday reflecting on your progress. Each post should also incorporate reflections on how your selected book is guiding your research.
• Produce something – a presentation, a writing piece, a show – that you share with people outside of our classroom.
• Reflect on what you have learned in a TED-style talk.

This is not simply a research project.  Once you’ve finished the research phase of this project, you must do something with your new found knowledge.  Students will be creating products and presentations (either individually or in small groups) that will extend beyond the classroom, such as documentary videos for H-Vision, web pages, pamphlets, newspaper or magazine editorials, an article for the Fordian, letters, public speaking presentations, fundraising, music, plays…or whatever you can think of to best make our community aware of your research topic.  The idea is to reach an audience outside the doors of our classroom in order to share your research.

Creating Your Pitch Video

Your video pitch will be a creative visual presentation that answers the same questions as your written proposal but in a way that engages our larger learning community.  Whereas your written proposal is meant for just your teacher, your video project proposal pitch is meant for our entire community to see and respond to.  So here are some guidelines and ideas to keep in mind:

         Whatcha gotta do is make sure you answer these questions:

• Why are you interested in this particular topic?
• What question(s) are you hoping to answer through your research?
• What will you need to research?
• Where will you find the expert and the information you need?
• What will the outcome/product of your research be?
• Why is this a viable topic?

Once you have written your proposal, you need to figure out how to produce your pitch video. The video pitch will be organized in the same way as the written proposal; however, you have the freedom to produce your pitch in a way that makes the best sense for your topic.  You can elect to screencast a slide or Prezi presentation or you may want to record yourself talking – it is up to you.  Your video pitch should

• engage your viewers with use of appropriate images and design elements,
• present your idea in a professional, well-prepared manner,
• be under two minutes in length,
• answer the same six questions as the written proposal, and
• be posted to our class website for our class to vote on.
         Tools to Consider Using For Your Video:
• Jing - a free app that allows you to screencast whatever is on your computer screen (and, it is already on the school computers)  
• PowToon - an easy online app for creating animated presentations
• Prezi - an online presentation program.  This would be a good first step to putting together your video and then you could screencast your presentation
• RawShorts - This site is an easy...seriously EZ way of making engaging animated videos.
• Screencast-o-matic.com - no downloading necessary with this free, online screencasting program.  Fast, easy, and awesome.
• VideoScribe - Have you seen the RSAnimate videos? Well this app allows you to make videos in a very similar fashion.  It can be a bit time consuming, but the results are pretty cool!
• 
  

Considerations Before Beginning:

Students watched the initial videos explaining Genius Hour/20% Time, and then explored potential ideas on a resource page found on our class website. I also opted to email parents about our project in advance of starting it, which helped me gather support as well as find experts in our community for my students to interview. I gave my students a framework for their research - blogging, reading requirements, interview, and presentations - in order to help them keep track of their learning. Some teachers will argue against formalizing the project in this way. However you decide to frame your project, keep in mind that student choice and purpose drive the 20% Time and Genius Hour projects. Try as much as you can to open up the choices that students can make about their research topic, how they research it, and how they present it.

What are the parameters? What can students research?

Read something and be inspired. Act on it.

Read. Discover. Pitch. Learn. Share.

• Brainstorm Days - Try using this video to introduce brainstorming to your students. Then use this video on "Where Do Good Ideas Come From?" during the next class period to encourage collaboration.
• Initial Research - check out the philosophy and resources available on the Independent Inquiry wiki. Consider sharing with students and have them explore the question of “what is learning?”
• Students then craft a written proposal and pitch presentation with works cited.
• Once a proposal is approved, students will need to find a book to guide their learning and a mentor with whom to work. Oftentimes, the mentor can suggest the best book for students to read, so you may want to have them start by finding a mentor. Use everything at your disposal to find real experts - community members, other teachers, family and friends, and social media sites
• On 20% research days (usually we had them each Friday), students were given the entire class to work. At the close of each research day, each student needed to post a reflection blogs which included not just a progress report but needed to also reflect on what the student was reading. Each blog posted needed citations or quotes from their research.
• On research days, the teacher would conduct conferences with individuals and small groups.
• At the close of the semester, not only did students find ways to share their research outside the classroom, but they also produced a TEDTalk style presentation on their project and what they learned through their research.

What’s New?

• I am currently completing follow-up research with my former students on their experiences completing both traditional research writing assignments and completing their 20% time research projects. I will be sharing this research at the upcoming Educator Forum at the Philadelphia School of the Future on May 3, at EdCamp Philly on May 17, and at the EdTech Teacher Summit in Chicago July 28-30.