It's All In the Approach

I keep running into Marc Prensky. Not literally, of course, but filed away are various photocopies of his articles passed my way by well intentioned administrators during staff meetings. I first encountered his writing this past school year when some of his work was included as part of an online course I participated in. Similar to my initial impressions following my reading of his article "Engage Me or Enrage Me" in the September/October 2005 edition of Educause, his recent article "Young Minds, Fast Times: The 21st Century Digital Learner" left me with a number of concerns and lingering frustrations. I'm struggling with some of his arguments for why teachers should use technology in their classrooms. While I agree that technology must have a role in our curriculum, I don't think that technology is the answer to all the problems of student engagement.

I don't think that the goal of educators is to entertain our students. While I agree that in order to succeed, we must engage our students, get them to buy into what we are teaching, and take ownership of it, I don't think that is what Mr. Prensky is arguing. His articles seem to argue that technology is the simple solution for getting students to engage in the classroom setting. This makes sense given that his livelihood depends on us accepting this idea. However, I think some of his proposals for change are a bit short-sighted. Technology is not the magic bullet for student engagement, and it is certainly not the only tool that educators have at their disposal for encouraging critical thinking and problem-solving in students.

Additionally, his over generalizations and patronizing tone do little to forward what might be a number of very important suggestions - namely, that educators need to involve students in the learning process rather than dictate knowledge to them. While I wholeheartedly agree with this proposal, comments like "It is a measure of the malaise of our educational system that these old folk -- smart and experienced as they may be -- think they can, by themselves and without the input of the people they're trying to teach, design the future of education," do little to help change the minds of educators using what are now labeled as more traditional teaching methods. Instead, his arguments alienate the very voices that need his support for change. It is ironic that he touts himself as someone students can connect with "...because I communicate somehow to the kids that I truly respect their opinions," but he does not extend this courtesy to his fellow educators.

It is the goal of educators to prepare students to be active, responsible, reflective citizens. Technology most certainly can help us meet that goal. We should and must use technology to help students integrate fully into the modern world, but technology is not the easy answer to the question of how do we engage students. Instead, I agree more with Will Richardson's suggestion that "By inviting students to become active participants in the design of their own learning, we teach them how to be active participants in their lives and future careers." Technology certainly aids in the this endeavor, but it is not the only way we encourage students to active participants in their learning.

Is This Going to be on the Test?

I'm currently sitting in my first PA Writing and Literature Project class of the summer. In our conversations today about reading and writing in digital spaces, we discussed the conflict that arises between what we are mandated to teach in accordance with high-stakes, stardardized, state tests and the skills students will need to live and work in the 21st century. To jump start our conversation, our teacher, Diane Barrie, shared this music video by Tom Chapin. Enjoy!

Wasting Time

I find my personal life blurring into my professional activities recently. Just before students left the classroom for their summer adventures, I found myself sitting through yet another meeting which ultimately devolved into complaints about how often teachers and administrators in my building find students wasting time on the web during class. Our high school is in the midst of reviewing which web applications to allow and which to ban students from accessing through our school network, and of course the one site that nearly drips with venom from the lips of most educators these days is Facebook. However, I’ve seen how social networking sites like Facebook can be beneficial inside the classroom.

After listening to many of my colleagues admonish students for wasting valuable classroom time goofing around on Facebook, someone in our meeting pointed out that I had used Facebook with a recent student project. Students in my tenth grade English class had been given the task of finding a way to present their research on an issue currently facing a non-western culture to an audience outside the walls of our classroom. Some of the students adapted their research and presented their work to middle school students. Others wrote letters to senators and newspaper editors. A number of students used Facebook.

Students asked if they might use the Group application in Facebook to form awareness groups and recruit members to join from both inside and outside of our school community. Students posted information, links, videos, discussion questions, and more using the application. Some groups experienced phenomenal results. A small group of girls put together a page about the challenges faced by girls and women in Afghanistan. Their Facebook group is still going strong with just over 250 members from all over the world – the United States, Singapore, Ireland, India, and even Afghanistan. Another group started a page on the challenges faced by former child soldiers in Liberia. Their group started some wonderful discussion threads that pulled in people from Australia, France, Minnesota, and India. Students rushed to our laptops each day to excitedly check and respond to whoever had posted to their discussion section. The students were truly engaged with an audience outside of our classroom based on their research endeavors. And because I too had a Facebook account, I could monitor what the students posted, and I could respond to their discussions.

However, this is also where my professional persona started to overlap with my life outside of school. Technology has a way of bridging gaps in unexpected ways. I originally started my Facebook account so that I could connect with students. My persona, Teacher Ward, was “friended” by my students. They could read my profile and see which groups I had recently posted to. Students would email me and post questions to my “Wall.” This worked well, until my friends outside of school also found me on Facebook. Suddenly, I found myself having to explain my teaching persona to my non-teaching friends. My students were using Facebook to connect with audiences halfway around the world while my former high school classmates were also trying to reconnect with me. It was an uncomfortable mix. Ultimately, I found I needed to “unfriend” my students in order to separate my personal life from my professional one, but I was still able to join and monitor my students’ groups without them being able to similarly monitor me.

It has been interesting to see how using social networking sites like Facebook and Nings inside the classroom have changed how I connect with others outside the classroom. Not only were my students connecting with others outside of their immediate community, but so was I. Using Facebook gave my students an opportunity to share their interests and research and connect with others. Ultimately, it has also done the same for me. Together we have bridged various cultural and perhaps even a generational divides. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t strike me as a waste of time.

One Year Anniversary

I just realized that today is the one year anniversary of this blog! I started it this time last year as a place to more deliberately reflect on my teaching experiences and philosophies, and in the process, I have learned a great deal not just from writing, but from also reading other blogs and responding to suggestions and links made by commenters here. Thank you, readers, for joining me on this journey. I hope next year brings many new connections for us all.

The Lessons I Have Learned

With the posters off the walls, the curriculum binders packed away, and the final papers graded, I’ve spent some time the last few days reflecting on the year, my teaching style, on what worked and what didn’t. Reviewing my blog entries from this past year reveals that I spent a great deal of time thinking and writing about ways to bring authentic assignments and learning into my classroom. Many posts rattle on about wanting to help students use their knowledge to engage in the world around them; however, as I reflect on my teaching strategies, I wonder how much time I actually spend doing this. I have a few key assignments where students write or present for an audience other than the teacher, but looking at what I do on a daily basis, most of the time, students are working at their desks. One of my goals this summer is to evaluate my assessments. What am I spending time assessing my students on? Is this worthwhile? Where will students need to use this particular skill in the future? I’ve signed up for a couple of classes through the Pennsylvania Writing and Literature Project (PAWLP) in the hopes of engaging with other teachers as they also reflect on these curricular conundrums.

But of course, that’s not all I’m going to spend my summer doing. With little baby boy on the way, I’ll also be spending some time thinking about what my changing identity means. Lately, I’ve been remembering moments from my own childhood that have shaped who I am today. I’ll be raising my child in a very different world than the one I grew up in. Whereas my summers were filled with bike rides, boat trips, and picking cherries, my little boy will have a whole technological world to explore that wasn’t there when I was growing up. It has me thinking about the lessons that I learned, and the lessons that he will learn.

So taking some inspiration from California Teacher Guy’s blog entries, I thought I would post some of my lessons learned in the form of poetry. Not only is an appreciation of poetry something that I try to pass on to my students, but one that I also hope to foster in my child as well.

Children of Cherries

Summer smells of pesticides,
cherry pits,
grass stained knees.
As children,
we chose to stay hidden in the pines
edging the orchards
when the sprayers chugged by
spotting new fruit.

The migrants refused to wear
regulation OSHA masks,
sweaty WWI contraptions
which left rings ‘round the nose and mouth,
and in the warmth of June,
made it impossible to breath.

We would make a game of it:
dashing into the pines as
the bright red sprayer drew close,
jumping out again
after the haze had settled
to holler and wave at the migrants
and slowly breathe in our
summer of pesticides.

Today's Lesson: Speak Up

I avoid conflict. I withdraw from situations where I am asked to stand apart from my peers. I am much more content to quietly lead by example, to sit back and listen while others debate. I rarely speak up in department meetings, workshops, trainings, or conferences unless called upon. I can be painfully quiet. I realize this is rather strange coming from a high school teacher who stands in front about 90 students on a daily basis, but when it comes to touting my accomplishments, arguing my position, or debating whether or not something should or shouldn’t be in the curriculum, I am much more comfortable listening and analyzing rather than jumping into the ring. That said, I find myself recently in a number of frustrating positions where I’ve been forced out of my comfort zone.

This morning’s three hour curriculum meeting left me drained. Although I find it intensely useful to question what we teach and how, to revisit our focus and methodologies, I find it immensely frustrating when as educators we are asked to reinvent the wheel in a different format every few years.

A few years back, the curriculum that I now love to teach was a bit all over the place, each teacher doing his or her own thing, using different books and materials. In the course of the past few years, my English colleagues and our social studies counterparts set about establishing a connection between the themes taught in the world literatures course with those taught in the world history course that students take in the same semester. Over the past few summers, we established core skills and themes: what grammar, writing, and reading skills students should leave the course with in order to be successful. Our goal was to have students walk out of our two classrooms, history and English, feeling empowered, seeing connections between what they learned in class and what they encounter in their world, and feeling more confident as critical consumers of the information they are inundated with on a daily basis. We wanted to get away from didactic teaching methodologies in favor of engaging students in the learning process. In order to be successful, students must own their learning and know their voice matters. Granted, this is also my personal take on education as well. I firmly believe that true education happens when students are in the driver’s seat and can prove their understanding in authentic situations.

Stemming from this philosophy, I developed a culminating research project about four years ago which was later adopted by all the teachers in my grade level. Based on the ideals of formative assessment (now known as assessment for learning) and authentic assessment strategies, the research project not only incorporates traditional research and expository writing skills, but most importantly, requires students find ways to share their research outside our classroom community in authentic writing and presentation situations. In the last few years, I’ve had students teach their topic to middle and elementary school students, start student clubs based on their research, write senators, create online web pages and communities dedicated to their topic, compose articles for local newspapers, sponsor community-wide fund drives, and host school-wide fairs. Students have taken this research project beyond the realms of the classroom, beyond the confines of the course, and continue to be engaged with their topics even after graduation.

Unfortunately, some of my colleagues have not seen similar levels of success. This is in part due to the fact that my grade level has seen a number of faces come and go in the last five years, which translates into a curriculum that remains a bit fragmented. This morning’s curriculum meeting was to be a time to re-establish and clarify those initial goals. So when a couple of colleagues today suggested that our research project was not "Englishy" enough, and that perhaps we should return to a final English project that asks students to analyze a literary piece, at first I sat quietly and listened.

As I heard a peer suggest that our English curriculum should focus more on teaching literary analysis and devices, about writing papers for the teacher, and reading literature in order to dissect it, I grew more and more frustrated. It is not that I think these activities don’t have value (ask any of my students what a microcosm is and they’re libel to rattle off not only a definition but a nearly infinite number of examples). However, if this is all we do in an English classroom, we are doing our students a great disservice. If students do not have the opportunity to write for a real audience, to write, read, and speak about issues that have meaning and value for them, as teachers we have failed them. Teaching English should be helping students develop an appreciation of literature and writing by guiding them through diverse and authentic interactions with reading and writing, not by dictating that appreciation to them. Very few of our students will be asked to regurgitate a definition of metonymy once they leave academia. However, all students, regardless of if they go to college, trade school, or immediately enter the working world following high school must know how to critically decipher the bias inherent in the magazine articles they read, must know how to use rhetoric in order to persuade, must know how to write for a real audience. I cringe at the thought of going back to a curriculum that is based on a set of terms and not on a set of skills. Unfortunately, teaching terms is easier, more measurable than teaching skills.

Realistically, however, I also know that as this was my initial project, and I have more investment in it than some of my peers. But I don’t think that my frustration lies with the dismembering of a research project. My frustration is born in what that project represents. I see a divide among my peers, not just those within my department but within the curriculum as a whole. On the one side are the traditionalists who argue that the teaching of literature and writing should take the shape of a more formalist approach, understanding the merits of a work’s style, devices, and diction in order to pass on the beauty inherent in a particular work of literature. On the flip side are those that argue anything can be literature – from a pamphlet, to a billboard, to a blog entry – and that it is the role of the teacher to help students critically engage and produce texts of all sorts. Granted, this is an oversimplification, but it is one that I saw emerge in today’s meeting.

I understand my role of teacher to be somewhere in the middle. I cannot force my students to appreciate literature, but perhaps I can guide them in that direction. I understand that there is usefulness in simply memorizing some things (if you know your 23 auxiliary/to be verbs, you are more likely to use action verbs to structure better sentences). However, the lessons that students remember beyond high school usually cannot be reduced to a single multiple-choice exam. As a colleague asked of us today – do you remember the questions on any particular test that you took in high school? However, you probably do remember an assignment where a teacher asked you to produce something, to be the owner of your education. And if that’s the case, shouldn’t more of our learning opportunities be structured around this philosophy. What is it that we want our students to know? More importantly, what is it that we want our students to understand and why?

What should English teachers teach?

Where Have You Gone, Ms. Ward?

I've gone AWOL. I've been a bit disconnected from my online community this past month, but for some exciting reasons. First, I found myself living in an apartment on Jackson Square in the French Quarter of New Orleans for a few days during my spring break a few weeks back. Although it was only five days away, it gave me quite a bit of time to reflect, and I'll be writing more about the experience soon. And, the other reason I've been a bit detached from the computer - I'm going to have a baby!

I've spent a great deal of time lately reflecting on my role as a teacher, as a parent-to-be, and as an individual. Our little bundle of joy won't arrive until the end of September, but already I find that my understanding of who I am is starting to change. Hence the title of this post. I'm in the midst of an identity change which will certain impact how I think about my role inside the classroom. So you can expect a number of future posts on this theme.