Writing for the World

Teaching is about helping students become more than just book learners. It is guiding them to be life learners. And that means that teachers, myself included, need to set up classrooms that are learning environments for everyone in that classroom - teacher included.

As a teacher, I believe that some of my best lessons have happened when I am also in the seat of the learner, learning right alongside my students. I've learned more about my own writing process as I've written with my students. I’ve learned that I have to commit to the writing process, not just to this or that essay, much like I ask my students to fully engage in writing as a process. I can’t just sit down at a computer and bang out a couple of pages, hurriedly assembled sentences and paragraphs. Like I ask my students, I need to remember that my written work is a reflection of who I am, of who I want to be. And so as I heard author James McBride once say, I must remember that “writing is rewriting.” As such, I must never look at a piece of my own writing as finished, and in turn, encourage students to return to their writing again and again and again. After all, aren’t the writers we remember those that looked at writing as a series of rewrites? Walt Whitman rewrote Leaves of Grass five times! Writing is a process that involves reflection, revision, and rewriting. Because I’ve recognized this in my own writing, I must open up space in my classroom for students to do the same. This means that I’ve had to stop assigning essays that students turn in only once, essays that I would labor over my commenting on but students either never read or did anything with the feedback.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve changed how I teach writing. Students can’t just turn in an essay to me. Instead, I ask my students to reflect on their writing goals following each writing assignment, contemplating how they addressed their previous goals with each assignment, reflecting on their progress as writers. Often times, I see essays multiple times, stressing each time that revision is not merely editing. And perhaps the biggest change to my teaching of writing involves who reads my students’ work.

Students are often asked to just write for their teacher. A single reader. What I’ve found is that the more I can open up my classroom to more authentic and meaningful writing experiences, the more invested my student writers are in the pieces they produce. The web has been immensely helpful in this process. Instead of turning in an essay on the themes of Elie Wiesel’s Night, I have students post their essays to our classroom blog site, where they can read each others’ work and give feedback. At the beginning of the semester, students write their own personal narrative essays on a core belief, in the style of NPR’s “This I Believe” program. I’ve found that when students share these essays with one another, post them on our class blog site, they generate an immense amount of feedback, and in turn, students ask to revise their essays. They ASK to revise! Later in the semester, I ask students to write editorials for our local newspaper, create web pages, and respond to each other using online discussion boards. When students learn that their writing is going to be seen by an audience other than just the teacher, they are more invested in the process of writing. They are engaged.

Interesting Links for Teaching the Holocaust

• Classroom Resources for Teaching Night: I put this list of resources together for my students and fellow teachers. It includes a number of resources specific to the Philadelphia area as well as a number of excellent national sources. There are enrichment reading pieces and extra credit assignments.
  
• Music of the Holocaust: Music of the Ghettos and Camps. Although the inhabitants were incarcerated, music was composed and performed giving voice to the indomitable human spirit within the ghettos and camps. Most cruelly, the large camps had orchestras and bands who were forced to play while their families, friends and neighbors were selected for death then sent to the gas chambers or firing squads.
• Holocaust Related Music: This Hebrew song, written in the twelfth century, is by Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon, also known as Maimonides, who was a great religious philosopher. His Talmudic Psalm Number Twelve from The Articles of Faith entitled "Ani Ma'amin" (I Believe) was later sung by many Jews during the Holocaust, even as they entered the gas chambers. Maimonides' descendants clung to his words for hope for the future and for humankind.
• Fragments of a Lost World
  Holocaust Resources and Organizations in the Philadelphia Region
  Courtesy of:
  Auerbach Central Agency for Jewish Education
  Seidman Educational Resource Center
  7607 Old York Road, Melrose Park, PA 19027


• Holocaust Resources for Teachers: A wealth of resources for teachers!

I Believe

It took awhile.

After teaching nearly 500 students how to write "This I Believe" essays, I finally got off my procrastinating hiney and submitted my own. Since writing mine, I've had the pleasure of reading and watching another 100 or so 16-year-olds present their personal narratives in my World Literatures class. And, I also helped bring the essay project to other teachers in my district. Now, all 10th grade students have an opportunity to share their beliefs with their peers and teachers. It is a significant lesson in the power of voice - for teachers and students alike.

I just found out yesterday that the essay I submitted was published to the NPR "This I Believe" website - http://thisibelieve.org/essay/70654/. And just like my students, I can't express the thrill I felt at learning my piece was published. I hope that I can find ways for the next 600 students I teach to experience that same thrill of having their voice heard.

Today's Interesting Links

• Bloom's Taxonomy Blooms Digitally, Andrew Churches - In the 1990's, a former student of Bloom, Lorin Anderson, revised Bloom's Taxonomy and published this- Bloom's Revised Taxonomy in 2001.Key to this is the use of verbs rather than nouns for each of the categories and a rearrangement of the sequence within the taxonomy. They are arranged below in increasing order, from low to high.
• The New Writing Pedagogy - According to a recent Pew Internet and American Life Project study, 85 percent of youths aged 12-17 engage at least occasionally in some form of electronic personal communication, which includes text messaging, sending e-mail or instant messages, or posting comments on social networking sites. In other words, our students aren't waiting for us to teach them the ins and outs of writing in these digital spaces.
• Microsoft Word - Glogster Instructions - A wonderful tutorial/handout for using Glogster Edu with students
• TICAL PRESENTATION (digitalliteracynow) - Tara Seale's presentation on teaching digital literacy
• Technology Integration for Teachers - Home - The purpose of this site is to take an extensive list of websites that are considered high quality, reliable, and valuable and organize them in a way that even "non-techy" teachers can utilize them. It took around 10 years to collect these resources, but new ones are found every day. All of these websites have been recommended by other teachers and educational organizations and qualify as "the best". You'll find support for all core curriculum areas. In addition, you will find lesson plans, multimedia, and primary sources to enhance your students' learning environment.
• Presentation Zen: Ira Glass:Tips on storytelling - There are a lot of books on presentations, giving speeches, using PowerPoint, etc. on the market. I think I have just about every book ever written on the subject. Many are good but most are rather mediocre "how to books" that seem dated and rarely inspire or talk much about creativity or storytelling, for example. This is why it's important to look outside to different disciplines for new perspectives, wisdom, and creative guidance. For example, I have been reading (and rereading) Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee for the past six-seven months. The 480-page book sits on my nightstand; I usually find something interesting, applicable, and inspiring every time I pick it up. It's a book on screenwriting, yet there is much we (non-screenwriters) can learn.

What Snow Days Are Good For

My family, my friends, my colleagues, and my students joke about it behind my back.

I am a Twitter geek.

I love how I've been able to grow my personal learning network (PLN) as a direct result of the connections, advice, and resources I've gained by participating regularly in Twitter. The community of teachers, bloggers, educational and technology professionals that I follow have helped me grow immensely as a writer, a thinker, a teacher - as a person. I am indebted to my Twitter friends.

As my family, friends, fellow teachers and students also know - I am always a teacher. I can't seem to turn that part of my brain off. I'm always looking for new resources, new ideas to bring into the classroom. I love learning about the art of teaching, so I guess this makes me a student of teaching. When I think about the teachers that have inspired me, they too seemed to be students first, hungry to learn more about their content area and the art of teaching it well.

So I guess it is no surprise that I've spent my last three snow days reflecting on ways to improve my teaching. I've been thinking about how to help others use Twitter to grow their PLN and teaching resources. So, drawing cues from Twitter's #edchat format, I've started a Twitter hashtag conversation.

Using the hashtag #engswap, secondary English/Language Arts teachers are invited to vote on a topic of collaboration each week, and then throughout the week use our hashtag on Twitter to share related curricular materials. It is an online English curriculum swap! We'll use Twitter to share lesson plans, curricular resources, and cool English links. It's a great way to add to our teaching resources.

I've put together a web page to both share more information about our Twitter hashtag as well as archive the resources participants share. You check check it out at http://engswap.pbworks.com. There you will find information about how to participate, how to follow all the resources shared, and how to vote on our weekly topics.

Want to participate next week? Vote on a topic below! Then follow #engswap on Twitter.

Taking Time

This is not a new complaint.
Time.
There's not enough.

It's hard during the midst of the semester to find a spare moment to sit down and reflect on my goals. I find that I spend much of the semester treading water, trying to stay afloat of all the grading, lesson planning, parent contact, emails, etc. It's ironic because I find that when I do give myself time to reflect on my teaching, when I participate in professional development opportunities, when I take the time to blog, I come back to my classroom much more energized. So, I thought I would take a moment at the beginning of the semester, when first semester grades have been put to bed and there is a bit of breathing room, to reflect and set some goals for this semester.

I set one main goal for myself this year - revising my final assessments, making sure that they connect with the skills that I teach throughout a particular unit. What I've been able to do is redesign some of my units. My unit for Night now ends with both a creative and analytical assessment where students put together a creative piece and write an analytical essay both based around significant quotes. This better fits with what I do with the memoir - teaching analytical discussion/writing skills, incorporating quotations into written work, and connecting to themes presented earlier in the class. It worked so much better than a traditional test. In fact, I redesigned a few other tests similarly.

Here's my problem. I like how the new assessments are a better measure of what we've learned and practiced throughout the unit, but they are much more involved, heavy on the writing. This is fine for now, when I've only got 25 assessments to grade, but how do you incorporate more meaningful assessments when you have 90 students to grade? I have struggled with this my entire teaching career. How do I make the work in my classroom meaningful and not kill myself with the grading of it?

The core content classes in our high school have just finished putting together common final assessments, in which students take multiple choice final exams that are composed of higher order thinking questions. But I still struggle with whether or not a multiple choice test is the best measure of what a student has learned. Especially in an English class. Are one or two questions on tone enough to assess whether or not a student can write clearly about an author's style, tone, and technique? And yet such multiple choice tests make it easy to get feedback returned to students in a timely manner. I supposed it is about finding the balance, which I'm not sure that I've achieved yet.

So for the second part of the year, I think I need to revise my goals. I still plan to look at my unit assessments, striving for more of a backwards design approach, but I need to balance this with what I can realistically grade when I have three full classes.

A second goal I plan to work on is increasing the transparency of my classroom. I found during first semester that I got an amazing response from students and parents alike about how open my classroom has become. Posting all my assignments and handouts on the web, inviting parents to participate with us on our class Ning and wiki, and especially granting students and parents access to the classroom via our live streaming web camera has been a positive experience. While students presented their "This I Believe" essays in class, parents joined us, emailing me wonderful positive feedback for students that were not even their children. The parents especially have liked having this opportunity open to them, even if they rarely take advantage of it. The students were the ones to use it most, watching the classes they were absent for. And for me, it has been an amazing vehicle for assessing my teaching. So I plan to explore how to continue that transparency.

Now, I just need to find the time.

Google Goodies

• 100 Great Google Docs Tips for Students & Educators | AccreditedOnlineColleges.org

• googleined - home
  Google More... An Introduction to Google Tools in Education Google provides much more than just a web search engine; they offer a wide variety of free web-based and desktop applications. This wiki was created to support a workshop that introduces participants to many of these services that may be useful to teachers and students. Please feel free to add to these resources by clicking on "Edit This Page" above.
• Reframing Google's search options - NeverEndingSearch - Blog on School Library Journal
  Over the past couple of years, those brilliant Google engineers designed stunning search options, moving Google search way, way beyond an effective, but relatively unflexible vertical search. And over the past couple of years I've been pasting links to all these options into my subject pathfinders so my students can find them. The problem is--so many of the very best search options are buried in the vast Google wilderness of labs, or in the wonderful pulldowns of more and even more--places where few but our most intrepid students and teachers dare to go.
• springfieldlibrary - Google Search Options
  Google Tools
• Kiva - Kiva Lending Team: Team Google Certified Teachers