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!

Growing Community Connections

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Keepin' It Real

Snow day #7.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slice of Life Blogging Challenge

March begins with a stutter start.

For the second week in a row, I will likely be out of school for multiple days. Last week, under a wet blanket of 10 inches of snow, we were out of school on Thursday and Friday.  I'm off today as a result of the piling snow, currently at about six inches with more still coming down.  I expect we will be out again tomorrow.

Usually, I am pressed for time to write.  Starting a new position this year - new state, new home, new school, new curriculum, and lots of new students - I have struggled to make time to blog.  So this stutter start to March - our multiple snow days - brings with it a welcome return to reflection through the annual Slice of Life blogging challenge issued by Two Writing Teachers.

The goal: blog. every. single. day. At least for the month of March.  I tried to do this in earnest last year, and I nearly made it. Okay, so I only had 14 entries in March of 2015.  But in 2014, I got a bit closer with 22 entries for the month and even had one of the entries published in the book Elevate Empathy. This year, I'm aiming for a perfect 31.

But what is this whole "slice of life" thing?  The blog challenge started with an inspired English teacher. Stacey Shubitz shared her experience about discovering "slice of life" writing while reading her students' writer's notebook entries:

"In February 2008, Stacey was reading one of her student’s writer’s notebooks and came across a piece of writing about his sister’s lost necklace. Christian wrote an entire entry about the outrage he felt when his mother made the family drop everything to search for his sister’s lost necklace in their apartment. Thirty minutes after they lifted up couch cushions and checked under all of the beds, her necklace turned up on her neck! There was something about his entry, this little snippet of Christian’s life. It seemed like a slice of life story. Stacey googled “slice of life” and found that it’s a term frequently used in literature and entertainment. It essentially means to describe everyday experiences with as much realism as possible. Stacey realized that was exactly the kind of entry Christian had written."

So the annual Slice of Life blogging challenge asks writers to share snippets of their every day, their ordinary, to write with details about a particular moment.

And so I am thankful for this stutter start to March. It is a much needed pause. Time to reflect.  Time to soak in and respond to the ordinary, the every day, and to capture a moment. Too often I am concerned about what is happening next, what is over the horizon. Today, I get to sit at my dining room table, watch the snow fall and birds flock to my feeder, and reinvest in my writing.

At least until the kids, who also have a snow day, burst through the back door in dripping wet snow pants and bright red cheeks come in search of cups of marshmallow-filled warmth. "I don't wanna get frost-nipped, Mom, so I neeeeed hot cocoa," my little one looks up at me with laughing eyes.

This blog is my hot-cocoa, my warmth. When I have felt out in the cold for too long, this is where I need to warm up, to write my way into understanding. So thank you, March, for this snow day stutter start.

Blogging in Class

I'm covering a class right now. Web Design. Students have just started to explore blogs as a means of writing for an authentic audience, of making connections through their writing.  The students tell me that they have done some researching: looking at other blogs, post types, design ideas.  Today they have logged into WordPress to create their first blog.  Of the fourteen students sitting in this room, no one has blogged before.  "Does Twitter count?"

So what do these novice bloggers think about blogging?

• "It reminds me a lot of Twitter, just longer."
• "This is just something I have to do for class."
• "I feel like blogging could be dangerous because people know what you are doing."
• "I took this class so I wouldn't get stuck in another gym class, but now that we've started, I'm kind of excited."

So am I.  I try to share all the connections and collaborations that I have made as a result of this blog.  I'm blogging in front of them at this moment, my words looming large on the screen in room 214 to demonstrate just how easy this process is.  I'm going to hit "publish," share this out on Twitter. Can you help me demonstrate how people connect using blogs? Leave a comment to let us know that you are visiting. 

What advice do you have to offer to these novice bloggers?

IHS students exercise empathy through random acts of kindness

I'm looking forward to blogging more in-depth about recent conversations and activities my students and I have been engaged in to address bullying in our school. For now, I wanted to share a recent news article that was published about some of the work we've been doing in my 10th grade English classes. It in part involves reframing how we think about bullying. In elementary grades, students talk more directly and more often about kindness and empathy.  At the upper grades, we focus more on the negative behaviors of bullying.  But what if we started to talk more about empathy and kindness at the secondary level? What might change?

IHS students exercise empathy through random acts of kindness

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!