Unplanned Lesson in Empathy

Slice of Life Challenge, Day 31 

I'm taking some time to reflect on empathy this morning. I stumbled across David Theune's request for stories of empathy on Twitter not long ago. After reading Emily Bazelon's Sticks and Stones, Theune couldn't stop asking the question: "What can I do to help promote empathy?" And so he put out a request for others to share their stories about the power of empathy in hopes of compiling them in a book. His request has me recalling an unplanned lesson from a couple of years ago.

Every semester my tenth grade students and I read Eli Wiesel's Holocaust memoir Night. As we discuss the memoir, we also read poetry, news articles, and personal essays from those impacted by the atrocities of war. Our purpose is to understand the complexities of humanity, to understand where our humanity comes from and how it can be lost.  And each semester we are fortunate enough to have a local Holocaust survivor come into our classroom to share his story of surviving not one but three death camps. His harrowing personal tale, told with such grace and strength, never fails to move all those who hear it.

My students heard Mr. Herskovitz speak again in October 2013

A few years ago when survivor Michael Herskovitz came to speak with our class, one of my students asked if he ever felt anger toward the Nazis. Mr. Herskovitz's response moved us to action. He told us that he cannot be angry. Every day is a gift that he treasures, a gift that he will not give over to feeling angry. He freely shares his story in the hopes that history will not be forgotten, in hopes that the voices of those who had their humanity stolen from them will not be quietly lost to history. He wants students to stand up for one another, to empathize with one another.

Michael Herskovitz

My students were visibly moved by Mr. Herskovitz's response. The next day as we reflected on his story, my students overwhelmingly felt that they wanted to do more. They wanted to do something to share what they had heard and learned with the rest of our school community. It was not part of a planned lesson. Instead, my students took over our English class, and together we shared an important lesson on empathy.

The students split themselves into committees. They planned, prepared, and presented an idea to our principal. The students staged a series of "What Would You Do?" scenarios around the school and filmed student reactions. The students wrote the scenes, planned the filming, informed the teaching staff, and filmed three scenes in which students were being bullied in the hallways between classes. We didn't quite know what to expect.

What we learned is that students would step in and speak up when they saw classmate's being bullied. My students interviewed those students who intervened, some breaking down in tears when they were asked what prompted them to speak up. And my students used the footage of scenes and interviews to put together a short documentary for our school television station. The students shared reflections from their reading, from hearing Mr. Herskovitz, from what they learned about our school community, and what it means to be a bystander and what it takes to stand up. At the foundation of all they had learned - empathy. Following the project, some of my students started a school chapter of the Anti-Defamation League and our school has since been designated as a "No Place for Hate" school. And two years after meeting Mr. Herskovitz and reading Night, the club and the lessons we learned continue to be shared.

What the students learned from this experience continues to influence our school community in the conversations we have about personal responsibility, about humanity, about the bystander effect, and most of all in how we think about empathy. It was not part of my planned lesson. I could not have planned for the learning that took place over the course of those few weeks. I am so thankful to work in a district and with a community of educators who value these unplanned learning opportunities, who understand that teachers have as much to learn from students as students do from teachers, and who value they lessons that cannot be easily measured by a rubric or standardized test. In five years, my students likely will not remember a single test they took in my class. However, I can guess that many of them will recall this experience in five years. And I know that it was a classroom experience that will forever impact how I think about learning and teaching.

Making It Happen: The Maker Movement

Slice of Life Challenge, Day 30 

Check out all the Make 2 Learn organizations

By now you have heard of the Maker Movement. With hacker spaces and maker clubs cropping up in schools, communities, and online spaces everywhere, opening up time to tinker has grown from a small grass-roots movement into what some might consider a paradigm shift, especially when it comes to school settings. More and more are we seeing teachers and students engaged in hands-on, project-based learning that requires learners to think creatively and critically while collaborating to construct something tangible. Students are trying, failing, and trying again. Learners plan, play, and produce. The Maker Movement attracts many teachers and students because it is not simply about producing. It is about creating. It is about the connected processes of learning that students engage in as they think through problems and construct their own learning. And at the center of the learning, of the creating and constructing, are students.  Students own not just the product, but the process as well.

This distinction between products and creation is being explored by teachers in all sorts of classroms. Hands-on learning is not just for the science classroom.  English and language arts classrooms across the country are actively engaged in the Maker Movement. Support for these endeavors can be found in organizations like the National Writing Project (NWP), the International Reading Association, and Edutopia. You'll find playlists of TED Talks all about craftmanship and articles on the international impact of the Maker Movement in the Wall Street Journal. The Maker Movement is making more than just a few small ripples in education.  It is wave, changing the way we empower students.

And this makes absolute sense to me. I’ve always been a crafter. I come from a long line of crafters. When I was very little, my mom would have me clean the gallon milk jugs we collected for her mother, my grandma. Grandma would use the plastic handles to create kitchen dish washing scrubbies, which she sold in craft fairs all over western Michigan. My mom sewed. She sat me down at a sewing machine when I was eight to stitch my first skirt, and I’ve been crafting and sewing ever since. 

My little guy has some loose teeth. Together we sewed this tooth pillow.

Crafting is not only a way to express my creative side, but it is also my connection to others. The variety of people that I have met through craft shows and classes, walking through fabric aisles and in online communities, has enriched my life. Crafters see a world of possibility around every corner. We see opportunity in discarded glass containers and potential in torn clothing. We are never far from a needle and thread and always carry a notebook for when inspiration hits, which it does quite often. We are do-it-yourselfers that like to dabble and make mistakes, knowing that however a project turns out, we will learn from the process. We are a group that encourages one another, that shares what we have learned, and that look out for each other.

I am a maker.

So it is time for me to hit publish and go connect with some other makers!

Keeping Elbow Close at Hand

Slice of Life Challenge, Day 25 

Pic from Bernard L. Swartz Comm. Inst.

I first encounted Peter Elbow's work in my undergraduate writing methods course. His writing has served as inspiration both for how I write as well as how I teach writing. Today I had the opportunity to revisit his piece from the College English journal published in 1993, "Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgement." I've been doing some research on feedback, so it makes sense to return to my mentor, Mr. Elbow.

We are a culture obsessed with feedback. Just take a cursory scan of the books listed in Amazon's search list when you type in "feedback" as a search term. Over 100,000 items pop onto the screen, everything from books on neuropsychological assessment to a children's picture book. And recently, a number of news outlets have been featuring the recent work Harvard's Negotiation Project, a book titled Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well. So even though Elbow's essay is over twenty years old, feedback is clearly a topic with which we continue to grapple.

Elbow's argument against ranking and grades, so closely linked to the writings of Alfie Kohn, Sir Ken Robinson, and many others, highlights what we have known to be true about student writers for a long time: grades kill writing. As Elbow points out, "Ranking leads students to get so hung up on these oversimple quantitative verdicts that they care more about scores than about learning - more about the grade we put on the paper than about the comment we have written on it." Any teacher of writing knows this. How many times have we complained that when we return their essays, after spending hours making careful comments and questions, students take a cursory look at the grade and toss the paper into the trash. Why is this? Elbow argues in part this happens because we have conditioned our student writers to be concerned with their rank. We have made them grade addicts.

And yet, we know this will not grow their writing skills. Elbow argues that students need thoughtful, evaluative comments that move their thinking forward, but which is mostly free of the ranking that can hinder their growth. I agree. We want our students to become reflective, confident, motivated writers. However, the threat of the red pen, whether in the form of a grade or in the form of over evaluating, can shut down the reflection and risk-taking that we need to encourage in our practicing writers to engage in. Elbow writes that "constant evaluation by someone in authority makes students reluctant to take the risks that are needed for good learning -- to try out hunches and trust their own judgement." We do not want students simply writing for us. What good is that? Elbow states that the worst influence of grading and over-evaluation of our student writers can be seen when students make changes to their writing “for the sake of the grade; not really taking the time to make up their own minds about whether they think my judgments or suggestions really make sense to them."

Instead, student writers grow when given opportunities to write for supportive readers. Students do need opportunities to write for both evaluation and (unfortunately) ranking, but we can lessen the negative impact these practices by carefully considering how to motivate student writers to reflect and revise through careful use of our feedback. As teachers, we need to be their supportive and not just critical readers.  We know this from our own experiences as writers.  I bet that most of us can recall that one teacher (or perhaps a few) who encouraged us to write more, who believed in our writing endeavors.  Elbow highlights this, too: "...the way writers learn to like their writing is by the grace of having a reader or two who likes it -- even though it's not good.  Having at least a few appreciative readers is probably indispensable to getting better." We help our writers grow when we put down the red pen and put on our reading lens. When we respond to our students' writing as invested readers, our feedback helps to support their endeavors. We highlight that connection between writer and audience, between writing and reading. And when we give feedback from this position, we help our emerging writers understand both the purpose and audience for their writing. This is where writing grows -- not in circling grammar mistakes or slashing out redundancies, but in highlighting our connections to the writer and the writing.

The Power of Publication

Slice of Life Challenge, Day 24

Before sending their pieces out for publication, my tenth grade English classes used Skype to connect with experts in the publishing world. This past November, as my students were in the midst of revising a creative writing piece that stemmed from an idea found in their daily writer's notebook, my students and I had the opportunity to speak with the founder and senior editor of Teen Ink, Ms. Stephanie Meyer. Additionally, students spoke Christine Weiser, the Executive Director of Philadelphia Stories who shared fantastic advice for revising both short stories and poetry, as well as details about what her editorial board looks for in the pieces that are submitted. Students used that advice to revise their work before sending it outside the classroom for publication.

Not only were a number of my students published on Teen Ink's online site, but yesterday evening one of my first semester tenth grade students emailed me that she had received word that she is about to have her poem published in the upcoming print edition of Philadelphia Stories, Jr.  The student's poem stemmed from a writer's notebook prompt where were searched through print editions of the local newspaper for inspiration.  Her poem, "Pray for the People in Camden," will appear in the spring/summer edition of the magazine. As students learned when speaking with Ms. Weiser of Philadelphia Stories, hundreds of students submit their work for publication, but only a few are chosen for the print edition of the publication. Those that are considered for publication have been read multiple times by multiple editors who must agree that a work is worthy of publication. My student's piece was selected from among many poetry submissions by students in our area.

And the student who wrote the piece? Quiet and unassuming.  She rarely spoke in our class and shied away from attention being drawn to her accomplishments.  It was through our daily writer's notebook that I learned of her interest in poetry as a form of storytelling.  It was in asking her and her classmates to work on a piece to send outside the classroom for publication that I learned of her dedication to the craft of writing, watching her in class and online spend hours crafting the lines of her poem, considering if she should add punctuation at her line breaks or not.

Both the prompt she took inspiration from and the use of writer's notebooks in general came from my involvement in the Pennsylvania Writing and Literature Project and the connections to the teachers and writers of the National Writing Project.  And this is why I am an NWP groupie: in giving my students an opportunity to write every day, the choice of what and how to write, and opportunities to share and publish their work, I have learned more about the young people in my classes, and not just about who they are as writers, but who they are as individuals.  And that has made all the difference in how I am able to support their individual learning adventures.

Learning to Fly

Slice of Life Challenge, Day 23

A sudden burst of color shoots past my knees.  My three year old son, eager to head out for an afternoon walk at a local state park, takes off in a run toward the paved pathway that leads downhill toward the river.  There is no stopping him.  He has flown past pleas to slow down that both his father and I call out to him.  In a split second, as he gains all the speed his little legs can muster, I watch it happen.  He throws his arms behind him, and although I don't see it, I imagine that he tried to push off with his right foot. To take to the air.  To fly. Wind pushing back his blonde hair, face turned upward, eyes closed, arms held behind him like wings unfurling.

Of course, he didn't. He came crashing down, face first into the pavement.  There was a moment before the tears, when my husband and I were rushing toward him that he looked up stunned, almost finding it hard to believe that he didn't lift off. And then the tears.  I imagine them to be not only accompanying the bloody cut on his forehead, but also for a bit of heartbreak.  The gash on his forehead a reminder that he was to stay firmly planted to the ground.

For now.

See this is not a new story. This is what he does.  In fact exactly one week ago while we were getting coffee at a local cafe, my little man took off on a full run around the cobblestone courtyard, arms thrown behind him as if he were flying.  He caught himself a bit better last week; the fall only resulting in a familiar big purple goose egg on his forehead, but no blood.  He is my dreamer, my idealist. He gets up, tries again.  Eyes to the sky, this little one will fly.  And I so desperately want him to, to keep that hope, that belief in something impossible.  I want him to fly.  And more than that, I want him to keep up that persistence and perseverance that drives him to get back up and try again even after so many heartbreaking falls.

But maybe next time he can try again while running on the grass.

Connecting to Learning Communities

Slice of Life Challenge, Day 20

I am the one in the strawberry red vest, near the middle of the top row.  And that is my entire kindergarten class; 16 of us. We were small, but we were mighty. And even though I moved away from our small town when I was 12, we were already thick as thieves, and I stay in touch with some of them to this day. It was in this tightly-knit class that I grew to love school. And it was also here that I learned to take risks.

In a small school, you have opportunities to play many roles.  In fact, you have to.  You don't get cut from the basketball team because they need the players.  And so even as a young student, I had opportunities to sew through 4-H, learn jump shots through basketball camp, etch mirrors in after school art club, I was pulled out of class to participate in a Great Books reading group as well as sing in a special choir. Even at 7, 8, 9 years old, I played many roles within my school community. And so I grew comfortable trying new things, learning new skills.  I came to see school as a comfortable place to take risks.  

I suppose I carry those lessons from elementary school with me to this day.  A number of my family, friends, and colleagues have labeled me a busy-body, and rightly so.  I enjoy learning new things and don't hesitate to take on new and challenging roles.  I am the perpetual volunteer, and I have come to realize that this is in part born from my very early experiences in the classroom. I seek out opportunities to learn new things, to make connections, to build communities. As a young person, I was encouraged to be active, to be involved, and I carry that with me.  I'm a teacher and a grad students, a parent and a wife. I'm on Twitter and I blog. I'm active in a string of organizations like PAWLP, GCT, PAECT, NCTE, PCTELA, and EdCamp Philly. I flip, I 20% time, I UbD, and workshop in my classes. And I invite others to join me on these learning adventures, knowing that along the way I will make some amazing connections.

As I take on new roles, I have connected with educators from a variety of school settings, with all variety of experiences and stories to share.  I have found mentors and collaborators who have bouyed my efforts and gently pointed out my shortfalls. They have pushed me to think more carefully and critically about my assumptions of student learning and the work I do in the classroom.  And this is what makes it all worthwhile.  I am a better teacher and a better student when I emerse myself in learning communities.  Being involved in a number of organizations, presenting at conferences, participating in weekly Twitter chats connects me with these communities. Much like I felt in my small elementary school, I am able to take risks because I am connected with learning communities that will both challenge and support my learning adventures. We all need those connections.

If you follow me on Twitter, you are likely tired of seeing my posts of Meenoo Rami's new book Thrive.  But her work is about just this idea: making meaningful connections to mentor your learning, whether you've just stepped into your first classroom or, like me, have been at it for over a decade. I would encourage you to pick it up, read it with me, and connect!

Remixing Poetry

Slice of Life Challenge, Day 17

I'm taking inspiration from Kevin Hodgson today.  A few days ago he posted some of his remixed and lifted lines of poetry using Zeega.  So I just had to give it a try!

I took a first draft of an idea I wrote for our morning writer's notebook prompt and remixed it from a student's perspective, found some images on Flickr, added music from SoundCloud and, well, here it is!