Rewind to 1989

“When students write for teachers, they are writing ‘uphill’ in the authority dimension: instead of having the normal language-using experience of trying to communicate ‘across’ to others in order to tell them what’s on their mind, they are having the experience of trying to communicate ‘up’ to someone whose only reason for reading is to judge the acceptability of what they wrote and how they wrote it.”—Peter Elbow

I came across this quote during the summer while rereading Jonan Donaldson's "The Maker Movement and the Rebirth of Constructionism."

I was drawn to the quote because I was experiencing the obligatory summer nostalgia for the classroom.  I like to dream big about what school could be. I know it sounds cheesy, but I even visualize how an ideal class period will go the upcoming term.

Elbow covers many of my current beliefs in the quote. Here's how it breaks down in my head:

• be explicit to students about pedagogy--blur the "authority dimension" as best as possible
• continue to have students write to authentic audiences and not just me--"communicate 'across' to others"
• begin to have students use the classroom as their learning environment--fight against students having "the experience of trying to communicate 'up' to someone whose only reason for reading is to judge the acceptability of what they wrote and how they wrote it"
• continue to place an emphasis on students developing digital literacies--it's 2014 now, so "communicating 'across'" often involves technology, or at least it involves the choice to use technology
• continue to stress the importance of considering the rhetorical situation in order to be successful in any communicative act--effectively "communicate 'across' to others in order to tell them what's on their mind"

Do This, and Other Advice, on Student Blogging

My Rhetoric students have 3 days left of high school. Not just my class. High school. They spent the year blogging, making roughly 10-12 posts per semester. Some students posted on their own--poems, pictures, random thoughts--and some students redesigned their blogs monthly. They often went from smaller fonts to larger ones, from black backgrounds to white ones, and from posts with one hyperlink to an explosion of images and sounds.

image courtesy of Traci Gardner, flickr

As they wrap up, I've asked them to add two final posts: the first will be a "DO THIS" assignment. They recommend things to their blog readers. A year from now, whether they're still posting or if they revisit their blog, they may really be embarrassed by their recommendations, but for now, this is how they feel. Our categories are as follows:

• Listen to this: (song/album/band)
• Read this: (book/magazine/food labels)
• Watch this: (tv show/movie/your mouth)
• Play this: (videogame/sport)
• Eat this: (food)
• Do this: (diet/overtip/whatever people should do)
• Click this: (a website that is funny/interesting and legal)
• Go here: (a place to visit)
• And always, always, remember this: (your best advice)

I'm letting them have total creative control over how this appears, because that's what I've learned from them about their blogs this year: they want a little structure and a lot of creative control. 

In their end-of-year presentations, we (Hackney and I) asked students to tell the story of their development as a writer, highlighting the blogs and the research paper at some point in that story. When they talked about the blog, I'd say that roughly half of the students discussed finding their writer's voice. I shared this with Hackney, and as usual, he embarrassed me with his deep digital pockets and pulled out an essay from Peter Elbow, and it probably changed the way I'll teach writing next year. That's a conversation for another post.

Their final blog post of the year--taking place in class in the next 3 days--will be a post that will function as a capstone for their year. Hackney is encouraging a "selfie" video, or at the very least an audio recording. I'm just asking for the post, but offering the video as an option. I hope they can summarize their blog, their thoughts, the meaning behind this whole experience. 

In the "Evolution of a Writer" presentations that the students just wrapped up, they posted their presentations on the blogs (see earlier posts from Hackney and me to see our students' blogs). We used them as a host for their Prezi, PPT, Powtoon, or other visual presentation tool. I was really happy with the way that turned out. The embedded presentation doesn't work if you just view it on its own, but we asked the students to be a necessary component to their story. "A presentation should need a presenter." That was the motto we went with.

Since we started this blog with the encouragement of professor and digital mastermind Troy Hicks, telling us it's imperative that we write along with our students, I guess I'll answer my own DO THIS questions:

• Listen to this: My Morning Jacket's Acoustic Citsuoca. Jim James' voice never sounded so beautiful and haunting.
• Read this: "Put Your Hands on 7." I realize, as an English teacher, that I should be recommending Kafka or Orwell, but I really enjoy non-fiction, too. In this case, Mike Newman (no relation)--who runs the Illinois running website Dyestat  blogged in 18 installments last year about the path to his York HS cross country team's run at a championship. As a cross country and track coach, I was obsessed with each installment. 
• Watch this: Moone Boy on PBS. Chris O'Dowd, the Irish cop from Bridesmaids plays the imaginary friend of Martin, a 12-year-old boy. It's all filmed in Ireland. I have to thank Hackney for this recommendation. I have to include NBA playoffs as something else to watch. It's so different than the regular season.
• Play this: Tetris. It's a classic. I'm just sayin'.
• Eat this: steak tacos with cilantro and lime. Casablanca in Joliet makes them better than most.
• Do this: take the Platinum tour at Graceland.
• Click this: I am a writing teacher, after all, so this site covers a burgeoning genre: check out Passive Aggressive Notes.
• Go here: It's not exotic in the sense of requiring a passport, but it's worth a visit: Chicago Botanic Gardens. People might actually get a chance to visit this place. 
• And always, always, remember this: We all make choices. We then have to live with them.

Blog as Storytelling

Prepared is best, but underprepared is always better than overprepared.
— Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer) February 19, 2014

Newman and I had our students create blogs this year as a way to practice formative writing that accounts for an authentic audience and prepares students for success in summatively assessed writing. For example, if we were ultimately going to write a compare/contrast paper, students would first practice the skills of comparing/contrasting on their blog.

In addition, a key part of the blog assignment is giving students a chance to think about their learning.  The blog functions as a place to practice writing, but it is also used to post summative assignments and reflections. In this way, the blog captures a student's work for the class in one place, provides an authentic audience, and requires other design decisions as students consider the genre of blogging.

Basically, the blog acts as a platform for formative practice and as a hub or portfolio for publishing a student's work from throughout the year.

Our students have done some pretty amazing work. They've designed blogs that show genre awareness, they've practiced the skills for a unit in various ways, and they've created some strong final assessments.

The truth is, though, that if you would have asked me last summer if I thought the blogs would look like they do and that we would have been able to do all of the things mentioned above, I wouldn't have had any idea what you were talking about.

An English Teacher's Love Song for NPR

Talk radio before 40: one man's journey to finding NPR on the radio dial

I'm alone in my car. The engine's off, but the keys are in the ignition. I'm in a huge parking lot, and I'm transfixed to the spot. I should be leaving now, but I haven't pulled the keys. I need them so I can listen to the radio. I should be walking into the grocery store, but instead I sit. Jim Derogotis and Greg Kot are adding a song to their Desert Island Jukebox. Instead I sit. Ira Glass features a story about someone's American Life--a guy who wants to achieve transcendence by fasting, and the whole time he's wondering if he's doing it right because he's had no epiphany yet. Instead I sit. I listen to a doctor tell a riveting story about trying to save Mother Teresa and the pressure from an entire country to perform this miracle.

image courtesy of NPR

This is what happens when you become your father and discover NPR. In Chicago, that's 91.5FM WBEZ. When you're a child, even a teen, NPR on the radio is the equivalent of the swishing of a dish washer, the hum of the air conditioner, or the rumble of the washing machine: it's background noise, and I don't care about it. Then something happened about 4 years ago. I don't know how it happened, but I --like when I put on 10 pounds over Christmas Break--woke up different. I added 91.5 to my presets in my car.

Where the good ideas happen

Jane's Addiction had a song, "Standin' in the Shower Thinkin'." I would say 30% of my lesson plans happen there. Maybe 50% happen at school. But that extra 20%--and maybe I'm overestimating--happen while I'm in my car. If I'm not listening to sports radio, I'm listening to NPR. What happened to music? That's a post for another day.  Having taught English for 14 years now, I'm ready for anything to lend itself to a lesson plan. I once caught a Mike Birbiglia story on This American Life where he told this story about a car accident. I parked at Dominick's (sky point for Dominick's, Chicago), and I just sat there. I'm caught up in the story, and then I think, "I gotta use this for teaching narrative." And that's what I do with NPR. All the time.

And not just in the classroom

image courtesy of NPR

I recently finished my 4th year of coaching cross country, and during my first year, we were riding to a meet on a Saturday morning. The guys were in that 7:30am Saturday morning moderate coma: half asleep, half thinking about the race, half wondering why they came out for a sport with competition that regularly happens before 10am. In cross country, I have the benefit of coaching a group of guys with a high cumulative GPA. I think they might enjoy logic puzzles over sleep sometimes. So I reflected on a Car Talk Puzzler (or "Puzzla" if you use the Boston accent of the show's hosts) from NPR. I know less about cars than I do about math--a tight competition, to be sure--but the show always intrigued me. So I lay it out there: "You have a 9oz. glass and a 4oz. glass, you have unlimited water, and you need exactly 6oz. of water. You cannot estimate. How do you get exactly 6oz.?" Well, when I heard this on NPR during a Saturday morning errand run, I literally drove through a stoplight picturing this puzzler. Once I put this out there for the team, the bus adopted the focus of an ACT classroom, with me as the proctor. "Wait, Newman, do we have to use those glasses?" "Wait, can I keep emptying my glasses?" and so it goes. Thanks, NPR.

A little credit here?

image courtesy of NPR

I'm pretty sure my NPR listening paid off for bringing This I Believe to my school. It wasn't in the curriculum 4 years ago. It is now. To teach narrative, I used the NPR long-running series. I had students submit their essays to the website. I collected their stories, including ones written by Hackney and I along with his students, and made a book of our stories. We underestimated the cost of said book and begged the principal to cover about $300 for that book (Thanks, Dr. Gibson).  The first time I heard one of those stories, I knew I could hook my students. Now, all sophomore students are composing these narratives as part of their curriculum.

And all the other stuff

The Moth Hour. On the Media. Morning Edition. Weekend Edition. More recently, I used my favorite show, Sound Opinions, as my class worked on evaluations. I sent a tweet out to hosts Greg Kot and Jim Derogotis about how I was using their show in class, and they acknowledged my comment by favoriting/retweeting. I talked to my class about how we might evaluate something we are not interested in. I heard the show on another Saturday morning grocery store shopping trip. Kot shared his experience covering Yanni for a week during a December 2013 show where they let the audience ask questions. He gave criteria for an evaluation that played perfectly to my class: give context, give evidence, give insight; educate, illuminate, and entertain. What great advice. More importantly, what great advice I heard while driving 6 miles to Meijer to buy bananas.

My Dad had the right idea

My dad wasn't listening to NPR when we were kids because he was a teacher. He wasn't listening because he wanted us to listen. He tuned in to 91.5WBEZ because he wanted to punish us. No. Wait. That was the WGN720AM "Farm Report." That was how he punished us when we would hop in the car for a vacation. But he loved learning, and still does. I can't help but learn something every time I tune in to NPR. My dad's selfishness in listening so he could learn something gave way to my altruism, in that I listen so I can use the shows to help my teaching. My students.  Or maybe, selfishly, I listen because I like it in the same way he did.  I learn something every time. 

KEEP CALM AND USE TECHNOLOGY

I teach in a district with a 1:1 environment where each student that I teach has been issued a laptop.  The mission statement for our 1:1 initiative recognizes that "the integration of technology is essential to motivating and engaging in rigorous and relevant lessons."  I appreciate that in this mission statement it is made clear that technology is to be used in the midst of rigorous and relevant lessons.  The computer is not a savior.  It is not the teacher.  

It has been my experience that some educators are apprehensive about the 1:1 initiative and its implications on teaching.  One of my colleagues has done a nice job of addressing some of these concerns in a recent blog post.  In addition to the teachers comparing their use or understanding of technology to each other, I imagine that some part of the apprehension to use technology is very much a fear that is rooted in the narrative that the computer is the answer, as is seen in the "One Laptop per Child" campaign (See video).

On a pragmatic level--fear of being seen as obsolete--I can see how buying into these kinds of beliefs has the potential to stunt teacher growth in the area of integrating technology. 

Exploring Apathy and Motivation in Teachers and Students as Professional Development

"I'm up there talking and they don't even care."
"10 out of 26 kids turned in a rough draft. I told them that they'd lose points, and the next day only 2 more kids turned one in."
"I planned the hell outta this lesson and it totally bombed. I thought they'd be excited, but they were like, 'Whatever.'"

And then we play the blame game:

• it's their home life; they don't value education
• they're always multi-tasking and can't focus when I'm just trying to teach them
• their other teachers never collect homework so they're used to doing nothing
• last year's teacher didn't teach them anything so they're not ready for this class

Image courtesy of kirkh from Flickr

So whether I've heard these things or said these things, that doesn't matter. It doesn't change the fact that student apathy exists. It also doesn't change the fact that teacher apathy exists. In our case, though, as teachers, it's the apathy to evaluate our own practices and determine what our role is in student motivation.

Because I had numerous conversations during the first semester about student motivation--in the hall, in the lunchroom, in my office--I knew this topic was on teachers' minds. When veteran teachers--those teaching over a decade--start to compare the current level of apathy they're facing and claim that "it's never been this bad," it's worth examining. Is that true? Is there some new development we need to be concerned about regarding student apathy?

Primum Non Nocere: Should Teachers Have an Oath, Too?

The Latin phrase, primum non nocere, translated from the original Greek, is generally associated with the Hippocratic Oath, which is sworn by some physicians, often more out of tradition than conviction. This English translation of "first, do no harm," never appears in the Oath itself, but it's grown comfy along with the other maxims of Hippocrates.

Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine

Still, this concept is one to which doctors generally subscribe. Should we, as teachers, consider the same maxim? Might we have different ideas from Socrates, John Dewey, or Bill Gates (kidding) to which we, as English teachers, subscribe?

Last year I served as a jury foreman on a medical malpractice suit, and this concept of "first, do no harm" came up repeatedly. Of the 12 jurors and 2 alternates, I think 4 of us were educators. The prosecution lawyer on behalf of the deceased patient regularly invoked this phrase, asking if what the doctor prescribed for his patient was really in the patient's best interest if it possibly led to his death. The lawyer asked us, "Did the doctor violate the concept of 'first, do no harm?'" Recently, I started thinking of what our binding agreement might be to our students. What should they commonly expect of all of us? Maybe this phrase could be adopted by educators. Or maybe it's too passive because it implies a position of doing nothing, possibly.  Maybe we need a phrase that demands action.

Children, Digital Literacy, Girl Talk, Remix, and a Timeless Essay from 1988 via Frank Smith

Anecdote
As I was putting my just-turned-two daughter to bed last night she asked me, as she always does, to read "Pooh."  She loves this book because it is just an encyclopedia with various pictures of animals and we get to look at the animals and talk about how they are different from one another. 

Side note: My daughter refers to the book as "Pooh" because, in infinite marketing genius, the publishers simply splatter pictures of Winnie the Pooh and friends at various corners of the page, making it irresistible to children.

When I was done reading "Pooh," and put my daughter in her crib, she asked me to give her a collection of books that she loves to read called Gigi.  She has asked for these books before, but I never thought much of it.  Of course, at this age, by read, I mean look at pictures and talk about what she sees.                          

But, what was different this time is that I noticed--after standing in the hallway and listening to her talk about the pictures--she was making up a story as she went along by combining what she thought happens in the various books in the set, at least according to the pictures.

I was excited to hear her jabbering on about Gigi's friend and daddy, how they weren't able to wear the dress they wanted to, and there was probably something about having to go to time out. 

The Kiddos

My daughter was mimicking what she has heard my wife and me say, and she was using that language that she had picked up along the way to give the pictures in her little books meaning.  This activity wasn't strange to her.  As far as she knew, she was reading.

This experience reminded me of Frank Smith's collection of essays, Joining the Literacy Club, published back in 1988.  I went back and reread his opening essay and have some thoughts about how Smith's ideas about reading and writing apply to my much older students.

Specifically, I'm curious about how Smith's insights inform students' understanding of technology and its relationship to reading and writing.

My Audience, My Blog, My Cause, My Goals: Student Feedback on Blogging

Image courtesy of Flickr

"Alright. I'm using random.org to call you up for your blog conference. You'll have 4-6 minutes to go through the prompts I've given you. I'll have a computer up here already so you can walk me through your thinking. According to random.org, the first person is...."

Thus my blog conferences, as described here, had begun.

Here is a list of my period 3 and 4 blogs, and I've included Hackney's period 7 blogs, too.

I am writing this post after my first day of conferences. My students (as Sean's would later in the day) began their conferences with me about how this semester of blogging has gone. Our blog assignment sheet can be found here.

Essentially, we gave students their choice of blog platform--Blogger, Tumblr, Wordpress, Weebly, Snack Websites--and had them post almost weekly in the genre we were studying for that two-week unit.  For example, our curriculum includes a Literacy Narrative as the first essay. Their first blog post had to be a narrative about something that happened to them on the job. If they never had a job, some students posted about trying to get one, and others wrote about summer work with their dad or mission work with their church. The blog was a chance to formatively practice the writing genre so that they could perform it better summatively. In terms of which blog platform they chose, most of my students used Tumblr, about a third used Blogger, and just a few used Wordpress or Weebly.

Not one of my students had been a blogger prior to this course. A few had a tumblr account but didn't really do anything with it. One girl told me today that she thought blogs "were just for responding to what other people said, like what my mom had to do for an online class she took in college."

Here is the list of topics the students were assigned for blogging; they follow the writing progression for the course: Literacy Narrative, Annotated Bibliography, Single-text Analysis, Compare/Contrast, Literary Analysis, Multi-source Synthesis/Argument.

When the students wrote an argument essay, they had to blog about a cause on change.org. Suddenly, they were activists petitioning others to sign on for a cause, to make change happen. One student told me today, "I had to get more people to look at the petition. My goal for next semester is to find out how to get more people to read my blog." The student used hashtags on his change.org post to get the petition viewed more frequently.

I had the students walk me through their journey of audience awareness. I asked them how their understanding of audience developed. I heard them say things like, "Well, at first, I knew it was just you, so I didn't care as much, but then when you had us start following others in the class, I was like, 'I don't want them to think I'm dumb,' so I tried harder." Another said, "The audience at first was you and the class, but then you showed us how to check our page views if we used Blogger, and people from around the world were viewing my blog. I felt like I had to be more interesting." And, my favorite, was this: "My goal for next semester is to make my blog more glowy and sparkly so more people read it and comment on it."

I took nothing they said as a personal attack; rather, I felt like a Physical Therapist talking to a patient about how the stretches made him feel (it hurts when you move my arm like this, so don't do that). When I heard comments like, "I just couldn't connect to that post you made us write about that TED talk," or "That post in response to tipping from the New York Times, I just didn't care. That set me back because I didn't have anything to say about it, so I was late on that one," it's those comments that I will use as formative feedback for my own teaching.

How can I improve this blogging experience next semester? Next year? For other teachers who ask me how it's going? How much will I control the topics and how much will I let them choose?

I know--because I've searched for the info myself--that there are thousands of blog posts about how to be a better blogger. About how to teach blogging. About how to make interesting posts. Well, I'm one semester in, so here's my humble addition to the existing literature about teaching with blogs:

1. Make the posts occur regularly.
2. Give them choices.
3. Use the blogs as formative writing practice for summative writing assignments.
4. Check in with them regularly.
5. Get testimonials from previous students about the positives and drawbacks of the various blog platforms.
6. Make them read each other's blogs.
7. Use technorati.com, the blog search engine, to get them reading blogs.
8. Conference with them.
9. Grade them with care, because they care about being assessed on how they feel.
10. Identify your tech wizards in class and empower them to help others.
11. Create opportunities for kids to teach each other how to do make posts more interesting.
12. Help them expand the audience: email the links to parents, other teachers, or other classes.
13. Oh yeah, and write along with them. That's what got Hackney and I writing this blog in the first place.

I am open to all kinds of feedback on this, and please, feel free to open up my students' blogs in the link near the top and give them some feedback, too. We look forward to next semester when we can enrich this experience even more.

Achtung, Baby! Using Audio Feedback in the Classroom

When U2 had something to say to their fans in the '90s, they used German and asked us to Achtung, Baby!  When I have something to say to my students, I use Audacity, Screenr, Jing, or even Audioboo, and I, too, want them to listen up.



From Flickr, courtesy of xrayspx

The issue of how teachers give feedback has been relevant as long as teachers have asked students to compose their thoughts. Written feedback may appear as only terminal comments, as praise/comment/question, as a series of checks and question marks, or any combination of words and symbols meant to reward, punish, shame or inform the writer (depending on the professionalism and disposition of the teacher). English Journal published an essay from Bardine, Schmitz-Bardine and Deegan that highlights a number of key points about feedback. One key issue is the benefits of conferencing. I've highlighted the work of Don Murray in 2 previous posts ("Implications 1" and "Implications 2"), and of course he wrote about the importance of discussing students' work with them, also. It's no secret. But what if we are struggling to find the time, management style, or method for having those meetings?

While it's not an honest quid pro quo, audio feedback is a worthy surrogate for the conference, and I'll explain why.