Saturday, January 29, 2022

What Are Students Learning? Ask Them!

 


Fiction offers us a powerful marriage of information and empathy. When we vicariously experience, through reading, not just the facts, but what it was like for a person to live those facts, we are more fully empowered to honor that Divine image bearer and love that neighbor. Nice philosophy. Does it play out? How about with middle schoolers?

To find out, ask. I did. And my 6th and 7th graders have given me a resounding "YES." I am sitting at my kitchen table on a Saturday afternoon, a little bit in awe of the learning they have shared with each other and with me. I had prepared the ground, selecting a novel, posing essential questions, and scaffolding activities. Then, at the end of it all, I simply asked, “What did you learn or think about during the last 4 weeks?” I’ll get to their answers in just a moment.

Before the term started, I considered my students. Most of them fully or partly Japanese, attending an international Christian school in Japan. I wanted them to think about the cultural, spiritual, and personal identity they are building from the diversity of stories that have brought them all to this unique setting. I also wanted them to consider what global issues they are unavoidably entangled in. The novel I selected was When My Name Was Keoko by Newbery Award winning author Linda Sue Park, narrated from the alternating perspectives of a Korean sister and brother over the years from 1940-1945. 

Then I chose essential questions: Who am I? How are people the same and different? How does historical fiction help me understand and impact the world? Finally, I scaffolded the learning with before-reading and during-reading learning activities. (More on that next week.)

Yesterday, when we had finished our final discussion, I posed the question online and asked students to post their own response and then reply to at least 2 classmates. (Every single post got 2-5 replies. They were so engaged.) Here are some of the things they said:

My thought was that there were a lot of changes to the characters. Especially Sun-hee, I feel like she became more mature and responsible. I also learned that the characters were all brave, but in different ways. Uncle did big things and was a rebel. Abuji and Omoni were calm but also did unexpected things. Mrs. Ahn was also surprisingly brave and helped the rebels. Every Korean's identity was changed as Japanese, but I was happy to read that they were able to change their identity back at the end. I am glad the Kim family was proud of their country and was courageous even in their worst times.

I think that Tae-yul was very brave to join the Japanese army for his Uncle and for his family. I think I would not have had the courage to join the Japanese army for anybody, even if it was for my family. Reading When My Name Was Keoko I learned that sometimes you have to help people before yourself.

I learned that even though someone may be small they can make a big impact on the world. Like Tae-yul volunteering for the kamikaze, it made the Japanese be nicer to the Koreans. Uncle also made an impact on the world at his time, he printed the illegal newspapers and handed them out to people.

(4 replies to that one, including: I think it’s interesting that even someone small can make a big impact on the world, and it kind of encourages us to do something. This could lead to some brainstorming next week!)

I tried imagining how it would be like to hide something illegal in your house, and I was amazed at how brave all of the characters were.  I also thought that Abuji wasn’t doing anything, but he was actually writing the newspapers but he didn’t tell his family about that.  I thought that he was extremely brave since people knew that his brother was printing illegal newspapers, but Abuji still helped uncle even though he knew it was very dangerous.  I will try to read a bit more historical-fiction because it makes me think about things more seriously.

This book really showed me how the Koreans were treated while they were conquered by the Japanese. It also shows me the perspective of a Korean person and how they saw the whole thing. Overall this book is really great and reading it could teach you a lot like being grateful. Discussing this with other teammates also helped notice some parts that I didn't notice the first time I was reading the book, therefore discussing it helped me learn more than I could if I read it alone.

I learned about how the book can be seen by other people with different cultural backgrounds. And discussing with other people in my class has helped me understand the book more deeply. When I was reading the book, I had this feeling of guilt in me because I live in a country that wiped out Korean culture and replaced it with its own. With the guilt, I noticed how there are two types of people: the one that is brave enough to stand up and spread his/hers thoughts around and the one that just rather follows the enemies rules because you don't want to be arrested/killed. This has made me think about which person I'd be if I was Korean back then. But it also made me think about my personality in general: Am I a coward, or a hero? I love historical fiction in general because I like learning about history itself. I am happy and honored that I could read and speak about the Japanese occupation in Korea.

(Reply: I also felt kind of guilty but I hope we can reflect on the past so it won't happen again. Same student replying to another post: Yeah I think the Japanese treated the Koreans badly but I'm mainly going to blame war for making this happen.)

Interchange after a similar post:
S1: I agree with "If I were the Koreans I would not want to change my name" I don't want to change my name too!
S2: Yes, because that will mean losing part of yourself!
S3: I agree, I never knew anything about Korea and Japan and it’s really interesting to learn it in a story like this and the relationship between Korea and Japan!
S2: Me too I did not know why Korea hated Japan so much.

Wow. I definitely have some thoughts to follow up on--from brainstorming ideas about small acts that could lead to big impacts to what to do with national guilt as a middle schooler. But that's what Jesus is for!

Mostly, I'm just impressed by where kids will go with their peers if I give them the chance, and blessed to have the opportunity to be part of the process. 

What happens when you ask students what they've learned?



Saturday, January 22, 2022

Increase Global Connectedness with Books



Connections. We are, inescapably, connected. To our family, neighbors, community, country, world. To the past and the present. To people who are like us in many ways, and to people who are unlike us in many ways. 

If we ever doubted it, those connections have been highlighted in glowing neon colors in the last 2 years. Virus transmission leaps every natural and man-made boundary, leaving us to trace its waves around the world again and again. Like every returnee to Japan in mid-December, I submitted to a 14-day quarantine after returning from a 10-day visit to my kids and grandkids in the US, and still Omicron infiltrated the borders. Supply chain disruptions affect our daily lives—this morning my daughter told me her church has been waiting since summer for replacement parts for an old heating system.

The manifestations are new, but the reality is not. Martin Luther King, Jr. said it like this in "A Letter from Birmingham Jail," which I often read with 11th grade AP students: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Jesus called it loving your neighbor—we just didn’t know how far-flung those neighbors could be.  

Yet that call is inescapable. The divine call to love our neighbors, to draw on the lessons of the past (both negative—like those who hardened their hearts in Hebrews 3:7-11—and positive—like the great cloud of witnesses in Hebrews 11), and to be part of his mission to bring life out of death, cosmos out of chaos, letting justice roll on like a river (Amos 5:24).

How do we invite students into this overwhelming task? An easy place to start is to do an inventory of the books students read. Who do they meet there, in the characters and the authors? Are they male and female? Are they from a variety of continents and cultures? Are they from the past and the present? Will students find people in whom they recognize themselves, and people who take their hands and lead them into other ways of seeing the world?

Pursuing answers to these questions, I’ve adopted new novels for my combined 6th/7th grade curriculum in the last 2 years:
Right now we’re reading the last one—set in Korea during the Japanese occupation. A Japanese teacher said to me, “I’m so glad the students are learning that history. Really understanding what happened is the only way to heal the relationship.”

This is what I have been thinking about this week as my book discussion group talked about chapter 4 of Becoming a Globally Competent Teacher titled “Global Interconnectedness.” I especially noted the chart of books that highlight global interconnectedness (see photo above). They’re all in my classroom library for grades 4-7, excepting the one which is high school level and Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate. I ordered it. It arrived Thursday. As soon as I read it, I'll advertise it to my classes and put it in my classroom library for their independent reading.

What do your students read, and what do they need to read—in the curriculum and optionally—to understand and love the neighbors with whom they are globally connected?

Saturday, January 15, 2022

Planting the Seeds of a Reading Culture: Books and Time

Blinding flash of the obvious: If I want students to find a book they’ll be able to sink into, I need to give them books to explore and time to explore them. Here’s how I learned that, starting with 2 scenarios from last November.

  • Period 1: Every student is settled into an independent reading book before the bell even rings. That silence? The sound of 6th and 7th graders reading. 
  • Period 6: The bell rings and a few students are diving for their seats shouting, “Safe!” while others are proclaiming, “I’m ready!” I remind them that it is independent reading time. Some open their books and begin to read. Some jump up to dig through backpacks. A small, predictable group gathers around the book baskets to find a new book. Again. That chaos? The sound of 4th and 5th graders getting ready to read. Flow? Elusive. 

What is the difference? Mostly time and focus. Mine first, not theirs. First, it was 1 and 2/3 years ago that I moved into middle school and dove into reading, collecting, and sharing good middle school books. When we returned to in-person class in late spring of 2020, I began giving independent reading time. Since then, I’ve accumulated a small but powerful middle grades classroom library (see here, here, and here) and grown a culture of reading in my combined 6th and 7th grade class. 

When I moved into 4th and 5th last April, I had less familiarity with lower level books and less class time to invest. Due to Covid-19 adjustments, I had a shortened class period in which I focused on writing with short mentor texts, and I continued the pre-existing class protocol of independent reading for homework. 

Late in the fall, we returned to a full class period, and I hoped to just expand the at-home reading that was happening, giving additional time in class. It worked…for some students…and clearly not for others.     

My New Year’s resolution: See if I can make independent reading in 4th and 5th as successful as it is in 6th and 7th. This was sparked by participating in an online ed camp focused on choice reading. (See here for the content of Camp Choice Reading by Betsy Potash of Spark Creativity. What you missed was the incredible interaction of 300+ educators on the private Facebook group where Betsy asked me what the difference was between my 6/7 class and my 4/5 class, giving me the opportunity to think all this through.)

The first day back after Christmas, I held a book tasting. Not one of those Pinterest-worthy ones where teachers have set up a coffee shop ambiance. Just a pile of books on each row of student desks. Each pile included some higher-level reading ransacked from my 6th and 7th grade classroom library and some lower-level reading snagged from the school library—Magic Tree House, Encyclopedia Brown, Beverly Cleary, Beverly Cleary, Roald Dahl, Geronimo Stilton… I gave students 2 minutes to browse the books stacked on their row of 3 desks. Then they rotated to the next row. They could take one book. If they found another, they had to trade—leave one, take one. 

It took half the period. The next day, 13 students settled immediately into their independent reading book. Two asked if they could get another book. Sure—that’s part of the deal—if you finish, or don’t like your book, or find it too difficult, of course you can change. That’s what readers do.

The next day, as I want around and noted the book and page number for each student (something I do once a week for monitoring), I saw that 2 students were reading the only 2 books I have from Jason Reynolds’ Track series: Ghost and Patina. I told them there were 2 more books in the series, and if they were interested, I would get them. The way their eyes lit up. The incredulity in their response, “Really??!!” Enough to melt any English teacher’s heart. 

Then Covid. We’ve been online for 2 days, with at least 1 more to come. I’ve moved the independent reading to the last 10 minutes of the period and release them from the Google Meet to do it. I can’t monitor their engagement the way I can in person. But I’m encouraged. It doesn’t take that much—just a little time and focus—to plant the seed of a reading culture.

Friday, January 7, 2022

Creative After-Reading Response: "I Am" Poems



It was the barely controlled chaos of the last day of English class before Christmas break in 4th and 5th grade. I needed to wrap up the novel we’d finished reading, Waffle Hearts by Maria Parr (see here and here), with a short but worthwhile activity—preferable an activity that would demonstrate understanding of the novel while challenging students’ creative and critical thinking, while also being engaging enough to harness the high level of energy. Do you remember the last day of class before Christmas break in elementary school?

The idea I came up with was “I Am” poems, but for the two main characters in the novel rather than the actual writer. I was actually surprised at how well it worked!  Students went back to the book to find examples. They discussed ideas with peers, came up with overall good summaries, and even deepened their understanding of the characters as they put themselves into the characters’ shoes, writing from their perspective. The side-by-side format also lent itself well to comparison and contrast, which some students picked up on and highlighted.

I gave students two forms with blanks—one for Trille and another for Lena (see photo above). With a little more time, I would have worked with the class to create a collaborative class draft. As it was, I posted the poems as students finished, and they were interested to see their classmates’ products. And today, I took the liberty of choosing lines from all the students’ poems and combining them (see below). A few times I just couldn’t whittle the choices down to one, so I left in two or three. Warning: I tried to avoid spoilers, but there are a couple. I can’t wait to share the product with the kids next week!    
    

“I Am” Poem: Trille

I am shy and loyal.
I wonder why Lena didn’t tell me something important was going to happen.
I hear Lena shouting, “Trille, you slowpoke!”
I see Lena falling from high places.
I want Lena to give me back Jesus’ picture.
I am shy and loyal.

I pretend to be in World War 2.
I feel love from parents.
I touch Auntie Granny’s waffle maker.
I worry if Hillside Molly is safe.
I cry when my dad sings my sad song.
I am shy and loyal.

I understand that Lena is scared, too.
I say God is with us.
I dream that I am Lena’s best friend.
I try to save Molly from the fire.
I hope that Lena can get a dad.
I am shy and loyal.
 

“I Am” Poem: Lena

I am brave and a bit crazy, impulsive and energetic.
I wonder if we can be like Noah.
I hear Uncle Tor yelling at me.
I want a dad. 
I am brave and a bit crazy, impulsive and energetic.

I pretend like I’m Jesus rescuing the lamb, like I’m a ship’s figurehead, like I’m okay, but I’m scared in my heart. 
I feel sad to leave Mathildewick Cove.
I touch the bandage on my head.
I worry about the chicken pox.
I never cry!
I am brave and a bit crazy, impulsive and energetic

I understand when Trille is frightened.
I say that Trille’s grandpa is awesome.
I dream of being a goalie.
I try not to take the blame.
I hope I can get a dad.
I am brave and a bit crazy, impulsive and energetic.

I will definitely add this after-reading response to my teacher toolbox along with hexagonal thinking and one-pagers. What’s a fairly quick and easy but still engaging and rigorous after-reading response that you use?

—————

“I Am” Poem form

I am (2 special characteristics you have) _______________________
I wonder ________________________________________________
I hear ___________________________________________________
I see ____________________________________________________
I want ___________________________________________________
I am (repeat 1st line) _______________________________________

I pretend ________________________________________________
I feel (an emotion) _________________________________________
I touch (sense) ___________________________________________
I worry __________________________________________________
I cry ____________________________________________________
I am (repeat 1st line) _______________________________________

I understand (something that is true) ___________________________
I say (something you believe in) ______________________________
I dream __________________________________________________
I try (something you really make an effort about) ________________
I hope ___________________________________________________
I am (repeat 1st line) _______________________________________