Best and Worst of My 2018 Blogs

One of my goals for this year has been changing by class library display more frequently

This past year for Lent I fasted from checking my blog stats. It was  a telling discipline: how I craved that dopamine charge when readership spiked, and how freeing it was to just not know and therefore care. So I wasn’t sure I wanted to venture into the realm of analyzing what got read and what didn’t during 2018, but since my hero Nicholas Kristof did it, I figured I should, too. The only difference is Kristof being a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter working for the New York Times, he has the ego cushion to list only his 10 least read; I’ve listed my 10 most-read first, and then my 10 least-read.

Kristof learned that people read most avidly anything related to President Trump and showed little interest in international issues without a Trump angle, like the power of education, the famine in Yemen, and women’s rights. However, I’m not sure I discerned any patterns at all—except that most of my friends must have gotten really busy in October and November:

• A blog on the same topic—self-care—appeared once in the top 10 (#6) and once in the bottom 10 (#2). I don’t think readership fell off due to the repetition: I tend to do this twice a year, each fall and spring, and it always has a relatively high readership. Except this fall.
• In fact, though the main goal of this blog is professional, the personal reflections tend to spike readership as they interest non-teaching Facebook friends as well. But this fall a personal blog on gratitude journaling made the bottom 10. Although it also elicited an unusually high number of comments.

Even if I didn’t find any significant patterns, reviewing all the blogs I’ve written this year was a worthwhile exercise. It got me excited for the year to come and all the great units coming up—like the unit on empathy while reading the Japanese novel After Dark (#4 in top 10). It also reminded me how much writing I’ve done (53 blogs!)—and what I’ve learned about writing while doing it that I can pass on to my students. And that makes it totally worth the effort even if for the bottom 10.

In case you missed one that you’d like to catch up on over winter break, see below for my 10 most-read and 10 least-read blogs of 2018.

Top 10 blogs (most read at the top):

1. What Does Thinking Look Like?: One specific activity from my AP English 11 classroom  plus reflections on how to further use ideas from the book Making Thinking Visible by Ron Ritchhart.
2. What and Why I Read: How I grew from just an avid reader to an eclectic reader and reading advocate, plus my favorite 2017 read from each of about 14 genres.
3. Who’s Asking the Questions?: When students are looking for answers to their own questions rather than the teacher’s: benefits and examples from my 10th and 11th grade classes. 
4. Reading Develops Empathy Even Better when It Is Targeted, Taught, and Assessed: Empathy seems like a slippery skill to teach, but when I really targeted it, being explicit with students, using formative and summative assessments in the 10th graders’ reading of the Japanese novel After Dark, it was exciting to see student responses at the end. 
5. Creating a Culture of Reading: Sharing Reading: The 3rd in a series on creating a culture of reading by modeling, encouraging, and sharing reading. 
6. Self-Care for Teachers: Reflect on Good Things that Happened this Week (Part 2): One important part of teacher self-care is staying positive: hanging out with positive people and telling the positive teaching stories of our lives. Here are a few of mine from a given week in the spring.
7. Service Learning Needs Special Opportunities and Daily Opportunities: Our school's service week is a great opportunity, and students also need to experience daily opportunities to serve their classmates with their learning. Discussion, peer revising, and presentations are all forms of this. 
8. Summer Reading List: Professional Development: In which I introduce the 9 professional books I planned to read over the summer. (I'm currently finishing the 9th.)  
9. Just Getting on with a Bad First Draft: An important lesson for myself and for my students in breaking the mental log jam for writing.
10. What and Why I Blog: In which I reflect on my whole educational blogging enterprise, and list my top 10 blogs from 2017.

Bottom 10 blogs (least read at the top):   

1. Keys to a Good Jigsaw Activity: 3 + 1: An example of an effective jigsaw activity in 10th grade Honors English using 3 different short texts to follow up on the theme of human dignity in the Holocaust memoir Night.
2. Self-Care for Teachers: Telling Our Happy Stories: One important part of teacher self-care is staying positive: hanging out with positive people and telling the positive teaching stories of our lives. Here are a few of mine from a given week in the fall.
3. Timing to Focus and Finish Peer Conversations: This was actually about peer revision conferences, but I was so excited about how my idea to use a timer proved really productive that I may have given it a title that left people totally in the dark.
4. Moving from Connections within Units to Connections among Units: Connections among units is one of those things that has always been so clear to me I’ve probably failed to actually articulate it to students. But I’m targeting it this year, and it’s so easy to improve with just a little attention here and there.
5. Laughing and Learning: Humor raises engagement and therefore learning. I get kind of a kick out of realizing that after 30 years, I’ve actually gained a little skill at using it. Here are some examples.
6. Writing Myself into Gratitude: As the living curriculum in my reading/writing classroom, I used Thanksgiving to reflect on how I have developed and been shaped by the discipline of a gratitude journal. 
7. Quick and Easy Vocabulary Discussions: Using complex vocabulary in academic discussion is an important part of students’ developing a rich and powerful vocabulary. Here’s an activity I came up with on the spur of the moment, and it worked so well, it will now be a permanent part of my vocabulary repertoire.
8. Why I Make Time for Project Reflection: Reflecting on a finished project or paper is a vital cementing of the learning process, and one I often slighted for time pressures. No more. Here’s why: a compilation of student questions, insights, and goals from a reflection this fall.
9. What Does Learning Feel Like?: Celebrating what felt like a breakthrough in my own use of student conferences and connecting it to growth mindset: noticing and sharing with students when I grow from novice discomfort to fluent ease in a new skill in order to encourage them in their various areas of growth.
10. The Joy of Reading and Thinking Together: After 2 years of teaching the same students, just enjoying being grown-up reading peers, sharing the drama Our Town with AP students during the exams they didn’t have to take last June.

News Literacy and Time "Person of the Year"

It's Christmas vacation, but I'm determined to get my blog posted before the flight leaves!

This week I received an early Christmas present: the Time announcement of “Person of the Year” not as an individual but a group—journalists around the world who face public mistrust some places and outright suppression others. Why was this so cool? Because headliners include people involved in 3 of the 4 issues my 10th graders had just researched in our mini unit on news literacy and current events. As students entered the classroom Thursday for their exam, I had the cover photo montage from the announcing article projecting on the board: "The Guardians and the War on Truth.” One student already knew about the announcement and had recognized the name of Jamal Khashoggi. I briefly informed students why I was projecting that image, passed out the exam, and posted the article in our online classroom. At the end of the period, I noticed a couple of the students who had finished the exam early reading the article. 

I used to resist teaching news bias and accuracy—after all, my syllabus is full. But having now seen students engage with this really current issue at the heart of some very practical English skills of reading and writing, let alone life skills of citizenship and ethics, I wouldn't give it up if you paid me. The keys for me have been to (1) embed it in a unit that has the purpose pre-primed and ready to be plugged into so that I can (2) make it short.  

The unit I embedded it in is my human dignity unit with the Holocaust memoir Night as its central text. (I’ve written here about the purpose, text sets, and a jigsaw activity I use for that unit.) After we’ve gotten righteously indignant about how people in the past could allow atrocities like the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide to occur, the harder next step is to find out if anything is happening today that future generations will look back on and say, ‘How could they just let that happen?’”

This year we had only 2 days for the mini unit—not ideal, but how it worked out with 5 school days cancelled due to typhoons. But the good news is, it did work! Day 1 we learned about news bias and accuracy, and day 2 we applied it by researching a chosen issue and reporting back to the class on it.

For learning about assessing news accuracy and bias, there were 2 steps:

1. Study this chart graphing news sources on a liberal/conservative x-axis vs. factuality y-axis. Find 2 news sources you are familiar with. Name them, and describe their rating.  
2. Read this page on the Media/Bias Fact Check website about their methodology for rating bias and reliability. List their 4 categories for scoring bias. List 3 additional terms from the page related to bias that you think are important to pay attention to. (We had an open-note quiz on these 7 items the following day—just to ensure they were processed at least twice—once in note-taking and once in writing them down again. For those who skipped the note-taking step, there was a re-quiz.) 

For applying the learning in researching a current event, there were also 2 steps:

1. Select 1 topic out of the following list of 4 involving possible disregard of human dignity: civil war in Yemen, killing of Saudi journalist Khashoggi, civil war in South Sudan, or treatment of Rohingya. Read 1 news article on it, and complete the news accuracy/bias assessment form on it. (See below for the form.)
2. Form a group with the others who picked the same topic. Share what you’ve already learned, what types of sources you learned it from, and what further questions you have. Make a plan for which members of your group will further research which questions. Spend the next 20 minutes doing that research and taking notes.

The final assessment was a 30-second-per-person group presentation to the class on what they need to know about this important topic where human dignity is possibly being currently disregarded. Because of the shortened time available this year, I told them this presentation would just be a participation grade—no time to refine and practice it—but still important as a de-sensitizing exercise for those with public speaking fear and a service to their audience who needs to know something about these issues. Everyone worked hard and gave it their best effort. Students were waving their hands to ask questions of the presenters, but I told them they’d have to ask after class because we didn’t have time. (Isn’t that one of the greatest things anyway—when a class conversation is so compelling that students take it out of the classroom?)

That was last week Thursday—last day of regular class before exam preparation started. Then this week Wednesday came the Time “Person of the Year” announcement. If I was worried about the news unit being shortened out of memory, that was the universe conspiring to rescue it. I get so excited when I can tell my students, like I could when they came into their exam this Thursday, “Look—what we did in class is something that real people in the real world are talking about!” I think they get excited, too.  

One student wrote the following in part of his exam: "Books such as Night and An Ordinary Man [the introduction] helped me dive deeper into different wars and problems of the past and today. Learning about the past has been particularly exciting. I think I’ve spent multiple hours reading on different articles on the internet on World War 2, and it’s not just about the Holocaust and the wars in Europe. I’ve also read a lot on the wars in Asia and the Pacific. Not only have I researched on the past, but now that I think about it, I’ve spent a lot more time reading the news (something I don’t usually do)."

Do you teach news literacy and current events? If so, what works for you?

Quick and Easy Vocabulary Discussions

I don’t believe I’ve ever had a student this eager to know what a vocabulary word means:

Me: “From which would you be more likely to avert your eyes—a kissing scene or a bloody scene?”
Student: “Wait! Wait! What did she ask? What does that word mean?”

In the moments before class started one day this week, inspiration struck. I try to introduce or review a couple of vocabulary words at the beginning of each period, and quizzes in both 10th and 11th were coming up, so we were in review mode, but I was feeling blah about all of our usual review activities. Suddenly I had a memory of last year doing bus monitoring, and how the elementary kids loved to play “Would you rather…?”  I glanced over the word list, and I saw many possibilities for my own variation.

It works for content vocabulary that comes from our reading:

• Which do you find more abhorrent—spiders or snakes?
• Who is more obdurate—you or your younger sibling?

It works for literary terms that help us talk about our reading:

• Which genre is more likely to have a dynamic character—mystery or romance?
• Whose memoir would you rather read—a person from history or a contemporary?

I pose the question, give students 5 seconds to consider it, then ask for a show of fingers—option 1 or option 2? After that, they have a minute to defend their choice to their table groups. If students don’t know what the word means, they suddenly have a felt need to know—not because they’ll get a bad grade on the quiz if they don’t, but because they’ll get left out of an exciting discussion if they don’t. One key: it works best if there’s not one right answer, as long as they can defend their answer. This hits so many targets for students, in addition to vocabulary review—it’s an engaging bell-ringer activity, engenders discussion, requires support for an answer, and builds community as we learn interesting things about each other.

And bringing us full circle to connect vocabulary to the bigger picture of writing, a student asked in a final draft reflection this week, “How can I use a small amount of words to describe something that I want to say?” One of my suggestions was, “Keep growing your vocabulary—as you have more precise words, you can use fewer.”

Timing to Focus and Finish Peer Conversations

My written feedback doesn’t always meet student writers where they are. Sometimes they don’t understand my advice, so either they ignore it, or else they incorporate it so completely that I know they have just copied my words without understanding their import. The most infamous example of this is once when I crossed out “dreams,” writing “redundant” above it, and the next draft read “hopes and redundant.” 

One of the reasons peer feedback is important is students get immediate responses to their writing and answers to their questions at the level they are ready for. I can figure this out in conferences, but I can't always get to every student every period. So I love to see students engaged deeply with each other in trying to figure out together what is working and what isn’t. 

While peer feedback has many benefits, it has to be set up well to make it worth the time. (I, too, have seen those student papers where the peer feedback has been either irrelevant or actually counterproductive.)

This week I tried something new—using a timer to structure peer feedback conversations on writing. What prompted the idea was a very extroverted class. They are great for discussions, but I'm still working on being really explicit and structured about when it is time for the discussion to end and the individual work—like writing—to begin. 

Here's what it looked like. I asked students to find a partner and share their rough draft Google Doc. They were to spend the next 20 minutes as follows:

• 5 minutes (split 2 ways, 2.5 minutes for each partner): Share your goals for your piece, what you were trying to do, and what specifically you want feedback on.
• 5 minutes: Read each other’s papers.
• 5 minutes: Student A responds to student B. (Be sure to have a balance of affirmative and constructive feedback.)
• 5 minutes: Student B responds to student A. (Be sure to have a balance of affirmative and constructive feedback.)

Option: If they were responding to each other’s papers digitally via online comments, they could use all of the middle 10 minutes for reading/responding. Then the last 5 minutes are used to read the partner’s comments and ask any clarifying questions needed.

The first 5 minutes are crucial: the writer starts in control. Feedback is less threatening when you have the chance to invite it, saying, “This is what I was trying to do. Did I succeed where I think I did? And please give me help where I know I need it.”

What kind of help might they ask for? We’ve done enough mini-lessons, conferring, and use of rubrics that students know some of the questions they can ask:

• Does my introduction hook you?
• Is my thesis clear, specific, and debatable?
• Does the order of my points make sense?
• Is my support sufficient, relevant, varied, and well-integrated?
• Are the transitions between paragraphs smooth and thoughtful?

In fact, next time I do this, I should probably have a possible list of questions like that, but in spite of my incomplete preparation, students were amazingly focused and interactive. They were asking questions and giving advice. Just look at the pictures!

The timer with its urgency and limitation seemed to be just the catalyst to get both classes (an extroverted one and an introverted one) to focus, have productive conversations, and be prepared to move to the next step of using the conversation in their writing.

Writing Myself into Gratitude

“Mom! Come quick! It’s a miracle!” 

I responded to my 4-year-old’s urgent summons to find her face to radiant face with a dogwood blossom right outside our front door. At first it seemed anti-climactic. Then I wondered what it would take to keep me as awake to delight as a 4-year-old child. One thing that has evolved out of that wondering is a writing discipline that daily reorients me to thanksgiving—my own peculiar form of gratitude journal. First I’ll tell you what I write, then how it evolved, and finally what effect it’s had.

What I write:

Overflowing with gratitude: (1) Coffee by Michael…. (8) Jesus died for me. (9) The Holy Spirit lives in me. (10) The Father deeply loves me and completely accepts me.

The intervening 6 items can be as specific as a gorgeous birdsong heard on my morning walk, a picture of a grandchild recently posted on Instagram, the smell of sun-dried sheets, a meaningful conversation in the hallway, a student’s epiphany in class, or a great line in the book I’m reading. (For the last 6 years a frequent weekend item is “blog posted”—sometimes with a sigh of relief at a task accomplished and sometimes with one of satisfaction at a vague idea wrestled into sentences and paragraphs.) The items can also be as general as sleep, health, peace, plenty, a roof over my head, the love of family and friends, rule of law, and meaningful work to do. Some days are just like that—when the specifics that dominate my mind are ones that spring from worry and stress, to still confess that my life is blessed in many ways is vital.

It started back when my children were small with a suggestion from my mom to write down 3 things a day I was grateful for. I can’t pinpoint when I added the introduction, though I seem to recall a conversation with a friend about a Bible study in Colossians where that phrase was significant. For me it has become a part of the ritual of reorienting myself to thanksgiving—however I feel at this moment, I do have many reasons in my life to be overflowing with thanksgiving, and I’m about to enumerate some of them. Neither can I remember the exact order in which the list grew from 3 to 5 to 10 as I added the anchoring 4 daily reminders of my husband’s first daily act of care, and of the Trinitarian resources of my spiritual life.

I do remember that the final 3 started as 1. I’d heard a PE teacher share how she combats girls’ poor self-concept by teaching them to look in the mirror and say, “I deeply love you and completely accept you.” I thought, “That sounds great, but what about the days when I just cannot do that? When I know I’ve thought, said, or done unlovely, unacceptable things?” Then it occurred to me that that is exactly where my Christian faith addresses the deepest needs of my heart—that even when I can’t love or accept myself, God has already done it, and I could confess that daily until it sank from my head into my heart. 

Eventually I realized I needed a daily reminder of the divine price of that truth—that Jesus had died for me. Then one day it dawned on me that it was less my spiritual tradition than my own practices that were obscuring my awareness of the work of the Holy Spirit. That’s when I added #9, frequently tagging on phrases about what the Holy Spirit was doing in my life: “The Holy Spirit lives in me to comfort me…to remind me…to guide me…to produce fruit…to unite me with others…” 

It’s been well over 20 years since that 4-year-old called me to witness the miracle of a dogwood blossom, and well over 15 years that I’ve been keeping some form of my gratitude journal. I’ve done it in the morning, I’ve done it in the evening, and I’ve done it in combination with a variety of other journaling forms—or without any. I still frequently fail to receive life as a daily series of miracles, and yet this small writing discipline has formed me, and for that, I am thankful.

Keys to a Good Jigsaw Activity: 3 + 1

• So what would you do? Would you choose to save the one person you know or the 5 people you don’t?
• How do you say ‘human rights’ in Japanese?
• Really? You have this book? Can I read it? 

Yesterday we had great discussions in Honors English 10—with the added twist of some visitors. It’s an activity I love—jigsawing—plus a group of students from a nearby Japanese high school was doing a half-day exchange visit, and 3 of them along with their English teacher came to our class.  

I love a good jigsaw activity. The one we did yesterday I wrote about last year here. This year was even better with the added challenge of explaining to the visitors what was going on. A couple of students usually on the quieter side rose to the challenge of working to translate the sophisticated legal, psychological, and ethical terms and ideas. I realized the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been translated into over 500 languages—so I could just print a couple of Japanese copies! The 2 visitors in that group perked up considerably, and some of my students wanted to see what it looked like in Japanese. (They may be fluent in daily conversation, but that level of formality was opaque to them.)
 
Our topic is human dignity—what is it, and why is it important? Our central piece of literature is the Holocaust memoir Night. Before reading it, though, we did some background reading on the Rwanda genocide and watched clips from the movie Hotel Rwanda to bring the issue closer to the present and highlight that “us/them” divisiveness is not just white vs. black (as in our previous novel Cry, the Beloved Country)—it’s also Hutus vs. Tutsis and Germans vs. Jews and many other things in other times and places. As we read the book, we noted instances, causes, and effects of disregard for human dignity, as well as the few examples of people fighting the flow to stay human and treat others as such. We also note how the author uses the tools of literature to make those images powerful.

After reading, I wanted students to get even more background information on a variety of topics related to human dignity that they could pull into their final synthesis paper. So I offered 3 very different but very relevant pieces:

• The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights—a legal document, so difficult reading level, but shortest of the documents; written in response to the Holocaust and referred to in current political commentary. 
• “What Makes Us Moral?”—a Time magazine article citing psychological and sociological studies and experiments in an attempt to explain how humanity continues to produce both Mother Theresas and Adolph Hitlers. 
• An excerpt of the introduction to Half the Sky—a work by Pulitzer Prize winning journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn on, as the subtitle says, Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. This has both statistics and stories of individuals. See Sheryl’s TED Talk, “Our Century’s Greatest Injustice,” for a taste. 

Students chose the piece they were most interested in reading Thursday night. They read and annotated it on their own, coming to class ready to discuss it. On Friday, first they  gathered with others who had read the same piece. In these groups, they asked clarifying questions to make sure they understood it themselves, then decided how best to summarize it for their classmates who had read other pieces, and which elements might be most relevant to and useful for the synthesis papers.

In my experience, there are 3 keys to a good jigsaw activity:

1. A topic that students have a stake in.
2. Jigsawed materials that are relevant to the topic but varied in content, style, and challenge, within which students have choice.
3. An end-product for which students have a felt need to understand both their material and everyone else’s.

The "plus one" key, which I can't always count on, is a real audience. It happened serendipitously yesterday, and it wasn't a disruption--it actually heightened the learning.

For the next class, when students will be brainstorming, planning, and doing any needed additional research for their synthesis papers on human dignity, I’ve posted additional optional sources (see page 2 of this Google Doc). 

Do you have a jigsaw activity that has worked well in your class? If so, please share it in the comments below! If not, consider trying it. 

Laughing and Learning

I am definitely not a stand-up comedian type. More the introverted bookworm type. The walking-into-the-cafeteria-and-having-to-decide-where-to-sit-gives-me-hives type. So one day this week, when above the general hilarity a 10th grader called out, “I have never laughed this hard in English class!” I filed that little gem away to think about later.

We were talking about the word literal—how it means a word’s most basic sense without metaphor, but in conversation we frequently use it as an intensifier: “I literally died when that embarrassing thing happened.” (Really? Who brought you back to life?) “I literally lost my mind.” (Really? Have you found it since, or are you still looking?) It followed us into the next day’s vocabulary with annihilate: destroy completely, reduce to nothing. As in the sentence in book Night that we are reading: “Hitler has made it clear he will annihilate all Jews.” Or as in what you might say before a game: “We are going to literally annihilate the other team.” On the other hand, maybe not. The comment about laughter in English class also became my segue into the rest of the class, discussing the Holocaust memoir Night: “And laughter is a good thing to balance out the tragedy of where we’re going next…”

Other opportunities we’ve had for laughter this week:

• Sharing my story of struggling with how hard to try to fit into Japanese society when, as foreigners, we’re never going to totally blend in: Playing on a local women’s club volleyball team, buying Japanese athletic gear, while realizing that sock style was not going to entirely distract from the fact that I stood head and shoulders above many of my teammates. 
• Illustrating the vocabulary word apathy with a joke: Person A says, “In your opinion, is the biggest problem among young people today ignorance or apathy?” Person B replies, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

I use humor other times as well, for example...

• Whenever a class is editing writing, I wear my t-shirt that says: “Let’s eat Grandma. Let’s eat, Grandma. Commas save lives.”
• In my Shakespeare unit I particularly focus on word play, sharing one current example at the beginning of every period. Because if you don’t get them in modern English, there’s no hope of getting them in Elizabethan poetry.
• Vocabulary bloopers, oddities, and misunderstandings: English is a wild and crazy language. I love its history, its uses, and its misuses. There is so much potential here. I love, for example, reading through the essay “How I Met My Wife” with advanced juniors, and seeing how many of the oddities they catch—words or phrases we use in English, but never without the negating prefix that the author drops here.   

Robert Marzano names humor as a teaching strategy in The New Art and Science of Teaching which I have just finished reading and discussing with some colleagues. Humor is one of the 8 strategies he lists under the element “demonstrating intensity and enthusiasm,” which is one of the 10 elements under “using engagement strategies,” which is one of his 10 design areas. Marzano says of humor, “Depending on a teacher’s personality and instructional style, he or she might show a funny political cartoon or video, direct jokes at him- or herself, use silly quotes or voices, or point out absurdities in a textbook, film, or article to demonstrate enthusiasm for a topic” (70). 

Like I said, no one would say a main quality of either my personality or instructional style is humor. But, as Marzano notes, “If the teacher demonstrates intensity and enthusiasm about the content, students are more likely to perceive the content as intriguing and interesting” (69-70). And humor is one way of demonstrating intensity and enthusiasm. (Plus, it's fun!) 

What helps me unleash my inner comic? 

• Knowing that humor actually is a valid instructional tool—it’s more than okay to tell jokes and funny stories and have fun together, as long as the time it takes is proportional to the instructional value reaped.
• Cultivating my own sense of humor: being on the lookout for what tickles my funny bone within my subject area. This is a virtuous circle because the more I share humor, the more people share back to me.
• Curating discoveries. One great thing about piling up birthdays is that with 30 years of teaching experience, I’ve come across a lot of puns, student bloopers, funny stories, cute quotes. But I also have to write it down, file it, Pin it, blog it, do something so I can find it when I need it. It’s so frustrating to come across that comic, pun, or funny story that I was looking for the week after I needed it.
• Losing my self-consciousness. Another great thing about piling up birthdays is realizing what a waste of energy it is to care whether students share my sense of humor. And what I find is that if they can see how much fun I’m having, they’ll probably want in on it.

How do you unleash your inner comic?

Moving from Connections within Units to Connections among Units

Like rabbits swept by the shadow of a hawk, the students suddenly still, striving to become invisible, only eyeballs roving to see if anyone has an answer for the question the teacher has posed.

Moments earlier the class bubbled with discussion, pulling together the introductory nonfiction pieces of our human dignity unit before plunging into our central work, the Holocaust memoir Night by Elie Wiesel. Students commented on the power of the line in the movie Hotel Rwanda about people watching the atrocities on the news, then saying, “How awful,” and going back to their dinners—recognizing that we have all done exactly that. They debated the extent to which the question of suffering is answered by the claim of Gary Haugen, founder of International Justice Mission (IJM), “The question is not where is God but where are his people.” 

Then I ask, “This concept of regard for human dignity—do you see any connections with our first unit, about people being made in the image of God?” The silence is deafening. Baffled, I explain one connection: the Christian belief that people are made in the image of God is the very basis for human dignity and human rights. 

Next question, “This concept of regard for human dignity—do you see any connections with the unit we just finished on shalom?” More silence. Then a tentative, “No?” I am astonished. “Any connection to God’s call to join him in his work of restoring the relationships he originally intended people to have with himself, with others, with creation?” Some giggle sheepishly. The speaker protests, “I meant, when shalom was broken in Cry, the Beloved Country, there wasn’t any regard for human dignity.” 

I posed these questions because of a recent Blinding Flash of the Obvious, I just didn’t expect my hypothesis to be so resoundingly confirmed. Occasionally a student has ventured while working on a unit final paper to ask whether it’s okay to refer to a central theme of a previous unit: “Is it okay if I talk about people being made in the image of God when I’m writing my shalom paper?” “Is it okay if I talk about shalom when I’m writing my human dignity paper?” The connections seem so clear to me, and it’s such an epiphany to them that they’re not sure it’s valid. It wasn’t until last week that I realized: oh, my—I don’t actually teach them to make connections between units. I systematically target, teach, and assess making connections within a unit, but not among units.

This realization hit when discussing The New Art and Science of Teaching by Robert Marzano with a couple of colleagues. I read about the strategy of cumulative review: “The teacher not only reviews content from the current unit but helps students relate it to content from previous units…. Periodically, students list their generalizations from previous units or sets of lessons and create one or more all-encompassing generalizations” (57). I wrote, “10th grade!” in the margin by those words.

I didn’t mean to make my students feel like hunted rabbits. I thought that just prompting them to look for connections among units of study would trigger the finding of connections. Clearly this is a thinking strategy I need to teach more specifically. After all, life is not a series of unrelated units, and learning is more effective when it is more connective, synthesizing new learning with what has gone before.

Are there connections among your units of study? Do your students know them? Ask—see what happens.

Self-Care for Teachers: Telling Our Happy Stories

Tired? Worn out? No worries: That’s teacher par-for-the-course in October. The honeymoon is over, and the holidays aren’t here yet. 

Quick: Tell me 5 good stories that happened to you in or related to your classroom this week. 

In a minute, I’ll tell you 5 good stories that happened to me this week. But before I do, just take a moment to remember that an important part of persevering as a teacher is self care, and an important part of self care is hanging out with positive people and remembering the positive stories. Apparently I do this in this blog every October (see also here) and spring (see here and here).

So, at the end of the first quarter and the ominous month of October, here are 5 of my good stories from the week: 

Monday: I remembered the morning of the 10th grade class on which my lesson plan prompted me to introduce the presentation, that I’d responded to some summer reading by committing to use some TED talks as models. I quickly opened the document I’d started with TED resources and cued the one resource copied in there (Amy Cuddy’s "Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are") for class. I showed the first 5 minutes, pointing out content and modeling students could use. The students were engaged, and we had a good mini-lesson. Friday, the day of the 1-2 minute presentations, after one student's amazing presentation, using all the patterns from the TED introduction and more, the rest of the students concurred: “That was just like TED!”

Tuesday: My dear juniors are a very introverted class. Last year, every quarter, they chose overwhelmingly to share their independent reading by writing a review on Goodreads—only 1 or 2 choosing to talk in front of their classmates. This year a majority chose to share in class. I’m happy that class feels safe, that they’re getting more comfortable sharing verbally, and that the variety, shared both in class and online, was eclectic: from nonfiction like Being Mortal, Half the Sky, A Higher Loyalty,  The Girl with the White Flag, and The Spiritual Lives of Great Composers, to fiction like When We Were Orphans and For the Time Being. 

Wednesday: When I arrived in my classroom in the morning, I looked at the corner of my desk I’d designated a “parking lot” for sticky notes with questions I’d promised students to find out about. (I’d just established this the day before when I checked the implementation plan I’d made for my book discussion group on Marzano’s The New Art and Science of Teaching.) I saw a Post-It note with my classic green-ink scrawl, “Foreign language citation.” I promised a student I’d have that information before the next class—that’s first period! Momentary panic, followed by focused perusal and sticky-noting of my MLA style manual. After the mini-lesson, when I asked if there was anyone else who needed information about citing foreign language sources, one other student joined us at the empty pod of desks in the back. I assured them, “Don’t stress out about doing this perfectly and then decide going forward to avoid using your first language sources: The ability to find information and perspectives in more than one language is a great gift. Use it! Let’s just use today as a jumping-off point to begin to explore how to do it with expert ethos.” 
   
Thursday: Before our end-of-quarter class share of an independent reading book read this quarter, I caught the 2 sophomores pictured above actually referring to the bulletin board listing books students were reading first quarter, talking about what they wanted to read next quarter!

Friday: A student asked me, "Out of the books you recommended, these 3 look interesting. Which should I take?" She fans out copies of Evicted, Killers of the Flower Moon, and The Book Thief. Working hard not to scare her off with whoops or fist-pumps, I calmly reply, "Why don’t you take all of them, read the first chapter, and decide which one you want to read first?" "Really? Wow!"

Reflection, gratitude, and self-care: Three words you’ll hear frequently in education these days. I find them so crucial--hanging out with positive people and telling positive stories. Here are mine. What are yours?