R.A.F.T.

There were lots of ideas floating around at the TESOL conference, including one called R.A.F.T. R.A.F.T. stands for Role Audience Format Topic and it offers a slightly oddball formula for designing written work. The product is likely to be a bit off-beat, but used right, the R.A.F.T. approach could help students think productively about voice and purpose in their written work.

"Role" refers to the voice you would like them to adopt in this assignment. It could be anything, from an impassioned abolitionist to Ho Chi Minh to Sigmund Freud.

"Audience" refers to the audience you'd like your student to address. It could be the editor of a newspaper, the Supreme Court or a gathering of Bolsheviks.

"Format" refers to the type of writing you'd like your student to produce: an appeal, an advice column, a love letter or a letter of complaint.

"Topic" refers to the subject you'd like the writer to address: the Second Amendment, the Dred Scott decision, health care reform.

This formula is highly adaptable and can be implemented in a serious or silly way. What caught my attention is that it encompasses a broad spectrum of writing, that it encourages students to think about the voice they are using as writers and that it engages the imagination at the same time it addresses a subject area.

Reading Journal

We've all heard of Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences: verbal/linguistic, logical/mathematical, body/kinesthetic, musical, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal. I see these different capacities all the time in my classroom and am always interested in ways to appeal to a broader range of students. In this effort, I find it helpful to stay abreast of Benji's on-going experiments with the Art of Teaching.

One of Benji's recent experiments: the reading journal. These journals were made of regular 8.5 by 11 paper, turned sidewise, lined and hole-punched along the crease in the middle. The students personalized the journals by choosing their own binding--colorful bits of ribbon threaded through the hole-punches.

Inside, the journals offered a variety of ways into the novel Beloved, which the 10th graders spend a few weeks on during Quint III.

There was a page headed "List of Characters."

There was a page set aside for "Themes."

There were numerous pages for reading notes and pages set aside for different kinds of writing exercises, including exercises in passage analysis and two personal responses. (Suggested personal response topics included: how the novel made the reader feel, connections with other books or ideas and questions which Beloved brought up for the reader.)

There was a place for the student to design their own reading quizzes--and to outline the answers they'd be looking for with these questions.

This approach had the virtue of offering a variety of ways into the novel--instead of a single "make or break" assignment. The specially designed pages freshened the delivery of these assignments in a surprisingly powerful way, even though some of the exercises were more or less variations on familiar approaches. Most of all, the care that went into making the booklets both lightened and deepened the mood.

Benji certainly isn't making any claims about Howard Gardner's theory, but these personalized reading journals do offer more points of entry into a work of literature than a traditional paper...while building some of the same skills that traditional literary analysis calls for. And I'm thinking that changing up the way we practice a skill looks could change the way the brain approaches it.

Celebrity

Recently, Harumi and some of her colleagues adapted the party game Celebrity for the classroom. The game involves correctly identifying famous persons or events and so lends itself to test review.

To prepare, students were divided into two teams, given two different term sheets and asked to prepare definitions of various persons, events or concepts.
Some of the terms included HMS Beagle, Australopithecus and differential reproductive success.

In class the next day, the two teams listened to each others' definitions while taking notes. Teachers and classmates weighed in, asking questions, correcting misconceptions and fine-tuning definitions. Students took these refined definitions home to study for class the next day. The idea was to be prepared to describe and identify each term correctly.

Celebrity works like this: students randomly draw terms out of hat and try to offer descriptions which their classmates will recognize. In the first round, each player can describe the person, term or concept at some length; during the second, the description is sharply limited to a two-word phrase-- a distillation of the earlier, long-winded explanation. The team or person to guess the most terms correctly wins.

Not surprisingly, preparation is key; the better students know each term, the more imaginative their descriptions can be--and the sharper their classmates' guesses. However, the game angle has the advantage of being student-centered, competitive and often quite hilarious. It makes memorization a means to an end instead of an end in itself--and yet the students come away knowing quite a lot more about Darwinism.

Brain Rules

Trolling the web recently, I came across UW professor John Medina, whose book Brain Rules recently came out in paperback. (Very co-incidently, while lost in Laurelhurst today, I noticed a mysterious campus-like facility called the Talaris Institute, which turns out to be his research institute. Who knew?)

Medina has dedicated a long career to understanding how human beings process information and has boiled his conclusions down to twelve simple rules.

The Rules

Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power.
Rule #2: The human brain evolved, too.
Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently.
Rule #4: We don't pay attention to boring things.
Rule #5: Repeat to remember.
Rule #6: Remember to repeat.
Rule #7: Sleep well, think well.
Rule #8: Stressed brains don't learn the same way.
Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses.
Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses.
Rule #11: Male and female brains are different.
Rule #12: We are powerful and natural explorers.

These twelve rules appear on Medina's interactive website. I know we've all heard plenty about brain stuff before, but there is something engagingly wonky about this website. You can click on each rule for a "mini-tutorial," which includes video, audio, charts and explanatory text. I found Rules #2, #4, #5, #6 and #10 particularly relevant in terms of how I teach.

Of course, the way my brain works, my challenge is to find a way to allow new ideas to have impact. Too often, I read or hear something striking and fresh about teaching...and then I go back to doing what I usually do.

So! I hereby vow to slash text from powerpoint presentations. And maybe look for ways to introduce smells into the classroom...