“The Danger of a Single Story”

In July, I attended the Asia Society’s Partnership for Global Learning Conference: “Creating Success in a Global Era: A World-Class Education for Every Student.” The following is a description of one of the sessions that I attended, “Beyond the Canon: Reading the World in Schools.” JB

The message of this session was that the selection of literature for English classroom use is a moral responsibility and that in the US the standard/traditional secondary school reading list
needs to be expanded and updated both to better represent the diverse backgrounds of American students and to expose these students to a wider range of global perspectives. The widespread high school use of The Scarlet Letter, Romeo & Juliet, and Huckleberry Finn were offered as examples. Perhaps the highlight of the session was the viewing of a 2009 “Ted Talk” given by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (the Igbo Nigerian author of Purple Hibiscus, which we read in NWS 8th grade, Half of a Yellow Sun, a novel set during the Biafran War, and That Thing Around Your Neck, a short story collection – all available in the NWS Library). The title of Adichie’s eloquent remarks is “The Danger of a Single Story” (available at http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html). She describes growing up with a limited sense of the variety and possibilities around her (such as an absence of literary role models to whom she could relate) and also confronting stereotypes of her as an African (à la Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden”) when she moved abroad. Some of the issues she raises echo Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Jamaica Kincaid in A Small Place, such as the power embedded in who determines which stories get told and what stories they tell.
In thinking about what books we read in our classrooms, the discussion in this session encouraged attendees to challenge the canon of books that “need” to be read; this reading list is, as I see it, a self-referential tradition that, tainted by the biases and power of the dominant group that oversees its selection, becomes both self-justifying and self-perpetuating. It also raised the question of how many stories and perspectives it takes to offer a “complete” and accurate picture. To me, the challenge is achieving breadth of representation as well as depth, all within such constraints as very limited time. The (incomplete) answer offered to this challenge was to teach an attitude or lens rather than a particular list of titles. Present students with a diverse and representative range of texts and guide them in receiving these texts through an open and flexible prism, with as few preconceived notions as possible. We were advised to choose sets of books that, regardless of setting, dealt with universal human themes, such as “the power of the family,” or topics, e.g. food, that would thus be widely relevant and accessible. Another suggestion was to choose transpositions of Shakespeare.

Resources for finding international texts were shared via weblist, a cool web tool: see http://weblist.me/Beyond-the-canon.

Facing History

JB recently sent me a link to Facing History, which is an amazing resource for Humanities teachers. It offers ideas on everything from teaching strategies to lesson plans to complete units on topics which are already part of our curriculum: Civil Rights, Human Rights, Identity, Stereoptypes, Civic Participation. (The list goes on and on.)

As part of his work with Teacher Education, JB saw a colleague in South Africa present some of the techniques featured on this website. These included a "Quaker Read," a "Shadow Read" and a "Silent Discussion."

The Quaker Read involves reading a text together in class silently, taking time to note words or passages which stand out. Students then offer up their impressions in the manner of a Quaker meeting--if they feel so moved. This sharing can be shaped into a full-on class discussion.

Shadow Reading involves dividing the class into pairs and reading two primary source documents. On the day JB was there, the pairs read two accounts of growing up in the USA in the 50's and 60's: one from the point of view of a black woman from Baton Rouge, LA and one written by a man who grew up in Enid, OK and Hiram OH. Each member of the pair read one of these accounts and responded in writing to a short set of parallel questions. The pair then shared their answers. Finally, they collaborated in writing a script for an imagined meeting between the two authors.

The Silent Discussion format also involved pairing students and having them respond in writing, this time to a primary source which could be either an image or a short text. The pairs wrote their reactions down on a piece of paper without speaking. Maintaining their silence, the pair left their work on the table and circulated around the room, reading and contributing to other "silent discussions." This too was followed by a full-on class discussion.

You can imagine how rich any of these formats could be. Thank you, JB, for sending this suggestion from Cape Town. We look forward to hearing lots more from you when you rejoin us in Quint V.

Speed Dating

I thought I'd end with a fun activity that I saw at Tyee last week.

The teacher stood at the white board with an overhead projector and revealed, one by one, a series of questions based on The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which the class had just finished reading. The list included a variety of questions: some interpretive, some strictly factual and some very open-ended.

Describe the narrator.
Who is Penelope?
What is at stake during the basketball game?
What genre is this work?
What did you get out of reading this book?

The students were seated in two rows of eight or nine chairs facing each other. The teacher would read out a question and allow the students a few minutes--not too long--to discuss it. After a pretty short interval, the instructor would call out, "Switch!" and one of the rows would shift over a seat, creating a new set of pairs. The process would repeat, punctuated by crisp, non-negotiable cues to "Switch!"

This was a small-ish class, with a significant number of students who spoke English but whose first languages were Spanish, Amharic or Vietnamese. The overhead enabled everyone to verify they'd understood the question. The unveiling of the question also contributed a certain element of suspense.

At the end of the list, the teacher reviewed the questions with the whole class, calling on students to share the answers they'd just developed in pairs. It was a requirement that each student paraphrase the last response before answering the next question. This kept the students responsible for listening to each other and for putting other people's ideas into words.

The teacher ended the activity by naming positive behavior he'd noticed while the students were working in pairs: "Santiago, I heard you pronounce the word 'denoument' perfectly." "Ali, I heard you encouraging your partner to speak." "Maria, you seemed really comfortable with literary terms when you were describing Junior's fight with Rowdy." I was struck by this matter-of-fact coaching. The teacher let each of these kids know they'd been seen without heaping on a whole lot of "praise."

Tyee Visit

Last week Melody and I visited the Tyee Educational Complex, which is a cluster of three small high schools housed on a campus in the Highline school district. We both came away impressed with the the professionalism, dynamism and strong chops of the teachers we saw there--and also a bit sobered by the challenges that these teachers take on.

In the classes I saw, the students appeared engaged and productive and often quite communicative with the strange lady visiting their classroom. This was pretty impressive just weeks before the end of the school year. It is perhaps more impressive if you consider that between 65-75% of the students qualify for Free or Reduced Price lunches. One of the students I met had had to leave school in October, moved back a few weeks ago and is ineligible to receive credit for this academic year. He comes to school because he likes it. Global has informally agreed to this arrangement, as has the teacher who corrects his papers and works with him.

In order to serve a broad variety of students, both ACE and Global have adopted a workshop model, which builds in a lot of room for student choice. Instead of having a "class novel" which serves as the point of departure for organizing the class, students work towards a "learning outcome" for each unit: for example, Use Academic Discourse to Articulate, Revise and Defend My Thinking about a Book--or Use Outside Sources of Information to Help Me Understand a Current Event. The teachers I spoke to acknowledged that assembling a library for this model requires an initial investment of time. Though you don't have to read all the texts concurrently with the students, you have to be familiar with the material--and it works best if the material is organized according to some sort of unifying principle: e.g., Love Stories or Identity or Social Justice. You then create small groups to discuss and write about the texts they have chosen. (This model also works just fine with using a single class text.)

The main virtue of this system, of course, is how nicely it can accommodate differentiation--working with a broad range of learning profiles in the same classroom. In a mini-lesson (10-15 minutes), all of the students are introduced to the same purpose--Understand Dramatic Structure--and given a task to help them achieve this purpose: apply Freytag's model to a text. You then allow them time for independent work, which can be organized in whatever way best meets the students' needs: students working on their own, working in pairs, working in small groups or signing up for conference time with the teacher. The period ends with a Share Out of some kind, which makes the students responsible for a result and gives them experience presenting and defending an idea.

Obviously, the workshop model requires a double period to work with. It is a bit of a radical model in that significantly prioritizes skills over content and minimizes teacher-centered time.

Research at Northwest

We were joined at our last department meeting of the year by Nancy and Ben for a discussion of research skills and projects in the Humanities department. As often happens, the meeting raised more issues than it resolved, though we began some useful discussions about academic integrity, appropriate sources and scaffolding the research process. (Each of these topics could be the basis of a future department meeting.)

Academic Integrity

Ben made the interesting observation that there is a wide gulf of understanding between American and Asian students on the issue of plagiarism and intellectual property.

Is there a productive way we could address this issue in a class or integration activity? We might compare several examples of papers that make use of secondary sources and determine if they do so in an appropriate way. It might be interesting to hear the students' feedback on papers which offer the same progression of argument and textual support as the Summary & Analysis page of Sparknotes. Do the students think this counts as a kind of plagiarism? If not, why not?

Scaffolding

Thinking about reducing plagiarism led to a productive discussion of the pace and structure of our assignments. Throughout the grade levels, students get good practice with Works Cited format, annotated bibliography and thesis formulation. However, there may be more we can do to support their work with sources. Can we build in more structured exercises using a variety of source materials? Ben offered Document Based Questions as a useful model: these are short, focused exercises that allow students an opportunity to explore a research question while interacting with both primary and secondary sources. It would be ideal if we could increase the students' comfort level with the many databases that are available through the school and the Seattle Public libraries (thus also decreasing their tendency to go to Wikipedia and Google). Perhaps we could create an exercise that required them to compare ProQuest, J-Stor and e-library?

Finally, John pointed out that it might be helpful to be more explicit about the skills involved in reading for research: scanning a source for specific information and skimming to assess its relevance are techniques that need to be explicitly practiced with international students--and perhaps with domestic students as well.

Across the Pond

I've been meaning to share a few things which stood out during my visit to Overlake this winter.

Thing One: Like Northwest students, students at Overlake keep portfolios of written work. These are stored in the classroom and periodically, time is made for students to review the feedback they've received on written work: how do thesis statements from September compare with those written later in the year? What kinds of mechanical errors are no longer showing up in papers?

Thing Two: Standard Operating Procedure is to return written work with comments but no grades. Students have a chance to respond to teacher feedback in writing; only then does the student receive a grade. The English Department Head emphasized the value of this opportunity for students to process feedback separately from grades. Students can defend their choices, make adjustments or make adjustments and explain the thinking behind their original choices. As at Northwest, students are free to fully revise written work. In our department, conferences create an opportunity for students to process feedback with their teachers, but it was interesting to see that Overlake has also built in this kind of intentional dialogue.

Thing Three: I was impressed by the systematic use Overlake makes of Diane Hacker's Pocket Manual for Writers. Many Overlake teachers grade papers using a rubric which references page numbers in the Hacker text. The teacher checks "Run-On" on the rubric; the rubric refers students to the run-on section of Hacker's text. If additional work is needed, Hacker's web-site offers an extensive menu of supplementary explanations and exercises. How efficient is that? Do we still use Hacker? Are we missing an opportunity to tap into some free stuff?

Teaching So Students Remember

The first TESOL workshop I went to was given by Kathy Olson, an educational consultant who reminded me of a veteran elementary school teacher--in a goood way. Her presentation outlined ways for teachers to capitalize on basic brain-research findings.

Naturally, she cited the alarming statistic that most of us forget as much as 80% of what we read and 90% of what we hear within 24 hours. However, she offered lots of ideas for working with this in the classroom.

Her first suggestion was about attention. She is WAY into stimuli, the more intense the better. She points out that students don't learn anything if you don't have their attention...so she recommends music, movement, humor, emotions, costumes, surprise. She points out that most of us love to guess and apparently, we try harder to remember information we've guessed wrong.

Olson recommends visuals, as vision trumps all other senses in the impact it makes on the brain. Even simple things like color can make a measurable difference: colored paper, highlights and of course pictures. (Evidently, groups using illustrated texts performed 36% better than groups using text alone.) She touted the great return you get by accessing prior knowledge. Connecting new information to information already stored in long-term memory enables the brain to process more effectively.

Her main idea is that once you have the students' attention and introduce some new material, it is important to "rehearse" or "manipulate" the information right away. This will move the new input from short term memory--where it will stay for fewer than 24 hours--to long-term memory, where it actually becomes useful to the student.

She offered lots of ideas about ways to do this: paraphrasing, summarizing, personalizing, predicting, repeating, mapping, classifying--especially classifying. The brain loves identifying patterns, charting differences and similarities, connecting ideas to each other or to personal experiences. I tried and failed to attach her powerpoint, but if you're interested, look her up on the web (Kathy Olson and "Teaching So Students Remember").

At times during her presentation, Kathy seemed a little grade school--or perhaps old-school: costumes? Really? However, I overheard a bunch of juniors yesterday fondly reminiscing about the 9th grade lecture Daniel gave dressed as Theodora of the Byzantine Empire. It's true that they remembered the costume better than the lecture, but at least two out of three remembered that there was a Byzantine Empire, with Theodora and Justinian on the throne.

Education for the Future

Howard Gardner was the keynote speaker at TESOL this year. His talk addressed the impact technology has had on education and the workplace; specifically, he has been thinking about how technology has changed our role as educators.

Gardner has identified four areas in which he believes students will need strong preparation in order to succeed in the world of the future: strength in a discipline, the ability to synthesize, creativity and ethics.

The first point concerns mastery of a discipline. Gardner feels that the acquisition of information used to be a legitimate goal of education, but that technology has changed this. Many students now have extremely efficient "personal assistants" (computers) which can look stuff up and do basic calculations. To succeed in an environment where general information is widely available, Gardner thinks expertise will become a priority-- not just knowing stuff, but mastery of a certain kind of thinking: "What does it mean to think like a historian?" "How would a scientist approach this question?" He encourages teachers to provide these kinds of opportunities for their students.

The second point was about synthesizing information. Again, Gardner seemed to be responding to the flood of undigested information that is available on the web. To take advantage of this resource, it is important that students have the skills to distinguish the useful from the useless and to discern what (if anything) all the data adds up to: students need to be able to determine significance in a sea of information.

Gardner's third point concerned deepening students' capacity for creativity. He made an interesting little jab here about genuine creativity being a challenge in "rule-and-tradition bound" institutions like schools. However, he thinks that succeeding in the 21st century will require personalities that are willing to stretch, break rules and even risk failure. Teachers should be thinking about ways we can develop these capacities in our students.

Finally, he spoke about ethics. Gardner reported that as he travels around the world these days talking to people in education, research, publishing and business, he meets young people who feel pressured by the pace of opportunity. They sometimes say that they can't afford to worry about ethics right now. First they need to "make it," then they can focus on doing the right thing. Gardner feels that whenever possible teachers should share stories of people who faced challenging situations and made ethical choices. He also recommends cautionary tales about people who failed to do the right thing and the costs of that failure.

Gardner has launched a project called Good Work. The mission of Good Work is "to identify individuals and institutions that exemplify good work: work that is excellent in quality, socially responsible, and meaningful to its practitioners—and to determine how best to increase the incidence of good work in our society."

Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose

Jamie Feild Baker has been reading Daniel Pink lately; Pink writes about motivation for a business audience, but a lot of educators have been excited about his book Drive. A bit like Alfie Kohn, Pink argues that extrinsic motivators--like gold stars, grades and merit pay--can have the opposite of their intended effect.

His idea is to replace the carrot-and-stick approach with "three essential elements:

(1) Autonomy – the desire to direct our own lives (2) Mastery – the urge to get better and better at something that matters and
(3) Purpose – the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.”

Reflecting on Pink's work in her blog, Baker challenges us as teachers to "scrutinize" our curricula for these three elements.

1. Does the work we offer our students include an opportunity for
choice and self direction?

2. Does it offer students a sense of increasing mastery--as opposed to repeating something they know how to do?

3. Is there a palpable "Big Picture" purpose to the work?

Pink and Baker are both admirers of "Google's 20% time," a model which allows Google engineers one day a week to work on something they are passionate about. Word is that our own NWS Curriculum Committee is contemplating the feasibility of a senior "capstone experience." Setting up such a program presents more than a few serious challenges, but Daniel Pink is emphatic about the pay-off of harnessing students' intrinsic interests and giving them practice with problem-solving...that is, solving real- world problems, where answers are often "poorly defined, multi-disciplinary and have several possible answers, none of them perfect."

T.E.A.C.H. Online

Somehow, while wrapping up in South Africa, Jeff found time to forward another interesting resource: T.E.A.C.H. Online. This is an extensive website, but a useful component is the section on teaching emotive or controversial history, which the site defines as history "where there is actual or perceived unfairness to people by another group or individual in the past." Some examples include teaching about slavery, empire and the Arab/Israeli conflict. The link contains practical lesson plans and also some philosophical principles which are interesting to think about.

The first of these is that the best results are achieved when students are invited to participate in specific inquiry questions. Teachers are challenged to create activities that allow independent thinking within "a secure historic and pedagogic framework."

This fine-sounding idea is echoed in another principle, that of interpretations. It's important that students grapple with multiple understandings of a historical event or situation. Students need practice comparing versions of history and assessing the different kinds of evidence, source material and points of view that shape them. This gives students a more nuanced understanding of a particular set of events--and a deeper understanding of the discipline of history itself. One interesting lesson involves annotating a web site which is biased in favor of Israel. The specific inquiry is for students to take note of what is missing and what is emphasized in this account. How might a Palestinian describe these events differently?

I am reminded of the Age of Explo exercise the 9th grade sometimes does, which offers students different accounts of the discovery/despoiling of the Americas by European explorers. Students immediately recognize and appreciate the opportunity this exercise creates: the opportunity to sharpen their judgment and do their own thinking.

Thanks, JB, for sending this interesting website. We are looking forward to getting the next Blair Report live, in real time.

Facing History

JB recently sent me a link to Facing History, which is an amazing resource for Humanities teachers. It offers ideas on everything from teaching strategies to lesson plans to complete units on topics which are already part of our curriculum: Civil Rights, Human Rights, Identity, Stereoptypes, Civic Participation. (The list goes on and on.)

As part of his work with Teacher Education, JB saw a colleague in South Africa present some of the techniques featured on this website. These included a "Quaker Read," a "Shadow Read" and a "Silent Discussion."

The Quaker Read involves reading a text together in class silently, taking time to note words or passages which stand out. Students then offer up their impressions in the manner of a Quaker meeting--if they feel so moved. This sharing can be shaped into a full-on class discussion.

Shadow Reading involves dividing the class into pairs and reading two primary source documents. On the day JB was there, the pairs read two accounts of growing up in the USA in the 50's and 60's: one from the point of view of a black woman from Baton Rouge, LA and one written by a man who grew up in Enid, OK and Hiram OH. Each member of the pair read one of these accounts and responded in writing to a short set of parallel questions. The pair then shared their answers. Finally, they collaborated in writing a script for an imagined meeting between the two authors.

The Silent Discussion format also involved pairing students and having them respond in writing, this time to a primary source which could be either an image or a short text. The pairs wrote their reactions down on a piece of paper without speaking. Maintaining their silence, the pair left their work on the table and circulated around the room, reading and contributing to other "silent discussions." This too was followed by a full-on class discussion.

You can imagine how rich any of these formats could be. Thank you, JB, for sending this suggestion from Cape Town. We look forward to hearing lots more from you when you rejoin us in Quint V.

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...

Workshop

Last week, I shared some classroom management ideas from Adina. This week, I'd like to describe a writing workshop which I observed in Suzanne's writing class. What was most striking to me was the initiative which the students displayed throughout this process. They had obviously internalized the rules and terminology and were accustomed to running workshop with little overt orchestration from Suzanne.

Each workshop focused on a piece by a student author, which the students had all read and critiqued in advance; the author sat quietly throughout the first part of the workshop, listening and taking notes. Suzanne also took notes quietly throughout.

During this phase, a student presenter took responsibility for facilitating the discussion; he or she had carefully reviewed the work under consideration and prepared a set of questions. The rest of the class weighed in with their own questions, reactions and impressions.

The presenter was adept at guiding the discussion and moved the conversation forward with prompts such as: "How did you think the dialogue established the main character?" "Did anyone have reactions about Richard?" "Does anyone else wonder about the oddly light tone?" If the conversation lagged (which was seldom), the presenter was practiced at asking questions such as: "Does anyone else have questions?" and finally, "Should we open it up to the author?"

This was a pivotal moment. Quite a lot of interest had built up as the students shared their impressions. When the presenter finally turned the conversation over, the readers got the rare chance to have their questions answered--and the author got to weigh in to the feedback which had been offered.

One by one, the author answered questions. On the day I observed, the author stood by some of her choices and seemed to be in the process of re-considering others. It was a fascinating shared experience of decoding and discovery and everyone in the room seemed aware of the privilege which this process conveyed upon readers and author alike. This is a rare feeling to achieve in a classroom...and Suzanne has clearly shown her students how to get there.

Student Roles in the Classroom

As you know, a lot of recent thought in education has gone into shifting emphasis away from teachers in the classroom and towards the students. Not surprisingly, it turns out that giving the students an active role helps them learn. If students are given some responsibility in the classroom, the information they process while on task tends to sink in.

Adina has been assigning her students jobs in the classroom for quite a while now. This enables her to step away from the center of attention and the students are able to step up.

The various roles are as follows: Facilitator, Recorder and Researcher and they are fairly self-explanatory.

The Facilitator takes responsibility for leading the discussion. He or she comes to class prepared with open-ended questions or structured activities designed to highlight key ideas and keep a conversation moving.

The Researcher takes responsibility for tracking questions that come up during class and does some quick research at home to find the answers. (For example, you might find yourself needing to know: who was the US Ambassador to the USSR during the Moscow Show Trials?)

The Recorder takes notes during the discussion. There are a couple of ways you can develop this role. It's most effective if you leave time at the end of the class for the Recorder to summarize out loud the main points of the conversation. This provides an opportunity to reinforce certain ideas...or to bring out ideas which didn't emerge. If you want to go Totally Crazy, you can also ask the Recorder to type up a quick summary which you can upload on your Teacher Page. This not only offers the students an opportunity to make a measurable contribution to the class, but also creates a written record of the discussion, useful for test review and perhaps for students beginning an analytic essay.

Adina is so organized that she has this all sorted out at the beginning of the quint. This way, students know what to expect and the rotation of roles is built in.

Date	Discussion topic	Facilitator	Recorder	Researcher
9/17	Agam. to 121	Austen K	Quinn F	Alex R
9/18	Agam. to 141	Will O.	Ann	Hanah
9/19	Agam. To 158	Wren	Hannah	Ranleigh
9/22	Agam. Done	Lulu	William	Brisa

Whoa!

(By the way, from 1936-1938, the US ambassador to the USSR was Joseph Davies, whom Historian Tim Tzouliadis has taken to task for his "glittering obliviousness.")

Retreat Wrap-up

We just had our annual department retreat and I thought it would be useful to post the results so that we can keep these ideas in mind as we move forward with our planning.

One of the goals of the retreat was to identify qualities of a Successful Integration Experience. It was an interesting review.

Folks confessed to a certain amount of fatigue with the amount of planning which goes into each activity; a consensus seemed to emerge that intermittent single or double-period activities may not deliver much value proportionate to the preparation they require. Support seemed to grow for more sustained projects that bring groups of students together for longer periods of time (at least 3 days). These longer projects have the virtue of being deeply woven into the curriculum instead of just tucked in the corners. This is important in terms of making the activities feel authentic and relevant and not just "tacked on." Because more sustained projects bring the same students together for several days, they offer more opportunities for students to get used to each other and for the teacher to assess and improve the model. Best of all, these projects may not require much more team-planning time than activities which only last one period.

There was also some discomfort expressed with student groups which are organized wholly according to teacher criteria. Might it increase student investment if their interests factored into the way the groups were organized? Would international students participate more actively if there were more of them in each group--and only one or two regular program kids? This would mean that some groups would be domestic-students only, but it might lead to international students taking the lead in the groups where they found themselves in the majority.

In general, some of the commonalities of integration projects which felt successful were:

• These are substantial projects which unfold over a period of days
  


• They are highly structured.
  


• Each student plays a specific role, which they have to prepare on their own.


• Each student is evaluated for their own contribution.

In addition, we also clarified our priorities in terms of the kinds of integration experiences we want to offer in Humanities and in terms of the skills we feel it makes sense to emphasize for English Language Learners in our department. We all acknowledged that it is somewhat artificial to separate these skills. As Adina and John observed, ideally, we would be creating a shared background for our students by offering all of these experiences and skills in concert.

However, I pushed folks to prioritize what is most important to emphasize, given the limits on our time and given that Humanities, while important, is not the only opportunity international students have to arrive at these outcomes.

Overwhelmingly, it seems, the department would like to see skills be our first priority, then content understanding and finally a shared experience.

In terms of skills, many commented on the inter-connection between reading and writing, listening and speaking. However, it was interesting that reading and writing were the clear top priorities, with reading coming in first according to all voters, except one. Speaking came in third and listening was in last place in terms of how the Humanities program should focus its efforts when working with international students.

Second Thoughts from a Luddite

I know most of the department is way ahead of me in the use of technology...but just in case, I'll share what I noticed on Thursday at Overlake School.

Every classroom in the Humanities building has a Smartboard, so I got to see lots of different uses of this technology. Everyone seems to take attendance with it: the MyBackpack class roster is displayed on the Smartboard at the beginning of every class. Student names are set to a default PRESENT, so teachers just tap the names of the one or two students who are missing and hit submit.

From there, approaches varied.

In some classes, the board just went dark and the teacher carried on as if this expensive equipment had never been installed. However, if a question arose in class, the Smartboard was there and answers to factual questions were immediately available.

Some teachers used the Smartboard to access their files. Rather than distributing 18 little half-sheets of paper, one teacher displayed a new assignment on the Smartboard. The same approach was used while discussing poetry. The three lines of In a Station of the Metro were displayed on the Smartboard, instead of being handed out on paper. After the students had articulated their own response to the poem, the teacher showed them a passage from a letter which Pound had written about this poem and a picture of the Paris metro.

Students seemed to know their way around the Smartboard too. I saw a couple of them give presentations on the first world war, combining power-point slides with You Tube. A cool feature is that if the Smartboard is displaying a map of troop movements on the Passchendaele front, you can draw all over the slide with luridly colored Smartboard pens. When you advance to the next slide, the board is miraculously clean.

The last nifty Smartboard Thing I saw was a presentation in a Comparative Religions class. The teacher in this class had prepared a few pages of a Notebook file for the Smartboard. On the first page, he had typed two words: GOD and HISTORY, which he used to elicit student reactions. He jotted down student suggestions under these headings, just like you'd do with a whiteboard. However, the Smartboard enabled him to slide a nifty virtual screen/shade over the surface of the board to conceal/reveal these lists. After he'd taken down student reactions to these two words, the instructor was able to transition to a page with some definitions he'd typed up in advance. The touch of a button had the effect of neatly organizing all the messy ideas the teacher had just elicited from his students.

Some of this isn't too different from what you can do with an old-fashioned overhead...but I'm thinking that next time I find myself in a room with a Smartboard, I'm going to turn it on.

Wikipedia: Guilty Pleasure or Role Model?

When I began writing this blog, Alan drew my attention to a blog called Shared Leadership by educational consultant Jamie Feild Baker. One of Baker's recent posts was a feisty defense of Wikipedia, whose detractors, she suspects, tend to be a bit old-school in their ideas about education. In fact, she feels that many of the Wikipedia features most often disparaged by teachers are in fact virtues--or at least realities of education in the 21st century.

What are some of Wikipedia's core values?

• Accessibility: Wikipedia's mission is to be free, easy to use and available in many languages.

• Transparency and Currency: Political agendas are prominently flagged and openly discussed. It is possible to track the history of every article, to read profiles of many of the contributors and to judge how each edit was received by the broader community.

• Inclusive Collaboration: Anyone can contribute to Wikipedia, at any moment, from anywhere in the world.

This last point, of course, is where we teachers often get stuck. Who are these people? Is this information reliable?

Baker suggests that engaging these questions is exactly the sort of work our students need to be doing. Limiting inquiry to neatly vetted sources may not best equip students for the fast-changing, paradigm-shifting world they are venturing into. There is bad information on Wikipedia, to be sure, and it's our job as educators to point that out.

But there's a lot to like about Wikipedia. Their Mission Statement: To empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain and to disseminate it effectively and globally.

That sounds quite compatible with our own " diverse community of people who challenge each other to learn in a healthy, creative and collaborative atmosphere. Or doesn't it? Let me know if you think this post may require cleanup.

See Jamie's blog to read her own words or to see a short-ish (20 minute) video clip of Wiki Foundation Chair Jimmy Wales. (You may need to search her blog to find the post, but it's worth it.)