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.

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.

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.

Index Cards

I have decided that there is something inherently fun about index cards. Deceptively dull in appearance, index cards can enliven a classroom in many ways. They add an element of chance and can be used to support a heightened level of student participation. I would love to hear from any of you who have had success with this humble office product and submit a few ideas here for you all to adapt if you like.

Idea #1. Write passages from a reading assignment on index cards (with page numbers in case a closer look is needed). Pass the stack in class and have students take turns reading a card aloud. Students share their responses; when the discussion subsides, the stack is passed to a classmate and a new card is drawn.

Idea #2. Give the students the index cards for homework: ask them to inscribe a card with a passage which strikes them for any reason--as beautiful, painful, wrong, confusing, funny. Use this student-generated collection in the same way you'd use cards which you yourself had prepared. The difference is that as the class responds to each prompt, the student who prepared the card can share responsibility for shaping the discussion.

Idea #3. Divide the class into groups of 3-4. Write discussion questions on index cards and give the groups 5-ish minutes for each. You can ask different kinds of questions, including:

a) Personal Response questions, such as "Does Eliezer do the right thing when he lies to his relative from Antwerp?"

b) questions about Authorial Choices, such as,"What effect do the anachronistic moments
in the text have upon the experience of the reader?"

and

c) Interpretive questions such as: "What do you notice about the role of shadows in this memoir ?"

Benji has a "popcorn rule" which I find useful: just as popcorn reaches a steady roar on the stove, so a good discussion starts out a bit slow, warms up and then cooks for a while before subsiding. In doing any activity, listen for the roar, and when it starts to subside, initiate the next step in the process--i.e. pass the card!

Harkness Skills

In my last post, I described the philosophy behind the Harkness Table. It was clear from watching classes at Annie Wright that the students knew this philosophy and were consciously trying to enact these principles in their conversation. To describe a Harkness Table in action:

The conversation is almost 100% student driven. The teacher sits at the table with the students, asking an occasional question but mostly just observing and making notes. During the conversation I observed, the teacher was 100% un-bothered by moments of silence, some of them lasting longer than I usually allow. When a moment of disagreement verging on confusion emerged during the conversation, the teacher sat right through it, obviously paying attention but not jumping in to clarify. It was also very striking that the students in this class almost never volunteered a comment without referring to the text to support their contribution. I will sometimes let my students refer to Lord of the Rings or Oprah if they appear to be making a genuine attempt to illuminate a relevant idea. In this class, that never happened. Every comment included textual support:

"On page 71, column B," the author says..." or
"Going back to Mariah's comment about p. 68."

The students actually talked like this. Students were also trained in structuring their conversation.

"Adding on to what Michelle said..".
"The passage on p. 70 confused me because..."
"I think the importance of Cathy's point is also shown on pg. 68"
"I actually disagree. I think the real reason is on p. 72."
"I think we may have skipped over something." (Student adds point.)
"I think we might be getting off-track. X happened for a lot of reasons." (Student then summarized the conversation so far.)

Students actually said all of these things.

After 30-35 minutes of this, the teacher stepped in and asked the students to summarize the conversation: what were the major themes and ideas? It was at this point that he clarified the confusion that had emerged 10-15 minutes earlier in the discussion. He then asked the students to evaluate the conversation: what grade would you award yourselves and why? When one of them suggested a B+, he disagreed, pointing out that three students had not said a word during the class. One student pushed back and said that although some were silent, most had done a good job of "always digging deeper" in the text. It was clear that all the students would all get the same grade for the conversation. This self-evaluation was the end of class.

I will end by adding a list of the skills that the Harkness method wants every student to exercise in class. Some of these are quite self-explanatory, but students might need to be explicitly taught language for some of these things:

• organizing, leading the conversation
  
• summarizing, re-stating or clarifying the text
• citing specific quotations or passages from the text
• asking a question about the text
• commenting on the text, giving an opinion or reaction
• making a suggestion about the text or discussion
• summarizing discussion up to that point
• analyzing text or a comment or the whole conversation up to that point
• reacting to comments
• answering comments
• re-starting discussion
• filling in a gap
• arguing a point, disagreeing
• asking for new information
• asking for other comments, reactions
• comparing to other works

It was very striking to me how rooted in the text this work is. There was absolutely a culture of "Where's your proof?" "Where do you see this?" "Find it in the text." However, reading assignments are significantly shorter than reading assignments I typically give. For example, in one class I observed, students had been asked to read from p. 64-71; in another p. 1-10 and p. 17-20.

The Harkness Table

"Civilized discourse must be at the core of all good education and all full lives."

--Edward Harkness

Edward Harkness was an American oil magnate and philanthropist who generously supported medicine, the arts and education during his lifetime (1874-1940). His interest in education led to the development of the "Harkness Table" which Melody and I saw in action today at Annie Wright.

The Harkness Table is a kind of round (or oval) table discussion. It is not unlike a fishbowl, in that the teacher's role is very scaled back. The main difference between a Harkness Table and a Fishbowl seems to be the amount of explicit protocol involved. The students we saw today were highly trained in a specific approach to classroom conversation. The Harkness Table has clear philosophical underpinnings as well as specific skills which inform it.

I'll go into the skills in a later post, (they won't surprise you), but the philosophy is interesting and made a noticeable difference in the tenor of the conversation. What follows are the "cultural beliefs" that underlie this approach to class discussion.

1. Everyone at the table is an equal. Everyone's ideas are of value and interest.

2. Everyone can agree or diagree with everyone's ideas.

• These agreements/disagreements should be about the ideas, not the people.


• They should be made politely.


• They should be backed up by specific reference to the text to provide evidence for your opinion.
  

3. If classmates don't contribute, we need to help them do so (because we believe they want to.)

4. If classmates don't contribute, they may be behaving selfishly.

5. There should be little or no silence.

6. The discussion should show a connection of ideas in a long, connected thread, including segues to the next big question.

7. The conversation should feel "natural."

8. At the end we do not need to agree about what we believe the text is saying, but we do need to understand each other's beliefs.

To be honest, the conversation I observed today did not exactly feel "natural." However, it was serious, informed and very productive. I am intrigued the idea of having this kind of highly structured academic conversation be part of my students' skillset and my regular routine.

The Harkness Table was originated at Philips Exeter but has been adopted at many schools and is ubiquitous on-line, if you want to check it out. I will be writing more about the specific skills that are required and the way I saw it working.

Student Engagement

John, Daren, Harumi, Ann and I had a useful conversation at our department meeting last Tuesday. We mulled over a bunch of topics, but one of our themes was how to maximize student participation and engagement in the classroom.

These are some of the things we noticed:

1. Preparation really helps. Something that I have been trying this quint is setting Reading Questions with every night's assignment. Of course, we are free not to pursue this subject...but creating some sort of expectations seems to set up richer conversations than simply asking the students to come in with with passages which are "interesting."

2. Daren noted that he often begins a discussion with a brief response exercise. Taking a few moments to write gives the students a chance to collect their thoughts before being called upon to articulate/defend them.

3. Even the tried-and-true "Share with a Partner" technique can be more productive if you add a step: Think-Pair-Share. If students are given a moment to flip through their texts and make notes, they will often make better use of the moment when they are invited to turn to their neighbor and share an idea. (How often have you noticed that small groups/pairs often start off off-topic?)

4. Harumi has found that setting goals with students is useful in increasing participation. Conference can be a comfortable place to draw students out; once they have ventured a few ideas there, you can challenge them to wade into section discussion. Even give them a deadline: "By the end of the next week, I expect you to_____________." Or even," Tomorrow, I am going to ask your opinion about ____________. " (Of course, you have to remember that you told them that!)

5. Both Daren and Heather M have attested to the usefulness of Opening Broadly to increase student engagement. Heather and Daren recently started their class with accessible State-Your-Opinion kind of questions, i.e.: "What constitutes a "right?" or "Is there value in reading a play written over 2,000 years ago?"

Students like to weigh in on this sort of thing...and then they feel invested in learning more. Content you present after this kind of a warm-up falls on a relatively receptive audience.

6. Finally, I am reminded of an article JB sent me earlier today, an article in The Washington Post by Daniel Willingham, who reflects on how Prior Knowledge Affects Reading Comprehension. Willingham points out that any student tackling a reading assignment will understand more of it if they have a frame of reference for approaching the issue: some vocabulary, key concepts or a sense of why they should care. Armed with these, students have a measurably easier time actually understanding the text. If they've simply been told to read it "for tomorrow," students understand measurably less of what they read...and reading strategies like Highlighting and Annotating don't seem to change that.

Interactive Lecture

Ben gave me a great article by Rob Weir, published in the April 29 issue of Inside Higher Ed. Weir offers an approach he calls "didaction," a mix of exposition and student participation. The article offers a lot of great ideas for keeping student involvement strong, even in a lecture situation. Some of the best of these include:

• Brainstorm: pepper your lecture with open-ended questions and invite students to offer ideas.

• Ask "affective" questions: students often hesitate to offer "right/wrong" answers, but many are willing to volunteer how something makes them feel or think. This gets them more personally invested in what you are presenting.
  

• Say it in pictures: No one likes to listen as the presenter reads a slide aloud. However, images are engaging...especially when students are asked to comment on them. Maximize moments where you can convey information by summarizing and affirming correct assumptions the students have extracted from images, graphs or maps.

• Story-telling: Students naturally remember stories. Take advantage of opportunities to package information as mini-stories.

• Be controversial/provocative/silly: if you notice that the class is drifting, ask an outrageous question or make an outlandish claim and demand to be corrected.

• Role-play: You can wade into the audience (which alone changes the mood and gets their attention) and ask questions. Ask more than one student--"What were the weaknesses with this point in the treaty?" or "Why does Descartes distrust the evidence of his senses?" This bit of drama can drive the point home.

• Encourage interruptions: Make your presentation an experience students feel free to join in with comments or questions.
  

• End with a question: it's always better not to end your presentation by simply running out of time. It can be effective to end with a puzzle or problem or question...something that previews material to come or that reflects back on what they've already learned.

Thanks to Ben for sharing this article. If anyone else reads/notices/does anything cool, let us know. You can comment or post or just let me know and I'll post.

Wild Card Seating

Benji taught me this creative approach to configuring the classroom.



You get an old deck of cards, too shabby for the poker table, and write the names of your students on them. These then become flexible classroom management tools.

• You can deal the cards out on the desks to create certain pairs or teams.


• Early-bird students can be given the enjoyable task of dealing them out.
  


• HH refined this idea by using all red for girls, all black for boys (or vice-versa). This comes in handy when you are looking for gender balance.


• For me, having a little deck of name-cards actually helps me design my teams/pairs. I deal out my groups of 2, 3 or 4 and then re-arrange when I see one group is getting too strong.


• Benji even customizes his cards, using pictures that the students bring in: baby pictures, pets.

This has been a simple and fun way to ensure that inertia doesn't have too much influence in classroom seating.

Reflections on a Fish Bowl

I just had a satisfying Fishbowl Experience. (If there's anyone out there who doesn't know, a fishbowl is when half of the class is ringed at the edge of the room, silent, while the other half sits in the middle and carries on the discussion. The teacher says nothing but keeps careful track of how the students participate.)


Some things that made this work:

• Students were prepared. I had told them what we'd be doing and advised them to come to class with passages, questions and observations to share.

• I had a stack of questions on notecards which they could draw from if they felt the conversation needed new energy.

• I had a clipboard with a little graph on hand to take notes. I made hatch marks under the Offers Passage/Asks Question/ Agrees/Disagrees columns and left a long-ish space at the far right edge to make longer comments.

• I had a fun, scooty chair for the "hot seat," where students on the outside can jump in if they really want to say something. (It is fair play to bump someone from the hot seat--and towards the end of class, I did.)

• At the end, we de-briefed the experience and reflected on what kind of comments make for good academic conversation. They themselves volunteered that comments that refer to specific passages in the text lead to richer discussions.

Taking a Backseat

Heather has been having great success lately by saying very little in the classroom. Students have been working closely with texts and with each other instead.

Heather gets the conversation started by inviting students to share passages from the texts they are reading. She reviews the rules of a good classroom conversation and then announces her intention to remain an observer. She even makes a bit of a show of moving to the back of the room and taking notes--and the students get the hint.

I'm thinking I'll do this on Tuesday with a spreadsheet chart that lists all the students names and allows me to check off the ways they participate: offers idea/extends/re-directs/questions/disagrees/jokes.