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?