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.)

Quoting the Quote

Sometimes it is daunting for a teacher to realize how often a skill has to be practiced before it becomes part of a student's toolkit. In 11th grade, we recently assigned a paper that seemed to me a straightforward exercise in passage analysis. However, the results reminded me that students need lots of guided practice before they understand what "focusing closely on a specific passage" actually looks like.

Fortunately, we have Daren and Benji on our team.

Daren and Benji have created an admirable document called "Tips for Integrating and Analyzing Quotations." It describes a couple of different approaches to working with quoted material. My favorite part of this document is the use of mnemonic phrases, for example: your evidence is not self-evident. This point emphasizes that quotations in analytic essays must always be followed by your ideas about what the quote shows. Quoted text is meant to support your argument rather than stand in for it.

Even more memorable for me has been the exortation to "quote the quote!" This catchy phrase captures the idea that one way to work with quoted text is to pull out and focus on individual words or phrases and relate them back to the idea you are trying to prove. This high focus on particular elements of quoted material is called "quoting the quote."

I have been getting a ton of mileage out of this document ever since Daren left it lying around carelessly on his desk...If you'd like to get some mileage out of it too, it is available on my teacher page (and Daren's).

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!

New Sections

In the Upper School, we'll all have a new group of students next week. There are advantages and disadvantages to mixing things up in this way, but a clear consequence is that teachers need to re-establish class expectations, just like we did in September. As Ellen never fails to mention, these first two weeks are an important window. It's always easier to start off a bit strict. I have concluded over the years that students like a bit of rigor in the classroom. It lets them feel that they are stepping up to something, instead of just carrying on in a comfortable slouchy way. It's a balance, of course. You want your classroom to be somewhere your students enjoy being.

I was reviewing the files that Heather created last year and came across a number of ideas for working with new students. Daniel sometimes groups the students in a few different configurations on the first day so that the class has seating options during the quint: students arrange themselves alphabetically by first name, alphabetically by last name and also in the order of their birthdays. During the first few days of class, Tim sometimes does a version of Two Truths and a Lie: students write down on an index card two facts about themselves and a falsehood. These can be read aloud and guessed at, several right away and the rest from time to time during the quint. I think I will avail myself of Scott's "Find Someone Who" idea: I will distribute index cards with names of figures we have studied written on them and have students find a partner whose figure is linked to their own: Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, for example, or Kaiser Wilhelm and Czar Nicholas. The pairs of students can then explain the connection. This enables us to do a warm-up while also reviewing the year so far. For me, it makes more sense to do this mixer on the second day of class. For one thing, the content of the curriculum is serious at the beginning of Quint III and the tone of our first meeting needs to reflect this. Secondly, having a focused and business-like first day is one of the ways I implement Ellen's September reminder about setting expectations. I find the energy at school tends to be high and loose enough on the first day without my doing anything to stir it up.