Portable Teacher

On NCTE, Meeting Heroes and Making Dreams Come True

2011-12-08T19:42:00.000-08:00

NCTE in Chicago was magical. I'm not talking wands, butter beer, potions or theme parks. The kind of magic I experienced at NCTE ran deeper. I'm talking about make your day, hard to explain, once in a lifetime magic. It probably began last July when my 10 year-old son begged to come to NCTE. Yes, he asked, he inquired, he persisted. I'd let slip that John Green was going to speak at ALAN and Collin was intent on attending. He hasn't read John Green's books. Not yet, anyway, but he's a Nerdfighter and Vlogbrothers subscriber on YouTube. He's participated in Project for Awesome and he knows I taught John Green's genius brother, Hank. John and Hank are two of our heroes.

I registered Collin for ALAN in July. He's currently the youngest member of the organization; Stephen, Joan Kaywell's son holds the record for youngest registered member of all time. Stephen started coming to ALAN when he was a baby. Now he's like 7 feet tall and nearly graduated from college. You can see Stephen in the signing line behind Collin (white hoodie, blue shirt standing at least a foot over my friend Kym). The camera lens had smudge-y stuff on it--think of it as a "soft focus." Collin worked ALAN as a book sherpa. He stood in the signing lines and got my box of books signed for the classroom. His box of books he had signed for Nerdfigheria. Pictured here, they will be auctioned off during Project for Awesome, December 17th and 18th, to raise money for charity.

Bringing Collin to Chicago for ALAN was not the beginning of the magic for me. The magic actually began Thursday during Kittle, Rief and Kauffman's afternoon session on conferring with writers. Many of my Twitter friends were there: Jen Ansbach, Teresa Bunner, Donalyn Miller, Meenoo Rami, Chris Kervina, Gary Anderson, Tony Romano and more. The session reminded me of the importance of listening to writers read their work. The importance of sitting with student writers and asking them "How can I help you?" Focusing on the writer not the writing. Penny Kittle shared video footage from some of Don Graves' early work on conferring. Amazing. Linda Rief shared a conference video featuring an 8th grader reading an essay about putting the family dog to sleep. Two days before I'd put my 16 year-old dog to sleep, to say that the writer moved me is an understatement. The room wept as she read.

Friday evening I enjoyed spending time with old friends, Sara Holbrook and Michael Salinger who introduced me to their friend Henry Sampson (King of Poetry Slam and Hemingway expert). We squeezed drinks and conversation between the last session of the day and 9 o'clock appointments. Afterwards, I ran into Barry Lane. He invited me to a party. Collin hadn't flown up yet, so I said yes. We ascended to the top floor of the hotel. On the way, we talked about Florida's new teacher evaluation model and his experience at the Save Our Schools March on Washington this past summer. Barry's work as an activist and advocate reassures me that there are good people out there fighting for my right to teach.

I couldn't have scripted what came next. When we got to the party he introduced me to one of my heroes, Stephen Krashen.

Krashen and I spent the next couple of hours talking. We talked about reading and about weightlifting. We talked about NCTE's stand on the Common Core and the misdirection of the media and merit pay systems. He played the piano for me. I could see the Chicago skyline twinkling out the windows as I stood next to the baby grand. Do you know how many times I've read his work? A dog-eared copy of The Power of Reading has sat on my desk at school within arm's reach since it was first published. Talking with Krashen in person? Absolute magic.

It wasn't all rock stars and fandom (honest). I learned a lot at NCTE and ALAN. Over the next couple of weeks I'll share lessons learned. I'll be posting video and pages from my journal soon.

Bye for now,

NCTE Approaches: Are You Going?

2011-11-13T12:42:00.000-08:00

The other day while facilitating a group of science teachers through the first cycle of lesson study, I compared our professional development work together to a vacation. Teachers at my school feel overwhelmed. The science teachers are juggling a new end of course exam, a new teacher evaluation system, shortened class periods and a merry-go-round of meetings. Like them, I sometimes feel green-faced, a little sick over the turn education is taking in my state. Regardless, we still have students to teach, books to read, conversations to have, and things to learn. Learning, for me, is a vacation. I encouraged the science teachers to think of lesson study that way. Time out of our classrooms (and current edu-troubles) to learn with each other. NCTE is my time out.

Like Gary Anderson, I'm excited about learning with my friends at NCTE! Part of that learning happens while presenting. This year, I have the honor of presenting with dynamic duo, Gary Anderson and Tony Romano. Here are the details for our session:

Zapping Apathy: Creating a Sense of Community in English Classes, Friday, November 18, 2011: Session D.27.I'm going to talk about hands-on community building (The Marshmallow Challenge), writing in community (This I Believe Goes Global) and building community using technology (cell phones in the classroom).

NCTE is my time to listen and learn from the masters. The teacher-writers I call education Rock Stars. If I name a few and you search the NCTE convention program for their sessions, be sure to save me a seat if you beat me to the room!

Thursday I'm heading to the Waldorf Room in the Hilton at 2:30 p.m. for "Talking Writer to Writer" with Douglas Kauffman, Penny Kittle and Linda Rief. I'll follow that with Cris Crutcher keynoting the Secondary Section get together at 4:30 in the International Ballroom in the Hilton.

Top picks for Friday include "Defending Intellectual Freedom" with John Green, "Literary Criticism" with Tim Gillespie and colleagues from Lake Oswego High School, and "High School Matters" round table extravaganza. Janet Allen, Gordon Korman, Linda Rief and Kate Messner are Saturday highlights. They will keynote the Middle Mosaic, one of my favorite sessions! Before the Mosaic though, I plan to tweet my way through the #engchat session with Menoo Rami, Donalyn Miller and Cynthia Minnich and then hop over to the Poetry Parade!

My son is meeting me on Sunday and staying through ALAN. He's registered for the conference and will likely fly up alone (a first). Joan Kaywell inspired me to register him after his visit to ALAN last year. He loved folding origami Yoda with Tom Ankleberger. He talked all year about meeting authors. This year he'll get his own box of books; we're going to use them for the Project for Awesome. I'm going to pay him $1 per book he gets signed. Joan Kaywell even suggested I let others pay him to stand in signing lines for them. Do you think he needs a work-for-hire shirt for that?

Kaywell used to do that for her son, Stephen. That way he earned money for Christmas. Isn't that a great idea? So, if you'd like to hire my son, Collin, just keep your eye out. He'll likely be the 10 year-old sitting in the front row with his Mom.

I can't visit Chicago without taking a field trip to the Art Institute, so that's a must for Sunday afternoon. Did you know they let you photograph the art? Looking through the lens changed my perspective last fall. I want to investigate a good restaurant or two and maybe walk the long green lawn to the Natural History museum like I did when I was 6.

It's going to be a great conference! I hope to see you in Chicago!

Skype and Literature Circles? Why not!

2011-10-17T17:46:00.000-07:00

Interested in participating in literature circles? My 9th graders will choose to read one of the following titles for literature circles:
Son of the Mob by Gordon Korman,
Romiette and Julio by Sharon Draper
If You Come Softly by Jacquelyn Woodson.

Students will begin planning for literature circles and setting a reading schedule November 8th. This will be our first cycle of literature circles this year and we'll use role sheets developed for Janet Allen's Plugged-in to Reading. Conversation is what counts though!

We hope to complete the circles before Winter break. Students will read outside of class and spend 2 days a week (for 2-3 weeks) meeting to talk about the book and their reading. Participating classes/students may Skype into the discussion once, twice or for the entire length of the circle. We will work out the details together based on our schedules.

Interested? Complete the Google form below and we will contact you with details.Loading...

Are You too Tired for PD?

2011-10-15T04:00:00.000-07:00

Visit FCTE online!

It's professional development weekend in Florida! Are you learning with colleagues? I know many teachers that are not. They are taking a 3-day weekend instead of going to a conference or working at school or using the time to collaborate. That doesn't mean they're not working. Who doesn't take home lesson plans? Who doesn't carry the ubiquitous pile of papers to grade? Who doesn't read for school?

Teachers are suffering this year at my school. Many are demoralized by continuing demands. With the new teacher evaluation program in Florida we're grappling with big concepts (learning goals, formative assessments and value added models). We're frustrated by time thieves who steal instructional time away from real teaching. We're bullied by the press and the freight train pace of the 7 period.

I'm taking a time out this weekend. I'm attending and presenting at the Florida Council of Teachers of English. Sometimes professional development seems like that one more thing--the last straw of obligations in a teachers too busy life. It's not. It's life-giving. It's renewing. It's a moment out of the battle ground many schools have become. As Jimmy Santiago Baca said Friday, it's a gathering of teacher warriors at the hearth. A place for us to lay down our armor, set our weapons outside the gate and be refreshed and recharged by each others' stories.

Alan Sitomer opened the conference with a rousing keynote Thursday night. I've heard Sitomer speak many times, but never has he sounded as authentic and impassioned as he did Thursday night. He talked about grit and how we Americans admire it. We admire it when we see people dig in and not give up. Whether it's weight loss (He shared a story about student, Edgar Ortiz who lost at least 100 pounds.) or overcoming life's trials. He railed against politicians and the freight train of the Common Core that's about to take us over. He encouraged us to not give up. To turn our faces toward the sun of optimism. He said that over and over, people that don't succeed give up just before success is to be had. We are on the cusp of a great change in education. Have hope, continue the good fight and the incredible work of teaching. "Do this job as if it is your life's work," he said.

Teaching IS my life's work. My students need me. That is why I often stay after school to give kids access to computers and my help. That's why I participate in school events. Students are why I write and continue learning. My kids are counting on me. I bet yours are counting on you too. Don't give up.

Posting Reviews from Good Reads

2011-09-04T16:12:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd try out Good Reads sharing feature that posts a review to your blog. Once you've written the review a window prompts you to share it (pictured below).

The Maze Runner by James Dashner

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Born from the dark depths of what you can imagine as a futuristic, elevator shade, Thomas arrives in "the Glade" knowing only his name. Surround by boys of various ages this reader first thought he'd be instantly attacked. But no. The boys are not savage (think Golding's Lord of the Flies crew meets the order of Bachortz's Candor). Instead they have organized a nearly self-sufficient and orderly civilization in the Glade, a place they've lived (without memories and under control of the Creators) for two years. Fans of dystopian novels, action and survival books will enjoy The Maze Runner.

For teachers, I can imagine using the opening chapter to teach a vocabulary strategy lesson. Before reading, I might have students predict the meaning of words in Gill's future-speak (shank, glade, griever, greenie, etc)and then revisit the text to examine/discuss context clues or how background knowledge affects our understanding of words to wrap up the mini-lesson.

View all my reviews

Happy New Year

2011-08-17T18:02:00.000-07:00

My double-wide, portable 29

After nearly 20 years you’d think this teaching gig would get easier, right? It does but it seems the more experience I have the more I question and refine my practice.

What does reading look like in my classroom? I balance our reading work among the reading approaches: read aloud, shared reading, guided reading and independent reading. My students, by year’s end, traditionally develop robust reading habits. At least a third of our time is spent reading. Students choose the books they want to read for independent reading and they read them in class, on school buses, at lunch, at home and sometimes even while walking the campus. After listening to Nancie Atwell and others speak during Middle

School Mosaic in 2009, I seriously questioned teaching whole class novels. I have been questioning the whole class novel for some time (see Do These Jeans Fit You?).

Common texts are mandated at my school. Like Jim Burke, I have to teach Romeo and Juliet and The Odyssey. I also have to teach Speak. The Hunger Games is an optional common text at the ninth grade at my school. My reluctant and struggling readers need the magic a whole class read of a novel provides, but it's time for me to push the students enrolled in my honors class to do more independently.

I have taught whole-class novels every year. We read Romeo and Juliet, Bronx Masquerade, Anthem and more, together. Some of the reading is done in class and some at home (think Gallagher discussion of Carol Jago’s “guided tour” and “budget tour”) (79). In my best years we can read 8 novels together—those teaching days were during the block scheduling heyday in my county, something we have not had for more than 5 years. With 45 minute class periods, last year we only read 5. Though students read many more titles independently during reading workshop time, I want to make what we do together as authentic as our silent reading Mondays were last year (many students met and exceeded my 25 books a year expectation in the 9th grade). I need to shift my thinking so that I can do more with students.

For more than I year I’ve been thinking and reading and talking to teachers about how to change how I use whole class novels. Right now, my answer is not to abandon the core text, but to use it differently. Meaning instead of reading 1 core text with an entire class, students will now have a choice of several titles. As Atwell said, “kids need the power of stories to invite, nurture and sustain.” Instead of doing the same book at the same time with all of the students in a class, I will immerse students in books and expect them to read one “assigned” book (from several choices) and one book for pleasure, any book of their own choosing. This is not to say that we won’t ever read a text together. We will. Students need support. The magic of shared reading is often the spark my reluctant or alliterate students need. In addition, some texts demand it. Romeo & Juliet, for example, is like a foreign language to my ninth graders. Reading matters.

My direct instruction of strategies and English content will be connected to short texts (articles, short stories, and poetry) and then students will apply those strategies to the core novel they have chosen. Does that make sense? I can still meet the curricular demands of my school, by include excerpts from the common texts in my mini-lessons (and I’ll bet most if not all students will choose to read Speak and The Hunger Games though not at the same time). This way they won’t have to. If I increase autonomy and provide more choice, I should see an increase in motivation, at least according to Daniel Pink and my own experiences.

My revised curriculum map is embedded from Scribd below. I've included links to the short texts (and handouts of my own creation) when available.

curric-map2011-page1

References

Atwell, Nancie. 21 Nov 2009. Middle School Mosaic Presentation. National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention, Philadelphia.

Gallagher, Kelly. 2009. Readicide. Portland, ME: Stenhouse.

Pink, Daniel. 2011. Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. New York, NY: Riverhead Books.

Ahh...Art

2011-07-30T07:20:00.000-07:00

Immersing myself, submerging myself in art recharges me like almost nothing else. My son and I have been in New York City this week on what we've dubbed "the museum tour," so I thought I'd blog museum resources and ideas I'm going to take back to my classroom when school starts.

“I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.” - Picasso

How can we, in lean budget times especially, help students "see" into the minds of artists? Resources online abound. Instead of going to the museum ourselves, we can visit virtually or visit vicariously by connecting with a class that goes. To layer virtual visits, I've annotated a few tools below.

Check iTunes for podcasts from the Museum of Modern Art like MoMA Audio: Kids or MoMA Audio: Teens, available in iTunes U or as podcasts these idea-rich broadcasts are created by and for teens.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art also publishes podcasts about special exhibitions. I'm thinking that episode 78, Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharoah would bean excellent pairing for A read aloud from Hatshepsut by Galford or from Curse of the Pharoahs by Hawass. In addition to the audio we'd visit the museums online.
A great feature on The Whitney Museum of America Art's site is the start your collection feature (bottom right on homepage). Imagine having students creating a character's art collection and justifying their choices. Ah, art always gives me ideas.

Copying iTunes Library

2011-07-17T06:34:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I had to get a new hard drive put into my laptop. Fortunately, I keep ,most of my files on a portable hard drive which is stuck to the back of the lap top screen with Velcro. Unfortunately, I hadn't backed up my iTunes library. Lucky for me I had Florida Digital Educators training last week and there were plenty of people in the room who could help me figure out work-arounds for computer issues. Po, one of our facilitators, did some at-the-elbow-coaching and showed me how to easily copy the library files.

My former lap top screen bulb burnt out, so it's retired, but I knew I had my iTunes library, if not synced at least semi-populated. So I connected the retired laptop to a desktop monitor and went to my music folder. Then I opened the iTunes folder and copied all of the files. I dropped the files from the retired machine into the My Music folder on my current lap top and voila, my iTunes library is restored.

After restoring all, I updated all of the iTunes on the home machines and turned on home sharing. Home sharing with iTunes 10.3 allows you to share music across 5 computers if all of the computers use the same iTunes account. Find it under the Advanced tab in iTunes. Once you turn it on, everyone in the family can share music over our wireless network. Love it!

OTIS Training

2011-07-11T08:02:00.000-07:00

OTIS training day 1

A county Technology Guru opened our 4-day OTIS institute by saying, "Your brains will explode over the next 4 days!" Can you imagine? Learning heaven. Take a peek at day 1 in the screen shot to the right.OTIS stands for Orange Technology Integration Specialist, positions being created at many district schools in order to facilitate technology integration and meet the goal of delivery 50% digital content (a new state law) by 2015. Actually, it's not 50% digital content, it's 50% of the budget for purchasing content will be earmarked for digital content. So think about that. This summer elementary school textbooks (just 1 series, I imagine) cost the district more than $80K--the money is moving. Who's going to follow it? OTIS is grant funded and the actual instructional positions at the schools aren't necessarily paid. While we won't be paid additional monies for agreeing to train teachers, or attend training, we are paid in trade: ideas, tools and tech swag. My expectations are high. Let the learning begin.

Fossil Fuels and the End of the World

2011-07-11T03:05:00.000-07:00

I couldn't find Florida Teen Reads titles in the local branch of my library this week, so I picked a few titles by author's I've enjoyed. It wasn't until I'd left the library that I realized I had a short set of end of the world fiction. The environment, fossil fuels, conservation, technology, all play a role in our future. These authors take the argument to a terminal degree.

Empty by Suzanne Weyn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Gas. Petroleum. Fuel. Energy. Do we have enough or are we running on empty? In the world Suzanne Weyn's creates, fossil fuels are only available on the black-market and Gwen, independent and fierce, has a brother who sells it. Gas is more than $40 a gallon. Heating oil, nonexistent for Niki's family once her father looses his job. When Gwen's house is destroyed in a fire, Tom must choose between the two girls. Will he rescue Gwen or Niki?

Girls will enjoy the budding romance, but plumb the depths of their thinking with debatable topics Weyn introduces: renewable energy, oil greed, conservation and more.

View all my reviews

This World We Live In by Susan Beth Pfeffer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Is romance the second stage of the end of the world? In Pfeffer's sequel (as well as several other end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it books I've read this week it sure seems so. Fans of Life As We Knew It will be pleased to find the Evans family still surviving after the meteor's encounter with the moon. Electricity is an occasional luxury and though government stepped-in with food, it seems as if supplies are dwindling. Storms loom. Will the house survive? Can the Evans weather the storm or is it time to leave?

View all my reviews

Ashes, Ashes by Jo Treggiari
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I loved the map of New York City at the start of the book. Maybe I'm like one of those kids Tom Angleberger talked about mapping things for at ALAN 2011. The map delighted me because we are going to NYC soon and I found myself imagining the places we'd go in terms of the brave new world Treggiari has created. Even after cataclysmic disasters, life, long and the world goes on. Good story. Strong girl. What's not to like?

View all my reviews

Human.4 by Mike A. Lancaster

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Matrix meets Asher's 13 Reasons Why who dates Nancy Werlin's Double Helix or Pearson's The Adoration of Jenna Fox . Imagine a world of the future where cassette tapes are a technology of the past (we'll we're there, right?). Meet Kyle. Friend of Lilly, Simon and Danny. Enjoying a seemingly ho-hum summer when the talent show changes everything. Kyle tells readers what happened in his voice, recorded and preserved on the tapes. We hear the story from Kyle with historical footnotes added by an anonymous figure looking back at the tapes from the future. Instructing plot structure, the real twist comes when Danny hypnotizes 4 members of the audience as part of his talent show spot. Those 4 are the only remaining analog humans in the town and possibly on the planet. What would you do if the human race automatically updated and you were left behind?

View all my reviews

Florida Teen Reads Titles round 1

2011-07-07T05:42:00.000-07:00

Each year FAME (Florida Association for Media in Education) names 15 young adult titles to the Florida Teen Reads list. Titles are chosen by a committee of 13 media specialists and voted on at year's end by teens throughout the state. At my school, our reading coach, Dr. Beth Scanlon, plans grant-funded literacy events around the titles each year. Grant funds purchase sets of the titles for English teachers that request them and enable us to build a reading culture through monthly "Chat and Chew" lunch book clubs and after school celebrations (Family Literacy Night and the Florida Teen Reads Round Table Awards). My favorite is the final round table awards ceremony--imagine a media center nearly filled to capacity, students and teachers buzzing and book talking books. It's amazing. Teachers from all content areas, deans and even administrators "champion" a title from the Florida Teen Reads list and a round-robin session of book talking begins. Students move through 3 rounds of book chat at tables manned by book champions. We have Italian ice, vote on the best teen titles and give students tickets for participating that are drawn for door prizes provided by the wonderful Mary Ramsey, community relations manager extraordinaire from our local Barnes and Noble. This year even the principal championed a book! More than a thousand students participated in literacy events at school last year. Can you feel the excitement?

With a new school-year fast approaching, I need to read through this year's titles so that I can pick the book I want to champion. For the first time in many years the list came out with 15 titles I'd never read. I've finished four and am looking forward to reading the remaining 11 before July's end. Here are reviews to my first four Teen Reads 2011 titles:

The Maze Runner by James Dashner

The Maze Runner by James Dashner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Born from the dark depths of what you can imagine as a futuristic, elevator shade, Thomas arrives in "the Glade" knowing only his name. Surround by boys of various ages this reader first thought he'd be instantly attacked. But no. The boys are not savage (think Golding's Lord of the Flies crew meets the order of Bachortz's Candor). Instead they have organized a nearly self-sufficient and orderly civilization in the Glade, a place they've lived (without memories and under control of the Creators) for two years. Fans of dystopian novels, action and survival books will enjoy The Maze Runner.

For teachers, I can imagine using the opening chapter to teach a vocabulary strategy lesson. Before reading, I might have students predict the meaning of words in Gill's future-speak (shank, glade, griever, greenie, etc)and then revisit the text to examine/discuss context clues or how background knowledge affects our understanding of words to wrap up the mini-lesson.

View all my reviews

Soul Enchilada by David Macinnis Gill

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Who knew that the devil demands collateral on wish fulfilled, sold-soul purchases? At times, Gill's novel--a 2011 Florida Teen Reads pick--seemed like a fantastical game of "Would You Rather." Would you rather live with a "bruja" (witch) or be evicted? Run from the devil or face his minion in a basketball game? Bug Smoot's grandfather sold his soul for his dream car, a classic Cadillac, and used Bug as collateral. Paranormals, demons, seances, psychics and more will delight supernatural fans. Bug's grit and determination will keep girls cheering her on as she battles for her soul and perhaps love in the process.

View all my reviews

The Miles Between by Mary E. Pearson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A vintage pink convertible with leather seats and a glove box full of cash? Who wouldn't go for a ride? Destiny does and her journey becomes her "one fair day"-- a day full of coincidence and joy.

Despite a secret she must confront, Destiny and 3 friends experience crystalline moments where the sun shines, the blue sky brightens and all goes their way. "Small, in-between moments, where there is magic and purpose and design and they are so perfectly beautiful they ache"(252). If only my students lives were as filled with whimsy.

View all my reviews

Incarceron by Catherine Fisher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Imagine a world--living, watching, listening, shifting--around you. Such is Incarceron, a living prison created to be paradise. Finn, a starseer, believes outside exists and is driven to find it with the help of his friends. Will the crystal key take him to his dreams of another world?

Action packed, description-rich, Incarceron tests your ability to imagine an alternative world. If you like dystopian fiction or even the artwork of M.C. Escher, you'll delight in Incareron.

View all my reviews

Book Art

2011-06-21T15:42:00.000-07:00

Aren't these amazing? This book art was created by students, teachers and media specialist, Carol Stollard from Jason Lee Middle School in Tacoma, Washington. Some have folded pages, others include collaged in items--all upcycled book discards! The works are on display for the Plugged-in to Reading Institute we're doing here in Portland, Oregon. I'm inspired!

So beyond a beautiful display what purpose could such a project serve in my own classroom? Why integrate art?

Art smiles. Art unites. Art unifies. Art heals. Art extends. Art thinks. Art wonders. Art delights. As Elliott Eisner says, "Art is literacy of the heart." I could pair this project with reading about paper mills and their affect on our environment. We could begin with this elegantly simple video "Pay It Green" which demonstrates in a concrete, specific and practical way how each individual could reduce paper's impact on our environment. I could also point students toward exploring issues of reusing, recycling or (upcycling). We could virtually visit "Reframe: Making Sense of Waste" an exhibit from the San Fransico Art Museum.We could talk about the value to a community of re-purposing goods. I want to teach students about "the power of you." Don't you?

What else could we connect? Engineering (the science and math behind the pop-up), reading (create a visual for a recent read like the student did with Yolanda's Genius), social studies (bring in the history of the book and printing press). Art connects. Art builds. Art enriches.

On Organizing and Test Scores

2011-06-14T04:00:00.000-07:00

School's out for summer! So exciting the end of the school year, especially for my ninth graders. Last week I began reorganizing the classroom library books. The books need constant maintenance and I am usually too busy teaching, planning, thinking, assessing--doing--with students that I don't take the time to patrol the books.

How do you organize your classroom library? Do you shelve by genre? Mimic the Dewey Decimal System?

In my double-wide, portable classroom, books are grouped by genre, and then alpha by author. Starting with the first bookcase on the left, the books run: fiction, nonfiction (after the window), short stories, poetry and picture books (near the projection screen) and then the Plugged-in to Nonfiction collection in the short green shelves. Behind my desk, not pictured) are bookshelves of professional books.

Why am I thinking about book organization? I'm thinking about it because I'd like to do it better next year. Do you "hire" classroom helpers? I would like to do that. I'd like to have students read about the workplace, create resumes, apply for jobs, sit for interviews and get hired. A brilliant teacher I had the pleasure of teaching down the hall from more than a decade ago was the best as managing a classroom workforce. I'm still awed by how he did. So in part I'm thinking and rethinking the book organization because I'd like to hire help or staff the books with parent volunteers next year.

I also keep coming back to the books and organization issues because my teacher-mind is worried about test scores. We got our results from the FCAT reading test last week. My students read like wild fire this year--or at least I thought they did. They talked about books. Not just any sort of character name dropping either. The kind of talk I heard is the "accountable talk" Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis discuss. Talk that tells my teacher ear students are really reading. Students self reported the number of books they read. Many said they read more this year than they'd ever read. We tracked started tracking the count--135 students read more than 1,500 books. So what? What matters?

To the state, the FCAT test results matter. A reading test of 54 questions that takes less than 3 hours to administer over a two-day period determines these students' reading lives for next year. Score below a magic number and students lose an elective class in their schedule and are placed in intensive reading classes to boost their skills. For me, for the first time in nearly 2 decades in the classroom, I didn't see the reading payoff in test scores that I usually do. Scores for students tracked in honors classes mirror state averages. Scores for students tracked in regular classes fall short. I have a lot of questions about the test and test results:

What do the results say about my teaching?
What will the state think the results say about my teaching when Florida shifts to the "value-added" teacher evaluations?
Why could the change in test format (from the FCAT, Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test to FCAT 2.0) say about our curriculum and instruction?
Are we teaching what the state is testing?
How can 1 test measure a year's worth of growth?
What do our scores in each strand tell us about curriculum?

	Vocabulary	Reading Application	Literary Analysis: Fiction and Nonfiction	Informational Text and Research Process
Number of Points Possible	9	12	11	13
Orange Co.	7	7	7	8
	77.00%	58.00%	63.00%	62.00%

Here are our average scores. I don't have mine. We get 1 document, pdf, listed students scores in alphabetical order. I did pull my students overall scores and change in developmental scale score (these are the learning gains NCLB accounts), but I have yet to examine my strand data. I had to return the file; pass it on to the next person. From the county averages you can see that we need to look at instruction in reading application. What does that mean? What is tested in that strand? How much of that is figurative language and how much is thinking/reading strategies such as inference and main idea? Those are questions our English department will surely discuss. But how much time do we devote to testing?

I re-read bits of Berlinger and Biddle's The Manufactured Crisis last week. Berlinger talks about his early claims in this article from School Leadership Briefing (You can read the beginning without a subscription). As Krashen says, it's about poverty not test performance. Last week was demoralizing for teachers and students. New pictures of our students and ourselves will emerge as we analyze and re-analyze and look at "the data" next fall. How much time do we spend crunching those 1-shot numbers?

So what will matter to me going into next year? How will my instruction change? How will I lift up the readers in my room?

What matters to me is turning kids into readers. Readers take control of their own learning. Reading is power both in the classroom and more importantly in the world. Why didn't students' test scores show off that power this year?

Read, read, read

2011-06-05T15:57:00.000-07:00

I didn't participate in 48 hour book challenge this weekend. I discovered it while dipping into the Twitterverse this afternoon. What a great way to kick off summer reading! Search the hashtag #48HBC to see what folks were reading and tweeting. I enjoyed dipping into the book blogs. As Jen Robinson's blog shows, the $48HBC is about much more than reading: reviewing, connecting, discussion. What a community! Sarah's blog got me wondering how much time I'd actually spent reading this weekend, so I set out to write up my own reading weekend stats. Wouldn't this be a neat thing to do with students next year? Anyone want to try it? I wonder if my high school students would be up for it at the end of the school year? Or if this would be a good weekend after exams kick off? I'll have to think about that.

How much did I read this weekend? Lately it seems as if I've been reading like a bear prepares for winter: storing up stories before I get writing this summer. Here's my reading weekend break down: 1675 pages, 4 books, 15 1/2 hours reading. No wonder I didn't get the laundry done!

Friday Night: 6 hours reading
4-5 pm Read Ann Rinaldi's Leigh Ann's Civil War
5-6 pm Figure out how to download Kindle app to hand-me-down iPhone (it works!)
6-6:30 Make end of 4th grade celebratory pizzas for son and friend (our school doesn't finish until next week)
6:30- 11:30 Read Victoria Roth's Divergent

Saturday: 6 hours
8 -9:30 am finish Divergent
9:30 -10 Shower, dress and depart
10- 10:30 pick up fixed laptop and other errands
10:30 am -3 pm Celebrate summer with bowling, pizza and arcade games
3 -4:00 Take son's friend home
4 - 5:30 finish Leigh Ann's Civil War by Ann Rinaldi
5:30 - 6 Fix dinner
6:00 - 8:00 finish The Girl Behind Glass by Jane Kelley (a reading dinner)
8:00- 9:00 start Spinning Out by David Stahler

Sunday: 3 1/2 hours
12 -2 read Spinning Out by David Stahler
2-3 nap
3-4:30 finish Spinning Out

My favorites from the weekend? Definitely Divergent by Veronica Roth. Dystopian novel where 16 year-olds choose their "faction"-future communities-based on value trait. Violent and action packed as the Hunger Games, I'm sure Tris would give Katniss a good fight. I also loved Spinning Out by David Stahler, the story of boy on the edge of Schizophrenia. Raw and well told, two class clowns change their image as they take on lead roles in the Man of La Mancha-Quixotic vision, this book had me weeping for things lost.

Are You Building a Classroom Library?

2011-04-23T07:41:00.000-07:00

Last week on #engchat, a Monday evening twitter talk session on English topics, Teresa Bunner talked about ways to build your classroom library. I missed the chat, but reading the archive had me thinking about classroom libraries all week, so I thought I'd blog a few library building tips from my classroom.

Shop sales. If you live near a Scholastic Book Fair Warehouse you can shop at their bi-annual sales (December and May here in Central Florida). Ten years ago my principal gave me $1,000. to buy books at such a warehouse sale. That year our goal was to help social studies teachers build classroom libraries. We did the same thing in following years for 9th grade English and reading teachers. Then, books were typically marked 1/2 price, but now discounts run even deeper. Can you imagine how fun it was to shop for $2000 worth of young adult literature? The best year, the book fair was at our school the week prior to the sale and instead of hauling the books I'd found in my car (all 35 or so boxes of them) , the book fair folks delivered them on a pallet when they came to pick up the book fair inventory. If you live near a book fair, go! Even in lean budget years when I am only shopping for my own classroom, $50 is $100 or more dollars worth of books depending on sale prices.

Shop conferences. Do you attend national conferences? Exhibit halls or give-aways at NCTE, ALAN, IRA can build your library. I collect enouch ARCs each year at NCTE to fill an entire book shelf. ALAN, the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents, is a must-attend. For your registration fee, you get a fantastic collection of just-out YA books (see the picture on right). Best part? Most of the authors of the books you receive are schedule to speak and sign books over the 2-day event.

Shop or trade online. Have you ever purchased books on eBay? Did you know several sellers will sell class sets or literature circle sets? If you're looking for a specific title you really, really want to teach or add to your library, don't forget about eBay. I discovered a lit-circle set of 6 copies of Hiaasen's Hoot for $14 in Martha's Attic Emporium, a top-rated bookseller and room-mom for my son's 4th grade class. Used books on Amazon.com can also be heavily discounted and don't forget Paperback Swap. Consider weeding titles from your home or classroom library that students no longer read or that you've not re-read in some time. You can list those titles on Paperback Swap. You pay postage to other swap members when they request your books and members return the favor when you request their titles.

Just a few ways you can build or add to your classroom library. Wouldn't it be fun for a group of us to join Paperback Swap and trade amongst ourselves?

For more ideas on how to build your own classroom library, visit the Google Doc Teresa Bunner started during #engchat. Next up? Keeping track of that inventory! How do you check books in and out of your classroom library?

You Can Only Teach 5 Scenes: Which Would You Choose?

2011-04-20T02:52:00.000-07:00

Glenda Funk led an excellent English Chat a few weeks ago on performance and teaching Shakespeare. The archived chat is available here. Since and because I am teaching Romeo and Juliet to ninth graders this spring, I've been rethinking my approaches to the play in class.

Yesterday I ask folks on twitter what 1 scene from each of the acts they would teach if they could only teach 5 scenes. Sarah from The Reading Zone replied right away, saying she would teach the prologue, the party scene, the balcony scene and Romeo's last speech. I loved the immediacy of her reply and the excitement I can hear as she wonders about a last scene to choose:

Like Sarah, my first instinct is to teach the prologue. It summarizes the action of the play and captures the essence of the plot. In years past I've begun by teaching students how to paraphrase using the prologue. Like Texas English teacher, Carrie Ross, I might follow the prologue with Mercutio's Queen Mab speech.

Figuring out if students transfer reading comprehension strategies from accessible (independent) texts to challenging texts such as Shakespeare interests me. I do an activity with students where I ask them to visualize Queen Mab and her chariot. We read the passage together but I don't explicate or support students by paraphrasing it for them. Students draw and label their drawings with words and phrases from the text. Questions arise during the drawing, so students recognize when meaning breaks down. They ask literal level questions like "What's an atomie?" Students drawings reveal where meaning is breaking down. If Queen Mab is huge and floating in the air, obviously they've not connected the ideas between her and the sleeping men's noses. I get too much out of the activity to skip the Queen Mab speech, so that would be included in my 5 scenes.

What I enjoyed about the tweet exchanges, as usual, is the conversation. The opportunity to rethink, reframe and retool how I will teach students using Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. If you'd like to add to the conversation, send me a line on twitter @spillarke.

Poetry Slam...Word!

2011-04-10T05:39:00.000-07:00

Picture this: the smooth gloss of a well varnished stage, the slick slip of the wood floor, bright lights throwing heat, a heavy, red-velvet curtain, more than 300 of your peers snapping, clapping or stomping in their seats, 3 minutes on stage, 2 microphones. Could you do it? Could you stand up in front of that audience and speak your piece? That is slam poetry.

Last week was Cypress Creek High School's 4th Annual Poetry Slam and I'd like to invite you to meet the student poets I am honored to coach. Head over to our YouTube channel and check out the kids' poems. Prepare to be amazed. More on slam and how you can set up your own or grow a program that invests in youth voices soon! In the meantime, here's Bryan, student poet, video editor and YouTube channel master:

The National Writing Project

2011-03-31T06:37:00.000-07:00

Schedule of Demonstration Lessons

"There is a connection between what writers have to say and the way they say it, good expository or narrative prose is born of deep investment and passion..."

- Milton Meltzer, Nonfiction for the Classroom

Are you a National Writing Project teacher? I am. In 1997 the NWP invested in me. I got a scholarship to the Central Florida Writing Project. Some $600 or so was given to me as a stipend to attend the writing project. That was the first time in my teaching career I'd been paid to learn or to attend training. We met each day from 8:30- 3, writing our way through most of it. If you're unfamiliar with the Writing Project let me explain it. Teachers from a variety of grade levels and content areas come together to learn how to teach writing. We know, from Ralph Fletcher and Donald Graves and other writing gurus that the best teachers of writing are writers themselves, so that's what we became during our month long summer writing camp. We lived the beliefs of the National Writing Project recopied here from my 1997 Writing Project binder:

The writing problem affects both universities and schools.
Student writing can be improved by improving the teaching of writing.
The best teacher of teachers is another teacher.
Change can best be accomplished by those who work in schools, not by transient consultants who briefly appear, never to be seen again and not by packets of teacher-proof materials.
Programs designed to improve the teaching of writing should be made available to teachers at all grade levels from all subject areas.
Classroom practice and research have generated a substantial body of knowledge on the teaching of writing.
The intuition of teachers can be a productive guide for field-based research, and practicing teachers can conduct useful studies in their classrooms.
Teachers of writing must write themselves.

In the morning we participated in a writing demonstration lesson given, the first week by UCF professors and local graduates of the Central Florida Writing Project. Our goal was to create a writing demonstration lesson we could take into our schools and beyond. One day we wrote about music with Dr. Judy Johnson. We wrote about the history of laughter after reading The Tickle Octopus with Kim Whitney, an elementary school teacher who is now an elementary school principal. We wrote and wrote and wrote ourselves new lives as teacher-consultants.

My summer with the Writing Project renewed by passion for writing. The experience grew my confidence as a teacher of writing and connected me with teachers who became important players in my professional life. When I think back about the writing demonstration lessons we created, I amazed not only at their breadth but also at how they foreshadowed our futures as educators. We wrote about space by reading about space and creating A to Z books about space. We created concept maps about ecology and used them to write a short story (mine is title "Reintroduction of Grizzly Bears into the Wilderness"). We wrote about food and memory and the human body and American immigration and the Revolutionary war and even math.

Many of the teacher consultants that year went on to work with Janet Allen in the literacy institutes she would run across the country for the next dozen years. Soon to become a fellow institute facilitator, Lee Corey introduced us to different countries with her writing demo and we created travel brochures based on what we learned. After the writing project she spent several years teaching Turkey; she's serving in Department of Defense schools in Japan right now. Each teacher took a turn at writing the daily log. Christine Landaker's was titled "Donuts, Cake, and Berries, Oh My!" She's an amazing teacher, National Board certified in both social studies and language arts, she nows blogs about gardening and food.

The Central Florida Writing Project connected me with educators outside of my classroom, teachers' lounge or school. Suddenly there was a network of committed, like-minded teachers I could call upon to process instructional issues or to share ideas. I knew then and I know now that the Writing Project gets results. Beyond the student achievement results, the Writing Project kept me in teaching, a field that weathers more than a 30% turnover rate in the first 5 years. Teacher turnover costs the nation an estimated 2.2 Billion dollars a year. How much did the National Writing Project cost us? According to the Appropriations Committee, 25.6 Million dollars. Million. Not billion. Can we afford not to retain quality teachers invested in learning?

Today I am asking Washington to continue to support the National Writing Project. NWP funding is labeled an earmark in the reductions. How is it defined as an earmark? An earmark to this voter signals special interests and pork bellies. Do teachers have a special interest in NWP funding. We do, so should parents. If you have a stake in students, if you want to support the National Writing Project, contact your representative (search for them on Twitter here). Search by zip code by using the search box on the bottom left. Blog about how the National Writing Project supported you as a teacher. Follow @writingproject, @chadsansing, and the #blog4nwp, or #nwp hashtags. Lend your support to those gathered in Washington today for the spring meeting of the National Writing Project. Let them know their work matters.

The Writing Project mattered to me. It showed me that I was not alone. I was valued as an educator, writer and teacher of writing. I learned from other teachers and they learned from me. I saw my classroom as an extension of the learning I did professionally. I took responsibility for my own learning and for the learning of my students. I realized that teaching and learning could be joyful events which fed into a community much larger than my own classroom. The Writing Project empowered me and gave me voice. That made all the difference.

Books Read

2011-03-02T02:40:00.000-08:00

Do you challenge yourself to read? How much? How many books? Do you aim for certain types of books? I joined Paul W. Hankins' The Centurions of 2011 group on Facebook this year. The goal? Read 111 book in 2011. Many folks track the books they've read using the note feature of Facebook editing the note at the end of each month. That's what I've done for the first two months, but Teri Lesesne's wall post this morning inspired me to blog my list instead.

Lesesne blogs each book she reads which never ceases to amaze me. I first heard Teri Lesesne speak at an institute day during NCTE. Janet Allen had organized a team of folks to present a day-long program prior to the official start of the conference (Secondary Reading or NCTE, I'll have to go back through my journals) . Who was there? Teri Lesesne, Bonnie Hill Campbell, Linda Rief and more. The day was organized with keynotes and round-table discussions. I led a round table. An eye-opening day early in my professional journey outside of the classroom, I'm not surprised that more than a decade later I'm still finding inspiration from Tere Lesesne.

I don't blog each book I read as Lesesne does. But I do I talk about them to friends quite a bit or my students. Feeling as if I had to write up each one would quickly sap the pleasure from the reading experience. Sometimes I'm moved to write or review, but I'll leave that to an occasional practice. I'm a habitual reader. There are few things I enjoy more than diving into a good story. Below are the books I read this month:

The Sliver Chair, C.S. Lewis (February)
The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis
Witch & Wizard, James Patterson
When the World Was Young, Tony Romano
House Rules, Jodi Picoult
The Looking Glass Wars, S.A. Bodeen
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy, Carlos Eire
S is for Spirit Bear: A British Columbia Alphabet (Alphabet Books), G.Gregory Roberts and Bob Douce
Touching Spirit Bear, Ben Mikaelsen*
Dear Author Letters of Hope, Joan Kaywell, ed.
Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson*
The Compound, S.A. Bodeed
Huntress, Malinda Lo

*re-reads with students

So what does all of this reading mean? The first three books I read so that I could participate in my son's reading. We saw The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, so I dipped into his Narnia collection to read the last two. He asked me to read Patterson's Witch & Wizard after he read it, so I did and on our commutes from school one week we talked about the characters. A student in my first period class recommended The Looking Glass Wars--a futuristic Alice in Wonderland retelling. I wanted to honor his recommendation, knowing as Donalyn Miller writes in The Book Whisperer that he would be more open to my own title recommendations if I also took his. I've always believed that when it comes to independent reading in the classroom teachers need to follow Ralph Fletcher's advice. Though he talks to us about writing, his words are easily applied to our reading community classrooms: you need to know your students, know your resources and know how to teach [writing]. For me, knowing how to teach the readers in my room means knowing the books that will interest them. I read. I read what I can, when I can, as often as I can. It's that simple.

Tweet Chat & Cheeseburgers

2011-02-15T05:10:00.000-08:00

Did you dip in to #engchat last night? The weekly guest-hosted conversation about English language arts topics was hosted by one of my teaching-heroes, Sara Kadjer last night. She talked or tweeted about digital storytelling. I'm mining the archive this morning, reviewing the resources and listening in after the fact. Isn't it amazing that the Internet let's us do that? Record, post, review, archive, collect, annotate, the process amazes me.

Hard as a rock, but no mold yet. Purchased 1-11-11.

Web 2.0 content is sort of like the month-old cheeseburger experiment I have running in my classroom right now. Content doesn't go away, doesn't decay, doesn't disappear or crumble. It's preserved. More on the cheeseburger later, to sum it up, we're running an experiment to test the claims made about fast food in the "McDonald's 4 year-old Cheeseburger" video about an aged Happy Meal (we're studying argument structure and reading Fast Food Nation; here's an excerpt).

A couple of weeks ago I hosted #engchat and like Kadjer's chat, the chat I hosted is also preserved, archived at the #engchat wiki. A whirlwind hour of abbreviated conversation on the gradual release of responsibility model, the chat darts and dashes between and around the hedgerows of teachers' ideas. I enjoy following the trails and revel in the rich resources shared. I debriefed with a critical friend the morning after my own chat. She's not sold on it as a means for her own learning. Too distracting, too "sound-byte-ish", too much to learn in terms of the tools to feel rewarded by the 140 character lines. Me? I get a lot out of twitter and twitter themed-chats: resources, questions, thoughts, teaching friends. Twitter and #engcat buoys my teaching spirits and opens my eyes to new resources while validating my practice and making me wonder about my own walk in the classroom. Have you tried it yet?

Next week, #engchat will will talk about the challenge of National Board Certification. I renewed my National Board certificate over a year ago now. It's one of the best professional development experiences I've ever had. The state of Florida pays National Board teachers a bonus for being certified--for the first ten year certification that is. The state also used to invest in teachers by paying NBCTs a bonus for 90 hours of mentoring. Those monies have all but disappeared, but for teachers in my state I know the salary increase (nearly $10K at it's peak) worked to convince teachers to certify. What motivates Florida teachers (and others) to become nationally certified now? I'm looking forward to hearing what others think about stepping up to the NBCT challenge. Check out the #engchat wiki for how-to help if you're new to twitter. You can learn a lot lurking. If you haven't jump into the Twitter stream as a participant yet, why not try lurking? See what you think.

Teaching vs. Assigning

2011-01-27T18:56:00.000-08:00

from John Holly's Compendium of of Strategies

What is the gradual release of responsibility? An instructional model developed by P. David Pearson, the gradual release of responsibility means that I show students how to do something before I ask them to do it on their own. Ultimately, "the reading goals are comprehension, understanding, enjoyment and insight for every child."

In my mind it's the difference between teaching and assigning. The model assumes teachers are the master craftsmen and students the apprentice. The master or expert in the room shows the apprentice how things are done. Gradual release in terms of reading means that the teacher takes on the responsibility first (for decoding or making meaning) then slowly releases the responsibility to the students. In my own high-school, English teacher mind, the gradual release of responsibility means what Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher call: I do, we do and you do.

Do you show students how to do something before asking them to do it by themselves. If I'm teaching my students how to analyze the rhetoric of fast food advertising (something we're doing in my A.P. language class this week), I can't just say, "choose a tray liner from a fast food restaurant and analyze the rhetoric in terms of purpose, audience and context." Well, I can say that, but chances are if I haven't demonstrated the process or taught the "how to" lessons that the assignment assumes, students will not understand the task or concepts involved.

When Kelly Gallagher plans reading lessons he asks himself several questions:

Without my assistance, what will students take from this reading?
With my assistance, what do I want my students to take from this reading?
What can I do to bridge the gap between what my students would learn on their own and what I want them to learn? What support should I offer ...?
How will I know if my students "got it"? (Deeper Reading 215)

My mentor, Janet Allen, says "you've got to be the bridge." Whether I am teaching a strategy for reading or writing, a genre, or a content concept such idioms or figurative language, there is a difference between teaching (modeling, demonstrating, showing how to) and assigning (telling students to read and answer questions, giving students a task without any help). Does that make sense? I like how one of the boy's in Jeff Wilhelm's study put it, "teachers give you hard things to do and then they don't help you." Modeling is the tool that helps students as Wilhelm describes in this video clip which examines the gradual release model from a Vygotskian perspective.

This year my district asked to film me teaching and to use the video to teach administrators about the gradual release of responsibility. Here's a copy compressed for the blog:

On Monday, 1/31 at 7 p.m., I'll be hosting a discussion of the gradual release of responsibility model on #engchat, a weekly English chat on Twitter. Selfishly, I'd love to talk about my questions. How do you know when to "release" students--it's sort of scary, isn't it. The Giver allusion aside, how do you decide? How much modeling do students need? How do we discover what students know so that we can maximize our time with them? These are few things I'm thinking about as Monday approaches.

If you'd like to join the conversation, sign in to twitter and follow the hashtag #engchat. Get more details and a "how to" join the conversation using Twitter tools here.

6 Word Memoirs

2011-01-19T02:51:00.000-08:00

For Christmas a friend gave me I Can't Keep My Own Secrets: 6 Word Memoirs by Teens Famous and Obscure. I made reading and writing 6 word memoirs our back to school community builder. We also need a transition day coming back to school after vacation and I planned to connect the memoirs to what we were discussing before we left.

In my AP class, students had just started to read Fast Food Nation. We're talking about obesity and health care and food. Before break we applied literary theory to Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. I used handouts from Tim Gillespie's Doing Literary Criticism and had students in groups teach the theory by presenting an interpretation of the novel to the class. So using the 6 word memoir in AP looked different from using the 6 word memoir in my ninth grade classes. Here's the sequence I used in AP:

Introduce 6 word memoirs with the video clip I Can't Keep My Own Secrets.
Model applying 1 of the literary theories we studied to the 6 word memoir.
Give students time to interpret a memoir from 2 theoretical perspectives.
Read/watch additional 6 word memoirs from NPR's Six Word Memoirs: Life Stories Distilled.
Brainstorm details and ideas using photographs and 5Ws and an H chart.
Model altering a photograph and writing my own 6 word memoir using Photoshop.
Give students time to write their own (one about food and one about a topic of their choice).
Share out.

I asked students to post their memoirs, once they added altered art, to our Ning, Bear English. I'm struggling with how many students did and did not post them. I know each student wrote at least 2 in class. The breakdown seems to come with the computer. Is it access? Is it skill? What's holding more than half of my students back when it comes to using technology? I've got quite a divide in my classroom between students who can and will follow through with something on the computer and those that either cannot or will not.

PS: Be sure to check out the discussion of 6 word memoirs on the English Companion Ning! Lots of resources and good conversation.

Six Take-Aways from Lesson Study

2011-01-12T17:07:00.000-08:00

The research team. I'm taking the picture
but you can see my laptop, back right.

Ninth grade English teachers are participating in Lesson Study again this school year. The Developmental Studies Center (DSC) contracted with Orange County to facilitate lesson study for the district. This is my second year participating. If you're not familiar with lesson study, let me sum it up.
During lesson study, a team of teachers meets for 2 days. In those 2 days, we plan, deliver, collect data and reflect on a research lesson we design and teach. On the first day we review and adapt a lesson plan. Currently we are using a lesson created by DSC.

The point of the process is not the lesson, not having the perfect lesson. The point is collaborating and seeing how the instruction actual works in terms of student learning. The point is the messiness of working together to figure out if students are actually learning and doing what we intend. The first day is all about building consensus. As a teaching team we have to agree to each part of the lesson, down to what the teacher will say.

We don’t know who will teach the lesson nor to whom (which students) until the end of the first day when names are drawn from a hat. Why draw names? The teacher is chosen last in order to keep everyone on the team invested in the process.

On the second day, we meet for an hour to discuss data collection points. The facilitator reviews each step of the lesson and asks the team what data we would expect to collect if the student understood the concept or did not understand the concept. We review the data collection instruments, arm ourselves with pens and paper and set off to the research classroom. Then the chosen teacher teaches the lesson while the research team collects data on the students during the lesson. Today we also had visitors at school observing the process. After the lesson we reconvene to review the data in order to see if the lesson met the academic and social goals we set for it. Part of data processing is transferring the data collected onto sticky notes which we then post in yes/no columns on charts showing the goals of the lesson. We collected data on two goals, one academic (identifying pros and cons) and one social (effective oral communication). We wrap up our debrief by reflecting on what we learned about the qualities of a good lesson and what we learned about the lesson study process.

We do 3 cycles of lesson study per school year (so that’s 6 days of teachers learning together). We are in cycle 2. This time around, I was chosen to be the research teacher. Fourteen educators visited our school to observe the process; we had 3 facilitators (district and DSC personnel) and 6 research teachers. It’s a crowded room. I taught a 10^th grade class of 25 students who were sitting in small groups of 4-5.

How did the research lesson go?

^{In a word, fine. It went fine. The students seemed to be doing what we asked them to do from my perspective. We planned too much to complete on a short Wednesday bell schedule, even if the initial computer set up had not eaten 5 minutes we would have run short on time. Computer problems at the start aside, I felt as if I recovered well and was still able to do the lesson as planned. I just felt awkward with my back to the class as I recorded student’s observations on the white board. I don’t like to present a lesson that way, but that’s the difference between being in the teacher’s environment and being the students’ environment. When we teach a research lesson the research teacher goes to the students’ class—the research teacher does not teach his or her own students.}

Had that been my classroom, I would have just slid the paper copy of the organizer under the document camera and proceeded that way. I was in unfamiliar territory, but it's not about me, right? It's about the learning. So, what did I learn? There were many light bulb moments. One, concerned student talk. I was surprised at how even though I felt as if I was talking/reading too much, I talked 20 min. and the students talked 19, but that reflection came later. My initial take-aways are below.

Take-away #1: Never turn the computer off. My laptop has been ill of late and booting up sometimes takes 5 minutes. My fault, I know, but jeez do I hate it when the computer crashes.

Take-away #2: Get set up ahead of time. Krystin and I should have just dashed out of the pre-meeting early and gotten set up. We can’t run during the 6 minute class change bell and expect to be set up and ready to go at the start of the period. We lost 5 minutes there and that’s preparation, I think.

Take-away #3: Kids are willing. The students went with the program. Of course, with so many visitors in the room they won’t act up, but it’s still delightful to see kids choose to engage with contact as these kids did.

Take-away # 4: Things are not always what they seem. For me as a teacher, that’s the bang of lesson study’s buck. I get to see and hear what students were actually doing and saying because the research team collects the data.

There is a big difference between what we think we’re teaching and what students are actually learning. It’s difficult for a teacher to see just exactly what the students are willingly doing. For instance, during this lesson students were discussing the pros and cons of genetically modified foods. We read “Techno Foods” and students would turn and talk, then highlight pros and cons, then turn and share the pros and cons with their partners before sharing out to the group. As I circulated listening for on-task student talk, I came across a quiet group. Not knowing if they’d already talked about the article, I paused and asked: “Did you talk to each other?” The students responded, “yes.” It wasn’t until we got back to the debriefing room that I actually saw what the students had said. One of the research teachers captured their conversation:

Boy 2: “What we said before.”

Girl 1: “I know.”

Girl 2: “This is difficult.”

Girl 1: “Can we write it down?”

The group laughs.

Girl 2 to Boy 2: “Want to sharpen my pencil for me?”

Teacher: Did you all talk to each other?

Girl 1: “Yep!”

image from Shutter Stock

Take-away #5: Visual support matters. Kids need something to look at, something with directions on it or engaging pictures. Though students were able to follow my directions, and what I wrote on the white-board, I missed the visual support my computer offers. We had this great image to kick off our discussion of genetically modified foods (see the orange in the apple skin), but instead I did a guided visualization to get kids to picture it themselves. Still, I couldn't resist later showing them the picture on the laptop once it had recovered.

Take-away #6: Always bring back-up. I had shut my laptop down before we left the room, but I guess I closed the computer before Windows finished that process. My laptop doesn’t like it when I do that. Fortunately, I had my Beth back-up (a colleague on the study team). Unfortunately, I had not emailed her or the team the power point I'd created with the directions. Fortunately, I knew the lesson and had a clean white board at my disposal. Unfortunately, using just the white board for the organizer meant I had my back to the class and couldn’t use the great apple/orange picture we planned to us.

Have You Upped Your Awesome?

2010-12-19T06:34:00.000-08:00

My students certainly upped their awesome potential this week!

Project for Awesome is coming to a soft close, the raffle goes through 12/20/10, but the commenting army is at rest.

What a show last night on YouTube! Did you see it? If you'd like to see clips check out the P4A channel. My favorite clip? John Green talking from his heart about Esther Earl and the Make a Wish Foundation.

Did you follow #p4a on twitter? Nerdfighters did it again trending tops several times over the past two days.

Highlights for me? Commenting from school. Commenting with my 9 year-old son--he learned to reply--but I'll write more about that on Pink Stone Days later this week.

Andrew's P4A Avatar for Twitter & YouTube

Nearly 75% of my students receive free or reduced lunch benefits. Many do not have access to technology at home. But, they created YouTube accounts, some also create twitter identities for P4A. They learned how to use image editing software to create avatars , how to tweet, how to comment, how to capture their screens. Lots of purposeful learning around 21st century tools this week.

The district unblocked YouTube Friday and though we had a slow start, it worked. Folks at the district don't arrive until 8ish. High school students get going around 7:15 a.m., so our first hour was a frustrating one as the filter hadn't fallen yet, but once we got going students swarmed each others pages commeting, rating and favoriting. How thankful am I that the district lowered the filters for us? I teach in the 11th largest district in the country. It was a big deal to get YouTube unblocked for the day. I am tremendously grateful. Thank you, thank you!

What did I enjoy the most about P4A at school? Teaching students the process, a definite list topper. Seeing kids smile as I narrated my silly stop-motion animation P4A video. Sharing laughs--when I couldn't decide how to begin my video and nearly included the Manualist performing the 20th Century Fox Fanfare--we all had a good laugh over that one. But even better was the discussion it led to about audience, purpose and your digital identity. Actually seeing my students videos and their surprise at how many other P4A videos were posted to YouTube.

The most fun? There were many most fun moments. One was when John Green wished Marquez happy birthday in comments. Lucky Marquez! We took a screen shot but it's at school. Marquez is a quiet, quiet student in my 6th period class. He totally surprised me by keeping count of comments and setting the pace during 6th period. Though I enjoyed the morning commenting on students' videos before P4A actually began, the afternoon was made of pure awesome. If I hadn't been finger-flying over the keyboard commenting with the Nerdfighter commenting army, I would have tweeted some of students' reactions. They said things like:

"Miss! Miss Lee Ann! We are NOT the only ones in here!" Julian said this once we got into the swarm and kids realized that thousands of people were commenting on the same video at the same time.

"Oh my gosh--there are like 100 comments a minute. It's going so fast!" Said in response to seeing the comment stream fly automatically.

Those were just 2 of the ah-has, but there were many on Friday. Most of these student productions are a first for the kids who made them. First time creating a video; first time uploading to YouTube; first time commenting; first time replying to a comment. Lots of firsts, so be gentle with their learning. If you'd like to add your comments to my kids' videos follow the links below.

And don't forget, there's still time to buy that $25 raffle ticket to win 49 signed books from NCTE and ALAN10! Sweet deal on hardcovers if I do say so myself. The money benefits Beat Bullying.

DFTBA,

My Video http://dft.ba/-p4aspillarke

CCHS Poetry Club video http://dft.ba/-poetrysaves

Ashley & Brandon's http://dft.ba/-ashleybrandon

Dat & Anthony http://dft.ba/-dat-and-anthony

Brick & Victor's http://dft.ba/-brick

Paula & Kim's http://dft.ba/-paula-and-kim

Nathalie's http://dft.ba/-nathaliep4a2

Foi's Trevor Project http://dft.ba/-trevorprojectfoi

Johnathon http://dft.ba/-mejiap4a

Kiana, Juan & Emily: http://dft.ba/-kiana-juan-and-emily

Derrick's http://dft.ba/-derrick-and-axxel

Kiana http://dft.ba/-kianap4a

Helbin's http://dft.ba/-helbin

Carl, John & Andrew http://is.gd/iU34H

Raven's http://dft.ba/-ravenp4a2

Dani http://dft.ba/-dani-julie-and-pamela

Briana http://dft.ba/-brianna

Katie http://dft.ba/-bingop4a

2010-12-18T14:49:00.000-08:00

Check out the raffle! in total $70K raised so far!!
Project for Awesome Raffle Page

When we’re spamwowing Project for Awesome videos it can sometimes be difficult to think about what to comment. I decided to comment using the first lines from the books I had signed to Nerdfighters at this year’s ALAN conference. I’ve not finished typing up all of the first lines, but I thought this chunk would get me started.

I’m posting them here because apparently YouTube doesn’t mind when I copy and paste a comment from a web source, but it rejects copy and pasted comments from my word documents. Harrumph!

If you are interested in buying a $25 raffle ticket to win these 49 author signed books, be sure to drop by the Project for Awesome raffle! or go directly to the book raffle ticket spot .

After P4A I'll come back and clean these first lines up (take out the hashtag and raffle links) but for now, I've kept them just so I can copy and paste straight to YouTube or twitter for faster commenting.

DFTBA!

“Doug came to, lying on his back in what felt and smelled like a field.” -Adam Rex, Fat Vampire #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

“They say that just before you die your whole life flashes before your yes, but that’s not how it happened for me.” -Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

“I’d always welcomed war, but in battle my passion rose unbidden.” –Andrea Cremer, Nightshade #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

“Lia Khan is dead. I am Lia Khan.” – Robin Wasserman, Skinned #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

“On a sweltering June Sunday ,stunned residents of Black Creek, North Carolina pray for seventeen-year-old Patrick Truman, who was beaten and left for dead outside the convenience store where he works.”

– Lauren Myracle, Shine #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

“Marley was dead, to begin with.” Marley was dead, to begin with? What kind of studpid opening line is that? A Christmas Carol is supposed to be some sort of classic novel…” –Lisa Yee, Warp Speed #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

“They took me in my nightgown.” – Ruta Sepetys, Between Shades of Gray #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

“The executioner swung his axe—thwack!—and another head went rolling into the dust.” – Darren Shan, The Thin Executioner #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

“It’s so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself.” – Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

“Everyone thought she had made it up, and she had tolerated more taunting and teasing from other children, more lectures and punishments from gown-ups, than any eleven-year-old should have to bear.” -Frank Beddor, The Looking Glass Wars #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

“Imagine this: You’re in your favorite bookstore, scanning the shelves. You get to the section where a favorite author’s books reside, and there, nestled in comfortabley between the incredibly familiar spines, sits a red notebook. What do you do?” – Rachel Cohn & Devid Levithan, Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

“Having just died, I shouldn’t be starting my afterlife with a chicken sandwich,no matter what, especially one served up by nuns.” -Carlos Eire, Learning to Die in Miami #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

“The world is drowning. Sinking. It’s being swallowed up. Glaciers are melting. Oceans are rising.”

-Dana Reinhardt, How to Build a House #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

“I knew today would be ugly.” -Robin Brande, Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

“It was a pleasure to burn.” – Tim Hamilton, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 the Authorized Adaptation #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

“I’m in Hokepe Woods this morning, like I am every Sunday, delivering papers and keeping an eye out for Jonah Lukes.” –Katie Williams, The Space Between Trees #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

“It’s always the same, not matter where in the world we happen to be.” -Laura Resau, The Indigo Notebook #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

“In which a corset is loosened… There are so many exciting things in this book—a Stolen Diamond, snooping stable boys, a famous detective, the disappearance of a Valuable Wig, love, pickle éclairs, unbridled Evil, and the Black Deeds of the Shipless Pirates—that is really does seem a shame to being with ladies underwear.” -Tom Angleberger, Horton Halfpott #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

“You can’t know what it is like for us now—you will always be one step behind. Be thankful for that.” - David Levithan “A Word from the Nearly Distant Past” from-Michael Cart, editor, How Beautiful the Ordinary #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

“The second act curtain was one chorus away when I spotted him.” – Judy Blundell, Strings Attached #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

“Zero Period. You got that right. Fail one math test you’re up before the first chirp of day.” -Rita Williams-Garcia, Jumped #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

“Han Alister squatted next to the staming mud spring, praying that the thermal crust would hold his weight.” -Cinda Williams Chima, The Demon King #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

“Mirka liked her stepmother, Fruma, well enough. Fruma had the longest nose of anyone in Hereville, but her odd looks hadn’t take nMirka long to get used to.” -Barry Deutsch, Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

"The eunuchs said the windows were ceiling height to allow the concubines their privacy, but JinLian knew it was also a way to keep them trapped. - Cindy Pon, Silver Phoenix #p4a raffle http://dft.ba/-bkraff

Project For Awesome: Cypress Creek Poetry Club

2010-12-18T14:40:00.000-08:00

Project for Awesome Update

2010-12-16T02:20:00.000-08:00

Bryan, performed at Middle School Mosaic and NCTE this year.
He's editing the Poetry Club's P4A video.

Just when you think you've cleared the way...

My students are well on their way to finishing their Project for Awesome videos. Helbin has already uploaded to YouTube (early bird!). He's finished, but not finished. Today will be the day we talk revision and re-exporting.

What does Helbin need to revise? He needs to add the thumbnail. When P4A takes over the front page of YouTube all you will see are Project for Awesome thumbnails: Project for Awesome Spoken Word Press, Project for Awesome Save.org, Project for Awesome Greenpeace. Will YouTube be broken? My students asked me that yesterday. No, YouTube will still work but what you see when you first land on the page will be different, will be awesome.

So, we need the thumbnail. Picture this: we're in the media center, using the computers, twenty-five 14 year olds leaning in toward screens or stomping around with Flip cameras. I remind students about the thumbnail. Guess what? No downloading. Student log-ins are not permitted to download--anything. So, what's the work around?

We take a screen shot of the logo. We paste the logo into Photoshop CS3. We crop the screen. We save the logo as a jpg file. Error. Nope. We can't save the logo as a jpg file because the computer thinks ".jpg" already exists and asks us if we would like to replace it. Sure, replace ".jpg." Go to Movie Maker, import jpg, but no, "p4a-logo.jpt" does not exist in the student document folder. Try again. save as png. Error. ".Png" already exists. What? What is this? Regroup. Open Paint. Copy logo from Photoshop to Paint. Save image as p4a-logo dot bitmap.

Saved!

The official kick off for P4A is somewhere around noon. See Hank's introduction for details. We're working or working around it. Friday I will blog and tweet links to the videos my students post. For most of my ninth grade students, this is their first experience with YouTube and social networking for good. We'd love for you to rate, favorite and comment on our videos.

See you Friday!

DFTBA,

PS: Those books I got signed for Nerdfighters to auction off? Hank and John Green are adding to their raffle! Yes! Risk? Worth it!

How Do You Take Notes?

2010-12-07T13:23:00.000-08:00

I want to start with stories. Three stories about my journal and meeting people at NCTE that I’d previously only met online. The first is about the journal itself.

Last year at NCTE I noticed a tribe member taking notes is a creamy-paged, sketchbook-style journal. Curious, I asked about it. Kim McCollum, Millersville professor, Nerdfighter and ECNing-er, told me she’d gotten the journal at “her favorite stationary store in Paris.”

*sigh*

I think I really did sigh. How romantic is that? Flash forward six months to the summer. A mysterious soft-sided package arrives in the mail. The package is addressed to me. Kim’s address—her real address—is in the return spot on the mailer. What in the world? You’ll see. She sent me a journal. Pure magic, the surprise.

This year when I went to the session on mentoring new teachers (a session I wrote about here), Tony Romano , Illinois state Author of the year and teacher phenom, smiled at me and said, “You’re the journal person.”

“I am,” I smiled. You could call me that—a journal person, a person who journals. I do journal and color and draw and take notes and write and reflect and catalogue. Yes, that’s me.

“I have been talking about your journal for a year!”

Really? Tony wasn’t the only one who’d been talking about my journals. Friends I’d made on the English Companion Ning remembered my journals too.

At the ECN meet up Saturday night Karen LaBonte asked us to note the questions we’d begun to cultivate related to topic threads from the conference: grammar, writing, technology, etc. I opened my journal to scan my notes and gather my questions. I wasn’t 2 pages in when Jen Ansbach said, “can I see? You are going to post pages from your journal this year aren’t you? I’ve been talking about your journal all year.”

Jen called her husband, Noah, over to take a picture. We got to talking. We talked through a session’s worth of notes. Soon there were six or so of us sitting in our section of the circle, talking about my journal .

So what? What matters? I think what matters is not my journal per se but the process, a process.

How do you make your learning “visible and discussable” as Bud Hunt said (citing Suzie Boss and Jane Krauss)? What processes do we use as education evangelists—as committed teacher leaders—to hold onto and extend our learning? Mine is but one. Surely there are an infinite number of ways we could systematize our note-taking. An infinite number of ways we could record, revisit, share and discuss. What matters, what’s important is that we do.

* * *

So I’m sharing. I scanned the notes I took during Kittle, Gallagher and Anderson’s session as well as notes from our ECN meet up. I’ve also created a key to my codes. If you’d like to read my earlier post about why and how I journal , go here. Because I don’t have permission to post photos of a few folks I have in my journal, you’ll see that I’ve blurred them out. Many thanks to Terry Heick for helping me figure out the inverse select tool in order to do that!

Open publication - Free publishing - More note-taking

Notes also posted to Scridb.

Novel Gift

2010-12-02T02:25:00.000-08:00

Participate in Readergirlz Novel Gift- click the picture!

Amazing things are happening and we're still more than a fortnight away from Project for Awesome!

Partnering with First Book, the Readergirlz are giving away more than 125,000 novels. Wow! Brand-new books going to teens that need them. What's the catch? Registration. The book fairy cannot read your mind or the map of your school's needs. Go to Readergirlz for all the details or go directly to the 5 minute registration site at First Book.

My students are anxiously waiting to dive into the new books I brought back from NCTE. Not the Project for Awesome auction books, but additional books I collected in the exhibit hall. Many are advance reading copies, or bargain books I purchased on the last day of the conference, unsigned, but definitely beautiful. I came home with 80 or so. We've made grand stacks on the back table. You should have seen my students hovering around the stacks yesterday as they finished their reading benchmark exams.

"Ooo... can I see this one?"
"Can I just look at this one?"
"Miss can I read...?"

Really? Better than chocolate cake their "can I" questions.

How Does E-Bay Work Again?

2010-11-28T05:07:00.000-08:00

Am I the only person in the world that knows naught about E-bay? Today is the day to discover what I need to know to run the Project for Awesome book auction to raise money for P4A Charities! So, what have I done so far? Gathered the books, gotten the books signed (that was the fun, fun part!), photographed the books. (See my kitchen photo shoot on the left. I love the quilt my Mom made out of my son's family drawing.)

I've uploaded the book photos to my Nerdfighters' Ning page and now I need to learn about eBay.

I know Etsy. Do you know Etsy? I desscribe it as an E-bay for artists. It's one of my favorite places to buy gifts. I've opened an Etsy shop, Copper Monkey, but have not populated it with collage art and domino necklaces yet. I've got to file some DBA paperwork first. But I digress. Etsy is not an auction site like E-bay.

What I want is to post each signed book to E-bay and have folks participate in an auction for purchase. To do this do I need a separate email or account? Should I just use the spillarke account my husband and I have used on eBay before?

So many questions, I thought I'd list them and share with students when we get to talking about our Project for Awesome projects next week:

How much does eBay charge to list auction items?
Can I set a start and end date for the auction?
Does eBay notify you each time a person bids?
Is it self-regulating? Can you list and item and then ignore it until the auction closes?
What kind of write up do I need to post with each book?
Can descriptions of auction products be hyper linked to other web spaces where I could have more info? Or is it a plain text the only option?
How many pictures can I use in my listing?
How much does eBay charge per listing?
Are listing rates different for differently priced items?
How much will it cost me to sell items on eBay?
How do you figure out shipping charges?
How long does media rate shipping take? (okay that's not really an eBay question)
Will I pay for eBay listings up front and when the sale ends?
How long will it take to list 50 items?
What else do I need to know in order to make this eBay charity book auction successful?

Find more photos like this on Nerdfighters

What do you think? Am I going to be to giving Nerdfighter books to everyone in my Christmas network? Or are we going to be able to raise some money for awesome?

What's Your Quiet Signal?

2010-11-25T08:36:00.000-08:00

My quiet signal is a llama hand sign. I was once a llama wrangler at Lost Trail Ranch in the Colorado Rockies. Four months at 13K feet sans electricity and indoor plumbing (guest had plumbing). Ninth graders are a lot like llamas and when I was looking for a quiet signal this year, Pammy and Dani of 5th period fame yelled llama, made the hand sign and that was that. Have you see the llama song on YouTube? I hadn't either--not one of the million viewers--I prefer the Green brother's Obama llama parody. But my students know it, so I looked it up.

Can you believe llama-ed it up at the English Companion Ning Meet Up? My students are going to laugh out loud. The room a buzz with conversation, What a time we had visiting.Here are the photos Noah took during the meet up:

What are You Risking for Your Network?

2010-11-24T11:34:00.000-08:00

I'm still thinking about something Bud Hunt ask last week at NCTE: "What are you modeling for your network?" If I think of my son and my students as my network, what do I want to model for them? Learning, curiosity, a can-do attitude, I also want to model taking a risk.

I am taking a risk for Project for Awesome this year. I discovered John Green and Hank Green 's, Project for Awesome in 2008. I wrote about my discovery on Pink Stone Days, here. At that time I 'd been volunteering with students at Give Kids the World Village once a month (for about 5 school years we did that), so when I discovered P4A I told the kids we needed to gather our photos and make a video. We did. I made the video. Last year was similar 2008 in terms of the video making. Students noted their ideas, I filmed and edited. We posted 1 video. However, on P4A day in class I tuned in to the live feed and tweeted the event the entire day while students watched and while we wrote and did other other work. If only I had saved the tweet @realjohngreen sent us in appreciation for bringing P4A into the school. Awesome is an understatement.

This year things will be different. I want students to be the Do-ers. I want students to create their own videos, upload them and join the commenting, favoriting, and twittering swarm of nerdfighters. You see Project for Awesome gets the word out about hundreds of charities by bubbling up the charity videos to the most discussed list on YouTube and the top trending topic on twitter. That takes people power--that takes Nerdfighteria.

So where does the risk come in? Unblocking YouTube at school. Convincing our director of technology that the local unblock will be worth it. That it will teach kids something valuable, that it will be more valuable than my demonstration alone. I plan for my students to participate live and in the school library. How awesome will that be?

I'm taking another risk this year too. I'm trying something new. Instead of making a video promoting my own favorite charity, I've decided to auction off books I purchased or received at this year's NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) and ALAN (Assembly on Literature for Adolescents) workshops. I took a risk asking published authors (many who still blind me with their star shine) to sign books "For Nerdfighters everywhere."

You know what? They did.

You know what else? They smiled. They laughed. They made my year. They asked what I was going to do with the books. And I told. Upon hearing others donated books. Wendy Lamb (who has her OWN IMPRINT) even told me to email her for more ARCs for the project! Can you believe it?

I'm going to auction off the signed Nerdfighter collection (nearly 50 books) to the highest bidder during Project for Awesome week. I want to ship the books by the 21st of December--before Christmas. I don't know how to run an online auction, but several folks to whom I've spoken seem to think E-bay (and keeping good records) is the best bet. After my students participate in P4A, I will let them vote which P4A charitites we should give the money to. Last year I donated money to 2 charities (yes, John's and Hank's). Remember Oprah's Pay It Forward Challenge? That's what I want to model for my network. I want to model taking a risk to make a difference.

What's the worst that can happen? I fail. No one buys the books. Is that really so bad? After all, I'm a nerdfighter too. Who doesn't like a book gift for Christmas?

Nerd Power

2010-11-23T05:03:00.000-08:00

My husband and son came out to Disney to meet me last night. We went to dinner where my husband teased me about my nerdiness.

"Is Dad a nerd, Mom?" Collin asked.
"No," I replied. "Dad is not nerd. Not even a nerd by association."
"Yes, he is!" Collin insisted.
"Nope. He's not. He's a foodie. He reads magazines, goes fishing and brews root beer. Not a nerd."
"Am I nerd?"he asked.
"Hmmm, well, you read."
"I do read!" He finished the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid book last night before going to bed. I'd given it to him at dinner.
"You play on the computer."
"I do."
"But you're missing something."
"What? What is it?"
"You don't have the pen. The pen clipped onto your shirt. See? Dad's not wearing one either--that's how you know. He's not a nerd."

So this morning, I get up and get to the ALAN room early. First for seats, up early to geek out, Rick and Collin met me here. Guess what? He clipped the hotel room pen to his t-shirt. Nerds unite!

My son is going to sit with me at ALAN today: listen in to the author's speak, act as my book sherpa when needed, and soak up the passion for reading that is the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents. What a great day it's going to be!

What's Your Happy Dance?

2010-11-22T05:51:00.000-08:00

Find The Nerdfighter Happy Dance Project here.

Do you have a happy dance? Young adult author extraordinaire, John Green and his awesome, gifted brother, Hank, have happy dances. Their tribe, the Nerdfighters, preserved and shared their happy dances a few years ago on YouTube. I am a Nerdfighter--perhaps the oldest Nerdfighter in all Nerdfighteria. Seeing an elder's happy dance is rare. Last night, this elder happy danced at the ALAN cocktail party.

Did I dance because I was swimming through a room of young adult authors? Book buzz all around me. Nope. Did I dance because I got the rare treat of re-connecting with and talking to ">Elizabeth Thomas, an organizer of Brave New Voices and an amazing performance poet. Nope. Well, to be honest, yes, Elizabeth did give me twinkle toes, but I wouldn't call it a full out dance.

She was not the impetus for the spontaneous outburst of happy dancing that left my hair standing straight up. What did? It goes something like this:

I was walking across the room for refreshments when I heard, "Ms. Spillane?" Good Lord I thought, there's not a student here is there?

Standing before me was Chuck. Charles Warren. Chuck who was in my 9th grade Global Technology English class at University High School nearly 10 years ago. Chuck, a member of the robotics team. Chuck, who was the only boy to give his teachers Christmas presents. Tall Chuck who, even then, stood more than a head taller than me. Wow.

"Ms. Spillane!"
"Chuck!"

Bear hugs ensued. Then Chuck turned to me and said, "I want to introduce you to my fiance. She's going to be an English teacher."

He's marrying an English teacher my stomach fluttered.

"Mindy, this is Ms. Spillane." Handshaking gave way to more hugs. "Mindy, this is the teacher that turned me into a reader." Wow.

I danced and danced, Snoopy feet, swirling fists, I laughed and Chuck grinned. He's a reader!

Priceless.

NCTE #2: Blue Sky What Ifs

2010-11-21T03:49:00.000-08:00

Today was cirrus clouds (though a cumulus is pictured here) and sunshine. A blue sky “what if” kind of day, a writing and drawing and talking and sharing push and pull of ideas kind of day I had at NCTE today.

It started in Ballroom M with Gary Anderson, Kim McColumn, Teresa Buner and the amazing Tony Romano (the most down to earth & gracious state teacher of the year I've ever met) talking about how to mentor, coach and care for new teachers. All but Tony I met first online via Twitter or the English Companion Ning community. Kim and I have Nerdfighter hearts. Connecting with virtual colleagues at NCTE gives the convention the celebratory feel of a reunion with friends .

The session got me thinking about how I interact with and nurture my own junior intern. Have I “given” too much in the way of lesson plans? Have I listened ? Coached enough with questions that will guide her thinking about issues like differentiation and assessment? Does she understand my model? Does she soak up the sequence and routine I run, an English class Iditarod with kids pulling me forward.

Gary Anderson always makes me smile , his facility with a group, the sparkle—yes actual sparkling—of a learner in his eye. He made be wonder about interview questions and the hiring sequence. ‘If you’re one of the folks cleaning up the mess at the end of a bad hire, then you should be involved on the front end too.” Makes sense as did the array of interview questions we shared and discussed with Gary giving nod to pre-service teachers in the room, “this is good stuff right here as you head into interviews.” Indeed it is good stuff. Tony Romano,

Gary’s partner in crime, Tony Romano, author, teacher, and mentor facilitates year 3 and 4 of his school’s mentoring program. Tony remembered me from last year saying “Oh, you’re the journal-er.” He told me he’s thought and talked about my journal many times this year. He has the link to my scanned pages favorited. I could sit at his feet and learn scads about public speaking. Both he and Gary have quite a presence. While Gary uses humor to engage, Tony more often uses puzzles. Yesterday’s puzzler involved roman numerals and re-creation. He’s like one of the Tapper brother’s. A voice of Chicago much like Click and Clack’s. His puzzle reminded me of their weekly “puzzler” on Car Talk.

Tony Romano’s school has a 4 year mentoring program for new teachers. Imagine that. Four years of someone looking out for you, feeding you nutritious teacher food (professional books, journal articles, good questions) and throwing in a bit of teacher bling (sticky notes, gel pens, highlighters). Year 3, I believe is backwards planning a la Heidi Jacobs for Tony’s new faculty and year 4 reflection. Do I even have a sequence I follow with new teachers I mentor? Am I purposefully in my talk with new teachers? Do I sequence their instruction in sense-making ways?

My Tech- to- Go session following theirs, so though Tony plugged my journaling and encouraged folks to talk to me about it (thanks Tony), I booked it back to the exhibit hall and to set up the laptop. There was some confusion with the tech kiosks, another presenter whom I do not know thought he should be at the kiosk where I was set up and thought I should be at the empty kiosk across the room. After much consternation (on he and his partner’s part) and much back and forth with the lovely NCTE Wireless Queen (again just them), he said I must move because my name was on the other side. Indeed it was not as I tried to explain, pointing to the Get Connected with Collaboration Tools, listed on the board behind me, mentioning the schedule shifting that happened with Friday’s kiosks. Mox nix, didn’t matter, I unplugged, disconnected, gathered-up and moved to the opposite kiosk. People are interesting.

The people I met at high school matters? Fascinating. Sharon’s table session on Manga stoked my curiosity. I have a student who’s not the others, a stand out student, a different student, a student who’s best friends are manga characters and books. I am trying to connect with that student and to do that, I need manga knowledge. Wait until you see what I learned! This post is entirely too long, so I’ll save that bit.

I’ll probably also save my thinking about this small world, this open global community. I sat down next to Katie McKnight at High School Matters. I had never met Katie in person, but the day before I tweeted her a compliment a principal bestowed after attending her session on literature circles. Her only reply to my tweet was @spillarke. Hmm... I wondered. Can you believe we were sitting next to each other at the manga table? What synchronicity.

I think my favorite part of the day was honoring Philippa Stratton.

I should have taken pictures: the wild mushroom tart, the Boursin cheese stuffed dates, shredded crab dressed in finely minced fresh salsa served in miniature martini glasses replete with cocktail spoons. But beyond the gourmet menu, beyond the sparkle of crystal and beauty of the Grand, I stood surrounded by teachers who are also writers. Kelly Gallagher, who’s working on a new book on teaching teenage writers; I talked with Ruth Ayers who pounced on my domino necklace when I first arrived. She delighted me by saying, "You're wearing one of those domino necklaces! When I told her I was the artist that made, she said well, I have your email then. I've given 3 as gifts here at NCTE. Can you believe she saw them? My favorite meet was Tim Gillespie who may skype into my classroom and talk criticism with my A.P. juniors. Imagine that!

I stood in awe of Philippa and the work she has brought to life –literally around the room—and wondered at the possibility of my own writing future. Not all of the folks under the trompe de l'oeil rotunda were Stenhouse authors, Stephanie Harvey publishes with Heinemann doesn’t she? There were editors circling, Bill Varner and marketing guru / Newslinks editor Chuck Lerch— behind the scenes gems—rock stars themselves who craft, push, question, critique, and edit their writers to greatness.

At the end of the day what can I say? What can I say to such a pink stone day*? Shakespeare, as always, said it first and best, “I can no other answer make, but, thanks and thanks.”

*To get the pink stone story think of Spinelli’s Star Girl and click here for the rest.

Who's on Your Carpet Circle? NCTE 2010

2010-11-20T06:28:00.000-08:00

Writing Time during Bud the Teacher’s session at NCTE Thursday:

Bud Hunt, or @budtheteacher on Twitter, posed provocative questions during his 21^st century literacies session Thursday afternoon. I appreciated his skill as a facilitator. Bud set the stage for our learning by calling attention to the vocabulary, “two phrases” , he expected us to learn, he set goals and outlined our time together. He wove analogy and metaphor into his teaching-- reminding me of Rick Wormeli. The metaphor I most enjoyed was the kindergarten carpet circle. Remember the carpet circle? Learners hand-waving excited, gathered in community to share and build knowledge.

Bud asked us “Who’s in your circle? In your network?”

I wonder.

Does he mean whom do I eavesdrop on? Does he mean which stars do I wish upon? We’re at Disney after all.

He asks us, “Who’s listening in? What “productive eavesdropping” are you engaged in, or helping to foster? How are you making your work “visible and discussable."

Bud’s talking and I’m feeling a sense of irony I can’t quite explain. You see, I am visible. Online, since before the last decade when I used the Florida Information Resource Network to dial in to a text based web. I “sailed the cyberseas” at the Miami Museum of Science and learned how to use Netscape Composer to create. Not a coder, but a WYSIWYG geek, a pioneer, not digital native, in my English department, the first teacher to create and maintain a web site. At that time, Carla Beard was also online—The Web English Teacher and a personal hero.

I so admired her collections of resources that my first attempt at web creation (Spillane Station) was content poor, link-rich (to mention the image copyright issues). But, I was learning. I was the geeky teacher who taught herself how to network Apple 2Es together with a rudimentary daisy chain so that English teachers could have a “lab.” My students taught them how to use the software. I wrote about my earlier experiences in FETC Connections. Old school print, I know. So am I visible? Yes, then and now, I am visible.

But, is anyone listening? I wondered as Bud talked. @budtheteacher whom I follow but did not follow back, whom I friended but did not friend me back. To connect do we have to make connections both ways? Or can I just wish upon those stars—those educational and techie rock stars. I wonder. I’m listening. I’m productively eavesdropping. I’ve lurked and learned. But I wondered?

What does it take to bring someone into your network? Are we all so busy marketing ourselves that we skate through conversations with folks we aren’t really connected to?

Whom am I really connected to? People I have relationships with. People I talk with, email with, see in person. My virtual friends –the one’s I’ve built relationships with—I’ve met. I’ve listened to. I’ve sat still and learned with them and from them.

So what?

So, I’m going to try and build relationships. If I want Bud and really more importantly, others to join my carpet circle, I’m going to keep raising my hand. Keep poking with the @reply. Keep trying to make my practice and the listening visible, accessible, and discussable.

It's About the Learning

2010-11-18T02:46:00.000-08:00

I'm a learner. I admit it. My name is Lee Ann Spillane and I spend hours reading, writing, surfing and learning about teaching. I am powerless in the face of those that teach and guide me. Learning has not made my life unmanageable, but sometimes, I admit, to not actually cooking dinner, so that I can listen in to #engchat.

Learning and teaching is a vocation, a calling. I know that a higher power invested me in the literate lives of today's teens, so I lurk and learn.

Book retailers love me. Amazon knows my name and thoughtfully suggests books I will like. For my 40th birthday, aside from a llama pair or a pony, I wanted built-in bookshelves. Shelves were built with the promise of more to come. Books stand like sentinels in my rooms at home and at school.

Far from perfect, I am still learning. Everyday, every moment is an opportunity. I love the turn of a higher level question. I bask in cognitive tasks.

Oh, I can't keep up the act, I'm a learning addict. Thus was I delighted with Sara Kajder's tweet this morning. A personal challenge? She takes it as a personal challenge to teach me something new. Oh man! Sharpen the colored pencils, charge the laptop, I am in for a great day at NCTE today! Sara hasd a galaxy of new ideas she could share with me. I am thrilled by the prospect.

My principal and I recently had a conversation about the gradual release of responsibility model of instruction. I was videotaped as an example of said instruction. The tape is being shown to middle and high school principals in the district. My leader wondered why more high school teachers aren't teaching that way. I wondered if I looked like an elephant on tape. She said, "You make it look easy, so why aren't more people doing it?" Embedded in her question is the idea that high school teachers are still lecturing, still transmitting content from the stage at the front of the room. It is not easy to step aside.

"Do you know how many years I spent collecting questions in my journal?" I told. "How many years I wrote down and gathered what I call connecting language that would transition an audience from one idea to another smoothly?" Lots of journals, lots of purposeful listening, lots of notes and I am still learning, hardly perfect in my practice of putting the thinking and doing on kids.

I don't feel like an expert most days, but I do feel like a pioneer. A learner willing to take risks, to devote time and myself to changing my own classroom practice. In my mind, that process never ends--learning is continual.

Are you a teacher learner?

Talk at school and online has turned to NCTE in recent weeks. I'm exuberant. Is everyone in my teaching universe? Hardly. Take this simulated exchange:

"NCTE is next week! Are you going?"

"No, I've been before."

NCTE is an ever changing smorgasbord of ideas and innovation. At NCTE you can rub shoulders or have actual conversation with education's Rock Stars. And one of them is Sara Kajder. Professor at Virginia Tech, winner of the first National Technology fellowship in English language arts, author of the Tech Savvy English Teacher and Bringing the Outside In, national consultant, sitting in her session today--what a gift that will be!

Really. How could you have "been there done that"? Is it because teachers have other learning outlets? Other conferences they are holding out for? Perhaps they learn online. They read. They tweet. They blog? I wonder.

Do Those Jeans Fit You?

2010-11-13T04:30:00.000-08:00

My English department decided to do common texts this year and ninth grade teachers chose 4 common texts: The Odyssey, Romeo and Juliet, Speak and Bronx Masquerade. We decided "to do", doesn't that sound funny? Who's doing in that sentence? What's the thinking behind studying works in common? At our school some of the thinking revolved around schedule changes and mobility rates. Students change classes at my school--throughout the year we have schedule changes for one reason or another. We also have a 30% mobility rate. Thirty percent of our students move, switch counties, shift apartments, and change schools.
These and other issues dictate the coming of a common curriculum in my district.

What do I dislike about a common curriculum? Students are different. Students have different needs.

Assuming that one work, like one pair of pants, can fit all students' needs is as ridiculous as the cowboy dog from Disney's Halloween pet parade. Those jeans don't fit that dog, nor are they engaging. So will one work, a common text, engage all students?

Intriguing how different schools in one school district truly operate differently. At my former high school, and the one before that, departments taught nearly everything in common: short stories, whole-class novels, plays. One school gave teachers a choice of which stories, novels and plays and other dictated certain works each quarter. We had curriculum maps (after the district brought in Heidi Hayes Jacobs) and we revisited or updated them each fall. One school eventually moved to requiring specific skills (standards/benchmarks) be taught each quarter, connected said skills to genres on the maps and left specific work choices to teachers. By that time though, so many teachers were mired in the familiarity of x, y or z, few changed the works they taught.

What do I like about teaching common works? Students talk to each other about English class and literature outside the double wide (my teaching portable). I know they do because I hear them when I'm standing on the porch in between classes. I also know they do because I have a contingent of students begging to read Speak. They've been talking to Mrs. Owens's students. They are amped up to read the book. Talk about an anticipatory set--they want to read!

I like that common works builds a reading culture at our school. It builds a common core of literature we can talk about at any grade level. It helps me know what my eleventh graders have discussed or dipped into before they arrive in A.P. language and composition. Yes, discussed or dipped into--they've been exposed to the literature. Shouldn't that be a bad word? If my A.P. juniors have never read Greek myth or delved into The Odyssey, they will miss many literary allusions in the texts we will read. That's just a fact and a difficult fact to take if you're a teacher who wants students to always have choices. But couldn't students get to the same common texts or ideas within a workshop setting which gave them choices?

Am I holding students back if we do a whole-class work? Or am I giving many students who wouldn't choose that particular work an opportunity to participate. Participate in a conversation--a conversation about big ideas, that began long before either of us were in school and will continue long after we are gone?

Nancy Atwell's presentation at Middle School Mosaic last year is still with me. I'm still thinking about how she railed against the whole-class read. I'm reading about it. As Cris Tovani says in her foreward to Sam Bennet's That Workshop Book*, "I [am] struck by how much I still [have] to learn. Oddly, it [is] comforting. Knowing that I [am not] there yet [feels] invigorating" (xi). The book is on my "to-buy" list for NCTE. I've read about it on blogs and at Heinemann, but I haven't held it in my hands yet or talked back to its text in the margins, so it's not quite mine yet.

Students have choices in my English class--but do they have enough choice? I don't think so. People tell me I am incredibly organized, but I haven't felt organized enough to jump into a full-time workshop. Isn't choice, choice of reading materials, after all one way to differentiate instruction? That's where I'm heading and this is what I'm thinking about.

*Bennett, Samantha. That Workshop Book: New Systems and Structures for Classrooms that Read, Write, Think. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2007.

Day in the Life

2010-11-02T19:20:00.000-07:00

4:30 a.m. Wake up, get coffee, start computer, read or write online with morning coffee
6:00-6:20 a.m. Leave for school
6:45 a.m. Arrive at school, check school email, organize handouts, copies, materials for the day, check that agenda is posted, check in at front office (across 95 acre campus)
7:10 students begin arrive in classroom
7:20 teach, listen, teach, practice, teach
8:08 stand at door, smile, usher out and welcome in
8:14 second period begins: teach, teach, teach, read, read, write
9:02 second period ends, wait, fidget, wait, first student arrives, then run to bathroom, return before 6 minutes is up and bell rings to signal next class
9:08 teach, teach, monitor, encourage, smile, teach
9:54 usher out, welcome in
10:02 waiting for lunch time class starts: encourage, cajole, teach, smile, encourage
10:55 ahhh, lunch
11:30 greet, greet, welcome, welcome, fifth period begins
12:25 sixth period, when did they arrive? was I picking up? shelving books? how did I miss the greet, greet, hello, hello at the door time. Rush into the last period of the day, teach, teach, monitor, modify, modify, support, cajole, smile, encourage.
It's over? already?
1:17 time to plan,
2:00 but wait, meeting, meeting, bathroom needing
2:45 p.m. back to class, quiet now, quiet
4:00 p.m. grading, grading still at school
cross town, extended-care pick up
grocery store someday
5:30 - 6:00 p.m. home depending on traffic and route
7:00 p.m. writing ,writing, planning ,planning, blog or occasional tweet

I've been thinking a lot about a teacher's day. What does a typical teacher look like? Are all teachers' days across our state similar at each level? Are teachers' days similar across the nation? Some teachers I've visited say no--others nod yes. It's hard to say. My schedule changes depending on the day or the week or the month of the school year. Above is a typical day where I'm in meetings after school for just a short time.

Today was a juggler. I participated in lesson study in the morning, then facilitated a different lesson study group in the afternoon. At the end of the school day, I met for an hour with student poets (Poetry Club) and took some time after that to begin writing out my common board agenda for tomorrow.

I left school at 4 pm (though we are released from duty at 2:30). After picking up my son from school and voting, I arrived home at 7 p.m. The lines were long at my polling place, so I'm sure that added more than an hour. How was your day? How do you build in time to grade? plan? reflect? write? hone your craft?

These are just a few things I'm thinking about this week.

Grades, grades, grades

2010-10-29T04:37:00.000-07:00

Grades are due this week and I am in the weeds; in restaurant speak that means behind. I have graded all of my students work--in fact the grading part has been going relatively smoothly this year. I stay late a day or two a week and knock out class sets of papers or I grade on the spot, walking the room and working grades at student's elbows where I can quick have a conversation with them about their work. But while I've been able to keep up with putting marks on papers or giving students feedback, I have not been able to keep up with grades into the computer. Two days this week found me up at 4 a.m. trying to do just that. I am working as hard as I can. So what got in the way?

Teaching surely. I mean I can't ignore students during class in order to input grades in the computer right? I have to be with them, guide them, facilitate their experiences--even if students are doing discovery work in groups, I need to be in their midst, not huddled behind my monitor. So grades are behind the scenes work that I do alone.
When can I get them done? On the new 7th period schedule finding time is challenging. I have a 45 minute planning period each day. I use that period twice a week to work with a junior intern from a local university. The remaining 3 planning periods, or 135 minutes I use to grade papers from nearly 150 students. That's not even a minute a paper were I to look at it that way. Of course students generate more than 1 assignment a week that needs feedback and a grade. How can I find the time? Well, teachers also have 40 minutes of common planning time after school each day. Two of those 40 minute slots (Tuesday and Wednesday) are filled with meetings. Poetry Club on Tuesdays and professional development time on each Wednesday. Parent conferences can be scheduled Mon., Tues., or Thurs. though I have only had 4 so far this year.

Students deserve to see their progress as we go from one week to the next. Grades should never be a surprise at the end of the quarter. I'm three weeks out of date. I take responsibility for that and I have apologized to students, but am I the only responsible party? Definitley not. There have been complications. Courses were not coded correctly in the schedule. Courses with reading trained teachers need to be specially coded so that "the state" can see that the school is complying with laws that say students who score low on standardized tests in reading must be with highly qualified teachers. I'm a highly qualified teacher, but my course names in the computer did not reflect that, so the courses names needed to be changed. When did the school make the changes? Six weeks in. So at the 6 week mark, I had to spend time transferring all of my assignments, re-setting up all of my classes with categories and weights and then I had to transfer students 1 by 1 from the old class into the new class. It took about an hour and a half for each class. How many classes do I have ? Six. How many hours is that? How many weeks would 8.5 hours take me? You get the gist.

I am running out of time, paid time anyway. Lately I've been thinking a lot about how education is funded, how teachers are paid. I hear a lot of complaints from teachers at my school about how teachers are asked to do too much or about how teachers should not be expected to work "for free" outside of their contracted work time. As Gary Larsen once capture in a Far Side cartoon, working for the railroad--doesn't it seem like students are being railroaded?-- means working all the live long day after all.

You know, when you sign up to be a teacher, you devote yourself to making a difference in the lives of children. Making a difference means doing what it takes. I belive that. It's in my heart. Sometimes doing what it takes can fit into the school day, most of the time it doesn't. Nearly every profession I've peeked into or experienced vicariously through friends and relatives has some amount of take home work time or extended hours. Doctors do. Lawyers do. Engineers might. Right? Why would teaching being any different?

Okay, back to putting my grades into the computer.

Voice Thread

2010-10-21T02:52:00.000-07:00

There is a difference between knowing a tool and knowing how it works with students. I know about Voice Thread but using it with students was new to me. In order to develop background knowledge about topics mentioned in The Great Gatsby, I thought I would adapt Janet Allen's expert groups idea for Voice Thread.

We all know different things and students are included in that all. Sometimes I'm surprised by what they don't know, but we've all had different experiences. Expert groups give students an opportunity to become "experts" on a topic or concept we will encounter in our reading. Usually, students will research their topic, take notes (just for themselves) and report out on the topic when we come to it in the novel during shared reading. Shared reading is not the reading approach I take with my A.P. language students, so we adapted expert groups. Instead of reporting out on our expert topics during shared reading, students posted what they discovered to Voice Thread.

I created the Gatsby thread with the book cover, the first scene from the Gatsby film and our chapter 1 Wordle. Because I had not used Voice Thread with students before my directions need help (I'll post them later they are on my teacher machine at school). While you can create an iconic image as your Voice Thread profile pictures, students can not post entire slide shows as comments. So I'll be reworking these directions for next time based on what I learned. Students worked on Gatsby related topics together in teams of two. We spent 2 class periods in the media center (90 minutes total). The media specialist taught students how to access the databases to which we subscribe and with that students were off gathering information.

I asked students to roughly script what they would like to say in their comment before they recorded it. I'm not sure they need an actual script. The notes they took are probably good enough for commenting purposes, but I may ask the students what they thought of it. If I were to teach this initial commenting process over I would do something similar to what Lee Kolbert did to teach students how to be good commenters. She simulated posting a comment to a blog with chart paper and sticky notes. My students need that practice. I haven't used Voice Thread with my freshmen yet, so I will probably start with physical bits they can manipulate and post before we go to the computers.

So what happened?

I wasn't sure how to share my thread so that students could post comments to it.
We worked together to navigate the page in class and students showed me how to make the thread public.
We experimented with commenting types: video, call in, text comments.
Students who had followed my directions (using images to illustrate their comments) posted their pieces to the center as they couldn't be posted as comments (so that actually worked out).
We took 1 class period to record the comments in class cobbling together access between my 2 laptops, a student's laptop. 4 antiquated student machines and students' cell phones.
It worked!

The students' comments worked. They make sense. They are audible. They are inform rich. There is much more for us to learn about how to make the collaboration smoother or more connected, but it was an exciting first step.

Teacher and Parent

2010-10-12T19:05:00.000-07:00

This morning I started writing about teacher parents. I finished that post with these wonderings:

Do I model learning passion for parents that I hope I live for my students? It also got me thinking about what I do to seek solutions to disappointments with my son's teachers. Do I complain or do I get involved?

I want to take a minute to jot down my thoughts as a teacher and my thoughts as a parent. I've got to warn you though, my thinking feels messy, so this writing will in part be me processing my ideas.

As a teacher, I feel an incredible obligation to parents. Parents entrust me with their children. The children I teach are between the ages of 14 and 18, but they are parents' sons and daughters. Children are remarkable, incredible--the future being created before our eyes. I want to treat them that way in my classroom. I want to see them today as successful, accomplished, learned, thoughtful citizens-- as the best future I can imagine for them.

Do I have rules? Certainly: respect yourself, respect others, respect our school/community. Do I have procedures? Too many to name, but here's a short list: what to do when you're absent, where to turn in papers, where to find lesson plans, where to find extra handouts, how to ask for a bathroom pass, how to question a grade, etc. Sometimes I even make help movies about our procedures. Procedures in class help us maximize instructional time. What I'd love to do though, is have the students make movies that will help each other learn--how engaging would that be? Like Lee Kolbert, I might not always be who you think I am. Janet Allen used to clarify those stages of learning and knowing-ness. Actually, I think the stages are of skill development and they go like this:

unconsciously incompetent (you don't know what you don't know),
consciously incompetent (you know you're missing something),
unconsciously competent (you can do it, but you can explain it, can't think metacognitively or reflect well), consciously competent (you've mastered the task, you can explain, you can reflect on it--you're there).

As a teacher I am constantly learning and questioning my own practice. I believe I am consciously competent, but that means that I know when I'm not doing what I could be doing. I learn by questioning what I do. Do I always model best practice? Hardly. A classroom is a practical place. Students differ. In fact, I think it was Richard Allington who once said at an NCTE conference that "100 years of educational research has taught us one thing: kids are different." What I do each day or each month or each school year depends on the students sitting in front of me. What and how I teach depends on what those students need.

The students I currently serve are very different from students in schools where I've worked before. This year I am using a very traditional Sadlier Oxford vocabulary book. The students I have speak many languages, but they need vocabulary practice. They need more structured practice than they are getting from their independent reading. So we're using vocabulary books for a time. We'll see what happens. Does that mean that I am decontextualizing all of our word study? Certainly not. But the books are definitely a compromise with my teacher-self that knows what the research says. I like the audio support Sadlier Oxford posts online, but I think my students could create better vocabulary podcasts. They are on the horizon.

As a teacher I am passionate in my beliefs about literacy instruction. I believe I was made to be a public school teacher to help students find their way as readers, writers and thinkers. If our children are to succeed in this ever expanding global marketplace they must read critically and by choice. Reading and writing are priorities in my classroom. We might not get our 10,000 hours in one year's worth of instruction. If Gladwell is correct about the making of expertise, then we have a lot of practice to do.

As a parent? I want my child to be treated fairly,with care and respect. I do not want teachers to use writing as punishment, as one of my child's primary teachers did. When my son came home and described having to write sentences about not talking or not paying attention, I was furious. When I found myself scanning the page to blog about it I stopped short. I made an appointment with the principal and brought NCTE's resolution on writing as punishment with me to the meeting. The principal assured me that a belief in Writing Project ideals was paramount, that the teacher would be spoken to. The principal copied my son's paper. Perhaps I shouldn't have allowed that. Perhaps I should have talked to the teacher first. The next week my son pulled 3 discipline cards. He was on the cloud much of the week--his classroom discipline system went from rainbow to sun to cloud (if the student was not following rules or talking out of turn he had to move his numbered card from one spot to another on the chart). Public embarrassment as discipline. Do we just not know better sometimes as teachers. Sure, there's that. Was that retaliation on the teacher's part? Or did an eagle eye suddenly spot prey? Who knows, but Collin hadn't pulled one card in more than a year, so three in a week was quite unusual.

As a parent, I want my child to have a teacher who continues to learn, who reads professional literature, who sets goals for him or herself and strives to reach them. Like Will Richardson mentioned on Ed Tech Talk, I want passion in a teacher. As a parent, I'm finding passion in short supply. I connect with passionate educators online, in virtual communities, through consulting work or with that rare colleague--I would say only 1 in 4 of my son's teachers has been passionate. The odds aren't good. How can I kindled that flame, that passion for learning and teaching?

As a parent I want my child to be engaged and I want him to have many opportunities or many paths he can take to learning. I want him to learn and develop a love for learning. I want him to be curious. I want his teachers to be able to set up scenarios that lead him to curiosity.I want him to have choices. He often does. Not many of the choices are technologically savvy, but the infrastructure for going high-tech with learning tools is being built at his school. That's encouraging. I want him to discover a curriculum that is not always worksheet bound. I want him to develop an ability to think and create for himself. Will he be able to do that if he is always filling in blanks on rip-out pages? Or are those rip-out pages part of that practice he needs? Why is he only allowed to read AR books at school?

As a parent I have more questions than answers. There are things that don't sit well with me as a teacher-parent. So what do I do?

I become visible. I participate. I offer to volunteer. Some years I've managed to be in his classroom once a week. Other years, I'm lucky if it's once a quarter. I listen. I learn. I talk to the teacher after I've thought about things a long time. In parent conferences, I question. I ask for teachers' rationales, their assessments. If they don't have them, I build a bridge with conversation.

This year I volunteered to work with the middle grades teachers on writing. We're going to have a monthly study group. We are going to learn together. We met last week for the first time. We talked about the traits of writing and then we wrote. We shared our writing and then talked about what it looks like to teach it. It was a good conversation, a good beginning to a shared learning journey. Next month we're going to talk about assessment (but the teachers don't know that yet). One of Collin's teachers was using a checklist (with points) and an FCAT style rubric to score narratives. If the students' didn't score a 6 on the FCAT rubric, the teacher took off points and dropped the grade; students also lost points on the checklist. Double whammy. So we're going to sort through the different ways you can assess student writing. I'm going to read a segment from Mark Overmeyer's book What Student Writing Teaches Us. We'll see how it goes. I'm engaged. We talking. The teachers are asking interesting questions. They are participating.

As a parent, I appreciate that. As a teacher, I'm excited. We're learning.

Image credit: This is a picture from my 1st period class. Students are sorting words/concepts by writing trait.

Teacher Parents

2010-10-12T02:56:00.000-07:00

I am a teacher. I'm also a parent. I have high expectations of my son's teachers. I live by those expectations in my own classroom, so in early September when Alec Couros tweeted his disappointment in his daughters kindergarten classroom I sympathized. At the time, I was knee deep in the swamp of the start of a new school year, but his thinking stayed with me.

Edu-bloggers picked up Couros' tweet and conversations ran long into the comments. Lee Kolbert blogged Couros' tweet. Honest and transparent, her post "I'm Not Who You Think I Am" detailed how practical realities of her own classroom (rules, procedures and even textbooks) have their place. We aren't doing project based learning 100% of the time after all, are we? I've had many "I'm not who you think I am" moments but that's another post. Will Richardson also blogged Couros' tweet with "A Parent 2.0's Back to School Dilemma." Richardson took the parent view. He wrote about his disappointment and how he and his wife mediate it: by introducing themselves, by co-schooling, by emailing resources (and cc-ing the principal).

Last week I listened to Lee Kolbert, Will Richardson and Penny Lindballe on Parents as Partners, an Ed Tech Talk show. The topic? Teacher parents, the recent blog conversations and how to mediate our disappointments.

Perfectly timed the Sunday night show helped me think about how I wanted to present myself and our classroom to parents at Open House last Tuesday. Do I model learning passion for parents that I hope I live for my students? It also got me thinking about what I do to seek solutions to disappointments with my son's teachers. Do I complain or do I get involved? Answers to all will be forthcoming. For now, I'm off to school.

Challenge, Wordle & Fingerprints

2010-10-04T02:53:00.000-07:00

"Are you ready for a challenge?" blogged fellow learning addict, Melanie Holtsman, last week. The challenge for edubloggers? Blog once a week for 10 weeks. Want to write with me? I thought I'd catch up on my the books I've read post. I think I have 4-6 books waiting a line a two and a picture, but I must have saved that post at school, so I'll get to it later. That's what happens with so many of my blog posts. I start them on the fly, in those in between moments of lunch or just before I leave school. Then they rarely get posted because I'm on to something else before I remember them. Perhaps if I made blogging a regular part of my classroom things would be different.

Using technology in class is a regular part of my classroom. Unfortunately I am not in a 1 to 1 school, so my students access to computers is limited. I do have 5 computers in my classroom, but they a slow and laborious machines. Teaching in a portable classroom--literally a double-wide trailer--means teaching without the latest computer equipment because computers get stolen from portable classrooms. My updated computers have big box monitors and their insides wheeze. You get the picture.

I demonstrate more than students can do with our older machines. What interests me though is how many students take what I do, and do it at home. Last week, I used a Wordle word cloud in my A.P. language class. I got the idea from Ben Davis on the English Companion Ning . The A.P. students used wordles of the first chapter of The Great Gatsby to analyze Fitzgerald's focus and word choice. It was interesting. But what was more interesting to me was how my freshman students saw the wordles when they came in the next class period.

My freshmen students are reading Bronx Masquerade by Niki Grimes. We had just done poetry rotations the day before and one stop on the carousel was a finger print poem.

Students saw the oval-esque Wordle and said, "Oh! Can we make our fingerprint poems like this?"

I hadn't seen the fingerprint shape in the Wordle until they mentioned it. What a neat idea, I thought. "Of course you can. This is a Wordle.

"A what?"

"Let me show you how to use it." So I did. Don't you know more than half of them went home and tried it themselves? Love it when that happens, but what I love the most is when my students see something I don't and we get to share the discovery of it.

My Thoughts: No Pen Needed

2010-09-22T03:30:00.000-07:00

from: http://sparkingtech.com/2008/01/

My husband came home the other night and told me about a story he'd heard on local talk radio channel about my school district spending more than a half of million dollars on new talking pens. I listened to him detail the exciting new technology and tried to keep my face expressionless. Why hadn't I heard this story?

In case you missed it, find the story at WFTV. The district has spent 200K on Smart Pens to pilot them. According to the story, much of the money comes from grants.

I've seen a Smart Pen in person. A friend, and district technologist rang it's bells and blew it's whistles for me one day. Interesting gadget, but I have to wonder. Would the pen mitigate a child's processing issues? Would the pen support students in our special education programs? Who would actually get and use the pen? How many administrators are "piloting" the pen? How many students are the pens serving? How many pens are we talking about for 200K? I want the numbers because you know what?

In my classroom, I often buy my own pens. I buy my own a lot of things. What disturbs me about the Smart Pen is not just the cost. It's the money. True or false: Two hundred thousand dollars is not a lot of money in a school system. True. The operating budget of just 1 of our large high schools exceeds 14 million dollars, so compared to that figure (which is a few years old) 200 K may not be statistically significant. The practical significance of the money is huge. When does the money make it's way to actual classrooms? When does the money actually go to students.

If the 98% pens are being tested by students in schools, then I will stand corrected. My guess is that they are not. I make that guess based on the blackberries, the iPhones, the MacBooks, the iPads, the multiple flat screen monitors at workstations. District folk and their offices are laden with technology while many schools and students suffer a dearth of access to today's tools. Certainly adults need to jump on the techno-learning curve. Certainly administrators and teachers and other support adults will need access to tools and time to learn them. But what about the children? When is it their turn?

If this initiative is grant funded, the money did not come from stretch district budgets. True. But someone spend district time writing that grant, right?

Did you know that teachers at my school have a limit on how many papers they can run through my printer At the beginning of the year teachers were told they would be able to print 1,000 copies school wide meaning each printer will record your requests and deduct from your $30 printing account. My limit hasn't taken effect yet. Is it coming? Our school can not afford to spend 22K and more on printer ink and toner each year, so printing and copying are limited. We can submit copies to a clerical person who does her best to have copies run within 48 hours. But both of her smallest-I've-seen industrial copiers have been broken. The machines limp along between repair visits and copies often take 5 or 6 days. What kind of instruction can I plan if copying response time is 5-6 days?

When the machines come up, the copying priority is progress monitoring tests--benchmark exams required by the district and state. We run thousands of answer sheets in order to scan students bubble tests into the data management system. The answer sheets didn't copy dark enough this time. There is a code, much like a bar code, across the bottom of the test. Many teachers have had to hand color in the code in order for the answer sheet scanner to read the test. Incredible, isn't it.

This is but one example. I could talk about portable classrooms (though I love my double-wide) or the amount of out-of-pocket money teachers spend for their students or the number of students enrolled in free and reduced lunch programs or the lack of access to technology (still) or any number of woe-are-we topics. There is a lot of money in education, but where is it going?

Two for Tuesday (a little bit late)

2010-09-08T03:25:00.000-07:00

There are few tales I remember from my Uncle Scott's growing up. Family said his people were from Appalachia.They might have been, but during my childhood Uncle Scott was from Ocala--tall trees and neighborhood roads without curbs. He once told my cousin and I how to get rid of warts. I wish I could remember the recipe complete. It was something involving a strand of hair and moonlight. Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell brought Appalachia to mind, but it is not set in Appalachia, it's set in the Ozarks of Arkansas. I'm not familiar with the Ozarks. Robert Flanders makes the Appalachia to Ozark comparison in OzarksWatch, but what I liked about the piece was this line: "The difference between town and country is this: In town others do for you. In the country you do for yourself." That is true of the Dolly's in Winter's Bone's hollows.

These Ozarks are not the superstitious, moonlight back woods of my uncle's stories, but the raw struggles of mountain folks in need: poverty, hunger, going without. It is a place where families do for themselves, shooting squirrels or other small game for the stew pot is but one example. Crime is big business. Ree Dolly's father cooks meth and has disappeared. She's been taking care of her younger brothers and her mom, since her mother has all but lost her mind. The law tells Ree that if her father doesn't show for his court appearance she will lose the house he put up for bail money. So begins Ree's quest to find her father. Bleak and cold, Winter's Bone showcases a side of humanity that hurts: themselves, each other, their families. Winter's Bone is a stark and brutal tale of a strong girl's struggles to make it out. How will she survive?

How does this sound to you? Sea plane into the Canadian wilderness, canoes, camping , no electronics, a month on the water. Heavenly. Effervescent, Nina de Gramont's Every little Thing in the World soaks readers in the pine-scented wilderness of Canada and story.When Sydney Biggs receives a month in Camp Bell from her as her punishment for going awry at home she too looks on it as a gift. As she should, pregnant and privledged, Sydney needs to figure out what to do. She's lied to her mother, been caught drinking, experimented with sex and ended her junior year pregnant. She and best-friend, Natalia, have it all figured out. Natalia will snitch the money Syd needs for an abortion. But is that what she really wants? Before she can decide both girls are busted in Natalia's mother's Cadillac at a kegger. Sydney's mom has had enough. She ships Sydney off to live with her father and new family for the summer.

Her weeks at Camp Bell canoeing ancient trails across a Canadian lake give her space and time to find herself and figure out what comes next. The narrative echoes with wilderness. Sydney and 8 campers strike out with meager supplies, tents and the little gear each canoe will hold. She feels her strength coming back with each day's portage. Will she be strong enough to save herself or her friendship with Natalia? The characters sparkle as their oars dip into deep lake waters. A quick read, if you enjoy the outdoors or reading about teens in trouble, this is the book for you.

What Teachers Make

2010-09-01T19:04:00.000-07:00

Interesting how the video creator, Gleekin, edited or revised Mali's "you give them this" gesture at the close of the poem. I think I like the video of his actual performance of the poem better. Gleekin's video caption reads: Taylor Mali's inspirational poem cleaned up a bit (aka censored) for a teacher's inservice audience. Below is Mali's uncensored version. What do you think about the censoring? Practical? Necessary? Outrageous? Just curious.

Mockingjay!

2010-08-29T14:29:00.000-07:00

I've just finished Mockingjay. What did I learn?

War scars.
You can't always get what you want.
Happiness comes, sometimes.
Peace is tenuous and costly.
Hold on to those you love.
Protect your family and your friends.

Overall, a satisfying end to the Hunger Games trilogy. I devoured the book. Though badly wounded and indeed often sedated and kept prop-like to be paraded across the air waves for those in the Capitol, Katniss Everdeen rises heroic out of loss to show us what it takes to survive: committment, drive, integrity.

Not to be a spoiler but this may ruin it for some, so if you're one of those types quit reading now.

Peeta suffers throughout much of the book. His mental breakdown leaves him angry, confused, bitter and resentful. In order to survive and to cope he and Finnick come up with a game of sorts: real or not real. Peeta shares a memory and then asks his companions "real or not real." They answer. The truth begins to rebuild him, but their love starts with this exchange:

"Ally." Peeta says the word slowly tasting it. "Friend. Lover. Vicgor. Enemy. Fiancee. Target. Mutt. Neighbor. Hunter .Tribute. Ally. I'll add it to the list of words I use to try to figure you out." He weaves the rope in and out of his fingers. "The problem is, I can't tell what's real anymore, and what's made up."

The cessation of rhythmic breathing suggests that either people have woken or have never really been asleep at all. I suspect the latter.

Finnick's voice rises from a bundle in the shadows. "Then you should ask, Peeta. That's what Annie does."

"Ask who?" Peeta says. "Who can I trust?"

"Well, us for starters. We're your squad," says Jackson.

"You're my guards," he points out.

"That, too," she says. "But you saved a lot of lives in Thirteen. It's not the kind of thing we forget.

In the quiet that follows, I try to imagine not being able to tell illusion from reality. Not knowing if Prim or my mother loved me. If Snow was my enemy. If the person across the heater saved or sacrificed me...I suddenly want to tell Peeta everything about who he is, and who I am, and how we ended up here. But I don't know how to start. Worthless. I'm worthless.

At a few minutes before four, Peeta turns to me again. "Your favorite color . . . it's green?"

"That's right." Then I think of something to add. "And yours is orange."

"Orange?" He seems unconvinced.

"Not bright orange. But soft. Like the sunset," I say. "At least, that's what you told me once."

"Oh." He closes his eyes briefly, maybe trying to conjure up that sunset, then nods his head. "Thank you." (270-271)

Thank you, Suzanne Collins.

Race to the Top

2010-08-26T16:47:00.000-07:00

I have a lot of questions about Florida's win in the Race to the Top funding competition. Will only struggling schools receive funding? I don't think so, but I think struggling schools will recieve the lion's share of funds(only appropriate, right?). Isn't that opposite of our former school grades system that rewarded A schools with more money than D and F schools?

Will all schools be expected to implement the reforms even if they aren't funded at the school site? I think my biggest question though is about teacher and principal evaluation. My county posted this overview of Race to the Top plans last year. There are several items to celebrate: career and professional academies, increased opportunities for STEM education, advanced classes, positive behavior systems, mentoring and more. But how will districts, and my district specifically, revamp teacher compensation systems? The Memorandum of Understanding calls for a teacher compensation system that "ties the most significant gains in salary to effectiveness." How will effectiveness be measured? Surely we'll get more than one shot to showcase effectiveness right? Or will effectiveness come to down to a solitary standardized test score? Don't get me wrong, I think standardized tests, and the FCAT in particular have value.

Tests, judiciously used, can provide valuable data I use to compare students to a norm group or to a set of criteria. But measure a teacher's effectiveness? I can plan instruction using testing data. But can I plan and execute student behavior? Human beings are entirely too complex to be categorized by one score, one measure, one 2.5 hour bubble in the answer test. And we certainly can't capture that complexity with monthly or quarterly tests that continuously interrupt instruction.

I am teaching as hard as I can, but some years, with some students, my best does not seem to be good enough. Perhaps that's politics working to, as Alan Sitomer says, "shame me into working harder" or spur me into "working for less." But we've been working for less. And this year we went to a 7 period school day. Teachers teach 6 classes instead of 5 to meet class size amendment laws. The other reason the school day has changed has to do with budget shortfalls. For every 6 teachers we need one less in our English department. With 48 minute classes, my students this year get 1,800 less minutes of instruction in language arts. That's 30 hours. That's one month less in my English classroom. But we are measured on the same scales we used to measure last year's students.

I wished we measured growth. In Florida we measure learning gains. We say we measure growth, but growth is strictly defined. The state defines growth or a learning gain as 77 developmental scale score points. Is 77 points statistically significant? Is 10 points practically significant? One hundred percent of my students do not make learning gains on our FCAT test. One of my best years, more than 80 % of my students improved, but less than 70% made that magical 77 point gain. In the state's eyes those students didn't make a year's worth of growth. Did we all walk on the same day? Did you master bike riding on the same day that all of the neighborhood kids did? Dick Allington says that more than 50 years of educational research has proven one thing: kids are different.

I'm thankful Florida will receive funding. Our schools need the money. But it's money with serious strings attached.

Books Read: Dusk & Songs Without Words

2010-08-21T20:47:00.001-07:00

I picked up a couple of books from the Barnes and Noble bargain section the other day. Well worth the sales prices. Dusk by Susan Gates tells a story of genetic manipulation, military experimentation and what happens when all goes awry. You can probably guess from the cover image how Dusk, the character, was genetically engineered -- I won't give that away but suffice it to say this short read reminded me a bit of Patterson's bird children. Much less developed than Maximum Ride, Dusk inhabits wilderness and wild places, no angel metaphors for her, she eats mice whole then spits out fur and bones. Though the title would suggest an ending of sorts, Dusk vibrates with living.

No so for many of the characters in Ann Packer's Songs Without Words. Such songs are suicide songs--swans songs of the depressed. Sarabeth, lampshade artist and part time realty stager, survived her mother's suicide with the help of her best friend, Liz, who's family took her in after the death. Now grown up the women have a sisterly friendship that is constant in both of their lives. Constant until Liz's teenage daughter, attempts suicide. Packer highlights complex relationships with ease and compassion.

The book reminded me of Cindy Bertossa, a former teacher and friend who lost her sister Jenny to suicide more than a decade ago. Cindy is raising money for the American Society of Suicide Prevention by walking in an Out of Darkness Community Walk. The foundation helped her and her family in their recovery and I've got to think that Sarabeth, from the novel, would have had a much healthier emotional life as an adult if she'd done some of the things I know my friend Cindy has done (but Sarabeth is just a novel character after all).

If you are interested in learning more about suicide prevention or in supporting Cindy in her walk visit her donation page or the American Society of Suicide Prevention.

Why Twitter?

2010-08-17T03:03:00.000-07:00

Why tweet? What's the point of twitter anyway?

I twitter to learn. By tweeting I connect with tech-giants to learn new about new tools, issues, headlines or professional books in the ed-tech world. I tap into the collective wisdom of teachers in my state (Lee Kolbert, Jerry Swiatek and others I follow via lists like Heather Mason's list of Florida teachers) or lean on teacher expert English teachers from across nation and nings. Meredith Stewart makes following such folks from the English Companion Ning-ers easy with this list. I'm talking educational rock stars in the English education world. Folks like Jim Burke, Kylene Beers, Stephen Krashen. For an an English teacher who is passionate about reading and learning this is 140 characters of heaven. As are the young adult authors who tweet:John Green, Ellen Hopkins, Sarah Dresden and more.

I twitter to change the world. John Green and his brother, Hank Green showed me twitter's world changing power last year during the Project 4 Awesome. The Green brothers, who just hit 200K subscribers on YouTube, command a band of Nerdfighters and host a yearly charity event on YouTube where the Nerdfighters comment and rate videos featuring charities in order to take over YouTube's most discussed page. Last year's the brothers added Twitter to the mix and we (for I too am a Nerdfighter) pushed the Project 4 Awesome to Twitter's #1 trending topic. If two minds are better than one, twitter ups mind power exponentially and no one leads the swarm better than the Green brothers.

How do you find time to do that? Twitter takes as much time as you want to give it. I don't twitter from my hip all day long. I dip into Twitter in the morning, sometimes mid-day and in the evening. During the Project for Awesome I twitter constantly, but unless there is a special chat or event, I am low-count tweeter. I joined twitter nearly 3 years ago and have not hit 3,000 tweets. Deeply embeded tweeps tweet much more than that. Meredith Stewart and Jen Ansbach, wonder-teachers and ECNingers, are closing in on 18,000 tweets in under 2 years time.

Twitter does take a time investment, but you choose your level of commitment. Do you want to listen in and lurk? Or will you join the conversation? Themed chats using hashtags* are one way to jump in. Find a chat, such as #engchat on Monday nights or #edchat. Chats seem like o-matic community builders because you have a group of folks gathered around a similar interest talking away. Like a great dinner party conversation but you don't have to worry about what you're wearing. I throughly enjoyed Sunday evening's book chat with Paul Hankins (@PaulwHankins) and Donalyn Brooks (@donalynbrooks). This was their first Title Talk chat and there are sure to be more.

So why twitter? Why not?

* * *

Twitter Vocabulary

twitter: social network where users can communicate with followers by posting short messages (140 characters or less)
followers: people who subscribe to your twitter stream or feed
tweet: sending a 140 character message via twitter
tweeple: people you connect with on twitter
list: a way to organize groups of tweeple in order to follow by categories you create
trending topic: subjects (recorded by keyword or hashtag) that are most popular on twitter
hashtag: a system of organization or folksonomy created with #sign and keyword (ie: #p4a is the Project for Awesome hashtag)

Summer Books

2010-08-15T14:54:00.000-07:00

I chose My Name is Memory because I love Ann Brashares' The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. I also love resurrection stories. Stories that show the eternal nature of our lives. My Name is Memory is a love story between Daniel and Sophia that spans centuries. With each life, Daniel searches for Sophia in order to fulfill the love he felt at their first, violent meeting. I enjoyed the characters as they changed from ancient times to present day and the mystery of their final connection kept me reading.

Pat Conroy is one of my favorite authors. The Prince of Tides one of my all-time favorite books. His magnolia-scented prose echoes a south I can only imagine. The descriptions in South of Broad are delicious, delectable, luxurious in their richness, but it is the characters that I fell in love with: Leo Bloom, Sheba and Trevor Poe and their band of high-

school friends turned adults on a quest. The novel spans decades and tells the story of friendship, the AIDS crisis of the 1980s in San Francisco, the downfall of the Catholic church, integration and so much more. Conroy's novel is full of love, saints and sinners who come to know each other and commit to life in a way most characters only dream.

What do your readers do?

2010-08-14T04:58:00.001-07:00

While dipping in to my twitter stream this morning I came across "The Fake Book Report on" Nancy Ehrlich's teaching blog. I've been thinking a lot about how I will run independent reading this year and I started to leave Nancy a comment and realized I was writing too much, so I thought I 'd write out my thoughts here and then link the post back to her comments.

Nancy's post reminds me of a story I once herd Yetta Goodman share. "What's the first thing you wanted to do after you read The Bridges of Madison County?" Goodman asked the audience. The first thing I would wanted to do (then and now) was call my best book-friend and talk about the book so that she would read it next or I might just bring her the book to read as I talk about it. Goodman described a scenario where she finished the book while reading before bed time and jumped up to go create a diorama of the bridges. Harvey Daniels summarizes the Goodman wisdom, "What do lifelong readers do when they finish a book, Yetta wondered--make a diorama?"

Real readers don't create dioramas or digital book talks or movie trailers. Read readers talk. some may write about books--teacher-y nerds like me especially, but for the most part it is a rare student--a student who is just learning to enjoy reading--that will spontaneous write about a book experience. First he needs to enjoy reading and feel the pleasure of being lost in a story.

Like Nancy, I thought critically about my own classroom when my son qualified for the accelerated reader program at his school. I will never forget how he got into the car and said, "Now I can't read whatever I want." I could barely suppress my anger. Of course he could still read whatever he wanted--I told him I'd fight all the way up to the principal's office to insure that right for him. Satisfied, we found ways to work around the AR program and found books he enjoyed for which his school had purchased tests, but still. Students should not have to take a test every time they read a book. I'll save that rant, but it was AR (and later my son's canned book reports--all written, no choice) made me seriously look at the assignments I was using to bog down readers.

While I may not run the readers' workshop Nancie Atwell pioneered and continues, independent reading--a mini-workshop time--is a core part of my classroom. I do not require students to do something with everything they read. Well, I take that back. I do require them to log their reading time and keep track of the pages they have read. Reading homework is consistent throughout the school year. Students may choose to read 2 1/2 hours each week for an A, 2 hours for a B, 1 1/2 hours for a C and so on. Last year I gave students extra-credit for each 1/2 hour extra that they logged. The reading log I use is a simple form. Originally meant to be cut apart, students never did, so the three column logs show me quite a reading history once they are complete.

Read Log

In my classroom I ask students to read 25 books a year. In the mid-90s New York and California new standards included a "25 book standard" for students in New York, I glommed on to the idea. I sold it to students by saying "If students in New York and California can read 25 books then so can you!" Now many states' standards include book thresholds. Georgia even acknowledges that reading and meeting the 25 book standard is everyone's responsibility in their social studies performance standards.

I hold students accountable for reading. I record the status of the class in my reading record notebook each day and use the data to assess students' progress as well as award points for reading. I wish that it were not so, but points, or grades, show students that I value reading. I also grade their progress toward the standard on our final exam. The 25 books becomes 25 points and the number of books students read adds to their overall exam score.

In the past, students have kept reading journals writing up to 2 pages weekly. Once students demonstrate application of the strategies I have been teaching in class by writing specifically and about the books they are reading, I "release" them from the responsibility of journaling about their reading (a la Lois Lowry). I did not have students keep reading journals last year. At the end of the year, mid-year their independent reading essays weren't as well crafted. I think the reading journals are a practice place I will bring back this year. We do them at the beginning of the year, for the first quarter only. I will need to revise my reading journal directions; the one I used to use, is embedded in this set of workshop handouts.

I don't require a monthly project or even a quarterly project, but I do ask via the journal and the log that students do something with their reading. I let go of the journal quickly though. I also assess them as readers and thinkers by making their independent reading the topic of our midterm exam. Students are give personalized essay questions--a process I wrote about here. I assess students as members of a reading community by asking them to showcase a book they have read at the end of the year. Like Nancy, I have required types of projects (book talks, book-movie posters, podcasts, etc), but I have also offered choices. This 100 projects list is what I may give students to choose from.

I've never had students fake an independent reading essay, but it's a long process. A teaching process I employ to scaffold students' abilities to think critically. We'll see how it works this year. I still have a week to think about what I want to do differently this year. One thing I'm definitely going to do is follow Ehrlich on twitter and subscribe to her blog. Her desktop chaos theme made me want a blog make-over of my own and I appreciate the parent perspective she brings to her teaching and thinking. Reflective, practical, she sounds like my kind of teacher.

Daniels, Harvey. "What's the Next Big Thing with Literature Circles?." Voices from the Middle 13.4 (2006): 10-15. Web. 14 Aug 2010.

Discovering the AR-C

2010-08-11T03:46:00.000-07:00

DO IT, THEN FIX IT AS YOU GO.

"Too many people spend too much time trying to perfect something before they actually do it. Instead of waiting for perfection, run with what you've got, and fix it as you go." ~ Paul Arden

Though Arden didn't write Nike's ad campaign, his words here call it to mind. Just do it. This week I've applied the slogan and swoosh in two different ways.

We've started a Ning at school! It's not perfect --indeed we need students and a community to get it up and humming, but it's begun. Our purpose is to engage students in reading, writing and learning socially outside of the classroom. I can only imagine the groups we may create and the communities we can develop online.

My next big tasks for the ning include:

an acceptable use policy
a parent information/permission slip
create layout and welcome for front page
spiffy graphics and a customized css layout
invitations to join the ning (to poetry slam poets, to media specialist, for students, etc.)
reviewing the controls and management features
add widgets to front page
upload cchs photos to front page (my students signed photo releases last year so I'll start there)
write blog post for the ning

Lots to do, but it's going to be an exciting learning journey!

The second just do it task of this week: creating a model for argument (indeed an entire vocabulary) to use in Advanced Placement Language and Composition classes with other A.P. language teachers. Our collaboration hummed this week. It is amazing what can happen when you get people together and talking on the same page and in the same direction.

We (Marjorie Anderson, Allen Gorney, Sheri Hjelms, Rebecca Mayo, Jacquelyn Owen, and I) were talking about themes and text sets that we could use with AP lang this year: medical ethics, science & technology, health care, the environment, gender roles, etc. Marjorie suggested health care or the ethics of dying. She told her father's story and pointed us to a recent 60 Minutes story on the cost of dying. Have you ever watched cotton candy being made? Seen how the pink sugar spins out like sweet spidery ribbons only to fall back to the center and wrap around the paper cone. As she spoke, our thoughts and were like that sugar. Here are my notes from that conversation.

Suddenly it all came together. Allen looked at my notes and I explained what I was thinking and we were on to something. The rest of the afternoon was devoted to developing what we are initially calling the AR-C. Think arc of conversation or ark to hold ideas. AR being argument and C for construction. What has been missing with our students is an ability to construct and argument in a logical and focus way.

The organizer begins with a bubble map of conversations in the center. Take the big idea of gender roles. What conversations or discourse communities exist around the idea of gender roles? We record conversations or thematic threads on the spokes of the center circle. Identity, sexuality, expectations, responsibilities, these and more are conversations people have about gender.

What affects these conversations? Perspective certainly. So, like the conversation round table we have perspectives in our frame: individual, group, societal and global. But these perspectives are static and remain in our frame as an enduring part of the conversation.

Circling the big idea and it's constellations of conversations are ripples or considerations (target notes). Considerations change with the big idea or over time. Considerations, like ripples in a pond, are dynamic and fluid. They add layers and focus to a conversation. Considerations could include: historical, political, financial, religious, philosophical or critical. The author and text are also considerations. The conversation may start with a text (if all things are text it probably does), but the conversation is not text dependent, so the text becomes a consideration, a layer in the conversation. The text and the author are constant ripples though changing as we bring in texts to the conversation. Does that make sense?

The model merges a bubble map with a circle map and Jim Burke's target notes and conversational round table to get at thinking critically about conversations (big ideas) and the influence texts and other factors have on those ideas.

We'll see how it works. Our intention is to make our thinking processes explicit for students and to scaffold their ability to create focused claims and questions they can use to write about text. As Paul Arden says, we'll fix it as we go.

If you'd like a one-pager explaination on the model click here. If you want to try the model with your own students find several versions here (we made several in order to teach different parts of the model separately).

Two for Tuesday

2010-08-10T02:55:00.001-07:00

Enchanted by Sarah Addison Allen's Garden Spells, I knew I would enjoy The Girl Who Chased the Moon. I wasn't disappointed. Full of magnolia and moonlight, the threads of Allen's story weave a magical southern tale. The characters are many, but the stories and their intersections focus on two women: Emily Benedict and Julia Winterson.

Emily Benedict moves to Mullaby, North Carolina to live with her grandfather after her mother, Dulcie Shelby, dies. Known as the town giant, he's nearly eight-feet tall, quiet and reclusive. He mystifies Emily. Why didn't Emily's mother tell Emily about her grandfather or his reclusive ways? Will he ever really talk to her? Does he even want her living with him? Why did Emily's mother keep Mullaby and her past a secret?

Next-door neighbor, Julia Winterson, a Mullaby native, comes to Emily's rescue not only with the hope-filled cakes she bakes, but also with friendship that gives Emily a sense of place and belonging. Heartbroken but determined, Julia has a two-year plan to restore her now dead father's restaurant and then sell it. She makes magical cakes. Butter, sugar, flour, chocolate and more combine to reveal Julia's heart and call forth a past love.

Love, redemption, family ties and friendship The Girl Who Chased the Moon doesn't disappoint.

* * *
My favorite book by Chris Bohjalian is The Double Bind, a twisted Gatsby-esque tale of intrique and one woman's tragic spiral into mental illness. His latest thriller, Secrets of Eden, focuses on the pastor Stephen Drew's loss of faith after newly baptized, Alice Hayward is murdered seemingly by her abusive husband. Bohjalian is a master of the telescopic moment--zooming in and out of time reeling in readers with the unexpected detail. Drew finds temporary salvation in Heather Laurent, an acclaimed angelologist and author, but like Drew's God, Laurent withdraws from him amid suspicions of murder.

Bohjalian masters suspense. The novel takes many points of view and readers who enjoy a good run with Jodi Piccoult will find intrigue and satisfaction reading Secrets of Eden.

Spend the Night Pillow Talk

2010-08-02T17:04:00.000-07:00

Conversation between my son and two friends, brothers, he had over to spend the night:

"At my school you can't read books if you don't have the right lexile level."
"What?"
"Yea, I wanted to read The Lightning Thief but my teacher said, 'Oh no, you don't have the lexile level, so you can't read it now.'"
"Oh yeah, Percy Jackson was 10 pts. more than my lexile and she said that another boy read it and didn't understand it, so she said I shouldn't read it." I was reaching for the book and then she smacked my hand away!

What? I thought, can teachers do that? Do teachers do that?
* * *
"One kid got expelled. He kept saying bad word, so he got kicked out!"
"But my teacher is sooo strict, but all the teachers are so nice except Mrs. Crabtree"
"No, Mrs. Crabtree is nice."
"Ok maybe she is is."
"What's your lexile score?"
"1080, what's yours?"

And the conversation continued through lexile scores (one said he was over 1000 and reading at a high school level) and what books each liked. One of the boys asked the others what types of books he liked. They talked about adventure books (Hunger Games) and myth-type books (Riordan's new Red Pyramid). I kept thinking how the boys' conversation mirrored that of my own book club.

I wished I'd recorded the conversation but when I went to plug my iTalk adapter into the iPod, the iPod battery was spent, so I took notes. Do you limit students reading? Why? How?

When I went in to remind the boys it was time for bed they had the lexile conversation with me. I said to them that lots of time interest in a book can overcome difficulty. If a student is interested and motivated to read a book then they will reach for it and make it work for them. I said that if their teacher wouldn't let them read it, they read it at home. Not the best advice I'm sure, but I'm learning. I wish their teacher had the same opinion. We need to support students where they are but we need not be gate-keepers. That's what I think.

Transparency

2010-07-29T02:02:00.001-07:00

"School is about to start and NO WAY do I want to make the same mistakes tha tI made last year. So I'm writing this guide to be sure I do things RIGHT."

~ Marissa Moss, Amelia's School Survival Guide

Last night I had a dream. My first teaching dream of the season. It seems early for the beginning-of-the-year dreams. School doesn't start until August 16 after all.

I had a teaching dream about journaling. Maybe it was Monday in the dream, but I was walking my class, reading over students' shoulders and doing at-the-elbow journal conferences. It must have been the first time I graded journals for that class or gave students journal feedback. The entries weren't going well. They were hazy in my dream. Students hadn't followed directions. I was feeling frustrated. It must have shown because a student interrupted my assessment and said, "Don't worry. Next time you'll give us better directions." My dream mind thought: Well, I didn't have students journaling last year, what do I expect. I'm rusty--I should have thought this through more. I didn't model the process for them. We didn't practice together. How could I have expected much if all I did was assign?

I had a dream about journaling and I woke up thinking about transparency. Like my wrist x-ray, how can I make teaching transparent--for teachers, for administrators, for parents but most importantly for students? How can I make what I want students to do transparent? How will I explain and clarify the processes I want students to learn? How will I model my own thinking, reading and writing practices?

When it comes to journaling with students, how will I set up their journals? In the past I've had students keep 2: an academic journal and a reading journal which changes or tries on different purposes throughout the year (reading journal, with a reading log, essay journal, creative journal). This year I think I'd like students to work from 1 journal. We can divide it into an academic journal (notes, ideas we process in class, early drafts, writing ideas, etc) and a reading journal (response, analysis, reflection, lists of what we've read).

Teaching dreams tend to get me questioning before the beginning of the year. I could follow the rabbit trails of ideas into the sunset, but it's summer and I have art supplies waiting.

I'm going to blog through my thinking this year. I hope you'll excuse my mess, but as I focus on my practice and developing transparency, I'm going to write it out. Below is a bit more thinking on journaling on paper or online. See what you think and then share it by leaving a comment.

Thinking About Digital Journals

I like a physical journal. It seems that no matter how much writing I do online, I still like to process on paper with colored pencils and black pens. I enjoy keeping my sketchbook journals. Not that students must take on my process. We don't have 1 to 1 access in class, so daily processing and note-taking are difficult to do digitally and cell phones, much to my dismay, are still forbidden. Still, if students used their own laptop in class (or if by some miracle I write a grant and get funding for a COW) we could keep digital versions.

As it is though, we'll start with the classic composition book and then I'd like to have students develop showcase pieces on blogs or online. That's what I'd like to do. Now, how can I get there? My district does not grant access to blogging platforms from school and students do not have their own blog spaces from the district. How can I work around that? How much control do teachers have or need to have over student content? Do we need to act as gate-keepers for kids or teach responsibility and step back?

Poetry Slam Prep 2010

2010-04-29T02:28:00.000-07:00

Ten students, three poems each, three minutes at the microphone per round, three rounds. Today we slam. Student poets have been preparing for the slam since February. Local poet, Natalia (or My Verse to poets), from Spoken Word Press visited each week for "poetry club." Spoken Word Press is doing amazing work in the community--grant funded, founder Jolanda Blackmon (or Blu Bailey to poets) works with high school teachers to recruit and develop youth. She is also the brains beind the Orange County Poetry Slam Jam, a county-wide slam featuring the top two poets from each of the 6 participating high schools. The support of Spoken Word Press and My Verse's weekly visits were quite a gift.

Another gift this poetry season was our visit from notable poets, Sara Holbrook and Michael Salinger. Sara and Michael got right down to business with student poets*. We started with a read-around--so that we could let the pros get to coachng. Joseph bravely volunteered to go first. He bulldozed his first piece--steamed through pauses and lacked emphasis. To teach him how to slow it down,Michael had Joseph do his poem as if he were reading it to a pre-school class. Can I tell you how I tickled I was that Joseph took to the challenge--his whole face changed. His eyes opened wider, his lips moved with more intention. You could see the change. Joseph didn't read the entire piece, Michael stopped him maybe 1/2 way--a coaching move that I later realized was key .The third reading Michael asked Joseh to do was in the voice of a pirate. A pirate! Michael even spoke pirate to make clear his demand. Joseph, our Bronx native, our only senior, ran with it. Again his face changed, his voice dropped, his pacing immediately slowed (hard to freight train while speaking Pirate). Pricelss.

Here are a few clips from Joseph's performance:

Off to school! It's going to big a big day today!

*Sara and Michael's voice lessons and performance exercises are noted in their book Outspoken.

Do You Workshop?

2010-01-25T16:27:00.001-08:00

An editor of professional books for educators asked me recently why more English teachers don't use the workshop model. A good quesiton to which there are no easy answers. My short list includes mandates, curriculum packages, reading or English programs, testing pressures, the cannon, school culture and teacher flexibility. I left NCTE this past year thinking what am I doing? What am I doing in my classroom? What am I doing in my professional life? What do I believe in as a teacher and are those beliefs reflected in what I do, what I write, what I say and how I teach? It is somehing I have been thinking about for many months.

Have you seen Nancie Atwell's video in response to the NY Times article on the "The Futue of Reading" where Jonesboro teacher, Lorrie McNeill, discusses her use of the workshop model. After hearing Atwell speak at NCTE this past year, I wondered why the reported or McNeill didn't mention that she'd spent a week observing and immersing herself in the model at Atwell's school. Though Atwell gave English teachers the workshop classroom with her landmark, In the Middle, orginally published in 1987, the workshop model is not ubiquitous. You don't see in every middle and high school in every district or even in every state. Why is that?

A portion of my class time every day is allotted to reading worshop. Students are surrounded by books. I expect them to read 20 titles a year and I read to reach 100. What I have not done though is connect my content teaching--the stuff of English--to what we read independently. Instead it's as if, over here I'm teaching a whole class piece (novel, play, poem, article) and we're doing "stuff" with that whole class piece. I think to shift my instruction, I could design open ended mini-lessons that push students into their own reading to apply the strategy. I'm almost there.

Likewise, a portion of my class time each week is allotted to writing workshop. Ideally, I would give a mini-lesson on leads or sentence variety and send students into the pieces they are writing to practice the lesson, but that is not quite what's happening in my classroom. Instead we might all work on memoir at the same time. I will demonstrate a technique or a craft element. Students will then take that to their own work. Not quite workshopping. But at the same time we have to write mandated types of assignments for our school writing portfolio. We have to do 3on-demand writing prompts handed to us by the district. The have-tos get in the way for me.

The workshop model is not as natural to me as breathing underwater is for a fish; it takes deep content and pedagogical knowledge as well as a finesse with planning and thinking on your feet. I understand why teachers might be reluctant to jump in--running a workshop classroom takes skill. Workshop meaning that students have choice--sometimes crafted or limited choice--to apply what I have taught during a mini-lesson to something they are reading or writing. I would like to transition to a full workshop. Really that is where my teaching heart is. Students need choice. They need to start where they are and read and write themselves toward a goal. But that goal might be different for each student.

Does it sound easy? Do you already run a workshop classroom? Why not?

Image: My 3rd period class during reading workshop.

Journaling through NCTE

2009-12-04T17:30:00.000-08:00

I filled a journal during sessions at NCTE. I've been thinking a lot about journals and my journal habit, especially after some twitter conversations about them, so I thought I'd start my reflecting on NCTE with a little peek into my journal. I journal and I blog and I tweet, but journaling is different more primal, more creative somehow. I know that no matter how easy it easy for me to connect with the computer in my pocket, I'll continue to journal. I journal because:

It's tactile and my brain processes information that way.
It's visual and when I draw and sketch I make connections between information and my long term memory.
It's fun.
It helps me think beyond the surface of things.
I've jounal sinced I was 15.
I enjoy journaling.
It helps me pay attention.
I stay with the speaker in my mind if I journal; it keeps me focused.
I'm less likely to talk to the person sitting next me if I'm journaling (definitely something my own high school teachers appreciated, I can tell you).

I barely remember a time when I didn't carry a sketch book or a composition book or a Moleskin or a mini-spiral Mead notepad around with me. I'm a journaler. My journal is what Fletcher would call my writer's notebook. In it go notes, ephemera--artifacts that get me writing--scraps of poetry, ideas, outlines for books, photographs and drawings.

I write my way to knowing. As E.M. Forster says, "How can I know what I think till I see what I say?"

When I take notes in my journal I code things. Red question marks are for quetstions (an obvious one). Q is for quotes I'd like to remember. A green, double-ended arrow <-> signifies a connection while a blue H notes where I record my thinking (also where I write things as if I'm talking back to the speaker... erase those when I publish my notes as they are more for me than for everyone). A green B denotes a book title and a light bulb an idea. If the light bulb has a red T or red W next to it, I've classified my idea for either a workshop (W) or for teaching (T). If I write LU I'm telling myself to look up something later to either verify or extend what I've heard. At the end of each conference day (or when I get a chance), I make an index type list on the back pages of my journal. I devote 1-2 pages to book titles and write down all of the green B titles I noted. I do the same for quotes, things to look up and ideas. That way, at any time, I can flip to the back of my journal and have an overview of what I captured.

With a recent post on the English Companion Ning, Penny Kittle reminded me that we rarely get to peek into each others' journals, so I thought I'd invite you into mine. I've scanned a few pages: my opening word art piece, notes I took during Gary Anderson and Tony Romano's session on creative nonfiction and an index page of quotes:

Peek Into My Journal

I have just started to go back through my notes and sit down with teacher friends to talk about what I learned and thought about while I was there. I've been holding off writing about NCTE. If I put it off I can still savor the ideas, sink into the swirl of thoughts, chase rabbitt trails and research citations--pretend it's not over. Until next year, I can hold onto that thinking in my journal.

Would You Please Un-block?

2009-11-05T07:32:00.001-08:00

The argument for controlling and censoring web content in schools goes something like this: we need to keep students safe; we need to keep predators out of our system; we need to keep students on task; we need to limit distractions. We need to limit students's access to sites on the web in order to protect them from pornographic or other inappropriate content. We need to control what our people can and can not do on the Internet from schools.

Why? Why not teach students (and teachers for that matter) what is appropriate? Why not teach folks how to be good digital citizens? I want students to feel empowered to learn, electrified by ideas, and enabled to succeed. I can't foster those creative and capable habits of mind if students are stuck in the web sandbox.

Today, I'm at the district headquarters learning about Moodle and am reminded of Dean Shareski's post, "Control is a Worthless Pursuit." He also wrote about filtering here. Like Shareski, I am not averse to district tools. I enjoy using them and am grateful for them. However, in my--probably adolescent mind--I feel a disconnect between what happens at the district, or what's allowed, and what happens at schools or what is allowed in our schools. There is a"do as I say not as I do" at work here. That whole "do as I say thing" vexed the teenaged me.

My thinking began with a discussion about messaging within the Moodle system.

A teacher asked, "Can students send messages to each other?"

The facilitator, who is all for giving students free reign inside the Moodle system, answered, "Well, I'm going to say that we sure wouldn't be working in a collaboratative environment if we could not send messages to each other." He continued with the idea that kid's messaging each other while on a Moodle site is a managment problem, not a system or a Moodle problem. He will not block students or block the messaging function.

Yes! One for the students.

Interesting. Why? Because the district is controlling when it comes to blocking and filtering out-of-system sites at schools. Outside of Moodle, students cannot access email at school-- personal email accounts; there are currently no district wide email accounts for students even though we have access and approval for two systems (ePals and Gaggle). Outside of Moodle, discussions or chats or blogging is discouraged: flat out blocked at school sites.

Within, Moodle, however, teachers can create online course content using Moodle which is approved by our district for use with students. We can email within the Moodle system. We can message within the system. It's as if the district must always be in control of the web environment in which students work. As a parent of an 8 year old, I can see the benefits of that, but as a 21st century learner, I resent it.

At the district, however, it seems that you can access anything. I can access all of my Nings, my blogs, twitter and who knows, I may even be able to dip into Facebook from here (I can. I checked.). Should I? If it's not instructionally relevant, no, I shouldn't. But should I be allowed to collaborate via the web with other educators? How can a district that pushes collaboration bind teachers to building-only resources? I learn a lot from my PLN--after hours, of course, when I should be grading papers.

Why can't I do some of these things from school? Any url with blog in the address is blocked. Twitter is blocked. Nings are blocked. Blocked, blocked, blocked. Firewalls are high and mighty in our schools.

There's a disconnect between what is available and allowed for administrators and what is available and allowed for teachers and students. Why? Is it that way everywhere?

Sometimes I wish I had the problem Bud Hunt wrote about in his post, "Would You Please Block This?" Instead of asking for sites to be blocked, it seems teachers in my district are asking for sites to be un-blocked.

I teach in the 12th largest school district in the nation. We have more than 5,000 teachers. One, unfortunate soul gets all of the "please un-block" emails. I've heard they are deleted as they arrive. We don't even get a canned response for our un-block requests, but that's another issue isn't it?

I want to empower students and teachers to learn. Everyone learns. What are we learning now? How can we empower learners when we keep them contained? What do you think about this issue? What happens in your district?

Image credit: Badjonni. "Neutron Man Presents."

I Want a Teacher

2009-10-04T06:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I met up with my A.P. Language & Composition friends. We spent a few hours at Barnes & Noble talking about lesson plans and what students need to learn. We read "I Want a Wife" by Judy Brady and got to thinking about having students write their own satirical definition essays. We thought about writing our own version too. I would write about teaching. I might start my essay just as Brady did:

I belong to that classification of people known as teachers. I am A Teacher. And not altogether incidentally, I am an English teacher.

Recently, a friend fresh from a two-week vacation met me for lunch. Bemoaning Monday's approach, she marveled at my luck. She wished she had summers off. She wished she didn't have to work on the weekends. Oh, to be a teacher, she'd love to have my schedule.

I'm still thinking about writing the essay this morning. Especially after reading Lee Kolbert's post. Kolbert's frustrated.

Back in the classroom fresh from a technology specialist position, she sees that not much has changed. The change we've all been preaching about or reading about or watching unfold online hasn't arrived in most classrooms. She wonders, why couldn't we create our own school? A school made up of our personal learning networks. What would a PLN school look like?

My literacy friends and I used to dream of our own school too. If Nancie Atwell can found a school based on her workshop principals, couldn't we? What would it look like? How could we fund it? Who would teach with us? Stop by Lee Kolbert's blog. Think about your PLN school and leave her a comment. Then take that conversation to your lunch table--what's stopping us? What's stopping us from doing as Ghandi says? From being "the change we wish to see" in our world?

Those A.P. teachers I met with? We were gathering essays for students to read and annotate. We were planning common lessons and coordinating the copies we would need to make. Kolbert notes, "Every day I pass the same teachers making oodles of copies of worksheets at the copiers. (They haven't even planned their lessons yet, but they've got tons of pages copied from their resource books.)" Nancie Atwell used to deem these types of people creationists; if the teachers are the creationists or the workers in a class then it is the teachers who are learning, not the students. Atwell started as a creationist herself:

I confess, I started out as a creationist. The first days of every school year I created, and for the next thirtysix weeks, I maintained the creation: my curriculum. From behind my big desk I set it in motion; then Imanaged and maintained it until June. I wanted to be a great teacher—systematic, purposeful, in control. I wanted great results from my great practices. And I wanted to convince other teachers that this creationwas superior stuff. So I studied my curriculum, conducting research designed to show its wonders. I didn’t learn in my classroom. I tended my creation. Today, I learn in my classroom. What happens there has changed, and it continues to change. I’ve become an evolutionist. (1998)

We need resources. I would love to give my students their reading assignments online. I would love to create a portal or a web page or a wiki of course readings to which they could responsd. I would love students to use Diigo to annotate or Delicious to note connections as they read. All of that would get me away from the copier. All of that I can and could do. If only my students had access to the Internet. If only my students could have reliable access to a computer 24/7. But they don't. So what do I do?

I do both. I show students how to build knowledge online with digital tools. I maintain a virtual classroom, a wiki, the occasional portal-o-links. I create help videos, screen-casts, to support their digital learning outside of the classroom. I use my LCD project and ELMO and digital camera and tool-box of web 2.0 tools everyday. But do the students? I am the digital creationist in my room. I do it more than students. At my school we get 2 days a quarter in a working computer lab. That is 8 days a year not to be scheduled consecutively. There is one C.O.W. for the reading teachers (a wonderful thing!). I have computers in my classroom but they are not reliable. Would you wait 5 minutes for a page to load? How much would you accomplish if Google Docs froze each time you tried to create a presentation? What if you couldn't access email?

We work around issues as much as possible. I maintain a can-do spirit. Sure, I can do it. But can kids?

How do I become an evolutionist? How can I do it without equpiment? Without a change in the zero-tolerance policies? How can I tap into resources we already have? Cell phones, unused desktops? How can I do it tomorrow? Because I haven't found the time to manage writing a grant that would either buy equipment or an alarm system to secure my portable classroom. I haven't figured out how to tap into untapped or unused district or community resources. Surely they are out there and boy do we want to use them! Couldn't we allow students to break the computers out of their pockets and get going? How can I become an evolutionists so that students are the ones creating?

If you've got ideas, I'm listening.

____________________________________

Atwell, Nancie. In the Middle: New Understandings About Writing, Reading and Learning. 2. Portsmouth: Boyton Cook, 1998. Print.

image: The Hunger Games summer reading collage created by Lee Ann Spillane

Lunch

2009-09-24T02:45:00.001-07:00

Who do you spend your lunch time with? Lunch at my school is only about 20 minutes long not counting the 6 minutes of passing time that kicks it off. A group of portable teachers --we all have classrooms in the portables out behind the main campus eat together. We leave the outback and travel in to the main buildings.We meet in a room behind our media center. Part office, part multi-purpose training and teaching room. E102 has been our lunch hot-spot.

Do you eat lunch with others? Or do you hole-up in your room and work through lunch?

It's easy to isolate yourself. There are many days when I'd prefer to work through lunch or to stay in my own classroom and enjoy the lunch peace and quiet alone. But you know what? I don't. Well, I don't do it too often. Every once and a while I miss lunch. I miss it because a student stops by with a question and I can't get out of the door fast enough or a parent or a teacher calls--occaisionally I get hung up and can't make it to lunch with the group. When I first came to Cypress Creek and missed a lunch in the opening weeks of school, my friend Lee called me to make sure I was okay. Not overwhelmed by the new school, new schedule, new everything. I loved that she checked and I laughed when she said "Lunch is not optional."

I've thought about it since. What's important about lunch? Not the eating--the meeting. Getting together with other teachers during the school day is what's important. Lunch to us is like executives golfing, I imagine. We bargain. We collaborate. We share. Ultimately we lift each other up. During especially stressful times, we bake.

This week has been cookie week. With lay offs or teacher transfers due to less than expected enrollment we've all been a little stressed. So we bake and we bring in treats to share. We comfort and care for one another during our little lunch break. What's more important than that?

Mark it Up!

2009-09-15T02:39:00.000-07:00

"Some books are meant to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; That is, some booksare to be read only in parts; Others to be read, but not curiously;And some few to be read wholly, and with dilligence and attention."

-Francis Bacon, Of Studies

So, what are you reading? How are you reading it? I'm teaching an A.P. Language course and that question is following us this year..Today we're going to talk about annotation: what is it? how do you do it? what does it look like? Students annotated the books they read for summer reading. Most of their summer annotations were personal responses--students talking back to the author, to the book.

Certainly annotations, effective annotations, are that, but they are also much more. I'm thinking about the codes I use in the margins of the professional books I read: Q for quotes, ? for questions, <-> for connections, L.U. for look up and a lightbulb for ideas.

Today, we're going to read and annotate Mortimer Adler's "How to Mark a Book." Yesterday I annotated Adler's article using Diigo, but then when I went to review my annotations last night, they were gone! Yikes! Little did I realize that I had to access the page I'd bookmarked from Diigo using the Recent Bookmarks choice from the Diigo menu selection (see picture). Now if I could just figure out how to make the annotations public, or how to include them in a group meant for my A.P. class. That's my next technoventure.

I want students to see that annotations help you organize and remember information. They can be created with more than just pen and paper. They also live and can work on the web. Social bookmarking annotations, tags, all of these contribute to the folksonomy of information on the web. That will be the hook for this lesson. I'd better get going, so that I can get it all together! It's going to be a great day.

Friday 5

2009-09-05T04:26:00.000-07:00

Lucy Gray started a Friday 5 tradition on her blog, High Techpectations, posting 5 or more web links organized by theme. She's now cross posting with Lucie deLaBruere on the Infinite Thinking Machine. LaBruere says "in a world where we are overwhelmed by choice, "more" is not always better." Definitely. When it comes to the web, narrowing the field, counter-intuitive as it may sound, hones us in. One of my favorite list-o-links covers cell phones and includes the must-read 2009 Horizon Report.

If you'd rather have your Friday 5 delivered, join the Google Group (think list-serv) and get the email digest. I don't know that I could keep up with a weekly 5; though a 2 for Tuesday kind of thing might be fun to try.

Out With the Old

2009-08-22T04:03:00.000-07:00

Have you ever changed schools? Last year I changed schools. I’d been teaching 10 years at University High when I decided it was time for a change. Five years as an English teacher , 5 years running a Reading Writing Center, 10 years as a total pack rat.

How many books would you accumulate in 10 years? How many files? How many notebooks? How many pens and pencils? And I’m not even counting the stuff I hadn’t thrown away since my last move. My Mom and my friend, Lee Corey, helped me pack up.

“Do you really need this? These files look pre-Internet!” Lee commented as we started on the first of 4 full filing cabinets.

“Well, I might teach British Lit. one day," I said eyeing the thick Canterbury Tales folder in Lee's hand, "I don’t know. I might need that!” I argued back knowing full well she was trying to get me to throw stuff away.

“Lee Ann Spillane, you do not need that!” Mom chimed in.

“What if I do?”

“I’m telling you—whatever you think you need you can print off of the Internet. Honestly,” replied Lee.

“Okay, okay, I give up. I’ll throw it out. I’ll purge. I’ll turn over a new leaf. If I haven’t used it in 2 years, I’ll think about tossing it.”

“Two years?”

“Well…”

“How about 1 year and you toss it—don’t just think about it.”

“Fine. Don’t let me look. Let’s just pitch it.”

And we did. I borrowed a flat bed hand truck from the janitors. It took 3 loads to the dumpster to get rid of things I’d collected but not used in a long time. I took pictures as we hauled one of the loads—thinking it would remind me not to collect so much stuff. But you know what?

At first all I could think when I looked at that picture was “Dang… I threw that away!” After cleaning up my classroom for this past week, getting ready for students on Monday, I realize that I've probably got at least another filing cabinet full of files I can purge! When was the last time you went through your files?

Ta Da: Prezi !

2009-08-14T14:10:00.000-07:00

Teachers come back to school, officially, on Monday. The "houses" or small learning communities at my school are hosting 2 day institutes for their teachers on Monday and Tuesday. I am facilitating 2 workshop sessions for teachers. One on the AVID binder and one on Google tools. I wanted to try something different for these workshops, so I turned to Prezi.

Prezi is an online presentation tool. Users upload content, arrange it in a presentation space and go. Free-form, intuitively zooming, clean lines... very cool. I had a lot of fun playing with it to create the AVID binder workshop. Now, we'll see how it works when I use it to present! Click below or here to see the AVID binder prezi I put together.

from prezi.com

Words

2009-07-21T05:55:00.000-07:00

Don't you love words? Today while skimming through postings at the English Companion Ning, I came across Sara Kajder's blog post on Wordia, a visual dictionary.

What do I love about Wordia? Not only is it visual--a rich milleau of voice and video, mostly British--but it's free and anyone can create and publish such word shorts. I could definitely use this in the classroom.

How fun would it be to hear these voices during a British Literature class? Daily word study is part of my classroom routine and more and more I've been using image, audio or video to engage students in word study. This site would make a great addition to the others I favor. Wordia reminds me though that everyday people (in addition to artists, thinkers, writers and the like) need to own words. How fun would it be to have students create their own Wordia videos for words we might be studying?

I also love The Princeton Review Vocab Minute, a definite favorite. Silly, sometimes outrageous, these podcasts are sung in a range of styles and each "song" features a plethora of words my students need. What student or small group wouldn't like to create their own such themed song? If I play one, I usually pull out a few of the words to show students what they look like in print. Then we negotiate which ones they want to add to the word wall or study further. I've only had a few students create their own songs--usually word raps--but next year, I think it will become a vocabulary assignment to choose either the Wordia video style or the Princeton Review podcast (or some combination there of that students could propose).

Got time for another favorite? Visuwords. Janet Allen showed me this one and I've almost developed the habit of checking it first (over Dictionary.com). I love the organization, color and graphic organizer-ness of Visuwords. It reminds me of Visual Thesaurus, but free.

Diagnostic AP Testing

2009-06-22T15:04:00.000-07:00

I am teaching AP English Language & Composition next year. New to me, the class presents a challenge, so today after meeting with colleagues to discuss the class and how it is structured, I took a diagnostic AP Lang. test at Spark Notes I registered for an account (free) and dove in. Though I am leary of test prep as curriculum, I wanted to see how I did. I wanted to experience the passages and wrestle with the questions--rather difficult I realized in a household with interruptions, but still.

I did fine on the practice test. My confidence bolstered, I thought, "I can do this." I can be an "A.P. teacher" --that mythical A.P. teacher about whom I've heard Kylene Beers wax poetic. I didn't start my career wanting to become an A. P. teacher, but sure remembering thinking I would. I started my career as an intern with A.P. and I.B. classes. Internships, under the best of circumstances, are idyllic but rarely do they map one's professional path. As an intern, I thought that my students were so smart that I should immediately return to graduate school. I didn't know enough to stay one step ahead of them. Surely, I needed graduate school and I needed that master's degree before I could start teaching full-time. Perhaps I just postponed actual work, but it worked out.

As you can imagine, I've traveled far from the A.P. road in my nearly 20 years teaching. I want to blog my way through the experience of coming to the A.P. Language course as a veteran teacher. I'm beginning today.

Wish me luck and post a helpful link or two for me to peruse, I could use the support and who doesn't appreciate encouragement?

Summer = Time

2009-06-16T04:05:00.000-07:00

I compartmentalize. I've think I've always been that way, boxing off my thinking, feeling and writing in particular. For instance, when I wrote about technology and learning web 2.0 tools, I wrote on a blog on my Classroom 2.0 ning page. When I write about my family and personal life, I write on my blog, Pink Stone Days. When I write poetry or memoir and the day-to-day reflections in my classroom, I write in an old fashioned sketch book. Sometimes it works for me, but other times I wonder.

Obviously, I haven't been doing much writing here this year, but with the advent of summer I see time on the horizon. Time to reflect on the year that just ended and think about next year's teaching schedule. Time to participate in book clubs, like the Readicide book club launch a few weeks ago on Jim Burke's English Companion Ning. Time defines this summer.

Speaking of time to think, check out Melanie Holtsman's post on homework, "To Homework or Not to Homework." If you have time, don't miss her links to the posts by Dayle Timmons and Silvia Tolisano that got her thinking. I'm letting myself sink into the quesitons Silvia Tolisano posed about homework. I'm returning to the English classroom next year, teaching among other things an AP Language class. I find I have a lot of questions about homework; here are a few:

How is homework different for older studens as the Canadian study suggests?
How can I ensure that students are engaged and immersed in meaningful work?
How will homework serve my AP students?

photo: Teo's photos. (10 July 2008). "Summer." Flickr.com

Spread the Word

2009-03-30T18:11:00.000-07:00

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
~ Anne Frank

Laura Stockman lives Anne Frank's words. Her blog 25 Days to Make a Difference never fails to inspire me to do more for others and our world. Her most recent challenge, a blog carnival on the r-word to promote Spread the Word to End the Wo rd. Blog about the r-word. Tell how it makes you feel and how you will help put an end to it. Leave a comment on her blog with a link to your post and you may win a Flip video camera.

If I were caught up with my reader and feeds I wouldn't have missed this chance with my students, but we are on spring break this week. I can't have them add their voices to my own, but I know how the r-word makes me feel.

Stupid. Idiot. Moron. What are you a re...?

Stop! Don't say it. Language makes a difference. Language can divide or it can unite. The r-word, when I hear others say it, makes me feel awful inside. The meanness and judgment is palpable in the word. In my classroom, students, even in jest, are not allowed to use the r-word or any words that belittle someone's thinking or abilities. It's mean. It's abusive and I don't tolerate it. I tell students that using those words can and will result in disciplinary action. I let them know that abusing their peers or others with those words will result in a referral for harassment. We can not build a learning community in our classrooms, much less a humane community in our societies, if we use the r-word or let others use it around us.

Stop using the r-word. Take the pledge today. Share it with your students. Don't wait a single minute --do something to make a difference today.

ASCD: From Pen and Paper to Wireless

2009-03-14T06:56:00.000-07:00

I'm spending the weekend at ASCD in Orlando and already I've noticed a difference in the conference and in myself as a conference attendee. First, the wireless, free and reliable. Compared to NCTE's conference in San Antonio, the wireless here is an awesome amenity. This is the first ever ASCD wireless conference, complete with live streaming of general sessions. In addition, ASCD has added a Technology Corridor which I'm excited to explore later. Sitting in my last session, I was tickled to discover that a few of the folks I follow on Twitter are here. Incredible the network bloom.

As an attendee I have certainly changed. Over the past 18 months, I've noticed how web 2.0 tools have affected how I process information. I used to journal every conference--black sketch books, colored pencils and sharpies my primary tools. I took notes. I drew. I illustrated. I color coded. I connected--but only to my own ideas, only to my own background knowledge. I have shelves and shelves of big black sketch bookes whose spines record years and conferences.

Now I use my laptop. Taking notes on Google docs instead of merely journaling. While I'm taking notes, I can tweet, check in on tweets labeled by the conference hashtag. I can go immediately to websites presenters mention like Pieces of Learning from this morning's session on flexible grouping. Wireless lets me look up and tag research cited, so that I can read it later. The richness digital tools brings to my experience as an attendee is hard to describe.

I'm stuck to a plug at the moment, one side effect of my new reliance on digital tools. I'm sitting on the floor at the back of the general session which is just about to begin! But I'm wondering how digital tools have changed your behaviors at a conference? What do you notice about your own learning in the connected space of the wide and wonderful web?