DIY Notebooks and My 2016 Take on PBL--Individual Study

Sometime right before winter break in my second year of teaching high school English, I got this idea for a do-it-yourself notebook. You see, I have this specific something instilled in me that's part environmentally-friendly, part OCD, where I don't like things to be wasted. I've been saving paper that's only been used on one side since high school (and, boy, did I get teased because of it!), and I've amassed quite a stack of it. I encouraged the third-graders I taught to draw and color on the blank sides, but the practice never quite caught on with teenagers. I'd been taking notes and doing daily writing on them, but the stack was growing ever taller, regardless.

It was around this time I started thinking that I should just carry some of this scrap paper around with me. Like a notebook.

But... more like a 3-ring binder because, as much as I like having the pages in a notebook securely attached, I enjoy the flexibility of being able to reorganize, add, and remove pages as necessary.

But... full-sized sheets are so large and cumbersome. I'd definitely need to cut them in half to be a good size.

But... one thing that's awesome about 8.5x11 pieces of paper is that.. well, they're a standard size. So when you put them in the hole punch, one of my favorite toys, all the holes are in the same place. There's not a standard hole punch for 8.5x5.5 papers.

Wait! What an excellent critical thinking opportunity with real world application! I offered my students some extra credit and gave them 20 minutes to come up with the best solution.

I finally settled for one offered by two of my juniors--If you align the papers at the bottom of the hole punch, like usual, the holes are awkwardly positioned. Same for if you align them at the top of the hole punch. It's not so awkward if you turn the hole punch to the right side, flip the pages to the back so that the used side is showing up, align at the top, and then punch! It took some getting used to, but it totally works! I was so happy to offer that opportunity to my students, and even more so to let them see me use a design they helped come up with on a daily basis.

A few months later, I decided that size wasn't right for my needs. I needed an even smaller size, a quarter size, to fit inside my purse. That was a bit of a struggle to design, as well! Eventually we decided that this one wouldn't work if aligned at the top or bottom; we just needed to center it between two of the holes. The pages weren't exactly the same size, which is what I was afraid of, because I cut several pages at the same time in an inexact method, but it really didn't matter. All that mattered, after all, was that the holes were a standard distance from each other. Neat!

Alright, switching topics, just a little. I knew I wasn't coming back to work the following year about half way through third quarter. That being said, I really wanted to go out with a bang. I wanted to give my students something they would really learn from and remember, something important.

At that time, I had a sophomore who was teaching herself Russian in her spare time, which I was immensely proud of. It reminded me of teaching myself Japanese when I was younger, and that spurred an idea I had been considering after reading Summerhill School.

It had a basis of Project Based Learning, and that's how I sold it to administration, but in reality, I just wanted my students to realize that they live in the digital age. Literally ANYTHING they want to learn is at their fingertips. Mostly, I wanted them to have more control over their learning, to have more ownership of their own learning.

Thus, it manifested like this: Individual Study. Once again, I threw the entire curriculum out the window for the final month of school, telling my students that we were going to be doing something more important--focusing on whatever they wanted to learn. I stressed how important it was to follow your passions, not let anything come between you and what you want to learn, and turn hobbies and interests into viable options for study and bettering yourself. I reminded them that this is what it means to be a 21st century learner.

But being a public school teacher, I still had to enter grades into the computer, unfortunately, so.. Remember those journals I had the students help me on? We made more, and they became logbooks.

This is what I told students I was grading on:

This hastily-hand-written-and-then-photo-copied sheet became "conference sheets," and students were to keep them to use as a reference every day. We discussed the entire sheet at length together, but also during conferences. I'll go through each bullet here like I did then.

1. Logbook
I. Participation - Are you filling out your log book every day?
II. Legibility and neatness/organization - Can someone else pick up your logbook and understand what you're doing without context?
III. Completion - Does each entry have everything it needs? Include the following:
i. Date
ii. Pre-planning with signature of approval
iii. Reflection - What do we mean by that? Here are some examples:
a. Self-exploration / meta-cognition - Thinking about your thinking. What are you learning about yourself during this time?
b. In depth explanation of process and findings - What path did your thinking take? What problems did you come across, and how did you solve them? What were the answers?
c. Analysis of findings - What do you make of what you found? What can you generalize or apply to other areas? What does it all mean?

2. Presentation of findings
I. Communication of ideas - Can you explain what you did in a way that everyone else understands and learns from, too?
II. Advocating for self - Are you enthusiastic about what you're learning? If someone is critical of you, do you stick up for yourself and what you're doing?

3. Weekly conferences

As you can see, the logbooks were the backbone of the project. It was a difficult line for me to address because I wanted to demonstrate to other teachers, parents, and administrators that this plan could work. I wanted them to be a physical representation of students learning on their own with minimal guidance, but to do that, I had to set a secure infrastructure. I wanted to leave enough room for the students to explore and be able to come up with their own, innovative ideas, and I knew that involves being able to fail. It's so much to learn in just a month. I knew it wasn't reasonable, so I built myself a safety net. I started a spreadsheet of what I noticed the students doing each day.

The truth is, I hated keeping this. I felt like I was judging my students on something they shouldn't be judged on. Isn't that all grading in a nutshell? Yet this felt worse, somehow.. Like I was giving them false freedom. Like I was keeping secrets from them. It felt like judgement, but it never entered into how I graded. It's just what I had to do to ascertain that I was still doing my job as a public school teacher, and I still hated it all the while.

It did, however, free me from keeping unnecessarily close tabs on the logbooks. Once they were created, I let the students conduct their business in whatever way they wanted and only asked them about their process during conferences. Thus, they knew what the expectations were and could choose to act on them or not, hence the pages being kept for reference and being revisited during conferences. They knew that the expectation was they kept their entries dated, for example, and could decide how much not doing that counted off of their own grade.

Here's an example of what one looked like. Again, the sophomore teaching herself Russian. (She chose to use the backs of scrap paper, as I did in my own journals. Other students used lined paper.)

The presentations were a little difficult to get started, my students all being hesitant to talk about themselves and having been instilled with a fear of the word "Presentation." My Juniors, however, were extremely grateful to realize that they didn't have to be formal presentations and arranged themselves into a big circle on the floor on presentation days. They went around the circle describing what they were learning and answering questions from the others. It was informal and pleasant, and it went so well that the biggest struggle we had was the time limit because of the bell system.

My favorite part of the entire project were the weekly conferences. I met with each student in their own space, joining them on the floor or in the desks, and let them flow through the Conference Sheet at their own pace, expounding on whatever they felt most important. I got to hear their genuine voices during these times, how they thought and what interested them. I asked them questions about their work and process, and then asked them what they would grade themselves, which was an incredibly interesting undertaking. Some students were hypercritical of themselves while others weren't as much, but, regardless, I always asked them how they would improve during the following week. It was an honest, authentic conversation, and one in which I felt like I was doing my best work as a teacher. This speaking quietly with students in a relaxed environment, listening as they explain what interests them and how they can and are growing as humans, while the other students work and play conversate and live around us.. This is what teaching is about for me. <3

I know this was a unique experience for my students, and I hope that they got something out of it. My biggest hope is that they will remember these four weeks at some later time in their lives and that it sparks some sort of renewed flame in pursuing passions. Teaching is sewing seeds of inspiration that won't grow into anything noticeable for years. I have faith that in 10 or 15 years, this one month will make a difference in the lives of some of my students.

And as for now.. I may have found another transformation for those logbooks in a new project of my own... more on that later!

Daily Writing Journals

I'll be the first one to admit that I don't rely much on routine as a teacher. I'm fully aware that humans, especially young children, thrive on routine, but it's just not who I genuinely am as a person. I find it far more important to be an authentic person to students than to drive myself insane trying to be someone I'm not. (Though I'm sure they get SOMETHING out of the novelty I embrace instead, right?) There aren't many routines that I commit wholeheartedly to. Most of the time, I test something out, see how it goes, and then scrap it. The intent is, of course, to iterate on what went wrong and make it better, but my anxiety usually gets the better of me. Thus, the whole thing usually goes out the window, and we try something completely new. (This is something I'm working on.)

There was, however, ONE routine I did carry from start to finish during my second year of teaching high school English, and that was daily writing.

I think it started with inspiration from Corbett Harrison's extensive discussion of writer's notebooks, most of which I latched onto immediately, right down to his "Sacred Writing Time," which I incorporated into our daily schedule.

One of my sophomores didn't like the use of the word Sacred and took it upon himself to change the acronym shortly after I hung this poster at the beginning of the year.

In essence, it was this: Ten minutes of silent free writing first thing at the beginning of every class. 

In practicality, it was much more nuanced than I realized until now! Let's break it down.

What to write about?

This was the hardest part for a number of my students, children who grew up in the system and were used to always being assigned topics on which to write. I occasionally offered prompts if anything interesting had come up the night before, but students were free to ignore them if they had something else in mind. And for the most part, I actively encouraged them to just write about whatever was on their minds.

We had a few brainstorming sessions on the board at the beginning of the year. Eventually I turned it into a permanent fixture to help a couple with consistent writer's block.

What Can I Write?
1. Things I'm looking forward to. Things I'm excited about!
2. Fears. Things I'm worried about.
3. Vent. Something I'm angry about and need to get off my chest.
4. Something I've been sad about.
5. Exploring my feelings and emotions to see if I can find out more about them or where they came from.
6. A secret I can't tell anyone. (Remember to fold this page over and staple it!)
7. Reflection. When I go over something that happened, I can learn more about it.
8. Stream of Consciousness. Just write whatever comes to mind with no judgements. Sometimes I think thoughts I didn't even know I had!

For some reason I didn't get stories of various genres, poems, etc. down. This poster didn't go up until after Christmas, and I think at the time we had already discussed a lot of fiction. This poster must have been specifically for non-fiction "journal" type writing. (Note to self: Make one for fiction writing, as well!)

And for the record, I let the students know that I WAS serious when I told them they could write anything they wanted. We talked a bit about how to use writing to get things out that one is holding in and what a great stress reliever it can be. If they didn't want anyone (including me) to read an entry, all they had to do was fold it over and staple it shut. (See #6 on the poster above.) Some students did this when they wrote about drama, others did it when they wrote about inappropriate-for-school topics. I'm glad to report that there were typically a couple of folded over pages each day--that means that students were working through and processing something they found stressful or otherwise important, always a sign of good mental health! (Also see the section on Grading, below.)

And, yes, to return to one of my favorite points, I DID have a few students who frequently felt they had nothing to write about. That's one of the successes of this program! I'm glad I gave my students something different to constantly struggle with. It was a known struggle, something 99% of them continually overcame, despite difficulties, and what might be considered the public school version of "being bored," the necessity to rely only on themselves for ten minutes.

Grading

At the beginning of the year, I thought I would just keep a chart of participation. If someone wasn't writing, they were docked points. I quickly realized that wasn't something I wanted to spend ten minutes doing. Thus, an iteration! Here's what we ended up with:

Journals were collected at the end of every month for participation points, two points per entry plus an additional two points for reading through their entries again, identifying which one was their best work, and writing a short explanation for why on a sticky note on that page. (It usually worked out to be about 40 points per month, or roughly 20% of their overall grade.) If students were absent from class, they just had to make up the writing time at a later date, either during homeroom or as homework, as long as all entries were accounted for.

I had one student working on a story of her own, especially during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), so I allowed her to work on that during writing time. I knew that if she wrote "Worked on novel" under a dated heading, I could trust that she did so for that day. Shortly before term papers were due in History, I had a handful of students do the same, "worked on history paper," as well as shortly before college applications were due, "worked on college essay."

I didn't read every entry, but made a point to at least read the "best" entry, as well as a few more, time allowing, and leave a little feedback, all of which was about content, not structure. The intent was to hear the students' voices and to make a positive connection along with a little encouragement.

I didn't speak much on how much writing was expected, since this was a new concept for them, so for the most part, if it was more than a few sentences, and it was ABOUT something, I counted it. Some frequently lost points for writing, "I didn't do anything. I don't have anything to say." These were students that were already on my radar, and I conferenced with them, but probably not as much as I should have, considering it was still occurring at the end of the year. Definitely one of my biggest mistakes of the project.

Grading typically happened during self-led activities in class or during homeroom, so the students knew that I didn't open folded pages but did hold them up to the light to ascertain that there were, indeed, paragraphs of words. I felt transparency on that issue was worth taking a class period to do while they studied for tests or did other projects on their own, and it was never a problem.

What did it look like in practice?

We used the timer from Online Stopwatch on the SmartBoard to make it visible to everyone. I started the timer soon after the bell rang each English period, and there was to be no talking while the timer was going. If students wanted to share with someone, they were to save it until after the timer. If they had a question, I encouraged them to write it down and see if they could figure the answer out for themselves.

I used a flexible seating arrangement in my class, so students came in, sat in a desk or found a cushion, got out their notebook and pencils, then chatted with friends, waiting for the bell to ring. There were occasions when I had to make a quick announcement before writing time, but I tried to start the timer when the first bell rang as often as possible so as to maintain the routine and not distract them from what they were planning to write.

My seniors got in the habit of listening to music on the SmartBoard while writing. They would give me suggestions of what to play (which ranged from hard rock and metal to dance-y pop to literal classic music), and I would queue it up on YouTube. My juniors selected one student to play DJ (the same person every day. They must have all appreciated her taste in music), and she played mostly Disney songs and pop-ish country music from her phone. My sophomores and freshmen preferred to listen to their own music on headphones or write in silence.

Once music was set and the timer was going, I gathered my notebook and found a spot on the floor among the students, modeling expectations. I tried my best to write with my students every day. That was my intention, anyway, but I had four main English classes. Forty minutes of writing every day is wonderful for me because writing is what I do, but to have it segmented in quarters was a test in patience and developing new skills. Just as my students were learning how they could write EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. for ten whole minutes(!), I was learning how to chunk my writing. The buzzer frequently went off right as I was getting into the flow of my work.

And then there were the occasion or two where I just needed to get some paperwork done quickly, and the ten minutes at the beginning of class felt like the right time. That's not a good excuse, and I was always disappointed in myself whenever I did so, but the students were rather forgiving because they knew I wrote with other classes.

After the timer went off, there were a couple of minutes during preparation for grammar in which students could share their writing if they wanted to. At the beginning, I frequently read what I wrote aloud. It was mostly silly little stories back then, but my students loved hearing my writing voice, and I loved being able to model it for them. I encouraged them to share aloud, as well, but they rarely did. Instead, I started giving them two or three minutes to share with a friend before moving on. To encourage feedback (which we also discussed) I handed out sticky notes to anyone who was sharing, on which their partner wrote one reaction they had to the writing and one question. This was an interesting idea, but it didn't seem to work well. Only a couple students gave feedback. Others just read and handed the journals back, perhaps to discuss privately later.

Student feedback

My other greatest failing was not scaling the project up properly. I started with expectations right where I wanted them to end up--ten minutes of writing every day. I didn't even realize that I should start slow. My juniors and seniors adapted pretty well, but after winter break, my freshmen and sophomores were burnt out. We held class meetings about how to make it better, and they decided (separately) that they would like to write every other day for the rest of the year. After that, they were satisfied.

This would have been a good way to begin the project, only writing every other day. Or perhaps only for five minutes per day, as my sophomores were contemplating. Especially for younger students, starting with a lower time frame and slowly increasing would have been preferable. Another idea I had after the fact that would have been especially good for younger students is workshopping a different type of writing every day at the beginning of the year. It would probably work well in an elementary classroom to workshop different genres and styles for the first semester, then free write after winter break. Alas. Live and learn!

Regardless, my juniors took immediately well to journal writing. They actively looked forward to it, scowled at any distraction while the timer was running, and thanked me numerous times for assigning it. The seniors generally disliked it but didn't complain.

Final thoughts

I'm thoroughly pleased with how this program turned out. We may not have written many formal papers this year, but we DID write. Every. Day. (Okay, Monday through Thursday. Fridays were blocked for another activity. I guess I forgot to mention that.) I'm so pleased to have shown my students that writing isn't a scary thing--it's just something we do, and it's a useful tool for a myriad of instances. I'm glad to have given my students an outlet for some of their difficult teenage emotions, and we talked at the end of the year, especially my juniors, about how they could continue this project on their own, even when it wasn't an assignment. A couple eagerly agreed that they would. <3

NSFW: A First Attempt at Magnetic Poetry with High Schoolers

Last summer I found a set of Magnetic Poetry at a garage sale that I was excited to share with my students. I set it up on the side of a filing cabinet like so (click to enlarge):

I started off with a poem of my own:

I set small sticky notes near by in case they wanted to create by lines as I had demonstrated, but no one ever did.

I didn't directly address the area of the room or create any rules for it, and it took most students quite a while to realize it was even there. Some students noticed it right away, however, and went over of their own accord to play, and I generally left them to it. Most of them had the sense that it was an "after-I'm-done-with-my-assignment" type of activity without me even mentioning it.

I documented every creation that was left after the students left the classroom. As shouldn't actually be surprising with teenagers, some poems got quite vulgar, so I'll include our adventure after a jump. Be warned, teenagers are very creative! They're exploring their sexuality and can put words together in ways I would never have expected. Most of their creations are Not Safe For Work, and a couple of them made even me blush.

Notes from a Week of Exploring Teaching the Core

Ooooh my goodness, my brain is so full of all of the things. Dave of Teaching the Core is a wonderful writer, but his blog posts are so chock full of all of the great information I want to learn and links to other pages that are also full of information. He's pretty prolific, too, so there are already so many posts he's published I want to read through. But I don't just want to read them, I want to devour them. I want to scour them for every morsel of useful information, analyze them, and decide how I want to use them.

I feel as though I'm at a big feast, and every time I finish a course, Dave just brings out another plate full of deliciousness and sets it in front of me expectantly.

I have all of the tabs open in my browser. Tabs from Teaching the Core, tabs for other Teaching the Core posts the original ones linked back to, tabs from awesome resources that those blog posts linked to, tabs from interesting articles that those links linked to... *groan* So let's try to get a little more organized, shall we?

Article of the Week and Making Annotations

It didn't take me long after finding myself in this click-hole to realize that I wanted/needed to implement this in my class. I'd been trying to find some way to incorporate more nonfiction reading but was hesitant to try something like this because I didn't want to start printing off a lot of pages. 1) because I'm a hippie and don't like "wasting paper" 2) because it seemed like a slippery slope to worksheets, and 3) because we live in a digital age and why print off something that could just be viewed and manipulated online? But all of these reasons were immediately out the window when I started reading Dave's blog. Hush, now. It's worth it.

Next semester, we may be getting Chrome books (one for each student), but until then, if we don't have print off articles, how could we make annotations? (I'd considered allowing them to write lightly in pencil in their books, but I hadn't gotten that desperate yet.) Annotations? Oh yeah, that's that "close reading" I'd been hearing so much about in CCSS articles. I learned about it for the first time at the summer conference I attended and didn't quite understand what all the hype was about. Alright, we're teaching kids to make annotations while they read. I do that when I read, so it made sense to me. It seemed like there was something more to it that I was missing.

Turns out, "close reading" is a super conflated buzzword that people are looking too much into. Dave recommends just sticking with teaching how to annotate and leaving it at that. Sweet, that's probably what I was going to do, anyway.

Links about annotation:

TtC - Purposeful Annotation - What annotations are and how to use them

Harvard Library Reasearch Guides - Six Habits for Thinking-Intensive Reading - some useful guides on how to annotate to share with students

TtC - Close Reading - Dave's original post on the matter, which he says is outdated but still has some interesting things, such as a modeling video

Articles of the Week

The Article of the Week is a child of Kelly Gallagher, one of Dave's heroes. We take a nonfiction article from an authentic source, read and annotate it, and then write a paper responding to it. Sometimes we can share our thoughts in a Socratic circle or debate. Awesome. I can't wait to get started.

Links about AoW:

TtC - There and Back Again - What AoW is, how to get started, and how Dave adapted Gallagher's work to fit his own needs

TtC - Articles of the Week - Backlog and current articles to get'cha started

Kelly Gallagher - AoW Archive - Gallagher's AoW backlog
TtC - Getting Started with AoW - more information

Argument:

Teaching students to make a claim and support it with evidence. 

Links about argument:

TtC - They Say / I Say Two Paragraph Essay - a basic way to introduce argument writing

Amazon - They Say / I Say by Graff and Birkenstein - the book Dave referenced above

TtC - Argument and Debate - what and how to (including video!)

TtC - Popup Debates - a debate starter kit Dave sells

And~

Links to other stuff!:

B10LovesBooks - Erica Beaton, Dave's coworker who also runs a sweet blog I need to explore further

B10 - Whole Class Novels vs. Choice Reading - This is part 3. There's so much to consider...

Jim Burke - Verbs to Live By - a phenomenal chart that defines and explains frequently used academic verbs in easy-to-understand language

Baka desu yo - 6 Things the Most Organized People Do Every Day - Just a reminder on how to stay focused and in control. Not sure if it's something to show to students or if it's just for me.

And there we have it! Not the most productive post, but at least it helped clear my head and leave some bread crumbs to come back to later.

An Initial Look into Exploring Emotional Intelligence with Teenagers

A teacher friend posted a link to this PBS Frontline clip about the teenage brain earlier this week, and I can't stop thinking about it. The most important point, in my opinion, was how, when shown images of adult faces expressing emotion, teenagers saw anger and shock where the adults saw fear. Further exploration of the interview with researcher Deborah Yurgelun-Todd finds that about half of the teenagers studied, slightly more boys than girls, incorrectly identified emotions that a full 100 percent of adults were able to identify.

What does this mean? I kept asking myself all morning. Is this usable information?

I definitely feel like I'd been presented with this information before, perhaps in college in my teacher training courses, or perhaps in my own high school psychology classes when I was a teenager. Whenever it was, the information must not have been pertinent to me at the time, and so I didn't retain it (a point I'm finding more and more interesting as time goes along--personal pertinence in regards to information retention). But here it is again, and, faced with teaching teenagers for the first time, it is pertinent to me now. So what can I do with it?

My natural response is to say, "These students need more emotional intelligence practice," and then, almost as a reflex, I reply, "But is that even a possibility? Can I teach emotional intelligence to teenagers without coming across as condescending or patronizing? Even if I attempt to do so respectfully, what if they misinterpret my intentions? Oh, the irony!"

And then I remember that I went to a SECD (social, emotional, and character development) presentation specifically geared towards secondary English teachers during the recent professional development workshops I attended. So yes, not only is it possible, but it's certainly recommended.

(Come on, now. Obviously I have enough faith in my students and their comprehension skills, regardless of human development and psychology. Sure, there will always be hiccups in teaching, but my philosophy is to respect my students enough to teach them items of importance and to trust that if they will retain it if they truly benefit from it--and if I introduce it properly! Must remember. Don't get confused again.)

I didn't type up my notes from the presentation, so I'll just relay some of them now.

The first point I made in regards to SECD is stressing the importance of creating a safe environment where one feels free to share their honest opinions. This is a given, but it's important enough to have a reminder. How does one create such an environment, though? I had this question during the seminar and here's what I came up with: start slow. Use the same style of discussion (Socratic circle, debate, etc.) that you will use throughout the year, but start with easier topics that students are already aware they have opposing opinions on, such as "Do cats or dogs make better pets?" or "Is ice cream or cake a better dessert?" Develop the skills of the discussion style first, and talk to the students about how to respectfully handle speaking with someone that has a different opinion than you. And when someone forgets and makes a disrespectful comment? First let them know that what they said was disrespectful, since they might not know or they might have fallen into an old habit of speaking that way. Help them find a better way to say what they meant, and do so gently. Getting indignant or shaming them would be counter-productive here, as it would model inappropriate behavior. After an initial testing period of getting comfortable sharing their opinions, it should encourage students to share deeper, more honest feelings. (This is definitely an area I want to explore at greater length soon.)

I also noted the importance of role playing, which is another activity I imagine I'll have to ease my students into. One way to do so is with a writing activity called R.A.F.T., which stands for Role, Audience, Format, and Topic. The topics, and/or any of the other criteria, may be chosen by the teacher, but it's an easy way to start students off thinking from another person's point of view. For instance, in the seminar, I was in a group given the assignment, supposing we were in a unit on To Kill a Mockingbird, of writing a newspaper editorial about the trial from Boo Radley's point of view. Once students are in the mindset of thinking from a literary character's point of view, it may be easier to see things from a peer's point of view.

Interestingly, non-assessed standards for SECD already exist. Like most standards, they are very dry and somewhat wordy. I had thought to post the high school specific standards here, but I lost the motivation to do so when I opened the pdf. Last year, I tried to share standards with the third graders by having them pick through pdfs. It was not our most successful lesson. Maybe high school students would be more capable of doing it? It certainly wouldn't be a fun lesson, considering how exhausted I got just by opening the file, but maybe we could use it for some sort of technical reading activity. I'll have to gauge my students when I meet them to see if I would actually want to attempt that. Maybe only the seniors? We'll see.

At any rate, I think I've been able to skim the surface on this topic. At least I know that this is something I want to play with further and that it's worth my time. Is there anything on my Pledge about SECD? If not, I need to put it on soon.

Daily Reflection

During my year teaching third grade, I admit that I was absolutely scattered. This was my first year teaching, and I wasn't quite sure what to do or what worked for me, so I tried it all. I used various approaches, attitudes, instructional techniques, and discipline methods. I'll be the first to admit to the inconsistent nature of my teaching this year. It's possible that nothing in my classroom stayed the same from one month to the next.

Well, almost nothing. The constant from August to May was our Daily Reflection writing. We started at the last hour of the first day of class, each student pulling out a spiral notebook from their freshly purchased school supplies, and we wrote at the end of every day, right up to the last day of school. 

The assignment was this: reflect on your day. What made today special? What did you learn? What else is on your mind?

It took some guidance at the beginning, to be sure. We talked about what reflection means, to start with. You see your reflection when you look in the mirror, your very image on a piece of glass in front of you. Writing reflectively is similar--you take what's inside your mind and put it on the piece of paper in front of you. It takes a lot of work, especially if you haven't done it before, because your brain isn't used to thinking this way, and you aren't sure how to articulate your thoughts. It just takes practice.

And we came across many difficulties throughout the year, as well.

Frequently, during reflection time, I saw students sitting, perplexed. "What did we do today?" they would ask, sincerely lost. They honestly couldn't remember what they did six hours earlier. I tried not to help these students too much, for fear that they would become dependent on me to relive the day for them, unable to do it for themselves. I encouraged them to retrace their steps using time, from arriving at school in the morning, to sitting down with their notebook. Occasionally I would prompt with some big event that happened during the day, such as, "Did we do anything special in math?" or "Did anything happen when we got back from lunch?" But I didn't want to put words in their mouth. I told them that I could only reflect from my perspective, not theirs. What was important about the day to me wouldn't be the same as what was important to them. Only they could reflect from their own perspective, and that meant that they would just have to contemplate more. I tried to explain this as gently as possible.

Unfortunately this continued to happen throughout the final week of school for one or two. Even with ten months of practice, these students couldn't recall important events from the day without struggle. There are many explanations for this. The most likely, in my opinion, is that I am the first person to ask this of these children. Their brains weren't used to having to work in this manner, as I told them on the first day, and, for some, ten months just wasn't enough time to adjust. Another is this: by age nine, children generally have the capacity to delve into reflective thought, but, perhaps, when asked to do it on command, they froze, suddenly forgetting everything they held in their mind moments before. A sort of stage fright, perhaps. It's also entirely possible that there was something more serious going on with the student that this occurred most frequently with, as he occasionally showed signs of a minor learning disorder. Surely they couldn't really be floating through life, acting and doing without though, right? Regardless, despite the near-constant struggle, I have faith that this sort of mind exercise was beneficial for those one or two students.

Another set of students wrote down merely the subjects they practiced during the day. An entry like this, for example, may read, "We did math, read a story in the English book, and did three questions in social studies." This may have been a good start at reflective writing, but, unfortunately, I saw this up to the last week for some students, as well, despite how often I reminded them to add more details. "But you do these things every day," I frequently told them. "What made today special? What did you learn today that you didn't know yesterday?" This typically evoking a week of entries such as, "We did page 208 and 209 in math, read a story in the English book, and did chapter 13 in social studies." For some students, this was as many details as I could elicit, and the explanation as to why is probably similar to the above situation--their minds didn't yet have the capacity to think any deeper than that. Surely it couldn't be because they were too lazy to think harder, right? I would have hoped that with ten months of practice, one would make more progress than that, but perhaps that's as much progress as they could handle at the time. Regardless, I have faith that exerting just that level of reflection on a daily basis was helpful.

A third "problem" I came up against was reflection after reflection of only Islamic Studies and Quran lessons. From one student, in particular. I wasn't the teacher for these subjects, so such entries were largely meaningless to me, as I had no way of making heads or tails of what they meant, not sharing the religion. But who am I to say that this wasn't the most important part of his day? Perhaps those classes were the most meaningful to him. Or perhaps he wanted to remember these parts specifically to please his father. It's not my place to say or to make any sort of judgement, so, despite that his entries mainly consisted of what chapter of the Islamic Studies book they were on and how many suras he memorized, I said nothing.

But for the large part, my class of third graders did excellent, starting off slowly and building their way to, in some cases, multi-page reflections of their entire day and considerations of emotions, reasoning, and, occasionally, insights.

It was also a great way to get to know my students. My favorite grading by far (a participation grade, of course) was reading what my students had to say about the different activities we did during the week. I greatly enjoyed hearing each student's different perspective on common events, and frequently I received more information on social issues that helped me better understand situations and give advice, particularly with the girls.

Apart from all of that, apart from how beneficial it is to all students to begin thinking reflectively, or at least in a way they're not used to, one of the most beneficial things our daily reflections gave us was the expectation and practice of writing every day. And writing every day is the only way to become a better writer. So at the very least, I can say that my third graders are writers. Not a bad claim to be able to make, at all.

Reflections On Reflection

A month ago, a blog I follow posted this article about daily writing. As an educator, I immediately agreed with everything it said. As soon as I began writing reflections about education (which would soon become the basis for this blog), I recognized how valuable it was. It soon became a goal to have my students reflecting on their own education as much as possible in a daily journal, as well as constant, continuous reflections on everything, myself. Reflections will be a huge part of my classroom--questioning and critical thinking and metacognition!

But reading the article as a blogger, I realized how infrequently I had actually been writing.

Why?

When true reflection is done, it takes immense mental work. It takes honesty, a sincere heart, an ability to admit mistakes and submit to being wrong. It takes an ability to show vulnerability and weakness. It takes the patience and sincerity to examine experiences, ask, "Why?" and explore trains of thought. It takes a reasonable and rational attitude and mindset.

It takes time. It takes patience. It takes work.

And frankly, sometimes I don't care enough to force myself into what it takes.

Okay, recently it's been a lot of the time. Okay, most of the time. Little ones are a lot of work, and a lot of the time it's hard enough just to keep my eyes open, eat some nominally nutritional substance, and fall into bed at the end of the day.

What's happened to me? Have I diverged from the path of Innovative, Insightful Teacher that I once tread pridefully? Or have I just become lazy? There have been several things I've been wanting to write about, but somehow I "just haven't gotten around to it."

Obviously I know how important reflective writing is. I want to write, and I want to care. Part of it is just that I've been under even more stress than usual lately with buying a house, applying for a new job, and preparing for my first summer of Montessori training. Another part of it, I'm sure, is lack of habit, as Leo Babauta would be the first to tell me.

So, with these thoughts secured by the act of physically typing them out onto the screen, let's see how I move forward.

Using Images in the Classroom

Rather than work on my senior paper today (lack of motivation is the result of assigning an activity, rather than letting the student have full responsibility over her own education), I discovered Yes! Magazine and spent hours pouring through the website. Although it's aimed towards adults and children older than elementary-age, it fits greatly with my Pledge to Guide Today's Students, discussing topics from peace and justice, the environment, happiness, and activism. There's even a section for teachers that includes lesson plans!

The lesson plans on Y!M follow a specific format. They begin by showing the students an image, usually ambiguous one, such as a unique macro or perspective. Step two is to ask the students to use their observation skills to note what they see and their inference skills to try to figure out what the image is or what is occurring. Third, the teacher asks what questions the students might be thinking about what is happening in the picture. Fourth, she tells the children the title of the image (which usually answers the questions about what the picture is about) and reads some background information about it, which leads into a discussion. Finally, the students are allowed to investigate more through extension activities.

Along similar lines, I've been collecting images online, mostly from National Geographic's Photography site, to use in the classroom. I had planned to use them as journal prompts, asking the children to either write what they think is going on, make up a story to go along with the picture, write what the story makes them think of, or anything else, really. Anything the students want to write would be acceptable.

I like my idea of using the images as journal prompts, but the Y!M method of teaching through images is wonderful as well. It's better in some ways, allowing the students to use observation and inference, as well as grabbing the students' attention, setting the stage for an important lesson, and using real-world situations to teach. However, it doesn't call for the creativity that's involved in writing from the students' own minds or producing an original, inspired work of art.

Both methods are perfect for my classroom, and it will depend on the situation and particular image as to which is more appropriate. I can use the Y!M's method when there's a powerful image I want to use to make a specific point and still use the journal prompt / creative writing method when there's a powerful image that conjures emotions or lends itself to stories. In other words, I can use images for the sake of photo journalism or for the sake of aestheticism.

Edit 08/17/2014: Here's an article from Edutopia that came across my Facebook feed. Someone else commented with this website, which isn't strictly related, but still interesting.