For a unit on public policy, I decided I wanted my students to be able to make their public policy proposals to an audience wider than myself. While it would be nice to bring in politicians into the classroom, it can be hard to coordinate outsiders and find time to allow them to come in. So, another way to get my students ideas out in the public forum is to use the internet. I think this is especially relevant now more than ever, as the internet has widely influenced politics over the past decade. I wanted my students to be able to post their policy online, and actually put themselves into the role of a grassroots organizer or politician trying to raise awareness of an issue. I found Change.org to be a great venue for this, because it allows students to post their policy ideas online for others to read, comment, and sign in support of. This gives students the chance to share their policy on their own personal social media, text it to family and friends, and post QR codes in their community that would bring users to their Change.org page.
Change.org has a large community of activists that use the site regularly, and will come into contact with student work. Suddenly, what was an audience of one becomes a very real audience of potentially hundreds, to even thousands in some cases. They are no longer writing just to satisfy the assignment (as would be if I had simply had them write an essay, with no public sharing), but instead writing with a real purpose. This project falls neatly under standard 11.3a in the CCTS: "Create experiences for learners to make positive, socially responsible contributions and exhibit empathetic behavior online that builds relationships and community." One of the benefits of Change.org is that it is moderated, and allows for feedback in the form of a comment sections. This will allow everyday people to comment on student proposals and offer their perspectives on their ideas. Change.org has its own moderation (both an algorithm that filters out hateful speech, and a real-life team of moderators), and so these comment sections are usually positive and conducive to productive discussion. This type of real world feedback will mean much more to students than a few comments from their teacher on an essay.
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I enjoyed reading what I have from Ditch that Homework by Alice Keeler and Matt Miller. I think there are a lot of critiques they make towards education and bad teacher habits that definitely ring true to my experience in school. The two chapters that caught my eye were chapter 2, Ditch that Lecture, and chapter 7, Ditch that Compliance.
I really enjoyed Ditch that Compliance, because it describes one of my chief complaints I had as a student: busy work. The authors bring up a good point by discussing the "gamification" of education, how since everything has become about the grades, we sabotage actual learning that could have taken place. I completely agree. I can describe multiple times where I was only doing the assigned work to get it done, rather than actually taking my time and learn the content. This means that students do not take ownership of their learning, and are merely plugging away at a list of work in order to get an A. The book suggests teachers try to get their students to invest in their own learning and the classroom. They suggest giving students roles in the classroom, so that they feel some responsibility to it. They also suggest giving students agency, and empowering them to make decisions about their own learning. This is anxiety producing, because it means you have to give your students the space to step up and take on roles, and potentially fail. That failure is not a bad thing though, and is a chance to grow. If we don't give kids chances to take ownership of their own learning, even if it is unsuccessful, they will always be passive in their learning, which will not help them in life. I liked their suggestion to utilize social media. It would be interesting to require students to watch the news each day, and make a post on twitter or some other platform on their thoughts on at least one current events topic, and then reply to some of their classmates. This is especially cool in social studies, because it can begin to let students get an idea of what is means to take part in the national conversation (online citizenship, national citizenship), and the global conversation (global citizenship). This develops two skills in one. Being able to follow current events is extremely important, and being able to break down those current events and communicate your thoughts will be a skill they use throughout their lives as citizens in a republic.
The other chapter I read, Ditch that Lecture, was really helpful to me personally in particular. One of the skills I struggle with in the classroom is standing up and giving long lectures in front of kids. It just isn't something that comes naturally to me, even if I do manage to pull it off most of the time. Whether it be ADHD or anxiety, I start to struggle the longer I need to speak. I appreciated this chapter because it made me feel a little better about that deficiency, because I will be a better teacher because I will try to avoid doing those long lectures. Of course there will be times where information dumps are needed, but the more I can delegate that learning back onto the students, the better, both for me and for their learning. Information can be expressed in so many ways, and taking time to talk at students may not be the most efficient way. Using my time wisely is key as a teacher. There is no reason I should take so much class time explaining things, sometimes multiple times over, when I can provide written versions and simply address it once, while redirecting attention should it come up again. (Of course, with students who may not be able to utilize written resources, alternatives can be made.) If I can avoid lecturing and create other venues of information transfer, such as peer to peer knowledge, topic exploration, digital conversations, etc., my students will be more engaged on the topic and I will be making things easier for myself (though the former is far more important). One of the suggestions I noticed that I will definitely use in my own classroom, especially due to my concentration, is the pausing the video suggestion. It's really common in social studies classes for documentaries and other videos to be used because there is so much content out there related to the subject. That said, just having a video playing and students taking notes in ineffective, especially if those students aren't good note takers. Pausing the video and making sure certain points are made and noted, while also encouraging discussion to further engage and deepen student understandings, elevates the tired practice of playing a video and turning out the lights, to an engaging, full classroom activity that demands student and teacher interaction.
Miller, M. & Keeler, A. (2017). Ditch that Homework: Practical Strategies to Help Make Homework Obsolete. San Diego, CA: Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc.
As part of my practicum course, Iâve been reflecting on my own experiences in high school. I wanted to reach out to past teachers to express my admiration and appreciation of them, and picked three in particular who impacted me. I had a hard time in school, and it felt sort of strange to go back and write to people that I likely gave many headaches, even if it is to express my admiration and appreciation. I decided I would write to my 6 and 7th grade social studies teacher, Mrs. Nylan, my 5th grade teacher Mrs. Galesian, and my highschool advisor and principal, Mr. Pierce. Mrs. Nylan is the teacher that made me fall in love with social studies, and I always think back to her and the ways she managed to get me excited about current events. Mrs. Galesian was incredibly kind, and was truly one of the most understanding and caring teachers I ever had. I told her I wanted to emulate her unconditional kindness. I emailed all three using the school emails I had for then. Luckily, Iâve stayed in contact with Mr. Pierce ever since I graduated. He told me my email made his day, and to keep in touch. I told him he was an inspiration to me, and thanked him for what he did for me to get me through highschool. He told me that I was an inspiration to him, and that he was happy to hear I was doing well at UMF. He finished by giving me some good advise as a new to-be teacher going into the field.Â
As part of my practicum and part of making a diverse and inclusive unit we are required to come up with a way to connect our unit to the community in one way or another. As I have mentioned before I made a MASSIVE unit on the periodic table, matter, and chemical reactions ( which my professor helped me break down into 3 meta-units. Thanks Dr. T) I decided to put my community connection into the reactions part of my unit and in particular to connect it to my summative assessment project. For those that donât know it is a scriptwriting project in which they will write a script for a kids TV show that takes what they have learned at the high school level and break it down in a way that is both easy for a child to digest and have fun learning it. Now some may think it would be impossible to involve the community with this but I would say otherwise. In essence, the new skill they are learning is scriptwriting and visual media. Having come from the Portland Maine area it is easy to find people involved in this segment of media. My idea for making the project community involved was to reach out to the local community college of Southern Maine Community College and have their department head give some tips and tricks of writing a good script (possibly involve their own students) In an ideal world I could introduce my students to theirs and my students would benefit from learning the basics of writing a script and their students might have an opportunity to film said scripts and even add it to their final portfolio ( a requirement for all media majors at SMCC) My hope is that by showing them people currently pursuing this field that they could not see the project I have given them as an insurmountable task and given that their role in the project it a scriptwriter/performer they could see from these students what that is really like. There may even be a possibility at the end for a showing with âprofessionalâ critique from the SMCC students or most likely their department head.Â
As an alternative, my ideas for this project that could be done in any classroom is having students go look at youtube episodes of sesame street and seek out interviews online of writers for various television. The idea being that it would give them an idea of what a typical sketch on an educational show looks like and that they could see into the mind of a writer and how they may work through their creative process.
Both have pros and consÂ
For the SMCC and department head coming in and talking with the students the pros are helping my students understand that there is both an art and science to scriptwriting. To see faces of people who are in this field and see the very diverse viewpoints that come along with media. Itâs very common to have only one viewpoint seen as the right way to present information and this could hopefully inspire them to get creative and see and embrace differences.
A con of this is that the SMCC students or department head may be too critical of my students and unintentionally break down their confidence if they are not briefed ahead of time of ways to make sure they are being constructively critical of what my students are doing
As for the alternative project, it is inherently consistent in that there will always be episodes of Sesame Street somewhere on the internet and there will always be interviews of creatives (whether a video or a written interview) out there and could even let students look into some favorite they may already have.Â
The con, however, is that they lose the opportunity to ask real-time for suggestions on where to start or what pitfalls they may have while writing that I even as the creator of the assignment may not be able to answer in a meaningful way since I am not a screenwriter by trade.
Lastly, as with most blog entries I need to connect it back to my growth as a future educator. With this particular blog post, Iâm going to connect it with the ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) teaching standards. these standard for those of you that may not know are standards that are supposed to guide teahcers and students to not only be proficient in technology in our modern ever-changing world but to also use this technology in a meaningful way. The standard im going to connect this too is as followsÂ
â Standard #11.4 Collaborator
Educators dedicate time to collaborate with both colleagues and students to improve practice, discover and share resources and ideas, and solve problems. Educators:
4c Use collaborative tools to expand students' authentic, real-world learning experiences by engaging virtually with experts, teams and students, locally and globally.â
My logic behind connecting with this one is based on the fact that my ideas for how to give my students a meaningful connection with this project hinge not on the community being able to get physically in the classroom but on the experts in our local state. Maine is a state with quite an active Indie film scene and we have experts in scriptwriting, directing, and all areas of visual media in our state. the drawback is we are also a very rural state but this also means that getting connected digitally to these experts is as easy as an internet search and an email. these experts are almost always willing to work to help the next generation and possibly grow the industry in our state and many are also always encouraging of students putting their work out there (even if it is just for a science project from their zany chemistry teacher)
The unit I am planning is based on the topic of travel for beginner Spanish classes. It will help them learn the importance and relevance of travel and cultural differences. Travel is an extensive topic, so, luckily, it would be very easy to pick various community connections for this unit. There are lots of options for a connection to the community, such as creating a poll to give the school to see how many people have traveled (whatever that means to the poll-giver) and how it affected them, parents could come in and speak about the importance of travel to them (even better if that parent could speak Spanish), I could bring in or video call someone who I have traveled with or met while traveling to show personal relevance, or have the students write to a pen pal.Â
My personal favorite of these, for my unit, in particular, is having the students write to a pen pal. There is a website that gives a map and shows where classes are participating in this online pen pals program. My students would go to this website, or another website if there is a better one in the future, and choose a key pal from a Spanish speaking country and who is around their age. I would have my students write to their keypals throughout the whole quarter, semester, trimester, or year, depending on how the class responded to the activity. I want them to be in contact for longer than just this one unit because it takes longer to get to know someone than just one unit in school. They will have mostly free liberty to discuss what they want to with their key pal, as long as it is appropriate. I would give them a couple of specific assignments during my unit about travel, such as having them ask their key pal about their experiences with travel or where they would like to travel.
I donât want any community connections to feel forced, so I have cautiously chosen keypals as the best fit for my students. The fact that the key pal is a real person makes this a really authentic activity and will help the students broaden their horizons. I always want my students to feel as interested in my content as they can, so if the class didnât respond positively to this assignment/activity, then I could very easily shorten it. However, the hope is that the students enjoy getting to know someone else and learning about another culture in a way other than through a textbook.Â
Just from the eight days I spent in a real classroom as a teacher, I could see that students, even if they donât mind the content, had a hard time actually feeling interested in what they were being taught. A community connection would be a really authentic way to grab the studentsâ attention back and continue to teach them while changing up their day a little bit. Instead of being teacher after teacher, class after class, test after test, a guest speaker, or a field trip could really reset the studentsâ brains and help them focus on the upcoming classes. Community connections are a really effective way to show how relevant a concept is to their own community, as well as giving the students a slight break from the usual routine.
EDIT:Â
Additionally, this activity may not work. It may end up taking too much of my time and it may not be worth it to do this exact keypals activity. I wouldnât want my other lessons to suffer because I am busy getting keypals set up. In lieu of this activity, I could do a very similar one within the school. I could have the students write to another Spanish class (even if the other class isnât the same level). The students would still get the experience of writing to another person their age who speaks Spanish and I could focus less on organizing the keypals and more on my actual lessons. However, the students wouldnât get the experience of speaking to a native Spanish speaker or talking about a different culture.Â
In short, the pros of doing the original keypals idea are as follows: talking to another person their age about their culture, speaking to a native Spanish speaker would help them see verb forms before they are taught and see more vocabulary, and could help the students see that while their cultures are different, everyone is still a person and it would help bridge the culture gap. The cons of the original keypals idea are as follows: it might take too much of my time and distract me from my lessons, some students might be uncomfortable with the idea of talking to someone they donât know, and the correspondence time might be days in between. The pros of pen pals within the school are as follows: a faster correspondence time and I would be able to focus on my lessons better. The cons are that the students wouldnât have the exposure to a native Spanish speaker or their culture and students might be more likely to fool around or be inappropriate if they were paired with one of their friends.
Common Core Teaching Standards Alignment:
Standard # 1 Learner Development: âThe teacher understands how students learn and develop, recognizing that patterns of learning and development vary individually within and across the cognitive, linguistic, social, emotional, and physical areas, and designs and implements developmentally appropriate and challenging learning experiences.â
Indicator 1c: âCollaborates with families, communities, colleagues and other professionals to promote learner growth and development.â
Whether I decide to use keypals, which I would prefer to use, or penpals within my school, this standard is applicable. In reference to keypals, the students would be talking to students their age from other communities and learning how they speak and live their lives. This aligns with the âlinguistic, social, emotional, and physicalâ aspects of Standard 1. In reference to penpals, the students would be working with other Spanish classes and I would (potentially) be collaborating with other teachers to make sure that my students received responses from students in their classes.Â
Standard #10 Collaboration: âThe teacher seeks appropriate leadership roles and opportunities to take responsibility for student learning, to collaborate with learners, families, colleagues, other school professionals, and community members to ensure learner growth, and to advance the profession. â
Indicator 10g:Â âUses technological tools and a variety of communication strategies to build local and global learning communities that engage learners, families, and colleagues.â
Like in the first standard listed above, keypals and penpals are both applicable to this standard. Keypals is an innovative technological tool that helps build a global learning community by allowing the students to communicate with other students to learn about their cultures. Penpals is another communication strategy that helps the students build a local learning community in which students practice their Spanish skills with other students.
21st Century Learning Standards:
Category: Communication and Collaboration
Standard: Communicate Clearly
Indicator:Â âCommunicate effectively in diverse environments (including multi-lingual)â
This standard almost speaks for itself. Whether using keypals or penpals, the students are speaking in a language other than their native language differently and more diversely than they are used to. Most people, including myself, communicate mostly through text or social media. Keypals or penpals are different from anything that I am not used to doing and have never done in my entire academic career. As the students practice more with their Spanish and hear from another Spanish speaker, their skills will get better and they will be able to communicate even more effectively than when they started.Â
ISTE Standards for Students:
Standard: Global Collaborator-Â â Students use digital tools to broaden their perspectives and enrich their learning by collaborating with others and working effectively in teams locally and globally. â
Indicator 7a:Â â Students use digital tools to connect with learners from a variety of backgrounds and cultures, engaging with them in ways that broaden mutual understanding and learning.â
The digital tool in use here is keypals. The point of this activity is to communicate with students with different backgrounds and who speak a different language, specifically Spanish, to expose my students to people who arenât just like them. It should help them realize, as mentioned above, that even though we come from different cultures, weâre all people. It should help them realize that every culture is worth learning about and will help them learn about what is unique about their own culture, as well.Â
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Well some sad news is that because of COVID-19 we never did get to go to CMERC. However, we had a great opportunity to have a dry run with our fellow students, professors, and a few quests in the field of education. To give some context what we were doing for CMERC was presenting pedagogically appropriate ways to assess students with technology. That meant either using technology to completely transform what was being done or using technology as a new way to perform the assessment. For me personally I used a new writing program for movie scripts I had never used before called indie skedge ( https://app.indieskedge.com/dashboard its completly free btw ) this allowed me to come up with a creative assessment for my students without the barrier being the creative background of them having to write a script ( the project was writing a script for a children's TV show that shows what they have learned in class) i also learned about a new app called plickers which just astounded me. plickers is an app that can be put on ones phone. it scans answer cards held up by students to give instant yet anonymous feedback. To me this is very important since sometimes students can be very nervous about being asked questions among a whole class even when it is the most effective was to check progress. the last thing i presented was a google form as a pre test for my whole unit. this was so that all my students could quickly access it and do it in their own time before we started the unit. Â
Moving on to more about the dry run. In our class we were divided so i sadly did not get to see everyone's technology. However, I did get the chance to see how creative you can get with some of the tech. An example is how i had a class mate show me a google tour following along some of history's greatest theaters. I never would have thought to go and do something like that. thinking about how I could take some time and show my students the places that some famous scientists lived or even the voyage of Darwin could really bring to life for them the history and just how short of a time in the grand scheme of human history we have had the knowledge we have. Â
All these new techs some of which were never really intended to be used in the Education field can help transform the way we teach and learn. just a simple example would be the google form pretest. i could set it up to give instant feed back to my students on what they got wrong or right and i could set it up so that they could keep taking it both strategies would help students self asses and let them know instantly where they are at. But, on the educators side it also catalogs what students answer. This transforms how i would teach them and allows for me as their teacher to zero in where they have no knowledge and ramp up things where they are already comfortable thus helping provide a reasonable level of content at all stages. Â
overall Iâm really glad i had the opportunity to have the dry run even if it ended up being the real full run. Â
Well, we have reached the end of three wise teachers. Part of the assignment was to do 4-6 hours of professional development. Boy howdy was that hard to fit in my busy schedule but, I managed to do it. I was given many good resources from my previous teachers. one person, in particular, kept coming up from them named Parker Palmer (i would link to the videos I watched but considering I just typed him into YouTube and let him play for about an hour that might be hard) what hit most home was a moment when he was talking about fear in the classroom. How it can undermine even the most successful teacher and student. In our educational system, we use fear to manipulate people to be better is baloney to him. I have to agree with him. fear can lead to paralysis. I myself experienced this during my practicum time in the field. However, it is overcoming that fear and always acknowledging that its there is what helps us move forward.
Something else that was recommended to me by an old teacher was to re-watch a movie called âWaiting for Superman.â This movie directed by Davis Gugenheim would be a great thing to rewatch as Iâm getting closer to being a teacher in a classroom and now that I have been in a classroom I would now have a new perspective about charter schools. To be honest I thought they were just trying to give me busy work but I gave it a shot. I was surprised by how my views on charter schools have changed since I was in my first education classes years ago. I used to be very confused about whether I was for or against a charter school. (personally I feel a very negative vibe at my college towards charter schools) however, after watching it again I became less ambivalent. I realized that as much as we want to explore different ways of learning and teaching it can be very hard when we have highly established school systems already in place and that the politics of education can be a massive minefield. I could be doing something extremely revolutionary and cutting edge in the world of education with my students and all it could take is an angry PTA or an unsupportive administration to take me down. Charter schools while not without some of their own problems (how they pull funding from the pool of funding for local schools or that they can reach capacity and cause issues with who gets in and doesnât) I feel as an educator I am more comfortable with a charter schools ability to adapt quickly. Â
The last resource I was given was more advice than anything. It was to familiarize myself with a website called https://betterlesson.com/ it was a mind-blowing website. This website has lesson upon lesson for teachers who may be struggling to come up with something for their kiddos. What I thought was going to be a little 30 min looksie turned into 3 hours later having gone from science lessons all the way over to English. Â
Overall all this professional development was rather easy and thatâs in my wheelhouse. When I am able to watch a video or just do something at my own pace Iâm able to digest it so much more easily. I also never thought that there was such a huge network of teachers who wanna help fellow teachers. Â
Graphic novels are a medium that tend to be overlooked or used mostly in early education environments. But, what if there was a way to incorporate this busy style of literature into your secondary education curriculum. As a fan of graphic novels and comics, I quickly became interested in how I could use them in my future classroom as a tool to help further my students' understanding of literary terms and elements. Graphic Novels created a whole new realm of possibilities, and using one of the many possibilities of how to use graphic novels in the classroom, I created a mock unit titled âClassic vs. Graphic Novels.â
This unit allows students to learn the key vocabulary associated with graphic and classic novels, create connections from one medium to the other, analyze two different types of literature in order to identify the significance of the similarities and differences, acknowledge and identify an authorâs literary decisions and personal choices and how they affect the plot of the specific novel, understand how each author makes unique decisions and how these choices can affect the readerâs interpretations of a scene or plot, and how the use of visual art in the graphic novel can impact the understanding of the storyline from the original novel.Â
In this unit, there is a Stage 3, which discusses my many learning events tailored to âClassic vs. Graphic Novels.â One of the learning events I will be discussing is the preparation for the final fishbowl discussion, where I will have my students prepare evidence to support their thoughts and ideas about the posed questions related to classic and graphic novels. These questions can be seen on a Padlet I created as a mock prototype to see the layout of the discussion board as well as some mock answers my students may give in order to try and prepare to see what the final product for this assessment may be and if I need to make any adjustments.Â
To prepare for these questions, they will pull evidence from both novels read during the unit, the classic novel âFahrenheit 451â by Ray Bradbury and the graphic novel adaptation, âRay Bradburyâs Fahrenheit 451: The Authorized Adaptationâ by Tim Hamilton. To note, these novels can also be switched with any classic novel that has a graphic novel adaptation. This evidence will include specific quotes, page numbers, and summaries of certain chapters that help aid studentsâ claims in response to the posed questions.Â
In order to create another opportunity for more supporting evidence, I am incorporating a community connection throughout this phase. A community connection is the âact of involving the community in the classroom related to contentâ that is being taught. This community can be local through families, businesses, organizations, etc. or on a broader scale through social media. As a way to meet Maineâs ISTE Standard 11 (Empowered Professional), this means of community connection through the use social media allows me to meet Standard 11.3, which states, "Educators inspire students to positively contribute to and responsibly participate in the digital world,â and Standard Indicator 3 (a), which says that the teacher will "Create experiences for learners to make positive, socially responsible contributions and exhibit empathetic behavior online that build relationships and community."
By having my students create a public survey in class, which poses questions to the public via any appropriate social media platform my students are comfortable with that relate to the questions I will be asking my students during the fishbowl discussion, they will be able to gather various perspectives on the matter. These can then be used to help further support the evidence that has already been prepared by students. But, it can also allow the opportunity for students to revisit their claims and change them based on some of the different pieces of data they may have gathered. Using some new ideas they may have never thought about, they can then find evidence from the novels to further support this new claim.Â
As a juxtaposition to this community connection activity, you could also complete this learning event without having your students create a public social media survey. Although there may be pros to this, there are also cons and it is important to keep them in mind. The cons to having this community connection involved during this specific learning event are that the time they use to create the survey could be used as workshop time to pull evidence directly from the story, some students may abuse the right to use social media in the classroom, and some students may dislike surveys and find them useless and then their engagement is then decreased. However, some pros are that it creates an authentic audience to your students, real people with real responses, which leads to further engagement of your students; students are able to responsibly use social media as an educational tool and not just as a recreational activity; it provides students another means to gather data and pieces of evidence and can be used as a learning opportunity to show the multiple ways to support your claim.Â
I think involving any sense of community in your classroom is important, and for this specific unit, âClassic vs. Graphic Novels,â you could involve the community in multiple ways. As a way to not only teach the responsibilities of using social media, which is a very important life skill students can use in and outside of the classroom but having students pose a survey online, creates a positive opportunity for students to see how social media can be used for educational purposes, building a positive relationship not only between social media and the student but also between the student and the online community as well.
