Partial success: This year's debates

So we have finished our debates in English class this year, and while they weren't an unqualified success, they were much improved over last year.  Students' arguments were much better prepared and much better structured.  They didn't quite work all the way through the structure; their closing arguments were more like summaries than rebuttals, but they paid enough attention to their opening statements to make their summaries.  Their cross-examination questions were often actual questions, and not just statements.  Their statements of position were consitently backed up with traceable research, and if their sources were sometimes less than reliable, at least they weren't articles from the Onion.  I haven't read their reflection papers yet, but it seems like they have gotten more out of it than last year's class.

There are things that they didn't do, a clear indication that they didn't know they were supposed to do them.  As often as not, they just read off of their source material, which means that I saw the same 4 speeches 6 times.  I don't know that they ever understood why I had them research both sides of the argument, but they did give some indication of arguing from a place of sympathy.

"Nobody could have foreseen..."

...that the merit pay hype would die off due to lack of funding.

Oh, wait, it looks like somebody did.  What was that, 2008?

For my English students, a reading assignment.  Why is my lede misleading as to the content of the EdWeek article?

And a bit of meta-blogging.  I've just told Blogger to post my labels at the bottom of my blog.  The good news is, the only people ever likely to see them is me.  The bad news is a lot of my labels are one-off jokes.  I learned the art of labeling blog posts from the oft-imitated, ne'er-duplicated Neil Gaiman, after all.  I can't find a way of making a tag cloud just of tags that appear more than once.  Any help from the universe on this one?

Literature circles

A quick link to a blog post about literature circles.  Is this something that I can use in higher grade levels?  Does anybody out there use literature circles?  I have a group of fairly disengaged high school seniors.

h/t Edutopia

More books I want

Doing Literary Criticism by Tim Gillespie.  In my "Teaching Reading" class in college, we had a mini-unit on using literary theory to give readers a purpose for reading.  I found it to be mind-bogglingly useful in that and subsequent classes.  Picking a literary theory provides students with a way to pick out key information.  This is useful as students learn to read an entire text, and also when (as often) they're required to read a book they don't want to, or are stuck on.

Stenhouse Publishers here.

To my students: Thinking vs. knowing

or,

The difference between when I ask you a question and when you ask me a question.

It's a common enough scenario in our class: I ask you a huge question, give you no guidance or background information, and demand that you analyze, choose and defend a position on it in three minutes.  I imagine that this is frustrating for you sometimes, especially since my skills at communicating my goals are not great.

This happened on Friday, and instead of just answering the question, one of your classmates responded, and then said, "What do you think about this topic, Mr. Cosby?"

I didn't exactly deflect the question, but I didn't exactly answer it right away, either.  I think I said something about not wanting to presume to know everything, to which somebody said, "Well, you expected us to know the answer." 

It reminded me of a few days earlier, when I asked you about a camera angle in To Kill a Mockingbird.  "Why put the camera there for this scene, and why not somewhere else?"  One of your classmates asked, "Does this have a correct answer?  I like things that have correct answers."  My response to that was similar: There may well be a correct answer, the director made that decision for a reason.  I can only guess at what it was.  The better I am at the language of film, the more likely my guess is to be close to correct.

The common theme to these two scenarios, dear readers, and the theme that connects a thousand others just like them, is this:  When I ask you a question like that, it's because I want you thinking about the answers.  I want you to come up with what you think the best answer is, and I want you to defend it.  When presented with new evidence, I want you either to explain how the new evidence fits into your position, or I want you to change your position to accommodate it.  I do this because I think that this is the most reliable way for people to learn.  There's something pretty Socratic about it, and I'm not sure how I feel about that, but there you go.  That's pedagogy for you.  I don't expect you to have the right answer every time, the first time.  You often get the right answer, or at least a right answer, because you're smart.  And even when you're off-base, you quickly come to a right answer.  But for our purposes, that's sort of the cherry on the sundae.  I want you to think in as many different ways as possible, and I want you--and this is the kicker--to be aware of your thinking as you do it.

When you ask me my own questions back, there's a different dynamic.  Based on past experiences, you imagine that I have answers to all the questions I ask.  Maybe you visualize a Teacher's Annotated Edition of To Kill a Mockingbird, which gives me questions to ask and themes to present.  Such things exist, and I use them when my own thinking is unclear or incomplete, or honestly, when I'm in a hurry.  So I feel like when you ask me a question, it's because you want to know the answer, and you want me to give it to you.  Your motivations are your own--I like to think you're checking your own thinking process against that of a respected local authority.  You may simply be tired of thinking.  But the point is this: When you ask me a question, it's because you want the answer.

The problem with that is the nature of the questions I ask: "What are the qualities of leadership?  What does a society owe its people, and what do leaders owe to unwilling members of a society?  How do stories and leadership relate?"  These questions have no one answer.  My objective is not for you to know how to answer them, it's for you to know how to ask them.

So, just keep thinking.  A lot of good will come of that, far beyond the limits of school.

Well, that's September gone, then.

This has been a REALLY good start to the year, I think.  I hope my students would agree.  I actually spent the first two weeks on community building, and have an outline for continuing it through.  I have enforced my rules consistently, and when I noticed a big upsurge in students pushing the boundaries, I responded in what I think is the appropriate way.  The students had seen the consequences for consistent disruptive behavior already, so the students who were testing the rules were unsurprised by their consequences.  After a few minutes, I found an excuse do to a re-focusing activity, like Braingym.  The next day, we re-covered our expectations, a la Randy Sprick, and rehearsed the routine where the students fell apart.  This was in my 8th grade Spanish class.  In almost none of my other classes have I had any difficulty that I couldn't pin on "the teacher kept us in the chair too long."  In fact, in my honors English 12 class, I have asked the students to re-write the rules--none of my original rules are a problem. 

All of this almost certainly has more to do with the school climate and the students themselves than with my opening sequence.  This school is something of an anomaly.  There's no school-wide positive behavior support system, the school expectations are not posted on banners all over the walls.  And yet the students know.  And even more amazing, they follow them.  I am frankly stunned at the internal level of communication between faculty, staff and administration that must be going on to make this happen.

What will be REALLY interesting is to see what happens in December.  Our football season ends in September, and the football coach is evidently a key part of keeping this whole system running.  We're a "Friday Night Lights" kind of school, except instead of the football players expecting special privileges because of who they are, they're held to a higher standard of comportment and academics. It's awesome. 

I'm clearly well-liked by the students.  My Spanish students tell their parents they like my class, and their parents tell my principal, and my principal tells me.  In return, I call students' homes as often as I can to gush about the wonderful things they're doing.  If it keeps up like this, the positive behavior stuff will just end up running everything.  And wouldn't that be nice? 

My Spanish 7 and 8 classes are what I expected them to be--start with social niceties, and go on from there.  (I expected my 8th graders to have had Spanish 7, and evidently this isn't universally true.  So that was a surprise.)  My Spanish I class is a little different.   They all claimed some familiarity with Spanish from middle school, but none of them could tell me what they knew, and nothing I've taught them so far

As for my actual performance in delivering content, I give myself a B in my Spanish classes, and a pretty generous C in English class.  In my early Spanish classes, I teach students the geography of the Spanish-speaking world.  (It's one of the content expectations.  I didn't write them.)  It's part of my Schmoozing 101 unit (hat tip to Annette from the County ISD for the name); students have to know where their Spanish-speaking friends are from without running to Google Earth.  (Although that is precisely what I do.)  But it's the sort of thing I hate--it's basically memorizing, it takes FOREVER to do right, and apart from some commands, I have a hard time doing it in Spanish.  So the students aren't speaking as much Spanish as I want them to.  (I've finally got the "draw your own map" project doing what I want it to do, though...yay!)  So they're learning what I'm teaching, I'm teaching it in the right way, but it doesn't feel like the right thing to teach.  I'll be working on that for future classes.

My Spanish II has thrown me a complete curve ball, because they're grammarians at the fourth-year level, but have the communication skills of people who have never spoken Spanish.  Because they haven't.  They have surprisingly strong packets of vocabulary, but there's no reliable way to predict what they have.  I've spent most of the last month selling Spanish as a vehicle for communication, and met with a few days of wide-eyed terror-stricken stares when I refused to translate directions.  They're starting to catch on, though, and I think they love it.  We started a unit in which we'll review everything that happens in a day, with a focus on them speaking Spanish every single day. After that, it will be my standard Spanish II curriculum, with a de-emphasis on grammatical concepts that they already know extremely well, and with plenty of time for back-filling.

Unsurprisingly, my English classes are a little meh.  I have a clear learning goal, and a good vision of what steps we need to take to get there.  I think my day-do-day practice is good instruction, because a lot of my students are doing good learning, some of them actually against their will.  (That was kind of a joke.)  I can clean up some of my routines, particularly the beginning of class.  But there's a gap, and I keep feeling like there's something missing.  I look around and wonder what I'm not teaching.  I may ask Annette from the ISD if she has time to observe me teach someday soon, and give me some pointers.

What if I were an English teacher? Pt. 2

As part of my preparation for some theoretical Spanish / English split post, I've been looking over Michigan state documents on teaching ELA and the standards and benchmarks.  Mostly I'm looking at the state standards: I haven't yet processed the Common Core standards, although from what I remember by flipping through them way back in March, the Common Core and the existing Michigan ELA S&B's are pretty similar.   Since they're the law of the state, though, I should download and study them.

(I have at least one non-teacher regular reader here.  So a few definitions might help: This post refers heavily to the state Standards and Benchmarks, both in ELA and in World Languages.  This is a list of skills in the respective languages that students need to have by the time they finish a class.  Because of the recursive nature of language learning, they're skills and knowledge that learners need to show progress on from year to year.  The Common Core standards come from a movement to set nationwide, consistently high standards.)

And I keep saying this, but the standards are shockingly similar to the standards for World Languages.  The first strand focuses on expressing yourself through speaking, writing, and visual presentations.  The second, unsurprisingly, is on interpretive skills--reading, listening, and viewing.  Those two correspond nearly identically to the Communication thread in the World Language standards.

The third thread is called "Literature and Culture," clearly an exact match for the Culture thread in WL.  The fourth is called "Language."  The title doesn't say much, but as I started reading the actual standards, this strand has elements very similar to the Comparisons and Communities strands. 

The standard sets have much more in common that differences.  The biggest differences here are that, in ELA, the learner is not assumed to have formal study in another language, the way a high school Spanish learner is.  This seems obvious--as I re-read what I just wrote, I think, "Why would I write something that obvious?"  But it's a striking and important difference.  Part of the goal of studying Spanish is to compare it to English, to improve the learner's skills in both languages.  If I were to walk in to teach an English classroom, I think that would be the biggest change to bear in mind from Day 1 forward.  (That and, of course, not to speak in Spanish.) 

What if I were an English teacher? Pt. 1

A lot of the positions open in my area are: 1.) elementary, which I'm not technically qualified to teach yet; 2.) middle school, which I AM qualified to teach, and would like to do, 3.) or high school, split English / Spanish positions, which I'm qualified to do, would like to do, but the prospect of which frankly intimidates me.

I've read through both the state ELA standards, and the common core ELA standards.  But it was mostly in the context of finding cross-curricular points of contact with Spanish.  The communication skills are obviously the same, but how you teach them are obviously very different.  So the goals--higher-order thinking skills and clear communication of thoughts--are the same.  But what it looks like where the rubber meets the road have to be colossally different.

As a mental exercise, I've started thinking about how my ELA class might look.  Learning goals?  Unit makeup?  Assessments?  Instruction?  Interventions and intervention triggers?  Obviously the answers to these questions are context-specific, but some parameters could still be set in advance.

Today's topic: A review of the training.

At my previous school, the county-wide instructional coach, taught us all to do a lot of ELA tasks.  For example, I've gotten day-long trainings in how to teach academic and content-specific vocabulary.  (As a World Languages teacher, I have a host of strategies that work well for this anyway.)  Annette also taught us how to teach deep-writing techniques, doing it in stages and getting deeper and deeper, using writing prompts, paired- and small-group conversation, picture storytelling, etc.  (Not incidentally, she also talked a great deal about building community in classrooms, an important task in all topics.)

In college, I took two English methods courses:  How to teach reading, and how to teach writing.  The reading class, as I recall, was heavy on the interventions--how to tell if a high-school student is having difficulty reading, how to determine exactly what kind, and what to do with that information.  At that time, gone 11 years now, I never expected to teach English, so in my independent work I applied most of the reading intervention strategies to ESL learners.  It helped me remember them better, but I'm not sure how effective they would really be at this point.  I still have a copy of I read it, but I don't get it by Chris Tovani, although it's probably 4 editions behind by now.  The "Teaching writing" class spent a lot of time looking at ways to motivate students to write, and what to look for once it's there.  I remember a touch of learning goals, a block of learning strategies, and a lot of interesting writing projects.  The over-arching theme of the class was writing as a community activity, not something done in isolation, but done together.  More specifics on both of these classes, as well as other trainings, as I pick apart the individual pieces.