Copy / Paste by Peter Pappas

Homefront America - Engage Students with Document Based Essential Questions

Recently my post: Essential Question: Who is the Teacher in Your Classroom? drew a response from a teacher looking for a more scaffolded approach to document based instruction. Here's my response ...

Homefront America in WW II is designed to improve content reading comprehension with an engaging array of source documents – including journals, maps, photos, posters, cartoons, historic data and artifacts. I developed it to serve as a model for blending essential questions, higher order thinking and visual interpretation. I intentionally refrained from explaining the documents, to afford students the chance to do the work of historians. A variety of thinking exercises are imbedded in the lesson to support reading comprehension. Graphic organizers support differentiated activities to assist the students in extracting meaning from the documents.

Hopefully this lesson serves as a model of how to infuse support for literacy into the more typical educational goal of content mastery. But more importantly, it is designed to demonstrate how student engagement can be "powered" by an essential question. 

Instead of attempting to teach the American homefront experience during WWII via the memorization of historical facts (like "victory" gardens), this lesson approaches the same subject through a more timeless question “How did Americans change their lives to support the war effort?"

This essential question invites the students into the material as they draw from their life experience to construct a response. Guiding questions direct students to construct comparisons between the American experience in WWII and the Iraq / Afghanistan war. Moreover, since the events of September 11th, the very notion the “homefront” has been redefined by new perceptions of terrorism and homeland security. 

Instruction is not simply an act of telling, it should instead be centered around creating learning experiences that provoke student reflection. In this lesson, source documents and literacy strategies combine to simultaneously teach content and comprehension. But more importantly, an essential question serves as a springboard to engage students in a deeper reflection on the notion of sacrifice in the historical context and in their own lives.

Scaffolding questions include ...

Pre Reading / Think Before You Start: 

Before you begin this lesson,think about and discuss in small groups the following questions: 

• What resources are needed to wage a war? 
• How could people on the home front help to supply these resources? 
• What would you be willing to contribute to a war effort? 

Post Reading / The Question Today: 

Civilians have always been impacted by war and they are frequently called upon to contribute to national war efforts. Since the events of September 11, 2001, the United States has fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

• How have Americans on the homefront contributed to the effort? What have they sacrificed?
• How do those efforts compare with the home front in WWII? 
• How did the attacks of September 11 change the nature of the “homefront?”

Essential Question: Who is the Teacher in Your Classroom?

Over the last few weeks I've been guiding teams of teachers on reflective classroom walkthroughs. During the course of one of our "hallway discussions" I asked a social studies teacher, "who's the historian in your classroom?" After a bit of give and take, we concluded that in the traditional classroom, the students get to watch (and listen) to the teacher be historian. 

That's certainly what you would have seen early in my teaching career. I was the one doing most of the reading, reflecting and synthesizing of historic material. I thought my job was to distill it all and simplify for consumption by my students. It took me a few years to realize my job was to get the students to be the historians (and economists, anthropologists, etc). 

Here's a sample lesson that I developed to demonstrate how historic material could be scaffolded so that all students could participate in doing the work of historians -  What Did Europeans "See" When They Looked at the New World and the Native Americans? Seems appropriate with US Thanksgiving nearly here.

It examines European views of Native American and the New World in the Age of Exploration. While it is a rather one-sided account, the documents reveal a great deal about the cultural "lenses" that the Europeans "looked" though. It is designed around an essential question that will engage students in reflection about how Europeans allowed prejudice to color their perceptions. That, of course, invites thinking about how we may be looking at other peoples and cultures today.

The source material contains twenty-five documents in text and image formats – including journal entries, letters, maps, and illustrations. I modernized historic accounts at two reading levels – 5th and 8th grade. (Each contains the same twenty five documents). I selected images which could be “decoded” by students with a minimum of background knowledge so that all students could practice their content reading comprehension and critical thinking skills. A series of six exercises accompanies the lesson to guide students through the process of extracting information from the documents and constructing their own answers to the essential question.

While this lesson is historical, the same perspective applies to lessons across the curriculum - who's the scientist, engineer, artist, nutritionist, mathematician, literary critic, and musician - in your classroom? Teachers are no longer simply “education dispensers” gathering, distilling and delivering information to students. (There are too many other sources that do a great job of delivering information 24/7.) Instead teachers can thrive as “educational architects” who design classrooms where students do the work of constructing meaning. 

Source documents - 5th grade reading level

Source documents - 8th grade reading level

Six activity worksheets

How to Teach Summarizing: A Critical Learning Skill for Students

Summarizing is an essential skill for learning, but too often in school we simply ask students to "guess" what the teacher (or author) thinks is important.

An essential part of a summary is that it needs to be expressed to an audience. In life, we purposefully craft summaries for a specific audience (directions for the out-of-towner, computer how-to for the technophobe). In school, the tacit audience for most summaries is the teacher. Imagine how a student feels when asked to summarize a textbook passage for the teacher. In effect they have been asked to summarize one expert's writing for delivery to another expert - the teacher.   "...and remember, be sure to use your own words!"

If students are going to learn to summarize they need to be given a chance to genuinely share what they think is important for an audience other than the teacher. Here's a three step process I followed in a second grade classroom using a popular Currier and Ives print, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way." (1868)  
Click to enlarge

Step 1: Start with the concrete "right there" observations. 

I projected a digital image on the screen and asked student to talk about the people, things and activities they could identify. They replied, a train, native Americans, a village, people digging, steam from the train, houses, trees, a lake, maybe a harbor, a road, dry grass, covered wagons, poles, mountains, a school house, people working, people waiting for the train, a train track, etc ....

Step 2: Give students a chance to tell what they think is important.

I managed this aspect by asking each student to draw a picture of what they saw in the projected image. The details they included were what they thought was important. Here's a few samples. Click to enlarge.

      

Step 3: Give students a chance to frame their summary into a narrative explanation for another audience. 

I digitally divided the image into multiple sections and photocopied them (in B &W) into packets of  image details. I gave groups of students the packets and asked them to work in teams to assemble the images into children's "a story book" with a caption under each image.  Click to enlarge.

    

Here are some of their captions: 

(spelling corrected) 

• Water would come from the mountain and fill the lake. You could get fish and drink water. Water is very important
• People were moving west. They moved by wagon at first, then but train, which is faster.
  
• Life was tough. People had to do everything for themselves.
  
• It maybe was lonely because people missed their friends back home.
  
• The people were building a town. They could get wood from the trees. It was a small town at first.
  
• The Indian see the people coming. They knew things were changing. They got sick from the smoke.
  
• The school was different from our school. People had different clothes than us.
  
• The train split the old life from the new life.

While summarizing has been shown to be one of the most effective strategies for building content knowledge, that gain only applies when students are allowed to make their own judgements about what’s important and frame their summaries for an audience. When we ask them to "learn" the teacher's summary - they are reduced to memorizing "another fact."

When we ask our students to create authentic summaries (with audience and purpose) we give students a chance to reflect on their learning. Instead of simply testing them for factual knowledge, students can be asked: 

• What did I think was important?
• How did I share that with my audience? 

• Did my summary match audience and purpose?
• Is my summary accurate? 
• Did I use my own words and style?
• What did I learn from the activity?

For more learning strategies see my blog post: 18 Literacy Strategies for Struggling Readers - Defining, Summarizing and Comparing

Teacher-Led Professional Development: Eleven Reasons Why You Should be Using Classroom Walk Throughs

I frequently conduct large-group workshops for an entire school or district. I use a variety of methods (like audience response systems) to create engaging events that model the practices I am promoting. The workshops resonate well with teachers and I am often asked to come back and "do some more." 

My reply is typically something like, "I'm done talking ... it's time to take this training into the classroom - that's where the teaching is going on. Besides, you need to build your local capacity." Over the last 3 years I have developed a classroom walk through (CWT) approach that works. When I return to a school my goal is to serve as a catalyst for dialogue that can be self-sustaining (read - no consultant required). 

During my return visit I typically lead groups of teachers on brief CWTs in an effort to try to identify the instructional elements that we addressed in our large-group session. For example, if my large group session was on fostering higher-level thinking skills, then our CWT focuses on trying to see if the CWT visitors can answer the question, "What kinds of thinking did student need to use in the lesson segment we just saw?" If the large group session addressed fostering student engagement, then my walk-through reflection might be "What choice did students (appear to) have in making decisions about the product, process or evaluation of the learning?" 

If the large group is "the lecture," the CWT is the "lab."

The specifics of CWTs are tailored to the school, but  here's a few of protocols I generally use:

1. CWT groups are kept small  - usually only 2 visitors per classroom. (I guide larger groups of teachers, who break into smaller teams to visit classrooms.)

2. Individual CWT visits usually last 10 minutes or less. No note taking or elaborate checklists to fill out. Just watch and listen with a focus on the learning. The real insights occur when we later process our different perspective about what we thought we saw during the CWT.

3. We rotate a pool of subs (or use planning time) to free up teachers for a series CWT sessions that total about 1-2 hours.

4. Teachers are asked in advance if they want to join the CWT and / or be willing to "host" a visit. No "gotchas" or surprises allowed!

5. All teachers are told in advance that we are not doing CWTs to "evaluate them or their lesson." Our purpose is to use a brief slice of their lesson as a catalyst for a discussion about learning. I ask teachers who did CWTs to get back to the host teachers later in the day to follow up and assure them that our dialogue was about learning, not "their" teaching.

Eleven Reasons Why You Should be Using Classroom Walk Throughs

1. Staff development should look like what you want to foster in the classroom
CWTs can be conducted like roving Socratic seminars - engaging participants in observation, reflection, and discussion. Isn't that the perspective we want to foster in our students? - thoughtful learners who are reflecting on their progress. 

2. CWTs relies on local resources not consultants
Typical PD takes place in the isolation from the students. Herd the teachers into a large lecture hall and let some consultant talk at them. Too often the consultant is viewed as a person with a PowerPoint from somewhere else who wants to sell you the solution to your problem. CWTs can be lead by teachers and move the discussion to the reality of the classroom. More importantly, instead of treating teachers as a passive PD audience they are active participants in staff development. 

3. CWTs break through teacher isolation
When I first started teaching 38 years ago, my department chair handed me my class lists and keys and said "Don't let the kids out 'till the bell rings." From that day I was on my own and for years I worked in isolation from other adults. Mentoring programs have made great strides with novice teachers since then, but can't more experienced teachers also benefit from thoughtful discussion and collaboration? 

 4. CWTs change the dialogue
Let's face it, our teachers' lounges are often dominated with complaints about problem students, annoying parents and the unpopular "reform-du jour" from district office. CWT fosters a different discussion. Teacher gain greater respect for their peers. Conversations move in a positive direction - observing, for example, how that problem student behaves in another classroom setting.

5. CWTs clarify your school's vision of teaching and learning
We spend all this time crafting a school mission (or is it vision?) statement. Let's see if it holds up in action. Are students given responsibility for their learning, or are they asked to simply follow instructions? If we believe in life-long learning, then how do the educators dialogue to improve our craft?

6. CWTs foster a K-12 conversation
I often lead K-12 teachers on CWTs at different school levels  - for example, take high school teachers on a CWT of their feeder elementary and middle school (or vice versa). As one high school teacher said to me as we walked out of a fifth grade classroom, "I didn't realize what these 5th graders are capable of - I think I need to 'ramp' it up a bit at the high school."

7. CWTs are naturally differentiated
Teachers bring a variety of background knowledge and experiences drawn from different disciplines and grade levels. Our discussion are enriched by their varied perspectives and teachers are free to take away the ideas that resonate with them.

8. We can all learn from each other
During a follow up debriefing, a math teacher remarked to our CWT group that she felt stuck in her approach - it was always foundations first, then have students practice with a series of problems. She asked, "how can you reverse the order and use problems to generate foundation understanding?" The PE teacher replied "when I coach the wrestling team, I put students into a new position and ask them to wrestle their way out of it. In doing so, they discover their own understanding of movement, that I later reinforce with techniques that work from that wrestling position."

9. It models life-long learning to the students
We ask teachers to explain in advance that teachers will be visiting classroom to improve their skills. As one student once remarked to me, "Still learning to teach? Just kidding - it's cool to see that you teachers keep working on it!" 

10. CWT's are cost-effective PD
No travel, materials, software, hardware required. With practice, you don't need the services of an outside consultant. Many of my clients have felt our CWTs were such powerful experiences, that they later continue the CWTs with teachers serving as facilitators.

11. This is PD that is equally valuable for  administrators
All my observation about the value of CWTs apply equally well for training administrators. I have led principals (and other admin) on CWTs and found principals to be eager to refocus their thinking away from the traditional evaluation of teachers to more fundamental reflections on the varied dimensions of learning. 

If you've read this far,  you might also like a few other posts:

A Guide to Designing Effective Professional Development: Essential Questions for the Successful Staff Developer

What Questions Should School Boards Be Asking about 21st Century Learning? 

How to Become a Teacher: Resources for Certification and Interviews

Essential Questions in American History: "The Great Debates"

I developed this series as part of my work with Prentice-Hall supporting Daniel Boorstin’s A History of the United States.

Originally it was suggested that I develop lessons on questions such as “Should slavery be extended into the territories?” I argued that most of these issues had been answered, and that it would be more engaging to frame the debates around essential questions. Thus the typical question - “Should the Constitution be ratified?” became “How powerful should the national government be?” Anyone following the reauthorization of NCLB or the proposed health care legislation knows the enduing relevance of that question.

The Great Debates feature consists of twelve debates, one for every unit of the text. Each of these debates contains an introduction that states the topic of the debate, examines the background of this issue, provides information about both the readings and the debaters, and discusses the debate topic from a contemporary perspective. Units feature the conflicting viewpoints of two or more historical figures or organizations and a worksheet that helps students analyze the debate through a series of comprehension and critical thinking questions. Download Great Debates here

Essential questions / debates  include:

Debate  1: How Should Society Balance the Need for Tolerance with the Need to Protect Itself? 
Debate  2: How Powerful Should the National Government Be?
Debate  3: Who Should Be Allowed to Vote?
Debate  4: Should Women Have Equal Treatment Under the Law?
Debate  5: How Should Americans Treat the Land?
Debate  6: Has Industrialization Produced More Benefits or More Problems for the Nation?
Debate  7: Should the United States Pursue a Foreign Policy of Isolationism or Interventionism?
Debate  8: What Should the Nation's Immigration Policy Be?
Debate  9: To What Extent Is the Federal Government Responsible for the Welfare and Security of the Individual?
Debate 10: Is Civil Disobedience Ever Justified as a Method of Political Change?
Debate 11: What Are the Limits of a Free Press?
Debate 12: How Much Should the Nation Invest in Defense?

Picturing the Story - An Interdisciplinary Approach to Culture, Environment, Language, and Learning

I'm pleased to served as an advisor to a new interactive resource for teachers and students. "Picturing the Story: Narrative Arts and the Stories They Tell" uses world art from the permanent collection of the Memorial Art Gallery dating from 1500 BCE to the 20th Century.  Each work has a story to tell, either visually through imagery and symbol, or indirectly through custom and ritual. The stories reflect sacred beliefs, folk traditions, common human experiences, or unique cultural practices. 

Each work of art includes downloadable resources - the story that inspired it, the culture where it originated, the techniques used to produce it, as well as extensive lesson plans, activity suggestions, and recommendations for further reading. The lessons and stories are designed to be used at a variety of grade levels. 

Downloads resources include: 

• Classroom Copy - Printable, condensed version of online materials, copy-ready for classroom use. 
• Curriculum Connections - Organized by subject area:  Social Studies, ELA, Science, Art/Art History. Lesson extensions, children’s book recommendations, and activity suggestions, most with accompanying activity sheets.  
• Learning Skill-based Activity Sheets:  Printable, copy-ready sheets that address specific learning skills, for classroom use with online materials or printed classroom copy. Includes skills such as constructing comparison, identifying context, recognizing sequence and many more.

Every work of art has a story to tell. These stories can explain the unexplainable, teach a life lesson, or celebrate our common human experiences. Each work in this collection is approached from three different perspectives: 

1. Picturing the Story: Viewing a work of art while reading/hearing/seeing its associated story. The story is available as on-screen text, as an audio file voiced by a professional storyteller, in ASL video interpretation, or printable pdf version. In addition, an audio “guided-looking tour” of the work of art by a museum educator helps focus attention on important details and promote visual and verbal looking skills. 

2. Reading the Art:  Understanding the symbolism and references used in this work of narrative art. High-quality images of works of art, with zoom-able details, comparison or supporting images, and interpretive information connect elements of the work of art to its associated story.   

3. Connecting the Culture:  Exploring the cultural and functional context of this work of art. Historical and cultural context information, including maps, supporting photos, and other images, connect the work of art and the story to the cultural background, promoting document-based and inquiry-based learning.  Information addressing purpose or function of work, biographical information on artist (as available), geographical and environmental issues, and process and tools of creation allows the objects’ significance to extend into a variety of curriculum areas.

Details from: 
 "The Fox and the Heron"  Flemish, Frans Snyders ca. 1630-1640 
 "Rama, Sita and Lakshmana Return to Ayodhya"  Indian, Rajasthan, Rajput School ca. 1850-1900

18 Literacy Strategies for Struggling Readers - Defining, Summarizing and Comparing

I've been working with teachers on learning strategies to support the literacy and comprehension skills that students commonly use across the content areas. This pdf includes 18 lessons organized in two ways: by comprehension strategy - defining, summarizing and comparing and by target reader - non-reader, word caller and turned-off reader.  The lessons are designed as templates which teachers can modify to use in their specific subject areas.

Strategies for Struggling Readers 3MB pdf   

There are two key elements that teachers should keep in mind when working in each skill area.

Defining

• Before the formal definition has been introduced, students should be asked to make connections between their prior knowledge and the term.
• After the term has been defined,  students need activities to more deeply process the term.

Summarizing

• Students should be asked to make their own judgments about what’s important to them (instead of just repeating the details the teacher highlights).
• Students will be able to more readily summarize, if they are asked to share what they’ve learned with an audience other than the teacher. 

Comparing

• Students should develop the comparison, not simply repeat the model that we present to them.
• Student should be asked to share what they learned from the comparison.

First Day of School? Don't Pass Out Books - Problem Solve!

I first published this post at the start of the 08-09 school year. It proved to be very popular and I've had thousands of downloads of the murder mystery students were asked to solve. I've added a second mystery - a bank robbery - and republished my original post below. Enjoy!

~ Originally published August 27, 2008 ~

As a social studies high school teacher, I faced over 25 years of the first day of school. When I first began teaching, I did usual thing – working through the class list (“do you prefer Patrick, or Pat?), a dry recitation of the class rules,  passing out the textbooks. Blah, blah, blah – think of the message it sent to my students.

As my teaching style evolved from the lecture / work sheet model into a more engaged learning environment, I redefined how I wanted to introduce my students to my course. I also came to understand that it was imperative that I get all my students to contribute a few comments to the class during those first few days. Very quickly classes learn which students are the talkers and non-talkers. Once those roles are locked in – it’s very difficult for student for break out of them.

So I did not waste the opening week of school introducing the course – my students solved murder mysteries. I took simplified mysteries and split them into 25-30 clues, each on a single strip of paper. You can download one of the mysteries and a set of rules from my website.  I used a random count off to get the kids away from their buddies and into groups of 5-6 students. Each group got a complete set of clues for the mystery. Each student in the group got 4-5 clues that they could not pass around to the other students. They had to share the clues verbally in the group and that guaranteed that every student is a talker on day one.

While the students worked to solve the mystery – I concentrated on learning the student names. After I introduced the mystery, I bet them that by the end of the first class, I could go around the room and recite their names. While they worked on the mystery, I circulated getting to know students and their names. Another message – in this class, we’re all learners.

Over the next few days we would process their problem solving skills, group dynamics, differences between relevant and irrelevant information and introduce the idea of higher-order thinking like analysis, evaluation and creating. We might even have time to try another mystery to see if they got better.

Learn Mathematical Thinking From the Wrong Answer

I recently saw this video clip from an old Abbott and Costello film (thanks to my Twitter network). It reminds us that math isn't simply about learning a computational process, or getting the right answer.  It's pretty clear that Lou Costello has learned the wrong algorithm, and he defends his approach it with great determination.  See the same mathematical thinking by Ma and Pa Kettle. 

We learn math skills so that we can apply mathematical thinking to the problem solving we will need in our lives. Thus, much can be learned from the procedures we use to generate both the "correct" and the "incorrect" answer. Sharing our thinking with others allows us to negotiate a deeper understanding of algorithms and their application in the real world. 

The video clip neatly "illustrates" a teaching strategy from Teach Like Your Hair's On Fire by Rafe Esquith. The book details Esquith's fifth grade teaching methods in a rough LA neighborhood. Esquith shows us what students can learn from the wrong answer and his process can be easily applied across the curriculum. While it makes for an excellent test taking strategy, its real power is that gives students an engaging perspective to think more deeply about teaching and learning.

Esquith writes,  "Let's say I'm teaching addition. Just before I give the kids their own problems, I put one more problem on the board: 

63 + 28 = 

Rafe: All right, everybody. Let's pretend this is a question on your Stanford 9 test, which as we all know will determine your future happiness, success, and the amount of money you will have in the bank. (Giggling from the kids) Who can tell me the answer? 

All: 91. 

Rafe: Very good Let's place that 91 by the letter C Would someone like to tell me what will go by the letter A? 

Isel: 35. 

Rafe: Fantastic! Why 35, Isel? 

Isel: That's for the kid who subtracts instead of adds. 

Rafe: Exactly. Who has a wrong answer for B? 

Kevin: 81. That's for the kid who forgets to carry the 1. 

Rafe: Right again. Do 1 have a very sharp detective who can come up with an answer for D? 

Paul: How about 811? That's for the kid who adds everything but doesn't carry anything. 

In Room 56, the kids come to learn that multiple-choice questions are carefully designed. It is rarely a matter of one correct answer and three randomly chosen incorrect ones. The people who create the questions are experts at anticipating where students will go wrong. When a kid makes a mistake somewhere in the course of doing a problem and then sees his (incorrect) answer listed as a potential solution, he assumes he must be correct. My kids love to play detective. They enjoy spotting-and sidestepping-potential traps. 

When students in Room 56 take a multiple-choice math test with twenty problems, they see it as an eighty-problem test. Their job is to discover twenty correct answers and sixty incorrect ones. It is hysterical to listen to the sounds of the class when the students take a standardized math test. The most common sound is a quiet giggle of recognition. The kids love to outsmart the test and can't help laughing as they discover one trap after another."

Inspire Your Students To Tell A Story With Prezi

I've been using Prezi in my workshops and have written a few posts illustrating it's features - brainstorming with Prezi and embedding Prezi in your blog.

Enjoy "Create a Prezi" - a fine video that demonstrates the process in under 5 minutes. (No, I didn't create it!) It will inspire your students and give them a chance to break out of the lineal / PowerPoint style. (Thanks for the tip - Twitter/ashleyproud)

>

Motivating Students - A Make and Take Workshop for Teachers

This week I head back to Edison School of Engineering & Manufacturing, to conduct a two day follow up workshop.  Our previous work together identified four target areas: 

1. Motivating students
2. Making learning relevant
3. Student-centered learning strategies
4. Effective use of technology

We are going to start by modeling a "Brainstorm, Group, Label" activity (See Tool 13).  It will also  set our agenda for the "make and take activities" of the workshop. Day two begins by modeling a "Fishbowl Discussion Group" on the topic of effective next steps. We'll use the ideas generated in the fishbowl to design a Strategic Planning Grid (below) to prioritize their staff development for the fall.

Most of our time over the two days will be spent assisting teachers in designing specific lessons. I've assembled some Literacy Strategies that teachers can use as starting points for modify their existing lessons. 

“Non-readers”  for students who lack decoding skills.

“Word-callers” for students who can decode, but lack comprehension skills.

“Turned-off readers" for students who have the decoding and comprehension skills, but lack motivation or engagement.

I'll also be showcasing some web tools that are very engaging for students.

Wordle (text analysis) 

Many Eyes (data and text visualizations)

Prezi  (presentation tool) 

Dipity  (timeline builder)

Bubbl.us (brainstorming)

Flickr Tag Related Tag Browser (image tag analysis)

Classroom Discussion Techniques that Work - Try This Hollywood Classroom Walkthrough

Recently I blogged about the teacher-centric information flow in the traditional classroom. See: Engage Student Discussion: Use the Social Network in Your Classroom  If you would like to see my point illustrated, you can do a quick "Hollywood classroom walkthrough" with this clip from "Stand and Deliver." Before you play the video, create a diagram with eight small circles labeled teacher and student responders 1-7. As you watch the video, keep track of the sender/ receiver in each exchange of information with lines and arrows. Once you have finished with the diagram, reflect on a few broader questions:

1. Were the students comfortable offering their answers?

2. What feedback did the teacher give after each student answer?

3. Did the students get any closer to a valid answer as each, in turn, ventured a response?

Go back and look at your information flow diagram. You'll notice that every answer was directed to the teacher. After the first six  answers the teacher found a clever way to say "your wrong," without explaining why. Students made a series of guesses at a correct solution without any evidence that they learned anything from the prior responses. Finally a student shows up at the door with correct answer and it's not even clear that she heard any of the earlier answers. 

Some might admire the comfortable climate of this classroom - after all, students were very willing to risk a response. Ironically the only one making fun of them was the teacher (a practice more suited to Hollywood than a real classroom.) Others might consider this an example of rather Socratic approach - but I don't see the teacher posing any new questions to expand student thinking. When you strip away all the clever (inappropriate?) repartee you are left with a very teacher-centric discussion - with students guessing at a correct answer. 

This approach reminds me of an illustration I saw in "Math Is Language Too: Talking and Writing in the Mathematics Classroom" by Phyllis Whitin. It's a drawing done by Justin, a second grader, writing and drawing about his relationship with math.

Like Justin, the students in "Stand and Deliver" don't see math as a topic for peer discussion or reflection. Rather, they "do the math" for their teacher. While these two examples focus on math, this dynamic could be true of many whole group discussion across the curriculum. I admit to being equally guilty of a dominating classroom discussion as a rookie social studies teacher. "Class, what were three results of the War of 1812? ... Anyone? ... Anyone??"

After years of facing this type of discussion, students learn that their comments are of provisional value until "approved" by the teacher. Over time, students stop listening to each other and only focus on what the teacher says or validates - "will that be up on a test?" When students are put in small group discussion, they rapidly get off subject. With no teacher to validate their comments, they naturally gravitate to other subjects where peer comments are valued - "what are you doing this weekend?" 

In my workshops I train teachers in discussion techniques that foster student reflection and interaction. The strategies are focused on getting the teacher out of the role of information gatekeeper and encouraging student-centered dialogue. 

Want to encourage students to redirect their thinking and reflection away from the teacher and toward one another? Try a research-based discussion technique like the Fishbowl-discussion 68 KB PDF

Why Don't We Teach Sequencing Skills? It's an Essential Higher-Order Thinking Strategy

We spend a lot of time in school getting students to learn sequential information - timelines, progressions, life cycle of a moth, steps for how to. Typically the teacher teaches the student the sequence and the student correctly identifies the sequence for teacher on the test. Thus we treat a sequence as a ordered collection of facts to be learned, not as a thinking process for students to use.  This memorization reduces the student's "mastery" of the chronology to lower order thinking. I was guilty of this when I first started teaching history "Can someone give me two causes and three results of WWII?" 

When students are asked to observe a process and develop a sequence they have an opportunity to use a full spectrum of higher-order thinking skills - they must recognize patterns (analyze), determine causality (evaluate) and then decide how they would communicate what they've learned to others (create). Sequencing can be taught across the curriculum at a variety of grade levels - we simply have to ask the students to observe and do the thinking.

There is some interesting research that demonstrates that students have trouble when asked to develop sequences. It comes from the Program for International Student Assessment.  PISA is an assessment (begun in 2000) that focuses on 15-year-olds' capabilities in reading literacy, mathematics literacy, and science literacy. PISA studied students in 41 countries and assessed how well prepared students are for life beyond the classroom by focusing on the application of knowledge and skills to problems with a real-life context. For more examples of PISA questions and data see my blog post.

Sample sequencing problem from PISA 2003.

The Hobson High School library has a simple system for lending books: for staff members the loan period is 28 days, and for students the loan period is 7 days. The following is a decision tree diagram showing this simple system:

The Greenwood High School has a similar, but more complex library lending system:
All publications classified as “Reserved” have a loan period of 2 days.
For books (not including magazines) that are not on the reserved list, the loan period is 28 days for staff, and 14 days for students. For magazines that are not on the reserved list, the loan period is 7 days for everyone.
Persons with any overdue items are not allowed to borrow anything. 

Task

Develop a decision tree diagram for the Greenwood High School Library system so that an automated checking system can be designed to deal with book and magazine loans at the library.  Your checking system should be as efficient as possible (i.e. it should have the least number of checking steps). Note that each checking step should have only two outcomes and the outcomes should be labeled appropriately (e.g. “Yes” and “No”).

The student results were rated on a rubric scale.  Only 13.5% of US students were able correctly answered the question. Their international 15-year-old peers didn't fare much better - 14.3% of them answered correctly. 

The correct response looked something like this.

Managing Project Based Learning (PBL) and Student Portfolios

I'm an advocate of project based learning (PBL) because students grow when they are actively involved in tasks that give them choices in product, process and evaluation. Throughout my teaching career, I looked for ways to shift responsibility for learning to the the student by designing academic experiences that provoked authentic student reflection. Unfortunately, I often felt like the “system” conspired to make that instructional shift very difficult - and the “forced march to AYP” didn't make that transition any easier!

Despite the challenges, there are growing numbers of teachers and administrators who want to move to PBL - an approach that values student creativity over test prep. Yet many are still hampered by a system tied to the standard report card /gradebook. After all, even the most innovative educator can get turned off when paperwork gets in the way of teaching and learning. 

Recently I heard about ProjectFoundry, a Milwaukee-based team of educational entrepreneurs who are tackling the task of bringing real-world feasibility to managing PBL. I was new to ProjectFoundry, so I  spent some time with their operations manager, Shane Krukowski touring their program via GoToMeeting. Shane and the ProjectFoundry team are veteran teachers with extensive experience in urban schools. It was clear to me that they have a genuine appreciation for the institutional barriers that often hold back student-centered innovations. 

I was pleased to see how their ProjectFoundry system simplified the PBL process – from proposal, through project workflow, to product showcasing, and evaluation. ProjectFoundry fostered student engagement with peer evaluation and feedback. All the work products easily flowed into a student portfolio with a variety of formats to export and share with peers and parents.  And the folks at central office will be pleased that the entire process can be quickly aligned with state and district standards.

ProjectFoundry has asked me to be the keynote speaker at a summer conference devoted to managing project based leaning and student portfolios. I look forward to the chance to meet educators from around the country who are having success with ProjectFoundry and those that are looking for ways to more easily manage their PBL process. 

ProjectFoundry Summer Conference: July 21-22, 2009

Location: The Tagos Leadership Academy in Janesville, WI. 

Audience: ProjectFoundry users and those interested in PBL management

For more information on the summer conference

Twitter: Who are the Best Bands at SXSW 09?

I'm an educator who loves innovative technology and music. In my last post, I showed "How to Stay Home and Use Twitter Tools to Network a Major Conference." That turned out to be a great way to meet many of the attendees and Twitter followers at the ASCD Education conference in Orlando. 

Well I didn't  get to go to Austin for "South by Southwest 2009", either. But I 'm using Twitter to help me find out what bands are generating a buzz. I 'm using two Twitter tools - "hashtags" and the Twitter Cloud Explorer to track the SXSW bands that are generating the most Tweets. I'm using the search string #SXSW + Band + Great. The size of the word indicates the number of #SXSW tweets using that band's name with the word "great."  

Sorry: As of 4/26/09 the TwitterCloudExplorer seems to have disappeared. 

Visual Literacy: How Do Your Students Share Their Thinking?

The perceived audience / purpose for most student work is the teacher / because it was assigned. Learning becomes more meaningful when students are given chances to share their thinking with more authenticity. It's as simple as adding an audience to an assignment. Example: "How would you explain your solution to younger students?" This also opens the door to more relevant self evaluation. "Did my presentation suit my audience and purpose?"

Visual literacy is the ability to evaluate, apply, or create conceptual visual representations. Visual-Literacy.org has assembled a collection of visualizations in as a periodic table. Mouse over each element and a sample pops up. The examples range from simple to complex and they provide a vast array of approaches beyond the overused Venn diagram or T-chart. 

A pdf of the table is also available. On another page you can group the visualization methods by your criteria and  find background information for a specific visualization method via Google Images and Wikipedia

European DBQ Source Goes Digital

Interested in source material for your European history DBQ's?

The new European Commission's Europeana digital library project has been launched with 2 million digital documents including paintings, audio files, maps, videos and other artifacts at http://www.europeana.eu

Enjoy

Update 8/21/08:

Oops! The crashed just hours after it went online, and it will be out of operation for weeks, the European Commission said Friday. The failure was attributed to overwhelming public interest. Europeana, a Web site of two million documents, images, and video and audio clips, opened Thursday to international publicity and acclaim. But by Friday, attempts to log on were greeted with a message saying that the service might not be running again until mid-December, when computer capacity will be upgraded. The site’s designers had expected a maximum of five million hits an hour. But searches for famous cultural works like the Mona Lisa or manuscripts of literature by Kafka, Cervantes or James Joyce produced traffic as high as three times that volume.

Sequencing - An Essential Summarizing Skill

I've been experimenting with Dipity, a new website that allows you to build interactive timelines. Open a free account, create a new topic, and then upload text and images (from a file.) You can view your topic as an timeline or flipbook. You can even geocode your events and view the project as a map. You are allowed to set permissions for viewers and editing rights.  I created a sample timeline "How did the roles and rights of women change at the turn of the 20th century?"  Note: One drawback for classroom use - banner ads appear on the page and  I can't vouch for what might show up.

Dipity allows you to configure the display of the topic and copy and paste the embed code into your page. You should be able to click the embedded image below.

Start Your New School Year with Rigor and Relevance

As a social studies high school teacher, I faced over 25 years of the first day of school. When I first began teaching, I did usual thing – working through the class list (“do you prefer Patrick, or Pat?), a dry recitation of the class rules,  passing out the textbooks. Blah, blah, blah – think of the message it sent to my students.

As my teaching style evolved from the lecture / work sheet model into a more engaged learning environment, I redefined how I wanted to introduce my students to my course. I also came to understand that it was imperative that I get all my students to contribute a few comments to the class during those first few days. Very quickly classes learn which students are the talkers and non-talkers. Once those roles are locked in – it’s very difficult for student for break out of them.

So I did not waste the opening week of school introducing the course – my students solved murder mysteries. I took simplified mysteries and split them into 25-30 clues, each on a single strip of paper. (You can download one of the mysteries and rules from my website.)  I used a random count off to get the kids away from their buddies and into groups of 5-6 students. Each group got a complete set of clues for the mystery. Each student in the group got 4-5 clues that they could not pass around to the other students. They had to share the clues verbally in the group and that guaranteed that every student is a talker on day one.

While the students worked to solve the mystery – I concentrated on learning the student names. After I introduced the mystery, I bet them that by the end of the first class, I could go around the room and recite their names. While they worked on the mystery, I circulated getting to know students and their names. Another message – in this class, we’re all learners.

Over the next few days we would process their problem solving skills, group dynamics, differences between relevant and irrelevant information and introduce the idea of higher-order thinking like analysis, evaluation and creating. We might even have time to try another mystery to see if they got better.

By week two, I got around to passing out the textbooks. But by then I had already introduced them to what was most important about my class.

Students Can Become Proficient Writers - Try a QuickWrite

The recently released NAEP report suggests that only about one-third of our eighth graders and about one-quarter of the nation's high school seniors are proficient writers. The results are not much better than the results of the NAEP's last report in 2002. More

If we want to bring these numbers up, students should be writing on a daily basis in all of their classes. So how do we give students more opportunities to hone their writing skills without overburdening our secondary teachers with loads of papers to grade?

Why not use the QuickWrite strategy.

• As students enter class, they see a prompt on the front board that requires them to revisit a previously lesson. This makes more productive use of the opening minutes of class where teachers are usually tied up in "housekeeping" tasks.
• Students are trained to write briefly, but in complete sentences.
• After five minutes, selected students read their answers aloud to the class. Students are instructed to read exactly what they have written. This requires quick organization of thoughts and prevents rambling oral replies.

The QuickWrite is followed by short discussion. Teachers call on volunteers, drawing out divergent viewpoint:

• “Does anyone have a different idea?”
• “How did those two students' QuickWrites differ?”
• “What do these QuickWrites tell us we should study today?”

This strategy stimulates students’ higher-order thinking about a concept from the previous day. Teachers can easily check for understanding before beginning a new lesson. The class is now ready to link this newly anchored understanding to the content of the upcoming class. 

Most importantly, a QuickWrite gives students a chance to evaluate what they think is significant and share what they've learned with their peers. It restructures the typical teacher-led discussion that too often finds the teacher playing "guess what I'm thinking?"

For more ideas and resources, visit my literacy posts on this blog.