A new context... a curricular evolution...

In some ways, this post marks the start of a new teaching project. My last post here was from Bowling Green, Kentucky, and it was four years ago. My context then was an intensive English program for middle-school-aged refugees. My context now is a sophomore Humanities class in a college preparatory boarding school in Indiana. While it is a leap, the curriculum development challenges remain interesting and connected. And we're off wrestling again...

The 10th grade Humanities curriculum has largely been organized around four central texts since at least the time I came to the level four years ago. We've varied the order, but we have always studied the following: The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra, and The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. It's been a long time since we've been a school that hands a new teacher a pile of books and invites him to close the door and teach however s/he wants to (and I'm grateful for that), but we haven't always had a clearly articulated curriculum. For the last four years, as a level, we've worked to identify a common set of learning targets around those central texts. 

We're at a point, though, where we're beginning a major curricular evolution. In June of this year, the level started to consider the idea of "to what end?" for our curriculum. And we landed on a connecting thread as we considered the four central texts: social justice. We defined these driving essential questions: What defines a just society? What creates injustice in societies? What makes it difficult to perceive injustice? What is the role of the individual in responding to injustice?

We're hoping that by spending a year working with students on these questions, we'll foster the following 21st Century Learning Outcomes: Intercultural knowledge and competence, ethical reasoning and action, personal and social responsibility, and civic knowledge and engagement.

So far, nothing I've written has been a major evolution. The fact that all of these pieces now live on a piece of paper somewhere that shows how they are all connected is really encouraging. The paper itself represents hours and hours of conversation with colleagues and great effort to honor the work that has already been done. These ideas have floated for a few years, and having them nailed down on a piece of paper (to the extent that anything is fixed on a piece of paper) is great thing, though.

The major evolution to the curriculum is the addition of a layer of thinking: key critical thinking understandings. The term "critical thinking" gets thrown around quite a bit, but this is a specific kind of critical thinking. We plan to directly teach our students about how their brains work and to challenge them to slow their thinking down as they wrestle with the big ideas of our curriculum. Think language like "system 1 and system 2" (Kahneman), fundamental attribution error, narrative fallacy, truthiness, illusion of knowledge, confirmation bias, familiarity effect, availability effect, rationalizing, and motivated reasoning. Kids will be thinking about their own thinking as we study the central texts. We don't just want our students to nod their head to Adichie's TED Talk "Danger of a Single Story," we want our students to be able to slow down their thinking, explain why we ALL create single stories, and consider how to recognize their own "single stories."

Most of the teachers at my level have been studying texts that teach us to think about thinking: Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow or David McRaney's You Are Not So Smart among many other sources. Some of us have had the opportunity to sit in a seminar with a colleague who has developed her own expertise in this area and in thinking about how it applies to our work with students. And this fall, we'll all be studying this together all over again as we work to deliver this to our students.

Posts to come (things I'm thinking about) will be about how this work is going from a curricular design level and at a classroom delivery level. I imagine, too, that I'll be doing a lot of thinking about how to facilitate conversations among the colleagues at my level as I'm the curriculum team leader for the tenth grade, and I spend a lot of time trying to create meetings that support others in their work. Plus, there are other components to the curriculum that I haven't mentioned here--the grading of course goals, creation of assessments, creation of common assessments (the Writing Program). And then there's my work around the teaching of reading. I think a lot about how to help my students be better readers. I'll work some of that out here.

Shrinking Class Sizes...even if the schools can't/won't

Had some fantastic conversation with colleagues today about accommodations for ELLs, but the question kept coming up about how to provide accommodations for these students while still teaching the other students in the class. I suggested using the ESL Instructional Aides and Resource Teachers in the classroom in order to be more creative in our approach to teaching. Here are a couple of suggestions that came out of our conversation:

1. Teachers seem to often schedule their entire class for a day on Study Island (or another computer-based project where the students are largely working independently). The teacher's role is often to monitor the students on the computers or record the student results as they report in. If this is the case, then the suggestion is to schedule two days instead of one. Divide the class in half. Have half the students work on the computers or on the computer project. Work with the other half of the class in small group. On the second day, flip the groups. If someone needs to monitor/support the students on the computer, that's a great leadership opportunity for one of the students. If there is an instructional Aide in the class, that might be an opportunity for them, as well.

2. To get an even smaller class size, consider formalizing a group rotation format that will allow you to meet with groups of 10 (in the event that you have a class size of 30) so that you can target the needs of individual students. This will definitely require another adult for support, so it's most appropriate in classes where you have a collaborating teacher or a collaborating aide in the room. But here's how it would work:

The class would be divided into three groups. Group make-up, of course, is up to the teacher. It can be by ability level, language challenges, or heterogenous depending on the goal of the lesson. 

The class period would be split in half with groups rotating at the halfway point in the class. 

The whole class would be set up on a rotation that would look like this:

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Monday
Group Red	Teacher A Teacher B	Independent Teacher A	Teacher B Independent	Teacher A Teacher B	Independent Teacher A	Teacher B Independent
Group Blue	Independent Teacher A	Teacher B Independent	Teacher A Teacher B	Independent Teacher A	Teacher B Independent	Teacher A Teacher B
Group Yellow	Teacher B Independent	Teacher A Teacher B	Independent Teacher A	Teacher B Independent	Teacher A Teacher B	Independent Teacher A

So for the Red group, the first half of class on Monday would be spent in 20-25 minutes of direct instruction with Teacher A. At the halfway point in the class, they would move to Teacher B for some guided independent practice of the concept just taught. For the Blue group, they would start out Monday working on, perhaps, a computer program like Study Island or Fastt Math. Then, they would go to direct instruction with Teacher A. For the Yellow group, they would start out with Teacher B for the first half of the class and then go to the independent assignment for the second half of the class.

Some thoughts/ideas:
*.This rotation is set up so that every seventh instructional day is an assessment day, and then the teacher can reassign groups based on student need. 
*. The role of Teacher B may be intervention. It may be language instruction. It may be upping the ante for the students who seem to be breezing through the concept. That's part of the cool part of this rotation. 
*. Getting the students used to the rotation/having the grouping and the rotations posted on the classroom wall is key to the success of this idea. Otherwise, too much instructional time will be wasted in procedures. 

Summer

I'll be back. I am taking a much-needed break from thinking about school for the summer. This is an unusual move for me. Last year, I was thinking about the next school year before the school year even ended. I spent all summer preparing for a PD delivery for my co-workers. I stressed about the hiring of a new teacher in our building. I had to go to trainings. I was never not working.

This summer, I am very good at being on summer vacation. I went to one lunch meeting with some folks from work, but I really just listened. I went to one meeting with the representative from Scholastic so that we could purchase books for a new course that we are going to be running for our long-term ELLs, but then I walked out the door and back to summer vacation. My next work responsibility is on July 13th when I have a full day of PD related to the Seven Habits. I'm not thinking about it until I walk in the door.

I spent much of this last school year stressing over issues that were external to my own teaching, and I was not happy. The time off this summer has given me some time to rethink my thinking on that, and I'm working to get re-centered on where I know my skills, talents, and passions are. I am getting excited about the challenge of National Boards Certification work this year.

Just a quick summer hello. I'll be back here when my brain shifts back into school mode.

The Leader in Me... and ELLs

Our school is starting a new initiative next year called, "The Leader in Me." It is grounded in the "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," and it gives schools a common language for discussing leadership skills with our students. The program has been implemented in all the elementary schools in our district, and the middle school where I teach is exploring the program now with anticipated full implementation next year. 

I feel a collective eye-roll at times when I start coming at these things from an ELL perspective. I get it. 88% of our students are not ELLs. But 12% of our students are. And our current population of ELLs is coming to us from refugee camps in Thailand and Burundi and Somalia. These aren't kids who have been living in the United States for years and are still struggling with language acquisition. These are kids who have just arrived in the country and are just trying to get their cultural feet under them while struggling to maintain a hold on their home culture. Some are just stepping into a school for the first time. 

So I've got questions. Read this paragraph from The Leader in Me: 

"First, observe the universal nature of the leadership principles that are being taught at the schools. The principles are timeless and, in most cases, commonsensical. I did not invent the principles; they have been around for ages and are familiar to all cultures. So whether a student is stepping out of a sizable home in an upscale neighborhood or out of a thatched hut in a rain forest, the principles will enable them to make better choices today and improved their tomorrows" (13).

Honestly, this paragraph made me really uncomfortable. So I'm trying to explore why. I started a conversation about this at a faculty meeting last week, and a colleague suggested that all cultures value respect, and that is one of the things that this program teaches. At the time, I agreed. But I was still uncomfortable, and I went home that night and thought about it, and here's the thing: yes, all cultures value respect. But showing respect differs greatly from one culture to the next.

The book, Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands, is great for leadership reference. It explains how to do business in sixty different countries. Here's a bit from the book about doing business in Austria:

• Austrian executives are often very charming, relaxed, and unhurried. They do not usually respond positively to high-pressure tactics or limited-time opportunities. 
• Austrian management style emphasizes consensus-building and sophisticated "people-skills." Confrontation is to be avoided even if rules must be bent to do so.

However, in Argentina:

•  Argentinian negotiators have a reputation for toughness, yielding very little. Part of their immobility is due to the fact that they are generally averse to risk. 
• Personal relationships are far more important than corporate ones. Each time your company changes its representative, you will be starting again from scratch. New alliances must be built before business can proceed. 

Let's translate this to some things I have seen in my teaching. Students from Burma call their teachers, "Teacher." It is a term of respect. They would never call their teachers by their names at home. In the same way that I call my doctor, "Doctor" and not "Steve", they call their teachers by the title. And kids arrive in schools in the United States, and the rules shift on them. While it seems like a very small issue, it is an issue of formality and familiarity. Titles mean something. I'm still struck when my colleagues call me, "Mrs. Bowman" in our faculty meetings when no students are around. I want them to use the familiar, "Kim" when talking with me. I'm not comfortable with the formality. I think it makes building personal relationships more difficult. I've been asking people to call me by my first name for six years. Yet that's not always the norm for the culture of our school. So it's a tough shift. Imagine what that does for students when we ask them to use a more familiar term than what they've used their entire lives.

Or when having a disciplinary conversation with a student from Tanzania, it's nearly impossible to get them to make eye contact. How many times have I heard teachers say to students, "Look at me when I'm talking with you?" Who knows? But respect in the United States means that when I am speaking, you are making eye contact with me. Even if it makes you uncomfortable. Students have told me that they can be admonished for eye contact in their home countries. That level of disrespect can warrant a smack with a ruler in some places. And then they come to our schools, and we ask them to show us respect by doing something that has been ingrained in them as being disrespectful at home. And we wonder why their disciplinary issues leave them feeling all topsy-turvy?

The other day I was teaching, and a student from Tanzania wouldn't stop talking out of turn. I gave him a quick warning, and his apology was quick, as well. "My bad." Sigh. I stopped class for a teachable moment. I pointed out to him that "My bad" is an apology perhaps better used with friends than with teachers and that it isn't appropriate to apologize to a teacher using that phrase.

Fast forward to yesterday afternoon. A non-ELL student was coming out of the cafeteria. He had just picked up his yearbook at lunch, and he was walking down the wrong side of the hall with the book open, looking down at the pictures in the book, and not paying attention to where he was going. He ran right into me. The corner of his book caught my arm in just the right spot and left a three-inch scratch/slight cut on my arm. His reaction? "My bad." Sigh.

What's the takeaway? All of our students need a lesson in registers of language. But some kids are trying to negotiate appropriate responses from a different point of view. And we need to be sensitive to that as we implement any program in our school.

People are excited about this program. Me, too. I have a background in leadership development. I used to run a Challenge Course for a living, and I spent my days dangling from climbing towers and trying to get people to understand how they impacted the others in their group. I just am wary of implementing any program without considering the cultural biases that may be embedded in the program or in the people implementing it. I have questions. But I'm out of coffee this morning. Just want to start people thinking. And talking. If I can. 

TESOL 2012 Presentation

If you are looking for my TESOL Presentation on using iPads and iPods in the classroom, please see my links page.

TESOL--Nodding with Kate Kinsella

I am at TESOL in sunny Philadelphia this week. I seldom find myself nodding my head while listening to a speaker, but I've nodded my head at all three presentations I've seen by Dr. Kate Kinsella this week.

If you aren't familiar with her work, check it out. Below are some links:
Many resources from the Santa Clara County Office of Education

Or do a search for her name.

I had the opportunity to speak with her briefly at a dinner hosted by National Geographic, and I was excited by our conversation about needing to find a balance between theory and activity. When you are at a conference like TESOL, you see a broad range of presentations--many very theoretically based and many activity based. True pedagogy, though, is somewhere in the middle between those two, and I think that's where a lot of teachers are lacking balance. They want to ask, "But what am I going to do with the students?" without thinking a lot about why they are doing what they are doing. Teachers often feel as if keeping the students busy is a sign that learning is taking place. On the other hand, teachers who spend all their time thinking about theory don't think about lesson delivery. Balance.

She is working with multiple publishing companies, and I have seen three programs of hers, and there is a common thread running through all of them--rigor for students at all stages of language acquisition. There is also a structure to the teaching piece. I love her push to have teachers be more thoughtful about the language of their instruction.

So here are the three programs:

From Scholastic: English 3D
From National Geographic: Academic Vocabulary Toolkit
From Oxford: Oxford Picture Dictionary for the Content Areas

If I get some time to do a more complete review when I get back from TESOL, I'll put those up here and link them in the other section, but I'm excited about all of these series.

Vocabulary Relay...a Friday wrap-up activity

This week, I wanted to close the door, ignore the lost top of my desk, turn off the phone, and shut off the email. I finally got to Friday. Second period. And I was there. My class was wrapping up a grammar-based unit on comparative and superlative adjectives, and I needed a closing activity. Vocab relay. 

We had a set of adjectives that we had been studying as a class, so I took the pictures that were representative of those adjectives and made three copies of each picture. Each adjective was marked with an A, C, or S. A=Adjective. C=Comparative. S=Superlative. And then we took the pictures and mixed them up on three different tables in the back of the classroom. By the time we were done, there were a total of 69 words for the students to consider. In addition to mixing up the pictures, we also mixed up the numbers assigned to each picture. So on any given table with 23 numbers on it, a group might have 2, 38, 47, etc.

Students were divided into three teams at the front of the room. One person was chosen by each team to be a writer for the first round.  The other team members were designated as runners. (The writer would change in each subsequent round.)

The game would be played in four rounds of five minutes per round. Each team was assigned to a table for each round. This prevented traffic jams and kept the students focused. After the first three rounds of being assigned to a particular table, the groups had the fourth round to run free to any table.

Rules were simple:

• Students had to be back in their seats at the time that the bell on the timer rang.
• Students had to work in English.
• Only the writer could write. Other students in the group could not take the pencil (or an eraser) to correct.

I've used this activity before in several different ways, but this was the first time I'd done it with this vocabulary. As I was going around the back of the room making up the master list, I became acutely aware of all of the layers of thinking that had to go on in order to have success. The mixed up numbers required that I remember one thing. The vocabulary word itself required that I come up with another. And then the label A, C, or S required that I determine the proper spelling for the word even if I knew what the base word was. And I was just making the master list. My students had to figure all of that out and then go back and report it to someone else who was desperately trying to write it all down. 

After we played the four running rounds, I gave them four minutes in their small groups to check and correct their papers. 

Wrap-up: I took their group papers and checked them. I made a copy of each group's paper for each student in the group, and I gave those back out to the students with the incorrect responses marked. Then, individual students went back to the tables and corrected the work that they had missed during the game. This gave me a chance to see who was still overly reliant on their vocabulary notebook. 

A few great things:

The language generated by this activity is awesome. When the students are under pressure from the clock to communicate with one another, the target language is not just the vocabulary from the back of the room but also the language of negotiation with a writer who is trying to understand what they are trying to communicate.

It's a great assessment piece without the students feeling the pressure of formal assessment. After watching my students go through all the rounds, I knew who understood the grammar construction intellectually, and I knew who understood it and could use it orally. I also knew who only got the basic vocabulary and did not yet have the comparative/superlative concept. 

The kinesthetic side of things made for an awesome Friday morning activity.