Week 8: Exploring Problems and Creating Solutions

I have to be honest. When I got to the end of the day yesterday, I thought to myself, "Crap. What did I do that was new this week??? What am I going to write about in my blog?" All week, my students have just been working on projects, so I didn't actually do much in terms of teaching and trying out new strategies.

My ELD 2 students are writing children's stories (which I mentioned last week), and next Tuesday, we will go visit a friend's 3rd grade class to share those stories. However, even though this is something "new" for me in ELD 2, I actually did this same project - including the part where we go to read to elementary school children - with another class a few years ago. So that doesn't count.

My English 11 students are working on their final projects for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The idea for the project is the same that I used last year, but I tweaked the project a bit for this year... so I guess that counts as "something new" for this week.

We began our unit on Huck Finn by reading "The Lowest Animal" by Mark Twain and discussing the problems that Twain saw in American society. We also talked about satire - how it uses humor in order to bring about some kind of change. This lead to the connection that Twain used his writing in order to raise awareness to the problems he saw and bring about change in American society.

Throughout the unit, I showed the students some videos and we read some articles about different problems in society, such as the female standard of beauty, the inequality of wealth, sexual abuse, suicide, and the way people view mental illness. (Here is a document containing all of the different articles and videos I used.)

Although they didn't know it, all of this was done to prepare students for their final project in which they had to choose a problem and create a solution. (Last year, I just asked students to outline their problem and propose a solution. This year, I raised the stakes by asking them to actually create a solution.) As many educators know, students will do a better job with something if they know that it is going to be presented in some sort of public forum. Often, a class presentation is not enough to really push my students because they are already so comfortable with each other that they don't feel pressured by this. Also, I decided that proposing a solution to their peers wasn't really good enough because it didn't wind up bringing about any real change. Sure, the 36 kids in my classroom were more educated on the topic, but that's not enough if we want to change the world! Therefore, I decided to ask them to create a solution that would be presented in some way that it could potentially reach a much larger audience. I gave them a few ideas - they could create a blog, they could mail a letter to a newspaper, they could make a YouTube video, etc. - but I also told them that they knew a lot more about technology than I do and that they had the freedom to do whatever they wanted to do (aside from making a poster and just presenting it to the class). I told them I wanted them to be as creative as possible, and I showed them the video of The Mimi Foundation's "If Only For A Second" project as well as the commercial for the GoldieBlox toys to help give them some examples of "creative" solutions. I emphasized that I didn't expect them to completely solve a problem in society, because that would be almost impossible; what I wanted was for them to raise awareness about their issue in order to help bring about change.

I started by having them brainstorm at least 4 problems per group, and then they shared out using "Novel Ideas Only" while I recorded their ideas on the board; they came up with ideas ranging from ISIS to cyberbullying, from today's hook-up culture to immigration. Then, they chose the issue they wanted to focus on. Next, they had to decide on the venue they wanted to use to create their solution. I have a group making a blogger, another couple are making blogs through Tumblr, and quite a few groups are creating videos to post to YouTube. I gave them this entire week in class to work (because, as I told them, I really want the projects to be good), and the best part? They all worked on their projects for the entire week! They will present them this week during the first half of their final period, and I am very excited to see what they have to offer. (I will follow up later this week with links to their various blogs and videos.)
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Ease of use: The idea for this project took a lot of building with my students. As I mentioned, we read quite a few articles and discussed quite a few problems before I even introduced the project. However, the idea behind the project is that I am having students create some kind of change in the world, and I am giving them free technological range in order to do so. Since kids these days are so creative when it comes to technology, I really didn't have to teach them anything; I just offered some ideas here and there, such as using programs like Screenr or Screencast-O-Matic to help them make their videos. 
Would I use this again: Yes. I really like the idea of giving students choice, and they really like being given choice. I may still change this particular project a little bit in the future (because I tend to do that every year), but I will stick with this idea for this project and others.
Downsides: You need to have access to technology if you want to give students time in class to work. You also need to make sure you have some form of accountability in place on a daily basis to keep students on task. 
Applications: I think this idea of freedom in presentation could be used for any project that you typically assign as a PowerPoint presentation or poster. Open it up. Let students be creative. Encourage them to step outside their comfort zone of just always making PowerPoints for every project they ever do. 
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UPDATE: Here are links to some of my students' projects:
http://weareequalsposts.tumblr.com/
http://policeabuse.freeiz.com/
http://helpstop-animalabuse.tumblr.com/
http://lewisfinalperiod1.blogspot.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSwvTXhsmPQ
http://big-brother-etta.tumblr.com/
http://hellosavetheanimals.tumblr.com/
http://obesityislame.tumblr.com/
http://helpstopdomesticviolence.blogspot.com/

Week 6: SparkNotes Reading Quiz (aka, How I Finally Beat SparkNotes!)

I have finally outsmarted SparkNotes! Throughout my career as an English teacher, SparkNotes has been the bane of my existence. Don't get me wrong... I appreciate SparkNotes as a study tool, and I even used to use it myself when I was trying to find a specific event in a book. (At this point, however, I've read books like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby so many times that I don't have to reference SparkNotes anymore to find anything because I pretty much have the books memorized.) I tell my students at the beginning of the year that SparkNotes is fine if they are using it to help them understand what they read in the book. In the cheating activity that I do at the very beginning of the year (which I mentioned in an earlier post), I even go over the appropriate use of SparkNotes:

Scenario: For homework, Ms. Toone asked her students to read and take notes on Chapter 1 in Of Mice and Men.

1. Joey did not have time to do any of the reading. Instead, he just copied down some notes from SparkNotes.
1. Is this an example of cheating? Why or why not?
2. What should Joey have done instead?
2. Maria completed the reading and the notes. However, she wanted to make sure she completely understood what happened in the chapter. Therefore, she went to SparkNotes to make sure she didn’t miss anything. She added a few items to her notes, in her own words.
1. Is this an example of cheating? Why or why not?

I do all this because I want my students to see that they need to actually read the assigned books, as opposed to just reading SparkNotes. I also warn them that I will catch them if they are just reading and taking notes off of SparkNotes (which they never believe even though I always have a TA who I previously had as a student in English 11 the year before, sitting in the front of the class, nodding his head in agreement as I am telling the kids I will catch them because he has first-hand experience with this). No matter how much I emphasize this point or dock students points when I see that they are just copying notes out of SparkNotes, I have never completely succeeded in getting them to read.

Last year, when I started implementing the single-question reading quiz, I told my students that they would not be able to answer the quiz question if they didn't actually read and only looked at SparkNotes. In a previous post, I mentioned how I have been using that method this year with Huck Finn; however, I occasionally slip up. 

Last week, my quiz question on Ch. 16 from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was something along the lines of, "What was the bad luck in Ch. 16?" I knew that SparkNotes gave the students one answer, but the real answer was that Huck and Jim missed Cairo and the Ohio River. Even though I had resolved to not accept the SparkNotes answer, I didn't stick to my guns in 1st period. Why? I don't know. But I definitely kicked myself for it when 2nd period rolled around, especially when I heard students talking about how they had just read SparkNotes. When I overheard this, I mentioned to the class that that answer was only worth partial credit. I saw the kids look at each other because they knew they'd been caught, but I also knew that this wouldn't deter them from doing the same thing in the future. I needed to think of something.

Then it hit me. I could use SparkNotes as the quiz itself in order to force my students to read. In other words, I decided to copy the summary from SparkNotes and then asked my students to tell me something that happened in the chapter that was not included in the SparkNotes summary. Why had I not thought of this sooner?!?

The next day was Thursday. I had to be out on Friday for professional development, so I told my students that there would not be a reading quiz until Monday. I warned them that they would not be able to answer the question if they only read SparkNotes. Some of them looked at me in disbelief, but I reiterated my point; in fact, I told them I could guarantee that they wouldn't be able to answer the question if they only read SparkNotes. 

When Monday of this week rolled around, I was ready. As soon as my students walked in the door, I passed out their quiz. They looked at it, and some of them laughed nervously because they hadn't taken my warning seriously. That day, I had 5 kids in 1st period and 6 kids in 2nd period who failed. I continued to give the same type of quiz every day this week. By the end of the week, I only had 1 or 2 students in each class who failed. (The kids who fail still have to read and write the 1-page summary, due by the end of the period, just like I mentioned in a previous post.) I knew I'd won when one of my worst SparkNotes offenders asked, "Are you going to do this all the time now?" "Yep." "Oh..."

Have I succeeded in getting my students to read? For the most part, yes. I am sure that some of them are still finding ways around actually reading and are perhaps just memorizing random facts from the chapters assigned. However, the thing that I love about this method is that it forces everyone to read a summary of what they read the night before at the beginning of class. This means that everyone - even the kids who didn't  really do the reading - are now at least somewhat prepared to participate in a discussion on the book. It helps the students review the important points of the chapter(s) and serves as a jumping-off point for the following activity.
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Ease of use: This is the easiest quiz you can imagine! If you can copy + paste, then you can do this. 
Would I use this again: Yes. I am going to do this forever. I love this. Okay. Maybe not forever, but I will do this for as long as it seems to be working... or perhaps until I don't need to do it anymore because my students are finally actually reading...
Downsides: As I mentioned above, I'm sure some students are still figuring out ways around reading, but as of right now, this is the best weapon I have. Also, and this is kind of silly, but I was used to just telling students to take out a half-sheet of paper and writing the daily quiz question on the board; now, I have to remember to make copies in advance, which is not always easy for me to do...
Applications: Reading quizzes on any novel that has summaries written on SparkNotes (or shmoop or any other online forum, for that matter). 

Week 4: Follow-Up From Last Week & Holding Students Accountable

Last week, I wrote about how I was trying to hook my students into reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I was only assigning reading in class, and I was letting the kids choose their reading strategy. At the time, it seemed as if things were going well. Unfortunately, when I returned after the weekend, and after having a sub at the end of the previous week, I discovered that, to my dismay, quite a few students had not read what they were supposed to read in class with the sub. I don't know if I chalk this up to the fact that it was Friday, that it was Halloween, that there was a sub, or a combination of all of these. I don't, however, blame the reading strategies. Why? On Thursday of this week, I had my students write their journal as a reflection of their chosen reading strategy. The topic was: "Reflect on your chosen active reading strategy. How's it going?" When we debriefed the journal after the students wrote for 10 minutes, the majority of them said that their strategy was working well for them. Interestingly, the majority of them have chosen to take notes in their notebook, which is what I would have forced them to do, if I had forced them to do something. The funny thing is that since they got to choose to take notes, instead of being told they had to take notes, they are all, for the most part, actually taking notes! Win. Win.

I realized that that part of what I was doing was working for the kids, but I still didn't have them 100% hooked into the book. On Monday, one of my few avid readers came in and told me the book was killing her. She said she'd tried to read the chapter and put what Jim was saying into modern language, but she couldn't; it was too hard. I thought to myself, "Oh man, if I've lost this student, I am definitely going to lose the rest of them." I needed to figure out what to do. I also needed to speed up our reading and start assigning homework. I came up with two solutions.

Solution #1: Holding Students Accountable

My first solution was that, if I needed to assign homework, I needed to hold students accountable for doing the homework. In the past when I've assigned reading homework, I'd follow-up the next day with a 1-question quiz right at the start of class. I tell the students that the quiz will be really easy if they read. (I make sure that the question can't be answered if the students simply looked at SparkNotes.) I also tell them that the point of the quiz is for me to see if they read, so if for some reason they can't remember the answer to the quiz question, they can write me something else that proves that they read. I make each quiz 20 points, and it goes into the "Tests & Quizzes" category in my grade book, which is worth 25% of their grade. This is enough to get the kids who care about their grades to do the reading. In order to get the rest of them, I would tie the quiz scores to some incentive at the end of the unit - something like, "If you don't pass X number of quizzes, you will have to do X at the end of the unit." This still never worked as well as I ever hoped, and I realized it was because it wasn't immediate. The kids didn't care right then about having to do whatever I told them they'd have to do later on. 

I realized that the punishment needed to be immediate, and it needed to be worse than doing the reading for homework. (For those of you who are familiar with EEI, I realized I needed to "raise the level of concern.") Therefore, I decided to make all students who failed the reading quiz do the reading in class that day and write a 1-page summary, which would serve as their ticket out the door stole. (This is a method I stole from Emily Toone, another English teacher at Fallbrook High School who is currently working as our ELL TOSA.) When I introduced this to my students, I asked them why they thought I was doing this. One student said it was because I was mean, but the rest of them understood it was because I wanted them to actually do the reading. 

Did it work? For the most part, yes. In my 1st period class, I had about 5 students out of 38 who didn't do the reading and had to write the summary; in my 2nd period class, I had about 6 students out of 36 who had to write the summary. With my previous method, I usually had about 1/3 of the class who wouldn't do the reading, so those numbers are much better. I am hoping that the number of students who don't do the reading will decrease over the next week, because the kids who had to write the summaries were pretty miserable when they realized I was serious. ("Yes, you really have to do this." "Yes, it really has to be a page." "Yes, you will not leave until you give it to me.")

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Ease of use: You have to have some time built-in in order to be able to check the quizzes right away and determine which students need to write the summaries. I just have my TA's check them quickly while I am explaining the next activity. Then, I wrote the names of the students who failed the quizzes on the white board and told them they needed to write the summary instead of doing the next activity. Aside from making sure the timing worked out, it was really easy.
Would I use this again: Yes; I am going to continue to do this throughout our unit. If it goes well, it may become my go-to method for what I do every time I assign reading for homework.
Downsides: As I mentioned above, it means the students who write the summary miss whatever you are doing in class, but honestly, they wouldn't have gotten much out of what we were doing in class since they hadn't done the reading.
Applications: Holding students accountable for homework assignments.

Solution #2: Creating a "Glossary" for Jim's Slang

With the strategy above, I got my students to read for homework. Now I needed to make sure they could understand what they were reading when we weren't reading together in class. While I was putting my son to sleep on Wednesday night, it hit me. If I gave them a glossary for Jim's slang, then they would be able to reference it while reading in order to help the understand what Jim was saying. Then I thought, "Wait a second... if I just give them a glossary, half of them won't even look at them, and it won't really help them to be able to figure out what they're reading when they come across words that aren't on the glossary... I need to make them make the glossary! I need to make them do the work!" Then I fell asleep, since it was Wednesday night and putting my son to sleep involves me holding his hand and falling asleep on the floor next to his crib. 

The next morning before school, I created this worksheet, which I copied and gave to my students on Friday. (The reading they had to do on Thursday was a chapter in which Huck and Jim weren't together, so I didn't have to worry about them not having the glossary before Friday.) Here is an example from the worksheet:

1. “No, sah - nuffn else”

1. sah = sir
2. nuffn = nothing

Translation of line: No, sir - nothing else.

I included the line in addition to the words I wanted them to translate, so the students would be able to use the context clues in order to help them translate what Jim was saying. I figured this would be a good idea because it would help them be able to dissect the language on their own later on in the text.

I gave the students the worksheet after their vocabulary quiz on Friday, and they worked on it in their table groups, with a partner, or individually. Overall, they seemed to get it. Even my ELLs were successful with it. Now, the test is to see if they actually use it. (But, I suppose, even if they don't use it, they've done the worksheet, which has helped to build their skills at using context clues to understand the words that aren't written in standard English.)

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Ease of use: Really easy. In the future, I think I will give my students this worksheet before we even start reading the book.
Would I use this again: Yes. See above.
Downsides: None.
Applications: Helping students become independent readers. :)
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Stay tuned for next week... I am going to attempt to get my ELD 2 students to write a precis!

Week 3: Giving Students Choice in Reading and Hooking Kids into Huck Finn

This past week, I started Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in my English 11 classes. Now, I know that there are two camps when it comes to Huck Finn, and I must admit that I am in the camp that LOVES Huck Finn. 

I first read the book when I was in third grade and was going through a phase in which I had to read all the "old" books on my bookshelves that my parents had read when they were little. Even though I didn't entirely understand it at the time, I enjoyed the adventure of a young boy being able to travel down the Mississippi River without a care in the world. (Like I said, I didn't really understand it at the time.)

When I was in 10th grade, I had to read the book again in my English class. It was actually the first book we read that year, and I was excited because I'd already read it and knew I liked it. I will be completely honest: if I hadn't already read and liked the book, I probably would have hated it as a result of reading it in 10th grade. Why? My teacher (we will call her "Mrs. F") didn't really do anything to make it interesting, and she never called on me when she asked for volunteers to read. I quickly became disengaged in class and read to myself, instead of following along with her monotone voice or the other students she picked to read. What's more is that when Mrs. F handed back our essays on the book, she told us that she'd graded them really "hard" and that we should be happy if we got a "B". We were Honor's students, so this worried us, and we all prepared ourselves for the worst. She wandered up and down the aisles of the classroom, handing back our papers; when she got to me, she looked at my grade and, before giving me my paper, said, "Writing's not your best thing, is it?" I was shocked. I managed some retort along the lines of, "Well, I just don't like to write about what people tell me to write about," as I grabbed the paper from her. When I looked at my grade, I was left dumbfounded. I had gotten an 80% - a B- ... As I watched her shuffle on toward her next victim, I shot laser beams through her back. She had just told us to be happy with a B, implying that not many students earned B's, and then she insulted my writing even though she'd given me a B-. What??? As I said, if I hadn't already liked Huck Finn, I'm sure I would've hated it after this experience.

This event (coupled with another similar experience I had in 8th grade) paved the road ahead of me, leading me to become an English teacher. I loved reading, but I hated my 10th grade English class. In deciding to become an English teacher, I thought to myself, "I don't want my students to have to go through what I went through. I want them to love English." Now that I have been an English teacher for 7 years, this is still what drives me. I have succeeded with some students, but I always feel the need to do more. (I know it is impossible for me to make every student love English, but I can try, can't I?)

The first unit of the year was The Crucible, a book I'd read in the same 10th grade class and hated. I had shied away from it in the past for this very reason. However, I wanted to challenge myself this year. I re-read the book over the summer, and I actually liked it! I found myself getting wrapped up in Abigail's lies and rooting for John Proctor to expose her for what she really was. If you did an informal poll of my students to see how many of them liked The Crucible, most of them would tell you that they hated it. Even though most of them understood what was going on, I still feel that, as an English teacher, I failed.

Now, I've had quite a bit of success with Huck Finn in the past, but I still usually wind up with about a 50-50 split of lovers and haters. My goal this year was to try to get more of the students to love it, because, as we all know, they are more willing to learn and to take risks if it is with subject matter that they are actually interested in.

In the two weeks leading up to our unit on Huck Finn, I stumbled across two blogs that helped me solidify my plans for the unit. The first blog was "How do you keep students engaged with a class novel?" by Jen Roberts. In this blog, Roberts explains how she tricks her students into reading The Great Gatsby on their own. She explains that she starts out by reading in class and making sure the students really understand what's going on. Once she has them hooked into the story, she starts assigning reading for homework. I have done this in the past with Huck Finn, but I definitely did not do this with The Crucible. I tend to fluctuate between: "But they won't read if I assign it for homework!" and "But they need to read outside of class!" Roberts' argument was: "They won't read if I assign it for homework IF they don't like it. If they are already invested, then they will read." When I was teaching The Crucible, I was in the "But they need to read outside of class!" phase, so I pushed them through the book instead of drawing them into the book. I decided to go back to how I used to do things with Huck Finn and begin by reading together in class.

The other blog I came across was "Start a Reading Revolution: Flip Your Class With Blogs" by Brian Sztabnik. While I am not quite ready to employ all of his methods in his "flipped" classroom (though I may be later in the year), what I decided to try was the idea of choice and allowing students to pick an active reading strategy which works best for them. Sztabnik explains that his students "must read actively, but get to choose their method: index cards, post-it flags, bullet points in their notebooks, etc." Usually, I force my students to take Cornell Notes while they read. Do I really believe that taking Cornell Notes is the best method of active reading? No. Actually, I, myself, prefer to highlight and write in my book. So why do I use Cornell Notes? Honestly... because my AVID students need Cornell Notes. Horrible. I know. Furthermore, I've had a lot of frustration with asking my students to take notes while they read because it doesn't actually force them to read the book - they can very easily go to SparkNotes, read the summary of the assigned chapter, and take their notes from there (despite the fact that I warn them not to do this and catch them when they do (see last week's post)). Therefore, I decided, "What the heck? My AVID kids can still take Cornell Notes, and everybody else can do what works best for them."

When I introduced this to my class, I told them they could take notes, they could use sticky notes, they could use note cards, they could buy their books (gasp!) and highlight and write in them, or they could download an e-copy of the book for free to highlight and take notes on. I also told them that if they had some other method, that was fine, too; they just needed to be doing something. One of my students said, "But I read best by doing nothing." To which I replied, "That's the problem. You need to do something." I am still making the students who aren't taking notes in their notebooks write a one-sentence-summary of each chapter in their notebook, just so I can give everybody points for whatever they're doing. A girl asked if she could just write the summary at the end of each chapter; I told her the point was to have her reading actively, and if she just writes something at the end, then there is no guarantee that she is stopping to think and reflect while she's actually reading.

The results? Well, we are only a week in, but so far, my students seem to be enjoying the book. When we read the first couple of chapters together, they laughed when Huck offered the gang Miss Watson to kill, and I thought, "I've got them!" I think I am going to give it a few more days before I actually start assigning chapters for homework. Like Jen Roberts, I want it to seem accidental; I want to be in the middle of the chapter, so they want to go home and finish it on their own. Will I be able to pull it off? Only time will tell...
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Ease of use: This is extremely easy to implement. You just have to be willing to go slow at the beginning. You need to be okay with the fact that you will spend an entire week (or more) reading about two chapters in class every day.
Would I use this again: I'm stuck with it right now. When I am done with the unit, we will see, but so far, I like it.
Downsides: Grading is going to be tricky. I told the kids I am going to have to be able to see what they're doing, but that means I am going to actually have to look through their books if they are using sticky notes. I don't have all of that figured out yet, but that's okay. Also, we definitely won't have time to read the entire book in class. I am going to need to figure out the sweet spot in terms of how much reading to assign for homework once I get to that point. I am a little worried about Veterans Day and Thanksgiving, but hopefully, I will have the kids completely wrapped up in the story by then... We'll see...
Applications: Any novel unit. Or, if you go with the bigger idea of "choice", any lesson, ever.