A win--win for the Writing Workshop classroom








The Parent Coach Plan

A few weeks ago I read about a technique called "Two by Ten.” The idea was that a teacher should spend a few minutes each day for ten days interacting one-on-one with his or her most problematic students, not nagging or scolding, not even necessarily discussing school issues, but just talking.  The results reported were impressive: Troublesome students suddenly became more cooperative in class and acted out less.


To me, this is a clever way to connect with our male students without their risking losing face by becoming "buddy-buddy" with the teacher, as Ralph Fletcher suggests can easily happen in his book Boy Writers:  Reclaiming Their Voices .  Embed this strategy inside a writing or reading conference, where a secondary male student doesn't feel singled out amongst   his peers, and we have a win-win for all involved. 

Now, granted there would have to be some discussion of school-related issues; after all, it is a literacy conference. But that conference excuse, if you will, permits the conversation to go in another direction, perhaps a more personal one or one that is more human-centered and less educational goals centered.  And ultimately, it allows teacher-student conversation to turn to a more individual level.  Individual conversations are the foundation of building relationships.  And relationships often foster learning… and cooperation, says Professor Raymond Wlodkowski, author of the “Two by Ten” model.

Most of us are probably familiar with the premise: Get to know your students for better classroom management as espoused by Harry Wong and many others.  We  use interest inventories and other techniques to know our students.  We informally greet students at the classroom door each period and take a disruptive student into the hallway to ask what is going on instead of calling him out individually in front of his peers. But sometimes keeping 32 students - including several rambunctious boys- on task and learning can be a challenge.

It seems to me that in a class modeled on Writing Workshop principles, teachers can integrate “Two by Ten” quite easily without changing too much in our classroom practice.

One consideration I will need to make is my current seating chart where students are grouped into pods of fours.  I imagine that a student would be less likely to have a longer discussion in front of his three other group mates, so I may need to adjust my seating practices. 

If students were seated in three double rows, I could scoot up to each student on the aisle to ensure a little more comfort as we chat.  I imagine that the class seeing me roll on my mechanics' stool around the room and chatting with several students one-on-one, as I already do, would keep the sense of routine normal. The only difference would be the students I chose to talk with each day and the length of time I stayed chatting.  My normal philosophy is more One-Minute Teacher style to touch base with as many students as possible.  But this may not be the best use of my time. 

Spending another minute with problem students may be the investment that pays the most dividends for the entire class.

The circus has opened

My apathetic seniors.  My listless, sleepy crew that dutifully meanders into the classroom on Green Days, but only as close to the 8:20 bell as possible without being tardy.  My likeable slugs who rarely have their materials with them, who still haven’t gotten used to getting out their writer’s notebooks to answer the prompt written on the board every day since August 4, and yet who still gnaw at me to find a way to connect to them.

We have ditched July’s carefully crafted plan to appeal to popular culture with a Gothic unit and have shifted to the outdoors as a theme.  Anything related to outdoors, the one place most of them would rather be than stuck inside my concrete block walls, even though I have painstakingly plastered them with motivational posters, student work, inspiring quotes, class-generated anchor charts, and pictures of famous writers.   They couldn’t care less.

This week, like other hopeful highly effective teachers, I used the data I had collected from their pre-assessment to divide the pack into three smaller, more manageable groups, so it’s not so easy for them to snooze in the back.   And like a savvy teacher, I even remembered to document my use of data as evidence for my future evaluation.

Each group had a poem connected to the outdoors and a student whom I immediately proclaimed the expert in the group based on his 100% score on the poetry terms pretest. 

The gasps and groans commenced.  “How’d he get so smart?”  “ A hundred percent!”  “Are you kidding?” 

We had already done a model together with Elizabeth Bishop’s“The Fish.”  Three reads, a la Cris Tovani, and deeper each time: Once for what it says; once for what it means; and a third time, more deeply, for why it matters.  The why it matters part stumped them. Why would anyone care about an old battered fish and some fisherman/woman- they couldn’t decide- throwing it back?  Most of these kids had done that lots of times. 

Then Kim quietly offered a thought:  “It’s about respect.”

Heads turned.  Sleepy eyes opened.  “What are you thinking?” I asked her.

She elaborated, albeit tentatively: “It’s about respecting something. Even though it’s ugly and old, it can be beautiful.”

I nodded and smiled at my star.  Then we dug into the poem for evidence that would support Kim’s idea.  A few other stars found it while their peers nodded and smiled and copied down the evidence.

Later, as they read new poems in their groups, their interest fizzled with the third read.  Why does it matter to be “acquainted with the night?”  Why does it matter that “The Negro Speaks of Rivers?”  Why does an old root cellar matter?

Summoned to each group by the ensuing moans, I offered a little background about the poet or asked about the era in which he lived or suggested a part to reread.   Heads tilted and eyes shifted as students began thinking.  

Suddenly, the room changed.   It had come alive, as students blurted out ideas.  Higher order thinking ideas.  Ideas that connected a theme to the poem.  It was as if some worker had thrown the switch that illuminated each bulb in a random sequence around the three circles.  The circus was open for business!  Some students went back to the text, exclaiming that they had found evidence.  Other students gaped in amazement, then quickly jotted down notes. Everyone was engaged and amazed at their performance as a group.  They could analyze poetry!

http://hearingvoices.com/special/2006/circus/

 

All my carefully-crafted discussions about themes and characterization and conflict from the Gothic unit that had fallen flat now suddenly had impact and relevance in poetry, poetry about places these kids would rather be, and places that they know.

The circus is open! 

Now my new challenge: Keep the future acts exciting, the cotton candy deliciously fresh, and the timing just right to reach ever amazingly new heights.  That’s my ringmaster’s job.

 

http://hearingvoices.com/special/2006/circus/

 

 

 

 

Batter up… to the podium?

About fifteen years ago, I joined a church softball team.   My position was right field, the spot long-coveted by weak players who pray the entire game, dreading that a fly will veer so far toward the right field fence that the center fielder will not be able to dash over and snag it for the team.

No, I was not athlete.  I hadn’t played ball since I was in elementary school and could be talked into shagging baseballs out in the cornfield for my older brothers.  But I decided that my daughter who was taking Algebra II again needed to see her mom fail at something.  And what could be more public and humiliating than to fail at church softball, in front of people I would see on a regular basis and who would sympathetically cluck at me, rather than curse, when I struck out or jogged breathlessly to first base if the impossible actually happened and I hit the ball?

 

Probably like most people, I had spent the majority of my adult life engaged in activities and interests where I showed some proficiency.  And that expertise is what so deflated my daughter as she struggled with a subject she was not naturally gifted in, even though she was a “gifted” student.

I remembered my softball days today as I began searching for Socratic Seminar articles on overcoming the fear of public speaking for my handful of anxious students.  The tips in each article were essentially the same as those in the student text, so of not much help.  I cannily switched my search to YouTube, but with little success there, either.  I found ads or motivational TedTalks by coaches who clearly worked with highly proficient players.

That’s when I remembered another anecdote about my daughter. 

A few months ago, she shared with our writing critique group how she sometimes pauses the “Perfection Tape” that plays in her head when she begins a new piece:  She tells herself to create the worst piece of writing she possibly can.  Once that is on paper, the revisions come easily.  She has given herself permission to do a poor job; therefore, in her mind, it is acceptable as a first draft.

Her strategy is like when I tell my students to circle words they cannot spell.  It gives them permission to get the content onto paper and ignore conventions for the drafting stage. 

That’s when I had it:  I will schedule time for my Speech students to give the worst speech they can imagine.  Maybe we will even come up with a rubric for it. We could take the official speech rubric and negate it in as many ways as possible.  Then each student will have two minutes to try to outdo each other in the worst speech possible, as their first speech.  Of course, it won’t be graded, but it will allow them to mess up… and in a huge and public way, and with an appreciative audience.  Their second speech is bound to be better, now that they will have done their worst.

If it turns out the way my softball experience did, it will be an opportunity for nervous students to realize that even though we can sometimes look silly and inept, we can always improve.

Flipping success... or not

 

                In our faculty meeting, my new principal mentioned a study hall goal sheet that one teacher had brilliantly devised.   I decided to use that idea, too.  At the beginning of class, my study hall students in grades 9-12 must fill out a goal sheet for that day, so they are focusing on their homework during our time together and also building time management and organizational skills. At the end of the period, they check if they accomplished those goals and set new ones for that evening based on their leftover goals.   We talked about it as a devise to build their "Executive Functioning Skills."     Check out this freebie on TPT.

 

That leads me to consider the number of my students in my other classes who did not get their flipped assignments done last week.  Two students completed the flipped assignment in one class of sixteen students, and only 58% completed it in another. In my Speech classes that are open to all students in grades 9-12, three-fourths of the students completed the assignment. 

Those numbers make me wonder about the correlation between students’ success in a flipped format and their executive functioning skills.  If students are not organized or cannot manage their time well, I am thinking that the engagement value of a YouTube video, a Survey Monkey  survey or choice-related activity, no matter how entertaining or useful, will not magically create students who complete and submit all of their work. 

Granted, one reason so many did not complete the work could be because our delivery platform had changed over the summer, and I constructed a couple of tasks in a way  that might have been confusing for students who were not inclined to click more than twice.  But I wonder if another cause is that these basic students may have rarely been engaged or successful in the past.  So why should they be now just because the assignment is posted online?

Many years ago when I began teaching general education upperclassmen, I eliminated most homework other than long-term projects.  I found that these students, so used to little success in school anyway, simply did not do their homework.  Rather than their failing and learning nothing, or my being angry  every day or trying to swim upstream to create a completely new set of values for them, I switched my instructional model to be deeper with less homework.  We worked in class on chunks of text, instead of attempting to tackle the full text- which most weren’t reading anyway.  I left the remainder of the text as dessert for those who wanted more.  I used this same approach with success more recently in a school with higher poverty and where there was more trauma and drama in students' lives.

This morning, I posted a discussion on Flipped Learning Network  to see how others are using flipped formats with basic education students. Please join the conversation to share your successes and challenges with this population.

 I think I will also administer an anonymous survey on Monday and Tuesday to find out why some of my students didn’t complete their work on time.  If my survey reveals what I suspect- that they just didn’t care about doing the work for any number of reasons, then next week, I will have to entice them into the flip.

If they don’t have the organizational or process skills, that’s an easier fix.

First Day: Huzzah!

Well, I survived another first day of school... and in a new corporation. 

Being on block schedule helps somewhat.  My mouth isn’t as parched and paralyzed as it would have been if I had spoken to six or seven classes today instead of only 4 and a shortened homeroom.  And I was able to implement a few slick tricks that made my first day terrific.

First was the fantastic seating chart idea that my former colleague Kristi Shipley shared via Shawn Churchill.  It takes a little time initially, but, boy, does it save time in the long run.  I'll be using it all year.

The basic idea is to use small sticky notes with each student’s name on the blank seating chart.  Then when several students don’t show up, or someone transfers out of your first period section and into your third, you can simply peel off the sticky note and replace it on the other seating chart.

The second really cool trick relates to the interest inventory I administer every year to uncover my students’ strengths, challenges and interests.  This year, because my students have 1:1 devices, I created the survey using Google Forms, part of Google Drive. This program allows you to create a survey, and then it collates the answers into a spreadsheet.   My first questions asked students to enter their names and which section they had my class.  Then the questions about preferences, work and study habits, and interests followed.  Because the students had entered their names and their class period in the form, I can easily sort their answers on the spreadsheet and have all the responses from a single class within seconds.

What a handy way not to have to shuffle through sheaves of paper, and to sort information or create groups to differentiate in my classroom!

Because the diagnostic writing assignment is posted on My Big Campus, I brought home very little work today.  I will simply access it online tonight or tomorrow before I see the class again.   

IMHO, that is where teaching is headed: Teachers will be investing more careful prep time up front in pretesting, and designing purposeful tasks and activities that help students achieve in new media as they work their way through material and inquiry projects in flipped versions of classes.  This approach allows for more individualized pacing and scaffolding.

What new approaches are you using during the first days of school?  How are you using the flipped classroom model this new school year?   What successes or challenges can you share?

Starting afresh

Today I learn which classroom will be mine.  And I hope my official move-in will begin.

Will it be this room?

 

All my books and files, furniture and posters are packed and eagerly waiting in my garage to see which ones will be lucky enough to make the cut to go to my new school.  In two weeks, I’ll be teaching two new courses, so the cut will be severe, but I’m excited to begin working with somewhat new content and with a different population of students.

 

Or will it be this classroom?

 

As I have been sifting through my electronic files thinking about what to leave behind for the teacher who replaces me at this late summer date, I’ve noticed how much time I devote to community building at the beginning of the year.  Critics might suggest that I am ignoring my content for the first week or two, that I am not providing enough rigor at the outset.

But I disagree.

One thing I have learned over that past 16 years is that if teenagers are going to learn, if they are going to allow a teacher to push them, they have to have a certain level of comfort and familiarity at the outset.  Because things are going to get mighty uncomfortable later on.  And if I can’t connect with them and push them a bit now in an atmosphere of fun, it certainly won’t happen when they are far outside their comfort zones.

Below are a few of the activities I like to use during the first weeks of school.  They all help build community and help me understand the strengths and challenges of each student:

·         Kinesthetic Likert scale of intelligences- students line up according to their self-proclaimed intelligence in various activities, e.g. calming a crying infant, changing a tire, writing an essay, etc.  We follow with a discussion about multiple intelligences and school expectations and success.

·         Multiple Intelligence survey http://www.businessballs.com/howardgardnermultipleintelligences.htm#multiple intelligences tests

·         Myers-Briggs Personality Assessment  http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp  This activity is especially useful as we begin to craft arguments and audience.

·         Writer’s Notebook with safes (hand-drawn pictures of a safe with images of what each student values inside.  Great for writing ideas when drawing a blank later.)

·         Connections to music- which song or lyrics define parts of you?  Why?

·         Pictionary about hobbies, challenges, summer successes, and activities.

·         Socratic Seminar about topics in the news.

Each of these activities builds community and also serves as a piece of informal formative assessment.  They all answer questions for me about students’ self-confidence, skills, ability to generate ideas and argument, as well as their speaking skills.

In the first couple of weeks, I also weave in my processes and classroom systems… more about them later.

How do you build community among your students during the first days and weeks of school?  What knowledge do  you gain and use later?

 

 

What I want for my students

This 4^th of July week, perhaps appropriately, has been a reminder of the power of the community.

From the rallying of the family to tear down our old deck to the contributions of teacher Fellows who have just completed an intensive three-week summer seminar, I’ve been reminded that in community we grow together, even in unexpected ways.

The backyard renovation project seems to have started an eternity ago, but this holiday weekend we made a measurable dent in the demolition of the huge deck that surrounded our 30’ pool.  It was a success because each of us brought a little different strength to the overall task.  

For example, my husband fired up his old Allis Chalmers tractor, finally able to use its hydraulic brutishness to knock over the 4 x 4 uprights. Middle son Ted used his need for cash to spur him to extraordinary feats with the crowbar, attacking 12 foot long deck boards, even in the intense heat of the day.  Youngest son John toted and stacked board after nail-infested board on the trailer bound for the city recycling center.  An uncle welded the hitch that broke and stalled progress for only a couple of hours.  Even the neighbors kindly tolerated our un-Fourth-ish racket as boards cracked, hammers pounded, and Allis chugged throughout their holiday celebrations.  The backyard has changed, improved. And so have those who together are making it happen.

On Thursday, teachers from across Indiana shared their insights and accomplishments at the Summer Institute Celebration of Indiana Writing Project.  Each teacher, all from different levels of experience and educational philosophies spoke about their significant takeaways from their three weeks together.  And, perhaps more importantly, how their journey together had changed them.  It was an impactful testimony to the power of community.

In both cases, by the end of their time together, each person had learned a little more about how to do his own task more effectively, how to assist with the challenges of others, and  how useful patience and tolerance can be.  Together, as a community, everyone grew and achieved. 

That’s what I want for my students.

As July begins and my weeks of summer freedom are numbered, now comes the challenge of creating a community for a new group of students. But as this new year begins, I want to move beyond using interest inventories and team building activites.  Maybe into service learning or project-based learning… something that has authentic purpose and positive outcomes for all.

How do you see community at work in your life?  In your classroom?  How do you foster a sense of community?  In what ways have you seen it impact motivation or achievement in your students?

Are teachers becoming extinct?

“Teaching was so much easier in the old days.”

 “Kids are so different now.” 

“This generation just isn’t the same as we were.”   

parentinginformer.com

 

How many times have I heard these complaints from veteran teachers?  In the hallway between classes, after school, at conferences.

I am struggling to know if this is really true as I think about how to motivate next year’s crop of sophomores.

It is true that I am a little different as a teacher:  I’m not a worksheet teacher at heart,  even though my early days of teaching were planned mainly from the teacher’s edition with sprinkles of what I considered exciting embellishments of opportunity.   That helps somewhat. 

I believed in authenticity and choice early on.  That pragmatic philosophy came from managing a house with five kids as a first-year teacher.    I also came from hearty, progressive teacher stock:  My mother’s fifth graders used carpet spools to build giant log cabins during their pioneer unit and created a twenty- foot pterodactyl to hang from the ceiling.  My childhood was filled with hands-on learning.

Even so, in some ways I do see general differences emerging over my past 16 years of teaching.  I see students who are

•        More open with their lives- sometimes when I’d rather they not be.
• Less respectful towards adults in general.
• Less concerned about homework if social activities or jobs are in the picture.
• More willing to work in teams or groups.
• More investigative, especially when it comes to using technology.

http://www.ttuhub.net/thehub/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/iStock_000018170994_Medium.jpg

 

Now that most of our kids are out of the house, I’m curious about this generation I’ve helped create. 

And I’m wondering how I can use these new traits to my advantage in the classroom.  How will I need to shift my practices to keep my new audience of students engaged and achieving? 

As Haw says, “If we don’t change, we could become extinct.” Who Moved My Cheese?

Is the cheese is moving from your perspective?  How are you moving with it?  Or not?  Why?

A teacher's sacred rites of summer

Every teacher needs to be forced to clean his or her classroom every year, whether it is to move rooms or just as a masochistic rite that marks the beginning of summer. 

For those of us who don’t teach by the book, the cleaning and sorting process takes just a bit longer. 

Like most teachers, we must also recap the markers, gather the chalk and erasers and magnets, and take down and sort the posters- all twenty- something of them. We also stow our cute family photos, displayed with the intention of making us real people to our students.  And we also remove the wall calendar. 

But those are the only similarities.  Now we must debate whether to save the pictures as possible writing prompts for the future, because we know that though there are millions of images available online, sometimes holding a picture in one’s hands is the next best thing to being there. 

Only then the sacred rite of packing up begins.

The first challenge is finding boxes for all the items that may not be left on the desks, tables or shelves so the custodians can wax or shampoo the carpets.  Not all boxes are created equal, so we tend to look for paper boxes first, and hope that no one has been hoarding them for a move to Maine.  If we are lucky or ambitious, we secure banana boxes through a young relative or parent who has a part-time job.  These are the sturdiest of all and can manfully handle books that must be removed from the ten bookshelves that circle our room.  The dozen tiny Amazon boxes tossed in the garage, albeit made of strong corrugated cardboard, are saved as a last  resort.

Then the boxes must be loaded, preferably in a neat and orderly system because, of course, they will all be unloaded in the two weeks before school begins in late July when no one wants to sort random stuff left over from last school year.   In order to save the custodian staff some work, we begin making an effort to consolidate into as few boxes as possible. Games in one, or two… or three.  Playdoh, beanbags, marker boards, extra erasers and markers, flashcards, baggies, all go in one marked educational tools.   Except for the two items that are just a hair too big and keep the lid from fitting.  They go in another “misc” box, so labeled because we can never spell once school has ended. 

Now it’s really decision time. Over the year, the plastic closet has been crammed with new artifacts, pushing last year’s stuff to the back.   What can be pitched, given away, or placed neatly in the boxes already labeled?   Leftover handouts:  When will we teach that unit or class again?  Is there space in the filing cabinets?  Half-used spiral notebooks: Should we tear out all the pages to recycle them? What about saving empty file folders with both sides labeled?  

This process can take hours. 

As the empty boxes evaporate and we are getting discouraged, we decide to face our past head-on.  We contact the custodians for the combination to a teacher double-locker just outside our door. No worries;   we are teachers now, not students, and the combination works and there is no tardy bell ringing in our ears.    Aha!   The small baskets will fit- what can be crammed into them?

Now there are only the giant stuffed tiger, the bent curtain rod with faded blue sheets, and two decorative foils from the Cyrano de Bergerac unit. What the heck?  Leave them out and let the custodians have a little to grumble about.

Finally, everything on the desktop is swiped into the drawers to be sorted in late July and artfully replaced, as we start all over again.

Glass and houses

Here’s a loaded question: What do whiskey and cigarettes have in common in my life.  No, they’re not my coping mechanisms at the end of the school year. 

Let me add Kellogg’s cereal and Hershey chocolate.  Stumped? 

These are some of the factories my family toured while we vacationed back in the 60’s.  While they all might not have been age appropriate, they still gave me indelible images about production and a wider vision of how the world works.

Exactly like my recent field trip to Kokomo Opalescent Glass   http://www.kog.com/  and the Seiberling Mansion http://howardcountymuseum.org/tour.php  in Kokomo did for fifteen girls.

In this age where the focus on STEAM has replaced STEM, which replaced math and science, which replaced all curriculum, teachers and parents giving students the chance to experience a variety of careers and opportunities still results in widening their opportunities.

Up to Kokomo



Last Monday, my colleague Beth Roop and I drove the white mini buses up State Road 9 and then headed west for about an hour to the stained glass factory.  The girls shrunk back a bit when we entered the hundred-something-year-old building with its dusty floor and cobwebbed ceilings.  They clearly were out of their element. 

Their attention shifted immediately with the intense heat and blinding glow from the 2600 degree furnace that melted the sand and ingredients.  They whispered to each other about the danger of carrying huge ladles filled with molten glass from the furnace to the rolling machine, but they edged closer to get a good look.  Even they were shocked at the $65,000 monthly gas bill reported by our tour guide.  They smiled as they watched the artisan blowing into the long tube to shape the blobs of hot glass into flat round plates of glass used as centerpieces for stained glass windows.  And by the time we saw the artisans making glass beads and laying out pieces of glass for windows, all of us were imagining the designs we would create if we were the ones behind the work tables. 

Career Connections

During our tour, each of the girls learned about surprisingly different careers: They could be a chemist who created recipes for various types of glass; an engineer who designed the machinery that created the glass; a social media expert who marketed goods across the world; an artist who designed stained glass windows for churches or famous singers like Elton John; even a retail store manager, selling delicate works of art, instead of burgers and fries or clothing.

Howard County Historical Society
After our lunch and tour of the Neo-Jacobean Seiberling Mansion in downtown Kokomo, the girls came away with new career possibilities in historical preservation and museum curatorship, interior design and folklore, all career topics that are now more to them than just majors listed on a college website.

 Lasting Impressions

And more than careers, the girls learned about production and manufacturing.  They learned that goods don’t just appear: There is a process that people create using math and science and language and trial and error.   They learned that the past can give us guidance for the future, if we take time to learn it.

Above all, these girls took with them a wider window on their world, a chance to see how many people take their passions in life and turn them into pleasure for others…while also earning a living. 

What an education!

Testing fun... and rigor

It’s testing time again. 

My Indiana Writing Project colleagues and I have been holding workshops for teachers who are giving ISTEP, Indiana’s current version of high stakes testing.  My area of expertise is the English 10 End-of Course assessment or ECA because I taught sophomores for 16 years and through several incarnations of the graduation exam.  I'm proud to say we had some great success together.

Not much has changed in terms of how to prepare students over the years, even though the stakes and the content has evolved:  It really begins on the first day of class, when teachers build students’ confidence and create high expectations for their learning.

But in the short haul, in these days before the test, sometimes even the best teachers are tempted to cram one more fact or approach in hopes that students will score just a little higher.  It can get out of hand and burn out kids before they even see the test, despite teachers’ good intentions.

To maintain everyone’s equilibrium in the noxious atmosphere of education these days, I encourage you to balance fun and rigor.  Play a game for a few minutes during class.  Construct a healthy competition between teams of students as you review.  Encourage students to write questions for each other using satire from The Onion or some nonsense poetry.  Get students up moving as they bowl for literary terms or answer conventions questions.

And start planning now to set the tone for testing day.  Last year at my school, we created a PowerPoint presentation for students to view as they enjoyed their protein breakfast funded by local businesses.  The content was the generic test-taking tips that we hoped all students would remember to use when they opened the test booklet or turned on the computer.  But to up the engagement, we created some buzz beforehand. 
 

We elaborately staged photos of the student-testers themselves a week or so before the test and were sure that no one saw it before test day.  One student had climbed on a desk to point to the clock for the reminder about budgeting time in his photo shoot.  Another looked as if he were shivering on the slide with a reminder about wearing layers.  By featuring the students themselves, we were assured an attention factor of almost 100% on test morning.

So, insert a little fun in your test prep.  You'll see the payoff in more engaged students.

Find some of my fun and rigorous test prep materials at
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Second-Classroom-On-The-Left/Order:Most-Recently-Posted

What Is success?

For the past seven or eight years,   I have taken my students to the local university library.  They enter, awed at the four stories of books available to them as they begin their academic writing careers.  By the time their instruction session has finished, and they have become intimate with databases, the electronic card catalog, academic journals and Boolean searches, some I have found weeping in the stacks on Third Floor, East, hopelessly confused about how to locate a particular title; others I have seen stumble down the steps looking dazed, their eyes unfocused and their voices not quite coherent.

Even so, most tell me later, sometimes years later, that this field trip is one of the best they have taken.   They have been challenged to find what academics have written about their research topics and have used it to create their own arguments.  They have conquered the various types of scholarly media that a university offers and supports.  And they have seen firsthand the rigor and expectation of the post-secondary education world – as well as the hundreds of college-age hotties they failed to impress, properly putting them back into their place in the pecking order of academia.

Sadly, this field trip has dwindled from including all my sophomores to only a few AP Language students.  The number of students being exposed to this academic world has decreased from two buses filled with eager students of all backgrounds and capabilities to only the few high ability students who have hung in there for the second semester of a challenging course.  It has become difficult to take students out of their classes with high stakes tests for field trips. Other teachers complain.  After all, their students' tests results impact their performance reviews.  I get that.

But if all students truly must be college and career ready, they all should be given the chance to see what  college expects of them.  Shouldn’t the students who claim in their writer’s notebooks that they want to be doctors and lawyers, nurses and physical therapists, teachers and computer designers, video game designers and vets see what will be expected of them if they choose to pursue these paths?  Isn’t that a large part of making them college and career ready? 

What a shame that "success" is more frequently becoming created from sitting in a classroom, memorizing facts and working practice sets to pass a standardized test, instead of experiencing the challenges of conquering higher level inquiry.

Would you rather…?

Would you rather swim in a pool filled with frogs or bathe in whipped cream every day?

No question. I’d take the whipped cream, even though I’d smell like a carton of  warm sour milk by the end of the week.  I hate frogs.

Yesterday at the Indiana Writing Project’s workshops “ISTEP: The Write Strategies,” my colleagues Kathy Flatter and Lindsey Thompson shared several fun ways to make the writing to a prompt genre more engaging.  One of them was the “Would You Rather…” game.     You may remember the concept:  Two equally difficult scenarios are juxtaposed for players to consider... and defend.  In the board game version, you might have to predict the response of another player or the consensus of the group after discussion to earn a point.

But there are also websites devoted to these ethical and silly conundrums.

Here is an example from nicka who submitted a proposition to the sometimes inappropriate for school website http://www.rrrather.com/ :  Would you rather… go way back in time and meet your ancestors OR go way into the future and meet your great grandchildren? Interestingly, the website actually breaks down the total 289,452 votes by gender and country, which could be a great tool for prediction exercises and higher order thinking…. but that’s an idea for another day.

I agree with Kathy and Lindsey that using these questions IS a super way to engage kids in creating argument.  Some of the choices can be really wacky and appealing, especially for kids who are learning to create and support written argument.  But I am in the throes of trying to help ninth graders respond to multi-part prompts about Shakespearean text, and these questions seem too simplistic at this point in my unit.

So, I’ve decided to write a few of my own, two-part challenges.  “Would You Rather… Double Dips” I will call them, or  WYRDD’s.

Here’s one that I am going to use in an online discussion next week: Would you rather… Pick a fight with someone you hated and be terribly wounded, OR defend the honor of someone and be beaten in public?

Here’s another:  Would you rather… Marry your true love and never see your family again, OR marry someone rich and retain your family’s love and support?

Okay, so maybe these prompts aren’t as engaging as the whipped cream  or time travel ones, but they do meet my academic needs.  They connect to the themes of Romeo and Juliet, and they provoke a moral or ethical responses, a sure hit with teenagers.

But they are also more than that: Students will need to discuss BOTH elements of their choice, not just one and justify themselves. That’s the part that will help them with the multi-layered prompts they will see on their state tests, the part they are currently struggling with in classroom writing.

So this week we’ll do a couple of WYRDD’s together and then students will create their own WYRDD’s from their independent reading books and post them for their peers. By Friday, I 'm hoping they'll be ready to take on a double- dip essay prompt about Romeo and Juliet, without any overt help from the whipped cream or frogs.