Testing after THE TEST?!

For many of us, especially in Texas, once the STAAR test is done we struggle to keep students interested in classroom activities. They have had so many years of standardized testing that for many of them it seems to be ingrained that the only important thing during spring semester is THE TEST. We teachers know differently. If you are like me, this is the time of year you have saved for the more creative and active lessons, like reading classical plays and pushing kids (in my case even further) to think and support their thoughts. The reality of the struggle is tough, especially when it comes time to give a unit test.


This time of year, I expect that my students have learned to think for themselves, question a text and are able to explain themselves. Since that is my expectation, I have been known to give them non-multiple choice tests. For instance, one of my favorites is called a Responsibility Pie Chart. I got this from one of my master's classes years ago and it has never disappointed me. The chart was created by the great Kelley Gallagher in his book Deeper Reading, and I have watched students sit and scratch their heads for the majority of a period to make a decision.


I used it with Oedipus Rex and my sophomores this week and it is always interesting to see who or what they feel is responsible for the outcome of the play. The best part is that they have to justify themselves too, so they are actually thinking about the play and not just which letter to choose!


If I could give every test all year long this way, I think I would. For an English class it is one of the best assessment tools I've ever seen!

The Problem of Vocabulary

I have been "teaching" SAT vocabulary pretty much the same way for years, and for years I've been frustrated with it. I struggle with how to teach general words (i.e., without a specific context going on) and usually feel like I'm failing at it. I like having an SAT word quiz every week because as an English teacher, that gives me an objective grade.

As I've been updating my grades, I am frustrated that so many of my students do poorly. I want to teach them how to study, but I forget that they don't know how to study. I can put the words on a flashcard app and for many that helps, but for others it is an afterthought. So I've decided that next six weeks I need to do something different. I need to find a way to take the time, that oh so important and valuable time to help them learn their weekly SAT words - words that they will see in future texts, on tests, and many they may even hear in video games.

So I've gone on a search. We have ten different words every week, more than that per week I believe is too much. I've found some really great ideas, some that I will begin instituting tomorrow: Create a movie trailer using the words in the description and the title; create a screen name with several of the words; the always famous vocabulary bingo (which may make me alter how many words I use per week); and texting a message using the words.

I've got lots of thinking to do for next six weeks, and it needs to be something that will not add additional grading to my already full week. I truly want to be the best teacher I can be for my kids, and that means I need to make some changes, and make them quickly. Students today don't know how to study and we don't have the time to teach them, the least I can do is institute some sneaky skills in my classroom.

Thinking Creatively

Sir Ken Robinson says that schools are training the creativity out of kids, and to a certain extent, I don't disagree. It seems the focus of education lately has become the test. That is certainly supported by all the parents who are opting their kids out of the STAAR test here, but when I see things like the artistic representations my 7th/8th graders presented today for a section of The Little Prince, my faith in creativity is restored.

I chose to have my 7th/8th grade class read The Little Prince because it is beautiful and has the potential to change one's view on the world. One of my girls told me that after reading it, she'd never look at the sky the same way.

I asked my class to choose a part of the book that for them scored an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the most beautiful section for them), and told them to create an artistic representation of that text. At first, like with all new things and teenagers, they hemmed and hawed and didn't think they could do it. Granted, it took a bit of a stern talk about pushing themselves and not just getting stuck where they are now before they truly took off with it.

Today they presented. We had drawings and paintings, but my favorite was from the same girl who said she'd never look at the sky the same way again. She and her father have a ritual of taking pictures of the sunrise each morning and sharing them with one another. She explained that that ritual makes the sunrise special to them. The part she chose in the book is where the Little Prince discovers a rose garden and finds that the flower he loves on his planet is not the only one in the universe. That moment he begins to realize, after some education by a fox who wanted training, that even though his flower was not actually the only one in all the universe that she was special because he loved her and cared for her. For my student, her sunrises are the same. She said that we know the sun will rise each day, but we don't know what it will look like. For several days she made sure to take her sunrise pictures facing approximately the same spot to help illuminate her point. Her pictures tell the story. Like the prince, we don't always realize how special the sunrise is or the little things that we labor to keep going are, but when it finally dawns on us (no pun intended) we know that even though everyone else can see it too (or like the rose there are many) it is special because it is part of a ritual in our lives.

Here are the sunrises she shared with us today in class, they are each from a different day and are in no particular order (the last is my favorite):

As she shared we all remarked at how amazing her photos are of the sunrises we don't always stop to enjoy. We, like the Little Prince, have taken things for granted much like he did his rose. We know the sunrises will be there, but shouldn't we stop and enjoy them on occasion. 

This student has not had the creativity trained out of her, and she can see past the standardized tests and into the beauty of the world around her and the rituals that make her life special. How can you help your students to find creativity and joy in their learning process?

Tension in Learning

My 5th thru 8th grade classes are beginning our Holocaust units, and today I did something completely different with my intro than I've ever done before. I scared them - hopefully no scarring occurred. Please don't misunderstand, the kids knew they were in a safe environment and I asked them to suspend our normal reality and enter into one I wanted them to experience. They all willingly followed me into a new, and ultimately scary experience.

We will never, hopefully, truly be able to experience what the victims of the Holocaust went through; however, today's kids need some sort of connection to the fear, danger, and emotions involved in order to truly empathize with the stories of those who lived and died. I began this experience today with a statement to my kids very similar to that one, and they seemed a little lost. Kids today typically think that if they do not get to play a video game everyday then their lives are miserable, and luckily, they do not have to face such obvious and forced persecution. Most kids (at least the ones I've worked with) don't know true fear, loss, misery, hungry, or injustice. All people today have experienced some level of those, please do not think me ignorant, and there are certainly kids today who live those things daily, but I needed my kids to have a more empathetic frame of mind before delving into our texts.

They came into the classroom and I had taped off two boxes, neither of them very large at all. When we began I showed them the "rules" they had to follow in order to succeed. Now, I've played tricks similar to this before with the kids (when I introduced Nightjohn I took their pencils away and wrote their writing prompt in gibberish yet still expected them to write), so they knew something was up.

Here are the rules I gave them to build a card house:

• You may not move out of the provided space, that includes any part of you
• If a card goes outside of the space, you lose
• You may only speak in whispers
• All of your cards must face the same way (only the face of the card may show)
• If you do not succeed, the leader of your group will fail
• You must build your card house so it has at least three stories, or you lose
• You must use all your cards, if you do not, you lose
• You must complete your house by the time the clock stops, or you lose

I did not actually give anyone a zero, I also did not let anyone succeed. I made them uncomfortable by walking around in my "stern" mode, I said things loudly, I kicked down their houses when they were just starting to figure it out, and I changed the amount of time they had to complete the task several times. Neither group was successful, they were all nervous throughout the task however. When it was done, I asked them to sit down, return to our reality, and pull out a piece of paper and reflect on their experiences. I asked them not to talk about it at first.

Here are some of the things they said:

"We were actually getting close to one story, but your friggin' foot just pushed it over! Don't try and tell me it 'brushed up against it'...NO!"

"My heart started beating fast when Mrs. Ranzau walked to us."

"Towards the end I wanted to cry..."

"I seriously considered tripping Mrs. Ranzau, just because I felt like she only walked by us to ruin our work."

"My hands were trembling, and I began to feel quite angry with myself."

"I couldn't stop giggling. I don't know that there was really a reason, but we didn't seem to stop."

My kids were nervous and I could feel the tension rising as the experiment went on. I noticed some kids pull into themselves when I walked past them after knocking something down or pushing their knees back into the box. They were immediately going into survival mode but didn't feel like they had any power to do anything about it. 

This got them all thinking about the reality they are about to read about in The Diary of Anne Frank and The Hidden Girl. I don't ever want my kids to feel as if they are in danger, anywhere, but I do want to encourage empathy. Without empathy and some level of understanding, we cannot truly learn from the words so many others have fought to share and protect.

A Classroom Kids Want to Be a Part Of

I teach grades 5-12, and I try to make sure my kids aren't doing the same thing over and over and over again each day. Don't get me wrong, we have certain routines we follow daily to keep us on a path, but I am constantly searching for new ways to teach the same old "boring" stuff.

My freshmen have just finished reading "The Most Dangerous Game" and I had deliberately set it up so they had to read it silently and we haven't really talked about it yet. I asked them to take what they understood about the story and set it in a completely different place so they could play with how the setting affects the text - we did talk about that as they were working. I got some interesting stories, and they were all able to see how things would have changed if the story hadn't taken place on a creepy, deserted island.

Today, I had them present their character wallets. I got this idea from the amazing Kelley Gallagher (look him up if you haven't read his stuff, you'll be glad you did). The idea is to create a wallet (or purse, or whatever) and fill it with things the character might carry around. We did wallets because the two main characters were men, and yes we chatted about some of the things they might carry. I suggested Rainsford's wallet would be water logged since he fell off a ship and had to swim to the island, and I got a wet wallet from one student this morning :) As the kids were presenting, they had to explain why they put what they put into the wallets. For Zaroff, several kids had hundreds of dollars because he wouldn't use a credit card - he would be traceable then and in his "game" he wouldn't want anyone to catch him. Several kids gave each a membership card to a hunting club since both characters were big game hunters. One student even had the two as members of the same club, she said it was because Zaroff was Rainsford's stalker (plausible if you know the story). A couple of kids had pictures in the wallets of the men with their first kills, and a couple had newspaper articles they'd created about the person commemorating something important to them. It was cool to see what they had come up with, and their art wasn't anything but scribbles and construction paper for some of it, but it was real.

I asked them how they felt about doing this project and they all seemed to agree that it made the characters more real for them. I love when my kids make connections to texts, and I LOVE when they enjoy doing it at the same time :)

Students of all ages want to be creative and they want to do something in class where they see value, i.e. authenticity. Don't be afraid to throw a crafty project into the mix, you might be surprised how much the kids can actually get from it.

Teachers: The World's Greatest Thieves!

Ok, maybe we aren't really thieves, but man do we know how to steal and use other people's stuff! As I was preparing for the year I decided to push myself and REALLY be prepared and organized this year. I sat down to write the full units, including rubrics and essay questions, for each book I had asked the kids to read over the summer. I teach grades 5 - 12 so that was quite a task! I had decided at the end of last year not to have the 5th/6th grade class students read a book simply because I wasn't sure whether or not the books would be returned, so that left me with four books to prepare (we currently have no sophomore students).

As I began my preparations for units that were engaging, incorporated elements of drama and theatre (role play, design, scripting, etc.), and challenging for the kids, I turned to some of my favorite professional texts to see what they had that I could use. With Readicide (Kelley Gallagher), Deeper Reading (Kelley Gallagher), and When Kids Can't Read (Kylene Beers) at my side (along with the trusty Internet), I began to plan and organize. In essence, I was stealing other people's ideas to make myself ready and organized and honestly, it felt great!

  

There is nothing wrong with using the things other teachers have put out in the open for us and there are some great places to share with teachers: NCTE's Connected Community, a Ning I just joined called English Companion (http://englishcompanion.ning.com) where English teachers from all over can chat and help each other out, TeachersPayTeachers (http://www.teacherspayteachers.com), The English Teacher's Friend (http://www.englishteachersfriend.com) and I'm sure there are tons of others (these are just the ones I use). We shouldn't feel like we need to reinvent the wheel for each lesson, we should take a base and adapt it so the new wheel fits our car. After all, no one has the same passengers as any one else, so why would we want to use exactly the same things?

Steal, invent, adapt, borrow, whatever word works for you see how great it can make you feel!

Planning and Learning

As I sit here eating the most beautiful Fritos pie I've ever seen and scroll through my Twitter feed to see what gems EduDemic has posted lately, I find myself thinking again about how I teach and how I learn.

We are three weeks into the summer break in west Texas and I've been planning for next year and in my own classes since before graduation. Perhaps that makes me a crazy person...more likely it makes me a teacher who wants to be well prepared as well as create as much challenge and authenticity for my students as possible. I sent books home with almost all of my students and am working to figure out the best way to delve into those books when we return. I want the books to be not only a discussion between us but also something to help my students realize the power of words.

Edudemic posted a link to an article examining the difference between projects and project based learning. Education is always full of trends and I feel like project based learning (PBL) has been one of those for a few years now. I am a fan of projects because I feel they can actually push students to guide their own learning. The article however disagrees, it's author seems to believe that projects are a waste of time and the end result is useless and unauthentic. The author also seems to believe that PBL is the only way to get authenticity from students. I can see where they come from, many teachers assign projects for no real reason. As I read through their list comparing the two I found myself identifying aspects in each column that I use when I assign projects to my students.

I hope that is a good thing. I never want to give my kids something that is worthless.