A few years ago when I was just starting to explore flipped learning, I was given an iPad by the district edtech TSA.  I had never used one (or any iOS device) but I needed a way to make videos so it seemed like a logical choice.  

The biggest problem was that I didn’t know how to make videos.  I had done some very basic video editing in the past, but lacked knowledge about any current apps or software.  The TSA suggested ShowMe as a good first step.  It’s an interactive whiteboard app for iPad that lets you narrate over slides.  There are very few choices - adding pictures, a few colours, and an erase function.  And that’s it.  I know it may seem limiting, but when you are first starting out, reducing options makes something Really Scary seem far more approachable.

So I started making etymology videos.  I took what I would have done in class and put it on video.  What I found was that I could get through the instruction in ⅔ the time, AND be able to walk around the room helping students and keeping them on-task.  Students who missed class or spaced out could see the video again on their own time.  Slow writers could pause whenever they wanted to.  Even though I didn’t end up assigning it as homework, it saved us so much class time that we were able to do far more writing than we would have pre-flip.

The next thing I used ShowMe for was creating videos of me reading the text aloud (Night, Looking for Alaska, Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby and Crown of Dust so far).  I would put the text on screen, then read it aloud.  I sometimes mark my place with little dots down the margin so students can follow along.  

On Saturday, I attended my third #EdcampSFBay, and Sam Patterson and I ran a puppet session for the second year in a row.  We are big fans of puppets in education for lots of reasons, but this year I'm taking it to a whole different level: 

All my 6th graders are making their own puppet.

The idea came out of the laptop distribution being mid-week for 6th grade.  I wanted something that would help them learn the 4 C's while infusing some bootcamp skills.  And puppets are always the right answer.

Each of them was tasked with designing a puppet that would be their friend and physical avatar all year.  I asked them to draw their puppet, name it, infuse it with a personality, and give me ideas on construction.

Tomorrow we will sew, hot glue and decorate the puppets, then comes the hardest task: making the puppet live and breathe.  That task is not just about making noises and moving the puppet's mouth.  It's about creating a character so vibrant that you willingly suspend your disbelief about it being more than a piece of fabric and some eyes.  It's about weaving a complex narrative with a character who has flaws and strengths and talents.  It's about the fundamental act of creation.

I’m not a fan of routines.  I wake up at slightly different times every morning.  I get bored if I start my class the same way every day, or even every period.  I go through bursts of being interested in something in sort of an all-consuming way, followed by boredom and eventual abandonment.  Andrew is the same way; it’s one of the things we had hoped the other one would be better at but yeah, no luck there.

And yet we regularly advocate a routine-driven teaching practice.  It’s a confusion that has kept me off-balance for some time.  It comes down to this: if routines are good for my students, I’m willing to do them.  However, I’m not good at following through with routines.  So my good intentions of following through sometimes end up in the same place as if I had never tried.

Case in point: I told my students I would read them the morning announcements every morning, but to remind me if I forgot.  

It took one whole day for me to forget.  One of my very sweet 6th graders reminded me that I hadn’t read it and that I had asked them to remind me.

The same thing applies to blogging.  If you look at my blog, there are periods where there are bursts of posts followed by long dry stretches.  I don’t spread the posts out evenly throughout the year.  I just capitalise on the motivation when it shows up.

As I was sitting in the first session of #edcampSFBay, I got this tweet:

I have, in fact, written about patterning longer texts, but I'm not going to link to it.  It's buried in the archive, and rightly so.  It's not very well-written and really complicated and ridiculous.  Thankfully, I have a collaborative partner who has made me a MUCH better writer since the last time I posted about patterning novels.

So let's talk patterning.

Tomorrow, I begin my first day as a middle school teacher.  

I didn't go to middle school (I was homeschooled and skipped 8th grade), so this is literally my first day of middle school.

I think about the last ten years of First Days, and these are the things that stand out to me:

• Students want to know what they will be doing, but mostly, want to know they will be loved, accepted, and safe.
• Reading a syllabus to them is a super boring way to start the year.  That's not the tone I want to set.
• The questions are usually, 1) Will I have homework? 2) Can I get an A in this class? and 3) Will I like you, and more importantly, will you like me?  That last question doesn't ever get asked.  At least out loud.  And the answers to the other two don't really matter.
• I'm always nervous.  No matter how many years I've done this, I'm always nervous, and I'm never ready.

I feel very blessed to be at Del Mar this year.  We are 1:1 with MacBooks, we have collaborative planning but in the context of a team where we are all capable and have different skill sets, and students are engaged in project-based learning.  This is so different from my last year that it's hard to imagine all of the ways my teaching practice and pedagogy will change.

But amidst all that change, I really only have one job tomorrow: 
to convince the students through both words and actions that I am committed to loving them and teaching them.  

In that order.

If I can do that, the rest will be fine. 

I’ve been thinking about perseverance a lot lately.  Maybe it’s the move down to 6th grade from high school, or going back to teach in a community where I know students often struggle to fight back from setbacks because they think that what they do defines who they are.  

Or maybe it’s because I see how far my students got last year and wonder, just like every year, if I can do that again from the beginning.

We also discussed perseverance as one of the traits we most wanted our middle schoolers to develop as a student at my new school.  But when we were asked to identify things that we would see or hear that could demonstrate perseverance, we got stuck.  It’s one of those characteristics that we all know when we see it, but trying to build a checklist of behaviours that evidence perseverance is pretty different.

It’s something that Andrew and I really focused on last year.  We taught our students about Growth Mindset (GM) and made an effort to always praise for effort and hard work rather than intelligence or academic performance.  The student who most embodied the change for me was a 9th grader named Josh.  

In my head, there has always been a distinction between “real writing” and what I did for classes.  Even in college, the way I wrote for fun and the way I wrote for a grade varied dramatically.   Lately, I’ve started to wonder about how to move from what we currently write (and teach as “academic writing”) to something that is “real writing.”  It seems like the only classes in high school that attempt “real writing” are either a course on Creative Writing or an AP course.  The implicit assumption, of course, is that to want to be a good writer, you need to sign up for a separate course.

Essentially, what we are saying to all our other students is that it is not worth it to teach you the art of writing because you didn’t sign up for a separate writing course.  

But even worse, for the students in “regular” English, we turn writing into a science, a formula, and train them to plug in values until they’ve finished the required five paragraphs.  You know what we’re REALLY teaching them? That writing is difficult, boring and completely irrelevant.  If they are lucky, they will leave high school with the belief that writing is a drudgery undertaken because the alternative is getting an F. 

Actually, there is something worse: thinking that because you can churn out a five paragraph essay, you are a good writer.  Those students get a harsh awakening in their first college course.  It’s just a guess, but I would bet that there is a large percentage of college drop-outs who could trace the reason they left back to their lack of ability in writing and their gradual awakening to the truth that what they learned in high school was nowhere near good enough outside of high school English class.

So what’s the alternative?  

Teaching students to read like writers.

In the last post, I talked about a close reading strategy we use called patterning.  It takes a text and breaks it into objective pieces so the reader can analyse the rhetorical structure and the underlying meaning.  But another way we use the patterning strategy is to just look for general patterns in a text instead of looking for patterns in parts of speech and with the connotations of words.  I tell students to just notice words or ideas that repeat and note them as they go.  

Instead of just explaining the strategy, I’d like to model it for you.  And you get to play along at home.  This is a short text called “Regret for a Spider Web” by James Wright.  As you read, try to notice words or ideas that repeat.  Your goal is to find between 3-4 patterns, or groups of related words, in the text.  If you’d like, you can actually comment on the text itself and we can make this document sort of a giant internet close read.

Ready?  Don’t click Read More until you have done this for yourself, and ideally, commented on the document linked above.  Trust us: it’s way more fun that way.

In the traditional high school English class, writing starts with crafting a thesis statement.  From there, students are directed to find evidence to support the thesis.  Then they are supposed to explain that evidence in commentary.  That claim-evidence-commentary becomes a body paragraph.  And every student has heard “the introduction tells your reader what you are going to say, and your conclusion tells them what you just said.”

I’m sure it’s not shocking that I think teaching writing like that produces mediocre writing and very little critical thinking.

However, Andrew and I have found another way.  When we teach writing, we teach students to lead with ideas and evidence, and build an argument out of those ideas and evidence.  I know many English teachers think that if you ask students to come up with an idea and to gather evidence without a thesis, they would end up with disjointed, disorganised, lazy reasoning and therefore bad writing.

And most English teachers also probably hate grading those “thesis-driven essays” for reasons enumerated in this post.  

Luckily, there is Another Way.

There are few things more important to a writer (and we’re all writers) than authentic feedback.  And yet teachers either take this task so lightly or they get overwhelmed with the whack-a-mole task of finding ALL the mistakes and marking them in red pen.

First I want to differentiate between grades and feedback.  A grade is a type of feedback - it’s a snapshot of the quality in reference to an arbitrary scale of letters.  And the problem with grades, or one of the many problem with grades, is that what is an A in one class is a C in another, and an F in another.  

And the main problem is that grades, especially when they are assigned to a draft of a piece, are antithetical to developing a writer’s practice and ability.  A grade says “Your writing is good” or “Your writing is average” or “Your writing is poor.”  How does that help a writer, especially a young writer, improve their craft?

Imagine a father, giving a kid a bike without training wheels for the first time.  He gives his son the bike and a handout about how to ride the bike.  Then he sits back on the curb and waits.  When the son finally gets on the bike and crashes a few seconds later, the father holds up a scorecard that says “2/10 - Poor Effort. Needs Improvement.”  

If you were that kid, would you get back on the bike again?  Even if you loved riding a bike, or thought that you could learn to love it, you certainly wouldn’t want your dad to see you ride again.

What happens when a technology you rely on to run your classroom effectively stops working?

That's what happened with autocrat.  

For the last year and a half, we have used autocrat to create student documents.  It's sort of magic - we embed a google form on our website for each class that asks for name, email and assignment title.  When students submit the form, a script runs and creates a document with a standard (i.e. easily searchable for me and the students) title and heading.  It then sends the students an email with a link to the document it created.  The document is owned in my drive and organised in folders for each class, but the student has editing access.

Well, with the new Google sheets, scripts have lost the ability to trigger the script to run when students submit the form.  You can still set it up, and frankly, it is 10000% easier in the new sheets.  You can also still trigger the merge to happen by pressing a button, but when students are creating documents asynchronously, that won't really work.