Mind the Gaps: Transitioning from "Me" to "We" in the Classroom

I have been making substantive changes in the way that I am teaching this year.  Chief among these changes has been an effort to tranform my Amerrican Studies course from one that is lecture/teacher based into one that activity based and student centered.

 

In my world history class I went 7 1/2 weeks without a single lecture. The change was not difficult, in fact I find that the change has made the class more enjoyable to teach and made assignments easier to grade.  I spend much more time interacting with students and I have interactions with a far greater number of students each day. Making these lessons isnt hard because I have only been teaching this World History course for three years.  I see it with new eyes and I think in activities and learning activities. 

Making this shift in American Studies is a horse of a different color. I have been teaching US history in general and American Studies specifically, for all but 2 of my 17 years in the classroom.  As a result I have an well ingrained program with nice connections and themes.  There are thematic strands and there are connections to the literature built in throughout.  I havee taught the class using a thematic approach, the decades approach and I have even taught it backwards.  The downside is that despite the organiztion of the class, the core of the program has been pure lecture. Another level of difficulty is that the class in 55 students (with two teachers).  Any activity has to consider this factor. 

So the transformation has begun and I am pushing ahead.  I have been running through the lessons as they were every night and trying to build activities that keep the rich connections between the units.  I have been working dilligently to inject the unit to tunit themes that make my curriculum cohesive.  Ihave found that it can be hard work if only because when I am pressed for time or in a pinch I tend to default to my old lecture mindset. 

It is working and the process is getting easier. I feel the class changing; more from them, less from me.  These are some takeaways and  the things that I find are helping with the transition:

• Since each the activities are chunking topics and concepts. I find that it is very important for me to create effective transitions from one to another.  Here I have created mini lessons that make these connections clear and place the topic for the day into context.  I call this “Minding the Gaps.”  I have found that it works best with a visual so that they can see where they are and how it connects.     (It works so well I wonder why I don’t have a similar visual prepared for all of my units in all of my classes?) When I do it right, the flow from day to day and activity to activity is as smooth as it was when the class was more teacher centered.

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   Laura, my co-teacher is great about cutting throught the extraneous and telling the truth about how things work in class.  So I have made it a point to share my goals and my feelings about where I am.  This puts four eyes and two minds on the problem. It makes the change faster and more efficient. I have never been disappointed with the class’s ability to understand documents and expresses complex ideas.  They are getting it on their own.  I suspect that this will be more satifying to them in the long run.  I know it has been more satisfying to me to see them discover and understand.  My fears that something would be lost in the transition have been unfounded. 

 

• The idea of making the class more activity based is working for me and I feel it is working for the program.  The group of American Studies teachers meets every Monday and we have increasingly included creating activities for the art and achitectiture poritons of the class.   

Overall I am pleased with the resutls.  I am going through the enevitable “Why Didn’t I Do This Earlier” debate in my head but even that is a good sign.  There is a lot of work ahead, but I am moving forward. 

A New Take on Professional Collaboration

As the year goes on I am noticing that when faced with a common task, I address it in an uncommon way, or at least differently than I have in the past. I believe this is the result of the incredible amount of collaboration I have been involved in this year. (Props to my tweeps here!)  

 

This week it was time for my student intern Tamar to present her first lesson.  She is a senior who as part of our school’s educational intern program assists me in class.  The topic of the lesson was “Roman Social Structure: Plebeians and Patricians and the Twelve Tables”

Our planning began with just a basic lecture format.  As we continued to plan Tamar kept throwing out things to plan to the lesson. So I kept adding to them as well. Rather than play the role of limiting her and keeping the lesson basic as I usually do, at some point I decided to let her run with it, make it bigger and see what happens.  By the time we were finished we had a lesson that divided the class into groups, gave brownies to the patricians, confined the plebeians to the floor, increased the conversation among the students, and had them discussing the injustice of a variety of legal scenarios.  Oh, and it took less time than what I used to do, seriously. 

I gained valuable insight into how students think and view learning.  My intern Tamar gained an understanding or what it means to collaborate. Meanwhile the students in class went into the lesson with a completely different mindset knowing that the lesson was created by one of them.  I always want my class to have a culture of learning that is about “us’ rather than me and them.  I am proud of the discussions and collaboration that creating that environment generates. I wish I had thought to have students make lessons for me before.  It got me thinking…

While it is standard in the twitter-verse to see collaboration between teachers, I want to challenge you to bring students into planning a lesson.  I think it might make a great incentive for students or serve as a way to connect kids who are disengaged otherwise.  It is another way to hand them the reigns and let them control the path and procedures of their own education.

 Can I also mention that I love the idea of breaking down the divide between teacher and students as I was teaching about breaking down the wall between Plebeians and Patricians?  It’s kind of poetic really.  

Little Tweeks to Get a WOW!

My ancient Greece unit is solid.  It builds a foundation for future units. I had even built in some flexibility with multiple readings and activities so that I could vary my teaching from year to year but still address each learning objective. 

But nevertheless, the unit was flat.  I remember thinking that the unit needed a wow factor.  I wanted all of the learning to congeal into a powerful conclusion that would have them thinking about Greece weeks later.

 So I took all of the readings that I use in class and instead of using my standard teaching copy, I started from scratch with clean copies so that I could read them with new eyes. 10 minutes later I had what I was looking for.  It really only required one very small change. I changed order of readings in a way that allowed me to develop a new idea.  

I began the unit as I always had but included a new theme: “What are the qualities of a good leader?”  Then after a brief activity on the geography of Greece I assigned a reading from Plato’s Republic.  For those not familiar with it, it is a discourse leadership that promotes the idea that a philosopher leader is best.  I have always included the reading but it was more incidental to the unit than essential. We discussed it as a class and students finished by writing a personal belief statement as an exit slip.

Next we began preparation for our Athens and Sparta debate.  The kids love this. We focused on types of government but also kept in touch with the theme, “What are the qualities of a good leader?” I was amazed at how the debate frequently touched on the theme and was ecstatic when one student added to closing statements “Maybe the Spartans were better warriors, but that doesn’t mean they were better leaders, force isn’t leadership.”  Big smile from me.  J

 The finally tier of this sequence was an analysis of Pericles’ Funeral Oration.  Once again for those not familiar, Pericles, the leader of Athens, is speaking to the families of dead Athenian soldiers at a public funeral.  He masterfully describes the greatness of Athens, gives credit for the greatness to generations of soldiers past, implores the mourning to respect the  legacy of the dead by supporting the continuing war.  I decided to recreate the speech and have the students evaluate it as I did so.  To make it more fun we had some student lie on the floor to remind the class what this event was.  Others were told they were their families and should act the part.  I entered from the hall wearing a full toga and wreath.  The families jeered.  I stood on the desk but instead of reading Pericles I read the Gettysburg Address.

 This surprised even me. As I went into the hallway to create “the big entrance” a student mentioned that it sounded like Lincoln at Gettysburg. I remembered that Lincoln had used Pericles as a model while writing the Gettysburg address. Once in the hall I searched for it on my iPhone and went with it (two minutes to read, 2 minutes to explain and connect).  It was well received, and made a powerful connection that the students really liked.

As I dramatized parts of the speech students shared what they thought the text was saying.  We shared, analyzed and then moved on.  The next day the topic for that discussion was “Was Pericles a Good Leader?” The resulting conversation included Socrates, Plato, Athens, Greece, Lincoln, Obama, Congress, our Principal, and me. 

We had fun, lots of fun, trying to make sense of the past and the world we live in today.  I came into class the next day to students still debating. Later that week I ran into a student and a parent at the local Starbuck’s and the mom told me about how they had talked about Pericles and Congress at dinner.

Pure, Authentic Learning

Last week my friend Adriaan called me and asked if I wanted to go to a World War II re-enactment.  To say it was last minute is an understatement since he was in the driveway when he called.  Ten minutes later my kids and I were on the highway headed to Rockford for what turned out to be the largest WWII re-enactment in North America.

http://midwayvillage.com/photogallery.cfm?setid=1006

My kids never really asked much about where we were going and I never really thought to explain it because it was so last minute.  When we arrived I was planning on having to sell the experience, especially to my son who likes to say “I’m not really a history guy dad.”  I never needed to.  As we walked into the event there was a re-enactment of the allies liberating a French town that was so loud and so fascinating that we all just stared in awe.

I spent the rest of the day trying to keep up with them as they ran from display to display.  Each re-enactment group had been camped on location for days.  As we walked through the camps the “soldiers” explained their equipment, their trenches, why they were there, and what they were fighting for.  They walked through the trenches and climbed on the equipment.  My kids just soaked it in. 

On the car ride home it was quiet for about 10 minutes and then the questions started.  There were lots of questions. I answered them one after another.  This went on for the entire ride.  I love it when that happens. There was no need to generate interest or to distill some connection. I I was just giving them the knowledge they wanted.

Moments like these are gold in the classroom and in life too.  Creating this dynamic is what I do for a living. It was nice to have my children embrace the event and learn so much. It was pure authentic learning as it should be.  

I am pondering how I can make such pure interest a bigger part of my classroom every day.