I am always looking for ways to present material to my students visually. I teach American Literature and Critical Media Studies, and I find that visual literacy is increasingly urgent for my students. They need to be able to read the images that they are exposed to in order to be literate critical consumers of media.
For this lesson, my goal is to introduce students to the Beat Generation writers of the 1950s and 1960s. Using ThingLink, I took this iconic photograph and added links to videos and audio of the writers, along with a few salacious news items. Before students peruse the links, I will engage them in a discussion where we break down the image in order to make inferences about the men in the picture, their relationships to each other, and the setting that they are in.
I have been skeptical about flipped classrooms. I worried about a Vonnegut-esque future where teachers were replaced by computer screens and YouTube instructional videos. I worried about having to spend more time monitoring and less time engaging with kids. I worried about losing my creative autonomy and becoming part of a hive mind.
But from the small experiences I've had with flipped learning, all of those fears were baseless. Good instruction is good instruction, and it will always require personal interaction and engagement, and a healthy dose of creativity. In fact, flipping a classroom actually engages my creativity more than preparing a traditional lesson. And that, to me, is empowering. The flipped lessons free up time in class to do the fun, creative stuff. Instead of spending 20 minutes providing direct instruction on grammar lessons, that direct instruction can happen at home. In class, we can focus more on reading, writing, responding, creating, debating...DOING. For the kids, flipped lessons give them extended access to the lessons. Instead of hearing my lesson once in class, they can watch it again and again until they understand. They can return to it to study before a test. They can pause and rewind. They can control the speed of their learning. Below I'm attaching two of my flipped lessons. One is a reading lesson which provides practice with identifying important details while introducing 11th grade students to the Declaration of Independence. The second lesson is a traditional grammar lesson about conjunctive adverbs and relationships which has been flipped to prepare students for an upcoming quiz. I look forward to building my library of flipped lessons for next year!
In my quest to learn more about Project Based Learning, I research 20% Time, and read up on Kevin Brookhouser's work with his 20Time Project. The slide deck below outlines some of my key takeaways.
...And Justice for AllReflectionThrough the process of learning more about PBL and trying my hand at creating a PBL unit, I have been inspired to make some fundamental changes to the way I run my classroom. Primarily, I'm driven to cultivate creativity in my classroom - I see that as one of the most compelling reasons to engage in PBL (since writing these units are so difficult, I need a really good reason to keep doing it!).
I used to subscribe to the idea that creativity is not something that can be taught. Some people are just born creative, right? I now consider that to be incredibly wrong-headed. Furthermore, I see teaching creativity to be one of the most important things I can do for my students. I've read up a little more on the topic and learned about the investment theory of creativity and legislative thinking from Robert J. Sternberg and Todd I. Lubart's 1991 article "Creating Creative Minds." The basic concept is that we can teach creativity through giving students opportunities to ask new questions to answer, and find new problems to solve. If we retread the same ground as others before us, there's little creativity in the paths we'd follow to reach the end. So, buy low - sell high, creatively speaking. Next year, I aim to fold these new-to-me ideas into my curriculum in a couple of ways. First, I plan to write at least two PBL units and incorporate a year-long 20Time Project into my curriculum. I also plan to use EduBlogs as a weekly reflection tool for my students in an effort to both personalize their learning, and to give them an authentic, global audience for their writing. Finally, I intend to teach and promote (through some student-made posters, perhaps) the 4 mindsets that develop student agency: growth, efficacy, belonging, and relevance: "I can change my intelligence and abilities through effort," "I can succeed," "I belong in this learning community," and "This work has value and purpose for me." In terms of PBL, this work has value and purpose for me. House Hunters: A Raisin in the Sun and the Federal Housing AuthorityReflectionWhat was my biggest takeaway from this course on Global Collaboration and Community?
It's embarrassing to mention, but I didn't understand how to use Twitter or Google+...at all. I didn't understand the idea of searching by hashtag or following certain people or hashtags on Tweet Deck. I figured that all the people who were so good at using these platforms literally just sat on their phones all day with all their unlimited free time. So my biggest takeaway from this course is that being a connected educator is not hard; though it's a change of habit, it's highly personalized and incredibly useful. What changes will I make in my teaching and professional development practice? Already, my involvement with PLNs on Twitter and Google+ have improved my practice. Yesterday, I was looking for ideas on how to help my students organize their writing, and saw a Tweet by an English teacher in #EngChat that shared a very useful graphic organizer made with Google Sheets. I foresee these platforms offering me yet another place to go to for advice, ideas, and materials. What impact will this have on my students? I have honestly been very wary of integrating social media in my classroom for many reasons, but mostly because of my school's "war on cell phones." However, I now believe that if I embrace the power of global communication in my classroom, my students will - in turn - be encouraged to use their social media prowess for good instead of evil. That's a joke. Kind of. I hope that through using social media in my classroom, my students will gain a genuine audience for their work, and therefore work harder to make their voice matter (instead of SnapChatting unflattering pictures of their teachers - ha!). I hope that by using platforms that already have such an important place in their lives, that they will see how their schooling can also have an important place in their lives. How have I become a more courageous leader so far? What steps will I continue to take to become a more courageous leader? I believe that I have become an advocate for the integration of social media in the classroom and as a professional development tool. I'm turning into the teacher leader who says, "Have you checked Twitter/Facebook/Google+? Maybe someone else has an idea about that." I'm now encouraging my peers to take their professional development into their own hands: don't wait for our school to have a sit-and-get session, learn it yourself! Moving forward, I hope to become a thought partner for my colleagues who aren't involved in these courses as they continue to try to integrate technology in their classrooms and connect their students to the global community.
Last year, our school adopted Schoology as our Learning Management System (LMS). We use the platform to communicate with students and parents, share classroom materials, collect homework, assign quizzes, and record grades. We jokingly call Schoology "Facebook for education," and our students sometimes use it as such - posting announcements, sharing pictures, or sharing articles.
Once our students embraced the social media aspect of Schoology, they started uploading profile pictures and writing bios - all the things one would normally do on any other social media platform. The problem we were noticing, though, is that our students more often than not have inappropriate profile pictures for a professional social media platform. When grading we find ourselves having to stare at animated gifs or photos of celebrities or pouty, emo selfies of our students. So, in collaboration with Ron (our Tech Coordinator) and Dana (our science teacher), I helped design a lesson that would teach students about the importance of establishing a professional digital identity, and provide them with tips for how to develop that identity - starting with their Schoology profile picture. This lesson is intended to be given in our homerooms, to all students, in the first week of school next year. The lesson plan, slide deck, and exit ticket are embedded below. |
An Online PortfolioThis blog details my adventures through the Future Ready Teacher Leadership certification process offered by the EdTechTeam. ArchivesCategories
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