The Teacher is Still Learning

I am still learning. Yes, I have been teaching for about thirty years, but I’m as far from knowing it all as I was when I began. If I didn't know that on November 20th, I would be keenly aware of it after the National Council of Teachers of English convention last weekend. 

Unlike many other groups that meet in Washington, D.C., this body of people will help me make real changes. I listened, learned, and reflected. Frankly, I spent a bit of time beating myself up. The presenters have it so together that they make me look like a newbie! 

I started the convention with a session about digital tools in the English classroom. I was floored by how these teachers, professors, and researchers engaged students with computer technology. They introduced me to the concept of social collaborative reading and annotating. I have done a big paper exercise where my students re-read some chapters and annotate together. What if they could read the book this way? How powerful and helpful! What a great use of student modeling and independence! We are going to try this in Freshman English! 

But wait! There's more! Another presenter talked about mixing genres and digital forms. He presented his book containing narrative, informational texts, video, audio, poetry, and images mixed together to give a more complete account of the war in Sierra Leon and Liberia. What a great option for senior project! And what a relevant, engaging, and important way for students to make sense of meaningful personal research! 

The next morning, I was introduced to the hackjam! The playful and energetic team from the National Writing Project introduced me to the concept of inviting kids to hack: to repurpose, reorganize, reimagine, and creatively collaborate. We had so much fun! We broke into different groups: one group ran down to the exhibit hall, picked up all the freebies they could, and make a construction with them. A second group tore apart children's books and make new ones out of them. A third group performed flash poetry readings throughout the convention. A fourth group took pipe cleaner like stickies and made poetry on glass surfaces (including a wonderful pun on the window of the lactation room: live feed). My group used HTML teaching tools from Mozilla to hack the NCTE website (well not for real - but we did make our own version of it). 

It is one thing to learn from experts like Troy Hicks and the National Writing Project people, but it is a special joy when the experts are my colleagues. My English department chair, Beth Ahlgrim, and two Deerfield teachers, Kristan Jiggetts and Dana Wahrenbrock presented the fantastic work they are doing with mixed genre research papers in Junior English.

Finally, it was a special privilege to listen to a trio of teachers whose blog I have been reading since I heard them speak at the NCTE convention in Chicago several years ago. The Paper Graders talked about the power of writing with your students and sharing your writing with your students.

Of course, there were other benefits to the convention. I got to spend time with my wonderful Deerfield English colleagues. I had two dinners with my delightful daughter, who goes to college in DC. We had a magnificent tour through the Phillips Collection Museum of Modern Art. 

Was I really only away for three days? 

The next step is to keep these ideas alive. By putting them here, I hope to remind myself (and feel free to remind me as well) to keep experimenting and learning in the classroom. Some of these experiments will fail. Some will help me figure out next steps. Hopefully, they will help my students grow and learn – and me, too!

A Class That Blogs Together…

After almost thirty years, one would think that teaching has become routine. It is the opposite. When I began, I met teachers who ran classes by binder: each unit was carefully scheduled and sequenced. Each year, it went the same way; if this was the third day of the fourth week of the second quarter, then we were studying participles. It was that simple. They had the script down, and the students were merely audience.

I cannot teach that way. Each year is different. Every class is unique. Over the summer, I set up units, lessons, activities, and, yes, schedules. I have tried to be a teacher with a perfect plan, but something always gets in the way. Whether it is because of a new book, a great opportunity, or the most aggravating factor of all, the individual  needs of the students in the class, I end up rewriting, changing, and adapting my summer plans all over again during the year.

A few years ago, I decided to embrace that process. I acknowledge my need to plan, but I am not married to those plans. I also find that experimenting in the classroom is beneficial to everyone. After hearing about a new technique, text, or technology, I will come to my class and we’ll play with it. A year later, I’ll try again a new way. It is messy and challenging, and it is anything but rote and routine.

This year, I started blogging with my students. A few years ago, I began asking seniors to blog as they pursued their individualized research projects in their last quarter of high school. These blogs turned into more than learning logs, but became communication vehicles between the students and the many people helping them on their research journeys. They were also a lot lighter to take home than the manila folders I had used for that purpose in the past.

I am trying to incorporate more and more student autonomy and choice into Senior English. In addition, our “thematic” focus with my seniors this year is finding our passions. It thought it appropriate to give them a public vehicle to express what was important to them.

So my students and I have started our own blog. Several times a week, we publish one to three short entries about topics that are important to us. The topics are as far ranging as the students in the class: we discuss make-up, basketball, fantasy football, food, college, and gender. We give advice, review, and rant.

It is a little frightening; I like to be in charge. I am a little bit of a perfectionist. The blog posts are not always completely polished and they are being written and edited by the students. I read them, but they are not “mine.”

I have also taken the little, yet scary, step of telling my Senior English students about this blog, and I am planning on doing some writing that will appear on both blogs! I want to participate, too!

So I invite you to click over to my students’ new blog, Why So Seniorous. Some entries are serious, some are not. Everything is written by seniors at Deerfield High School – with a little help from their teacher, who is still learning right beside them.