A Big Hug for Ukraine

Fellows in the Teachers for Global Classrooms program went to half a dozen different countries for their two week “in country” experience. I went to India, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the group that went to Ukraine. Here’s a blog post from Sara Karakour, who has kept up with her host teacher in Zaporizhzhya, Ukraine.  It’s so interesting to think that two years ago, or even six months ago, we couldn’t have imagined that the world’ spotlight would be focused on that country!

Innovation on Earth

Artwork by a 12 year old Ukrainian Student

“Thank you so much everybody for your support. Every word in your letters makes me smile. Because it is something special to feel that you are not alone and hear this not from politics or media but from you.”    ~Veronica, a student at Zaporizhzhya Classical Lyceum

Students marvel at the artistic talents of their Ukrainian peers

Today Ukraine entered the hearts of some very excited American students! It was a simple exchange — just a few pieces of paper sent in the mail — but it feels more powerful than any connecting we’ve done online. When the students looked at the photographs, letters, and artwork from their peers in Ukraine, the excitement in the room was palpable.

Me on my fellowship in Zaporizhzhya, with waitresses in traditional dress

We’ve discussed the crisis in Ukraine in class, and last quarter students wrote cards of support…

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Teaching Online

At the end of my sixth, two-week training module, the online teaching experience is finally coming into focus.  As it does, I’m trying to compare it to the more usual, face-to-face mode of teaching, which involves

1. planning
2. “teaching” (directing classroom activities)
3. grading and responding to student work
4. giving one-on-one help to students who seek me out

Any part of this process can be rewarding, but #2 is where teachers tend to be most profoundly engaged.  When a class is going well, it feels like what I imagine surfing to be: moving along in a predetermined direction while making constant, tiny adjustments to turbulence in the water/student body.  In class I am fully absorbed in the challenge of the moment and the outside world recedes.

Teaching online involves little to none of this core activity but lots more planning, responding to student work, and one-on-one conversation.  Occasionally I’ll explain things in the form of a recorded video, but students will rarely be doing their work in my presence.  Here’s the schedule for the introductory unit of Digital Journalism (my first Gantt chart!):

On any given day, I’ll be conferring with students by video or chat, and I’ll be reading and responding to their work.  It will feel like teaching in the sense that I’ll be engaged with young minds encountering new concepts.  I don’t think it’s going to feel like surfing, but perhaps there will be other kinds of rewarding experiences.  September is when it will all start to become clearer.  Meanwhile, there’s lots of planning to do.  And fortunately, I really love taking deep dives into the content of courses and deciding how to shape it for students.  For any planning fans out there, here’s the description of the first unit of Digital Journalism.

 

 

Discusion: The Student View

“Typically,” writes one student, “she will pose a question about something, and we will sit there for a few seconds. We aren’t exactly eager to answer immediately, but when called on, we say what we think.”  Another describes it this way: “We give a summary of what the reading was about and then we start to analyze it more by looking at the true meaning of the work and how it relates to the world.”

These responses came from an anonymous survey I created to get the student view of what goes on in class discussions.  I asked for a description and then asked some multiple choice questions.  At the end I asked students to respond to an excerpt from my previous blog post, i.e. my own description of class discussion.  I was a little worried about that last question.  Sometimes teachers and students can be in the same room but on different planets!   To my relief, the students overwhelmingly found my description accurate.  Thus I feel ready to go forward with the project of figuring out how to replace discussion in teaching online.

Here’s one more comment: “I like the class discussions because it makes me fully understand whats going on with whatever we had to read. It also makes me change my opinion about some of the readings.”  And since Survey Monkey can make colorful charts from multiple choice responses, I’ll include one here.  It shows that 72% of responders said that students generate most or all of the meaning in discussion–I like that!

The Point of Discussion

I recently explained to my students that I need to rethink many elements of teaching, and especially class discussion, as I prepare to teach online next year.  I’d like to enlist their help in defining what really goes on in Bessias English class discussions, and it seems like a good idea to give them a few days to think about it.   In the meantime, I’m going to go on record with my own version.

In general, students read a text for homework before class begins.  That gets them to a highly variable beginning point for discussion: some enter with a pretty strong understanding while others may be pretty confused.  Everyone, though, has more to learn (we we don’t read anything easy), and everyone can make an observation or ask a question about the text.

From the outset, I generally have in mind some topics to address (a characters’ motivation, for example, or the author’s writing style), but I often begin by soliciting thoughts from the students.  They ask questions, I ask questions, we look closely at passages.  I often write key phrases or make charts on the board.   I try to involve every member of the class and discourage anyone from dominating.   I try not to talk too much, but I probably use up at least a third of the air time.  In my mind, we’re all engaged in constructing an invisible tower, an understanding specific to this group, in the middle of the circle.

Probably 50% of total class time in a given week is devoted to this type of discussion.  So what do I think is accomplished?  Some goals relate to specific content, while others are part of a long term skill-building program.

• students gain a deeper understanding of the specific text: shades of meaning and patterns are revealed, misunderstandings are corrected
• students examine the text’s structure, devices, and underlying values
• students make comparisons with their own values and experience, thereby developing a clearer understanding of themselves and the world around them

• students build analytical thinking skills and learn to formulate questions
• students broaden their aesthetic sensibilities and develop emotional maturity by confronting difficult material
• students develop skills for oral expression
• students develop their capacity for auditory comprehension
• students develop a social sense of conversational timing and appropriate expressions of agreement and disagreement

In a few days, I should have the student version to share.  I assume students will be more focused on content than skills, but we’ll see.

What is a course?

Preparing to teach an online course next year, I find myself examining many assumptions about education.  The online course will never meet, i.e. there will be no “class time” in which the 15 or so students and I engage synchronously as a group.  We’ll have conference calls in twos or threes or fours, but we’ll never all be awake at the same time.  The ethos of the class will have to develop out of discussion forums, wikis, and many bilateral exchanges.

Fortunately, there will be some common elements: all students speak English and attend an independent school in the Global Online Academy consortium.  I think students at Durham Academy, Sidwell Friends (Washington, DC),  Punahou (Hawaii), and King’s Academy (Jordan) share similar assumptions about the purpose and structure of education.

Schools in the Global Online Academy consortium

One of the challenges I’m facing is to imagine teaching without my favorite tool for building understanding: face to face discussion.   Amy Hollinger, the director of professional development at GOA, addresses this issue by asking  “What is the goal of the discussion”?  She offers eight tech tools for interaction across distance and time zones.  I’m familiar with the tools and enthusiastic about using them in blended learning environments (face-to-face + digital).    The prospect of relying on them entirely, though, is a bit unnerving.  Perhaps that’s because I don’t have the clearest of answers to Amy’s question.  I’ll work on that another time.

For now, though, I’ll pivot to a bigger, related set of questions:  what, exactly, is a high school or college course?  What purpose does it serve?  Can a series of YouTube videos or writing exercises accomplish the same purpose?   Here are some thoughts in progress.

A course is first of all a topic artificially carved out of the world’s conceptual jungle.  It’s artificial because in this world ideas and skills do not have clear boundaries.  Buying a house, for example, involves social skills and numerical knowledge and self-understanding and organization and the ability to communicate in a variety of ways.  Academia organizes the vast complexity of the world into departments and levels and courses to make the world more manageable.

A teacher or professor then selects content to include in the course.   There are many arbitrary choices involved: which poets and which critics will be included in a unit on Modernism?  Should the World War II course open with the end of World War I?  Should introductory Geology include units on oceans and atmospheres?  Such choices are difficult, but they get made and a syllabus gets organized.  Content is delivered to students through readings, lectures, films, etc.; sometimes it is discovered through experimentation or questioning.

Students in a course don’t just encounter content, however.  They develop understanding through dynamic processes such as discussion, problem-solving, and writing.  They personalize the content by forging connections to their own knowledge and experience.  They are changed in some way.

Students create products such as essays and lab reports that both generate understanding and form the basis for evaluation. And finally, they receive feedback on their work.  Ideally, this feedback is more than just a grade–it deepens their understanding and improves their skills for the next unit or the next course.

As students go through this fairly standardized process, their learning styles and life experience generate quite different outcomes.  We tend to reduce those outcomes to a linear scale (grades) or a paragraph of description, but of course learning is extremely complex and hard to describe. Furthermore, the impact of a course on a given student changes over time.  Teachers often think of intellectual processes as more important than course content.  As I tell my students, in ten years they are unlikely to remember the plot or themes of a novel that we study, but they’re quite likely to be thinking analytically and articulating their thoughts in writing or speech.

So these are my current thoughts about this key building block of our educational system.  What have I missed?  What have I gotten right or wrong here?  It has been a long time since I posted to this blog, but I anticipate doing more in the coming weeks.  Comments are always welcome.

Wikifying Durham!

This week I saw a newspaper account of Triangle Wiki, an effort to create a hub for information about history, government, business, media–all things local–to “increase collaboration and knowledge sharing across the region.”  It’s been in development for a few months, and on Thursday it officially launched with the first 1,000 pages.

As a wiki fan, I was immediately drawn to this idea. So far, it is mostly Raleigh based; the leaders of it are at Red Hat, SAS, IBM, NC State.  They’re looking for Durham people to get involved, though.  I sent out a few email messages to Durhamites who might be interested.  “This would make a cool class project,” was a line included in a couple of the messages to school people.  “But what class?” was the unwritten, frustrated comeback in my mind.  I’m always dreaming up ideas for interdisciplinary activities that don’t fit into Durham Academy’s disciplinary structure.

But then I thought about my 11th grade Writing Seminar, which will soon wrap up a unit on personal essays and be ready to study a different kind of writing.  I was planning to do blogging, but my syllabus says “Digital Writing.”  This is the year they study US History and American Literature, this is the year we open with the Downtown Durham Scavenger Hunt.  We’re always looking for “real world” connections to what we do in the classroom, and here’s a great opportunity. With fifteen students working for a couple of weeks, I think we could make a good start on the Durham portion of the Triangle Wiki, and it would be fun for students to create pages for the things they know and care about.

Yesterday I floated the idea in the Triangle Wiki Facebook group. Looks like it’s a go!

Final Project for Arabic Novel Seminar: The Writing Experience

It’s wonderful to be home again, and it’s wonderful to have completed the Arabic Novel seminar.  Thank you, taxpayers, for the privilege of spending 4 weeks in a world of ideas!

The final project for this seminar gave me the best chance I’ve had in years to do some academic writing.  Though it was longer, at 16 pages, than anything I assign to students, it refreshed my sense of their experience.  Wanting to explore newer formats, I did the project as a series of blog posts.  That wasn’t a terribly successful experiment, but it was valuable.

Why wasn’t it successful?  

Stories Move Like Whirling Dervishes

 Just ran across this beautiful TED talk by Elif Shafak: “The Politics of Fiction.”  Here are responses to a few of her ideas.

I like what she says at the beginning about the tendency to isolate ourselves in homogeneous communities.  That seems to happen as much today as ever, despite the availability of technology and travel. 

Her description of international schools helps me understand why the students I know who’ve attended them don’t seem any more–and often seem less–open to cultural differences than those with purely domestic educations.

“Multicultural Fiction,” a label she decries, sounds a lot like “World Literature.” 

What is a book?

Actually, I think the question I want to ask is, “What’s the best format to use for books we want to study?”  I find this question disquieting.  I love conversations about curriculum–what to read, how to teach it, how much is too much, etc.  And I feel competent to make decisions about those matters on behalf of young people.  When we’re talking about form rather than content–what to read in a physical sense–I’m full of doubt and confusion.  I’ll use today’s post to process some thoughts and see if readers care to comment. 

On first reading The Season of Migration to the North

This novel has an interesting, nonlinear structure.  At times it’s not entirely clear who is speaking or what the situation is at the beginning of a new section.  I didn’t find this effect frustrating, though; it contributed to a certain mystique.  I became more aware of the imagery as the novel went on.  Here’s one of many passages that I found arresting: “The tops of the palm trees shudder in the gentle breeze and grow still.  Under the sun’s violence at midday hot steam rises from the fields of watered clover.  Every breath of wind diffuses the scent of lemon, orange, and tangerine.  The lowing of an ox, the braying of a donkey, or the sound of an axe on wood” (107).