MOOCs and Kooks Part Deux!

by Mr. S Posted on April 29, 2013

As promised, here is follow up to the post I did a while back on the two MOOCs I took over the past month and half.

It was an interesting experience. Purely as a student, I enjoyed the heck out of it. Though I might remind myself next time that two at once was a bit much. Keeping track of the deadlines of two different assignments was challenging, and there were a few weekends where I really had to burn some time working on the material. The learning experience for me was great. In both courses I learned a lot, enjoyed doing the assignments, and felt it was totally worth my time (especially considering it was free).

I observed some interesting dynamics though. I found I spent almost no time on the class forums. Frankly the volume was too loud and I didn’t need them. The facebook group in one class that was centered around the software platform that we (the members of the group) used to do the course, was a bit more personable- there were about thirty members, of which I would say four were particularly active.

Most of the chatter I saw online really seemed to come from people who were uncomfortable operating in the online world. Questions about how to post things, technical difficulties with completing assignments, challenges using software or online platforms to do the work all constituted the bulk of the conversations as far as I could see. As I am pretty comfortable with the basic operations necessary to do the work (making pdf docs, recording and posting audio files to web sites like sound cloud, and posting videos to youtube), I didn’t need much help with that stuff. And frankly, one of the attractions of these courses was the chance to get some exposure to new ideas and wrestle with them myself.

I did run into one technical problem, making screenshot videos. I downloaded Camtasia (after using quicktime, which works, but I can’t recommend it if you want to make good screen capture videos), which was listed as a recommended software in one of the courses. I used their free trial and not only was it a great piece of software, but when I needed help I just tweeted my question and they looked at my videos on youtube, and tweeted back a link to a video on their website that covered the problem I was having. A really excellent 21st century customer service experience from the folks at TechSmith. And kudos for being on twitter in a meaningful way! If screen capture video would be useful to you, this is a great product, and I will be happily paying for it when I go to make some vids for my classes later this spring.

So, reflective thought one from my MOOC experience: Very cool, but this is an environment where the responsibility for learning is completely on the student. In many ways that is a good thing, but it means that the MOOC format will not be right for all educational contexts (more on that at the end).

Reflective thought two: I would really like to see the stats from courses like this. At one point, one of the instructors posted that there were over 50,000 people signed up in the course. That is indeed cool, but I want to know how many finished, what was the quality of learning, why didn’t the ones who completed complete, you know, all those research questions you would ask before you made any hard claims about the efficacy  of this mode of education delivery.

Reflective thought three: these courses were very effective, at least for me, at doing marketing for the full cost versions of online courses from Berklee or similar institutions. A 12 week, three credit course, online from Berklee costs about $1400. That’s actually not bad for a three credit course, and the courses are limited to 20 students at a time, so there is definitely a much higher degree of interaction with the instructor, including direct feedback on student’s work and the chance to have a more collegial engagement with other students (albeit online). But that is not a MOOC- it’s neither open nor massive. So you can see immediately that in the ‘for money mode,’ you immediately get a higher degree of engagement from the institution delivering the product. I would imagine that the professors of the courses I took would not need to do much to deliver the same course over and over, the videos are made, the assessments are made, and the assignments are peer scored- the work is front loaded, and can then be repeated many times with little further effort.

Reflective thought four: Peer evaluation really works, and it really works in the way that one of the professors said in an overview video. Peer evaluation does not provide as much learning for the person being evaluated (though the way it was set up was fine, and I did get meaningful feedback), it provides powerful learning for the student doing the evaluating. In both courses you completed and submitted your own work, then evaluated the work of five of your peers. You were given a rubric that was simple, but did lead you to make decision about whether the work you were evaluating had or had not achieved the objective. There was space for comments in all the rubrics, but you weren’t required to comment. In one of the courses, once I had completed evaluating the other students work, I then had to complete a self-evaluation using the same rubric. I found I viewed my own work in a whole new light after looking at/listening to the work of some of my peers. I could see where the weak points in my work were and what I might want to improve (you couldn’t change you assignment at that point, it was already submitted). As a result of this experience I am going to experiment more with having my students do peer evaluation. The trick is guiding their evaluation (through rubrics or some other method) so that they can focus on the piece of work.

And a wrap up: MOOCs are cool, and I’m glad I did it. It was a great learning experience for me, great marketing for the full cost versions of  online learning experiences, and a cool way for higher ed institutions to extend their brand and serve knowledge and learning in interesting ways. I can easily imaging doing more of these in the future just to satisfy my curiosity about things I’ll never have time to delve into otherwise. But MOOCs are not a panacea for anything. Engagement with instructors who understand their subject AND how to teach it will not go away. Especially in the world of K-12 education, where we deal with a captive audience that is often intrinsically UNmotivated, really good teachers will continue to be crucial in many ways. This experience definitely showed me some ways in which technology can help a bit, and I’m excited to explore those, but I’m not in fear for my job.

As a final note, I’ll share two bits of work from my courses.

Here is a screenshot vid I made for the course on Music Production:

And here is a recording of the song that was my final project for the songwriting class:

Posted in 21st century teaching and learning, cultivating real learning, education, teaching paradigm, technology | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Testing Backlash: Zombies, Spoken Word, Opting Out

by DocZ Posted on April 28, 2013

Perhaps you’ve seen this video: “I will not let an exam result decide my fate” by Suli Breaks, spoken word poet out of the UK:

I’ve seen it because my students pretty much demanded I see it after I showed my class this TED talk (my apologies for the nearly 20 minutes of video posted here, but I promise you, both videos are absolutely worth your time):

My purposes in showing my class the TED talk were several–one being that I think Michael Wesch does an excellent job of describing the digital world that we live in now. My students’ task last week–in preparation for their semester final project–was to enter that world and extract from it some artifacts that would show them how that world was taking up a conversation regarding the individual essential questions they’ve each had to guide their work all semester. I thought Wesch would help them see their search for these media artifacts as more than simply putting their essential question into Google and seeing what comes up (though that is of course something they should do as well). But Wesch also makes an important argument for the need for school to change based on the new digital landscape which makes access to literally the entire body of human knowledge (and the constant, layered conversation going on about it) possible for our students via the smart phones they carry in their pockets. He argues that our goal should not be to prepare students to pass the arbitrary tests schooling typically places in front of them, but to prepare students to pass the test of their lives via the skills they’ll need to work together to address the human, economic, and environmental crises in play all over the globe.

And Wesch’s argument that school needs to change is what I think led one student to come right up to me after class with her smart phone in hand keyed up to Suli Breaks’s piece, demanding that I watch it right then. As another class was coming in the room, I asked her to post the video on our class Facebook page so I could watch it when I had time to really pay attention to it.

And from the class Facebook page, another student found it and included it in his collection of media artifacts for his task last week, a list of media artifacts about morality (the connection to this piece being that Suli Breaks calls to question the morality of a system of schooling that sorts and labels and determines the futures of students based on exam results only).

And then when I was asking the class on Friday which artifacts we should look at together and discuss, another student suggested we take a look at that particular link, so the whole class saw it. They nodded in agreement as if Suli Breaks was truly speaking for them, for a long-held yet quiet struggle they have had with schooling. We had a short conversation as a class after watching the video and I told my students how much I agreed with what Suli Breaks argued about schooling and test scores and the fact that there’s a distinction between “school” and “education” (but that there shouldn’t be). I shared with them my frustrations within the system, not being able to change it all by myself but refusing to leave because I want do what I can to try to make it better for my students.

And then a couple of class periods later, another student from that class approached me to say thank you. Thank you for being the first teacher ever to see clearly what their struggle is as students in this test-driven world of “school” and to be able to note the damage that it does to them as human beings.

Whoa.

I am intrigued by the backlash that is beginning.

In January a group of teachers in Seattle refused (backed by their administration) to give the district-mandated test. (Don’t forget the Atlanta cheating scandal and the cheating allegations during Michelle Rhee’s reign as chancellor of schools in D.C. that are currently under investigation as concrete examples of what can happen under high stakes testing).

In February, a group of students in Rhode Island dressed up as Zombies to protest a decision by the Rhode Island Department of Education to attach test scores to graduation.

In February and March, a group of Oregon students organized an opt-out campaign to encourage students to opt-out of testing because,

They’ve joined teachers and students in other states who are boycotting the tests, calling them a waste of money, inefficient use of teaching and learning time, and a poor judge of actual student or school performance.

“We’re stopping class to do something ridiculous,” says Garcia, who proposes that student portfolios be used instead. “You’ll be having a good lesson, building a relationship with the teacher, then take this test that is not necessarily related to the curriculum or the style of writing we’re talking about.”

In April, a group in North Carolina staged a testing zombie event in order to appeal to their state legislature to minimize high stakes testing.

And students are leveraging digital tools to get the word out–Facebook pages, WordPress blogs, YouTube. Our media landscape makes it possible for Suli Breaks’s powerful statement conceived in the UK to reach my students in a classroom in Colorado.

Perhaps the more they can connect and see that they are not alone, the stronger their voices will become. This can enable them to exert more pressure on the system to change toward what could make “school” better line up with what “education” could/should be.

And our students are not alone in this struggle. I included an example of teacher resistance up there on purpose. As long as the high stakes tests are in play, we need to do them well or face the very real consequences of not doing well. This is why I show up every year to proctor the mandated tests even though I’m beyond grumpy about it for reasons I’ve articulated here before.

But more and more I want for us to collectively say no, we just won’t do it any more.

 

Posted in education, policy, testing | 1 Comment

Reading, reading, reading…

by Mr. S Posted on April 18, 2013

We have been reading Penny Kittle’s Book Love and talking a lot about how we might set up our classes so as to encourage more reading. I know in my honors level 11th grade class, if the students only read the assigned books, they really aren’t reading enough.

As is the case with our teaching of writing, Kittle makes the point that you can’t teach kids to be readers without being a reader. Now, it’s not like I’m not a reader. But I have heightened my awareness of what I am reading, how often I am reading, why I read what I read, and what variety there is in my reading. A big part of modeling behavior is just making it public, so I’ve been talking more in class about what I am reading.

I also posted to the blog that I share with students listing the books I have read so far this year. This isn’t radical change, yet, but its a start. We are thinking about what we will do next year to bring reading more fully into our classroom practice.

Here is my book update, if you want to see what’s been on my bedside table.

Posted in 21st century teaching and learning, cultivating real learning, making change, reading, teaching literature, teaching reading | 2 Comments

Standardized Mission Statement

by MisterB Posted on March 12, 2013

Here is a school district’s interim mission statement, with my suggested edits in italics: “We develop our children’s greatest abilities and make possible the discovery and pursuit of their dreams through standardized testing, which when fulfilled can benefit us all. We prepare every child to become the architect of his or her own life long education through standardized testing. We provide a comprehensive and innovative approach to education and graduate successful, curious, confident, and hopeful students who are able to confront the great challenges of their time through standardized testing.”

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

A Tale of Two Approaches to Schooling

by DocZ Posted on March 6, 2013

Yesterday was a tale of two approaches to schooling for me, each diametrically opposed to the other.

(Well there was the proctoring of the mandated state testing that happened yesterday morning. It’s the season. But this post is not about that. If you want to know what I think about that, read about how I keep my mind busy while “actively proctoring” and the frustrations that came up for me last year in testing season.)

My story starts at 12:45pm, when over half of our department went off-site for some curriculum work. We worked with a district literacy coach (who also teaches middle school in our district), and he showed us a unit-building template he built that works to integrate all the forces pushing on our curriculum planning: CCSS, the impending PARCC assessment of the CCSS, our district curriculum, 21st century skills, the set of books reserved for each course/grade… it’s a lot to pull together. But the literacy coach kind of wowed me with how clearly he did pull all of this together into one template. If we fill it out, we’ve got all of our ducks in a row.

It was a great opportunity for conversation with the department about our work together and our goals for our students. It was a great opportunity for reflective practice–what this unit planning template asks of us will absolutely improve the experiences we offer our students, so I was interested to see what’s missing in what I’m already doing with my students.

But it was overwhelming. We have a lot of conversation and work ahead of us to get everything straightened out.

And then later that day, Mr. S emailed to me and Mr. B the video below. It’s about a school-within-a-school in a Massachusetts public high school where students design and enact their own educational experience for a semester. Guess what they build in none of? Grades, tests, quizzes… It starts with this:

“It’s crazy that in a system that is meant to teach and help the youth, there is no voice from the youth at all.”

(The Independent Project website)

What struck me here was the simplicity, the utter simplicity. Students design their own learning and the semester is structured around this:

  1. Every Monday, each student asks a question connected to one of the four core academic areas. They spend the week researching/exploring and putting together a presentation for their classmates for Friday where they teach their classmates what they learned.
  2. The individual endeavor–each student takes on and ambitious project for the semester, like learning the piano or writing a novel or making a film or conducting extensive research. Must involve effort, learning, and a mastery of skills.
  3. The collective endeavor–the whole class (this year, nine students) takes on a project together at the end of the semester. They must negotiate with one another to determine the focus of the project and then they must work together to enact their vision. (click here to see the students’ articulation of their work for a semester)

It’s.

So.

Simple.

Why on earth are we spending hours and hours on curriculum design and standards and aligning curriculum to standards and making sure our instruction prepares students for the big scary state test?

Why not put education into the hands of our students?

We can trust them to do this work. We just need to get out of their way.

As Mr. S pointed out in the office today, human beings are designed to learn. It is the very fabric of our being. If school has become a place where we feel compelled to force students to “learn” through grades and high-stakes tests, then we have really messed things up here. Humans want to learn, no forcing necessary. And in fact, many of our students may just be jumping through the hoops we place before them just to get to graduation and that piece of paper that gets them into college, but they follow their passions with the things they do outside of the realm of the school day.

Why can’t school focus on their passions? How do we teach them to operate in the world when we keep them safe from it here in the artificial ecosystem that is school?

Standards. High stakes tests. Bell schedules. Graduation requirements. Grades. Essentially these things just control students and, increasingly, teachers (as our value as teachers becomes tied to test scores by law as is the case in Colorado). What are we doing? Why are we doing this to them? Why are we doing this to ourselves?

What if my role was to advise and mentor my students along their journey toward their own learning goals? As much as I can, I’m already doing that in my classroom (they choose their books, they choose their essential questions to frame their work, they choose the focus of their writing…). But there’s only so much I can do within an institution that orbits around accountability and things that can be quantified. Because without numbers to show growth has happened, how do we know it has? That’s what the world of educational policy tells us right now, right?

We cannot quantify real, engaged learning. But you know when you’re looking at it.

I almost couldn’t make it through the instructions today for the reading test my group of students did for the state testing: “It’s important for you to show us how well you read.” No. The test doesn’t show anything about what kind of readers students are–it shows us what kind of test takers they are. There’s no standardized test to measure engaged reading. But you know it when you see it. It’s the kids who read voraciously, who have lists of books they want to read next, who refer to books in casual conversation. And because of all the time they spend with books, they’re also strong thinkers and writers and question askers. That’s the kind of real, engaged learning we should be after.

So what are we doing? Really? And how can we just stop doing it?

In the link above to the official Independent Project website, you’ll find another video. I pulled some snippets from it that I want you to read just to get more of a sense about what this is all about. Forgive me for the long bulleted list here, but this is also for me to collect these tidbits for my own work and thinking, and I’m a fan of bulleted lists for that purpose:

  • “I realized that my friends were spending 6 hours a day, 180 days a year not being happy. That just didn’t make sense to me.”
  • “It’s not that there is a sinister group of educational leaders who are intent on making American education intellectually and existentially numbing. It’s just the nature of large bureaucracies and large institutions.”
  • “We all come together to provide education for all of our citizens and there’s this tendency to drive everything toward this point of mediocrity.”
  • “It just doesn’t help anyone because you’re trying to put them all in boxes and humans don’t fit well in boxes.”
  • “The real world isn’t stocked full of textbooks and worksheets.”
  • “How can you teach them about the world when you’re isolating them from the world?”
  • “You can’t achieve the broader goals of making people into readers, making people love ideas, love conversation, love knowledge, want to get good at things if you don’t make school a place where kids want to be.”
  • “Now I feel more confident. I can gather information on my own. I can learn things on my own. I don’t need tests or quizzes. I know it. I know that I know it. And I know that I can express myself through it.”
  • “So often, in this school and in other schools, I see kids who look like they are being passed through the system. Get to this period, this bell, and someone put out this work for me to do, I’m going to get through this. So they’re getting through. I’m not talking about kids who are dropping out even or rebelling. But even successful kids are being sort of pushed along a conveyer belt. And what I see when I look at the independent project are kids who are moving themselves into and out of experiences.”
  • “The real opportunity is for the adults to get out of the way. And when students take responsibility and they’re encouraged to do so, all sorts of wonderful things happen.”
  • “This doesn’t involve hiring a bunch of fancy new people or implementing a bunch of fancy new programs. The potential for this is right there within the walls of every single school.”
  • “We learned how to learn. We learned how to teach. And we learned how to work. We learned how to learn in the sense that we learned how to ask questions and explore the answers using different methods like the scientific method or different resources. We learned how to teach in the sense that we learned how to take what we learned and share it with people not just because we had to do a presentation but because it was our responsibility to make sure that everyone in the group benefitted from our work. And we learned how to work in the sense that we learned how to use different resources and go to different people and use different methods and push each other and be pushed and criticize and be criticized to produce the best work and learn as much as we possibly could.”
  • “I see it as the only way to dramatically change our high school education in this country–to make kids feel in charge of their own education, to make them not just the recipients, but the authors of their own educational experience. And it’s ridiculous for us to have thought that kids between the ages of 14 and 18 weren’t capable of that. They are. So I think this has enormous potential.”

I agree. I see so much potential here. And I have to admit that I had a moment last evening after I first watched the video where I thought, “That’s it. I’m done. I cannot go back to teach at a high school that isn’t something like the independent project.” Of course this kind of thinking is especially vivid in the midst of mandated state testing time. But I really did have that moment where I thought I just couldn’t do it anymore, starting today.

But the truth is that I love my school, my students, my colleagues, my community. I’m there for the long haul. My challenge now has become clear: how can I minimize my role, my “authorship” of my students’ educational experiences so that they can step in to be more in charge themselves? I’m already doing this in lots of small meaningful ways, but I want more. It means giving up even more control and convincing my students I trust them to do good work that is important to them.

So even though I can’t magically make the independent project appear in my school tomorrow, there ARE things I can do to move toward more of that kind of experience for my students in my classroom. And I can do what I can via conversation with my colleagues to encourage them to do the same. And I can work with my school leaders to see how we can build in more flexibility to the structures of our school as a whole to create more space for students to make choices about how they spend their time over the four years that we have them.

I can keep at the forefront of everything that I do in my school community (including the complex curriculum work we were asked to begin yesterday afternoon) the important goal of empowering students through education by putting them in the driver’s seat.

And I can remind myself to just get the heck out of my students’ way.

“Inspiration, hunger: these are the forces that drive good schools. The best we educational planners can do is create the most likely conditions for them to flourish and then get out of the way.” –Ted Sizer

Posted in 21st century teaching and learning, cultivating real learning, engagement, making change, policy, reform, the system, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Of MOOCs and Kooks

by Mr. S Posted on March 5, 2013

Okay, I just liked that title. This post is really about MOOCs. And I suppose we are kooks in any meaningful sense of that term. So maybe the title is appropriate after all.

MOOCs are Massive Open Online Courses. There has been a lot of talk about them in the past year- variously presenting MOOCs as a curiosity, a notable evolution in online education, the transformation of higher education, a revolution in education, and the end of all that is good and decent in the world. As with most things, history will be the judge of the transformative/revolutionary power of MOOCs.

But, I am enrolled in two MOOCs right now, and I thought it would be interesting to reflect a little on the experience. The courses I am taking are offered in a joint project between Coursera, which provides the platform for the course, and Berklee College of Music in Boston, which is providing the content. The two courses I am taking both have to do with my other life as a musician- one course is in songwriting, the other is Intro to Music Production.

The basic format of both courses is the same. The six week courses are broken into six sections. There are online video lectures by the professors, Pat Pattison for the songwriting course and Louden Stearns for the Music Production class. The videos are broken into short segments covering a topic or idea. There are online quizzes that reinforce the basic concepts and ideas. At the end of each week there is a project or assignment due in each class.

The Coursera platform has student forums which allow for discussion and interaction, and the instructor for one of the courses is clearly monitoring, as he has added comments several times already. I have to say, the volume of people makes the forums a bit daunting at first (I had to switch email notifications off immediately). But you can create a user profile at whatever comfort level is agreeable to you, and sub-forums are rapidly developing around topics which should make the interaction more manageable. Stearns, who is obviously very comfortable using social networking technology, also immediately created a facebook page for the course, and posted links to google groups and other venues for interaction.

So far, sounds like a pretty basic online delivery of knowledge. But the ‘Massive’ part of the MOOC changes what happens after that. The courses are free, and that increases the volume of students pretty radically. And that means that the likelihood that you are going to get any individual attention from the instructor drops to zero. I don’t say this to denigrate the courses in any way, just to observe the practical reality. Given that, the courses have been constructed to maximize student feedback.

The project due at the end of each week is posted online, and then there is a follow up assignment in which students are required to give feedback to each other on their projects. So the course is pretty much crowd-sourcing the feedback part of learning. Not a bad idea really. If there is a high enough volume of participants, then the feedback should distribute evenly, giving a relatively accurate response to the student work.

At this point its all theoretical. I just started the two classes, and haven’t posted any assignments nor given and received feedback.  I will report when I have some actual experience.

So far though, I am really enjoying myself. The videos are pretty good, the information is thoughtful and well organized, and the quizzes are a great check on how well I understood the videos (you can repeat the quizzes as many time as you like, so if you miss things you can go back and review). In one of the courses there are questions embedded in the videos that work well to reinforce and focus the viewer on the important points. The video format also allows for diagrams and schematics to illustrate ideas. Overall it seems well done and effective.

My immediate thought is that this is a great format for a learner like myself. My motivation is completely intrinsic (I have no interest in grades, certificates or degrees in this material). I can do the work on a schedule that is convenient to me (as long as I keep up week to week- I can do the work whenever I want). And so far, I’m not worried about lack of direct feedback from the instructor.

I am especially intrigued in the projects for the music production class. At the end of this first week we are asked to pick from a list of topics and create a short video teaching that topic using what we learned. Reviewers are given a rubric that asks them to asses the videos in several specific ways and offer comments- not on the video production, but on the content and delivery. Creators are asked to include a brief reflective statement in the video. Again, given enough people participating, it seems like a very effective way to handle the feedback issue, especially since the rubric is quite focused. I’ll post my video and how the review process went sometime next week.

Further updates as I learn more!

Posted in 21st century teaching and learning, cultivating real learning, engagement, teaching paradigm, technology, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Beyond Dioramas: Inviting Students to Read and Read and Read

by DocZ Posted on February 18, 2013

There have been some dramatic moments for my daughter in 4th grade this year.

Aside from her grade-stress meltdown that I wrote about, there was also the drama of the lost reading log.

My daughter’s class is nearing the end of a reading contest. Since some time in December, students have been logging pages read (in English and Spanish). Students get double credit for every page they read in their second language. Two students will get recognized at the half time of an upcoming women’s college basketball game–the student who read the most and the student who improved the most (meaning that over the course of the contest read more than s/he had been reading prior to the contest).

As an avenue for encouraging students to read A LOT, this has worked very well, at least for my kiddo. She has very diligently timed her reading and counted her pages and added everything up and carried the reading log from school to home and back again in her backpack every day. She has always been a reader, but I think this has incentivized reading for her in a positive way. She’s well over two thousand pages in English and several hundred in Spanish.

And last Monday afternoon, the reading log came up missing. She couldn’t find it in her backpack, she couldn’t figure out where it was, and she was distraught. All those pages read and logged, gone, and the end of the contest was only a week away. She was overwhelmed at the prospect of catching up in just a few days.

We talked through her day at school that afternoon and tried to figure out just exactly where the reading log disappeared so she could retrace her steps the next day. We talked about how she could ask her teachers for help. We wondered what we her options might be to still participate in the contest if the reading log never showed up.

And by Thursday, it hadn’t.

But for some reason, at bedtime that night, she wondered if maybe her reading log might be in her backpack after all. So we turned on the light in her room and pulled her backpack up onto her bed and started to look.

When we found it (in the middle of a stack of papers), we yelled with delight and cheered. We couldn’t believe it! We had even looked through the backpack a few days before and didn’t find it. (Yes, lesson here about keeping one’s backpack clean–I’m certain there are other presumably lost items in the depths of her backpack. And probably several rocks from the playground and a few sticks that she thinks look like magic wands.)

But the moment struck me with a realization. We were celebrating that we had found the evidence of all the reading she had done over the last two months, the pages consumed and the minutes spent. The record is considerable (and literally way more than my high school students are reading for my class… something I brought up to them this past week as we launched into independent reading for the rest of the semester). She is reading, a lot, and the reading log is tangible evidence of that. She is proud of her work and was upset at the prospect of having lost that record. The moment we found the reading log was nothing short of catharsis.

So a reading assignment that required her to read widely, to follow her interests, to read the books that appealed to her–to simply READ–truly engaged her in that task. And an assignment in conjunction with a book her class read together (that I wrote about earlier) and that asked her to bring to life four scenes from the story with construction paper and cardboard and glue didn’t hold her attention in the same way. She FORGOT she hadn’t finished the diorama until 30 minutes before leaving for school on the day it was due (inspiring the grade stress breakdown I wrote about earlier), whereas the moment the reading log showed up missing (only missing in the depths of her backpack apparently), she was beside herself with grief.

The diorama scene depicting Benjamin Franklin's electricity experiment with a kite and a key.
The diorama scene depicting Benjamin Franklin’s electricity experiment with a kite and a key

I admit that the diorama was kind of awesome, especially this scene. See the kite and the clouds and the lightening bolt and Benjamin Franklin standing there with his son? There’s a shrinky dink key hanging on the kite string right by Franklin’s hand (hard to see in the photo).

I think that the artist in my child got legitimate joy out of this project, and that alone makes it worthwhile. But I’m not sure about how it helped her as a reader. Granted, I do not know what the goal was of this project–it very well may have been simply about learning details about Benjamin Franklin’s life–something that the task certainly did achieve. I do not mean for any of this to be some sort of criticism of my kid’s teachers. Her teachers are awesome and support her in so many ways and give her umpteen invitations to engage as a learner–my kid is truly thriving at her school. I am so grateful for the experiences her school has provided for her.

But the contrast between my daughter’s heartbreak over the loss of her reading log and the lack of even remembering she had to finish up her diorama made me wonder.

Being the teacher geek that I am, any story out of any classroom becomes an opportunity for me to reflect over my own practice.

So this made me wonder about what kinds of things I’m asking my students to do in the name of reading. Am I inviting them to read and read and read some more to the point where they would be heartbroken if they somehow lost the tangible evidence of all of the work they had done? Or am I asking them to do tasks alongside books that they literally forget about until the last possible moment?

And how am I encouraging them to think deeply about what they read? To make meaningful connections to their lives? To ask questions across texts? To reflect their own lives off of the experiences of a character in a book? To read to seek answers to the deepest questions of their hearts? To read to find the deepest questions of their hearts? To read to feel connected to the human experience? To read to see through the eyes of others? How am I inviting my students to read for these purposes?

And in Twitter recently, I came across this:

I want my students to be reading deeply. I thought about this last week as they discussed The Road and The Great Gatsby. How do I know that they’re reading deeply by listening to what they say in these student-led discussions? It comes in the questions they ask of the text and of each other. It comes in every time I hear one of them refer to a specific moment in the text to support something they’re saying. It comes in the surprising connections, like yesterday when my 5th hour class was discussing whether or not money can buy happiness and a student wondered if Gatsby is addicted to Daisy in the way that people get addicted to drugs. This was one of the best re-connections to a text after a tangential discussion thread I’ve ever seen. And my other class tried to really figure out the world of The Road as a metaphor for the path we are all traveling on our own in our lives. One student was even wondering about the patterns she was seeing for what happens to the boy and the man when they leave the road in the book and what that means with the metaphor–our moments of divergence from the paths we follow are what help us to really learn and grow and question? That has been the case for the boy in the book, and we started to wonder how much his experiences speak for our own.

But there are times when what they say does not suggest they are reading deeply. Sometimes they make only cursory mention of the text, or only say something similar to what the person before said, or only rely on details that they could pick up in class without ever even cracking the book themselves. How am I failing these students, not inviting them to read deeply? Not finding a way to make it so that they might be heartbroken if they don’t?

Not sure how to answer these questions, but I’ll keep trying. I guess it’s a matter of serving up the right invitation to the right student at the right moment that leaves them with an unquenchable desire to open up the pages of a book (and then another, and then another) to read.

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