Eduholic

An excited group of 8th graders is a skittish beast. Believe it or not, they are capable of engaging in deep discussion with a little teacher snake oil. In fact, I think the techniques I’m about to discuss can be fruitfully applied to nearly any age or ability of student and will result in a stimulating, text-based discussion about whatever you happen to be reading together as a class.

First, a deep breath.

“Now, hold it for forty five minutes,” I sometimes say. Too corny? Maybe, but it's true that the simple act of a focusing breath or two can have a powerful effect.

Next, reactivate the velcro. Reviewing previous learning is significant. One method is to go over the notes from the last class. Which begs the question, how do you get kids to take decent notes?

I ask students to begin a typical class of literary discussion by opening their writers’ notebooks, putting the date in the upper right hand corner, and a heading that’s not too sexy: “Book Thief, Part X, pp __-__” will do. Whenever responding to a book or taking notes on it, I want students in the habit of noting page numbers. Nothing anchors a discussion like actually referring to text.

Before talk, we go back to the book. I give a few minutes to review the assigned reading, and ask students to write down points for the day’s discussion. Sometimes, I dress this up a bit. For example, today we were continuing to look at the book’s final section, a task we’d started the day before. So, the warm up prompt was “Yesterday, Today.” The directions were to review one’s notes, the text, and memory to find a significant point from the last lesson, and also, look at the currently assigned chunk of pages and find a point worth sharing with the class. In both cases, use page numbers to cite text, and explain the significance.

This five minutes yields great dividends in the literary discussion to follow. No awkward pauses and everyone has something to say when called upon. The literary luminaries will still shine, but others have a chance to contribute, too. What does the teacher do with this time? You review, too. After all, isn’t the truth about reading that every time one encounters a text it’s different? Depending on the cast of light, or maybe whether or not the ball team won yesterday, you’ll notice new and different stuff. Even if you don’t, as a teacher who’s read it before, this moment of review will help you zoom in on what you want to bring out in today’s discussion.

And remember that this is a discussion, not a lecture. Being brilliant is easy, but making your kids smart is a lot harder. Instead of pontificating, direct traffic: “We’re going to zoom around the room now and everyone share their ‘yesterday.’” Once that conversation starts, don’t stay mute, by all means. Add value. Piggyback on their comments or bring out key points Socratically. Extend their ideas; add insights about literary technique to a mundane (but original to that student) observation about plot. Just make sure that you aren’t talking more than they are.

By the way, I no longer do teacher-produced “reading quizzes” to students, because I think it privileges my understanding of the text above theirs. Am I better reader? In most cases, yes, if by better one means understanding more about how literature works and life in general. But, if one defines “better” as “having an original, personal interpretation of the work that is well-grounded in what you’ve encountered as a unique reader,” it would be difficult to argue that I am “better.”

The fact remains that I’m me, and they’re them. How brainy I am on any given day isn’t that important. My goal is to pull out the hidden treasure of each student’s unique individual response. Hence, reading notes and discussion instead of traditional reading quizzes. Guess what? I can still tell who read and who didn’t.

So there are days I give a free pass to those who didn’t. Should my job be to bring them along and provide the means to stay with (or get back into) the game? Or should I spend my time as a gatekeeper, letting only the most devoted students into the sanctum of understanding? I’d rather reach every student, not just the best.

Talking this way lets everybody play, one way or another. If their eyes glaze over, or for homework if you get carried away, set aside a few minutes for each person to write about something they’ve heard that they think is important. During this part of class, the desks of the kids who never say a word squeak just as loud as the ones where the talkers sit. Same as yours.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 9:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We are wrapping up preparations this week for a big event in the life of any school, our five year accreditation with SACS-CASI. Having completed a school wide look in the mirror over the past half a year which involved collecting evidence and answering questions in seven categories ranging from governance to “teaching and learning,” we will be visited by a team of three educators who will help assure that we are doing what we say we are doing.

All schools, public and private, go through this or a similar accreditation process. I myself went through the SACS process not too long ago as a member of the staff at Thomas Jefferson. Then, I confess, I tried to stand in the back row when they were handing out jobs. Not so in my current smaller pond. My recent experience with the process and administrative role landed me in the thick of it, and something unexpected happened. I liked it.

Over the past several months prior to this current final push, our small staff of forty divided into seven groups, and unlike at TJ, meetings did not disintegrate into bickering over when the next meeting would be and how much or little of lunch we would sacrifice to have it. My colleagues collected evidence and as they examined it engaged in honest conversations about how the school met, or in some cases, didn’t meet, the standards set by the accreditation body. I helped assemble the final report, which reflected both the unevenness and the breadth of vision of any group written document with over three dozen authors.

And this week, I am collecting “essential evidence,” a list of material the visiting team will want at their fingertips. The fascinating part for me is seeing the many facets of our school come together in one place: annual reports and health office stats and board bylaws, along with dozens of other substantial artifacts each of which is the product of many hands, and all of which together form a mosaic of who we are and how our school works.

There’s plenty of minutiae: colored hanging folders in a clear plastic box, a cardboard box cut into strips for dividers with the contents of each section glue-sticked to the top edge, a checklist of artifacts so annotated as to be nearly illegible at this point, each scrawled note reflecting a comment at a meeting or a quick check-in with another vacuole in the amoeba of the school.

But along with the endless printing and reprinting of schedules for the visiting team comes mind-melding with the leadership team around the big table, trying together to step back from this thing we’re all so deeply immersed in and imagine how it will be seen, or how we want it to be seen, by a group of outside educators.

There are the high-level reflections by the Head, who sees the school both as an evolving organism and as a business. Being privy to financials is completely foreign to my experience in mostly public schools over fifteen years. I find myself catapulted into a situation where I look at, talk about, think about annual budgets and sustainable models and the nuances of capitalization.

And there are the countless, constant contacts of collection, discovering each person in their job, each bringing forth documentation of how they sing at school: the facilities manager’s report, the executive assistant’s survey data, the director of curriculum’s school improvement plan. The interconnectedness of a hundred hands, all passing along a child who travels from the driveway up the steps to the hallway, from classroom to classroom to lunch to recess to the library to the gym to the nurse to the fields, and always, back to the classroom again.

I hear Congressional singing, each to each, the varied carols I hear. The multitudes are now all organized in a plastic box with multi-colored hanging folders waiting for the Quality Assurance Review Team to step in the door next Monday.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 5:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Caught one of these yesterday, all alone in the rain on Big Hunting Creek outside Catoctin Mountain National Park. As a chronically hapless angler, my efforts are generally rewarded just enough to prevent me from putting all my equipment on ebay. Fortunately, during the time I wasn’t catching fish, my subconscious was hard at work thinking about Pith.

That’s the title, for now, of the book I propose to write about the a year in the life. It was one of my eighth graders' vocabulary words around the time the idea was born, and seemed a good thing to shoot for. The heart of things is my subject, whether that’s the wood in the center of a tree when you’re building a dugout, or balancing roles as a teacher-mate-parent-child while going for for Natty Boards.

When I first wrote about this ("Page 1," December 31, 2008), I revealed good intentions and introduced my able guide, Andrea from Long Island. Since then, I’ve pieced together a twenty-six page proposal at her direction consisting of a summary, author information, target audience, competition, marketing and promotional opportunities, manuscript specifications, and an outline with table of contents. As well as an enlightening glimpse behind the scenes of book marketing, this was an excellent form of procrastination which allowed me to avoid, until now, the actual task of diving in.

The time has come. A “sample chapter” is required to complete the proposal. I’m leaning towards Chapter 2. Why not begin at the beginning? Part of my strategy is to build on “Certifiable?,” and Chapter 1 as I’ve sketched it out consists of more new material than Chapter 2. And, frankly, recycling seems less daunting.

Renovation might be a better way to think of it, actually: this certainly won’t be blog-warmed-over. More like emotion recollected in tranquility. Yesterday’s stream time was a good start, and I’ve got the house to myself right now. So, here I go. One wild brookie is all I ask for.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 1:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)