How American Studies is going...

Flipped classroom instruction has its benefits....

Getting Feedback-- Collaborating with Students on Assessments

I'm working on a new component to my AP Government and Politics class that incorporates Public Forum into the classroom. For information on the structure of these kinds of debates and how they will work into my classroom, feel free to check out my page here. The idea came from my time advising the Forensics Team and the kinds of mental rigor that it asks of students is perfect for the class.

But I left it to the experts, namely two of my students who both debate for me and took the class last year.

I sent the link above for feedback and got some great feedback from students. Here's one from one:

It's really good! 

It's a really good way to make them apply what they actually know, and discourage stupid in class arguments where everyone just says the same thing and gets really offended when people disagree. 

That second contention still annoys me though! Haha. I'll think about another way to say it or a resolution under the same category. 

Are you planning on pairing them up yourself or letting them do it? If you pair them up, I suggest having the names and schedules ready just so when they start to complain (obviously they will) you can say "shut up, I've had this done since August and your whining isn't changing it." 

If you do pair them up yourself, even though [student] and I could demo, you should probably choose kids you know for the first one, kids you know will be pretty good. That way everyone else is held to a high standard. If its a total flop on the first round, no one will take it seriously. 

Yay for Public Forum! 

Oh and 2 questions: why did you give them 3 minutes and are they going to be speaking fast? 

I wish I had three minutes, my summaries would be so much better!

As I knew she would, she gave valuable insight, particularly about her concern that no one would take it seriously if the first one was a flop. Because she has experienced doing what I'm asking students to do her recommendations have far more weight than a teacher or administrator. It is always difficult to place ourselves in the mindset of the classroom and being 17 years old, having to preform a task. So why not ask those students?

Of course I choose specific students. This student is driven and hungry for challenges. She is intolerant of assignments that waste her time and she once told me that she would rather "learn in a class and hate the teacher rather than like the teacher and do nothing." She isn't going to give feedback that soft pedals an assessment and she isn't going to argue that a student's grade should be based on compliance.

The second contention that annoys her was the following: Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially decrease its authority either to detain without charge or to search without probable cause. And she was right. This is a clunky open-ended resolution. She explained in an earlier email that the problem is that "substantially decrease" is so vague and ill-defined that the debate could lack a sound foundation.

 She sent a follow up email:

Resolved: The Patriot Act is a threat to American civil liberties

Short and direct. Perfect.

The reason I post this is that I got to thinking... how often do you ask kids to take a direct hand in leaving their fingerprints on the kinds of assessments they get? I will say that this student is a particular kind of learner, but how much better would our assessments be if we actually had a conversation with former or current students on the kind of assessments that make the most sense?

Tolerance and Utility

I've been reading Walter Isaacson's amazing biography on Benjamin Franklin and there is so much people can learn about learning when looking at this larger-than-life Founder. I'm a big nerd when it comes to the founding generation, mostly because everything you ever need to learn about living a full, thoughtful, and connected life you can learn from studying the likes of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, and Washington. They are all so different but all tend to share this common creed about bettering one's self as a means of improving society as a whole. They were the ultimate in self-paced, intrinsic learning and when you look at the ideal student profile that high schools are trying to produce through public education you are essentially reading descriptions of Jefferson or Franklin.

There's a passage where a relatively young Franklin is defending his unique perspectives on religion and orthodoxy to his family back in Boston and he outlines a model of thinking that should be the end result of any student in a high school:

Franklin's freethinking unnerved his family. When his parents wrote of their concern over his "erroneous opinions," Franklin replied with a letter that spelled out his religious philosophy, based on tolerance and utility, that would last his life. It would be vain, he wrote, for any person to insist that "all doctrines he holds are true and all he rejects are false." The same could be said of the opinions of different religions as well. They should be evaluated, the young pragmatist said, by their utility: "I think opinions should be judged by their influences and effects; and if a man holds none that tend to make him less virtuous or more vicious, it may be concluded that he holds none that are dangerous, which I hope is the case with me." He had little use for the doctrinal distinctions his mother worried about. "I think vital religion has always suffered when orthodoxy is more regarded than virtue. And the Scripture assures me that at the last day we shall not be examined by what we thought, but what we did... that we did good to our fellow creatures. See Matth 26." His parents, a bit more versed in the Scriptures, probably caught that he meant Matthew 25. They did, nonetheless, eventually stop worrying about his heresies.

Franklin is concerned with the doctrines of religion, but in society there are a myriad of ways in which students get locked into ideological rigid ways of thinking that tend to be self-serving and too often lead to some form of intolerance. As someone who teaches a Government and Politics class, I can say that it takes a great deal of effort to get students to see outside their own pre-packaged viewpoints. Judging ideas by their utility and tolerance  is a great set of guiding principles to look toward when thinking of broad themes. This is especially true of an early American Studies class.

Teaching Our Students to Be More Like Lisbeth.

One of the biggest problems I think all teachers can attest to is the lack of flexibility students possess when it comes to doing searches on the Internet. We see this all time time. If students are doing research on Revolutionary War weaponry, for examples, they tend to be very literal with their search options. They seldom deviate from "Revolutionary weapons" or "Revolutionary guns" or some very limited variation on that. They are also reticent to go beyond the first page of search results. And because their searches are largely superficial, they often get redundant information. 

Hitting the top searches, to many students, is the same as hitting the most relevant sources. But according to Eli Pariser, in his book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You, says this is far from the truth. Check out his talk below to show how information is not being shared the way most people think it is. This is something that needs to be taught to students



Performing effective Google searches is hard to teach. For starters, I don't even know if it would be accurate to say I do effective searches on the Internet. I'm sure a Google-certified teacher has a thousand ways to find information that I have never even considered. What I know about doing Google searches is what I've been picked up as a grad student and a teacher from doing. I don't have a ton of training in all the ways that you can exploit the resources of a search engine. Because of this, my confidence in teaching kids how to use it is limited. Also, a lot of the methods of searching I do feels to me intuitive and therefore is hard for me to teach. It is difficult for me to break down into steps something I just work out in a kind of organic way. 

I work the problem until it sorts itself out. How do you teach that?

There are ways, certainly, and I think it comes down to seeing it as training students to be detectives. I love detective fiction and I'm always interested in how a writer creates sophisticated plots that is a character working through a problem. Lisbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series is probably the most apt example of this. The way that Lisbeth manipulates the Internet is displayed as being almost supernatural. But even the hacking and surveillance seems a little far-fetched, the general principle that through intelligent, methodical application of problem-solving skills can empower individuals using search engines is still something we can strive for.

A lot of this thinking comes from my addiction to reading about smart but gruff detectives working through cases, but it also comes from this post from Daniel Russell on his blog. Russell works for Google, where he studies the way that people search. Every Wednesday Russell posts a series of questions. Each question is harder than next, and readers are asked to find all the answers and then share how they were able to use Google to locate that information. As I've looked through some of the questions asked, they can be rather hard. But it sure beats students clicking on the first two hits of a general search. Every Thursday Russell posts the answers and the level of problem solving skills is pretty amazing.

All of the questions in the latest search challenge are related to Thomas Jefferson's relationship with wine. The third question, which makes it the hardest, asked, "How many times did Jefferson refer to wine in ALL of his writing?" Not something you can just look up. You have to work the problem.
I had in my mind a few ways to solve this and the actual resolution actually wasn't too different than what they ended up doing. This is from Russell's Thursday post, where he explained how he figured it out: 

This comes under the category of downloading and scraping content from web sites (which we'll discuss later in more detail), but for this problem here's what I did. 

a.  Find a collection of ALL of Jefferson's writings in plain text.   
b.  Download all of those texts and concatenate them into one big file.  (Remember that this is someone writing with quill and ink--he didn't write THAT much text in the course of his life.)   
c.  Do a textual search for "wine" throughout his collected text (by using Control-F, Command-F, or if you're geeky, grep). 

He goes into a more detailed explanation of all that was entailed, but for that you should check out his blog post.

This to me is a great way to get kids to learn about searches. The content you are asking them to find is irrelevant; it's the act of finding it that's important. As a matter of fact, the more obscure the information is, the better. This is because if the knowledge is readily available because of its inherent utility, students won't need to employ as many problem-solving skills to find it. Figuring out how many times Jefferson mentions wine in his correspondence is useless cocktail trivia, but learning the skills to draw out that kind of information from the Internet has great relevance

I think I am going to do this once a week. Present the students with three questions, scaled from easy to medium to hard. Then I'm going to give them some time to work the problem and students can share out the ways in which they found it. What was their thought process? How were searches adjusted as you learned more information? How did one line of inquiry help build onto the next? Did you use Google News? Google Scholar? Google Books? (It always surprises me how little Google Books is utilized.)

Coming up with these search challenges is not easy and requires you to have to really think about how you conduct searches, drawing light on how narrow your own skill set is. Hopefully by doing this I will improve my own ability to do effective searches, which in turn will help me teach it better over time.

Self-pacing in an English Class in Regards to Reading One Core Text Together

After reading Chris's latest blog post about our design of student self-paced instruction within pods, I want to share how I currently plan to approach how this would look in our American Studies class (or even in any English class) when reading one core text. As I've stated before.... I'm open to feedback and suggestions.

How do I assign reading, writing, discussions, and final assessments on a text when every student is moving at his or her own pace throughout that text? 

Last year I tried to implement self-paced reading through a directed-choice read unit during the fourth marking period with my seniors.  Students were given a choice of three texts.  They then chose the one that most interested them and needed to complete it by a certain date during the fourth marking period while simultaneously writing a research paper.  Students were given study guide packets for their books and needed to maintain journals on their reading.  We also had weekly book talks.  The only due dates that the students needed to adhere to were for the research paper, which was broken down into multiple digestible steps. Essentially, my senior classes were reading at their own pace and were directing their own learning of that text.  Yes - I guided them throughout it, but since they were now seniors they should have been able to identify themes and symbols, complete characterizations, and comprehend plot devices that were being used in the text on their own.

There were many pros and cons to this approach. The largest con to this was that I would have scheduled book talks on certain days every week that eventually fell flat on their faces.  Students would have a schedule, which I created for them, as to when journal entries were due and when our book talks would be held.  The main issue here was that eventually the book talks came to a screeching halt. Not only were students still abiding by MY calendar of assignments rather than truly designing their own, but now we ran into the problem by which students would sit together based on their chosen text they were reading and discuss it.  I supplied them with massive study guide packets at the beginning of the text.  There were supplementary readings, assessments on plot, characters, themes, etc throughout.  (I basically gave them everything we would do throughout the study of this text all at once in one large packet.... bad idea, especially with seniors.)

But getting back to the BIG BIG issue I found that deteriorated discussion rather than enrich it was the self-paced environment that was created. One student finished Frankenstein because she is a veracious reader who truly enjoyed the book.  A second student was on chapter five of the book.  Putting these two students together in a larger group created a huge problem. Student one didn't know what she could say so as to not spoil the text, while student two had barely anything to contribute.  I tried my best to motivate students to further their reading through individual conferencing.  I had created one Google Doc per student that I would update daily.  Each day there would be a narrative about that student's progress in this self-paced unit.  Perhaps part of the problem was that I was working with seniors during the fourth marking period, but for the most part it didn't matter how many times I would tell students either virtually via their Google Doc progress chart or in a face-to-face conversation that they needed to be at a certain chapter at certain point for the next book talk; it just didn't happen. So then I decided to break students down based on book AND their progression throughout the text.  This also created a problem because I had one group who had so much to say, while another group sat there silently.  I was basically putting them in groups based on motivation, which only added to the initial problem. Now kids were being left behind.

So inevitability the book talks fell flat.  Now you may be thinking to yourself (because this was my train of the thought, which was heavily influenced by fellow educators).... "Why not have the book talks be centered around themes so that the content or plot of the book does not become the focal point of the conversation?  It wouldn't matter who was where in the text as long as the conversations were about larger concepts."  It did matter.  It mattered a lot actually.  For instance: one book talk was about "parenting."  My hope was that students would discuss parenting as a larger concept by using some of the discussion questions I provided for them as a means to get their conversation going (just in case they were stuck on how to start it in the first place). Talking about parenting started out very well, but once they brought it to their particular text it fizzled out.  Students would not know what they could or could not say, because let's be honest here - the development of a theme progresses throughout the novel itself.  A statement regarding how a character behaves is appropriate in the discussion of the development of a theme, but if you are finished with the text you have a full understanding of that character and his/her motivations which in effect influences how you analyze a particular theme within that text.  Students got stuck.  So we then moved the conversation to the class as a whole.  How is parenting different from text to text?  Let's just focus on the theme and the larger concept of what parenting means, and subsequently how that it represented in various ways and perspectives throughout the literature we are reading.  Students became lost in the mix because of where they were, or perhaps weren't, in their reading.

Basically it comes down to this..... students need to be held accountable.  It doesn't matter whether or not they are holding themselves accountable in a pod (or group) system by which they create their own calendar of reading assignments and assessments on those readings, or whether the teacher creates it.... they must be held accountable.  So... how do I make this work in a self-paced learning environment where now every pod is in a different place at a different time throughout the one core text we are reading?

I have considered taking the literary circles approach when trying to trouble-shoot how this may look in the English classroom.  So let me break it down:

1.) Pod One = 4 students.  Pod One receives 5 calendars.  Each student gets one calendar for his/her own use, while the last calendar is considered the "master calendar" that is then submitted to the teacher.  As the teacher I then know my students' schedules for their reading assignments and can hold them accountable for staying on top of their own scheduled work.

2.) On the calendars that are initially provided there will be reading check-points.  By this date it is heavily suggested that you are at X point in the text.  This will hopefully alleviate the problem where the deadline for the text and assessments are due, and I have 20 students coming up to me saying: "But I'm only on chapter 10."

3.) Run it like a college class. Have the larger group discussion at the end of the book.  Discuss the book as a whole.  By that time students will have read the text, written about it, taken assessments on it so that I can gage where a student is in their mastery of literary terms and concepts as well as plot. On the initial calendar that the students receive they will be generating due dates for their pod in order to work toward the end deadline of when the book needs to be read by and when the assessments need to be completed.

Now comes the bigger question: How does this benefit the student MORE than the traditional approach to teaching a book? Because let's face it; this is far more work on both the teacher and student involved.

1.) The students are taking ownership.  The student decides what segments of the text will be read. The students need to cooperatively work together to design these due dates for themselves based on their own skills, motivations, and personal schedules. Basically... it's all about the students here.  I mean, when I think about it who am I to say when something must be done?  I'm creating due dates to fit my own schedule, but what about the students? What about the student who despises reading versus the student who is currently reading three different books at once for fun? We need to keep these kids in mind when designing our plans in order to meet the learning objectives, and perhaps that means telling the students what those learning objectives are and allowing them to instead design the plans on how to reach them.

2.) Students can use each other as resources rather than always looking to the teacher. Jose has read the first five chapters, responded to the thematic questions on his blog, taken the assessments to gage his comprehension of that section of reading and now he can move forward to the next assigned reading section that his pod has put together.  But Alex isn't quite there yet.  She needs some help, and the first person she can go to is Jose. And why shouldn't she? The teacher does not have all the answers, and I think this needs to be our mantra if we are going to use the flipped classroom model for the English class. I remember as a student loving my English classes more than any other class because we could talk about everything and anything! All the disciplines fit in so nicely and every one of my peers saw something differently. Explore these perspectives within the pods and allow the students to drive those conversations.  Now I'm definitely not saying that as the teacher we need to sit back and relax. In fact, I think this is where we are needed more than ever.  As English teachers, or perhaps educators across the board, we need to focus on the process of getting from A to B as it works for each student.  Guiding students through that process individually will not be an insurmountable task if we use the flipped classroom model as a means to help our students understand literary concepts. Not every student starts at A and many students don't know how to get to B.  That's where we're needed!

Balancing Self-Pacing and Collaboration

Jess and I have been discussing the self-paced classroom in preparation for American Studies this September and we've run into some roadblocks. Not necessarily insurmountable, but they do call into question the logistics of transitioning a humanities course into a flipped classroom environment. Most of the exemplars out there tend to be science and math, so one of the reasons we started this blog is to think out loud about how we can take the principles of flipped instruction and apply them in a way that makes sense to the English or history class. One of the questions we keep coming back to is the issue of self-pacing.

Just as a little background to the class itself, we're teaching a class that is cross-disciplinary between history and English, aligned with the early United States history curriculum (which is from colonization to the Reconstruction). The class is a double-block (137 minutes) and is made up of 40 students, which rules out the more traditional approach to teaching. Having taught the course last year, it is clear that the flipped classroom is the only real viable approach to the class. We've worked out the first two units in our minds in regards to readings, themes, and learning objectives.

We've committed to doing a self-paced mastery set-up, as outlined in Jonathon Bergmann and Aaron Sams's Flipping the Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day. The question we run into is how to do this in a class where they are all reading the same work. In the second unit, which under the broad umbrella of Colonial Society, we're going to be reading Arthur Miller's The Crucible while we take a look at how the values and mission statement of a society shape the various colonial regions differently. But can students be self-paced and still read and discuss a core text together?

In the past, we would have had them read a segment of the book and build a lesson about the elements and themes in that particular segment. But how to do this if a student can read the play in two days while it takes another student a week to read? Can you allow for the level of self-direction that the mastery approach offers without losing group cohesion?

The exchange of ideas between people over the same text is invaluable. Discussion, whether face-to-face or online, is really important to shaping students' understanding. But outside of asynchronous discussion boards, can a self-paced class have that sense of a shared experience?

One of the ways to maintain some kind of cohesion is to create pods, or groups, that allows them to lean on each other and sort out their own issues as a group. This could be collaborative learning that is more open-ended. One of the ways we were hoping to foster this is that is having them develop their own work schedule as a group rather than as an individual.

We would introduce the first unit in the first days of the school year, discussing the learning objectives, overall theme, and the various readings and activities they would have to do to show their mastery of the material. We then discussed giving each pod (who would sit at tables together) a blank calendar sheet with a benchmark of when Unit I material would have to be done. How students got their would be up to the group. They would take a look at the schedule and work out a schedule of due dates for each individual assignment leading up to the end date. This would be agreed upon by everyone in the group. We would hold them to their own schedule just as if we made it ourselves.

We decided to do this for a couple of reasons. The first is that by doing it we are having them get to know each other and collaborate first thing in the class. Students will negotiate with each other on something that is consequential to them, something that has a real impact on their day-to-day life. We are also hoping that compliance to a work schedule will be much higher if students designed it themselves.

This is also a nice compromise between individual differentiation and uniform due dates because students have to negotiate an arrangement that reflects their needs and strengths while also considering other people. This, in my view, is more reflective of real life than working by yourself at whatever pace you want; whether you are a contractor, a lawyer, a doctor, or a teacher our sense of how fast or slow work is always subordinated by the people you work with in some way. In life we all balance how fast we do or do not do something with the needs of others. We all to some degree do things at our own pace, but within the framework of immutable constraints. I think working with a group to come to a consensus emulates this nicely.

This also gives an opportunity to have students help each other. Part of the push in the class is to make students own their own learning (a phrase, by the way, that is fast becoming a bad cliche). To accomplish this it's important to have students work within a system where they can get help and support from each other. I see this as a cross between a work unit, book club, and a study group. This provides the cohesion that would be missing if every student was just going as slow or fast as they wanted. Students would create these pocket communities that would be help them through the unit. We decided we would change them up periodically so that students would be able to get to know as many people in the class as possible.

My purpose for this blog...

Here is my very first blog posting about the use of flipped classroom instruction. I do have some concerns regarding the use of flipped instruction in a humanities class; most of the exemplars of such instruction are in the math and sciences, but I think that this approach to American Studies will allow for deeper student engagement that will foster a stronger understanding of key concepts in our curriculum. I hope that this space will allow for reflection on the use of flipped instruction in a humanities class in order for myself and others to effectively reach our students. Feedback is welcomed!