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Lesson Debrief: To Stage or Not to Stage

May 5, 2008 By 1 Comment

With my Grade 12 (College) English class, Hamlet is usually my most successful unit. The students know that I am passionate about it and that I have looked forward to this unit the entire semester. I think that they then feed off of my passion, and can’t help but enjoy themselves as well.

For this unit, I ask all of my students to keep a Director’s Folio to be handed in at the end. Early in the unit, students are asked to decide whether they would choose to produce a stage version of Shakespeare’s play, or a film version. All of their future activities hinge on this choice. Graffiti ShakespeareSo we begin this lesson with a casual discussion about live theater the students have attended or participated in, as well as movie experiences that have succeeded or failed. Then, the discussion is graphed in their notes.

What worked well

  • I’m not the only one in the room that enjoys story-telling, the students love sharing about plays and movies they’ve experienced
  • light, casual discussion, with a lot of laughter, before the heavy language and tone of Hamlet
  • on the heels of a casual class discussion, stage and film advantages and disadvantages are easily compared with a T-chart in student binders

What needs work

Photo by Plutor

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Teacher as Storyteller; OR Lesson Debrief: To Stage or Not to Stage (Prelude)

May 5, 2008 By 2 Comments

While I was on my practicum-placement from Lakehead University, my associate-teacher in Orillia, ON told me that the best teachers are the ones with the best stories to tell.

I had recently returned from a couple of overseas adventures (teaching English in Japan and development work in the Sudan), and the students enjoyed the stories of Kansai train navigation and avoiding puffed-adders in the Nuba Mountains.

Now, I don’t talk about Osaka & Fukuoka, or Meroe & Khartoum very often in the classroom. I’ve been at this Durham Board high school for almost 3 years, and adventures from 4 or 5 years ago seem almost from a different lifetime.

Still, I enjoy telling stories, and often begin class with a brief narrative, including the other day when I shared about attending the opening night showing of the 1995 Kevin Costner movie, Waterworld …

I love movies. DVDs and the theater; though the latter hasn’t happened since parenthood began 2 years ago. When I was in my late teens, the movie theaters in Kitchener-Waterloo offered a half-price Tuesday deal; patrons had the privaledge of paying only $4.25 instead of $8.50. (Do they still do this?) It was always the WORST night to go to the theater. Much better to go to a full-price showing, especially a Friday-opening-night when the place can be electric.

With much hilarious digression, I related the following to my students:

Returning from a camping trip we stopped at the theater. We shouted Norm to an acquaintance. We played Charades. We cheered the dimming of the lights and went ballistic for the Canadian Heritage moment about the rowing team that actually won an event. And then … We hated the movie; as did everyone in that room. The crowd was one. In it together. Every one of us equally appalled at the pathetic nature of the movie. And we enjoyed hating it.

Which brings me to the actual Lesson Debrief …

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Lesson Debrief: "The Crucible" Historical Documents

May 1, 2008 By Leave a Comment

When my Grade 12 (College) English students finished their Arthur Miller unit last week, they wrote a short test on The Crucible, and I gave them the weekend to put the finishing touches on their ‘Salem historical documents’. Over the course of the unit, students had some library-time to research Salem, the Witch Trials, and an (assigned) individual involved in the trials. At the end of the unit, students were to hand in:

  • 1-2 pages of research on their assigned character
  • a secret journal kept from their character’s perspective
  • a chain of events of the trials
  • a short opinion piece on John Proctor
  • a letter to Massachusetts Governor William Phips

I had dropped the hint that I’m a sucker for creativity, and the students really rose to the occasion…

What worked well

Creativity! Given the freedom from writing a five-paragraph-essay, students spread their wings, and flew:

  • the chains-of-events came in a variety of forms — one girl built a small gallows and had a noose hanging for each event, a small broom with labels, letters spelling out the town name (S-A-L-E-M) with events described on each letter, strings of crosses, strings of witch hats, and more
  • many students stained the pages and burned the edges of their character-journals, with words written in fountain pen, and blotted pages, creating the illusion of documents that have survived since 1692
  • an old book (discarded from the library) was refitted to look like a Bible and holes were cut out of the center pages to hold the pages of the secret journal

What needs work

  • My briefcase smells like the coffee, tea, and smoke that was used to stain the pages.
  • I need a way of transporting brooms, gallows, books, and posters from the classroom to my office without damaging student work.
  • My rubric… I wasn’t expecting a gallows with noose.

Well done and will do again. Let the students delve in the past, let them dwell on it, and give them freedom to choose how to respond. No five-paragraph-essay with this unit.

And the result: much more fun for all.

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Lesson Debrief: Writer's Workshop, Day One

April 30, 2008 By Leave a Comment

STUDENT: ‘Mr. W., I’m done.’
TEACHER: ‘No, you’re not.’
STUDENT: ‘Yes, I am.’
TEACHER: ‘You can’t be. We’ve just started. I myself am still working on my own word web.’
Silence.
TEACHER: ‘Alright, look. Just go back to your desk and read it over and find at least one area to elaborate on. Then bring it back and I’ll take a look at it, okay?’
Student shuffles away.

It was Day One of our mini Writer’s Workshop in Grade 9 Applied English. To introduce our Ender’s Game unit, students are writing short sci-fi stories. On Day One, students were given a few parameters: a spaceship, a planet in danger, a renegade pilot, a boy — and they were expected to brainstorm each aspect with a word-web, then make point-form notes answering a few leading questions on their handouts, and finally begin writing a (very) rough first draft. This step should take all of the first period and much of the second… NOT simply 10 minutes!

… Thinking of strategies to deal with this phenomenom.

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Lesson Debrief: Creating Julius Caesar audio files

April 28, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Last week saw the end of my Grad 9 applied unit themed “lost worlds.” I will miss the talk about myth, legend, and historical fiction. I will miss the ghosts of Beowulf, Arthur, and Caesar haunting Room 203.

Of the many highlights, the one that will likely stay with me for a while will be the audio tracks that students created from scenes from Julius Caesar. In self-created groups of five or less, students used Audacity to record their dramatic reading (with sound effects) of a scene assigned to them. They had to choose a genre to create the reading.

Some of the interesting scenes included:

  • Calpurnia’s plea to keep Caesar from the Capitol in a Star Wars genre
  • the conspirators with Brutus in a mafia genre
  • the murder scene in a Transformers genre

Students practiced in class several times before we moved to the lab for recording (this took about three classes to complete.)

What worked well:

  • Students had fun listening to their own production — almost too much fun, as it was sometimes hard to encourage them to move on to the next few lines.
  • By creating their own audio recordings, students learned a lot about sound effects and how they add to a story’s interpretation.
  • Audacity is getting easier for me to use all of the time. Next time I’m sure I’ll be able to get students started sooner and using it easily.

What needs work:

  • Time, time, time. Audacity was a new program for them, and it took students a long time just to learn the software. I’m glad that they’ve had the experience, but when I think of the time that it took to do that and then look at all of the curriculum expectations that need to be met before June, I wonder about the time investment.

But even so, I think it was worth the time required. I think I’ll use this again in the future.

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Lesson Debrief: Virtual Literature Circles (Part 3)

April 6, 2008 By Leave a Comment

We’re done this experiment in taking literature circles online. We’ve learned lots about wiki-based collaboration in these two weeks, and believe that we’ll try something like this again.

What I Like

  • I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: this has been especially worthwhile because of the opportunity to collaborate with a colleague. I really enjoy the opportunity to exchange ideas and proofread each other’s work. It created better assignments and a better unit test for the students.
  • Also, it was great to see a handful of the students really exploring the wiki technology… Finding out what it was capable of and where their limitations were.

What Needs Work

  • The in-class, face-to-face discussion has not carried over to our online classroom space very well. In class, students are interested in discussing their chosen novels and have some lively conversations about them but the wiki has not harnessed that discussion very well. This could be because it is designed more for facilitating collaboration than for fostering discussion. The students were very reluctant to give that one extra click of the mouse to go to the discussion page, let alone the added mouse-clicks for reading previous posts and for typing their own.
  • The fact that their peers can see their work has not encouraged many students to reconsider the quality of their final work. I had hoped that more peer collaboration would enable them to see their work in a new light, but for many, they remain content with submitting minimal work. I think that perhaps if I spend more time in helping students learn how to use the wiki effectively that the positive peer pressure I’m hoping for might increase.

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Related Posts

Lesson Debrief:  Virtual Literature Circles (Part 1)

Lesson Debrief:  Virtual Literature Circles (Part 2)

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Lesson Debrief: Virtual Literature Circles (Part 2)

March 18, 2008 By 2 Comments

The wiki-based virtual literature circle experiment is continuing, and I feel that almost daily I’m learning from yet another mistake. I remain grateful for my long-suffering colleague who is collaborating with me.

What I like

  • I’m glad that I had a Code of Conduct (based on the Wiki Warranty by TeachersFirst) published and reviewed with students before they started using the wiki. Today I had my first vandalism experience, with a couple of students putting inappropriate content on other students’ pages. I took the opportunity to review the Code of Conduct with the whole class and then spoke individually with the offending students. It wasn’t a highlight, but the students seemed to accept and understand why they would be banned from the wiki for the rest of the unit.

What needs work

  • I wish that I had set every student up with a wikispace account ahead of time. That way I would know and control their passwords, which are prone to being lost and shared.
  • I wish I’d known about the gmail-plus option for setting up multiple addresses linked to the same gmail account when I’d started. Kim Cofino first introduced me to the idea of linked gmail accounts; Sean Deasy gives a quick summary of this cool gmail feature. Next time I’ll use linked gmail accounts to sign students up for our class blog and the class wiki just for my own sanity’s sake.
  • Trying to incorporate two novels into this experiment has been a bit much. College-level students can’t reliably read novels independently, so I plan to read aloud any novel we study. This gets tricky when I have two groups of students reading different novels in the same classroom. We’re surviving, but next time I do this with a college-level class I’ll just use one novel.

Two weeks left of the literature circle experiment …

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Related
Lesson Debrief: Virtual Literature Circles (Part 1)

Lesson Debrief: Virtual Literature Circles (Part 3)

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Introducing Shakespeare with graphic novels

March 5, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Last semester I happened to land upon a great tool for introducing Shakespeare to Gr. 9 students, thanks in part to inspiration from a colleague in a course I was taking at the time. Graphic novels help students to understand how dialogue works and provide a basis for reading a script.

I chose to use this approach in a unit that incorporated A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We began by reading excerpts from Bone (by Jeff Smith) as a class, discussing what elements made it fit our definition of fantasy literature. Next, I gave students copies of some pages in Bone with the dialogue erased. Working alone or in pairs, students created the dialogue that they imagined could work for those characters. From there, students translated their dialogue into script form and presented it.

The fantastical Bone was a perfect lead-in to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Our conversations often included some comparison of the setting of the two texts.

This semester, I’m hoping to use Julius Caesar as the primary Shakespearean text for this class. It’s challenging, though, to find a graphic novel that works really well with this play. I’ve considered Beowulf, another text based in an ancient world, but there’s very little dialogue in Beowulf to work with. Characters proclaim their thoughts, which are then interpreted by the narration.

An old-world graphic novel? I must do some hunting.

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Lesson Debrief: Virtual Literature Circles (Part 1)

March 4, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I’m technically cheating here, doing a series of lesson debriefs on what is really a unit. But since I’m making the rules, I imagine that breaking them is allowed.

I’ve mentioned before that I am collaborating with a colleague in a wiki-based, cross-class literature circle experiment. The long descriptor there gives a pretty good sense of just how complicated it feels sometimes. We’ve decided to have each class break into literature circles and choose to read either The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravtiz or The Catcher in the Rye. Our in-class literature circles are quite standard, with members assuming roles and completing related handouts.

Each in-class literature circle is teamed up with another lit circle from my colleague’s class to form a larger virtual literature circle. That virtual team is expected to summarize and extend their respective discussions online via our class wiki. The end goal of all of this is for students to compile a detailed portfolio of the novel that they can use to create a book trailer.

What I like

  • I enjoy collaborating with a colleague in my department. While I appreciate the connections I make online, and the learning that happens here, it’s great to be trying out ideas with someone who I can visit with in the hall.
  • I’ve honed the literature circle role sheets that I use and they seem to be working well for this grade level. Students are using them to get a fresh perspective on the novel.
  • The two novels – Catcher and Duddy Kravtiz – work really well together. Reading them, I frequently laugh out loud.

What needs work

  • When a circle is missing students, then the discussion aspect suffers. This is a unit that is particularly hampered by absenteeism, which is a bit odd since so much of it is being taken online. It seems that if there isn’t some face-to-face conversation immediately following a reading, then it’s more challenging for students to summarize ideas and extend them online.
  • Although a wiki is a straightforward tool, I should have had students complete more activities with it prior to beginning this fairly intensive unit. Some students are still learning how to work with the technology rather than spending their time on content. (Having said that, working with the technology is one of the goals here, so I’m pleased to see progress.)

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Related
Lesson Debrief: Virtual Literature Circles (Part 2)

Lesson Debrief:  Virtual Literature Circles (Part 3)

Filed Under: 21st Century Skills, Lessons Tagged With: , , ,

Lesson Debrief: Perspective, Bias, and Opinion

February 28, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I’m starting a unit with my Gr. 9 class that will focus around different commentaries on society – editorials, blogs, and lyrics to name a few. I kicked it off with a 2-day lesson that allows students to work with terms like perspective, bias, and opinion.

Once again, the Media Awareness Network (MAN) provided me with a great start to this lesson. I used ideas from both their Bias Lesson and a related Bias in the News Lesson, but started everything off by reading the wonderful Voices in the Park. (If you’re not familiar with this picture book, it presents the same event through four different voices, with corresponding changes in art.)

After talking about the concept of perspective and how important it is to telling a story, we compared three headlines related to Tuesday’s federal budget. From there we used the Sir Sam / Hughes handouts, with students creating very different descriptions of the central character of the story based on the version of the handout that they have.

Finally, students found articles, columns, and editorials that they felt presented a judgment on a topic, and circled the value-laden words. As a class we talked about those articles and created a chart showing which type of article was more blatantly opinionated.

What I liked

  • Students really enjoyed Voices in the Park – particularly the way the art portrayed the feelings of the different characters – and understood the value of perspective in telling a story.
  • Comparing several headlines from a current story connected with students. By seeing the three versions side-by-side, they realized that bias is real and it’s part of storytelling.
  • The different descriptions of Sam Hughes that emerged from student readings were entertaining and led to a friendly debate, reinforcing the concept that bias on the part of the writer can easily lead to bias on the part of the reader.
  • Finally, having students identify judgment present in different articles helped us all to visualize the varying degrees of bias or opinion that exist in these articles types.

What needs work

  • While the Sir Sam Hughes case study worked brilliantly, I’d really like to update this with two conflicting perspectives on a more current character. Perhaps Mr. Mulroney?

This one’s a keeper. It’s a great lead-in to reading and creating opinion pieces and other forms of commentary.

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