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Lesson Debrief: Scripted Dialogue with Duddy Kravtiz

December 5, 2008 By Leave a Comment

My Grade 12 English class is two weeks into a unit that uses Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz as its main text, and “What is important in life?” as its guiding question. At the end of this unit, I am expecting students to submit essays that reflect their learning and thinking processes.

Rather than starting with the five-paragraph essay form and shoehorning their ideas into that, however, students are going to test their ideas in a form that is both exploratory and fun: one option for them will be the scripted dialogue. So, we practiced.

To begin, students were asked to imagine a conversation between Duddy and his dead mother, Minnie, and to express it in dramatic script form. (Since we had recently studied An Ideal Husband and Hamlet, students were familiar with the form.)

I offered students some prompts to get them started in their dialogues:

  • Mom, guess what I’ve done? You should see me now! You’d be so proud.
  • Mom, I’m sorry. I’ve made a few mistakes.
  • Mom, tell me about _________. I was too young / I never knew ….

They were then given 50 minutes to create dramatic scripts with opening, stage, and character directions. I explained that it was not a test to see how much they knew about the novel, although I did want to recognize Duddy. Mostly, I wanted them to have fun.

The results were promising.

What Worked Well

  • Simple instructions were easily and quickly followed, allowing students to spend their time creating rather than figuring out what I wanted from them.
  • Everyone wrote busily and happily for 50 minutes, suggesting that this was a topic and/or form that has a lot of potential for this group.
  • Students genuinely explored Duddy’s personality in vulnerable moments, something I doubt I would have seen had I expected them to create a thesis and muster three supporting arguments for it.
  • Students are proud of their products and are eager to share their scripts with their classmates. (This is unusual.)

What Needs Work

  • The rubric that I’m working with needs to be adjusted to take the focus off of textual knowledge. A few students were too anxious to prove textual knowledge and were sidetracked looking for quotes and minute details.

All told, this was a great exercise in which possible essay topics rose naturally to the surface.

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Lesson Debrief: Staging Hamlet's Ghost

October 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment

When my Grade 12 College level students study Hamlet, we do not spend weeks analyzing the details. We do not debate about Hamlet or Claudius proving the greater villain; we do not philosophize on whether or not Rosencrantz and Guildenstern got what they deserved; nor do we try to pin Ophelia’s death on Gertrude. All of these arguments are saved as essay topics for the University level students.

No, with College level students, our three-week focus is on understanding and enjoying the story of Hamlet and its production. Students are challenged to think about changes that they would make were they producing the play.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the unit for students is when they speculate on how they would stage the Ghost in Act 1.

What Worked Well

  • The handout that I provide is easy for students to follow. Their task is to find five quotes in Act 1 that describe the Ghost, and this handout proves to be a good guide for that.
  • Students have fun comparing their ideas for staging the Ghost with the decisions made by the director of a production that we view in class.
  • Students use ten words of their own to describe the Ghost. This helps them clarify their images of the Ghost and sharpens their ideas for their own imagined production.
  • Students always have fun sketching a zombie of their own and describing his movement and voice.

What Needs Work

  • Trying to fit this unit in between Thanksgiving and the Fall Break has rushed this entire unit and students just didn’t have enough time to speculate on the Ghost. Two-and-a-half weeks is rushing it; I feel like this unit is probably about a week shorter than it should have been. (It didn’t help that a large group of the students were on a three-day canoe trip with the Outdoor Education class, either.)
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Lesson Debrief: The Hobbit News Article

October 20, 2008 By Leave a Comment

As I have mentioned, reading The HobbitThe Hobbit with my Grade 9/10 Essential level students has been a surprising treat for me this semester. Throughout our journey there and back again with Bilbo, we have paused for activities designed to increase students’ comprehension of the text and their use of reading strategies.

One of my intentions with students at this level is to prepare them for the OSSLT (a literacy test administered in Grade 10). News articles – comprehending and writing them – seem to form the backbone of the test, so I drill the form with my students.

Midway through our reading of The Hobbit, then, I had students write a news article based on Bilbo’s escape from Gollum and the goblins. This was an action-packed scene with lots of meat for students to work with. They had to write about the scene in the standard news article format and include quotes from characters involved.

What Worked Well

  • Preparation for a key component of the OSSLT was accomplished. Check.
  • Students analyzed the scene from a fresh perspective and found new humour (and action) in it. This is a great example of students filling in gaps in their reading.
  • In creating quotes, students had to think about places where the text was silent. They practiced in a limited way thinking about various perspectives on the text.
  • Because we had practiced writing news articles in our previous unit, students felt confident approaching this assignment. It was a text they understood and a form they were familiar with. They turned into professionals.

What Needs Work

  • We were working with book sets borrowed from our Board’s Media Library. This is a fantastic resource, but the default timeframe of three weeks was a bit tight for this group and this book. I should have asked for a four-week loan of the books.
  • When they write the OSSLT, students will be given a headline and a picture and asked to create a news article. In this lesson, I gave students a well-described scene and asked them to create an article. I should try this using just an image (such as Bilbo caught in the doorway) and a headline (such as “Narrow Escape in the Misty Mountains”) next time.
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Lesson Debrief: Political scandals introduce "An Ideal Husband"

October 1, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I decided to mix things up a bit in my Grade 12 English (College level) course this semester, and am using An Ideal Husband as our modern drama instead of my usual Crucible.

We started by talking about what constitutes a scandal. We watched a video clip about Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz’s recently infamous comment regarding the Listeriosis outbreak. The clip showed the political mileage that the opposition is getting out of his “death by a thousand cold cuts” pun.

It turns out that seventeen year-olds are not easily offended or outraged. Even the glimpse that they took at the deathby1000coldcuts online game hardly raised an eyebrow.

Students were given the task of researching a modern North American scandal. In groups of 2-3, they spent an hour finding information about one of the following:

Their job was to introduce the scandal to their classmates in their own words in less than a page.

On Day 2, students created a brief timeline of the main events of their scandal and then each wrote a paragraph answering the question: “Was it really an awful or shameful thing, or was it merely sensationalized?”

Finally, students posted all of their work on the class wiki.

What worked well

  • Students were eager to research these terms and names that they’ve heard, wanting to defend Mulroney or denounce the Liberals with the Gomery Inquiry. (The school seems to be in a staunchly Conservative riding.)
  • Hearing exclamations like, “So that’s what Watergate was!”
  • The variety of websites that students encountered, many of them news and history sites.
  • The exercise of paraphrasing challenged the students to understand the material and communicate it clearly.

What needs work

  • The wiki and the school server continue to butt heads, and many of our attempts to edit pages on the wiki were rejected. This may be a Wetpaint issue, as I haven’t had any problems like this with Wikispaces.
  • The students who researched Iran-Contra are still scratching their heads.
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Lesson Debrief: Smart Surfing WebQuest

February 22, 2008 By Leave a Comment

This year I’ve been experimenting with WebQuests, mostly using them in instances where I had previously used a lecture / quiz format. There are a lot of things that I like about the WebQuest format: student independence, the structured use of online resources, and the expectation that students work with information to produce something else.

This week I used a Smart Surfing WebQuest with both my Grade 9 (Applied) and Grade 11/12 (Multiple Exceptionality) students. It wasn’t brilliant, but it wasn’t worth trashing, either.

What I liked

  • Students seem to focus more with a WebQuest than with a similar assignment handed out on paper. I don’t know why exactly. Perhaps it’s the fact that they have to read through it a page at a time, which reinforces the process for them. Perhaps it’s just the cool computer factor.
  • For some students, the opportunity to work entirely online was clearly liberating. They produced their best work and were the most excited about learning that they’ve been this semester.
  • The WebQuest allowed for more student independence, which meant that I was able to spend more time in one-on-one conferencing with students and other important tasks. I really like being able to minimize hand-holding on assignments, and this seemed to do it.

What needs work

  • I need to preface this with a more structured introduction to WebQuests. Some students seemed to freeze at first because the term “WebQuest” was unfamiliar. Spending part of a period explaining the characteristics of one might help. (Of course, this will be easier to put into practice when I’m able to go online in the classroom and actually walk them through it.)
  • Even more importantly, I need to somehow teach online reading skills. As before, I noticed students clicking away and ending up lost, not knowing why they were on a particular page and what they could do about that. I really am not sure how to go about this in an environment where computers and lab time are both scarce.
  • And what to do with students who declare their intention to create a PowerPoint presentation (hooray!) and then ask me to walk them through each detail, from scanning images in for them to animating their slides. (I don’t, but they still ask.) Does this mean that I should be prefacing the lesson with presentation how-tos? Should I have resource pages on my website with screenshots that walk students through creating different media texts? Maybe links to online tutorials? Or should I just point them to the great big world online and tell them to figure it out? I really struggle with the neediness that some students display and finding a response that I’m consistently comfortable with.

Bottom line: I’ll use this again in the future, but not without a better lead-in and more support. (Somehow.)

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Lesson Debrief: Analyzing "Batman Begins"

February 14, 2008 By 3 Comments

With my Gr. 12 English class, I’m in the midst of a unit that asks, “What makes a person great?” This lesson builds on our conversations about characteristics of great people, features of a great movie, and the blockbuster phenomenon: in other words, media literacy. Once again, I owe a lot to the good folks at the Media Awareness Network, as I launch this 3-or 4-day lesson with a slightly modified version of their camera shots lesson. After talking about the hero journey, camera shots, and comic heroes, students are ready to discuss the techniques used by movie directors to portray a hero.

I’ve used Batman Begins several times with this lesson, and as much as I like mixing things up from class to class, I keep returning to this movie because it works so well.

What I like

  • Batman Begins, suprisingly, has not been seen by the majority of my students. It’s always nice to work with something that is new for most of the class. And the upcoming Dark Knight adds an extra level of intrigue.
  • Bruce Wayne/Batman offers an interesting portryal of the hero’s journey.
  • The camera techniques used in Batman Begins are a rich discussion source. During class, I play the movie for a few minutes, pause it, and ask what students have noticed about the camera angles (or anything else from music to script to costuming). We talk about the the movie’s director’s decisions, why they were made, and what impact they have on the audience. Students invariably get involved and enthusiastically share their ideas. (A high school English teacher’s dream come true.)

What needs work

  • This lesson portrays yet another male hero. I want to find more strong female characters for this unit, and indeed the entire course, both of which are too male-focussed right now. Aeon Flux is an obvious alternative for this lesson with its female hero; however, I tend to use that movie in my Grade 9 class. I could use it again, I suppose, but then it just gets a bit boring for both me and the students.

Final notes

This lesson markedly changes students’ media literacy. One student half-complained, half-joked, “I’ll never watch movies the same way again!” That is exactly what I want to hear. I have a friendly debate with a colleague about our role here: he is of the opinion that we shouldn’t spoil the way students watch movies, while I am convinced that students should be equipped to see movies as constructed re-presentations of reality. For me, then, this is an almost-perfect lesson.

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