The Suck and #20time in My Class

I absolutely stole the concept of The Suck from Jon Corippo. Essentially, The Suck talks about productivity on longer term projects. When group projects start, productivity is high. Planning and delegation happens. And then productivity decreases. The deadline is far off and the urgency to get work done - no matter the size of the task - drops. That’s The Suck: this drop in productivity.

#ObiWanCorippo has a couple solutions to The Suck. First, you’ve got to label it. Kids need to know what The Suck is. The need to be able to recognize when they get stuck in The Suck. I’ve seen the power in labeling The Suck this year: students use it in class to call themselves or their groups out for unproductive times.

Another tack that Jon suggests is creating a deadline that doesn’t allow for The Suck. Give kids big tasks with quick deadlines and give them lots of repetitions on the task. They get better at the task and they don’t have time to waste because of the imminent deadline.

I’ve messed with both of these and seen success. As always, Corippo knows things…

So. #20time. True to the nature of The Suck, my kids were super productive at the beginning of their work on their year-long #20time projects, which we work on every Friday in my class. However, as last semester wore on - and the project wasn’t due to be completed until the end of the school year - groups started to fall into The Suck. The deadline was too far away. Daily reflections about what students accomplished in class weren’t defeating The Suck.

Just to be clear, there were significant portions of all my classes that had been very productive with their #20time. But this wasn’t the case with all students.

I needed to intervene.

Time to think. And regroup. That’s what winter break is for, right?

Doctopus: The Document Octopus!

So today, the battle against The Suck commenced in earnest. I used Doctopus to push this document to all my students. After consulting their year long #20time schedules that students created in September and reflecting on where they were and what they needed to accomplish by the end of April (when this project concludes), students created their own rubric to assess themselves on what they could accomplish in January. They will reflect at the end of each Friday #20time period on what they got done, then assess themselves on the rubric that they created at the end of the month.

(No, I’m not grading them based on where they place themselves on the rubric. Just on if they complete the reflection.)

I am hopeful that by making students divide up their remaining #20time into four month-long sections and by having them name what they will accomplish in each month, a sense of urgency will be created. And The Suck will die.

Time will tell. The battle against The Suck in #20time has begun though!

Crowd-Sourced Information in Class

So thanks to a blog post by Catlin Tucker, a brilliant NorCal English teacher (if you’re not following her on Twitter, do it now), I figured out how to start my world history units this year: crowd-sourcing schema from a unit! Why? Well, before my kids can dive into their chosen inquiry question within a world history unit, they need some schema for that unit. But the question is, how do you get that schema?

Obviously there are a ton of ways to do this, but Catlin’s crowd-sourcing idea was attractive to me for a couple reasons. First, I was able to provide my students with some structure to direct their research. For the Russian Revolution, I asked my students to look at the following six areas:

1. What were the conditions in Russia in the early 1900s that led to people revolting in 1917?
2. What did Lenin and the Bolsheviks offer the Russian people? Why was this offer appealing? Hint: think about the context of the Russian Revolution (see question one).
3. What was the Five Year Plan? What impact did the Five Year Plan have on Russia?
4. What was collectivization? What impact did collectivization have on Russia?
5. What tactics did Lenin use to keep power? Describe the tactics in some detail.
6. What tactics did Stalin use to keep power? Describe the tactics in some detail.

Second, my students had some schema about this era: they had started to read Animal Farm in English and knew some information about the Russian Revolution. By running a modified KWL to start this activity, my students were able to both activate and build their schema and start to figure out what further questions they had about the Russian Revolution. Here’s the perfect time to start crowd-sourcing information! Third, my students got to practice their research skills, but this knowledge came from them. No screencast. No lecture. Their research. Their ideas.

And like anything else I’ve done that’s new, I learned some things. One thing in particular. The maximum number of users you can have on a Google doc is 50 - after that people don’t have editing privileges on the document. No good for a crowd-sourced research section. My classes max out at 28, so I wasn’t worried about this. I didn’t have students log into their Google accounts first period - 27 kids? Why bother? Well, with that many anonymous users on the document, Google Drive freaked out a little bit. Some students started to get an error message - too many editors on document. Which didn’t make sense - there were way less than 50 kids in the class. Next period, my class - 24 kids - logged into Google Drive, then accessed the document they were recording their research on. No problems. No problems the following period either. Weird. Live and learn though - have students log into their Google Drive account before crowd-sourcing information with your students.

It was a great kick-off for the unit. In the coming days, students are going to go back and check out the documents from the other classes and start to find areas that they are interested in spending a couple weeks researching intensely. Even today, as kids were doing the basic schema-building research, they were starting to generate questions that they wanted to answer. Excellent!

It was definitely the right start to the unit - thank Catlin!

Presenting

Without sounding all high and mighty and ‘he likes to talk about presenting’, I’ve noticed an interesting discomfort in sessions I’ve had a hand in facilitating. I cut my presenting teeth facilitating conversations at edcamps: start a conversation, give some context, then get out of the way and let the knowledge in the room surface and build ideas collaboratively. This is the type of conversation I like to be a part, in part because this is what my classroom looks like. If I spend more than two minutes at the beginning of the class period talking at my students, I have done some serious thinking and determined that this is the best use of our time together that day. This is where I am most comfortable, both in my classroom and when presenting/facilitating conversations with other educators.

This style works well, particularly for edcamps or other conferences where participants haven’t paid their hard-earned money to be at the conference: my expertise (or lack thereof) wasn’t paid for by anyone - I wasn’t chosen to present, so I can move to the side. I don’t feel the need to talk.

However, at conferences that people pay to be at, I feel like it is my duty to give attendees something tangible to make their time with me worth it. This means, for now, I talk more. More than I feel like I should. I always ask for feedback and generally my feeling isn’t borne out by the people I’m presenting to.

However, as I watch presenters I look up to, I know that this is an area that I need to improve in: talk less and let participants do more. I’m hopeful...

CanFlip13 Initial Thoughts

I got to meet Graham Johnson and Carolyn Durley!!!

They are just as #EduBadass in person as you would expect them to be. Allow me to most accurately complete this sentiment with a tweet I sent out the evening after the conference ended:

Why Blog?

And some context

So why am I writing this? Why start a blog? Several reasons, actually. This is an entirely selfish venture – I am writing this for myself. I believe that one of the best ways to become a better teacher is through reflection, purposeful thinking about what you did in the classroom, how it went, who was learning, and maybe more importantly, who wasn’t learning. This is a place for me to do that: to reflect on what I have been doing in my classroom, and to try to get better. Always better. Always.

What is my classroom? I teach world history in San Mateo, CA.  I am lucky to get to loop with my students: I get them as ninth graders and keep the same students as tenth graders. This group of common students is shared with three other core teachers – English, math, and science – for the two-year loop. Then we get a new batch. This smaller learning community (SLC) structure emphasizes personalization, which meshes well with my personality. I just finished my second loop with students and will receive a new group of freshmen in August.

My class is unique in a couple of ways: first, I collaborate extensively with my English colleague in an attempt to discuss similar topics in both my students’ English and history classes. For example, they will read All Quiet on the Western Front in English while we study World War I, or Cry, the Beloved Country while we study South Africa. Large Humanities papers and projects are markers of progress throughout the two-year loop.

The second way my classroom is unique is the literacy and evaluation of history focus. I was heavily influenced in these areas by being able to study under Sam Wineburg, who believes that students should be reading and interpreting history, not being fed a narrative without the ability to question it. In short, students should be doing the work that historians do. This is a big difference from what my students are used to in history, and is able to engage them in a way they are not used to in history class. I absolutely love the emphasis that this pedagogical style has placed on critical thinking and interpretation of history. Additionally, I was further influenced in my literacy emphasis by a training I was able to do with WestEd that emphasized the explicit teaching and modeling of the reading processes expert readers use to students.

Finally, I was lucky enough to participate in the Making Education Relevant and Interactive through Technology (MERIT) program through Foothill College this past year. This yearlong experience focused on getting teachers knowledgeable of and comfortable with educational technology resources, as well as creating a supportive network in which to learn and experiment in our classrooms.

This push to integrate more technology into my classroom – not at the expense of the critical thinking focus but to allow for more of it – combined with completing my second loop of students has given me a lot to think about this summer as I reconfigure what my classroom looks like. And here we are again, back at the beginning: this is why I am starting this blog.