Brief Hiatus

As the semester draws to a close, I will be  taking a brief hiatus from blogging to focus on end-of-year duties. I may begin blogging again during the summer as I begin preparing for next year, or I may wait until the fall. I have concluded the PBL Endorsement courses and will be pursuing my Ph.D. in literacy beginning this fall. My posts will likely begin spinning in that direction as I consider how to use PBL and the strategies I learn during this program to help my students become stronger readers.

Thank you so much for reading my blog! As always, comments are welcomed.

PBL Endorsement Course Presentation

I created a Google Slide presentation to showcase the units created for the Furman's PBL Endorsement program. Please let me know if you have any questions.

PBL Overview

Article Reflection--"Closing in on Close Reading" by Nancy Boyles

During the past 15 years, I have taught all levels of English to ninth grade students, from remedial reading classes to Honors English II. Going deeper with a text is always a problem, no matter the level or student. Even my English II students who read regularly or on an 11th grade reading level sometimes fail to interact with the text on more than just a superficial level. "This reminds me of 'so-and-so'" as we are reading about the roaring '20s in The Great Gatsby, or "I once pulled a prank on my family" as we are reading "The Open Window." Making personal connections is great as we often retain information better when we can attach those details to something familiar; however, if we want our students to become better thinkers, speakers, and learners, we need to teach them to be more than "metacognitive readers," as Nancy Boyles calls them in "Closing in on Close Readers." In order to become those deeper thinkers, Boyles advises us to use shorter passages, aim for independence, and focus on observing and analyzing. The length of a text can be intimidating, both from the teaching standpoint and from the reading standpoint.

By using short texts, we can reiterate a close-reading skill numerous times in a short span of time, as opposed to hitting on it once or twice during a longer novel or work. I love teaching novels, but I often find that we aren't going as deep as I would like because I worry the novel will drag on and on ifI slow down. I believe it could be possible to still teach the longer novel and engage in some shorter close-reading activities within each chapter; my only concern would be that I wouldn't focus on the same skills each time and would want to hit on something different each day. This isn't, especially with the reluctant readers, going to strengthen the skills to the degree that I would like, though.

My ultimate goal as a teacher is to create independent learners; I want them to put me out of a job (sort of). As independent readers, students would not need me to point out where to stop and ask important questions. I often tell my honors students to ask the "What is this telling me about (character/conflict/etc.)?" "Why is (author) including this detail?" and "How is (author) showing us (personality trait/motivation) about (character)?" questions to go deeper into the text. I try to avoid too many guiding questions and push them to look for places to pause and ask questions. Both of these steps are crucial in nurturing those close reading skills our students need. I believe many students are uncomfortable with this, though, because the answers aren't always as concrete as they would like; many times the answers are based on personal interpretation of details connected with other details. Evidently, text-to-reader connections and close reading analysis must work in harmony.

Boyles includes a chart at the end of her article called "Craft Techniques and Related Questions for Close Reading" that I think could be useful to share with the students as a bookmark or a poster on the wall. This chart provides basic questions to encourage the students to go deeper, helping them make the connection between an author's craft and the text's meaning. Eventually, as the students continue to strengthen their close reading skills, they will create these questions on their own and become more aware of the deeper meanings of what they read.

As my Honors English II students wrap up their reading of The Great Gatsby and my English I CP students begin their nonfiction unit, I'm looking to take them deeper into the texts, pushing them to ask the tough questions that don't always have concrete answers.


Boyles, Nancy. "Closing in on Close Reading." Educational Leadership, ASCD, www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/dec12/vol70/num04/Closing-in-on-Reading.aspx.

Kristyn Kamp's "5 Strategies for Making Project Work Time More Productive"--Article Review

As I mentioned in my previous post, group projects are a struggle for me--some students don’t want to work with others, some students want others to do all the work, some students don’t get along with the other students, some students will be off-task the whole time. However, in the real world, we work as groups on a regular basis, and our students need to be taught how to work with others successfully. In her blog post “5 Strategies for Making Project Work Time More Productive,” Kristyn Kamps discusses how to motivate students and provide purpose to group activities. I have attempted these strategies to varying degrees with varying success:

1. Prepare students for working in teams. Kamps recommends providing numerous low-risk opportunities at the beginning of the semester to help prepare students for group tasks such as discussions, debates, and negotiations. She engages her students in a variety of skill-building activities in the forms of role selection and homework review. I also attempted some of these activities, but I believe I need to plan for more explicit practicing than what I’ve been doing. I often forget the purpose for the activity because of the fun nature of the activity or the final product of the activity.
2. Use team leaders as liaisons. Many years ago during one of my first PBL units (I did not realize then that it was), I structured my students’ groups to have a liaison. My classes were tasked with creating an amusement park from Odysseus’s adventures in The Odyssey. Each group had a different land which had to have a restaurant, three rides, and a show. Every day would begin with team meetings, and then the liaisons would come to a planning meeting with me. We’d share our ideas, give each other suggestions, work through problems, and then the liaisons would return to their groups. That year was probably the most successful of all my years doing that project. The students knew their concerns were being heard, and I knew everything that was going on without standing over the groups.
3. Train team leaders. In the back of my head, I have always known I need to train my students to be leaders, but I’ve never been explicit about it. Some students naturally want to be leaders in the group. I can see asking my students at the beginning of the semester what roles are most interesting to them and training them to fulfill those roles. Leaders aren’t the only roles for which they must be trained.
4. Structure team meetings with agendas. I kept saying my students needed to create agendas during the Invisibility Project. We even learned how to create an agenda at the beginning of one class period. However, I failed my students by not following up with it and encouraging them to continue. Because of that, I have a feeling some students floundered and were unsure of their daily goals. I tried to put too much on my students too soon; I needed to hold their hands a little bit longer.
5. Plan frequent opportunities for feedback. Kamps recommends providing multiple opportunities for self- and peer-feedback along the way, as opposed to at the end of the project. This is something I attempted to do on a daily basis, if not every other day. I wanted the students to recognize how their individual products would mesh with other students’ projects and encourage them to rise to the challenge of blending their ideas and writing with students of various writing abilities. I found most students receptive to this; however, I know that some of my students will need to be taught how to reflect and provide feedback. This isn’t always an innate skill.

Kamps’s blog post has provided me an opportunity to reflect on recent successes and struggles with my PBL units, and I can definitely see how I can use her strategies to my students’ benefit. I strongly recommend reading her post to gain more personal insight for your classroom’s PBL units.

Kamps, Kristyn. “5 Strategies for Making Project Work Time More Productive.” Blog | Project Based

     Learning | BIE, BIE, 

     www.bie.org/blog/5_strategies_for_making_project_work_time_more_productive.

Reflecting on the Semester

PBL requires practice. And time. And energy. And planning. And patience. It’s hard work, but it’s doable. And sometimes, even when the students don’t realize they’ve learned something, you as the teacher realize they have. Even when they don’t successfully complete a task, such as the torn paper art challenge earlier this semester or the booklets they were supposed to make for their interviewee, they learned something.

This entire year has been stressful and strange and required flexibility from beginning to end for reasons both in and out of the classroom. I can honestly say that not a single unit was completed without issues or to the degree that I would have liked; however, I have found successes and areas of need as I reflect on what we did accomplish:

1. Group projects can, and must, be done in the CP classroom. I often shy away from group work and activities in the CP classroom because the students tend to be off task all the time (unless I’m standing directly next to them), one student completes all the work, and/or the students just don’t get along. During our most recent unit, “The Invisibility Project,” I assigned students to different groups based on their skills and interests I’d learned through a survey earlier in the semester. I wanted to make sure each group had a designer, each group had a leader, and each group had an organizer. I also wanted to make sure certain students were working in separate groups. The result was four groups of 3-4 students. Surprisingly, the smaller groups were more successful creating informative websites, even though they had to do the same amount of work as the groups of four; I have a feeling this was because one less student made it easier to agree on what to do. All four groups created a website, to varying degrees of completion, ultimately working together to complete the final touches after completing individual portions of the website on their own. I spent most of my time working with the two groups of four in an effort to help them overcome their differences and work well together. As the project progressed, the students’ minimal group project opportunities became more apparent. I understand; as I said, I’m hesitant to do group work in the CP classroom. However, I began the unit creating contracts establishing who would take notes, who would present to the class, how to contact each other when someone missed, and how the final product would be graded--one group grade as opposed to individual grades based on a peer evaluation. I held them to what they wrote in their contracts, and hopefully they learned to make those decisions more carefully as they began to regret their grading decision towards the end of the unit and realized some students hadn’t been pulling their weight as much as they would have liked. We discussed these decisions on multiple occasions and why it’s important to think over them carefully; however, I did stress that “group grades” is real world--very rarely will a group assignment be judged for individual participation. Students need to see the real world ramifications for their behaviors in low-risk situations, and I can’t think of a more applicable situation in my classroom than a group project. I should not shy away from group tasks in my classroom just because of lower success on the final product.
2. The final product is not the end-all-be-all...the process is. I’m certain I’ve said this before, and I know I’m not the only one to say this--the process is more important than the final product. Yes, the final product does showcase what the students have learned. Yes, pushing the students to have a successful final product demonstrates to the students the soft skill of finishing what one has started. However, sometimes a student isn’t to that point just yet; sometimes a student needs to see the small successes of smaller tasks before realizing he can accomplish a larger task. This is why I didn’t stress too much when some of my students didn’t complete all of the steps to fully complete the “Learning from the Past” unit. By the time we’d reached the end, they were done and didn’t want to go any further. Along the way, though, they had learned how to interview someone, how to write that interview into a summary, how to research using both online and print resources, and how to copy and paste from one Google doc to another to blend different tasks. I call that success because some of these students fought me every step of the way. One day they will be motivated to complete the final product, but I’m okay with them learning how to do it in order to be successful when that day comes.
3. Sometimes it’s just time to move on. I am still a student of PBL. Even after 15 years of teaching, I’m still a student of creating units for my classroom. So many times I will create what looks to be a great unit...on paper. Add students and everything hits the fan! Haha! Something I expect them to love--creating a website for classmates, researching a topic they choose, interviewing a family member--doesn’t pique their interest. Instead, I’m left with a class full of students who will do just as much as they want to in order to get by with a decent grade. I’ve learned this semester, as I’ve mentioned a few times before, that sometimes it’s okay not to completely finish the project because it’s the process, not the product, that’s most important. Of the three primary PBL units I completed with my CP students--a Getting to Know You class website, the Learning from the Past booklets, and the Invisibility Project websites--about 60% of the projects were completed to the end, with the booklets being the least completed. Two of fourteen students completed the booklets entirely; four more students almost completed it, but they never gave me a cover; however, the remaining students just were not interested in getting the assignment done. I contacted parents, I asked them to come during CAVS, I gave them extra time in class. There comes a point, though, that it’s evident nothing else will be done, and it’s time to move on. I stopped offering time in class, and moved the entire class on to a new unit; they still could come finish the assignment on their own time, but I wasn’t going to drag out the project just for 100% completion.
4. I wonder if completion of a project can be an option but not a requirement… Bear with me… Not all students care about getting As and Bs. Not all students care about completing projects. What if I worked through the process with them during class, teaching them how to complete the project, but they need to do the final product on their own. I’d offer assistance outside of class in some way, accommodating those students who really do want to finish the project; however, we wouldn’t be taking up valuable class time belaboring a task that some students aren’t interested in completing because they are okay with Cs. This isn’t to say that I wouldn’t encourage them to do more than what they complete in class; I’d grade the assignment as is, give them the rubric, and then give them the opportunity to bring up the grade if they would like. Some students will take me up on the offer, as was evident with the booklets this semester; others will be content with where they stand. My plan was to do just that with the Invisibility Project websites; however, circumstances outside of the classroom kept me from being around that week, and by the time I returned, we were so far removed from the project that there really was no point. We moved on. I graded the final product, and I’ve heard nothing from the students about wanting a higher grade.

I may not have taught my students how to successfully complete every single project, but I do know they learned a few things during the course of these units: 1) no two students will work the same way, and we must learn to work with the differences rather than force others to conform to our learning and working styles; 2) deadlines mean the work is due at that time, and if you want to receive full credit for the individual task, the whole task must be done then and not a day later; 3) even if you don’t finish the task on time, the task still needs to be completed because it’s only part of a larger assignment; 4) before signing a contract, make sure you understand and agree to all of it as you can’t change your mind after the fact.

I look forward to continuing to learn and grow alongside my students as we engage in more PBL in the years to come.

Brief explanation of my absence from the blog

For the past four years, she has fought hard against stage 4 lung cancer, outliving every statistic written about her type of lung cancer. I'm so proud of her for not giving up and happy that we were able to make so many memories in those four years. In the past six months, my mother's health has declined, with the most drastic decline occurring in the past two to three months when she decided to stop all treatments. She passed away the Tuesday of Spring Break. We knew it was coming, but that hasn't made it any easier. I'm just now getting back into the swing of things and returning to this blog. I hope to be more consistent with the blog in the coming months and years as I believe it is an important tool for my learning, and I hope it will one day provide useful to others who are beginning and continuing their PBL journey.

Thank you for your patience.

March 12--(In)Visibility Project--First Week Progress

March 12--(In)Visibility Project

A few weeks ago, my professor visited my classroom to co-teach a collaboration mini-PBL and guide my students through the creation of a contract. We were still in the middle of our Learning from the Past PBL, which required little interaction with other students at the project level. They enjoyed sharing their findings with each other, but they didn’t need to work together to create a final product. I knew that was coming, and I wanted to prepare them for that with a few different activities. The Torn Paper Art challenge was what I’d hoped would be one of a few different group challenges during the next few weeks leading up to the (In)Visibility Project, but I discovered my students needed more time in class to complete the Learning from the Past booklets, and collaboration mini-lessons moved to the back burner.

Fast-forward to March 6th. Time to move on. We’ve spent almost every day in class working on the booklets, and I feel like we’re spinning our wheels going nowhere. I’m becoming frustrated. That’s a reflection for a different blog post; I digress. My students are tired of working by themselves and want to work with other students, which really is a good bit of PBL--working with other students to accomplish a common goal.


TEAM CONTRACTS

The (In)Visibility Project will give them the opportunity to collaborate with other students, research a majority-voted topic (student choice), and create technology-based product for for an authentic audience (their fellow classmates with an extension to the entire school community). We began discussing those aspects of the project from the very beginning, and for the most part, they seem to be joining me on the journey so far.

We revisited the team contract concept again this past Thursday. This time, the contract would be sticking with them much longer than 45 minutes, and they could quickly find themselves kicked out of a group for not following through with the expectations laid out by the group. I liked the original contract my students completed during the mini-PBL (page 3 of this lesson plan), I wanted something heftier and more in-depth that allowed my students to fully grasp the gravity of signing the contract and the expectations their groupmates and I had for them during this process. I really liked the New Tech contracts I saw at J.L. Mann, but I couldn’t find any examples of those online (probably copyrighted), so I sought other examples online and found a college project contract to tweak for my students.

We spent almost the entire class period Thursday working on the group contracts with varied success. We popcorned a few good answers now and then; I made some suggestions now and then to guide them towards some expectations that would hopefully lead to success. Mostly, they worked diligently and successfully to create a team contract they could agree upon. Were the contracts perfect? No, but it was their first time with such an in-depth contract and second time creating a contract at all. Did they seem to appreciate the contract process? For the most part, yes. Some of them balked at providing their contact information. Others had no clue how to contribute because they seemed to have limited group work experience. Could the process have gone better? Yes. We were continuously refocusing attention away from a student who really didn’t want to be there that day (long story that is hopefully turning into a happy ending), and we didn’t get to where I wanted us to be (story of this class, it seems like). Was it better than the first time? Yes! I noticed very few un-answered questions when I reviewed the contract, and I worked with that particular group to fix those issues before they signed the contract. They appear to grasp the importance of the contracts, and I expect the importance will continue to be realized as the roles they selected are utilized in coming tasks.

One decision every group made was to have no peer evaluation at the conclusion of the unit; all students would receive the same grade on the assignment, no matter what. I fully explained to them that this meant if one student didn’t pull his weight, all students would be penalized. Even after meeting with every group individually and discussing this, they all chose no peer evaluation. Perhaps it is because of my experience to always have so much of the project to do that I would never choose no peer evaluation. I’m hoping they don’t regret this.


PROJECT PROPOSALS--COACHING OBSERVATION

• Project Proposal Lesson Outline
• Project Proposal Student Document

Now that teams have signed their group contracts and selected their topics, they need to focus their research and determine initial research tasks. In order to accomplish this, as well as give the students the opportunity to begin practicing peer feedback. I have discovered I am somewhat unrealistic with the amount of time I expect a task to take. Our initial “Breaking Down the Topic” brainstorming, discussion, and sharing took almost 40 minutes, and the students needed to be re-instructed on multiple occasions to help them accomplish what I wanted them to do. Looking back, it’s possible these issues could stem from confusing instructions, distracted students (they are facing each other, as opposed to straight forward), or student apathy (which was the case for at least two of the students, especially by the end of the class period).

I hoped “Considering the Audience” would allow us to pick up the pace some, but they struggled with grasping how the issues of bullying, social media, school safety, and depression could impact groups differently.

By the end of the class period, the students, for the most part, completed their proposals. One group stopped working on it, but I believe that was because I was going too fast for them, and they became frustrated. We barely had time for the daily journals, though, and we definitely didn’t have time to present the proposals for feedback. I believe that will need to happen at the beginning of class tomorrow before we begin learning how to find the answers to our research questions.

One thing I really like about the students working in groups: Instead of monitoring the progress of 14 different students in this class, I am monitoring the progress of 4 different groups. At times, my students will be working on different tasks, but they will be able to ask their peers for assistance, and I will be able to work with those students who are really struggling. While the assistance isn’t necessarily one-on-one, it’s more focused than the whole-class instruction and less time-consuming than individual instruction. I found myself able to sit down and talk to all the students about their research questions multiple times, and I know that would not have been the case had the students been completing individual assignments. My hope is that they are gaining the same, if not more, knowledge about research from this group project. Only time will tell...hopefully I can gauge that timing correctly.