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.

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.

What Do You Do With a Problem? Torn Art Collaboration/Conflict Resolution Activity

What Do You Do With a Problem? Torn Art Collaboration/Conflict Resolution Activity

My lesson for today: Sometimes the intended outcome isn’t what comes to fruition, but the realized outcome is far superior.

The third semester of the PBL Endorsement consists, partially, of a series of coaching sessions with our professor, Dawn Mitchell, that could result in co-teaching on or both of two half-class-period sessions. My original plan was for Dawn to help co-teach a feedback and collaboration session with my CP students because I expected them to be at a point with their Learning from the Past final products to share them with their classmates to receive feedback. Timing doesn’t always go the way I expect, and my students are nowhere near ready to share. (They haven’t even begun to synthesize the information yet!) When Dawn came for our planning session on Friday, I shared with her the bad news. I’d already pushed the second coaching session to a later date; I didn’t want to do that to the first session. I wanted to move forward because I wanted some help and wanted her input on how things were going in my classroom in regards to PBL.

Over the course of our conversation, we kept coming back around to my students’ need for collaborative experiences to help them succeed in upcoming PBLs. Note...upcoming PBLs. Not the current PBL. This one they are doing on their own with interactions from an outside source. Almost every PBL from here to the end of the semester will require some form of collaboration. I have 15 students in my CP class (I know I’m blessed. I’m very thankful for this; however, I sometimes want more for reasons I will explain later.); from small group and partner activities, in addition to daily interactions, I have learned my students struggle to work successfully with students outside of their own comfort zone (and sometimes within their own comfort zone) and have a hard time resolving conflict.

Back to the conversation with Dawn--we kept coming back around to my students’ need for collaborative experiences. She recommended we focus on that in a short, isolated PBL-like activity. I recalled an article I read recently (which, for the life of me, I can’t find now...comment below if you know to which article I’m referring) which tasked students with creating an image from torn paper to represent a scene from a book about an ocean. Students had to collaborate because they were given only one color to contribute to the picture; they could not touch any other colors. Dawn recommended Kobi Yamada’s What Would You Do With a Problem? to use for the task as it focused on facing problems head-on and making something positive, which was exactly what we were asking the students to do. I loved it, and today’s lesson was born… We incorporated group contracts, time constraints, technology interaction. Students were going to be placed in real-world situations (working with a team, with contracts, with deadlines) to create a product (torn paper art) to share with the public (their classmates, us, and displayed in the hallway) and reflect on using Padlet. All this was intended to be completed in 45 minutes.

Let me repeat that. 45 minutes. I was supposed to introduce the task, my professor was going to lead them through the concept of group contracts, I was going to read the book and give them the task instructions, they were going to complete the task, we were going to debrief verbally, and then they were going to debrief using technology in 45 minutes. I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry. How could this be successful in any way?

So what do you do with a problem? If you go with my reactions I just mentioned, you have two ways people handle problems--by laughing or crying. Our students also would add that they get angry, shut down, run the other way, ignore it. With this activity, they had a problem they had to face and overcome, and I ask my question again: How could this be successful in any way?

It wasn’t. Well, not in the way I expected it to be. The activity started out well--some students were responding, most of the students weren’t acting up, all of the students were paying attention. Win! We discussed the types of problems we face and how we handle them, although we didn’t go as deep as I would have loved to. I only had two to three minutes before we began working on the contract if we wanted to stay on schedule. Dawn then spoke with them about the purpose of contracts and asked them to work as a group to create a contract highlighting their expectations for participation, how to handle conflict, who would talk, etc. Being the first time they had probably ever created a contract, they struggled. As we watched them struggle, we decided to abbreviate the contract and ask them to focus on participation and conflict. One group established a leader who would guide the group to success, another group discovered nobody wanted to talk but knew they would need to in order to succeed, and the third group had two dominant personalities that wanted to be vocal the whole time. Overall, the contract process took eleven minutes. I would have liked for the students to have completed the whole contract, but they gained some initial perspective and experience with the contract, so I will take that as another win. After reminding them of their task, I read Yamada’s book refraining from showing them the pictures. I wanted them to focus on listening for images and the message to help them with the coming task.

Finally, it’s time to create a picture...in twelve minutes. I distributed the materials and stood back to let them get started. These groups could not have been more different! One group got right to work, tearing their own colors as they discussed what they were going to create. The young man who said he was going to lead had the idea, and they ran with it and successfully created an image of a broom sweeping away “problems” (complete with problem written on all the torn pieces of paper). SUCCESS! The other two groups weren’t as successful in completing the project. The second group quickly established an idea--a student sitting at a desk frustrated over a problem--but they couldn’t get anywhere because they wanted to use primarily the colors from only one student, and he became frustrated because he thought he was going to have to do all the work. I decided this required a little intervention to help them overcome the conflict and stepped in asking them questions about what was frustrating (“I’m doing all the work; why can’t they help me”) and being misunderstood (“His paper is what we need down first, so we need him to start tearing it”). The students obviously brought prior bad experiences to the activity and that was shaping their interactions with each other, but we were able to talk about the differences and solve some of the conflict. While they didn’t make their art, I believe had they been given more time, they would have achieved success on that end. The third group couldn’t decide what to do, but they also weren’t talking to each other very much--three of the four students are typically quiet students. One student became the leader by default because he was the most vocal of the group, and he tried pulling ideas from the other students with varying success--one student opened up and provided input and ideas, another started working, but the last student shut down and turned away any time he was directly addressed. They recognized their struggles revolved around their tendency to be introverted in group settings, so they came to the understanding that sometimes they have to come out of their shell for the success of the group.

I stuck to the time limit and stopped them at 12 minutes. They weren’t done, and a number of the more grade-conscientious students were worried about this, but our discussion focused on the process and the ideas and not completely on the end product. We didn’t even have as much time to complete the reflection Padlet as we would have liked, but our discussion was so much more beneficial to me.

Isn’t that what PBL is about? We want our students to learn the how-tos and life skills instead of focusing solely on the “assessment” at the end or the content-area standards. What did they learn along the way? My students can now talk about resolving conflicts in small groups, a little bit, so that when we work on our first group-based PBL in a few weeks, they will have common experiences--”oh yeah, sometimes we misunderstand each other and need to ask questions about the process before blowing up” and “sometimes I need to speak up if we are going to successfully finish what Mrs. Lux asks us to do.” So in the end, did I have three torn paper art pieces to display? No, but the best laid plans rarely go as expected, and shifting my perspective can help me understand the needs of my students and goals of PBL.

I’m excited to see what these students can do, as frustrating as it can be at times to prod them along on this journey. They are almost finished with their Learning from the Past books and ready to move in to their first group-based PBL--the (In)Visibility Project. Let’s see what they’ve learned!

Link to the Lesson

January 27, 2018--Reflection on the beginning of the semester + Matt Bertasso's call to action

January 27, 2018
Course 3 Blog Post: Reflect on the beginning of your semester and any PBL units implemented; optional: In a recent blog post for New Tech, Matt Bertasso, Director of Compass Academy asks us as educators are we giving students fish or are we teaching students to fish for a lifetime? After reading his article below, reflect on your current unit of instruction and consider how you are structuring your content. Are you providing opportunities for students to discover through their own reading, writing, thinking, questioning essential understandings or are we providing it to them? What areas are strengths? Where can we grow and improve our practice?

https://newtechnetwork.org/resources/secrets-great-teaching/?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=newtechnetwork&utm_content=The%20Secrets%20to%20Great%20Teaching%20-%20New%20Tech%20Network
Bear with me...this is a long post (as mine tend to be...it's the writer in me). The first two paragraphs are an update, the next two paragraphs are my response to Matt Bertasso's article, but the last paragraph is the Call to Action for me--how I want to utilize what I gleaned from Bertasso's article. Skip to that if you'd like. I won't be offended.

Once again, we begin a semester with the weather throwing a curveball at us. Last semester it was total eclipses and hurricanes; this semester it’s fake ice storms and real snow storms (which I was reluctant to believe would come up until the second I looked out my window at a blanket of beautiful white snow covering the ground and rooftops). These curveballs have me scrambling to make sure I can get through each of the PBL units I’ve planned before the end of the school year. Their first nine weeks is packed full with nonfiction- and community-based PBL, and I want to get them to the second nine weeks fiction and media-based PBL units rolling around in my mind.

We jumped head-first into a getting-to-know-you PBL (unit title pending) with the students writing personal narratives and opinion essays, conducting classmate interviews, and designing a class website. Some students are more excited than others (mostly because we’re in the writing phase of the unit as opposed to the designing phase), but I’m hoping they will all come around the further along we get. My biggest obstacle so far has been student absences--one student has been absent all but one school day, another has missed the last four school days, a third has missed every other day this past week. Once these three students return, I will need to find numerous opportunities to catch them up to the rest of the class without keeping them from making up work in other classes.

I designed this unit to ease the students into the idea of using projects to learn various skills--creating websites, interviewing people, solving problems in the community; however, after reading Matt Bertasso’s “The Secrets to Great Teaching,” I’m wondering if I’m providing the fish too much as opposed to teaching them how to fish. I’ve located the sample personal narratives and opinion essays to read and examine for style, albeit mostly because the students cannot access Teen Ink on our network; I’ve stipulated the required elements for the website instead of letting them throw out ideas for what should be included. Granted, I’ve struggled to get them to answer my questions about what the writer is doing, but I wonder if I could eventually get them to answer more if I continue to expect it instead of settling back into the habit of giving them all the answers.

I also wonder if I’ll get better reactions if I give my students the rod instead of holding it myself. Bertasso says “When students have ownership over their learning, they aren’t learning for the teacher, the grade, or for their parents, they are learning for themselves and deeper learning happens. Students, at this point, are truly fishing.” I want them to fish for themselves. Every semester, my students receive a letter that describes my role in the classroom: “My goal is for you to emerge from this year as eager learners—always looking for the next big idea and indulging your curiosities. I am here to facilitate and monitor you on your educational journey.” I’m a facilitator--my job is to make the learning easier, but I’m not doing that by giving them the fish, answering the questions for them. They will never learn to catch fish on their own if my hands are always on the fishing rod or I’m always giving them the fish.

That brings me to my next thought, and it scares me: What if I involved them in the planning of the unit? Completely throw out every bit of my plan other than a chunk of time during the semester and let my students design the unit with my guidance? I’d give the students a problem, theme, or essential question and see what they create. At its core, this is Genius Hour but full-time. Can I give up that much control in my classroom? I might have to flesh out the unit to ensure it’s not fluff and my students are truly learning the standards, but part of me believes they will be fine. I’m not sure I’m ready to do that just yet with my CP students; perhaps I will after these first few units. However, I’m about to begin the first true unit of my English II American Literature class after we wrap up our summer reading writing unit next week. I’ve been toying with the idea of having them research life in Colonial America and creating a presentation to sell the idea to those still living in England at the times. What if I tossed them the question “What was it like to live in American during Colonial times?” Would that be too open-ended? Would I get high quality products? Would they access the primary sources I would like them to use or would they create a project that could be completed by simply doing a Google search? How do I fit in all the literature I don’t want to leave out--Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Bradford’s Plymouth Plantation, Henry’s speech to the Virginia Convention? I’m scared, but I want to give it a shot. Am I crazy? A quote from one of my favorite movies keeps running through brain: “You’re daft, lady!” I think I’d rather be daft like Jack, though, than play it safe and limit my students’ potentials.