Patrick Higgins, Jr.

Archive for May, 2009

Daily Diigo Links 06/01/2009

In Uncategorized on May 31, 2009 at 7:29 pm

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Daily Diigo Links 05/29/2009

In Uncategorized on May 28, 2009 at 7:29 pm

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Daily Diigo Links 05/28/2009

In Uncategorized on May 27, 2009 at 7:29 pm

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Daily Diigo Links 05/27/2009

In Uncategorized on May 26, 2009 at 7:29 pm

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Daily Diigo Links 05/23/2009

In Uncategorized on May 22, 2009 at 7:29 pm

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Daily Diigo Links 05/22/2009

In Uncategorized on May 21, 2009 at 7:29 pm

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Daily Diigo Links 05/21/2009

In Uncategorized on May 20, 2009 at 7:29 pm

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Daily Diigo Links 05/20/2009

In Uncategorized on May 19, 2009 at 7:30 pm

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Daily Diigo Links 05/19/2009

In Uncategorized on May 18, 2009 at 7:29 pm

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Daily Diigo Links 05/18/2009

In Uncategorized on May 17, 2009 at 7:29 pm

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Daily Diigo Links 05/16/2009

In Uncategorized on May 15, 2009 at 7:29 pm

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Daily Diigo Links 05/14/2009

In Uncategorized on May 13, 2009 at 7:29 pm

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What is Summer Reading?

In ascd, curriculum on May 13, 2009 at 9:27 am

summer-reading-533

It’s coming to that time of the year for school districts around the world where we begin assigning our summer reading to our students.  In the next few weeks, PTO’s and other fund-raising groups will be competing with one another to raise money through the sale of every district’s summer book lists.

Concurrently, students and teachers are pondering the merits of the titles on the lists.  Students are wondering if there are Spark Notes or a movie for the books in question, and teachers are wondering which of the titles they have chosen, if any,  will resonate with students.

I am wondering about the reasons behind summer reading.

My office receives more calls about summer reading than we do about just about any other topic within curriculum, including honors placements.  Surprisingly, half of the calls are complaints about the fact we actually assign summer reading (students need a break), and the other half of the calls are just the opposite: that we don’t assign enough (sharpen the saw).  How do you win?

For some reason, summer reading has become the bane of my existence in that I can’t determine its role in our curriculum.  In looking at it, I see it as playing one of two roles:

  • Addendum to the curriculum, meaning that these are books within your curriculum that you cannot get to during the year, but are necessary to the successful completion of the course.  This is truly only applicable in courses where the curriculum is external to the school district, as in AP or IB.
  • Demonstrating to students that reading is not solely an academic endeavor, but a lifelong skill.  This model is not to prevalent in our schools today, but exists in communities that show the value of reading through their actions.

I’ve been looking at various models of summer reading, and I’ve asked the question several places, and what I’ve come up with is that in order for summer reading not to fall back on the drudgery associated with it, both from the students standpoint of reading (or Spark-Noting) the books, or the teachers who spend time assessing the work of the students in the first weeks of September.  I don’t know which is worse: having to write a paper about a book that meant nothing to you, or having to read a paper from a student about a book that obviously meant nothing to them.   What’s the solution?  I’ll present two that I liked from the many responses I got out there.  The first is employs the use of social media, the second, not so much.

As I said above, I asked this question of several people, both on Twitter and on the English Companion Ning, and the responses I got were insightful.  Kristin Hokanson gave me this bit of transition, which matched my thinking very closely:

summer reading2Her first post, which is the bottom image, shows how I view the traditional summer reading process, but the second one shows how her district is toying with the idea that there has to be something more to what the students do with the text; we have to allow them to read together.  In his Wall Street Journal piece from a few weeks ago, writer Steven Johnson describes that the future of reading will involve us reading together and having discussion write on the pages of the texts that are on our e-book readers, so that at any given moment I can discuss with colleagues, or look for discussions that others have had right on the very page I am reading.  Distracting, perhaps, but as an alternate assignment for some sub-groups of students it may work.  Seriously, if I had the ability to take time out and get some clarification while slogging through Jane Eyre as a sophomore, I would have jumped all over it.  That book nearly destroyed my desire to read.  Thank goodness for Holden Caulfield, who arrived swiftly in September.

Others, too, are turning to social media to help them facilitate discussion around summer reading as it’s happening, and leveraging the technology to make the assignments richer.  The English faculty at Fredericksburg Academy have all spoken up about their use of social media with their summer reading as a means to increase engagement.

Late last night, I received this from Candace Follis in response to some prompting:

summer reading3

and it changed some things.  Should summer reading include summer writing, and should that writing be in such a form that it builds communications skills around the text?  Can you have informed dialogue around why a novel is not in your top five?  Simply, can we tell a student that if they don’t like the book, they need to illuminate for us in some capacity why they didn’t love the book?  I am sure several hundred thousand English teachers have done this, but I like how Candace phrased it; it changes the way I see what we ask students to do in the summer.

Lastly, Dana Huff is really the impetus behind this thought stream, and her description of their program is below.  If you look back at some of the posts I wrote during the ASCD Conference this year, you’ll see that I hovered around one idea specifically: modeling expert thinking.  Dana’s school, The Weber School, includes an element in their September evaluation of summer reading that I feel does just that:

Students in grades 10-12 have the opportunity to read books selected for study by faculty members. Students will select which novel they will study prior to the end of second semester the previous year. During the first week of school, students will participate in seminar discussions led by faculty based on these selections. Students will be evaluated by faculty, and these evaluations will be part of the students’ grades for English during the first semester. Faculty members may request that students complete pre-discussion activities. Our goals are to encourage students to become life-long readers who read critically, insightfully, and enjoyably, to give our faculty and staff an opportunity to model the behavior of life-long readers, to familiarize our students with authors and literary works that include a range of genres and universal themes transcending time and place, and to challenge our students to grow, to reach, to stretch, and to broaden their experience of what it means to be human.

In the next few days, I’ll be posting about what we plan on doing here in our district, and appealing to all anyone who has ideas about making it work well.  Whatever we decide to do on the assessment side of summer reading, if we decide to do anything at all, I am going to use Brian Smith’s post as my guiding principle:

summer reading1
“summer-reading-533.jpg.” Online Image. New York Times. August 7, 2008. May 13, 2009 <http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/07/recommended-reading/>.

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Random Sampling

In writing on May 12, 2009 at 8:45 pm

This is a big attempt to get in the habit of more regular writing, so these are some very loosely connected ideas and things I like:

Announcements

In the last two months, I have picked up two more blogs on which I’ll be writing.  Twice a month, I’ll be posting at Tech and Learning.  I’ve joined a fantastic group of educators there, a group of people who I truly admire and enjoy reading.  Look for those posts on the first and third Wednesday of every month.  Also, one of the people I met at ASCD this year, Jason Flom, has invited me to post whenever I’d like over at Ecology of Education.  While I am not too familiar with a lot of the writers over there, I’ve been impressed with what I’ve read so far.  Jason and I were both covering the ASCD conference this year as media, and were flabbergasted at how well they treated us and the access they gave us to the presenters.  I look forward to reading and writing over there.

InfoGraphics

I’ve fallen hard for the emergence of data visualization as a high art form.  I’ve said often to the teachers I work with, especially those in the social sciences, that those individuals who can translate the amount of data that we now have in our possession, and will continue to accumulate, into meaningful images will be very powerful people in the future.  The folks over at Cool Infographics and Flowing Data have recently been blowing me away with their ability to visualize statistics in illuminating ways.  Be sure to check them out if you can.

Also, Hans Rosling recently created a wonderful overview of the last 200 years and how they have completely changed the world.  Check that out below:

Daily Diigo Links 05/13/2009

In Uncategorized on May 12, 2009 at 7:29 pm

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Daily Diigo Links 05/12/2009

In Uncategorized on May 11, 2009 at 7:29 pm

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Daily Diigo Links 05/11/2009

In Uncategorized on May 10, 2009 at 7:29 pm

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Anagnoresis and Peripiteia

In philosophy, reflection on May 9, 2009 at 10:34 pm

In my house, we are huge fans of Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel (we call it “Yucky Jobs”).  I saw his name pop up in my iTunes library the other day in my TED Talks subscription and I wondered what this was going to be about.

Rowe speaks of two elements that arrived in his mind at a moment that no one can likely relate to.  These elements, anagnoresis and peripiteia, which I am sure I once used in a literary analysis back in the day, both deal with Aristotelian tragedy.  Anagnoresis, which is a literary device used to show how the protagonist moves from ignorance to discovery, Rowe used to describe the awakening he had at the moment when he was illuminated by his faulty reasoning, and peripiteia, the point in a tragedy whereby the tragic lead realizes the irony of the moment he or she is in (think Oedipus realizing that his wife is not who he thinks she is), he shows us that there may be a whole string of faulty reasonings that underpin his belief system.

Heady, I know.

The idea that it takes a moment of unexpected clarity or irony to show us our flawed assumptions is scary, in that we could last a long time in our own rut until that moment occurs.  Rowe’s ultimeate discovery is that he feels he should challenge all of his “platitudes.”  For example, in the talk, Rowe points out that if people took the advice and “followed their passion,” we would have a whole lot of economic difficulty within this country.  See this pig farmer’s story. Rather than follow a passion, what if we just “looked and saw which direction everyone else is moving in, and moved the other way.”  What if we just analyzed situations to find where the needs were, and acted upon that?

His ultimate understanding was this:

dirtyjobs

As I watched the talk and gained a new appreciation for Mike and the show, I did what I always end up doing–I related it to my own work.  What if the ideas I hold dear in education, the very things I have been focusing on over the last few years, are wrong?

It made me go back to my notes from BLC last summer.  I’ve mentioned this before, but on the last day of the conference I hadn’t planned on attending Dr. Pedro Noguera’s keynote, but I ended up there.  Three things I wrote in my notes were triggered by what Rowe talked about:

  • Too often we use this equation: Talking=Teaching.
  • We shouldn’t be asking what does good teaching look like, but rather what does good learning look like.
  • We need to connect the way we teach to the way they learn.

I hadn’t thought about Noguera’s ideas that much lately, and hearing Rowe talk about anagnoresis and peripiteia brought them back.  What is it about education that causes you to lose focus on the big ideas that should be driving you?  I’d like to shift the focus onto student learning; I’d like to be listening to students the way Ryan has been and getting feedback from students on how they learn best, and I’d like to share that information with teachers that will act on it.  These are the types of discoveries that lead to real change.

I am guilty of trying to find out what “good teaching” looks like through my observation of teachers.  Perhaps I should have been looking at what the students were doing.

Daily Diigo Links 05/10/2009

In Uncategorized on May 9, 2009 at 7:29 pm

  • Discovery, Realization and Dirty Jobs

    tags: dirtyjobs, discoverychannel, mikerowe, ted

    • For example, Rowe tells us about a pig farmer in the United States, who managed to amass a fortune ever since he started transporting and feeding his pigs the leftovers from restaurants in Las Vegas. The farmer knew that the discarded food was rich in protein. When the pigs ate the protein rich meal they would grow faster and bigger which meant a bigger turnover. The farmer jokes of how he turned down an offer of $60 million for his farm recently. Who would have thought there was so much money in pig farming?! Did you?

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Daily Diigo Links 05/09/2009

In Uncategorized on May 8, 2009 at 7:29 pm

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sarcasm= saying it-not meaning it

In change on May 8, 2009 at 12:47 pm

Earlier this week I wrote a post for TechLearning which I posted here and at Ecology of Education titled “Open Letter to the Teacher who said ‘I Hate Technology.’” Sarcasm is not my strong suit, but it just felt like the right mode to match the way I was feeling.  I’d like to turn this post over to the commenters at each of the three places that post appeared because of the conversations that sprang from it.

From TechLearning:

Veiled sarcasm and disguised insults and insinuations are not productive tools in diagolue. Nor, are they good tools for persuasion. Yes,it is difficult to leave your comfort zone, however, it is necessary for growth.”
– Roxann

While it is tempting to poke fun at those who resist technology, these teachers are often (but not always) the ones who have many of the other skills and talents necessary for good classroom instruction. They have the learning strategies, classroom discipline and understanding of curriculum down cold. When we honour these skills and abilities and provide on-going support many of these “resistors” are encouraged to use technology and change their teaching. When we belittle them, they, just like our students, retreat, resist and defend. Too often, when we “train” these teachers they feel overwhelmed as they struggle to see how the software connects to what they are doing in the classroom. And so they continue doing what they’ve always done.–Kendra Grant

From Ecology of Education

We might do well to also hate technology for its ability to shed light on assumptions and render the teacher’s knowledge authority obsolete. What’s more, when students understand technology better than us, it only serves to illuminate our own ignorance, further eroding our positions of authority.

What are we left to do? Level with students? Learn alongside them? Or worse, admit we don’t know something and learn from them?! Blasphemy, Patrick. Blasphemy.–Jason Flom

There are many good examples of how teachers are using technology with their students, both in and out of the classroom. It’s important to make those connections so teachers can see the value. Problems arise, though, when some teachers refuse to even participate in the discussion. They don’t need technology, and nothing anyone can say (or show) will change their minds – they’ve closed them tight. I think those teachers are in the minority, but they definitely present a challenge.–tcervo

Think there’s a deeper, possibly more discouraging aspect to this. The teacher who hates technology communicated a hesitation to learn and grow. Technology just happened to the target of the moment. And if that’s the case, this teacher needs to find a job where learning and growth aren’t the actual reason for the job to exist. We all resist change, and perhaps that’s more the motivation here. But failing to recognize that growth = change, and that to continue being a relevant teacher I must grow, and that to grow I must learn, and that technology may be the thing needed to be known at this point in history—that’s a sad commentary. Sure, our teachers did it without technology, but technology (other than filmstrips—BEEP!) was not an option.–Kevin Washburn

Chalkdust101

I’m not sure if your response is to a hypothetical person or not, but I wonder if the tact you take in this blog post will be a constructive addition to the conversation. Rant is certainly an appropriate tag for the post, and I wouldn’t begrudge anyone an occasional rant. However, if conversation is what your looking for, why not ask questions.–msstewart

Patrick, I too hate technology. That is, I hate technology simply for technologies’ sake. On the other hand, I love learning and I love teaching kids how to learn. If I can use some digital tools among the other tools I’ve acquired over the past 17 years to help kids learn, I love that process. The more tools I have, the more effective I can be, as each tool may not be relevent, useful, or timely in every situation.–Barry Bachenheimer.

Thanks to everyone for truly pushing my thinking on this.

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Some Raw Ideas

In curriculum on May 7, 2009 at 10:23 pm

We are in the middle of a huge curriculum writing season here, if there is such a thing.  The list of courses we are either writing anew or creating from scratch is mind-boggling.  One of the newer course we are adding to our high school Social Studies offerings is Contemporary Issues.  Today was the first day we really got down to discussing what we want to do with the class.

Our idea was to marry a few areas together into this class:

  • applying the lens of historical inquiry to the flow of information we call news
  • learning how to recognize how media is manipulated
  • manage to trim the deluge of information present in the media to a manageable and intelligible framework so that it “works” for you.

Here is what we came up with for our introductory unit:

contissues

The idea of creating a “current events” class kind of turned us off.  We didn’t want the class to turn into an academic version of TMZ every day (although that idea will rear it’s head somewhere in the design), so we we’ll begin this class withe the election of 2000.  A watershed event to help the students understand the true workings of a contested election.  It’s also a great jumping off point for the discussion of the role of modern media propaganda.  We want to walk the thin line between historical analysis and modern themes.

We haven’t really begun to forge our assessments yet, nor have we ironed out the tech backbone for this class, but a good deal of that will depend on the comfort level of the teacher I am working with.  Thoughts?

Daily Diigo Links 05/08/2009

In Uncategorized on May 7, 2009 at 7:29 pm

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Daily Diigo Links 05/07/2009

In Uncategorized on May 6, 2009 at 7:30 pm

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Open Letter to the Teacher who said “I Hate Technology.”

In rant on May 5, 2009 at 11:33 pm

Dear Teacher who Said “I hate technology,”

First of all, I want to thank you for your candor and your willingness to openly share your opinion regarding the use of tools for learning.  I am a firm believer that we should all have an open forum for expressing our opinions about our profession and the factors that influence it.  That is why I am writing here.

Rather than do what most readers of this letter are expecting me to do and refute your claims, I have to admit that I concur–I hate it too.  Yes, I must admit, that comes as surprise, I am sure, but something tells me that our reasons for this shared loathing will not be the same.  Let me share mine with you and then we can have an informed discussion to compare and contrast.

First, I cannot stand that I have had to give up hours of painstakingly annotating papers with carefully crafted comments and editing marks.  I’ll miss that fullness of self when I return the essays and research papers back to the students and they scurrilously thumb to the last page, jettisoning any comment or edit I made, to find out their total score on the paper.

Secondly, the fact that there will be conversations about topics in my class that occurr UNABATED and not in my presence is inconceivable and incorrigible.  Thoughts about the content of my class that do not occur during the sanctity of my 50 minute class period belong either as one-on-one conversations with me in the hallway, clearly stated on their homework papers, or held onto in the working memory of the student until the next class period or hallway conversation with me.

Lastly, the assignment of group projects should be a rite of passage that includes several if not all of the following situations for students: one student should do most of the work including but not limited to: writing, researching, organizing, and assigning ancillary roles to other team members, one student should lose the flash drive that has the slide presentation at least once during the assignment duration, one student, most likely the one who pulls down 30+ hours at the local burger joint, should not be able to meet with the rest of the group at any time outside of school, provided the other group members athletics and extracurricular activities schedules do not preclude any outside of the classroom meetings.  Additionally, I should not be able to see the extent to which each of these students worked on the project until the very end of the process.

As you can see, my role as a teacher is being compromised by the intrusion of tools that render aspects of my daily goings-on as obsolete.  This I won’t stand for.  Plus, adding to my ire is the fact that there is all of this talk about new definitions of literacy.  Reading is no longer just the deconstruction and reconstruction of text, but now I am being asked to help students make sense of rich media, data sets that are visualized, and more streams of immediate news and information on a daily basis.  If you ask me, there is just a whole lot of noise.  What do you say we just don’t listen to it?

We had teachers growing up who were able to teach us the finer points of composing, of calculation, of geography, and the greater literary works of both North America and Europe, yet their technology was limited to chalk, and blessed be, an overhead projector.  Can’t we do as much or more with the same?

So I am with you, I think, in resisting this move, and I’ll do just what’s mandated of me by my building principal.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go close my classroom door…

Cross-posted at Ecology of Education and TechLearning.

Daily Diigo Links 05/06/2009

In Uncategorized on May 5, 2009 at 7:30 pm

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Daily Diigo Links 05/05/2009

In Uncategorized on May 4, 2009 at 7:29 pm

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Daily Diigo Links 05/03/2009

In Uncategorized on May 2, 2009 at 7:30 pm

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