What I learned from The “Apple” Challenge

I wrote four pages mulling over this topic but they read with a rather nasty tone, so I have condensed my thoughts to these four main, hopefully non passive-aggressive, points.

1. Collaborating with a for-profit business about curriculum was an interesting experience. I don’t particularly recommend it simply because in education teachers already have multiple bosses (students, department heads, school principals, parents etc.) and they don’t need another one who a) has interests independent of serving students as well as possible and b) is not present to adjust their demands when what they ask for is unreasonable. The next time Apple Inc. invites me to try their experiment, I will do it on my own timeline or I will say no thanks.

2. Collaborating with other teachers across disciplines is a wonderful professional development opportunity. However, it doesn’t make sense to engage in this illuminating yet time-consuming process unless you have the same students who will make connections between the thread started in Biology class and continued in English class. The block schedule at my school minimizes the chances of overlap and makes me question if this system is really the best schedule for student learning.

3. We need teachers. (What a relief!). Part of the Challenge Based learning model appears to suggest that teachers need to stop lesson planning so much and get out of the way. “Hand over the reigns to students,” CBL suggests, “and they’ll teach themselves!”. I was optimistic about this at first but discovered that the reality is that no, they won’t. It isn’t because of a lack of drive; I think it’s probably just a frontal lobe that needs to grow. Freshman aren’t there yet: they still need us to point them in the right direction, show them some cool examples they couldn’t find on their own, teach them the basics, and then invite them to impress us. Otherwise they sit there staring at one another for days.

4. Group work rocks. Students pay more attention to one another than they do to anything else and group work can steer that energy toward self-reflection. One student reflected after the whole project debacle came to an end:

During the course of the past three weeks or so, I had to overcome a lot, personally. It was very hard for me to keep my cool when other people in my group weren't cooperating, or if we were having communication problems. It was hard for me to be able to not take all the work myself, but to be able to trust the other people in our group to do some work as well. I was personally able to overcome this when people in our group really showed an interest in the project and wanted to help out, which was when I was able to hand over some responsibility to them.

That’s neat. So she learned more about herself than she did about English class content. Am I satisfied with that as a teacher? No.

In closing, I must say that this project left me with a lot of questions and one that even related to my identity as a teacher: How can I strike a balance between content-driven classes and experiential learning? Why do I so enjoy leaping at the risky, uncertain, potentially disastrous projects instead of just using my office-mates lesson plans that are tried and true? If nothing else happens in my classroom, what is the one thing I can’t do without? The creation of a class culture? The ability to use discussion techniques? The development of an appreciation for poetry? The proper use of a hyphen?

Each teacher answers these questions for themselves and it will take me a few more years before I am confident in my own responses.

Synapses ready? Fire!

I'm reading a book called Teaching with the Brain in Mind by Eric Jensen. Stale as the raisin-bran that struggles to stay fresh in our Hawaiian heat, this book is still worth my time just because it is so applicable to teaching. I'm clearly not lapping it up since the bookmark lies a meager 43 pages in, nor do I grok much of the neurology described (why can't they make a layout and choose images based on the research they have done about how brains digest information? Arg.) However, the book has affected some change in my classroom.

First, I started playing music in the classroom between breaks that sets the desired tone for the lesson. This is really easy using Pandora.com, an online radio-station that plays any genre of music you invent. In the morning when I want them awake and focused, I play an upbeat latin-music station. During the first break before we do a close-reading of a text, a Mozart-centered station pops on. They seem to appreciate the added stimuli--when I forget to hit play they say "why don't we have music today?". In theory, it is priming neural pathways to increase the speed, sequence, and strength of the connections they will make about poetry.

I change what is on the walls about once a week because change is stimuli for the brain.
I am careful to eliminate threat (verbal abuse, mockery etc.) because a scared brain is not absorbing anything.

According to the brain book, enrichment is all about challenge and feedback. Allowing students to choose their own books for class should insure that they read at the level challenging for them. Right now we are in the process of choosing free-choice books that students will read individually and write about on their blogs. This is instead of reading the Odyssey as a class (the debate is still open as to the validity of this, but lets just wait and see). Today we visited a junior-filled composition class to hear about their book recommendations. These students are reading such interesting books! just a few of the suggestions were Faster than the Speed of Light by Joao Magueijo, Eragon by Christopher Paolini and 1984 by George Orwell, This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff, and The Atonement Child by Francine Rivers. Just hearing these students do a Reading-Rainbow-style plug for books raised my confidence in students today.

So in an ideal world, challenge comes via the free-choice book, and feedback comes via blog when they write about what they are reading.

Finally, one last change regarding feedback. In college, I recall slipping away excitedly to read the feedback on my papers (dork!) as soon as I got them. But not everyone does that, and not all comments make sense, even if you do manage to read the teacher's terrible handwriting. Lots of students make similar mistakes, and having them corrected in relation to work they have recently done apparently makes a different. So lately when I return a batch of papers I choose 2 issues that came up for almost everyone. Perhaps it was weak verb usage. Perhaps they mis-punctuated dialogue. I do a mini-lesson the day I return their papers and it seems to sink in.