Personal interest projects

A teaching mentor once told me that you lose student’s engagement as soon as you tell them what you are going to do for the year. They didn’t choose it, so why should they care? They will go through the motions, but the heart is missing.

This year, with the personal interest project, my co-collaborator Mr. Hines and I are trying to give ownership of some of the content back to the students.

Students select an essential question to explore such as “how can I teach electromagnetism to elementary school kids?” or “How could I demonstrate my knowledge of U.S. history in the form of a novel?” and spend the semester creating a project that effectively answers that question.

Empowered by this ownership, students are often enthusiastic, but suddenly dwarfed by the enormity of the task ahead. Mr. Hines and I are regularly reminded that the difference between a great idea failing or succeeding is scaffolding. We try to provide this in the following ways:

1. Provide clear rubrics of project expectations.

2. Indicate draft deadlines that lead up to project deadlines.

3. Chunk the project down into several steps.

This is surprisingly difficult to do as each project is unique and requires a different series of sub tasks. As students get a period a week to work on their self-designed projects in each of our classes, they get feedback from both of us on their projects as they develop. It is scary as a teacher to give up this much class time to completely self-directed student projects, but students regularly report that this is the most meaningful work for them because they chose it.

Ethan getting excited about rubrics cubes

 

 

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Media literacy unit

What do students really need to learn in history and English in school? Do they need to remember what happened in a particular civil war battle or how to analyze a sonnet? Even if through hard work and some luck a teacher were able to coax students to learn these things, is this knowledge that will serve them in the real world?

MPX does not use textbooks so students are often charged with finding and reading primary sources in their own research. In order to do this effectively they need to be able to identify valid sources and understand where the information they gather comes from, just as they must sift opinion from fact whenever they open an Internet browser. This is why our first unit is about developing media literacy skills through an investigation of the news.

Students are currently working on writing a news article about a topic of their choice ranging from contamination in the Ala wai canal to the recent Okinawan festival. They spent a day in the library researching their topics and learning from the librarians about the rich array of databases there as well as proper citation techniques.

Wednesday we went to the Star Advertiser's printing plant in Kapolei to learn about the production side of publication. Please read thoughtful blogs from Emma and Sean about our trip. Sean astutely pointed out that we learned the production side in Kapolei, and his questions about Star Advertiser journalism will be answered next week by a journalist who will be visiting our class.

The last day of class students taught one another about various elements of journalism ranging from how to write a good lead to proper interview techniques. The knowledge gains there will be directly applicable as they conduct interviews this weekend and work on writing up their articles for the high school newspaper next week.

 

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Field trip to Hawaii Public Radio

Yesterday the group of MPX 10s loaded onto a school bus and drove down to the Hawaii Public Radio station to deepen their understanding of our current topic: media literacy. Students met with the radio's director of public outreach Gene Evans, news reporter Bill Dorman, and sound technician Jason Taglianatti to hear about how public radio decides what makes it to the air.

When asked by students why the station doesn't cater more to the tastes of younger listeners (they have five shows which play exclusively classical music), Evans replied that younger listeners typically "don't have the chops or life experience to appreciate what we try to do here." He further explained that the radio believe "you gotta be challenged by the music and the news" suggesting it isn't the station's objective to play only things which are entertaining or pleasing to the ear.

 

Students asked questions about how the radio covers breaking news, whether radio has any advantages over tv, and how the decide which stories are newsworthy. See student blog posts about the field trip to read more about what they learned.

 

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Photo-essay of Alchemist

Last week was a productive one in MPX humanities. Students worked on their photo-essays which told the story of various moments from our summer reading book The Alchemist by Paul Coelho. Students printed and mounted their photos, which are now on display in the classroom. Additionally, they wrote essays which explained how their photos utilized the elements of photography such as angle, zoom, and the rule of thirds to evoke moments from the summer reading.

My highlight of this project was working with students to edit their first drafts of their written essays. They got feedback from a partner in the class as well as from me, and so far the final drafts have shown significant improvement from the first. Several students commented that it is important to them to be able to have time to produce a high quality final product and that the revision process enabled them to do that on this project.

Excited about project based learning

I got my first taste of the amazing feeling of enough time and enough teachers to do project based learning successfully on a big scale! All four MPX teachers teamed up to plan the thirsty games with the purpose of giving the incoming freshman the experience of a full project cycle. Teams were provided dirty water and had time and tools to brainstorm a way to clean the water with limited tools.

Three 9th grade students planning to capture the steam released when they put their dirty water on a hot plate.

 

 

See colleague Mark Hines' curriculum snapshot on it here.

 

 

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Literary Magazine 2013

This year's layout just shows how far we have come as a class.


Things that we did differently this year:

1. Lots of creative writing during the fall with feedback cycle so students learned to give and receive meaningful feedback.

2. Each student created their own individual small zine using the class's work for content. This was when they learned to use Adobe InDesign effectively.

3. Integrated art from our Chinese sister school, Souzhou Lida Middle school.

4. Added a theme that connected the cover to the content (birds).

5. Invited a graphic designer to speak to the class about innovated layout.

6. Published digitally! Copies available for purchase here

Schools of the Future annual conference

We stayed until the end.

Leslie Witten, the library media specialist at Island Pacific Academy, and I attended the final session after an energizing day of professional development.  We were rewarded with gold at the end of the rainbow: Rob Mancabelli’s session on Personal Learning Networks.

Exhausted and happy

He explained that all classrooms are now blended; students don’t ever leave their online networks, regardless of school appropriate use policies for mobile devices. Modeling for students how to utilize these devices as tools to learn what they want to know is as valuable a skill as teaching them how to analyze a text.

It is not only a small radical group of educators who believe this but the very traditionally minded National Council of Teachers of English is also on board. According to their position statement: 
Twenty-first century readers and writers need to:

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology

• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally

• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes

• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information

• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts

• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

It was a great session and I’m glad we lingered long enough to catch it.