Back to the Classroom
Every year I have the opportunity to guest teach in at least one classroom. Typically, I work with one of our 7th grade English teachers, Mrs. Solheim, to introduce a unit featuring Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. I appreciate the chance to go back to the classroom for a number of reasons, mostly selfish ones. First, I love teaching. I did not leave the classroom because I was tired of teaching. I was looking for ways to make a broader impact on students' lives. Second, education has changed a great deal since I left the classroom in 2002, as has my philosophy about what the classroom should look like. This gives me an opportunity to try out new things as well as to practice what I preach. Third, getting back into the classroom as a teacher helps me to keep in touch with what teachers deal with on a day-to-day basis.
I wrote a full learning plan for the classes I taught on January 7th. If you don't already know, the classes are 105-110 minutes long. Perhaps that sounds like a long time, but even when I was teaching every day I had trouble getting to everything I planned. Like the short game in golf, pacing is the first thing to go when you get out of practice. With one shot at getting it right, I tried to develop a plan that took in consideration all of the following things:
The essential questions: what were the overarching concepts I wanted the students to understand; what were the learning targets? In this case I was focusing on the characteristics of a classic, the tools of interpretation (meaning-making), the importance of the text, and the power of symbols. Secondarily, we touched on the evolution of language, and the sonnet and poetic form. These are some big concepts!
Innovative practices: what contemporary instructional approaches did I want to model? In this case, I was determined to do a flipped classroom. I made two videos using an application called Knowmia, and provided them to the students prior to the class. Altogether the videos took about 20 minutes to watch, and covered a significant portion of the factual content I might otherwise have covered in class. By doing this, I was able to have more time for students to be engaged in activities.
Technology: what technological tools could I utilize to engage and assess students? Anyone who continues to stand against students using technology in the classroom is standing on the tracks in front of the train. So I instructed the students to bring their own devices. Setting expectations with them was easy. I incorporated an application called Padlet, a web-based whiteboard that allows students to post answers in real time. Students used it to post notes from their research on sonnets. I used their work to highlight the key information. I also incorporated an application called Poll Everywhere, which I used to allow students to post via text or web words that had entered the language during their lifetime. After also hearing examples of Old, Middle, and Shakespearean English, we used their words to discuss what causes language to evolve. Third, I used Educreations. I'll touch on that in the next bullet.
Collaboration: what strategies can I incorporate that will allow students to learn from each other and work together to create a product that is stronger because of their collective effort? This is where Educreations, an iPad and web-based application that allows students to create presentations, came in. In this case the students took "living pictures" that represented parts of the sonnet that is the prologue to Romeo and Juliet, created a storyboard using the photos, added direct text annotations from the poem, and recorded a voice-over description/narration of what they created. It only took about 5 minutes to teach the kids how to do it. Then they took off. They were engrossed in it, and went in directions I did not anticipate ... it was great!
Student engagement: how could I design the lesson so the learning kept the students' interest, or was, dare I say it, fun? I don't know where anyone at any level of education got the idea that learning shouldn't be fun. The more fun it is, the more open they are, and the better they learn it. That's why it was so gratifying to me as I was circulating from group to group when a couple of the kids said to me, "this is fun!" Imagine that ... it was fun, and they were learning!
The student-centered classroom: how can I design the lesson so any observer would walk in and see less of me and more of them? After all, education is no longer about a teacher showcasing his/her knowledge. To paraphrase Home Depot: it's about less talking, more doing. In reflection, I talked more than I would have liked, but the amount of student-centered activity was pushing about 60-70% of the class. My goal is always 80%.
All told it probably took me about 3-4 hours to prepare the lesson. For me it was a challenge to find the time to do it on top of my principal duties. Like most teachers, I used part of my holiday, my weekends, and my evenings to get it done. However, I only had to prepare the one lesson. Every day our teachers are putting in incredible amounts of time to prepare lessons like the one described above, especially those who are driven to innovate and evolve. Many of them are doing it for more than one content area. And that's just the preparation; nevermind the assessment, grading, feedback, etc. Oh, and the meetings, parent communication, etc., etc. And little of that can happen during the actual school day, because that's when they are doing the actual teaching! What a massive job they have! But what fun it is; after all, it's not just learning that should be fun, the teaching should be fun, too!
