Junior High English Teacher

Aha! It's All about Executive Function

nobody@vox.com(Jen Budenski) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:08:52 -0800

Yesterday, in my 3rd block 7th grade class, a boy who has been tortured by the intricacies of sentence diagramming, stood up and shouted, "I get it!" and added, "Mrs. Behnke, it's like 'I ate spaghetti. Ate what? Spaghetti.'" And with that, he understood direct objects. I clapped for him, he sat down, and then I tried to get back to my activboard demonstration on diagramming prepositional phrases. This boy's "aha moment" epitomizes what's been befuddling me about teaching junior high.

These are not bad kids, they aren't malicious, lazy, delinquent or even intentionally disrespectful. It's just that they get up when they want to, blurt out a thought when it occurs to them, get distracted by any stray sensory stimulus, and seem to want constant playful interaction. In short, they're normal kids--not the laid back, slightly apathetic, intellectual young adults I'm used to teaching from my high school years. As a result, I've really struggled in my classroom management. I've felt the lure of behaviorism. I've tried my mean voice, and applied consequences, pulled kids out into the hall. I've thanked and praised students exhibiting preferred behaviors like staying quiet while I give instruction, waiting patiently, and raising their hands before speaking. But my management hasn't been getting any better. I've just gotten more frustrated, or on good days, more comfortable with a slightly wiggly learning environment.

So, I was surprised and pleased with a recent classroom discussion of the story "First Crossing" by Pam Munoz Ryan. I used a Jeffrey Wilhelm strategy, asking students to take on roles from the story and its related issue of illegal immigration. Volunteers "played" the story's main characters, a US politician concerned about immigration, a young girl featured in a CNN clip about immigration, her lawyer, and the infamous sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. The rest of the class "played" the role of this panel's audience, asking them questions. This was my among most orderly days of class so far this year. After listening to an interview with Adele Diamond this weekend and reading more about her Tools of the Mind initiative, I understand why.

As they "played" my students were following unstated rules of pretending. While they were on the panel, they couldn't speak out of character or blurt their stray ideas. While they were part of the audience, their "job" was to question panel members. Admittedly, staying in character was difficult for some students, but for the most part, the class was engaged in the play and was able to remember ideas from it afterward. Although Adele Diamond's research has centered on preschool and kindergarten, I'm intrigued about its application in junior high.

According to Diamond's research, executive function, or "inhibitory control," is a critical factor in school success. Self-regulation and discipline is a better indicator of potential achievement than IQ. "What the child really needs to do is to take a moment and think," she contends. Teaching self-regulation through classic practices of behaviorism, though, won't work. Praise and punishment, while they may lead to immediate classroom outcomes, won't develop long term skills. Diamond says what students need to do is play--not in a chaotic free-time environment, but with structured, regulated pretending.

Last week, I heard another 7th grade teacher reminding a student that what he'd just said was a "thought bubble" not a "dialogue box." In other words, he should have taken a moment to wonder if what he had to say was important and useful to say aloud. The reminder the teacher gave him was what Diamond might call a "mediator." In preschool and kindergarten, a mediator would be an actual object. A child might have a card on his desk with a picture of lips on one side and an ear on the other. When it's time to talk, he'd have the lips side facing up on his table, and when it's time to listen, the ear would be up. This physical object helps the child self-regulate as a reminder of the role he needs to play at a given time in class. So what if each 7th grader had a double sided card in front of him, one side with a picture of a thought bubble and the other with a picture of a dialogue box? Before raising his hand or speaking, he would have to take a moment to consider the card and think is my idea private (a thought bubble) or will it help the class now (a dialogue box)? I'm going to try this strategy.

(Though I'm out of time and space for this posting, I'm deeply considering how Diamond's research could explain my past success with inviting reluctant readers and writers to take on the roles of artists in my classroom. What were the rules of that "pretend play"?)

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

5-Paragraph-o-phobia Continued

nobody@vox.com(Jen Budenski) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 06:48:48 -0800

I've been reflecting on why the idea of teaching a 5 paragraph essay unit would bother me so much that I would run off to the National Writing Project archives for research against the practice. In laying out my unit calendar and pulling together materials, 5 paragraph essays have seemed pretty innocuous. The 7th graders have enjoyed their success at writing really structured "academic" paragraphs. Honestly, they seem to love being able to identify and highlight their topic, point, and proof sentences.

Then smart Ellie reminded me what students could be missing out on when they start with a form before they know their content. She really struggled with our most recent paragraph topic: should immigrants who have crossed the border illegally be allowed to stay in the U. S. to work and/ or become citizens? We had explored the question from many angles, spending the most time on the story "First Crossing" by Pam Munoz Ryan. While at the beginning of the unit most students strongly believed that all illegal immigrants should be deported, after reading that children cross the border along with their parents or alone, they were less certain. So, Ellie couldn't decide how to answer the question in a paragraph form. That structure is so certain, and her ideas weren't. Instead she wrote a long, freethinking essay that circled around the question instead of answering it. She gave me permission to post it:

Illegal Immigration

By: Ellie

Illegal immigration is wrong. Or is it? It’s illegal, but think of all those starving people who need jobs to meet their needs to barely scrape by. Although, what about the people who live here legally? The illegal immigrants are taking away our jobs. As you can see, I’m very confused about what I think about illegal immigration.

It’s wrong and against the law to immigrate to America without a genuine visa. Also, they will hurt our economy by taking away our jobs. We are already in a recession, why make it worse? It’s against the law, so why do we do allow it sometimes? Some people believe that we should have harsher punishments for sneaking into our country. Paul Westrum said, “But I think they (the workers) should be out of the country. If they’re here illegally, they should be sent home.” But, times must be tough for them to risk coming illegally into our country, why would we send them home rather than help them?

Although I know it is illegal, why can’t we let them stay? What’s wrong with helping out another human being who is struggling to stay alive and hoping to help his/her family? What if a child snuck in and was caught like Marta? Would they send him or her back to no home or family? They just might. Also, when or if the illegal immigrants are caught, they sometimes have to sleep in tents in the desert or spend three years waiting for a court hearing in a jail. Adults have to support their family, and kids shouldn’t be locked up. They never know when they will be deported. Joe Arpaio feeds the immigrants a $0.15 meal without salt and pepper, to save money. They waste part of their lives trying to be sent back to poverty.

Some people believe that there is another thing to consider. If it is illegal to come in the United States without a visa, why not help them in their own country? Volunteers could go and do charity work by raising money, giving out food donations, building houses, etc. This is yet another thing to consider. Even so, some people think that we should help the less fortunate in our country rather than help the poverty stricken people of Latin America.

I don’t know what is the best way to solve this problem. We can either let them stay, deport them, or do charity work in their country. Many people believe we should help them in some way. Other people like Joe Arpaio, also known as “America’s Toughest Sheriff” would say that we should deport them and house them in tents. It’s your choice to make whether you want to help or deport them.

Ellie isn't ready to commit. We conferred about her draft. I told her how much I loved its exploratory tone. I commented in the margin that it matches with the spirit of "essay"--an attempt. But then, I suggested that if she doesn't want to personally commit to an answer, perhaps she could evaluate the reasoning on both sides. Which one has better reasons? She seemed excited because that writing purpose gave a manageable shape to her ideas.

I now realize I was so irritated by privileging the 5 paragraph form because teaching writing is about teaching thinking. Students should explore their ideas, consider possible audiences, then choose the appropriate mode of composition for their purposes. This process seems particularly important given the new multitude of forms available to them for composition tasks. Why assign the same highly structured paragraph to all students, when many can easily compose creative nonfiction, poetry, movies, songs, hypertext and more?

I'll post Ellie's revision with her permission when she turns it in.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

5-Paragraph-o-phobia

nobody@vox.com(Jen Budenski) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 19:05:25 -0800

Let me begin by admitting that I am not a fan of “the 5 paragraph essay.” In fact, I might even call myself evangelical in my pursuit to eradicate the pedagogy of “the 5 paragraph essay” from teaching. I‘ve told my high school students that they have to unlearn it to pass my class. Yet, I’m about to start teaching a 7^th grade unit delivering just such a curriculum. Read on.

Fifteen years ago, before I began teaching, I was lucky to be able to apprentice myself to John Schmit (an Associate Professor at Augsburg College) as his Rhetoric Assistant at the Carleton College Summer Writing Program. I remember and still use his explanation to our shared students as to why perhaps they shouldn’t use a thesis statement that previews their three main ideas. “It’s just a list,” he told the group. Such a rhetorical construction doesn’t explain relationships among ideas, doesn’t accurately reveal a writer’s thinking. It merely provides some blanks for students to fill in order to complete the task of writing an essay.

Many teachers (myself included) have justified teaching the 5 paragraph essay as “academic writing” which gets students ready for college. However, Linda Flower, a Professor of Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University and co-author Reading-to-Write: Exploring a Cognitive and Social Process, expands our notion of academic discourse in her multilayered study of high school students transitioning to expectations for college writing as freshmen. Flower explains that academic discourse includes “research, scholarship, and theory” but also “encourages and values writing which presents new ideas, hypotheses and mysteries, issues for negotiation, and thoughtful reflections.” Student writers ought to write to transform or discover knowledge, and schema-driven tasks like writing a 5 paragraph essay change the writing purpose, prioritizing a perfection of form over discovery of content.

Further, the idea that college papers have to be written in a highly structured, formal way is getting dusty. It’s a holdover from New Critical movement of the mid-twentieth century that just doesn’t jibe with the reality of our current semiotic landscape. Agency matters now. And it motivates young writers. When we secondary teachers tell students they can’t write “I wish,” “I think,” and “I believe” we are “tak[ing] the inquisitiveness of a promising mind and devalu[ing] it” according to Rebecca Feldbusch a Pennsylvania teacher and consultant with the National Writing Project.

The great revelation of these years in the middle of my teaching career has been a paradigmatic shift from assessing students’ technical skills to assessing their thinking. Assessing thinking can be a messy, ambiguous business as is learning itself. (But it is possible to do efficiently in a classroom setting.) I’ve learned to teach writing as a series of risks and experiments that reveal ideas to student writers who then arrange them into a composition whose form enhances its rhetorical purpose. The process is by far not as fluent as the sentence that I just wrote to describe it. Students get frustrated, they fail, they start over and learn to be recursive thinkers and writers over time and at different rates of progress. That’s one reason why I wanted to come to junior high. I’ve long envied Nancie Atwell’s classroom and the possibilities her workshop model offers for a thinking-based curriculum.

In junior high, I teach a course called Academy Prep, which was conceived as an intervention for student writers who need additional support to be successful in their grade level English class or in order to pass the Minnesota GRAD in Composition. Twice already this year, I’ve watched an over-reliance on the 5 paragraph schema sink a writer mid-composition. Once, a young man had written a lovely homage to his father as a rough draft. In revision, though, he tried to break it into 3 body paragraphs governed by a thesis statement. The essay lost its controlling purpose, and he couldn’t articulate what he learned from writing it—and therefore couldn’t figure out how to conclude it. Just recently, a new student labored over her graphic organizers to write a practice essay for the GRAD. Her tightly organized essay included such rhetorical clunkers as “First of all” and “In conclusion” that only served to distract me from her ideas instead of classifying them as she’d intended. Yet, the next day she brought me a personal essay she had written for another class that was coherent, incredibly fluent and natural in content, voice, and structure. To explain the difference, she said that she had written it really fast and didn’t have time to revise. In other words, her internal editor didn’t have time to take over for her creative brain. I’m reminded of the motto of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Writing: “Better writers, not better papers.”

But now, we come to the moment where I sit reflecting. I spent most of my Saturday creating an activboard flipchart to deliver the three-part thesis statement lesson to my 7^th graders. After all I’ve explained and argued above, why would I do such a thing? Let’s enumerate.

1. As a former high school teacher, I have to enter the junior high as an observer and a learner. Gifted, longtime 7^th grade teachers have handed me this curricular goal, which is built upon in subsequent grades and across disciplines in the building.

2. My overwhelmed, culture shocked 7^th graders—new to junior high—are begging me daily for certainty. They are good kids who want to succeed and be seen as successful in concrete ways. I need to strengthen their tolerance for ambiguity slowly and gently.

3. Schema development is critical to learning and, really, to cognitive development. Building clear mental models for discipline specific, academic discourse is important for all students, but for marginalized students in particular.

4. I know how to teach past this. The 5 paragraph essay schema represents scaffolded instruction—like a child’s first swimming lesson in the safe hands of an adult. Eventually, after swimming with life jackets and milk jugs, they’ll jump in alone to discover a whole new freedom of movement. I just have to remove the scaffolding intentionally, over time.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

"I Feel Like a Professional Writer"

nobody@vox.com(Jen Budenski) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:01:21 -0700

Two years ago, when I was on sabbatical (and this blog was dedicated to my learning and research), I read a lot about "agency." How can we make students the agents of their learning? How does our curriculum promote agency? Much of the research I read centered on video and online gaming as exemplars for agency.

I had a great moment in my second block, ninth grade class last week. I had just worked my way through a sentence variety lesson I've used for years (I think I got it from a Diana Hacker writing handbook). Afterward, while students were revising a piece of writing for sentence variety, one student said, "Doing this makes me feel like a professional writer." He became an agent of his own learning, rather than a student just answering a teacher's questions in writing to get the points. I love it when students remember that writing is an art, not just a chore.

Here are a couple of examples of great revisions for sentence variety from class that day. Students were responding to a portrait by Xavier Tavera.

Original Sentences

Their body stance is indicating that they won't back down from a fight.
The artist is showing how buff and big they look.
It is indicating that they are criminals.

Revised Sentences

Shoulders up, arms tight with tension, their body stance indicates that they won't back down from a fight.
Artist Xavier Tavera show how buff and big they look.
Dark and mysterious, ski masks hide something they want no one to know about.

Particularly Effective Use of a Short, Simple Sentence in Revision

In the picture to the right, it shows a white guy standing very tense and uneasy with eyes filled with anger wearing a sleeveless shirt, ski mask, and casual pants. In the next picture, a black man stands behind the same brick wall as the white guy wearing the same ski mask as the white guy with a hand extended out wanting something. the man wears a white shirt and black pants. Both are dangerous. [my italics]

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Junior High Academic Writing: To Narrative or Not to Narrative?

nobody@vox.com(Jen Budenski) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:45:15 -0700

   A wise woman I know, a social worker of long experience, asked me once why I required my students to write about anything but themselves. The best stories, the ones with the most life and detail she believed, come out when teenagers write from personal experience. Perhaps her preference comes after years of listening to young people tell her their compelling stories. Her point of view is untempered by the reality that developing writers need what many researchers and practitioners call "mental models" for structured, academic writing. They need to know that a topic sentence is followed by supporting ideas, which in turn are proven with examples and other evidence. Like I tell my students, you need to learn how to play the scales before you can make music. That said, I'm a sucker for a detail-rich story!
I've been thinking about the difference between formalized, highly structured academic writing and storytelling lately because my students turned in their first drafted paragraph just this week. I was impressed by their understanding of formal organization, and was pleased to find a few storytellers in my pile of essays as well. The stories were lovely to read, but more difficult to grade because their structure is far more subtle, the student's thinking more tricky to assess. So, I put it to the students: Which style is better writing? It's a false dichotomy, I know, but it led to lively conversation about "good writing." What we discovered small group after small group is that what makes writing good results from strengths that a particular writer brings to the page. And that a blend of clear structure and vivid voice is like chocolate and peanut butter--they go best together.

     Here are the two exceptional 7th grade pieces we used for our debate:

Structure_paragraph008

Narrative_paragraph011

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Paintings from Poems

nobody@vox.com(Jen Budenski) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 06:13:44 -0700

Jeremiah

Alonte

The Kingdom
by Fuad Rifka

His kingdom is a n ancient lamp,
a walking stick,
a water bag.

At the door of his dwelling
the sun slants
and the stars are resting.

Scott

Danielle

Fatality
by Ruben Dario

The tree is happy because it is scarcely sentient;
the hard rock is happier still, it feels nothing:
there is no pain as great as being alive,
no burden heavier than that of conscious life.

To be, and to know nothing, and to lack a way,
and the dread of having been, and future terrors...
And the sure terror of being dead tomorrow,
and to suffer through all life and through the darkness,

and through what we do not know and hardly suspect...
And the flesh that tempts us with bunches of cool
grapes,
and the tomb that awaits us with funeral sprays,
and not to know where we go,
nor whence we came!...

Melissa

Echo
by Henriquieta Lisboa

Green parrot
let out a shrill scream.
Rock in sudden
anger, replied.

A great uproar
invaded the forest.
Thousands of parrots
screamed together
and rock echoed.

From all sides
strafing space
steely screams rained
and rained down.

Very piercing screams!

But no one died.

Politics

Tatiana

by Alkaios

He wants power
He has power
He wants more
And his country will break in his hands,
Is breaking now.

Marcy

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

OCP Artists at Work

nobody@vox.com(Jen Budenski) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 09:12:27 -0700

IMG_0014

See more at our Picassa slideshow. (I'm blogging during class so I don't have time to learn how to embed it!)

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Poetry: What Can We Make of It?

nobody@vox.com(Jen Budenski) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 07:10:52 -0700

Clampdrawing

In previous years, I've used visual art as an entry to both creative and academic writing, novels and poetry. Drawing offers a way to teach observation, even reading in a way that helps kids deprogram from previous poetry experiences that had them hunting for metaphors, symbols and correct interpretations. When they practice observational drawing, they learn to notice details and trust their own meaning making.

So last week, I launched our world poetry unit by inviting my arts partner Judi Petkau from the Weisman Art Museum to my classroom. Over two days, she reviewed gesture and contour drawing, asking students to draw leaves, tools, stones, and other elemental objects. Then, they created observed self-portraits.

Leafdrawing

Meanwhile, students had spent days paging through selected world poetry books I'd checked out looking for lines that captured their interest. They had created found poems from those lines.

My examples (culled from The New African Poetry, ed. Ojaide, Sallah):

Winter                                                           Spring
January is like a stone                                  Joy surprises me.
that sits at the tip of my tongue,                   A little birdsong threatens
bitterness for the absence of sap.                to burst out of my heart.
Selfishly, I lock in my heart                           All dreams are possible.
the memory of grass and warm rain.           I offer my pollen to the wind.

Student examples (see resource list at the end for book information):

Untitled by Jennifer

you live only for me and in me you are
reborn and in this way I live for you. You
changed my whole life. I need you so much
love, in these gray hours. Leave behind all life
that was life. A sensation of tranquility that
seems never ending love was the flower carried
in their mouths, and love blue like their fear.

It Flies High by Tyrone

It flies high
above the miniature beacon of light
the Lu bird flies with no set course
with inflexible heavens
never losing his way
while encountering the cold, solitude
rain. Even though the sky is like a
bedsheet and below a delicious hell where
furious birds dwell, spring is here.
Winter winds have blown out of the sky
the dark Earth drapes herself green
sailors are out on the broad sea,
Zephyrs duffing out their sails.
Nightingale deep in the woods
where bees make honey
and poets daydream silently seeing
beautiful birds sing.

Never Alone by Amy

the pine cones rustled
and I ached to be alone with the wind
an epic of flowers told as drops of dew
nights I dreamed in a fever
about houses wet with love
stories I tell from to the finger prints
left to mark a dream of loneliness
imagine how unfair that the dust
was my only companion

you will remember for we in our youth did these things by Marcy

I heat up the coffee, light my morning
cigarette & grab breakfast to go
but I'm distracted, so fully I feel
his flesh in me, that I don't feel
him on me
then I remember what he's done,
I treat him too well for how he's harmed me
frustrated I inhale the tobacco
until my lungs are heavily loaded
I look forward to tonight when
I can sit on my porch alone
with the moon & a jar of wine

Solemn Fool by Scott

I have only one question
for the solemn fool
Although I'm dead
I'm waiting for you
Do you miss me
like I miss you
Please, please tell me,
solemn fool.

As students finished a self-portrait, I directed them to find a line of poetry to be its caption. They were to write not a description of themselves, but of their portraits. For example, while I was feeling birdsong in my heart, by portrait turned out looking haggard and bitter (see below). Students helped me to choose "Life is made of thistles and black thorns. I would have liked it sweeter and less bitter."

Self-portrait_assignment

Student examples:

Tom

Danielle

Alonte

Several students are complaining both about having to draw and having to read poetry. Such creative exercises are outside of their comfort zones. There are no blanks to fill in here, no correct answers. Only individual interpretations supported by evidentiary reasoning.

In the next week, we're going to translate a poem to canvas. That should be fun to document and post.

As Judi and I proceed, I need to articulate our goals and outcomes.

Knowing: Students will know about the role of poetry in other cultures. They will be able to identify language techniques used in poetry.

Comprehending: Students will understand that poetry can be read as an aesthetic experience similar to viewing visual art. They will understand how to support their interpretations with textual evidence.

Doing: Students will read self-selected works of world poetry. From this textual basis, they will create found poems, original poems, drawings, and a painting.

Resources (the books students referred to most in the first week of the unit)

20th Century Latin American Poetry

The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

International Poetry on the Web

The Space Between Our Footsteps

Windcatcher: New and Selected Poems by Breyten Breytenbach

Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments

The New African Poetry

Contemporary Russian Poetry

:

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Web 2.0 Workshop This Morning

nobody@vox.com(Jen Budenski) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 06:17:02 -0800

For about the past half hour, I've listened to Victoria Wilson, our high school Library Media Specialist highlight fun Web 2.0 tools. Some of her usable ideas:

just hear !t: use this real time player for class room music...A few years ago a Minnesota Writing Project fellow suggesting using the Rolling Stones "Satisfaction" in as many versions as can be found as a lesson in voice and style. Here's an easy way to make that happen without having to compile the songs or pay for them, or to ask students to create their own playlists of other cover songs.

Wordle: create visual representations of word lists or other texts. For example...

Progro

This is a really simple example, but more complex texts are available in the Wordle gallery--like Wordle interpretations of presidential speeches. I'm definitely going to use it as a poetry interpretation tool.

Finally, I would add two sites to my graphic storytelling toolbox-- SUMO Paint and Animoto. Beyond storytelling, too, Victoria suggested photographing students at work during a particular unit and dropping those photos into Animoto to reflect their process back to them. Years ago, I had a TV student follow us around to make a documentary--a long, intense and worthwhile process. Now with a few clicks I could be making minidocumentaries myself through the year.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Using Google Sites for Literacy Practice

nobody@vox.com(Jen Budenski) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 18:46:15 -0800

OCP Home Page Evolution

I started second quarter with a test prep unit, assigning students to prepare for either the MCA/ GRAD in Reading or Composition, the GED, or the SAT. We studied a lot of usage and syntax, took practice tests, and almost killed each other. I hate teaching to these tests because the curriculum tends to be inauthentic and boring. I did the best I could embedding choice and high interest reading, but really. This is a curriculum even an English teacher can't love. Ideally, we shouldn't need to "prepare" for these tests. If my student population weren't transient, truant, and chemically addicted, I could teach a scope and sequence that would end organically with success on the tests.

After this grammar tortore, we were burned out, so I punted. How could I make writing functional and engaging again. I asked my students, "Hey, what if we could create a website for our school?" We didn't have one, and other Minnesota alternative programs do. The idea of creating a website seemed like the perfect formula for success with nontraditional students. It offered daily computer access, relevant composition tasks, and a highly visual, published product. And truly, most students who chose to work on the website project were engaged as soon as they found their niches. Some wanted to work primarily on visual design, some researching, interviewing and gathering images. Others who never really discovered the content they could confidently contribute, or those who struggled with the technology, quit early.

Students sorted themselves into categories of those confident with technology (even overly so) and those skittish about delving too deeply beyond checking email. Initially, I asked them to work cooperatively across three class periods to contribute research information to a matrix comparing and contrasting free webhosting and authoring service.

Webhoster

The matrix has just enough tech speak on it to make those familiar with the terminology feel some expertise and to overwhelm those who couldn't bear the acronyms. However, each day individually coaching these students through finding a measurement for bandwith or a yes or no on FTP access, I was able to help build a mental model of our genre--the webpage. Knowing what our platform could offer shaped the content we would compose on it. After a solid week of seeking numbers to fill in the blank boxes, we determined that Google Sites suited our purpose best. Really, I determined that, but after the week they spent gathering data to evaluate the possibilities, it was easy to explain why I chose Google Sites.

Subpages on the site grew naturally according to student interest. For example, Demetrius really wanted to post an image of Barack Obama, but after a unanimous reaction by his classmates that Mr. Obama was not an appropriate graphic illustration for our OCP Rules and Expectations subpage, Demetrius decided to compose an OCP Heroes and Role Models page. Demetrius' process in composing his chosen page was beautifully organic and honest, punctuated by many breaks for You Tube, Firefox crashes, and leaving the classroom to get a drink of water (check his phone messages). First, he interviewed fellow OCPers about their personal heroes. Next, he searched for images, asking along the way who some of them were, occassionally diverting to google them. Finally, he attempted to post them on his subpage. For a reason he and I never discovered, posting an image to Google Sites during his class period involved an incredibly frustrating process of watching Firefox crash each time he clicked the browse and upload buttons, then restarting Firefox an unpredictable number of times until an image would appear in the selection box to be added to the page.

My perception of Demetruis' process is that he surrendered most days to his frustration believing he could never finish. When I asked that he add captions to the images so that site visitors could recognize the heroes and role models, he seemed to think it was an impossible task. Moving images in Google Sites is something neither of us mastered, so finding space for typing names in a consistent way to maintain page design proved impossible. But if I could just find him a tool, like clicking paragraph text in the format menu just to place the cursor for typing, he could persevere. On the last day of the project, Demetrius opened his subpage to discover that another student had attempted to write a brief introduction naming what the chosen heroes and role models shared in common. Finding this small contribution on his page seemed to motivate him for a final effort. Also on this day, another student and I discovered through trial and error over a few days how to insert a Picasa slide show on a subpage. Demetrius discovered his solution. Rather than struggling to manipulate the images on his page, we placed them in a slide show. Although we still didn't have role models' names listed, we did have the introduction and the slide show frame to give shape to the content.

I loved the experimentation and frustration of the recursive thinking and composing, and the clarifying effect both of collaborative writing and translation of information from verbal to visual text. We didn't know what our composition would look like or read like until it was finished. We couldn't just fill in the blanks.

Another student, Devin, volunteered to explain the hard to understand calculation of credits earned in alternative school. He wrote and revised a written explanation, but couldn't clearly communicate how attendance, participation and quality of work could result in a passing letter grade but not an entire credit. When our program assistant produced a fictitious grade report for "Jane Alternative," two other boys were able to use the visual to generate three clear statements summarizing how credit is earned at OCP. I'm going to admit that I sat beside them to facilitate the translation of verbal to visual to verbal again, but they were authorities on the accuracy of the information and the precision of language for each statement. All students learned how a multimodal composition could communicate more clearly than verbal text in this situation.

I feel as though I could type these stories over and over. Adam made the OCP tour movie and posted it on You Tube. Reed created the curriculum subpage, Ana the staff. Jesse struggled mightily with the image uploading issue to create the student work subpage. Sheldon took over the community subpage when others had to walk away from the frustration of the technology. Keyla, Alonte, and Brittany became fully invested in finding and posting OCP's favorite media. Chet didn't want the responsibility of his own page, but assisted many others and allowed me to use the subpages to help him practice identifying main ideas.

Students didn't articulate these outcomes on their unit reflections, but here's the kind of literacy skills I believe we practiced:

task and risk management, resilience
recursive revision
information gathering and evaluation
comparison and contrast
translation between verbal and visual modes
criticizing, using criticism
collaboration
editing and proofreading

The outcome that students nearly unanimously appreciated was collaboration. While they had plenty of criticism for other aspects of the unit (one student called it "chaos"), all but three students said they felt like they were all working together on this project. Jeff said, "Yes, we all played our parts and helped others who asked for it." John pointed out, "You had to get help to finish." Nikki said that she "saw people getting other people to finish." Adam noticed that "we all had different jobs to finish the project."

Over the 20 days of our unit, assessment became a matter of triage. What problem can we solve today, and who's going to be in charge of working on it? Who can help? If we all worked toward making progress on the site, we all earned our participation credit for the day. We also stopped at the midpoint and at the end to view the site as a whole to evaluate it, reassessing our to do lists. In the end, students received academic points for completing their individual projects (subpages) and writing feedback at the midpoint and end of the project. They will share an academic grade for the site as a whole.

And here's our page. I enabled the comment function, so please sign into your Google account and freely comment to validate and extend our learning.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend