Category Archives: teaching

I’ve taught a lot of different subjects to a lot of different kinds of students and learners over the years, but my fascination with teaching has remained the same– which is handy, since it’s my chosen career, right? I love reading about how other teachers practice their vocation, so I try to post about my own teaching in the same manner. However, I never post about individual students, or about distinct characteristics or issues of any of the schools where I teach.

MOOCs, Redux

Posted by Jackie in education, personal goals, technology, writing and tagged with , ,

After making a strong start with Modern Poetry (nicknamed ModPo) last fall and feeling really enthusiastic, I ended up crashing and burning midway through the semester. However, since it was completely a falling-down on my part and not at all related to the course, I’m giving Coursera another try this summer, as well as enrolling in ModPo again for the fall. This summer I’m signed up for:

Latin American Culture: hoping this will help prepare me better to add more history and culture to my Latin American fiction course next spring

The Fiction of Relationship: not totally sure I will be able to complete this one, as there are several books on the reading list I’ve never read and don’t own! But I’m very curious about the class, and what they will discuss for the books I am familiar with, like Beloved and Ficciones.

This time around, I’m planning on taking more of a cherry-pick approach; I’m definitely aiming to complete the Latin American class, but if I don’t get to every assignment, I’m okay with that. With the fiction class, I’m planning to start off as more of an interested observer, and if I get hooked, then I will do my best to complete what I can. I think this is probably the most realistic approach for me, and I think it will also help ensure that I do feel I’ve gained something for the hours I end up investing in the class.

The next big Coursera development that intrigues me is their entry into professional development courses for K-12 teachers; I’m especially interested in this course on Brain-Targeted Teaching because I’m familiar with some of the professor’s work, and she is the former principal of the elementary school my daughters attended until this year. I also added this course on museum teaching strategies for the classroom to my “watch list,” so that Coursera will alert me when future sessions are scheduled. I have no idea whether MOOCs are a good venue for effective professional development, but I’m fascinated to see how this unfolds.

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Evaluating A Course: Latin American Literature

Posted by Jackie in authors, poetry, teaching and tagged with , , , , ,
Cover of "The Feast of the Goat: A Novel&...

Cover of The Feast of the Goat: A Novel

What I wanted: to see what the students thought of my Latin American Literature course, which I created myself and taught for the first time this spring. The course had a list of five texts, all of which I had never taught before: three novels, a collection of poetry and a collection of short stories.

What I used: a Course Evaluation form I designed specifically for this purpose, but I think I could use for any senior elective I teach (feel free to use it yourself!)

What I suspected: that five books were too many, as I think we’ll only end up watching the film adaptation of the final book; that they may have only really enjoyed one of the books we read

What I feared: that the class had been uneven, seemed randomly arranged or not engaging enough; that I had made at least one poor choice in texts; that they had not enjoyed the course (always a fear of mine!)

What they said:

  • only one student found the pace too fast, but several mentioned wanting to go more in depth with the books they liked, so I think next year I’ll drop the novel we didn’t get to this year and look again at the schedule of readings
  • Our work with The Essential Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems was a hit, and they really enjoyed The Feast of the Goat: A Novel (as I suspected might be the only book they really liked), so those two units will stay; I may incorporate more poetry alongside Neruda as well
  • several mentioned wanting to know more about the culture (yes, including food), so I have to think about how to integrate that more
  • none of them particularly liked the text I thought was a poor choice (Ficciones (English Translation)), so I’ll be dropping that and looking for a replacement

What surprised me:

There were a few positive comments, but also some strong recommendations to drop One Hundred Years of Solitude , which I didn’t expect. I can’t imagine teaching a survey of 20th century Latin American literature without including this book, so I don’t think I’ll drop it, but I do think it means I need to do more work in scaffolding the book and engaging the students more thoroughly as we study it. It’s a challenging text, but I think it is so rich and valuable that I need to challenge myself to do it better justice next time. Perhaps placing it at the beginning of the course was too intimidating? Maybe I should have eased us in with some short stories first? Need to think more about this.

What pleased me:

  • Several comments about how different the course content is from what they’d been exposed to previously in school, which is exactly why I thought we needed to offer this course
  • comments about me being a tough grader, but also “reasonable” and never unfair, and always paired with comments about the class being engaging, enjoyable, and “welcoming”
  • comments about enjoying discussions and how I guided or conducted those sessions; this semester was a small group, so I tried to run it like a college-level seminar (with spring seniors, always tricky) and think that was useful

Notes for the future:

Need to replace at least one text; thinking about using The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories

Need to reconfigure the schedule of assignments better so that they are more evenly spread through the semester

Need to ask specifically about the assignments on the course evaluation next time

Need to rethink assignments; they wrote one 4-5 page essay and one short timed explication, completed blog posts for one unit, were responsible for leading class discussion once and will write a personal essay (which probably will not do next year, due to changes in text, and will need to be replaced)

Need to go back and turn scribbled notes into more formal lesson plans

Need to choose film (perhaps Il Postino, which I know our library owns) and think about how to integrate more cultural aspects/information

*Explanatory note* this class is pretty male-author-dominated, but that’s mainly because there is another set of electives at my school called “Hispanic Women Writers,” so I have to steer clear of any overlap when I choose books

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Summer Schooling

Posted by Jackie in education, teaching and tagged with , , , , ,
The Old English epic poem Beowulf is written i...

The Old English epic poem Beowulf is written in alliterative verse and paragraphs, not in lines or stanzas. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Instead of choosing some professional development books to read this summer, I’ve got enough new units/courses that I’ll be plenty busy with reading and planning. Here’s what I’m looking at:

  • start mapping out lessons and assessments for Beowulf
  • start mapping out lessons and assessments for Persepolis
  • read and annotate several texts for new senior elective on reading/writing nonfiction
  • start mapping out lessons and assessments, based on workshop format
  • read new summer reading texts for 9th grade, including The Pearl and plan mini-unit
  • condense 9th grade Bible-as-literature unit to form new introductory mini-unit on recognizing allusion

As you can see, we’re making some exciting changes to our ninth grade curriculum to make it more global, and I’m tackling a new senior elective in addition to one I’ve only taught once before. So instead of doing big-picture pedagogical thinking, I’ll be immersed in nuts-and-bolts curriculum planning. I do truly enjoy both, but it’ll be a shift for sure, and should be plenty to occupy my summer hours.

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Tracking Students with E-Textbooks

Posted by Jackie in conversations, education, technology and tagged with , , , , ,
English: Textbook

English: Textbook (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The hot topic in education today is how technology is going to shape, track and modify student behavior, especially in areas that are typically hard to control. The NYT writes about e-textbooks that will track student engagement in real time for professors to view. However, how we interpret this data is not so clear cut.

Adrian Guardia, a Texas A&M instructor in management, took notice the other day of a student who was apparently doing well. His quiz grades were solid, and so was what CourseSmart calls his “engagement index.” But Mr. Guardia also saw something else: that the student had opened his textbook only once.

“It was one of those aha moments,” said Mr. Guardia, who is tracking 70 students in three classes. “Are you really learning if you only open the book the night before the test? I knew I had to reach out to him to discuss his studying habits.”

Here are my questions: who among us hasn’t been that student, where everything you needed to know was discussed in lectures, and the reading so thoroughly reviewed that a sharp student didn’t need to do it in the first place? But more importantly, doesn’t this also point to a greater problem with how the course itself is designed? In other words, if that student can pass that class without opening the book, then hasn’t the teacher gone wrong somewhere in designing the course, the content, the lectures, the assignments and/or the choice of book?

Later in the article, everyone involved acknowledges that students will still continue to be inventive:

students could easily game the highlighting or note-taking functions. Or a student might improve his score by leaving his textbook open and doing something else.

Apparently, students taking paper notes are also penalized because the system can’t track them.

Finally, one of the professors seems to engage in some self-reflection toward the end:

“Maybe the course is too easy and I need to challenge them a bit more,” Mr. Guardia said. “Or maybe the textbooks are not as good as I thought.”

If our students aren’t engaged, aren’t challenged, aren’t paying attention, they certainly own part of that responsibility. But we do too, as it is our job to track and reflect and engage, even without any high-powered software to help us.

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Evaluations and Leaning In

Posted by Jackie in all about me, conversations, teaching and tagged with , , , ,
Image representing Sheryl Sandberg as depicted...

Sheryl Sandberg Image via CrunchBase

Like many schools, my school has a tiered evaluation system, and this year is one of my years to be evaluated. At my school, we are evaluated by our division head, department chair, and a peer we select ourselves. We write narrative self-reflections on different specific professional areas where we want to improve, and then all three members of our team come and observe our teaching for an entire class period. Then we meet again, and the team members share what they observed, and we have a conversation about it all. It’s a great process, and I helped revamp it a few years ago as a member of a school-wide committee, so I’m familiar and comfortable with it. This process is not tied to salary, like many performance reviews are, and even if it were, I feel fairly confident about my job performance.

I think I am a good advisor, I try hard to be a good and collegial colleague, and I put a lot of time and energy into trying to be the best teacher I can be. I seek out professional development, volunteer for committees and extra responsibilities, and advise one club and one student organization. I’ve been evaluated before, always with positive comments, I enjoy the opportunity to reflect on my teaching and set personal goals, and I’ve served on plenty of evaluation teams, which I have always found to be fascinating and personally valuable.

But in all honesty, each time, being evaluated freaks me out. Like, majorly. MAJORLY. I was super-stressed in preparing for my first evaluation meeting this week, in which I had to discuss what I think my own strengths are (I think I came up with two, maybe?), and I know my nervousness showed, which made me so frustrated with myself. I am already stressed when thinking about my observations, which will happen after we return from spring break. I trust, value and respect my evaluation team, so this isn’t about them; it’s entirely about ME.

I’ve always thought that part of my personality is a strong dash of imposter syndrome. Illustration: when I was in my first few years teaching at my current school, the secretary came to my classroom door while I was teaching, beckoned me into the hallway, and whispered that we were going to have an all-upper-school meeting in the theater directly after that class period. My first immediate and vivid thought was that they were going to fire me in front of the entire assembled student body and faculty. Even after the assembly (which I think ended up being a slightly graphic one about drunk driving), I had a tough time shaking that panic and fear for the rest of the day. I’m nowhere near that bad these days, or I wouldn’t have been able to write that paragraph above about the ways in which I think I am good at my job. But that feeling still lingers, and evaluation season is certainly its favorite time.

However, lately I’ve also been wondering if there’s something else going on with my reluctance to blow my own horn, as it were. Reading this profile of Sheryl Sandberg makes me think maybe there’s a gendered aspect, that I worry somewhere inside my head that if I had come into that meeting (or any meeting) with a bulletted list of my strengths and accomplishments, I would have instantly seemed less likeable, too conceited or self-important or pushy. I work in a very female profession, and everyone on my team is female, but that doesn’t mean the barriers don’t exist inside my own head. Again, this isn’t about the women on my team; it’s about me. I’m no Reese Witherspoon, but I do agree that I need to dig deep and get more comfortable with being uncomfortable in this area. I’m much more comfortable outlining my weaknesses and where I need to improve as a teacher, and while that helps me keep improving, it doesn’t help my confidence or self-image, and it may shut me of from future opportunities.  You can’t say, “Wow, that would be perfect for me, as it plays to all my strengths,” if you have no idea what your strengths are.

Do you struggle with this too? Are you as comfortable listing your strengths as you are your weaknesses?

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Teaching Through Repeated Exposure: Metaphors and Similes

Posted by Jackie in teaching, writing

While we are studying Their Eyes Were Watching God and reflecting on ourselves, we are also studying figurative language, and specifically metaphors and similes. We began our unit thinking about caged birds and free birds, and while we read, students are keeping track of metaphors and similes in each night’s reading. In an activity about taking Janie and her husband Joe to marriage counseling, I asked them to describe several aspects of their relationship in similes and metaphors. I’ve asked them to draw symbols, similes and metaphors to represent Janie and Tea Cake’s relationship, and at the end of the unit, they will choose a passage of figurative language from the text and make a quilt square that depicts it, which we will display in my classroom, as well as write essays incorporating what they’ve learned.

The book is distinctively rich with figurative language, and so understanding it is a key piece of really comprehending the beauty and power of the novel. I know my students have been exposed to these terms before, and have done projects and assignments about them before, but I also know that teenagers need constant reinforcement of knowledge they have acquired in order to really own the knowledge and be able to put it into use. What they are capable of understanding at ten needs to be expanded and enriched at fifteen, and again at eighteen, and even beyond. This is a lesson that I’ve really learned through parenting; you don’t have one “birds and the bees” talk, but instead a series of conversations across the years, each time giving age-appropriate information and letting your kid process what she’s just learned.

Once again, I see how much parenting has enriched my teaching, and ow much teaching has enabled me to be a better parent.

Book Review: With Rigor for All

Posted by Jackie in book reviews, education, teaching and tagged with , , , , ,
Cover of "Crime and Punishment (Vintage C...

Cover of Crime and Punishment (Vintage Classics)

With Rigor for All, Second Edition: Meeting Common Core Standards for Reading Literature addresses the issues many of us English teachers are tossing around these days: how to teach a wide range of students in one classroom, how to reach reluctant readers, and above all, how to do so without sacrificing any of the rigor we strive to provide to challenge and enrich our students in their education.

Carol Jago, the book’s author, has plenty of credentials, published work, and years of classroom teaching to make her qualified, but even without knowing all of that, her confident, sure tone and practical approach would be enough to convince any reader. Every chapter is full of easily adaptable classroom stories, lessons and assessments, including reading lists grouped by category and age range and with titles such as “Comprehending Complex Literature” and “Developing Proficient, Independent Readers.” The back of the book includes a study guide for Professional Learning Communities and would be useful for any English department who chose to read the book together.

My favorite chapter is “Testing That Teaches,” where Jago addresses not massive state-wide standardized tests, but the objective tests many teachers give to assess a student’s understanding of a text. She begins the chapter asserting, “Every time a teacher of literature gives an objective test, students’ confidence in themselves as readers is undermined,” and moves from there to systematically dismantle any argument in favor of tests. I was thrilled to read so many cogent arguments that aligned with my own frustration with quizzes, and my own refusal to give objective tests in my classes. For Jago, these tests waste teachers’ valuable professional time, encourage destructive competitiveness in the student community of learners we are trying to build in our classrooms, discourage critical thinking, and place the emphasis on what a student is able to recall under pressure, rather than concrete and valuable reading and writing skills. While all of this is important and thought-provoking, what makes Jago so useful for the classroom teacher is that she offers alternatives, assessments and activities she uses in her teaching to assess understanding. The most creative example is giving her students Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird for class discussion, and then asking them to write poems titled “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Raskolnikov,” while reading Crime and Punishment (Vintage Classics), but she offers several others that are easily adaptable to any text and grade level as well.

While I understand altering the title for this edition, when so many public school teachers are adjusting to Common Core standards, I hope independent school teachers will still check it out, because I found it incredibly useful. I’d like to read her Classics in the Classroom: Designing Accessible Literature Lessons sometime in the near future; I can always use new inspiration, and I trust Jago to guide me in a productive way.

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Teaching Metaphors: Caged Bird, Free Bird

Posted by Jackie in poetry, teaching, writing and tagged with , , , , ,
Sketch of African-American poet Paul Laurence ...

Sketch of African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This one goes out to all the English teachers and poetry lovers in the crowd, so let me know if this was useful or interesting to you!

Here’s how I recently began an introductory unit on metaphors and similes with my ninth graders, adapted from an Edsitement lesson on introducing metaphors through poetry. We are about to begin Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Novel, which is rich with figurative language, and so I like to make sure they have a working understanding of similes and metaphors before we dive in. I chose this particular grouping of poems because the novel also touches on the idea of freedom and how we yearn for it, but don’t always know how to achieve or preserve it, and I liked the idea of using variations on a theme to help them think about the metaphor in different ways.

First, I gave them Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings for homework, with modified response questions, adding the final question, “In your life, do you most often feel like a caged bird or a free bird?” I added this question to build on the metaphors in the poem and ask students to make a text-to-self connection, a strategy in I Read It, but I Don’t Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers that I love and try to use it whenever possible, after reading that great book.

Day One In Class: They sent me their homework, we reviewed the poem together and made sure we understood the metaphors and how they were used; this included reviewing what they could have annotated, making sure they were adding to their annotations as we went, counting lines and stanzas, discussing metaphors, titles, refrains and repetition. This took about twenty minutes, and involved my whiteboard.

Next, I split the class in half: one half got Well, I Have Lost You, by Edna St. Vincent Millay, the other half Sympathy, the Paul Laurence Dunbar poem that inspired Angelou. I gave them that background, and also that there is a high school in Baltimore named after Dunbar, and their sports teams are called the Poets (text-to-world connection!). I asked them to silently read and annotate their poems for several minutes. Next, I asked them to get into pairs and compare annotations, and then write 3-4 sentences together comparing either the Dunbar/Millay poem to the Angelou poem they had read for homework, thinking about metaphors, structure, repetition and more. I gave them about ten minutes to write their sentences and walked around the room, checking understanding and encouraging them to expand and add detail.

Next, I asked them to pair up in different groups with someone from the other “team”; so if student A had read the Dunbar poem, she now needed to pair up with someone who had read the Millay poem. Their next task was to share the sentences they had written in their groups and merge them together in one (semi) cohesive paragraph. This took us until the end of class.

For homework: they completed this Edsitement worksheet on creating your own metaphors. They also read I Go Back to May 1937, and answered response questions, which included, “If you could go back in time, what would you say to your parents before they had you?” We spent the next class period reinforcing similes by reviewing the poem, discussing the metaphors they had created, and then reading aloud the first few pages of the novel, which features an abundance of figurative language alongside passages in dialect. We annotated and discussed, and I previewed the structure of the novel (flashback) and encouraged them to think about examples of dialect in their own lives.

Tasks I was striving for: to expose them to some beautiful poetry, encourage them to think about metaphors and understand this literary tool and why it can be powerful, practice close readings of poems and responding in writing, practice comparing one text to another, begin to think about the themes of our next novel and connect those themes to their own experiences.

I think this lesson shows how many complex tasks I’m asking my students to perform in one class period, but also how much scaffolding I am giving them to support them in doing so. Clearly, I benefited a lot from Internet resources while planning this lesson, and I think it also shows how much can go into planning a lesson, designing tasks, finding materials, figuring out how to extend the learning experience with relevant and creative homework. I get a lot of search terms for lesson plans, and so I thought this would be a good example of how I map out a class and teach or reinforce several different important skills during one period. It’s a good representation of my style with my ninth graders: a mix of small group work and discussion, switching from activity to activity, incorporating writing and reading tasks, and having them collaborate while also being responsible for individual contributions.

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Tuition, Motivation, Grades, and Me

Posted by Jackie in all about me, conversations, education and tagged with , ,

So you’ve probably heard about the study recently that found that college kids whose parents pay for all/most of their expenses get lower GPAs, right? This gets me where I live for a number of reasons, of course, as a teacher and parent, but it also started me thinking about my own college years.

I went to a wonderful state university on a full scholarship, and worked all but two of the semesters I was there, as well as breaks and summers, in addition to a full course load in an honors program for a major and extended minor, a semester abroad, and completing an internship during my senior year. There are some decisions I regret making during my college years, but working isn’t one of them; my tutoring job is one of the reasons I went into teaching, and the other jobs (retail, restaurants) taught me a LOT about the “real world” outside of the classroom. I had worked in high school, an afterschool file clerk job in an opthamologist’s office, so working wasn’t new for me, and I never felt burdened by my need to work. However, what the study also found was that these students participated less in on-campus clubs and organizations, and that was definitely true for me too, and something I do regret.

While having a full scholarship was incredible, it also is the key reason why I really feel like I earned my degree. My parents would have helped me at any point, and I lived at home during breaks and summers, and they gave me my first car during my senior year, which made it possible for me to have that internship. However, as a scholarship student, I paid the majority of my own way, and that will always be the first major accomplishment of my adult life. I went on to earn a graduate degree, funded entirely by an assistantship that paid my full tuition in exchange for teaching a class each semester, and again, I feel like I earned that degree, in a sense that is inextricably connected to working my way through in order to pay for it.

Quote from the story: “grants, scholarships, work-study, student employment and veterans benefits don’t have similar negative effects on GPA, though loans do, along with direct parental aid.”

This was true for me too, as the idea of losing my scholarship was horrifying. I know my parents would have found a way to keep me in college if I had, but the shame, embarrassment I would have felt, the disappointment, the lack of pride in my own abilities, would have changed my life and identity forever. Not coincidentally, I earned the best grades of my academic career, up to that point, while in college, because my GPA was tied to my scholarship, at a required GPA of 3.5 to keep the award. That provided real motivation for me, and pushed me to excel even in classes that didn’t align so closely with my own scholarly interests.

My own kids won’t be college-aged for another 7-8 years, but the question of how to motivate them to excel is certainly one we’ll be thinking about in the next period of their education. There’s plenty of evidence for and against paying kids for good grades, and it’s a delicate juggling act, as I’ve seen too many kids who are fixated on grades without thinking about their own learning and their own passions.Obviously, I have no idea whether my kids will earn any scholarships, or how much college will even cost by the time they are ready to go, but I feel fairly confident that we won’t be funding it entirely out of our own pockets or savings, and that they will be expected to share in the costs.

Though I won’t say the skyrocketing costs of college don’t keep me up at night sometime, I also believe that kids need to have some “skin in the game” when it comes to grades, and I do believe strongly in the value of feeling like you’ve earned something, accomplished something, in the pursuit of your own education. If my kids work their way through college, with as much support as we can give them, I think we’ll all be the better for it.

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In the Middle

Posted by Jackie in all about me, conversations, education, family life and tagged with ,

Like my friend Anjali, I’m thinking a lot about MIDDLE SCHOOL, which my girls will be entering this fall. And yes, something about it just requires all caps, as it proving to be a more terrifying transition than I had expected.

On the rational side, I’m very excited about the middle school my girls will be attending; their new school is a K-12 school, so they won’t be leaving the building they’re currently in, and will use the same dining hall and gym facilities. Since I work in the Upper School there, I know some of their teachers already, and am thrilled to think of my girls getting to work with them. Lucy will start Chinese this fall, and Sophie is already looking forward to trying for the middle school musical and joining middle school chorus. There are plenty of sports teams they can try (all with no-cuts policies, so they can really experiment), and afterschool clubs (free to join) with all kinds of different interests. There are mixers each year to meet other kids (boys) from different schools, and yearly retreats that include outdoor education and leadership training. I’m glad they will be in an advisory program, as I think those are so crucial in the 6-12 grades, and I know and trust the Middle School principal, who is just a fabulous person, as well as being a skilled administrator.

So what’s the problem, right?

In her post, Anjali wrote, there’s something about the term MIDDLE SCHOOL that feels incredibly oppressive and repressive and suppressive and claustrophobic and makes me want to have a drink. Of alcohol. Make that a double. YES. There’s a lot of talk recently about how we never truly leave high school, but middle school brings up much more depressing feelings for me than high school. It just seems like such a maelstrom of feelings and hormones and chemicals, so ripe with bad choices and careless actions, kids who aren’t old enough to drive but are old enough (physically) to make life-altering decisions, old enough to lash out at each other but too immature to see the consequences. It’s also the period of time when kids start pulling away from their families (especially parents) and towards their friends, but when they still need so much guidance and support.

Working with high school kids means I hear all the stories, the good and the bad, and sometimes I wonder if that has made me more cynical, more anxious. But I think it’s also the lingering memories and emotions from my own experiences; I escaped middle school fairly unscathed, but I knew so many girls who suffered some serious traumas, and I felt guilty for years, wondering if I could have been a better friend, if I could have alerted more adults who might had been able to help them. One of the difficult parts of parenting adolescents is keeping your own experience apart from theirs; your daughter is not yourself, and her life is not yours, just as her future will be different from yours. I learned some valuable lessons from those years, but I’d like my own kids to not have to pay such a high emotional cost while learning them.

I don’t anticipate blogging a lot about my kids’ middle school experience, since I’m blogging publicly here and want to respect their privacy as much as possible, but I know it will be a big part of the next few years of my life, so I’m hoping to be able to work out my own feelings in writing (here or privately) as I make the transition right along with them. What I’m also thinking about is when my kids start to pull away, how I will maintain connections with them, and what shared interests can I foster? When they start to pull away, what will I have space for in my own life, and what might I be able to pursue that I hadn’t before?

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