Tag Archives: education

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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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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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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School’s Out for Summer?

Posted by Jackie in conversations, education, teaching and tagged with , , , ,

Whether or not to preserve summer vacation or move to a year-round school calendar is a debate that springs up from time to time in education circles, and apparently, that time has come around again.

As much as I love summertime, I do believe that during the span of my career, we will probably see a longer school year, whether that means adding an extra month (like July) or losing the summer altogether. One of the big barriers that you don’t see mentioned often is air conditioning; if we are going to keep buildings open in July and/or August, there are a lot of school districts that are going to have to invest in installing or upgrading their air conditioning. Here in the Baltimore region, it’s not uncommon for public schools to sometimes shut down in early June for heat index related reasons, similar to snow days, in districts where not every school is fully air conditioned. But I think with our increasingly warm global climate, that is probably a pressing concern anyway.

More importantly, I’m not sure how many students still benefit from having the entire summer off. Summer learning loss has been documented over and over, and contributes to the achievement gap between lower- and upper-income students. All the working parents I know spend significant amounts of money on camps and summer programs that are enriching, but also expensive. Some kids lose access to nutritious meals that are provided free during the school year, and others get less exercise and practice with academic skills they spend all school year acquiring.

As for teachers, the summer break is often a perk people question if we deserve. I don’t think people realize how many of those summer programs and camps are staffed by teachers, earning extra money or often volunteering to do it for no pay! Not every district pays on a 12-month schedule, so many teachers use the summer as time for a second job. Teachers often use the summer to recharge and reflect, which can be difficult to do during the chaos of the school year, when teachers are often working many more hours than people realize. Summer is also an important time for sustained and excellent professional development, a vital tool in increasing and maintaining teacher quality that is difficult to accomplish during the year. Many teachers I’ve met over the years take graduate-level courses during the summer to make themselves better and more qualified teachers. All in all, I believe some kind of multi-week break will still be needed, to accomplish all of these goals for teachers in the profession. If we truly want to ask teachers to work more, of course, we are also going to have to pay and respect them more as professionals.

Should we extend our academic calendar? I think a shift is inevitable, but not without considering all the different angles and factors that such a shift would require. In the meantime, I’ll hang onto my precious summers and try to appreciate them even more.

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Digital Social Teaching

Posted by Jackie in teaching, technology, writing and tagged with , , , , ,
Twitter 6x6

Twitter 6×6 (Photo credit: Steve Woolf)

Teaching in the 21st century, wired into social media and working in a 1:1 laptop school, has fundamentally shaped me as a teacher in ways that make me so grateful to have the job I have, when and where I have it. A related milestone I never made time to blog about this year happened fairly recently: I had a piece published on the ReadWriteThink website! I have used this wonderful resource as inspiration for many lesson plans and projects over the years, and am thrilled to contribute my experience with Making Friends with Holden Caulfield. This is just another chapter in how I try to find creative ways to integrate social media and digital tools and activities into my lessons and work with students.

The most popular entries on my blog, year after year, continue to be the two posts I wrote about another similar project: the original Gatsby Facebook Project post and a post I wrote to update and expand some of the ideas and resources I mentioned. That second post mentions an article I co-authored on Digital Scaffolding, which discussed the Gatsby project as well as a project on explicating sonnets using Voicethread. In years past, I tested out a lesson plan from ReadWriteThink using the language of texting to imagine new scenes and moments in The Catcher in the Rye, and used blogging when teaching Catcher as well as Hamlet. When I was still adjuncting, I taught courses on Facebook culture and the implications. Clearly, this is a thread that runs through my teaching, inspiring me as I look ahead.

But beyond what I’ve implemented in my classroom, I’ve also been so inspired by the resources at my fingertips, sites like EDSITEment from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Poets.org, The Poetry Foundation, and ReadWriteThink. Whenever I tackle a new text or plan a new course, like my fast-approaching elective on Latin American literature, I make sites like this my first stop for ideas, plans and seeds for exploration. I follow amazing educators like Traci Gardner, Jim Burke and Carol Jago on Twitter, and get updates and links from NCTE and Web English Teacher there too. I check in on group blogs like ProfHacker and love the conversations at the English Companion Ning. Individual blogs like Treasure Chest of Thoughts, What Now? and Confessions from the Couch not only teach me about activities and tools like foldables, but provide camaraderie and company on days when I need a boost or some validation.

Do I read every post or follow every link? Of course not, but it all provides a fruitful atmosphere to get my own brain churning and stimulated. Sometimes I get overwhelmed thinking of all the things I could be doing, which is too often followed by guilt over what I’m not doing, but that’s life in the digital age, right? When I try to imagine my life as a teacher any other way, I know it’s worth whatever I have to do to keep a better balance between inspiration and overload when I think about digital social teaching and learning.

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MOOCs, ModPo, and Me (Part One)

Posted by Jackie in education, poetry, writing and tagged with , , , , ,

There’s been a lot of talk about online education these days, and more specifically, MOOCs, or massive open online courses and what they might mean for higher education. As a teacher interested in technology, I’ve long been curious about what online education might look like, and how effective it might be; as a lifelong learner, I found the idea of taking free Ivy League level courses intriguing as well.

I decided to choose Coursera for my experiments, based on what I read about their model and the wide array of courses offered. My first attempt was back in the mid-summertime, Listening to World Music, a course that touched on material that has long interested me, but unfortunately, I wasn’t in the right state to be able to give it my full attention.  At the same time, I signed up for Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, which overlaps one of my passions (American literature) with one of the areas in which I am not as comfortable (modern/contemporary poetry). Coincidentally, both of my choices originate at University of Pennsylvania, only one of the many elite institutions offering courses through Coursera. Over 30,000 people have signed up for the course, including Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, of Illinois.

Luckily, ModPo commenced as I began to come out of the mental fog I’d been drifting in for months, and one of the first signs to me that I was truly coming out of it was when I found myself watching a video discussion of “Danse Russe,” clenching my fist and muttering, “Get back to the new mother! What about her?!”  I went to the discussion forum and posted my thoughts, went to Twitter and tweeted at ModPo, came here and started working on this long-abandoned post. Then the professor commented on my post, and two other classmates, and someone up-voted it as a “thoughtful post, worthy of attention,” the discussion continued to build, and I felt a real glow, the same way I would have if I had been seated around that table at the Penn Kelly Writers House and had made a point that furthered the discussion in a new way.

At this point, I definitely am having a worthwhile learning experience, and can feel myself stretching mentally in useful and exciting ways. Next post: once the reading load got heavier, writing my first assignment, and critiquing my classmates’ work……

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Summer Reading

Posted by Jackie in book reviews, education, teaching and tagged with , ,
English: Bell Hooks

English: Bell Hooks (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

While I’m not doing any formal workshops this summer, I’m still developing a lengthy list of summer projects for myself, which range from formalizing a list of classroom policies for my fall students to developing assignments for the new elective I’ll be teaching next spring. In addition to these kinds of practical matters, I try to always assign myself summer reading that will help me think about some bigger-picture aspects of my profession as well. Some of my favorite past choices included Teach Like a Champion, Fresh Takes on Teaching Literary Elements and I Read It But I Don’t Get It. Each of these books has informed my teaching in different and concrete ways.

This summer, the front-runners seem to be Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom by bell hooks and Imagine: How Creativity Works, which touch on two critical areas that are more abstract as far as pedagogy, but no less important.

I’m thinking I may also go back and revisit some of my past choices, as I’m making some bigger changes to my ninth grade curriculum and shuffling the books into a new sequence, in addition to this new elective. I’ve got a few lessons and assignments I need to rework, and a few new ideas I want to map out for myself in preparation for executing them next year for the first time. I’ve also got some books to review that I’ll be teaching next spring.

I’m looking forward to digging into this kind of reflective work, free from the daily grind of grading and meetings and all the necessary mechanics of making a school run. While it’s lovely to be able to work on my own schedule (and even poolside, if I choose to), it’s also mentally refreshing to be able to step back and think deeper about what I do, why I do it, and how I could do it better.

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