Category: English 10 Regents (2018-2019)

Interstitial instruction, feedback, and discussion for students in English 10 Regents for the 2018-2019 school year.

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English 10 GAP Q3B Update: Six-Week Growth

  By English 10 Regents (2018-2019)

Note: The header image for this post (the image you see in emails or when the post is embedded elsewhere) comes from this article on innovation as a mindset shift.

Six-Week Profiles: Q3B+Q3C

A few days ago, we overhauled your current unit of study:

The Invisible Man: Required Final Assignments

We also updated the daily calendar, which now reflects these changes. You can track your reading, plan your writing, and even set your daily goals in advance.

The renewed focus on structured, in-class work gives us an opportunity to slow down and walk you through new material, like the current SOAPSTONE analysis. It is also a chance to revisit your current progress in terms of GAP scores.

What we’ve decided to do is to eliminate the GAP score for Q3B. We will fold those three weeks’ worth of evidence into the profile-based assessment of the next three weeks, ending with another GAP report on April 5.

This means that you will be able to demonstrate growth, if you struggled recently, and earn a much higher profile score. You will be able to demonstrate more amenability and self-awareness. It’s a chance to look at six weeks worth of progress, not just three, which is exactly what some of you need. (Students already doing well should just keep on keeping on.)

A comment noting this decision and linking back to this post will be added to Infinite Campus. You can ask questions below.

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The Invisible Man: Required Final Assignments

  By English 10 Regents (2018-2019), Literature (2018-2019)

The Invisible Man

March 19, 2019 Update:

You will be reading the rest of the novel, The Invisible Man, with three days in class to hit specific page goals. You will not be able to choose another book in place of The Invisible Man.

We will then watch the 1933 film version of The Invisible Man. It will take two days. See the course calendar for the planned dates.

Finally, you will write a character analysis essay comparing the film to the novel. The majority of this will be completed in class. Again, see the course calendar for the planned dates.

Direct Link to the Novel Online
Reading Assignments

Page numbers are taken from the Dover Thrift Edition available in the classroom. Use the direct link above if reading online.

  • Due Friday, March 22 — Chapters 13-17 (Pages 43-59)
  • Due Monday, March 25 — Chapters 18-21 (Pages 60-77)
  • Due Tuesday, March 26 — Chapters 22-26 (Pages 78-97)
  • Due Friday, March 29 — Chapter 27-Epilogue (Pages 98-110)
Writing Assignments
  • Due Thursday, April 4 — Character analysis essay

 

An Explanation of These Changes

We started The Invisible Man on February 7. For the next few weeks, we tackled essential questions, in-class discussion, and the next round of 20% projects. Most recently, we did close reading of later chapters in The Invisible Man to practice analytical writing.

Here is what that looks like in Google Classroom:

You were also given a daily calendar for the rest of the year and a streamlined process for choosing between the assigned novel and a work of equivalent literary merit.

This degree of preparation and planning was meant to give you choice. Consider the updated makerspace FAQ or this recently published overview of a makerspace: It takes much more work on our end to give you choices, because we are setting up individual feedback and flexibility.

Consider, too, the transparent attempt this year to focus first on skills while promoting choice in what we read. We gave you time to build stamina and develop good habits, which helped us, after A Long Way Gone, to choose to read instead of being forced to read.

We even showed you empathy and patience by studying, through close reading and discussion, the nature of your struggle with focus and self-control. That was back in October, and we’ve returned to your need for self-regulation and self-discipline repeatedly, most recently by banning phones to increase productivity.

Unfortunately, you have struggled collectively to stay focused. You aren’t meeting deadlines, and the lack of reading means your “choosing to read” analysis is ineffective.

To help you, we are having everyone read The Invisible Man. We may return to choice novels in Q4, but this novel and Macbeth will be mandated. We are also making these changes:

  • You now have assigned seats and group members.
  • You will not be given Fridays to work on your 20% projects until April 12.

You will need to work on your Pareto Projects on your own time, carving out 20% of your schedule elsewhere. You are still responsible for the project itself. On April 12, before Spring Break, we’ll dedicate the period to these projects again, with the hope of using every Friday after that to plan and create.

Instead of your projects, you’ll be using the next three Fridays to catch up on the required reading and writing. You can see in the daily calendar what this specifically entails.

You will first finish the SOAPSTONE analysis assigned for this week:

SOAPSTONE: “The Siege of Kemp’s House”

We will update the daily calendar to reflect these changes. We will note page counts and other specifics, too. Ask questions in the comment section below.

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SOAPSTONE: “The Siege of Kemp’s House”

  By English 10 Regents (2018-2019), Literature (2018-2019)

Head back to the hub for The Invisible Man for essential questions, background, and a copy of the novel:

The Invisible Man

SOAPSTONE Overview

Handout #1: SOAPSTONE Overview

SOAPSTONE is an acronym that breaks down persuasive or expository writing into discrete components. By separating elements this way, you can analyze the overall rhetoric of a piece more efficiently and effectively. The acronym stands for Subject, Occasion, Audience, Purpose, Speaker, and Tone.

The overview and explanations in the handout come from Ogden Morse and the College Board:

SOAPSTone: A Strategy for Reading and Writing – AP Central

Introduction For many students, the creation of a piece of writing is a mysterious process. It is a laborious, academic exercise, required by teachers and limited to the classroom. They do not see it as a way of ordering the mind, explaining their thoughts and feelings, or achieving a personal voice.

Chapter 27: The Siege of Kemp’s House

Handout #2: Chapter 27 Analysis

The following letter comes from Chapter 27 of The Invisible Man. You are to analyze the rhetoric of this letter — the Invisible Man’s declaration of war — by using the SOAPSTONE tool.

Rhetoric is defined simply as “the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the use of figures of speech and other compositional techniques.” To understand the rhetoric of Griffin’s missive, you should first annotate it, and then you can apply SOAPSTONE.

You have been amazingly energetic and clever, though what you stand to gain by it I cannot imagine. You are against me. For a whole day you have chased me; you have tried to rob me of a night’s rest. But I have had food in spite of you, I have slept in spite of you, and the game is only beginning. The game is only beginning. There is nothing for it, but to start the Terror. This announces the first day of the Terror. Port Burdock is no longer under the Queen, tell your Colonel of Police, and the rest of them; it is under me—the Terror! This is day one of year one of the new epoch—the Epoch of the Invisible Man. I am Invisible Man the First. To begin with the rule will be easy. The first day there will be one execution for the sake of example—a man named Kemp. Death starts for him to-day. He may lock himself away, hide himself away, get guards about him, put on armour if he likes—Death, the unseen Death, is coming. Let him take precautions; it will impress my people. Death starts from the pillar box by midday. The letter will fall in as the postman comes along, then off! The game begins. Death starts. Help him not, my people, lest Death fall upon you also. To-day Kemp is to die.

The handout has a printable SOAPSTONE chart. You can also work in a notebook or with a separate sheet of paper. Look to Google Classroom for the formal/typed assignment.

Ask questions about this work below.

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Video Meliora: Phone Ban

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019), Triage

Starting Monday, your phones will be banned in the classroom. You’ve been given one of the pockets in the corner of our room as a holder for that phone:

Notes on the surrounding posters and handouts are in the next section. First, a complete list of assigned pocket numbers:

Write down your number. They are assigned in alphabetical order. We may also use these numbers to do some assigned group work.

Part of what you’re doing is performative — you are showing us, at the start of class, that you’ve chosen to remove the distraction of the phone. Putting that phone in its designated pocket does that. You are basically channeling Oedipus in this scene and playing to the back of the theater.

You should turn off notifications, sound, etc., before storing the phone. Make it obvious that you are removing the distraction.

The Why

You’ll notice posters and handouts all around the storage cubby for your phones. These are reminders about how to start the class period so that you can be most effective. The bigger poster is drawn from this:

“What Do I Do Next?”

While the smaller posters are all gleaned from the following document, which will be added to the “What Do I Do Next?” post when I find an extra hour in the day.

This is all about self-control and removing distraction. Remember that we banned phones once before:

Moratorium

That was the trial run. Keep in mind, too, that we looked at self-control and distraction earlier in the year:

The Return of the Fatal Flying Guillotine

That’s where the black-and-yellow poster by the phone cubby originates, at least in this class: Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor. It means, “I see better things, and approve, but I follow worse.” I think you’ll find your productivity increases greatly without that distraction.

Ask questions about any of this, from the protocol for putting away your phones to the philosophy behind the decision, in the comment section below.

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Data, Data Everywhere [English 10, 2/25/19]

  By English 10 Regents (2018-2019)

Schedule time before March 1 to read this post and apply its data and feedback to yourself. Think of it in terms of interstitial awareness: When and how will you be able to read this most carefully?

Ask any general questions in the comment section at the end of the post.

GAP Q3A Scores

It is critical that you first read this post on pre-GAP triage:

GAP Score Triage: Overview

Then you must find your set of GAP Q3A data in the following spreadsheet:

You can also use type the URL directly: https://tinyurl.com/gap-triage-218. Scores for Q3A will be posted in the morning on February 25.

New Hall Passes

On Friday, February 15, one of the bathroom passes for Room 210 was found on the floor of the cafeteria, which is, as you may have noticed, not the bathroom. We’d already lost a pass or two this year to that sort of abuse, so you’ll now be signing out and back in every time you leave the room.

If you take too long, go too often, wander down to the cafeteria, or in any other way abuse the privilege, you lose that privilege.

No More Phones

December saw the first moratorium on phones:

Moratorium

Phones can be learning tools, though, or so the thinking goes. In January, we went back to student choice and self-control (again), and you were allowed to use phones and other personal devices in the makerspace.

Starting February 26 — on Tuesday, so you have Monday to make peace with the change — you’ll be prohibited from using your phones in the makerspace. The negative impact on your learning far outweighs the benefits.

You might want to read this to understand why the ban is necessary:

I will sort out individual access as necessary. Anticipate putting your phone in the holder in the corner, or accept that one of your teachers will take the phone to administration.

Spreadsheet Specifics

You should read the triage post and look over the spreadsheet first.

Total Check-In %

These numbers are based on the maximum possible “Daily Check-In” responses from November 17 through February 14. Absences and individual circumstances were taken into account after the fact on a case-by-case basis.

These percentages also ignore the content of those responses; instead, we are using them as reference points for habit-building and compliance. They are part of a bigger picture, like everything else.

Learning By Doing

This will get its own lesson, post, and discussion at some point.

The basic idea is that the more you, the student, do on your end, the more you learn. The work teaches you without the need for constant correction and redirection. When the assignments, texts, questions, etc., are done sincerely and thoughtfully, the doing is often enough. Hence the 0/1/2 scale on a triage spreadsheet like this.

That scale is there to tell you, after the fact and in conjunction with a GAP score, “No, you didn’t do enough.” Find the folks who wrote a lot for the ETA podcast assignment, for instance. Their work taught them through the way they did it. Others would be recorded as a “2” mostly out of kindness, but they definitely didn’t learn a lot from the writing — it’s a couple of sentences, if that, and obviously not enough to construct real meaning.

You get out of this what you put in. That’s the key to learning. You are given lessons that teach you by making you the agent of change. It’s not just about being corrected and redirected and so on. You explore and think in writing, and while helpful correction always comes in person, in class, in face-to-face meetings, etc., the habits and understandings that last longest happen through the work itself.

It’s a better form of feedback. When you don’t complete the assignment sincerely and thoughtfully, it doesn’t work. For you. It’s on you, then, to put in your best effort each time.

Update: Reading Calendar [Assignment Notes]

This assignment is on the post-panel proof-of-process pre-GAP spreadsheet as “Update: Reading Calendar.” It required only a single click. You had to indicate that you read the update by marking the assignment as done. Look at the directions in Google Classroom: “Let us know that you read the post.”

That’s it. Click a button. Let us know. Look at the spreadsheet, and note how many folks didn’t do that. Whether it was an oversight, an indication that they didn’t read the update, or disengagement, the takeaway is the same: You have to get better at organization. You might want to revisit that unit from the beginning of the year:

Organization: Getting Things Done

Regents Students: Overall Feedback on Q3A

https://tinyurl.com/gap-anchors | Load that document. Review at the descriptions on pages two and three. When you’re done, look at your assignments on Google Classroom for Q3A.

Here is a comment that could have been applied to many students:

Read both the student’s thoughts and my response. Then read a similar exchange with a different student:

Both students feel that directions, deadlines, and expectations are unclear. That feeling is important, because we need to work together to alleviate it. It is not a feeling based on fact, however.

There absolutely are deadlines. They are clear and consistent deadlines. Here is a student from the same Regents class as the previous two:

 

Note the time stamps for my responses. My feedback for these three students was within the same ten-minute window on Saturday, February 16. Here is another student in the same class, less than ten minutes later:

This student is using the idea of “External Artifacts” to take responsibility for missing work, because they know how clear and consistent the expectations have been. Rather than make excuses, they’ve embraced the empathy and flexibility at the heart of the course.

It’s also important to note that you have several days to write a paragraph like that about some element of your grade abatement profile. Here is what is possible in just 25 minutes of focused writing:

Again, read the student’s response and my feedback. This is a student is “focused and productive,” despite “a very large class with the potential to distract”; since every Regents class in the space this year is large, that could be said for all focused and productive students.

This student’s response is also honest. That’s why we focus so much on the Dunning-Kruger effect and the fear of being honest that holds students back. That last student has the following row in the post-panel proof-of-process pre-GAP spreadsheet:

That is exactly what they describe in their paragraph. That’s why they are a 90 in Infinite Campus: self-awareness, amenability, integrity, and overall consistency.

Practice Regents Exam (Aug. ‘16) [Assignment Notes]

First, a review of how we got here. On January 3, you were given this post:

Regents Exam Practice: August, 2016

On January 7, through Castle Learning, you were assigned the following:

  1. 8/16 Practice: Part 1 – Passage A
  2. 8/16 Practice: Part 1 – Passage B
  3. 8/16 Practice: Part 1 – Passage C
  4. 8/16 Practice: Part 2
  5. 8/16 Practice: Part 3

We dedicated class time to each assignment, and then extended the deadlines for each section of the exam to February 15, which was the day before your February break.

The metacognitive or reflective prompts attached to each section of the exam were generously assessed as sufficient or insufficient according to this standard:

Insufficient vs. Sufficient Work

We left feedback where and when we could, prompted you repeatedly to return to incomplete assignments, and so on.

Load the GAP triage spreadsheet, and scroll over to the English 10 tab. The practice Regents Exam has its own section in your sheet. Before I paste in a copy of that spreadsheet, two note:

  • Part 1 multiple-choice scores with yellow shading reflect incomplete task (questions left unanswered), not a total score.
  • Essay scores of 0 in red reflect missing work (no attempt at a response at all), not a low content score.

As we explained in class, the least important part of exam prep is your score; it’s far more important that you understand how to improve, how to help others, and so on.

Here is a screenshot of roughly half of the total students in English 10:

Let’s talk about what this means.

Rewards and Incentives

If you earned an 85 or higher on the practice Regents Exam we did between January 7 and February 15 — five weeks or so — and you did the majority of the all-important metacognitive analysis, then congratulations are in order: You don’t have to do any more Regents Exam prep this year.

That includes the otherwise required work on exemplars and rubrics, all of which will be assigned in late February and March. You did well enough with the test and the required self-analysis that further test prep is not necessary.

If you earned between a 70 and an 85, you’ll be asked to redo the section with your lowest score. It will depend also on how much of the all-important metacognitive analysis you completed. You’ll also need to work on some, if not all, of the exemplar and rubric assignments.

If you’re below 70, you need practice, either in following directions and meeting expectations, or in the core skills of the test itself.

Depending on how low the score is, we’ll be folding in lots of exam-related practice to boost your skills. You’ll definitely be completing all of the exemplar and rubric assignments — that’s a great way to see what the state expects, and one of the fastest ways to improve written responses. Otherwise, we are going to individualize the work based on your scores and the quality of your self-analysis.

A scale score of 65, for instance, might just mean that you need to redo the section with your lowest score. You might need extra attention on the exemplars, and we’ll look closely at the quality of your metacognition.

Failing scores, of course, indicate the need for more support. Don’t worry! Again, the least important part of exam prep is your score; it’s far more important that you understand how to improve. We have plenty of assignments that will help you. We’ll make sure you do lots of self-analysis and reflection, too, including a special focus on the rubrics and exemplars.

For those students who really struggled and have scores at the bottom of the scale — 31, 27, 6, and so on — there is obviously cause for concern. Don’t beat yourself up, though. Test-taking is a skill. You’ll just need to keep practicing.

Fortunately, we’ll keep giving you chances to improve. That might mean that you have to give up a Pareto Project Friday or in-class reading day to finish another practice test, but the Regents Exam is something you must pass to graduate. That was the purpose of this diagnostic — to show us where the greatest needs are.

GAP Q3A Starts the Ending

With all that in mind, you have to start thinking in Regents English about getting credit for the year, passing the final exam, etc., because some of you are closing in on the point of no return.

We’re going to try to slow down. You’re still going to have to make good choices, pay attention to directions, etc., but we’re going to go as slowly as we possibly can. You must

  1. follow all directions exactly;
  2. meet all deadlines, unless explicitly told otherwise;
  3. use all individual and general feedback to improve; and
  4. stay focused each and every day in class.

If you don’t know what to do after reading this post, start with a review of what it means to do enough work to get credit:

Insufficient vs. Sufficient Work

Ask general questions in the comment section below.

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Galvanizing Feedback: How to Sisyphean High

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019), Triage

“Sisyphean High” is an example of anthimeria in the title of this post, because we’re talking about a different sort of action. As always, the most important thing we learn is always something about how we learn, and the makerspace exists to build a better version of each student.

To Sisyphean High, so to speak, is to study how we learn the way we’d study computing in order to build our own PC. It’s highly modular learning — that is, learning with a focus on understanding and then experimenting with each component1.

It is also best done collaboratively, hence:

In It Together: 2/14/19 Discussion

That activity and the subsequent discussion need to be codified somehow, or we’ll lose the insight students gleaned from this year’s feedback after analyzing it in class2. For instance, that instructional post, “In It Together,” asks us to sort the responses into positive and negative piles, but students had a better idea almost immediately:

  1. A pile of responses that could be used to help others
  2. A pile of responses from students who seem to need help

That’s a great example of the best kind of feedback. And after we’ve done that — sorted the responses according to a different sort of efficacy and need — we can start getting down some of your insights.

Students: Use the comment section of this post to share ideas. Focus on how to galvanize peers and improve the learning environment. Reflect on the patterns you saw and the specific details that resonated. Above all else, be empathetic.

We’ll talk in class about how to use our universalized writing process to respond to this activity, too, according to your interest and investment. An open letter, a narrative, a how-to guide — these are all possible writing responses that could be published and publicized in order to help others.

  1. If PC building isn’t your thing, I really do think this essay that uses cooking as the analogy is a helpful one. ↩

  2. It’s important to link back to last year’s feedback, too, as part of this exercise. The insights are the same, although the data pool is shallower. ↩

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In It Together: 2/14/19 Discussion

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019), Space Explainers

Note: This post is from 2019, but it may help other students and stakeholders to understand the efficacy of the course. The lesson outlined and explicated here was designed to showcase positive feedback from students, both to defend the space from its detractors and to encourage buy-in from students and other stakeholders.

On to the original post:

Scroll past the background to the first subheading (“Rising Tides”) to see the details of the lesson itself. We will be setting up on February 13, weather permitting, and sharing out our findings on February 14. And if you missed this on the main page of the site, here’s an essay about taking risks and getting engaged in our makerspace:

View at Medium.com

In brief, the lesson we’re running this week is about collecting and sharing feedback in order to increase student buy-in and agency. The makerspace embeds Brewster’s SCP and other “future-ready” methods, and specific student feedback, positive or negative, helps us improve that work.

That’s one of our makerspace walls, with notes on the Daily Check-In and its mindfulness component; the use of engineering “failsafes” to insure a common language; the connection between our work and Brewster’s SCP; and in the corner, a note on adaptability in the face of inevitable curricular dissonance.

Just like it is in our writing process, adaptability here is about a universal language that students can take with them1.

Consider what Gerald Graff and Steve Benton published about this in 2013:

[C]urricular dissonance also does much to widen the achievement gap. The high achievers manage to synthesize the mixed messages on their own and thereby deepen their learning from course to course, but the rest do not. For them, education is not a cumulative process, but a bizarre obstacle course in which students must virtually start from scratch every time they enter a new course. Who can blame them if they come away believing that education is just a cynical business of learning enough to get past one teacher and then setting aside those lessons to meet the unrelated or conflicting demands of the next one?

This matches what you see in a high school. Students move from class to class and year to year without a guarantee that things will stay the same. That “bizarre obstacle course” persists, even when progressive systems like Brewster develop ways to bring teachers together — and Brewster’s Strategic Coherence Plan really does give students universal languages for assessing their own learning.

The high achievers’ ability to navigate this is the key. That ability can be learned, and all students need to know how to “synthesize the mixed messages on their own and thereby deepen their learning,” as Graff and Benton put it. We need to teach deeper skills and develop persistent traits in students.

With that in mind, here are the prompts and instructions that were posted on January 28, with a soft deadline of February 4:

Engines That Could

The prompts are carried over from the 2018 version of this survey. They are, in order:

  1. Reflect on our use of makerspace ideas and strategies — project-based learning, process-focused feedback, collaboration, etc — to promote student-centered work.
  2. Reflect on the extent to which the interstitial classroom’s flipped, multi-level instruction has changed how you access lessons and other important information.
  3. Reflect on the ways grade abatement’s use of profiles, skills, and traits has impacted your self-awareness, self-efficacy, and overall sense of success. Use this post as necessary: http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=2139.
  4. Reflect on how you use technology (e.g., smartphones, Chromebooks) in the makerspace to individualize and organize your learning.
  5. Reflect on our approach to writing, especially the focus on process over product and the use of radial and proxy feedback to empower and encourage students.
  6. Reflect on our approach to reading, especially the use of student choice in literature through the process outlined here: http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=2106.
  7. Reflect on the extent to which the course and classroom have impacted your social and emotional well-being, especially the use of a mindfulness-inspired daily check-in (http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=2539).
  8. Reflect on our focus on empathy and collegiality as the “stuff of growth,” including the extent to which your work with others has helped you to accomplish your learning goals.
  9. Reflect on the big questions we consider as a Humanities makerspace — the problems we solve, individually and collectively, through creative and critical thinking.
  10. Reflect on the extent to which this course invites you to take risks, overcome obstacles, and forge connections between hard work and success.
  11. Reflect on the extent to which you are given clear goals and actionable feedback that help you adapt to academic and social/emotional challenges. See the posts on feedback as necessary: https://medium.com/@sisypheanhigh/a-better-form-of-feedback-b340032e3dd0
  12. Reflect on how this course instills in you the skills, traits, and attributes you believe are necessary for college and a 21st-century career.
  13. Reflect on the extent to which our universal skills and traits have helped you in other academic disciplines and assignments.
  14. Reflect on how this course is explicitly and implicitly preparing you for any and all high-stakes tests, including explicit test prep. Consider, too, our approach to quizzes: http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=2562

There is also a space on the form for additional reflections that don’t quite fit one of the other prompts.

Rising Tides

To set up student work on these responses, my co-teachers and I needed to

  1. take the unedited feedback from students and transfer it to a spreadsheet;
  2. post that spreadsheet: https://tinyurl.com/SSCP-19;
  3. print the responses and add some of the feedback from last year’s students;
  4. cut out each individual response; and then
  5. bag the responses by prompt.

Each class period gets a stack or two on one of the tables in the makerspace. Then, in groups, they sort the responses, putting positive feedback in one stack and negative feedback in another.

Remember, this is unedited feedback, except where we had to remove identifying details. That’s the point. Students will see overwhelmingly more positive feedback, and that positive feedback tends to be specific and clear. The focus on metacognition and self-efficacy creates that kind of clarity.

And what that does is to open up a discussion about why students are not successful, or at least about what those students report about their lack of success. No one is singled out or otherwise embarrassed, even through an individual conference, because our focus is on helping everyone improve their learning.

As the responses are sorted, each group talks about what they observe, with the ultimate goal of reporting out those findings in a discussion over the next period or two. Each group will also share ideas on how to move the less successful students into the much larger group of motivated, successful students.

We’ll repeat the lesson in each class, from 10th grade to AP, and then provide everyone a chance to codify their findings through website comments, posters in the classroom, and open letters to struggling students.

This is empathy-driven problem-solving, done anonymously so that struggling students in the room can listen and incorporate the feedback at their own comfort level. It’s also a reminder of how powerful the profiles we use can be. The GAP process covers this, of course, but we’ll also be using the first page of a handout on GAP anchors:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2019%2F02%2FGAP-Anchors-WIP.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

The fourth tier of profiles center around a GAP score of 8, which becomes a 95 — by any metric, then, a measure of outstanding work. And the key in a makerspace to that performance is improving the learning environment for others. The strongest students benefit as much as anyone from the protégé effect, especially because of what that hyperlinked article ends with:

Above all, it’s the emotions elicited by teaching that make it such a powerful vehicle for learning. Student tutors feel chagrin when their virtual pupils fail; when the characters succeed, they feel what one expert calls by the Yiddish term nachas. Don’t know that word? I had to learn it myself: “Pride and satisfaction that is derived from someone else’s accomplishment.”

Unmotivated or disengaged students are given a way to reenter the learning environment, not out of fear or through force, but because the path is clear, and high-achieving students are shown a path to even greater success.

And that brings us back to how we started the year.

The Stuff of Growth

The first thing we do in the makerspace is watch the animated version of Ken Robinson’s speech on educational paradigms:

The complete poster of this RSA Animate hangs on our wall, too. And while it’s all inspiring, the key is what he says toward the end:

Great learning happens in groups. Collaboration is the stuff of growth.

As high schools move toward teaching students how to learn, not just teaching content, this collaborative “stuff” will be the most important element. Students will need empathy and a sense of the greater good to teach each other.

Herd Immunity

The other side of Robinson’s coin is that we need students who are inoculated against misinformation, cynicism, and self-doubt. That takes herd immunity:

View at Medium.com

This makerspace is emblematic of the need to arm students with information, open-mindedness, and patience. I can address rumor-mongering directly, and I can clarify what we do repeatedly; it’s only through the testimonials of students, however, that the paradigm shift begins to find roots. If we want buy-in for any major change in education, it has to be sold on the words of students.

That’s the point of a lesson like this: For all the lengthy, hyperlinked instruction delivered through this a website, the real impact will be in class using the oldest tools we have. We’ll have paper, pens, and voices. We’ll have each other.

As always, the comment section below is for questions.

  1. The next few paragraphs are lifted verbatim from that post on the writing process. This is really the focus of a Humanities makerspace, and I am getting used to the language as much as the idea. We are building substructural strength. As Neil Postman wrote, the most important thing students learn is always something about how they learn. ↩

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The Invisible Man

  By English 10 Regents (2018-2019)
From the 1933 film version of The Invisible Man.

From the 1933 film version of The Invisible Man, which is quite different from the novel. We will watch the film, regardless of your individual reading choices.

Essential Questions

In education, the sort of question you’ll find below is often called essential. The Greeks called these discussions dialectics. In brief, they are the reason we read and think and write: to answer questions that matter. Or, at least, to start to answer them.

You have a foundation now, and you’ve been using it to read and write. You know what is expected in a learning environment like this one1. You also have a reading process that guides us through literature and more:

The Reading Process

As you did with your first assigned, full-length novel, you are required to read enough of the next book to hit John Holt’s threshold, which will allow you to choose what to read. Before we get to the assigned book, remember that anything you read in here must

  1. teach you something about how you read;
  2. serve as “a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity,” using most or all of the ideas under that aegis; and
  3. be well-written enough to teach you how to write.

The Invisible Man, by H.G. Wells

Your assigned novel is The Invisible Man, by H.G. Wells. This is a short, strange story that uses science fiction to grapple with issues of morality and society. It also has an excellent film adaptation that uses the idea of an invisible man to tell a much different story.

You can read the novel here:


More on why reading online helps later. First, you need to answer the essential questions that go with this novel:

  1. To what extent do you trust that what you see is what is really happening?
  2. To what extent do you trust your memories of the past?
  3. Would you want to be ignorant and happy, or have knowledge and be miserable? Why?
  4. To what extent and in what ways does power corrupt?
  5. What does it look like to be truly alone?
  6. To what extent is human nature self-destructive?
  7. How should we deal with individuals who threaten a community?

Define terms, seek examples, and, above all, talk to each other. Ask clarifying questions below in the comments. Use the makerspace to anchor your in-class conversations and then continue those conversations in writing. Share your observations and insights as often and widely as you can.

Note: As always, the formal assignment will be posted to Google Classroom, alongside copies of the novel and links to the other resources you need.

We will also add to these questions as we continue, shifting the language and focus as necessary. As you read and write, new questions will occur to you. This is Piet Hein’s idea: “Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.”

Throughout all of this, work in writing as often as possible. Sketch out ideas, take notes, write metacognitive responses — whatever it takes to generate understanding and GAP evidence, since those are one and the same in this course. Look to Google Classroom for formal assignments, as always, and advocate for yourself when you feel lost.

Choosing to Read

Again, we are using John Holt’s litmus test for reading to choose what to read:

I would like you to read a lot of books this year, but I want you to read them only for pleasure. I am not going to ask you questions to find out whether you understand the books or not. If you understand enough of a book to enjoy it and want to go on reading it, that’s enough for me…

I don’t want you to feel that just because you start a book, you have to finish it. Give an author thirty or forty pages or so to get his story going. Then if you don’t like the characters and don’t care what happens to them, close the book, put it away, and get another. I don’t care whether the books are easy or hard, short or long, as long as you enjoy them.

This time, you will use the protocol for choosing a work of literary merit after about nine chapters of The Invisible Man. At that point, if you want to start a different novel, you will be encouraged to choose one of the following:

These are shorter novels chosen as much for their length as the quality of the stories. They are also the same sort of science-fiction novel as The Invisible Man. If you want to choose a new novel other than these two, we’ll look first at Victorian science-fiction literature. Then we’ll look at more modern novels that cover the same concepts. So you’ll have choice within a predetermined framework.

We have a few copies of The Invisible Man on our bookshelf, almost a full class set of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but no hard copies of The Time Machine. That’s okay: You should attempt to read these novels online when possible.

Reading Online

Here again is The Invisible Man:


The most compelling reason to use this online version is that we can also use Snap&Read to translate the text, Co:Writer to take notes, and an open browser tab to look up character and plot summaries. Your Chromebook (or other device) becomes a powerful tool for navigating an interesting but difficult text.

We will review Snap&Read and Co:Writer as we start this novel. If you have questions, ask them below.

  1. Which is an atelier model, by the way — a specific kind of makerspace that centralizes creativity and expertise through the ripple effect of teaching others. That’s worth mentioning in a footnote. ↩

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Essay Writing: Five Prompts

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019), Writing Prompt

This assignment builds on the NPR Podcast Challenge we started in early January:

NPR Student Podcast Challenge

You can continue to use the space to complete the challenge, and I’ll make that an ongoing option through the end of March. There is an opportunity here to do more than just a podcast, though. The five prompts provided by NPR could be used for discussion and essay-writing, too.

First, those prompts again:

Tell us a story about your school or community: about something that happened there — recently or in the past — that your audience should know about.

What is a moment in history that all students should learn about?

Show us both sides of a debate about an issue that’s important to you.

What do you want to change about the world? What’s a big change that students today will make in the future?

Explain something to us that kids understand and grown-ups don’t.

Answering these five questions has given you the subject and approach, at least, for five different essays. We will use the writing process(es) outlined here:

The Writing Process

Your assignment is simple: Choose a prompt, and then write an essay in response to it.

You can use your peers for inspiration, by the way, since you can load the Google Form you completed, click on “See previous responses,” and read hundreds of potential approaches:

You have to add your own answers first, of course. If you’ve done that, you now have access to the anonymous suggestions of your peers.

Follow any further directions on Google Classroom, and ask questions below.

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Engines That Could

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

See the 2017-2018 version of this post here.

2/13 Update: We’ll be using this year’s set of data on February 13-15 to tackle motivation and engagement in the makerspace. Load a reader- and printer-friendly version of the responses here: https://tinyurl.com/SSCP-19.

The original instructional post is below.

Strategic Coherence

One of the first texts given to students each year is Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on educational paradigms. It introduces one of the animating beliefs of this makerspace, which is that traditional education does not prepare students for the world they will join after high school. That world demands a different kind of intelligence, and it’s a far cry from the “model of the mind” that Robinson criticizes.

Watch the whole thing periodically to remind yourself why we do what we do.

For most students, what this nebulous “real world” will demand matters less than getting into college and/or starting a career. That’s why district’s like ours look more specifically at what those colleges and careers value. That list always starts with empathy, but it also always includes the rest of the nontraditional skills and traits we centralize in this course. As a reminder, the instructional, assessment, and feedback structures in the makerspace are all linked by universal languages:

The GAP Process

Two of these universal skill and traits are self-awareness and self-efficacy, which we loop together like so:

Students need to understand why we do what we do. They need self-awareness and a sense of self-efficacy. There is a permanent place on this website to discuss the Dunning-Kruger effect and imposter syndrome, for instance, because an accurate sense of self is difficult at any age. And as that post on empathy and college readiness notes, we always need an answer to the question, “When am I ever going to have to use this?”

The Most Important Skill

That’s what we have here. The makerspace makes explicit connections to college-, career-, and world-relevance in order to reshape the geometry of traditional education. Our work is rooted in a shared sense of purpose.

Part of that is our focus on metacognition and reflection. Tracking the arc of our learning over time gives us the necessary self-efficacy. And that applies to all stakeholders: Teachers in the makerspace practice metacognition and reflection. Brewster, as a district, also reflects on its progress in order to improve.

Which brings us to the BCSD Strategic Coherence Plan:

This Strategic Coherence Plan has been available to the public for a while, but January 11, 2018 saw the formal release in that post. In late January of 2018, the Tri-State Consortium visited the district for three days to evaluate the SCP, which has led to even more innovation.

A quick aside: You can learn more about the Consortium here. I’ve been involved as a team member for almost a decade, and many of the innovations of this course started with Tri-State. I first heard of Alfie Kohn’s essay on de-grading through one of their study groups, for instance.

Our job as stakeholders is to help the district, and we do that by highlighting the extent to which our Humanities makerspace fits the Strategic Coherence Plan. Through the support of district- and building-level administration, we’ve been able to develop a unique and uniquely nontraditional learning environment, and it aligns perfectly with the SCP:

Load a PDF explaining how by clicking here.

Our particular innovations beyond the SCP are just that: innovations particular to our classroom. We have a unique assessment model, grade abatement, based on growth in universal skills and traits; an interstitial model of instruction that improves on the flipped classroom; and makerspace-inspired assignments that reframe and individualize the important work of the Humanities.

Students in this course can speak specifically to the district’s vision. It’s why feedback and advocacy are essential. The district values that perspective as much as I do, and a sense of how this SCP is enacted on the frontlines will help to shape what happens next. The feedback provided in 2018 is available here:

We do this at the halfway point of the year for two reasons: First, students are now fully immersed in a different way of learning and creating meaning. Like any makerspace, we need time to learn the basics and establish good habits. For a reminder of how this works, load the following post:

The Big Sky

Second, this gives us another semester to use the feedback. As you look at those responses from January of 2018, you’ll be able to see how each prompt is tied to student goals and growth. There needs to be time and space to process the responses while still in the makerspace.

With that said, there are a few notes for current students in the makerspace, who are probably reading this as part of the formal assignment.

Students, recognize this as an opportunity for self-awareness and self-efficacy. It requires the most important kind of reflection and metacognition, which is why this assignment is replacing the usual self-assessment writing that accompanies the GAP report process.

There is also an extrinsic motivation: This form will help you to generate evidence for the top tiers of grade abatement: the use of “inquiry-based tools and structures” in an attempt to “demonstrably improve the learning environment,” for instance. The cited language comes from the fourth tier directly:

This is also an opportunity to “do more than just what is required,” since the quality of your responses is entirely in your control. Those of you who take advantage of this opportunity will find more clarity and purpose, but you will also receive more feedback from me and the other teachers in the makerspace.

Review the questions first, and then write your initial responses in a separate document. Copy them into the Google Form when you’re ready. You can submit multiple responses at different times, edit your answers after you submit them, and get feedback before posting anything. Try to answer as many prompts as you can, and ask for help on prompts that are unclear.

The formal assignment will be posted to Google Classroom. Look there for any other pertinent information. Like everything else in our makerspace, this process is about looped feedback and shared understanding, so you need to work together. You might start by asking questions in the comment section below.