A Simple Workshop

24 November 2009

ZPS PSD: Google Reader Session

Hello to the participants in Shari and Kip's session on using Google Reader. Below you'll find links to blogs that you may be interested in following. These are just a few starting points. Remember, there is often a list of great blogs (a.k.a. a blog roll) in the sidebar of each blog. Have fun exploring and remember to share anything that interests you!

A few of Shari and Kip's favorite blogs:

Or, if you trust Shari and I to choose good content, you can click on this link to subscribe to all of these sites in a bundle.

The following articles contain lists of blogs from a wide range of topics:

I have created a Moodle site called The Connected Teacher for those who are interested in learning more about using blogs and Twitter for their professional learning. You can either log in as a Guest or use the enrollment key: tweet.

Some other articles that you may find of interest:

18 November 2009

Our Workshop Schedule

One of my biggest challenges of teaching using reading and writing workshops is making sure that I confer with each student, check in with their reading response and writer's notebook, and give each student a chance to share each week. As I tend to be an out-of-sight, out-of-mind person, when I saw index cards tacked to a bulletin board under the heading "Writing Conference" in a colleague's classroom a few years ago, I knew it was something that I had to try. Over the past few years, our classroom workshop schedule has slowly evolved to what you see in the image below.

In an ideal week (does that exist?), a student will turn in his or her reading response notebook to me after independent reading, I'll read it that night and then have a chance to discuss their reading and their responses the following day when I confer with them. On the following day when they have an opportunity to share some of their thinking from their independent reading book, I can prompt them for any particular thinking that we had discussed the previous day or that they shared in their reading response notebook. The same process goes for writing.

What systems or structures do you use in your reading and writing workshops? Or, borrowing words from Samantha Bennett in That Workshop Book, how do you help your "students [to] read, write, and talk about important content in order to learn how to read, write, talk, and develop their dispositions as thinkers?"

03 November 2009

Joy in School

Allow me to take you back eighteen years to the fall of 1991. My high school twelfth grade IB English class was reading The Grapes of Wrath. Groups of students were assigned the task of creating a product that would help the class further understand the time period in which the book takes place. My group chose to create a photo essay using iconic, depression-era, black-and-white photos.

This was back in the day when the most we were taught to do on a computer (at least at our high school) was to program a turtle to move around the screen. So, we headed for the library and checked out several coffee-table books containing photos from the depression and got to work selecting those that we felt had the greatest impact. Then, we spent a long afternoon at the home of one of my group members using a tripod-mounted video camera to shoot a few seconds of video of each image. Imagine: find the next image, lay it down flat, zoom in the camera, record for about five seconds, and then repeat. Over and over for several hours. It was a laborious process, but there was joy and camaraderie in the collaborative effort. (Plus, I vividly recall the friend who was hosting our group making me a tape of U2's newly released Achtung Baby with some B-sides and rarities while we worked. I still have that tape, but no tape player...)

To present the project in class, we played the video and, since we didn't have the capabilities to overdub the video with music, we played a CD of some melancholy bluegrass/folk music. I can still recall sitting in class watching the video, feeling proud of the product, proud of our accomplishment, and emotional as it sank in what life was really like during the depression.

So, why the trip down memory lane? Yesterday morning, Alfie Kohn tweeted a link to a piece that he had written five years ago entitled, Feel-Bad Education: The Cult of Rigor and the Loss of Joy. As I was home sick in bed, I had the time to read it and found it entered into my thoughts throughout the day. Then, (and I love it when this happens) later in the day when I opened Google Reader I found a post by Dean Shareski with his reflections on the same article that he had seen on Twitter.

Rather than share additional comments when I feel some great points have been made, I'd like to raise a few questions. When I completed the photo essay group project, I felt a great deal of satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment and yes, joy. Today, given the advances in technology, my fourth graders could create a more professional looking presentation with the same content in a fraction of the time. But would they feel the same sense of accomplishment? Can we ensure that our students will feel a sense of accomplishment--and joy--when they complete a project, with technology or without? Is it all about making the project authentic and relevant? Is that enough?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Image: Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange from the Wikipedia Commons

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009

Yesterday morning, someone shared a link to the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009. It is a list that is currently being developed by learning professionals and hosted by a group in the UK. Normally, I would just bookmark it and allow folks to see it in my Delicious list on the side of my blog. However, I have personally found those items in the top 5 to be powerful tools in my own professional learning. If you're a ZPS staff person who would like to know more about any of these tools, let me know and I'd be more than happy to get you started.

27 October 2009

"These teachers are constructivists, and they're the ones we remember."

While I don't plan on filling my blog with quotes from other folks, I came across this one as a dug into a book that I used for a class about eight years ago.

"During a workshop several years ago, a teacher, reflecting on her own education, noted that the teachers who influenced her most were the few who made difficult concepts accessible by seeking to understand what she knew at the time. We have heard many people recount similar stories about their most memorable teachers. For the most part, these remarkable teachers mattered so much because they were less concerned about covering material than they were about helping students connect their current ideas with new ones. These teachers recognized that learning is a uniquely idiosyncratic endeavor controlled not by them but by their students, and they knew that conceptual understanding matter more than test scores. These teachers are constructivists, and they're the ones we remember."

From the Introduction of In Search of Understanding: The Case for Constructivist Classrooms

25 October 2009

"Presence is wisdom!"

"Wisdom is not the gathering of more facts and information, as if that would eventually coalesce into truth. Wisdom is precisely a different way of seeing and knowing... I suggest that wisdom is precisely the freedom to be present. Wise people always know how to be present, but it is so much more than that. Presence is wisdom! People who are fully present know how to see fully, rightly, and truthfully. Presence is the one thing necessary, and in many ways, the hardest thing of all."

-- Richard Rohr

Launching Writing Journals/Research Notebooks

In my district, students are working on the personal narrative mode of writing during first semester. Each year, many of my students tell me that they don't have anything to write about. For some, that's true. They don't go very far from home or have opportunities for experiences that expand their minds. For others, I believe it is a matter of not paying attention to life.

A variety of sources put the idea of a writing journal in my head. The idea goes by many different names, but essentially I wanted a place that was separate from their writing notebook that contains the material they are drafting, revising and editing in the classroom. Personally, I have used journals for about fifteen years to capture my thoughts, ponder life, and collect quotes, pictures, and other items that strike a cord with me. I wondered if developing a similar practice of paying attention would help improve my students writing.

We began our writer's workshop by reading the first dozen or so pages of Nothing Ever Happens on 90th Street. As we read, we made note of the advice that was offered to Eva, the main character who couldn't find anything to write about. We focused on Mr. Sim's advice (see image at the right) and began to talk about how we could pay attention to the "stage"" and the "players" using a writing journal.

I shared that I had seen a blog post the previous week at Two Writing Teachers that contained a video showing what one of the teachers includes in her writing journals. Of course they wanted to see it, so I pulled it up and we watched it together and then expanded our list of items we could include in our writing journals.

I gave them the choice of either bringing in a journal or using one of the spiral notebooks I had in class. On Friday we wrote Mr. Sim's quote on the first page and then made a short reminder list of some items to put in our writing notebooks this weekend.

I'm hoping that not only will their writing journals be a source of writing ideas, but that they will also create a spark and interest in writing that many are expressing at this point in the year.

[I'm also hoping that their writing journals will double as their research notebooks that Harvey & Daniels write about in Collaboration and Comprehension (see p. 135), but that's a post for another day.]

20 September 2009

Classroom Blog

I'm trying an experiment this year with a classroom blog. Each year I set three goals for myself and each of the past four years communication with my students' families has been one of those goals. I'll admit that I'm not very good at sticking with it through the year. I'm hoping with the "push-button publishing" of Blogger it will be easier to keep up with it.

10 September 2009

The "Best Classroom?"

It's day three here and as my fourth graders work on writing our classroom guidelines they have been doing some brainstorming. What would the "worst classroom" look like, sound like, etc. and what would the "best classroom" contain?

Several of my students felt a best classroom would have students working quietly on worksheets all day while the teacher sat at his/her desk and did paperwork or played solitaire on the computer. No, they weren't joking. I'm working hard at changing their idea of what learning looks like to them.

We began generating this web together, and then as they filled in their own details, I filled in mine. It was one of my attempts to change some of their thinking.

What would a "best classroom" look like and sound like to you?

[As an aside, this post by Will Richardson has had me thinking a lot about what happens in my classroom. Plus, it has given me some good questions to ask my own 3rd and 1st graders at dinner.]

11 June 2009

The Connected Teacher

Yesterday Will Richardson posted a great piece where he uses a fictitious conversation between an educational leader and a journalist to share the benefits of using the social web in education. I have been thinking about the post throughout the day (while scraping paint off the side of our 98 year old home) and how great it would be if his "dream" became a reality.

I am by no means an expert at blogging, using Twitter, or participating in Nings. Yet, I can't possibly describe how much I have grown and been challenged as an educator since they became a part of my daily life.

About a month ago I had a similar vision for the staff of ZPS. What would it look like if more of us began following blogs, blogging, using Twitter, and the like? So I began putting together a simple Moodle course called The Connected Teacher. The goal is to get a small group of ZPS teachers together (this summer?) in order to support one another in using the social web for "personal professional development." Anyone is welcome to check out the Moodle course as a guest and if you're a ZPS teacher who would like to participate, send me an e-mail for the enrollment key.