Beyond 'Flipping the Classroom': Asking Students to Design their Own Learning

Too much of the teacher narrative out there is still devoted to what we do to our students. In my opinion, we need teach our students how to teach themselves. 

To this end, I have recently started a new non-fiction unit with my students... 

Dear Students,

You’re embarking upon the next evolution of our year. Our non-fiction unit builds on everything we have done, but will be more challenging than your previous work. I'm excited for the next two weeks - they have the potential to fundamentally change how we approach learning and teaching for the rest of the year. 

You just successfully completed your Poetry Portfolio. It was full of powerful intellectual work  - you curated content, wrote thoughtfully, and compiled everything into a finished product. These Portfolios were a pleasure to read, and I thank you for giving me a glimpse into the way you connect to poetry and music and life.

With that said, our non-fiction unit will challenge you in new ways. Instead of being asked to create a static portfolio, you will 1) publish your final product on the internet, 2) design both your product and your day-to-day tasks, and 3) will use at least one technological platform. Your product and process probably won't look like your classmates, which emphasizes the self-determination you have in your own learning. 

For such an independent unit, I expect you will be pushed a bit outside your comfort zone. You will need to be able to choose a goal and design backwards from it, be more comfortable with frustration, and be willing to ask for help when you’re floundering. If your confusion becomes too much, or you need to conceptualize it in more tangible terms, write out your questions or talk them out with either a friend or with me. It’s ok to get stuck, but help yourself get un-stuck.

This responsibility might be overwhelming at first, but it's meant to be empowering. In previous units, I’ve done this all for you - established the learning goals, designed the final product, and scaffolded your skills / activities to get you to that product. Now that I’m handing the bulk of this process to you.

I hope I have prepared you well for success in this unit. Consider:

-      In our Macbeth unit, I decided the annotations, the work, and you chose a product to show your understanding

-      For Lord of the Flies / Choice Book unit, I chose the essay format, you chose the book and the topics

-      For our Poetry Portfolios, you chose the content and intellectual work (within my prompts), I determined the product

-       Now, I'm choosing the overall learning goals, and you choose how to fulfill them. To help yourself,  track your work habits/progress daily – this can take the form of a to-do list, a log or chart, or however you want to keep your process tangible.

Think about what you have going for you:

-      a consistent emphasis on the process / product in my class

-      the five ‘teacher objectives’ so you know thelearning goals

-      freedom to choose a product that you’re interested in

-      ability to find mentor texts that help inform your final product

-      class time and technology to help your search /creation

What will this all look like in the end? To finish the unit, you will write me a 1-2 page formal letter explaining how you have fulfilled each of the five objectives. You will attach artifacts that demonstrate how you have fulfilled these goals. Compiling an ‘application packet’ like this is good practice for the future – colleges, jobs, scholarships, presentations all ask you to thoughtfully and carefully compile your intellectual work for a high-stakes audience.

Again, I'm not only excited, but ready, for this next stage of independence in our class. You are articulate young adults who deserve the freedom and support to publish your own voice - and I feel lucky to provide that space for you. 

Sincerely, 

Ms. Kennett 

Non-Fiction Unit

MCAS Prep - Prepare Yourself for Success

MCAS Prep:

Next week is MCAS - prepare yourself for success!

There are two parts of the MCAS: Long Composition and Reading Comprehension.

The Long Composition is meant to evaluate whether or not you can articulately organize your thoughts around a topic and use a text to support your ideas. Think of this as a similar task to your UHE blogs and other in-class essays we have written this year. 

The Reading Comprehension section - which includes non-fiction, fiction, poetry, or other types of texts - will test if you can read and answer questions (both multiple choice and open response). Consider this a similar task to your poetry portfolio, the writing on the narrator we did, the knifefight scene, and anytime you have read the nutrition facts on a food and made an argument about why you should or shouldn't eat it. 

For both the Long Comp and the Reading Comprehension, you will use the writing and analytical skills we have worked on all year: strong thesis statements/topic sentences, clear use of support and explanation, brilliant analysis that ties together. On no part of the MCAS should you be writing straight summary.


Full Review: 
Practice Test - from 2012
Released Test - April 2012 (Long comp starts on numbered page 6)
Released Test - April 2010
Strategy Booklet


Long Composition: 
Book Review for Long Composition - fill this out
Scoring Guide for Long Composition
2012 Prompt
2011 Prompt
2010 Prompt


Reading Comprehension (text, multiple choice questions, open response questions): 
Practice Test
Practice Excerpt (questions at the bottom)

Graded student responses to the 'Bridge of Sighs' excerpt

Poetry Portfolio!

Prepare Yourself for Success
     - 5 annotated poems
     - 10 thoughtfully-crafted responses
     - if you researched the poet, include cited sources as footnote or Works Cited page (and dig deeper than Wikipedia)
     - folder with middle-binding



Pages in Completed Portfolio
     - cover page (unique title and your name - think like opening to a cover page of a book)
     - table of contents
     - Introduction - super short 'intro' to the entire portfolio - welcome the reader to your compilation
     - optional! decorate your folder




Nitty Gritty Formatting 
     - Your ten poems and your responses should be consistently formatted (size of font, italics, etc.)
     - Responses should be double spaced, size 12 font, Times New Roman (or other consistant font)
     - You do not need a MLA header on each response
     - Poem titles in single quotations: 'Out, Out-' by Robert Frost
     - Citing one line from a poem: "The night knows nothing of the chants of night" (Stevens 1).
     - Citing two-three lines from a poem: "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day" (Shakespeare 189).
     - Citing more than three lines from a poem - block quotation (example from OWL)

In his poem "My Papa's Waltz," Theodore Roethke explores his childhood with his father:

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We Romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself. (quoted in Shrodes, Finestone, Shugrue 202)

Folders for Sale! $1.75 but will take donations for $2.00

Time Well Spent to Change the World

I like to read on Sunday mornings, pairing my coffee with articles, chapters, and posts I haven't gotten to over the week. This morning, two unrelated texts provoked a whole set of questions about time in the classroom. The first was Walter Bender's forward to Learning to Change the World: The Social Impact of One Laptop Per Child, and the second was 'Health, Happiness, and Time Well Spent,' a recent post by Howard Gardner on WBUR's Health blog. 

Bender opens with an anecdote when he asked engineers about a powerful learning moment they have had, and then asked them how they would use technology in the classroom. About their answer to the second, he writes "when they design technology for learning, they revert to a passive model in which the student is receiving information rather than designing a technology to enable students to rapidly prototype ideas, explore, and collaborate. They know what great learning looks like, but they believe that school is about instructing" (Bender, viii). In answering the two questions, there is a significant disconnect - for the first, they owned the problem and problem-solving process and in the second they intentionally distance the tools based on their idea of school. I thought to myself - why does moving into the classroom space force a disconnect to the immediacy of our own experiences and shape the way we approach our time with students? 

Gardner opened his article with the questions 'What do people value most? What do you personally value most?' and build his post around the research that people value time well spent, and how they feel frustrated when they think they have wasted their time. We've all had the classes or meetings that we've walked away from saying 'well, that was a waste of time'. If we equate time and effort, I find that students will justify the quality of their work based on how long they spent doing it. And, inversely, I find myself wondering how students can just 'sit there and not do anything,' dumbfounded at their learned passivity. How strong is the correlation between ownership and sense of time well spent? And who defines 'well spent'? 

I'll pull both of these texts together in a story from this past week. I just interviewed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at Michigan State University, and in one of my conversations with a prospective doctoral student at MSU, we discussed iPads in the classroom and how to re-frame them as a tool for learning so they're not just a distraction device. I said "honestly, my challenge to myself is to design the assignment to be more compelling than Temple Run." He gave me a look like I was crazy. 

I think his look was a reaction to how I had taken away the foundational assumption that a student has to pay attention to the teacher. I don't want to rely on and reinforce the traditional teacher-as-authority, student-as-producer role - but neither do I want to cede my authority into a vacuum. I want to leverage the roles of student and teacher in ways that will help me build frameworks of the assignment's purpose so that I am an architect of student learning and the students actually build their own experiences. If this is my goal, what does classroom time, and my associated instructions, look/sound like? 

I've finished many classes and said 'this is what I would do differently' but I realize that I'm the one prototyping the changes in learning, I'm the one reflecting, seeing cause and effect, and changing. While I know my students sometimes walk away frustrated, they don't ever come to me and say 'this is what I would have done differently' - how are we leveraging the classroom space to engage students having everyone's time well spent? How are we approaching learning as a messy process that takes time? And, in the end, what does 'time well spent' look like with technology in the classroom? 

Short Story Anthology

Here is what we've compiled and anthologized as we wrap up our short story unit. Enjoy reading through our stories!

- Ms. Kennett

If you have an iPad/iPhone, click the link here to download the book into your iBooks

Universal Human Experience Blog Post / Assignment: 
- connect your purpose for stories and your universal human experience
- read 3-5 stories and select three that relate to your ideas
- write a blog post (500-600 words) that thoughtfully connects your purpose, UHE, and the stories
- refer to the authors by their first names, put their story titles in 'single quotations' and clearly explain why that story connects

Due Tuesday, February 5th