The basic premise of Iron Teach is based on the show Iron Chef America, where two teams of chefs battle to develop recipes that include a “secret ingredient” revealed shortly before the challenge begins. The dishes often fit a theme and the final results are judged by a celebrity panel who rate each dish on Originality, Taste, and Plating.
Iron Teach will follow the same basic premise. Two teams of educators (more if you’re interested in joining us) will battle to develop a unit or lesson plan to meet the requirements of a selected teacher. Each team will share their lesson along with the process they used to brainstorm and develop the idea. A panel of judges, including the teacher who issued the challenge, will rate the lesson on Originality, Student Appeal, and Ability to Meet Outcome.
For Battle 1 of Iron Teach, two teams – Team Milobo and Team BionicTeaching have been issued the following challenge:
The Audience: 2 classes of 10th grade General Level Literature students.
The Secret Ingredient: The novel “A Separate Peace”
The Challenge (as defined by the teacher): Students are beginning a book discussion of the novel “A Separate Peace.” These particular students struggle to demonstrate understanding of content through writing, but have recently become more motivated to read and respond to literature as their teacher has incorporated audio books and modern literature into the curriculum.
The teacher shares that the class performs better when asked to discuss personal experiences and would like to incorporate the book themes of envy/conformity into the book discussions. These students in particular are not easily motivated to participate in class activities. Their teacher is looking for an original and fun way to have the students discuss and share while demonstrating understanding in a way that goes beyond writing an essay or taking a multiple choice test.
Two weeks have been dedicated to class reading and discussion of the book.
The Deadline: It’s due by midnight- Sunday, April 26th. Post the content to your blog and link back in the comments here and on Tom’s blog.
We’re making up the rules as we go along, and I hope that it’s something we can develop into a long term project, but for now, it should be a great way to have a little fun while helping out fellow teachers. If you’re interested in joining in the fun as a team member or judge, or want to issue a challenge for a future Iron Teach Battle, leave a message here or on Tom’s blog.
Over the past several months, I’ve had the honor of working with a group of wonderful educators from the New Jersey Powerful Learning Practice program. My focus with the group was on Collaboration: How can educators use collaborative strategies both in the classroom and in their own professional growth? We’ve spent time learning about the skills and mindsets needed for successful collaboration, discussing the challenges of collaborative learning, and discovering what others have to say on the subject of collaboration.
To welcome a larger audience into our collaborative learning discussion, I’ve posted the conversation starters here on my blog. You’ll see a link to a listing of the discussion starters in the blog header above as well. My hope is that you’ll share your ideas and thoughts with us. I also hope that some of the original New Jersey participants will be willing to share their responses and replies too. Their insight and the discussions that resulted within our closed community were a wonderful learning experience for me.
I look forward to hearing your comments and continuing the conversation.
I don’t go to the beach much, but whenever my nieces and nephews visit, you can bet we’ll spend at least a day or two there. Where I live, the main commercial section of the beach is only about 6 miles from our home. Our favorite area to visit is a section of beach in the Gulf Islands National Seashore called Langdon Beach. For the past 4 years, though, the road to Fort Pickens and Langdon Beach has been gone, the result of hurricane damage that literally scattered the road from one side of Santa Rosa Island to the other.
It seems building a road on a foundation of sand doesn’t stand much of a chance against a major hurricane….
Likewise, a classroom built on a shaky foundation— one that is not well organized, that’s missing compassionate policies, or that doesn’t consider best practices is destined to crumble too. I’ve become a fan of several blogs that help teachers think through their own classroom practices including Successful Teaching, Practical Theory, and Teachers at Risk. All are good reads for new teachers or for those who want a new perspective on classroom practices. Looking back at my own teaching career, I’ve discovered that there are a half dozen statements that have served as my guideposts. They’ve evolved somewhat over the years, but they serve as my foundation – so much so that I used to write them at the front of my plan book every semester. I’m not in a classroom full time anymore, but these principles still guide my work.
My Foundations:
Help students learn instead of teaching them a lesson. Early on in my career, I had the pleasure of teaching Eric. Eric was a mustached fifth grader who should have passed onto middle school at least 3 years before. He towered over me and over his fellow fifth graders. According to his previous teachers, he had a reputation for throwing desks at teachers and spending more time in the principal’s office or on suspension than in the classroom. Great. On the first day of class, I pulled Eric aside and asked “What do I have to do to help you stay in my class and keep from getting a desk thrown at me?” His reply? “Mrs. B, when I say ‘I’ve taken a mood’ just let me be.” True to his word, whenever he’d utter that statement, we had an agreement that he could go to the back of the room until he was able to rejoin us. I’m happy to say that Eric didn’t miss a day of class that year due to suspension. Plus, he competed in science fair, worked in groups and passed fifth grade; if not with flying colors, then at least with pride.
Give second chances. We all fail sometimes. It’s learning to deal with failure that means the most. Enacting compassionate policies in a classroom doesn’t make you a push-over; it makes you a realist. Kids mess up sometimes – they forget a book, miss a homework assignment. A “no-exceptions, no makeups” policy only teaches students that unless it’s learned according to a set schedule, it’s not worth learning. In my Algebra class, I used to allow students the opportunity to receive half credit for any test question that they reworked and turned in along with an explanation of their error. It gave a student who failed a test the opportunity to pass if they were willing to put in a little extra effort. In the long run, they probably learned as much from their mistakes as they did from their successes.
Leave room at the top. As many of you probably do, I often use rubrics to assess projects. Sometimes, however, my rubric would end at the “B” level. When students would ask what would earn them an A, I’d say “Amaze me.” Funny how often they exceeded my expectations when I left room for them to go beyond.
Be amazed. Be willing to show your awe when your students impress you. Look for the moments when they go beyond your expectations and celebrate them publicly.
Be amused. Forget the rule “Don’t smile before Christmas.” It’s not wrong to show students you care, especially if it’s backed with clear classroom expectations. Smile at them and laugh with them when you get the chance.
Never assume you are the smartest person in the room. Enough said.
Those are my foundation statements. What would yours be?
So here it is, 3 weeks after Halloween and a bowl of leftover candy still sits on my counter. I’ve picked through the remains now and then and what’s left behind is the stuff that makes “junk food” sound like a compliment. Stuff that’s full of sugar and artificial flavors and tooth-rotting, chewy goodness. Stuff that would make a dentist’s early retirement dreams a reality.
Stuff that makes Halloween a fun change from the regular routine but wouldn’t do much to provide for a healthy, balanced diet.
Good thing it only happens once a year.
Looking at that bowl of candy, I think about what sometimes happens when teachers think about addingtechnologyto their regular classroom routine. “It’ll help make learning fun,” they think as they usher students into a computer lab with little thought to the outcomes and goals they’d normally employ to design a learning activity. Sometimes, there’s a new web tool or site they’ve seen that looks like it might hold a student’s interest. Even more often, it’s the end of a unit and there’s a day or two to be filled, so using technology to create a brochure or slide show seems like the ticket.
Like the empty calories contained in my leftover candy, this type of use doesn’t give much thought to the nutritional balance students need to grow into strong and healthy learners. Playing games or throwing images into a slideshow doesn’t necessarily translate into learning. Sure, it’s fun, but unless it is backed by an understanding of the intended outcomes, it won’t hold you or your students over for long. And that’s part of the challenge I meet every day in my job. Helping teachers move past the quick fixes it seems technology can provide to thinking about what they really want their students to understand. Making a little sugary tech-goodness into a four course meal where dessert is part of the package, but isn’t the main focus.
So, what’s the secret to a perfectly seasoned technology lesson? When I co-plan with teachers, I ask them to use these three basics:
Begin with the end in mind. It’s rare when a good lesson begins with the technology. If you identify the tool before you are clear on your outcome, you’ll end up with a lot of fun, but not much learning. I often ask teachers to share with me what they hope students will learn or be able to do as a result of their activity. I listen for specific words that cue into their goals (see Bloomin’ Web Tools for an explanation) and then pick a tool that matches that goal. Having teachers document their outcome makes for a much better match between activity and tech tool.
Make sure the curriculum drives the process. Once you’ve matched outcome and tool, the real work begins. Next, comes defining the process students will use and the benchmarks that keep students on track. I’ve seen the best ideas come to a dismal end when teachers don’t clearly define their vision to their students. Share with students what your goals are and let them know what you see as an acceptable end product by using a rubric or defining a S.M.A.R.T goal. Most importantly, make sure your standards focus more on the curriculum than on the esthetics. While good design is important, unless you’re teaching a design class it’s more important that students show clear understanding of the content.
Reflection is essential. What a shame it is when students spend a significant amount of classroom time creating a product, only to have it turned in, graded, and returned without any peer feedback or culminating reflection. Any time you use technology, you should plan in time for students to reflect on their learning. Give them a chance to publish or post their products. Ask them to rate and comment on the work of their peers. Let them share what they learned. Without this final step, they’ll leave the table without feeling fully satisfied.
In short, make sure your technology integration efforts turn into more than an empty snack. A love of learning blended in with a dose of curiosity is what we’re trying to awaken in students. Not mindless entertainment, but mindful purpose. And if it happens to be a little fun at the same time, then that’s really sweet.
If it were the number of students in your class, it might seem like an impossibly large number. If it were the amount of minutes you spent per subject each day, it might seem a bit rushed. But what if you knew that 42 is the average number of people who respond and react to a student’s work from the time they enter Kindergarten until they graduate from High School? The following video created by Barry Bachenheimer really brought the point home for me:
So, after 13 years of schooling, a student’s perception of their ability as a writer, thinker and communicator has been influenced and shaped by an audience of fewer than 4 dozen people.
Makes you think doesn’t it?
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has defined Communication and Collaboration as one of the key elements students must master to be successful in the 21st century workplace. This includes:
Articulating thoughts and ideas clearly and effectively through speaking and writing
Demonstrating ability to work effectively with diverse teams
Exercising flexibility and willingness to be helpful in making necessary compromises to accomplish a common goal
Assuming shared responsibility for collaborative work
Most importantly, students need to be able to accomplish these goals within a global community. It’s not enough for students to be able to work effectively with the person who sits next to them. Now, they’ve got to be able to work well with the person who sits around the globe from them.
We’re giving students the tools to take their learning out into the world through the CHS 1:1 laptop program. Now we’ve got to take those tools and help students learn to use them to collaborate within our school community and within the global community. How? How about starting small within your classroom and then going global when you’ve got the hang of it:
Start Small: Create a classroom gallery of work that can be rated and commented on by student peers. Celeste Bell is doing this now with her students by creating a Studywiz Gallery of their “Jesus Moments” photographs. While she’ll tell you that the students enjoyed taking the pictures before she created the gallery, she’ll also tell you that creating the gallery has motivated students to respond to and appreciate the work of their peers.
Go Global: Create a project that is published and posted on the web. Marilyn Stefani is doing that now with her student’s Earth’s Composition Wiki and Google Map. Marilyn paired her students across two classes and asked them to collaborate to create one page with background information on an assigned topic. She then challenged the students to identify current environmental issues related to their topic and create a collaborative map that gives a brief overview of the issue and links to more information on their wiki. It’s been a challenge to teach the students to work asynchronously on a common goal, but the payoff has been that students are learning how their actions (or inactions) affect others while appreciating the knowledge and talents of their fellow students.
Do people really pay attention to these efforts? The answer is yes, and sometimes in a big way. Last year, Nancy Collin’s class created a wiki project on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I wrote about it in a Scholastic article along with Christine Day’s Google Doc project. It’s still out there for others to see and on a whim, we decided to use Google Analytics to keep track of how many visitors we have there. In the last 6 months, there have been visits from exactly 42 locations. Not 42 visitors, or 42 cities, or 42 states, but 42 different countries sent over 1600 visitors to the site. How’s that for a global audience?
So, we can close the doors to our classrooms and give our students an audience of 1, or we can find strategies to give our students a global audience. Their future will include the challenge of living and working in a connected world.
This year, we’ve set ourselves a goal at Catholic High. This will be the year of the (almost) paperless classroom. We’ve pared down the locations in which users can print so that we can adequately support printing and have added several new tools that make it easier for teachers and students to hand in and out work electronically. So, in honor of this goal, I decided to borrow a bit from Shakespeare and set the tone….
A Printing Soliloquy
To print, or not to print: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the classroom to suffer
The slings and arrows of piles of ungraded worksheets,
Or to take arms against a sea of papers,
And by opposing end them? To staple: to collate;
No more; and by use of a web resource to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand piles of assignments
That a classroom is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d….
You get the idea. But how are we going to meet this goal without going the way of poor Yorick?
“Alas, poor Laserjet! I knew him, Horatio; a printer of infinite toner, of most excellent quality; it hath printed me front and back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is…”
The following is an email I sent to our faculty as we begin our 1:1 journey this year.
Enjoy.
August 18, 2008
To: CHS Faculty
From: Michelle
For those of you who are teachers of freshmen, the day is fast approaching when a class full of students will walk into your classroom with a laptop in their hand. The first laptops will go home with the students in D period Computer Applications on Tuesday and the remainder of the students will receive their laptops on Wednesday.
That means that as soon as Thursday, every student who walks through your door will have at their fingertips a machine that can be the most powerful learning tool they’ll ever own.
24 hours a day.
7 days a week.
All year long.
But remember, it’s only a machine. It can’t think, plan, organize, create, or inspire on its own. All of those things require a good teacher–that’s where you come into the mix.
This summer, we spent a busy week trying to prepare ourselves for this change. I know that many of you did even more preparation in the time between our Digital Learning Summer Institute and the first day of school. Now, the time to put all that planning into play is here. If you’re still wondering how you’re going to make it work, don’t worry.
We’re all in this together.
I’ve spent a lot of time myself this summer talking to teachers in 1:1 schools, asking them what advice they’d give you on your first days. Here are the words they selected just for you:
Today, I’ve spent a great deal of time exploring with an interesting social networking tool called Plurk and joining in conversations with other educators who share my enthusiasm for Web 2.0 tools. If you haven’t checked out Plurk, it’s an interesting twist on microblogging with user comments posted in a timeline style… (more…)
Happy Valentine’s Day! In honor of the day, I thought I’d share some of the things I love on the Internet…especially the two sites that I can’t live without.Thought #1 – Customizing the web with iGoogleiGoogle (http://google.com/ig) is a customizable homepage for your web browser. In addition to adding links to your most commonly used web pages, today’s news, and world maps, you can find tons of content that relates to your subject area. Now, there’s something new awaiting you every time you open your browser! I have two tabs set on my iGoogle Account, one for stuff I use often (like my GoogleDocs, Email, PCHS web links, and a Weather Radar widget) and another with education resources (like Today in History, Art of the Day, Word of the Day and more)…Thought #2 – Bookmarks are Del.icio.usThis is a site we introduced during the summer institute, but it’s one I truly can’t live without. Del.icio.us allows you to store all your web bookmarks online and to share them with others. The best part is being able to “tag” each bookmark with multiple keywords so they’re easy to find. I have over 1000 bookmarks that I share online – you can bet that when I email you a link, I’ve also usually added it to my Del.icio.us account. I also love being able to view the bookmarks of my network of friends and fellow teachers – under the “My Network” Link I can access the links of 19 of my buddies, while 30 people are following my links….pretty cool! You can check out my Del.icio.us at http://del.icio.us/miloboThought #3 – Just because I like youIf you need a pick-me-up….if you need something to make you smile….here’s the site for you..http://www.chriscummins.com/like/Until next time, think happy thoughts!
It’s been almost a month since Pensacola Catholic HS made our announcement about the upcoming 1:1 rollout (time flies, doesn’t it!?) and it’s got lots of our teachers thinking about next year. What a blessing it is to have an entire semester to prepare and get ready for what will be an exciting time next fall! Speaking of the rollout….
One thought that’s been rolling around in my head came from a question posed by one of the reporters on campus during our freshmen parent laptop meeting – she asked “Now that every student will have a computer, how will you make sure that students aren’t just copying information from a web page, pasting it into a document and calling it their own?” Wow….what a question… Of course, we have Turn It In on campus to help catch plagiarism, but all that will really do is keep the blatant copy/pasters at bay. It doesn’t really stop what I’ve witnessed in every school I’ve ever worked in – students who read a paragraph from a source, then rewrite sentence by sentence so the words are different but the ideas are still not truly their own.
So the question is, how do you ensure that students are truly taking their writing to a new level? How do you make sure that instead of just participating in low-level recall, students are moving on to the higher levels of analysis and reasoning that we want them to reach? One way is to rethink how you pose your writing topics. Here are some ideas and examples:
Thought #1 Write a letter
Instead of asking students to write a report on a topic, have them defend their topic in a letter or proposal to an organization. For example, instead of writing a report on global warming, ask them to write a letter to their congressman explaining why global warming should be a priority in government policy.
Thought #2 Write in first person
Have students tell the story of your topic as a person who was directly involved. In Literature, ask students to tell the story of a significant event in a novel from the perspective of an eyewitness.
Thought #3 Narrow and rate
This works well with broad topics. Ask students to select a small number of events that are most important to their topic and justify their choices. For example, in American History, ask students to select the 4 most important ideas or events that led to the passage of a particular amendment.
Thought #4 Ask What if
Ask students to explain the significance of a topic by asking what would be different if it never happened. In Religion, a good example would be “How would the world be different if Martin Luther had followed his first calling and become a lawyer instead of a monk?”
What other ideas do you use to take your writing to the next level? I’d love to hear them!
I’ve long been a fan of Tom Woodward’s insanely creative method of developing units, so when he gave the green light for an IronTeach challenge, I had to jump on board.
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