PPT-Title Slide
PPT Slide-Classroom/Auto
Teachers or Autoworkers
· Foreign competition
· Expensive
· Innovation difficult
· Assembly line
PLAY “DID YOU KNOW”
(from start to jobs by 38)
SCREEN SHOT – 21ST Century Skills (jobs that don’t exist)
OR PLAY CLIP OF QUOTE AND QUESTIONS
PPT SLIDES-
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
How Can I
· Make students aware of the global/technological economy?
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
How Can I
· Integrate 21st skills, especially creativity, collaboration, and communication?
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
How Can I
· Still provide the necessary English 12 curriculum?
WORDLE 1
WORDLE 2
PPT SLIDE: Sometimes serendipity trumps planning.
PPT-Caveman
PPT-ENGLISH 12 – 21ST
PHOTO OF CHARTS
2 MM TRAILER
THE UNIT-PART 1
· Watch “Did You Know?”
· Watch 2 Million Minutes
· Read NY Times article
· Read “Shift in Literacy”
· MC test
THE UNIT-PART TWO
Student Projects
· Redesign senior year
· Produce a video
· Collaborate
PPT Slide-Group Work?
· BOPSA
· Pretend productivity
· Hard to monitor
· Harder to grade
PLAY PIXAR GUY EXCERPT
OPEN ADOBE MEETING
Show various pods
Show Travis pod
PPT Slide-highlighted pod in Word
PPT-Participation rubric
PLAY PROJECTS
PPT-rubric
PPT SLIDE-THE UNIT PART 3
PPT SLIDE-TWO REPORTS
PPT SLIDE-UNIT PART 3
· Watch news report
· Read USA Today article
· Read two national reports
· Watch 2 Million Minutes: The 21st Century Solution
PPT Slide-Unit Part 3
· Skills: paraphrasing, finding the main idea and supporting details, choosing quotes
· Collaboration and evaluation
· Assessment: letter
PPT Slides-letter composite with pull-out quotes
PPT SLIDE-UNIT PART 4
CRAWFORD INTERVIEW
PPT SLIDE-UNIT PART 4
· Read from Shop Class as Soulcraft
· Read from Catching up or Leading the Way
PPT SLIDE-UNIT PART 4
Self-reflective narrative question
PPT SLIDE-TITLE SLIDE / One of the great things about teaching is that despite standardized tests and other external pressure, there is still room for serendipity and synthesis – those times when you start with an odd idea and build it into so much more. The students are engaged and learning. My presentation today is how one nagging issue – my mid-career crisis – morphed into a curriculum unit that brought me and my students into the 21st century. Let me explain.
I had been teaching English for about ten years when it occurred to me that American teachers were becoming a lot like the American autoworkers of the 1980s.
We were producing a product – our students’ education – that was inferior to our foreign competitors’, that was expensive to produce, and that prohibited innovation due to decades of systemic regulations. Even the way we taught resembled an assembly line – people in rows performing repetitive tasks. Worse, I think people – students, parents, taxpayers, employers, and colleges – were starting to catch on.
And then it got interesting. I saw the now legendary video, “Did You Know?” which really brings the global-technological situation into focus. If you haven’t seen it, here is just a short excerpt.
(PLAY DID YOU KNOW)
So now my mid-career crisis had its own movie. The statement that resonated with me was this: “We are preparing our students for jobs and technologies that don’t yet exist, in order to solve problems we don’t even know
are problems yet.”
I saw the video at one of the in-service days just days before school started. I went home that weekend and scrapped my opening unit in favor of one that posed these essential questions – of myself.
How can I make my seniors aware of the demands of the global/technological economy they’ll be entering?
How can I integrate 21st century skills, particularly creativity, collaboration, and communication?
How can I still provide the necessary English 12 curriculum – preparing them for college-level reading and writing, and other skills like paraphrasing, integrating credible research, synthesizing diverse media?
And how could I find a way to use all of the cool 21st century tools in class? I mean, when I started 10 years ago, this is what we had to work with. Today, there’s so much more.
I would like to state that all of these ideas coalesced instantly, but, as I said at the start, it’s more a matter of serendipity. I pulled items together as I stumbled across them – seeing an author interview on TV, reading a chapter in a literacy book, getting an edutopia email. So I didn’t teach the unit you’re about to see exactly this way, but I did it over the course of the school year as I discovered more material. It evolved.
I started by asking my seniors to list their current jobs, their probable careers, and their dream jobs. I posed the question: what if what you’re doing here isn’t preparing you for what you want to do? We watch “Did you know?” in its entirety and discuss it. We also watch the documentary “2 Million Minutes.” Here is a trailer from that video.
(PLAY 2MM TRAILER)
We discuss the video. We read a New York Times-Tom Friedman article on outsourcing jobs. And we read an excerpt from the book “Adolescent Literacy” called “The Shift in Literacy Demands” which traces the definition of literacy from the Revolutionary War in which “signature literacy” – having good penmanship counted to today’s multi-media forms of communication.
Because I want to teach listening, note-taking, and reading skills for college, I use the very non-21st century assessment – a multiple-choice test – to make sure that the students understand the central ideas.
The next part of the unit is more aligned with 21st century skills. I ask students how to redesign high school, senior year, specifically, to make it more globally and technologically relevant and to create a video that explains their ideas. This is 21st century skills: creativity, communication, and collaboration come in. There is just one problem: for me, as a teacher, group work is a nightmare to manage. It’s usually “bopsa,” a bunch of people sitting around, or it’s pretend productivity – everyone looks busy when the teacher walks around. It’s hard to monitor, and it’s even harder to grade. I researched a lot of articles on how to teach collaboration, but the strategies seemed babyish for high school seniors or too corporate for students who have grown up together. Then I found this guy. Randy Nelson of Pixar Studios describes the difference between cooperation and collaboration. I show his full speech to the students. Here is an essential excerpt.
(PLAY PIXAR GUY CLIP)
(OPEN ADOBE MEETING)
With this concept in mind, we begin brainstorming projects in my favorite forum for group work: Adobe Connect. Groups are assigned discussion pods and they type their discussions. There are amazing advantages. First, I can monitor each group simultaneously, helping them get on track or prompting them to elaborate on ideas. Students who normally won’t speak up in class will contribute this way, so we get many more ideas. We also have a permanent record of their discussions which they can access throughout the project.
I also want them to practice using academic language and behavior in what they normally would use for social networking.
As you can see — one group still doesn’t get it. (Pause)
Because this is a new experience for them, I want them to reflect on their 21st century skills. I have each student copy and paste the contents of their pod into a Word document then use the highlighter tool, using one color to mark when they made a productive comment or when they made a negative, off-task, or non-academic comment. Their participation is also a process grade, and I use this rubric to rate them.
Students had to figure out how to organize and visualize their ideas. I had to teach them how to edit in Microsoft Movie Maker, the only program available in my school. Here are a few of their projects.
(PLAY TWO TO THREE PROJECTS)
We upload finished projects onto SchoolTube and show the projects in class. Using the poll tool in Adobe Connect, we vote on which groups had the best ideas and which had the best production value. I use this rubric for scoring the projects – it basically follows the standard New York State Regents criteria – meaning, development, organization, and conventions, but it also includes criteria for production AND for 21st century skills which range from learning and helping others with the technology . . . to using technology as an excuse for an incomplete or inferior project.
(AD LIB ABOUT LEARNING)
n MovieMaker
n Voice reluctance
n Spelling
n Server crash
Here is where the unit may seem disorganized, but there are two reasons for it. One is serendipity. The components I’m going to present next weren’t part of the original unit. I added them at the midterm and in the last marking period simply because I hadn’t discovered them until then.
The second reason – and the reason I probably won’t change the order – is that I wanted the students to engage in creative problem-solving not to recycle other people’s ideas.
So the third part of the unit is to bring students in on the national conversation that is going on regarding American education and senior year in particular.
We watch a news report about Utah’s attempts to eliminate senior year, read a USA today article on the same topic, and read excerpts of two national reports: The Lost Opportunity of Senior Year and Raising Our Sights. Both confirm students’ ideas – that senior year should be more project-based and customized to the individual learner. We also watch another documentary from the 2 Million Minutes producer on the Basis charter school in Arizona which teaches rigorous AP courses and has a semester-long senior year capstone project.
At this point in the year, I am preparing students for their senior research papers, the tasks associated with this part of the unit focus heavily on paraphrasing, finding the main ideas and supporting details, and selecting quotes. At the midterm, we happened to get a new superintendent, so the midterm writing task was to write a letter to the superintendent describing the changes that students would like to see to high school. Students collaborate, reading the letters and voting on which to send to the boss.
Most argued for non-traditional teaching and learning like internships and curriculum specific to a student’s interests or career path, and more rigorous courses even in middle school. “Students could graduate as juniors because of high school credits earned in middle school, but the internship would be an attraction for students to stay and give them experience in the field they plan to follow.”
“The arts, I believe, help improve students’ conception of creating. More hands-on classes will enforce logic skills and encourage problem-solving rather than problem-finding.”
“Making the courses more interactive will bring more interest and excitement for school which will translate into the grade book.”
If I taught the entire unit all at once, the students would be ready to kill me. Breaking it up by marking periods enables me to share more points of view and to keep the critical thinking going without mutiny. Which brings us to the final part of the unit which comes at the end of the year.
We recap the material we covered, going back to 2 Million Minutes, etc. We read excerpts of Matthew B. Crawford’s book, Shop Class as Soul Craft. In a PBS interview, Crawford advocates for classes that are not necessarily hands-on but that emphasize problem-solving.
(CRAWFORD INTERVIEW)
Since we’re a rural school, many of my students do have mechanical skills and plan to work in skilled trades, so the Shop Class chapters reinforce one strength about America’s place in the global-technological economy. To build on that, we also read excerpts from Catching Up or Leading the Way by today’s keynote speaker, particularly his concept of high test scores-low ability and the idea that American schools nurture the creativity that will lead to innovation. Because it is the end of the school year, one component of the English 12 final exam is to write a self-reflective narrative that asks how that student might have spent a non-traditional senior year.
Next year, I plan to add another project to the unit by asking students to record interviews with people outside of our school – for example, employers, policy makers, elected officials, students in districts unlike our own. And of course, there is always room for serendipity.
(HANDOUTS)
PPT-Title Slide
