My first YouTube video

So I finally finished this video - 

This was kind of a daunting undertaking for me.  I took several hours to do this, not counting the time spent taking the film.  

I only used my iPhone 3G and my MacBook (3 years old).  It wasn't challenging, really.  Just time-consuming.  I'm also not that great at editing for length.  I needed to make some deeper cuts - not all of this needs to be here.  It could have easily been 5 minutes long.  

I like some of the features of using iMovie (the Mac application that I used to edit the film clips from my phone).  But sometimes it feels like all videos made with iMovie look the same.  So, I'll be looking for other tools I can use, perhaps on my home PC.  

As far as the story itself goes, I've been frustrated by the fact that these rabbits (I don't know for sure how many there are) are attacking my plants.  I thought that telling this story - with the gross smells, some of the more vivid and violent details, and the variety of visual details for analysis - would be an interesting and useful text for classroom use.  

I don't know how much money these bunnies have cost me over the past two years, but I know that several of my trees and other plants have been damaged.  I planted the two Hawthorne trees on either side of the house hoping that they would blossom in a few years.  Now, they're ugly little sticks.  And it seems like every time they grow, the bunnies swoop down like some kind of bully and break them down to little sticks again.  

Anyway, it was fun to make the video.  My son enjoyed being the cameraman.  My daughter wanted to play a bigger role in the video, but I wasn't able to work that in.  Maybe next time.

Being a Connected Educator

I've been on a few Twitter chats about this topic, such as #21stedchat, and I think that the topic is relevant here - on a blog - and to most teachers.  I think there is increasing pressure to become "connected" to other teachers because there are so many benefits.

Before we go any further, I need to point out that no one really thinks that teachers cannot be effective if they aren't connected.  I think that there are too many ways to be effective to believe that a teacher couldn't find a way to be a good teacher without it.  And, of course, there were many good teachers before there were connected teachers.  Yet there are so many good ideas - and good people - to connect to, it's much easier to be effective when you can connect and collaborate with others.

I've tweeted about this before - there are several examples, from my own teaching, of how I've made use of ideas from other people on Twitter.  The more I think about it, though, the more I think it matters exactly who you connect to.  Because Twitter is simply a meeting place.  If you aren't meeting enough good people, or don't know where to look, it's like going to a party where you don't know anyone and you're too afraid to introduce yourself to new people.

So where am I getting the best ideas?

I've posted about the #tlap community before, and I think this is a great place to listen and share ideas about teaching.  I created a Google doc with some ideas about my favorite Twitter chats for a department meeting a while ago.  This is a little dated, but also emphasizes a couple of key chats (not including #TLAP, which I discovered more recently).  The master list of Twitter chats - the biggest list of educational Twitter chats I know about - is this one, compiled by Jerry Blumengarten (aka @cybraryman1).  It's huge - it's a nice indicator of exactly how many cool things are going on there.

That takes me to the next point.  Obviously, there are a ton of different Twitter chats and different ways to connect with other educators.  I think that Twitter is the fastest and easiest way for teachers to interact with other teachers.  That's how I've become connected.  But I don't want to merely provide a list of teachers to follow and tell people that they must follow these people.

Why not?  Well, I think that Twitter is a different experience for a lot of people.  One of the reasons that I had so much fun with it from the very beginning was because of two positive experiences I had.  First, I followed Seymour Simon, a moderately well-known children's nonfiction author.  Not only did he follow me back within 24 hours, but he sent me a welcoming message expressing his respect and admiration for teachers.  I've read - and used - much of his work, and that was a big deal for me.  I bragged about that quite a bit, in fact.  The other really positive experience was when Donalyn Miller replied to a few tweets of mine, and followed me.  That was enormously gratifying.  Since then, because of Twitter and #engchat, I have been included in Troy Hicks' most recent book. (Crafting Digital Writing, pages 144 and 145.  I'm also in the index!)

A lot depends on what times you are looking at your Twitter stream.  It depends on who you follow (and I recommend following a LOT at first.  You can follow up to 2000 people from the beginning.)  It also depends on who you know.  I would bet that many teachers already know someone on Twitter, and it makes sense to follow that person and check out who that person follows, especially if they have similar interests and goals.  But some of my strongest relationships on Twitter come from the back and forth that occurs during the chats, and I've been given several opportunities to collaborate with teachers on Twitter to create and share resources.  I've shared some of the successes and failures of my teaching experience, and I've received helpful feedback on some of those.  I've offered feedback on other people's ideas, and I've learned a great deal about other people's great ideas and tried some of them.  Here are a few examples of things that I've used in my classroom or personal life because of Twitter:

• Genius Hour (passion-based learning, where students pursue their own passions during part of the school day or week)
• the book Wonder
• Twitter itself, in several different ways
• Wonderopolis

I'm planning to use more.  Much of the learning and change has occurred in subtle but important ways.  I already removed my "big desk" from my classroom and planned some major changes for next year because of several conversations about Genius Hour and different attitudes toward classroom space.  I'm working on a few more YouTube videos so that I can use a slightly flipped class (a tilted class?).  I was blessed with a chance to write for the Nerdy Book Club (again, because of Twitter), and I'd like to do more like that - and share more like that.  I'm working on a class newsletter, and I have many ways to share that with parents and the world.  

It's really kind of overwhelming when you think about it.  

What makes a good fantasy series?

I just finished reading the Beyonders series with Chasing the Prophecy, the third book.  I've also been reading the Harry Potter series to my son for the past few years, and we just started the final book, The Deathly Hallows.  So, I've been thinking a lot about what makes a good fantasy series.

I should point out that I mostly focus on YA and MG fantasy - I do read some grown-up (I don't want to say "adult") fantasy, but not as often.

I've posted elsewhere about the importance of a good "bad guy."  A fantasy series really needs a good villain, more so than most other story types that I can think of.  Voldemort is a good example - he kills anyone and everyone, and he's cruel to his own minions.  He has no friends and doesn't care.  He tortures the other orphans in the orphanage and enjoys it.  He even tries to bully Dumbledore, when Dumbledore shows up to find out if he should be invited to Hogwarts.  And what about Snape?  He really had no reason to kill him except a vague theory.  It was kind of like an experiment - maybe killing Snape would give him mastery of the elder wand, maybe not.

One of the reasons that I enjoy Harry Potter so much, I think, is because Voldemort is so thoroughly and convincingly bad.  Lord of the Rings is a really good fantasy series for a similar reason - Sauron is so overwhelmingly powerful.

Does it work the other way?  Sure - to take a really bad horror movie example, one of the reasons that the movie Squirm is so ridiculous is because evil worms (not even turned into giant monster worms!) are killing people in ridiculous "accidents."

I suppose there are no universal and permanent rules when it comes to something like this.  And I'm thinking about a couple of different series where the evil seems embedded in the "world."  Like Holly Black's Curse Workers series, where the main character is not exactly a nice guy.

There's a lot more to say here - but I need to re-focus and come at this again in a different way.  

Teaching LIke a Pirate

So, a few months ago, I started hearing a lot about this book - Teach like a Pirate - on Twitter.  I decided to check it out, and I got my hands on a copy.  Two days later, I finished reading it.  

This was unprecedented for me.  I had never read a "teacher" book in only two days before.  Usually, it takes at least a week, even during the summer.  Sometimes much longer.  But I found this book to be both readable and short.  Mr. Burgess isn't as engaging and quirky as someone like Tom Romano or Barry Lane, but I still finished his book much faster than those other guys.  

Another surprise?  It was useful.  And not just in a theoretical way.  I know that I enjoy reading books that help me understand instruction or engagement better, but this provided helpful tools for planning engaging instruction that I could use the following day.  

This is starting to feel too much like a paid endorsement, so let me summarize what I don't like about the book:

• Many of the strategies suggested focus on delivery of lectures or content.  It often feels like "sage on the stage" paradigm stuff.  
• Not enough of the book seems to focus on ways to get the students taking control and responsibility.  
• It sometimes feels like a "one size fits all," "all my kids are the same," "let's teach everyone the same way" thing.  Not always.  

Perhaps these are my biases coming through, as a middle school teacher reading a book written by a high school content-area teacher (Burgess teaches history).  Perhaps these things are there and I'm not seeing or remembering them.  And perhaps these things are not the point of the book, really, so it might not be fair to fault the book for not including everything about everyone.  After all, the book focuses on engagement, and apart from the above, it does so quite well.  

Perhaps the most valuable section, for me, was his discussion of how he encourages his own creative ideas.  I learned a lot from reading about this, and I continued that study beyond the book.  

Some time after reading and enjoying the book, I found the #tlap hashtag and book discussions.  I also found the author participating in these book discussions (as @burgessdave).  I met a lot of great people as I continued to show up for these chats, and I really learned to look forward to this hour of discussion of engaged, passionate teaching with a growing group of dedicated, connected teachers.  

I just finished participating in a very large (hundreds of teachers from all over the country), very productive (almost 2,000 tweets in one hour) chat centered around a book study of this book.  Chicago-area teacher Paul Solarz is moderating this chat - (http://psolarz.weebly.com/tlap.html), and I'm looking forward to participating more.  

I think it's one of the best educational Twitter chats out there, and I encourage everyone who is interested to participate.  

Integrating Disciplines in Middle School

Hmmm . . . I thought it was time to post something about how to "cross the line" between subjects in my classroom(s).  This is something that I've wanted to do since I started teaching middle school, and something that I have done in medium-sized and small ways over the years.  I'd like to start planning/playing with ways to do this in larger, more meaningful, and more useful ways next year.  

After all, as I have been telling people, your seventh year of teaching is supposed to be your best year.  And this is going to be my seventh year.

So, I'm going to talk a little about how our school day is set up, and then talk about what I've done to integrate disciplines, and then talk about some other ways to integrate (I hope).

My school is a 6-8 middle school with "teams," in the sense that students are assigned to a small group of teachers from whom they receive all of their "core" instruction in reading, math, science, and social studies.  For example, my 7th graders attend my reading class, my teammate's math class, and then either my social studies class or my teammate's science class.  (We trade science/social studies groups every six weeks.)  There are 20 minutes of "flex" time at the end of the last block class that we use variously for intervention, extended instruction, silent reading, or other related activities.  Then, at the end of the day, students have a "home base" period of forty minutes with a "home base" teacher - usually a core teacher, like me.  

Of course, the students don't spend the entire day with their "team."  The first three periods of the day - in the case of seventh graders - are "exploratories."  All students have gym class during one of those periods.  They attend two other classes that change every trimester (12 weeks).  So, a student might have Technology, Gym, and Art for the first three periods of the day before they come to Reading, Math, and science/social studies.  

This is the gist of the schedule - there are a lot of complications for bilingual or IEP students.  

So, I'm sure you can see where we throw in the "integration."  Typically, we experiment with cross-disciplinary learning in "flex" or "home base" time.  There are two problems with this.  First, all of our bilingual students are in extended bilingual reading/communications class during flex time, so any instruction given during this time will exclude them.  Second, many of our optional music programs (band, orchestra, chorus, and the various offerings within each of these) pull kids out of home base two or sometimes three times a week for practice.  So, often we are missing several members of class during home base.  And those days vary - some students miss four out of five days a week of home base, because they are in band and chorus, for example.  So, no matter how awesome the activity is that we offer, we will not be able to reach all students, except on Friday.  And that's not a very effective amount of instructional time - 40 minutes a week, at the end of the day on Friday.  

We've done a lot of "study skills"-type lessons, and some "learning how to learn" lessons on things like concept-based learning (big ideas, essential questions, facts vs. concepts, etc.).  We've done some technology lessons to help familiarize students with the tools (Garage Band, iMovie, Keynote).  We've also done some basic literacy skills practice with things like summarizing.  We also talk about current events (most often via CNN Student News).  But we tend to shy away from rigorous instruction because so many students are pulled out, and because it sometimes can be perceived as "punishing" students for participating in activities like band, something that I really believe in and want to support.  

So far, the best use of this time has often been some kind of "study hall," where teachers have the flexibility to work with students who need a little extra help.  We've also experimented a little with peer tutoring during this time, though the pull-out programs often limit our human resources and have limited our effectiveness with this program.  This is something that we really want to develop more, regardless of other initiatives.  It's a really cool idea, and many students have expressed an interest in being tutors.  (Though often very few seem interested in being tutored.)

So, what are some ways that we can combine disciplines better?

We've started teaching reading strategies in science and social studies classes.  For example, I teach annotating strategies and assign annotation in social studies class.  It helps students deal with the abstract ideas in our economics curriculum, and it helps me see their thinking more clearly as they are trying to make sense out of the text.  This often slows us down, but I think we are getting better results from a slower, more methodical approach with unfamiliar, abstract ideas like the "invisible hand."  (I try not to call it that - with so many language learners, metaphorical terms can really be misleading.  There is no giant hand that directs markets.)

Two (related) big ideas that seem appropriate here are project-based learning and genius hour or 20% time (also called Google time).  The former focuses on larger, multi-disciplinary projects through which students are learning as they work, and applying the learning to a larger context, as they would in a real project outside of school.  The latter is based on a business practice at Google, where employees are given a significant chunk of their work time to pursue their own "pet projects" that they care about, then present those projects to managers.  The idea is that students will be much more engaged - and learn much more - if they choose the topic and are given adequate time, tools, and support to learn about it.  

I've pledged to try Genius Hour again this year, and I hope to work on several projects over the course of the year.  I'd also like to give students much more time and more opportunity to share and collaborate on these projects.  

Are there other, medium-sized ways to work across disciplines?

I think the "academic" or "study skills" approach is valid, but that it shouldn't be merely limited to the "home base" or "flex" time we have at the end of the day.  We have common academic vocabulary lessons, focusing on words like "specific" that are useful in almost all disciplines.  This is a good way of synergizing, and helpful for students and teachers.  Looking for opportunities like this can really be helpful.  I taught a lesson on brainstorming, for example, during home base.  This type of thing can really be helpful in several classes.  Research skills can really help, as can note-taking.  

So, I think the answer is to look for medium and large-scale chances to integrate.  

Using verse novels in the classroom

I don't know how much attention these things are getting anymore.  I think the trend has slowed a bit, but it doesn't seem like it was that long ago that YA/MG novels in verse, like Crank by Ellen Hopkins or Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse, were getting a lot of attention from teachers and students alike.  (And of course, Love that Dog is a classic of this type, though it's probably young for most of my seventh graders.)

I enjoy books written in verse, and not just because they are often quick reads (although that is a major selling point).  I enjoy poetry, of course, and reading a verse novel is a nice blend of two of my favorite things (though I could probably read a bit more poetry these days).  

This format also fits novels about emotional struggle and loss very well, and many of the best verse novels I've read are about trauma.  Shark Girl, probably the first YA novel that I read that was written in verse, is about a young woman whose arm is bitten off by a shark.  This is traumatic enough, but she is also an accomplished young artist who doesn't think she can pursue her dream anymore.  That combination - physical suffering and potential loss of identity - became a resonant, emotionally-dense narrative that I was able to read in less than two hours.  

I haven't read every verse novel that I've heard of.  I read Crank and was disappointed.  It wasn't as searing as I had hoped, and felt predictable.  Here's a short list of my favorite verse novels:

Inside Out and Back Again by Thanha Lai

Shark Girl by Kelley Bingham

All the Lovely Pieces by Ann E. Burg

Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse

True Believer by Virginia Euwer Wolff

Yellow Star by Jennifer Roy

By the River by Steven Herrick

There are a lot of other great titles on a list I found here, in case you want to look for more.  The titles above I have read and enjoyed.

The best part about novels in verse is that they can be very motivating for struggling readers.  I've had success using Shark Girl, Out of the Dust, and All the Broken Pieces in the classroom.  Kids might be tempted to read them too quickly, though, so they have to be reminded to pay attention and listen for things that don't sound right, or that might be misleading or confusing.  

I'm also surprised to find several lists of "verse novels" include House on Mango Street.  I love this book, and I love teaching this book, but I suppose I never thought of it as a "verse novel."  It's very poetic, but I'm not sure that I buy into that - it's hard to "see" the poetry here, and opening that door makes the distinction much harder to make.  

Some notes from Larry Ferlazzo's SELF-DRIVEN LEARNING

I picked up a copy of this book not too long ago, and I've been slowly making my way through it.  It seems like Mr. Ferlazzo has done a lot of homework on motivation and engagement, and he has a lot of psychology research to support his explanations of how to motivate kids.

Some of what he talks about is familiar to me, but here are some things (and the interesting names for them) that I've already learned:

- the Progress Principle - people are very motivated by seeing themselves grow or make progress toward a goal.

- the Zeigarnik Effect - once people start something, they tend to want to finish it.

- the Hawthorne Effect - people do better and work harder when they think they are being watched, and also that people will work hard to do better at something if they feel they are an important part of something (and not hard at all when they don't think they are an important part)

- the Losada line - positive feelings have a big impact on learning and retention, but criticism/negative feedback, though necessary, can counteract positive feelings.  The Losada Line is the optimum balance of positive comments and negative feedback or criticism - about three positive comments or interactions for every one criticism.

Those are some of the most interesting for me.  I was also surprised at how much of a positive effect that "gratitude letters" - letters about what students are thankful for - can have on so many things.  (Something I'm going to try next year.)

I like correlating this book with Dweck's MINDSET, so I'll try to keep updating and looking for connections.