An exciting year ahead

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As the students trickle back to school – for some, 7 weeks holiday is not enough – we now have a full complement in Grade 9, 10, 11 and 12. It’s our first year with a Grade 12 graduating class, so that in itself is exciting. We have some new students in grades 9 and 10, and have lost some students who have moved to pastures new so the classes all feel different.

This year there will be much more project-based learning going on and I’m excited by the changes that I am making to my syllabus and hope that the students respond well and become independent learners. It may be a slow start as they get used to this new way of working but I’m sure I will see a blossoming as students become more and more in charge of their own learning. I have reduced the number of units, built in a great deal of choice with regards to the texts used to explore the concepts, as well as choices in the ways in which the students demonstrate their understanding. I am mindful I also need to continue to develop their essential skills too but if this occurs in an authentic way, those skills will be more meaningful and relevant and make the acquiring and developing of them that much more successful.

Grade 9 – Culture

Grade 9 are starting off the year with a unit entitled “Culture”. To explore the concept of culture, the students will choose one of the four novels on offer, four short stories from a choice of several, and six poems from three different collections, complementing those literary texts with some non-fiction texts which they find for themselves. This unit centres around the production and reception of texts and explores how language is used to express and understand culture. We started with a general discussion: what is culture? The students viewed the cultural iceberg image and we discussed that much about a cultural identity is hidden and for many of us, it’s not clear cut. The students are exploring their sense of culture by producing a personal cultural map, visually showing how they see their own cultural background.

We are going to make our classes as connected as possible without being too bound by the classroom walls, so the students will continue to blog about their learning journey and I have introduced them to the world of Twitter. We agreed a hashtag which we will use for the year – #LisLAG9 to represent Léman International School language arts grade 9. It will be interesting to see how this develops as it’s a new way of communicating for many of the students. Their first Tweet should be “Culture is …” using appropriate hashtags. Some students have managed this:

#LISLAG9 #culture Culture is tradition or a belief for a family or a person which they experienced to built an “entire” personality.

Culture is the way you think, interest with others. Your beliefs, values, customs, attitudes, and behavior. Culture unites people.

It may not seem like such a big deal, but trying to get the students accounts on Twitter was not as easy as it should be. But we’re getting there. As I continually tell the students, the vagaries of the internet in China cannot be seen as an excuse but merely an opportunity for some creative solutions.

Grade 10 – Power & Leadership

Grade 10 will be working in a similar fashion this year. It’s even more important for the grade 10 students to become independent learners in order to prepare for their studies next year in the IB diploma programme. Returning students from last year will have some experience of this as we ended the year doing a project-based unit with the novel Frankenstein at its core. This year there will be more choice of texts, allowing for greater student input, engagement and personalisation.

The first conceptual unit is based around developing an understanding of power and leadership. A variety of texts, both fiction and non-fiction, print and visual, will be used to explore these concepts. The students have a choice of one novel from a possible four, two films from the many on offer, a biography of a leader they are interested in researching, and some self-selected and researched non-fiction texts, such as newspaper and magazine articles. As a starting point, the students will be seeing if they can come up with a “formula” for a good leader to investigate whether there is a set of common traits among good leaders. We will then discuss whether being a good leader means you have to do good things: Hitler, for example, could be considered to have been a good leader. They will then use these discussions as a way of exploring the characters in their novels and films, and the biographies through which they will investigate some real-life leaders. The unit will last eight weeks, during which there will be on-going formative assessment in a variety of forms, including Tweets and blog posts, to ensure the students are developing their understandings as well as their skills. Summative assessment will take different forms for different students. Over the course of the four units during the year, the students will have to balance out how they demonstrate their understanding. It’s important they continue to develop their analytical writing skills as well as creative and oral responses to texts but when they do which is up to them over the course of the year. One of the advantages for me is that this should mean that I will not have a whole class load of essays to assess all at the same time

At the beginning of the unit I envisage having to provide more structure for the students, particularly for those less used to working in this manner but experience tells me that students will relish the opportunity to be more in charge of how they learn as well as what they learn and will rise to the challenges and therefore reap the benefits of project-based learning.

 


Project Based Learning

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[The following represents a re-work and expansion of a post already published on my other blog.]

OK, it’s time to stop testing the water with a toe and jump with both feet into project based learning.

Grade 10 have today made the leap with me. A leap of faith? I hope not. Let’s hope it’s more of a giant leap forward.

But enough with the metaphors. Just as I require Grade 10 to document the process, I will do the same. I have been exploring project based learning for a while and have put it into practise in a small way. Now is the time to see how it really works, whilst addressing required learning outcomes and assessing the students effectively in order to write their reports at the end of the semester.

Day One: Introduction of the Unit

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I introduced the project to the class. We were due to do a unit on 19th Century European literature, and they have done a small amount of research in preparation. Today, we were going to start reading Goethe’s Faust. And then I stopped. Really? What can the students possibly gain from that? What’s more important is to grapple with the ideas contained within the text, rather than the text itself. What would you sell your soul for? How much are your dreams worth? Not wanting to waste the work already undertaken, and believing that the essence of the unit has value, I decided to change the way in which we worked, rather than change the unit completely and so I used elements of my previously written unit to introduce the project to the class under the following headings:

Topic:

19th Century European Literature: From Romanticism to Realism

Big Idea:

Expressions of the heart and life’s lessons: the age of Romanticism and the emergence of Realism

Essential Questions:

  • How do literature and social change connect?
  • In what ways were the Romantics influenced by both the natural and supernatural?
  • What are your dreams worth?
  • If everything is representation, what is real?

Learning Outcomes:

(these come from our curriculum)

  • Produce a variety of texts appropriate for audience and purpose
  • Determine central themes or ideas in a text
  • Compare and contrast themes and ideas within and between texts
  • Organise and develop ideas for the purpose and audience

Given the above prerequisites, the students need to produce a multi-media project, documenting their process and progress. They need to use 19th century literature as the vehicle to explore the ideas, so that the literature is secondary to the enduring understanding.

What I’m trying to impress on them is that they are not reading, for example, Faust or the poetry of Baudelaire or Wordsworth just for the sake of it, but as a means of exploring and understanding something more authentic and meaningful.

To ensure the project is still addressing the skills they need to be developing, they started with acquiring an understanding of some essential vocabulary:

  • Romanticism
  • Reason
  • Revolution
  • Idealised
  • Nationalism
  • Enlightenment
  • Industrialisation
  • Philosophy
  • Neo-Classicism
  • Realism

From there, they will start exploring some literature and decide what they wish to focus on and how they will present their findings. Despite several reminders that the ‘product’ comes last, of course that’s where they all start! “I’m going to do a video.” “I’m going to produce a rap song.” I have to say that I had to question where the latter fitted into the Romantic ideals, but if they can justify it they can do it!

It’s early days. They are currently engaged. Two of them are exploring a new ‘thing’ I found today: https://edu.hstry.com which looks promising.

Day Two: Providing Structure

As much as students enjoy project-based learning, I find that it’s important to give them some structure. Previous attempts at project-based units have lost momentum and meaning because of allowing the students too much free rein, and not giving them a framework within which to work. With each project-based unit, I am hoping that they will become more and more able to provide that framework for themselves, but at this stage there need to be stricter guidelines and deadlines in place to keep the students focused and productive.

Today was the follow-up lesson to the introduction of this unit on 19th Century European literature. Having given the students the opportunity for an initial surf of the internet and a read around of Romanticism in general and some authors in particular, I needed to get them to focus their thinking more keenly. Using Edmodo as our communication platform, I provided the students with some general links – mostly to Wikipedia as a first stop – and some statements that embody Romanticism – taken from ReadWriteThink – to ponder to help focus their thinking.

IMG_1773From this, and the initial details given, the students needed to come up with their main area of focus for their project, develop two research questions, and initiate some specific lines of inquiry. They had to discuss these with me by the end of the lesson, and write a blog post giving more details about this as their assigned homework. As I had told them that this project will require work outside of class time, I feel that assigning homework tasks is within the spirit of the project and will be enhancing and developing their learning, rather than being ‘busy’ work or homework just for the sake of it – something I try to avoid.

I found this approach to be quite successful: by the end of the class most students and all the groups had a much clearer picture of where they are going with this project and had clear and focused lines of inquiry to follow.

Some of the topics are:

  • How the philosophical and ethical thinking of the time is reflected in the literature
  • How social change and Romanticism are connected
  • How novels such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Phantom of the Opera provided impetus to the move from Romanticism to Realism
  • How the “limitations” of Romanticism led to the emergence of Realism
  • How the effects of Romanticism are felt in today’s world

Through the process of formulating and documenting their thinking, the students were able to determine in which direction their inquiries should go. For instance, in the first example above, the student will need to research what the philosophical and ethical thinking was and then find some examples in literature in which these are reflected.

I suspect as the students move forward, they will find they need to further hone and narrow their thinking in order to produce a demonstration of their understanding that is focused, detailed and specific. I continue to impress upon them a need for depth rather than breadth, otherwise the project becomes less meaningful in terms of enduring understandings.


Passion Project: Week One

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Week one for my passion project, so far, looks like this:

First steps:

  • I put a call out on Twitter for some advice as to what software options there were out there
  • I searched Google for “book creator software”
  • I downloaded and tried out Blurb.com/booksmart

Thoughts as I explored:

  • I had a little play with Booksmart and it seems easy to use but maybe not very creative. There are many templates and you just fill them in. I found out that to print, obviously, will cost – I wonder whether I can download and print elsewhere? Probably not as that would be how they make their money – much like the Apple books you can create from iPhoto. It’s not a huge amount of money, but getting the final product mailed to China is always a challenge.
  • What I’ll need is one I can do and have printed here, which will obviously be cheaper. Photoshop? I hope not, as that’s pretty hard work and very time consuming. I’m not very good at Photoshop.
  • Hmm.. rather than a book which can be published, I should investigate some sort of digital book – I’d like it to be in digital format and interactive: connect to my Tripadvisor reviews, restaurants and hotels I mention, sites I explore, Google maps, that sort of thing.
  • I had a reply to my tweet from a company which had a link to a great blog by a teacher of grade 1s and 2s who’s doing an ‘I Wonder’ version of genius hour.
  • Spoke to the Grade 11s and asked their advice about format – one student recommended iBooks Author, which is an app/software I can use on my Mac Air, so I’ll check that out. I can’t find it in the app store, so it may be a downloadable software. I’ll check it out. My Mac Air doesn’t have much space on it, so I hope it’s not too large a programme. I didn’t get a chance to try it out yet.

Progress:

All the students have to complete a proposal by the end of this week, so I modelled what I mean by completing my own. PASSION PROJECT my proposal

It was a good process to go through as it continued to help me clarify my thoughts and ideas. I’m sure it will continue to morph and change as I go through the project, but that’s kind of the idea.

I had a lovely comment from my sister-in-law about my previous post, who commented that it’s a good idea for everyone to think about their ‘passion project’ and “to take stock of where we are and where we want to go and what we want to do.” She also commented how much she’d enjoyed reading it, which is always gratifying. I’m finding that not many people are commenting on my blog itself, but rather where I share it.  Wherever the comments are, though, it’s always good to know that people are actually reading what I’m writing and thinking about it enough to make a comment. Makes me think I’m on the right track.


Let’s get blogging!

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Alrighty then. That’s all the student blogs set up. Let the blogging begin. I’m hoping this will be a way forward for my students to share their learning with a wider audience in an authentic way, as well as encourage them to reflect on their learning, explore their passions, and share their successes.

As the students began to explore their new blog space in class today and yesterday it seemed like there was a positively charged atmosphere in the room, so the signs are good. They will be able to use their blog to write their reading reflections, chart their progress in their passion projects and generally have a voice.

This will also be a useful tool for their student-led conferences at the end of the year and they can use this blog as their e-portfolio.


A moment of realisation

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I think I’ve just learned a very valuable lesson about blogging: don’t wait until you have time to write the whole blog to start writing down your ideas. I’ve had the belief for a while that a blog needs to be written all in one go – a stream of consciousness as it were. But I’ve come to realise from reading a few that they are often pieces that writer take time over and revise, and edit, and re-work and generally polish. This is a revelation to me, as I have, in the past, always written straight into the blogging site and then pressed ‘post’. I don’t think I’ve ever taken the time to “compose” a piece before.


Lesson one reflection

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Well, today was a big day in the online world of Grade 9 at Miras: the start of our completely digital unit.  For the next few weeks we will be exploring and inquiring into the huge topic of ‘rights’, and the impact that social media can have.  We started with a lively discussion from the outset – what are ‘rights’?  Who has them?  Who should have them?  What about animal rights?

From there, it was a big leap for some of the class into the world of digital communication. By the end of the class, I think we successfully got each student set up with Twitter, as a member of our class Wiki, and hopefully on a blog site too.  I think the hardest thing for most of the class will be to keep up with the blogging, but hopefully we can do some work on that and so achieve the two objectives of the unit: (a) to become more aware of and active in global issues; and (b) to examine the role of social media in effecting change.

I, for one, am excited about the possibilities that this unit presents.