Three Lesson Ideas Inspired by My PLN This Week

This week, members of my personal learning network (PLN) have inspired me with a couple of good English teaching ideas, which I’d like to share. I have not tried these out yet, and I still need to develop them further, but I really like their potential. By writing this blog post, I have been able to reflect on these ideas a bit more. As always, all feedback and suggestions are welcome.

Thanks to those of you in my PLN who share your knowledge with others and who pass along good ideas as you come across them.

Lesson 1: Writing Conclusions

The first lesson idea came to me from Meredith Boullion via Twitter and is about teaching students to write conclusions. Meredith received the idea from Caroline Trull’s blog post.

The lesson is very simple. In fact, it’s so simple that I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that I’m the only English teacher not doing something like this already.

1. Teach the students the goals of a conclusion.

2. Provide the students with examples of different styles of conclusions.

3. The students read essays with the conclusions removed.

4. The students write their own conclusions for those essays.

5. The students see the original conclusions.

6. The students reflect on and discuss how their own conclusions are different than the authors’, and which ones are better and why.

That’s it. It’s a very simple use of the constructivist predict-observe-explain (POE) model of teaching (White & Gunstone, 1992) where the students encounter knowledge that is different than what they held previously and then learn by coming to terms with it.

I’m not sure if I’d provide the students with the examples of different styles of conclusions at the beginning, though, or if I’d let them discover those different styles in steps 5 and 6 before giving them some sort of reference for the different types of conclusions. That’s something I’ll have to think about some more. As well, I would use this lesson with my grade 11 students right before they had to write their own conclusions for their research papers. That way they’d be putting their learning to use immediately.

Lessons Two and Three: Narration within Narration

I like reading literature that has interesting narrators.

• “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver – The narrator is the main character, but the narrator’s opinion of the story’s events is different than the main character’s is at the end of the story; therefore, the narrator’s realization must have come between the end of the story’s events and his telling of those events.

• True Grit by Charles Portis – There are many reasons I couldn’t put this book down, but one of them was the strength of the narrator’s voice.

• The Princess Bride by William Goldman – Aside from being a fun read, this novel has some interesting interruptions by the narrators.

• Middlemarch by George Eliot – At work two years ago, two colleagues were talking about the intrusive narrator in Middlemarch, so I knew I’d have to read it. Then I read Daniel Deronda, which has a similar type of narrator.

• Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King – The narrator is often interrupted by the characters of his own story talking directly to him. Often, they inform him him that he is  telling the story incorrectly, so he has to retell portions of it.

• The Reivers by William Faulkner – I have not read this, but it was recommended in the comments of Laura Gibb’s Google+ post that I mention below. Apparently, the story is framed by only two words at the beginning of the novel: “Grandfather said”. That novel is now on my “To Read” list.

Because of my interest in narrators, I latched onto a Google+ post by Laura Gibbs (She also has a blog post about the same topic). In part of it, she discusses her interest in framed narratives (narrator within a narrator), and how she’d like to use that as a focus for her students’ reading and writing.

She was thinking of having her students write a narrative and then frame it in another narrative. I think this is a worthwhile exercise, but I will need to sort out best method of teaching students to do this and to have them work on it. It looks like it would be a good exercise not only in structure but also in voice and transition. It would probably be best for me to assign this after the class has read Frankenstein and discussed that novel’s narrative structure.

Of course Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, is another good story for the study of narration with its narrator within a narrator within a narrator. Since it pairs well with Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” anyway, and since the poem has a narrator within a narrator, it may be a good time to compare aspects and effects of the narrators, or perhaps the story-telling honesty of Victor Frankenstein and the mariner.

So there you go. In one week, I have three lesson ideas that are inspired by members of my PLN. Thanks again to Caroline Trull, Meredith Boullion, Laura Gibbs, and the commenters in those posts for sharing your knowledge and ideas with the rest of us.

References

Bouillion, M. https://twitter.com/realtechfored/status/420376306380193792

Gibbs, L. (2014, Jan. 7). Third person storyteller style [Google+ post]. Retrieved from https://plus.google.com/u/0/111474406259561102151/posts/Kq465FU6bRu

Gibbs, L. (2014, Jan. 7). Third person storyteller style [Web log]. Retrieved from http://writingwithaesop.blogspot.ca/2012/01/paired-storytellers-stories-in-dialogue.html

Trull, C. (2013, Dec. 16). Writing superhero conclusions with the phantom endings exercise

[Web log]. Retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/blog/writing-conclusions-phantom-endings-exercise-caroline-trull

White, R. & Gunstone, R. F. (1992). Probing Understanding. London: The Falmer Press, chapter 2 & 3.

Shared Note-Making with My English Classes

My first blog post is going to be a reflection on my implementation of shared note-making, which I began in September this year. Even though there are many ways to implement shared note-making in a classroom, the core idea is that there is one set of notes that are made by students and shared among the entire class. I first heard about shared note-making from Alan November at a conference a few years ago and have been thinking about the idea ever since. Last year a fellow English teacher at my school tried it out during a Shakespeare unit, and reported back how well it went, so I was encouraged to try out shared note-making this year. My colleague also put a nice twist on the idea. In a class with few computers, she had one student type the notes on a computer that was connected to a projector so that the rest of the students could view them. This is a good idea for a class that does not have technology in the hands of every student.

My Approach

I haven’t done anything too adventurous with shared note-making yet. I figured that I want to get a hold of some of the basics first. I have a shared a Google Drive folder with each of my classes. In the folder, I have one document for each day of class, and I try to get the documents up one week ahead of time. At the top of the document, I type the planned agenda for the day. The agenda includes hyperlinks to any resources that the students need for the lesson. The students are free to print anything out ahead of time, and I make hard copies of any poems or texts that the students need to annotate. The agenda, of course, is flexible and will occasionally change in the middle of a lesson as our exploration of the topics can take us in new, but still valuable, directions. We will sometimes add new resources as we come across them in class.

I rewrote the notes for this example because I did not want to publish my students’ work. However, this is a close approximation of the quality, style, and language my students used.

Below the agenda is where the students make the notes for that class. During each class, there is one student in charge of the note-making and one student supporting her. The students rotate these roles. However, it isn’t uncommon for other students to support as they see fit. In fact, I try to encourage that. After each natural break in the topic, I ask the students to evaluate the notes that have been made and decide what should be added, removed, or edited. I look at them to check for the class’s understanding of the topic. Students can also make their own notes in their own books or on their own devices.

Benefits

There are five benefits that my students and I have noticed:

1. My students negotiate knowledge.

• When the students come to an agreement about the quality and accuracy of the notes, they are negotiating their knowledge, and accommodating the knowledge into their prior understandings (Barab & Duffy, 2000; Xin & Feenberg, 2007).

2. I can see what my students do or do not understand.

3. The students use the notes to help catch up on missed classes.

• My classes have a lot of discussion in them, which is very tough for students to catch up on if they are away. However, the notes at least give them an idea of the main points they missed.

4. The students can use the notes for review.

• Because we use Google Drive, my students can search for a topic and have a search results list of each class when that topic was discussed.

5. The students learn how to make notes.

• I begin the year by giving my students some pointers on how to make notes. I could, though, do a better job with this. My students also see how their peers make notes and learn from them. Because the notes are for everyone, the note-makers tend to make high-quality notes that are nicely laid-out.

What I would like to improve on

I would like to do the following:

1. Remember to have students evaluate the notes more frequently.

• Sometimes I will forget this step until the end of the class, and there are times when I forget to do it at all. This step is crucial for many of the benefits but especially for the first one.

2. Have the students do more of what Vatonen, et al. (2011) call, “Developing Lecture Content”.

• “Developing Lecture Content” means that the students don’t make notes only on what I or other students say in a discussion, but they also include their own interpretations of the content, which reveals understandings and misunderstandings. They can also include new ideas and questions for further discussion.

• This may involve having the students add more to the notes after the class is over.

3. Make room for more flexibility of note-making styles.

• Valtonen, et al. (2011) suggested that students may want to draw lines and other markings. Students may also want to enhance the notes by adding images and other multi-media.

4. Revise the model I use so that it better fits a student-centred class.

• Right now, my approach to shared note-making seems too mechanical and tailored for lecture-based teaching, which isn’t how I teach most of the time. In fact, I’m working  very hard this year at developing improving the amount of student-centred and personalized learning that happens in my classes, so the shared note-making needs to reflect this. In points 2 and 3, I have mentioned two ways that I would like to notes to be more student-centred. However, I’d like to continue evolving the shared note-making to make it even more flexible, more student-centred, more meaningful, and more personalized. This will likely mean completely redoing my approach.

Conclusion

I’m glad that I’ve begun implementing shared note-making in my classes this year. Even though I have much to think about (Doesn’t that apply to all aspects of teaching, though?), I’m seeing some solid benefits to continuing this in future years. Some of my students have been wanting to make shared notes in other classes, and, in an anonymous survey, the majority of them said they found the shared note-making useful for their learning. To me, it seems like something worth continuing.

References

Barab, S., & Duffy, T. (2000). From practice fields to communities of practice. In D. Jonassen and S. Land (Eds.), Theoretical foundations of learning environments. Mahweh, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Valtonen, T. T., Havu-Nuutinen, S. S., Dillon, P. P., & Vesisenaho, M. M. (2011). Facilitating collaboration in lecture-based learning through shared notes using wireless technologies. Journal Of Computer Assisted Learning, 27(6), 575-586. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2729.2011.00420.x

Xin, C., & Feenberg, A. (2006). Pedagogy in Cyberspace: The Dynamics of Online Discourse. Journal Of Distance Education, 21(2), 1-25.