Education – Page 8 – R. Tyler Horner

Teaching with Zombies

I teach a split class schedule this year, with three gifted sixth-grade social studies classes and two gifted seventh-grade Texas history classes. I just wanted to make this clear since some of my former posts have talked about my social studies classroom. My lesson I’m going to share this week is how I chose to teach about the four regions of Texas.

Under normal circumstances, the regions of Texas are boring. Usually people I’ve observed and I have lectured about the natural resources as well as the uniqueness of the regions. In that scenario most kids tune you out as soon as you start your lecture and remember nothing about the regions of Texas, which end up playing a big role later on when we look at exploration and settlement. My first time teaching the regions, I tried splitting my class into four teams and having a debate over which of the four regions was the best. The problem with that is that there are two plains that are using the same arguments and lose the desire to be competitive quickly. As I sat down to redesign my lessons I knew I had to scrap everything I’d tried before and completely start over.

I knew I wanted the kids in collaborative teams and I knew that the lesson had to center around the regions of Texas. I’m always a fan of low stakes competition in my class, so I was trying to think of a way the groups could compete without catering completely to the athletes in my classes. I decided to use the pop culture phenomenon of zombies to motivate my students beyond the desire to compete. I started on Monday of this week by setting suspense for Friday by simply labeling it as “Zombie Apocalypse Day” in my agenda for the week. When my seventh graders saw that on their agendas you could hear the murmurs of excitement. I knew I had them at that moment.

When Friday finally came around, we started with a simple warm-up that got them to recall the lesson from earlier in the week where we learned what the regions of Texas are. All the kids were still wondering how zombies played into the regions of Texas, but I didn’t answer any of those questions. I told them, after hearing their responses from the warm-up, that we needed to start preparing for zombies with a completely straight face. I told them that it’s not a question of ‘if’ but a questions of ‘when’. At that point I got them into groups, decided in which order they would select their regions, and get every team a region of Texas. I then gave them the rules of their scenarios:

Decide what you would do if zombies invaded your region of Texas.
There are no cities, roads, or other people.
You have only American Indian technology before the explorers came to the Americas.
They had to reference their textbooks for what resources they had at their disposal.

They basically had to think like an American Indian defending their lands from foreign explorers who kept coming after their land. The kids looked up and planned how to defend themselves from and imaginary enemy. The kids were very creative and immediately asked me what the limitations were of zombies. Most kids agreed that they couldn’t swim and didn’t like fire. They went to work and I went around and tried to fan their creative flames as they worked in their groups. Hearing their plans at the end were awesome and funny. We had good discussions about the weak sides of their plans as well as what they had really right. These discussions lead to discussions of how the type of zombie that invades would determine how long you could survive. For instance, if the zombies from The Walking Dead were coming after us we would probably survive longer than if the zombies from World War Z were coming after us. In turn this lead to discussions of particularly interesting places in Texas that would be easier to defend than others. It was a great day of learning and talking with my classes. I think I’ll keep this lesson around for a while and hopefully I can use the lessons learned in this quick assignment to help them understand the explorers relationship with the American Indians.

Longitude/Latitude Differentiation

The first week of school is always a fun week. I’d rather not have to act like a fool during the pep rally on the first day, but every teacher in the school is required to do that. I’m terrible with new names and since I’m not coaching this year I have two more classes of kids to memorize, but that’s fun in an odd way. This year is a little more challenging because our high school was introducing their one to one iPad program which means the tech integration specialists were swarming to handle any difficulties teachers or students might have. This also meant that we at the middle schools didn’t get the opportunity to set up all the student login’s handled the first week, so I went the low-tech route on my introductory concept which is longitude and latitude.

Longitude and latitude is one of the few skills that I get to teach in my social studies classes. Most of my kids have never used this to find absolute location, so it’s fun to teach a new concept and allow my kids to learn how to use it practically. After having an introductory conversation about how their phones and most location based technology actually uses longitude/latitude to find your position, we go over the basic method of finding a spot on a map. This includes finding the latitude on the side of the page and the longitude on the top or bottom of the page and tracing the lines to find the intersection. The first day we spend most of the time practicing and me answering questions about the maps we use. At the end of class, I give the students an exit ticket that has four basic questions:

Give me the longitude and latitude of Ft. Worth, TX
Latitude runs north/south or east/west
On a scale of 1-10 how confident are you in your answers?
Would you be willing to teach someone how to do long/lat?

Once the kids are done and the day is over I quickly sort the cards into piles:

Pile #1 – This pile is for all the cards that got #1 and #2 correct, were confident in the answers, and were willing to teach.
Pile #2 – This pile is for all the cards that got #1 and #2 correct, but were either not super confident or were not willing to teach.
Pile #3 – This pile is for kids that were wrong on either #1 or #2 or were not confident at all.
Pile #4 – This pile is for kids that were way off.

I match a person in Pile #1 and #3 for collaborative groups for the following day so that the kid who has grasped long/lat a little quicker can help his classmate that needs a little extra help. I partner the Pile #2 kids together because they have the concept, but don’t necessarily want to teach the concept to someone who doesn’t understand. I help the kids in Pile #4 since they do not grasp the material as well as they need to. With this system I get to help the struggling learners while allowing the stronger students in class to help their classmates in learning.

The next day in class we have a few practice problems to work on. when they have them checked to be correct they start creating one of three products to show their mastery of he concept:

Create a song that reminds people how to keep the differences between longitude and latitude straight.
Create a poster that visually reminds students how to find a location using longitude and latitude.
Think of 5 careers that would frequently use longitude and latitude, tell me how you think they use it, and then predict what the modern world would be like if longitude and latitude hadn’t been invented.

This was also the first assignment I gave narrative feedback for in my ROLE classroom this year. I found that my kids wanted to do their best and took the feedback well. Some groups were still in process at the end of the day on Friday, so we’ll be finishing it up on Tuesday. I think it was a great first lesson, especially since we didn’t have the opportunity to use technology at all for the week.

Constructivist Week

My week of inservice training is behind me and the kids come for the first time on Monday. I feel like the week before school has flown by and all of a sudden I’m scrambling to finish off a few last minute things this weekend. All things considered this was by far the best inservice week of my teaching career and the theme of it all would be ‘constructivist’.

Our district’s social studies theme for the year is constructivism and we spent some time looking at what that looks like in a classroom. We worked in groups to define the term and come up with things we’d like to know more about so that our curriculum director can work on some trainings throughout the year to help us out more. In the afternoon of this particular day, two of my co-workers and I got to lead a training on Project Based Learning which is our campus’ focus and has been for a year. We each shared a project that we had run in our classrooms this year as well as provided some ideas and things to think about when planning a PBL unit. We got some great feedback on our presentation and our curriculum director praised us at our campus later in the week.

Later in the week our principal brought in Mark Barnes to speak with the whole staff about his particular brand of constructivist learning. After he presented to our teaching staff as well as a number of district administrators, six of us got the opportunity to spend the rest of the day learning from Mark in a small group in a more in depth way. He shared with us about how he uses his website to be the hub of learning for his class, different technologies he uses, and ways to deal with the different problems we might encounter during our first year. I walked away from this day with a head swimming with ideas and not enough time to adequately plan out how I might implement them. On top of all that, my school issued a few of us an iPad mini to use in the classroom!

I’m really excited to push the envelope a bit this school year…in a good way. I’m ready to take a massive step toward transforming my classroom into a place where my students drive their own learning and create more than intake. I’m ready to think differently about education and I’m so glad that I have some co-workers who will be traveling this road with me.

Chatting It Up

With the school year coming so quickly my wife and I got the opportunity to take a quick family vacation to the mountains of Arizona. While we were up there I decided to take some time to try out a twitter chat. One of my main goals this school year is to take advantage of Twitter for professional development. With that in mind, I logged on to Twitter Monday night for the inaugural #RoleTalk chat and it was great.

Since it was the first time there weren’t an overwhelming amount of people participating, but that left us the ability to really talk with each other. I use TweetDeck to track all my hashtags and it really does help. I was able to monitor the overall scope of the chat while responding to certain people’s posts. I really like Twitter for intaking information, but I do find it difficult to decipher some people’s tones. I find that I see discourse on Twitter as a confrontation rather than a conversation so that will take some getting used to this year. During the half hour I was able to participate I was able to both receive responses from other people about the ROLE classroom, but also help people find solutions to their own questions. I really like the near constant flow of information during the chat as well as the ability to develop relationships with like-minded educators.

My plan for the year is to try and participate in two chats, #gtchat and #rolechat, as often as I can. Hopefully throughout the year I’ll post some reflections on how the chats have influenced my classroom. Between blogging and chatting, it should be a great year. I’m really looking forward to this school year and seeing how I can innovate in my classroom and evolve as a teacher.

Shark Week: A Case Study in Education

It’s that time of year again, when the Discovery Channel has their week of programming known as Shark Week. As a boy, I can remember being glued to the television watching program after program about something that intimidated me so much. I am so scared of sharks, that I really don’t like swimming in the ocean and I used to be scared in the deep end of the pool. That being said I still tune in every year to see the new programming that is basically the same thing over and over. Then I ran into this article about Shark Week and it struck me that it informs millions of viewers each year about marine biology and most of those people probably aren’t interested in science at all outside of this week. What can we learn from Shark Week as teachers?

There is Emotional Attachment

There are two types of people that watch Shark Week, the shark conservationists and the people that want to watch people or animals getting eaten. We all know people will rally to a cause like saving a species, especially when it is being harvested in huge numbers. Discovery Channel is not the only group that has taken on this topic, but they do a pretty good job of making this issue with shark populations. I wouldn’t say that this is the forefront of their shark coverage, but they do promote shark conservation on some level to a huge audience. The there is the sadistic side of humanity that is really only watching to see blood in the water. These are the same people (like myself) that watched Nick Wallenda walk across the Grand Canyon just to see if there was a chance he would fall. There is something about watching an animal that chances are most will never come into contact with ripping apart fake seals, whales, boats, etc. The funniest part about watching for this reason is most of the action in Shark Week is directed toward inanimate objects or is allusions or dramatic reenactments of actual events.

What if we could illicit these types of feelings on a daily basis in our classrooms? The number one question I get in class relates to how concepts or ideas apply to kid’s lives. Can we create emotion in our methods of teaching that would create meaning for kids? Is it possible to conjure up such strong emotions in a classroom on a consistent basis?

It Brings Together All Kinds

Between the conservation of sharks and the bloodlust of shark programming, a variety of people are brought together for a single week. A huge percentage of people I run into are excited about the beginning of Shark Week from all parts of society. Old friends from high school on Facebook, peers on Twitter, and children I’ve talked with at church have all mentioned Shark Week without any prompting from me. Imagine the conversations that could be started with such a common bond. Background, political beliefs, economic background, and even race all are minimized when the topic of Shark Week is brought up.

Is it possible for me to teach concepts in class in such a way that it brings together all types of kids? Is it possible that there are inherent topics that are so provocative that children are so interested that little else matters? Is there a way to tap into such topics without renting a national TV station for a week every year?

The Information is Reliable

Outside of a few random programs trying to find new information about a species, most of the information is repeated hundreds of times in a given Shark Week. It’s a wonder that after this many years we still want to watch the same basic show premise hour after hour in repetition. In reality, there are very few new shows every year, and this year they are adding a live program to end the day, which is not necessarily scientific in nature. With all this boring content, what we do find is that the information presented is repeatable, which is huge when it comes to scientific experiments. Multiple sources are all drawing similar conclusions about a topic, which is a huge desire in data collection and research.

This makes me reflect on my preparation for class as well as my students collecting of data. Do I do a good job of checking the sources of some of my material or do I trust that the textbook is providing me all the answers I need? Am I challenging my students to find multiple research sources that say similar things before presenting it as facts? Do I look at things in a scientific way, or do I shoot from the hip sometimes?

Conclusion

I hope that when a student leaves my history classroom they are as passionate about Texas History as many people are about Shark Week. Hopefully, as I continue to feed my nerdy desire to know more about sharks, I’ll continue to glean new ideas and ways of thinking about teaching through an expert like Shark Week. Whatever they started all those years ago has become a universally recognized phenomena that masterfully teaches all types of people about marine biology. Hopefully, one day, all education can do a job as wonderful.

Reflecting on Blended Learning

One of the many things teaching related that I’ve run across is the Middle School Matters website and podcast. Being a middle school teacher it made sense for me to learn as much as I can about the middle school mindset as well as learn from others in the trenches. As I was listening to their latest podcast (show 249), the guys brought up the idea that sometimes we are looking for the one classroom model to teach all students at all times. They brought up that maybe the idea of blended learning (defined as using teacher driven learning, student driven learning, flipped classroom, etc. where it fits best in the curriculum) is what we need to look at an not focus on only one model.

I’ve always struggled with models of teaching because none seem to fit my classroom just right. Currently, our school is really pushing PBL in the classroom, and I’m helping pilot some ROLE strategies in the classroom this year. Others in our district are pushing the SEM model, flipped classrooms, or are emphasizing STEM. It’s easy to see great teachers using a certain model and think to yourself “I need to try that”. I think it’s folly though to change the bent of your classroom year after year just to find that the outcomes don’t quite work for you and try again with something different. Maybe the greatest skill we as teachers can learn is how to use the strengths and weaknesses of all the different methods of teaching combined with intimate knowledge of each of our students to cater each unit to maximize learning and produce based on that knowledge.

If that’s the case, this still doesn’t give us any room to sit back and relax as a teacher. It means we need to be actively looking for teaching models that we haven’t tried. We should be scouring professional development opportunities and take advantage of our colleagues with varying backgrounds to expand your knowledge as a teacher. We should constantly be innovating and learning. We should take risks, just like we ask our students to take risks in class. We should relish the chance to get new technology in our student’s hands even if it doesn’t go too well the first time. The more we push ourselves as teachers, the more we are able to push our students in the classroom.

Don’t Get Stagnant

When I was in little league, my coaches used to tell me that if you’re not getting better you’re getting worse. I never really understood that growing up, but now that I’m on the wrong side of my sporting career it makes sense. I try to remember that during the summer where it’s really easy to fall back into what we’ve always done before.

Luckily my principal has either intentionally or randomly chosen to change the course I’ll be teaching almost every year I’ve been teaching which keeps me on my toes. It’s helpful, but as I’ve reflected on the beginning of the school year, I realize that they have always gone well but I’m beginning to wonder if I could do more or do things differently. I want to front load the first week of school with information gathering about my students to help me in meeting their needs throughout the school year.

The first weeks of school for my school is relationship building and introducing the students to our school. We have a project based learning initiative at our campus, so last year I put together a PBL for our 6th graders to introduce them to the process we go through for project based learning as a school. We found in it’s first year last year that it helped the new 6th graders better understand project based learning and the expectations their teachers had for them. It also helped the kids learn more about the school and our policies up front so they all knew what basic policies (library, technology, late work, etc.) were in the beginning which meant we didn’t need to cover them in our classes individually. The 6th grade team though it went really well and with a few tweeks it will be done again this school year. I’ll put up a post in the next few days where I outline this grade-wide project.

While refining the school-wide project, I want to do a better job of understanding all my students from the beginning. I did some reading on My Beginning of the Year Student Questionnaire by Pernille Ripp and her other post on Parent Questionnaires I decided that I could easily collect a lot of information very easily. I’m also going to try Curriculum Compacting with at least one student this year, so knowing more about each child’s interests will help me to create projects and products that they find interesting and engaging.

The other big change in my classroom is that I’ve been asked to be in a pilot group of teachers employing Results Only Learning Environment in my classroom as well as Standards Based Grading. I’m really excited about the change in grading especially. I know it will be a lot of work in the beginning especially while I’m getting used to it, but I realize that it’s better for my kids. I need to reread parts of the book to make sure I’m on the same page with the rest of the people who are piloting this concept.

I’m trying to be intentional about changing up my routines as I go through my career teaching so that I don’t turn into a formulaic teacher. That being said, I want to make sure I’m doing things that have real meaning and purpose for my classroom. I don’t want to push the envelope just for the sake of pushing the envelope, I want to make sure that it adds to my classroom or is research based. What are you doing to change your teaching this school year? Are you getting better or getting worse?

Is Compacting the Answer?

There are a number of things that the average classroom teacher must deal with regardless of location and circumstance. We have our state or national government telling us what students in our class must master to graduate, we have mandates from our districts for what is going on in our classroom, and we have (for the most part) increased student populations creating and overwhelming amount of children per classroom. With the vast number of things that are increasing the pressure on teachers as well as trying to work with struggling kids, providing for children with learning disabilities, and entertain students in ways we never thought we would have to how to we find time for everything? Is it possible that compacting curriculum could ease the pressure on the classroom teacher by allowing the gifted learners the opportunity to achieve higher while allowing the struggling learner the opportunity to have more time and attention from the teacher?

Compacting

Compacting is the idea that we pretest the students in our classrooms before each unit to see what they know and do not know about the upcoming material. If a student struggles with the material (as most should since you haven’t taught this yet) they move at the same pace you would normally teach. If a student can show aptitude that meets your definition of mastery you would compact their curriculum. All this means is that the student would not need to be retaught all the things they already know, but would be given an individual enrichment project based on their individual interests that they would work on while the rest of the class learns the material they have already mastered. If a child masters certain topics but not others you would have them work on their project only during the concepts they have not yet mastered.

I can almost hear complaints from where I sit typing this out right now. This seems like a logistical nightmare. Kids wandering everywhere doing something or another while you are trying to hold class for the kids that need to learn. The bottom line is that there will not be a significant amount of children being compacted at a given time. If more than a handful of kids have mastered concepts you are about to teach them, you might think about upping the rigor of your class rather than compact them all. Some classes may have a few kids while some may have zero children being compacted. If a child who has had their curriculum compacted decides to distract the class instead of working on their individual project, they can come on back and work on the stuff they have already mastered for the day. You can then talk with them about the choice they made and they can decide to choose to work on a project that works them in a way that will not distract the class or they can be bored out of their minds while they relearn old material.

Putting it into practice

I’ll be honest when I say that I have not tried this out in my classroom…yet. I’m going to try it out with one student this upcoming school year and really try and keep great records on how things go. I want to prove to myself that this can work and that it’s what’s best for the students in my classroom. I’m excited by the opportunity and I’ll try and report back on what is going on with the lucky child.

Coaching Change

This week is one of the biggest in my career as a teacher. It might be on par with my appointment to department head of the history department at my school and the day I was hired in my district (which was tougher since I was alternatively certified). This week I officially signed paperwork that says I will teach from now on, but not coach. It’s a bittersweet ending, but one that is the best for me and my newly formed family.

I have coached since the day I entered the classroom. To be honest, coaching was really something I wanted to try as well as a way to get my foot in the door with a district. When I was single, I thought I could coach for the rest of my career. Sure there were long nights and early mornings, but what else did I have to do? As I began to progress through engagement and into marriage time became more precious. Suddenly there were more forces at work pulling me all over the place. I wanted to do everything, but I was severely limited due to my coaching responsibilities. My wife and I began talking about what a family would look like and our desires for how it would operate. We didn’t agree on everything, but we did agree that coaching and family life don’t go together in our household. We decided that when we began our family it was time to begin looking for the ability to teach but not coach. I lucked out this year because some situations happened that opened up a full time history teaching position for me to take. Part of my brain thought I would have to leave my district and search for a position that didn’t require me to coach, but luckily that didn’t happen.

I’m really happy to be able to commit to more family events this upcoming school year. I’m excited to be able to take off a Monday, Tuesday, or Friday during the football season without being deathly ill. I’m really excited to be a true department head for the history team. I’m sad to not be around the awesome group of coaches at my school as much, but I’m excited to begin the rest of my teaching career.

Hypothetical vs. Reality

I feel like compared to a lot of classrooms I was presented with during the teacher certification process I have done a really good job of innovating in the classroom and putting into practice a lot of the neat ideas that we are presented with at any number of conventions and seminars we attend as teachers. I wouldn’t call my classroom cutting edge or overly progressive, but I would put myself further on that continuum than the old fashioned, sit and get methodology that we know to be archaic and outdated. Recently though I’ve had a tough time marrying the big, new ideas of the people attempting to revolutionize teaching and the reality of the classroom that I have to teach in.

I see a lot of educational bloggers and authors talking about how we should do away with learning standards and how we should end the push for a common core. I would tend to agree with the idea that we for sure have too many standards and that standards tend to make us teach to the lowest common denominator, not push our students to achieve more. I would love to be able to throw out all standards and just teach what is best for kids. There’s only one problem with that, I would probably lose my job. The administration at my school and even my district is among the most progressive group in the wonderful state of Texas. On top of that, we are among the highest performing districts in the state as well. With all that being said, if I didn’t teach the state standards to every kid in my class, my administration would find a way to get me out of teaching…and they would have a good reason to. We can all debate the points of state standards, standardized testing, and how they should be reformed, but until that day happens I will be teaching the standards that are put in front of me by the state I teach in. Knowing the content that you are expected to teach well enough to relate it to kids in ways they with receive it and have it change the way we look at the world is the essence of teaching. I’m not in the business of making kids read a history textbook, take endless notes about the reading they did, and test them over it in by having them regurgitate exactly what I told them the previous few days. I am in the business of teaching kids the big ideas of history, the cause and effect relationships in history, the amazing stories of epic people in history, and having the kids internalize history to make it real to them in modern times. All this is done keeping the state standards in mind so that I can be above reproach with my administration and teach the kids the topics and ideas the state wants them to learn in my classroom.

As my brain wandered through these ideas, I started to imagine a school where the teachers all taught what they thought would be best for kids and completely disregarded the state standards. I imagine the super-artistic teachers completely going off on tangents that have little or nothing to do with anything the kids need to cover during their tenure at our middle school. I see the overly political teachers standing on their soap boxes going off on their political tangents that make them look like talk show host. I see people that cover only a chapters worth of material in a school year because their belief is that the state got it all wrong. Call my cynical if you like, but without some sort of standards we are doomed to the whims of people who have taken up the mantle to teach. People tend to be fickle and that is exactly why we need some standards. Not to mention if everyone taught their particular passion in life, the kids across the country would get vastly different educations which would be very difficult to measure in any quantifiable way.

The problem with the modern day idea of state standards is that we have seen them as the bar for teaching. Our outdated attitude is “all kids need to know are the standards” and once they have those committed to memory our job is done. Speaking as someone who has only been teaching for four years, the standards gave me legs to stand on my first years of teaching. I luckily teach in a district that does not prescribe exactly what I need to teach and at what pace, I am given the ability to teach things how I see fit and how it would best make sense to my kids in my classroom. We walk a fine line calling for teachers to forget the standards and completely teach with passion alone. While I’m sure there would be wild creativity and imagination there will also be far less new teachers with much stamina in the teaching field.