Text Complexity

What is text complexity? Why does it matter?

Great questions. I had the same ones as I sat in a professional development training session a week ago. Here's the gist of it. Text complexity refers to the difficulty of a piece of writing. There are varying levels of text complexity. For example, a children's book would have a low level of text complexity. The Federalist papers written by our founding fathers would have a high level of text complexity. The goal is keep students moving up this ladder. Too many times we offer them only reading materials that are at their current level. Sometimes, that's okay. But it's important to also give them reading materials that are just out of their current text complexity level in order to help them grow and achieve new levels of reading comprehension. The goal is not only college preparation, but workplace preparation. Someone who goes to college and takes a sociology course will need to be able to read at a high level just as much as someone turning wrenches and reading a technical manual. For heaven's sake, trying to program your DVD player using the manual can sometimes feel like an honors level course. We need to create readers who don't need everything brought down to their level. Instead, the goal is to create readers who have the ability to climb to whatever level is put in front of them using decoding skills, context clues, and reference skills for the words or phrases they can't figure out on their own. Raising text complexity for students, one of the goals of educators here at Newell-Fonda.

So far, So good

We are a few weeks into the school year and my blogging experiment with U.S. History is going pretty good. I really enjoy reading the students' blogs and seeing the personal touch they put into their designs. My favorite part is when they comment on each other's blogs and ask each other questions about their posts. I'm trying to get them to read their comments and respond when someone asks them a question. I want them participating in online dialogues about their own thoughts on history. As I type this, the students are working on a blog post about one culture significantly altering another. They are currently studying the interactions of American settlers and Native Americans in the mid to late 1800's.

Lower the Voting Age?

A colleague of mine recently e-mailed me a link to an interesting website where David Holford made an excellent argument for lowering the voting age. It got me thinking, "Should the voting age requirement be lowered?"

At first I thought it was a nice thought, but after reflecting on my own high school experience and political apathy, I figured it wasn't a battle worth fighting. But then it dawned on me. I didn't care about government or politics in high school because I COULDN'T VOTE ANYWAY!

I would have cared about politics and what was happening in Washington if my voice could have been thrown into the mix. Here at Newell-Fonda, U.S. Government is a class for mostly seniors and some juniors. How much more would they be involved in government and politics if they were learning about it at the same time they were being given the right to vote? Holford makes the case that we could be developing highly active citizens by pairing their education about government with their passage into voting eligibility.

In my own experience, I took government class in high school and then went off to college where I voted for the first time in a presidential election 3 years after I took the class in high school. My parents did not push me to become politically active beyond asking me, "Are you going to vote in the election?" As Holford explains, young people get out in the world and they are trying to figure out so many things about being an adult and voting just isn't high on the priority list. If it was a privilege they took on while still "in the nest" with mom and dad, they could get some guidance on the procedure and have a trusting environment to talk about politics in. It makes as much sense to me as a kid learning to drive while still under mom and dad's roof.

I encourage you read the website I linked to above and see what you think about lowering the voting age.

Blog it Up!

This year in United States history class, the students are going to be blogging throughout the year. I've always wanted to try having the students blog their thoughts. I'm a really big fan of having my students write about history. Blogs give them an opportunity to be creative in their design and learn a cool modern skill. Many people have blogs nowadays. In fact, many people are making money off of writing a very interesting and well designed blog. Of course, my students will not be putting advertising on their blogs to make money, but some of them might find blogging to be fun and may start a blog on a personal interest of theirs. This will be a fun year trying out the blogging format for class and I'm sure I'll find some hiccups along the way, but it will be worth it.

Renewal

This summer I started working on my Master's Degree from Morningside College. One of my first classes has been Instructional Technology. I have learned a lot in this class and one of my main projects has been improving my class websites and making them more integral to my classes, as well as user friendly for my students.

I use Google Sites to host my class websites and I have been doing quite a bit of research on their tutorial and help pages to try and improve my knowledge of their systems. I do learn a lot just by playing around and trying new things in the site management area. I have also been reading various blog posts about best practices for site design.

I am really excited to start the new school year and use all these changes I've made to my sites to give my students a better experience in class.

More Writing Please

I recently gave my U.S. History class an assignment of writing film analysis papers on the movie, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.  We watched the film as part of our Westward Expansion unit in class.  As I'm grading the papers I am realizing that students need to write more.  I'm seeing a lot of mistakes that I think can be attributed to lack of practice.  I'm trying to work more assessments into my courses that require more writing from students.  I also don't want my students to get to college and be blindsided by the amount of writing they are going to have to do.  I've been hearing a lot from professionals that I know that being able to write well is such an important skill.

In this day and age with texting, e-mails, twitter, and Facebook posts, being able to write and express yourself well through written language can set you apart from your peers in the workplace or in the college admissions process.  One important thing to remember in this discussion of writing is that there is a time and place for many styles of writing. It's okay to use shorthand when texting or tweeting.  It's not okay to use shorthand when writing e-mails to employers or organizations.  I'm worried our students are not understanding the difference in contexts. 

I think I can help solve the problem in my own small way by having more writing assignments in my classes and showing my students what quality writing looks like. 

Lightning In A Bottle

I recently had such a great day being a teacher that I thought I should blog about it. Let me explain.

In my World History class, we are currently working on infographics covering ancient Athens and Sparta. I split the class up into 5 teams of 4 to do the project. This was all done randomly by drawing names out of my Atlanta Braves batting helmet. Based on the students in the class, I wasn't concerned about any combination of kids working together. This is a very hard working and high achieving class as a whole. I decided the students would work together using Google docs to do the infographics. I taped an example to the cabinet from a McDonald's/Starbucks infographic I had found and told them to consult it for questions on what one should look like. Each team had a captain that made the doc and invited their teammates to join them in creating it and then explained the instructions to their group.

Any of you that have used Google docs have experienced the frustration with it. It doesn't always put things where you want them to, it doesn't always format things the way you think it should, etc. My students grew frustrated at work that would be completed and then lost due to a Google error. (This happened over the course of a few days)  I kept encouraging them to try again. When one of them would complain to me about it, my response was, "What should we do about it?" Which led to their answer, "I guess do it again." And my reply was, "Good answer." 

Some of the students didn't have a lot of experience with Google docs and were trying to learn it. I encouraged the whole class that we were using this experience to learn about ancient Greece and also to build our technology skills. That is some backstory of our project. 

So Thursday rolls around and the kids aren't as far along as I, or they, would have hoped due to technology issues with the site. I started class by saying, "Clearly we are having some technology problems that are keeping us from accomplishing our goal. What should we do about it?" One girl, who probably had the most work lost due to errors, and was well versed in my suggestions, answered aloud, "Push through it!" I laughed and said, "Great answer! But what else can we do? Let's talk about it." 

Another student spoke up and said, "What if we created our graphics and stuff in another application and then took screen shots and dropped them into the doc?" I told them I thought that sounded like a great idea. With that student's suggestion, the class was reinvigorated with hope of getting this assignment done. The kids then worked harder than I've ever seen them work. It was awesome.

One girl sitting on the floor with her group, looked away from her project long enough to say to me, "How about some working music Mr. B?" I plugged my iPhone into the speakers and turned on my classroom mix of music and we kept working along. And I do mean WE. I had my laptop with me and would go to whichever group wanted some help. Since they've shared their docs with me I would pull it up and basically join their group as I did some editing, researching, and troubleshooting. When we all got over the hump of whatever problem we were working on, I'd exit the doc and wait for another group that needed me. 

I saw kids helping kids and teaching each other. That was my favorite part. At one point, I heard a student call out to her teammate from across the room, "Can you get a map of Sparta in here?" The other girl replied, "I'm on it!" And then buried her nose in her work to get it done.

As I'm floating around the room, I just stopped and looked around. None of the students even noticed I was in the room for a while. They were just problem solving, teaching each other, and having a good time while they worked. Every one of them was focused on the mission. Textbooks were cracked wide open and screens were lit up as facts were checked, websites were being consulted for images, and kids were creating graphics to go into their project. I could have left the room and nothing would have changed. I knew then that I had to find a way to create more days like this in my classroom. 

Towards the end of the period, a student approached me and said, "Hey Mr. B, ours is bigger than we thought, we're thinking of doing two infographics together. Is that okay?" My response was, "I'm going to leave that decision up to you. Whatever you and your group think is best." You could tell he appreciated the freedom to dictate the course of his own project and I like not having to think for all the kids in the room. 

I also saw one of my more disengaged students get totally into this project. His teammates gave him a specific aspect to work on and he took ownership of it. He asked for feedback from me on his image selection and got some advice on how to insert text boxes, and even was proactive about calling a teammate over for help. 

That was Thursday. Friday was the final day of the project since I extended the deadline due to our tech issues and the fact that the kids just weren't done creating yet. Friday was full of more troubleshooting and teamwork. I'm excited to see the final project. I will hang them in my room with pride and those kids will remember how hard it was to create those stinking infographics on Athens and Sparta! 

I am not a perfect teacher by any stretch of the imagination. These kinds of days don't happen all the time. I'm still trying to figure out this teaching thing. But these last couple days with my world history kids have left me going home feeling on top of the world. They've been knee deep in ancient Greece and technology for the last week and I know they've learned a lot and I can't wait to give them an assessment to prove it.  I couldn't have a classroom like this without the freedom from my school to use technology, play music, let kids sit on the floor, and basically create the environment I want to.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go try to figure out how to catch lightning in a bottle.