Poetry Empowers

This is slice 18 of 31 for The Slice of Life Story Challenge hosted by the 

talented team at Two Writing Teachers--thanks Tara, Stacey, Betsy, 

Dana, Anna and Beth. Click over to the 

Two Writing Teachers' comment stream for seconds or to serve up your own slice.

"I want to talk to you about how poetry might just change your life."  - Dana Gioia, Poetry Out Loud

Poetry changes lives. It changed my life when I used it to write my way through hard times as a teenager. It changed my life the first time I witnessed a living poet perform and breathe magic into verse. Poetry inspires. It supports.  It pokes and prods. Poetry cajoles. There is not much poetry cannot do.

Today I watched poetry transform my students. We began a few weeks ago analyzing word choice and discussing poetry during our weekly Socratic discussion. We listened to poems from Poetry Out Loud. We chose poems to spend some time with and students took on Expressionist roles to illustrate them and analyze them in their Altered Analysis books (click here to see the project description).

Paul chose to capture Hamlet's soliloquy in his Altered Analysis book.
We are learning about art movements and applying what we learn to a poem every few weeks. 

Last week student experienced a bit of poetry heaven when Sara Holbrook visited. Consummate poet, she created poetry fire (the students' words)  with her stories, performances and poetry lessons. Students have studied, worked through, analyzed and memorized a piece of poetry. Today we plugged into poetry's power through performance.

"Poetry helps to enlarge our humanity and give us the power to express it." - Dana Gioia

Today, Paul tapped into that expressive power. Incredible, he took several pieces of poetry and put them together as if he were crafting an oral interpretation for debate. He put the text marking tips Sara gave us last week to immediate use. You can see his P.I.P.E.S. marginalia as well as Sara's advice to mark emphasis and vocal sounds as well as her tip to not "hit the rhymes too hard" and to "tell a story."

You can see his effort on the page. His preparation paid off. He absolutely wowed us. He stepped off those pages and became the words. I only captured a short clip, but here he is at the beginning of his piece: amazing, inspired, empowered.

Planning for What?

This is slice 17 of 31 for The Slice of Life Story Challenge hosted by the talented team at Two Writing Teachers--thanks Tara, Stacey, Betsy, Dana, Anna and Beth. Click over to the Two Writing Teachers' comment stream for seconds or to serve up your own slice.

Today I am thinking about lesson plans {and grades}. Our third quarter ends this week, so it seems natural that I reflect on planning {and grades are due Friday}. I've written about my own lesson planning processes a few times. I wrote about what teachers at my school are required to include in their plans here and I wrote about audience, feedback and lesson plans here. "The Evolution of Lesson Plans: Throwback Thursday" is probably my favorite post on lesson planning though because I took time to look back ten years or more and see how my planning process changed.

My understanding about what and how I am teaching shifts year to year as I continue to learn and hone my craft. That's part of what I love about teaching--tinkering with what will work even better with the next group of students.

Today I am thinking about what. What is being taught? What am I teaching students --is it a concept or a process? Am I teaching them how to __ in order to__? Am I teaching students a work (insert piece of literature here)? Am I really teaching a standard ?

One of my mentors used to say that language arts is a content area. She would describe how content area teachers looked down on the language arts. We're not as "hard" as math and science. We don't have as many concepts as world history or anatomy and physiology. Sure we do. But our students have had more years of practice in English than they have with other content areas. Our processes help students learn the world.

Not to short change our concepts. Concepts, of course, include all of the nouns you find in the standards. Looking at the first two reading standards we find a host of nouns: evidence, analysis, text, inferences, theme, central idea, development (of a text), specific details and summary. My lessons should address those concepts if I am teaching the standards. Here I am reminded that students cannot make an inference or discuss implicit meaning of  a text if they do not know what an inference is.

One thing I like this year about our lesson and unit planning requirements at school is that it forces me to re-examine my practice {and think about what I grade--participation, behavior, standards, knowledge, some or all of the above?.

We are at the point in our analysis and word choice unit where students are refining their understanding with practice and performance. I am not teaching explicit lessons this week--though I have modeled the writing (and performance) students are doing. Our first  learning goal (analyze how authors' choices affect meaning, theme and or tone) comes straight from our unit plan--it's a big goal that we've worked on all quarter.

Week nine's lesson plans; plans are posted online with each week linked to each tab. Find this week  here. 

I am not sure if it makes sense for me to carry that goal day to day (repeatedly). That is something I've been thinking about lately. Do I need to parse it more or does it naturally come back to the big picture after we've examined all of the parts of the standards we're currently working with and from?

I'm just thinking about that this afternoon {as I  put off grading the papers from yesterday that I've got to get done}. What do you wonder when it comes to your lesson plans? I'd love to hear your thinking.

Dreaming of Differentiation

The Slice of Life Story Challenge is hosted by the talented team at Two Writing Teachers--thanks Tara, Stacey, Betsy, Dana, Anna and Beth. Click over to the Two Writing Teachers' comment stream for seconds or to serve up your own slice.

Is there a way to deliver differentiated professional development face to face in one room? I know well that  I can dip into the Twitter stream or tune in to a web-, pod-, lecture-, great course- cast, but can that autonomy and differentiated be duplicated face to face in a one-room professional development situation? Is there a a way to assess the adult learners in the room--or have them assess themselves--and break into three, four, even five groups based on where they stand in terms of the day's learning goal?

It's not a new question. I'm not the only one who has been wondering if it's possible. Professional organizations are on the verge of delivering it virtually (they have been for a while actually). NCTE is launching differentiated professional development--it's self-paced and online. I don't know that I've ever experienced it in person though. Can be done face to face with adult learners?

Can a stranger assess a learner in a thirty minute warm-up sequence? Can a teacher? I'd like to say I can get an intial assessment--enough to group and go and level up as we went. Certainly I know I can plan for a variety of levels of understanding. I am thinking: I need entry level guidance, I have some some experience and need practice, I understand but would like peer support and perhaps  let me investigate on my own. I'm just thinking here how it could look.

Can learners--adult learners-- accurately assess themselves or will they or we, like many of our students, choose to sit with learners we know? That's a different issue, isn't it?

Today a group from school participated in an "elements" training -- elements being items in the Marzano Art and Science of Teaching Framework that is being used to evaluate teachers in the state of Florida. My group thought the day would be different than it was. We've had experience with the elements and I think we expected to go deeper than we did. The day was not wasted though. We all wanted to get smarter and learn more.  With that mind set anything can be instructive.

The facilitator did a great job of going back and forth. She spoke from the power point and then we paired up or form triads or talked in table groups or picked person across the room, got up and talked. Of course, she called it "chunk and chew," a strategy moniker I could have done without, but names aside, she worked the room and the content in ways that modeled strategies. I appreciate that. The facilitator clearly has mastered the quick back and forth that Judith Langer describes in her Beating the Odds research.

She read the room, first thing, by asking for a show hands. It was the usual, who here is from ___ (insert grade level or job description). Perhaps she could have gone a step further in that assessment and read how experienced the educators in the room are with the Marzano model. A few folks I talked with were new to the elements and new to using scales to assess learning; others had one to four years of experience. A few questioned the change in language being used: desired effect of an instructional strategy to desire result or learning scale to learning progression for example. I wondered.

I wondered if there were a way to capture the group's experience and then divvy us up accordingly. Could we have met in years-used groups (how many years has your building or site used the Marzano model) ?  Could a written response or a quick post-it on a graph have given the facilitator enough information to sort and seat us?  Could the facilitator have differentiate the content we received? I wonder.

I appreciated the time. The time to reexamine my own thoughts about Marzano's elements and what they mean in terms of how I plan. The time to consider how to engage teachers in my department in that planning process. I appreciated time with teachers and leaders from my school too.

This was the first time I've sat a table learning side by side with some who attended and I must admit, I liked that they all took notes, that they all wanted to learn and that they shared their thinking. It was fun to focus on learning together.  We had interesting conversations even if the session didn't exactly fit our current needs. I appreciated the company and community. Still, I wonder.