Letting Go

This is a post I started in December. Since my students are currently writing their own blog posts, I decided to publish one as well:

This past week has been one of the most rewarding of my career. On Friday, two of my colleagues, Cathy Stutzman and Marci Zane, and I presented at the NJ Association of School Librarians conference in Long Branch, NJ. We presented on assessment, both that of the school library program and that of our students. Buffy Hamilton created a fantastic video about various formative and summative techniques and Heather Hersey was not only there via Twitter, but her brilliance was all over the powerpoint and learning plan we presented. Marci, Cathy, and I spent the day listening to speakers and prepping for our presentation, which was my first.

I was blown away by the experience. It's one thing to get up in front of teenagers to speak, but to speak in front of my peers and strangers was simply amazing. The audience's questions and feedback were invaluable; I left the session challenged and motivated. After the presentation, the three of us had dinner with some of the most amazing women I have ever met. One in particular, Alice Yucht, continued to blow my mind over and over; this is the educator that we all aspire to be. Dudes, I hope I have that much wisdom some day!

Alice really helped us to reflect not only on our presentation, but on what we are truly trying to do with this inquiry and information search process class. One of the many things we talked about (and there will hopefully be more posts to come!) was letting go in the classroom. By adapting this style, the teacher must let go of a lot. Some of it easier than others; it's very, very difficult to let go of what we love. And in many ways, we might be letting go of the things that made us become teachers in the first place. But once you've studied inquiry and you've given your students the power over their learning, you'll see why this can be even more rewarding. What I'll attempt to do with this blog is address some of the things teachers are often uncomfortable giving up and how I've dealt with them. Or honestly, how I'm still dealing with them.

The Unit Plan

The first time I taught Brit Lit in this new format, I simply replaced the traditional unit plan I would have designed for the course with a simplified, blank version for the students; this unit plan design is a modification of the Understanding by Design unit template. There are three basic building blocks to Stage 1 of each plan: the standards, essential questions, and outcomes. When my students and I attempted this in the Fall of 2010, they chose texts first, then developed essential questions, and chose state standards (this quarter, students rewrote the standards in student-friendly language). They were required to only have three standards: one reading, one writing, and one "other," which could be a language, speaking/listening, or technology standard. The next element students developed were outcomes: what skills or knowledge did they want from the unit? Stage 2 of the plan involved designing an assessment: how would the student demonstrate that they had attempted mastery of the standard and worked to answer the essential questions? The final stage was the learning plan: what would the student do to practice the standards and interact with the texts? This is one of the first unit plans developed by a student.  Each time we completed a unit, the plan was tweaked a bit and as my second class of students moves into their second unit this week, they'll be using this unit plan.  By not requiring my first class of students to attempt all categories of standards, I was doing them a disservice; we'll see how this next unit goes!  


For the first attempt, students completed four units over the course of nine weeks, an overly ambitious goal in hindsight. They were required to cover three of the five major literary periods: Medieval, Renaissance and Reformation, Neoclassical, Romantic/Victorian, and Modern; they were allowed to repeat one period. Students also had to read "long texts," meaning books, plays, or the equivalent in essays or poems; supplementary material, like artwork or poetry, was also a requirement, but that has subsequently been removed. Instead, students are now required to read fifteen poems of their choosing over the course of the class; I'll have to blog more about this in the future, since it is still an aspect of the course that I am working through. With the first class, we did not work through periods together; students could choose any book at any point. This proved to be completely chaotic--it separated students from each other since there were always a handful that chose completely unique texts that no one else read. There was a lack of class community, which I disliked, so this quarter, our first two units are designed around time periods: Medieval/Renaissance and Neoclassic/Romantic. This has provided a better opportunity for students to work collaboratively with other students who are either reading the same text or working through the same time period.

I wish I had started blogging when I made my first attempt at a totally student-designed course this past fall. Aspects of the course change nearly daily since there are so many decisions to be made.  My students in the fall were truly pioneers in their own right; while I may have "developed" the idea for the course, there is no way I could have kept it going if it hadn't been for them. Because really, that's the beauty of this type of class: it's exactly what the kids decide it will be.

Pure Dead Brilliance?

Well, I guess if I'm making my students blog about their experiences in Brit Lit, I should blog too. I am a part of this experience after all and I'll need to be able to reflect in order to grow (sounds so trite...). My apprehension about blogging is the same of my students: I'm scared to put myself out there, to see my mistakes and to share them with people. But I'm also inspired by my students; some of them have created brilliant posts, full of questions and the desire to be better. Plus, if my students can pull this off, we'll be changing education--not only here at Central, but in other schools as well.

The idea for this class came to me on the ride home from Point Pleasant this summer. I was thinking about how I wanted to approach teaching a British Literature course in only nine weeks. How was I going to cover hundreds of years of brilliant writing in such a short amount of time? I was overwhelmed by the thought that I would be responsible for choosing the three or four texts that might be my students only exposure to British authors. And then it came to me: give the control to them. Just because I love Jane Eyre does not mean my students will, so why not let them choose something they will love?

Earlier this summer, most of my time was devoted to the 1 to 1 pilot program here at Central. This program gives netbooks to students as a way to improve their learning and give them opportunities to reach outside of the classroom.  I was prepping another class I had never taught before--Contemporary Lit. Through my conversations with co-workers--Marci Zane, Cathy Stutzman, Mary Woods, and Heather Hersey--I learned more about student-directed inquiry, a concept I loved. And so through my panic over Brit Lit, emerged this amazing idea: allow students to create their own curriculum, their own learning plans, their own assessments. I begin sketching out a rough idea of what I wanted the course to look like--something I'll discuss in an upcoming post.