A Week in the Life of an English Learner Classroom

This is a teacher evaluation year for me, and so I enlisted and peer pressured a friend and colleague, Jen Fong at one of my high schools to let me deliver information literacy to a couple of her English classes.  At first, I thought I was going to just co-teach her class of Emerging English Learners, but not wanting to juggle too many different lesson plans, we included all her college preparatory freshmen English classes too.  What was interesting about this undertaking were ALL our competing goals--Jen's to teach English-Language Arts and integrate technology into her instruction AND mine to engage students in some critical thinking by having them craft their own open-ended research questions as well as "replace patch writing and plagiarism with synthesis."  All students were reading A House on Mango Street, and so with protocols I learned from the Question Institute, I navigated students through writing their own close- and open-ended questions to the chapter "My Name" in Cisneros' novel.  Once they practiced some convergent, divergent thinking and metacognition, I gave them a new question focus based on Jen's overarching question, How does race, culture, family and/or ethnicity impact who I am as an individual?  We teachers really wanted our students' learning to be personalized and for them to research something they were really curious about.  Below is my model.

 Jen then added another layer to my worksheet atop.

Lest you think all that librarians do is just say shush, this is what I did today as a teacher librarian, which was model to English learners information and technology literacy.  I always put myself through the same paces as the students in addition to assigning them a series of learning tasks.  

What is it school librarians do?

I've been inspired by the blog, The Adventures of Library Girl, and I especially love her post, "Your Students Need a Reading Champion - Giving Yourself Permission to Read."  On that note, I need to return or rather start blogging about my profession as a high school librarian.  For the past 8 years, I've focused on the information literacy component or the teaching research, but one of the reasons I pursued the MLIS and this vocation was to become an advocate of reading and be awesome at delivering book talks and putting a book in a kid's hands.  And I've sucked at that honestly.  So here's where I'm going to start reading, rehearsing a book talks and finding the best passage to read aloud and pique a student's interest.  I'm drawing most of my training from the Pikes Peak Library District's "Booktalking Colorado."

First and Foremost a Teacher (Classroom Manager)

From the very beginning of my teaching career (which was an an English teacher, not a librarian), I thought classroom management was key to allowing instruction to happen whether it be in the library or an individual teacher's room.  Unfortunately, the high school library in these times of economic straits seems to be utilized as warehouse space for students rather than a place for robust learning.    I was reading the blog, Teacher in a Strange Land, a title I love because that's exactly how I feel as a librarian sometimes.  In Flanagan's blog, she talks about the "really important issues:  Building a functioning community.  Safety.  Personal dignity. Kindness.  Order.  Academic Integrity.  Democracy."  These concerns are exactly the kind of things I want to implement in a library space.  And so I'm copying verbatim from her blog the bullet points I also value:

• You're shooting for influence, not control.  Fact is, teachers never have absolute control over kids, even using techniques like fear, punishment, isolation and intimidation.  (In edu-speak, "consequences.")  You want kids to behave appropriately because they understand that there are rewards for everyone in a civil classroom.
• No matter what rules you put on paper, your most important job is role-modeling those practices, not enforcing them.  Behave the way you want kids to behave:  Ignore minor, brainless bids for attention.  Make eye contact with speakers.  Don't be an attention hog--your stories aren't more important than theirs.  Don't be rude to kids.  Apologize publicly when you're wrong.  Remember that you're the adult in the room.  It's your calm presence that institutes order, not rules.
• Rules shouldn't restate the obvious.  "No cheating" is a stupid rule.  "Bring a pencil to class" is a silly rule.  Any rule that begins with "don't" is a challenge to the rebels in every class.  Any sub-rule covered by the general idea of being respectful (or, if your students are in first grade, nice) doesn't need specificity.....
• Integrity helps build community.  The most important directives in democratic classrooms are around ethical practices:  A clear defnition of cheating, understood by all students, in the digital age.  Why trust and personal best are more important than winning.  Why substandard work isn't ever OK.  How true leadership--kids want to be leaders, too--is a function of respect.
• Carrots and sticks are temporary nudges toward desirable behavior at best, but ultimately destructive.  One of the phrases I hate most in the conversation around acceptable student behavior is "caught being good."  One of my kids' elementary school PTAs started a campaign to catch kids "being good"--one per week--and give them $5 and a mention in the P.A. announcements the next day.  Fortunately, the first rash of faux "good" behavior from spotlight-seeking 5th graders triggered a quick end to the plan.

Recently, a dean asked me to create rules for my high school library.  I resorted to my lifelong guidelines:  trustworthiness, truthfulness, active listening, personal best, no put-downs and crafted something similarly pithy.  Too pithy for him to just say that the library is an academic place of study and to use common sense.  But then again common sense isn't all that common when it comes to bureaucracy.

Flanagan, Nancy. "Who Makes the Rules in a Classroom? Seven Ideas about
     Rule-making." Teacher in a Strange Land. edweek, 14 Aug. 2012. Web. 15 Aug.
     2012.

RECOMMENDED READING FOR A.P. LANGUAGE & COMPOSITION, gleaned from my stint of reading and scoring A.P. English Language & Composition essays and talking books with my fellow readers in Louisville, Kentucky

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, Christopher McDougall

The Condemnation of Little B, Elaine Brown

Ghost Soldiers:  The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission, Hampton Sides

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, Barbara Ehrenreich

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell

Where am I Wearing: A Global Tour to the Countries, Factories, and People That Make Our Clothes, Kelsey Timmerman

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed

SVCUE - Where in the World Are We Going with eText? by Daniel Hudkins PRESENTATION

Good free content
*Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org
Online Books by University of Pennsylvania http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/
*Flexbooks http://www.ck12.org/flexbook/ (major effort to develop Creative Commons and Open Source content)

Limitations and obstacles of e-books
*edition
*pagination
*no abridgement
*mutual incompatibility of platforms
*highly variant objectives
*pedagogical history
*cost
*ownership

Where does text come from?
*Publisher identifies need
*Publisher finds author
*Two years later, there's a new text

Digital Rights Management (DRM)
*Not all content is available offline
*Not all readers work on all platforms
*Readers are different on different platforms (and doesn't work with all browsers)
*Same text from same publisher, same editiion, same ISBN won't run in the same reader application

Equity Problems or few schools have resources to
*assure all students with hardware
*pay annual licensin
*provide pervasive access

Cost Advantages
*Creative Commons and Open Source
*Markup tools (students can write in their books; annotations, highlights, study guides)
*Can it be monetized? For example, EverNote is free and available on many platforms and contains ads
*Pervasive Access (look it up on the phone)
*Always up to date
*Annual transitions

Decision Criteria
*Are we willing to select text based on compatibility?
*Are we willing to accept varying reader experiences?
*Are we prepared to deal with equity issues?
*All/Nothing or something in between?
*Choose the reader applications before the platform
*Consider platform neutrality
*Beware walled gardens

Option 1 - One Way
*One Way is one platform, one reader, only use texts compatible with that combination
*iPad
*Kindle Fire/ Nook Tablet
*Advantage - continuity of use, nothing in the backpack
*Disadvantage - cost, limited repertoire

Option 2 - Higher Ed
*Higher ed strategy is choose the text; if there's an etext, student choice, student provided hardware, student selected reader
*Advantage - cost on student, pedagogical options
*Disadvantage - equity, pagination

Option 3 - Wait it out
*Market is immature
*Too many incompatible participants
Who will be in the reader market in 5 years?
*Google
*Amazon
*Adobe Digital Editions
*Apple
*Barnes and Noble
*DRM is a train wreck
*Already have the resources
*Disadvantage - Outdated resources

Option 4 - Split Screen
*Pick a "preferred" reader
*Use only for low hanging fruit
*Out of copyright trade books
*Use as an option
*Supplementary materials
*Advantage - less disruptive, low opportunity cost
*Disadvantage - equity

E-Text Readers
*Nook Study
*Nook
*Kindle
*Google Book
*Adobe Digital Editions
Publisher based
*CourseSmart
*Vital Source
Channel based
*DigiDirect
*Cafe Scribe

Predictions
*Sufficient hardware will become pervasive
*DRM nightmare will last, but reader compatibility will improve
*Creative Commons/Open Source will become more prominent

WHY AM I USING A TEXT?

SVCUE/FIGHTING ENGAGEMENT DEFICIT DISORDER PRESENTATION NOTES by Caitlin Tucker

Cool Tools
Linoit - www.linoit.com
Google or URL shortener - bitly
Interactive multimedia timeline (*$5/month) - tiki-toki.com
MyFakeWall.com

Creating a Dynamic Learning Space
*Play with your physical space, so that the teacher is not the center of attention and students are looking at each other for engagement and answers and practice the following:

Collaboration
Leverage the online space for academic work (Ex. Linoit, a multimedia post-it note board to create groups and share notes; Online discussions via Collaboriz to provide content online and embed video and for students to select answers in a short objective quiz in group experiences and to give everyone an equal voice by engaging quiet, shy kids; Google Docs for group collaboration

Interesting
Use a tool like Prezi to show relationships between ideas and make lectures more interesting; Use media, audio, graphs, photographs, videoclips as a springboard for writing like National Geographic, Khan Academy, TED talks, History.com, MIT World, PBS.org, YouTube for School, School Tube)

Artistic (Creative and Fun)
Collages can be done online with such tools like PicMonkey (Fearless Photo embellishment where students can upload photos with bubbles), Animoto (free 30 second videos where students can upload images and add text, music to make a movie), Glogster (students create multimedia posters), storybird.com (when students do work that they know other students will see, they want it to be good; when students do work that they know the teacher will see, they want it to be good enough--this site lets the student pair the writing with artwork and then publish); storyjumper. Get students up off their feet and let them enact plays (acting, dramatic readings, and reenactment); blabberize; voki; socrative (create a quiz, copy & paste and play in teams with mobile devices--have students make them for each chapter of a book for example and then they participate in randomly chosen teams); pixton.com (students create comics to show what happened in a chapter)

Relevant or Project-based Learning (have to sacrifice curriculum to collaborate on real-world issues and create real-world solutions)
Challenge Based Learning Project (developed by Apple)
1. start with a big idea
2. student groups then work together to brainstorm questions about their topic online
3. identify a challenge associated with their topic
4. research the problem or challenge
5. design a real world solution
6. preeent challenge, solution, evidence of implementation & reflection in a multimedia project (dynamic informational website, powerpoint or prezi presentation

QR Codes in Class to
* link students to a helpful video
* go on a virtual fieldtrip
* design an in-class web quest
* direct students to quizzing site
* make a textbook interactive

SV CUE ON March 24, 2012

In my professional life, I devoted a Saturday to learning technology at SV CUE at the Harker School in San Jose, CA and posted my notes on the blog.