Category Archives: Professional Learning

Professional Learning

Book Review: AI For Educators

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Matt Miller makes many provocative statements in his latest book AI For Educators. One of the first comes from Dr. Kai-Fu Lee who claims that “We {societies} overestimate what technologies can do in five years. We underestimate what they will be able to do in twenty years” (Miller, 2023, p. 7). This made me want to go back and judge every major innovation in the last century.

Later in the book, Miller offers another juicy quote that resonated with me. Sherry Turkle states “We expect more from technology and less from each other” (p. 111). Wow! What a truism. As a classroom teacher, I constantly see students who would rather spend time on their phones instead of interacting with each other. My job is to create activities that require them to interact and engage in tasks that make them read, speak, listen, and write about what they’ve learned. My AP Research students are seniors in high school and their single worst habit is their inability to pick up the phone, call someone, and ask for help. I wonder how AI can facilitate this, or will AI make social isolation worse before it gets better?

Interestingly, the College Board and the International Baccalaureate programs have very different views of on using AI in education. This makes me wonder who will change their views first? How will these programs look in 10 years?

Overall, your reaction to this book will depend on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist. If you believe AI will inspire students to be more creative and advanced with their critical thinking, you are going to dive in, explore, and share the responsible use of AI with your students. If you think the glass is half empty, you are going to try to police AI, shield your students from it, and run away from it. You will probably become more and more disillusioned with education and maybe even wind up leaving the field.

Miller acknowledges AI has biases built in (p. 18). Educators are going to need to be hyper-aware of these flaws and specifically plan lessons that address diversity, inclusion and equity, not to mention SEL concerns. If you are looking for a starting place to learn about the implications of using AI in education, this is an excellent one. If you want to learn more before purchasing the book, view this YouTube discussion Miller hosted.

Disciplinary Literacy, Historical Writing, Professional Learning

Interdisciplinary Approaches to ELA & History

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I am always on the hunt for good historical fiction that makes my students connect with the era under study in my class. This week, I finally finished Forbidden City by Vanessa Hua. It’s a fantastic book by a well-respected author and could engage students in deep learning about the Chinese Cultural Revolution, however, the focus on the love life between the Chairman and Mei Xiang makes this book too cringey for me to assign to my class. This is honestly the first book where I have censored myself and I wonder if other social studies teachers feel similarly in this political climate, or if I am alone in this sentiment. 

Do you feel as if your school administration would stand up to parents who want to question or argue with you about your curricular choices?

Does today’s anti-teacher sentiment make you anxious about assigning academic work outside of your district textbook?

Should teachers team together on interdisciplinary approaches to teaching ELA & History in order to diffuse some of this tension? 

Join me on Twitter September 26, 2022 at 5 PT, 7 CT, or 8 ET to chat about this topic with the #sschat #sschatreads & #engsschat community. Bring your most controversial titles. We will be issuing merit badges.

Professional Learning

Middle East Conflict Lessons

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It was a glorious, short week in Dr. Petri’s World History class because LAUSD has given us a four-day Labor Day weekend. My students continued learning about the Middle East. They finished their Flip videos on the History of Afghanistan.

Only 40/53 or 75% of my 10th-grade students turned these in, so I have some work to do in building a culture of completion. Toward this end, I’ve designed a follow-up peer review protocol so students can practice giving each other positive comments a la the feedforward book I’ve been reading by Joe Hirsch. 

After finishing that, students collaborated on a Middle East Wars Cyber Sandwich that taught them the basics of the Persian Gulf War and the War in Afghanistan. This led to a note-taking drill where I measured how many pages of notes students took while listening to the excellent This is Democracy Podcast. Students only slightly improved their note-taking when given the transcript compared to just listening.

For homework, they were asked to write five multiple-choice questions on the War in Afghanistan. I gave them a Quizizz template, so I could easily import questions into the gamified platform for some Fast and Curious reps next week. That will remind me to teach students about Ebbenghaus’ Forgetting Curve.

Lastly, we viewed a PBS Frontline documentary called Afghanistan Undercover which profiled the Taliban takeover and their subsequent treatment of women. Students completed a Sketch & Tell to record a memorable moment that stuck with them. I thought these samples showed significant maturity and depth of reasoning. I have great hopes for these students. It is early, but it is going to be a great year.

10th-grade student work sample.
Professional Learning

First Two Weeks of School

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I spent the first week of school giving my students seating challenges and teaching them to use EduProtocols. Each day students were put on the clock and asked to sit in a certain order. The goal here is to get them talking to each other and working as a team. As a bonus, I get to see who rises to the top as classroom leaders and which kids are happy to withdraw into a corner, whip out their cell phones, and tune out the world. At the end of the week, students met at least five people and learned about their screen time, birthday, shoe size, favorite band, and favorite movie.

EduProtocols

After the seating challenges, I trained students how to use four different EduProtocols. We did a Cyber Sandwich on Academic Recovery issues. An Iron Chef where students introduced themselves to the class. Another Cyber Sandwich on the ethics of being monitored. For variety, one class did a Number Mania on effective homework policies, while another used the Research EduProtocol. Which I stacked the next day so they could identify best practices with high school bathroom policies.

After discussing all of these issues, my classes were ready to write our social contracts which will become our rules for the year. Remind me to update my syllabi before my principal starts badgering me for them.

During the second week of school, I was ready to dive into World History content. We are starting with the War in Afghanistan this year as the one-year anniversary of the US withdrawal is coming up on August 30th and I always like to have my classes interview their parents about where they were during September 11th. This year’s unit will cover Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, post-WWI shifts in the geographic and political borders of the Middle East,  how the forces of nationalism developed in the Middle East, the Balfour Declaration, and the role of political ideology, religion, and ethnicity in shaping modern governments.

We started learning the History of Afghanistan by doing a 10% Summary of this 2,500-word timeline. Students struggled with this. The reading was too long to get through, plus they did not have enough knowledge of the subject to know which details were important and which weren’t. 

Students who turned in a 250-word summary

The next day, students created a 6-slide PowerPoint that they would use to supplement their oral report. They had more time to hit their goal of writing a 250-word summary. This was really an excuse to get them to practice with Microsoft Presenter Coach before recording their own 2-3 minute Flip Screencast. Once the videos are in, I will pair students so they can conduct a peer review using a success chart. This upcoming week, we will take a closer look at the modern wars in the Middle East with a Cyber Sandwich and use the 3X CER Challenge from Ariana Hernandez to analyze claims about these conflicts. Thanks to Angela Zorn and Adam Moler for pushing me to blog about my classroom routines again. It feels good!

Professional Learning, social emotional learning

Book Review: Two-For-One Teaching

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A few years ago I was “voluntold” by my principal that I was going to be the chair of my school’s Social Emotional Learning (SEL) committee. This task has introduced me to a new network of scholars and colleagues interested in infusing SEL into core content instruction. Occasionally I review books on this blog and in my workshops I often include a Book Pass activity to help educators understand the wide variety of activities, constructs, methods, and strategies that are available to help them with SEL instruction. This post will review Empower Your Students (2018) and Two-For-One Teaching (2020) by Lauren Porosoff and Jonathan Weinstein.

LACOE SEL Workshop (1)

These books remind educators and students of the importance of teaching values within a crowded curricula. While I personally worry that “values” can sometimes be used as code for religious indoctrination, the truth is all institutions have values and they subject their employees, customers, and vendors to them. In the world of K12 schooling, we define our values via our mission and vision statements, often without consulting students. Schools then expect students to blindly follow those values without really teaching them what they mean, or how to follow them. Our principal dutifully reads a code of conduct to our students each day. It concludes with the phrase “and always keep your honor.” I have never heard him provide any examples of what that means or how to follow it in practice. On a daily basis, I see students copying homework, giving each other answers to tests, using their phones to look up answers instead of reading, not to mention outright plagiarism. These books aim to curtail this behavior by teaching students that their values are freely-chosen “qualities of action” that make life meaningful. The strategies demonstrated give teachers a menu of options when teaching students to explore the values that resonate with them and then act accordingly.

empoweryourstudents

The first half of Empower Your Students is made up of activities that help students develop values- consistent behavior. These activities cover curiosity, motivation, purpose, participation, sharing, empathy, and resilience. I have found that most of these values can easily be aligned with the “CASEL Five” SEL competencies of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible  decision-making. The second half of the book elaborates on strategies that empower students with dialogue, partnerships, collaboration, course content, inquiry, and addressing teacher values as well.

Two For One
Two-For-One Teaching suggests methods for conducting values work in the classroom using tools from psychology that help students take action aligned to their personal values. It follows that students will be more engaged during activities that mean something to them and that more engagement will equate to more achievement. The rest of the book offers thirty protocols that help students prepare for learning, explore new material, review material, create work, refine work, and reflect on learning. This book fits nicely into the work of SEL educators or any teacher who wants to make their instruction more relevant to students.

These books clearly instruct educators on how to use and adapt their protocols to suit their own classroom culture. There are ample reproducibles in each book and on the publisher’s website. What I personally found most valuable were the “scripts” that demonstrate teacher conversations with students around issues that are important in my classroom like grading group projects. Being able to ask questions that help students notice their values-inconsistent behavior is hard work and requires a lot of practice. I like having lists of questions and sub-questions such as: What have you tried? How has it worked? And What has it cost? These help me practice this skill and solve problems with groups of students with differing work ethics — a big problem in gifted education. Many of my students struggle with social awareness and relationship skills.

While these books are excellent starting points, time is what is truly needed so that teachers reading them can work together to implement, assess, and debrief the use of this framework and protocols. Until schools and districts make time to connect instruction to student values and increase SEL training in all subjects, I worry that implementation will be inconsistent and results will be mixed. Eventually these worthy programs will be replaced by the next new edu-fad

I am often asked “With all of the content we are asked to teach, how do you have time to do all of this SEL work?”  I take my answer from Jonathan Raymond‘s book Wildflowers where he states: “Reshaping public education is the opposite of impossible. It’s consistent with our history and character as Americans and a realistic and achievable goal.” Empower your Students and Two-For-One Teaching are books that help teachers do right by their students.

Disciplinary Literacy, Historical Writing, Professional Learning, student choice

Student Created Study Guides

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As a teacher who emphasizes reading and historical literacy to my high school students, I have mixed feelings on using study guides. Do they help our students read the texts we assign them? Are they used only by students who haven’t done the reading, but want to project the illusion of work? History teachers can solve this problem by asking students to create their own study guides focused on what happens to the historical figures, which vocabulary words a reader might have trouble with, and illustrating timelines that help the reader get a better understanding of the story.

Hellfighters

These students had five days of class time to read a graphic novel called The Harlem Hellfighters by Max Brooks and illustrated by Caanan White. I have used this text several times in my World War One unit and have noticed that students have trouble tracking who is who and who does what throughout the story.

This post is to showcase some exemplars from this assignment. I have also included the reflections from each student describing how they managed their time in italics. There was a 70% completion rate on this assignment. Grades were distributed as: 42 As, 48 Bs, 22 C/Ds, and 40 students didn’t turn in anything. Students receiving an A generally had 10 or more character descriptions, suggested WWI vocabulary words, or events on their timelines.

The first day in class, I spent the day trying to figure out what the prompt was and I was planning out how I was going to organize my information. The following days I read the book and wrote my information as I was reading. I also found a pdf of the book online which allowed me to work on the project at home. One of the major issues I have is that I get distracted easily when people are talking while I’m reading, so that’s why I also had to work on it at home. I think if I didn’t get so distracted, I would’ve finished sooner. In total, I would say I spent about 1.5-2 hours doing the assignment.

I think I earned an A because I worked hard on my slides and looked for characters and searched for different WW1 timelines. I probably would have made my vocab and WW1 facts more detailed.

This next student created a seven page book. I was impressed how historical context and vocabulary were front-loaded. There was also a very consistent citation method employed, no doubt due to this students concurrent enrollment in AP Research.


I believe that if I spent more time on identifying the characters and explaining the timeline it could have performed better. I worked all days, however, I definitely forgot to work on the Commonlit after being too focused on the study guide.

Another project that got an A was this unique creation on Canva. This student had turned in some work on paper and I did not check her electronic work. When you see her comment below, you will understand why she came to me after school very quickly so I would change her grade. She was proud of her project and I love students who advocate for themselves.

Hellfighters Study Guide

I GOT AN A! I really think i got an A because I really put the effort on the presentation of the time line. The only thing I would say is the amount of information I used could’ve been more but other than that I cited, used pictures, used more information than ____. This is very honest btw.

Overall, I was very pleased with how creative my students were in response to this assignment. There were a few instances of shared images and text, which necessitated some classroom discussion on plagiarism. I can see repeating this assignment next month when we read …

Maus

My next post will delve into the reasons that 40 students did not turn in anything at all. This semester we will be doing a lot more work reflecting on our classwork and documenting how students manage their time.  #FailureIsNotanOption

Professional Learning, social emotional learning, Speaking & Listening, student choice

Doing Student Led Conferences with Flipgrid

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Since the Saddleridge Fire caused my school to cancel Parent Conferences in October, I offered students 100 points to record a conversation with a parent about their grade on Flipgrid. I gave them this prompt: Lead a conversation with your parent(s) about your 15 week grades. How many graded assignments did you complete? How many were missing? How many were late? Which assignments did you struggle with? Which did you learn the most from? Describe your work/study habits and explain how you are going to balance assignments in the future with all of your other responsibilities. Share an assignment from this class that you are proud of & describe how you created it.
Stu Led Confs Flipgrid.pngOverall, 49 students (33%) completed a video and 23 of them (15%) improved by a full letter grade in time for the 15 week marking period. Since I have a total student load of 154 students, this means that five students (3%) went from a B to an A, nine students (6%) went from a C to a B, eight students (5%) went from a D to a C, and one student (.6%) went from an F to a D. All of the videos demonstrated students improving their self-awareness and taking responsibility for their learning with the added bonus of parents figuring out how to better support them. These videos warmed my heart. I will definitely do this again in the Spring before the parents come in for Back to School night. Now I just need to start recording my responses. I’m going to try and do five per day so that I get to them all. Please be patient life outside of work is very hectic right now.
15 Week Grade Dist F19-20
In short, this assignment improved grades for one-third of my students. Fifteen percent of students moved up by a whole letter grade. Further, this assignment reduced my D/F percentages from to 24% to 18%. I need to give more thought as to how I can motivate this group of struggling students to engage and learn how to ask for help. More importantly these videos showed me that even in secondary school where engaging families is difficult, most parents are working hard to help their children succeed academically. Thanks Flipgrid for bridging this communication gap and giving me valuable insight into the families I serve.

https://flipgrid.com/+petri/ce927ddf?embed=true

One of my favorite videos came from a 10th grade softball player Jazmin and her mother Ana. I loved it because this mother asked her daughter questions about her life in school, i.e., What do you like about this class? & What’s your favorite type of assignment? Plus, at about the 3 minute mark, the Mom actually DABS because she is so proud of her daughter. Jazmin’s reaction made me laugh out loud. The two of them seem more like friends than mother & daughter. I doubt I would have seen this sweet side to their relationship had this been a traditional parent meeting in my classroom. Educators new to Flipgrid can read their blog and check out their Discovery Library for ideas to get them started.

 

Historical Writing, Peer Review, Professional Learning

Peer Review Reinforces Writing Instruction

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For the past few years, I have been experimenting with peer review in my high school History classes. The California Council for the Social Studies recently published my article about this just as I was conducting a peer review activity with my 10th grade World History students. In the article, I detail using a computer program called PeerGrade, which is great, but can add several days to a lesson because students have to type their work, submit it, and then conduct several peer reviews.

This post will showcase some student work in doing a peer review activity on paper in one class period. The essay was an argumentative task where students had to state a position about eugenics and support it with evidence from 15 Minute History and the Eugenics Archive. Before writing the essay, students shared the evidence they had categorized on a Vee Diagram. The peer review worksheet I created can be accessed in this Google Doc.

In two (50 minute) class periods of writing my 10th grade students produced an average of 361 words with 6 explanations of their evidence.

Eugenics - positive or negative

Eugenics - positive or negative (1)

Eugenics - positive or negative (2)

Eugenics - positive or negative (4)

I stole this list from one of my awesome ELA teachers, Mandy Arentoft and will project it when giving students time to practice using transitions in their historical writing. Another great teacher, Keith Hart from Brunswick High School in Maine has a helpful blog post teaching students how to use transitional phrases to present their evidence.

A benefit in using peer review is that I get immediate feedback from my students that tells me who is applying the skills from my mini writing lessons. In this case, I clearly need to go back and re-teach the importance of including a creative title, a complex thesis, and in using transitions. Fortunately, not everyone will need this instruction and I can create more advanced writing lessons for them in my next station rotation activity.  For more information about peer review, please look at this #TeachWriting Twitter archive on the topic. It has a wealth of resources for teachers looking to implement peer review into their classroom writing instruction.

Professional Learning, Public Speaking, Speaking & Listening

Listening & Speaking Workshop

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Integrating Listening, Speaking & Writing in the Social Studies Classroom

Los Angeles County of Education

Tuesday, November 6, 2017

Here is the presentation for today’s workshop. Feel free to make a copy and repurpose it for your instructional program. 

8:30 – Listening Instruction

  • Teacher Survey
  • Overview of Research
  • Julian Treasure – RASA
  • Listenwise

9:30 – Listening Drills

  • 15 Minute History – Scramble for Africa
  • Note-Taking Drill
  • Quizizz Formative Assessment

9:45 – 10:00 Break

10:00 – StoryCorps

  • The Great American Listen
  • One Small Step
  • 9/11 Oral History Project
  • Vietnam Veteran Interview

10:30 – Socratic Smackdown

  • Social Darwinism & Laissez-Faire American Capitalism
  • Rules/Scoring
  • Coach/Instant Reply Cards

11:00 – Discussion Models (whole class, small group, individual)

  • Constructive Conversation Skills
  • Historical Talking Tools
  • Speaking Scaffolds (Confidence Monitor/Teleprompter)
  • Classroom to Classroom Video-conferencing

11:30 – 12:30 Lunch

12:30 – Civil Conversation

  • Social Darwinism & Laissez-Faire American Capitalism
  • Tracking conversations
  • Reflection/Debriefing
  • Curriculum Library

1:00 – Creating Speaking Assignments

  • ACOVA
  • PVLEGS
  • Flipgrid

1:45 – 2:00 Break

2:00 – Assessing Speeches

  • Progressivism & Imperialism
  • Openings – SignPosting Language – Closings
  • Rubrics
Education Research, Professional Learning

Improving Inquiry

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I’m looking forward to attending Jay Sorenson’s CUE Rockstar presentation on using the Question Formulation Technique. Rothstein & Santana (2011) devised a protocol that helps students improve their questioning skills, something that needs to be explicitly taught before embarking on inquiry projects in Social Studies. In my high school class, I found that my students could generate between 2-13 questions with the average student generating 6 questions in five minutes. These numbers increase over time with consistent practice using the protocol. The QFT can also be done in small groups, which helps students learn to collaborate and build off each other’s ideas.

QFT_NATIONALISM

I experimented with the QFT this summer and was unimpressed by the effort students put forth and the quality of the questions they asked. When I return to school for the fall semester, I am going to begin QFT activities by playing a related story on Listenwise before posing a focus question to the class. I am hopeful that this will help students generate more sophisticated critical thinking and better questions.

Meanwhile, I look forward to hearing how other teachers are developing one-period inquiry projects in their classes.