Fall Exhibition Night 2013: Fingerprints

Two mentors of mine went together to a middle school project night at a different school a few years back. What they saw there was a whole lot of student work covered in what they termed "adult fingerprints." Many times as an educator there are pressures to micromanage student work which you know will be on display for a wider audience. For teachers, student work is sometimes seen as solely a manifestation of of the teacher's acumen, as opposed to the students' ability. This fear is what can lead to the "adult fingerprints" clouding authentic student work.

Where I work, we try our very best to combat that with our Exhibitions. These events happen at the end of each trimester, and showcase work of the students around a theme. Our Fall theme was "Teach Your Stuff," and the teaching team built a schedule of classes taught by students with the parents as the learners. Parents learned how to conjugate verbs in Spanish, program calculators in Math, build electric motors in Science, and serve a volleyball in PE. The teachers were minimally involved in the execution of the night, acting as guides-on-the-side and event facilitators.

For me, as the Humanities teacher, I opted for passive displays of student work, and allowed the students to present them during the passing periods between the official lessons. Here's the project description for the 5th and 6th grade:

What is your responsibility once you learn something? Are you compelled to act? After reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, students had the option of choosing either to share one new fact from the reading they think should be publicly known or explain one commitment they could make to their eating or food as a result of what they learned. We examined old propaganda and PSA posters for inspiration, and spent time reviewing our notes and reading journals to find the information in these posters.

And here's the display:

5th and 6th grade posters on The Omnivore's Dilemma

These posters are direct reflections of the students' understanding of the content, and created with minimal supervision. They made them during class time, and I was available for questions, but the layout, materials (except for the standard paper size), and content was determined by the students. Sure, I set the parameters above, but other than that this is their work, and I took it as it was and hung it on the wall. As a result, the students decide for themselves what quality is and what they want to show off to the wider school community. In general, this motivates excellence far more effectively than a grade ever could, and you end up with a much more rewarding and educational exhibition than one covered in "adult fingerprints."

Next, I'll examine the debrief and reflection process with the 7th and 8th grades.

Reading Hard Poems with 6th Graders

The Rationale:

I am a firm believer that you can elevate any young reader just by asking more of them.

My 6th graders have just finished a unit reading a young readers edition of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. While we prepare for our Fall Exhibition (post pending the successful execution of said event), I'm doing a short 2-week long unit on poetry and food. I've selected two poems - Gary Snyder's "Steak" and Wendell Berry's "MANIFESTO: Mad Farmer's Liberation Front" - which I believe will prove challenging to the students but are well within their grasp both topically and prosodically (this may or may not be a word).

The Lesson:

Do Now: In your notes, give me 3-5 sentences answering the question, "What is poetry to you?"

After settling in and jotting down some thoughts, I went around and solicited answers from the students. Some answers which stuck with me were "songs without music" and "a tapestry of words." I immediately challenged these ideas with Snyder's "This Present Moment." This led to a livelier conversation, but alas, I was forced to return to the matter at hand.

So, I posed the question: "When faced with a difficult poem, what should you do?" With this in mind, we generated the following 11-step procedure:

A 6th Grader's Guide to Reading Difficult Poems

1. Read it!
2. Read it one more time.
3. Read it again.
4. Try to understand the first two lines
5. Think about it literally
6. Make guesses about it.
7. Try to think about how the poem relates to you.
8. Circle or underline the words and phrases that are confusing
9. Look up difficult words.
10. Try to figure out allusions*, references, etc.
11. Read it again.

*great in-situ vocabulary lesson here.

I divided the class into two groups, and had them run through their own procedure. This afternoon in our Writing Workshop we'll begin the process of explaining our personal understandings of the poems to a wider audience.

Working hard

One student's first try at annotation

Tune back later for some samples of student writing from this activity.