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Finally, technology is embedded into the structure of all we do. It's part of how we research, how we capture information, and how we display our learning. It's never an accessory tacked on at the end.

In my English classroom, this looks a lot different than in my biology and chemistry classrooms ( which you can read about here). My English curriculum is largely skills-based, which provides a fair amount of flexibility. Many people ask me how I have the opportunities to do what I do in my classroom. My answer? It's all in how you look at the curriculum.

MEETING CURRICULUM AND TEACHING GOALS

My curriculum states that I need to develop skills in 5 areas: reading, writing, viewing and representing, listening and speaking. The curriculum also suggests themes. Our grade 11 theme is childhood, but nowhere does it state whose childhood. So this year we read Patricia McCormick's novel Sold, which chronicles the childhood, or more specifically the loss of childhood, in a young girl who is trafficked. A powerful story. This was the springboard into our unit on modern slavery and creating a social media campaign.

Whenever we begin a new inquiry unit, research is always involved. We start by sitting in a circle to talk through what we want, and need, to know about slavery in the contemporary world. From there the research begins. The first thing my students do is open a Google doc, access their Diigo or Delicious account, and sign into Symbaloo, a site that houses all of their favorite tools. We spend approximately one week on our initial research. Any more than this and students tend to become overwhelmed.

After researching, we come back together to discuss what needs to happen next. What is the best way to present our learning? What will be the most powerful? What do we want others to learn from us? Throughout this process, my students do most of the talking and leading. I tend to sit and listen, and at critical moments, draw out the nuances or similarities of what is being said. And when things aren't working, sometimes I need to suggest a new direction.

SOCIAL MEDIA-WISE

This semester, we've chosen to create a social media campaign to raise awareness around modern slavery. This is the project-based part. It's not enough for my students to learn about slavery, they need to do something with it, specifically "real world" projects that matter.

One of the most important things we can do is teach our students how to use social media wisely, and how social media can be used for social good. My students started by creating a Flickr feed, Facebook page, a YouTube account, a Tumblr blog, and a Twitter account.

They decided that visual representations of their knowledge would be the most powerful. So some of my students created photographs depicting images that they felt best represented modern trafficking. These photos were then edited in Picnik, and posted to our blog.

Teaching this way also allows me to teach real writing to my students. Before we started to create videos, my students looked at numerous YouTube videos about slavery. They focused on those they found powerful, and conversely, those that weren't very effective. We analyzed the differences between the two. My students talked animatedly about how the powerful videos touched your emotions.

I grabbed a piece of paper and drew a triangle. On each tip I wrote one of three words: Logos, Pathos, and Ethos. When you write for an audience, you can appeal to knowledge, emotion, or ethics - the Aristotelian triad. A few years ago I tried to teach this idea to a grade 12 class when we were studying essay writing. They didn't get it. But in the context we were using, after comparing social media content, it made perfect sense to my grade 11 students. So we designed our videos with the triad in mind.

My students decided to create Common Craft-styled videos to educate viewers about slavery. These videos took hours. First, students needed to distill all of their "fact" knowledge into a compelling story. Then they needed to write the script, create paper characters, and finally begin to practice moving their papers on the whiteboard. My students soon discovered there is only a very small area to use on the whiteboard while filming these videos, otherwise you move out of view of the camera. In the end, it took hours to coordinate movement with script, film & then edit our videos. The remarkable thing is that these videos fulfilled many objectives across all 5 strands.

Here's one example:

As part of this project, my students have also Skyped into classrooms to teach what they have learned, so that other students can begin this enormously important discussion in their own communities. This is the connected part. My students believe that what they have learned is valuable, for themselves and for others too. They also believe they have a role to play in teaching others.

My student are also creating a Museum Box, a project inspired by the work of Thomas Clarkson, who spent most of his adult life trying to abolish the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Clarkson carried a box to support his argument. The Museum Box site allows you to build an argument or description of an event, person or historical period by placing items in a virtual box. Students can display anything from a text file to a movie. My students will be using this platform to argue their thesis, rather than writing a traditional essay.

For our second novel, we're reading The Secret Life of Bees. For this unit, my students are engaged in wiki work. In pairs, my students are responsible for identifying the major themes in each chapter, and how they are developed. The first week I model this skill, and throughout the novel I coach my students as necessary. They're also responsible for posting and responding to the discussion questions for each chapter.

CLASSROOM IMPACT

My students have started designing our curriculum units. Seriously. While transitioning to our current unit, we discussed the possibilities as a class. Both Dr. Seuss & Christmas literature were mentioned as possible study topics. But one student wasn't sold on either.
"Could we do something entirely different? Something that you haven't done before?" "Sure. What are you thinking?" She thought and then said, "What about a movie unit? Could we study movies of different genres and then analyze them for themes and other different features? Is that possible?" I explained that, with the English curriculum, we have more flexibility than with chemistry or biology. In those subjects, I'm specifically told what content I need to teach. In English, the concern is mostly around teaching skills, although the curriculum does stipulate how many novels, short stories, poems, etc. we need to include. I further explained the five "strands" that we use in English and that there are multiple skill objectives for each strand. "So yes, it's possible to do something with movies."
I asked them to talk a little bit more about what it might look like. My students brainstormed various possibilities. Maybe dividing into groups to show clips from various genres. Each group would be responsible to facilitate the discussion around the analysis. Maybe creating a digital space to post movie critiques, and other connected classrooms could join us. And, of course, there would be writing involved too.

After hearing a number of ideas, and seeing a plan beginning to formulate, one of my students looked at me and said, "Can you help us create a unit plan for this?"

Wow. Never in a million years did I think my students would ever say those words. Another student remarked, "Yeah, I only know how to teach swimming lessons."

I looked at him and said, "Well, it's not that much different." When he gets in the pool he doesn't just splash around for 30 minutes. He knows exactly what he's going in there to accomplish. Not only that, he knows what it looks like when someone has mastered the skill and when someone isn't even close. He agreed. Curriculum & teaching is pretty much that. We need to know what our outcomes are, the content we're using to get there, and what we're using to show our learning.

My students are always a bit surprised to see what curriculum actually looks like. They pulled out the objectives we are meeting with this unit. They chose six genres that they will look at with films as diverse as The Princess Bride, A Time to Kill, and Hitchcock's North by Northwest. In groups they will analyze six elements in each film: themes, writing, character development, film techniques, setting and plot development.

Once students have watched the film, they will meet with their group to discuss their findings. A group summary of their findings will be posted to the wiki. Students will also write a short analysis rating the film, including their basis for doing so. Ratings will be published to the wiki.

The next day, there will be an in-class discussion of the movie. Each group will contribute their observations. From the list of movies chosen, students will need to write a longer critique, much like an essay.

Students are excited about this unit because they designed it around something of interest to them. I'm excited about this unit because film is the medium of the future, and our students need to be astute at critically evaluating it.

MY TEACHING, THEN AND NOW

Before the technology/constructivist shift in my classsroom, I would have taught all of this quite traditionally. We'd read books, answer questions, and then address those questions in class. I'd lecture a lot, with supplemental grammar lessons here and there, and I'd include some type of artistic project to achieve viewing and representing objectives. The whole design would have been extremely teacher centered. And at the end of it all, I'd hope they learned something about writing and thinking.

Instead, inquiry and technology are a natural part of our English classes. It's what my students have come to expect and have started to design themselves. Instead, of saying, "hand in your assignments," I say, "publish your assignments and send me the link." They think about connecting and sharing their learning in the larger world.

That's the 21st century difference.

Shelley Wright is a teacher/education blogger living in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in Canada. She teaches high school English, science and technology.

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Finally, technology is embedded into the structure of all we do. It's part of how we research, how we capture information, and how we display our learning. It's never an accessory tacked on at the end. In my English classroom, this looks a lot different than in my biology and chemistry classrooms ( which you can read about here).

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Constructivism

Susan doesn't understand physics. It just seems so difficult to her, with all the variables and calculations. The more her teacher goes on and on about how to calculate this or figure out that, the less Susan understands, and the more frustrated she gets.

Constructivism is a philosophy of education that says that people construct knowledge through their experiences and interactions with the world. Essentially, it says that people learn through experience, not through hearing someone give a lecture. For example, Susan doesn't really understand physics when her teacher tries to explain it. But if she was faced with a physics problem in her everyday life (say, trying to figure out how hard to push on the gas pedal to get her car to accelerate up a steep hill), she might understand it better.

Because constructivism points out that experiential learning is more powerful than lectures and worksheets, a related view is that by directing their own learning process, students will understand concepts better than if they were just handed the right way to do things. In other words, her teacher can give Susan formulas all she wants; Susan will never understand them as completely as she would if she were given the problem and had to come up with the formula herself.

Let's look at how constructivism relates to social learning and how it can be used in the classroom through project-based learning.

Social Learning

Remember that constructivism says that people learn through their experiences and interactions with the world around them. And the world around us is filled with other people, so you probably won't be very surprised to find out that constructivism is closely linked to learning through interactions with other people, or social learning.

Take Susan, for example. She can read a textbook on her own, but it doesn't really sink in. But when she's with others, she can ask questions, brainstorm ideas, and flesh out her thoughts until she really understands something.

Psychologist Lev Vygotsky pointed out that the most effective form of social learning doesn't come from teacher interactions with students, but from students' interactions with other students. Vygotsky's zone of proximal development says that people learn best from other people who are just a little ahead of them.

Anyone who's ever seen two kids together understands the zone of proximal development. Kids learn from each other all the time: One sibling comes home having learned about how seeds grow and shows that to his younger brother. The younger brother, meanwhile, might have learned how to turn a cartwheel and demonstrates this for his older brother.

What does this mean for Susan and physics? Even though her teacher knows the answer to a complex physics problem, instead of giving Susan and her classmates the solution, the teacher can give them the physics problem and have them work together to figure it out. The teacher is there to support the students, but instead of giving answers, the teacher might ask questions of the students and encourage them to use each other to try to solve the problem.

Project-Based Learning

Having students work in groups to figure out a problem is the basis of project-based learning, or PBL, which focuses on giving an open-ended question and complex problem to a group of students and having them figure out the best solution to the problem. PBL is a constructivist process, so the problems are real-world problems, and students are encouraged to figure out a solution based on their own understanding of the world and the topic.

For example, remember how Susan needs to get her car up a steep hill and needs to know how much pressure to apply to her gas pedal? Instead of telling Susan how to calculate the answer, Susan's teacher can put Susan in a group with other students and have them figure it out as part of PBL.

There are several steps Susan and her classmates will follow in a PBL environment:

1. Learners are presented with a problem.

The first step is, of course, for the group to receive the problem. In this case, Susan's group is presented with the problem of how much pressure to apply to the gas pedal to get up the hill.

2. Groups develop theories to explain the problem.

As a group, Susan and her classmates begin to explore the problem more in-depth. Perhaps they figure out that they need to know how steep the hill is, or perhaps they begin to think about what elements are involved in getting a car up a hill. In the end, as a group, they have several theories about what information is needed to solve the problem.

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constructivism: overview & practical teaching examples - video & lesson transcript | study.com

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Constructivism: Overview & Practical Teaching Examples - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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Susan doesn't understand physics. It just seems so difficult to her, with all the variables and calculations. The more her teacher goes on and on about how to calculate this or figure out that, the less Susan understands, and the more frustrated she gets.

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Instead of just lecturing to my students I will engage them in a collaborative project that allows them to learn from experiences and interactions with each other. I will act as a facilitator and help them construct new understandings through using prior knowledge to come to a deeper understanding.

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In my classroom, I will let my students reflect on what they have learned and give them opportunities to analyze real-world problems. I will also have them not just learn content, but do something with the content that they learn. In this article, it discusses teaching students how to wisely utilize social media. Creating visual representations of what they have learned and using social media platforms to raise awareness on important issues.

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I recently created an interdisciplinary unit and I formulated a project that the students would create using what they have learned in their math, English, and health class. They would have to create a plan to survive the zombie apocalypse.

This was apart of the assignment description:
In our class you have learned about identifying reliable and unreliable sources. How do you know if a source is accurate? Now understanding what you have learned in your math class about statistical reasoning and applying what you have learned in your health class about the spread of infectious diseases; devise a survival guide that will help you survive the zombie apocalypse. Support your reasoning.

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This is an awesome lesson! I think this would take a lot of planning, but the students seem really engaged.

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Inquiry-Based Teaching: Discussing Fiction Texts

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Inquiry based teaching strategies lead to rich discussions amongst students and the teacher. Watch a high school literature lesson uses the inquiry based teaching method, and hear what both students and the teacher think about it.

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I will make sure the materials I use in my classroom are relevant and interesting to my students. I will also connect what were are learning to some current event happening in the world. I will also have my students find a news article that is related to a topic we are discussing in class and write a reflection to present to the class.

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I plan on utilizing cooperative learning in my classroom as much as possible. Whenever we are reading a book, poem, or informational text my students will work in small groups to share and discuss their ideas. I want my students to learn from each other and formulate ideas through collaboration and active participation in the learning process.

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These are some great ideas for service-learning projects.