Life in the Sandbox: Opportunities ... and a Question

In the chapter “Learning in Activity”, Green writes about how “situative analyses” of the learning environment focus on “activity systems: complex social organizations containing learners, teachers, curriculum materials, software tools, and the physical environment” (p. 79). Referring to Blumenfeld, Kemplar and Krajcik from later in the volume, he goes on to explain that when “learning environments do not support personal identity, learners will not be deeply engaged, even if they manage to maintain focus long enough to complete a classroom activity” (p. 89).

Building our class around this idea of “learning in activity”, the class had a wonderful time exploring a range of technological innovations to build that learner engagement. I was struck by how I would be able to use a variety of these in my own “classroom sandbox” in the fall:

1.      The use of short videos, or perhaps the program “Show Me” to explain key concepts such as how to present a title page or write a thesis statement would allow a key feature of the “flipped classroom” to emerge – allowing time in class to focus on tasks and discussion rather than instruction.

2.      Glogster – what fun! Has potential as a more visual, multi-modal means of presenting information.

3.      Twitter: as my students work through the list of texts we are obliged to study over the course of the year (15 texts between the two years of the IB diploma program), we could follow related Twitter feeds and discuss what we discover in class. During the long Shakespeare study in the fall, for example, student engagement could be heightened with the understanding that the bard continues to spur profound interest and engagement from tweeting scholars. Political issues surrounding other plays could also be shown to be alive through Twitter contact with experts.

4.      Software that allows for questions to be posted and responded to using Smartphones would add an interactive, all-inclusive element to class discussions.

5.      Video-conferencing could be used to great effect to achieve virtual debates with students in other countries.

6.      Class Wikis would allow for easier interaction with and between students.

7.      Use of Twitter, even email, could lead to a requirement that every student at some point in the year, for some text or some assignment, contact and receive advice from an expert in the field.

All of this leads to a bit of a paradigm shift in my classroom, which involves recognizing how the use of technology can make my classes more engaging and relevant to students. Two challenges come to mind. I’ll write about one here, and the second in a subsequent post.

The first challenge is that in the case of IB English, with its list of 15 titles over two years and final, standardized exam, is: how do I create authentic, problem-based generative topics for my students for all those texts so that the technology can be used to accomplish the kind of collaborative learning we have been discussing? Often, we barely have time to get at a text’s main features before it is time to move onto the next one.

In the past, there has been a tendency to say, “Next we will study …” when moving on to the next text. Recognizing that this is about the worst way to introduce a text, I have at least been able to shift my teaching toward the use of “hooks” for each text. This involves identifying a central issue for each text that is of interest to teens. For example, the hook for “A Doll’s House” is “Are men the new ball and chain?” The hook for “King Lear” has been “Why is this play so dark that for many years the ending of the play was never performed?” or “What happens to a king when he gets old and gives up power?” Creative writing and discussion prior to starting each text gets the juices flowing and, I hope, makes students interested in exploring the text in order to get at the issue or question we have introduced. Because I try to choose hooks that might pique the curiosity of teens, the activity goes some way to supporting and building the “personal identity” mentioned in the text. It links the text to the student’s own experiences. It’s a neat moment in the classroom when I can say, “So this is what you think about this issue … now let’s see what the author has to say about it.”

But this is still some distance away from the authentic tasks and problem-based learning. Is this approach best suited to other subjects? How can it be applied to higher level secondary English studies, with its rather daunting list of challenging texts?