Empower Students through Authentic Presentations

I don't think I can say it enough. I went to ISTE with this thought in mind: one gem. I just need one nugget of information that lights me on fire. Isn't this the way it often goes when a teacher attends a professional development opportunity? Okay, I hear ya. Some people grudgingly drag their feet to PD. I choose to look forward to such opportunities in an effort to grow in this career that I love.

I attended more than 17 hours worth of sessions at ISTE. and I did come across some awesome sessions with fresh ideas to fill my tank (click on the link; I promise it's worthwhile!).  On the third day, however, I was still searching for the gem that would make me go, "aha! Now that's what I'm talkin' about!" Really? Am I the only one who does this? Okay, moving on...

So there I was, day three. I started to wonder if I was going to stumble across this moment before making the short drive back home. My head was swimming with ideas already, so maybe I ought to give it up already.

I am incredibly lucky to have a support system in my district (shout out to you lovely people!) who encourage me to take risks in my classroom and who seek my feedback to make things work better. For this occasion, I was signed up to have students present how high school students act as both consumers and creators of virtual reality. If you've read my last post, you've seen a little bit of how my students have become consumers of virtual reality.

At ISTE, my students were presenting on how they created virtual reality projects. Yes, my FRESHMEN students, five fabulous ladies, were presenting to educators about what they had created. As I explained to a colleague about how three of my students were those who barely spoke in class, she looked at me like I was crazy. These three students were explaining their project and answering questions as if they were the most talkative students in my classes.

And there it was: my gem. The one thing I was looking for during the conference. These five students communicating with others at an international conference that more than 14k educators attended. Here are some gems that I uncovered by reflecting on their experience:

• Students were excitedly presenting on topics they chose and they created. 
• Students came across challenges in their projects, and were proud of how they overcame the challenges to create their projects. 
• Students were empowered to speak because of the above, but also, because of this: their teacher thought their project was worthy of presenting at a prestigious event and they had an authentic audience in which to present to. 

If that's not a sparkly gem and a highlight of my teaching career, I don't know what is! Teachers really need to think creatively and critically about how to incorporate the elements bulleted above into their courses if they wish to really, truly empower students.

That's all for me today. I know you're probably still waiting to hear about what my students created with VR, but that's for another day. :)

#VR4edu to Build Empathy in 9th Grade English

Virtual reality (VR) has been a phrase that has lingered in the back of minds for some time now. At earlier points in history, it seemed the work of creative science fiction authors (see "Pygmalion's Spectacles" by Stanley Weinbaum), but over the last 85 years, it has become an ideal way to place one in a new environment that may otherwise never be experienced. From VR gaming platforms to college campus tours, #VR4edu is more than a hashtag; it's an innovative way to immerse students in creative and critical thinking while also engaging them in empathy and social-emotional wellness building. 

Social Emotional Learning (SEL) activities lead to student success both academically and as citizens in the community (Hamedani & Darling-Hammond, 2015). Incorporating activities into the classroom that focus on a student's ability to self-assess or build relationships with others reinforces critical and creative thinking by increasing his self-awareness and understanding of a situation. Essentially, SEL activities build strong schema for students to reference as they make decisions and solve problems both in and outside of the classroom. Additionally, teachers who reflectively incorporate SEL components into their classroom on a regular basis receive surprisingly positive emotional wellness benefits, as well (Zakrzewski, 2014). 

A strong and often emphasized component of SEL lay in a student's ability to empathize with others and see from differing perspectives. VR is a revolutionary way to place a student in a new environment so that they might experience the raw emotions of another. 

During a unit titled "It Happened Here" with the Compose Our World curriculum project I've been lucky to be a part of, students in my 9th grade English classroom were exploring setting and perspective as ways to make meaning. We had been reading To Kill a Mockingbird, focusing heavily on the setting aspect and the comparisons/contrasts between the small town that my students live in and the time period/place in which the wily Scout and Jem lived. Just as Scout slowly uncovers the importance of empathy for characters such as Boo and Tom Robinson, my students needed an extra boost to understand how their perspectives were influenced by their own setting and time. Thus, I decided to take them on a tour to view other places in our world during our current time period. 

Through the immersive journalism app NYT VR students in my classroom followed three refugee children through the place in which they lived, highlighting the daily happenings of their lives. Using headphones and Google Cardboard viewers, students were placed in the shoes of one who was sitting/standing right next to the refugees as they stood in a bombed classroom, rubble surrounding them in 360 degrees or on a boat as it glided through alligator infested waters, the sound of the water splashing in their ears as it slapped the side of the boat. 

I am absolutely positive that simply talking about this experience with students would not have produced nearly as compassionate and thoughtful responses as viewing, and thereby acting as an active participant through the 360/3D video, The Displaced report. Responding to a prompt that simply said, "before today, I'd never thought about..." students had this to say:

"The scarring memories each child carries with them due to the different circumstances present in the countries the children live in."

"I had never thought about how specific time periods and settings influence how situations play out." 

"Before today I had never thought about how you may be born into a situation that you can not easily get out of and the cycle repeats."

"Before today, I had never thought about how much pain refugees go through. Everything seems difficult for them, even simply getting food to survive. They get grain and basic supplies dropped from airplanes for them to take, and meanwhile we, in America, are sitting around eating food and complaining if there isn't anything we like in our house." 

 To get started with VR is easy: start looking for apps that you can use in the classroom and gather the materials necessary to facilitate the activity. Apps such as NYT VR, Google Cardboard, Google Expeditions (now available!), and Discovery VR all contain valuable lessons that can support both SEL and PBL in the classroom. 

You'll also need smartphones and viewers for the magic to happen. My students cycled through the VR station four at a time to experience the situation above, and I was lucky enough to borrow three phones in addition to my own to make this happen (thanks, friends!). You can also walk students through the process of downloading the appropriate app at school, but you'll likely want to give them the warning that 1) they should be connected to wifi and 2) this may take a while. VR apps are large and take up lots of data. Use the wifi to download them! 

Viewers come in many shapes, sizes and comforts. I was lucky enough to be awarded a grant through my school district and through donorschoose.org to buy the cardboard viewers you see above in the photos from my classroom. These are cheap and usable! In fact, some students have since gone out and purchased their own.

Placing your students in the experience of someone else is truly life-changing and builds empathy on a whole new level beyond talking about it in a book. Using VR to do this gives your students an opportunity to build skills of empathy, while also igniting creative passions, such as when my students created their own VR experiences, but I'll talk more about that later! 

What implications can you see for #VR4edu in your classroom, content area, and/or grade level? Share with me below! I'd love to learn from you!

Hamedani, M. & Darling-Hammond, L. (2015). Social Emotional Learning in High School: How Three Urban High Schools Engage, Educate, and Empower Youth (1st ed.). Retrieved from https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/scope-pub-social-emotional-learning-research-brief.pdf

Zakrzewski, V. (2014). How Social-Emotional Learning Transforms Classrooms. Greater Good. Retrieved 15 July 2016, from http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_social_emotional_learning_transforms_classrooms

Take it to the Community: Engaging Students in Project Based Storytelling

As many of you have read in this blog before, I'm constantly reflecting, wondering, and planning for ways to engage students while also making learning relevant to them. I am not a teacher who recycles lessons from previous years and plops them into present time. While this sounds like a lovely time-saving endeavor, it's not my style. 

For the past nine years, I have made many conjectures on how to get students to tell meaningful narrative stories. I've assigned many of these over the years in both ninth and tenth grade English, and each year I have run into the same problem: many in my population of students simply lack the experience to tell stories about their own lives. The projects I have given them--memory maps of their lives, This I Believe essays, or anecdotal accounts of meaningful events--have been a challenge for them for this very reason. 

With this in mind, a more experiential student experience was born: the interview narrative. While reading Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie about the author's experience with his dying professor, I began to see the wisdom and experience that comes with aging--and my students did, too. Admittedly, some of them didn't see it right away, as one student remarked: 

...I thought that it would not be a good book at all.  I thought I would just have to read the book and get it over with, just like it seems it is with most books I am assigned to read... As I started to get into it, the book kept growing on me more and more. After we finished the book, we were assigned to go interview an elderly person and tell “their story.” At that point, I thought “ok, well I will go ahead and interview someone and get it out of the way.” I then interviewed a lovely women and learned about her, her life, and and her story.  Here is her story which really touched me.

And she tells it exactly as I presented it to students: read the text, write at least ten questions about topics from the text ("death, fear, aging, greed, marriage, family, society, forgiveness, and a meaningful life (66)."), and interview someone in preparation to tell his/her story. 

Here is what happened next, as told by another student in class: 

On September 15, 2015,  my English class and I made a chilly journey on foot to the old folks home that was only a couple blocks from our high school. The early morning air and slight drizzle sent shivers down my spine. I expected this to be like every other field trip, not fun or useful, but still better than school. Little did I know that inside that brick building would be a wrinkled, warm-hearted 94 year old woman named Doris who would change my outlook on life forever.

That, my friends, is magic. In the 100 essays I have read, I stumbled upon varying degrees of similar accounts to that above: students who were nervous to interview residents in a local nursing home, those who were attending to just get out of class, and those who were concerned they would meet "cranky old people". In 92% of these cases, however, students reflected upon the joy they received by meeting with our community's wise residents. Likewise, the residents were filled to the brim with happiness and pride as they shared with my students. 

The affects of this project did not stop with just students and the residents. In one instance, a student who interviewed a resident allowed his mom to read his narrative before he turned it in. Half-way through the narrative, the mother stopped suddenly, a vague recollection floating in the back of her mind. Her son hadn't even mentioned the resident's name yet--he was writing in first person point of view--but his mom knew exactly who he was writing about. It was a former customer of the mother's salon who had stopped coming to the salon four years earlier. She and her co-workers had been wondering where the resident had been. Because of this project, they were able to visit the resident in the nursing home to catch up again like old times. 

I went into this project as a way for my students to connect with people in our community and a hope that they would emerge with meaningful narratives. What I left with was gratification from students, parents, and residents alike. And what of those narratives? They were wonderful, harrowing, intriguing, beautiful narratives that spilled tears onto my cheeks, down to my chin, especially when reading lines like this: 

I smiled at the thought of me and Betty being alike, because I have never thought about myself growing old. I started to imagine Betty as a reflection of myself and as I listened to her speak, I could hear more of me in her voice.  

To read more of their beautiful lines, that connect nicely to the standards of the rubric, click here. I promise you won't be disappointed! 

How have you taken students into the community? What experience have you had with this? Let me know in the comments below!