AATE 'Novel Ideas' publication – Flipped Learning in the Middle Years Classroom – By Steven Kolber (3 pages)
“The child’s scribbling on the margin of his school-books is
really worth more to him than all he gets out of them. To him the margin is the
best part of all books, and he finds in it the soothing influence of a clear
sky in a landscape.”
-
From Seth Lerer, Devotion and defacement: reading children’s
Marginalia
For me, annotating has proven the single most important reading
strategy in my learning, for fiction, I doodle, draw, circle and highlight in a
free and creative response to the text. One of my favourite texts, John
Milton’s Paradise Lost, beginning as a plain penguin classic, was transformed
into a highly illuminated and scrawled upon volume. When reading academically,
written annotations are numerous, aggressive, contrary, challenging and
conversational.
I was forever inserting myself into the text and at many points in
opposition to the reader. I believe there is something innately human and
compelling about marking, annotating and even defacing written texts. The very
act shifts the process of reading from a passive, imaginative process into a
dialogical and vibrant, human experience. This process served me, and continues
to bring me joy, through my undergraduate study, to my postgraduate work and is
something I regularly practice still. It should come as no surprise that I want
this same experience to be granted to my students, to see texts as places where
they have agency, where they can deny, ignore and speak back to dominant, even
iconic, famous texts in ways of their choosing.
Moving from the idea of annotation as historic, archetypal and
perhaps even primal process, the use of instructional video for teaching and
learning is perhaps the exact opposite, yet I’ve found a combination of the old
and new techniques especially fruitful in my practice. The idea to convert some
well-worn PowerPoint presentations into videos occurred to me in my sixth year
of teaching. After teaching the same unit of poetry analysis to Year 9
students, year-on-year, I decided that my PowerPoint on metalanguage, and the
first, second and third example I had for each poetic technique were unlikely
to improve. Rather than be tethered to the front of the room, the teacher’s
desk, I figured I could use technology to record my presentation. This first
video, published on June 6th of 2016, was of both poor quality and high
utility, my class of 25 students watched this video a collective 80 times and I
never again stood in front of a class to teach this content. Instead, I was
able to use class time to read and respond to poems, annotating with the
knowledge of techniques that we had engaged with via video. After 4 years, 490 videos
created and 400,000 views across the channel, it’s safe to say I’ve found great
enjoyment, usefulness and professional growth from this creative process and
teaching practice.
In my experience the primary challenge of all English teachers is
getting their students to read the set texts, novels, poems and plays. In many
respects the pick-up rate of this practice is cultural and idiosyncratic, in
many ways relying on the student’s home life and Socio-Economic-Status (SES) to
ensure that students see this as important.
When the novel is read, the reading is invariably shallow, with
many students not practicing the habits of good readers. Between these two
forces, not reading texts, or reading texts in such shallow and disconnected
fashions, many English teachers feel the need to read aloud, summarise, or
synthesise the plot of set texts for students within class time. This is a
practice I indulged in, shamefully, for many years, but faced with the reality
of students who had not read or could not properly recall the text we were
expected to be studying, there was little other option. After practicing and
refining my cajoling, threatening and influencing strategies across the years,
I could reasonably reliably get students to read the set texts. But again, the
depth of reading simply was not there, so it became clear to me that a new strategy
was required. If you feel the challenges
outlined above fit with your experience, the examples below may be useful to
illustrate ways that these techniques can be matched to different students,
classes and texts.
The fact that silent reading of set texts was completed almost
exclusively at home, most often during the summer holidays in Australia, or during
the term breaks meant that analogue forms of intervention were not possible. Though
digital annotation was possible, the format of School Assessed Coursework meant
that physical copies of the text were always required. In a similar fashion to
my production of videos around poetic techniques, for many of the set texts I
had years of experience taking students through the core stylistic elements of
each text. My response was an annotation guide delivered via video, which
students were asked to watch before reading the text and referring to, as often
as they needed to. The first example of this type of video was for the American
classic ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’, that provided the four key themes, the
consistent motifs (the Mockingbird for example), symbols and literary devices
in three minutes. Students were directed to assign a highlighter colour for
each of the four themes, asked to draw symbolic images alongside symbols and
motifs when they appeared and to add post-it notes to help them be able to
locate these things within test conditions. Following this video, and its use
within my Year 10 class, students returned from their holiday break bearing
novels triumphantly daubed in highlighter with post-its resplendent along the fore
edge of their novels. It was as though my advice on process had been taken with
them on their break, guidance provided when and where they needed it most. The
quality of discussion, written responses and content knowledge that followed
was superb. Most importantly, the students that had engaged in this process
were not those students who would have always excelled, but included students
from more disadvantaged groups who had experienced success through this method.
The actual process of video production has changed subtly across
the last four years, but all methods are very easily attainable by English
teachers and it is not the technology that is important in this method. If you
would like to explore instructional video production for your own classes, the
first step is to use whatever tools you already use in your personal life, then
upload the output onto a place where your students go to engage with digital
content. The method itself is simple, it is the thinking and planning that
takes the most time. Planning that responds to your class’s students, the
challenge implicit within the text, the expectation of the year level and the
assessment type.
Year 8
example: The Ratcatchers Daughter by Pamela Rushby
Class characteristics: diverse skills, high-LBOTE, disengaged readers
Challenges of the set text: vocabulary and historical context
Year level: 8
Assessment: text response essay
Challenged groups: low-literacy, ASD, Dyslexic students
Exploration:
The focus for this class was on including all students regardless
of level of confidence as readers and for them to experience closely annotating
a text. The text includes many historical concepts and unfamiliar vocabulary,
so in addition to the annotation guide, a vocabulary guide was produced. The vocabulary
annotation guide asked for students to locate key vocabulary and note a three
word or less definition, with this list of words being used for a range of
spelling and writing activities throughout the unit for retrieval practice. One
key to a quality guide is to allow for differentiated entry points and levels
of participation and challenge for different levels of student achievement show
the ways that these video artefacts can be used flexibly:
Remedial: annotating for vocabulary, definitions, chapter summaries
Low: as above, but also, annotating themes to key quotes, concrete
symbols
Medium: as above, but also, symbols, motifs and some predictable literary
devices
High: as above, but also, all literary devices provided within the
guide
For students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), this type of
communication can often be less challenging that face-to-face delivery and
providing headphones are used within class, the challenges of sensory issues
can be curtailed somewhat. Dyslexic students find the multimodal format of
these videos easier to engage with as a starting point than the core text and
therefore can build background vocabulary, context and plot knowledge aurally,
before beginning reading, ideally supported by a read-aloud or audiobook when
available.
Year 9 example: Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Class characteristics: perfectionism, test anxiety
Challenges of the set text: multiple layers of meaning
Year level: 9
Assessment: text response
Challenged groups: high-achievers, skim readers, SparkNotes abusers
Exploration:
For this class, a select-entry group, the focus was not on
differentiating across wide skill gaps, but rather to promote creativity and
iterative responses. Each year, students were assigned to groups and asked to produce
their own guided annotation of the chapter assigned to them. These live, in
situ responses were filmed and made available to students afterwards and to
students from the following years. The annotation guide served as a guide to
direct them to the key elements within the text but allowing them space and
creativity to explore the connections between these ideas themselves.
Year 10 example: Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Class characteristics: diverse skill spread, high-LBOTE, EAL/D students
Challenges of the set text: context, Shakespearean language, perceived relevance
Year level: 10
Assessment: text Response / Creative response
Challenged groups: EAL/D learners, Dyslexia, low-literacy students
Exploration:
As with any Shakespeare text, getting students to comprehend the
text itself is the primary challenge. So, an alternative approach is taken, as
well as a guiding annotation guide, each scene is given a short video where key
events are outlined, whilst crucial quotes appear on the screen. For Dyslexic,
EAL/D and low literacy students these videos may be the primary engagement that
is had with the text, whilst audio readings and film texts further supplement
their understanding. For other students the ‘critical questions’ within the
videos as well as videos that synthesise scholarly readings of the text from
academic articles extend them to think about the text in a holistic manner.
These three examples across the middle years, with different classes
and disparate needs shows the flexibility of instructional video in English
teaching. The means of creating videos are equally flexible and many
possibilities are available, likewise the application or method for using these
learning resources are similarly broad. The first step is to choose a class, a
text-based unit and consider the criteria provided above, then get to
producing. Then blend the old with the new, annotation and instructional video
to allow for deeper reading and a more dynamic classroom.
References
Bergmann, J., & Sams, A. (2012). Flip your classroom: Reach every
student in every class every day. International society for technology in education.
Bergmann, J., & Sams, A.
(2014). The flipped classroom. Commissionerate of School Education, 17(3),
24-27.
Bergmann, J., & Sams, A.
(2016). Flipped learning for English instruction. International
Society for Technology in Education.
Lerer, S. (2012). Devotion and
defacement: Reading children's Marginalia. Representations, 118(1),
126-153.
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