Here’s the Old Farmer’s Almanac version
Here’s the PA Master Gardener’s Version.
Oral History and the joys and horrors of lesson planning
Working with an awesome group of tenth graders during second project block. Building on the work kids did last year, they’ve set out to conduct interviews, record them, write about them, with the end goal of a website and conference.
It’s hard for kids to find interviewees/narrators so the project isn’t moving as quick as I would like. I would have preferred to have spent today’s time working on their documents, doing research, editing recordings, but it wasn’t to be.
Instead we had a glorious conversation on the principles one ought to use while doing oral history. After writing their own ideas for “rules” they should live by, we broke into groups to translate the principles laid out by the Oral History Association.
Here are their translations. Not perfect but pretty awesome for a Friday.
This is a solid lesson with important objectives. It’s also the last thing I thought would produce a thoughtful, wide-ranging conversation. You never can tell (great Friday song).
Letter
Most students like the idea of advice columns. I usually get one or more proposals a year where students want to respond their peers and offer suggestions (demands?) about what they ought to be doing. We wrote letters to ourselves today to offer advice about how we could best handle feedback. I didn’t spend a lot of time processing this morning as the momentum towards Friday deliverables was palpable.
Student version:
One I wrote for myself. Last word is things.
“Learn Different” from the New Yorker
I read this piece on Sunday and this paragraph has stuck with me all week:
The point of the hackathon was to sketch out in code potential solutions to “robot tasks”—routine aspects of a teacher’s job that don’t require teaching skills. Kimberly Johnson, the head of product success and training, addressed the team. “Basically, what we have told teachers is we have hired you for your creative teacher brains, and anytime you are doing something that doesn’t require your creative teacher brain that a computer could be doing as well as or better than you, then a computer should do it,” Johnson said.
I’ve been racking my brain all week trying to come up with a “robot task” I do that consumes more than ten-fifteen seconds. Some robot tasks are also things that students should learn to do as part of daily life: organizing their work into a table of contents or plugging up computers or taking care of the room. And most “robot tasks” I like to use as a break from intellectual work: taking attendance or passing back the initial pile of papers for kids to sort themselves.
None of these add up to even five minutes over the course of a day.
“Our class where we do our work.”
We began with this statement — our class where we do our work — and tried to explain how feedback makes this happen. In other words, what role does feedback play in making this statement true?
MH noted that “feedback powers the projects”.
AB let us know that “feedback helps us work harder?”
IJ said that it helps you to “reflect”. I started singing this song because feedback helps you reflect on how you got there…I sounded pretty good too.
Feedback, p.2
Today I hoped we could all talk about the intention of feedback. I wanted to think about how the intention changes based on the quality of the work. Each student had to write about how intention of feedback shifts for outstanding, mediocre, and bad work.
Terrific, terrific conversation.
Intention of feedback on outstanding work:
get help winning contests
taking things to the next level (getting published?)
to make a better connection with the audience
feedback (helps you) figure out why something is outstanding.
Intention of feedback for “bad” work
helps you figure out a different direction to go in
helps you know why the work is so bad
what can you do better?
should make you feel like working and rising to a challenge
One example:
Feedback week
In advisory last week we talked of ownership and what it means to be inside a project. This week we’re turning to feedback: how to seek it, how to use it, when to build on it, when to ignore it, and what constitutes good feedback.
Monday morning we did a collaborative activity where students made a list of types of feedback, passed their papers to a colleague who wrote out an example of that sort of feedback, and concluded with a second colleague writing about when such feedback is helpful and when it is not. This is standard Monday morning “let’s write instead of talk because everyone is crazy from the weekend” but the results offer a window into how our group is seeing and feeling feedback.
Now if I could just a find a time machine so that I could offer more (and better) feedback.
Front yard of garlic
Natural Gardening
Music Stiffneck
Inchelium Red Softneck
Purple Deadnettle
This winter weed has done a good job digging into the sunny raised gardens up front.
Easy enough to pull.
Making more questions
One thing we do is ask students to reflect on the variety of skills necessary for projects to move forward. We’ve encoded these skills in our evaluation system but it’s still important to regularly return to those skills, process them, and think about how they apply to the current project work. The photo below is a creative effort to integrate this week’s conversation about seizing control of your own work with our reflection questions.
