Teach the Poem in Your Pocket Zines Lesson
This 826 Digital lesson, designed in collaboration with Academy of American Poets, introduces students to Poem in Your Pocket Day and invites them to create their own pocket-sized zine featuring a poem they wrote (or a poem they love). Teach the lesson to your students and discover how zines can be a powerful medium for self-expression.
The research confirms her assertion: Writing both records and generates thought, leaping forward in sudden bursts of inspiration before doubt emerges and the author senses the need to loop back and revise, close gaps, and clarify their thinking.
Asking kids to “quick write” for 3- to 10-minutes gives students a low-stakes space to put pen to paper in response to a prompt. Quick writes are versatile, simple, and repeatable; they can be assigned several times a week, and can become a staple of paper notebooks across subject areas.
Middle school English teacher Meghan Rosa uses 7-minute writes “almost daily” as an “idea generator.” Students write the date and provocative statement like “homework should be banned” at the top of notebook paper, then share and refine the resulting written work in pairs. In social studies or history classes, students might engage in a 5-minute, written reflection about the importance of a towering figure like Frederick Douglass, or quickly respond to a prompt like “Was the U.S. Civil War avoidable?” to commit some initial thinking to paper.
Many good suggestions in this article.
Suppose a science lesson identifies 15 pages of reading and 10 related questions for students to complete within a 45-minute block. Many students will struggle to meet this expectation, so teachers are faced with two choices: spread the lesson over more than one class, or determine what portions of the text and which questions are most important for achieving that day’s learning goal. I recommend the latter because it will not only prevent the dreaded problem of falling behind but also help teachers learn more about how the curriculum supports important standards.
To avoid rushed grading, it helps to reflect on what feedback actually accomplishes. As Youki Terada and Stephen Merrill note, “The hours you commit to grading and commenting on every assignment and quiz are likely to be met with a shrug by your students.” Instead, they recommend focusing on a few high-impact areas for improvement. One of my favorite strategies for streamlining feedback is the holistic sort, which places formative data into two or three categories (such as “met,” “approaching,” or “not yet”). That way, we get a brief yet accurate picture of how students are doing.
For example, if students write a short constructed response (say, a paragraph) with the goal of identifying a main idea and some students have not done this correctly, the teacher is aware of who exactly is struggling. The next day, this teacher might allow students who met the standard to work independently for 20 minutes while pulling the “not yet” students aside for small group instruction on the skill. To try this out, pick one major assignment per week to receive detailed feedback and mark the rest with a quick holistic sort only. Research also indicates that students respond to feedback better when they see it without a grade—the latter is evaluative but is not considered feedback in and of itself.
Also a link to another article about the holistic sort
When teachers get bogged down in grading a large number of assignments, students do not receive feedback in time to make necessary adjustments to their understanding and are therefore more likely to give up. Providing feedback is not synonymous with giving a grade, and the value in letting students know where they stand informs their future success. Deciding which assignments deserve a grade and which exist solely to give the teacher data requires some discernment, but it’s well worth the effort. As for student pushback about not getting graded on everything, they will not be as vocally opposed to feedback for its own sake once they see the value of correcting their mistakes before their work is evaluated.
Suppose a sixth-grade science teacher wants to assess how accurately students identify mutually beneficial relationships within ecosystems by asking them to make a list of such interactions among organisms. Rather than grade the assignment or spend time making numerous comments, the teacher can divide student understanding into two categories labeled “Met” and “Not Yet.” Then, looking for overall patterns, the teacher makes notes about what mistakes students who are in the “Not Yet” category seem to encounter and uses that information to guide next steps.
This process is short and direct and provides the sort of visibility about student outcomes that makes instruction more relevant. In addition, students receive far more incisive feedback that helps them improve before a higher-stakes opportunity presents itself in terms of grades, and they are therefore less likely to get bogged down in a sense of failure.
from NYT learning network -
read NYT - windows and mirrors
Before you read any further, try a quick experiment:
Go to the NYTimes.com home page, or to any of the individual sections.
Find an article, video, image, podcast or graphic that is immediately interesting to you because it is on a topic you know or care about, or are somehow connected to already.
Now take a second look. Find an article, video, image, podcast or graphic that is outside your usual comfort zone, yet still seems potentially interesting.
Read — or watch or listen to — them both. What happened?
This is exactly the challenge Kim Butterfield, an English teacher at Central High School in La Crosse, Wis., and a member of this year’s New York Times Teaching Project, gave her students.
What they discovered is that no matter how foreign a topic feels initially, you can nearly always find a way to connect to it and learn something valuable. And, as Ms. Butterfield explains below, when her students shared what they chose, “all of our worlds widened.”
We liked the idea so much we asked other Teaching Project members to try it. We ended up with students in schools from four U.S. regions — the South, the Midwest, the East Coast and the West Coast — all attempting the same exercise, and all discovering the same things Ms. Butterfield’s students did. Below, you can read excerpts from the reflections of a few students in each of these classrooms.
We have labeled the students’ choices “windows” and “mirrors,” because all of these teachers explained the assignment in terms of Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop’s often-cited metaphor of “windows and mirrors,” which she described this way in a 1990 essay:
Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author.
When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.
What mirrors and windows can your students find in The New York Times? If you’d like them to try the exercise described above, we have a related Student Opinion question, “How Often Do You Read, Watch or Listen to Things Outside of Your Comfort Zone?” that challenges them to take the same steps, then post their answers to our comments section.
If they enjoy that, they might also be interested in our annual Summer Reading Contest, which invites teenagers to tell us what got their attention in The Times each week and why. This year it begins on June 11 and runs through Aug. 19.
From NYT learning network: summer reading
Every summer for 16 years now, we’ve invited students to read (or watch or listen to) anything they like in The New York Times and tell us about the experience. We’ll be doing that again this year, and, as always, we’ll be offering students dozens of free pieces a week to choose from if they aren’t already Times subscribers.
But if you would like to help your students practice this kind of independent reading before turning them loose, our spring challenge can help.
All your students have to do is choose three articles (or videos, podcasts or photo essays) from three different Times sections; read, listen to or watch them; and then tell us what they thought — in writing or via a short video.
Clarify Priorities Constantly from Leadership Freak
Fuzzy priorities waste energy. What is your priority today? This week? This month?
If you can’t list your priorities, you don’t have any.
If you have more than five priorities, you don’t have any.
Just sharing: You probably know Cal Newport ("Deep Work"). Here's a short excerpt of an interview where he's talking about AI and students (he teaches at Georgetown). Seems wise. I really like the "10,000 steps" metaphor.
In this Chronicle of Higher Education interview with Evan Goldstein, Cal Newport (Georgetown University) talks about his worry that artificial intelligence is making us stupid. Some excerpts:
“When AI automates tasks that are repetitive or time-consuming,” says Newport, “or that you would be willing to hand off to a research assistant, I’m not so concerned. If a political scientist can use an AI coding agent to do a more comprehensive and faster data analysis to help them form an argument, that’s good.”
But he sees many students using AI to automate thought. “Think about having to write something and facing a blank screen. Blank-screen writing is hard. You might want to avoid that cognitive strain. You can get a good enough draft from AI and maybe edit it. You are spared cognitive strain. That worries me because cognitive strain is at the core of the entire post-Paleolithic human experience. It’s at the core of all big ideas. It’s at the core of empathy, morality, ethics, notions of justice and human rights, and religion and philosophy… Yes, automate drudgery. But automating hard thought is a dangerous direction to go.”
The combination of distracting social media and artificial intelligence “is a powerful one-two punch,” says Newport. “This is a problem that’s 15 years in the making. The smartphone revolution and social media kicked this off. Now here comes AI at the worst time from the perspective of human thinking.”
“We need to think about cognitive fitness the way we think about physical fitness,” he continues. “There should be a simple rule for being a thinker in an age of AI: don’t let AI write anything for you. Writing is to cognitive health what steps are to physical health. Write that e-mail from scratch. Write that memo with the bullet points from scratch. Don’t flee the strain. You need it as much as you need those 10,000 steps a day.”
How about the student experience? “We are going to look much more like classic Oxford than we do today,” says Newport. “More in-person testing, more blue books. Also, more Oxford-style tutorials where you sit with a proctor and walk through an argument and they assess how well you understand the material.”
