WEEK TWO, DAY TWO

We started the class off with the desert survival guide activity again. Wilson and I set up the situation a little better this week, having them close their eyes and truly imagine that they are in the situation. Having 8 kids made it tremendously better because they had two groups of 4, and really had to work together to come to decisions on each item in terms of importance. They all achieved synergy because their group scores were lower than their individual scores.

We tied this activity back to the imitation learned in the egg activity and talked about inspiration from your peers. We then transitioned into a highly successful imitation writing activity. Same as last week, we passed out four different styles of writing and had the students read them. Initially they were all really hesitant to read and a couple even didn’t start reading and were just staring into space. However, once a buzz started about how cool a couple of the pieces were, they came around.

By the time we finished reading, everyone seemed to be relatively engaged. However, the best part was when we told them all to select their favorite piece and write something in the style of that writer. Again, there was a little initial resistance but once they got started it was the most productive activity thus far in the week. There were several really notable things that happened:

• Two of the kids (not friends before the week) teamed up and wrote parallel essays that complemented each other. With no prodding or suggestions from Wilson or I, they simply started giving each other feedback and helping each other, while using combined ideas to write two separate pieces. One of these kids practically was refusing to write anything yesterday, and seemed to thoroughly enjoy this activity.
• One kid who has been very indifferent to the majority of activities found a style that he was interested in and ended up writing a really good dialogue piece.
• Two kids took on the palindrome poem (same forwards and backwards) and wrote really good poems from it, which is a very advanced writing form for students their age.
• We gave them a lot of freedom to talk and interact, and they still were very productive, almost more so than when they were quietly writing. Further dismantling this idea that silent individual work is the most productive.

After about 20 minutes, they shared with their partners and discussed what they were doing well and needed to improve. Wilson and I also circled throughout the room, working individually with each student and giving them things to work on. We also had them discuss with their partner what in particular that they liked about the writing style/selection that they chose, in order to help them further improve their piece. They then spent a few more minutes improving and finalizing their work.

Thoughts from the first part of the day:

• Allowing them to create a “finished product” in the imitation activity turned out to be a great idea for a lot of them. Though it didn’t seem to change the mindset of all the kids, several seemed to be more proud of their work.
• The imitation activity is a great way to bypass this creative block that many of them have (that I suspect is from the standardized way that they are used to being taught in class with prompts, etc.) It’s nice because we sort of were able to trick them into being creative. They still made up their own writing and ideas about things they were interested in, we just gave them individual goals to shoot for.
• To this point in the day, we really accomplished a lot of the improvements and ideas that we had discussed after class yesterday to engage the students more and improve their experience. Almost all of our feedback and discussions were in small groups rather than the large group where they tend to get bored.
• When students feel more comfortable with their peers, they are much more attentive in a lot of ways which is interesting. Today, as the class environment improves as they get to know each other, it seems as though they actually focus better which is the opposite of what you might expect.
• Wilson and I are getting good at allowing each other to talk for longer when one of us is on a roll and really connecting with the students.

After a snack break, we transitioned into speaking. To continue our theme of imitation, we showed them three inspirational sports movie speeches. The “Remember the Titans Gettysburg Speech”, the “Miracle final speech (Herb Brooks)”, and the “Friday Night Lights halftime speech by coach Gaines”. After each speech, we brainstormed quickly as a class what the coaches did well and what techniques they used to make their speeches especially powerful.

We broke the students up into small groups and had them all present one of the speeches to the rest of their group with all the emotion and passion that they could put into it. Wilson and I circulated the room and helped them with the specific skills that they were working on. After a debrief of that activity, we started working on hooks.

Our structure of a presentation continues to be based on: hook, engaging the audience, conveying information, and powerful ending. Today we started with the hook. First, Wilson and I showed a couple TED talks and had the students break down what was good about the start of the presentation. We brainstormed different ways to draw the audience in. 

Next, we had the kids do a couple practice hooks on random topics such as pokemon, bacon, pterodactyls, and water. The goal is to make a short presentation (15-30 seconds) with your partner that makes us care and want to keep listening. After two practice topics, we had them start developing the hook for their own presentation. The students all worked individually on creating an entertaining and suspenseful hook. We tried to get them to make the hooks relatable and something that is somewhat unexpected that gets the audience curious. 

Thoughts on the day:

• Far better than the first day. Our goal is to not necessarily drastically improve the technical skills of the kids because most of them will most likely forget those small changes, but to give them an experience where they truly enjoy writing and learning. That will be much more impactful.
• Having the skills to write a really good hook can be crucial to learning how to make great presentations and writing.

A lot more thoughts to come in the next couple posts!

WEEK TWO, DAY ONE

This week we have 8 students in the class. They are all boys (not sure about why these first two weeks have had zero girls, but it’s an interesting note). The age range is from 10-15, and the backgrounds of the kids have an extreme range of socioeconomic statuses.

We kicked off the week in the same way, having the kids write about a boring prompt “Should schools require uniforms? Please explain and support your answer”. As expected based on last week, all eight of them didn’t enjoy the work. We had them crumple up the papers and toss them into the garbage.

The format was primarily the same as the first day of last week, so I won’t go too in depth in detail. However, we didn’t do the imitation activities this week on the first day, instead we focused more time on writing about things the kids are passionate about. In addition to our free write about anything, we had them do a word association activity that led to a short writing assignment. This week, we had a little trouble with a couple of the boys in terms of getting them excited about writing. Thoughts below.

Thoughts from the writing portion: 

• There is a complex line we have to walk, between setting learning goals and not being too overbearing. We want to have common goals that the kids can work toward as a class, but learning is extremely individual.
• The reasons why we learn are totally different and we can’t expect to standardize it, but we want to be able to get the class fired up over the same things.
• We also need to figure out effective ways to measure the kids’ success and progress. It’s hard to motivate kids to work on the pure basis of enjoying learning when they are often not interested.
• There is a disconnect between what we are passionate about and the classroom. The classroom, “learning”, and “writing” seem to be triggers for a lot of the kids and makes them not want to do the activity, even if it’s about something that they love! For example, I tell a student he can write about his favorite food, but the concept of writing is so ingrained as a negative thing that is boring, we can’t overcome that mindset.
• We are improving on giving individual feedback while still keeping the class engaged, because when you start talking to one kid the rest tend to lose interest because it’s no longer applicable to them.
• Accomplishment is one of the driving forces behind why people work because it feels great. One of the flaws in our activities has been the lack of finishing. We have been acting as if the process of writing itself is always fun, but the truth is sometimes it can be frustrating and difficult.
• Even when working with kids to really find out what they are passionate about, they don’t necessarily jump to wanting to learn about it. Having total control of your own learning is so foreign to so many of them that it sometimes is actually detrimental.
• Definitely had some kids completely buy in to the process and fully enjoyed writing about anything they wanted.

In the afternoon we moved onto our first day of public speaking. We spent a lot of time working on voice control and tone, similar to last week. Tongue twisters, coloring words, and telling short creative stories were the primary activities that we used. We rounded out the day with our topic choosing session for their presentations that they will work on throughout the week.

Thoughts on the overall day:

• Having more kids is good and bad. Clearly with only two we could do tons of individual feedback. However, with 8, we are able to integrate a lot more peer feedback and group work.
• The egg activity is a favorite for a second straight week. It’s interesting, because it actually has the most amount of instruction. However, I feel that because it seems the least like “conventional classroom activities” there is an automatic disassociation from learning and it becomes “fun”.
• The kids give great peer feedback but if we have all of them share in front of the full group it takes too much time and some of them start losing interest.
• It’s really inspiring to see some of the students completely “go for it” in the public speaking activities. When they hold nothing back and don’t try to censor their emotions, some of them have made great progress.

This blog post may seem like it has lots of criticism of ourselves, but Wilson and I both felt the first day of this week was overall an awesome experience! We are holding ourselves to high standards because of our extremely short time with the kids, and we want to make an impact in that window.

WEEK ONE, DAY THREE

To start day three we did a short ice breaker that I learned in one of my college classes called the Desert Survival guide. It’s a teamwork activity that is designed to encourage group interaction and synergy. Essentially the students just all create individual rankings for a list of items they have in the middle of the desert after being stranded by a plane crash. The kids then come back and work as a team to develop group rankings. Both individual and group are compared to the expert rankings, and then we see if they achieved synergy by getting a better group score. This activity leads into our comfort with sharing, power of working in a group, and imitation. However, with two kids, it ended up not being as effective as planned.

Next, we shared a couple stories with the students from a blog post titled five lessons to being a better person. The point of this activity was to show them how to use emotion to make stories powerful. We followed this up with “make your momma cry”, an activity we designed to help students access the power of emotion in storytelling and writing. The goal is simply to write a piece or story that would make your mother or any other person cry. We continued to hammer home our point about the unexpected being the most powerful thing you can use to make someone feel emotion about anything.

The students were really responsive to this idea. The stories weren’t necessarily as powerful as they could have been but they really grasped the concept that the unexpected is what draws emotion from people.

We transitioned from storytelling into our public speaking/presentation model. We broke down presentations into four separate parts: The hook, keeping the audience engaged, conveying information, and ending. Through these four different points, we analyzed a couple TED talks bit by bit and discussed how each of the speakers used these different techniques. The students then started developing their own presentation about parkour. Due to the limited time and the small number of students, we had them just do a group presentation. The remainder of the day was spent preparing and then presenting to end it.

Thoughts on the day and week:

•      We feel that we need to emphasize the idea of self-direction more on the first couple days. It’s our mission and in order for the kids to take ownership they need to understand why they have control.

•       One of the problems is that the kids don’t seem to want to be doing the research and don’t seem like they want to be creating the presentation, even though it’s about something they love.

•       We feel that on the first day, we didn’t create the sense that they needed to be choosing everything that they learn and that they have ownership in it.

•       WE CRAVE STRUCTURE. Students are so inclined to want structure in any environment. It’s an uncomfortable thing to have to be completely free and do whatever you want while still in an educational frame. The kids naturally want to do nothing to do with school when we give them freedom. How can we create a desire to learn/make a presentation about something they love? We think that starting at the beginning and laying down solid framework of what self-direction is and how this week will operate (more macro ideas) will allow that to happen.

•       Definitely having more time to develop the presentation is important. Next week we want to combine our different activities with the presentation so they are simultaneously developing skills and working on their presentation.

WEEK ONE, DAY TWO

The bulk of day two in our first session was spent at the Woodland Park Zoo. Wilson and I wanted to emphasize the power of observational research and felt that the zoo was a great place to engage in this and give the students the opportunity to do so. Upon arriving, we gave them a quick crash course in research and explained why it is important for writers to be able to research.

Throughout the morning, we visited different exhibits and had the kids observe animals for different amounts of time, taking both objective notes and also writing reflections integrated with their opinions. The longest observation period was ten minutes. Immediately following that one, we had them give a short speech to a random person at the zoo (individually) about the animal that they had chosen to observe for the longest period of time. Through this exercise, we had them practice their public speaking skills, specifically voice control and body language.

The kids definitely enjoyed the zoo, as did Wilson and I, but we felt that a little more structure inserted into the day could have made it more productive. More will be discussed down below in thoughts on the day.

After returning to Garfield, we transitioned into storytelling. We had a brief conversation about how writers use facts from observation to make their fictional stories more believable and realistic, and then had the students write a story about one of the animals they had observed. After a ten minute free write on that topic, their next step was to understand how storytelling could make them tremendously more effective as writers when it comes to any sort of writing assignment.

Our belief is that good storytelling is key to engaging your audience and making your writing relatable. We returned to our original question to the kids at the very beginning of class about school uniforms and whether they should be required, but this time, we had them creatively make up stories that would support their points. One of the boys wrote about how dress codes could interrupt the way people dress for religions, and the other wrote about a kid who started a clothing company to support himself as an orphan but couldn't sell shirts due to the dress code.

We finished the day talking about the true power of stories and how evoking emotion in readers and listeners (in speeches) is crucial. The kids were burning out toward the end of the session, so we improvised our lesson plan into a game where they would shoot a play-doh ball at the garbage can. If they missed, they had to give us a time that they cried. Our message was to examine why we cry when reading writing, or even why we cry in general. Generally, it is because something unexpected happens in the text, which was proven time and again by their examples. They both became actively engaged after we got them moving around.

Thoughts on the day:

• Kids experienced some burnout towards the end of the day. It's really tough to go from an environment like the zoo back to a classroom. Next week the whole day will be spent at the zoo. 
• Our improvisation at the end was crucial to the day. We definitely believe something that makes teachers great is the ability to look at a situation where the students aren't responding well and be willing to be flexible and completely change the lesson plan on the fly. Teaching to bored kids isn't effective, so we might as well try something different. 
• We are still battling with the balance between being seeing as "friends" versus educators. On one hand, we aren't in an official school setting and we don't want to be seen as official educators. However, we have to maintain an aura of them wanting to learn from us. Definitely something to improve on. 
• The schedule at the zoo wasn't as tight as we could have made it. In a highly stimulatory environment (such as the zoo), we think that if productive learning and grasping of concepts is going to take place we need to put the kids in a situation that sets them up to succeed in that way.
• The students continue to be heavily focused on the "micro" versus the "macro" ideas that we are trying to impart on them. Our goal is to help them reframe how they think about learning, but the challenge is to show them that through a series of small lessons. 
• We as educators need to make sure to be extremely fired up about activities that we give them in order to make them excited in turn. If we are lackadaisical and disinterested in our explanations, that message is translated into the activity not being fun. 
• We have to fight the urge to quantify success. As much as Wilson and I are against grading and other forms of testing (for the most part), it is such an inherent idea that has been drilled into us for so many years that the only way to measure academic success is by quantifying it. We are doing our best to measure our successes by the impact we have on the students and the concepts that they take away from the class. In five days, we can't make someone a perfect writer. But we hopefully can give them a way to reframe assignments they find boring in school and turn them into something that they are passionate about.

Update on day three coming tomorrow! Feel free to comment, share, follow our blog via email (link is on right), or send us feedback to our email at selfdirectedlearningacademy@gmail.com. 

WEEK ONE, DAY ONE

Week one of the SDLA: We only have two students this week, and due to the shortened session we are modifying the curriculum a bit to best suit their needs. Week two is already nearly full, so we will have a good variety of experiences.

Day One: We started off the day having the kids write about the most boring prompt we could think of, the classic “Should schools require uniforms?” on plain white paper with pens. The initial response was exactly what we expected. They both said “really?” under their breaths, and seemed not excited in the slightest. After ten minutes of silent writing, we told them our one ground rule: you ALWAYS must be 100% honest with what you think about the activities and the learning. Then we asked the question, “Did you enjoy what you just did?” The response was as expected, that neither of them liked it.

After hearing that, we had them crumple their papers up and throw them into the garbage can. The symbolism of throwing away something boring was a powerful feeling. We then popped laptops in front of them and started our introductions as to who we are and why we do what we do.

The second activity of the day was a short discussion between us four about a time when we truly enjoyed writing. The responses varied from making a picture book in second grade to powerpoint presentations to Facebook comments. We followed this up with a 20 minute free-write about anything they were passionate about. Halfway through, we met with them individually and gave them feedback on their writing, before giving them another 10 minutes to work.

To introduce imitation, we played a game called “Defend the Egg” where we gave the students a collection of things to build with including popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners, straws, gum drops, and paper towels. Working in a team of two, they had to build a contraption that protected an egg from breaking when dropped from shoulder height. We linked this game back to imitation because Wilson and I intentionally took their ideas to inspire our own.

Throughout the rest of the morning we worked on imitation through inspiration in writing where we had the students read four samples of different writing styles that highlighted satire, dialogue, descriptive writing, and a poem. They then chose one example that was of particular interest to them, and wrote in the style of that writer.

Thoughts from the writing portion of today’s class:

• We found it interesting that our natural tendency was to be overly casual and convince the kids that we were “cool” in order to gain their trust and confidence that we would have fun this week.
• It’s hard to find a balance between letting kids write about whatever they want and in any style they want but also offer constructive feedback that will help them succeed in the school system.
• It’s hard to start students on a creative path when they have been so conditioned to follow prompts and direct instructions.
• The egg activity was a raging success and they continued to talk about it throughout the entire day.
• When you give freedom to someone to let them write about whatever they want, voice comes out immediately. 

After lunch, we picked up with public speaking. After showing the kids two TED talks that we selected, we jumped into the practical parts of speaking. Wilson and I have come up with a few skills that we classify as parts of our “presentation toolbox”. The main skill is your voice. Through a shouting exercise, tongue twisters, and coloring words, we emphasized loudness, enunciation, and tone of voice. The kids responded well. An unforeseen problem was the tendency of middle schoolers to giggle when they had to speak in front of a group. A major step that we made today was helping them overcome that.

We followed this up with some improvisation activities and had them read something they had written out loud, putting everything together. The final activity of the day was to discuss what makes a good TED talk and what they were interested in presenting on.

Thoughts from the public speaking portion:

• It seems like we need some kind of activity that makes committing seem cool. By committing we mean being fully engaged and putting yourself out there with no regards to being embarrassed or laughed at. The kids have a tendency to hold back a bit.
• The kids responded really well to the improv activities and were actively working to improve on the points that we made about their speaking tendencies.
• Both kids seem to be pretty outgoing in the first place, and so our focus on improving their speaking can be more focused on voice control and tone usage versus just trying to get them out of their shell.

Overall thoughts on the day:

• Great first day. The kids loved it and we enjoyed working with them. We want to continue to find a balance between fun activities and productive learning.
• We struggled a bit with communicating what we are teaching them on a larger scale. The kids are very “micro-focused” whereas we are trying to convey an understanding of how to manage their educational careers.