Classroots.org

Super Mario Brothers Candy by sonson

Here’s a quick post on an imperfect start to using video games in the classroom for teaching the soft-skills necessary for collaboration in a manner (hopefully) authentic and relevant to students’ media experience.

• Teams of 3-4 students played New Super Mario Bros. Wii at a classroom station.
• Teams were asked to win the most levels possible with the fewest lives lost in 20 minutes.
• A teacher kept track of lives lost and levels won on a graphic organizer and took notes, as well, about groups’ pro- and anti-social behavior.
• Lives could also be lost on paper for trash-talking.
• Trash-talking was addressed whenever it occurred, and serial trash-talkers were asked to stop playing.
• The group with the lowest lives lost to levels won ratio was awarded 3 lunch periods on the Wii.

Here are our results (lives lost:levels beat, reduced to the lowest equivalent ratio):

• Group 1 – 10:1
• Group 2 – 6:1
• Group 3 – 50:1
• Group 4 – 22: 1
• Group 5 – 15:1
• Group 6 – 10:1

Here are comments from the groups with the lowest and highest ratios, respectively:

• Comments from Group 2: “Backed up to easier levels; good teamwork and talk; [Student A] led them through the levels and made sure all followed.”
• Comments from Group 3: “Students fought each other and never started working together.”

I can see that Group 3 needs some social stories work before playing together again, and that the difference between Groups 2 and 3 wasn’t necessarily the amount of communication, but the type of communication that went on between group members.  Before the next contest, I’ll use the data and observations from this activity to pose questions for students about the value of strategic thinking, positive communication, and leadership to social learning.  To help make the discussion more personally meaningful to students, I might begin by asking students to figure out the ratios and results from the data after I make it anonymous.

What do you think?  Does the competition undercut the collaboration?  Is the reward appropriate? I’ll follow up later so we can see where the activity goes and whether or not it impacts soft-skills and collaboration in the classroom.

I’m sure many of you are familiar with the TwitterKids of Tanzania – students tweeting in English with followers from around the world. I’m also sure many of you are much more adept than I am at breaking down the walls of the classroom with tools like Twitter, Skype, Google for Educators, wikis, and blogs. To follow in your footsteps, in the interest of advancing authentic engagement with our classwork on narrative, writing, and questioning, today we started tweeting to Tanzania.

We began with a simple interactive whiteboard activity. This week we’ve been learning the terms and definitions of plot structure and matching them up together along the St. Louis arch, U2’s Popmart arch, and roller-coasters. We’ve been using the terms to write and our own stories and analyze those we’re reading. Today, we looked at a scrambled narrative adapted from the Epic Change blog to learn the TwitterKids’ story. We ordered the pieces according to plot structure on the SmartBoard, and then used Google Earth to get us from here (Charlottesville, Virginia, USA) to there (Arusha, Tanzania) in our minds. Finally, we brain-dumped a bunch of questions for the TwitterKids and chose a few per class to tweet in hopes of responses to read and respond to later in class.

Here are some of our interactive whiteboard and Twitter artifacts from class (via Seesmic):

TwitterKids Plot Structure Exercise - Before

Twitterkids from Tanzania Plot Structure - After

Tweeting with the Twitterkids of Tanzania

You can follow the Twitter Kids here; you can follow our class account here.

For me as a teacher, the big idea here is to act. There are great models out there of how to bring the world into your classroom and how to broadcast your classroom to the world. Find one that seems manageable to you. Find an idea, lesson, or unit that you can emulate with success and try it. The small steps you take for your classroom’s engagement with the world will help American education make the giant leap into relevance that we teachers and our students need, desire, and deserve.

[Editor's note: Guest blogger Damani Harrison, gifted musician and mentor, joins Classroots.org for a series of posts sharing his take on authentic engagement in teaching and learning.  Damani works for the Music Resource Center, "a state-of-the-art facility where teens can learn the latest technology in the music industry and study and participate in every phase of music production," in Charlottesville, Virginia.]

Coffee Talk

Caffe Latte by Accidental Hedonist

My name is Damani Harrison. I am the outreach coordinator, youth mentor, and studio educator for The Music Resource Center in Charlottesville, Virginia.  The Music Resource Center is a non-profit after school youth risk prevention and music education program for 7th-12th graders. Through a series of posts at Classroots.org, I would like to present what I have learned as a teacher and as a student of life. I am writing this blog for three reasons: 1) Chad Sansing asked me to. 2) I hope to inspire discussion and dialogue. 3) I want to illustrate the process of non-traditional learning which has shaped my teaching for a new generation.

My journey into teaching began when I was 21. At the time I was working at a coffee shop. A young highschooled girl who frequented my store had taken a liking to me. Her affinity was completely innocent. She would come into the shop and chat with me while I made lattes. We talked about many things – music, philosophy, books, current events. She seemed stimulated by our conversations, conversations she wasn’t having at home or with her peers.

Her father also came in the coffee shop from time to time. He was a stern, physically imposing fellow with a low voice and intimitdating look in his eye. To my surprise, one day while waiting for me to make him an espresso, he asked me to tutor his daughter because she was failing school. He offered to pay me. He spoke directly and succinctly saying something to the effect of: “My daughter seems to like you and respect you. She might listen to you and do better in school. Will you tutor her twice a week?” I immediately accepted. I was afraid to say no to this guy. He didn’t seem like the type of guy people say no to. I thought he might shoot me if I did.

I tutored his daughter for a year. I would help her with geometry, government, and English, and she would spend free moments in between our lessons trying to convince me to become a vegetarian. We finally came to an agreement. If she passed highschool with a B average I would stop eating meat for a year. She passed her senior year with an A average. I stopped eating meat for four years. What I learned being a vegetarian for that promised year completely altered the way I view my diet to this day. She changed my life. In my first real experience being a bonafide teacher I ended up being the student. This was the first of many lessons I would take with me throughout my teaching years.

We, as teachers, are also students. We are students of what we teach and who we teach. The more we learn about whatever subject we teach the better we are equiped to teach it. In the same fashion, the more we learn about and from our students, the more we can serve them better as educators. In the case of the young lady from the coffee shop, it was just as important for her to share a piece of what she was learning in life with me as it was she receive any information I had to offer her. We were not equals – I was the teacher, she was the student – but, there existed a mutual respect between us. By respecting her opinions and ideas, I opened the door for her to be receptive to what I had to offer.

I found in the 11 years following my encounter with that young lady a pattern emerged. Young people want to feel respected. They want to feel they have something to offer. They want to know you, as a teacher, are willing to open up to what they have to say. More importantly, these young people do have something to offer. The world is changing at a more rapid pace than it ever has before. The information and ideas that youth culture are exposed to have created a barrier between our generations even greater than the one that exists between us and our parents. We must learn from our students. It is imperitive for our survival and effectiveness. We must understand how they learn, where they learn it from, what they are learning, and how it is changing the very foundation of the role of the student – and the teacher.

I am no longer a vegetarian. However, I am very aware of, and control, the amount of meat I consume. Because of it I feel healthier, more energized, more even tempered, and holistically more in tune with my body. I thank my student for it. I thank my students for continuing to help me grow. I only hope that as a teacher I can affect their lives as positively as they have continued, and will continue, to affect mine.

Trevor Przyuski works as an instructional coach for Albemarle County Public Schools.  In, “Let Them Own It,” he writes about the tension between children’s authentic engagement with personally meaningful work and their struggles with traditional school work.  By sharing an anecdote from his own experience as a classroom teacher, Trevor offers a model of instructional decision making that favors following the “happy accidents” of authentic engagement over sticking with the teacher’s plans.

Trevor’s post makes a startling point: the genius of a lesson plan may be in its failure.  If a plan prompts students to follow their interests and passions in taking the work in another direction, then its failure can provide more authentic engagement than its success.  Indeed, to move past thinking about our own lessons as successes and failures, we need to make students equal partners in the differentiation of their learning.

After reading Trevor’s post, the big question for me is: how do we shift our mindest and planning practices to prepare for the “accidents” of authentic engagement?  Even in a classroom rich with opportunities for authentic engagement, students will make discoveries about themselves and their learning that will take them in unanticipated directions.  When planning for authentic engagement, what’s the right balance to maintain between familiar structures and the unknown?

Trevor’s blog is here, and you can follow him on Twitter via @trevorprzyuski.  Please read on and comment!