Student Choice in Reading: Let Students Decide Whether They Want to Read a Shakespeare Tragedy, Comedy, or History Play

One thing is certain: when students are given choice—whether limited or wide open—they read and write more.  -Kelly Gallagher, "Moving Beyond the 4x4 Classroom"

Why Is Reading Such a Chore?

What makes something a chore? Is it the essence of the activity itself, such that mopping the floor, for instance, is inherently more chore-like and more obligatory in nature than doing something else, such as watching a movie? Is it really that ontologically simple? Surely not. The idea that something is a chore due to the nature of the act itself is an obvious oversimplification: it fails to account for the importance of context. That's why cleaning the house can also be therapeutic, perhaps even fun. The word chores functions, not as a label for a certain set of activities, but as a description for how one feels about the activity he or she is engaged in. The question has more to do with why one is engaging in a given activity as well as how one came to be motivated to do it in the first place.

As teachers of reading, this is exactly the kind of oversimplification we are battling when students enter our classrooms and say, "I don't know. Reading is just not my thing. It's such a chore." They have become convinced that reading is one of those activities that falls under the category of chores.  How can we convince them otherwise? How can we get them to experience the joy of reading again?

What happens when, over time, an activity that one used to enjoy begins to feel more like a chore? Whether it's something that's leisurely or something that demands a large amount of work, an activity risks becoming a chore, in my opinion, when one (or all) of the following factors starts to seem amiss:

1. Agency in the form of having a choice in the matter.

2. Purpose in the form of knowing why you are doing the thing in question.

3. Relevance in the form of appealing to one's interests and/or passions as an individual

Even things we enjoy doing can become a chore when we no longer feel a sense of agency, purpose, or relevance, which brings up the important question for all teachers:

How can we make students see reading as something other than a chore? How can we prevent what Kelly Gallagher calls Readicide, namely the "systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in our schools"?

Kelly Gallagher suggests several things for combatting the phenomenon of Readicide. One suggestion that's challenged me to grow as a teacher and designer of curriculum is the idea of providing more opportunities for student choice, thereby getting students to exercise agency in determining what texts or books seem most relevant and purposeful to them. 

Core Texts: Community at the Cost of Agency?

I am a big fan of building a learning community around the collaborative study of a core text, whether it be classic or contemporary, but I slowly have come to realize that, if that's all I'm doing, students will inevitably lose sight of one (if not all) of the above three factors (namely, a sense of agency, purpose, and/or relevance).  Community is important, but so is agency. In agreement with Kelly Gallagher, I think there needs to be a balance, but in no way can I claim to have made room for choice to the extent of a "20/80 model" like that in Gallagher's class. 

On a quick side note, I personally think there are strategies one can employ for purposes of empowering student agency even when one is reading a singular text as a class. I suggest the following ideas:

1. Let students choose to be a certain kind of "expert." Sometimes I'll create four reading groups: Group 1 reads for setting, historical/authorial context, etc.; Group 2 reads for character development and analysis; Group 3 reads for theme analysis and development; and Group 4 reads for rhetoric and literary style. Each group is responsible for being the experts in the room when it comes to discussions that relate to their topic of choice (Go here to read more).

2. Allow students to have more direct influence over what you discuss and how. There are so many technological platforms that make this possible. I often use google docs as a back channel for students to make clear to me what they want to talk about and address in the novel we're reading (go here to read more). My friend, Joel Garza, often uses hypothes.is to amplify student voice and particularly to empower the quieter students in his classroom (go here to read more).

3. Gamify the experience for the students. I've written extensively about the pedagogical benefits of gamification, which can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

4. Allow students to persuade each other and to choose democratically a core text for the class to read.

I don't think that assigning core texts necessarily implies a lack of agency, purpose, and/or relevance for students, but it does demand us to be intentional and creative as teachers. On the flip side, promoting student choice for reading also doesn't need to be seen as a threat to cultivating a sense of community in a collaborative classroom. There are ways to foster community while allowing students to direct their inquiry more independently, whether limited in nature or in a completely open framework.

Student Choice in Reading

A couple years back, NCTE published the article "Top Five Reasons We Love Giving Students Choice in Reading" and the first reason the authors identified was the idea that "Choice empowers students":

School is sometimes a frustrating place for students. Their technology-rich world is robust with opportunities for decision-making and choice, but when they enter the classroom, the opportunities for choice are much more limited. When students are routinely assigned books to read without any opportunity to act on their own judgment, many end up dreading the reading and often fail or refuse to complete it. But when we provide students with choices (even within parameters), they make their own decisions and they feel empowered and important. (Campbell, Dubitsky, Faron, George, Gieselmann, Goldschmidt, Skeeters, and Wagner)

I emphasized the 2nd and 3rd sentences because I think this gets to the heart of how choice connects to relevance and purpose, especially for the 21st century student. Our students' technologically-laden world is one that constantly invites them to make choices, to interact, and even to manipulate the things that capture their interest. This is why school can seem so frustrating at times: They don't have that same sense of agency.

*****

This year, when designing my latest unit on William Shakespeare, I was debating whether to do a Tragedy, Comedy, or History play, and it occurred to me: Why not let the students choose? I knew I would limit it to a 3-option choice, meaning there were still strict parameters when it came to exercising student agency. Despite how minimal it was, a significant change in student engagement was immediately evident due to a simple gesture on my part: I trusted them to make a choice based on what sparked their individual interests the most, and simply put, that excited them.

Ss are exploring the first scenes of the #Shakespeare plays they’ve chosen to read. Already, I see more interest & engagement b/c Ss have a choice in the matter #engchat #aplitchat #edchat pic.twitter.com/TfZEb1EJTU

— Jared Colley (@jcolley8) January 12, 2018

Working off the thematic question of What does it mean to be the Other?, I selected three very different plays: Othello, Merchant of Venice, and Richard III. On the first day, I framed each text for the students (we watched movie trailers for each one as well...). We also identified common themes across the plays, and I encouraged them to explore each option a little more by getting on YouTube, Google, and other platforms to find out more information.

Once students selected the play that perked their interest, they received the following instructions:

(1) Based on who chooses what play, you will form “reading groups” with other students who are reading the same text as you.
(2) On the class calendar, each reading group is scheduled to lead a class discussion on various days on a weekly basis.
(3) Groups will lead class discussion only on the due dates for completing each Act of the play (meaning there will be five scheduled presentations for each group).
(4) On those scheduled due dates, each group is expected to present their ideas in a 10-15 minute period of time. Each presentation will be followed by a 10 minute harkness-style question and answer session, and all reading groups are expected to participate.
(5) Presentations will be based on the questions related to the themes that are listed below. Groups may use the same question (or questions) for multiple presentations as long as each presentation develops the revisited question further.
(6) Expectations for each presentation:
     (a) They must be at least 10 to 15 minutes in length
     (b) They must address at least 3-4 of the questions that are related to the themes
     (c) Students must turn in presentation notes, outlines, or scripts
     (d) There must be multiple citations of the text to provide evidence
     (e) Presentations must be cogent, prepared, and collaborative: everyone has to talk
     (f) Optional: Students may use media, visual aids, etc., to enhance the presentation

My school's schedule operates on an ABABC block schedule, meaning I get to meet with students for 80 minutes on either A or B days, and I see every class for 45 minutes at the end of the week on the C day's modified schedule. The reading plan looked something like this (with a few improvised adjustments along the way...):

For each play, we identified 7 common themes we wanted to talk about: (1) Prejudice towards Otherness (2) The idea of Bonds, especially with Family (3) Marriage & Love (4) Hatred (5) Honesty & Trust in a World of False Appearances (6) Gender Politics and (7) Justice vs. Vengeance. There were 3-5 questions for each theme that potentially could be applied to any of the three plays, and students could use any of those questions to frame their weekly discussions on the days they were assigned to lead the class meeting.  (Go here to see the complete google doc that contains the questions as well as the rest of the resources related to the project)

It was very much an experimental risk on my part. How would it go with students talking to each other in class discussions while reading different texts? Would it fall flat? Would students make interesting connections? Overall, I was blown away, watching students teach, challenge, and make connections for each other in organic conversations that were purely student led. By giving them choice, the students gave back as well both to me and to each other. There were days, no doubt, when it was dry, and by the end, I think we were all ready to move on. However, with a few adjustments to the calendar and to the volume of discussions, I will definitely be doing this again next year.  As the authors make clear in "Top Five Reasons We Love Giving Students Choice in Reading," providing students with more choice (whether it be limited or open) empowered them to have more meaningful conversations, to deepen relationships with both peers and the teacher, and to think more independently as developing learners (Campbell, Dubitsky, Faron, George, Gieselmann, Goldschmidt, Skeeters, and Wagner). I saw all of this at work on a daily basis when students took ownership of their choice to read a Tragedy, Comedy, or History play, and although there were a lot of student-led discussions and presentations, there was also time for independent reading, group preparation, and small group discussions with the teacher. 

For a final project, students had the following choices as well:
1. Team up with 1 or 2 other students from your class section (or from another section).
2. Decide whether you want to partner with peers who read the same play or with people who read something different.
3. Select one of the seven themes from the student-led class discussions.
4. Choose to either create a digital essay (using sound, image, & text) or a podcast episode (using sound and voice) that explores the theme you selected.
(Again, Go here to see the complete google doc that contains the final project instructions as well as the rest of the resources related to the project)

We examined examples of both mediums and discussed their merits and flaws, and students were let loose to make their compositions, and overall, the final products were creative, funny, and diverse. You could tell they had a good time: With all the options, I think it felt less like a chore and more like an opportunity to take a risk and be creative. (One of my favorites was a podcast created by 2 sophomore boys where the episode would periodically be interrupted by Shakespeare-era adds like the one from the company "2 Murderers for Hire"). I will say, I had no idea what to expect with the digital essays; it was new territory. Overall the products were beautiful, and to demonstrate, I leave you one on Richard III created by Rosalind K. & Reagan L:

Works Cited

Campbell, Bridget, Andrea Dubitsky, Elizabeth Faron, Deborah George, Kelly Gieselmann, Brooke    Goldschmidt, Keri Skeeters, and Erica Wagner. "The Top Five Reasons We Love Giving Students Choice in the Reading." English Leadership Quarterly, National Council of Teachers of English, 2016. Accessed 27 March 2018.

Gallagher, Kelly. "Moving Beyond the 4x4 Classroom." Kelly Gallagher: Building Deeper Readers & Writers, Gallagher & Associates, Inc., 15 July 2015. Accessed 27 March 2018.

Gallagher, Kelly. "Reversing Readicide."Educational Leadership, ASCD, March 2010, Vol. 67, No. 6. Accessed 27 March 2018.

Using Google Docs and Online Discussions to Increase Student Engagement with Shakespeare

I’m a big fan of reading Shakespeare aloud in class, assigning various roles to students, even if the reading process takes a little more time. Using online discussions has allowed me to do this more often than not since we can outsource the discussion to the digital sphere beyond the walls and time constraints of the daily class meeting. In fact, I’ve seen three additional benefits to “flipping” the class in this way: (1) the shy student rises to the occasion, voicing her insights with just as much volume and force as the more vocal learners; (2) the teacher is not the center of the discussion (even in Socratic seminars, decentering the role of the teacher becomes difficult) for I simply monitor and direct attention to certain highlights of the a-synchronized conversation, but I resist chiming in directly; (3) students later can cite each other in their papers, making the discussions an experience where they are reading and thinking for each other and not simply for the teacher.  Citing each other’s comments from the digital discussions also provides an authentic audience for the writing process and provides opportunity to practice digital literacy.

Here's a screen capture of an Online Discussion from one of my classes

I didn’t start this post to reflect on the benefits of online discussions; I wanted to share a strategy I’ve been using to keep ALL students engaged when trying to read a difficult scene aloud in class. My classes typically have about 20 students in them, and reading aloud only engages the handful of students who have a part in the given scene being read. How do you make sure the other students don’t “space out” and disengage from the experience? More importantly, how do you create an environment where they remain engaged and do so collaboratively? Short answer: create a back channel and distribute tasks which get them to read the text closely with intention.

A week or so ago, we were reading Act 4 of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and we had made it to the last scene (Scene 3 which takes place at the English court). It’s a very difficult scene for high school students: it’s long, wordy, with plenty of digressions that are difficult to follow or unpack. I knew that the 16 or so students who would not be reading would have a really hard time staying focused, so I set up a Google Doc, changed the sharing settings such that anyone with the link could edit, and typed in four categories of interest: characteristics of England; characteristics of Scotland; the definition of a king; and lastly, the definition of a tyrant. I divided the non-readers into four groups accordingly, and their job was to get on the google doc to type bullet-pointed notes related to their assigned category as it related to the scene in question; meanwhile, the other handful of students read the scene aloud for all of us. Everyone was focused because we all had a task, and the entire class participated in a collaborative, close reading of a very difficult scene from the Scottish play. At the end, we put the document on the digital projector and reflected on the notes as a class – better yet, as a reading community. It was a huge success born out of a simple, no-brainer solution. More importantly, they made the notes together and constructed the meaning collaboratively, and I simply sat back and enjoyed the experience. Here's some screen caps of one classes notes at the end of the reading:

The Joys of Collaboration: Shakespeare across the Campuses

I’ve written and presented quite often on the joys of collaboration (go here) and on its benefits for improving my potential to be a truly student-centered teacher, and I had to return to the blog today to reflect more on this (more reflection here as well) because it really has been such an amazing month of multi-directional collaboration both in and outside the classroom, both at my school and beyond. There is something in the air right now, a kind of buzz of energy, which could only be made possible because it’s not just coming from me. And much to my pleasure, all of it in some way gets back to igniting student interest in Shakespeare and doing so authentically.

Seth Burgess presenting with me at OESIS

This weekend, I returned from Boston where I presented with Seth Burgess of Lausanne Collegiate School at the OESIS gathering. It was a fantastic conference! So many connections were made with other innovative, creative-thinking educators who stretched me to reflect more deeply and more critically about topics such as blended learning, student-centered pedagogy, and meaningful tech integration in the 21^st century classroom. (Shout out to @danamhuff, @mattscully, @tomgavin, @jeannettemelee, @mrtedp, and @ianhabs to name a few!) Seth and I hosted three workshops at OESIS on how we gamified a unit of study on William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (check out our resources here), and one thing was made clear: our success was very much the result of our willingness to collaborate together and to do so adventurously, despite the risks involved. Another thing that stuck out for me was the fact that in both our testimonies it was made abundantly clear that students got excited about Shakespeare as a result of our curricular approach – an approach that valued student choice, autonomy, and independence. Seth even shared how his students, after finishing the unit, demanded that Lausanne Collegiate School put on a Macbeth performance in the theatre department. How cool is that!

When the conference concluded, I rushed to Boston’s Logan Airport on Sat. to fly back to DFW (along with a cabin full of Patriots fans… poor Cowboys…) so I could catch The Oakridge School production of “An Evening with Shakespeare.” Our campus’s English Department collaborated with Fine Arts this fall to stage two 50 min. productions of Richard III and The Merry Wives of Windsor. My directorial debut was the R3 production, and Brad Deborde, Oakridge Drama Dir., was in charge of staging Merry Wives. The students did an outstanding job! Simply amazing! They were excited, focused, and motivated, and part of the excitement, I think, was the collaborative approach Brad and I modeled for the students who got involved. It was meaningful for them to see the valued connection between English and Fine Arts; it made it something bigger and more profound. Oh! And we even cast the upper school Chemistry instructor (@DrJRoberts) as an extra! So many connections for the students to see in action! And it was fun for everyone!

Zoe M. as Richard III speaking to Caleb B. as Buckingham

The excitement hasn’t stopped, however. Following a tradition that was born here on Oakridge campus, Greenhill School is hosting an inter-institutional paper colloquium on William Shakespeare’s Midsummers Night’s Dream on February 29, 2016. Students from schools in the area are invited to craft papers on the Shakespearean Comedy, and those who submit their compositions will be considered for acceptance to present on Greenhill campus in Feb. of 2016. (For more info, feel free to reach out to Joel Garza, Upper School English Instructor at Greenhill).

Although Oakridge first hosted something similar in 2013 on James Joyce’s Dubliners and again in 2014 on Shakespeare’s Richard III, the reason it was as successful as it proved to be was due to the collaborative buy-in that schools like Greenhill generously provided. We not only hosted Greenhill and other schools on campus; we collaborated together online, using blogs and various media well before both colloquia ever took place. And now, the same is happening again, and it’s such a thrilling thing to watch unfold! Just the other day, Greenhill sent us an mp3 with their responses and insights about Scene 2 of Act 1 of MND; check it out:

Post-skype session selfie!

We of course were planning a response of our own when Mr. Garza reached out (right when we were about to record!), inspiring us to skype in to his class to share our thoughts in real time. Everyone was giddy; Shakespeare felt relevant and worthwhile to the students. Simply put, there was a lot of joy in the room.Of course, I can’t forget to mention that Greenhill will also be performing the Comedy outdoors on their campus October 22, 24, and 25, and they have graciously invited us to join the celebration in anticipation of the “midwinter” colloquium. The collaboration and connectedness just continues to grow!

Speaking of collaboration, Joel and I look forward to sharing some of these experiences tomorrow actually at the ITEC Iowa conference which is taking place as we speak. We’ll be presenting Oct. 13 at 11am here, and it’s free for anyone to join (much thanks to @zeitz for inviting us to share the joy with what looks like an awesome gathering of passionate educators!). Can’t wait to make more exciting connections with like-minded pedagogical adventurers in Iowa! Oh, and here's our wiki page for the conference presentation tomorrow (there's lots of resources to check out so make a point to visit the page). 

All this to say, it’s been a rewarding and joyful month in terms of making connections and collaborating with others; such encounters continue to inspire me to grow and improve as a passionate, student-centered educator. Hope to see you tomorrow!

Metaphors We Teach By, Part Two – More on the Rhetoric of Emancipation, Jacques Ranciere on Equality

At a K through 12 school like mine, if I were to ask my sophomores, how many of you are painters?, there might be a couple hands raised in a given class, but if I travelled down to the ECC (Early Childhood Center) and asked the same question, I imagine a swarm of hands would shoot into the air proudly and enthusiastically. What happens between Kindergarten and 10^th grade? Where do all the painters go? One answer might go like this: we begin to divide up the world for them; through our language, our conceptual binaries, students start seeing the world as one made up of amateurs and experts, of inferior intellects and superior ones; they start seeing themselves as having strengths and weaknesses, things they’re good at and things they’re not. And this got me thinking: How do we cleanse the doors of their perception? How do we inspire students to claim back their place as painters again?  After all, “…it’s not a matter of making great painters; it’s a matter of making emancipated [students]: people capable of saying, ‘me too, I’m a painter,’ a statement that contains nothing in the way of pride, only the reasonable feeling of power that belongs to any reasonable being. ‘There is no pride in saying out loud: Me too, I’m a painter! Pride consists in saying softly to others: You neither, you aren’t a painter.’ ‘Me too, I’m a painter’ means: me too, I have a soul, I have feelings to communicate to my fellow-men” (Ranciere 67). When did high school students stop believing that they have something to communicate? How can we get them to paint their masterpieces again?

Yesterday in class, we were reading one of Macbeth’s soliloquies from Act One, and a student continued reading until I interrupted: “Ok, stop,” I said. The class directed their eyes towards me as I asked, “Do these opening lines mean anything to you?” Blank stares were accompanied by silence. “You guys are having a hard time understanding the language, right?” Gradually there were confessional nods across the room. “Well, let’s walk through it, phrase by phrase, and see what’s troubling us.” We went through it, and sure enough, the students unpacked every word and those they couldn’t (such as verb phrases like trammel up) there were footnotes supplying the meaning. I did nothing other than reinforce/redirect their will and attention towards the text; the students were the ones who constructed the meaning, albeit slowly, but with no problem. They could do this, but why did they stare blankly at me the first time I asked? Why weren’t they doing it? Were they convinced that Shakespeare was “above their heads”? Had I contributed to their self-contempt?

French philosopher Bernard Stiegler in Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (2010) makes a connection between the loss of responsibility and the infantilization of youth in contemporary culture. His definition of education reads as follows: “…education is our name for transmitting the social competency that produces responsibility… [which] leads to ‘maturity’” (2). Stiegler worries about education (on a philosophical level) because students are not taking responsibility for their own capacity to exercise intelligence (or their own capacity to be painters!). Students aren’t to blame, however. It’s a cultural issue, says Stiegler, one that involves difficult questions about the social practices of adult culture. After all it is the language games of adulthood which dulls their sense of wonder, namely their capacity to fancy themselves as painters… So this got me thinking about Jacques Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (2007).

Ranciere’s work explores the pedagogy of a French Enlightenment figure named Joseph Jacotot who courageously posited the following claims:

1. All men have the equal capacity to exercise intelligence

2. All men have the equal capacity to instruct themselves

Both principles contradict directly certain “common sense” assumptions that shape our daily pedagogical practices as teachers. Take principle 1. We often concentrate on the rhetoric of outcomes as well as metaphors of progress, which in my opinion conflicts with Ranciere’s radical strategy to treat principle 1 as a fact of nature, not as a hoped-for destination to be reached. Equal intellectual capacity is not an idealized, pie-in-the-sky goal; it’s a practical starting point. Students are equally intelligent the day they walk through the classroom door, no progress is needed in terms of improving the intellect. Ranciere writes, “There aren’t two sorts of minds. There is inequality in the manifestations of intelligence, according to the greater or lesser energy communicated to the intelligence or by the will for discovering and combining new relations; but there is no hierarchy of intellectual capacity. Emancipation is becoming conscious of this equality of nature” (27). Underperforming students are not lacking in capacity nor are they less intelligent in some sense; instead, the real challenge is revealing the student’s intelligence to his or herself.  “…Our problem isn’t proving that all intelligence is equal,” Ranciere writes. “It’s seeing what can be done under that supposition” (46). Differences in student performance and success, says Ranciere, has more to do with the amount of Will and Attention one has exercised towards a given task than with one’s capacity for “natural talent” or “superior intelligence.”

Ranciere urges us to shift our pedagogical focus and language away from concerns about outcomes and to direct it toward how we frame the learning experience from the very outset. This means emancipating students before teaching them, namely convincing each learner of the idea “that every common person might conceive his human dignity, take the measure of his intellectual capacity, and decide how to use it” (17). This gets back to making students aware of the fact that they can take responsibility for their own capacity to be intelligent. Ranciere urges the educator to “give not the key to knowledge, but the consciousness of what an intelligence can do when it considers itself equal to any other and considers any other equal to itself” (39). It’s not about knowledge as much as about empowerment; it’s more about the outset than the outcome.  Our culture makes this shift difficult, however, due to the industry’s obsession with results, data, and progress, which puts a lot of pressure on students and teachers alike.

Jacques Ranciere

In reference to principle 2, Ranciere advocates for learning as doing, meaning the teacher’s role is more about creating a learning environment where students want to do, where students want to exercise their capabilities. When students aren’t performing, one’s first instinct should be to focus on the learner’s Will and Attention, not their Intellect. As Ranciere states, “There is stultification whenever one intelligence is subordinated to another. [However] a person – and a child in particular – may need a master when his own will is not strong enough to keep him on track,… but that subjection is purely one of will over will” (13). Thinking back to my situation in English class yesterday: the students could do the work, so my task was to focus on redirecting their will and attention to see it through. What I didn’t have to do was “explicate” the Shakespearean text. Too much explication stultifies a learner, for “It is the explicator who needs the incapable and not the other way around; it is he who constitutes the incapable as such. To explain something to someone is first of all to show [the student] a world divided into knowing minds and ignorant ones, ripe minds and immature ones, the capable and the incapable, the intelligent and the stupid” (6). I do think there are times when explication is necessary but it need not be the default modality for facilitating learning. Instead, one’s default should be to address them as people “under the sign of equality.”  “What stultifies the common [student] is not the lack of instruction, but the belief in the inferiority of their intelligence” (39). Too often, I rely more on explication, instead of targeting the student’s will in order to awaken her own intellectual capacity so she can explicate the subject matter for herself and for her peers. To put in Gilles Deleuze’s terms, when the teacher explicates, the students need only trace that which has been explained for them (a.k.a. rote regurgitation); when the student explicates for herself, she is mapping her learning experience in her terms.

To get back to Stiegler, students need to take responsibility for their own capacity to exercise intelligence, but we must guide the process by practicing a language of emancipation that worries less about quantifiable outcomes and more about the authenticity of the learning environment we invite them to inhabit and explore. As Ranciere claims, “[Students develop] their intellectual capacities as the circumstances demand… They develop the intelligence that the needs and circumstances of their existence demand of them” (51).  It's our job to make such demands but we must do so while treating them as equals. And who knows, maybe some will start painting again.

Whoever teaches without emancipation stultifies. Whoever emancipates doesn’t have to worry about what the emancipated person learns  –J. Ranciere

Ranciere, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.

Stiegler, Bernard. Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.

A Teacher's Reflection on Student Responses to Gamifying English Class for the First Time

On Feb. 19th, I blogged about gamifying my curriculum for the first time, and I was right in the middle of the unit. Along with Seth Burgess and his classes at Lausanne Collegiate School, we read William Shakespeare's Macbeth and used schoology.com as the interface for receiving various options for assignments to earn "XP points" which opened access to more and more challenging levels. You can read more about the breakdown of the project here and here.

We finished the unit on March 6th right before students left for their spring break holiday, and last week, my students took a very detailed survey which measured their levels of enjoyment, satisfaction, and benefit as a result of this experience. I want to thank Seth Burgess for putting the survey together, and I look forward to sharing our experiences as co-presenters this summer at Lausanne Learning Institute in Memphis, TN.

I feel confident claiming that the experiment was a first time encounter for everyone involved at my school (The Oakridge School). I also think it's important to note that, due to snow days, there ended up being a slight shortage of time. No students, for instance, made it to the final 6th level, BUT plenty of participants earned an A+ with more than enough XP points (mainly due to optional "grind assignments"). Final grade distribution ranged from D to A+ (the Ds & Cs were a minority with most students scoring somewhere from a B+ to an A).

For the survey, students first had to rate their overall evaluation of the gamified curriculum on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 = worst; 5 = neutral; 10 = best), and seventy students were surveyed. Surveys remained anonymous so students felt comfortable giving frank feedback (you can take a look at the entire survey here):

No one gave it a 10, but no one characterized it as the "worst" experience either - and I was pleased to see a high concentration of response around the 7 to 9 range of scores. Most students, I think, would want to do this again, and a large group of them (the 8s & 9s) preferred the game-based approach when compared to how curriculum was designed and delivered in previous units of study. I think the 13 students who rated anywhere from 5 to 3 were most likely the students whose "softer skills" of self-pacing and self-management still need some work. (I can't prove that, however, because surveys were anonymous - but more on the soft skills later...)

If you look at the survey linked above, you'll notice there were MANY categories that students could rate on a 1 to 5 scale, 1 meaning this was one of the "worst" experiences related to the project and 5 meaning that it was one of the "best." For this post, I did a quick data analysis of trends where I saw an overwhelming amount of 5s as well as where I saw an overwhelming amount of 1s. The graphs below represents the categories where there was the most consensus of positive and negative experiences:

Choice, Independence, & Motivation: What strikes me immediately about gamified curricula is that students respond most positively to the following: (1) they appreciated choice (2) they felt more motivated and (3) they liked having independence.  More than 50 times, students expressed their enthusiastic appreciation for having choice to do the assignments that interested them the most, and I think having this kind freedom and independence motivated them to level up and to achieve a sense of accomplishment. Watching students work independently on assignments they chose allowed me as teacher to get to know them better, simply put. It's humbling to admit it, but there were some students in my class that I did not know as well as I should at this point in the year. The gamified approach made this apparent and helped us build better relationships because the learning experience was so individualized, forcing the teacher to meet every student where she's at by addressing her specific learning track and keeping her accountable accordingly.

XP Grading, Mastery, & Accomplishment: Students loved the XP grading approach: more than ever, they felt like the grading process was transparent and fair. "I knew exactly what I needed to do to make an A," one student commented on the survey.  They also said that grading was not some spectre of stress which haunted them as they strived toward mastery; instead, failure only meant that one had to try again.  They really benefited, I think, from the emphasis on mastery because it created an authentic, need-to-know feedback loop that was helpful to the learning process. Many students did express a desire for there to be a public point board if we were to try this approach again. I had shied away from publicly displaying point levels out of concern for embarrassment for those who progressed more slowly. Still divided on that question...

Feedback & Evaluation: Gamification only works if the feedback loop matches the pace of the students' progress, which presents a challenge to an English/Language Arts teacher. I was overwhelmed by the demand for grading student essays and compositions (something that makes me wonder how one would sustain such an approach for an entire year), BUT the survey responses validated my efforts because students told me that they received more useful and more relevant feedback than that which was provided during previous curricular units. That was really satisfying for me (as well as for the students).

Students did give some "negative" feedback in certain, distinct areas, but the trends here were much more minimal:

The Overwhelming Factor: Students were overwhelmed by the experience. I want to acknowledge the tension/connection between being overwhelmed and having choice, freedom, and independence: it felt overwhelming because students had choice and because pacing was up to them. The curriculum measured/assessed their softer skills of self-management just as much as it addressed the traditional, academic skills of any given English class. Students complained about the time factor, and some of this was due to failing to take advantage of the ice days which disrupted the unit. As a result, there was an expressed concern that quantity was taking precedence over quality, which is why it was important for me to remain vigilant about expectations of mastery (which gets back to why I was overwhelmed...).

Frustration & Confusion: Students did express in considerable volume that they felt higher levels of frustration and confusion at times. Again, I think there's some tension between the frustration factor and the demands for students to achieve mastery within a limited time frame (and to do so according to their self-paced initiative). This was a new experience for them, and never before had soft skills been demanded so directly. Understandably, that was overwhelming. In terms of confusion, I do think some of that was me: this was my first attempt to launch a gamified unit in an English class, and I learned a lot about how to articulate expectations and procedures as clearly and effectively as possible, meaning I'd hope there would be less confusion next time due to better execution.

Analyzing Shakespearean Language & Style: When examining the "negative" graph above, I think it's revealing that most things students perceived as negative were factors related to self-management, working with others, or self-pacing (in other words, "soft skills"), but one area of feedback that related to the harder skills of English was language and style analysis. Students overwhelmingly felt confident about their knowledge of content, structure, theme, and character development, but they consistently voiced concern about the need for more teacher guidance when analyzing Shakespeare's language and style. Rhetorical & style analysis of difficult literature unavoidably requires considerable teacher intervention and direction, and my execution of a student-directed, gamified curriculum allowed for less time for such matters. Is this a problem? I don't think so, for the survey provided me with feedback, which makes clear that style analysis (and related skills) needs to be prioritized in our next unit. Now, if I gamified my whole year's curriculum, I would need to rethink this, BUT I want to point out the obvious: gamification may not address all skills but it does target softer ones that students sometimes never have the opportunity to practice getting better at. However, I do also want to stress here that students wanted more teacher guidance and intervention, meaning there needs to be a balance between student & teacher directedness.

Other Observations:

Collaborative Work vs. Solo Work: There were options at various levels to do assignments which required group work as well as ones which remained "solo" in nature. The graphs show something interesting here: there is a clear split between the independent solo worker (and what they love about gamification) and the collaborative group worker (as well as what they love about the experience). I don't think that the divide here is a problem, however; instead, it's proof that students have different learning styles, and the fact that both groups of learners had positive things to say about the unit only demonstrates more clearly the benefits of the gamified approach.

The Soft Skills Gap: As stated above, final project grade distribution ranged from D to A+ (big gap!). I am very convinced that the D students were the ones with the poorest "soft skills" and the As were students with excellent self-management skills. There were some 'A+' students who scored in the B range (demonstrating in my opinion that they were the 'A student' who knows how to function in the traditional schooling system but falls short more readily when self-management is a factor), and there were some 'B students' who scored in the A to A+ range (demonstrating they were students who are motivated when choice, freedom, and pacing were in their hands). Unlike the divide above, this is a gap I'd like to bridge. My worry is this: the gamified unit pointed out for certain students that they have a deficiency when it comes to soft skills, but did those students improve their skills by way of the experience? Not sure yet.

These are my observations now that I've had time to reflect. One might ask: would I do this again? My answer, without hesitation, is an emphatic YES! and the majority of my students would agree. Would I use the gamified approach all year? I don't think so, but with practice, perhaps my attitude would change. Please leave thoughts, questions, observations. This is a conversation that has really just begun for me, so feel free to join!

More on Authentic Audiences for 21st Century Students: Why We Read, Write, and Think for Each Other

Joel points out in his post the fact that independent school teachers often have a lot of pedagogical & curricular autonomy, which is mostly a good thing… mostly. 21^st century technologies, however, have brought changes to almost all areas of our cultural landscape – changes which make clear that teachers with autonomy need to revisit questions about the benefits of collaboration and connectedness (if not for their sake then for the sake of today’s students). One reason: we’re not the only experts to whom students have access whether at school or outside of the traditional classroom. Technology has made this evident and undeniable. More importantly, in my opinion, connectedness and collaboration make it possible now for teachers to provide authentic audiences for their students’ voices in ways unthinkable in the recent past, and one thing that can bestow purpose and meaning on a student’s learning experience is the presence of a real audience.

More than ever, it’s possible to have students read, write, and think for each other (as opposed to doing such things for their singular teacher) – making the activity more real, more connected, and perhaps more fun. In recent years, I’ve been employing various digital, web 2.0 technologies to get my students to connect and collaborate with students in classrooms from other campuses. (Go here to see how my students at The OakridgeSchool connected with classes at two other campuses, Greenhill School & TheHockaday School, to read together James Joyce’s collection Dubliners. Of course, we did it again last year, this time studying William Shakespeare’s history play, Richard III.)

One of my favorite methods we experimented with was getting students from one class to frame questions for their peers in other classes from different campuses. We did this through various means:
-my students at Oakridge collaboratively posted blog articles (here) that always concluded in a series of questions for Greenhill and Hockaday students.  Greenhill and Hockaday would respond employing various modalities of expression such as text, video, or mp3. (More examples: Greenhill which leads to Oakridge's response;  Hockaday which leads to Oakridge's response; Greenhill which leads to Oakridge's response and then to Hockaday's final word)
-we also had the advantage of augmenting our digital collaboration with visits in person to each other’s campuses – something that’s only possible with the benefit of geographical proximity. Using the responses of the Greenhill students (which were born out of the blog), Mr. Garza (teacher from Greenhill) visited The Hockaday School, bringing his students' questions to their Hockaday peers.
-Hockaday blogged about their perspective of the visit, providing insight and more questions for both Greenhill and Oakridge classes as we struggled with what were very difficult literary works.
-Greenhill students made use of Audacity to record an mp3/podcast both for Oakridge and Hockaday students. Their recording was guided, of course, by the evolution of questions being posed by classes from the other campuses.
-Using GarageBand, Oakridge then responded in kind by putting together their podcast response; here's some highlights:



Oakridge student citing Hockaday student's blog post

At this point, students were citing each other by name, complimenting each other’s readings with expressions of appreciation. They were reading and thinking for each other, serving as meaningful audiences in a community of collaborators. I can’t emphasize it enough: namely, the joy they felt once this exchange became real – once the students received a validating response from an unknown peer who heard them and who cared. As a teacher who is a community of one, I can’t recreate that kind of meaningful learning experience on my own, but by collaborating and connecting with other campuses, such an experience can be designed and realized with ease and joy.



Greenhill student addresses Hockaday teacher's point

What happened next, however, was even more amazing: simply put, we started writing for each other. For me, this first occurred when my students sat for their 9 week midterm. Instead of a comprehensive exam, Oakridge students wrote essays for their Hockaday and Greenhill audience and posted highlights on the blog. (See Hockaday’s response here) Never had I seen developing writers operating so keenly in terms of connecting word, audience, and purpose in their writing. These students weren’t grudgingly writing for me, the teacher; they were eagerly sounding out their voices to peer groups across the digital channels of the internet. Eventually this evolved into composing more formal papers to conclude the project, but in many ways, their compositions were not traditional at all. Students wrote to each other (to each other’s teachers). Many of my writers chose to cite blog, mp3, and video pieces posted by students from other campuses. It was a real learning community full of curious writers and readers, open-minded speakers and listeners, and there was so much joy! By formally engaging nontraditional, digital resources, students were learning the connections between digital literacy, research, and composition as well (while validating each other’s voice in the process!).

So why should we integrate technology to craft authentic audiences for our students? When a student writes for their teacher and that instructor is the only one who will see that composition, why should she make it great? But if she’s writing for a communal audience of peers and teachers alike, not only will she feel the push to make it better, she will act on the desire to make it great because there’s an authentic audience! Bottom line, it makes their learning meaningful, relevant, and worthwhile, and one might just catch them enjoying the process as well.

-Jared Colley