How is "love for learning" measured in the classroom?

It is the athlete that often returns to grueling practice sessions day-after-day because she loves what she is doing. She spends time outside of practice doing what she loves; often drawing neighbors, siblings, and other non-teammates to practice with her. She is passionate about learning because she wants to be better, feel greater successes, and excel to a higher level. I witnessed a parallel in my eleventh-grade English students recently, during The Crucible SchoolTube Enactment Project.

The project objective emphasizes: Analyzing the writing, directing, and performing of "The Play", as well as, an examination of the literature of The Crucible. The project is designed to help students think critically about the composition of The Play, and understand the relationship between literature and performance.

The learning outcomes include: Developing interpersonal skills as students work on teams. Each student will be able to identify the most important scene from the play, and enact that as a group. Acquiring and evaluating data, and using it to interpret and communicate the literature. Submitting work in a timely fashion.

What I like most about project (passion) based learning, is that it carries the student well beyond the objectives and and outcomes that I've carved.

"Middle-of-the-road" students were engaged during the unit, and were inspired to "do more." During a teacher-student post-project interview, some students admitted to not having read the "entire" four acts of the play. In order to get the enactment correct, he had to go back into the play and read. This led to a "better understanding" of the themes in The Crucible, and Arthur Miller's purpose for writing the play.

In addition to completing the reading, students seeking accuracy in the project recruited friends, siblings, and parents to help act out the scene. In more than once case, students from other classes asked if they could contribute to the project. Students mentioned the dialogue that occurred when explaining the project to these co-actors deepened their understanding of the project and play.

The project is complete, the assessments are recorded, and students still want to revise, edit, and republish their work. Knowing the work is in the eye of a global audience 24-7 and ready for commenting is a strong motivator. These students want to grow as learners, be better students, and receive better comments on their projects.

Is this an appropriate measuring stick for "love of learning?"

The Crucible SchoolTube Enactment Project

Seventeenth-Century Salem, Massachusetts brochures are scanned and on display in Room 106. The Crucible enactment videos are available for viewing and commenting on SchoolTube, and post-project teacher-student interviews are complete. The results exceed my expectations and I feel privileged to be teaching in a project-based 21st-Century Learning Environment.

The products within The Crucible SchoolTube Enactment Project include: Creating a Del.ici.ous social bookmarking account, publishing a brochure, writing a video storyboard map, filming a scene enactment from The Crucible, and publishing a video on the Internet.

In the first stage of the unit, the student must use the Del.ici.ous website to gather information regarding 17th C. Salem. She learns to use advanced Google search skills and seek out "reliable" data. The November Learning site is a great resource for more information on this.

The student uses the information gathered in the web hunt to create a brochure. Creating the brochure lends to an understanding of why Arthur Miller chose Salem as the setting of his play. The student uses the setting details later in the project when filming the enactment video.

In groups of three, students choose a theme from the play, then decide which scene in The Crucible epitomizes the chosen theme. The next step for the group is to plan how they will enact their scene by writing a video storyboard map. Students answer the questions: What props will they use?, What is the setting of the enactment?, What dialogue will they use?, How will they act out the scene?, and What elements from "The Play" will they use? All of this information is outlined again, in an essay submitted on Google Docs at the end of the project.

Students begin the acting and filming process as soon as the storyboard is complete. Room 106 offers two cameras (a Canon Digital Compact and Canon Flash Memory Camcorder), and there are 7-9 groups per class for this project. Watching students embrace this part of the project is one of the most gratifying stages in the process. In lieu of using the classroom cameras, groups film using personal flip video cameras, iPhone, Droid, digital compact cameras, and family owned camcorders. Most groups film using video, however, some groups chose to use stop action. In the teacher-student debriefings at the end, several students said they would have used stop action instead, and visa versa.

Once the filming is complete, students upload the pictures and video to a computer (iMac or PC) and begin editing. Most students use iMovie or Movie Maker 2.6, but others chose unique paths, like Photo Story with a voice over. The group that filmed using the Droid, needed to download the Droid editing software to the classroom PC before moving the video into Movie Maker 2.6. In the case of the Droid group and the Photo Story group, the QuickTime files needed to be converted to .WMV or .AVI files using Any Video Converter.

In the end, each successfully filmed scene enactment, is uploaded to SchoolTube. The videos are open to the public for rating and commenting, however, comments are not open ended in SchoolTube. Viewers must select from a drop down menu of options for comments. Please take a few minutes to view the Q-Tube channel on SchoolTube and comment on these videos.

Some of the videos did not upload directly to SchoolTube, so they were sent to YouTube then imported to SchoolTube. In the process of posting the videos for a global audience, I noticed there are a lot of English teachers out there with similar projects. I feel very good about this project and plan to write about the many successes in my next post. I would love to hear from teachers, who have taught similar projects, so the students in Room 106 can have an even greater learning experience.

Chalk it up! (Or should I say, "Mark it on the white wall"?)...Week No. 1 at Queensbury HS is history. After back-to-back Superintendent Conference Days on Tuesday and Wednesday, Room 106 welcomed students to the 2010-11 school year, this past Thursday and Friday. After a brief introduction to the course, English 11 Regents, English 11 Regents Modified, and Sports Literature students, went to work on an assignment entitled, "Great Escape Multimedia Project."
The Great Escape project emphasizes the use of technology as a tool for learning in the 21st-Century Learning Environment, and is centered around work stations in the room that students circulate to. Similar to park-goers traveling from ride-to-ride at The Great Escape, a popular Six Flags themed amusement park in the Queensbury community. The stations for the project include: A SMARTBoard connected to a netbook computer, iMac computer with 27" monitor, plasma monitor connected to a netbook, digital video camera & digital camera, iPad, and more netbooks for GoogleDocs usage. Students use each station to derive an answer to the driving question: Why is technology an important part of the 21st CLE? By the end of the project, each group answers the driving question by adding to the word web established on a wall of the classroom painted with IdeaPaint.
...I left the web on the wall, and each class contributed to the ideas established by the previous class. I felt this lent to more thoughtful responses to the driving question by the end of the last block class on Friday. In the future, I will take timeline pictures of this type of web and share it with students from the earlier blocks, as a review - allowing them to see how the other classes contributed to the ideas they founded.

IdeaPaint is a huge hit with students and an integral part of Room 106. Students wanted to write on the wall, contributing to the established thoughts. Many students asked about the paint, wanting to know if it was something they could purchase for their own rooms at home. A colleague even mentioned she wanted to paint a room in her house for her 8-month-old grandson.
Students enthusiastic about writing...Students wanting to share ideas...Students working together...Thank you, 21st-Century classroom!

One of the many reasons I chose to enter the world of project-based teaching and turn Queensbury High School's Room 106 into a 21st-Century learning environment is because the canvas is vast and the opportunities for students are endless. That said, rebuilding from ground zero is one reason this teacher of nine years, feels like a rookie again.

Three reads I acquired in preparation for the classroom transformation include, Project Based Learning: A Guide to

Standards-Focused Project Based Learning, Edutopia: Success Stories for Learning in the Digital Age, and Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age.

There is plenty of utility in all three of these books, however, A Guide to Standards-Focused PBL and Reinventing PBL, are must-haves for your teacher bookshelf, if you are taking the "giant leap" into the 21st C.

This fall (2010) the leaders at QUFSD allowed my high school classroom to receive a makeover. Inside the walls of this 21st-Century classroom, I will challenge my students with projects. The literature that I teach will remain the same, however the palate on which I serve the curriculum will change dramatically.

In the spirit of project based learning (PBL) & the 21st-Century classroom (21st CLE), I am sharing a draft of a project I created using The Crucible. Take a look at the document I created on GoogleDocs, and PLEASE send feedback.

The Crucible SchoolTube Enactment