Judi Elman
ARL Team #4
June 13, 2002
June 13 – the day before school closes for the summer. Finally, some time to reflect on my year in the classroom. I always wonder, at this time of year, about the extent to which the choices I made regarding curriculum and instruction will have a lasting impact on my students. That’s probably because:
- I teach seniors.
- They have just graduated, and I won’t see them to ask them.
- They began to lose interest in school about a month before they graduated, leaving me with the usual frustration that I feel at the end of each school year.
Five years ago, I joined an Action Research Team to investigate strategies for engaging seniors in their own learning. Recognizing that they represent a unique population with unique needs, I put a variety of strategies into place that resulted in more sustained engagement and deeper learning. Last year, I became fascinated with the notion of Self-Directed Learning, a concept that Malcolm Knowles wrote about in the 1970’s. The chief tenets of Self-Directed Learning are, in no particular order, choice in what one studies; choice in what one produces as a result of his studies; setting personal goals for learning; reflecting on one’s attainment of those goals; establishing a timeline for learning; repeating the process.
This year, I combined what I learned about Self-Directed Learning with a number of new strategies that connected students to experiences that they will encounter when they go to college. For example, I
- Posted all information about my course, Twentieth Century Literature, on a website, www.schoolnotes.com. This information included the syllabus and expectations for student work; daily homework information; links to articles and helpful websites; personal notes to students about school activities; the first semester final exam. Students were able to check the website at any time; I was able to make changes/revisions as needed; and students who were absent were able to see what they missed. College professors often post their courses in this manner.
- Required students to send me their papers via e-mail. I then downloaded their papers into WordPerfect, which has a function whereby I could insert comments in the text and send the papers back to students electronically. This practice allowed students to send me papers at any time in the writing process for my feedback. This practice is one used by many college professors.
- Introduced Art Costa’s "Habits of Mind" to the class and required students to set two goals for improvement for each semester. As a result of assessing their growth in their personal goals, students developed awareness of themselves as learners and community members, knowledge that will help them to be successful in college and the workplace.
- Required each student to make contact, via e-mail, with a professor at the university he/she will attend; in this e-mail, the student asked the professor for permission to send a paper to the professor for feedback. Specifically, the professor was asked to tell the student whether he/she felt that the student’s writing met the standards for an in-coming freshman at that university. My purpose in making this assignment was twofold. First, I wanted to introduce students to the strategy of e-mailing a professor, something all will do in college. I also wanted students to expand the audience for their writing beyond just me.
- Utilized literature circles for fourth quarter. Students selected the books that they wanted to read; found others in the class to read the same book; established their own timeline for reading; and made a presentation to the class that incorporated a form of technology appropriate to the presentation. The freedom of choice and the opportunity to set their own agenda mirrors the kind of work that students encounter in college.
- Treated students as college students, giving them freedom and choice throughout the year and creating a family-like environment in the classroom.
So, did these strategies result in greater student engagement and deeper
learning?
Here’s what the students wrote about their experiences this year:
| B. M. | "With structure, minimal guidance, and focus on individual work and growth, your class has been the most successful for me to be in. The fact that we got to choose a lot of the material, structure and content of our first semester writings allowed us to shape our writing skills." |
| J. K. | "I love having our assignments in such a reliable place (schoolnotes.com); I often misplace papers, and this is a great tool for keeping me organized." |
| J.T. | "I have had much growth in my two "Habits of Mind" goals. My two goals were to apply the past to new situations and to think about thinking." |
| T.B. | "I have met the goal of striving for accuracy and precision through a lot of painstaking revisions and spell checks. For second semester, I have set the goal of thinking flexibly. I really have not looked at my work from a perspective other than my own, and that is something I need to do." |
| T. B. | "I love the class, and everyone in it, including you, works very hard to create a class environment in which everyone can be comfortable enough to participate." |
| M. P. | " I loved writing to the
college professor. We have e-mailed so many times that I feel like I
have a friend at Colorado. He told me that my writing is on par with his
college juniors."
|
| B. M. | "One of the big factors why I did so well on one of our first writing assignments was that I got to write about something I was interested in, or had already experienced, something that I could describe in detail." |
These responses are representative of the responses I got from all of the students.
They clearly enjoyed the class and found the strategies useful. However, I still think I can improve their engagement and, thus, their learning.
I have taught seniors at Highland Park for seven years now. Each year, the pattern for student engagement replicates itself. Students are eager to learn and to produce their best work during first semester. Once they receive their college acceptance letters, their interest in high school plummets. Students who used to strive for A’s are now content with a B- for their second semester grades, just so they don’t have to take a final.
Clearly, we need to provide exciting, real world learning experiences for these kids. They value choice and thrive when they get to design their own projects and means for demonstrating their learning. If there is one thing that I’ve learned from this year and from my previous experiences as an action researcher, it is that the design of our school day and our requirements for the individual courses on students’ schedules interferes with most seniors’ motivation to learn during their last semester of high school. With all of the innovative strategies that I, and many other teachers employ, our seniors are still bound by a system that does not meet their developmental needs. We really do need to focus on designing a quality Senior Experience in the near future.