HC English Department

"Facing History's unique video collection includes insights from top scholars, the voices and memories of witnesses to history, and inspiring stories from teachers and students who wrestle with the complex questions of history in today's classrooms. The videos selected below provide historical background and thematic insights that will be useful for teaching To Kill a Mockingbird. Also be sure to check out activities for Mockingbird that use these resources."

"Students almost universally hate close reading, and they rarely wind up understanding it anyway. Forced to pick out meaning in passages they don't fully grasp to begin with, they begin to get the idea that English class is about simply making things up and constructing increasingly circuitous arguments by way of support. So what would happen if we ditched this sacred teaching technique? For starters, we could help students read more. Speeding things up might make it easier to grasp--and appreciate--the overall arc of a book, while allowing the opportunity for real connection with the characters and plot. You can't do that at the pace of a chapter a week. Furthermore, aiming for fifteen books a year, rather than five, might expose the students to more good literature . If the goal of an English class is to improve students' grasp of language, introduce them to great literature, and--hopefully--get students excited, then there's really no downside to this approach. If a few students really want to do close reading, they can do it as an elective or jump in head first in college. Otherwise, let's chuck the concept. We gain nothing by teaching kids to hate books--and hate them s-l-o-w-l-y. "

"As they progress through middle and high school, students are expected to take on increasing responsibility for their learning, with more out-of-class assignments that require independent research, reading for understanding, and wider application of classroom lessons. Our new book, Teaching Students to Drive Their Brains: Metacognitive Strategies, Activities, and Lesson Ideas, suggests that learning and applying strategies to "explain it to your brain" can help students improve their study habits. We note some of those strategies here."

"The collection of prompts below asks young writers to think through real or imagined events, their emotions, and a few wacky scenarios. Try out the ones you think will resonate most with your students. "

"Whole-class novels are the white powdered doughnuts of the education world. We eat them when they are all that's available, but virtually no one would choose them when given other choices like chocolate eclairs, bear claws, or lemon-filled pockets of gooey goodness. No one bites into a white powdered doughnut and rolls back their eyes because of the taste explosion in their mouths. And are there any white powdered doughnuts in existence that are not completely stale? I think not."

"Most teachers make an effort to get to know their students, and many regularly distribute surveys at the start of each school year to speed up that process. The problem is, most teachers read these surveys once, then file them away. Sure, they might have every intention of returning to the surveys and reviewing them later, but far too often, that time never comes. We rely on our day-to-day interactions for relationship building, and although we get to know some students quite well this way, others just fade into the background. A 360 Spreadsheet is a place for teachers to store and access the "other" data we collect on our students, giving us a more complete, 360-degree view of each student. It's a single chart that organizes it all and lets us see, at a glance, things we might otherwise forget. Many teachers already keep track of students' birthdays. Think of this as a birthday chart on steroids. Figure 10-1 is just one possible version of a 360 Spreadsheet:"

" I finally took my first tangible steps toward exploring teacher autonomy by applying for an Ignition Grant to attend the Teacher-Powered Schools National Conference in Los Angeles in late January. The grant is for teacher groups who are interested in learning more about the teacher-powered model, which is defined as schools or programs in which teachers have the autonomy to make design and implementation decisions. Long story short: We received the grant and found ourselves immersed in a small sea of like-minded educators-educators who not only envision an educational approach more effective for their students, but have the courage, the heart, and the wisdom to make it a reality. Here are my top five takeaways from the conference."

Some interesting ideas on how to handle late work and other issues involving grades.

"Inquiry or interrogation? What if you asked your students which of these best describes their experience with classroom questioning? How do you think they would respond? My colleague Beth Sattes and I have posed this question to a wide range of students. The majority choose "questioning as interrogation" as the best fit for their experience. What makes them feel this way? Many believe that teachers ask questions to surface "right" answers, which students fear they don't know. Others think teachers ask questions mostly to find out who is paying attention - or not! Almost all students view follow-up questions as attempts to keep them on the "hot seat" and embarrass them for not knowing. And most perceive classroom questioning to be a competition that pits students against one another - Whose hand goes up first? Who answers most frequently? Very few students understand questioning as a process for collaborative exploration of ideas and a means by which teachers and students alike are able to find out where they are in their learning and decide on next steps. This is one of the primary themes running through our work."

"1. Survey students about our school's writing atmosphere What role do you expect writing to play in your life during the next 5-10 years? What do you think colleges/universities expect in terms of student writing? What writing do you think is valued at your high school? What does your teacher value in terms of writing? How do you know what writing is valued at your school and in this class? In the last 2-3 years, what has positively influenced your writing? What feedback is most helpful to you as a writer? How does grading influence your writing? My colleague and I turned these questions into a Google form survey, and the results will give us lots to think about in the months ahead. This is a great opportunity to talk with students about what they value about writing and help them find ways to make their writing reflect what they value and what readers might need.  2. Separate my reading roles At the symposium, participants discussed how rarely we simply read student work as readers. 3. Create opportunities to switch "modes""

"Modern Love is a series of weekly reader-submitted essays that explore the joys and tribulations of love. Each week, an actor also reads one of the essays in a podcast. Though the stories are often about romantic love, they also take on love of family, friends, and even pets. This teacher finds their themes universal and the range of essays engaging models to help her students find their own voices."

"Roosevelt's brevity exposes the rhetorical devices leaders often use in times of crisis. Take the five-step structure so popular with speechwriters it now has a name: Monroe's Motivated Sequence. In "Infamy," Roosevelt uses all five. First, win attention. Second, present a problem. Third, offer a solution. Fourth, envision the future Fifth, utter a call to action"

To mark the 200th birthday of "Frankenstein," we have updated our older Learning Network lessons with recent Times resources to pair with the text. We also provide teaching ideas related to theme and suggest activities for students. Continue reading the main story Lesson Plans English Language Arts AUG 31 Social Studies AUG 31 Science & Math AUG 31 E.L.L. & Arts AUG 31 Current Events AUG 31 See More » "

"Teachers are taking up the challenge to change that. NPR Ed put out a social media call asking how educators are teaching fake news and media literacy, and we got a lot of responses. Here's a sampling from around the country:"

"Empathy is often confused with sympathy, which is a pretty extraordinary error depending on how tightly wound you are about these things (and whose definitions you stand behind). Dr. Brené Brown offers a divisive take on the difference: "Empathy fuels connections, sympathy drives disconnection." Teaching someone to feel what others feel and sit with emotions that aren't their own couldn't be any further from the inherent pattern of academics, which is always decidedly other. Teaching always begins with detachment -- learn this skill or content strand that is now apart from you. Empathy is the opposite -- it starts in the other, and finishes there without leaving. Here's one way to consider it. Without empathy, you're teaching content instead of students. The concept of teachers as primarily responsible for content distribution is a dated one, but even seeking to "engage" students misses the calling of teaching. To teach a child is to miss that child. You must understand them for who they are and where they are, not for what you hope to prepare them for. "Giving knowledge" and "engaging students" in pursuit of pre-selected knowledge are both natural processes of formal education -- and both make empathy hard to come by. So where to start doing something different? How should you "teach it"? How will you know it when you see it?"

"The longer I teach (I'm now in my 32nd year) the more I'm convinced that the best thing we can do for our students is help them learn to think for themselves. That involves explaining what critical thinking actually means - a step I fear we often skip - as well as equipping them with the requisite skills. That's why I recommend talking to students on the first day of class about critical thinking. What is it? Why is it important? How can they learn to do it? What follows is an example of my opening-day remarks. For graduate students and Ph.D.s new to teaching, if this talk resonates with you, feel free to adapt it for your own classrooms."

"Sommers has been researching teacher response to writing for decades. "If teaching involves leaps of faith," she says, "responding is one of the greatest leaps because we have so little direct evidence of what students actually do with our comments, of why they find some useful and others not." Her key advice? A teacher's response to a student's work can play a leading role in the student's development as a writer - but to leverage that potential, a teacher needs to understand where and how much to comment, and how to engage the student in the feedback process. GETTING IT WRITE: SIX WAYS TO TEACH THROUGH COMMENTS To avoid these issues - and to stave off comment overload - Sommers suggests that teachers begin by asking themselves, "What do I want my students to learn, and how will my comments help them learn?" A teacher can write seventeen comments on a short draft, but a student probably won't learn seventeen different lessons. Sommers advises teachers to:"

""Writing is rewriting," says everyone all the time. But what they don't say, necessarily, is how. Yesterday, Tor pointed me in the direction of this old blog post from Patrick Rothfuss-whose Kingkiller Chronicle is soon to be adapted for film and television by Lin-Manuel Miranda, in case you hadn't heard-in which he describes, step-by-step, his revision process over a single night. Out of many, one assumes. It's illuminating, and I wound up digging around on the Internet for more personal stories of editing strategies, investigating the revision processes of a number of celebrated contemporary writers of fantasy, realism, and young adult fiction. So in the interest of stealing from those who have succeeded, read on."

"Unfortunately, students are expected to learn how to avoid plagiarism by some kind of osmosis. As they progress from grade to grade, they are expected to already know how to weave research into their writing in original, elegant, and ethical ways, but far too often, they don't have this skill set. Not at all. We need to explicitly teach these skills, and we need to do it more than once if we want good results. How? First, we need to help them identify plagiarism. When students are shown different examples of plagiarism and taught-even through basic lecture-the many forms it can take, their understanding of what constitutes plagiarism gets much more sophisticated (Landau, Druen, & Arcuri, 2002; Moniz, Fine, & Bliss, 2008). Then we need to give them practice in correctly citing their sources. When students get hands-on practice with paraphrasing and correctly citing sources, especially if that practice comes with instructor feedback, plagiarism is significantly reduced (Emerson, Rees, & MacKay, 2005). Below I have outlined five exercises you can do with students in grades 7-12 to give them a much better understanding of what plagiarism is and how to correctly integrate research into their own writing."