HC English Department

"It's especially powerful because students identify the topics and carry out their own explorations, rather than teachers determining everything in advance. However: while the effort usually concludes with students presenting their learning through videos, blog posts, multi-media presentations, demonstrations, genius hour advocates often conceive these final outcomes primarily as students "showing what they've learned," essentially to evaluate the work and give it a grade. There's certainly nothing wrong with this approach, and teachers and students in many schools enjoy the energy, creativity, and learning that genius hour generates. But there's also so much more waiting to be unleashed if the products involve a larger purpose that just a grade. What's especially valuable is the potential of geniur hour as a gateway to student civic involvement."

"By creating intentional spaces for feedback and revision cycles in my classroom, students now think critically and authentically about their writing, which has led to diminishing the disconnect between how teachers and students define effective writing feedback. In my tenth-grade English classroom, we study multiple genres of authentic writing. After I give feedback on each draft of a piece of writing, I ask students to respond to two prompts:"

"The true beauty in leadership is being able to discern when to pull back and not give teachers things they don't need. There is a balance that great principals learn, and because of that balance, they generally have happy teachers in their classrooms. My favorite principals have intentionally held back four things that I never wanted or needed. "

"It is our responsibility to teach students not only how to derive and articulate their own views, but also how to listen to those of others. Plus, most college courses will expect students to acquire information aurally (as lectures continue to prevail), and few of them have developed the ability to do so. Here are seven things you can do to encourage active listening:"

"Five Ideas for Authentic Student Writing Stephen King, in his memoir, On Writing, recognized the weight of writing. He understood that each time any writer approaches the blank page, there is an opportunity to craft something meaningful and powerful: "You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair-the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed.... Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: You must not come lightly to the blank page." Here are five ways students can turn a blank page into a powerful expression of their mind and heart."

How can writing change people's understanding of the world? How can it influence public opinion? How can it lead to meaningful action? In this post, which accompanies our Oct. 10 webinar, Write to Change the World: Crafting Persuasive Pieces With Help from Nicholas Kristof and the Times Op-Ed Page, we round up the best pieces we've published over the years about how to use the riches of The Times's Opinion section to teach and learn. We've sorted the ideas - many of them from teachers - into two sections. The first helps students do close-readings of editorials and Op-Eds, as well as Times Op-Docs, Op-Art and editorial cartoons. The second suggests ways for students to discover their own voices on the issues they care about. We believe they, too, can "write to change the world." Join our webinar (live on Oct. 10 or on-demand after) to learn more, and let us know in the comments how you teach these important skills."

"It's hard for kids to write more and well because collectively I don't think we are as intentional about building student writing stamina as we are about building their reading stamina. It's also hard for teachers because the more they write the more we have to read.  That takes time and it feels overwhelming. While these are all very real and valid reasons, I'm still left with an itch I can't ignore called hypocrisy.  If I believe readers need to read more to become better readers, the same has to be true for writing.  So why do my expectations differ?  Why do I encourage my kids to read more to get better at reading, but not write more to get better at writing?"

""The best literary precedent for what we're enduring now is not the static image of Big Brother but the turbulent eruptions of King Lear," wrote the Washington Post's Ron Charles in May. Or is it The Handmaid's Tale, also an Amazon top seller? Or, maybe, Brave New World? America's high school English teachers are asking the same questions. After watching the tumult of the 2016 presidential election play out inside their classrooms last year, and after a summer of hate-filled violence, many are retooling the reading lists and assignments they typically give their students. They worry that the classic high school canon doesn't sufficiently cover today's most pressing themes-questions about alienation and empathy and power-and that the usual writing prompts aren't enough to get students thinking deeper than an average cable news segment."

""The first draft is for the writer. The second draft is for the editor. The last draft is for the reader.""

"When we ask teachers what is their biggest obstacle in teaching writing, they often say "Time!"  Indeed, the time to fit everything in and do a good job with writing workshop is our greatest challenge.  There is no way to remove this obstacle from our daily challenges, so we must, as Rudyard Kipling tells us in his poem "If",  fill the "unforgiving minutes with sixty second worth of distance run…"  Perhaps the best way to do this is to begin with a set of questions we can ask ourselves as teachers of writers: How are we currently spending the limited time we are given? How can we revise the way we spend our time in workshop to be more effective/productive? Is this the right lesson for these students right now (a question we can ask ourselves daily)? Is this learning experience worthy of the time it will take us to do it right? Is there another way - a better way - to approach this concept/learning? What is essential here? Important to know? Necessary to learn as a stepping stone to the next concept/skill? How can we give students more opportunities to write? To have choice? What do our students need from us right now?"

"In Karen's very clear standards for students about points, grades, and keeping score, one sees a belief that school is about work and that students must be coerced or bribed into learning through the use of grades. In this chapter, I'll explore five belief sets that act as action theories and lay a foundation for our expectations in learning groups. They can either facilitate a culture of thinking, though they can never fully ensure it, or act as an inhibiting challenge to that development. The five belief sets are as follows: * Focusing students on the learning vs. the work * Teaching for understanding vs. knowledge * Encouraging deep vs. surface learning strategies * Promoting independence vs. dependence * Developing a growth vs. a fixed mindset"

"What are the constraints of teaching the five-paragraph essay? Rorschach argues that its preset format can lull students into nonthinking conformity and questions whether struggling writers need such a format to be successful. Dive into this provocative piece, complete with student writing excerpts."

"While individual efforts are valuable, students can learn the skills of collaborating on civic issues by working together as a whole class. Here are the five broad steps they should follow: Identify issues important in their lives and community, and decide on one to address. Research the chosen issue and decide how to change or improve the situation. Plan an action, including determining a goal for change; identifying who or what body in the community has power to make the change; and deciding how to approach that person or those people. Carry out the action through letters, talks, meetings with officials, policy proposals, and activities, depending on the specific goals of the project. Reflect on the effort when it is over in order to understand their successes, challenges, and ways to continue learning in the future. Two features are especially crucial to making the experience authentic and empowering. First, students must own the key choices and decisions and figure out solutions to problems themselves, so they discover that they can do this. The teacher facilitates the work, of course, but leaves as much of the decision-making as possible to the students. Second, the work should culminate in some action focused on change in the school or community. It's not enough to just talk about change, practice mock legislatures, or serve in a soup kitchen (as valuable as these activities may be). Only when students see adults listening to them with respect, do they realize they have a voice and can make a difference in their world. Their efforts may not always succeed, but in being heard they come to value the studying, reading, writing and planning that they have done."

""If visual literacy is the ability to read, write, and comprehend visual language, then looking at an image is similar to skimming a text while seeing an image is comparable to reading it." So how does someone move from looking at an image to fully seeing it? "As you begin to slow down and look closer, you will begin to make note of the different elements in the image. This is called observing- the process of building a catalog of visual elements- and is the bridge between looking and seeing." One reason why twenty-first century students need to master this type of thinking is so that they can understand the way they are affected by media. Francoise Mouly, Art Editor of the New Yorker's "TOON" book comics, thinks there's probably a lot of support for visual literacy, but that educators don't know where to start when it comes to teaching it. It's clear that teaching visual literacy is more than just using visual aids or Power Point slides. So if educators are going to try teaching the real thing, where should they begin? Here are five ideas to get you started."

"Teacher-consultant Rus VanWestervelt describes how he founded a journal designed and edited by high school students and devoted entirely to publishing creative nonfiction written by teens throughout Maryland."

"Student empowerment was not just on the agenda, it was the agenda Monday night, June 19, at "TEDxYouth@WHRHS, an independently organized TED event," at Watchung Hills Regional High School (WHRHS). The TEDx event, which was the brainchild of 2017 WHRHS graduate Vineet Parikh, championed student empowerment,innovation and inspiration. It was he who first proposed holding such an event at WHRHS. Back in October 2015, Parikh was one of the student-members of the WHRHS team that helped shape the school's "2015-2020 Strategic Plan, A Warrior Vision." In addition to contributing to the long range strategic plans, the TEDx event at WHRHS was also an example of one of those long range plans being implemented. Youth@WHRHS was an example of immediate discussions about how student inspiration, innovation, and empowerment can be turned intoreal, everyday improvements for Watchung Hills Regional High School (WHRHS). "

"Low-stakes writing is a tool to help students build comfort with sharing and developing their thoughts through writing. A defining element of low-stakes writing is how it's graded -- the grade doesn't carry a lot of weight. This removes much of the pressure from having to do the assignment a certain way, putting value instead on student thought, expression, and learning, rather than punctuation, grammar, or getting a correct answer the first time. "The most important thing about it for me is that it's not censored, and it's not too highly structured," explains James Kobialka, a UPCS seventh-grade science teacher. "Students aren't being told exactly what to do. They're allowed to have freedom, and they're not so worried about it that they try to write what they think they want me to see, or that they're tempted to plagiarize. It's about them getting their own ideas down, and then being able to interact with those ideas, change them, and revise them if they're not correct." Low-stakes writing: Increases students' comfort with expressing their ideas and empowers student voice Creates more investment and ownership in student learning Prepares students for high-stakes writing and testing Is adaptable for any subject Allows for differentiation"

"A HyperDoc is a digital document-such as a Google Doc-where all components of a learning cycle have been pulled together into one central hub. Within a single document, students are provided with hyperlinks to all of the resources they need to complete that learning cycle. Here's an example. "

"Zoe Roben, an English teacher at Harvest Collegiate High School in Manhattan and enthusiastic Moth listener, wanted students at her small public high school to have a more sophisticated understanding of how to tell personal stories. So in the fall, she invited Moth educators to Harvest Collegiate to carry out an afterschool workshop with nine kids, while she acted as the teacher liaison. For eight weeks, the students and adult supervisors brainstormed and practiced telling their stories, and at the end delivered their tales before the school and again at a Moth office, where they were recorded. The theme was courage. Students told stories about kitchen disasters, lost hamsters and minor acts of adolescent agitation, like chopping off hair. Anxious at first about their ability to perform, students came to embrace the experience, Roben said. "They were glowing at the end, with the feeling that they could get up in front of an audience and do something this big," she said. "It was knowing they had something to say, and experiencing their own voice as something valuable," she added."

"For years, we've thought that the answer to boosting adolescent reading comprehension lay in building students' vocabulary. Teens often struggle with the jargon and advanced terminology they encounter as they move into middle and high school, so educators have designed curricula and interventions that explicitly teach these complex words. But these strategies aren't always fully effective, according to literacy researcher Paola Uccelli. As she writes, many of these interventions have yielded "significant growth in vocabulary knowledge yet only modest gains in reading comprehension." Too many teens still struggle to understand assigned texts. Uccelli's research explores a new approach. By focusing on how words connect in academic texts - and by recognizing that this connecting language is a possible source of difficulty for adolescent readers - teachers may be better able to equip middle and high school students with the tools to comprehend the texts they're reading for higher-order learning. Her work identifies a set of language features that are common in academic text but rare in informal spoken language. She's found that many of the most common language features of middle school texts are unknown to large proportions of students, even by eighth grade. "