So Long to 2022, Hello to 2023!

I kept starting blog posts with resources or teaching ideas these last few weeks and would then stop myself from posting them because it's December. I just feel like everyone is done with the teaching year. I'm right, aren't I? This year was the first uninterrupted year of school since 2019 but there was this constant sense of 'could things become unsteady again?' and the COVID-related absences (both staff and students) riddled the year with a certain sense of discontinuity. It feels really obvious to say this but everyone across the entire planet is feeling really tired.  

So I thought I'd do something different and write a little more personally for my last blog of the year. 

Here are some things that I was thankful for this year:

• My beautiful baby, who is now wobbling around the house on two legs like some stop-motion wonder from an old Ray Harryhausen movie. It's a cliche but my whole worldview has genuinely changed with the arrival of this additional person in my house. It's been amazing to watch such grow, to see everything anew through new eyes, and to share this journey with my beautiful wife.
  
• A new school to call home. This is the fourth school I've worked at now and it's been great professional learning to see just how differently every school operates within the same overall system. I feel a great sense of calm in knowing that I will be continuing at this school into next year and beyond. 
• Becoming a Learning and Support Teacher. I've alternated between English and History for my decade-plus career, never quite committing to just one (I'd like to say that I can't pick between the two but the honest truth is that I just go with the flow - if I'm asked to teach English, I will, if it's History, I'm happy to do that too). In Term 4 this year I got to step into the entirely different role of Learning and Support Teacher, and I've loved it so much. I've been feeling a greater sense of self-worth and I enjoy working to help students and their families - plus it allows me to look at big sets of data (a secret and highly nerdy passion that I've never had enough opportunity to dive into in the past).
• New (and old) friends who have been supportive and funny and helpful and a reminder of what matters in the workplace and beyond. 
  

As you might have guessed from the above, things have been busy in my house this year. I haven't had as much of a chance to write aside from a couple of teaching articles and some poems (two were published under a dastardly pseudonym). I read about half the amount of books that I'm usually able to (being a parent reintroduced to me to the concept of existing in a constant state of tiredness) but there were still some really great things that I got to read, here were my ten favourites, in no order:

• Plunder of the Ancients by Lucinda Delaney Schroeder. A true crime account of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agent going undercover in the Native American illegal artefact trade.
• Kindred by Kirli Saunders. I read this because I wanted to teach it to Year 11 and I found the poetry to be quite soothing and welcoming - Saunders has a way with words when it comes to providing a window into the very soul of the earth.  
  
• The Overstory by Richard Powers. This was a big wow; a brilliantly interwoven and finely crafted piece of climate fiction about trees. Much more interesting than you could imagine.
• The Hare with the Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal. My second time reading but my first time truly appreciating.
• Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. A seedy knife's edge cooking memoir, and the perfect spiritual companion to this year's best new TV series (The Bear).   
• A Confederate General at Big Sur by Richard Brautigan. My third Brautigan novel - and I've loved all three so much that I'll be working my way through his entire body of work in the near future.
• Pax by Sara Pennypacker. A heartbreaking and beautiful coming-of-age novel about a fox and his boy. Thanks to my friend Ellen for this one!
• Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong. Last year, Vuong had a poem included in the HSC and he found himself (unexpectedly) bombarded online by students who hadn't coped with said poem. Unlike most authors who have previously faced this horrifying prospect, Vuong merely expressed bemusement and set about savagely and hilariously mocking some of the messages he received. His poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds further exemplifies his mental acuity with a raw juxtaposition of the tough and the intimate in a range of pieces filled with unforgettably visceral imagery and remarkable wordplay.
  
• After Story by Larissa Behrendt. This one was recommended by my friend Lis. I just finished it this morning and I love how effortlessly it blends together so many different elements (trauma, family, travel, literature, Aboriginal culture) through dual perspectives. 
• The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. Technically you could call this picaresque novel a 'coming-of-age' but, really, I haven't read anything like it before. Bellow's voice is uniquely colloquial yet sophisticated, presenting a range of misadventures and characters both hilarious and poignant.
  

And that's it from me in 2022. If you're reading this, I hope you take some time over the holiday break to rest and be with the people you love most. Here's to a gentle 2023. 

Guided Storywriting

Hi, how's it going?

I hope you're well, and I really do mean that - this has been a tough year for everyone and being a teacher in the public system looks like it might only become more challenging as we move into 2021. I've long been a big believer in free education for all but I know how hard it is not to feel demoralised and disillusioned sometimes when working within this system. What's that adage... nothing worth doing was ever easy? 

Teaching isn't easy. 

So, fellow teachers, I hope you're all kind on yourselves as we move into Term 4 of 2020. I hope I can be kind on myself too! Today I thought I'd share a stand-alone worksheet that worked well with my mixed-ability Year 8 classes in that nebulous part of the year where we were all trying to get students back on track after everyone isolated during NSW's first COVID wave. This lesson was designed to focus the students on building their literacy skills, and it bought me some time so I could continue planning some longer term work for my classes.

Guided Storywriting - Worksheet.

The first half of the lesson involves students filling in an open-ended cloze passage that comes with annotations that 'guide' the sort of answers that will work best. This is useful for students who aren't yet at the point where they can generate ideas in sufficient number, and helps them ascertain what categories of words work well in particular contexts.

The second half of the lesson contains some Super Six Strategies to extend student comprehension, and this includes visualisation, connection, and monitoring/summarising activities.

Have a nice term! :)

August Heat

Hello from Amber-land!

Below you'll find some resources that have been developed for a lesson that can be taught with Years 7-10 English. Normally I'd discuss the way the lesson works but today I'm going to take a different approach by reflecting a little on how the lesson went and how it was developed/delivered. I find it useful to blog about this process as putting it into words helps me crystallise how I teach. If you're already an experienced teacher just on the look-out for some resources then, by all means, feel free to skip down to the bit about the PowerPoint and activity sheet and disregard anything you already know :)

Preamble done.

Now, to start with, my friend and colleague Kira Bryant, who is also my Head Teacher, brought to the faculty's attention a great short story called 'August Heat' by William Fryer Harvey. Kira said it worked well with her Year 7 class, so I figured I'd give it to a go with three of my junior classes - two Year 8s and a Year 9 class.

(Incidentally, Kira has a really cool blog called Tales from an Edugeek that has a whole stack of stuff about English teachers who write.)

'August Heat' is suitable for our purposes for a number of reasons:

• It isn't too short and it isn't too long - just the right length for the 'mainstream' in a junior classroom (that zone of proximal development that we all love so much!)
• It was published in 1910, which makes it 110 years old, and therefore public domain. As it's not subject to copyright laws there's therefore no legal problem photocopying or printing it for the classroom.
• The style of writing isn't too inaccessible for today's teenagers. The prose is straightforward but not without a certain poetry, and Fryer Harvey's craft as a storyteller should grab the attention for at least a suitable portion of the class.
  
• The content could be described as 'horror' or, at least, in the realms of the mysterious and supernatural. Kira describes it as having an ending with "just the right amount of ambiguity to challenge our students". In any case, the story isn't too inappropriate for young adolescents, and it has an effective sense of dread and mystery that builds in detail until the wonderfully enigmatic ending.
  

So, as I was saying, I decided to use it with three classes.

The lesson itself was designed to be relatively direct. Getting students back into seats in a shared classroom has been, to put it lightly, a bit of a challenge after the disruptions caused by COVID-19 over the last three months. I initially attempted to do a class novel when each of my junior classes returned but that didn't really work out the way that I'd hoped. Each student was moving from separate, individualised online learning to working in a single room with the same novel, ostensibly learning at the same pace. I tried this with my four junior classes (two Year 9s, two Year 8s) and this approach is only really working with one of them so I had to abandon it for the other three classes.

Side-note: Don't be afraid to abandon a lesson that just isn't working. Adapting to the needs of a classroom is paramount to both their sanity and yours. I learned this very early on in my career. Sure, it can be depressing to see a beautifully-designed lesson just completely clunk in the face of disengaged students, but learning how to deal with this is preferable to taking it personally. When this happens to me, and it still happens even now because I like to keep trying different things, then I tend to take two approaches:

1. Recognise where exactly the lesson went wrong and learn from this.
   
2. Use the remaining time of the 'lost' lesson to work individually with students who are still engaged and/or build rapport by talking to the disengaged about why the lesson isn't working for them. If it's a case that the student is 'acting out' then, more times than not, it could be because the work is too difficult for them. Their behaviour should still be dealt with in an appropriate manner (that's a blog for another day), however, the 'tipping point' where they lost the will to learn is invaluable information if you can pinpoint where, when, and why it happened. That, in itself, is informal assessment of student ability.

Anyway. I abandoned the novel study with my two Year 8 classes and my other Year 9 class. I decided that self-contained lessons with minimal whole-class instruction was the best way to go. I also wanted to have it student-centered so I could spend my time doing one on one instruction or 'crowd control' around the room, so I put all the activities onto a single double-sided sheet.

Here's the lesson:

1. Read through the short story with the class. This is presented in PPT form after I heard my colleague Blake speaking about how much more engaged students can be when reading through a screen. Something about smartphone conditioning I guess! I broke the story up across slides with an image for each part of the story (except for one slide).
2. Students work through the six activities on the sheet. There are six of these to correspond with each of the Super 6 activities. I wanted to do something like this after blogging about the Super 6 a couple of weeks ago, so I split the sheet into two halves - the first half is for the students to do before and during activities (Predicting, Monitoring, Questioning), and the second half is for after (Visualising, Summarising, Connecting). I won't go into too much detail as the activities are deliberately self-explanatory to make it as student-directed as possible.
   

Reflecting: The actual lessons with each individual class all turned out very differently. I did the lesson three times across a Friday. Our school has a 5 period day, and I delivered the lesson for Year 8 Class A in Period 1, Year 8 Class B in Period 4, and Year 9 Class A in Period 5.

• Year 8 Class A: This went really well. The class was engaged for the entire short story and the majority of them finished the sheet. Some students struggled with certain parts of the sheet but I was able to simply flip the sheet over and let them pick an activity from the back - after listening to and watching 'August Heat' some students with additional learning needs were quite happy to express their learning visually or tell me stories of how it connected to other things.

• Year 8 Class B: Even though they're both Year 8, this class is really quite different to Class A as it contains a whole range of students with quite diverse learning needs. This class found it significantly more difficult to focus for the entirety of the story so I simply read up until the slide with no picture (this slide is needed to cover the visualisation activity) and told the class that was where it ended. The students who had no issues paying attention were still able to complete the sheet and came up with interesting ideas that demonstrated their comprehension. For the students who had struggled I was able to walk around to them, one by one, and explain whatever had confused them. The variety of activities on the sheet gave every student at least one entry point to show their comprehension. From this point on I just wandered the room, keeping students on task, clarifying information, and answering any questions students had.

• Year 9 Class A: As per the law of diminishing returns, Year 9 were even less engaged than Year 8 Class B. This was last period on a Friday, and the class came in off the back of lunchtime, so I guess they were all ready to go home! Usually this particular period starts with a cascade of groaning requests, like, "It's last period Friday sir, can we do something fun?" (My response of "This is English, it's always fun" is not usually well-received) or "Can we just have a chill lesson?" (Response: "Nah bro"). I made the quick decision to follow the same approach I used with Year 8 Class B, opting to cut the PPT short at the halfway mark. Sheet completion was probably around the 20-30% mark, with another 40% at least doing half of it, and the remaining 20-30% of the class still doing at least one activity after the reading portion. Not ideal, but better than the last Friday Period 5 I'd had with them.   

In hindsight, I've decided that the lesson works fairly well and I'm sure I'll use it again next year. That said, the inability of two of the classes to focus through the entire PPT while the story was read to them isn't what I had hoped for. I knew that some of the students in Year 8 Class B in particular would find it quite challenging so it wasn't a surprise, but these things still need to be tried.

For the next lesson I did an entirely self-contained sheet with no whole class instruction and no PPT/board work. I figured this would be a better work-around for students unable to focus on teacher-talk for any amount of time. This turned out to work even better but more on that in a future blog.

Focus on Reading and Super Six Strategies

I have to admit that I'm finding it difficult to think pedagogically at the moment. What I mean by that is that I'm usually trying to think and plan ahead into the next term or two. I always want to backward map as much as possible, to frontload students so that when they get to the tricky part of their learning they feel as prepared as possible. It also helps diminish my own anxiety and gives me a clear roadmap to work to - everything is transparent and students know exactly what's coming up throughout each term. Assessment tasks can be given to students far in advance of due dates, and it usually frees up my spare periods to concentrate on head teacher responsibilities, or welfare troubleshooting, helping students 1:1, or any other long projects I might be working on. 

In the age of COVID-19 it just feels impossible trying to plan for anything. Our goalposts are getting moved almost daily... and it isn't anyone's fault, it's just kind of how it is. Being able to plan far ahead has become a privilege rather than a necessity. 

I hate it.

Whenever I get stuck like this I tend to favour a back-to-basics approach. When times are complicated then the work should be simpler. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (pictured above) makes it pretty clear that students are less likely to be able to engage with curriculum if their basic needs aren't being met and, as this pandemic provokes and fertilises a seemingly neverending range of issues straight out of a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel, I don't blame them. A lot of students are going to find it difficult to take complicated course content on board in order to "become the most that one can be" if they feel that their safety needs are being threatened by a pandemic.

I always come back to the Super Six Literacy strategies. 

Some time in the past, I think it might have been 2013 or 2014, my school undertook the Focus on Reading professional development modules. Others will be able to tell you about this literacy initiative more than me... what I will say instead is that this particular professional learning galvanised my appreciation for teaching literacy skills. The Focus on Reading modules just felt so wonderfully practical and I'm glad to see that the Department of Education is currently working on a new version of it.

I replicate some of the Super Six-related strategies below in the absence of their current availability. 

Here's an example, from Page 8 of Module 1, drawing upon Teaching for Comprehending and Fluency by I. Fountas and G. Pinnell (2006, pp.463-464). This demonstrates some ways in which students can practice independent writing in relation to their reading:

Writing and Drawing About Reading

Using words, phrases or sketches on stick-on notes or in the notebook to note:

• Place where you made a personal prediction
• Predictions
• Place where you found out something about a character
• Wonderings
• Place where you learned new information
• Place that you found confusing
• Place that you found interesting
• Memorable language
• Place that reminded you of another book

Short writing activities - a few sentences or paragraphs produced quickly in a notebook or a long stick-on note that is placed in a notebook:

• Reaction to the writer's style
• A prediction
• Response to a selected quote
• Response to a peer's thinking
• Reaction to a character
• Thoughts about the writer's craft
• Thoughts about the writer's message
• Comments on the writer's point of view
• Thoughts about how the text reveals life issues
• New understandings or insights
• Using knowledge of the genre to think about character, plot, theme, setting
• Links to other texts
• Story map

Graphic organisers - words, phrases, sketches, or sentences on graphic organisers or drawn in a notebook:

• Web
• Time sequence chain
• Comparison/contrast chart
• Cause/effect chart
• Problem/solution chart
• Grid for comparing elements or taking notes
• Outline
• Letter to the teacher with reply (ongoing dialogue about texts)

Longer responses in the notebook elaborating on thinking about one or several texts

• Double-column entry (two-column responses with material from the text, a category or questions on the left and response or comments on the right)
• Expansion of thinking from the notes, sketches, short writing, or graphic organisers
• Letter to author or illustrator study
• Book recommendation
• Book review 

Published work - more formal responses to texts that are shared publicly

• Poem related to a text
• Picture book on a topic or subject (EG. Biography)
• Opinion essay
• Report of an author or illustrator study
• Examination of a particular theme across texts
• A character analysis or companion
• A book critique  

This particular Focus on Reading module notes go on to discuss the interrelated nature of reading and writing - the way in which learning to write should take place alongside learning to read, as one strengthens the other and vice versa.

I came to realise in light of all this that the explicit teaching of reading and writing right up to the end of Year 12 it is a fundamental part of our ongoing ability to understand complex and sustained text. Indeed, even adults need to make these processes explicit to themselves if they are to develop their own critical faculties in relation to the wider world. Learning never stops.

Super Six Literacy Strategies

The strategies mentioned above can be categorised as examples of the Super Six - to be honest, all comprehension essentially fits into this paradigm. The Super Six, in brief, are the following:

Questioning: Learners formulate and respond to questions that clarify meaning. This allows for greater depth of understanding when drilling down into texts.

Visualising: Learners create a mental image from a text. Visualising isn't necessarily a natural skill for everyone and is something that needs to be developed so that imaginative skills are engaged.

Making Connections: Learners make personal connections with the text by linking it to themselves, another text, or the wider world. This process makes use of our ability to recall information from our broader understanding of things - building pathways between different kinds of knowledge and prompting development of our ability to synthesise information.

Monitoring: Learners interrupt the reading process by stopping to check their understanding. This is an important part of comprehension as it forces the learner to develop strategies to cope with obstacles or disrupted meaning during the reading process.

Summarising: Learners identify and gather together the most significant parts of a text, restating this information in their own words. This is another valuable part of the comprehension process as it helps develop our ability to synthesise information, sort and categorise ideas, and discard irrelevant details.

Predicting: Learners use information from one part of the text to construct an idea of what will happen later in the same text. This is a valuable part of our critical thinking in that it makes explicit the way in which we adjust expectations based on the available information.

I always find myself assured that I'm doing something useful by falling back on the above six domains of comprehension while designing learning activities. Students never fail to be able to engage with these strategies and it's almost always useful in a wide range of contexts.

Food for thought :)

This Is How It Starts...

I wrote this journal entry at the beginning of April after a brief trip to do some groceries. 

A time ago I wrote many songs and zines about life in Western Sydney. They were pieces of hyperbole, filled with cynicism and invective, and presented a world on the precipice of armageddon. Now, in light of the exponential spread of COVID-19 and the impact this is having on society, those days seem unexpectedly idyllic by contrast.

Like the steadily-climbing whine of a bomb dropping from far above, the past few days have inched by for me with accumulating anxiety. I've been home with the flu, and the realisation that we lacked defrosted meat for tonight's dinner led me out to Coles to do a quick shop.

The car park was fine. The store looked fine.

But inside is a different story. The penny drops when I walk into the chicken aisle and the freezers are nearly completely empty. People come rushing after the staffmember as he unloads precisely eight lots of chicken breast onto the shelf, the only ones available, and there is a quick and silent scramble. As I move through further aisles I note further absences... no rice, no pasta, no noodles, no eggs, no long-life milk, no toilet paper, no tissues, no chips, no pies.

I stop to listen to the cursing opposite me.

"There's no fucking pasta."

Another voice, louder, "Mate, watch your mouth. There's kids around."

The first man, tall and of scowling angular head, raises his own voice, "I don't fucking care. There's no bloody pasta."

Louder still, the smaller bloke, "Watch your mouth, there's kids around!"

"You want a piece of me?"

The two are suddenly standing staunchly against one another. Everyone in the aisle freezes where they are, necks twisted, faces bemused. The loudspeaker issues a request for security to Aisle 6.

As I move through the rest of the increasingly spartan store I notice that everyone is warily watching each other. A woman at the self-serve checkout pushes her jaw unnervingly close to the cashier who's come to see why she is making a commotion, "What are you gonna do? C'mon then!" And outside, a man leans into the window of a car and jabs his finger at the driver while yelling something unintelligible.

During my journey across the store, I see an older guy in a Guns 'n' Roses T-shirt lecture at least three different staff members (in different parts of the store), telling them that everyone is inevitably going to catch the Coronavirus and we should all stop worrying. He tracks his way back and forth across the store, seemingly not there to actually buy anything, like a New York sidewalk preacher-bum with an 'End is Nigh' sign strapped to his chest.

I clutch my bags close and make a straight line to my car.

Book Journeys: Station Eleven

I don't often read new releases and, yes, I count a book printed in 2014 as a relatively new release. I tend to instead spend my time catching up on classics, favourite authors, graphic novels, and the NSW HSC Prescriptions List (No, no, I've never actually claimed to be fun at parties).

Last year I returned to a much-loved hobby, reading while walking. This has led to a strange series of synchronous coincidences in which the weather coincided with my reading experience. In the last four months:

• I read The Shipping News, about life on an island, while walking the coastline of Stanwell Park. 
• Journey to the Stone Country, about the sparse rocky inland of Northern Queensland, read while sweltering in the dry heat of our recent and devastating Australian summer. 
• And then there was Island Home, Tim Winton's nature-inspired memoir of growing up alongside fragile and unsung ecosystems such as the heath-lands of south-west Australia, which I read while walking the semi-developed swamps of Werrington.

Okay, that last one is a stretch, but spare a thought for the romantic in me. 

Less romantic is the COVID-19 pandemic that currently casts a pallid silence over the world. I picked up Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel for no reason other than the fact that I liked the minimalist design of the cover, and metaphorically gasped as I walked my quietening neighbourhood a month ago and came to the realisation that I was reading a post-apocalyptic story that described in scarily accurate detail what the world might look like after a devastating pandemic wipes out the majority of humanity. 

It took me four walks to read Station Eleven from start to finish, and it's the sort of book that made me want to keep on walking. It's a compelling read, with easily-read prose that belies certain complexities. For a start, St. John Mandel (is that the whole last name? I'm never sure) utilises a non-linear structure to encapsulate fifty years of events, four or five protagonists, and layers of meaning that keep you thinking long after the novel has ended. 

In a way this is a book about the importance of art in the face of tragedy and cataclysm. Relevant, huh? In Station Eleven, a single piece of amateur art is used to form the thematic core of the entire narrative; a suggestion that art's relevance is entirely dependent on its significance to the reader. This is further exemplified by the text's equal use of examples from both high culture (Shakespeare, Beethoven) and low culture (the remnants of pop culture that still persist, with the Star Trek: Voyager quote "Survival is insufficient" taking centrestage). The text circles around these ideas and doubles-back in multiple ways, employing dramatic irony ("one day she'll show it to the world and we'll all say we knew her when"), symbolism (the eponymous comic that holds the various threads of the different time periods together), and metatextuality ("You don't have to understand it, it's mine").

It's a beautiful and breathtaking piece of accessible science fiction that asks big questions about religion, survival, art, and humanity. How could anyone say no to that?