Support

A while back, I had every student look into the camera and finish this sentence: One thing I like about San Jose is… I took all those clips, the shooting of which was managed by one of the students in the class, and put them together into a video that we watched one Tuesday. As you may already know, Tuesdays and Thursdays are note-taking days in Support. They noted who liked what. No big deal, a fairly straightforward thing, but worthwhile since several students didn’t get these notes correct and clearly need more practice at such things.

Later that week, students looked at these notes again and were faced with the following classroom task: arrange yourselves into groups according to what you like about San Jose. Much to my surprise, two students walked up to the board. They ran the whole show. I literally sat that one out. The rest of the class wasn’t paying much attention, but they did chime in from time to time. Eventually, the board was split in four, all students were placed into the proper area, and all areas were titled. And they did this with little to no prompting on my part. Sure, it was really only two of them that did it, but to some extent everyone in the room checked in a decided that they were correctly placed. A few even made suggestions for where to move names around.

It ended up that one of the quadrants had eleven names in it, so I broke it down further. Still, this was a very cool thing to witness. Sadly, we haven’t shot anything yet because the planning isn’t happening. Next week, we launch into it and let that failure to plan have its affect.

Lesson

What video has taught me is how incredibly cool it is when you only intend to step out of the way for a little bit, but the students just don’t need you to finish what you started. Video has also taught me that jumping in is sometimes what’s called for. You gave all the directions, you tried your best, now let the students demonstrate what they did and did not understand. If my students don’t start shooting next week, regardless of progress made on their two-week-old storyboard, it’ll be too late. It may already be too late, in fact.

I’ll mete out other lessons over the next few weeks. On a different but related topic, next up I’ll detail the videos we watched in Speech and how I got them ready to tackle their own productions. The AFI stuff was just the beginning.Similar Posts:

• Patterns And Shapes
• AFI Curriculum
• Support: Changes
• Treats
• What Video Has Taught Me – Part 2

Seating plays a big role, too. I went around the room yesterday to issue censure for poor notes based on a video we watched twice. Almost every critique involved me pointing at their desk, nearly pounding it with my index finger, while emphasizing that “maybe this is not the right desk for you. Maybe you shouldn’t be sitting so far back, surrounded by others who are also taking poor notes.” Yeah, that’s my job to move them. They don’t know enough about themselves or this game to make the right choices when it comes to where or with whom they sit. We’re back to a more traditional grid of desks (the set up I usually start and end the year with anyhow) and I’ll get back to seating charts for them tomorrow.

The routines and the consistent expectations help these students more than others. Those things keep these kids hooked into what I’m offering. They like me well enough to (mostly) do what I ask of them. I just need to make it easier for them to do so, something I’ve grown lazy with since most of my juniors and seniors meet me halfway already.Similar Posts:

• Support: Tomorrow’s Notes
• What Video Has Taught Me – Part 1
• Fix, Create, Save, Think
• Results
• Self Imposed

I showed this AFI video to Support for our note-taking session yesterday and will show it to Speech after Spring Break when they start to storyboard. It moves through the ten final shots pretty quickly, a good challenge for my Support kids who are just learning to take notes, but also makes it easy to understand what the shots are.

The American Film Institute (AFI) put together a series of videos that walk you through movie production. They have lesson plans, handouts, and audio/video resources that actually aren’t too shabby, at the very least providing a good skeleton for you to expand on. I heard about this curriculum a few years ago and am happy to have found it all. And it’s free, something I worried would be true back when it first caught my attention.

Links And Handouts

There are a few ways to get to all this stuff:

• AFI:
  • AFI ScreenNation – The Lights, Camera, Education channel is where I spend most of my time, though some user submitted videos are in my list of favorites, soon to shine in my classroom. These will be some examples of documentaries for Speech to use as models.
  • AFI Screen Education – This is all the same content, from what I gather. I just found this tonight when looking closer at a few URLs.
• Mike Phillips
  • The Mike Phillips Blog – Found in the Digital Film category, Mike has slightly revamped the AFI stuff and I like his approach a bit more.
• The Jewel: Storyboard Glossary Of Common Film Shots – This is what grabbed me when I first heard of the curriculum. Sure, it’s also on pages fifty to sixty-one of AFI’s Educator’s Handbook, but I like it when I don’t have to scroll through a bunch of stuff I don’t need right now.

So there’s at least two sites…Similar Posts:

• What Video Has Taught Me – Part 1
• Beginning A Documentary
• We’ve Begun
• Support: Tomorrow’s Notes
• Punctuation Videos

My plan here is to show a step at a time, then pause the video to extrapolate on the ideas a bit more. I’ll create some scenarios and ask for participation, then move on to the next step. At the end, we’ll talk about who got what information and how the notes look. We’ll then move to giving our notes the Cornell treatment and create possible test questions in the left margin.

I looked through a lot of possibilities, but narrowed to this one because I want to keep it short and at least moderately fun here at the beginning. That lecture about why the earth has seasons, though a bit dry, is certainly coming because that’s good practice, too. I aim to get videos about several different disciplines, so suggestions for other quality videos are welcome. I’ll be delivering some of these lectures myself, too, PowerPoint on some and no visuals on others.

Handouts

• How To Be Assertive Notes (PDF) (Word)
• Video

Similar Posts:

• What Video Has Taught Me – Part 1
• Support: Changes
• Punctuation Videos
• Heavy Water
• B&N Studio

Reading

They will read five hundred pages for me outside of school reading by the end of May. That puts us on a course of forty pages each week. This can’t be reading done for their Core English class or any other subject. We visit the library each month to renew books or check out new ones. We read in class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for ten minutes, with the goal of getting up to twenty minutes by the beginning of May. Right now, we can barely get through ten minutes, but we couldn’t even get through three minutes when we started this last semester. Beginning next week, Fridays will be days for them to write a response about what they’ve read during the week and I’ll have them catalog the number of pages they read each day.

Notes

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I provide some type of lesson where the students need to take notes. We have periodic notes quizzes and will move toward taking those quizzes without the aid of notes, so notes become study tools. I’ve so far covered what to bring to class every day, the eight basic parts of speech, rules of capitalization, and how to eat sushi. During vocabulary presentations, the notes were to write down the first word and definition each student discussed (they spoke about five different words). The content of these days is not so important, so my options are wide open here. So far so good, but it’s a lot of not getting the notes down in the moment and asking what to write down later. We’ll get there. Cornell Notes will enter into the equation a bit later.

Tutorial

On Fridays, for about twenty minutes, my vision is to have students in groups by English teacher working on whatever reading, writing, or other assignments their teacher has provided. The maiden voyage of this was disastrous this past Friday, full of “Nope, we’re not working on anything”s. A possibility given that it was the Friday before a week vacation, but I still don’t buy it. We’ll try again the Friday we return, but before then I need to think of what I can have students do who give me that excuse. Email to and notes in boxes of seven different English teachers asking what is going on in class, that’s my Monday after-school plan.

The Support class has transformed, so I don’t feel overly guilty about not having new ideas for course work. We work on usual stuff with added attention to how to do said stuff successfully. If any of you have something, I welcome suggestions on what to do with a group of kids who are disenfranchised, accustomed to not working, and violently against the idea that any of the things we do in school actually matter. I’d also like to know what you think about my changes and if you have any ideas for tweaks to make them successful.Similar Posts:

• What A Mess?
• Patterns And Shapes
• We’ve Begun
• Why Another PW?
• What Video Has Taught Me – Part 1