Mirror Mirror Pitch

In 1999 I had one foot in Marketing and the other foot in a Master's Degree.  All the theory and reading was enlightening but deep down I wanted to just get to work with the kids.  Over the summer I signed up for a 1-credit, intensive weekend workshop with The Center for Social and Emotional Learning.  There I met the Principal of Winston Preparatory School who hired me the week after and that took care of the foot that was still in Marketing.

Fast forward 14 years and I am still a proponent of explicit incorporation of social and emotional lessons into a community's curriculum.  We do not currently have a middle school homeroom or pastoral care program so I decided to create my global project to address the following questions that I believe all middle school students should be thinking and rethinking about:

Mirror Mirror on the wall, Who Am I and How Do I Portray Myself to Others?

Following the Project Planning Tool from Julie Lindsay and Vicki A. Davis I have put together global project  that I am calling Mirror Mirror.

The primary aims are as follows:

• Students create a visual representation of who they are
• Together with students from other schools around the world they create a wiki page that teaches tolerance
• Students then take the visual representation someone else made and interpret it in their own artistic way (poem, song, visual art, video)

Of course students will have the chance to use various Web 2.0 tools as well as other technology to communicate, collaborate and create.  I recently discovered the power of student choice and so am planning on incorporating that into the project somewhere.

I would be grateful to get feedback and thoughts on how this global project would entice you as a teacher to sign up and participate with your middle school students.  What would you like to see?  What would make you hesitate to participate?

Another C: Calibrating

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo by USFWS Mountain Prairie: http://flickr.com/photos/usfwsmtnprairie/5434754068/

Align your project to standards.  Did I even use any ISTE NETS Student Standards?  Would there be anything to align to?  Panic.  I wish I had read challenge 11 before I did challenge 9 but to be honest, this happens to me occasionally.  I have a lesson perfect, ready to rock and bam!  Doesn't click.  So I am off and running to find something 'better' and only afterwards do I hope that it reflects the standards.  I know it shouldn't be like that but it happens.  So here I am, inadvertently simulating a 'what not to do' and hope that it turns out ok.

Acutally, what I'm really hoping for is that I am so in tune with those standards, that without thinking about it, I wove them in!

Here are the standards associated with the project.  As I hoped, I covered many areas including creativity, collaboration and digital citizenship.  Areas for improvement:

• Students use digital media and environments to communicate and work collaboratively
• Students do more of the research, discovery and sharing of information on typography rather than being guided mostly by the teacher

April: The month of Judging

Gaeun

 (All artwork in this post was done by ASM's talented 2013 Digital Art students who continue to inspire me).  

In an effort to get some experience on both the Eracism and Flat Classroom Project I decided to judge the spring 2013 sessions.  I managed to watch 2 asynchronous training sessions which gave me guidance and I was able to join the judges Nings in case I needed support.  But the most powerful piece given to me were the rubrics to follow.

Yasin

Last school year my professional goal was to develop rubrics that would allow for spontaneous adjustment on both my and the students' part.  My original goal was to take the emotion and ambiguity out of grading and ensure that students earned their grades.  What I got was so much more.  I could be fair which, the incredible Rick Wormelli reminds us all, doesn't always mean equal.  Students could self-correct and help each other to gain points.  Parents were thankful for the detail and for the clarity they provided.  I could tell places where I might have not taught something well enough if all students lost points on it.  And best of all, my students took the feedback and improved.  One boy noticed he kept losing a point for not simplifying.  Another girl noticed she would know how to do the problems but lost points for mathematical errors.

ChaeYoon

This year I have added digital art and movie making classes to my math load.  At the beginning of the year I felt like Jekyll and Hyde.  What a contrast to my math mark-schemes.  How do I give collaboration points?  How do I judge a students' art?  And this was when I discovered evidenced based rubrics.  And the best way I could do that was involve my students in the process.  After they would find out the project we would take about 25 minutes to make a list of what they would look for if they were grading.  These conversations always start with one of the students saying "they did a good job."  Then I ask what does that look like or sound like and from there we'd generate rubrics together.  These rubrics are then posted around the room as a constant reminder for the students of their goal.  At points in the project they can evaluate each other using them and they provide a platform for us to stay on track.

Olivia

I was still concerned that the 'like' factor of art would not be included and didn't know how to deal with that so I give that in feedback that isn't included in their grade.  In judging the Flat Classroom Project videos I decided to do a test.  These were not art projects but I was curious anyway, Would my top 8 receive the most points? I watched all the videos and scored them them based on the rubrics.  Then, before I totaled the scores I rated my top 8 just based on the 'like' factor.  It turns out that my actual scores and my likeablity list were identical for the top 4 but after that my bottom 4 based on 'likeability' were actually the 8, 9, 6 and 5 respectively.

Giovanni

Rubrics help me grade based on evidence and that should be OK for middle school art where we are wanting students to discover and experiment and realize that the process is where the important learning happens.  And what I have realized is that after watching their efforts and being part of their process, I like everything that they do.

Scary but Successful: Student Choice

Honestly, over the years I have not done many student choice projects as a math teacher except for the statistics, math and art, and write your own song projects.  Even after this successful digital art project and my sincerest desire to do this more in math classes, I'm still not sure how, but that we'll save for another blog post.

For the unit on Typography in digital art, I decided to go all out!  Students would not only choose their subject matter but also the style for their unit project.  Scary!  What if they ask me how to do something on Photoshop that I don't know how to do? But I plowed on anyway believing in the tweets and blogs I've read over the last few months about the power of student choice.  

Week one I introduced the 'ask 1 before me' idea.  Week two we tried 'ask 2 before me'.  Now I was seeing collaboration, not just cooperation and helping but deliberation, experimentation and all before they even considered me in the equation.  However week three when we tried 'ask 3 before me' it didn't work so together we stuck with 'ask 2 before me' and since then haven't looked back.

At the time I thought that I was holding onto some ounce of control by guiding them from the beginning with certain videos but in hindsight, it was me simply setting up the groundwork, giving them confidence and ensuring they knew what they needed to achieve.  I did not need to control their learning, they were perfectly capable.  

That is not to say I didn't teach.  I have read many articles and blog posts suggesting that a teacher is redundant now that you can learn pretty much anything you want off of YouTube.  I am here to tell you that I have had tiring days teaching but to my surprise, the most tiring were during this process.  With every student tackling different subject matter and different techniques I was co-searcher, co-experimenter, co-creator exponentially.  Exhausting but so worth it.

We learned about David Carson and watched a PBS video on Graphic Designers who make a living with typography.  Then I showed them a lyric video (the one I really wanted to show them by Justin Timberlake, the best one I think out there right now, I couldn't because of the language but you should check it out).  For the next 20 minutes my students shared their ideas, commercials included, and together we scoured YouTube.  I put up many of their ideas on my website for the other classes.  We created a Pinterest Board together with examples of typography.  

Turn off the computers.  That threw everyone off, myself included.  It was time to create a Passion Poster.  I adapted Oprah's Find Your Passion to be more kid friendly though for next time they have already given me some suggestions on even more effective questions for middle school kids.  They picked their top 3 passions and found illustrations for them, a font type that represented each one and also a quote that spoke to that passion.  These posters were later scanned to .jpg files so the students could write about them in their final blog posts.

Smile has no disability. 

Everyone is smiling. 

Disability is a prejudice and they have

the same ability as we do. 

Working together we have each other

My students were purposefully wearing t-shirts with typography and emailing me more videos to watch.  A lovely 6th grader brought the image on the right from her Korean textbook to demonstrate the power of typography.

I then presented my students with 3 possible typographical effects in Photoshop.  I included my own examples with the step by step instructions in PDF.  And this is where the magic began.  Immediately hand's raised and asked if they could try other effects like 3D or glowing or something else they had seen that they wanted to try.  Students who were less comfortable followed the tutorials and then asked if they could mix and match ideas.  Students asked each other how to do certain effects and I got to spend time with the 30% of my students who have been learning English for less than 10 months.  Using hand signals, Google Translate and lots of trial and error they were all on board creating projects about what they are passionate about.

I got goose bumps reading their final blog posts with their work.  "This was the best art project I ever did because I was so passionate about it" wrote Sebastian.  Many students did 3 - 6 projects when only 1 was required.  Choice, Collaboration and Creativity - powerful classroom tools that I will be employing in every project from now on.  Well done students, you have taught me a lesson I will treasure and build on and try to incorporate them into my math classes.