Creating "Magical Moments" by Integrating Curriculum

At the end of class on Friday I had one of those magical moments that make teaching about the coolest thing in the world to do for a living.  I'm talking about those moments when the light goes on, when a student's eyes get wide and fill with the glean of recognition, when ideas previously separate and isolated are joined in understanding.  I'm talking about those so called "Aha!" moments, those thrilling, joyous instants which makes a teacher's life wonderful.

Two things made this "Aha!" moment on Friday extra special.  First, it didn't happen to just one student, but to the majority of the students in class all at once.  Second, I had worked together with my friend and colleague, Isaac Zawolo, to in a sense plan for it.

Sean, Isaac, Pat and I have a cohort of students.  That means we can think creatively about our overall learning objectives for the group, and plan lessons in our respective classrooms that reinforce the learning taking place in our colleague's classrooms.  Teaching is often such an isolating experience professionally.  Former APS Superintendent Larry Cuban just wrote a blog post on the topic, titled Alone in the Classroom, that describes the problem well.  I am in the incredibly fortunate position of being able to escape this problem, since I am working closely with colleagues who stimulate my thinking, challenge my assumptions, expand my horizons, and make me a better teacher for the direct benefit of the students whom I teach.

We are all working together on a big fourth quarter project we are calling The HILT Institute in Our Eyes.  The aim of the project is to use our English, mathematics, social studies, and information and communications technology skills to learn more about our own community.   In English, the students have been constructing a survey which we will use to gather information about ourselves.  In mathematics, students have been learning data analysis skills, including creating pie charts showing distributions of values.  In my ICT class, I've been teaching students how to use Google Forms (so they can create the survey) and Google Spreadsheets (so they can collect and analyze the data we gather).

On Friday I was introducing two new spreadsheet functions: UNIQUE(range), which returns an array of unique values from a specified range, and COUNTIF(range, criteria), that returns the number of times a specified value occurs within a specified range of values.   For this lesson, students were following along with me step by step, creating their own versions of the spreadsheet I was presenting them.  With only five minutes left in class, I told them to stop doing that.  I told them I wanted to show them where we were going with this, so they should just watch now and could do it themselves next week.  I proceeded to finish this demo.  There were about 30 seconds left in class when I clicked the button that made the pie chart appear.  That's when it happened - wide eyes and big smiles across the classroom, together with the "Aha!" of understanding.  "We've been making those things in Mr. Zawolo's class", they thought, "I understand exactly what it is that the computer just did!"

Teaching Grammar Using Student-Created Materials

A perennial problem for English as a second language teachers is finding compelling ways to teach grammar. Many grammar textbooks are less than ideal. At best, these books provide a general overview of a language feature. At worst, their exercises are tedious or culturally biased. All commercial texts are by their nature disconnected from students' lived realities. Ask yourself this: Did you ever really care what happened to Dick and Jane?

It is up to the teacher to make the language come alive for the students. Our online picture dictionary partially solves this problem. The student-created dictionary has evolved into an image bank from which I can mine content for grammar examples. When I want to present a new grammar point (subject pronouns, for instance), my first destination is Our Dictionary. There I retrieve interesting photos of the students and make questions based on the visuals. Usually the pictures are funnier and more original than what appears in any textbook. As you might expect, our students are much more willing to study esoteric syntactic structures if they themselves have crafted the content.