Teaching students how to read is frequently overlooked at the secondary level. We often assume that students have mastered decoding skills and are consequently well prepared for the demands of processing the lengthy, sophisticated texts taught in upper schools. As many of us well know, however, the journey from decoding symbols to gaining understanding can be a long one. This article tells the story of two digital media projects Jackie and Laura undertook at our school as a part of Jackie’s 11th grade English classes, one utilizing a Facebook-style social networking environment to undergird students’ exploration of the novel The Great Gatsby; the other using the newer, web-based Voicethread (www.voicethread.com) software to assist students in their construction of interpretations of Shakespearean sonnets.
The creation of digital media projects can serve as a potent means for scaffolding students’ reading experiences. Project-based learning, in general, has gained quite a bit of ground as an alternative form of summative assessment in many schools; students are "showing what they know" through video-recorded performances, websites, blogs, podcasts, etc. We would like to deepen, however, our collective consideration of project-based learning as a way for students to make meaning and grow in their intellectual abilities, to go beyond an understanding of The Project as the teacher’s yardstick for what a student has learned. A good project can serve not only the purpose of having students "show what they know" but also can help them "come to know what they know." In itself, a project can serve as the scaffolding for the reading experience. In this way, "reading as meaning-making" happens not only in the reader’s mind, but externalized in the form of the product she is creating.
While our students’ finished products did demonstrate a higher level of final understanding of the specific literature, what was more important to us than a summative assessment was the deep reading and thinking the students experienced while actually completing the projects. The design of the projects themselves led the students to consider their reading with new, more sophisticated eyes.
Laura: Making the Case for Scaffolding
Prior to beginning my work as a school technology integration specialist, I spent 11 years as a secondary English teacher. During those years, it pleased me to see reading logs and journals and other "reader-response" activities infiltrate the pedagogical culture of my department. We came to understand and expect that students each had their own individual reading experiences. We grew to believe that the "one-size-fits-all" reading quiz (with questions like: “What kind of gun did George use to shoot Lennie?”) did not validate the individual reading experience of a student. (A student with prior knowledge of Lugers might ace the Of Mice and Men question, while another student — who read just as thoroughly — might gloss over that one term, using context to figure out it was a gun, but never registering the kind.) We noted that our quizzes seemed to be doing nothing to help them become better, more thoughtful, and more insightful readers. What reading quizzes did was train our students to memorize details that we teachers selected because we felt the need to hold students accountable. Reading journals opened the door to students’ free expression of their reading experience.
Over time, however, I found students’ reading journals lacking the kind of substance we English teachers like to see. State-mandated graduation exams in the public school in which I taught asked students to read a story and then share their reflections. In preparation, we filled the year — and scores of black and white marble notebooks — with reflections. The results were almost as dismal as the years of students trained by quizzes. Kids simply felt they had nothing to say. Or, if they did manage to find something to say, filled their notebooks with drivel — oftentimes sweet drivel (“Johnny reminds me of my uncle because my uncle always says we should live life to the fullest.”) — but drivel nonetheless. But it seemed so cold and disingenuous to tell our students we found their reading experience "trite" and "lacking depth." And reading journals still failed to address the pressing need in secondary schools to offer students some guidance as to how to read, how to make meaning from those symbols that students can manage to decode at a phonetic-level reasonably well, but can’t manage to say anything meaningful about.
A recent turn in secondary reading pedagogy caught my attention: the belief that even secondary-level readers need more scaffolding. Scaffolding, in theory, stems in part from the work of Jerome Bruner, a cognitive psychologist who elucidated the language acquisition patterns of young children. Bruner noted that caretakers, in their give-and-take dialogue with young children, seemed to instinctively know how to ask questions and offer replies that would elevate, step-by-step, a child’s language skills. Bedtime stories, nursery rhymes, even "baby talk," all play a role in leading the child towards greater language mastery. Scaffolding is a natural part of learning. It is a natural part of the relationship between caretaker and child.
The work of psychologist Lev Vygotsky has also influenced the understanding of the value of instructional scaffolding. Vygotsky is most often cited for his theory of the “Zone of Proximal Development,” which asserts that the best learning occurs in that zone of challenge, just beyond a student’s current level of skill. Not too easy or too hard. Scaffolding works in tandem with this theory by breaking very difficult skills — skills that are perhaps beyond the ZPD — into more "learnable" lessons that can be mastered within the ZPD.
For many of our students, reading a lengthy novel or making sense of a Shakespearean play is beyond their Zone of Proximal Development. No number of reading quizzes or response journal entries will help them because we have not scaffolded the actual reading experience for them. What exactly do good readers do while reading Hamlet? How does a good reader get through Anna Karenina and make sense of it all? I can recommend here the work of Harvey Daniels, whose practical guides to Literature Circles (Literature Circles: Voice and Choice in the Student-Centered Classroom (1994), Literature Circles (2002), and Mini-Lessons for Literature Circles (2004)) do a superb job of making more explicit for students what good readers (and good book discussers) do. His Subjects Matter: Every Teacher’s Guide to Subject-Area Reading offers equally and insightful and practical strategies for teachers in non-literature-centric classrooms.
With a vast range of digital technologies appearing — almost relentlessly — on a daily basis, teachers who are asked to integrate technology are understandably overwhelmed. The most important question I am asked when demonstrating a new tool is “What can I do with it?” In response, I offer another question in return: “What can your students do with it?” When we put the tools into the students’ hands and ask them to create, we are asking them to engage their brains in a manner often left untapped by the more traditional "sit and listen" model. Jackie offered this opportunity for creation in her English classes and it altered the way her students read: They were more engaged, asked more probing questions, and developed more nuanced interpretations.
Jackie: Facebooking Gatsby, Illuminating Sonnets
On Admission Tour Days at our school, you never know who will pop in: admissions staffers, bright-eyed prospective students, wary parents, or even administrators. One spring day, it was all four, making an impromptu visit to my English 11 class. Luckily, we happened to be discussing the imminent launch of the Gatsby Facebook project, which would be a major assessment in our Gatsby unit, but also the first major digital project I had ever implemented. The year before, I had let them design their own creative projects to finish our unit on Romantic poetry, but after a series of school workshops on technology integration, I was itching to try something digital.
There were several factors swirling in my head as I struggled to imagine what form this project would take. I had been teaching an upper-level elective in the Media and Communications Studies program at a local university, a course titled “Facebook Culture,” so the meaning and ethos of our national infatuation with Facebook had already been occupying my mind. I had also seen a lesson plan online at the NEH’s Edsitement website discussing the Secret Society of the 1920s embodied in the book’s atmosphere and character dynamics. Due to concerns about student and server safety, our school would not allow us to conduct the project on Facebook itself. Truthfully, the students were a bit disappointed by this, because we could not make their Sharepoint blogs actually “look” like Facebook does. But as they engaged more with the project, this disappointment surfaced less and less.
In my plans for the year, I was determined to incorporate assessments that would serve to illuminate areas of student achievement and ability beyond the composition of an essay. I knew that I wanted the project to encourage student creativity, so my vision for the project involved a fair amount of student choice and open-ended writing opportunities. I also wanted students who might be quieter to have an alternate space for expression and participation. In my college courses, I had used student blogs and discussion boards, and had found that this alternate space was often very fruitful for the student whose voice might not be heard in the classroom setting. During this particular school year, I was also experimenting with ways to assess reading comprehension behind the stale “reading quiz,” so I wanted the project to incorporate student comprehension of the book, both as a whole and in a selected section. Finally, I wanted the students to be able to consider less concrete devices like voice, mood, and tone in new ways. All three are integral parts of Fitzgerald’s legendary novel, but all three could sometimes be tricky for students to elucidate and analyze in their writing. I hoped that by taking on a voice from the novel, they would have to consider the mood and tone as well, and that their understanding of those terms would develop as their creative writing did. In this way, I hoped to build a project that encompassed higher-order thinking skills, writing tasks, basic comprehension, and class participation.
After discussing all these factors, we decided to use the blog feature our school web portal offers, so that each student would have a “Gatsby Facebook” blog hosted on my teacher website. The blog feature allows for the blogger to create categories to sort posts into, so we decided that the students would have categories connected to wall posts, status updates, and notes, the main writing-focused aspects of Facebook-style interaction. I chose to divide the project in two halves: one in which the students would choose a character from the book and create a profile for that character as a s/he appears throughout the book, and a second where each student would choose a chapter of the book and have to reconstruct that chapter through notes (two, 250 words minimum), and a combination of wall posts, events, and status updates (20 total). I also wanted the students to incorporate pictures where they thought it was appropriate. Each blog post would be sorted into a category, as well as appearing as the blog itself, which I hoped would ease the grading load somewhat. Almost immediately, the students begged for the chance to interact on each other’s blog as their “profile character,” which I immediately agreed to, though I had no idea how to grade that interaction.
In the first iteration of the project, in the spring of 2009, I allowed the students to choose their character and also allowed for duplicates of characters. I was lucky enough to have a small section of nine students, so each student chose a chapter. I allowed for interactivity and ended up adding 10 points to the total number of points, and gave each student full credit. One drawback this year was that in allowing my students to do the same character, most characters chosen were Tom, Gatsby, Daisy, Jordan, and Nick. In a novel like Gatsby, with such a rich supporting cast, I think this hurt our representation of the voices in the book. Only one student chose a more minor character, and his work with Meyer Wolfsheim, the novel’s unforgettable gangster, was witty, clever, and well represented. Inspired by his work, I made a new rule for the second project iteration in the winter of 2009 that no duplicate characters would be allowed. This time, I had students choosing Myrtle, Wilson, Myrtle’s sister, and Klipspringer, which enriched the entire project.
In both iterations, Laura came to class for one period to help the students set up and become accustomed to their blogs, and in both years, I also gave the students a class period to work on their projects. While we are a 1:1 laptop environment, in the junior year, we also have students from our brother school, which is not a laptop school. Therefore, the male students had access to laptops while on our campus, but had to access the project from their own family computers while at home.
In both groups of students, I saw a wonderful amount of enthusiasm and creativity while they worked on their projects. The following conversation between two students is just one example of the interactions I overheard: “Would Gatsby have favorite books on his profile? No, because remember in the library scene, none of the books had been read? Yeah, but wouldn’t he pretend to have read books, like books people would think were impressive? Yeah, probably, because he’s always so concerned with the impression that he’s making, since he wants Daisy to think he’s a powerful guy.” They laughed at their classmates’ wit and appreciated the often insightful choices made. In both groups, the students clearly demonstrated a sense of ownership over the material they had chosen to master, sometimes challenging other students to test their knowledge of a given chapter. Also in both years, I had them write an in-class essay after the Facebook project had finished, because part of me still felt I “needed” an essay in the unit. In both years, the essays were the highest essay grades several students had made that year, and in both years, the project grades were rarely below a B+. The confidence and creativity my students showed was worth every tech hiccup and every hour spent grading. In fact, grading the projects, while not the easiest grading I’d ever done, was often the most enjoyable, because I was so curious and pleased to see what they had created.
The project I had planned for my juniors was the final assessment for our sonnet unit, which traditionally serves as the introduction to our study of Hamlet and also traditionally ends with a written explication. This project would be the first time I planned a unit for my juniors that did not include a formal essay, and as such, I was concerned with the rigor of the assignment more than I perhaps would have been if a formal explication had also been present.
For this assignment, we spent one day introducing the form, which most students had encountered before but not necessarily studied extensively. We talked about the two main types, Petrarchan and Shakespearean, discussed rhyme and meter, and then dove into analysis. Before class, I had printed out Shakespeare’s sonnets 1-10, each on a separate piece of paper, and cut them up so that one line would appear at a time, keeping the lines together by sonnet. After our discussion, students split into pairs and had to reconstruct the sonnet based on their knowledge of the form. At the end of this class, they each chose a sonnet from a randomly selected group I had chosen and printed before class. I allowed them to trade their choice in if they were unhappy, as this was the sonnet they would become experts in for their projects.
We also discussed the upcoming project and what it would require of them, using a blog entry from the Folger Shakespeare Library on hypertexting a sonnet as an example. Their homework was to read through their sonnet a few times and look up any words they needed to define.
For our second class on sonnets, I had planned to be absent for family reasons, so I left a lesson on my class calendar on my website for my students to complete. I chose a lesson from the Learning Lab section of the Poetry Foundation website that incorporated both The Windhover, by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and The Oven Bird, by Robert Frost. I instructed them to read The Windhover, then listen to the recording of the poem being read aloud, then to read the poem again with the annotated words. They read the poet’s biography present on the site, and then used the drop-down menu to find four discussion questions, which I asked them individually to answer in Word documents. Then they read The Oven Bird, copied it into their Word document and annotated it. Next, under “Teaching Tips” on the Windhover page, they found a question asking them to compare the two sonnets, which I asked them to answer in the documents as well. Their homework was to thoroughly annotate their chosen sonnet and start collecting images. Before our next class, the students had a 40-minute “bump” class, which they spent annotating and collecting images as well.
We spent our entire third class with Laura, our upper school technology coordinator, on hand as the students created Voicethread accounts, looked at samples, and began uploading their images and testing the comment features. These students had done Gatsby Facebook project earlier in the school year, so they were less reluctant to dive in and start experimenting with the technology. One of their first questions was about the use of multiple images per line, which prompted a useful discussion about punctuation and line breaks and the different ways to “break” a line for different purposes. We also discussed the different types of comments here, as some students wanted to add music to their slideshows, wondered how much typing could be done compared to recorded comments, or asked how they could record comments if their home computer had no microphone. As I said earlier, the male students did not have the same laptops our female students do, but luckily Voicethread has a feature allowing comments to be recorded by cell phone, as I had required both typed and recorded comments as a feature of the project. I had also created a project-based learning checklist to help them navigate the project. Laura and I were both pleasantly surprised at how seriously the students buckled down to business, resulting in a rather quiet second half of class.
In our fourth class, the students viewed each other’s slideshows and began the commenting process, as I had required them to comment on each other’s projects as part of the grade. It was a fun class for all of us: Their excitement about what they had created resulted in laughter as they viewed each other’s final results, and as they reached certain images or heard certain songs, they congratulated each other on making good choices. It was certainly the most fun I’ve ever had at the end of a unit, and I have never seen a student hand in a formal essay with the same kind of pride, joy or support from fellow classmates as my juniors received from their Voicethread viewing day.
The juniors knew that before next class, they had to have commented on each other’s slideshows, so over the first few snow days, I went through each slideshow, noting the comments that had been made and checking to see if the projects themselves had met my expectations. I wanted to see if they had fully explored their sonnet, displayed their understanding of it, and matched the images found in the text with appropriate visual images. We had also discussed in class that the images should be cohesive, so that the viewer doesn’t feel jarred moving from one slide to the next, and that there should be a mix of literal and figurative images as there usually is in the sonnets themselves. Finally, I wanted their comments to be thoughtful and encouraging as well.
This group of projects met all my expectations and exceeded them. The images they chose were thoughtful and visually appealing, cohesive and relevant. I also asked them to send me their thoughts on the project as compared to a more traditional explication, and two students had already done so before the class ended. Here follows a sampling of their comments:
- This project got me more enthused about my sonnet, rather than dreading writing just another paper! —Caroline
- You could see everyone's creative side rather than a long passage of literary devices that show that we understand the poem. —Jordan
- I really enjoyed doing this project opposed to doing the "normal" explication. It gave us an opportunity to connect the meanings in the sonnet with images. The process for completing this project, whether we know it or not, is basically the same as a written explication. —Tessa
Several students also said to me, with some surprise in their voices, that doing this project probably took them longer than a “regular” explication would have, but that this project was more interesting, which was worth the work. I also noticed that the students with the least confidence in their writing skills seemed most confident while undertaking this project and earned higher scores than they had on earlier essays. I hope to build on this confidence so that they will finally believe that writing is a skill they can acquire, and that difficulty with writing does not correlate to a failure to understand or analyze literature, or the dreaded label of “being bad at English.”
Laura: Observations of Digital Media Success
Despite the growing prevalence and significance of digital technologies in our society, I am often asked, as an educational technology specialist, if all the "bells and whistles" are really necessary. Don’t they just distract students from the "real" work of school? Dilute all the hard thinking that needs to be happening? It has always been my contention that more technology in the classroom is never the end in and of itself. If the "bells and whistles" do detract from a rigorous learning experiences, by all means, get rid of them.
Looking back now on how Jackie’s digital media experiences with her students turned out, a few observations, however, came to mind, observations that I hope will foster greater understanding of the potential power of classroom technology when it is used thoughtfully and directed towards rigorous pedagogical aims.
Student Confidence
Where does it come from? It comes from having a strong sense of the genre and audience. Most of our students are very familiar with Facebook and have internalized the social nuances of wall posts vs. private messages, public photo albums, and cryptic vs. revealing status updates. This familiarity gave them an immediate framework for interpreting the characters and events of Gatsby. For example, if you ask high school students to write a formal character analysis, many will struggle, because the genre of a formal character analysis is foreign to them. If you ask them, however, to interact on Facebook as a character, students are much more able to leap into the role, and the analysis flows naturally from the role-playing. The "raw material" of analysis arrives first via their imaginations, which Jackie was then able to strengthen, examine, and polish into more refined, formal thinking and writing during class discussion.
Project Structure
With the Voicethread sonnet projects, the structure of how a Voicethread is put together forced the students to consider the significance of line breaks and forced them to consider imagery in a very concrete way. Shakespearean imagery can be quite abstract and difficult for many students to grasp. Having to choose actual photographic images to represent their interpretations of a line in a sonnet allowed Jackie to easily see which students were still reading at a literal level and which students’ thinking had progressed to the metaphoric level. The actual construction of the Voicethreads led to some very powerful moments when students themselves began to realize that perhaps the first images they chose were too literal, and that, upon rereading, their interpretation had deepened and become more nuanced. Urging students to consider multiple and deeper meanings is something English teachers are accustomed to eliciting through class discussion; the Voicethread projects prompted the students to go to this deeper level just by the very nature of working on them and having to make choices as to which photographs to include.
Classroom Community
Finally, Jackie and I were both surprised and pleased by how these digital projects enhanced the sense of community in her classroom. But beyond the joy and excitement we saw in her students, this more powerful feeling of community also increased the intellectual heft of their interactions. Because both projects were public and immediately viewable over the web, students were more attuned and accountable to their audience. Instead of their work existing in an isolated stream between student and teacher, the whole class was involved in the sharing, commenting, interpreting, re-interpreting, and evaluating. Having such a wide variety of ideas and opinions so freely and immediately available enhanced class discussion and stretched their thinking. The value of fostering community in the classroom cannot be overestimated, as it habituates students to participate not only in their learning, but in society as a whole.
There is a widespread fear in our culture that increased technology is leading to our increased isolation and alienation from each other. Jackie and her students found the opposite: Working on digital projects together actually opened up communication and made for more fruitful discussion. Concurrently, our culture fears that digital technologies are "dumbing down" our youth. Is that because they are fun? Yes, a digital media project can be fun. But it can — as Jackie and her students will attest — make them work harder and stretch higher than they expected.