Welcome to the Northern Virginia Writing Project’s 2016 Invitational Summer Institute! I’ll be blogging the demonstration lessons and the various activities occurring during our four-week duration. Find out more about the NVWP and the National Writing Project.

Today begins with Arvinder’s presentation on visual literacy. We’re going to be working with framing and reframing images. She introduces herself with a searing poem. She starts out by asking us what’s going on in this picture:

Image Questions:
1. What we think is going on in the pic
2. What we see that makes us think that
3. What more can we find?

We share out: OFL says that the picture doesn’t seem to have a point of conflict. They’re too relax for there to be a rescue or some sort of event. We note that the more we stare at the picture the more we see. We have questions about what’s on the inside.

These three questions are great entry points into visual thinking strategies. They allow for a variety of answers and perspectives on the same image. The questions push divergent thinking. And, true to basic social constructivism, our own answers are bound up within the classroom discourse, folding and feeding and vectoring off one another. The questions also push us to use evidence. These visual thinking strategies help us oscillate (her word!) between safe spaces (the narratives we’ve constructed mentally for the picture) and branching out to provide evidence for each other. I’m thinking about the endless dialogic loop of thesis + antithesis -> synthesis.

Arvinder talks to us about the visual standards we just employed in our conversation.

Ok, time for another look at the same image. This time we have to write down 40 words that describe what you notice in the photograph and the feelings, sensory impressions, and meanings it evokes for us.

We go from 40 words to 20 words to 10 words to 3 words. Here’s my process:

Then we share out our three words and write them out on the board. Each one of us took the assignment in a slightly different direction, as our three words demonstrate.

She invites one of us to come up and circle the words that don’t fit. What’s our own interpretive lens? This is an exercise in perspective and rationality and what we include in our schema.

We’re asking our students to pay attention to images in different ways. To create frameworks, to problematize the frameworks, and then reconstitute the frameworks with new understanding. I think immediately of Piaget’s theory of learning and his notions of assimilation and accommodation. Creating a tentative frame of investigation to find coherence. Arvinder reminds us that the teacher must remain neutral in these discussions. Summarizing and paraphrasing with intentionality. This image and question process brings the biases and prejudices of each student to the forefront.

The following questions help introduce students to counter narratives.

She reveals the “true” backstory behind the image. The building is a school. Inside the building students sit and take high stakes exams. The men on the outside of the building are carrying answer-sheets to give to the students on the inside.

Arvinder goes through this process with her students twice a month. The New York Times Learning Lab puts a new image up every Monday. On Tuesday they provide the backstory.

Here’s a photo of her teaching philosophy. Amazing!

Welcome to the Northern Virginia Writing Project’s 2016 Invitational Summer Institute! I’ll be blogging the demonstration lessons and the various activities occurring during our four-week duration. Find out more about the NVWP and the National Writing Project.

Christy Gill kicks off our third and penultimate week of the ISI with a presentation on combining research, maps, and writing. Students research a topic they’re interested in, create some sort of mind map, sketch note, or visual, and then compose a write-up about the process.

Quickwrite: How have you used student-directed learning in your classroom? What are the challenges? The successes? 

Although I haven’t implemented Genius Hour or something similar, I try to create assignment structures that allow for a fair amount of student choice. I’ve let students come up with assignments, pick topics, pick formats, create individual timelines, and self-assess. Many students enjoy the ability to direct aspects of their own learning. That said, placing decision-making power in the hands of students can be a daunting task for a few key reasons. 

Most students (and teachers) aren’t used to equitable power sharing in the classroom. In fact, even the term ‘equitable power sharing’ is amorphous and ambiguous. Some students can become frustrated and recalcitrant when provided with freedom. Sometimes this is because I did a poor job of scaffolding and building up to the freedom. Other times it’s because our culture of education is often one of compliance. Whether through rules, punishments, or rewards, students are used to 1. being told what to do, 2. being told how to do it, and 3. given feedback on how they did what they were supposed to do. 

We share out. A few of us speak on the ethics of student-directed learning. How children from certain backgrounds have resources at home to help them while others don’t. How certain types of children (white & middle/upper middle class) typically receive more guidance and exposure to student-directed learning. Heads around the room are nodding.

Christy tells us that students do not need a lot of geography knowledge in order to succeed with this project. Maps can tell a story and provide inroads to different types of literacy (research, visual, cartographic, to name a few!). Christy’s map project begins with asking students the following questions:

Student examples include literacy rates and crime, erosion at the Outer Banks, the geography of NFL fans, to name a few. Here are a couple examples:

Here’s a truncated version of the process students worked through:
1. Brainstorm topics both interesting and robust enough to sustain research. What do you want to know more about? Is the topic easy to research or obscure? How can you visually represent what you learn?
2. Create a daily timeline and to do lists.
3. Create the map.
4. Write the map story.

Here’s my number 1:

Here’s what she gives us for number 2. We’re not going to do this now because of time constraints. Christy tells us that this is an easy place to add or remove scaffolding as necessary for each student. Daily check-ins also the teacher to touch base with every student and offer guidance and support as necessary.

Here’s the map I made for step 3! It visualizes my thinking about teacher subjectivity. I tried to use pictures to represent school climate, public discourse, U.S. climate, philanthrocapitalism, center/margin, and binary discourse. So fun!

We spend the least amount of time on the fourth step: writing the map story. This makes sense to me, because while many of us do plenty of low-stakes writing, we rarely spend time on creating visual mapping products.

The questions for the map writing piece are:
1. What did you create?
2. How did you create it?
3. Why is this topic important?
4. SO WHAT?

This project is rife with possibilities for differentiation. What a great way to start off the day!

Welcome to the Northern Virginia Writing Project’s 2016 Invitational Summer Institute! I’ll be blogging the demonstration lessons and the various activities occurring during our four-week duration. Find out more about the NVWP and the National Writing Project.

Lauren Kennedy is going to walk us through her creative building activity to inspire personal connection in narrative writing. We’re going to use materials (shoeboxes, glue, various craft supplies) to create a model of our own personal thinking places. This is a perfect way to start out the year. It also draws on a number of reading techniques such as visualization and highlighting specific details.

She tells us how the twin phrases “Reading is listening” and “Writing is speaking” guide her literacy classrooms. This lesson is meant to be playful and fun. It’s a project-based learning experience designed to inspire creativity and freedom of expression. The older students get, Lauren says, the fewer opportunities they have to play with glitter, markers, colored pencils, and etc.

Quickwrite: What does creativity mean to you? What’s your own creative process (even beyond writing)? What’s your approach to creating works of creativity?

I’ve never really considered myself a very creative person. This obviously has to do with my personal definition of creativity, a definition no doubt constructed and reinforced in specific cultural ways throughout my upbringing. I’m not sure I’ve ever thought about my personal definition of creativity. This type of open-ended definitional question flummoxes me. So I’m going to bypass that part and try to answer the other sections.

I’ve played guitar on and off for 20 years, and my favorite thing to do with the instrument is to play songs written by other people. Although I enjoy a quick sketch now and then, (My mom insists I have some latent, untapped visual talent. I am skeptical), I don’t spend any time on it. I guess writing and word-smithing would be where I get my creative expression going. In retrospect this answer probably would have been better suited starting at this point (rather than all the hemming and hawing above).

We share out. Some of us mention the desire to work within rigid structures. I can cosign on that with feral intensity. Others discuss the value of age/experience/maturity when it comes to being able to let go and take risks with our creative outlets. Someone else chimes in to say that everyone is a creator; we all actively pursue our own creative endeavors, regardless of whether or not it’s stereotypically creative.

Teachers are idea hoarders, Lauren says. To use more current nomenclature, we’re preternatural makers.

Here’s Lauren’s process:

Q: She asks us what we enjoy thinking about.
A: Anything and everything related to education!

Q: List the different ways you express your own creativity:
A: Writing is pretty much the main way I use cultural symbols to create and express. Someone else says ‘lesson planning’ so I’m going to add that one in as well. The most difficult part about writing, for me, is composing works of fiction. My brain struggles to invent worlds, and therefore I don’t write fiction as much.

We share out about our experiences with personal creativity. This type of discussion always reminds me of the importance and relevance of social constructivism. Everyone’s answers spark more answers inside my own brain. Our voices come together, intertwine, and feed off of each other to create connections that previously didn’t exist. People are so great. Also, I need more hobbies.

When introducing the project to her 2nd grade students, Lauren spends time up front to talk about different planning mechanisms and show off some exemplars. This project has two components: a model of our thinking place and a short, descriptive paper to explain the model. Her students used Google Docs for the rubrics and the planning.

Lauren wisely devotes most of her presentation time to the process leading up to it. The examples of student work (pictured at the top of this post) are amazing. This demo lesson is a great corollary to Sarah’s. While her presentation dealt with the real processes and routines we set up as writers, this presentation approaches it from the virtual realm. Students construct virtual spaces inside their brains to help them function creatively. What do we need to be creative? What objects and environmental attributes induce feelings of equanimity and safety within us?

We’re all excited to begin making our creative spaces after we return from lunch.