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“Paul,

I have now been able to get into the website. I am wondering if you can help me set up an assignment I want to do with my class. Beginning in January my students will be choosing between To Kill a Mockingbird, I Know why the Caged Bird Sings and Black Boy. These books center around the following essential questions: How do childhood experiences shape the adults we become? How is race understood? How does race function in society? How has the racism of the past shaped current race relations in America?

I would like to have my students post these questions on youthvoices and check once a week to see the ongoing discussion and use that discussion in addition to their books and other class activities to construct an answer to these questions. I am wondering if this is something that can be facilitated through youth voices and if so, how I do it.

Thanks”

-

from an email to me

I can’t wait to follow up with this teacher!

Dr. Sondra Perl and Writing Project teachers from rural sites will be joining us on Teachers Teaching Teachers this week. We’ll be taking a look at their experiences in 10-day seminars that Dr. Perl led this summer and last summer. We’ll learn more about how teachers from those summer experiences have integrated teaching the Holocaust into their work with students.

Join us if you have stories of your own to tell about studying and teaching the Holocaust. Join us if you would like to add this to your curriculum. Join us to learn more.

HOLOCAUST EDUCATORS NETWORK

The purpose of the Holocaust Educators Network (HEN) is to provide a forum for faculty interested in studying and teaching the Holocaust. The Network extends the work of the summer seminars sponsored by the Memorial Library. Located at Lehman College of the City University of New York, HEN uses an inquiry-based approach to focus on how educators can engage students with difficult material and how writing and dialogue can help move students from shock and denial to empathy and action. We look to support educators from middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities in the following ways:
• By examining teaching practices both critically and generously;
• By sharing resources and devising new approaches in workshops and in online forums;
• By inviting noted scholars and researchers to present new work to the group; and
• By developing and conducting workshops in teachers’ own schools and communities.

This summer the Holocaust Educators Network will once again offer a ten-day summer seminar led by Dr. Sondra Perl to middle school, high school, and college teachers from rural sites within the National Writing Project. Join us to find out more!

Join us at http://edtechtalk.com/live on Wednesday, December 17, 9:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM Pacific.

See you on Wednesday!

Voting is now open for the Edublogs Awards - “the annual event where the best education blogs of the year are decided by, well, you!”

We would love for you to vote for us, but what’s even more important (of course) is that this awards process collects together a valuable lists of many wikis, blogs, podcasts, and web sites available in the edublog world. Check them out!

We invite Friends of Teachers Teaching Teachers and Youth Voices to consider voting for us. The links listed below will take you to the ballots.

You can vote twice for Youth Voices for:

• Best group blog: http://edublogawards.com/2008/best-group-edublog-2008/
  
  
• Best educational use of a social networking service: http://edublogawards.com/2008/best-educational-use-of-a-social-networking-service/
  

Teachers Teaching Teachers is up for the Best educational use of audio: http://edublogawards.com/2008/best-educational-use-of-audio-2008/

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Habits I introduced or reinforced this week:

1. Use Response Guides | Youth Voices
   

   Copy and paste the text from a Response Guide into a word processor or other text editing program. You can customize your message using that software prior to posting your comments.

2. Move beyond the Response Guides | Youth Voices
   

   Please choose and use the sentence starters, screencasts, and suggestions that are listed as links to the left. Also feel free to break out of the overly-structured “sentence starters” and create your own kinds of response.

3. Notice and practice the range of moves good writers use when composing
   
   • discussion posts
   • response to questions
   • annotated bookmarks for online research
   • comments in response to posts by peers
4. inserting a Flickr Creative Commons image into a discussion post

Reading/Writing Genres we practiced this week:

1. Read and an article online (chosen with a partner, NOT a Wikipedia article) and write a detailed response, and post as an annotated bookmark - General Response to a Non-Fiction Article (for a bookmark)
   
   
2. Use the generative writing from Sondra Perl’s Composing Guidelines (that we did on Friday, 12.05.08) …
   

   These writing guidelines will help you discover more of what is on your mind and almost on your mind. If they seem artificial, think of them as “exercises.” But they are exercises that will help you to perform certain subtle but crucial mental operations that most skilled and experienced writers do naturally:

   … in an extended personal essay about your inquiry question - Personal Inquiry (for a discussion)
   
   
3. Write (on-demand, in class, like a test) a reflective essay about your learning this marking period. Take detailed questions, and write paragraphs in response to them; don’t answer each question - Basic Reflection Questions.
4. Ongoing homework: Write five comments on posts you find on Youth Voices. Two of these five comments should be in response to another student on Youth Voices — probably from another school — who is writing about your inquiry question - General Discussion Response or Agree or Disagree Response.

Monday. 12.08.08
I gave students this list on paper and in their school e-mail:

These are the Discussion items and the Bookmarks that I should see on your profile page for October 17 - December 10.

1. Discussion: Response to “An Incident” (short story)
2. Discussion: Response to “Incident” (poem)
3. Discussion: 5 words, then freewrite about Obama’s election
4. Discussion: Response to “Losing Home” (podcast)
5. Discussion: Your own “Where I’m From” poem
6. Discussion with a Creative Commons image: Your Inquiry question, revised think it through interview (with partner)
7. Discussion: Response to “I Stand Here Ironing” (short story)
8. Bookmark: Wikipedia article on your Inquiry question (encyclopedia article)
9. Bookmark: Any other source about your Inquiry question (online source that you link to). Use the “General Response to a Non-fiction Article” Response Guide.
10. Discussion: Revised “Guidelines writing” with quotes from #8 and #9 and with a Creative Commons image. (see “Personal Inquiry” Response Guide)
11. Discussion: Reflection on your work, based on “Basic Reflection Questions” (on Response Guides)

I should also see at least ten Comments on other students’ posts. (I will be looking for your best two weeks of commenting.)

I had two goals on Monday:

• to have students type into Google Docs the Guidelines for Composing writing that we had done the Friday before. Then I wanted them to use the “Personal Inquiry” Response Guides to write an extended essay from this writing.
• to have students use their time on the computers to practice the habits listed above.
• to give time for students to complete any unfinished work from this list to improve their grades before the marking period ended.

Although students generally copied their written text into a Google Document (first goal), they were too busy finishing other assignments that all but a few students still — by the end of the week — haven’t understood what the task is for #10 above. We will be working on this writing Friday, for homework over the weekend, and into next week.

Tuesday and Wednesday 12.09 - 12.10.08
I wanted pairs of students to browse and find an article about their inquiry question, then read the article, and start completing an response to this article, using the “General Response to a Non-fiction Article” Response Guide. This was the procedure we followed.

1. Click on Response Guides on Youth Voices. Scroll down and find the “General Response to a Non-fiction Article” and open the link.
2. Copy the sentence you find there.
3. Paste these sentences into a New document on Google Docs, titled “Response to second article”
4. With your partner, find an article online (not Wikipedia, this time), and read it.
5. Compose your thoughts about this article using the Response Guidelines.
6. Post your response as a Bookmark in your blog on Youth Voices.

Students needed more than one day to complete this, and many were also working on old assignments from the above list of eleven assignments that were due on Wednesday. They did a lot of reading, responding, and writing in Google Docs and on Youth Voices on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Thursday 12.11.08

Students were given the period to complete their “General Reflections on Youth Voices.” They wre encouraged to write non-stop for 10 minutes on each of 4 prompts, creating a 4-paragraph discussion post on Google Docs, which was then posted on Youth Voices.

Friday 12.12.08

I’m going to use Peter Elbow’s “Loop Writing Process” to re-engage students in their inquiry questions. My goal is for them to use most of the period writing in different ways to find out what they are thinking now about their questions… and to generate a lot of raw material for an extended personal essay about their question, as contained in this Response Guide: Personal Inquiry (for a discussion).

I’ll use the following prompts for the loops:

1. Write your inquiry question at the top of your paper. (Do now)
2. Freewrite about your question. (10 min.)
3. Metaphors. If your topic were one of these what would it be? (5 min.)
   
   • color
   • math problem
   • magazine article
   • video
   • song
4. Dialogue. Write a dialogue about your question. (10 min.)
   
   • Who? Choose two or three characters.
   • Where? Imagine where they are, but don’t describe it. Just write their words
   • What? What specific conversation are they having about your question. Write it now.
5. Facts, Lies, Assumptions. List as many as you can in 2 minutes each. (6 min.)
   
   • Things you and everybody else in this room are sure are true about your question/topic.
   • Things you and everybody in this room know are not true about your question/topic.
   • Things you are pretty sure are not true, but you think may be true. In your head you think these things are not true. In your heart or gut your’re not so sure. Maybe?
6. Essay exam. Pretend to be taking an essay exam. Answer your inquiry question to the best of your ability. (10 min.)

HOMEWORK: Take the writing you just did, and find the writing you did last week for the Guidelines for Composing, and put it into the same Google Document. REVISE this writing using the “Personal Inquiry” Response Guide. Make it your own! Your essay should not be like the Response Guide, it should not be like the Guidelines writing from last week, and it should not be exactly like the writing you just did. Take all of this and re-write it into a fresh essay about your inquiry question that only you could write.