It's What's on the Inside that Counts....

If you've been down the hall by room 222, I'm sure you've noticed the fantastic Twitter pages that English 9/World 1900 students created this past week. At first glance they're amazing! The students did an amazing job with their graphic designs and modern depictions of the characters from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Their task was to read an excerpt from the Epic of Gilgamesh, a story that is based on the first epic hero or the first superhero. This story took place in ancient Mesopotamia, which is one of the civilizations that the 9th grade students just finished studying. With the creative mind of Matt Anderson assisting, the idea was derived to have the students read the Prologue and Forest Journey and create a Twitter page as if they were Gilgamesh. So to restate their task, the students had to assume that Twitter existed when Gilgamesh went on his epic journey in the forest and create tweets that depicted their reading comprehension. As we checked the Twitter pages we realized that the students were making outstanding projects, however, they weren't enriched with the content knowledge that we were striving for. So, even though they looked nice on the outside, what was on the inside, the part that mattered, was lacking.  When we debriefed about this issue with Matt Anderson and Dr. Whitehouse today, I told them that I just didn't understand why the students were lacking the reading comprehension knowledge in their projects. I continued to tell them that I heard April tell the students that they had show reading comprehension in their Twitter pages.....Matt replied, "Stop right there"! He asked me again what I said and I told him that I heard April say that we wanted to see the reading comprehension evidence in the Twitter pages. He then clarified that just because I heard that information and retained it didn't mean that all of the students heard the information. So what does this mean exactly? It means that we needed to do a better job laying out the structure or foundation for the students when they were working on projects. This is certainly something that we are working on and as a matter of fact, April has spent hours tonight creating questions that will better secure the structure of the current project that the students are working on. What we've began to realize is that while we want the students to have "self discovery" we have to provide a foundation for them to stand on during this process. We must teach them how to self discover. Matt provided us with a great example to help us wrap our heads around this. When a five year old wants to pick out their own clothes for school, the parent lays out three outfits. The child still has choice and through that choice establishes ownership of their decisions however, the choices are guided by the expert so that they will not fail. As the child grows and becomes more aware of what it takes to match an outfit the parent provides less structure, eventually setting the child free to make the choice on their own. If we apply this method to our students in the Innovation Zone classes, it will ensure that the students are getting the solid foundation that they need to stand on in order to excel in these very rigorous classes!