Strategies
Student-centered Learning at the School of the Futuree
My student-centered classroom is defined in large part by my school's vision of teaching and learning that is continuous, relevant, and adaptive. The goals of continuous learning are facilitated by technology; my students have laptops and are therefore connected to the tools they need to learn at any time and in any place. The insistence on relevancy is both in terms of material and pedagogy; I endeavor to connect the content and the approaches of my classroom to my students' experiences. This does not mean that every text we read or way we write is hip or edgy, but rather that there are accessible points of entry into material and ways of learning for all of my students. The final piece of the puzzle is about working with what we have and what we want - we adapt lessons and learnings to the present needs of my students and the anticipated demands of their futures.
The result of emphasizing the continuous, relevant, and adaptive is what others might call a student-centered classroom. Students have more immediate connection to their learning and as they move through my school they take on more ownership of the learning process. As their teacher, I help my students set goals and scaffolding necessary skills and processes - easing into what one of my fellow educators calls a a "guide-on-the-sideide" position. Since this unit is intended for students who are at the end of their third year, it will include a lot of student-directed discovery and planning. I see it as my role to give them material, framing questions, and reflective assignments that will help them construct their own understanding.
Studying Genre
Genre theorists in both literary and cinematic circles spend their time categorizing media. There is a great deal of thought and scholarship that goes into the taxonomy of genre. Many high school English classes devote time and energy to a careful parsing of genre, for genre's sake. Texts are selected and writing assignments are structured in the service of teaching students to differentiate among the categories.
But outside of high school classrooms, genre plays an interesting role. In a way there is a kind of unspoken conversation between writer and reader inherent in genre. If we accept that genre conventions are somehow universally held, or at least recognized, between auteur and audience, then genre can open up a kind of parallel conversation between a writer or filmmaker and their reader or viewer. (This "correspondence" between audience and filmmaker or producer is expounded upon in Rick Altman's Film/Genre).14 It is genre put in play that is most interesting to me and most useful for my classroom purposes.
Early in the unit, my students will work together to define the conventions of war stories and war films as genres. We will then watch as the texts, films and other materials of this unit push and pull our definition in new directions. It is my goal that at the end of the unit, students will not only to identify elements of and departures from genre, but also analyze the intentions behind genre-related choices made by authors and directors.
Do Now Blogs and Reflection Journals
My students write a great deal in my class and this unit will be no different. At the beginning of class each day I put a "Do Now" prompt on the board and on a class blog. Even without the assistive technology, this kind of writing is becoming common practice in education. I choose to use a blog because I have the tool at my disposal and it facilitates more immediate collaboration since my students can see each others' responses. It also is naturally organized in a topical and chronological format that allows us to return to these short writings at any time.
My Do Now prompts are intended to open discussion, connect to earlier material, bring in student prior experience, and introduce new ideas. For this unit Do Nows will include statistics about the Vietnam War, quick creative writing tasks related to photos, quotes, film clips, or passages and prompts for personal reflections connecting to our themes. I will also require journal entries, which are larger at-home versions of many of the same kind of writing tasks as Do Nows. I also ask students to find their own prompting materials - images, songs, videos - and write or create response pieces in their reflection journals. s.
Both of these forms of informal writing give students a chance to connect to and grapple with the material. Throughout the unit, I will use the reflection journals and Do Nows to set the tone for the unit. I put the "work" of examining text and film into the students' hands and give them chances to generate their own ideas and questions on our topics. We will also return to the unit's Essential Questions: Why do we tell war stories? What makes war stories different from other kinds of stories and from each other? What is authorial intent? How do a storyteller's choices affect his or her audience?
I will also write prompts for Do Nows and Reflection Journals that begin to bring out the connections to the wars Iraq and Afghanistan. I do anticipate that my students will generate questions and ideas that link the current conflicts to the historical ones. If this conversation is slow to start and to support it as it develops I will guide it along. I plan to introduce my students to the war stories being told in the digital videos soldiers are making overseas, as well as news articles, photo stories, and radio and television interviews with returning servicemen (especially those collected by students through the Youth Radio "Reflections On Return" project).15
Using Film
My students associate turning on a movie with turning off their brains. The first task I face in this unit is preparing my students to engage with films as critical material. When we watch The Green Berets we will use some very explicit guiding questions and graphic organizers to highlight film elements that students may otherwise ignore. Since we will need to watch the film (which is 141 minutes in its entirety) over the course of a few class periods, we will have natural opportunities to review the film from day-to-day and check for comprehension.
I may also skip certain scenes from some of the films in the interest of instructional time and student attention spans (and in the case of two potentially objectionable scenes in Platoon and White Badge). I have indicated the scenes I intend to cut below.
The Green Berets - Skip the spy subplot - minutes 105-118 (DVD Disc 2, Chapters 9& 10)10)
Platoon - Skip the party shack scene - minutes 29:33-36:04 (DVD Chapters 8-10)-10)
White Badge - Skip the strip club/prostitute scenes - 61:33-70:37 minutes (DVD did not have numbered chapters)
Story-writing and storytelling
Students will engage in writing, telling and creating stories throughout the course of the unit and building towards their final Performance of Understanding. Through these writing activities, students will explore the conventions of war stories and demonstrate mastery of literary elements. We will use clips and trailers from other films, interviews, combat photos, protest songs, comic strips as "story starters." Students may write the stories of scenes, from specific characters or perspectives - focusing on character and description. They will also explore cause-and-effect through writing prologues and epilogues to existing narratives. We will also practice storytelling using some of this same generative material. Students will be prompted to tell stories to partners - with one student telling and the other writing. If my students take interest in it, we may develop this activity into a story-off, since my students love competitive activities. ies.
Performance of Understanding
Every unit I teach ends with a "Performance of Understanding" or POU. To be clear, POU is more than just jargon. Instead of being merely a dressed up final project, this mode of assessment puts learners in a position where they must construct new understanding in the development of a final product. POUs are usually introduced at the beginning of the unit, so that students know what they are working towards. Students typically share their POUs in a showcase, which is open to parents and others throughout the school community.
This unit is the focus of our third marking period and by this point in the academic year my students should be able to work more autonomously on this kind of larger project. So I anticipate that this POU will be more free-form than earlier projects. They will certainly need support with the novel and the film - but the Do Nows and Reflection Journals should help guide their thinking.
For this unit the POU requires students to create their own war stories. The understandings demonstrated will include an analysis war stories' structures and purposes, awareness of creative and strategic writing choices, and empathy for others. Students will have many options and one comprehensive rubric. Possible POUs produced may include mash-up videos, photo diaries, documented oral histories, written short stories, or comic books. Students may choose to base their war stories on material they find from any existing sources or conduct interviews of their own (there are many veterans on my faculty, and countless more in my students' homes and communities).
They will also have the opportunity of telling a story from the Vietnam War, or from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The choices will be up to the students; however every decision they make for the project will need to be explained. All final POUs will include a reflection and a rationale or statement of purpose in which students clearly articulate what they have learned in the unit and in the process of creating their final product.
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