I am not a Gamer. The whole idea of Gamifying the classroom was incredibly difficult for me to conceptualize how it worked. I understood it in theory, and thought it was a great idea, but could not picture how it would work in reality. I especially found this difficult to apply to a 6th grade Language Arts classroom, which is much more subjective than math or science, in terms of linear order and clear answers.

To be honest, I’m still trying to figure it out all the way, but it’s something I’m excited to  learn more about.

Based on reading and the videos I watched from Michael Matera, I realized that I needed to start small. I wanted to focus on one small piece of my classroom. Maria, my partner, and I, talked about options for what would work and ultimately settled on focusing on vocabulary because the very nature of word study allowed it to be Gamified somewhat naturally.  I have vocabulary set up to operate on a 10 day sequence. Day 1, students are introduced to 10 new words. Day 2, students answer prompts related to the words (what is something that might be submerged?, what is an antonym for obscure?) Days 3-5 students work on a variety of vocabulary assignments that help them get to know the words. These assignments are created by the curriculum my district adopted and I just modify them to meet my needs. Days 6-9, students take a short review quiz each day that asks them to match 5 of the words to definitions, or to fill in a blank in a sentence. Students take one of the words they missed on each of those days and complete something I call “vocabulary images”, which requires them to write their own definition of the word, find an image to represent the word, and explain how the image represents the word. On Friday, students have a vocabulary quiz that I have already been leveling based on Depth of Knowledge, or an attempt at them. Level 1 is matching words to their definitions. Level 2 of the test is writing the definition of words. Level 3 is putting words into blanks in sentences, and Level 4 is writing their own sentences.

Vocabulary is something that has proven to dramatically improve students’ reading comprehension. As a 6th grade team, we have chosen to focus on vocabulary because of how big of a different it makes for students. By gamifying this aspect of my classroom, I am hoping that students will take some ownership of their learning and will encourage others on their teams to do well. Vocabulary is one area that students are often not instrinsically motivated to succeed in – other than wanting to get good grades – so gamifying this process may cause students to take more responsibility for this learning.

Because this process is concrete and more objective than other things in Language Arts classrooms, this seemed like a good place to start, but I had no idea where to take it. Based on few things I read, I started by checking out Class Craft and noticed that it was almost perfect for what I wanted to do. It allows for customization for “behaviors” and “health points” which allowed me to tailor it to match our vocabulary work. I wound up with the following rules for XP points, Health Points, and Sentences – which are consequences if a student loses all of their Health Points.

Because we had just taken a test, it was very easy to give students XP points right away. One of my concerns with this process, especially how I’m approaching it, is because able to use it on a regular basis. Without consistency, students won’t have the same buy-in that they will if it’s present almost daily in the classroom. I have already discovered “The Makus Valley” which is a volume meter, and “Boss Battles” which allow for quick whole-class formative assessments, similar to Kahoot but connected to Class Craft. I also did not originally have the behavior of “complete a vocabulary assignment with 80% accuracy” but added this so that I could more frequently award XP points.

I have only been using Class Craft for two days and can already see that it is engaging to students. Students truly enjoy being able to create a character and are excited by the options they will have as they level up to customize their character. I know that it’s the new, shiny toy, so I know their level of interest may dwindle as the year progresses but I am thrilled by the level of excitement students have already.

---

Curricular goals: Students will require using  mental processing to be ready for college, workforce training, and life in a technological society, students need the ability to gather, comprehend, evaluate, synthesize, and report on information and ideas.

Standards addressed:
ISTE Standards: 2b. Students engage in positive, safe, legal, and ethical behavior when using technology, including social interactions online or when using networked devices

Iowa Core Standards: 21.6-8.TL.6 Essential Concept and/or skill: Understand the underlying structure and application of technology systems.

L.6.6 Acquire and use accurately grade-appropriate general academic and domain-specific words and phrases; gather vocabulary knowledge when considering a word or phrase important to comprehension or expression.

 

I’ve never really considered the Gamification of my classroom. I believe that gaming in the classroom would create more student buy in and would result in higher student engagement in their learning. However, I struggling to wrap my head around how it would work in a Language Arts classroom. Learning how to identify Least Common Multiples seems much easier to gamify than identifying the theme of a text, at least in an organic way. It would be easy to assign points if students get it “right”, but identifying theme doesn’t have one right answer.

As I started reading about the idea of “flow”, as explained by psychology Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi I was better able to see my classroom reflected in those ideas. Flow is something we’ve all experienced when we’re doing work that is truly meaningful to us and that we are fully engaged in and challenged by – something that is just difficult enough to keep our attention. I can imagine students in this state when they are reading a book that they are truly invested in, when they’re writing something they really want to write, or when they’re working on a project that they care about. It was interesting, then, to see how so many of the characteristics of Flow overlapped with the characteristics of gaming: immediate feedback, short and long term goals, a balance between what is difficult and what is known or already mastered. Although this connection makes sense and seems obvious, it isn’t something I had ever really taken time to consider.

Then, listening to an Edutopia interview with James Paul Gee really made me begin thinking about the fact for this sort of learning to take place in schools, the entire environment and culture of traditional education will need to change. Especially when he talks about how gaming is essentially assessment, that gives constant feedback, as well as allowing you to retry over and over until you are successful. The idea that textbooks/ manuals only make sense to us and area only useful to us once we have a reference and a need to learn information from them. It’s with this thought that I considered my TAG students first. If they were able to pass / achieve something without being directly taught, why should they have to sit through the instruction? Why should they have to read the manual? The process of a gamifying a class, in theory, could allow for much better individualization of instruction while still requiring all students to show mastery.

As I explored more and more topics about gamification of the classroom, ideas began to form. Could students find the theme of a story and submit it for a certain number of points, and if they weren’t quite right, I could return it to them with feedback in real time instead of doing an activity as a class, having them turn it in, and me have to grade 118 papers to give back to them in an amount of time that matters? Would it be possible for them to submit it, and if they weren’t quite getting it, be sent to a video or text that gives them more information? Or could they go in search of their own videos about the topic? I am definitely finding myself rethinking the ability to incorporate gaming in my classroom, although I’m still not quite sure how to manage it. Seth Priebatsch’s Ted Talk about the layer of gaming in real life especially helped with this, as many of the aspects he discussed are already part of the school environment (Appointment Dynamic – showing up to class or school on time; Influence and status – honor roll, reward cards, grades). I think the idea of gaming in the classroom reimagines the teacher as not being the center of instruction and allows students to take a little more ownership and invest themselves more in their learning, which is incredibly important in preparing them for 21st century learning.

In Paul Anderson’s Ted Talk entitled “Classroom Game Design”, he not only explains how he managed to Gamify his classroom, but also the challenges he faced when doing so. One thing that stuck out to me was his mentioning that some students stalled out when given instruction in this format. I think this is an important thing to consider, as there is a reason that an adult with a teaching degree is in the room. Could students, at some point, be required to meet with the teacher before they were allowed to try a level again? Could another level be meeting up with a peer for explanation?

Anderson’s Ted Talk also got me considering how to group students for certain levels for pieces of the activity. I liked the mention of “passion communities” from James Paul Gee, but do think that in some situations, intentional grouping is necessary to support and enhance learning. How can we group students to make the learning most effective? Should the groups stay the same throughout the entire course?

Although I definitely agree with Paul Anderson about trying to completely overhaul a classroom during the school year, I am excited to look more into the Gamification resources and consider how I could Gamify more of the elements of my classroom both in the next couple of weeks and throughout the semester.

 

This week, I thought a lot about my Personal Learning Network. Teach Thought describes a Personal Learning Network as “the group of people that you connect with to learn their ideas, their questions, their reflections, and their references.” This definition was helpful to me because it emphasize that a PLN wasn’t always about sharing resources, which is how I was originally thinking of it.

Using this broader idea of PLNs allowed me to consider even more aspects of what constitutes my Personal Learning Network, but I realized as I was making the map that I was taking in many more resources than I was contributing to, and that my PLN was largely limited to Social Media or resource sites.

I think one way that I would like to expand my PLN is to engage in more Professional Communities / Associations that are not directly related to my content area. It can often feel as though I am receiving similar information in different iterations when only engaging in English/Language Arts communities. Although becoming a member of other communities can be expensive, I would like to participate in at least two others. I am considering ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education), AMLE (Association for Middle Level Education), or IBEN (International Baccalaureate Educator Network). I would also like to explore how to be more involved with NCTE at this year’s conference.

I also think, in order to share more in my PLN, I want to make sure that I am regularly posting blogs, as well as tweeting out experiences from within my classroom. I am trying to actively use the #Teach180 hashtag, which involves tweeting out something from the classroom every school day for the 180 days of the year. Additionally, attempting to participate in more Twitter Chats will allow me to connect more with educators outside of my immediate circle, which will help to expand my PLN.

Digital Footprints are things we talk to students about constantly.

“Once it’s out there, it’s out there forever” is a phrase I’m sure they’ve heard so much that it has most likely ceased meaning anything to them, but I had never really taken time to consider the Digital Footprint I had created for myself.

My parents have always been involved with technology, and have coached me from a young age to be safe on the internet and to make sure my privacy settings kept my information secure for online accounts. When I became a teacher, this became even more important to me because I wanted to be able to live a life outside of school without constantly worrying if parents, or students, or colleagues would be able to see everything that I posted. When I received the assignment to Google myself for a grad class, I was please to find that nearly all of the results that came up were things I intentionally put out there: My teacher twitter and Instagram accounts, my staff listing on my school’s website, blog posts I wrote for companies (like this one about what teachers need from administration, or this one about being an introvert and a teacher), and a blurb for a book I reviewed on Netgalley. My vigilance for making sure all of the boxes are checked on my private social media accounts so the profiles do not show up in public searches has paid off.

My image search resulted in about the same results, although a picture of Chris Pratt with a stuffed rooster appears for no clear reason, but who’s to complain about that?

The only blip in this is my old MySpace profile, which I have no doubt I had set as private at one point, but have no touched since approximately 2007. Since then, the privacy settings have probably changed and allowed old photos to show up in my search.

Although this is certainly not a significant problem, it is certainly not something I want my students stumbling upon, so I immediately went about deleting the account. How long, though, will those pictures remain in the search? I could not find any definitive answers about this, but am thankful none of the photographs I posted as a high schooler were anything more than slightly embarrassing. I am hoping the Google Alert I set up will help me monitor what else shows up without my intending it to.

I then took actions to intentionally expand my Digital Footprint, starting with About.me. Creating my About.Me page was a bit more challenging. I couldn’t decide what exactly I wanted to put in my bio, so I stuck with the site-generated information for now, and plan to do some research and continue working on it. I have added my About.Me page to my professional Twitter, and Instagram, as well as to the bio on this blog. I was also able to purchase my domain, TediSwanson.com from GoDaddy. Although I don’t know what I’ll do with this website, the possibility of a professional portfolio is intriguing to me.

The third action I took involved book reviews. Being involved in the book world is always something I’ve been interested in and I consistently use Goodreads, but Goodreads is a somewhat isolated world. This time, I copied the same review onto Amazon, a much more public market.

I think the important thing about this activity is that it made me think about actively creating the narrative that my Digital Footprint tells about me. I have been good about being a gatekeeper for my passive footprint, but have never truly considered creating and shaping what is available, beyond creating professional profiles. I think with students it is important for us to talk to them about this active footprint. It’s already frequently discussed that the persona created in public profiles is cultivated, but it is important to talk to students about the kind of persona they are projecting rather than using scare tactics or attempting to make them paranoid.

This summer, during a district sponsored professional development, I had the opportunity of attending a session with Rosalind Wiseman, who has a degree in Political Science but whose career is understanding adolescent social issues and teacher others about them. The session was about social media and started with an activity that asked us to look at our last 10 posts on the social media outlet of our choice, what that said about us, and if that was what we wanted said about us. I think an expanded version of this with students, potentially starting with made up profiles before asking them analyze their own posts, would be a great way to start talking to kids about how to cultivate a Digital Footprint that takes responsibility for what they are presenting about themselves. Helping students create an active Digital Footprint instead of merely telling them what not to do online honors the reality of technology in the 21st century.

 

The group of students my school has gained this year has proved to be rather challenging. Parent phone calls started getting made by day 4. On the end of day 6, our resident first year teacher was at wit’s end. A colleague and I found ourselves in his room after school as he expressed his exasperation.

“For about 30 minutes after school, I just turned off the lights and it worked. People walked through but people got it. ‘He’s not trying to talk right now.'”

My colleague and I both found ourselves offering condolences.

“Your first year is always hard,” I said.
“Yeah, did I tell you that one day I crawled under my desk during passing period, curled up in the fetal position and cried?” my colleague offered.

Even as this was occurring, I knew it wasn’t helpful. Being told that someone else once felt your pain does not fix the current situation you are living in. So it made me wonder… what would help a new teacher?

We all know that part of the first year is struggling. It can often feel like you’re at the eye of a hurricane, everything spinning madly out of control around you.

Posts, videos, and books with tips for new teachers are easy to find. Like this article from Edutopia with tidbits of advice like “building relationships” and “blog with students”. And this collaborative post from the NEA with veteran teachers sharing advice based on their experiences.

With all of the posts floating around out there, I’ve yet to see anything with advice for veteran teachers about what they can do to help new teachers in their building. What would truly make the experience better for students? Below, I’ve compiled a few ideas of ways you might be able to make a new teacher’s year better.

1. Help them solve problems instead of leaving them to drown.

This is easier said than done. It is more easily done in a middle school setting, when teaming and scheduling options are available but not limitless. However, finding ways to find solutions to problems or move especially difficult students around so that they aren’t together could alleviate some of a new teacher’s stress.

      2. Make sure to share your struggles.

It is easy as a new teacher to feel like you are stranded in the middle of the ocean, fighting to stay above water alone while everyone else seems to be happily floating along and enjoying themselves. Sharing your challenges with new teachers helps them to see that it isn’t just them, that even veteran teachers struggle to figure out kids, or lose their cool, or have to give in and send a kid out of the room. Knowing that this is part of teaching and not just part of being new will help alleviate some of the stress.

      3. Continue offering help, even if the new teacher isn’t taking it.

It can be scary to take someone up on their help. It can feel like admitting defeat, or like your ability to do your job will be called into question if you take any help offered to you. Continuing to offer help gives the new teacher the reassurance that someone is there if they do want help, and they may come to you eventually, or they may not come to you at all, but continuing to offer help defines you as a safe space should the new teacher choose to utilize you.

 4. Stress the importance of putting the work down sometimes

Many times as a first year teacher, I found myself devoting all of my time outside of school to school. It felt like the work kept going. and going. and going. As teachers, the work truly could be endless if we let it be. This feeling of needing to perpetually be preparing for school is a quick way to burn out. Taking time for yourself is maybe the most important trick to having a fulfilling career. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to merely tell new teachers to take time for themselves. This can feel patronizing and like it’s being said because you can see that they’re exhausted. Instead, this needs to be modeled for them. Saying things like “Last night I didn’t grade anything. I sat on my couch and watched TV and everything is fine,” is much more useful. New teacher’s will see that their veteran colleagues are doing this and realize it’s okay for them to do it too.

And teachers, new and veteran alike, if you need a little fire back in your soul, this poem is for you:

As the 2015-2016 school year drew to a close, I found myself considering professional development quite frequently. It came to mind as I discussed the possibility of my district adopting Chromebooks as teacher devices, and I considered my colleagues that would need significant professional development to be successful with that level of technology. I considered it as my PLC chose to move forward with adopting a new textbook series that is bountiful with resources but could lead to unnecessary stress and frustration without proper training. I considered it, a lot, as I sat through a district-funded workshop that was packaged as being something new and revolutionary but had very little to offer aside from a somewhat unimpressive, self-published book.

There are very few moments I can point to as moments when the professional development I experienced was truly effective and beneficial to my growth as a teacher, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard the same idea echoed from teachers across the state.

And this, I feel, is one of the biggest flaws in Education. There are times when teachers are treated as if they are clueless, being forced to sit through yet another afternoon of Professional Development hearing about what exactly formative assessment is, and there are other times when we are expected to be magicians and mind readers simultaneously.

Research in best practice has proven that students don’t learn from being told to do something. As educators, we would never say to a student, “A fraction is a numerical quantity that is not a whole number, now multiply them.” We would model for them and show them exactly what it was they were expected to do. Yet, that is how teachers are expected to learn about their profession. Explaining the philosophy behind a technology-rich educational environment help teachers understand how to implement technology into their classroom, or teach them to be comfortable with it themselves; hearing the definition of formative assessment does not show me how to implement formative assessments effectively.

Just as we assume that students are not performing to expectation because they do not understand the material, it is time the world starts assuming the same of teachers and using best practice to help us meet expectations.

In order for teachers to truly improve, we need explicit instruction, we need modeling, we need to observe experts implementing the practice that we are trying to learn. In a perfect world, teacher professional development would involve differentiation, and closely working with a peer or an instructional coach or an administrator who could model best practice in the targeted area before guiding the teacher through implementing it themselves.

But how do we differentiate professional development for teachers while still honoring their skills as a professional? What would that process look like? Would administrators need to observe said teacher and identify a weak area for them to work on? Would this only happen during “on cycle” years when the teacher is up for review? Or would individual teachers be responsible for reflecting on their practice and identifying an area of weakness to focus on improving? What would happen when teachers that were known to struggle with a certain essential aspect, such as formative assessment, didn’t choose that as their area of focus?

Beyond differentiation, how would the limited number of instructional coaches manage to work, theoretically, with every teacher in the building? How would educators find time to co-teach or work in others classrooms to see models of the practice they are trying to improve?
​
While the logistics of a more focused and personalized professional development are hard to fathom, a third year of meetings about formative assessment indicates that the lecture-style professional development isn’t working to truly help teachers improve their craft; In a world where fingers are constantly being pointed at the flaws in our Education system, it seems imperative that we invest in us, the teachers, who have the ability to change that narrative.

It may not seem significant in the grand scheme of like… the entire world at large, but as far as the ELA classroom goes the “To teach a whole class novel or to not teach a whole class novel” debate is one that rages on endlessly.

Even during my Milestones in English Education course, I saw evidence of early stirrings of this debate long before schools had things like literacy libraries and group sets of novels.

Everyone that teaches English/Language Arts has an opinion on this topic, and it’s a topic that tends to stir up intense emotions. Within my own district, I have experienced the effects of mandates to have leveled reading groups, diatribes about how whole class novels are ineffective, and impassioned arguments made about why whole class novels are a teaching method that individuals will never abandon.

And while I can’t disagree that giving students choice is a strategy that increases engagement and student ownership over learning, my experience has taught me one thing about teaching novels in the classroom, and it is this:

If the teacher isn’t passionate about the book or books, the kids aren’t going to be engaged. 

For the last three years, I have taught the novel Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson in my classroom in one way or another. My first year, I gave it to a small group of kids that were advanced readers because of the historical aspects that would be challenging to them. It was during the creation of the lessons to go along with this that I fell in love with the book. My second year, I had an advanced class of sorts, and the students were divided into two groups, with one group reading Fever 1793, and another group reading a different novel due to a number of the students already having read the book in their 5th grade classrooms. In my other two classes, we read the novel whole class. This year, I read the novel whole class in all three of my classes.

I love the book. I love teaching it. I love talking with my students about Nathaniel Benson and Matilda when we first discover they like each other. I love learning with them about Yellow Fever. I love discussing with them the difference in scientific knowledge in regards to hygiene and medical treatments. I love working through the figurative language with them. I love taking them through the wild ride of a city plagued with such a devastating disease.

And guess what? They love it too.

Boys that read nothing but Rick Riordan, or nothing but football books all year love it. Kids that will only read dystopian novels love it. Girls that are in remedial reading classes and require small group lessons and a more advanced reader to help them work through it love it.

It’s a book they would never pick up on their own, and a book they will never read again. But it’s a book they get caught up in and fascinated by.

I would never argue that the only way novels should ever be taught is whole class. There is a time for ability grouping, and a time for book clubs based on interest.

But I do know that working through a novel whole class allows students to hear a proficient reader on a regular basis. It builds community through a shared experience. It allows for more specified individual instruction that does not exhaust the teacher while they try to keep up with the plot of 5 different novels. It opens students’ worlds to books they would never have chosen.

And there is absolutely nothing better than saying “we’re going to stop there for the day” and getting a chorus of “nooooo”s in response.

Should I abandon this book or stick it out? Why do some people abandon books while others refuse? How do I coach my students through reading grit and endurance and helping them to understand that it’s okay to not like a book you read when I regularly abandon books I’m not enjoying?

These are questions I’ve been struggling with for quite some time, but tonight I think I stumbled upon some beginning of an answer and I’m wondering if it makes sense to anyone but me.

This summer, I was given the opportunity to work with the company behind a new platform for engaging and interactive online reading for students. The platform (and company) is Actively Learn and you should totally check it out. One of the blog posts I’m writing for them is about reading strategies in the real world, so I was thinking about what reading strategies I actually use as a reader outside of the classroom. This lead into thinking about teaching reading strategies in my classroom, which lead to thinking about how I want to start the school year, which reminded me that I wanted to have a more heavy emphasis on setting a purpose for reading this year.

At the beginning of the last school year, I spent time talking with students about why we read to set a purpose for the entire school year but for some reason (#newbieteacherproblems) that didn’t translate into having students think about their purpose for reading something for the rest of the school year.

And somewhere in this line of thinking it hit me: Whether or not we choose to abandon books depends entirely on what our purpose is for reading them. 

A friend, who is actively pursuing her life as a writer, reads books primarily for the purpose of making herself aware of the kinds of books that are already out there, and to study writing craft. As a result, she rarely (never?) abandons books. You can learn just as much about writing craft from terrible books as you can from phenomenal books.

I, a 6th grade Language Arts teacher, pursue most reading outside of school for the purpose of enjoyment. If I’m not liking a book or if I think it’s badly written, I quit reading it.

This lead me to consider the numerous texts I was required to read for classes and how my purpose for those was entirely different. I may not have enjoyed the literature review in Chapter 2 but my purpose was to be prepared for class and to investigate why the professor wanted me to read it.

Does our purpose for reading entirely drive our willingness or unwillingness to stop reading? Or is this some nonsensical thought train I’ve stumbled upon?