Inspiration from Bill Bolling

Yesterday we had a speaker, Bill Bolling, visit our campus. He came to my religion class, and later in the day, he gave a lecture to the entire school. Mr. Bolling is the founder and CEO of the Atlanta Food Bank, a company that distributes approximately $40 million worth of food to the organizations who serve people in need. I was particularly struck by how he described himself, when he was telling the story of his life. Mr. Bolling said he was always the kind of kid who asked questions. He said that sometimes this made his teachers dislike him (sadly, I can see how that would be true), but he never stopped asking. He wanted to know why his faith (rural Baptist) limited salvation to only those within the realm of Baptist-style Christianity. He wanted to know why stores throw away so much food when there are hungry people right around the corner. he asked these questions, and more, and they spurred him to action. He started his reflection on his own experience as a dogged “questioner”, and then he ended his reflection with encouragement to our students to ask questions. Why are homeless shelters filled beyond capacity, for example, when there are so many vacant houses in our city? A great question.

But Mr. Bolling’s real brilliance came out when someone asked him how he actually gets business leaders to decide to give leftover food to him (instead of throwing the food in the trash, as they did previously). He answered by explaining that he’s had to learn to see the issue from the point of view of the business, to see how he could make an argument that would allow food store owners to see the benefit, in their own corporation, of giving away the food. When food stores said they couldn’t donate because of liability issues, he worked to pass the “Good Samaritan Food Act” that would take away liability. When he saw how much food was wasted, he gave them workable ideas about how they could waste less, and in return, they were more than happy to give what was leftover, in this more efficient system, to him. When Wal-Mart decided to “go green,” he persuaded them that his food bank could help them achieve their goal of achieving “zero waste” in their stores.

Bottom line: Mr. Bolling starts by asking a question, and then he solves the problem that the question brings up by seeing the issue from multiple perspectives and finding an answer that works for all parties. That’s the essence of what good questions can do.

Failures and Successes

I’m starting a new semester, and one of the things I’m doing in this first week of school is visiting my “teaching partner” for our new faculty evaluation program. She teaches a course cross-listed in the Religion and History departments, entitled “History of Non-Violence”. I really appreciate being able to sit in on her class for two consecutive days. On the first day, she helped the class define terms, starting by brainstorming with the students about what they think of when they think about “nonviolence,” then moving on to a definition of violence, and the finally moving on to a rubric that might help students differentiate between direct, indirect and structural violence. It was a great, inquiry based lesson. It also happens to coincide with my lessons this week on Reconstruction, and allows me to introduce the concept of structural nonviolence to my own classes (an especially relevant concept when we talk about black codes and post-Reconstruction Jim Crow laws). I was excited to see the way that a fellow teacher uses questions to stimulate learning, as we are encouraged to do, and I was especially interested, as an observer in her class, to see how students were “pulled in” to the conversation be means of effective questioning.

The title for this blog post, “Failures and Successes” is inspired by my second day of observations in this teacher’s class. I was struck by the teacher’s reminders to the class (illustrated by a discussion on the early failures Gandhi experienced) that failures can be as helpful as successes, even more so, because they teach us how to do things better. So that will be my goal for this year when it comes to incorporating IBL into my classes: to take a bigger leap, to take risks, and to not fear failure. That’s my 2010 Inquiry Based Learning resolution. We’ll see how it goes.

IBL and the “Stories” Project

I know that I’ve been preoccupied with American Studies lately (both in my head and on my blog) but I do teach another course, Old Testament, and that course has also continued to benefit from the “art” of IBL.

Recently, I handed out my semester project, called out “Stories” project, in which students choose a story from beyond the first five books of the Old Testament (which we read fairly closely). The are asked to eventually write a highly structured paper, along with an accompanying powerpoint, and the final part of the term project involves students pulling the written information from their paper, and the visual images from their powerpoint, to “teach” their story to the class. [Part of the final exam comprises questions based on what the class learns from these student-delivered presentations.]

Anyway, the whole project, like the class itself, is very question-oriented. Step one, after students choose a story, involves pairing students [in that shared reading style called "hevruta"] to read over their stories and come up with questions that the text gives rise to. I ask students to differentiate between “text-based” questions called “kushiot” [in Hebrew], and larger philosophical questions, called “she’elot.” For example, in the story of job, one text-based question might be “What does ‘Satan’ mean? It is a proper name or a title, or something else entirely? A philosophical question, on the other hand, might ask, “Why does God allow a good person, like Job, to suffer? Does God care more about winning a point of debate with Satan than God cares about the suffering of human beings? [Those are two actual questions that one hevruta pairing came up with this year, in their reading of the introduction to Job].

I then comment on the questions, helping them to find a thread in the kinds of questions they have been asking, in order to start to develop a research plan for their projects.

I really like having “questions” be the first step in the “Stories” project. Not only does it underscore the class’s emphasis on Inquiry, but as another bonus, it radically reduces the prospect of having students merely look up “the meaning” of a story and refashion it for their paper. They are required to use the questions they come up with as the starting points for their paper, and that makes the research more truly their own.

IBL and The Encyclopedia, Take Two

I continue to think about the ways that I can connect IBL to my use of the Encyclopedia of American Studies, and I think I’ve figured out a good way to continue to use this resource as a way to promote the asking of “good” questions.

After I asked students to peruse the website and come up with “good” questions about its structure and choice of topics, I asked students to explore the encyclopedia with an eye toward coming up with ten topics that were of particular interest to them.  

This was “pitched” by me as the “first step” in our yearlong term paper writing process. The goal, aside from familiarizing students with the Encyclopedia itself, was to spark student interest in topics that are beyond the scope and sequence of our course materials, topics that they might want to investigate further for their American Studies term paper. 

The first step of the term paper writing process — choosing a topic – is often, for students, one of the hardest This is not only because students don’t know the scope and sequence of American history well enough to make an informed choice. It’s also particularly hard for students to choose a research topic because, frankly, over the course of their entire education, most students have never been given freedom – ever — to choose what they want to learn about. And now, in their eleventh grade year, not only do we ask student to select a topic, but we also allow – even encourage – them to “think outside the box” and consider doing a paper on what really interests them, even if their interests run more toward video games and MTV than art and philosophy. One student remarked that, after perusing the Encyclopedia, she couldn’t wait to start the research process, because, in her words, “I had no idea that we are allowed to choose topics that are actually interesting!”

And so, when I gathered my students in the library to commence their encyclopedia-based assignment, I must say, it was a revelation. One student asked: “You mean, we can study about birth control for our term paper? Really? That’s allowed?”

Another was amazed that television sitcoms would not be considered off-limits as an academic subject.

 I know that the idea of investigating birth control or sitcoms for a term paper would not come as a shock to any of us sitting in this room, but I have to tell you, for many high school students, it’s shock and awe. They can’t believe that they are allowed, even encouraged, to choose something that truly interests them. 

So, that’s the first step — just asking them to identify what they MIGHT be interested in for their term paper topics. The next step involves asking them to actually choose their topic and then form a research question. When it comes time to do that, I’ll definitely remind them about what we’ve been discussing re: the “art” of asking “good” questions, and I’ll ask them to come up with several questions that they want to research as a focus for their term paper. I’m looking forward to it.

IBL and Metacognition

I’ve also been thinking a lot about the power of asking good questions as it relates to another “higher order” skill, the skill of meta-cognition. Last year, our American Studies program was chosen as a “pilot” school for a new online resource called the Encyclopedia of American Studies. [I recently gave a presentation on uses for the Encyclopedia at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting]. 

To be honest, for a long time I was not sure exactly how to utilize the online Encyclopedia as a supplement to our American Studies course. In this day and age, when background information is one Google search and Wikipedia article away, what could the Encyclopedia offer us that’s not already accessible on the web? Why do we need another Encyclopedia, when do don’t even use the ones that we’ve already got? Those were my initial questions, I’ll admit.

But the more I looked at the online Encyclopedia, and connecting it to the focus on “asking good questions” that I’ve been preoccupied with as a result of my participation in this cohort, the quicker I hatched a plan. Why not ask students to review the Encyclopedia — how it’s structured, what kind of topics it covers — and ask them to come up with “good” questions about it? Questions like, “why is there a thematic search engine in this Encyclopedia in addition to the standard keyword search engine? Why are there so many entries about art and music and relatively few about presidents and elections? The questions the came up with were varied, and intriguing. 

And then we used those questions to think about American Studies as an academic “discipline”. My aim was to build a “bridge” between American Studies in high school level [defined by high schools in a very limited, course-related way] and American Studies in college and beyond [defined by scholars in the field as a broad-based field of inquiry].

So, after students handed in their encyclopedia “questions”, we all I had an f in-class discussion of what they learned, on a meta-level (although I didn’t use that language) about “American Studies,” based on what they saw and asked about as they perused the Encyclopedia. 

The ideas we generated (based on student questions and insights) include:

a)     American Studies is a field that looks at America through the lens of “big picture” themes

b)    American Studies is a field that includes what we think of as “traditional” historical and literary emphases, but also emphasizes the role of culture in shaping the past

c)     American Studies sees both “high” culture and “low” culture as significant and worthy of academic study

d)    American Studies seems especially concerned with identity formation, and seems to focus particular attention on gender, race and class

Not a bad set of conclusions for a group of high school students to come up with, I’d say! Any resource that can yield such good questions and sophisticated insights will remain a part of my American Studies curriculum.

Inquiry and Synthesis (November Book Reflection)

This is a reflection that is based on a book I’ve been looking at, entitled Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner. I’ve been thinking about how IBL can be connected with building a “synthesizing mind.”

As I said, I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways that Inquiry-Based Learning fits in with other elements of  ”higher order” thinking, especially synthesis. At my school — and, I’m sure, at many of yours — we’ve been having tons of conversations about higher order thinking and the ways we’re moving students toward it in our classroom lessons. 

One of the foundational skills I try to develop in my classroom is the ability to make meaningful connections across time, space and genre.  This echoes Howard Gardner’s thesis, from his book, Five Minds For the Future, that it’s important for educators to cultivate “the synthesizing mind,” a mind that can integrate ideas from different disciplines into a coherent whole and communicate that integration to others.

So, in my American Studies class, I created the lesson plan intended to foster the dual goals of IBL and synthesis (this is also a lesson plan I will present during a session at NCSS this weekend). I took three texts — a blues song, a poem, and an image — and asked students to “read” with an eye toward the goal of the lesson plan, which was to determine the “success” or “failure” of African-Americans’ journey toward fully engaged citizenship, 50 years after emancipation. The questions the students raised about the text were excellent. Not only did they ask specific, text-related questions — What does this lyric or stanza mean? How does the melody of the song add to its deeper meaning? — but they also asked “synthesizing” questions, — How do these texts connect with, or contradict, one another? If they seem contradictory, what might these contradictions tell us about the path toward fully engaged citizenship — are there complications and contradictions along the way?

I hope to explore further the many possible connections between IBL and forming a “synthesizing” mind. This book reflection has been helpful to me in connecting IBL with other “higher-order” thinking skills.

Social Studies and IBL (Book Reflection)

I enjoyed reading the social studies chapter from our Inquiry-Based Learning book, and there is one part that reall strikes me strongly. At our September meeting, Kara asked us to define Inquiry-Based Learning, and I think that the social studies chapter from the book gives, in large part, a great answer. To paraphrase, Inquiry Based Learning is the practice of teaching students to ask good questions before looking for correct answers; it encourages students to see themselves as makers and interpreters of meaning, not just consumers of predetermined facts. In the classroom, an inquiry-based approach requires the use of nuanced texts or pieces of evidence that may be interpreted in varied, perhaps even opposing, ways. I love this definition because it allows the students to feel a sense of ownership over the own education. At the beginning of the year, a colleague of mine gives students an article called “Claiming an Education” by Adrienne Rich. It’s a commencement address given at Wellesley College, about how young women need to claim their education and determine their own path, instead of allowing another person to claim an education or a path for them. I like how both the chapter reflection and the “Claiming an Education” article put ownership on the student, and awaken in them a desire to claim knowledge for themselves.

Alfie Kohn Reflection

First of all, many thanks to Jonathon for posting this article, “It’s Not What You Teach, It’s What They Learn” by Alfie Kohn. Jonathon, you always make such excellent contributions; you always make me think!

I really like Kohn’s general overall point. I think we have become far too data-driven and we’ve lost an emphasis on “true” education in the process. As people who read my Action Research Plan reflection already know, my ARP was to ask students about the most significant insight they’ve had over the course of the semester, one which arose because they considered a particular question. I will use those reflections in my mid-semester comment writing, to add to what has been a very data-driven and bromide-driven comment that I usually give. Asking them to tell me their best insight gives me a way of giving students appreciation for deep thinking they may have done that has not been assessed. I also gives me the opportunity to add a sentence to my comments (with the appropriate student-specific follow-up) that reflects my own teaching philosophy. Namely, I will now put in my comments a statements that although numbers tell a part of the story about the depth of a student’s growth, in my opinion, they don’t reflect anywhere near the whole picture. Kohn makes this point very powerfully.

There is more to this reflection, posted in its entirety on the appropriate page of the wiki.

Self-Inventory Reflection

Another thing we were asked to do as follow-up for our September meeting was to take the Inquiry Based Teaching Self-Assessment Inventory, and then reflect on what we learned. I really enjoyed this assignment; in fact, ever since I took the test (about two weeks ago, although I haven’t had time to post about it until today) I’ve been reflecting on it, coming back to it again and again. Some of my favorite questions were the first two, which deal with how our instructional strategies show respect for students’ prior knowledge and the preceonceptions or misconceptions found in that knowledge. You know, my partner in American Studies (he’s also my husband, matter of fact) always starts the school year off by telling students that they already bring a lot of prior knowledge with them, and he swears by this statement as a way to kick off a productive school year. Not only have students typically already taken American history and read American literature before, he tells them, but they also know a lot about American culture just because we live it, each and every day. I pick up on what he does by including a “myth” versus “fact” portion in each unit. Fro example, in Unit #1, we discuss myths about Jamestown and the Pilgrims, and posit reasons why we’ve mytholigized these stories about our national beginnings the way we have. Students really love this — not only do they feel excited to be learning a more “mature” version of events than what they had been taught previously, but they also really pick up on the fact that all knowledge-gathering is a matter of breaking down old ideas and  revising or replacing them with new ones. [I know this struck a lot of students, because they mentioned this as their primary insight on the reflection paragraphs I assigned at mid-semester, as part of my Action Research Plan.] That said, I think my lesson plans also fail in a number of key ways, especially ones relating to whether the focus and direction of my lessons are determined by ideas or questions originating from students. Especially in American Studies, where I have a jam-packed content-based curriculum to “cover”, I find it very hard to let student questions lead the discussion. My partner and I sit out together at the beginning of each unit and plan out our essential questions, and those questions, made by us and not by the students in our classes, are what lead conversation. That said, I am able to do a much better job of allowing students to lead the class in new directions in my Old Testament class. We’ve taken things in some fascinating directions.

Action Plan Follow-Up

I just posted a really interesting article (written in question and answer interview style) about the potential of IBL to teach the “ethical” side of history. Check that requirement off the list!  And now I’d like to post an update about how my action research plan is going. At the last meeting, I decided that I would ask students to reflect, at the mid-semester point (which is now) on the power of asking questions in my class and what these questions may have taught them. I also asked the students to think about, and explain, what (hopefully profound) insight the questions might have sparked. I LOVE this assignment and I’m really finding it helpful in assessing what works and what does not, and what my kids have been learning (and what they haven’t). I know that there is no real science behind my gathering of this qualitative data — sorry, Chanley!  — but I still think it has proven useful.

Essentially, my action research plan had yielded about 50 pages of written reflection by my students at the mid-semester point (one page for each student). In American Studies, many of the insights deal with students’ new understanding that one’s perspective (which could be shaped by gender, race, worldview, life experience, or any of a million other attributes) shapes the way we narrate the story of the past. That’s an important, and I think necessary, concept for students to think about. Many other students reflected on the fact that they have been revising old opinions, based on mythologized narratives about our past, and have replaced them with newer, more nuanced, more mature “readings” of our national origins. And yet another category of response dealt with students who found the contradictions in history most interesting; for example, one person cited the fact that the New England colonists’ efforts to be “pure” (they were, after all, Puritans!) sometimes, ironically, led to the most “impure” of events Salem Witch Trials. The person who wrote this said that she arrived at the insight after asking herself where, and how, a group’s values might clash with their actions. All interesting thoughts. What was most helpful about this, aside from the fact that it let me see what connections students really were making, was that I was also able to see instances in which the Q:A format of the class yielded sophisticated relfection.

I also like the Action Research Plan because, frankly, it helps me to write much better, more sophisticated mid-semester comments (this blog posting comes in the midst of comment-writing season). It’s so hard, in a comment, to move beyond the old bromides: “She’s so diligent; He needs to come to tutorial more frequently; She has a cheery demeanor and a bright smile.” But this exercise allows me to cite students’ own reflections about the progress of their own learning, and gives me the opportunity to either commend students for their sophisticated level of analysis OR challenge them to start thinking more deeply and reflectively. So, that’s been a wonderful bonus as well (after all, what teacher doesn’t a little help in writing more in-depth comments)?