A Conversation to Improve

With the suggestion of Mr. Kohn, I set up the classroom early on Monday morning circling all the chairs into the center of the room moving all the tables aside. I opened the class explaining to the class about the past few days: my initial blog, the response from Alfie Kohn and others, and the importance of today’s conversation. I explained my frustrations to the class regarding their work completion, efforts at achieving successes, and reminding them how intelligent I think they all are. Then I talked to them about the three questions I wanted us to discuss for the rest of the class: What is working? What isn’t working? How can WE do better? Here is what they said:

What is working?
· Reading as a group and annotating together- talking through what we are reading
· Food
· Writing topic sentences
· Using technology
· Watching movies
· Editing in class
· Six weeks to redo work
· Redo work allows us to learn more, less pressure, more flexibility, not happy with my grade until work is satisfactory
· Class blog keeps me organized, scribes are extremely helpful
· Skype- nice to have direct contact with you
· No books, nice to have print outs
· You aren’t a hypocrite- you do the work with us
· PLN- helps so much with my writing, I can voice my opinion
· PLN presentations- it is great that we get to pick what we can do and present on
· Like the interactive methods of teaching
· Nice to have time to work on writing paragraphs in school
· Note taking is minimal
· Nice to be able to pick the day you scribe
· Rolly chairs and tables
· Make up days- nice to have the time to make-up work and get caught up; you can prioritize your other classes with the flexibility of this class
· Not strict about talking and behavior

What isn’t working? (we talked about solutions with the problems- those are indicated in parenthesis where we had a solution)

• Hand writing is hard to read (online comments work best)
• Annotations: it is really hard to read to understand, make connections and ask questions all at the same time (can we read a bit, then stop and pause to write questions and make comments; reading could be the night before so that we can read for understanding during the night, and then leave annotations for the next day in class; small group reading based off of reading ability)
• Big assignments (can these be broken down more into a day by day format; or paragraph by paragraph format)
• Annotating in the format you suggest doesn’t work for me (don’t worry about the literary devices, move on and ask big questions, make big connections)
• Don’t like downloading programs such as Picasa and Google Earth (?)
• Homework can be overwhelming (?)
• Hard to get used to blogging and homework (?)
• Structure paragraphs (go over paragraph structures again and again, go over different parts of the paragraph to redo; breakdown each paragraph and give work time to finish)
• Assign rough drafts (next day could be a work day, edit, and then edit again, and then final draft)
• Show examples of what you mean, don’t just tell
  

How can WE do better?

• 
  Bring in work the next day when it is assigned
• Get homework in on time
• Turn in work on time so you get time to redo the work
• Work in smaller groups based on how fast we work
• Hold us accountable when we don’t do what we are supposed to
• When we do good things, can you bake for us? YES!
• If we all do good things, can we all get rewards?
• Be more specific with online comments
• Have more group projects
• Hold one another accountable
• Slow down
• Take time with our annotating
• Talk about our PLN’s and maybe do one together
• Read in circles more often
• Put questions up- expand on what questions need to be about