I recently came across this video from Edutopia and it has forced me to amend my practices with regard to cell phones in class. Briefly, it suggests a study has found that nearby cell phones exert an influence on student performance – even when they are stowed in a pocket or backpack. In the study, students who left their phones in a different room did a better job solving math problems than they did with the phones in the same room – even if the phones were out of sight and fully silenced.

While this would suggest that banning the beasts altogether makes sense, I continue to believe in the efficacy of frequent, low-stakes testing, and my students routinely use their phones to access Kahoot or Socrative for that purpose. My compromise is to put all the phones in a basket when we are not doing the low-stakes testing and to put the basket as far away from the students as possible.

The video would suggest that a distant phone basket is not enough to undo the evil influence of the phones, but I am not convinced that banning them from the room is a practical solution. Students are going to keep their phones with them during the day; would my banning them result in anything other than their attempting to hide them while in class? Is there firmer middle ground?

Recently, I was a bit intrigued when this list passed across my Twitter feed. (It says 53 Ways to Check for Understanding, yet only 28 appear on the image I’ve pasted here; the full two page doc is here.) To be honest, there is not much here that is particularly new, and there are many things here I would never chose to use in my own classes, but the list is nonetheless worth a look, if only to remind ourselves of a) the need to be sure our students are indeed learning what we think they’re learning, and b) there are many different ways to accomplish that goal.

The thing I like most about the list is that different methods will appeal to different students. I would not necessarily have done well with drawing a picture that reflects my understanding, but I might have enjoyed the challenge of writing a poem to do so. I also like the fact that so many methods openly acknowledge that students might still have questions. Ideally, that would allow students who do have questions to ask them instead of silently assuming they are the only ones who do not “get it.”

Full disclosure: I often do not get to this. When I do, it is with the quick quizzes (or kahoots) at the beginning of class (to check understanding of the reading or prior classes); when I fail, it is because I have scheduled it for the end of the period and I so rarely make it to end of my plan. Goals for the rest of the year: check for understanding multiple times per week (tests included), and choose 5 new (to me) of the 53 Ways to implement.

At a recent Come to the Clark Room Event, I was demonstrating how to use Snagit and iMovie to create short videos which might be helpful for reviewing or flipping the classroom. In the context of that work, I ended up making a short video about making short videos, and I thought I would share it here as well.

Enjoy.

Last winter, I made the fateful decision to jettison the textbook associated with my A.P. World History course and replace it with the Norton Anthology of World Literature. My motivation was many-fold, but it began with the fact that my students simply were not reading the textbook. My theory was that the literature assignments would prove more compelling and that they would provide my students with deeper insight into the cultures we study. So, a few weeks ago, this year’s A.P. World cohort and I embarked on the shakedown cruise for literature-as-history in the Clark Room.

For the most part, it is going well. The two major questions we need to work out – how will we use the literature to study history? and how will the students achieve the necessary mastery of the history itself – are coming into focus. The first question is easier, as anyone who has ever read literature knows it offers insight into the time and place in which it was created. The students read a segment of the Bhagavad-Gita for today’s class and then took part in a lively conversation about which stanza most fully captures the essence of the piece. I am satisfied that they emerged from that conversation with a stronger sense of ancient Indian culture than they might have gleaned from a textbook. They also emerged, though, with no specifics as to the actual history of that time and place; we are going after that with presentations in class (by me and by the students themselves), (other) primary source readings, a large number of videos (some assigned, some available, some mine, some others’), and a review book that the students have purchased. Through one unit – a whopping 5% of the course material – their mastery of that material is roughly on par with prior years. I will know more after we complete unit II, which is a much larger unit.

Overall – peaks and valleys, and the jury is still out to some degree.

Relational learning is not a new idea, but it has been in the spotlight of late, thanks in part to Reichert and Hawley’s I Can Learn From You (which is available on the recommended reading shelf of the Clark Room, if you would like to have a look). The idea is that a positive relationship between student and teacher is not merely useful in learning, it is a prerequisite.

I was reminded of that lesson when I attended a celebration of the 100th birthday of Avon Old Farms’ oldest living alumnus, Maestro Francis Madeira. The room was filled with people who have spent their lives in music (including at least two others who have earned the title “Maestro”) and with people who knew Francis from hiking, which was another of his passions. I found myself, though, seated next to two gentlemen whose connection to the Maestro was that they had been members of the Brown University Swim team when he was the faculty advisor. Again, Francis was the advisor, not the coach, of a team these men had been on more than half a century ago, but his influence had been such that they have maintained a relationship with him through the ensuing decades and they travelled a considerable distance to be a part of this birthday celebration. Their very presence there, along with the way they talked about him, spoke volumes about Francis’ influence and his ability as a teacher.

Would that all of us might live to be 100 (assuming we could be in the same fine fettle – both mentally and physically – as Francis), and, more to the point, would that we could all inspire our students to the same degree.