“I couldn’t wait to show you what I found out on the news.”

There was a problem with the water pipes in our school that necessitated early release.  The students were told that as soon as lunch was over, they’d be sent home.  The bell rang at 1:01 for the kids to go home.  I planned on using the extra time to get some work done, so I settled into my chair and got out my to-be-graded stack.  Just as I got comfortable, my door burst open and my Speech students, Heather*, an athlete, stood at the threshold.  She held out a printed out news article.  “I couldn’t wait to show you what I found out on the news.  Gaddafi is dead!  I’m so excited.  I knew you would be too, and I wanted to be the one to tell you.”  Anticipation and excitement shone in her eyes as she pushed the article toward me.  She said, “I was just surfing the internet, and I saw this headline, that Gaddafi was dead.  I thought, ‘That’s exactly what we’ve been talking about in Speech,’ and I had to know more.  So, I checked it out, and when I read it, I just knew I had to print it and show it to you right away.” 

In my Speech class, we are working on building students’ background knowledge to enable them to do extemporaneous speeches about world events.  So, each week, they are required to choose a big topic like environment, politics, or international issues.  Then, they find three reliable articles to share with the class.  We talk about the articles they bring in, and I try to fill in the gaps.  When one student brought in an article about Gaddafi being tracked in the desert a few weeks ago, I asked the class what they knew about what was happening in Libya.  They didn’t know anything about it.  The next day, I showed them a few articles from Time magazine about him and his opposition.  We went back to an article posted in February, at the beginning of the resistance, to find out what the complaints of the rebels were.  Then, we talked about how it would feel if we were asked to live in a regime like that.  Students were appalled by the accusations of the Arab Spring, and couldn’t understand how someone who treated his people so badly could continue to be in power for so long.  Of course, this led to discussions of the importance of being active citizens to make sure something like that doesn’t happen in the United States.

 Students are engaged in the current events collection and discussion, as is evidenced by Heather’s excitement.  When asked at the beginning of the year if she read the news, she told me she did not.  Now, she cares about finding out what is happening in the world.  The fact that she’s the one who brought me the news thrilled me.  Sometimes I’m not sure how much of an impact I’m making, and if they are going to take what they learn in class to apply it to their real lives.  Times like this give me hope. 

The two camps as I see it

There are two conflicting camps in education.  One camp believes that the route to success is by controlling and aligning as many factors as possible.  In this ideology, the problem in the current system is not the system itself, but lack of planning.  If teachers plan together so that one grade builds on the next, and all desired skills are gradually developed, then students will be able to achieve the performance goal.  In this model, the students are called on to prove what they’ve learned in a standardized test, administered at the end of the year.  Funding is then tied to the performance of the school, determined by a formula that also takes into consideration demographic information and attendance rates.  In this camp, the pervading belief is that if teachers were able to plan the perfect system, aligned both vertically and horizontally, then students will achieve the desired goals. 

Another camp believes that planning and assessing isn’t the crux of the problem.  Instead, we need a revolutionary change to take the current education system that was designed in the Industrial Age and update it.  This camp believes that, in order to have a healthy system, it must be adapted.  Changes are necessary at all levels of the organization, from the age-based system down to the standardized assessment.  In this viewpoint, human beings are at the center of the classroom, not just students.  This means that we have to look at them as individuals and make adjustments according to their needs.  Within this system, creativity is valued and divergent thinking encouraged.  People who fall in this ideological stance aren’t necessarily against standards, as they recognize the importance of having goals.  However, the usage of current standardized tests is what is questioned.  Instead of giving the tests at the end of the year when the teacher can’t take corrective action, this stance would rather have the tests earlier, so that results could be used to determine where the most attention should be given.

In both camps, teachers, administrators, and policy-makers believe they are making the best decisions for their students.  They use the information and experiences they have in order to shape their pedagogical beliefs.  Because everyone has a different set of experiences, in different contexts, with different people, and different goals, there is bound to be a different outcome. 

For myself, I believe that a mix of the two approaches is probably closer to the truth.  However, I do lean more toward the socio-cultural constructivist viewpoint.  As I’ve stated in a previous post, I don’t plan out every question I’m going to ask, although I have a good idea of where I want to go.  Instead, I listen to what the students already know, and adapt to them.  If they need more instruction in one area than another, and I’ve planned differently, then I’m not opposed to dropping my goal for the day and returning to it another day.  Sometimes, this means I’ll do it in the same unit.  Sometimes, it means it will be shifted to another unit.  I couldn’t do this in a scripted curriculum.  However, I value the importance of meeting with other teachers, across content areas.  If we could figure out a way to make sure the History teacher and the English teacher are discussing WWII at the same time, the students will note connections between the two subjects.  If the Biology teacher is discussing Ecosystems, the English teacher could provide an article to supplement this instruction in order to teach a reading skill.  They are all interrelated, so there should be a collaborative plan.  But it shouldn’t stop there.  Teachers in the middle school and teachers in the high school need to plan together.  High school teachers can tell middle school teachers what skills they’d like to see more fully developed.  Middle school teachers could tell high school teachers what skills and texts students had already learned.  In this way, students would have a cohesive, logical, relevant curriculum to give them maximum connections.

But until we sit down and reconcile these differences, this won’t happen.  We’ll continue to teach the way we think it should be done, following the rules, and getting it done.  Is it enough?  I don’t think so.  We should expect more of ourselves just as we should expect more from our students. 

What I learned about Deaf Education

I am not an expert on Deaf Education.  In fact, I do not teach any deaf children, nor do I know any adults who are deaf.  However, I was so blown away by Serena Johnson's presentation on deaf education tonight in class, that I felt it important to share a few nuggets of information that she shared.

1)  Deaf people are usually not COMPLETELY deaf.  That is, they can still hear sounds, but they can't differentiate the sounds.  Watch the video below to hear what hearing loss sounds like.





2.  Apparently, the average graduating high school deaf person only has a reading level of fourth or fifth grade.  More research is necessary in this field.  This is a gap in education, because there is a small community of people affected by this issue. 

3.  Deaf education has historically followed the trends of hearing people's view of education.  However, this group has different needs, so, perhaps there needs to be an entire field dedicated to the research and development of reading education for people with hearing loss.

Ethos, Pathos, and Logos and TED Talks

Today, I asked students to watch a series of videos from TED to compare the presentation styles of four speakers.  I chose to include Adora Svitik, Jane McGonigal, Hasan Elahi, and Marcel Dicke because they were all different in content, but each used ethos, pathos, and logos brilliantly.  As models for understanding how a speaker builds a good speech using those three rhetorical elements, the speeches served to allow my students to apply their knowledge of the terms. 

Because Adora Svitik is so young, she is an inspiration for my students.  If they doubt their ability to make an excellent speech because of their age, that fear is assuaged by this little girl.  At the same time, her content mirrors what they already know- that their knowledge matters every bit as their teachers.  They liked her argument in her TED talk, "What Adults Can Learn From Kids," about how learning should be reciprocal.  At the same time, students were easily able to see how, as a child, she was a credible source for speaking about children.  Additionally, she showed her audience her book cover, which only emphasized that she was worth listening to.  She's not "just a kid".  She's a kid who has achieved great things, despite, or perhaps, because of her youth.  This is a clear example of building ethos.  By giving examples of adults who have made disasterous decisions, and paralleling them with impactful youth, Svitik appealed to the logical side.  She used logos to show that her point was not just because she was too young to get it, but instead, that her argument made sense.  Finally, she jokes with the audience, relaxing them. This is a form of pathos.  As an even more clear example, she includes a photo of a youngster who raised large amounts of money for charity. 



I love Jane McGonigal.  The first time I saw her, it was through her TED talk "Gaming Can Make a Better World".  Her ideas were absolutely ridiculous and brilliant at the same time.  Like any good speaker, she left me with questions and an interest to learn more.  Already intrigued by the idea of gaming as a means to help students learn, her assertion that games could help make the world better, took my interest a step further.  Building on my knowledge of James Paul Gee's work, McGonigal brought a whole new dimension to my understanding of the impact of games.  But, her ideas are also interesting enough, that it sparked a wonderful conversation with my students, that may become the subject of a discourse analysis in a future work.  Students were able to identify her occupation as building her ethos, the historical story about Herodotus as logos, and the photo of a thoroughly engaged boy as pathos.  But, students went beyond making connections about the use of these two devices.  With this one, they wanted to discuss the virtues and shortcomings of her presentation style.  They were interested in the content, and were able to make personal connections.  What made the conversation even more worthwhile was the equal representation of different sides.  In a class of six students, one was completely on board with McGonigal, one completely opposed.  Three were in the middle, but thought her ideas had merit, if not completely on point, and one was silent on the issue.  The mix of viewpoints led to good discussion.  Students were engaged in both the form and function of the speech and the topic.



Next, I let students choose two more videos they were interested in seeing.  The students had a choice which one out of the list to watch.  So, there was enough choice that the students could feel like they had some control.  I've watched a number of TED talks, most of these talks are school-appropriate.  If anyone else wants to use this approach, I'd suggest considering the needs and views of your students and your school before opening it up.  The videos they selected were from Hasan Elahi, who spoke about his art/database/personal reporting system; and Marcel Dicke, who spoke about why people should eat insects.  Students discussed ethos, pathos, and logos in each video, and then also added a discussion about the attire speakers wore. 






Using TED talks, my students were able to analyze the form and function of a good speech across a variety of topics. I first made decisions about the videos they'd look at, finding videos that I knew were good examples of the use of ethos, pathos, and logos. Then, I released some control to the students. After all, if I was giving them a video about how kids and teachers should have a reciprocal learning relationship, this was really my only possible course of action. Otherwise, it would seem that I was not practicing what I preached. In this instance, this method worked well. Students were able to understand the concepts of ethos, pathos, and logos. They were able to apply their knowledge across multiple presentations. They noticed other elements of effective speeches that we had discussed earlier in the semester. Overall, it was a successful lesson.