Final journal reflection

Students have finished reading the novel, created a project related to what they learned in the book, and presented their ideas to the class. There were three groups, each containing two students. Therefore, three projects were planned. The students came up with some wonderful ideas including diversity commercials on the school-wide morning announcements, kindness posters to be displayed around the school, and trying to line-up speakers from a variety of cultures to share their stories during our language arts class. I thought that the students did a great job of taking the themes presented in the novel and relating them to real world experiences. I have learned that my students are very interested in cultures other than their own. I think that reading this novel and developing this project has allowed my students to become more culturally sensitive.

I had my students fill out an reflection after presenting their projects. Students thought that the project was an important piece of reading the novel. Many students shared in their reflections that simply reading the novel would not have been enough. I thought it was great to see the students taking this kind of ownership in their learning.

I plan to implement this project next year. I am not sold on my hook...I think I can make it better. That is something I will work on before next year. I would also like to add a research piece to the project. For example, I am thinking about having the students research information related to their own culture before reading the novel.

Student Projects: Days 1-3

Students are coming up with some great ideas about how to share what they learned through reading the book with other students. Students are working with a partner (so there are three groups) as to how they can plant their own seeds of community here at CBE. These are the ideas that have been discussed so far:

• Bulletin board/sings around the school that have quotes or interesting thoughts about the themes presented in the book.


• "Commercials" on the morning announcements that are viewed by all classes each morning.


• Bringing in speakers from other countries to share their stories. (This actually happens in the SEED class for teachers. I think it would be great for students to hear these speakers as well.)


• Starting a "Unity in Diversity" club at school. Not sure what this club would do yet...


• Having students study their own cultures and create a poem about what is important to them. These could be displayed in the building and represent many cultures.

These are a few of the ideas that the groups have been throwing around, so to speak. I think that they are really making real-world connections to the topics discussed in the book. They have two more days to prepare, and then they will share their ideas with the class and implement their idea some time before the end of the second quarter of school. I have decided to grade their plan and presentation. I will not formerly grade the implementation.

Day 11 and 12

Yesterday, the students finished the novel. Today, we discussed themes that emerged from the book. Some of them were brought up in previous discussions, such as stereotypes and ignorance. Students used their lists of highly descriptive words as well as the novel to come up with themes. The following ideas were discussed: tolerance, diversity, prejudice, judgemental, pessimistic, ambition, persistence. Every time a new idea came up, I simply asked, "Why do you think this is a theme present in the novel? Give me evidence." I did not tell the students they were right or wrong. By the end of class, the students decided that some themes were more prevalent than others. Their assignment for the night is to write about the themes they think are most important from the book. I asked them to think about what the author would want his readers to learn from the novel. This will also be their last blog to their teacher-partners.



I don't know if I will do this blogging with my students in the future. In some ways, I've really liked it. It very much supports inquiry learning, which is what I was going for with this project. The teachers provide the students with good questions and the students also practice generating good questions. I'm just not sure if it is totally necessary. I think I could have provided all of the scaffolding for my students instead of the teacher partners. It was neat to have some inter-generational conversations take place though. I guess I'm still undecided about the effectiveness.



I have been using the critical thinking rubric to grade students writing/blogging. It has worked well for me. It is nice to have a set list of criteria to look for in the students' writing. Some students can be great writers, but lack critical thinking skills in their writing. This writing rubric has helped me to understand both the reading and the writing process and how they are connected.



Tomorrow, students will begin to plan their own seed projects where they will design a plan to plant a seed of change within their own community. I hope that students will be able to see that a little kindness/charity can go a long way. I'll be interested to see what they come up with. I've been encouraging students to think about this project throughout the reading of the novel. There are many ideas in the book (such as the themes discussed above) that might help them in designing their own projects.

Day 10

Today, we picked up where we left off with our discussion about ignorance. The students seemed to agree that this was a prominent theme in the novel.

During class, I looked over the students' written responses. Their writing has really improved since started to required them to create a rough draft to highlight their own ideas and evidence from the book. I decided that I would give the students a choice of creating the rough drafts to highlight; however, I told them that I expect quality writing. If highlighting really helps them, then they should continue a while longer with that procedure. Those students that already understand can now skip that procedure.

Days 8 & 9

Chapters 9 and 10 were read and discussed. As usual, students followed our regular procedure. My role in all discussions has been that of a facilitator. I have never told students the answers to their questions. Instead, I would pose another question that might help guide them toward the answer. I have tried to make the conversations very inquiry-based. I think that this has helped to strengthen my students reading skills. They are learning to read between the lines to infer the author's message.



As a short review, I had the students look back at the characters discussed in the novel thus far. I had them create a list of three to five highly descriptive words for each character. "Fluffy" words like nice, caring, etc would not be considered highly descriptive. Some students decided to use a thesaurus. The students came up with some great words to describe the characters; however some students struggled, especially when they tried to use the thesaurus. Two students in particular were choosing very uncommon words that didn't really fit with the story. I sat with these two students to help them get a better idea of choosing highly descriptive words and using a thesaurus. Of course, students had to have evidence from the book to back up their descriptive word choices. I think that this list will eventually help them decipher some of the themes of the novel. At the end of class, we started to have a discussion of what it means to be ignorant, since it was a word that appeared on one of the students' lists. We will pick up with that discussion tomorrow.

Day 7

Students came into class and checked the blog as usual. Then as a class we discussed some of the comments. Today, we read and discussed chapter 8 of the novel. A student brought up how the kids in the novel seem to be good problem solvers. I thought this was a great comment! Kim is the first character introduced in the novel and she is the one who really starts the big change in the community. Also a child came up with a solution to the garden's water problem. This led to a discussion about how many people view today's youth as problem-makers, not problem-solvers. I encouraged them to share this insight with their teacher partners to get an adults perspective of this idea.



Earlier today, I was filling out the Proposal Rubric for this class. One of the pieces on the rubric stated: Assessment standards and tools are discussed, created, and agreed upon. They are used by both teacher and students to judge and report on the quality of their products and performance. For this category, I gave myself a "still developing." Looking back, I wish I would have shared the assessment rubrics that I created for this project with my students before beginning the project. I plan to share the Critical Thinking rubric with my students tomorrow. When it comes time for students to develop their own "seed projects," I will share with them the assessment rubrics that I created and ask for their input.

Day 6

Over the past five days, we have seemed to fall into a routine which is working well. Students come in to class, get a computer, and check out the new posts on the blog. This is followed by a short discussion of the blog. Students comment to one another regarding the ideas they have posted. Then, we read a new chapter from the book.

Today, I read chapter seven aloud to the students. As usually, students then reread the chapter as they took guided notes. While students were silently reading, I worked with the two students that were still having trouble developing good questions. Instead of them reading the chapter silently, I had them take turns reading aloud. This allowed them to verbalize their questions as we read. When everyone had finished this, I had the students go around in a circle and share their questions. We briefly discussed the "juicy" questions together.

Today, I decided to work on creating better written answers. I presented the students with the focus question for the chapter: What does Virgil mean when he says he is mad at his father and also feels sorry for him? I then gave students time to write their answers (I called it a rough draft for their blog.) When students finished writing, I had them grab a highlighter. I asked the students to highlight their own thoughts/inferences in one color and to highlight evidence from the book in another color. This worked really well! Some students found that their answers were made up of exclusively their own thoughts. Other students realized that they had a lot of evidence from the book, but none of their own thoughts. I then told the students that they should try to have a balance of their own ideas and evidence from the book when they construct an answer to the daily focus questions.

A few students already had a good balance of ideas and evidence, but their answers could still be made better. I noticed that a couple of students had all of their ideas at the beginning of the paragraph and all of the evidence at the end of the paragraph. Their writing will improve if they learn to weave the evidence in directly after their own thoughts. This will be something that I watch for over the next few days.

Day 5

To begin this session, I read aloud chapter six of the novel. As I read, I paused to model the questions that I had as I read. I used a think aloud strategy to model the thinking going on in my head. I tried to focus on higher level questions that require critical thinking. Once or twice, I posed questions that were easily answered in the text. When doing so, I reminded the students that those were not good questions because the answers were right there in the text. They didn't require me to do any real thinking. As I read, I wrote down all my questions. At the end of the chapter, I had the students look back at my list. I asked them, "What makes these good juicy questions?" Students were able to tell me that you had to think to answer the questions. You had to look back at the book to find evidence to answer the questions. I thought this was great!



Also on Friday, I collected my students' guided notes. I was able to see what students are still struggling in regard to character description and questioning. On Monday, I plan to meet individually with two students who are struggling with their guided notes. I think that if these students improve with their guided notes that the quality of their posts on the blog will also increase.



Next week, I plan to turn my attention toward developing good written answers to the focus questions. I plan to model for students how to integrate their own inferences with evidence from the book to create a well constructed paragraph.

Day 4

Today, my students worked on the fifth chapter of the novel. I am still finding that students interest level concerning the novel is high; however some are feeling overwhelmed with the amount of blogging that takes place on a daily basis. For this reason, I am only having them respond to their teacher-partner. They do not need to respond to an additional person through blogging. Instead, I am letting the students verbally respond to other students' posts during class.



Students have improved in regard to describing the characters in the novel. I have asked them to use highly descriptive words to describe the characters, not words like nice, caring, kind, old, etc. Some students decided to use a thesaurus. The trend quickly caught on in the group, so I did a quick little lesson on how to use a thesaurus appropriately.

Now that students have shown improvement with descriptive words, I would like to see an improvement in the quality of questions that they generate. Many students are still posing very dry or superficial questions; however today, one of my students posed a great interpretive question. It was so good, that I decided to use it for the day's focus question instead of the one that I created. Tomorrow, I plan to use a think aloud strategy with my students to model good questions.



Students are still excited to see what their teacher-partners comments are. Many of the teachers are commenting that the students are able to make good inferences based on the information they are reading. The students are getting better at providing evidence, but it is something that I plan to work on after questioning. The teachers are prompting the students to discuss any themes that are emerging in the novel. So far, this has led to discussion on stereotypes.



Tomorrow, I plan to collect my students work to see how their guided notes are looking.

First three days of implementation

Well, I have finally started to implement my engaged learning project! I actually started on Monday of this week. I quickly scribbled some notes over the past few days and now I will paraphrase them.

Day 1:

• Prior to the first day of implementation, my team divided our 65 students into small groups. I only have seven students in my group which is great! I have the chance to give each student some one-on-one attention. Also, each student has a teacher-partner that they will correspond with as they read the book.
• The students played into the hook. The group of students that I have are above grade level and have a love of learning. They felt that it was "cool" that they were going to be able to help other teachers by sharing what they learn through reading the novel Seedfolks.
  
• Together during class, I read the first two chapters of Seedfolks aloud. Students then reread the chapter and took guided notes on a packet that I put together for the novel. Their notes included a short character description, questions/comments about the chapter, as well as vocabulary questions. I'm looking for students to write "juicy" questions (interpretive/evaluative), but for the first day, many of their questions were pretty "dry" or superficial. The students do, however seem to be enjoying the story. They were engaged during the reading and the note taking.


• Next, I posed an interpretive question about the chapters that we read. The students brainstormed ideas to answer the question and located evidence in the book to back up their ideas. It was nice to observe the students sharing their ideas and listening to the ideas of others. I told that students that they did not have to raise their hand to make a comment...we would treat this time more like a book club format. It was hard for students to do this! They kept raising their hands. But after a few minutes, they got the hang of it and took turns speaking. Locating evidence was a bit challenging for some. Some students tried to use their own experiences to back up their ideas instead of evidence from the book.


• Lastly, each student used a laptop computer to post their ideas about the reading to a blog that I set up through the school. The teachers-partners also answered the same question and posted their answers to the blog. After creating the post, each student was to comment to their teacher-partner's post as well as one additional post. Since it takes some time for students to post their blog, read the other posts, and create comments, I've divided the process as follows: First, students post their comment. Then they read the other comments that are posted. At the beginning of the next class period, students read any new posts and post their two comments.

This is the procedure that I have followed for the past three days. It seems to be working well. The students seem to be enjoying the book. Every chapter of the book describes a different character's perspective of the neighborhood that they all live in. Today, one student pointed out that the blog they are creating represent the different perspectives of the book. To some degree this is true! Many students have never blogged before and I can tell that they think it is a fun mode of communication. They are excited about sharing their thoughts and ideas with students as well as teachers. Most teachers have been writing comments back to the students. They can't wait to open the blog and look for comments!

I will be working with my students on the fifth chapter of the book later today. I will then add additional notes to this blog!