Explaining Wiesel’s “Night” with the Whiteboard

This week, the students in my 9th grade class began reading Night.

Before I began teaching this semester, my mentor teacher played audiobooks for the students during class so that they could listen and follow along in the text. Many of them have trouble reading at home, so they liked the idea of reading in class and they came to accept the audiobooks as a suitable form of reading. I found, however, that although they seemed to be paying attention, many of them got into the habit of using that audiobook time to rest their brains and not really listen to what was going on in the story. I suspected this was the case when I was still observing, because many students didn’t seem to have a full grasp on the last book even after listening to it, reading it, and completing worksheets about it. My suspicions were confirmed when I played Section 1 of Night for them and then asked for volunteers to summarize what they had just heard. After hearing crickets as I waited for an answer, I took a step back and began to ask simple questions about the text such as “How old is the narrator?” and “Who is Moishe the Beadle?”. A few students were able to make guesses, but it was clear that many of them hadn’t been listening or absorbing the story at all. Since the period was nearly over, I didn’t have much time to discuss Section 1 in detail, so I decided to use the next day to break the story down step by step.

After re-reading the first section and typing up a quick summary in the morning, I got to school a little earlier and drew simple pictures on the board to illustrate each major part of the plot from section 1. Drawn in a very loose comic strip form, I numbered each step of the story so as not to confuse the students. When the students began filing in, they looked with fascination at my strange mural on the whiteboard and asked what was going on. The bell rang, and I explained that I was going to thoroughly explain Section 1 with pictures, because I find it easier to understand a story when I can diagram it and see it in picture form. The students looked and listened with rapt attention as I pointed to the picture numbered “1” on the board and introduced the book’s narrator, 12-year-old Eliezer. I explained where the book was set, and the fact that Eliezer was a very religious young man who studied the Talmud and Kabbalah regularly. We talked about the meaning of the words “Orthodox” and the phrase “deeply observant,” and I told them to pay attention to the narrator’s references to his faith, because it proves to be a large theme in the book as he questions it during his experiences in the death camps. The lesson continued in this way for a while, with me pointing to the pictures in sequence; explaining, asking questions, and answering their inquiries about the story line and themes in the book. I think it was a very successful lesson because I could tell by the end that the students had a firmer grasp on the first section of Night. From them on, I decided to take the book slowly and make sure they understood it every step of the way. Knowing that the students had a stronger understanding of the beginning gave me confidence that they would be able to build upon that foundation for the rest of the semester, which will make the lessons much more rewarding for both me and the students.

A New Way of Presenting

Before the freshmen begin reading Elie Wiesel’s Night, I want them to have a fair amount of background knowledge about the Holocaust. I have done a few anticipatory activities about the book to give the kids a bit of context for the story, but I wanted to give them a little more information in a format that would review information or teach them something while keeping them interested. I was inspired the other day when I was listening to a podcast for teachers, and the topic of “Prezi” came up. The podcast said that Prezi is a new alternative to PowerPoint, and it is quickly spreading around the country as one of the top ways to present information. They said that Prezi is a little more labor-intensive than PowerPoint, and here is why: Instead of using “slides,” you put all your information on a giant whiteboard-esque background and arrange it with a “path” so that as you click through the information, the screen will zoom in to your words. You can add twists, turns, themes, and more, but you have to position each word or phrase individually and determine the size, angle and order in the “path” in which it will be shown. Prezi sounded like an interesting tool, so I decided to go home and try it. I was pleased to find that it was actually really fun to use, and although I did in 3 hours what I would have been able to do in 45 minutes with PowerPoint, I was really excited about the results. My presentation was a compilation of words that I thought the students should know when learning about the Holocaust and Night, and I added pictures to the presentation as well. These words and images included topics that I had talked about in earlier lessons this week, plus a few more terms that I wanted to introduce or review. Here is my Prezi:

http://prezi.com/ml6ibn_w8c6s/night-vocabulary-words/

When I showed the students, I talked a bit about every section, so there is more information not included in the presentation that I used to elaborate on every term. Before I showed this to them, I told the students that it was a presentation, but if they tended to get motion sickness they might want to avert their eyes between terms. This piqued their interest and got them wondering what I was about to show them. When I presented the information, I heard lots of “ooh”s and “aaah”s, and the students were completely attentive throughout the entire lesson. I was so happy! At the end of the presentation they actually said “that was so much more interesting than a powerpoint!” and “that must have taken you such a long time!”. It seemed like they really enjoyed the lesson and found it informative, which is awesome. I would recommend Prezi for any teachers who are trying to spice up their lessons.

Using Projects and Performance to Check for Understanding

According to the Checking For Understanding textbook, seeing projects as opportunities to check for understanding rather than merely task completion gives teachers “insight into the extent to which students have transferred their learning to new situations” (73). One of my favorite things about projects and performances is that they can get students excited about a topic. Many teachers who experience “burnout” have given up on exciting assignments: they just focus on giving students busywork in order to assign grades. When a teacher stops assigning things that have potential to excite the students, there is a big problem. This has been on my mind a lot recently because I have witnessed teacher burnout in the school where I’m currently student teaching, and the teachers in question basically assign worksheets all day long. I have been thinking of assigning projects when I begin teaching full-time so that I can not only wake up the students, but check to see what they truly understand. By not mixing up the lessons, teachers make students bored with what they are supposed to be learning, and there is no real way of knowing if students even care about what’s going on. When more projects and performances are encouraged in the classroom, students become engaged, they are able to show what they have learned, and they are more likely to remember the content for a long period of time because they must use all different parts of their brains.

However, the book points out that as great as projects and performances are, they can be misused in the classroom. These activities should not distract a student from learning the main point of the topic; they should only enhance what the student is meant to learn. The book speaks of instances in which students got so caught up in doing a project that they failed to see the forest for the trees; in other words, they lost sight of the meaning behind their project because they were blinded by the act of doing it. One way to prevent this from happening is to make sure there is an essential question for the basis of the project, or, a question which promotes deeper thinking rather than a simple “yes” or “no.” If a student does a Hamlet project about why or why not he believes Ophelia was truly a victim, for example, he will learn more than if he simply does something that depicts surface-level information (i.e. the setting of the play).

Fisher and Frey write, “The importance of performance opportunities lies in their potential for providing other outlets for students to demonstrate their mastery of different concepts in ways that are not limited to more traditional school-based demonstrations such as reading, writing, and computational tasks” (80). This means that performances allow students to learn and express what they have learned in ways that are “outside the box,” so that they don’t get stuck in boring cycles within the classroom. Performance tasks are especially great in classrooms that have all kinds of learners because they give students a variety of ways to show their understanding of something, which is the core of differentiated instruction. In my own classroom, I want to use performances and projects frequently enough that students will continue to participate and be engaged in what they are studying , but not too much. These activities take a lot of work- they require lots of time to create and to grade, and they can also be hard for many kids who are not outgoing or particularly creative. Also, having students do projects or performances too much may become repetitive. I definitely want to give kids enough opportunity to express their knowledge through these activities, but for me, once a unit or semester is enough.

A Lesson From The Best

Philip Beadle teaching clip

One of the most interesting lessons I have seen over the past few months was taught by Philip Beadle, 2004’s “Secondary School Teacher of the Year” in Britain. Teaching 9th grade English, Beadle uses innovative strategies to get his students feeling enthusiastic about potentially dreary subject matter. The video clip (the link can be found above) begins with Beadle explaining the day’s activities, which included a few rounds of “argument tennis.” Beadle explains that this particular lesson would feature two rows of chairs facing each other, where students would sit and debate in pairs about whether Macbeth willingly chose to kill the king to gain the throne. I could feel my eyes glazing over on the students’ behalf when I heard the word “Shakespeare,” because  I feel like his plays have been a rather sore subject for many kids. From a teacher’s perspective, it can be hard to get students to absorb the antiquated words in Shakespeare’s work, let alone get them to understand what is going on. Because of that, I half-expected Beadle’s students to groan at the suggestion of sitting and talking about Macbeth for an entire class period. However, Beadle is the teacher of the year. Once the “tennis” commenced, I watched and listened as the students filled up the room with noise. To my amazement, they were all talking about the play, just as Beadle had instructed.

The biggest question that initially came up while I watched this clip was, “how does he get them to really care about this subject matter?” During my observation in the high school, I have seen a lot of kids who just roll their eyes when  they are asked to have meaningful discussions about the books they’re reading. It seems like many 9th graders abhor the idea of being asked to do anything related to persuasive, text-based arguments in class: without even really listening to the assignment,  the words “critical thinking” will often trigger the response “I don’t get it” from many freshmen.  However, Beadle’s students were passionate about their opinions and it was clear they had put a lot of thought into the preparation for their debates.