How to Foster Empathy in Students Using Project Based Learning in an ELA Classroom.

Image Credit: Pixabay User fancycrave1 / Public Domain

Noisy and energetic like any scene during lunch, my students can be found sprawled throughout my classroom, intent on seizing the coveted title: Inventors of the Year.

Though my story may be seem to be specific to my English language arts classroom, I think there are larger implications of the importance of incorporating empathy with project based learning. In this instance, every year, my students read Daniel Keyes’ “Flowers for Algernon,” a fictional story about a man’s extreme quest for intelligence and his willingness to undergo a radical surgery to increase his mental abilities. My students are always fascinated by this story, and they enjoy debating the merits of the operation. They write reflections, engage in discussions, and compose essays during this unit – all classically rigorous activities that require critical thinking skills. However, I wanted my students to do more than just study the story from an academic perspective. I wanted them to not just appreciate their natural-born abilities but for them to realize and explore what it would be like to live with a disability, hopefully leading to an empathic understanding that will last a lifetime.

An Invention for People with a Disability
As I pondered this one night well over 10 years ago, I did what I always do when coming up with lesson ideas. I asked myself how I could design an assignment that could simulate real experiences, a life outside the walls of a classroom and the world in which we lived. Then inspiration hit. I could ask them to become scientific inventors and imagine the impossible.
My students were challenged with creating a product that will improve the life of someone with a disability, in essence, an Invention of the Year.  The product must be a device that people with disabilities can use in their daily lives, and it cannot be a miracle drug or an operation that will magically conjure away the disability.

First, each team had to choose a disability to research and were directed to medical websites to learn about their topic. We talked about the importance of credible web resources and how to find experts on any given research topic. At the time when I first conceived of this project years ago, the Common Core State Standards had not yet been introduced to schools. What inspired this idea was my long-standing belief that real-world applications should be at the core of all my lessons. Therefore, using informational texts like medical articles fit in perfectly with the adoption of a CCSS curriculum.

When doing their research, students brainstormed many different ways they could help someone with the disability. Then they created three final works: a prototype sketch of their invention, a product description for the purpose of "selling" their invention, and a user guide. To guide them, I shared examples of product descriptions from online vendors like Amazon, which they examined and emulated. I also shared examples of user manuals from real products we use in our lives. With these professional examples as their model, my students were practicing writing skills beyond those required in a traditional English language arts classroom.

The Culminating Expo
The culminating activity in this project was to debut students’ products at the Invention of the Year Expo. Over the years, I was able to convince the other language arts teachers who also taught this story to join me in this endeavor. My colleagues liked the idea of incorporating more informational texts and taking PBL approach to this curriculum unit. As a result of this collaboration, we decided to hold an expo where all our students would showcase their inventions in the multipurpose room and present their ideas to each other.

Anxious and yet excited, the entire eighth grade met during their language arts period throughout the day to show off their inventions or to learn new ideas from their peers. By the end of the school day, they saw some amazing inventions such as computerized glasses that speak and project holograms (this example is from many years ago, before anyone had even heard of Google Glass). Other creative projects include a GPS-equipped walking cane with self-defense mechanism for the blind and surgically implantable microchips that moderated electrical signals in the brain (which I later discovered is not too far from the impossible as a few companies are currently trying to develop this technology to measure electrical brain activity to predict epileptic seizures). In the end, our expo was a success, and students talked about it for days afterwards.

After completing this project, my students wrote blog posts about what they learned, and they published their projects and reflections on their own individual blogs. Because my students are connected with other classrooms around the country, they received many compliments on their work from peers outside our school. In the end, this project gave my students a greater appreciation for people with disabilities, and they were able to share their epiphanies with an authentic audience through their blogs.

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This post is also published on the Buck Institute for Education PBL Blog. 

8 Ways for Students to Reflect on Their Learning

“Students Collaborating” by Greg Anderson Photography / CC BY 2.0

How do we know our students are truly learning? Teachers often use tests and essays to gauge student achievement. And although these methods are useful ways to measure student performance, they place most of the responsibility of analysis on the teacher. What if students were also involved in actively analyzing their mastery?

In my classroom, student reflection is regularly woven into each unit of study throughout the year. Below are eight ways I’ve found to encourage and promote this very important cognitive skill.

1. Blogging

All my student have their own blog, and in addition to writing on topics of their choosing, I often also ask them to write about what they’ve learned from  a lesson I’ve taught. My prompt usually includes variations of the following questions: After studying this unit, what conclusions can you draw? What do you think of the ideas and skills we covered during our lesson? What do you think about what you learned? Did you find these lessons meaningful or valuable? Why or why not? To learn more about incorporating student blogs into your teaching, check out my post “How to Inspire a New Generation of Writers Through Blogging.”

2. Websites

All my students also have their own website, which is  a great way to showcase the projects they’ve worked on in my class. For each assignment they add to their site, I ask them to write a short paragraph of explanation and reflection. Because I teach in a G Suite for Education district, my students use Google Sites, but there are also many beautiful website builders like Wix and Weebly that students might find equally easy to use.

3. Padlet

I love Padlet, a virtual bulletin board where students can share ideas and crowdsource information. If building a website seems a bit daunting, then Padlet is a great alternative — it’s very easy to use. Students can post their projects on a Padlet and reflect on what they’ve learned.

4. Google Slides

Google Slides is not just a tool for creating presentations, it can also be used as a digital book. Think of each slide as a page in a book, and you get the idea. Students can upload or import each assignment into a separate slide, and write a short explanation for each one. With lots of fonts, colors and layouts to choose from, a reflective paragraph never looked so pretty.

5. Google Forms

What better way to keep things quick and simple than by collecting reflective responses in a Google Form? I love that Google Forms populates all responses into one spreadsheet. No need to click on 175 different files to read 175 paragraphs. You can also use the same form throughout the year to have students reflect on different assignments, since all responses are timestamped. Below is an example of a form I use in my class for this purpose.

6. Google Classroom

When I want my students to write a short paragraph, I often turn to Google Classroom. Using its “Create Question” feature, I can quickly ask my students a reflective question, and they can post their replies. I can also decide if I want their answers to be viewable by only me, or if I want them to read and respond to each other’s ideas. What better way to promote reflection than to have students interact and evaluate each other’s responses?

7. Screencasts

Not only is screencasting a fantastic tool for reflection, it promotes fluency skills as well. Students can open a digital assignment on their computer and record themselves talking about what they’ve learned from the lesson as they show the project on their screen. Some popular screencasting tools include Screencastify, QuickTime, Explain Everything and PowerPoint 2016. This list includes both free and paid software. Some are Web-based or specific to Mac, iOS or Windows platforms.

8. Student-Designed Assessments

Since last year, I have given my students the option of designing their own assessments. I first ask them to consider what skills and content they learned from a particular unit. For example, after reading Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” and Dolores Huerta’s “Proclamation of the Delano Grape Workers for International Boycott Day,” I asked them to reflect (in small groups) on their takeaways from the lesson. They replied: “We learned many rhetorical strategies and how they help make a speech powerful and convincing.” They also realized that “words are as powerful as actions,” and “problems can also be solved without violence.” After pinpointing the goals of the lesson, we craft a rubric together to identify the criteria that will be used to evaluate their assessment. Students have fun working on this project, and I love seeing their creativity.

A Reflective Classroom

As a teacher, I want my students to become independent learners and critical thinkers. I truly believe that in order to learn, one has to be reflective. If you have found ways to encourage reflection in your students, please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Originally published on KQED's "In the Classroom" blog. Reproduced courtesy of KQED.

Real News, Fake News or Opinion? Teaching Our Students to Discern the Difference

Image Credit: Matylda Czarnecka / CC BY-SA 2.0 

It used to be so easy to distinguish between truth and fiction. In previous years, I would focus on just teaching my students the difference between fact and opinion. Now the Internet has become a murky river of information, and buzzwords like “fake news” and “alternative facts” have become real concerns of an educated society. How do we teach our students to discern all these differences in this post-truth era?

Below are some ideas, lessons, and resources to use in the classroom. You'll want to adapt them to suit your needs or cater them to meet the ability level of your students.

Question the Publisher

Many students use search engines to look up information, and they often click on the first link at the top of the page. Very rarely do they stop and look at the URL before launching the website. They usually assume that if the information exists, then it must be true. Each of my students has his or her own blog in my class, and I use this as an example of how easy it is for anyone to publish their content on the Internet. I train my students to question the reliability of the publisher first before using the information from a website.

Credibility Rationale

When my students come across a website that they think they might want to use, they are instructed to read the “About Us” page. Sometimes students have trouble locating this information because the page might be named differently. It is helpful to let them know that it may be called “Our Company,” “Our Story” or some variation of this wording. Sometimes a website is published by the subsidiary of a parent company, and they will have to visit the parent company’s website to find out more information. If the publisher’s background is unknown or if the webpage is written by an author without a biography linked to it, my students are not allowed to use it as a source.

After identifying the publisher, students must then justify their choice by explaining why they think they have found a credible source. I call this the “credibility rationale,” and they must write a paragraph explaining their choice. I created a Google doc to help my students through this process, and the link to this file can be found here. Feel free to make a copy of it and customize it for your class.

Taking It a Step Further

The above lesson idea is a great first step to introducing the concept of evaluating a website for its credibility. To take it a step further, I recommend two excellent resources when gathering research material.

1. Jim Kapoun's "Teaching undergrads WEB evaluation: A guide for library instruction" (published on the Princeton University Library’s website)

This resource has guiding questions that students can use to determine whether the source they found is credible. They are asked to examine each website for its accuracy, authority, objectivity, currency and coverage.

2. Robert Harris’ “Evaluating Internet Research Sources”  

Robert Harris’s CARS Checklist has an easy-to-remember method for determining the legitimacy of published work. CARS stand for Credibility, Accuracy, Reasonableness and Support.

Google Advanced Search

Most students go straight to Google when searching for information. Though great when shopping for merchandise or other personal uses, it is not always the best method to use when conducting academic research. A great alternative is Google Advanced Search. It allows you to narrow down your search by omitting specific words or searching exact websites. For example, you can enter “.gov” or “.edu” in the box that asks for site or domain, and limit your search results to just government or university-owned websites.

Fake News or Real News

Sometimes we surf the Internet for information, but there are also times when information is delivered to us through social media or shared directly with us by our circle of acquaintance. In our digital world, where headlines can go viral rather quickly, our students are now also being exposed to unreliable information from the Internet. There have been many incidences where fake news now masquerade as real news, which can carry detrimental consequences. So what can we do as educators? Below are some lesson ideas and resources from various organizations that are tailored for the classroom.

1. PBS NewsHour Extra: Did Fake News Influence the Outcome of Election 2016?
2. Common Sense Media: How to Spot Fake News (and Teach Kids to Be Media-Savvy)
3. Channel One News: Lesson Plan: How to Spot Fake News
4. The News Literacy Project: Ten Questions For Fake News Detection
5. EasyBib: Identifying Fake News: An Infographic and Educator Resources
6. EasyBib: How Savvy are Your Students?: 7 Fake Websites to Really Test Their Evaluation Skills

Fact or Opinion

In addition to discerning the credibility of websites, sometimes I find that my students have trouble understanding the difference between fact or opinion, even when reading a bona fide source. In my English language arts classroom, my students often quote from a text as evidence to support their claim. Though this is great for writing literary essays, this method doesn’t always work when writing an argument if the supporting evidence is gleaned from informational text. For example, I once overheard one student argue that “the quote is a fact because it’s in the article.” I realized that I had to quickly explain the difference between a statement of fact and a statement of opinion.

To help my students discriminate between fact and opinion, I like to use ReadWorks Digital, which provides thousands of non-fiction texts for the classroom and gives students the ability to annotate a text using the built-in highlighting and commenting tool. In addition, each text also comes with vocabulary support and comprehension questions.

To teach my lesson about fact vs. opinion, I first instruct my students, who are working in teams, to highlight all phrases that are factual. Second, I tell them to go back to their highlighted text and choose a different color to identify facts that are more specific, facts that contain a statistical data, or precise information like names or dates. Then, each team copies and pastes this information into a table in a Google doc that is shared with the class. This table has two columns: General Facts and Specific Facts. Next, each team is assigned to evaluate the answers of another team. They must determine if they believe the other team has correctly sorted the information under the right column. During this process, some teams will discover that another team has incorrectly identified a phrase or sentence as factual when it is actually an opinion. After sharing their feedback with each other, arguing over the answer, and defending their responses, each team walks away better able to tell the difference between fact and opinion.

When News Companies Publish Opinions

Another area students need help with is knowing the difference between a news story and an editorial. Often students are under the assumption that the job of all news companies is to report events. It’s important to point out that many news agencies have an opinion section as well. The New York Times Learning Network has a great lesson to teach this concept: News and ‘News Analysis': Navigating Fact and Opinion in The Times.

An Educated and Democratic Society

The advancement of technology has enabled us to search for almost anything we want, instantly. With information traveling at what seems to be supersonic speed, it is more important than ever to equip our students with the skills they need to make intelligent and fact-based decisions. They must thoroughly understand the difference between fact, fiction and opinion. How else can our students become informed citizens and critical thinkers in a democratic society?

Originally published on KQED's "In the Classroom" blog. Reproduced courtesy of KQED.