During week two of my practice at Grimstad Upper Secondary both of my English groups started working on a group-based digital presentation project on South Africa. The competence aims I chose to focus on were «communicating through digital media» and «present and converse on relevant and interdiciplinary topics».
The teaching plan involved choosing between making a film, or making a photostory of roughly three minutes. These presentations would then be uploaded to itslearning and later shown in class. Initially they had two full school sessions to work on the project, but one of my groups missed out on a session. Further, they had to choose between four different assignments to base their film or photostory on. The assignments were:
1. Present the Boer War.
2. Contrast the South Africa of today and the South Africa during the period of apartheid (1948-1989).
3. Present the life and work of Nelson Mandela.
4. Make a timeline of South African history.
The main challenges I faced during this project were:
– In the English group that missed out on an entire school session, only two out of six presentations were handed in by the end.
-Challenges in working on the project outside of school as students live in different places and have a full schedule with activities after school.
– Apart from assignment two, none of the assignments give room for reflection, and thus effectively stops students from getting a top grade.
Time is always an issue, and for one of my two classes more so than the other as the Friday of week three was a teacher’s planning day and they missed out on their second English session of the week. This turned out to be far more troublesome for my pupils than I had feared. I would have thought that they were extremely competent on social media and group-based work over the internet simply from being young and living in what one could call the internet era. This is not the case, and making such assumptions is grave misjudgement and very naive on my behalf. They have no more experience in working with digital media than anyone else. Their digital competence lies in other areas, especially communication.
My initial plan was for the pupils to handle the distance between them by working through facebook, twitter, skype and e-mails. This worked for the groups that had already done most of the work while under supervision at school, but for the groups that missed out on an entire session, it simply did not. It is hard to measure wether it is from a lack of time, effort or ability, but considering this was the group with the highest average English grade of the two I would have thought they could cope with the task they were given.
Initially I wanted to upload the projects to youtube, but I later dropped the idea. This had many reasons, but the most important one was that my pupils themselves opposed the idea for varying reasons and that I did not feel that forcing my will through on the matter would be doing anyone any good.
The reason I consider my own assignments bar the second poor, is that they are too broad and not spesific enough. Especially the last of the four really only offer a chance to repeat what you have learnt in a timeline. And this showed in the presentations that were handed in; most of the pupils made presentations on Nelson Mandela, and they answered when, where, what, but not why, not what consequences the when, where and what had for South Africa. But the single group that did assignment number two presented a contrasted view of old and new, black and white, apartheid and true democracy, racial hate and reconciliation. And they did this in a very visually moving manner.
Stian
I think it is good to give the pupils the possibility of working together in groups on a project where they have to produce and present a final product in English. It definitely helps reaching your second competence aim as it creates a situation in which discussion often flows freely between them as they all are involved in creating the product. But as you have commented upon yourself, your ambitions for their level of digital competence might have been a bit too high. I think this age group needs a lot more guidance and clearer goals than we might think.
As for reflection to take place I think we need to operate with a broad definition of the word, and look for it in wherever it might occur. If we for instance split up the assignments into a different parts, we avoid quick solutions and answers from the pupils and make room for both a more «reflective» process to take place, and for a more complex end product. This last point I think is crucial and you also reflect on it yourself in your response to Heidi’s comment. To ask good questions is very important, especially in lower secondary school, where the pupils (at least my pupils) tend to find the easy way out. So the challenge is to ask questions that encourage reflection. It is something I think most of us has experienced the need for during practice.
Hi Stian
I very much like the fact that you so clearly picked out the main challenges which you faced. This shows a well-developed ability to reflect on your teaching, which is essential (as long as you also learn the lessons from the reflection)! I’d like to «problematize» a couple of your points:
I was left wondering if it was your pupils’ technical competence with digital media which was lacking, or whether, as you seem to hint at, it was rather their lack of maturity (self-discipline, will and motivation) combined with the relatively low expectations of the school culture which led to the hand-in problems with the group who missed the sessions. My own experience is that it is only with very motivated final year students at upper secondary school that you can afford to give them real freedom combined with responsibility.
You reflect that your assignments were too broad and not specific enough, but wasn’t the main problem rather that only one of them asked for a contrast/comparison ? Isn’t it through such a contrast/comparison that students are forced to reflect ? Or do you think you could you have achieved the same aim by asking more specific quesions on each topic without a contrast/comparison?
James
Stian,
Your teaching plan was very ambitious. I think that it could have worked out well, though, given more time. It must have been interesting for the students to try something else in their English lessons. So often, their readings and assignments are related directly to the textbook, and they typically write down their answers in their notebooks. In this case, at least, they were able to use another tool.
Your reflections gave food for thought, especially where you noted that there’s a problem when assignments are so straightforward that they don’t really give room for giving the students top grades. As assessment of students’ works is such an important part of what teachers do, we all need to design projects and tests in a way that enable students to show their competence levels.
I suppose it looks like my teaching plan did not work out very well when reading my post(I ran out of space, so I left outall the positives), but it did. It was in fact a success for one of the groups, and the second group simply ran out of time.
Regarding assignments I think it is important for coming teachers to consider how to ask a good question. In evaluation we consider comparison higher than repetition and reflection higher than comparison. If we do not ask good questions, we can not expect good answers. That is something I learnt from this practice period.