This month, I've been working with my 8th graders on a journalism study of the neighborhood surrounding our school, which I wrote about last year in Edweek.  This is an adaptation of a study I have done with students before in East Harlem and Crown Heights before this.  In each school community, the methods are more of less the same, but the dynamics of the experience and the findings are unique to the students and the neighborhood. 

This year, it was a chilly morning, when students conducted their original surveys out on the border of Park Slope and Sunset Park, Brooklyn.  It was 9am and potential survey participants were busily hurrying to work.  Students approached adults, asking them to please take their surveys, but many shook their heads and kept walking.  

As the day got later and the sun got stronger, more people were willing to take the survey, and students got excited every time they were successful. But still many adults turned the students down--something I had not encountered so much in the other neighborhoods. (Here are links to Part I and Part II of the process in Crown Heights in 2009.)  

In some cases, students realized that the adult they were asking did not necessarily speak English, which was a real barrier to participation.  A few shook their heads and said simply, "No English."  One eighth grader noticed, "Hey, our data is not going to be accurate, because we can only ask the people who speak English." 

At that point, some of our Spanish-speaking students realized there was a simple solution to this problem, and began approaching pedestrians in Spanish with more success.  It got even better when Spanish-speaking students started translating for non-Spanish speaking students to help them get more participants in their surveys, which is what is happening in the picture on the left.  

I was especially happy to see this because I've noticed that many of my Latino students--who make up 35% of the 8th grade student population--seem to avoid speaking Spanish in school.  Unlike the bilingual middle school I worked in in East Harlem, where Latinos were a majority and regularly spoke Spanish, English and Spanglish to one another, my Spanish-speaking students are shy and even embarrassed to speak the language.  I assume they do this in response to English clearly being the language of the majority and the language of their academics, aside from Spanish-language class.  

The day we conducted the surveys around Sunset Park, knowledge of Spanish became a powerful tool for success on the project.  It became a way of connecting with and learning from more people, allowing us all to gain a more complete picture of the realities and perspectives of the community. Finally, among students in our diverse school, the experience sent a strong message of the value of bilingualism.

Last week, Jacqueline Woodson, one of my very favorite young adult authors, came to speak to my seventh graders.  Now, if you teach middle school, you know that bringing a guest speaker to 100 seventh graders doesn't just automatically go well.  There is a novelty factor, yes. And though we'd like that to sufficiently ensure that students receive the guest properly, in reality, middle school students pay attention to many more factors than that. So we must too, if we want it to be a positive transaction for all.

Jacqueline Woodson's visit went very well, and students did get the rich experience--of hearing and seeing an author in person share her work with them--that I hoped they would.  In reflecting on the thought and preparation that went into the event, I've come up with a few factors to consider any time I bring a guest speaker. 

Clear Connection To the Curriculum: Students will wonder, why is this stranger coming to talk to me?  The  more connected to their learning or any aspect of the work they do at school, the more appropriate and genuine the connection will be. A guest speaker comes for a quick moment, which can seem unimportant to many students.  But if it is well placed within a curriculum, the guest will be part of a much bigger  conversation and in a sense "last longer."  In this case, we had read and discussed Woodson's novel, From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun, as a whole class. Many students went on to read many more of her books.  She was known to them, but through her writing. We had spoken about possibly communicating with her or bringing her to our school, since she is from Brooklyn. Her finally coming was a way of continuing the conversation about her novels and a point of comparison for the current novels we're reading.

Relevent to Students: Students will wonder, why this, and who cares?  As with any curriculum piece, the content of the presentation should be developmentally appropriate.  It should matter to the students at their age level.  If Woodson came and talked about her college experience, my students may or may not have been interested. But she presented to them about her books which all deal with developmentally appropriate themes for middle school students. 

Also, the event should be as culturally relevant as possible, whether that means direct identification with students' culturally or through exposing students to worlds different from the one they know.  Either way, identity is a big factor for middle school students, so we need to consider how students will identify or not identify with the guest and the value that could have for them.  One thing that made Jacqueline Woodson's presentation great was that she was a black woman speaking very candidly and confidently about issues of race and  to a group of diverse students who were themselves hungry for fresh perspectives on this aspect of their growing identities.  She also had the attention of many committed student writers, looking to understand the practice better.

Doing Our Homework: It was really important that we did our homework and discovered that Jacqueline Woodson has a great website designed for kids and teachers, which answers the questions she most often is asked by readers.  She also has many interviews available on the web. We took a day in class to explore the website, watch an interview with Woodson about her writing, and create questions we'd like to ask her in person, that hadn't already been answered in the resources available to us.  I encouraged students to ask questions about her use of literary elements, something we'd been looking at in all the novels from this year, to keep.

Participation & Accountability: On the day of the visit, students understood what they were expected to DO during the presentation.  In class we went over the fact that they would receive a grade for ther participation in the event (Yes, I was willing to use any and all measures of control to make sure they did not make fools of themselves or us in front of a guest. I also justified this because it is actually an important life skill to be able to make a good impression on others, especially those who are successfu at something we are learning to do).  The grade was be based on

• active listening throughout the event
• asking appropriate questions at appropriate times
• taking (some) notes on points of interest

Students received a clipboard with a packet as they entered after lunch.  The front page outlined these expectations again.  The next page had all of the questions (with some editing) they had created in class typed up.  This was a great resource for students.  When Ms. Woodson asked for questions, practically every hand went up. The questions were not superficial, and Woodson was also excellent in her ability to respond.  She clearly was practiced at speaking to kids about her work.  She provided a great mix of humor and depth, and had some witty comebacks to occasional seventh grade silliness.  Students were also, quite obviously doing their best to avoid possible distractions (ie. each other;). 

Timing & Space: I spoke to Ms. Woodson before she came, and she aptly noted, "90 minutes for 100 seventh graders in June could be a long time to keep their attention..."  The only scheduling option for the assembly was for the period directly after lunch....groan. I talked over the timing with my principal, and we decided that the whole grade would stay for 60 minutes, not 90, and then students who were interested in more Q & A would stay for the extra half hour.  We also decided on a large meeting room instead of the auditorium, so that she could speak without a mic (more intimate) and where students would not be too spread out and therefore hard to monitor. 

It worked just about perfectly.  Students were just starting to get squirmy at the hour mark, but left wanting a little more, not bored yet--always a good thing.  The self-selected group that stayed for more time was a great mix of avid writers, voracious readers, and students who were just plain curious, for whom this visit sparked something new.

Teamwork & the Teacher Look: It was important to coorinate with a lot of people to make this run smoothly. The admin team helped organize the schedule and the flow of students from lunch to the room, and made sure our tech. director was there to record it and shoot photos.  The other seventh grade advisors each walked their advisees to the event and seated them together.  I gave each advisor a clip board and instructed them to mark down the names of any of their students making any kind of disruptions.  I asked them to tally up the number of times said students disrputed. Students also knew these would become points deducted from their grade (out of 10). I don't do this sort of thing for regular class activities, but when the stakes are high, like during a student poetry reading, or an event like this, and each individual's self-control at that moment really is crucial to the experience of the entire group, I am all for taking points off for talking, humming, poking, etc.  Advisors also did a stellar job of applying the "teacher look" aka "side-eye" to students who may have been tempted to do any of the actions listed above. The united front supported by the system for teachers to share the task of keeping tabs on individual students was effective. 

Follow-Up: We're working on a creative thank you card.  I hope Ms. Woodson will come back next year!  I highly recommend her as a guest speaker for NYC teachers, who read her books with their students. 

[The image above comes from ncte.org only because I don't have my hands on the real pics of Woodson speaking to my students!  Soon!]

Last Friday, before the long weekend, I wrote in the homework section on my board, "MLK Day Monday!  For Tuesday, read pgs..."   Throughout the day several students in each class asked what MLK was.  When other students or I told them those were Martin Luther King's initials, most students said, "Oh yeah," but a few added, "Wait, who is that again?"  

I thought about this throughout the long weekend and decided to devote some time during Tuesday's class to the words and work of Dr. King.  I started with a quote from his "I Have a Dream..." Speech in 1963:

I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

We talked about that line from the Declaration of Independent (which they had learned about recently in social studies class), what it meant, when it was written, and whom it excluded.  We talked about how long after that line was written that slavery was abolished, about the rise of legal segregation and Jim Crow Laws in the South and the long struggle to end those.  Then we watched a few minutes of the speech itself. It was an interesting environment to discuss the vision of desegregation King describes in his speech. My school is very diverse racially, and I think this allowed students to reflect on that positively and in more depth than usual.

Students were struck by how huge the audience was in the March on Washington, how triumphant the tone of the speech was.  I felt like they got to see what a real social movement looked like in those days.  Then we watched a few minutes of Dr. King's final speech in 1968.  We talked about the triumphs of the civil rights movement, but also the constant struggle--the fact that there were regular citizens as well as people in positions of power who supported the civil rights movement and others who opposed the vision of MLK and his supporters, which ultimately resulted in his death.  Students wanted to know more about that, so we projected a google search and read together the account of the assassination.

We talked about the response of Americans when Martin Luther King was killed--the devastation and anger--and the role of musicians, such as James Brown, who began giving free public concerts to get people to stop rioting and help sooth their pain.  One of my students shared that her grandfather had been a civil rights activist who worked with Dr. King.  She even showed us a picture she had on her phone of a photograph of him after being arrested for protesting.

Students were very interested in the discussions and video footage. It visibly sparked something in them. What was meant to be a half-period  presentation and discussion easily turned into an entire period. It seemed that everyone had learned something about MLK at some point in elementary school, but now were able to think about the meaning of his life and work on a different level, as seventh graders developing critical thinking and social consciousness.  

It also occurred to me that I had not had the opportunity to learn about the civil rights movement in school at all--until college, and at that point it was by choice.  In high school, I did learn about it on my own from media--movies, music, books, etc, and from my parents and grandmother who had some first hand experience with it.  It was not part of my formal education, because we never "had time for it" chronologically in history classes. 

Seeing my students' interest in Tuesday's class made me hopeful about this generation finding their own way toward making positive change in this country/world.  We certainly need social leaders with vision and the courage to stand up for their beliefs.