MACUL Blog Post

I attended several sessions at this year’s MACUL Conference. Among them were talks by Andy Schoenborn, a special needs teacher at Mt. Pleasant High School, and Karen Chichester, who teaches at Monroe Jefferson High School and the Eastern Michigan Writing Project (http://goo.gl/OrrtXo). Schoenborn’s talk, “Fostering Authentic Writing Through Digital Feedback,” was about fostering authentic relationships with one’s students. Authentic relationships, argued Schoenborn, means connecting with students on a social-emotional level, e.g., greeting them at the door, shaking their hands, or calling them by name. He began his session with an opening writing exercise. He asked his gathered audience of about two dozen or so to spend 2-3 minutes writing about their writing experiences at high school – that is, as a high schooler. He then asked the gathered audience of younger-looking practitioners to turn to their neighbors and spend a few minutes pairing-and-sharing before asking for volunteers to share what they had discussed. This was, presumably, his way of modeling how to foster “authentic” relationship in the classroom. Moving on to his PowerPoint, Schoenborn then shifted to scales of concerns: the global and the local. For Schoenborn there are both global (macro) and local (micro) problems with how students write, ranging from problems with thesis, structure, and analysis to problems with sentences, formatting, diction and/or grammar. Hoping to unlock door to “authentic writing,” he provided “five key things” that teachers should be doing when providing effective digital feedback: (1) read through the entire piece before inserting comments; (2) focus comments on patterns or representative strengths and weaknesses; (3) use a respectful tone and search for what is right and effective; (4) ask questions and respond as a reader, not an evaluator; and (5) personalize final comments using two positives and one suggestion. He then provided a “feedback template,” encouraging his gathered audience of teachers “to focus on the piece, not the person.” Finally, he concluded with some ways in which to foster authentic writing through digital feedback. Among them were: personal peer editing, e.g., Google Docs; revision history, which allows for self-reflection; group essays, which creates collaboration; embedded rubrics, which builds consistency; and reflective learning blogs, which is a good way to check for understanding over time.

1,000 Years of History to be Digitized

[I've copied an article from my alma mater, University of Cambridge, that links the past and present, as well as teaching and technology.]

A campaign to save ancient documents chronicling 1,000 years of history has succeeded after £1.2m was raised by the universities of Cambridge and Oxford in their first-ever joint appeal.

This can only bring benefits to both institutions and provide an exemplar for other purchases and collaborations in the future

Anne Jarvis

The ‘Lewis-Gibson Genizah Collection’ of Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah dates from the 9th–19th century and is an invaluable 1,000-year record of the religious, social, economic and cultural life of the Mediterranean world.

Treasures include the earliest known example of a Jewish engagement deed (dating from 1119), an eyewitness account of Crusader atrocities, and autograph writings by leading Jewish thinkers such as Moses Maimonides.

A genizah is a sacred storeroom, a room set aside inside a synagogue for the interment of old religious writings, which, because they contain names of God or use the sacred Hebrew alphabet, cannot be discarded. For more than 1,000 years, the Jewish community of Fustat (now a suburb of Cairo), deposited all manner of writings – not just sacred texts – into the dusty storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue. Its contents were described by historian Simon Schama as ‘the single most complete archive of a society anywhere in the whole medieval world’.

The fragments purchased by Oxford and Cambridge were brought back from Cairo by intrepid twin sisters Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson in 1896 and deposited at Westminster College where they remained until August 1.

The appeal, launched earlier this year at The British Academy, marked the first time the two universities have joined forces to fundraise. A lead gift of £500,000 from the Polonsky Foundation was followed by a donation of £350,000, arranged through a Director of the Littman Library of Jewish Civilisation.

A further generous grant of £100,000 was pledged by the Bonita Charitable Trust – both libraries are grateful to the many other individuals and charitable trusts who made donations to the appeal from around the world.

With the manuscripts secured, the collection, previously owned by the United Reform Church’s Westminster College, will undergo careful conservation at Cambridge University Library during the next two years before being digitised and made freely available online.

The manuscripts will then be divided between the University Library at Cambridge and the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford. A public exhibition looking at the collection – and the extraordinary twin sisters who played such a vital role in their discovery – will be held in 2016 at Cambridge University Library.

Both libraries are already holders of substantial Genizah collections in their own right. Cambridge is home to the largest collection in the world with some 200,000 fragments out of the estimated 350,000 to be found in public collections worldwide. Meanwhile, the Bodleian holds 25,000 world-class Genizah folios, the size and quality of which rank it among the most important global collections.

Cambridge University Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “Over the centuries the Bodleian and Cambridge University Library have been celebrated rivals, particularly when it came to the acquisition of great collections. Now that our two great libraries will share the ownership of the Collection, this can only bring benefits to both institutions and provide an exemplar for other purchases and collaborations in the future.”

Bodley’s Interim Librarian Richard Ovenden said: “The Lewis-Gibson Collection has been a catalyst for bringing our two organisations into closer cooperation than ever before. As we face ever harder challenges brought about by complex factors: financial, technological, organizational, the university libraries at Oxford and Cambridge can testify already to the power of collaboration to enable us to face those challenges.”

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-       See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/news/1000-years-of-history-to-be-digitised-following-unique-appeal#sthash.2y433vaU.dpuf

Spooky Skeletons from the 1600s

Below is a woodcut showing the anatomical theatre at the Dutch University of Leiden. The University's medical school was closely connected with the city's English-Scottish community. Many of them, including the Pilgrims, had fled to Holland to escape persecution. The roots of the English Reformed Church at Leiden reach back to 1607, when the growing English-Scottish community petitioned the city government for a place of worship, meeting first in St Catherine Gasthuis and then in the Jerusalem Kirk. With the arrival of a new wave of exiles fleeing the Laudian persecutions and the war-torn British Isles in the 1640s, the congregation moved into the larger and more centrally located Begijnhof church, a former Catholic chapel, which, after the Reformation, had been converted into a multifunctional facility. It housed the medical school’s anatomical theatre (in the chancel), the university library (on the upper floor), and, after 1644, the English church (in the nave). ‘These three places make together a handsome building’, observed a passing seventeenth-century traveller.

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Cell Phones: Education Technology and Learning

Our most-recent guest lecturer was Liz Kolb from the University of Michigan. I really appreciated her personal anecdote about her academic struggles in middle, lower and high school. Perhaps her struggles say more about our educational system than her mis-diagnosed learning disabilities – that is, the systems inability to offer differentiated instruction. Perhaps her case-study offers further insight into how we, as educators, can differentiate/individualize our instruction. Not all students “score” well on standardized tests. But in our current system, we tend to relegate those students to the back of the class, labeling them as “special needs,” underperforming, or slow. Perhaps we could graft our curriculum into our students’ daily lives, as Liz suggested. Cell phones, she informed us, is one device to connect with our students. Cell phones, when used for educational purposes, help us, and our students, become more socially-emotionally engaged with, for example, current events, historical monuments, wireless technology, and each other.

Framing Textbook Terms Around Essential Questions?

I’ve posted some of my reflections about the use/misuse of terms in AP US history. I’ve also posted an excerpt from a student’s notebook. For convenience, let’s call this anonymous student Napoleon, whose notes are posted below.

Completing Terms takes a lot of time. Students tell me they typically spend about 10-15 hours per week on their terms alone (Daily Routines, 4.5). In theory, the students are expected to read the textbook, which, in the case of Chapter 7, amounts to 33 pages of densely written text, before answering the terms. However, in the hectic world of high school, during which time many of the students are also involved in extracurricular activities, this generally doesn't happen. They often choose the path of least resistance. 

Rather than read the chapter and then answer the terms, which helps situate the terms in their proper historical context, they tend to comb the chapter, find the term, and copy a paragraph or two out of the textbook. This week's focus question was on Camp-Meeting Revivals, i.e., The Second Great Awakening that swept across the religious landscape of antebellum America. The revivalists, the so-called movers and shakers, are conspicuously absent from Napoleon’s notes on the Second Great Awakening. Where, for example, is the evangelist Charles Finney, in Napoleon’s account?

The textbook devoted 8 pages out of 33 (or nearly 25% of the chapter) on revivalism, including two pages on Finney, whose life and legacy are sketched in the textbook. The problem that Napoleon and many of his classmates struggled with was how to "discriminate" such a large chunk of reading. His notes suggest that he has failed to fully understand the significance of The Second Great Awakening, not to mention the central role played by Finney, the so-called Founder of Modern Revivalism. This is due, in large part, to the absence of an essential question to direct his 8-pages of reading for this term.

For example, one essential question could have been thus: Why was the Second Great Awakening so Great? Framing the term around an essential question would have helped Napoleon (and the 120 other students who are currently taking AP US History) to focus on the evangelical reformers and their big ideas. The Second Great Awakening was great because it was so far-reaching and wide-ranging. It affected both men and women, white and black, rich and poor, north and south. It was Great because it spread across the American religious landscape, from New England in the North to Georgia in the South; from seaport cities to frontier settlements. One of the legacies of the Second Great Awakening was the Abolitionist Movement, the coalition of whites and blacks opposed to slavery. To support their cause, they frequently quoted Jesus' statements about treating others with respect and love. White Christians in the South, however, did not view slavery as a sin. Rather, their leaders were able to quote many Biblical passages in support of slavery. The Civil War and the divide over the question of slavery thus began in the nation's churches, a decade before fighting began on the battlefields. All of this, however, is absent from the overwhelming majority of the student's notes, including Napoleon’s, despite the fact that the chapter had two sub-headings clearly identified as: EVANGELICALS AND SLAVERY and THE BEGINNINGS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY. Framing the Second Great Awakening around an essential question could have helped students such as Napoleon navigate his way through the religious landscape of antebellum America. In so doing, it would have contributed to the Development of Intellectual Character (Benchmark, 4.1) while exercising higher cognitive processes (Smoothly Functioning Learning Community, 4.3).

What do you think?