I recently completed my first MYP unit, and in keeping with the spirit of the IB, I have decided to publish my end of the unit reflection here on my blog. As regular readers know, I am a big believer in practicing what I preach, so if I tell my students that reflection is vital to their learning, then I must be able to take the time and reflect on my own style, planning, and pedagogy. It is easy to get lost in the jargon of education and simply cut and paste ideas from one document or another into our plans, but I hope that this reflection will help me truly live the IB profile and model life-long learning. (All jargon and clichés, I know, but I get it. I agree with it. And I want to model it.)

The obvious place to begin is Reflection:

They give thoughtful consideration to their own learning and experience. They are able to assess and understand their strengths and limitations in order to support their learning and personal development.

I will start by giving a brief overview of the unit. Rather than simply attaching or cutting and pastingh the unit plan, I thought it would be helpful for myself to re-articulate what we did. I will spare you the step-by-step minutia and try to focus on the main events.

But let’s start with the Unit Question:

How can language be used to influence how people act?

I teach English as Language B, we are still working out the kinks of what this looks like at our school, but the way I see it, I am assessing my students on a series of Language B Criterion, and while I will do my best to try and have a connection to the content in Language A, I am learning that I need not be so connected with that conent. This unit happened to mirror and complement Language A nicely, but my unit in grade 6 and 7 did not. Both approaches had pros and cons which I will discuss later.

In language A the students were to create a documentary about the following question:

What can I teach others about me and my world?

They were to make a documentary film about some environmental issue. I decided to have my Language B students explore persuasive language, emotive language in particular, to create a movie poster and brief synopsis for their films. The significant concept I was hoping to convey was:

Students will develop an understanding of how through the use of language they can persuade others to act in the best interest of the community.

So here is what we did step-by-step:

Using a shared Google Doc we identified some key human emotions we felt we wanted viewers of the film to feel: guilt, anger, joy, sadness etc…I like using shared documents as my whiteboard. I use it as a blank slate to share information with students, but if they feel they need to add anything at anytime, they can simply added to the board without needing to get up and walk to the front of the class. Google Docs allows every student access to the front of the class at any time. I then asked them to go to a thesaurus and come up with other words to help fill out our list.

After we had a healthy list of emotive words, we began using Flickr to find images that matched the mood, tone, and meaning of the words. We had a quick lesson on Creative Commons and a brief discussion about copy right, ownership, and publishing.

I asked the kids to also add the link to the Flickr image to our Goolge Doc for later use. I want to get the kids in the habit of always keeping a record of where they find images. Then we used Picnik to add the words to our images. I like using as many tools as possible so students can have a choice. I love Picnik as it is easy to use and quite versatile when it comes to simple photo editing.  I was often frustrated by how slow our Internet can be at school and finding images and both Flickr and Picnik were unusable at times. I may need to rethink using so much imagery because of slow bandwidth, which is a shame seeing that photography is a great tool to convey language to non-native speakers.

After our newly edited pictures were finished, I created a shared Google Presentation and had every student add their images to a collective visual list of our words. I also printed them out for a word wall in the classroom and posted them on out class blog for use. The problem is I don’t think too many students understood that this presentation was for them to use at a later time. While I am pleased with the level of tech skills the kids acquired, I am not sure it helped them learn the words any better. Perhaps next time, we spend less time on creating this presentation. Although it is now a resource we can use all year, and so can you. Take a look:

Now it was time to write our movie blurbs using the words we had just used. The kids really struggled with this part, we ended up doing a lot of research to help them organize their ideas for the actually movie in Language A.  Each student created a Google Doc which they shared with me, so I could monitor their progress, edit their work, and make suggestions for follow up.

At this point, I had the kids do a middle of the road reflection on what we had done so far. It was there first and so they obviously struggled. Next time I think I will focus on quickly daily reflections on what we have done that lesson, so that students have a pool of ideas and thoughts to pull from when writing more comprehensive summative reflections. We had a brief chat about HTML and embedding and they embedded the shared presentation onto their reflections which they posted on their blogs. We used this time to discuss proper tagging, so we can find posts at a later time.

Next, we began to write rough drafts of blurbs and discussed the emotional appeal of the words they used. How were they going to persuade people to watch their film? I tried to create an outline to help they stay on task. The first paragraph should paint a dismal scene of the problem they were presenting; the second should offer some facts and figures to pique interest, and the third should be an appeal of the power of the film. Some did a great job. Some struggled. I think next time, I would spend more time on sentence frames and idea generators. I overestimated their language skills and so we flounder for a while. After their blogs were completed, we began making the movie posters. Again we focused on language and taglines and titles. All of which with they struggled. Again we used CC images from Flickr, but this time we made the posters on Big Huge Labs movie creator. I had all of the posters and blurbs put on another Google Presentation, so that I could share them with you here:

Each student posted the posters and the blurbs on their blogs. The final step was to have the students reflect on what they had done for the last seven weeks. They were to write a reflection on the steps we had taken, but also to look closely at the unit questions and their own learning. Again they struggled when it came to organization, but with some support they began to write some decent posts. I learned that not all summative assessment or reflection need be perfect. I think publishing work gives it this sense of needing it to be perfect, but I am realizing that blogging especially for students is not a exhibition of best work, but a place to explore, reflect, and grow, and to make it useful they must be allowed to post work that is in progress and in draft.

The true power of reflective blogging and sharing comes in the looking back at work in the future, and hopefully in comments offering feedback. That is why I think weekly reflection can help the students learn from each other. If they are posted their frustrations on any given day, maybe someone else can help them over come whatever difficulty they are facing.

Finally, I realized that I also needed to assess them on Criterion A, which is an oral component so I had them, do a quick video reflection in which they were asked to articulate a 45second answer to the unit question. This was also posted to their blogs.

Wow! All of that, and I have yet to begin the MYP unit plan formal reflection section. This is hard work. See it is valuable to do what you ask your students to do. It gives you clarity and empathy for what they deal with everyday in every class. If I were asked to write one of these reflections for every class, I think I would burn out. There is only so much forced reflection one person can take. So how can we make reflection more natural and part of what we do? I want my reflections to be the assessments, not the after thought.  Anyway, onto MYP!

Ah ha! I probably should have looked at this section more closely earlier, because it would have helped me frame our reflection task. Being that I am new to MYP, the protocol is all a bit new. I see now that this reflection section was meant to guide the whole class. I thought it was just for the teacher to complete at the end of the unit. Here are the questions:

What did we find compelling? Were our disciplinary knowledge/skills challenged in any way?
What inquiries arose during the learning? What, if any, extension activities arose?

Unfortunately, I felt so rushed to get through the task, I found it hard to stop and smell the inquiry. This inability to see where the students wanted to go was compounded by the fact there level of English makes it difficult for them to guide their own learning. I have been struggling with how to make an ESL classroom inquiry based. How can a student articulate what and how they want to learn if they do not have the words to do so?

How did we reflect—both on the unit and on our own learning?

I think we did a great job of reflecting, but as I mentioned before; I want to have more formative, ongoing reflection in our next unit. I love the idea of a short video reflection for Criterion A, thanks to my lovely wife and co-teacher @mairinraisdana. I will use that again for sure.

Which attributes of the learner profile were encouraged through this unit? What opportunities were there for student-initiated action?

Again, claiming novice status, I often got lost in the task and forgot to step back and look at the bigger picture. I have rectified this problem by putting the Learner Profile and Areas of Interaction on my classroom wall, so as to remind myself to constantly be asking myself and the students to think about how what we are doing is connected to those two areas.  I also dropped the ball on the remembering to bring attention to the Approaches to Learning.

How successful was the collaboration with other teachers within my subject group and from other subject groups?

I spoke often with the Language A teachers and knew what they were doing at all times, because I also push into their classes one a week. This pushing-in is vital, because it allows me to stay connected to the pulse and timing of their work in Language A.

What interdisciplinary understandings were or could be forged through collaboration with other subjects?

Sorry my brain is fried and honestly, who could possibly still be reading at this point.

Were students able to demonstrate their learning?

These are the Criterion, objectives, and skills on which they are being assessed:

A: Speaking and listening—message and interaction

1. present his or her ideas, giving details where appropriate

• Use details, examples, anecdotes, or experiences to explain or clarify information.

B: Speaking—language

1. Use clear pronunciation and/or intonation

• Make formal and informal presentations that use clear diction, tempo, volume, and phrasing and are appropriate to audience and purpose,

C  Writing- message and organization

1. Provide information and ideas correctly use a range of vocabulary

• Write clear, coherent sentences.

D. Writing- language

1. Correctly use a range of vocabulary

• Use descriptive words that add interest and meaning to writing.

I will allow them to self assess, based on a rubric and unless there are many major discrepancies between what they think they deserve, and what I observed, their grades will stand as they seem them.

How did the assessment tasks allow students to demonstrate the learning objectives identified for this unit? How did I make sure students were invited to achieve at all levels of the criteria descriptors?

I made the mistake (Too busy? Is that an excuse we accept from students?) to have a proper rubric ready before the task went out, so I am giving it to them now. I know this is not fair or best practice, but it will never happen again. Next time, we will constantly go back to these learning objectives. Both the students and I needed constant reminding of what it was that we were actually learning. This unit was not about making a poster or writing a blurb it was about: presenting ideas, giving details where appropriate, using clear pronunciation and/or intonation, providing information and ideas correctly using a range of vocabulary, correctly using descriptive words that add interest and meaning to writing, writing clear, coherent sentences, using clear diction, tempo, volume, and phrasing and are appropriate to audience and purpose, using details, examples, anecdotes, or experiences to explain or clarify information.

Did they do that? I would say so.
Can they better understand how language influences people? I think so,

But don’t take my word for it, go see for yourself. Go to our class blog and follow the links to ESL 8 Please leave comments on either the posters or their reflections.