I had a similar experience with this week’s activity—storyboards. We’ve been using storyboards in a variety of ways now for over twenty years. The earliest storyboards I can remember were made by Terry Gilliam for his movie Time Bandits. In 1981 he released the full script of the movie in a book aptly titled Time Bandits: The Movie Script by Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam.

This was at a time when, as kids growing up in the 1970s and 1980s without the internet, we sought any artifact that might connect us to our beloved movies. I loved collecting albums that would have the voice acting from a particular film—my favorite was the two-album set of the Rankin/Bass animated version of The Hobbit. When the July 18, 1977 People magazine with C3PO came out, my friends and I immediately bought it (and anything else we could find with pictures from the movie).

Another precious artifact was my Time Bandits script. Supplementing the movie script were Gilliam’s doodles and drawings storyboarding the film.

What impressed me was the action and perspective of the images. The story was communicated not only through text but through tiny boxes of doodles.

Reading as Immediate Experience

Michael W. Smith and Jeffrey Wilhelm, in their book Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men, study the literacy lives of 49 middle and high school boys, looking closely at what they chose to read and do outside of school and why those experiences often engaged them more deeply than the reading they encountered in classrooms.

Smith and Wilhelm found that the boys they studied were often deeply engaged in activities outside school—even activities involving substantial reading—when those activities created the conditions for what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to as a “flow” state. The problem wasn’t simply that the boys disliked reading; many of the conditions that made their out-of-school activities compelling were largely absent from school literacy.

One of the most important findings was that the boys they researched tended to value the immediate experience of an activity rather than a distant payoff. They were more motivated when doing something was satisfying while they were doing it: when they could become completely absorbed in the activity, experiencing a sense of flow.

When we’re designing lesson plans, the authors encourage us to think about the question:

What is the quality of the experience I want [students] to have today?

The combination of text and imagery in Time Bandits captured my imagination as a boy. So much so that when I began thinking about my earliest encounters with storyboards, I remembered a book I had read forty-five years ago. It’s probably no coincidence that I was also an avid reader of comic books, choose-your-own-adventure stories, and Whitman Big Little Books with flip-book animations in the corner.

For me, these books, with their images and interactivity, offered precisely this kind of immediate experience. Later, I would be drawn to theater and performance for similar reasons—they offered a way to interact directly with a text and bring it to life.

The Challenge of Mapping Narrative

You can see, then, one of the reasons I chose to focus on Donna Barba Higuera’s graphic novel Xolo for Habla’s Chicago Teacher Institute. Its bright, vivid illustrations draw inspiration from Mesoamerican codices and stelae.1

The illustrations, combined with text, provide a rich narrative experience. However, the mixture of text and image can also be confusing, particularly when reading the book for the first time. Characters, especially with names unfamiliar to most readers, can become jumbled and the plot, based in Mesoamerican myths, is also difficult to follow at times.

The central myth retold in Xolo is a reimagining of the Nahua/Mexica story of the recovery of humanity’s bones from Mictlan. After humanity has been destroyed, Mictlantecuhtli, lord of the Underworld, possesses the bones of the dead, and those bones are necessary for humans to live again. Traditionally, Quetzalcoatl is the hero who descends into Mictlan and retrieves them. Higuera reimagines the myth with Xolo, an unlikely hero, at the center of the story.

One of our goals of the institute was to demonstrate to teachers how we can create these experiences of “immediacy” with text that Smith and Wilhelm describe. Part of that experience is reading the text itself. But for many students that’s not enough. How do we shape experiences that help students process and comprehend a text in ways that are vibrant and energizing? The retold myth has a clear narrative filled with action and intrigue, so we decided to have groups share their understanding of the story through performance. Before beginning their performances, groups needed to develop a clear understanding of the key events of the myth. Below I’ll describe the storyboarding process we used and then next week share how we moved from storyboards to high-quality performances.

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In an opinion piece in The New York Times, author Viet Thanh Nguyen describes the concept of narrative plenitude. Narrative plenitude is when so many stories are told about a particular cultural group that no single piece of media or art needs to carry the burden of defining that group. In the case of Greek mythology, students might encounter multiple versions of myths from Percy Jackson to the new film version of The Odyssey to modern retellings such as Madeline Miller’s Circe and The Song of Achilles.

The opposite of narrative plenitude is narrative scarcity: when a particular cultural group has few representations in media. These limited roles then reinforce existing cultural stereotypes.

Viet Thanh Nguyen writes:

I, and most other Asian-Americans, grew up and still live in the opposite of “narrative plenitude.” We live in an economy of narrative scarcity, in which we feel deprived and must fight to tell our own stories and fight against the stories that distort or erase us. Many Americans will take these Asian images — which are usually awful — and transfer them to any Asian-American they encounter.

As educators, we sometimes unintentionally reinforce narrative scarcity in our curriculums. In our efforts to broaden what students read, we might add a book representing a perspective that has traditionally been left out. But a single book can’t represent an entire culture or group of people. Narrative plenitude asks us to think beyond representation toward abundance.

After learning about this concept from my colleague Jon Baricovich, I’ve focused on making narrative plenitude a key idea that drives how I choose texts and other artifacts for learning.

We recently visited the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City. The museum brings together artifacts from Mexico’s Indigenous civilizations—from the Olmec, Zapotec, and Mixtec to the Mexica and Maya—while also presenting the cultures of Indigenous peoples living in Mexico today. As I wandered through the museum’s vast halls, I was struck by how much of this history is left out of our school curriculums. It’s perhaps not just an instance of narrative scarcity, but of narrative omission.

As a quick self-quiz, think about what you know about Zeus, Poseidon, and Athena vs. Quetzalcoatl, Xolotl, and Tlaloc.1

Donna Barbara Higuera’s novel The Last Cuentista is a book we’ve built curricular units around in the past. The protagonist, Petra Peña, carries with her the stories her grandmother Lita told her, keeping them alive as she leaves a destroyed Earth with the few humans chosen to rebuild humanity on another planet. The novel asks us to consider which stories we carry with us—and which stories matter enough to keep telling.

In Higuera’s more recent novel Xolo, she returns to the idea of stories worth telling by reaching back into the myths of Mesoamerica. She reimagines the story of Xolotl and Quetzalcoatl’s journey to recover the bones of humanity, but with a twist—Xolotl, a secondary character in the original myth, becomes the hero instead of Quetzalcoatl.

We centered our Chicago Teacher Institute on Xolo, focusing on the question,

“How do stories travel across time, cultures, and forms?”

During our visit to the Museo Nacional de Antropología we realized just how complicated the histories of Quetzalcoatl and the other Mesoamerican deities are. They change names over time, and even from region to region. They take different forms and serve different purposes. For instance, Quetzalcoatl is closely related to Kukulcán among the Yucatec Maya and Gucumatz among the K’iche’ Maya, while in Central Mexico he is associated with figures such as Ehécatl, the wind god, and Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, the Morning Star.

Many of the world’s origin stories and myths began in oral traditions. The stories that eventually became The Odyssey were told for centuries before the poem took the form that we read in print.

Higuera is then joining in this tradition as she takes a myth that has traveled through centuries and tells her own version of it. In her author’s note, Higuera describes the inspiration for her retelling and the question that drives her book: “But what if Xolotl was the real hero?”

Higuera’s recentering the hero of the story is similar to what we are doing when we bring to the center narratives that have traditionally been omitted from our curriculums.

Mesoamerican myths are a subject I knew very little about. That’s precisely why we decided to build an institute around them. It is up to us, to the best of our abilities, to foster greater narrative plenitude in our classrooms, so our students experience an ever-expanding world of stories and histories.

So how did we build learning experiences around Xolo? Join me here next week to see some of the approaches we used in the Chicago Institute. We have decided to focus next year’s institute in Merida, Mexico around the same text and concept with visits to local archeological sites. To read more and register visit us at hablateacherinstitute.org. Readers of Growing Ideas receive a 10% Institute discount with the promo code GROWIDEAS.

Creating art in all mediums starts in a similar place. As writers we begin by looking at a blank page. Painters face a white canvas. Theater and dance performers see an empty stage. Staring at this emptiness is both intimidating and exhilarating. Intimidating in the sense that we might always ask ourselves: Are we up to the challenge? Will we be able to contribute something worthwhile? And perhaps the toughest question we face is, “Will it be good?”—by our own standards or by others?

At the same time, if we are able, we might also embrace the possibility of what might be. It is a godly act to make something out of nothing—to create. And although we are not gods, just maybe, what we make will contain a spark that might ignite something that makes someone’s life just a little bit better—a reader, a viewer, an audience member.

And so it is with teaching. When we walk into a class for the first time, we are, of course, not facing a blank page. Our students arrive with full and robust lives. They bring their own talents, passions, interests, hopes, and fears.

It’s at this moment that Mary Oliver’s lines from her poem “The Summer Day” always come to mind:

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

We have a precious power as a teacher—we have the ability to decide what we will collectively do with our time together. We must tune out the white noise—a cacophony of standards, district mandates, packaged curricula, the latest educational theories and fads. At the same time, our classrooms don’t exist in isolation. What students take with them must also lift them from where they’ve been and help them with the next steps of their journey which might be Ms. Maria’s classroom next year, college, or the beginning of a work life.

With all these considerations—and sometimes seeming contradictions—we set out as a classroom community to create something extraordinary.

When I enter the classroom (or really any space I’m facilitating), looking at all the faces in the room, I think, “What extraordinary work will we do together?” I don’t think about questions like, “Will you know what a metaphor is when you leave my classroom?” Content is important. It is absolutely necessary for creating exceptional work, but it isn’t the entire journey. The first question we ask might be ,“Tell me, what is it we plan to do with our one wild and precious life?”

Outside of Louisville, we were asked to kick off the year for a middle school. My parents coincidentally live in Louisville so I was staying at their house. My father, a retired public school English teacher, said to me, “I always hated when someone else came from outside to lead a PD day. I’d rather be in my classroom getting things ready for the year.” (Thanks for the inspirational talk, Dad!)

That morning when I left to drive to the school, I thought about what my dad had said. And standing in front of the sixty or so teachers in that middle school, I told them what my dad had said to me and acknowledged that they all probably would rather be in their rooms prepping rather than spending the day with me. I then told them, ‘At the end of the day, my goal is for you to feel that there was nowhere better you could have spent your workday than right here, together in this room.’

Our students’ lives—their time here on earth—our time here on earth, is precious. We certainly can’t make every experience we have in our classroom extraordinary. I’m sure some of those teachers near Louisville, at the end of the day, still wished they would have had the time to prep in their rooms. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t try every day to bring a little magic to our experiences together. I hope when someone leaves my classroom they feel a little bit taller. I hope they feel inspired, and I hope they feel like the time we spent together was well worth it—perhaps even precious.

As a child I often visited my father’s high school English classroom. The most striking thing about his room was his bulletin board. In my elementary school in Indiana, I was used to seeing bulletin boards decorated by the teachers. Before the opening of school they painstakingly prepared a beautifully laid out design with lettering and pictures, perhaps around a particular theme. My father’s bulletin board was different. He let the students bring in practically anything they wanted and hang it—there were layers upon layers of cartoons, comic book characters, and poems. It was a mess, but it was theirs.

Wanda Lincoln, a retired educator, in a speech to elementary school teachers said, “When we as teachers make sure the room is perfect at the beginning of the school year, we are sending the message that the classroom is ours, not the students.” She encouraged teachers, “Begin with walls that are blank—nothing on them at all!” Educator Tom Rademacher echoes this idea when he writes:

I’ve just never wanted my classroom to feel like my space. A classroom, in so many ways, is something that a teacher and students build together.

When we were asked to visit 6th grade classrooms in the Everett Public Schools in Massachusetts to model what an arts-integrated class might look like we thought about the question, “How can we help students visually transform the classroom?” I partnered with one of our then creative director at Habla, visual artist Tommaso Iskra De Silvestri to design the following mask-making workshop in response.

The Black Panther

Immediately before our visit the Marvel movie The Black Panther had just released. We looked at an image of the Black Panther (his first appearance in comic books in 1966) and asked the students what they know or might guess about his characteristics. They answered “powerful, stealthy, quiet, fierce, noble, aggressive.” We then asked how these characteristics were expressed by his mask and costume.

After considering a few other superheroes in the same way we looked at masks from various contexts including the wrestling sport Lucha Libre. For example, the wrestler Volador Jr.’s mask with wings images might symbolize his ability to fly across the ring at his opponent.

Our guiding question for the day was“How do masks both hide and reveal us?” meaning that as the students created masks, they could make them completely from their imagination. Their masks might reveal aspects of their true personality, reveal who their superhero personality is, or some combination of both.

Kennings

We knew if we simply asked the students to create a “superhero” masks we would get many masks derivative of today’s heroes. We needed to find a way to move students to a more poetic and symbolic way of imagining their masks.

I first learned about kennings from Boston-area artist and educator Regie Gibson. Regie had teachers create Kennings that related to their personal identities. Defined by the dictionary, a kenning is:

a compound expression in Old English and Old Norse poetry with metaphorical meaning, e.g., oar-steed = ship.

Examples of kennings (students loved guessing these—find even more here):

• storm of spears—battle

• forest walker—bear

• land bones—rocks

• arm serpent—bracelet

• head forest—hair

• tongue land—mouth

Students began by brainstorming their own word bank of nouns and verbs. When their papers were filled, they practiced at combining two words to create a kenning representing themselves. In order to create a kenning, we reviewed how to add the suffix “ing” on to a verb to form an adjective (or adjectival participle to use the formal term). We also looked at how verbs can be transformed into nouns by adding the suffix “er.” Without any formal grammar lesson, students naturally began manipulating, transforming, and combining words.

Some of the examples students came up with are:

• Panda Sleeper

• Laughing Kitty

• Jumping Singer

• Reading Wolf

• Breathing Books

• Exclaiming Pencil

Mask-Making Introduction

We were inspired by Chicago teaching artist Cynthia Weiss’s workshop on mask-making and the book think and make like an artist.

We demonstrated how to simply fold a paper in half, and like Matisse, begin “drawing with scissors.”2 When the paper is opened it reveals the first layer of a mask. We then cut up more paper in a similar manner and added layers on to the first. We showed how scraps from the table could be added to the masks for three dimensions.

To create three-dimensional masks, students added layers of additional symmetrical designs. They also glued on scraps left behind after the initial cuttings.

Transforming the Classroom

After finishing the masks we gathered in a circle and each student presented their mask with their kenning. With each class we asked the students to look around the room to decide the best place to exhibit their work. You can see from the images the different choices the students made.

The image above of the lockers is the best example of how we might rethink our classroom spaces. Before, the teacher put an owl on each students’ locker and in the teacher’s handwriting wrote their name. Instead might students decorate their lockers with images that represent themselves and share some aspect of their identity with the larger community. We can also see the inspirational posters above the lockers starting to be replaced by the students own art-making.

Schools are big. Blank walls are everywhere. We can teach in institutional spaces, or, with the help of our students, transform them into beautiful, magical places to learn. In doing so, we show students that these spaces belong to all of us and that they too can “contribute a verse.”

This mask-making project was made possible with the support of Eileen Mackin and SmART Schools, an arts-integration organization based in New England, and in partnership with the Everett Public Schools.

Resources

Before you Decorate Your Classroom. Here’s a Better Idea.

Read Tom Rademacher’s ONE WORD WALL idea here and his overall take on ways to “Show my students that this classroom is theirs, that they are welcomed and affirmed here”

Now Spinning

We can transform spaces through sound as well. Read Adrian’s Newsletter article, Now Spinning, about how he sets up listening experiences with his students.

Designing Your Pre-K Classroom for Deeper Learning

Reggio Emilia, the pre-school program in Italy, is an inspiration for transforming spaces at any grade level. This article by Abby Bucher highlights some important considerations.

Beautiful Work

Ron Berger in this short article encapsulates how important it is for students to intrinsically care about the work they do in schools and how we foster environments that encourage and honor students’ creation of “beautiful work.”

To effectively “read” a text we need to both decode the words on the page and understand what those words mean. For instance, since Spanish is a second language for me, I might be able to read a page of Don Quixote in Spanish getting most of the pronunciation right, but I would understand very little of the meaning behind the words (and I’d probably struggle with much of the vocabulary).1

When I’m working with a text in the classroom, I’m thinking about these two questions.

1. How will we first read the text?

2. How will we deepen our understanding of the text?

The first question explores how students will first encounter the text. Perhaps they will read it at home to themselves as homework. The teacher might read the book aloud to the class. Pairs might read it back and forth to each other. During this time, we know students will reach varying levels of understanding depending on their reading abilities. In the daily life of schooling, it’s at this stage that I think we mistakenly build in assessments of student learning. Middle or high school students might be assigned a chapter of a book at night and then return to class to be greeted by the dreaded “pop quiz.”

Instead we might think about how we might help all students reach a deep understanding of the text. This will obviously vary by age group, reading level, and language proficiency. When I taught English language learners, we would need to first work through the text at the word and sentence level, defining difficult vocabulary and practicing pronunciation before we were able to get to the deeper meaning behind the words. Once we achieved an understanding of the text at the surface level, we were then able to have the more complex conversations about the meanings within the text and how they related to our own “lived worlds and perceptual realities,”2 to quote philosopher Maxine Greene.

Last week in Bend, Oregon, we led a professional development day kicking off the school year for North Star Elementary School. The session was about how we approach teaching topics and texts that are different from our own cultural backgrounds. The day was titled Imagining Mexico based on a quote by writer Carlos Fuentes3:

I am Mexican by will and by imagination.

With imagination as a guiding idea, we decided to build the day (and the curriculum we’re developing for elementary school social studies) around specific artists from Mexico and the concept of portraiture. Our guiding question was, “How does art show who we are?”

We began by looking at portraits by Frida Kahlo and then read the book Frida and her Animalitos by Monica Brown and John Parra.

To read the text out loud, we performed a “Wild Reading” of the text involving choral and back-and-forth reading as well as three-part movement animal performances. It was certainly wild and engaging, but as mentioned above, a lively reading doesn’t necessarily show actual comprehension of the text.

Character Portraits

To comprehend the text, we first asked participants to write (or draw) “Frida” on a post-it note in the center of the table. Then, in small groups, participants constructed a “word portrait” of Frida with evidence from the text.

Here were the instructions:

I explained how important it is for students to return to the text to find evidence—hence the importance of using actual quotes from the text. What I loved seeing was how participants had the actual books in hand and were flipping pages, rereading passages, and discussing what the text revealed about Frida. The overall activity took about fifteen minutes. In a classroom, after completing this group activity, students might be asked to write a character portrait using evidence from the text.

Although this was aimed at younger students, it would work equally well for secondary-level students even when working with longer novels, short stories, or plays.

Reading a text once is just the beginning. After initially reading the text, students need to return to it, spend time with it, and discover meanings they may not have noticed on an initial reading. This is what I’ve previously described in Tip of the Iceberg. Vocabulary, decoding, and even basic narrative understanding are the beginning of the journey.

Character Portrait Process

1. Choose a character. Write the character’s name, create a symbol, or draw a sketch on a Post-it note placed in the center of the table.

2. Return to the text. In small groups, have students reread and find words, phrases, or passages that reveal something important about the character.

3. Build a word portrait. Around the character’s name, students add qualities they notice along with quotations from the text that support their thinking.

4. Share and discuss. Groups present their portraits, explaining what they discovered about the character and pointing to the textual evidence that led them there.

Bonus: How Far I Hope We’ve Come

A profound discussion with Henry Winkler— a window into where we were in literacy understanding in the 50s/60s.

Schoolishness is a term coined by Professor Susan Blum that she defines as “educational practices that emphasize packaged ‘learning,’ unimaginative teaching, uniformity, constant evaluation by others, arbitrary forms, predetermined time, and artificial boundaries.” When I first learned about this term from Adrian Neibauer’s article Scutwork, it seemed to perfectly capture the teaching and learning experiences I’m always seeking to avoid—tasks we give to students simply because that’s what’s always been done in schools: worksheets, multiple-choice tests, having everyone around the room “report out,” writing a response paper after reading a book.

Instead, when we’re introducing an activity in the classroom, one question we always ask is “Is it authentic?” My colleagues at the Habla Teacher Institute, Cynthia Weiss and Tommaso Iskra de Silvestri, always root their visual arts teaching in real-world models. For instance, in Mexico when we teach photographic portraiture to students, we introduce them to Mexican photographers Flor Garduño, Graciela Iturbide, and Juan Rulfo.

By showing students model photographs, we give them a much richer visual vocabulary to draw from when they take their own photographs, rooting their own work in an authentic tradition of photographers who came before them.

Authentic Models

Because I often lead theatre and performance activities, the challenge for me is how to build these experiences from authentic theatrical practices. There are many theatre games and activities that have been passed from educator to educator. Even though students are moving, I’ve found these activities often lack purpose and meaning in much the same way as traditional “busy work” in the classroom. When I lead performance activities, I try to root them in actual theatre practices. Since the models for theatre are, well, in the theatre, this has often been a challenge in the classroom.

I recently watched David Byrne’s performance of American Utopia directed by Spike Lee on HBO. For this year’s Institute, It occurred to me that Byrne’s staging would be an ideal model to stage performances in the classroom.

There were several elements of American Utopia that caught my attention.

A) Sound. The instruments are on the stage and the musicians are part of the choreography. Byrne actually has a song in which he introduces every musician and each one begins playing their instrument until, after all are introduced, they launch into the song, “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On).”1

B) Text. Byrne and his band are performing a range of songs and Byrne often comments on various topics. Of course we’d expect him to share his music, but what caught my attention was how seamlessly the words of the song, the choreography on stage, and the music all formed a unique whole.

C) Dance. Although the entire cast, musicians and all, are part of the choreography, there are two primary dancers who are often performing their own choreography. It was actually these dancers that inspired the activity I describe below.

All of these elements—sound, text, and movement—would be incorporated into our final performance. At the beginning of the week I was laying the foundation for each of these in the approaches we were using for entering text. I’ve previously described how we entered text by performing portions of the text itself and how we entered the text through the sounds of words.

Taking inspiration from David Byrne’s dancers, here is the process we used to combine text and movement.

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1. situating the text in a historical and sociological context

2. introducing the author

3. teaching critical content necessary for understanding the text

4. introducing key vocabulary, phrases, or sentences

As I mentioned in a previous post, one of my favorite techniques for entering text is working with phrases and words before reading, as a way to help students become fluent with difficult vocabulary.

Each day of the institute we entered the focal text of the day through a different modality. On the first day we used Story Nuggets with small groups vocally performing a small portion of text. On the second day we piloted a new approach for entering text by vocally playing with the sounds of words. On the third day we created a three-part movement to introduce the text. The following process describes the second day’s approach—layering words and phrases on top of each other.

Layered Symphony with Words

Although we’ve orchestrated text and sound before (see the Symphony of Words activity), Darío Bernal Villegas, an improvisational musician from Mexico City, employed a multilayered approach to generating sounds from words. Darío has his own improvisation band in Mexico City, 7 Perros, and tours with Diego Luna creating found sounds behind his live theatrical performances and his Pan y Circo series on Amazon.

Darío is one of the most wildly creative people I know. When we work together he is always pushing the boundaries to create something new and to make the experience transformative for everyone in the room. This was certainly the case for the activity I’ll describe below.

The Lost Spells

On the second day we shifted to a different text by Robert Macfarlane, The Lost Spells.

Similar to the structure of The Lost Words, our focal book for day one, the preface to The Lost Spells framed the focus of a trip we would take later that morning to a beach ecosystem on the Gulf of Mexico.

This is a book of spells to be spoken
aloud. It tells its stories and sings its
songs in paint and word. Here you
will find incantations and summoning charms,
spells that protect and spells that protest,
tongue-twisters, blessings, lullabies and psalms.
Here you might swoop with a swallow, follow
a seal through the sea or sky-race with swifts.
Here you can listen with owl ears and watch
with the eyes of an oak. Here a fox might
witch into your mind, or flocks of moths may
lift from the page to fill the air.

Loss is the tune of our age, hard to miss and
hard to bear. Creatures, places and words
disappear, day after day, year on year. But
there has always been singing in dark times—
and wonder is needed now more than ever.
‘To enchant’ means both to make magic and to
sing out. So let these spells ring far and wide;
speak their words and seek their art, let the wild
world into your eyes, your voice, your heart.

The Process

1. Prepare words and phrases. He first decided on the words and phrases he would use. Each table of about six participants was given a different phrase from the text in English or Spanish (here are the words and phrases he selected to work with).

2. One word per table. In addition to the phrase, Darío then gave a word to each table. He turned the word into a rhythm and asked each table to repeat the rhythm, creating a foundational sound. For instance, he said the word “owl” to a table, then directed them in the repeated sound, “ooooooooooooowl, oooooooooowl, ooooooowl . . .”

3. One phrase per table. He then gave each table a sentence from the text on a slip of paper. Each table practiced reading their sentence at the same time, in chorus.

   For instance, one table received the line, “To ‘enchant’ means both to make magic and to sing out.”

4. The Word Symphony. Directing from the front of the room, groups at tables would either continually repeat the sound of their word or read their entire phrase. It’s easier to witness in action in the video below. You’ll also hear a mixing of Spanish and English since half the groups received words/phrases in one language or the other.

From Mérida to Chicago

The following week we were leading a teacher institute in Chicago focused on the book Xolo by Donna Barba Higuera. Higuera retells the Mexica story of Quetzalcoatl retrieving the bones of humans from the deity Mictlantecuhtli. As you might imagine, many of us had difficulty pronouncing the names of the Aztec gods, even if we spoke Spanish, since the names are in Nahuatl. Darío showed the names of the gods on a slide and led us in a similar exercise of repeating sounds from the parts of the names. The repeated experiences with the vowels and consonants of the words helped us to remember them and pronounce them correctly. Many phonics programs are methodical in their approach, but miss emphasizing the beauty of the language. We repeat, but we don’t have the opportunity to create. After witnessing Darío’s approach to singing and composing with the sounds of words, I believe we can do much better with how we help students learn and fall in love with language.

Epilogue

Later that morning in Mérida, we used the following phrase from The Lost Spells to frame our visit to the beach:

speak their words and seek their art, let the wild
world into your eyes, your voice, your heart.

We captured images, sounds, and words at the beach and used those to compose a soundscape of place and an exhibition of close observation.

In this series of articles I’m sharing approaches, activities, and reflections from the Habla Teacher Institute in Mérida, Mexico. Previous posts include One Word Beginnings and Story Nuggets.

For every text we read at the Teacher Institute, we first engaged in what we call an “entering text” activity. With Story Nuggets we gave participants a small portion of text to immediately bring to life through performance. Later in the institute we also used sound and movement to enter text (Stay tuned for these practices that were piloted by improvisational musician Darío Bernal Villegas and dance educator Liz Lerman). It’s important to note that these approaches are ways of introducing the text, and that they should be followed by deep reading experiences, like Marking Up Text and Tip of the Iceberg. This week’s post describes an approach to discussing text that we call Building Conversations.

How Building Conversations Evolved

Early on in my teaching career I learned about “protocols” with various purposes— offering supportive feedback on student work, brainstorming ideas around a student-project, or structuring “talk” in the classroom. Many of these protocols were developed by educators working at organizations like the Coalition of Essential Schools, the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, Harvard's Project Zero, and the National School Reform Faculty. When I was in graduate school I would often sneak into sessions and conferences led by these organizations (all based in the Boston/Providence area) and absorb as many of these practices as I could.

My first job after graduate school was at Souhegan High School in Amherst, NH. The faculty and administrators at the school were exceptional, and the PD sessions were faculty-led. They used protocols to structure almost every PD experience for the faculty.

Although I have a great appreciation for protocols, I often feel like there is too much structure. As I've adapted them for my own PD sessions and classrooms, I find that I'm always simplifying them—taking steps out—making them as clean and streamlined as possible.

One of my favorite protocols has roots in The Microlab Protocol I learned from my colleague Tina Blythe from Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I’ve used the original Microlab Protocol to develop the following structure, Building Conversations.

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Teaching Shakespeare

Twenty years ago, Mary Hartman from the theater group, Shakespeare and Co. in Berkshire, MA led a professional development workshop for me and a group of fellow teachers. At the time we had just started The ArtsLiteracy Project in the Education Department at Brown University—we were learning how various organizations, theaters, and schools were integrating theater, dance, and movement into more traditional education settings.

Shakespeare and Co. founded their education programs in 1978 with the goal of “immersing students in the world of Shakespeare and classical theater in active, engaging, and personally meaningful ways.” We often think Shakespeare should only be taught in high school with the idea that Elizabethan language is too difficult for elementary school students. Shakespeare and Co. introduces the youngest of students to Shakespeare, not by giving them an entire play, but by offering phrases and asking students to embody the phrases vocally and physically.

Their approach is similar with older students. They placed us into small groups and gave each group a monologue from Othello (this is before we did anything else with the play). The instructions were “collaboratively bring it to life.”

As an English teacher who had spent many hours with Shakespeare in various settings, this approach was a complete paradigm shift for me. There was no formal “lecture” introducing us to his work. There was no orientation to the play. We began right in the middle of the play with a monologue bringing it to life. It taught me that sometimes it is better to begin with “doing” rather than “saying.”

Story Nuggets: Introduction

With Shakespeare and Co.’s work as inspiration we expanded their approach to use with all texts at all grade levels. If I had to choose a “desert island” practice it might be this one. It’s incredibly versatile, engaging, and immediately immerses students in the focal text. I usually lead it before we read the full text, but I’ve also used it as a post-reading experience as well.

It’s important to note that this doesn’t replace a deep reading and discussion of the text. As I mentioned in my previous post, One Word Beginnings, our anchor text for the institute is The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane. I divided up his opening essay into four parts and took participants through the following process. I’ve attached the full essay in English and Spanish below and having led Story Nuggets for many years with different texts, I’ve also included a variety of slides that show the different guidelines I’ve given when working with diverse texts from elementary to university level.

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This year we are shifting our lens to consider “What is the role of analog experiences in the classroom?” This question is primarily inspired by the book The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and illustrated by Jackie Morris.

Macfarlane was inspired to write this book when the 2007 Oxford Junior Dictionary omitted many words describing our natural world and added words mostly about technology. The 2007 and 2012 editions omitted the words blackberry, almond, cauliflower, and chestnut and added the words paste, broadband, and ironically anlalogue to give just a few examples.

A group of writers including Macfarlane and Margaret Atwood wrote a letter in 2015 to the Oxford University Press asking that the “many words associated with nature and the countryside” be reinstated in the next edition. They point out the decline of our children’s experiences in the natural world:

This is not just a romantic desire to reflect the rosy memories of our own childhoods onto today’s youngsters. There is a shocking, proven connection between the decline in natural play and the decline in children’s wellbeing. Compared with a generation ago, when 40% of children regularly played in natural areas, now only 10% do so, while another 40% never play anywhere outdoors. Ever. Obesity, anti-social behaviour, friendlessness and fear are the known consequences. The physical fitness of children is declining by 9% per decade, according to Public Health England.

Keep in mind that the research they are referencing is a 2009 study by Natural England—Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite and even Instagram didn’t yet exist.

In his book, Macfarlane selects a word that was omitted, for instance “willow,” and writes an acrostic poem for each accompanied by a stunning illustration by Jackie Morris.

The Lost Words begins with an introduction featured in the image below. (I’ve included the full text in a footnote in case you can’t read the words in the image)1

We’re beginning the institute in five days from when I’m writing this. I’ll take you through the process here of how we begin to think about “conjuring back these lost words.” We’re all still enjoying our summer so no need to think about those first days of school yet, but if you find something interesting in here I hope it will serve as inspiration for the start of your school year.

Open Doors

Before we actually begin the morning session there are some fundamental structures we put in place to welcome all the participants.

a. A welcoming space. Teachers will be joining us from all over the world. Many will be in our city, Mérida, for the first time. We want everyone to know our school is an open, safe, and inclusive space. We’ll do this first by greeting everyone who comes into the building. I visited an elementary school that had designated greeters. They would wear a sign that indicated different types of greetings. An incoming student would point to the greeting they were most comfortable with and they would exchange the chosen greeting with the teacher. Making sure every person feels welcomed is something that stuck with me after watching this school’s greeters warmly acknowledge every student walking through the doorway.

b. Food. As soon as participants enter the space they will see a buffet of breakfast foods. Just as with our students, we know if they are hungry there is not much else they will be thinking about (and with the adults we also assure a steady stream of coffee throughout the morning.)

c. Clear roadmap. Entering a new space with strangers can always be difficult, and anxiety-provoking for some. When I have a new group of people in the room I always like to let them know where we are heading— what each day will look like, who will be presenting, what time we are eating lunch, and what the end product of our work might look like (knowing that it will change with the dynamics of each group.) For the study of women’s suffrage I wrote about in a previous post, we might explain that, yes, we’ll be studying how women fought for the right to vote in England and the United States, but we’ll also be designing and building a parade of our own by the end of the unit.

For this institute we’ll introduce them to many of the ideas I’ve previously discussed:

• Core Text. Our focus will be on the book The Lost Words

• Essential Question/Concept. What is worth remembering and holding onto?

• Exhibition. We’ll create a visual art exhibit and performance of “found words” inspired by the various texts we’ll read through the institute.

Opening Experience: One Word

The first step we’ll take in “conjuring lost words” is a new activity we developed, One Word. At the beginning of the session the first priority is on participants meeting each other. Last year we used the Rapid Bios activity we developed for introductions that move beyond the typical “My name is, I’m from.” In institutes past we’ve also asked people to share their name and the story behind it.

For this institute, since we are focusing on words that have been lost, we’ll reverse that idea of lost words and ask everyone to identify one word they want to keep, a word that holds a special memory for them. The prompt will be: “Imagine that there is a dictionary that no longer holds a word that matters deeply to you. It might be a word from your family, in your work, or a word that holds cultural significance for you, or reminds you of a special time in your life. The word can be in any language.”

As my own example, I’ll offer the Portuguese word saudade to the group. I learned this word when I was working in Brazil and became close with a family. The word, which combines a sense of longing with both joy and sadness, speaks to me as I remember my time there.

We’ll take participants through the following process:

1. Individual reflection. Choose a word you never want to lose—you want to keep with you forever. Presenters introduce themselves by each offering their word and telling the story behind it. Participants have a few minutes to write some thoughts down.

2. Sharing in small groups. In a small group of 5, participants will introduce themselves, share their word, and their story.

3. Further sharing in trios. To mix the room up, everyone will stand and gather in trios, sharing again with a new group.

4. Bringing it full circle. The entire room (of about 30 people) will gather in a circle near the edge of the room. I’ll have them turn their backs to the center (I learned this technique from dancer Lida Winfield—by turning your back to the circle, facing outwards, you create your own movement space out of sight of others). They will all say their word out loud at once. Then they will think of a full-body movement that matches their word. With their backs still to each other they will embody their word in movement. I’ll likely encourage them to “make it larger using your whole body” given that it is our first morning together. We’ll then all practice the movements at once, combining both the word spoken aloud with the movement.

5. Sound and Movement Circle. We’ll then move around the room with each person speaking their word synchronized to their movement. The rest of the group will “echo” the person’s sound and movement. I’ve found that this echoing by the whole group creates a feeling that we are all in this together—it almost immediately offers a shared sense of community.

This opening sequence will take around 45 minutes. By the end of it folks will have met at least nine new people. I've used Sound and Movement many times in past workshops, sometimes using words selected from texts and sometimes using words generated by students. Combining it with One Word will, I hope, create a powerful opening. If you’re reading this in the future, after I’ve led this activity, you’ll find images and videos of what it looked like in action.

The next post will feature ways we approach Macfarlane’s text. Stay tuned for more missives from the Habla Teacher Institute and we hope you can join us someday.

One Word in Action

You’ll see from the photos below that we expanded the activity above by “finding and writing the story of the word.”

1. Initial reflection and writing

After setting up the activity, participants took notes on possible words to share.

2. Sharing in small groups

They then shared their words in groups of three or four.

3. Choosing one word and writing the story of the word

Each person to time to write the complete story of the word (we modeled stories of our words first.)

4. Storytelling in pairs

You’ll see that we are often not sitting in seats for too long. Everyone stood up, found a partner, and then shared their words and stories.

5. Sound and movement with one word

The group gathered in circle and combined movements with their words. We first said our words together as an entire group. Then turned our backs to the middle of the circle and practiced our gestures (I asked them then to make them 50%-73% larger and practice a second time). We turned back facing the circle and performed our gestures and word at the same time. Finally each person performed their word and movement around the circle and the rest of the group echoed. The total process took less than 10 minutes.

After quite the morning we had the traditional Yucatecan cochinita for lunch and everyone enjoyed marquesitas from the food truck for dessert.

Resources

What is your favorite word?

We used this video (in Spanish) to help inspire students to come up with their own favorite words. Isabel Allende and Shakira’s comments are wonderful. Here are the English translations to a few we featured.

Morning Greeting Signs

There are morning greetings available with a quick search online. I found this template on Canva that can be customized and changed based on the day/week.

Chega de Saudade by Tom Jobim.

Chega de Saudade is often referred to as the first bossa nova song ever written. The song features music by Tom Jobim and lyrics by Vinícius de Moraes, one of Brazil’s most famous lyricists.

A beautiful version by Yo-Yo Ma and Rosa Passos

Turning our attention to Mexico today seems appropriate since the World Cup opens in Mexico City in just a few hours.

At the end of July, Habla, our education center in Mérida, Mexico, will host its 18th annual Habla Teacher Institute, a week-long experience for educators from around the world.

Over nearly two decades of leading institutes, we've learned many lessons about designing meaningful learning experiences. One of the most important has been about reflection.

Before, we reflected on the day’s experiences at the end of the day, because that seemed logical. The word “reflection” comes from the Latin word reflectere, which means to “bend backwards” or “curve.” The word was usually used in the context of light or heat bouncing off of a surface.

It makes sense then that we reflect at the end of the day, shining the light backwards on the day’s experience. The problem is—everyone is tired at the end of the day. Participants are thinking about heading to the beach or the pool, not engaging in a deep conversation about their learning.

We’ve found reflection is exponentially improved at the beginning of the day. At 9 a.m. when participants enter the Institute, they grab a cup of coffee, some pan dulce, sit down at a table, and begin working.

We've also learned that reflection becomes more powerful when it moves beyond words.

One day we led a workshop creating visual art from cut paper. As we were cleaning up the project at the end of the day, we thought, “let’s leave the scraps on the table and let the participants use them in the morning for their reflections.”

The next morning we encouraged the use of “drawings, doodles, and scraps” in their reflections. That experiment became the beginning of the activity we now call Artful Reflection.

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We can’t take for granted that students will intrinsically want to learn the content. I think this is particularly true for older students, as the late Ken Robinson famously noted, schools often kill creativity and curiosity. After years of “receiving” content in schools—more content, more stuff to learn, more tests are simply more ways to go through the routine of “doing school.”

My ongoing quest has been to find ways to break this routine; to find ways to show students that, at least in this classroom (and we hope in this grade-level and even in this school), this is not “business as usual.”

Finding the Concept

When we were reading How Women Won the Right to Vote: Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and Their Big Idea, we were looking for that larger concept to draw students in.

First of all the book is rich in content. It tells the story of Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, as well as other suffragists, and positions them in the larger suffragist movement. The book is filled with information including a rich appendix with sources, resources, and a timeline.

I mentioned in my last post, What Makes a Book Worth Teaching?, how sometimes the concept for the unit—the big idea—is right there on the surface, and, well, surprisingly, in this book, it’s in the chapter titled, “The Big Idea.”

The author writes:

Alice told Lucy her big idea: It’s time to take our fight to Washington.
It’s time to demand a federal amendment to the Constitution.
It’s time to guarantee and protect a woman’s right to vote once and for all.
It’s time for a —

Parade!

A double-page spread in the book then lays out the “THINGS A SUFFRAGE PARADE NEEDS.”

Over half of the book is dedicated to the planning of the parade and the day of the parade itself.

The 4th grade teaching team at North Star Elementary School in Bend, Oregon and I were working on developing a unit on the 19th Amendment and the suffragist movement. We discussed what it would take for the students to plan a parade themselves, using the suffragist parade as inspiration. We looked at the planning pages pictured above and imagined students selecting their own parade headquarters, organizing a committee and seeking community volunteers. We even discussed Inez Milholland who led the parade on a white horse—what form would the students’ grand marshal take?

Planning a Parade

One of the most challenging aspects of designing the parade was actually figuring out what the parade would be about. The women’s suffragist parade resulted from an immediate need in a particular historical context—years of diligent advocacy led up to the event itself. Asking students what issues they want to take action on can be difficult because it often leads to a familiar set of topics. I’ve seen many project-based units on “taking social action” that are often about the same issues—trash in the community, pets in the streets, the need for recycling, saving endangered species. It’s not that these issues aren’t important, but what I’ve witnessed is often these projects lack depth. Students quickly embrace the issue for the sake of the assignment, and then put together a quick presentation or poster board with images cut and pasted from the internet.

One of the ways the teachers and students addressed this challenge was by reframing the question. Rather than organizing a parade around a problem—such as ocean pollution—they chose to celebrate the world's oceans in all their wonder and majesty. By focusing on the positive, they hoped to inspire others to take better care of the world’s resources. From this idea, the students researched a range of ocean-related issues and studied the animals they would feature in the parade. They then composed speeches that demonstrated their understanding of the issues.

Drawing inspiration from both the book and the Women’s Suffrage Parade, the students designed their own parade with the following elements:

1. Advocacy Speeches. Throughout the parade different students took the bullhorn and delivered a speech explaining the reasons behind the students’ march as well as educating the visitors on key aspects of marine life.

2. A Herald on a Horse. Well, rather than a horse, after all this is ocean animals, the students chose a right whale as their herald. One student who was particularly passionate about right whales also decided to make a poster that accompanied the parade’s “grand marshal.”

3. A Pageant. The Women’s Suffrage Parade in 1913 enlisted “pageant designer,” Hazel Makye, who was a “professional theater dramatist.” During the parade she would “stage a pageant that celebrated the ideals of American democracy.” The 4th graders also elected a “pageant group” that staged a performance to open the parade. The students also noted the costumes and colors that were used during the suffragist parade and they wore matching shirts that symbolized the ocean.

4. Signs. On the page “THINGS A SUFFRAGE PARADE” needs it mentions the importance of signs, “The parade would begin with the women’s demand for a federal suffrage amendment.” So, too, the students made a series of signs they carried. The signs also became inspiration for chants that were shouted along the parade route.

5. Floats. The students wanted to make full-scale floats. Given the time and resources available, they scaled their vision down. Instead they built puppets in the style of Bread and Puppet Theater, made from paper mâché and wood. They then recreated a “float” of ocean wildlife using blue cloth and the puppets.

6. Music. Music was an integral part of the Women’s Suffrage Parade that included nine separate bands. Sean Micken, the husband of 4th grade teacher Erin Micken, volunteered his time to lead the students in a drum corps that accompanied the parade. Listen to the background drums in this short video:

Reflecting on the Experience

Later, after the parade, the teachers used the idea of Stephen Hawking’s blackboard that I had mentioned previously in the article Research Boards. The students’ 4th grade teacher Erin sent me an email after I’d returned home:

Thank you for the great idea for the parade reflection based on Stephen Hawking's blackboard. We did that yesterday and it was awesome! Here it is if you want to take a look!

She had them analyze Stephen Hawking’s blackboard asking, What do you notice? What do you wonder?

Then the students did a 4-Square Brainstorming exercise reflecting on the four areas:

• What you learned?

• What was hard?

• What was fun?

• Which characteristics are needed to be successful?

Finally the class made their own Stephen Hawking board answering the question:

How can you pass on your “parade genius” to next year’s 4th graders?

Rites of Passage

This was North Star’s first attempt at a 4th grade parade. I love that this may become a yearly ritual, something next year’s class will look forward to and begin planning as soon as they enter the classroom. The parade has already become part of the school’s culture—a shared experience passed on from one 4th grade to the next. And to think that all of it was inspired by one page, of one children’s book.

The Women’s Suffragist Unit and parade were designed and led by North Star Elementary 4th grade teachers Erin Micken and Elizabeth Broadbent, instructional assistant Gwyn Bell, and North Star’s 4th grade students. Special thanks as well to Dr. Shelley Berman for bringing us all together and for continuing to champion innovative approaches to social studies instruction. Finally, much gratitude to the school’s principal, Beth Martin, for supporting both teachers and students in thinking beyond the metaphorical—and literal—classroom walls.

Resources

1. She Was More Than Just a ‘Most Beautiful Suffragist.

Regarding the photograph above, The New York Times writes, “For her series Standing Together: Photographs of Inez Milholland’s Final Campaign for Woman’s Suffrage, 2016–2020, the artist Jeanine Michna-Bales recreated Milholland’s 1916 journey West by staging historical re-enactments and capturing the landscape. Transitioning, above, metaphorically depicts Milholland’s shift from life to “whatever comes next.”

2. Do Schools Kill Creativity?

With 24 million views you’ve probably already seen this, but since I mention it in the article, here it is just in case you haven’t.

Part of our work in Bend, Oregon is piloting a new social studies curriculum, one that we are co-creating with the teachers. At the 4th grade level, the students study the 19th Amendment and the women’s suffrage movement in the U.S. and England. Many of the topics, like this one, I would say aren’t immediately engaging to students of this age—religious freedom, women’s suffrage, child labor laws—so much of our work is finding the texts that best present the content, and then finding ways to teach the texts in ways that captivate the students.

Finding the Right Book

The principal of the school, Beth Martin, often asks me how I choose the books to use in curriculums, workshops, or classrooms. Over the years I’ve internalized several criteria which include art, story, content, and concept.

1. Art and Illustrations

For children’s books I first look at the art and graphic design. Art is, of course, subjective, so it’s kind of a gut call whether the book is visually appealing or not. If the illustrations feel like they were made “for educational purposes” or the book feels overly dated we put it aside. For instance, we decided not to use this book, Tools, that is an anchor text in the EL curriculum. Not only are the photographs dated, but many of them aren’t culturally appropriate.

Art and graphic design do matter. When I first began teaching high school English, I remember having conversations with my colleague in the English department, John Hanlon. When we chose which books to purchase for the school, we looked at the cover, the font, the quality of pages—the book as object itself was important (I remember we chose the Vintage edition of many books back in the 90s).

When we offer students books with compelling illustrations, like those of Rafael López, we send the message that the book itself does matter.

2. Story

It may seem obvious that the story the book tells is important, but it’s remarkable how many children’s story books have no narrative at all. The ones I quickly dismiss are books that seem overly didactic. Books like the following:

I certainly agree that themes like friendship, community, and diversity are important, I just don’t want to spend time in the classroom on decontextualized themes.

When I’m looking for books I try to see through the eyes of students at that age. Many children’s books seem to not be written with the kids in mind. There are other authors that are masters at connecting to the lived worlds of children—writers like Mo Willems, Oliver Jeffers, Jon Klassen, and Jacqueline Woodson.

3. Perspective

In all the books I select I want them to tell stories both through art and text in different ways, representing different perspectives, and ways of seeing the world. I could have used the word “diversity” of authors here, but I think perspective encompasses more possibility in what might be achieved in book form. Perspective includes stories told by a wide range of storytellers from different age groups, orientations, and cultures. Perspective also includes new ways of seeing the form of the book itself—with characters breaking the 4th wall speaking directly to the reader or picture books with no pictures.

4. Content

When teaching a subject other than Language Arts, I ensure the book dives deeply into the content that I want students to know. This may seem obvious, but in working with schools, I’m often shocked by how many books based on a particular subject area have very little content in them, even books chosen for for often adopted curriculums.

When we built a unit around the “lifecycle of the bee” I read dozens of children’s books about bees. Few of them actually communicated very much about the biology of the bees themselves. I’ve seen this with books about nearly every subject, but particularly in units focusing on weather, oceans, and outer space.

The perfect book combines all three elements: illustration, story, and content. For instance the book we did use as our core text in the bee unit, Honeybee, by Candace Fleming and Eric Rohmann tells the story of honeybee from birth to death. The illustrations are beautiful and each page describes an aspect of a bee’s life.

5. Concept

All of the above might make the book suitable for a read aloud, or serve an anchor text for teaching the content, but the real magic happens when a book resonates at a conceptual level. As I read, I look for elements of the book that will offer a conceptual centerpiece to build an experience for the classroom community. This is probably my “purple pedagogy” as described in my post a few weeks ago. In addition to education, my academic background is in both the study of literature and in theater production. As a theater director, when we read a play, we’re looking for the big idea that will guide the conceptual thrust of the production. In Hamlet for instance if we focus on his inability to take action—to revenge his father—then that concept informs the choices the actors, the costume, the lighting, and the set designers will make.

At times the guiding conceptual ideas are right on the surface of a book, even in the title. In Jacqueline Woodson’s book The Year We Learned to Fly, she describes how difficult it was for a brother and sister to move from one neighborhood to another. The children, through their resilience and with the help of their mother’s advice, learn to fly.

After reading this book, we’ve asked students to think about “When do you fly?” The flying metaphor can carry us through the year by coming back to question such as:

• How can we fly together as a community?

• When we experience adversity or challenges, how can we fly above them and succeed?

• How can we help each other to fly?

I also like the book because it best encapsulates my hopes for our classroom community. I want us to fly together; I want us to lift off the ground a little bit, away from the everyday doldrums of an education institution; and I hope that we can create such beautiful and compelling work together that we will leave the classroom feeling elevated and inspired.

Building Experiences from Books

This brings us back to our study of the 19th Amendment. In researching this topic there is actually a wealth of high-quality text for students. One possibility is to do a biographical study of different influential figures during the women’s suffrage movement.

The Bold and the Brave is a wonderful overview of the various people who contributed to the movement.

And it can be supplemented with books that dive more deeply into individual figures.

The book we landed on for our core text was How Women Won The Vote: Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and their Big Idea by Susan Cambell Baartoletti and illustrated by Ziyue Chen.

It is both a biography of Alice Paul and Lucy Burns and it also tells the story of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade and it was this that caught our attention.

The challenge is finding books that don't just teach information but invite students into an experience. When we found How Women Won the Vote, we realized the parade at the center of the story might become an experience of its own.

In my next post we’ll do a deep dive into this book and I’ll tell the story of how the 4th graders at North Star Elementary School designed and led their own parade.

Part of the magic of Mary Oliver’s poetry is the way we read one of her poems and then suddenly encounter a phrase that cuts to our core. In one of her most quoted poems, “The Summer Day,” we reach the end of the poem, after examining a grasshopper, with the astounding question:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Although this poem is her most well-known, many of her poems embrace a similar structure—a kind of wandering and observing in nature followed by a piercing insight that lifts us up and speaks to our larger existence beyond one particular moment.

This has always been one of the great joys for me of reading literature. We’re reading along and suddenly we come across a sentence or a phrase that makes it all worth it. Perhaps this is why I love Shakespeare’s plays so much. He, like Mary Oliver, consistently delivers poetic insights. One of my favorite moments in Hamlet occurs in Act I, when Hamlet responds to the appearance of his father’s ghost with the observation:

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”

These nuggets of wisdom are why I read with pen in hand, marking each resonant line I come across in a book of poetry or a novel.

A Calendar of Wisdom

Leo Tolstoy seemed to have something similar in mind when he assembled and wrote A Calendar of Wisdom at the beginning of the 20th century. Each page of his book is a day of the year. He collects quotes that speak to him and then offers his own insights about his selected quotes. He might at one point quote Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The joy of your spirit is the indication of your strength.

And then on the same page offers his own response:

You must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy.

Tolstoy’s book reminded me of when, in high school, I first read the transcendentalists—primarily Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman—marking insights along the way, many of which have remained with me throughout my life.

Braiding Sweetgrass

I’d bought Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom many years ago and it gathered dust on my shelf, largely forgotten. Then recently I was teaching Braiding Sweetgrass, Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. To prepare, I began reading her book, pen in hand, considering what sections to focus on for class. I found myself underlining sentence after sentence. I thought about the fact that, in classrooms, we often teach students to “mark up text” and emphasize “choosing importance,” yet we rarely talk about the deeper purpose behind those acts. Underlining text is a precious act, a conversation between the reader and the writer. It is a response, saying I hear you, this means something to me, and I want to acknowledge it, keep it, and remember it in the future.1

In reading Braiding Sweetgrass, I found myself on a journey to understand what Kimmerer refers to as the “indigenous wisdom” within the book. When I read any book, I’m looking for what wisdom the author might offer—I’m considering what I want to take with me from the experience of visiting another person’s mind.

All of these ideas, however, are very abstract. I’m not sure if I was quite there as a high school student, and most of our students aren’t even close to wanting to read for wisdom (or even wanting to read for entertainment for that matter). I began to think about a concrete way for students to notice moments in a text that truly speak to them, beyond the “reading strategies” like making “text-to-self connections” that are often taught as quick activities that rarely help students understand the deeper reasons behind why we, as human beings, read books.

As we explain in our book A Reason to Read, when we approach a text, we look for ways to actually do something concrete with the text. As much as we’d like students to read “for the sake of reading,” as difficult as that always might have been for many students in the past, it is even more challenging now with the ubiquity of screens, as evidenced by what the New York Times recently highlighted as a “generation-long decline” in reading scores.

A Book of Wisdom

Before beginning to read Braiding Sweetgrass, I told students that we were going to create an individual and collective “Book of Wisdom” modeled after Tolstoy’s calendar. As they read the book, they would “underline any lines, phrases, or even words that speak to you.” I shared what this looked like in my own reading of the chapter, “Asters and Goldenrod.” Near the end of this chapter Kimmerer writes, “To see if in some way, the songs and our stories could help people fall in love with the world again.” What strikes me about this quote, and Braiding Sweetgrass in general, is that in writing a science book about biology, she writes about the beauty of nature and falling in love with the natural world (which reminds me again of Dan Bisaccio’s teaching story from my last article, A Purple Pedagogy).

As students search for quotes, I explained that it is important to select the quote and to explain their thinking behind it. When we listen to others’ interpretations, it deepens our own by offering us another way of seeing the world. It’s also important to put our thinking into words. As E.M. Forster famously wrote about the process of writing in his book, Aspects of a Novel:

How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?

We see this in Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom. Tolstoy first selects quotes others have written (from such varied sources as Lao-Tzu, Marcus Aurelius, the Bible, the Talmud, Lucy Mallory, and Confucius). He follows each entry with his own response—his own reason for selecting the quote and why it speaks to him.

We often think of students’ responses to quotes as dry and analytical (think of weekly “response” papers ubiquitous in college classrooms). Tolstoy shows how poetic and insightful our own writing can be in response to others—we can be jazz musicians, playing off an original theme, offering our own “words of wisdom.” And this is precisely the goal: for reading to inspire students’ writing—to move them beyond “doing homework” and writing a response because it is assigned—to a space where they are inspired to write their own ideas, riffing off the words and ideas of others.

The Final Product

At the end of the unit, students browse their collection of quotes in their “Book of Wisdom” and identify a single quote—it could be their own or one from Braiding Sweetgrass—they want to contribute to a collective “Book of Wisdom.”

While reading selections from Braiding Sweetgrass, we also undertook a photography project capturing black-and-white images of the natural world in response to the question posed in the book: “Why is the world so beautiful?” The students paired their chosen quotes with black-and-white photographs (and in some cases took entirely new photographs to accompany their chosen “words of wisdom”).

We then collated all the photographs and text into a shared Book of Wisdom.

Although we’ve only created Books of Wisdom in response to a particular text, I can imagine a class creating a Book of Wisdom for an entire year of reading.

We’ve led this experience as a workshop for conferences and for schools. The examples below are from a Deep Dive at a Deeper Learning conference in San Diego, U.S.; The New School of Thought conference in São Paulo, Brazil; and for teachers at Hope High School in Providence, RI.

The Process

Words of Wisdom is an approach for engaging with a text on a deep level, inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom. As you read, you will collect words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs that you feel are worth holding onto.

Materials

• Notebook or journal

• Focal text or book

• Pen, pencil, or highlighter

1. Read and Underline

As you read, underline (or mark up in a way that you prefer) passages that:

• seem wise to you

• speak to you in some way

• change how you see something

• seem important for the overall text, perhaps summarizing big ideas

You may select a sentence, phrase, word, or even paragraph.

2. Respond

After selecting a quote, write a short response explaining why you chose it. It doesn’t have to be purely an analytical response. Your response may be poetic, or the quote might be a springboard for your own original ideas or observations about the world.

3. Build Your “Book of Wisdom”

As you collect quotes, have in mind an overall “Book of Wisdom” that is uniquely yours. Feel free to add doodles, sketches, or even printed photographs to your book. Think of it as an “art object” you are developing over time.

4. A Collective Book of Wisdom

At the end of the project, select one quotation and response from your book to share with the class and add to a community “Book of Wisdom.”

Download the process (and revise for your own classroom).

Recently, I came across a list the drummer Questlove put together for Rolling Stone—his top 100 Prince songs. Having been a Prince fan since middle school when he released 1999, I opened the list expecting the usual hits. What I found instead was a selection of many cuts I’d never heard, along with Questlove’s reflections on how the songs shaped him, his listening experiences with Prince in his younger days, and how he sees Prince’s impact across multiple genres of music.

This week, while walking my dog, I worked my way through Questlove’s list, reading every entry and listening to each song in order counting down from 100. So, on the 10th anniversary of his death, Prince has been on my mind. As I was thinking about what to write here, I realized that Prince has had an influence on my teaching, perhaps quietly, behind-the-scenes, but an influence none the less.

Prince’s Unique Culture

When you listen to the song Purple Music, you’ll hear Prince experimenting with the idea of a new sound he describes with only one word, “purple.” (perhaps influenced by Miles Davis’s “blue” period in jazz most pronounced on his album, Kind of Blue). Prince’s purple sound would come to fruition in the movie and its even more influential soundtrack, Purple Rain. Questlove notes that Prince’s sound “isn’t funk, rock, jazz, or fusion. It isn’t pop or Latin. It’s just Prince.”

It wasn’t only Prince’s sound that was unique. He developed his own lexicography replacing words with icons (for instance the song “I Would Die 4 U” and most notably his own name).

In addition, in the realm of fashion, his outfits were all custom designed, and strikingly original. He explains his approach to style:

“Style is not lusting after someone because they’re cool, style is loving yourself till everyone else does too.”

In all his creative efforts—his forays into filmmaking, album cover art, even in building his own architectural world at Paisley Park Studios—he created a unique and cohesive culture that infused all of his work.

A Unique Classroom Culture

At the center of Prince’s work is a defining concept: “purple music.” What would it mean for our classrooms to be shaped by a similarly clear idea, so that when students enter the space, they know they’re not just “doing school”?1

Typically when we reflect on a classroom’s culture it is defined by either the subject-matter or the teacher’s reputation. We all can remember entering the dreaded “Mr. Myers” classroom who had a reputation for being the meanest teacher in the school, or we had to go to American History class where we would spend the year methodically working our way through the district-required textbook. Either way we knew we were at school doing the usual school business, nothing inspired, nothing to make us want to get out of bed and go to school every day.

Taking a lesson from Prince we might consider the questions: How can we, as teachers, create our own “purple music”? How can we intentionally design classrooms that are distinct and lead students to the heart of the disciplines we teach?

Here are a few teachers with answers.

1. The Shadows of Fergus: A Guiding Concept

Perhaps one of the best example I’ve seen of creating a clear, guiding concept for the classroom is in a beginning of the year routine. Adrian writes about his first day of school with his 5th graders:

The first day of school for all students! When students arrived, they found on their tables a one-page explanation of the origins of the name of our classroom. We read W.B. Yeats’ poem, Who Goes With Fergus? and spent the morning discussing its meaning, metaphors, and how it is connected to our classroom, The Shadows of Fergus.

First, I love that his classroom has a name, The Shadows of Fergus, and that this name has a purpose behind it that defines his classroom’s culture, which is, at the essence, “to be your full, authentic self.” Adrian also builds his classroom culture through a shared close reading of Yeat’s poem, modeling his high expectations for students to bring their full selves to complex texts.

2. Raggedy Ann and Andy: The Passionate Teacher

My first foray into public education was as a little 1st grader walking into the classroom of Mrs. Patty Deig. The room was full of decorations of Raggedy Ann and Andy. Raggedy Ann was a doll from 1915 that then became the lead character in a series of books, the first of which Raggedy Ann Stories, was published in 1918. First off, let me tell you I wasn’t into Raggedy Ann. I went to school that first day with my Spider-Man lunch box and, as a first grader in 1977, I was obsessed with a movie that came out the previous Spring, Star Wars. And yet Mrs. Deig’s passion for Raggedy Ann was infectious. She’d begin the day at the piano every morning and we’d sing along to a series of songs. Then we’d transition to the rug for read-alouds. Often the books she selected were from the Raggedy Ann series.

Now if this feels dated to you I can tell you that it felt that way to me at the time as well. But that’s not really the point. Even though I personally didn’t have much inherent interest in these books, her passion for reading, and centering her classroom on books she cared about, showed all of us what it means to be a reader. Yes, she taught us phonics and how to read as well. But it was her passion for the act of reading itself and how she modeled that in the overall classroom’s zeitgeist that showed us how we too could be passionate readers.

One of the books that was the earliest influences in my teaching was Robert Fried’s The Passionate Teacher. Fried writes,

To be a passionate teacher is to be someone in love with a field of knowledge, deeply stirred by issues and ideas that challenge our world, drawn to the dilemmas and potentials of the young people who come into class each day—or captivated by all of these.

More recently, here on substack, Jared Fox has begun a series of posts about “Passion-Driven Pedagogy.” This series, just beginning, is meant to, in his words,

“encourage educators to find the space and courage to bring what they are most interested in into their classroom. For me, one example of this meant teaching about the history and science of New York City’s water supply and waterways—topics that allowed me to share my own love of nature alongside my students.”

Most importantly, as these examples demonstrate, passionate ideas also should be at the very center of the discipline, what Fried describes as being “in love with the field of knowledge.”

A professor of history at my college was in love with baseball. His lectures on Roman History were often peppered with tangents about baseball, not at all related to the subject-matter at hand. Passion for passion’s sake isn’t the goal here. It’s using our passion for a subject area to create our own “purple music,” a guiding concept that signals to students what is at the heart of our teaching and why we care.

3. Dan the Science Man: Fostering a Love of Nature

Biology teacher Dan Bisaccio’s classroom was base camp. His students knew they wouldn’t be there long. It was a space for gathering up everyone to head out on an adventure. The adventures consisted of research projects in the woods around the high school. Dan partnered with the Smithsonian Museum to monitor a permanent biodiversity plot near the high school as part of the SIMAB program (Smithsonian Institution’s Monitoring and Assessment of Biodiversity). SIMAB is a program built for scientists doing actual scientific work. Every year, Dan trained his students in how scientists track biodiversity by working alongside them in the woods. He also took his students on trips around the world, working on parallel biodiversity sites in Costa Rica, Belize, Saba, Jamaica, and Mexico (I worked with him and his students at El Eden Bio-Reserve in Quintana Roo, Yucatan).

Dan’s “purple music” was one phrase he told me when I visited his classroom. This was when the “standards movement” was just beginning in the late 90s and disciplines were defined by seemingly infinite lists of standard skills students should master in every discipline. He said,

I have one standard, for students to love nature.

For students to love nature, Dan realized that they need to have a deep understanding of how things work in the natural world and engage in the work of actual scientists.2 You can see that from the photos that Dan has a great passion for nature. Even in retirement, he leads field walks in his small town of Troy, New Hampshire, open to anyone who wants to join.

Your Purple Music

Prince teaches us through his concept of “purple music” that by bringing disparate elements together, by experimentation and fine-tuning his sound, and by working through multiple modalities, he could create something unique.

The examples I’ve offered show the same is possible for our teaching.

For Adrian, it’s the idea of becoming your full, authentic self through language and literature. For Mrs. Deig, it was a lived love of reading. For Dan, it was a ongoing relationship to the natural world beyond the classroom walls.

What strikes me is that all of these examples emerge from finding the center of the content we’re teaching and building immersive learning experiences from that center.

To find our own purple music we might ask ourselves:

• What do I want students to understand deeply about this subject by the end of the year?

• What in my content are is really worth caring about?

• As a community, we are spending many hours of our lives together. What is most important in our shared space? What really matters?

When designing a unit Rob Fried asks us to consider our personal stake. He asks, “What would you say to students about why this unit is personally meaningful to you?” Similarly in Understanding by Design, authors Wiggins and McTighe encourage us to consider the enduring understanding of what we are teaching—focusing on what the foundation is for the content we are teaching. This is the work of finding our own “purple music,” the defining idea at the center of our teaching.

Thanks for reading to the end. Enjoy some Purple Music! (and please note that many of Prince’s songs aren’t appropriate to play in classrooms, including the song “Purple Music!”)

My high school students didn’t always have time to do the homework. As an English literature teacher, it was common practice to assign a chapter of homework every night, and, at the time not knowing any better, I did. A chapter of most books takes some time to read, even for the most fluent of readers. My students had after-school jobs, sports, theater or simply lives at home that made it difficult to complete their homework. I’ve written before about how we should rethink how we give homework in schools—but at the time my solution (inspired by my then professor Eileen Landay), was to focus on a small portion of text. Whether my students completed the assigned reading or not, I wanted them all to be engaged and to participate in the day’s class.

Since those early teaching days, I’ve used this approach of focusing on a small portion of text in numerous settings including classroom visits, teacher institutes, and workshops. There are several different “deep reading” techniques we’ve used to analyze text including Tip of the Iceberg. Framing Text, inspired by visual artist Cynthia Weiss’s activity of seeing the world through frames, is one of our most powerful approaches.

Engaging with Complex Texts

We’ve often used this approach with particularly complex texts. Working with high school students in St. Paul, Minnesota, we introduced them to Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak Memory. After working with the opening of the book, one student said, “Wow, now I really want to read this book!” and let me tell you, Nabokov’s opening doesn’t inspire most students to want to read more!

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).

At the Habla Teacher Institute we chose as our anchor text, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Donald King, former Artistic Director of the Providence Black Repertory Theatre, said, “I never liked that book. I’ll even venture to say I hated it when we read parts of it in college. That approach to just the first paragraph made me see the intricacies, possibilities, and even beauty in the text.”

The Process

Read more

Welcome to The Teacher Toolbox. In this space, I’ll collect all of the activities and strategies I’ve developed, adapted, and found for teaching and learning.

As I post new ideas, I’ll add them to this page for easy access in the future. Feel free to bookmark it and return whenever you need fresh inspiration.

This Toolbox is designed as a supplement to the two books Eileen Landay and I have written. The first, A Reason to Read: Linking Literacy and the Arts, was published by Harvard Education Press in 2012 and examines the theory and research behind our work while also offering a host of activities. The second, ENGAGE: Creative Strategies for Teaching and Learning, published in 2022 is more of a handbook featuring over a hundred activities, strategies, and thinking routines. Here I’ll be offering completely new activities as well as further developing ideas we wrote about previously.

The activities featured here can be adapted to any age of learners. Most of my work as a teacher is in the areas of literacy development, language arts, and the arts, although more recently I’ve been working more in the sciences as well. Let me know which activities here have been helpful to you and your students, and what you’d like more of.

All the best,

Kurt

Building Community and Beginnings

I generally don’t like building community activities for the sake of building community itself—icebreakers that are fun but don’t really move our content teaching forward. I’ve found that we can achieve both at the same time. Here are some ways to begin the school year, a unit, or a course you are teaching.

• Rapid Bios— a quick, but meaningful way of introducing everyone in the room

• The One Word Wall—a solution for those empty walls and a fantastic way to build a sense of community and classroom ownership (via Tom Rademacher)

• 10 Words—What are our first impressions of a given topic?

• Sing to Me—building community with a complex text

• Inquiry Walls—designing paths of inquiry to guide learning (see this in practice with a unit on the Europa Clipper mission)

• One Word Beginnings—starting with just one word that is important to you.

• Story Nuggets—build a dynamic performance with just a small portion of text.

• Layered Word Symphonies—an artful, improvisational approach for exploring the sounds of text

• Text in Motion—combining movement with reading—inspired by David Byrne’s American Utopia

Comprehension and Content

Approaches for helping students read deeply and understand content.

• Knowledge Check—integrating low-stakes content assessments into our daily teaching

• Yes, and . . . —helping students to remember what they’ve learned

• Brain, Book, Buddy—a classroom routine for remembering content (from Blake Harvard via The Bell Ringer)

• Research Boards—giving students agency to learn content independently

• Tip of the Iceberg—a strategy for reading deeply beneath the surface

• Marking Up Text 2.0—an new approach to “marking up text,” building on ideas from our book Engage

• Framing Text—an invitation for all students to access complex texts

• Building Conversations—a structure for supporting discussion

• Character Portraits—intentionally reading a text again looking for specific evidence of character development.

• Mask-Making and Kennings—a way to bring students’ identities to the classroom walls at the beginning of the school-year.

• Storyboards—a process for arriving at a clear understanding of complex texts.

Exhibiting Student Work and Culminating Events

Here I’ll share ways that students can demonstrate their understanding of content. We’ll also look at how we can create spaces for students to show their original ideas and work.

• Infographics—an artful approach for sharing complex processes

• A Book of Wisdom—building a book of insights from our readings

• Artful Reflections—a more dynamic way to reflect on learning experiences

Every week I visited our local comic book store, sorting through hundreds of used comics and purchasing two dollars’ worth at twenty cents each. In my bedroom, I had a poster of Bilbo Baggins confronting the dragon Smaug from the Rankin/Bass animated The Hobbit. We played a variety of role-playing games that had recently been invented, including Dungeons & Dragons, Marvel Super Heroes, and Gamma World. It is no coincidence that Stranger Things took place in southern Indiana, the same place where I grew up, and that the lead characters in the series graduated from high school the same year I did: 1989.

And then I went to high school.

Not wanting to be seen as a “nerd,” I put all of this aside. I stopped collecting comics, stopped reading them, and stopped playing games. As I grew older, though, I didn’t stop entering imaginary worlds; they simply became the worlds of “respected” literature, from Shakespeare to Faulkner to Morrison to Márquez.

Game of Thrones Teacher Night

At our school Habla, we had a group of young teachers that were devoted fans of Game of Thrones. They would all gather every week for a viewing party. I joined them for the final episode, and being the oldest guy in the room, they asked if I had ever played Dungeons & Dragons.

I confessed that I had played in middle school, and they asked if I’d run a game for them. I hadn’t played in years, so I bought a Starter Set, and we began.

For those unfamiliar with D&D, the game is run by a person called the DM, or Dungeon Master. Their job is to build the world the other characters will inhabit and to guide them through it—creating an open world of NPCs (non-player characters), quests, and challenges. Everyone else creates a character with a backstory and personality. Although there are mechanics to the game, it is essentially about building an imaginary world together.

With a group of educators—mainly English and art teachers—playing D&D together, we became interested in how we might bring this idea of world-building into our classrooms.

Ian Wiggins, one of the teachers, taught English language learners and created an experiment in his classroom based on the premise that students collaboratively building an imaginary world would generate more written and oral language than a conventional ELL curriculum. He taught students who were just beginning to learn English. Rather than beginning with the usual basic grammar curriculum, he began by building a world with his students.

Ian explains:

After we finished our exploration of imagined worlds in film and fiction, we started to think about how we might create our own. We began with the fundamentals of what we know to be true: the land, geography, native plants, climates, animals, and how those things shape the cultures, languages, and beliefs of the people who inhabit those lands. Then we set out to design our own worlds, starting with geography, climate, plants, and animals. From there we asked ourselves: What might they eat? How might they dress? What gods, monsters, heroes, or stories might fill their world, imaginations, and religions?

The semester culminated in an exhibition in which students presented their imaginary worlds to their families.

Kids on Bikes

During the pandemic, we had to shut down our school in Mexico. With the unused building, we gathered a few families together to create classroom pods. The parents shared the teaching load, and my area was 1st- and 4th-grade English language arts.

Given how strange those times were, I didn’t want to teach a conventional language arts curriculum: read a book, discuss it, and write. Our D&D gaming group had branched into other role-playing games—games in which you build a world and inhabit different characters within it.

I saw the potential of RPGs for language development, particularly because the 4th graders were a diverse group in terms of English proficiency.

With Ian’s teaching as inspiration, I proposed to the students the idea of basing the class on an RPG and asked what kind of world they would like to spend the semester in: fantasy, science fiction, cute and cozy, folklore, mystery, frontier, post-apocalyptic.

Most people only know D&D, but there are over 13,000 published role-playing games, so we could almost certainly find one to match their interests.

The Netflix series Stranger Things was popular at the time, so they asked whether that was a possible theme. Game designers Jonathan Gilmour and Doug Levandowski created Kids on Bikes, a role-playing game inspired by Stranger Things and the 1980s influences behind it—films like E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Goonies.

Building a Town

At the beginning of the Kids on Bikes rulebook, in a section called “World Building,” the authors offer this prompt:

Kids on Bikes should probably be set in a small town at any point in history
before everyone had a video camera in their pocket at all times. It should
probably be a place remote enough that the rest of the world just doesn’t
care about it but close enough that black helicopters can be there within
hours. Everyone in the town probably knows everyone else — for better
or for worse. People look out for each other, but rumor also travels fast. Ultimately, though, this is all up to you.

They then offer prompts to help the group create their own imagined town:

1. Our adventure takes place in… (name of town and state)

2. The industry our location is best known for is…

3. Our town is famous for…

4. Our town is infamous for...

5. Economically, our town is… (prospering, floundering, stagnant, etc.)

6. A notable local organization is…

7. A notable local landmark is…

8. Our school’s sports team is called…

I gave the class these prompts, and they collaboratively went to work. Their job was to build a map of their town and keep a town chronicle.

The town chronicle was the class’s shared responsibility. They chose a town historian for each session, a role that rotated from class to class. The chronicle was paired with a Google Slides deck that gave students space to add images and media that extended their world-building. For instance, there was a research laboratory in their town, Whitewood, called The Lida Corporation.

Creating Characters

The students then created the characters they wanted to play. Kids on Bikes sets up character creation with the following paragraph:

The core of any RPG is the character you’ll be embodying. You and your GM [Game Master] should work together to agree upon a character you’ll be excited to play. One who reminds you of yourself in important ways — but who also is different
enough from you to be an escape from the real world.

The game then walks the players through a detailed character creation process involving selecting personality traits, motivations, fears, relationships to other characters at the table, skills, and even what they have in their backpacks.

Each character also had their own journal. This was an English class, after all, and I wanted to ensure that students were consistently writing in English. The town chronicle belonged to the whole class. The character journal ensured that every student tracked their own progress through the adventure while allowing for deeper character development as the story unfolded.

Once we finished sketching the basics of their characters, I asked students to write a character profile in their journals. As we all know, getting 4th graders to write extensively can be challenging.

The students in this class wrote silently for the final thirty minutes and then took their journals home to continue writing.

The Adventure Begins

Each class became a day in their characters’ lives in Whitewood.

They began by reading the Whitewood News, a newspaper I created for each session with the latest gossip and events. I would set the scene, and then they would narrate in third person how their characters were beginning the day. Soon the characters would ride their bikes to meet up, and the story would begin.

They moved fluidly between narrating their characters’ stories in third person and improvising scenes together. We often left the classroom to act out scenes or adventures outdoors.

Supplemental Texts

In addition to the adventures unfolding in class, the homework involved students choosing mystery books they wanted to read.

I introduced them to one of my childhood favorites, The Boxcar Children, and they became hooked on the series. Together we also researched contemporary mysteries. Every two weeks, students shared what they had read, what they thought about it, and whether they would recommend it to each other.

Because they were reading within one genre, it gave us the opportunity to discuss common narrative structures, character tropes, and recurring themes.

Series like The Boxcar Children often follow a fairly predictable structure. As students read more, we paid particular attention to moments when books broke from genre expectations. This led to conversations about innovation and “thinking outside the box,” and students began searching for stories that surprised them through diverse characters or plot twists.

These discussions then informed the story we were creating through the role-playing game. It pushed them beyond predictable storytelling and encouraged them to take risks in their improvisation.

Experiments in World Building

Much of our students’ lives are filled with consuming information. Movies, television, video games, and books all offer compelling imaginary worlds to enter. Even a robust literature curriculum is often designed around students reading a sequence of books.

In Second Words: Selected Critical Prose, 1960-1982, Margaret Atwood points out how critical reading is to being an effective writer:

“It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.”

Students do need to read extensively to develop literacy.

What I believe we do not do enough of in schools is give students the agency to know that they can also create—that they have the power to bring something new into the world.

World-building does not require a full RPG campaign or even an elaborate setting. We’ve been experimenting with curricula that involve reading Mesoamerican myths, writing origin stories for imaginary worlds, and designing galaxies of planets that combine science and the humanities (more on that soon).

The goal is not to choose between reading and creating, but to let each deepen the other. The richest literacy experiences happen when students move back and forth between entering worlds imagined by others and building worlds of their own.

One of my favorite moments in a movie is when detectives (i.e., Mulder and Scully) stumble upon a cork board in a secret room covered with a character’s obsessive research on aliens, vampires, or some massive hidden government conspiracy. I’ve always loved the organization of a multitude of photographs, articles, maps, and various ephemera. The walls reveal the thinking of a character—how that person organizes images, how they annotate text—they are windows into how their mind works and how they see the world.

This is especially evident in boards created by mathematicians. Stephen Hawking had a blackboard in his office at the University of Cambridge filled with ideas. It’s a wild collection of quotes and doodles including lines like “DON’T FORGET TO DOUBLE-CZECH YOUR RESULTS” and an alien Pan-like humanoid exclaiming “IT DOESZ WORK!!!” The blackboard was from a conference in 1980 that Hawking attended with colleagues, all seeking the answer to the “theory of everything”—theorizing how it might be possible to combine the rules of general relativity and quantum mechanics. The blackboard was a playful and welcome distraction from the heavy ideas of the conference.

Juan-Andres Leon, a curator at the Science Museum in London, the current home of the board, writes:

None of this blackboard’s scribblings are by Hawking’s own hand (he had stopped writing on blackboards in the mid-1970s), but were made by a dozen collaborators during the workshop.

This deepens rather than detracts from the interest of the blackboard and indeed one of the reasons we chose it for the exhibition was to evoke the collective nature of scientific work, where Hawking’s co-authorship is evident, even if not drawn by his own hand.

He further explains that “senior researchers rarely work on their own but are rather part of a distributed cognition system.”

Distributed Cognition Systems

Traditionally, classrooms in the United States have been organized around the idea of the student as an individual performer. This idea grows out of a long history of schooling shaped by industrial models of efficiency and measurement. From the early 20th century, as public education expanded, systems were designed to rank individuals in the form of timed tests, grade point averages, class rankings, and high-stakes exams. Even the physical design of classrooms—rows of desks, forward-facing, spaced just enough apart—reflects this. How many times growing up did we hear “Keep your eyes on your own paper.” (I’m talking to you Mrs. B.!)

And yet, that’s simply not how the world works beyond school. In nearly every profession, knowledge is constructed and applied through “distributed cognition.” If a doctor is facing a complex case, they might consult a multidisciplinary team. In high-stakes litigation, lawyers work collectively. Harrison Ford, known for his iconic roles, stated in an interview,

Acting is not about competing. Acting is about cooperating. Acting is about collaboration. It's about your utility, your usefulness, your capacity to add to the work that has already been done and will be done. You're just part of a team.

Which raises the question: why is so much of learning in our schools still focused on the individual student? I’d rather my classroom look like that quantum physics conference, with groups of researchers taking on difficult questions, exploring solutions, and occasionally taking breaks to draw squids and other wondrous creatures on inventive boards in the break room.

Research Boards

I had Hawking’s board in mind when I thought of the idea of Research Boards. In January, a group of Brown University students visited our school Habla in Merida, Mexico for a short study-abroad experience. We took them through a series of pedagogy workshops that connected deep content to meaningful engagement. Our key questions were:

What sustains life? What sustains us?

We guided them through an inquiry-based experience (described previously in this article) learning about the Europa Clipper mission—a NASA mission designed to determine whether Jupiter’s moon, Europa, has the conditions necessary to support life. The question, “What sustains life?” gave us our focus for scientific research, while the question, “What sustains us?” informed our reading of poet laureate, Ada Limón’s, poetry. As part of the mission, her poem “In Praise of Mystery” was commissioned by NASA and inscribed on the spacecraft.

After learning about the Europa Clipper mission, students gathered in small groups around circular tables. On each table was a blank piece of butcher paper. They had around 45 minutes to research the question from a scientific perspective, “What is needed on a planet to sustain life?” The table was to serve as their collective answer to that question. We asked them to cite specific sources and not simply plug their question into AI. They were also free to doodle and draw in the spirit of the physicists’ blackboard. Because each student was concentrating in a different discipline, it truly felt like a distributed cognition system.

Although this was our first foray into Research Boards, I can imagine using this approach in many different ways: with online platforms, on classroom whiteboards, or—my preferred method—on an actual blackboard with chalk.

Research Boards have several implications for student learning:

• Students focus on a key question, diving deeply into content and often discovering new and surprising insights—sometimes beyond even the teacher’s knowledge.

• They use diverse modes of research, particularly the technologies available to them, and discuss together what counts as a valid source.

• They learn from one another, especially those with deeper or broader knowledge in the area of focus. (In the example above, one student was specializing in biochemical engineering.)

• They are at the center of the learning process. Ted Sizer’s maxim of “student as worker, teacher as coach” becomes fully visible—students do the heavy lifting of research while the teacher guides when needed.

• They have permission to be creative and playful. Illustrations, drawings, and doodles illuminate group thinking.

If we want students’ thinking to reflect the way we actually work in the real world, then we need to create classroom spaces where students can work through ideas and work on products with each other. A research board is simple—a guiding question, an open surface (digital or analog), and time for discussion and note-taking. What matters is that students are doing the work of thinking together, not just staring at their own paper in fear of incurring the wrath of Mrs. B..

Download the Research Boards “How To” PDF here.

Inspiration and Resources

1. Mathematicians’ Blackboards

   In researching different kinds of boards, I found this article in the New York Times featuring blackboards of mathematicians, stunningly photographed by Jessica Wynne. If I knew more about math teaching, I’d love to build an experience around these!

2. Note Taking

   Reading ’s article on note-taking and see the playful marginalia reminded me of how we can combine “serious” ideas with Stephen Hawking’s sense of playfulness.

3. My Daughter’s Science Notebook

   Just for fun, my daughter annotates all of her notes from her 9th grade science class in the style of different characters from the Marvel Universe. This inspired me to think about ways we can open up our classrooms to students’ individual passions, even in everyday tasks that might not initially seem creative. Can you guess the Marvel characters that inspired each illustration?

   

   

   

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Every morning on the drive to school, my kids and I listen to the trivia podcast Good Job Brain. The hosts start with a few classic Trivial Pursuit questions, then move into themed rounds built around a central idea. Although we started listening for fun, it also serves as a cognitive warm-up for the day—and it made me wonder: why not try something similar with students?

When I was designing a PD session for teachers in Chicago, I realized that I often jump into a key text taking for granted that students have the background knowledge that would support their comprehension. The book we were working with is the picture book Malala’s Magic Pencil. I had read recently that only 23% of people in the United States could identify Iran on a map, and I wondered how many of us could identify Pakistan, the setting for the book.

I’m not advocating for a social studies curriculum that was like mine when I was in the 7th grade. Every week we were given a different map to label and color and then tested on the states/countries/capitals at the end of the week. Chris Hefferman, a 7th grade social studies and math teacher, notes in an article about the importance of teaching geography:

Geography matters today more than ever, but only if we are looking at the right things. Google has changed our world, and geography is included in that. I haven’t given my students a map quiz in years because there isn’t really a need to memorize where countries are. Students can Google any country in the world to find its location.

He then points out the need to learn what he calls, “human geography.” He eloquently explains what students do need to know:

They need to understand the relationships that exist between cultures. They need to see not just the differences in cultures, but the similarities. Students need to know that the kid sitting in a school in Afghanistan today probably doesn’t speak the same language, practice the same religion or live in a home that looks anything like a student in the United States, but they have a lot of things in common. They both love their families, they both want to play and they both want to learn.

Certainly most of the literature we teach, if it is curated with a diversity of voices in mind, can help students to reach a deeper understanding of “human geography.” But I also want them to have a concrete sense of where they are in the world. How do we help students develop this sense of a global geography without a curriculum of rote memorization and testing?

Knowledge Matters

If you’ve read my previous articles, you know that recently I’ve been learning more about the “science of learning.” A decade ago, my colleague Liz Remington at The Learning Alliance, an organization dedicated to the “science of reading,” introduced me to cognitive approaches to reading through books like The Reading Mind by Daniel Willingham and Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf. Having been trained as a secondary-level literature teacher, many of these ideas were new to me. Since then, thanks to Holly Korbey at The Bell Ringer, my reading has broadened to include more at what now is commonly referred to as the “science of learning.”

One of the principal ideas to come out of this movement is that knowledge learning is critical not only for reading, but for learning in general. Willingham writes:

The conclusion from this work in cognitive science is straightforward: we must ensure that students acquire background knowledge in parallel with practicing critical thinking skills.1

Natalie Wexler warns us, however, that “Education certainly shouldn’t end with facts.” This point is one that I think is critical. The potential danger of the “science of learning” movement is that we go back to a time when we plodded our way through textbooks. We can all probably remember a class in which we were given a textbook, read a chapter every week or so, and then were tested (often with a multiple-choice test), on the facts we had memorized (usually hurriedly the night before). And yet we do need to teach students content. Wexler then follows up on her above statement, “But if it doesn’t begin there, many students will never acquire the knowledge and analytical abilities they need to thrive both in school and in life.”2

In this week’s article, I’ll offer a quick and simple strategy I’ve developed, the Knowledge Check, that we can use when we teach any text or concept in the classroom.

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