Playing catch-up: initial reflections from week 1 assigned readings

There was a lot to chew on in this foundational set of readings. I'll just stick to the surprises/insights for this post:

1) VTS is a social learning experience -- I was particularly taken by the use of the term "group mind" in the two Yenawine articles. The notion of collective creativity and knowledge creation has been very much on my radar lately (largely thanks to this article), so while I'd already considered VTS within the construct of peer tutoring. I think I had mostly thought of this as a peripheral benefit of the VTS model, so it was enlightening to see it foregrounded in these readings. It also brought to mind the Barrett articles that we read for LTC8740 and his emphasis on art interpretation as both a personal and communal endeavor.

 2) Within that social learning framework, I have some very clear responsibilities as facilitator that I need to work on honing -- I need to keep in mind that I am modeling the notion that "listening to and trying to understand others is important" (VTS manual, p 6). I've not reviewed my videos yet, but I suspect that I rush things too much in my eagerness to acknowledge and move to the next comment. I need to model what it looks like to take time and carefully consider each participant's input and I need to review this specific component of our activity before beginning the discussion by explaining that we are here to "build understandings together" (p 24).

 3) I need to encourage this type of deliberation from the get-go -- I suspect that I get in a rush because I'm eager to respond to the students' eagerness to share their observations. Lately, we've begun the session with the image already on the board and the students usually have their hands raised before I even begin to remind them of the VTS expectations. I suspect that if we're more careful about not showing the first image until after the preparatory conversation, the students will be more likely to more closely attend to that discussion. This is particularly important because I want to encourage the boys to adhere more closely to the "building understandings" notion as opposed to the tendency to list observations that don't lend themselves well to the "what do you see that makes you say that" question. I believe that all of the boys have demonstrated themselves capable of creating understandings but I think they may get in a hurry to contribute and default on these lists as a result. It will be tricky to encourage progress in this regard because the first question is deliberately engineered to be open enough to allow for all types of response and I don't want to take away any tools from the toolbox, but I do want to reorient our understanding of what the VTS session entails.

4)VTS and Big Ideas, a perfect pair -- Finally, it was interesting reviewing the the Walker text through the lens of VTS because I'd never realized how closely their goals are aligned. Each attempts to scaffold students as they build a knowledge base on which to create meaning. Each allows plenty of wiggle room for curriculum to be tailored to the students abilities and interests. Each moves students further along a path from personal meaning making to a broader application and understanding of meaning as a matter of multiple salient perspectives.

Also, I'd like to reiterate that I've not reviewed my VTS videos yet, so it's entirely possible that I've been overly critical about what I think can or should be improved upon. These were just my gut reactions as I read these texts and reflect the extent to which I felt my own efforts were not yet fully formed. I'm eager to see what other impressions arise as I review the video record.

11/28/11: Reflection

We began our 11/28 meeting with a VTS , as usual.  Maria did the honors while I manned the camera.  The image was a knights on horseback battle scene and the boys enjoyed it but I was surprised by how they kept their comments focused on relatively few details/areas of the image considering the widescreen excitement.  VTS was followed by a quick review of the life and times of knights the codes by which they lived, which was handled by Mary.  After that, the boys began to work on drawings and stats for the page and squire to accompany the knights that they’d already created the week before (when I was absent).

Having already done the knight activity, the boys seemed to have little trouble conceptualizing their pages and squires though O said that he’d already made his knight 10 or 11 years old.  He tried to suggest that the activity just wouldn’t work for him.  It wasn’t difficult to suggest that he could either change the age of his knight later on or that the page and squire could just be different characters altogether.  However, O wanted to argue about this until Mr T made it clear with a stern look that he expected O to create a page and a squire.  I’m still not sure what O’s motivations are when he tries to talk his way out of a task.  He has plenty of ideas and his drawing and writing are very confident even though he rarely gets very much of it down on the page.  It’s as though he’s mostly just interested in the opportunity to talk.

W continues to be the opposite of O in this respect, although he seems to have become more confident in his conversations with me as year has gone on.   He’s still very quiet and while he rarely hesitates to respond any more, he never initiates conversation.  I feel more and more that W gets hung up on doing things correctly.  I noticed that he seemed to do a lot of erasing and redrawing during this day’s activity and he only wrote one line.  I wonder if his hesitation to write is because he’s concerned about spelling things correctly.  I’m going to try to encourage him to “take notes” and emphasize the rough draft quality of the sketchbook so that he doesn’t feel as constrained by his formal concerns.

11/28/11: Pictures

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10/17/11: Reflection

We began with VTS by Ms F again today.  I was responsible for taking video of the VTS with Ms F’s iPad.  This was the first time I’d taken any video with an iPad, though it works exactly the same as the camera function of the iPhone and I’ve taken a lot of video with that.  Even so, I don’t recall too much detail about the VTS this time and I think it’s because I was distracted by the intermediary.  The iPhone is discrete and it’s easy to forget that you’re taking video with it sometimes; the iPad is a good deal more awkward to handle although I liked being able to frame the scene with the large screen.  In any case, we’ll have to refer to the video for the details because I don’t have much to pull from memory here.  We added the adjective word poster to the VTS activity as discussed during our meeting on 10/12 (interestingly, Ms F and Ms U came up with this addition at the same time that I was writing about wishing I’d had a list of adjectives for the boys during my last journal entry).  I think this was a little difficult to incorporate at first, since most of what the boys were saying was very noun heavy but Ms F fished the adjectives out afterward and shifted the visual focus to them prior to the writing activity.

After VTS, we handed back the samurai hats that had been worked on during the last class and introduced the additive materials (feathers, yarn, pipe cleaners, stickers, etc).   Many of the boys wanted to punch holes in their helmets in order to thread materials through as drapery or projectiles, so I turned the classroom three-hole punch into a makeshift single-punch tool.  The results were a little unreliable, so it might be a good idea to scare up a single-hole model if we do something like this again. Many boys fashioned chin straps from the pipe cleaners and these added an excellent layer of authenticity to the completed helmets.

With about 15 minutes to go, we tried to move the boys away from adding (and fixing the already added) materials to the helmets and on to the writing activity.  The boundaries for this transition were not very clear and at least a few boys only scrawled out a sentence or a phrase or two and quickly returned to the helmet creation.  And several boys had to be asked repeatedly to write.  I think a clear creative materials clean-up and transition to quiet writing would make for a more productive writing time.  As it was, I spent a lot of time talking individually to boys, trying to get them to write or write more, meanwhile several of their peers were carrying on with helmet creation, so it was difficult to justify my persistence while the boundaries and expectations for the activities remained unclear.  I also wonder if our writing prompt was not well developed enough, since it was basically just a return to the same prompt we’d used during our last meeting and the boys seemed unsure of what they were expected to add.

That said, I think the adjective poster was an excellent addition and the boys seemed to enjoy inventing additional adjectives to share with their peers.

10/10/11: Reflection

I’m not sure whether it’s the smaller group size or that I’ve become especially well oriented to the VTS/Boy Writers routine, but I feel like I’m building individual relationships with the boys in ways that I didn’t last year.  As a small example, W walked in a few minutes late, after Ms. F had already begun to prep the boys for VTS and I whispered, “Hey Will” as he walked by me—to which he gave me an equally quiet “Hey.”  As I mentioned before, W has been pretty reticent so far, so it felt important to make an extra effort to greet him even though other activities were occurring to which he needed to begin giving his attention.  For me, the ability to recognize students as individuals and the opportunity to share in their tastes and talents is a huge part of teaching, so that I already feel this developing makes me feel extra excited about the year ahead with these boys.

Ms F began the session by leading us the boys through a VTS with another samurai image.  She seemed particularly energetic today and her facilitation was very commanding, keeping the boys on task and the conversation moving forward.  That said, I have to admit I was a little relieved to see that even our resident VTS expert had some trouble getting the boys to adhere to the “What’s happening” as opposed to “What do you see” formula.  But Ms F was persistent, asking them to reformulate their observations and quickly moving on from the ones who refused to move on from the listing format.  Something else that Ms F did differently was to ask the boys not to physically point out their observations, reminding them that their vocabularies will benefit from the descriptive exercise.  Last year, we allowed the younger group we were working with to come up to the Smartboard and point and we had carried on this practice so far this year but I think it’s a good idea to move these boys beyond that because I certainly think they’re capable of “using their words.”

After the VTS, Ms F reviewed some of the historical/contextual info that I reviewed last week along with a few additions she had made and particularly some extra images of Samurai armor and helmets.  From there we transitioned the boys into the helmet making activity and Ms F modeled with a piece of paper held up to the wall as she led the boys through the origami steps.  Most of the boys were able to transpose the steps as shown to their own piece of paper on the table in front of them but Ms. F, Mr. T, and I hovered around the tables to provide any additional support.  After the hats were made, we showed some example helmets and had the boys begin to decorate their own using markers, crayons, or colored pencils.  Most of the boys jumped into this without much hesitation but B3 (who, it should be noted was energetic but way more focused and working on his own than during the last class—so, I guess the ADHD med patch was refreshed) became fixated on recreating the eyes exactly as they appeared on one of the example helmets.  I brought him some scratch paper to practice the eyes on and placed the model helmet up on a board so that it would be visible to all of the boys.  He became frustrated and asked me to draw the eyes for him repeatedly but he toughed it out and came up with a very good approximation. 

B2 worked on scratch paper for most of the period and I felt like he was allowing O to distract him again, so I think I’ll ask Mr. T whether we should switch up their seating arrangement a bit before the next session.

With 10 or 15 minutes remaining, we stopped the boys and I reviewed a slide or two on adjectives and introduced the writing prompt—to create a catalogue-type entry describing their helmet.  The boys seemed to grasp the concept pretty readily but I wound up wishing that I had prepared a varied set of adjective examples.  One of the last words I used to model adjectives that they might use, ‘fierce’, wound up as a central feature in some (all?) of the catalogue descriptions.

10/3/11: Reflection

The boys were very high energy today and not super keen on following directions.  Before we could even begin the VTS a couple of the boys had to be coaxed down to the carpet from their tables: "But what if we can see fine from here?"  I gave a quick reminder of expectations during VTS, then asked Ms S to click the PowerPoint over to today's image.  A couple of hands shot up right away but I reminded them to take a moment to look at the image and that I would begin asking for their observations shortly.  After this pause, I asked, "What's going on in this image?"  Nearly all of the boys hands shot up this time.  "I see girls fighting," was the first observation.  I tried to be careful to stick closely to the exact VTS question sequence and had reviewed them just before going into it, but mostly the boys just pointed out details which made using the sequence a little tricky.  Instead of conjecturing a narrative or speculating about the image's intentions, the boys pointed out objects and their physical attributes, which made using the "What do you see that makes you say that?" a little awkward.  The was some conjecture over the genders of the two figures and some initial speculation about whether they were fighting on a bed or a roof though and that seemed to provide a little more richness and detail for elaboration within the VTS sequence.

Following the VTS sequence, I went over the slides with the historical/contextual info on Japan and reminded the boys of the Daimyo in the Samurai Cats book.  After that, Ms. S took up the Samurai Cats story where I'd left off last week then went over the map making prompt/labeling prompts.  I turned the lights back on and the boys got to work, though there were initial questions about whether they would be allowed to finish up the Samurai cat drawings that they'd begun last week.  We told them that they could return to these drawings if they finished today's prompt and had extra time at the end.  At least one boy (O) seemed to hurry through today's work so that he could get back to this drawing and we had to coax him into elaborating, first on his drawing, then on his writing.  The writing that we wound up having the boys do was not included in the lesson plans, but since the boys had jumped right into labeling as they made their maps and had already begun to tell stories about the Daimyo's travels on their maps, we went ahead and added a full-fledged writing assignment as well.  This made for some awkward transitioning, since we ended up prompting some of the boys to write the tale of their Daimyo's travels by way of extending the activity early on and then made it a general expectation in the last fifteen minutes.  All of the boys seemed to have a story to tell and it seemed like too good of an opportunity to pass up getting in some quality writing time, so I asked Mr T if he thought we should make an announcement about expecting them to work quietly on writing for the remaining time and he agreed.  Several of the boys jumped into the writing without any additional prompting (B, B3, O) though O required some coaching to elaborate on his story.  The other boys generally had to be encouraged to write and I tried to have them tell me their stories before asking them to write it down.  For most this was enough and W actually seemed to transition into the writing activity more easily than he did the drawing activity (though he was only slightly more communicative overall than he'd been during our last meeting).  B2 had a wonderfully complex set of places for his Daimyo to stop at and possible outcomes for having done so and verbally worked out and revised his story very well, but I had a hard time getting him to focus on writing it down (though partly this may have been due to O's near-constant conversation--they shared a table).  Most of the boys were able to tell their stories more clearly than might be suspected from the written versions that resulted.

It should also be noted that Mr. T worked independently with B3 for much of the drawing/writing portion of the session.  Mr T explained later that he suspected that B3's ADHD medication patch needed to be changed.

10/3/11: Images

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