I had one of my greatest successes ever in 2016 in the realm of writing. At my school 33% of my students have IEPs, and they have universally expressed how much they dislike the writing process. 12% of my students, with our without special education services, had not completed even a single writing assignment, in my classes, over the first two quarters of the year. With a ranking of 1-4 in each Common Core skill for English Language Arts, 1 being beginning steps, 2 equaling approaching proficiency, 3 being proficiency, and 4 equaling mastery, 58% had not achieved grade level proficiency in at least 80% of recorded writing skills at semester. Part of that is due to the fact that we have not complete a full year of ELA instruction, but another part of this is, again, real dislike of writing. To counteract this, I employed two simple, but as it turns out, highly effective strategies to help my kids move forward in the writing process. The first was increased student voice, and the second was chunking.
Increasingly, and hopefully, unsurprisingly, there is increased discussion about the necessity of engaging students in the decision making process about their own instruction. It is long overdue. Since No Child Left Behind, everything from the federal government down to the classroom has been a top down, shut-up-sit-up-straight-do-as-you’re-told-or-else paradigm, divesting all stakeholders in education from engagement because of denied choice and voice. There is no more crucial a stakeholder in learning than the learner, and with that stakeholder being long shut out from being heard, when our children are disenfranchised in our schools, should we be surprised when they show resistance to leaning into the work we put in front of them? Here I was faced with a high level of disengagement, the answer to which was to bring in, for lack of a better word, my clients. It would appear that current trends, particularly in European schools, agree with me. “Engaging in a meaningful dialogue with students, commonly referred to as “student voice,” is still seen by some schools as a risky strategy. However, this is a risk of which people need not be scared, as proven by ambitious schools which have already experienced impressive and positive outcomes that result from an active student voice.” (Biermann, 2016, P. 96)
I only just dipped my foot in the water to find great results, simply exploring student interests and creating a class to meet the demand, but there are schools where students are trained to be part of school governance and even curriculum design, the results of which, to date, seem to be positive. I and my team, at the end of the 2015-16 school year polled our kids about what they wanted to learn, and when they told us, we designed quarterly courses around those interests, which included such classes as Comic Books as Literature, and ELA and art class, U.S. Historical Re-enactment, a social studies and TV production class, The Science of War, combining history and science, and finally, the big success, Video Game Analysis (VGA), a combination of ELA and art, particularly digital. We allowed students, within the constraints of ensuring they took a commensurate number of core classes, to select the courses they wanted, and we were adaptable about delivering them as well. We’d planned to do an Antebellum Period class called the Science of Innovation, which would have combined social studies and physical science, but so many kids signed up for VGA that we dropped it to create a second section. This was important, because by giving kids an ELA class based on their own interests, we had already done much to increase engagement before the first work was even assigned.
Among the target writing strategies identified by Stephen Kucer in Dimensions of Literacy is the need to use conceptual background knowledge, and choosing video games as our focus enabled this. Over the span of four weeks, in VGA, I planned to cover all aspects of what goes into video game design, such as the monitoring of resources, the graphics and sound, art design, & sequencing, and this is when, realizing how poorly organized my students’ writing had thus far proven to be, I relied upon chunking. I define chunking as the breaking down of a large task into its smaller building blocks, enabling students to make continual progress on an overarching goal at a pace reasonable to them without feeling intimidated by second-guessing themselves about how on earth they are going to get a large project done. “Unitization or chunking is one of the most important psychological processes, as it provides a means of organizing the information we encode from our environment.” (Perlman, Pothos, Edwards, & Tzelgov, (2010), P. 658). Chunking was a means by which I supported students using quite a few of the writing strategies named by Kucer, including removal of the blocks that prevent writing, variation of the manner in which texts are written to support purpose, ease of editing, revision, and use of “repair strategies”, and making adequate links between topics in a piece of work.
I chose eleven different aspects of video game design, and again, attempting to encourage student choice, I asked them each to select a video game to analyze, requiring only that the game exemplified the kinds of story arc with which they were familiar from books, TV shows and movies, so that we might fulfill our obligation to meet language arts proficiencies. Their homework was to play the game they’d chosen for twenty minutes per night, taking notes pertaining to the aspect of design discussed in class that day. It was no small source of amusement to me that I received a number of phone calls and emails asking if that was really their homework, because many parents imagined their children couldn’t be telling the truth that it was, and when I explained to parents what the objectives of the course were and how we’d be meeting those objectives, I not only got understanding from them but complete appreciation and buy in. Even their engagement increased.
We had a highly predictable and structured daily session. Each day, the students were given twenty minutes, at the outset of class, to record their observations about a single design aspect of their video game in a single five-sentence paragraph. Following this, I introduced and we discussed a new aspect of video game design. The most pleasant side effect of these discussions was that students could really bring in their prior knowledge, and even though they learned that they knew far less about what went into crafting video games than they had previously imagined, they were given an opportunity to be experts about something, which increased not only engagement with our material but confidence as well. Then, for twenty minutes, we would gather around as two new students a day played Marvel: Ultimate Alliance on a PlayStation I brought to school and projected onto a white board. Students would take notes about the game design, and then they would use those notes, in the final twenty minutes of class, to write a paragraph about their observations of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. At the end of our observations, we talked about what went into writing good essay introductions and conclusions, and students wrote both for their analysis of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance and the video game they chose.
In the end, after three weeks, students had completed and revised two 13-paragraph essays, complete with Kucer-recommended pictures, charts, color schemes, headings, subheadings, and graphs, and they never even fully realized they whole picture of what they were writing until it was nearly finished. I’d snuck it in on them. Chunking it the way it was, students were able to focus on manageable single paragraphs with a single focus, and at the end, the realized they’d written a full-on critical analysis of every aspect of a video game’s design. There were kids in that class who’d never done any written work at all. There were kids in class who’d only provided half-hearted, paltry examples of the most perfunctory work known to education. There were kids in that class who never believed they could ever finish writing at that scale with any degree of proficiency. But, there it was. They’d done it. The evidence was in their hands, and suddenly, in their assessments, many had achieved proficiency scores they hadn’t (and thought they couldn’t) before.
After these video game analyses were finished, employing another writing strategy identified by Kucer, we expanded on what they’d written by asking them to plan a video game design, based on what they’d learned thus far, and to present their pitches to LoDo Game Company (a fake company, of course, combining the beginnings of my last name and that of my co-teacher, Mr. Lopez). The real-world problem we gave them was as follows: You work at a small game design company, and you’re looking to supply a game to LoDo Games, a giant gaming company in the industry. You imagine quality games, but your company doesn’t have the resources needed to market, package and ship your work to a broad enough segment of the population. You must take your vision of the greatest video game ever imagined to LoDo Games, hoping that they’ll be so wildly impressed, they’ll back your game to the hilt, and your small game company can become a real player in the gaming industry. Their presentations, which included pictures, computer graphics, animations, costumes, and even a smoke machine at one point, were creative, exciting to watch, and demonstrative of the fact that they’d acquired a good number of new skills and a deeper love and understanding for a topic they loved well.
In most cases, the students from VGA had learned how better to organize essays, how to introduce and conclude essays, how to take learning from a page into the real world and vice versa, and most manifestly, how not to be daunted by a large project, full in the knowledge that such projects did not have to be done all at once or, conversely, last minute. They are all working on research projects to close the year at Media Arts Collaborative Charter School. These Presentations of Learning (POLs) involve a research paper, an interview, a media piece, a slide show, and a physical presentation at year’s end. I’m watching the students who took VGA, which was almost the entire middle school student body, and it pleases me to see the way they are progressing, utilizing what they learned last quarter. I believe that not only for the writing process, but for life, they’ve acquired the confidence and skill I always hope they will, and as for student voice and chunking, these are strategies I will continue to develop and use from now on in my instruction.
Works Cited:
Biermann, E. (2016). Student Voice. Education Review, 19(2), 96-101. Retrieved April 16, 2017.
Perlman, A., Pothos, E. M., Edwards, D. J., & Tzelgov, J. (2010). Task-relevant chunking in sequence learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 36(3), 649-661. doi:10.1037/a0017178
Kucer, S. B. (2014). Dimensions of literacy: a conceptual base for teaching reading and writing in school settings. Place of publication not identified: Routledge.