Professional Outreach

Publications:

Coming Soon: "A Conversation with Orwell; Teaching 1984 in Bulgaria" in the Winter 2012 issue of Independent School Magazine

"Five Strategies for Any Teacher in Any Subject" in the CAIS Spring 2011 Newsletter

"Why Teach Abroad" in the Winter 2011 Independent School Magazine

"Interdisciplinary Inroads" in the January 2011 English Journal

"Creating Character Blogs" and "Creating an Online Community through Educational Technology" at NCTE's Readwritethink website.

"Motivational Moments" in Reading Today, August/September 2010

"Partner Classrooms: Linking Bulgaria and Washington D.C.", May 2010 Issue of English Journal

"Educational Blogging" at NCTE's Classroom Notes Plus website.

"The True Benefit of Technology to Education" at Independent Teacher Online Journal

"No More Spying! English in the International Classroom" in the European Council of International Schools Newsletter

"Jazzing up Spring Lessons with a Theater Corner" in the CAIS faculty newsletter (p. 17)

"Finding Mr. Potatohead" in the CAIS faculty newsletter (p. 6)

"Into the Wild", NAIS Cool Books Project, Independent School Magazine Website

"Partner Classrooms: Linking Bulgaria and Washington D.C.", May 2010 Issue of English Journal

Presentations:

Since attending the Exeter Humanities workshop, I've often presented on the Harkness method of discussion and worked with faculty members at both The Webb Schools and The American College of Sofia to help them incorporate it into their classrooms.

More recently, I've become interested in the role of technology in teaching. I coordinated a technology in-service for ACS including workshops on blogging, anti-plagiarism sites, Web 2.0, Wikipedia, SIRS database, and message boards. Visit the in-service companion blog I startedhere.

"Thanks for all the time and effort you put into planning yesterday's in-service. I enjoyed all three of my sessions very much and learned quite a lot as well. The feedback from others has been very positive. I think this was probably the best in-service we've had in the past few years."

-Tom Cangiano, President, American College of Sofia

Poetry Slam

From left: Students line the balcony at a library slam, enjoy sushi at our baseball field slam, prepare the stage for a garden slam, and perform in a lunchtime poetry jam

Whenever I teach American poetry, I like to introduce the concept of poetry slam with a variety of audio and video clips and pieces by modern poets. I've never had a class that didn't eventually fall for the genre. As we work on writing and performing pieces, students divide into committees (judging, ambiance, programs) to plan for their own slam somewhere on campus.

This year was my first time holding slams in Bulgaria. The two shows "Just Slam It" and "The Broken Cliche" proved popular amongst students and teachers alike.

The Harkness Method

I learned about Harkness, a student-centered discussion method, at the Exeter Humanities institute after my first year of teaching. I've been using it, presenting on it, and writing about it ever since. My students run their own discussions and analyze their own productivity using observation charts, and I find they listen very carefully to each other's advice about how to improve. I've met with some difficult sections over the years, but each of my classes has eventually learned to share the floor as equally as possible, to brainstorm discussion questions worth asking, to balance text and commentary, and to stay on track. It's fun to see them go from that initial panic of long awkward pauses when they start out to confident leadership at the end of the year.

Often the best discussions come after interesting warm-up activities. Here are a few of my favorites, which I often share in my presentations to others about Harkness.

Discussion Sparks

1. Partners act out a 20 second version of the reading for the group, illustrating just one or two moments they see as most vital.

2. Share Around: each person in the class responds to a question, reads a favorite sentence, etc.

3. Graffiti representation: students create pieces of artistic graffiti that represent an aspect of the text and we view them gallery-style before beginning our discussion.

4. Silent discussion: everyone writes a question and then passes it to the left. Each student writes a response and then passes it on to continue the silent discussion. After ten minutes they return the papers to their original owner and someone whose question prompted a lot of good thinking opens the discussion.

5. Question Hat Exchange: students put one question in. Everyone takes someone else’s out to ask during discussion.

6. Students choose a song that best fits the reading to add to the book’s soundtrack, briefly explaining their choice and the connection in writing or to a partner before discussion begins.

7. Students prepare as if to report “live at the scene” at some crucial moment in the previous night's reading. Several volunteers make their report to the class.

8. Students illuminate a passage they see as vital to the text, either with annotations or by drawing it out and emphasizing important words or phrases with different colors.

Outside Reading

Clockwise from top left: student-designed shirts promoting books for an outside reading festival, book cover projects, tallies in the May 2009 outside reading competition, the reading corner of my room at ACS

Sometimes I think popular authors like J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer act as P.R. agents for the most beautiful works of literature. It seems that the more students I can get interested in scifi, fantasy, adventure, and teen fiction, the more students I have who love English. I spend a lot of time trying to hook my students on every kind of literature. Below, you'll see a list of the ways I keep outside reading interesting for my students, which I used in an article I wrote this year called "The Call to Armchairs."

• Invite teachers, parents, or other community members to do guest book talks
• Create a tic-tac-toe or Bingo card with book titles, and offer a prize to anyone who reads all the books in one row
• Have a competition between several classes to see who can read the most, or an individual competition among all students
• Put up certificates in a wall of fame for anyone who reads over 1,000 or 5,000 pages
• Put on a book festival in which each student creates a project about his/her favorite book – have food and music, invite other classes
• Create a “Favorite Reads” blog and post student reviews of their favorite books for future classes (see ours at www.acsreads.blogspot.com)
• Spend a whole class period in the library encouraging students to explore every area – fiction and nonfiction
• Connect outside reading books to the curriculum, giving short book talks when a book relates to the class material. For example, pitch Into the Wild while reading Walden, The Things They Carried while reading A Farewell to Arms, Slam while reading The Scarlet Letter. If you’re having students create graphic novel pages from a text or as an autobiographical project, pitch Maus and Persepolis on the day you introduce the assignment.
• Assign or invite students to interview parents or teachers about their favorite books and create recommendation posters

Recently I watched as a student stared in disbelief at the outside reading "Top 10" list on the wall. "Him? But he's so stupid!" said the student. I took pleasure in correcting him. The boy he was talking about is one of my best readers, a student with a voracious mind, a strong fluid writing style, and almost no desire to speak in class. He had read 3,000 pages of outside reading in the second quarter, shattering others' impressions of him as a lazy, untalented student. He recently won our class poetry slam, and seems to be on the road to sharing what he humorously calls his "secret genius."

Project-Based Learning

A student reads a "This I Believe" essay at a live radio show put on by my 12th graders for the 8th graders. Several students had their essays published on NPR's This I Believe website.

I love to teach through projects as well as papers. I find the students enjoy mock trials, fashion shows, scrapbook-making, graphic novel creation, storyboarding, children's book writing, and festival creation as much as I do, and they learn the analytical skills they need while hardly noticing.

I often differentiate projects and mini-project lessons to engage multiple learning styles.

A Few Examples: Final Project for As I Lay Dying, Project for How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, Death of a Salesman Tic-Tac-Toe lesson, Project for Emma.

Portfolio

Portfolio workshop first captured my imagination when I was at Bread Loaf in 2006. At the Middlebury college library I picked up a copy of Richard Kent's Room 109, The Promise of a Portfolio Classroom and I was immediately engaged.

The next year I had my Honors American Literature students create identity portfolios, including personal graphic novels, identity mandalas, and a variety of writing. They loved it.
See the latest version of the identity portfolio assignment here.

Last year I had my 10th graders create poetry portfolios which eventually became poetry anthologies, combining their best work with their favorite published pieces. The anthology showcase impressed us all.
See the assignment here.

This year my I.B. 12th graders are creating digital portfolios of their best writing, and sharing their work via the internet with students in an I.B. classroom in Kentucky. The students provide each other with feedback throughout the process and get to know each other a bit as well.
See the assignment here. See examples of student portfolios here and here.

Drama

My first year of teaching I applied for and received a community grant to create a theater corner in my classroom, complete with wigs, costumes and unusual props. Ever since, I like to incorporate acting in my curriculum.

One of my favorite projects, inspired by my wonderful Shakespeare professor at Pomona college, is to have students act out a play in separate scenes around the school campus. See the project description here.

Sometimes I incorporate drama in simpler ways, like this reader's theater lesson plan for Huck Finn and this Macbeth tableaux.