The day of presentations arrived - everyone was anxious and excited. The day prior I prepared an agenda for how the afternoon would unfold. Everyone was committed to a time to present and a group to move through presentations with. After one quick explanation of the lay out they understood and they began, (they listen to instructions VERY WELL, little time is wasted in transition when they know what to do, why it needs to be done this way and what the benefits are in doing it this way).
The afternoon, two hours, of presentations flew by for everyone involved - presenters, viewers and invited guests. Not everyone in the class was able to view everyone else's project in the two hours allotted, we ended with everyone wanting more time to view and present. The projects required time to understand and time to interact with, they were AMAZING!
The afternoon was an extension of the previous learning - students took the knowledge they amassed through the reading, talking, drawing and writing process, added to it the knowledge from Diane on Multimodalities and found a way to make it their own. This made the projects successful.
The presentations of the projects were successful because they were presenting thoughtful, rich and unique projects and also because as viewers the students value the knowledge and the representation of the other members of the class. It is a way of being in the class that I have scaffolded and modelled from the first day of school and continue to scaffold and model each and every of school.
Before moving through presentations I gave each student a piece of paper, without direct instruction, (but because that is how we work), they wrote a comment or a question or a compliment for each presenter.
As well, when the afternoon drew to a close I lead them through a reflection of the presentations, another regular practice, (a form of closure and acknowledgement), a time to pat each other on the back publicly for a job well done.
Zack - Reflections Post Presentations
The two minutes to draw and three minutes to write that created the post presentation reflections was poignant. The students knew, especially those in grade seven, that this was probably the last time they would get to participate in activity. When I flip through the reflections several themes jump out at me: they were impressed by each other's ideas, creativity and effort, they appreciated the amount of thought and energy that they had given to the projects, they loved reading the book and were happy to have the opportunity to present projects about it, they were inspired by each other and they were proud to have been a part of such an endeavour.
Several days later I passed out another form of reflection, this one was sentence stems that asked for thoughts on the entire novel process...
I spend a fair amount of time reading through these reflections, and I am sure I will go back to them several times in the future. They reaffirm why this approach, both the reading the novel and for preparing the projects, are 'good teaching' - all students engaged with it, their reflections tell me that they connect with the activities where they are at in their learning and they move to their own next level while feeling very much apart of the whole class.
We were lucky to have the opportunity to have Diane Potts to come and extend our learning for the 'Zack' projects. I could have offered the same information in the same manner but it would not have had the same impact as it did when delivered by Diane, for several reasons. I positioned Diane as an expert, a Graduate Student from UBC who was coming to help the students to understand Multimodalities which in turn would help them with their 'Zack' projects. I also positioned her as my friend and someone who I talked with to help extend my learning; just like I ask the students to do with their friends and other people in the class. As well, I try to build collaboration with other adults into the dynamic of the class by working with student teachers, resource teachers, principal, aids and experts in front of the students. Further discussion of collaboration as part of classroom instruction can be found in an account on collaborative teaching of a novel study by Jeannie Kerr and Melody Rudd, (see Collaborative Novel Study). Collaboration is an important part of my teaching, collaboration between the students, collaboration between adults and collaboration between students and adults. In this case, the collaboration between Diane and I and the students worked magic. It worked to create moments of 'exceptional learning' for many of the people involved, the students, myself and Diane.