Storybooks: The Big Picture

For Connected Courses (#ccourses), I had posted something about the Storybook project, so I thought I should start the arduous task of documenting that project here too. It's the heart and soul of my classes, and there's so much I want to say about it. For an attempt at an overview, see the Connected Courses post: Why? Writing!


BRIEF DESCRIPTION. The Storybook is a semester-long project in which each student chooses a topic related to the class, finds traditional stories on that topic, and then retells those stories in their own style. They publish the Storybook as a website, and the students share and comment on their Storybook projects week by week. You can see an archive of past projects here: Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics.


DETAILS. There is so much I will need to say about the Storybooks, but for an overview, take a look at the week by week assignments which you can see here: Weekly Storybook Assignments.

As you can see, there is an alternate project called the Writing Portfolio. That is something new for Fall 2014, so I will write up something about that separately when I see how many people choose the Portfolio option. It's totally new and I have no idea what to expect.

The Storybook project begins already in the first week when students browse through the archive of past project, looking for ideas and inspiration: Storybook Favorites.

There then follow two weeks of brainstorming, divided (somewhat artificially) between brainstorming about Storybook Topics and Storybook Styles. I will write up separate posts explaining how those assignments work.

Then, in Week 4, students should be ready to write their Introduction, based on the plan that has emerged from the two weeks of brainstorming. Based on that Introduction, they then make their choice: carry on with the Storybook project, or switch to the Portfolio instead.

Students who carry on with the Introduction then create a website for their Storybook and publish the revised Introduction. (They already created a practice Google Site so that they are now ready to make a website for the Storybook.)

After the website and Introduction are both online, students then start reading and commenting on each other's projects; I'll have more to say about that in a separate post. You can see the projects for the current semester here: Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics. I also keep Pinterest Boards for the Storybooks!

The rest of the semester consists of alternating weeks of writing and revision as students add new stories to their Storybook and then revise those stories. I'll have something to say about the writing-and-revision process in a separate post.

The schedule is flexible so that if a student misses a weekly Storybook assignment, they can still carry on after having missed a week. I'll explain more about the alternate schedules in a separate post. The alternate schedules are an important part of how the project works: it's a demanding project, and while I want the students to work on the project every week, I totally understand that there might be times in the semester when that is just not possible.

At the end of the semester, students nominate their favorite Storybooks and we have a ballot, just for fun, where they vote on the most-nominated Storybooks for the best-of-semester projects. I'll say more about that in a separate post also.


HISTORY.

I've used the Storybook approach since I first started teaching online. In fact, one of my biggest motivations for wanting to teach online was to make the students' websites the natural focal point of the class. When I first started, I very naively did not have a cycle of writing-and-revision. Instead, I asked the students to add a new story every week while revising their previous story at the same time. That worked for some students, but many students needed more help with their writing, so starting in the second year, I switched to the alternating weeks of writing and revision. The next year, I created the alternate schedules to help students see how they could stay on track even when missing some of the weekly assignments.

As for the websites themselves, the students originally published them in webspace (4MB) provided by the university, using Netscape Composer (later Mozilla Seamonkey) to create their pages and upload them with FTP. Then, without warning, my school deleted hundreds of student projects from the archive. It was the single greatest setback I have ever experienced as an online instructor; I spent Sunday, August 15, 2010, literally in tears as I clicked through one broken link after another after another, realizing that hundreds of websites had simply vanished overnight, just a few days before the start of the Fall semester. Luckily, some of my students had been experimenting already with Google Sites as a publishing alternative (for students working in computer labs, a 100% browser-based option was much more convenient), so starting in Fall 2010, students began publishing with Google Sites. That is why my archive of past projects only goes back to Fall 2010, and it is also why I will find it hard ever to really trust my university again for any kind of web hosting.


GOALS. I have far too many goals even to possibly list here, but there is a graphic about "teaching writers" as opposed to "assigning writing" or "teaching writing" which really sums it up for me (thanks to Larry Ferlazzo for sharing the graphic at Google+):

GENERAL THOUGHTS

I cannot begin to describe my enormous satisfaction with the Storybooks. They are a pleasure to read, and watching the students create the Storybooks every semester is like watching a magic show as they summon the Storybooks out of nothingness using the magic wand of the imagination. Even though I have taught these courses for over 10 years and have seen now what must be over 2000 Storybooks, each semester always brings new topics, new styles, new approaches that no one has ever tried before. As a teacher, I had always believed in each student's creative powers as an abstract principle, but the Storybook project has demonstrated that principle in action year after year after year: the students' creative powers are awesome. Every semester, there are Storybooks that make a huge impression on me, stories and styles that I will never forget.

Even more important: the students have the same experience too, being surprised and delighted by their own creativity while also reveling in the creative powers of their fellow students. The Storybook project has been a great experience for me not just as a teacher, but just as a person; these projects are an important part of my life. Plus, it's a very flexible type of project: I would urge anyone who is looking for a writing-based semester-long project to give it a try. I'm sure it could be adapted to just about any class where the students are reading and writing and sharing their work!

Here's a screenshot of the Indian Epics Storybook Archive at Pinterest: so much goodness — and all created by students in MLLL-4993-995. Please feel free to browse and enjoy! There's an even bigger Myth-Folklore Archive Board, too. :-)

The Half-Reading Option

A general strategy I've been trying to use in my classes is making things more explicit and transparent so that the assumptions I have about learning which are obvious to me can be more obvious to the students too. The "half-reading option" in both my classes is one of my new experiments along those lines this semester, and I am really happy with the results so far! Because of exams in other classes around this time of the semester, this is a week when I would expect to see lowered participation in my classes, but when I just checked for this week's reading, every single student in both classes had done at least half the reading, so nobody is blocked from the storytelling post this week! I'm really happy to see that, and it prompted me to write about that aspect of my class for today's post.


BRIEF DESCRIPTION. There are two roughly equal reading assignments in each of my classes each week. For students to do the storytelling post, they need to have done at least half of the reading because the story is based on that reading. In addition to the regular reminders I send out about pending assignments, I have a special reminder that alerts people explicitly that they need to do at least half of the reading if they want to do the storytelling blog post for the week.


DETAILS. This works slightly differently in my two classes because of the nature of the reading.

In Myth-Folklore, students choose a new reading unit each week from the UnTextbook. Those reading units are divided in half. Ideally, they start a reading diary post for the first half which they complete on Monday (Tuesday morning grace period), and then they add to that post as they do the second half of the reading on Tuesday (Wednesday morning grace period), followed by a storytelling blog post on Wednesday (Thursday morning grace period), with blog comments starting on Friday. If students miss the first half of the reading, I remind them that they can still make a reading choice and do half the reading; the only limitation is that they should choose a reading unit where the storytelling arc does not require reading the full unit. They can see when they make their choice in the UnTextbook just which units are not suited to half-reading. Here are the specific assignment instructions: Myth-Folklore Reading Diary.

In the Indian Epics class, the reading consists of epics that do carry on from week to week, so students cannot just skip the reading. To fill in the gap if they do miss a portion of the reading, I have Reading Guides for them to use. Those Reading Guides actually serve many purposes, but one important purpose is to cover a missed assignment. Because the reading is more substantial in this class, students complete two Reading Diary posts each week: Reading A due Monday (Tuesday morning grace period) and Reading B due Tuesday (Wednesday morning grace period), following by storytelling and then blog comments, just like in Myth-Folklore You can see the instructions here: Indian Epics Reading Diary. If a student misses the A portion in a given week, I send a special reminder to let them know that they need to read through the Reading Guide for that missed portion so that they can be caught up and ready to read and complete Reading Diary B. Reading the Reading Guides is an assignment that is already part of the class at the end of the week (Reading Review assignment), so the students who do use the Reading Guide for this purpose are making headway on that assignment too!

I am incredibly pleased at how well this working. I was worried that students might find it confusing, but that has not been the case. I've gotten a few emails from students just checking to make sure they have understood the situation correctly, and in every case they have. Sometimes they choose to do half the reading because they are swamped (I know that because they sometimes comment about their choice in their Reading Diary), and in other cases they just run out of time. Either way, the half-option serves its purpose. I would rather have people do half the reading than none at all, especially because they need to do at least some reading to be able to do the storytelling post. That storytelling post is really the most important assignment of the week, providing the basis for the blog comments at the end of the week. It is also, I suspect, the real locus of learning: students probably won't remember much of what they read... but they might indeed remember the part of the reading that they worked with to create their own story!


HISTORY. There is a somewhat different history here for each class.

In Myth-Folklore, I made no half-way mark distinction with regard to the reading. It was all-or-nothing. If students did the reading, they could do the storytelling post; if they did not do the reading, they could not. Every week there were students who were shut out of doing the storytelling posts as a result of the all-or-nothing approach to the reading, and I suspect that there were many students who skimmed the whole reading way too quickly in order to avoid being blocked, so they actually got less out of trying to do the whole thing than they can now get out of concentrating just on half.

In Indian Epics, the readings were always divided into two halves (it's a more substantial amount of reading, so it really needed to be divided up), and I also supplied Reading Guides. But here is what I did not do: I was not explicit about what students should do if they missed part of the reading. I assumed they would realize they could use the Reading Guides to fill in the gaps, but occasional remarks by students in their blogs made me realize that they were not doing that. So, I have now made explicit what was just implicit before: the Reading Guides are an important part of the class; everybody needs to read the Guides and, in particular, people who miss a portion of the reading should use the Reading Guide to fill in the gap before they move on to the next portion of assigned reading.


GOALS. As often, there are several goals at work here:

• Self-Awareness. I want students to be aware of the choices they are making as they do the work for the class, taking responsibility for their choices.
• Flexibility. This flexible workload allows students to make choices that accommodate their own interests and priorities.
• Quality over Quantity. I want students to know that choosing to do half the reading well is, for the purposes of this class, better than skimming through the whole thing in a rush.

GENERAL THOUGHTS

As far as Indian Epics is concerned, this is a change I should have made ages ago, and I am kicking myself for not having seen that earlier. It's actually not even a change at all — rather, it is just making something explicit that I had wrongly expected would be obvious to the students, even when it clearly was not obvious at all.

As far as Myth-Folklore, I am really glad that I had the realization about reading-in-halves in the Indian Epics class so that I was able to take that factor into account as I built the UnTextbook this past summer and designed the reading and writing assignments to go with it, making the two-halves distinction very clear.

This system is working incredibly well and, at least right now in the midst of Week 5, I don't see any reason to change this strategy for next semester. So far, so good! I might tally up some stats at the end of the semester just to see what the patterns of half-reading were like. I'll be curious if I can detect a bump because of midterm season for example, and also how levels of reading participation by a given student might correlate with other aspects of the class. Once again, of course, D2L BS gives me no help in doing that kind of data analysis, but I can gather the data on my own and see what I learn!

Better half an egg than an empty shell.

(English proverb)

Sample Assignment Schedules

One of my students wrote me today to ask just how exactly she could turn the class into a Tuesday-Thursday class, so I wrote up a few sample schedules to share.


BRIEF DESCRIPTION. As a way to encourage students to work ahead, I've created three sample schedules that simulate a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, a Tuesday-Thursday schedule, and a weekend-only schedule. You can see the schedules here: Designing Your Class Schedule.


DETAILS. As I explained in another post, the class is self-scheduled. Ideally, I wish students would be working a week or more ahead of schedule, and that way they are really ready for anything that comes up, able to just take time off from this class to handle anything that might happen unexpectedly, good or bad. At the same time, I am very aware that a lot of students just default into letting the daily deadlines dictate their schedule, which is certainly not going to be especially convenient for anybody. I'm not entirely sure that these schedules which I've created will be a perfect fit, but maybe just seeing the examples will inspire people to come up with the schedule that really does suit them best.


HISTORY. This is something brand-new as of September 2014; I am glad that I will have it ready in time for next semester where I can do a better job of promoting it right from the very start of the semester.


GOAL. My goal here is very simple: I would really like for every student to arrange the weekly schedule of assignments so that it fits conveniently into their other obligations!


GENERAL THOUGHTS

I am so glad that this student wrote and asked me. From her email, I could tell that she really was stumped about how it would be possible to re-arrange the assignments. So, for sure these sample schedules can answer her question. Now I am hoping that maybe there are other students who might have the same question but who had not written to ask me. As always, it's really great when someone asks! Clearly it was something I would not have figured out to do on my own, and it will be great to have this in place next semester.

LatinLOLCat:

Aliud agendi tempus, aliud quiescendi.

There's a time for working and a time for resting.

Grading without Fear

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I've updated all my (un)grading materials here in much more detail: (Un)Grading - An Omnibus. That's the post you want to read. :-)

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I've been thinking about the wonderful post by Mark Barnes, My Throw Out Grades Challenge Video, along with all the great posts at Joe Bower's blog about abolishing grading. I would also recommend this post by John Spencer: What happens to student engagement when you take away grades? While I cannot abolish grades in my classes, I have managed to reduce my role in grading to zero, and it's something I consider crucial for the success of my classes.
A sad update: Requiescat in pace Joe Bower.


BRIEF DESCRIPTION. My school uses an A-B-C-D-F grading system, no pluses and minuses (thank goodness). Within that institutional constraint, I have created a points-based grading scheme, and the students record their own points in the Gradebook using Declarations: they complete checklists in the form of a true-false quiz for each assignment, and those points are automatically recorded. The students thus keep track of their own work, and the result is the grade they have earned based on their total points at the end of the semester. I do set the grading scale and, yes, it is arbitrary, like all grading scales are. Aside from that, though, I do no actual grading for the course. All my time is spent giving feedback (not grades) on their projects every week.

DETAILS. The best way to see how this works in detail is just to read what I explain to the students. I love being able to tell the students right from the start: the grade has nothing to do with me — but we have other important work to do together: Choosing Your Schedule and Your Grade. I also provide an explanation of my philosophy of grading for students who want to know why I take this approach.

HISTORY. I always used this points-based grading system, but I did not invent the Declarations until a momentous day in 2004. That was a game-changer for me. Before that, I used to spend a ridiculous amount of time recording the points in the Gradebook, and the students were sometimes frustrated that there would be a delay (sometimes even several days) between doing the work and seeing the points in the Gradebook. But then I realized I could hack a true-false quiz in order to let the students do that for themselves so they could see the points immediately, while also giving them much more responsibility for checking their own work. Better for them AND better for me! I'm pleased to say that there are other faculty at my school who have adopted this same "Declaration" system, and I am always happy when a student remarks in a blog post that they did Declarations in some other class they have taken.

GOALS. I have far too many goals here to list; the most important goals would be:

• Remove Myself. My main goal is to remove myself from the grading equation so that I can focus all my effort on providing personalized feedback (which I provide in abundance).
• Remove Stress. This is meant to be a completely stress-free grading system.
• Make It Flexible. Students can choose to get an A in the class, or a B, or a C; it's up to them.
• Make Students Responsible. The students are responsible for checking their own work with the text of the Declarations prompting them to check carefully.
• Be Clear. At any moment in the semester, students can see exactly where they stand.
• Be Objective about Grading. There is nothing subjective about any of the grading; it's a completely objective system (aside from the subjectiveness of the A-B-C-D-F scale itself). At the same time, there are no learning objectives; there are only learning "subjectives" (thanks to #Rhizo15 for this great term) meaning that this system allows the students to pursue their own learning paths and to set their own goals.

Proverb Laboratory:

Without curiosity, there is no wisdom.

(Polish: Bez ciekawości nie ma mądrości.)