Five Ways to Keep High School English Engaging

You're done. Mentally over it. The next student who calls your name is getting his lips stapled shut. Lesson plans? Phfft. They're lucky if they get an agenda on the board. Your testing may have already happened, so you have these lame duck class periods to fill. Your testing may be coming up soon, and your students are stressed and may need to think about something else for a class period or two. Maybe you can't risk the brain break and need to incorporate music or games in your review.

One of my mentors my first few years of teaching lived the philosophy that students had enough steam at the end of the school year to give her 20 good minutes of attention, and she demanded all 20. That's when her direct instruction took place. She changed up her strategies every 15 or 20 minutes and was able to hold on to her classes without discipline issues. I, on the other hand, caught one of my AP students playing Frisbee on the front lawn of the school during my class period. Did I mention that my classroom overlooked the front lawn? Engagement fail.

There are so many painless ways to hang on to them. Take them outside for silent sustained reading. Let them sit in pairs in the hallway to cut down on the noise in the room. Keep cheap ear buds on hand so they can listen to music while they are working on projects.

Planning for engagement is HARD, so I quiz teachers all the time about their strategies for keeping class lively and interesting. Last year, I asked some AP teachers what they do after the exam and wrote about their responses. Take a look at this post from April 2016 and dig through the ideas.

This year, I hopped on Facebook and asked my teacher blogger/author friends to point me to some stand-alone high school English lesson plans that my followers could grab and teach tomorrow---low prep, high engagement. Substance with stealth.

1. MIX IT UP WITH MUSIC. 
Melissa Kruse's blog is a must see; I fell in love today with her approach to engaging secondary writers with a play list of their school year. Selena Smith has her students use music to review poetry devices. She loves to teach the lesson, and they aren't bored. Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

2. MEMORIALIZE THE YEAR.
Much like Melissa Kruse's playlist activity. a succinctly written memoir is a great go-to activity and can teach students to trim the fat in their writing. Memoir haiku, six-word memoirs, and OC Beach Teacher's 100-word memoirs are a great way to scratch the teenager's itch to talk about herself and still get in some sound instruction on eliminating redundancy.

3. USE FILM DELIBERATELY.
I'm not a fan of showing a full movie as a reward or break from instruction. They can watch movies at home. There are, however, exceptions to that rule. If a film can be used to review skills assessed on an end-of-course exam, I'm all about it. English Bulldog uses "Hidden Figures" for just that purpose. I'm especially all about it (redundant, I know) if students are working while they watch. Doc Cop's lessons on "Life is Beautiful" are compatible with Google apps, a win for those of us old dogs who are trying our best to integrate technology.

4. STACK ON THE FUN.
Landlocked teacher Julie Faulkner has developed a thematic group of activities to get her students thinking about the beach, and teacher-author Addie Williams uses this collection to keep her students engaged (Read the reviews on this one---amazing!). Play bingo with Juggling ELA's literary terms review; you get 30 cards with this set, and students get a chance to compete and get ready for the end-of-year test.

5. MAKE IT CURRENT.

Times are crazy, people, and students need to learn how to sift through all the coverage. My own five-lesson mini unit on fake news is print-ready and Google compatible.

Why Teachers Should Watch "13 Reasons Why"

SPOILERS!!!!! 

I need to give a few details in order to convince you to watch “13 Reasons Why” on NETFLIX, so be prepared. Or just trust me. Watch it. Then come back and read this post.

I taught Hannah Baker, the main character in “13 Reasons Why.” She sat by the heater on a side aisle and always smiled when I tried to make jokes with my second period English class. It was 1991, and I was 23, a first-year teacher at an urban high school. She was 14, and in October of that year, a boy raped her in the wrestling team’s mat room after school one day. That evening, she didn’t tell her parents or her sister or the police. The next morning, she told me.

She told me. I never knew why. Maybe I was approachable. Maybe she didn’t think I would judge her for going into the mat room with that boy in the first place. Maybe I was just young enough for her to think of me. Maybe it was because she had just told me the week before that she had a new boyfriend. Whatever the reason, she gave me a great gift: early experience in dealing with a rape victim. 

If, by some outside chance you don’t know about this NETFLIX series, it is the story of a high school junior, Hannah Baker, who commits suicide and leaves behind a number of cassette tapes explaining why she did it. Everyone who played a part in her decision to die must listen to the tapes and live with the consequences of everyone else hearing the stories.

Because I binge watched “13 Reasons Why” until the wee hours, I processed Hannah’s death while I slept. I dreamed of her, noticed her, counseled her, and beat up a couple of the other characters. Over the three nights that I watched, I saw the faces of so many students I had taught in 22 years of working with teenagers. Untouchable athlete. Irresponsible journalism student. Repressed honor student. I talked out loud to them on occasion.

Oh yeah, I got your number.

Yep. Taught you too, you little turd.

Teachers, you’ve seen the images float by on NETFLIX, but you haven’t watched yet.

I get enough teenage drama at work.

For teens. Produced by Selena Gomez? No, thanks.

I don’t want to watch something so depressing.

There’s a good bit of criticism of the series, including statements from organizations committed to suicide prevention. One psychologist blogged about her daughter's desire to watch it and her decision not to let her. Some wonder if the show just opens a wound without offering a way to heal it.

Festering in that wound are violence, sex, profanity, bullying, depression, misogyny, denial, rape, drug abuse, apathy—all the ingredients for a life that’s too hard to live. Who wants to watch all that, right? 

Here’s why you should: ALL OF YOUR STUDENTS ALREADY HAVE. Your emotionally unstable adolescents whose brains have not fully developed have watched all the episodes. Together. During Spring break. It’s Spring break in my district, and I’m at Panera Bread about ten feet from two sophomores—they still flip their hair and are obviously waiting for a ride—and I’m wondering which characters they are. Are they the bullies or the bullied or both? They are most certainly two girls who have watched a thirteen-hour primer on how to commit revenge suicide. I hope an adult watched it with them and talked through it all.

I am Hannah Baker. When I was 12, I was bullied by three other students at school. Person by person, they convinced most of my seventh-grade classmates to ignore me, to stop talking to me. By that winter, I was having panic attacks, chest pains that prompted my parents to run heart tests. At 12, I had an EKG and a stress test to determine what was going on. At school, two girls saw what was happening and befriended me. Both of them were on the fringe too. Lisa and Tibby, you saved me. 

My teachers had no idea all this was happening. One saw me crying a lot and told my parents I was “too sensitive” for a seventh grader. No one should be that lonely or misunderstood, particularly a child who is surrounded by adults. 

Go watch the show.

How to Make Multiple Choice Test Prep Less Like Torture

 We're sliding into testing season (except it's that long, slow, shallow kind of slide with spikes, barbs, and razor blades along the way). You dread it. They dread it. Even your #2 pencils dread it; they were made for writing, after all, not bubbling.

Students need exposure to the types of questions they'll face, but there are ways to practice that are--dare I say it--engaging. Heaven forbid they actually learn while practicing.

Here's my favorite, and I can attest to its efficacy: Four or Five Corners

1. Post large letters around the room corresponding to the number of answer choices on the multiple choice practice. So, there will be ABCD or ABCDE taped to the walls and file cabinets.

2. Give students a short set of multiple choice questions that are written in the style of the actual  test. These might come from a benchmark, a released exam, or materials created by teacher authors.  WARNING: If you choose to purchase multiple choice practice, find out the question-writing experience of the authors. A good question writer understands design, answer order, stem quality, and most importantly--how to write a FOIL answer. In a five-answer format, there is typically one answer that can be eliminated fairly easily, two answers that a good reader can eliminate, and a foil, that almost-correct choice that trips up our students.

2. Once students have completed the questions, have them all stand in the center of the room.

3. For the first question, each student quickly moves to the letter corresponding with his or her answer choice.

4. At each station, students with that answer confer about their reasoning for choosing that letter. Tell students that you will call on one random person to explain the answer, so everyone needs to be ready.

5. Go around the room and call on students to explain the answers. You can make this step interactive by having students from other groups question the student who is presenting.

6. Explain that students may change groups whenever they wish. If they find that they are unable to defend a choice, they may even stand in the middle of the room until they hear a well-defended choice. Students LOVE this option. The movement will become competitive, and students will start trying to win converts.

7. Once all four (or five) groups have presented, most students will be in two groups, the correct answer and the foil. Let those two groups choose spokespeople and duke it out in a debate.

Why do I love this strategy so much??  
Strong readers are modeling their thinking for weaker readers. As a weak reader, I need to hear the think aloud of someone's reasoning. I need to hear the text used to defend an answer choice. I need to hear someone else's process of elimination.

Do I grade these exercises?
I actually do. Students need a little skin in the game to take their presentations seriously. For a low-stakes daily grade, I offer points for each one the student got correct even if he or she switched groups after hearing others' defense.