Taking Risks (Can a great lesson get even better?)

Taking risks as a teacher is scary, especially when you feel like you have a pretty good thing going. When you get good at teaching something, it can get easy to just keep going with the same things you have always done.  Why not? It is a good lesson, it always goes great, so why change things up?

I personally believe it is things like that that get great teachers in ruts.  Just because something is great, doesn't mean it can't be improved.  The world around us is constantly changing, our students are constantly changing, and it makes us better at what we do if we take risks and challenges

Social media is huge for our students, and I don't know about other schools, but at my school in particular it is Twitter and Snapchat that students spend most of their time on.  I am a fan of social media.  I don't think we should preach to kids how awful it is, instead we should teach them to have digital citizenship, and how to use social media to their benefit.

In my Advanced English class we have been reading/watching Hamlet for the last few weeks.  The kids always seem to get really into it, and I have some great lesson plans. But, I realized I was starting to get complacent, and comfortable.  With this class especially, they love Twitter.  So I started looking through resources to try to find a way to combine what we were doing with Hamlet, use social media, give the students an authentic audience, and teach digital citizenship.  (I wanted more than just tweet like you were a character, make a Facebook page for a character, etc.  I wanted it to be something more authentic than that)

I came across a lesson, that to be honest, I first read through and thought it was a) too much work, and b) waaaay too different than anything we had done before. I came back to a couple days later though, and decided to give it a try

Basically the kids were divided into 3 groups, the actors, the paparazzi, and the news reports.  The actors were responsible for playing the scene (with props and costumes), the paparazzi's job was to live tweet and snapchat the performance, and then the news team had to put together their report on the scene, just based on the twitter and snapchats

The kids were SO excited, and got so into it.  They had full on costumes, the Tweeters made a new Twitter account and hashtags, and the news team created a whole news network.  I was SO impressed, and it was refreshing to do something new and fun.  I shared the Twitter handle with our administration and some other teachers to give the students a live audience.  Going back through and looking at the feed after the performance, I was impressed with their interpretation of what was going on.

After, we were able to discuss how each group interpreted the scene, and more importantly, we had a great discussion over how ideas can be skewed through a social media lens.

Moral of the story: Don't be afraid of change.  I am lucky I have a great group of kids to have as "guinea pigs", but it really felt so good to go outside of my "teaching comfort zone".   I know not everything will go great like this did, but the attempt alone is enough to not only engage my students and get them excited, but to also get me excited about teaching also

Peace, Love,
Ms. A