Clairemont 12th Grade
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Clairemont 12th - Oil, Iraq, and Islam
Contents |
Team Members
| Name | Subject |
|---|---|
| Mr Jimenez | Economics |
| Mr Knight | English |
| Mr Simpson | Multimedia |
Projects
When is war justified?
The purpose of this project is for students to examine the causes, consequences and impacts of the conflict between Islamic countries of the Middle East and the U.S. Each group will choose a topic from the list below (see Essential Questions) to investigate and develop into a 15 minute news program. As participants in the Digital Media Academy, students in groups will be expected to produce a fifteen minute news program. This will consist of:
1) Individual students will produce a Research Binder (Due: Oct. 9th).
2) A five minute documentary (Due: Nov 2nd).
3) A 10 minute talk show,separate from the video. (Due: November 13).
4) Each group will produce, maintain and submit a Project Planning Binder. ((Due: periodically)
An additional requirement is that each group must document contacts with at least four (4) adult experts in the outlying community. Help will be provided in contacting professional journalists, professors and other experts. However, the expectation is that ALL groups will use our community resources!
Curriculum Map
[Click here for curriculum map]
Blog
Summer Institute Update
Insert Blog Entry
First Quarter Update
First Week The first project the students were assigned was to produce a photo essay to train students to thin visually. They were required to produce a two-minute photo essay focused on a place. This project was modeled on an international student website, www.Bridgestoundertanding.
Weeks two and three
Students read WWII war memoir Girl With The White Flag. This book was required reading to instill and deepen students understanding of the horrors of war from the civilian perspective.
Weeks Five and Six
Students analyzed PBS War documentary “The War.” Credit was given for these reviews in both the Economics and English classes.
Students read Shah of Shahs a new journalism docu-novel on the fall of the Shah of Iran.
Current Project
Students are beginning to create their research binders for the main project “Oil, Iraq and Islam.” Students have been conducting research in both English and History class.
Challenges One significant challenge has been that we do not have a “pure academy.” All three classes have different students that are in the Digital Media Academy (enrolled in Econ. English and Multimedia Video Production. This has made grouping and research very difficult.
Overcoming Challenges
We are trying to deal with the issue of not having a “pure academy” by asking that all groups include at least 1-2 students that are enrolled in all three classes within the academy. It is also a challenge to try to cover or juggle regular curriculum with ongoing projects.
Driving Question
There has been no change to our original driving question.
General Response from students
We are pushing the students to read more, research more and to produce more than is required from the average classes. There is a bit of reluctance to take the extra steps needed to produce the product. We are trying to counter this by backing off the normal curriculum and concentrating more on the project and giving he kids ample time to do research, write scripts and eventually to film and edit project. Pictures http://chs.sandi.net/rockets
Second Quarter Update
1. What have you, as a team, learned from this project experience? Keep the expectations high and use a good rubric and students will, in general, perform.
We need scaffold our instruction. When doing complex tasks, students need more assistance doing the component parts. We had them produce five-minute videos, we needed do a better job teaching them the discrete skills in smaller portions. For example we need to teach them how to do voice-overs and how to unify voice-overs with images and interviews into a complete narrative.
If we had a junior level academy, we could get kids in the 12th grade with higher level skills.
Students need to be retrained and rewired to break down the walls of the classroom. Getting them out in the community was like pulling teeth. We required each group to contact four experts in the outside community. No one received an A on that requirement. We needed to adapt the pacing to students skill levels. We’d like to have more time to assign some smaller projects first, so that they have more technical skill for a big project like this.
2. What surprises have you, as a team, encountered during this project? We have had a hard time collaborating, but we are working on meeting 3rd period.
Students are not accustomed to moving out into the community. We were surprised at how timid (lethargic) and reluctant they were to make contacts and conduct interviews. Once they did them, the quality was pretty good. As teachers we literally had to make the calls. Students spent hours avoiding making calls. And they whined endlessly about how adults would not help them, yet when calls were placed, the experts were unbelievably cooperative.
We do not have a pure academy. Students have complained that we need to do a better job of coordinating our instruction. We’re working on it.
Pleasant surprises: The creativity was impressive. The videos were visually appealing. We were pleasantly surprised by the critical , thinking. There was an emotional charge to almost all the videos that was impressive. The students did meaningful research and asked lots of deep questions. When they did get out to talk with experts the students were thinking and engaged. The students bought into the topics.
The talk shows were engaging as well. The students that planned and prepared were quite impressive. We have to adapt the format so that we can fit it into the school broadcast. It needs to be shortened. We also want to distribute their work so that it has more visibility. History classes, the bulletin, the school website, You Tube, contests.
3. What have you, as a team, done to address the diverse needs of a diverse classroom of students? We made sure the academy was accessible to ELL’s and special ed by making it a World Lit course and not a British Lit course (advance). The groups reflected the diversity of the class.
We tried to keep the rigor high while scaffolding the instruction. We used graphic organizers (story boards) to assist students with planning and pre-writing. Since this was our first year, we did not have the best models available for demonstration purposes.
Next unit will be on immigration. This should be a topic that will speak the concerns of many ELL’s.
We addressed the topic of the war in the Middle-East via novels, films and contemporary readings. This approach allowed them to deepen and broaden their understandings. There was some intentional built in repetition. This helps ELL’s. Students also worked in groups. All these instructional approaches provide “comprehensible input” and contextualization.
4. What do students say has been the most difficult part of this project? Students complained about time management issues. They had a hard time forecasting and getting the small tasks done as opposed to procrastinating.
They had trouble adjusting their mindset to think outside of the box. They were nervous and reluctant to make contacts outside of school for interviews. Once they made the contacts things seemed to go quite smoothly.
They had a very difficult time building and maintaining a coherent narrative. We spent a lot of time planning and pre-writing and researching and setting up interviews, but when it came to editing and splicing film (interviews, voice overs and narrative) the story-telling broke down.
Overcoming senioritis, lethargy and inaction is a huge issue around here. Students admit to their own laziness and senior lethargy.
5. What do students say has been the most valuable part of this project?
Students enjoyed getting off campus and interviewing experts (Steve Breen cartoonists for the U-T, George Varga music critic for the U-T, professors of Middle East studies, Islamic women, military recruiters, peace activitists) outside of school once we were able to get them to pick up the phone and make the call. They were able to see adults in their real world job sites, rather than just teachers. They seemed to thrive on the interaction once it finally occurred.
They were challenged by the topics. They actually liked being engaged and challenged.
They had fun tying music, images and sound bites into a film project.
The following four photos were taken during the second quarter.
Third Quarter Update
1. How has this project changed the way you each teach your respective subjects?
A) VIDEO PRODUCTION: This PBL Project (videos on “Oil, Iraq, Islam” and “Immigration”) has helped reinforce the need for student planning in order to produce a quality video. Students have had to take into consideration the perspective of the viewer. They need to be better at re-creating the 5-stop writing process (1 brainstorming, pre-writing, drafting, editing and revising) as it applies to video production. They like to shoot from the hip and improvise. They don’t plan and predict or forecast very well. They need more structure in order to produce a better final product. This would help them improve their storytelling abilities. We need to continue to assist them with improving sound and visual production quality. In video production we have had to reinforce the teaching of editing techniques.
B) WORLD LIT: First semester, the “Oil, Iraq, Islam” unit went pretty well. The teaching of Kite Runner, and Shah of Shahs went pretty well. Students loved Kite Runner. Shah of Shahs was less well received. Students selected topics for student. The resulting projects were pretty good. One skill we need to improve on teaching is pre-writing and scripting. Students need to see actual scripts earlier in the year, so they know how to create one and work from one. We had them recast and shoot from a professional script from “48 Hours of Madness” and this was a productive exercise because it allowed them to work with a real script.
Second semester has not gone as smoothly. The topic of immigration was problematic. Many students are unable to look at it from a rationale perspective. They brought in attitudes of intolerance, racism and anger. Students were also distracted by a racial incident on campus which led to a near violent clash – not in our class but in another. There were also some difficult moments in this class as students were “loco” and unable to move beyond highly emotional arguments to look at the topic in an unaffected manner. In addition there were two more racial incidents on campus, and given this incident. We tabled our discussion for two weeks (which also allowed students to complete their senior exhibition projects). One change in my delivery of instruction would be to teach the news articles first – BEFORE we read a text as controversial as Enrique’s Journey. Students need background information that is based on realities. They have so much bias,
C) In Economics we looked carefully at the escalating oil prices and how they translate into higher gasoline prices at home. We also did extensive research into how the war in Iraq has affected oil supply, increased the national debt, put a strain on the military and caused dissention at home in the United States. We have continued to follow what the presidential candidates have had to say about the war in Iraq and what their plan is for the future. We viewed several segments of 60 Minutes in order to give the kids a clear picture of what professional stories and interviews looked like.
Students spent time researching these areas, gleaning information from print and electronic source material. They used this material to create scripts for their 60 Minutes style video documentaries.
2. What kind of attention has this project created on your campus?
One of the video documentary segments was used during advisory period and broadcast across the campus as a hot topic. Students were able to watch and discuss the theme of the effect of music lyrics on the war (and vice versa) in advisory.
About a dozen students made reference to the Digital Media Academy and their experiences in video production in the Senior Exhibitions. Many of them talked very positively about the creative work they did in the class. The work of the Academy has been touted by the English Department Chair in her submission for the monthly parent bulletin. One student put her video on You Tube.
Many students who worked on these projects in the Digital Media Academy took these skills with them in creating interesting Senior Presentation projects. There was a buzz within the Digital Media Academy about how interesting and sometimes difficult it was to find real people that they could interview, how to get there, how to set up interviews and write open-ended questions etc.
3. A. If you are producing a product for a client (on site or in the community), what kind of feedback/response have you received from your client regarding the process and the product?
3. How could this project be designed to produce a product for a client?
In several respects, this project did produce a product. A) One of the first assignments was to produce a video about a place. One student created a PR video about the school. This students said the principal asked to use this for the school website. In the future we might revise this assignment so that students actually produce videos for clients. We could have students go to local organizations and businesses to offer their services as videographers.
Short investigative interviews and stories are the bread and butter of the news industry and this was the sort of story that we were hoping the kids would produce and learn how to manage. They learned how to incorporate still pictures, video clips and interviews into the final project.
B) We plan to have students produce more “Hot Topics” videos for the Daily Bulletin here at CHS. These news segments will hopefully be seen school wide.
C) A number of seniors made “How to” videos to fulfill their senior exhibition requirement. There were videos such as: “How to design a weight work out;” “How to hit selected tennis strokes”; “How to help English Language Learners.” And one student did a documentary on “Why CHS needs to update access to its football stadium for Special Needs Students.” We might explore ways for students to build on this notion.
4. What comments have you received from the parents of the students involved in the project and teachers on your campus who are not involved in the project?
We haven’t heard formally in any way from parents and colleagues. On the other hand, every thing we’ve heard anecdotally has been generally positive. A number of colleagues who sat in on the “Oil, Iraq, Islam” videos were ecstatic about the ideas – though the production values were in need of improvement. One student teacher gave up his prep period for a week to watch the videos and talk shows. The librarian said she was impressed.
A couple of parents actually got involved in helping students by supporting them in their efforts to produce videos on the war. Some parents were on site for the presentations. We did not get a studio as we had hoped, nor did we have community experts come in.
Teachers generally seem supportive of the effort. We haven’t heard to the contrary. The English Department is supportive of the effort. Presentations were giving over the period of about a week and a half. Various teachers, staff, students and parents sat on the panel for the final presentations of the Oil, Iraq and Islam projects and they were impressed by the overall quality and learning stretch that the students had been required to make. Although video, sound and “talk show” varied in quality from presentation. It was generally agreed that students had definitely gotten out of their boxes and done things that they had not been required to do before and that applied learning, organizational skills and real world learning had taken place.
5. Photos.
Final Update
Teacher Reflection
Student Reflection
