I had planned to write this post for some time now. I wanted to celebrate students' work and had even put together some paragraphs, but my ideas didn't feel genuine enough. I felt as if I was trying too hard to promote what we do in class instead of digging deeper. This weekend, I read An Ethic of Excellence by Ron Berger, and my thoughts all fell into place.
Before I delve any deeper, I ought to provide a context first. My students' culminating work from the Grade 9 Revolutions unit was the creation of a crash course. As discussed in Keeping it Real, we had looked closely at the stages of the Egyptian revolution as a case study and then students researched a revolution of their choice that spanned from political to cultural and technological revolutions.
Even though students possessed a conceptual understanding of the stages of a revolution, this simply wouldn't suffice in the creation of a video crash course. Students were presented with many challenges such as the choice of suitable video clips and background music, the use of humour and the editing of the final project, just to mention a few. They did not use any professional equipment; most of them were armed with their iPhones, laptops and tons of ingenuity. As we were in the thick of the design and creation stages, I felt confident that the unit was structured well enough for students to achieve the best successful outcomes. After all, we had learned explicit skills and also looked at sample crash courses. However, I hadn't thought about promoting a culture of excellence.
In Ethic of Excellence, Ron Berger tells us about the importance of critiquing in creating work of value. Teachers need to display student work and have a genuine conversation with the students about its strengths and the areas that need improvement. Students need to display their work and receive purposeful feedback from their peers, so that they can improve their drafts. This has made me reflect on my own teaching. Too often in Humanities we've done meaningful projects but we've rushed through them and haven't taken the time to make the work beautiful. Like any other skill, this needs to be taught explicitly and modelled by the teacher. I had clearly dropped the ball on this one.
As I watch my students' crash courses, I'm haunted by "what if's". What if we had taken the time to critique various drafts of the script? What if I had set time aside for students to show initial versions of their footage to receive constructive feedback. What if we had discussed in more detail the qualities of effective crash courses? What if instead of hiding the crash courses from the previous year because of my silly fear of stifling creativity, we had, instead, unpacked them together comparing the strong ones with the less engaging ones?
The truth is that had we delved more into the process, I would not be displaying only some of the students' work on this post. Had I promoted a culture of excellence in my class where students are held accountable to critique one another's work and taught them how to pay attention to those subtle details that can refine the final product, then the outcomes would have been different. Like any other product that requires a good dose of creativity one, it is unrealistic to expect students to get it right on their first draft.
Having said that, I cannot but feel a sense of admiration towards my students because considering all the aforementioned shortcomings, they were still able to create products of value. Some of them are posted below:
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