Apprenticeship
Making the Video: How Students Grew While Making a Documentary
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Jessica Lander is a Teaching Associate at the Edwards Middle School in Charlestown, MA
Hot fuchsia flip-cams
What happens when you pass out hot fuchsia flip-cameras to eleven sixth graders with the plan to make a movie?
If you are in Room 213 you might see shots of bright yellow Jordans, impromptu rapping, or angled dance moves filmed covertly while a teacher is talking. There will be close ups on a nose, or a blinking eye, and classroom whiteboards spun into vortices.
Having grown up assembling Marx Brother-esque shorts and PlayMobil stop-action epics, I jumped at the opportunity to co-teach an apprenticeship on documentary filmmaking. Little did I know what I was getting into.
Our class of eleven was a middle-school microcosm. There were the best friends and the loners. There were the troublemakers and studious types. There were students so quiet it took minutes of cajoling to get them to share a thought and others who required constant reminders not to call out. We had Spanish SEI (Sheltered English Immersion) students, Chinese SEI students who spoke limited or halting English, and one autistic boy who dreamed of becoming a filmmaker.
By week five I was dubious that any movie would result. Class seemed to be more about juggling emotions and attitudes than an intense study of cinematography. We finally settled on a fitting topic: what it was like to be a sixth grader.
And, slowly, a movie emerged.
Students climbed onto chairs or lay, backs flat to the creaky wood floor, to capture the most interesting angled shots. They fanned out silently to record daily life: homework help in the cafeteria, the step-dance team in the hallway and a range of apprenticeship lessons in the classrooms.
Bright yellow Jordans
At the culmination of ten weeks, we presented our movie to students, parents and teachers. All the elements were there: a storyline, interviews, b-roll, voiceovers, odd angles, even bloopers so as to include the yellow Jordans and the covert dance moves. But more than that, the movie held together as passionate and playful portrait of 6th grade life.
What the audience did not see, however, was the ten-week transformation of the film crew who sat, bashfully, near the front of the stage during the premiere.
No, they weren’t suddenly all best friends. But over ten weeks I had witnessed subtle shifts in their attitudes and their assumptions of each other. I saw mainstream students reach out to Chinese SEI students and take the time to listen and respond to their halting English. I saw the shyer students improvise eloquent voice-overs when the talkers of the class grew hesitant. And I watched as the autistic boy in our class, who struggled constantly to stay on task, walked purposefully and silently through the halls and classrooms of the school, camera in hand.
It is this still-unmade documentary I wish the audience could see.
Here is the documentary that the students did create:
Two Lessons Learned about Teaching from Students
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Sylvia Monreal is a Second Year Teaching Fellow at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Newark, NJ
If there’s one thing I’m learning from my experiences as a Teaching Fellow, it’s that education is a messy business.
Sometimes kids need to get messy for learning to sink in.
Earlier this year, I sat down with my new Citizen Teacher partner, Megan, and helped her to map out a series of lessons about roller coasters and physics. It was a very logical, easy-going process, and I remember that we left that meeting with a nice sense of confidence. The kids love roller coasters, the kids would love our roller coaster-themed Apprenticeship, and we would be the best teachers ever, with kids flocking to our class every week, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
Naturally, during our first Apprenticeship lesson, while Megan tried her best to talk about chemical engineering, kinetic energy, and Six Flags, I had to pull aside about half a dozen students and quietly endure their familiar tirade: “This class is boring! You are boring! I hate everything!” Fortunately, I had enough sense and enough time to ask these ornery little students, “Why?”
Maybe there are two things that I’m learning as a Teaching Fellow – “Education is a messy business” and “You could learn a lot with the right questions.” Because it wasn’t long before these students stopped their complaining and started giving me some important information: “I don’t want to talk about making roller coasters. That’s all we do is talk! I want to do something. I want to make roller coasters!”
Student-created roller coaster in the cafeteria.
Megan and I looked at her brilliant lesson plans and set to work. They could learn about inertia by running across the playground, they could learn about potential energy by dropping bouncy balls, they could learn about physics with their own hands – and they could put it all together in their own roller coaster designs. All we had to do was watch and give them the right words to describe what they were seeing.
Now, at the end of every lesson, I collapse in my chair, panting and probably red-faced, feeling like I’ve just finished running a marathon. But at the end of every lesson, I’m smiling and pattering on like a proud parent, “They learned about the Engineering Design Process today!” or “Look at this awesome design that they drew!” Their protesting has been replaced with excited chattering – it’s just as loud, but that’s part of the fun now.
Recently, I read that Jacob Bronowski once said, “It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.” And Bronowski, who was a mathematician, biologist, historian of science, theatre author, poet, inventor, and television host, seemed to know a thing or two about education and learning. I’m learning, the hard way, that petulant, rambunctious, eternally bewildering middle school kids do, too.
What lessons have you learned from kids?
Running Backs and NFL Stats: Pairing Math and Football in the Classroom
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George Ganzenmuller is a Second Year Teaching Fellow at the Edwards Middle School, Charlestown, MA
One of the things we do very well at Citizen Schools is bring volunteers into the classroom to teach students apprenticeships on subjects that they’re passionate about. As a Teaching Fellow, I’m able to teach my own apprenticeships, and what I’m passionate about is getting kids active.
Students take a number of standardized tests each academic year.
But here’s the problem. Since the standards-based education reform movement of the last 20 years, schools are now judged (almost entirely) based on how students score on standardized tests. As a nonprofit which partners with struggling schools, Citizen Schools is largely rated on our impact on student test scores.
Since taking this job in 2010, I’ve been wrestling with the implications of this reality. I know that the obstacles facing the students that we serve are monumental, and without building the proper skills and abilities they’ll have a tough time overcoming them. I know how important it is to give our students an extra hour of math per day.
I also know it’s important give my students some time to run around and, well, be children.
Last month, it came to a head. My colleagues at HQ asked me to make my flag football apprenticeship a STEM course—to demonstrate that I was building my students’ skills in either Science, Technology, Engineering, or Math.
Somehow education reform has come to this: even physical activity has to be justified with an academic angle. I was frustrated because state standards were encroaching on my students already too limited time to be active.
But, that’s the service we provide at Citizen Schools. I knew that in order to make those 90 minutes count, I needed to find a way to teach math competency and flag football at the same time.
Problem was, I had no idea how I was going to do it.
Then it came to me, as I was sitting down for my fantasy football draft . Have them draft their own fantasy teams, play against each other and calculate their own scores (I’m not the first to have this idea). They’d be using division, multiplication, addition, negative numbers, averages—and they’d enjoy doing it. Perfect.
Two crises, one stone.
Some pre-practice situps.
So far, we’ve had 5 classes. Each student has a fantasy football team of five players (1QB, 2RBs, 2WRs).We start each class with 20 minutes of score tallying and statistics assessing, and then transition outside for 60 minutes of flag football drills. They’ve gotten so quick at calculating their scores that I’ve been able to mix in some more challenges like averaging scores and predicting next week’s outcomes. They’ve learned football rules, passing routes, defensive techniques, offensive strategies and even developed our own team chant.
I still harbor a healthy concern about how all of this standardized testing is going to impact our children and our country. But on this occasion, I am pleasantly surprised. Maybe we can make learning active mentally and physically.
What ideas do you have for pairing physical activity with academic rigor?
Students Program Basketball Dunking Robots
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Student introducing his robots with pride.
At 3 or 4 o’clock in the afternoon, lecturing and mindlessly filling out worksheets gets old fast, really fast. Bored students tend to be pretty vocal about their feelings.
That’s where apprenticeships come in.
Apprenticeships are hands-on, play-in-the-dirt, get covered in paint, learning experiences. Volunteers from all walks of life come into the classroom and bring excitement to learning.
I get to see a lot of the apprenticeships. Database design, acapella, journalism, mock trial, solar cars, cooking, investing, marketing, flag football, etc. etc. But one of my favorites is… the robots.
Everyone knows how awesome robots are. And while we are still waiting for Rosie to clean up after us and the Jetsons, students, through the robotics apprenticeships, are learning valuable skills: computer programming , research and design, collaboration, as well as mathematics.
The following clip is a personal favorite. Featured are two students, and what, upon closer inspection, appears to be a miniature basketball arena, right down to the foul lines and hand-drawn crowd. The sound isn’t great, but what is readily apparent is the excitement and pride these students have for their robot creations. The fact that these are basketball playing robots is icing on the cake (watch out Lebron).
There are lots of ways to teach; and while those other ways of teaching are important and at times effective—not many of them involve students programming basketball dunking robots. Its learning experiences like this, which students will remember forever, and may bring us closer to that robot utopia.
