World Religions

I'm teaching a months long world religions unit. It is difficult. I want to do justice to these important belief systems yet also have students think about them critically. I can't proselytize, nor should I. Yet, as we break religions down into just their practices and beliefs, we do little to capture what adherents get out of their practice.  Okay, okay, many people dutifully attend religious services only out of a sense of duty to family or heritage. But many others find deep meaning. And that's what is so hard to teach.

Religion is multi-sensory. I happen to be Catholic- a disaffected and deeply upset Catholic, but Catholic nonetheless. On reason I remain one is because Catholics at their best worship with all five senses. There's sublime (and sometimes ridiculously awful) music. There's art, incense, bread and wine and kneeling, standing, sitting and processing. Jews also worship with all 5 senses. So do the adherents of many other faiths. We mainly teach and learn with two senses. Perhaps this is one reason why it's so hard to teach about religion. There's a lived experience aspect to religion that mere words can't capture.

Yet, what's really tricky in teaching about religion is that religion itself, as Ken Wilber points out, has always performed two important but very different functions. For millennia, religion has allowed humans- through  stories and rituals- to make sense of the world, our role upon it, to understand suffering and to explain death.  This is the religion we attempt to teach in our world religion units- the religion that bolsters the self and society. But there's another aspect of religion that we don't even begin to explain. The great insight/ triumph achieved by mystics across faith traditions is religion that transcends the self instead of reinforcing the self. It's the genius of Gandhi and Francis of Assisi and Buddha and Hildegard. Something happened to these people. Yet, today, we're just as likely to call them crazy.

I teach in a school born of a religious tradition. William James called George Fox, the founder of this tradition, a spiritual genius. William James suggested that we study religion through those individuals who "have a genius for religion."  We don't talk much Fox's genius nor of anyone else's, really. Perhaps I should take William James up on his suggestion. But I know I can't. Because it isn't "history". And that's crux of the pickle in which I find myself.

Big History

Not every lesson is a homerun and that's okay.  I hit a solid line drive up the middle with this lesson that I share below. Kids learned content, tech tools, and had fun doing it. I share this with my readers because I reference three tech tools.

1. Canva
2. BigHistory
3. Google Slides

I am using the Big History Project to supplement my World History course this fall. Big History has been valuable in letting me "set the stage".  (To see a broad overview of Big History, click here.) My course kicks off with a study of ancient religions, but it was the agrarian revolution that created the milieu in which religions would be born and I used Big History materials to teach a lesson on how agriculture started in the fertile crescent and both spread and developed independently across the globe.

After a short lecture, I had students read and watch videos about the discovery and development of agriculture across the world. To demonstrate learning, I had the students create menus as if they were opening a restaurant specializing in "first foods". Students used Canva to create their menus. It took all of about 20 minutes for most students to complete the task. I like to think that this activity allowed for a "stickier" lesson.  I'm the first to admit that the assignment challenged students and DOK level 2- not the deepest level of thinking. But they liked the task, they learned about Canva and had to show their learning in a creative way. I think the lesson is a keeper.

(BTW, I used the ever flexible Google Slides to make the presentation below- the first page of this is courtesy of the amazing Template Palooza created by Ryan O'Donnell - which is chock full of fantastic templates for student and teacher use.)

Student Led Conferences

 Student led conferences aren't new, but they seem to be gaining steam. I've taken some tentative steps in this direction as I invite students to parent conferences. But this is a baby-step and I likely can't go further without institutional support.

I'm interested in what the research says about student led conferences. Are they effective? Why should schools adopt them? 

Some research suggests that parents don't particularly find traditional parent-teacher conferences all that useful and instead find them to be stressful and time-consuming. But I digress. 

The most thorough review I could find of student led conferences was this Dutch study of 130 10th grade students. (There was a separate control group of students who did not lead conferences, but only attended teacher led conferences.)  The students who led conferences prepared for these conferences by creating learning portfolios to present at the conferences. In contrast, students who attended teacher led conferences did nothing in preparation.

There were some intriguing results. Before diving into them, I want to note that these results don't measure "soft skills" nor do they examine any of the other alleged but seemingly obvious benefits of slcs such as student agency, ownership, and having students parents and teachers all on the same page (literally and figuratively). Instead, these results look at student achievement the subjects of math, Dutch and English. Interestingly, it seems that math scores improved more than the language subject scores for students who led conferences. Boys received a greater benefit than girls. And low achieving students, boys in particular, saw the greatest improvement when contrasted with the control group. 

I don't think the study fully accounts for the variable that is the portfolio. Indeed, how important a role does the preparation for the conference- the building of a personal learning portfolio-  play in the success? The metacognitive process of portfolio building would seem to have benefits whether or not it was created for a conference. 

I'm not surprised that the low-achieving students saw the most improvement. One reason of course is that high-achieving students have less room to improve.  There is a cap to highest scores. Yet, I can't help but thinking that student led conferences encourage (okay force) disaffected and disengaged students to participate in their schooling.