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| by Joe Poletti | |||||||||||
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 Deep Dive 1: The Butler Did It! First, the Butler did it! I walked into Jim Butler's class two weeks ago and was immediately struck by the students hard at work on cat cadavers. In the back of the room, Mr. "Socrates" Butler was quizzing students individually on their scientific knowledge of feline characteristics. Jim added the dimension of writing to this lesson by creating a Class Blogmeister account. On his class blog, he uses some thought-provoking material to set up his ultimate open-ended question. Let's take a "deep dive" to analyze how Jim structured his initial blog entry to ensure high quality and diverse responses from his students. He starts off by recognizing the controversy associated with dissection. To emphasize the controversy, he provides a provocative quote from a 2002 on-line newsletter. He links to the entire article, "School Dissections: Cut It Out." Jim adds more background by offering a quote from PETA and some survey statistics on school dissections from a university study. Only now is he ready to issue his open-ended question: "I am extremely interested in your perspective on this issue (school dissections), especially since you are now veterans of these claimed atrocities." Perhaps, however, what upholds this assignment as a model worthy of emulation is the guidance Jim gives to ensure that students adhere to Standard Written English. Check this out: "Do not worry about offending me; my concern is not over your position, but how effectively you are able to express it. Remember, others will read your post so be clear, concise, and grammatically accurate. Poor writing reflects a confused mind! Even though this is an opinion paper, it may be beneficial to provide documentation to support your claims and/or web links that might add to the reader’s insights. *Typing your Blog in MS Word, then using the cut and paste option, will allow you to more effectively save the document, as well as perform grammar and spell checks." I spoke with Jim about this assignment. He said the first attempts by students were laced with chat lingo. He simply used the built-in features of Blogmeister to send the unworthy entries back to the students for revision. That helped to establish the standard. Jim also takes advantage of technology to help in the grading. Upon receiving a suitable response, he copies and pastes it into Word and runs the Spelling and Grammar Check. If it doesn't pass muster on that test, he returns it to the student immediately. Kudos to Jim Butler, biology teacher at Croatan High School, for using technological contexts to enhance writing opportunities for students. As the student entries will show, the reward is certainly worth the risk of innovation. Stay tuned... Read Jim Butler's first AP Biology open-ended question (Animal Rights) on his class blog.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. |
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