Going Paperless: A Teaching Post

I kill a lot of trees in June.  I probably photocopy more in the last three teaching weeks of the year than in the other nine months combined.  In all seriousness, I often go in on the weekend because I feel like a criminal for using the amount of paper my June lessons require.  Throughout the normal school months, I espouse eco-friendly paper reduction:  class sets of short stories or plays, showing notes on my SMART Board and posting them to our distributed learning environment online (D2L), and, of course, double-siding everything.  Students are encouraged to use the dropbox function of D2L to hand in assignments instead of printing them off.

However, when it comes time to review reading comprehension strategies, I revert back to highlighters and paper copies for each of my 109 students.  I find old exam questions and go through in minutia various strategies that might help my Grade 9s be more successful on the reading comprehension test that Alberta Education delivers to us to administer each June.  Why?  Well, this test is kind of a big deal.  It arrives weeks ahead of time and is locked up in a bullet-proof vault.    In September when I come back to work, I will be tasked with applying statistical analysis (stop laughing.  the math teachers help me!)  to the types of questions my students answered incorrectly, report this information to my principal and subsequently charged with adjusting my lesson plans to better address these deficits and writing goals for our School Development Plan that include student achievement on this particular test. If I'm really lucky I'll be offered AISI support to make progress towards these goals.  AISI support has to be saved for another rant post.  

Students with very specific needs (reading disabilities, English Language Learners and the mentally ill) can be provided with accommodations or in rare circumstances, exemptions.  Otherwise, everyone in Grade 9 in the province gets out a HB pencil on the morning of June 26th and answers 55 multiple choice questions on seven to nine readings.  

This year I used a blended approach that made me take a few beginning steps away from my serial June tree homicide.  I still photocopied the stories, poems, articles and cartoons and modelled how highlighters can be effectively used.  Together, students practiced elimination strategies, using logic to find the "most correct" answer and began to recognize the different types of questions (inferencing, vocabulary in context, synthesizing information).  Students are generally pretty cooperative with this because of the looming exam.

I had heard from one of my classmates at the University of Calgary that the SMARTboard clickers had become far less cumbersome to use.  The easiest way to explain what this device does is to refer to the game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire".  When the contestant polls the audience as one of their lifelines - that's what a clicker does.  Each student holds a small electronic tool that interacts with the SMARTboard through a receiver that is plugged into a USB port.  The question is displayed on the SMARTboard and students are able to respond with A, B, C, or D.  Can you see how this might be engaging and useful to fourteen-year-olds in 2012?  Once the question is "closed" (you click a button that says, "close this question") the responses from the class are displayed in a pie chart or bar graph.  It's anonymous (at least the way I set it up).  It's formative because it gives the class a chance to debate two responses.  It would be hugely effective with the shorter pieces that students are tested on (poems and cartoons) because the SMARTboard is big enough to display a two-page spread (the text and the question could be up at the same time).  Unfortunately, longer pieces (short stories and articles) still need to be in front of students as they search for evidence in the text to answer the question.  If students had reliable and equitable access to netbooks or iPads, I would argue that I could do these June lessons almost paperlessly.  That's not likely to happen, but at least this is an option for shorter texts.

Maybe trees will be a little safer next June.