“Podcast Review” Lesson Reflection
Allison Kauffmann
Chances are, you have had some teaching experience if you’re reading this. At the least, since you’ve made it to a graduate-level class, you’ve probably been a high school student yourself. So you’re likely in on this fact: high school kids have opinions. Many of them. They have “opinionitis” and they have it bad. I see plenty on Facebook and Twitter every day (and these aren’t always even from high school students): “Guns don’t kill people...people kill people #aurora” or “Dark Knight Rises was sicckkkkk.” (I guess I’m one generation ahead of the tendency of adding letters for emphasis; that must have been initiated with everyone right after I graduated high school.)
So how do we transition from loaded, spontaneous opinions our culture loves to give so freely on Facebook to thought-out, well-represented opinions? Opinions, after all, are vastly important to how we appear to others--they are fundamentally how we judge and relate to one another. Can we get them to think about why they value what they do? What makes a subjective answer credible? How well does your opinion hold up with others? Why write more than your opinion--if you think something’s bad, why not just say it how it is: “that was bad. I hated it, and you should too.” With so many opinions floating around out there, how do you know which ones you agree with? Do you challenge those opinions? Can you resolve opinions with ones that differ from your own?
By allowing my students to create their own podcast review on a subject they find compelling or worth investigation, I hope that each of the questions above will be addressed, if not answered in some small way. By digging deeper and feeling a sense of ownership over their opinions, students will learn how to question and interact with texts.
The reasoning behind the lessons: How I got here
If I’m teaching a lesson on “How to Write an Effective Book Review,” they will probably tune out and go through the motions. They will do what they think I want, and strive for the letter grade. But if I want to get them thinking about what they value and what they would take a stand for, I need to get their real-world, real-time opinions. So they’re going to want to revert back to experience. We can start with what they are familiar with, then, and scaffold from there.
In my own everyday conversations, the most commonly solicited opinions are usually related to film, music, T.V., or books. So it’s settled, I am going to use those talking points that we naturally turn to in conversation. My students may not feel like talking all day about their opinion of Piggy in Lord of the Flies, but I know that they can talk all day about Jersey Shore or trending online information. But I also know they are capable of more than their statuses might belie; their format doesn’t always lend itself to deep conversations, so we are going to push beyond the initial opinions and figure out the why. Meeting them where they are, we are going to discuss how we gather our opinions, how we dig deeper than the surface of an opinions, and what a good review contains. Together, we are going to compare the outspoken ways of offering an opinion with how the New York Times presents opinions. We will comment on the overwhelming, instantaneous information presented to them on the Internet, and what makes a person’s opinions hold weight.
In these lessons, I plan on reading conflicting reviews together as a class to get a sense of some models to strive for and to challenge what a good review contains. They will debate within their groups whether they were personally convinced or persuaded to see the author’s viewpoint. The students will collaboratively analyze a review, noting how they are generally structured. They will also choose the effective techniques of online reviews and create guidelines to be used in their own work. By critiquing a few online reviews, I feel that students will be reading types of work they may already be familiar with or can relate to because they are written for entertainment. They are seeing firsthand a well-written, organized scrutiny that they (sometimes unconsciously) enact every day in conversation. And they’re learning how to represent their thoughts in a credible way for an online audience. If I needed to further drive home the point that opinions matter, we might also read about how impactful the critics’ reviews really are in relation to box office sales or album purchases.
And then, if I’ve given them the right tools, they will hopefully want to take off those floaties and compose a podcast review of their own. At the core of it, critically analyzing a text can be done using the same process as critically analyzing a piece of music or a T.V. show. So why not harness those digital newspaper reviews that they might peruse anyway as a springboard for analytic thinking? Instead of giving them a book to review, I am going to give them the option of reviewing a song, a T.V. show, a movie, or a play. They may not even realize what made them react positively or negatively to the work they are going to review, but I want them to discover the elements of what they are reviewing and analyze why they feel the way they do. Ultimately, I am giving them different paths to get to the same goal. I feel that their work will be so much involved and exploratory if they are passionately defending or criticizing a work of their choosing. (Plus it doesn’t hurt that reading their lively, unique work will be vastly more entertaining than 60 similar Lord of the Flies essays.)
I am hoping to publish a class anthology of these podcasts on the blog so that they can respond to each other and hear how many great opinions they all have to offer. I hope to foster meaningful discourse, providing a safe place for them to challenge ideas or discuss commonalities.
My goal is to set a fire beneath them, so that they feel confident in their opinions and can compile them in a rich, compelling way. By creating a shareable document with an online audience, they should feel ownership of their thoughts. And they should know that the thoughts matter, that they have a place in the online community.
As I ask students to use realistic applications such as podcasts to write and publish their reviews, they will be creating something digitally stimulating and contributing to the greater, online community. Their audience changes from me (and who cares what I think, other than for a grade?) to their peers and possibly a more general online audience. As the anthology is shared online, it might become a place for future critiques, and they might even continue to share after the class is over. (I’m probably too optimistic, but it could happen with a little inspiration.) I also hope to use this lesson to facilitate further responses or commentaries within the class, in which students give interactive feedback to each other’s work using a program like Voicethread or WallWisher. My own writing shows a marked improvement if I am confident that what I have said is worth reading or influential to others; receiving feedback affirms that our voice has been heard by many, and (if the time and effort has been put forth) that what we have to say is valuable. I want my students to know that I have been there--tired, unmotivated, inept, lazy, you name it--but that this is going to be a process. We will all cheer each other on, surrounding each other with helpful ideas and troubleshooting tips. This is a chance for them to break free of the traditional writing format and show their true colors through opinions about issues they care about already.
When the students begin to create their own podcasts, my Digital Writing Institute experiences will come in handy. I hope to give my students the space they need to think freely. My structure will be loosely defined and I will not focus on what the end product should look like. In fact, hardly any “shoulds” will be used. Although I struggled without strict guidelines in my own OWP podcast project, just getting a draft out was the best way to begin, in retrospect. I was not comparing my work with others’, and I was thinking about what a good podcast might contain. I didn’t rely on others’ opinions, but on my own judgement. Which, in turn, freed my process up so that I was creating my own standards and audience. I was making editorial cuts, as my students will be, and listening to my work again and again until I polished it. Because I knew people in my field were going to listen to my podcast, I think an internal compass arose--my intuitions and experiences listening to reviews instilled and fueled a need to create a professional-sounding piece. But, like my students, I also needed to work at my own pace and talk myself through the process. Thus I hope to give the class ample time to exchange notes and share their work along the way. It’s digital, after all, which allows for more saved drafts and more of a story to be shown of how you arrived at your final draft. I will be conferencing often to ensure that students are producing the best work they are capable of, as well as having them set their own deadlines for their project.
I want them to delve in as wholeheartedly as possible, but I also want to meet them on their level and build on the skills they are starting with. I will include a screencast for those who struggle with technology, allowing them to review the main features in solitude; in this manner, those who are advanced may plunge forward, perhaps helping those who are needing help with technicalities. The advanced students are not bogged down and the novice students are not overwhelmed. I would rather them plunge in than spend the hour on learning the software step by step, as was made evident to me in my week in the OWP. Talking through ideas instead of giving students a restricting plan of attack is much more conducive to meaningful, memorable acquirement of those skills--and they may need to apply the audio recording skills they learn in this project to future projects (in my class, in college, and in the workplace). I feel that giving them a tutorial and forcing them to use the software in a certain way restricts their capabilities and limits the potential uses of the tool. Additionally, if students dive into their work they are less likely to focus on how people might judge their content and more likely to focus only on getting out a first draft to manipulate in the audio editor.
Once they have recorded the technicalities to memory, students are allowed more mistakes, more mutability, and a more fluid thought process by recording and rerecording rather than writing and rewriting. The cut and pasting process in an audio format will allow for a new, interesting form of writing that pushes and inspires students past the typical drudgery of writing a 5 paragraph essay. I also hope to involve the podcast early in the processes of brainstorming to push students' thoughts in ways they might not have considered using paper.
By using their voice to organize their thoughts in lieu of writing them down, students who have had adverse experience with writing in the traditional sense may be freed from the writing that limited their initial thought process.
By setting students free with the software, I am hoping that they will teach each other (which is always one of my goals in teaching!), discover tools on their own that might naturally and authentically enhance their work, and realize on their own why these tools might best suit their narrative. For many students (like me), they may not have known what they were capable of, and what forms their writing could take. They may discover their thoughts in a new light just by hearing them aloud, and think of a new stance they had not considered by simply reading their review on paper or thinking about it silently. And this may open doors to many other social forms of meaningful conversation. As a teacher, I want to facilitate as many authentic responses as possible and transcend the perception that online opinions are reserved for what someone ate for lunch (there’s actually Facebook group against this phenomenon!). I want my students to prove their generation’s stereotype wrong, and be able to defend their opinions in meaningful, interactive, publishable ways.
Extension Applications
While I’m thinking of using this lesson to foster thought about why we think what we do, the implications for what else I could teach are vast. This could be an enforcer of using descriptive, colorful language to paint a picture for your audience (something we will be talking about earlier in the semester). Word choice is huge, and this could facilitate some highly creative thoughts. Or the project could function as a fantastic companion piece for teaching persuasive techniques. I haven’t nailed its function down yet because it’s so open and I want to be sure I use this lesson for the best purposes.
Although I would like to write out lesson plans for every idea I have thought of using in my classroom in the OWP, I have not yet formally plotted out every idea in agenda format. However, I plan on building upon the versatile, invaluable tools, techniques, and methods I learned from the class in the next few weeks as I plot out my English II class calendar. I can’t wait to share what I have learned with my students, and I know they will be just as inspired and challenged, but ultimately satisfied with their finished products as I have been. Without being able to fully express every implication I can take away from the class, you can view a limited, brief listing of lesson and project ideas that I would like to incorporate in my classroom next year.
The Proof is in the Pudding
For Carrie Windham, grad student in Athens, GA, creating podcasts has an observable, concrete benefits for the students who attempt to do so. She interviewed university students around America about how they saw podcasting as an educational tool, and found that “a lack of familiarity with the content or equipment was not a barrier to success.” The students she interviewed loved that they could get creative and present content in “a way they choose,” and that podcasts can be shared so easily, for free, to virtually anyone who can access the Internet. What Windham found is one of my own major rationales for using the project--students discovered they “could showcase their projects to the rest of the community, expanding the reach of the classroom to their friends or members of the community.”
Troy Hicks, author of the hugely applicable book The Digital Writing Workshop, also found worthwhile, significant advantages to creating content in a digital, audio format. As he talked to digital writers concerning their own audio recording projects, they “talked intently about the ways in which the process of writing recording, revising, and rerecording made them more conscious of their decision-making process as writers.”
Although I will be the first teacher at my high school to incorporate digital narratives into my curriculum, I am feeling invigorated and groundbreaking rather than anxious and burdened (as I thought I would be feeling two weeks ago). I will be learning along with my students, but I have learned the valuable lesson that you don't have to be an expert on every aspect of the subject to teach it--my students will surely be teaching me as well. As the discourse changes, I am happy to get the chance to jump on board the train rather than get run over, because I know that the train is heading down a path to richer, more interactive compositions in which the possibilities are endless.
