Week in Review - How a Document Camera is Transforming My Teaching

Last Spring I was lucky enough to be able to attend a conference with Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher at Kennett High School in North Conway. Penny Kittle’s books have instrumental in thinking about how I teach. I appreciate her ideas and that they are given with the understanding that teaching is a process, that turning long time reluctant readers into lovers of books will not happen overnight or with one magic shift. After the conference, I read her most recent book with Gallagher, 180 Days, and loved it. I have been working to incorporate techniques and routines in my classroom. I wanted to reflect weekly about the practices I’m trying and the effects I’m seeing.

For context, I teach five classes total including two sections of AP Language and Composition, three sections of Senior Topics in Lit (our college prep level course), and one section of Honors American Literature. In total, I have 86 students. Our schedule is an alternating block schedule with 72 minute periods. Wednesdays switch off between black days and gold days, so I see classes either two or three times a week.

One practice I’ve included this year is probably a step back from digital writing (sorry!). Out school is immersed in Google Classroom, Google Docs, and rely on students having laptops. For daily writing this year I went back to handwritten journals. Kittle and Gallagher cite research done by Mueller and Oppenheimer about the effects of writing by hand and I wanted to give students the opportunity to reap those benefits in their otherwise tech-laden lives. I purchased a document camera, and while it seems old school, my students have been surprisingly amazed by it.

I use the camera to model my writing practice during notebook writing. After we write, another process I’ve adapted from the book is dedicating 3-5 minutes to quick revision strategies. So far this year we have used  RADaR Revision and Rainbow Revision for style. I model my revision in a different color and ask students to complete their own revisions in a different color.

I use the camera to share annotations and to let students share theirs. In both AP and Senior Topics, we are starting with memoir. The seniors will parlay the text study into writing college essays and the AP students are looking at close reading strategies for rhetorical analysis before they dive into their own writing and memoir book groups. One of my favorite moments this week was when the AP Lang students took turns sharing their annotations under the camera and leading the discussion of Donald Murray’s “The Stranger in the Photo is Me.”

It’s a risk to share my daily writing with the students, but the camera forces me to model taking risks, revising, and annotating. I’ve written alongside my students before, but showing my work under the camera means that I can model the practice without stopping to read everything I write. It’s there - sometimes I use it to model the next step and sometimes it just shows that I am a writer alongside them - crossing out words, pushing myself to just keep writing, and finding my stride.

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