In The News...

The local paper did a story on my school district's Critical Thinking program. (The link to their website is here.)

They also did a video interview:



Here is an excerpt from the article, about my kids:

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At the middle school level, critical thinking teacher Michael Fisher has both pull-out and push-in classes, as well as some special classes like the Reading and Beyond group. Fisher said the school pulled a handful of the sixth grade’s most advanced readers to try something new.

“We want to see how they interact between text, their experiences and world views, ” Fisher said. “They have made some pretty profound connections.”

Skills they can use

Tuesday was an exciting day in Fisher’s seventh-grade critical thinking lab.

On the second-to-last day the students had with him before moving on to another subject area, Fisher indulged them with a “foldable-a-rama,” a one-period event in which students had to create a “foldable.”

“This idea came from the kids,” Fisher said. “They had been asking for a Foldable Fiesta.”

The students eagerly picked out colorful sheets of paper for making the foldables, which are study aids created by folding multiple sheets of paper. It makes extra nooks and crannies in which to write extra information.

“Just think, how can I make this awesome,” Fisher told the class. “Awesome gets the A.”

The lab is part of the school’s push-in program. Students learn various study skills they can use in their other classes. For example, at the beginning of each class, the students’ first task is to solve several problems illuminated over an overhead projector. Practice solving analogies and looking at the roots of words will come in handy once they have to tackle the SATs.

Jon Vitali, 12, used 3-by-5 index cards to make his foldable. Overlapping them and taping them down in a manila folder, Vitali planned to write a science vocabulary word on one side of the card and put the definition on the flip side.

Vitali has enjoyed his semester in Fisher’s class.

“This is the best class ever,” he said, taping another card onto the folder. “Plus, we get to listen to iTunes.”

Getting advanced

In Fisher’s Reading and Beyond class, students have been doing presentations on songs with meaningful lyrics. Fisher taught them how to make a music video using PowerPoint, which the students play before analyzing the lyrics.

Sixth-grader Nicole Kasper chose “Backseat of a Greyhound Bus” by Sara Evans, a country-inspired tune about a girl who gave birth in a bus.

As her PowerPoint video played, students kept an eye on the perfectly timed slides and their lyric sheets at the same time. When the presentation failed to show the last batch of slides or finish the song, Kasper filled in with her soft soprano and clicked through the rest.

After writing down what they noticed, thought and wondered about the song, students presented their lyric analysis. Libby Koplas, 11, saw another meaning in the first few lines: “She wore a dress with cherries on it/Goin’ somewhere where she’d be wanted.”

“She’s sweet but misunderstood,” Koplas inferred. “A lot of people like cherries but don’t like the pits.”

Fisher raised an eyebrow at that comment.

“They have these magnificent moments,” Fisher said later. “They are making these textual connections. And what they write down (on assessment sheets) is little of what they say.”

Presentations in this class are peer-reviewed on the “deep and the duh scale,” the students’ name for a rubric used to discern levels of insightful discussion. Tuesday’s college-level talk touched on feminism and parenting.

“She obviously mistook love for sex,” Kasper told the class about the song’s protagonist, dropping her voice on the last word. Not one giggle escaped her classmates’ lips. “She later found love with the baby.”

Fisher doesn’t scare the middle schoolers away from attempting college-level work. He has taken at least one eighth-grade class to an undergraduate class on children’s literature at Buffalo State so students could participate in a book discussion.

In another class, the students’ foldables on literature include “critical lenses,” or perspectives on the material based on ideologies such as Marxism or feminism.