As a general education teacher for students identified with emotional and behavior disorders, I needed to find a way to engage my students in learning when academics weren't their priority. I taught language arts and social studies in a nontraditional, alternative program known as the ATM (Academics, Technology, and Motivation).
Located in northeast Ohio, the ATM program typically serves from 25 to 30 students at any one time. The program was the last resort for some of my students; if they failed here, incarceration was their next step. I was responsible for teaching six students in the 4th, 5th, and 6th grades.
And I did find a way to motivate them. Building on the students' interest in technology, I designed learning experiences that not only engaged these reluctant learners in academic learning but also decreased the incidence of problematic behavior in my classroom.
A Complex Challenge
Historically, students with emotional and behavior disorders have been difficult to teach, are often segregated, and are often likely to fail in school. They're less likely than students with other disabilities to be educated in least restrictive environments (Smith, Katsiyannis, & Ryan, 2011); and they have low rates of school success. In their research, Duchnowski and Kutash (2011) found that "the average academic achievement for these students was below the 25th percentile; they had the highest dropout rate compared to all disability groups; and half of these students were involved with the justice system two years after separating from school" (p. 323).
Students with emotional and behavior disorders are often labeled as disruptive, insolent, and disobedient, frequently displaying behaviors that impede learning (Fitzpatrick & Knowlton, 2009). These students' interactions with others can be so disruptive that they can seriously strain relationships with peers, parents, and teachers. Not surprisingly, these students often present complex challenges for schools, families, and society.
An Opportunity to Create
As is often the case in alternative programs, many students in the ATM program had already failed in traditional school settings. The staff understood that the program needed to be different from traditional schools; it would need to motivate students to learn through unconventional approaches.
The program had two big plusses. First, it employed a project-based learning approach that enabled students to work on projects of interest. Students worked with various staff members on their projects; they didn't spend the entire day with their assigned classroom teacher. Second, the program had rich offerings in technology, including individual netbooks for each student, multiple iPads, digital cameras, voice recorders, and interactive whiteboards. Understanding that the majority of my students were already using technology to create their own content, I made it a point to integrate mobile technology with content, specifically in three areas.
e-Reading and e-Responding
For the first part of the year, the 4th, 5th, and 6th graders I taught were unmotivated to read anything more than a picture book. Assessment scores and classroom observations indicated that they were capable of doing more, so one day I packed up the picture books and broke out the iPads!
I downloaded several e-books that I thought might be engaging and decided that Tuck Everlasting (Square Fish, 2007) by Natalie Babbitt would be the first e-book we would read. Students were invited to join this book club, which was conducted in addition to their regular classroom work. Three of my middle school students, two 8th graders, and a 9th grader agreed to participate. I showed the students how to use the iBook app that comes standard on the iPad. After a little exploration, they were ready to go.
The students really liked being able to personalize their reading experience by changing the background screen, font type, and text size. They also liked being able to record their thinking using the annotation and notes feature. Throughout the reading of the novel, which lasted about a month, the six students in the book club recorded 282 annotations and 80 notes. This information gave me excellent insight into the students' thinking about the story.
For example, students noted the strangeness of "the man in the yellow suit," a character who turns out to be the villain. Although he sounded nice at first, a student pointed out, he actually wasn't very nice at all. The students' comments showed that they had begun to predict the part this character would play in the story. I doubt I would have seen this level of engagement or comprehension if I had given them paperback books and sticky notes to record their thinking (Larson, 2009).
One student had difficulty keeping up with the others. To help him participate in the discussions, I downloaded an audio version of the text from Audible that he could listen to as he followed along.
Because students with emotional and behavior disorders often lack social skills, it can be difficult to engage them in whole-class discussions. To help with this problem and facilitate discussion of the novel, I created a discussion board on Wikispaces. After each reading session, the students were to post to the class wiki using their assigned netbook. Throughout the book club, the students posted 94 times, with only 16 posts being unrelated to the literature discussion. When asked how they liked the wiki, the students responded that it was better than face-to-face discussions for two reasons. First, it was a safe environment for them to post in. They liked being able to think through their responses before posting them for all to see. Second, they liked the fact that the discussion was archived so they could go back and refer to previous posts anytime they needed to.
We continued e-reading and e-responding throughout the rest of the year and eventually engaged in an author study in which students read a Jerry Spinelli book of their choice. Using our class Jerry Spinelli blog, which I created on Kidblog, they examined various literary elements, such as problem/solution and character development, and compared the author's use of them across a variety of his books. The students were also able to choose the technology they would use to access Kidblog—their netbook or the iPads.
Digital Writing
The students also created digital poetry. The wrote "I Am" autobiographical poems and used Windows Moviemaker Live on the netbooks and iMovie on the iPads to add images, animation, transitions, and effects. Students further enhanced their poems by adding meaningful audio as a final touch.
One student wrote her biography poem about how she had been separated from her father and brother and how she missed them and her former home in Tennessee. She used images from free-use websites such as Creative Commons to help interpret her words. She chose the song "Jar of Hearts" by Christina Perri to accompany her poem because it's about abandonment and closely ties to her poem's theme.
This was a powerful activity because it enabled students to get to know one another on a different level. The students often had difficulty expressing themselves, and this was a safe way for them to do just that. As this was one of the first technology projects we completed, it really brought us together as a learning community and set the stage for future work.
The "I Am" poem project was so successful that later on in the year, I gave students a similar opportunity to turn a poem into a movie, but this time using works by well-known poets. After reading a wide variety of poems by such poets as Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and Carl Sandburg, the students selected the one they wanted to work on. As before, they added images, effects, and audio to convey their personal interpretation of the poem. Again, this enabled me to see more clearly into their thinking.
Jenna chose to interpret Carl Sandburg's "Little Girl, Be Careful What You Say." She purposely used black-and-white images because she felt that the mood of the poem was dark and somber, that it was about how words can hurt people. She chose the song "Glitter in the Air" by Pink to accompany the poem because it talks about how we interact with people, which further illustrated the words in the poem. Through her interpretation, I learned not only about some of the emotional problems that Jenna was dealing with, but also that Jenna could synthesize information from different sources to create a single product, which is evidence of higher-level thinking. (To see Jenna's and several other students' poem videos, go to www.facebook.com/kristinwebber329 and click on the video tab). The students' digital work enabled them to connect with the poems and interpret them on a much deeper level than they would have if they had just read and discussed them (Stuart, 2010).
In this project-based program, students were continually researching their own areas of interest and were engaged in a significant amount of informational writing while, at the same time, developing Internet research skills. The new literacies of the Internet require a specific set of skills to successfully navigate nonlinear, digital, and audio text (Coiro & Dobler, 2007). The students used such applications as PowerPoint, Prezi, and Glogster to present their projects to their classmates, schoolmates, and parents, as well as to the global audience that technology has made it possible to reach.
WebQuests
Because I taught students of different ages in the same classroom, I needed to design instruction that met the differing standards for each grade level. WebQuests were a way I could meet this challenge.
A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most or all the information that learners work with comes from the web (Dodge, 2007). Using Zunal WebQuest Maker, I created WebQuests for each grade level that were based on the content the students were studying. Some of the WebQuests were short; students could complete them in just a couple of class sessions. Others were longer projects that could take up to six weeks to complete.
One WebQuest I created, "Exploring the Thirteen Colonies," was specifically geared to my 4th graders. Each student "expert" was assigned a geographic region to research. They were required to answer such questions as, Who was the founder of your colonies? and Why were these colonies founded? After they completed their research, the students had to compile their findings into a class presentation. This WebQuest can be viewed at http://zunal.com/webquest.php?w=135212.
My students loved the ability to work through the WebQuests at their own pace. If several students were working on the same standards, I created WebQuests that involved some minimal group work to help them continue to develop their social skills.
Zunal is a fabulous site that any teacher, whether novice or advanced in this area, can use to create WebQuests. Teachers can access free WebQuests, use the already-created WebQuests, and create one free WebQuest. With an upgrade to "pro" ($20 for 3 years), users can post up to 50 WebQuests as well as enhance existing WebQuests to meet their instructional needs. I found WebQuests particularly useful for teaching social studies, but teachers can easily create them for any subject area.
Fostering Competence
Research has shown that students with emotional and behavior disorders often waste time, accomplish little, and require increased instructional attention and effort from teachers. These behavioral deficits can result in incomplete school work, lack of instructional gains, and frustrated educators (Fitzpatrick & Knowlton, 2009).
Through the integration of technology into my instruction, my students were motivated to complete work on their own and required little assistance from me. In addition, they generally stayed on task and willingly offered one another support. Most important, they enjoyed completing assignments that afforded them opportunities to create knowledge independently and in new ways, not just to "do school" through traditional pencil-and-paper tasks.
Perhaps when students have regular opportunities to show themselves as competent learners in a medium they already enjoy, they'll find schoolwork more relevant and worthwhile. Teachers should also ask students, as Alvermann (2008) proposes, for their suggestions on how digital literacies might become a part of the regular curriculum.
