Wiggling

(I apologize that these are all posted on the same day... I've been working on these but Blogger has been blocked at my school this week. When I asked the tech person she said, "it's hit or miss." Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't. Anyways, I am posting several all at once.

At about the middle point of this project I was starting to worry… there were so many types of bread options and so many different versions of bread. I now better understand the stress of an open ended project for my students. Especially when I want them to decide in a very short amount of time. I am guilty of giving students an open ended prompt and then expecting them to pick a direction in one night, or less time event. How stressful! I hadn’t realized. I know kids who have said “Just tell me what to do,” making decisions is stressful. As much “Fun” as it is to get to pick something you’re interested in the uncertainty certainly can cause anxiety.

So, at this stage I decided I needed to physically narrow down my choices. I went down to my local library and found the bread section. There were two books there that seemed to fit my needs, Artisan Breads by Eric W. Kastel and My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Kead Method by Jim Lahey. The Artisan bread book seems to hit right where my goal is and the No Knead book seemed interesting and the pictures still looked like the goal I was going for.

Lamb writes, “…students working independently may need the support of friends, family, and teachers.” It’s true, in a small group a student can get encouragement and support from the group – also the student feels the (positive) peer pressure to perform well, to do their part. Even today I saw this play out in my classes. Usually we go over homework as a whole class. Students get to ask questions from their study guides that they had trouble answering. Then, another classmate gives the answer – I chime in when additional information is needed. Today, I had them perform this same type of task in their small groups, about 5 students each. After this process I asked how they felt about it. They gave some pros: 1) it is easier to ask questions in a small group of peers you are comfortable with. and Cons 1) if your group didn’t do their work then it is harder to get answers. One boy moved to another group because he was the only one in his group who had finished most of his homework. At the end the class mostly agreed that they would like to do this style of discussion again sometime – but not all the time. They also seemed to agree that if they knew their group was going to be relying on them they would make more of an effort to do their work. So—should I always make them do it this way? Probably not, variety is good – but it was an interesting experiment. Often I feel teachers try different things and then just try to figure out from simple observation if it worked or not. I am glad I decided to ask them.

Anyways… back to my project. I knew I had been talking about my project a lot when my boyfriend surprised me with a refurbished KitchenAid mixer. He sent me a text on his way home that said, “I hope you’re serious about this bread making thing…” but I still had no idea what he was cooking up ;) Needless to say, I was very pleasantly surprised and really enjoyed getting to use it.