Supporting STEM in the SLLC and Beyond

 This past week was another busy one. I'm composing today's blog post just a few hours before it's scheduled to go live. 

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) was a common theme in last week's adventures.

Dreamer Day

On Tuesday, October 22, my dear friend Farah Wadia arranged a trip to Dreamer Day 2024 down at the Enercare Centre. The goal was to expose young women and girls to opportunities for careers in STEM fields. Every Grade 6, 7, and 8 female student in my school went, along with Ms. Wadia, Ms. Berwick, and me.

At first, the girls were shy. We encouraged them to ask questions and check out all the displays. They enjoyed collecting all the fun swag and by the end of the day were much more confident in setting their own agendas and exploring on their own. Farah learned about this opportunity by thoroughly reading TDSB guidance department emails and the whole experience was free for our students! Thank you Farah (and the sponsors of Dreamer Day) for making it possible.

First Lego League

My lunch hours have been full with supporting our school's First Lego League robotics team. I'm one of the coaches. Matthew Malisani is the other, more experienced, coach. Our team consists of about 8 students from Grades 4-6. We finally (FINALLY) got our confirmation that our team is officially registered and received our mat and parts a few weeks ago, although we've been working since late September to develop coding and building skills. Matthew built our FLL table and the team has amped up their efforts to prepare for our upcoming competition in December. I may not have the skills to program the robot to complete the "Submerged" missions, but the students do! 

STEM Classes in our STEM Lab

I see two classes for STEM instruction. Both of them are Grade 1-2s. We have been learning about the Engineering Design Process and our challenge was to find a way to connect two pieces of cardboard together without the use of anything sticky - no glue, no tape. The students would rather skip the plan and design portion and jump immediately to building, but it's important to have ideas in mind. We are close to completing these experiments.

The school library learning commons and the teacher-librarian are positioned perfectly to help make STEM / STEAM education possible, practical, and pedagogically appropriate. The library space is large enough to house equipment (and the tops of shelves have become important storage spaces for projects, not just the ones I help coordinate, but for Ms. Gomez and the Grade 2-3s she sees for STEM time as well). Going to see experts or bringing in experts enriches the experience; I didn't arrange that trip to meet women in construction, the military, or other industries but Farah did and she has her TL Part 1 AQ. 😉 Extra curricular clubs and teams that relate to STEM (and less formal gatherings like Maker Spaces) can be run in the library. One of the aspects of a FLL competition involves research, so I'm getting to flex my teacher-librarian inquiry skills muscles as I show the students how to take notes from reliable online sources, send emails to gather information from people who know things, and ask good questions.

Now I just need to use my STEM skills to design a cloning machine for myself, or at least an external battery so I don't get exhausted keeping up with all the demands that late October brings!

Happy CSLD!

 Today, Monday October 21, 2024, is Canadian School Library Day.

This is a busy time of year. It is also Media Literacy Week (October 21 - 25, 2024), which is near and dear to my heart both as the co-VP of the Association for Media Literacy as well as Canada's representative on UNESCO's Media and Information Literacy Alliance (North America & Europe chapter). I wrote about Media Literacy Week last year at this time on my blog. This time, I'll focus on Canadian School Library Day. 

Canadian School Library Day takes on added significance this year for me because I recently joined Canadian School Libraries, the organization, as an executive board member and as their lead editor for their publication, Canadian School Libraries Journal. I used to be the editor-in-chief for the award winning magazine for the Ontario School Library Association, The Teaching Librarian, from 2006-2018. I guess I'm returning to my volunteer "roots", so to speak. 

When Kim Davidson and I hosted a TDSB Teacher-Librarian Network meeting after school this past week at Banting and Best Public School (thank you Molly for offering your fantastic space!), we mentioned CSLD and brainstormed with the group about ways people could mark the occasion. I shared the idea that I'm running with for this year's event.

Monday will be a book borrowing bonanza! I've made arrangements with the board's library department to turn off my pre-set limit number and encourage students to come during both recesses (or use their library period if it falls on this day) to borrow as many books as they can carry. Usually, the library is open for morning recess only (because I need time to use the bathroom once in a while!). Usually students need a library pass (so that I'm not overwhelmed with an exceptionally large number of students in the space with me as the only supervisor). Both of these safeguards will be suspended for this single day. Have I lost all my senses? Is this a disaster waiting to happen? My friend Kim did point out to me that checking in and shelving these returns is going to be a real chore.

This is where I'm grateful for my newest adult volunteer. She comes in once a week for the afternoon and her job is to shelve books and keep the shelves in order. I won't name her here, because she is rather shy and does not want to advertise that she is doing this for me. However, she's already made such a positive difference - my book return cart isn't overflowing with neglected titles waiting to be returned to their homes on the shelves. It seems that she enjoys contributing to the school's well-being in this way. On Thursday, she brought me flowers from her garden and homemade banana chocolate chip muffins, to thank me. Really, I should be thanking her!

The library is so much more than the books - although they are definitely important. Originally, I was going to write today's blog on "STEM and stickers and swamps", so that I could discuss:

A) how the new STEM Lab (located in the library) is being actively used

B) how consumable items can really motivate students to learn (like my collection of stickers from the Sandylion Sticker Warehouse - even my principal remembers his days in the classroom with these and what a great resource this was for teachers at a great price)

C) how really energizing and delightful my recent co-teaching opportunities have been with the Grade 6s for social studies (where the swamp reference originates), the Grade 5s for science, the Grade 4-5s for social studies and the kindergartens for literary/numeracy/community. 

I'm going to resist writing at length about those three (save a snippet and a photo or two to pique curious minds) for now. I still have reports to write, assessments to complete, culminating projects to design, TMC webinars to rehearse, and TL AQ tasks to mark. The takeaway should be that school libraries are incredible hubs of learning and innovation that need the three pronged protection of strong policy, robust funding and equity of access as critical foundations for their success. Long live school libraries!

GenAI / LLMs in the SLLC

 Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate! I am unfortunately under the weather, so today's blog post will be relatively short and sweet. 

How do educators navigate the waters of LLMs (Large Language Models), more popularly known as Generative AI (Artificial Intelligence), in the absence of official guidelines and policies?

This is a difficult question to answer. What's allowed? What's ethical? What should be embraced and what should be avoided? (Heck, even the image that I included with this post wasn't made by me; Bitmoji put it together.)

This coming Wednesday, my friend Kim Davidson and I will be hosting a TDSB Library Network meeting and one of the topics we plan to discuss include AI. There are two recent examples I have that illustrate where we must proceed with caution and/or curiosity. 

Sound-Alike

At the OLA 2024 Super Conference, I attended a keynote session by Avery Swartz. One of the tools that she mentioned gave the ability for an individual to sound as if they were fluent in speaking a different language. I made a note to myself to investigate this particular tool.

I finally got around to exploring it. My first piece of advice comes from the AML - read the EULA (End User License Agreement). Even though these are boring and full of legalese, it is critical to understand what you are agreeing to when you use the software. In this case, the creators would be able to use my voice to train their program. I became a bit nervous about using it but was still fascinated, so I used one of my "junk" emails that isn't linked to almost anything to try it out. After making it, my next conundrum was to determine how to share it "safely". I didn't want it spread without context - which is why you won't see it on my blog. One of the AML key concepts is that audiences negotiate meaning, and I didn't want to give the "wrong impression" to others. I consulted with my administrator, and afterwards with two other teachers with expertise in technology education. They gave me some great advice which I will follow.

An interesting tangent to this story involves my son. He was interested in my process and offered to match my "lip flaps" to the words, so that it would look more realistic. I thanked him for the potential free labour, but I was actually glad to see that my mouth didn't match the sentences, so it was clear it wasn't me. When people upload videos to YouTube now, there is a section where the creator must identify if any parts of the video used "GenAI". I wonder how many people are honest about their use.

Collaborative Inquiry

At the 5th International Media Literacy Research Symposium, I attended a talk by Yonty Friesem, Estrella Luna-Monoz, and Irene Andriopoulou. In my "so what / now what" reflection, I commented that I wanted to replicate their cross-country study within my school board. I asked a few people at my TDSB TL Facilitator meeting and a few people, like Tracey Donaldson, David Hoang, and Dawn Legrow, agreed. Yonty very kindly forwarded us the prompts they used in his initial study and offered to be involved with our version too!

This venture is more about curiosity than caution. There are some tools that we'd be permitted to use with guidance in our schools, especially if they are part of a supervised, guided inquiry with our students. The purpose would be to show how LLMs can both help and hinder the writing process and to involve critical thinking when employing it in school tasks. When does it constitute cheating and when does it count as legitimate assistance? 

The same applies for teacher use. Can teachers use AI for planning, teaching, and/or assessing? If so, how much? How might student privacy be compromised if their work was inputted into a GenAI program for evaluation? We need to have frank conversations, not just about what's possible, but what's prudent.

This applies to teacher researchers too. This week and next week, I'll be part of two webinars, one for BCTLA and one for OSLA, on preparing action research papers for Treasure Mountain Canada 8, the Canadian school library think tank and research symposium. It's very important to "put in the work", as just last year, a researcher with TDSB was fired for using ChatGPT to generate citations that turned out were non-existent. I wouldn't mind having something reliable to check if I formatted my references correctly, as I'm notoriously bad at proper citation (ironic, considering I teach this as part of my TL AQs), but I think I'd rely on people (like my far-away friend Joanie Proske - who will be co-writing a paper with me this year). We shouldn't be ostriches when it comes to LLMs (even though I know it's a myth that ostriches hide their heads in the sand), but we need to go forth with an equal measure of curiosity and caution.

Total Physical Response

 Total Physical Response

On Friday, I completed my ESL Part 2 Additional Qualification course with Queen’s University. The culminating task was to share my inquiry project via a blog post. In the interest of being as authentic as possible, I’m sharing my project on my actual blog!

The Question

My question was “How might I use Total Physical Response to increase comprehension / communication with my MLL students?

Total Physical Response, or TPR for short, is a method of teaching language acquisition using a combination of words and actions. 

I had heard about TPR before but wasn’t sure about how it actually worked. I thought it would suit my particular teaching style. I like to use movements to reinforce foundational terms, such as “media” or “authority”.  I also thought it would be useful because, in my new role as half-time ESL teacher for the primary and junior students at my school, I noticed that I have a lot of students who are at STEP 1 in their English proficiency level. Those students seem to feel more comfortable speaking in Cantonese/Mandarin, because there are many students in the school who share the same language. I will not discourage the use of their home languages, but I still wanted to encourage more attempts at using English. In my AQ, there was much discussion on the “acquisition method” as well as the “learning (direct teaching) method” for language learning. How might TPR fit in?

The Literature Review 

TDSB’s Professional Library department helped me immensely in locating many peer-reviewed academic journal articles and studies connected to TPR. The creator of TPR is James Asher, an American psychologist who focused on young childrens’ linguistic interactions. He stated that young children learned how to speak by watching their parents combine words and actions to reinforce meaning. I read two of Asher’s actual studies (Asher 1966, Asher & Price 1967) and others that employed his methods from Turkey (Bulan & Kasapoglu 2021), Indonesia (Fahrurrozi 2017) and China (Tingting 2018, Rong 2021). The general consensus was that it seemed to benefit the students, although the Turkish study found no difference between using TPR or a more traditional grammar-translation method of instruction. Benefits included social-emotional ones, such as lessening anxiety and raising confidence, while learning.

The Further Questions

Good research often leads to more questions. I wondered if there were a set of specific actions that I had to learn. I considered how I could use TPR with students who were not beginners. How do we go beyond nouns and verbs? Is this TPR approach recommended? 

The Non-Academic Resources

I reached out to my friend, who was an ESL Itinerant teacher. He told me that our school board does not have an official policy related to the use of teaching with TPR (Khan, 2024). I also sought out some practical examples of educators actually using TPR. The ones that helped me were videos like from The Teacher Toolkit, NovaKid Evening Show, and Mooncake English. Seeing it in action helped, so I thought I’d put it into action by trying it out. 

The Action Part of Action Research

I decided to make some videos to demonstrate some of my attempts at using TPR with my students. However, their privacy is very important to me, so I created these videos after school without any students present. (Thanks to my daughter for being the videographer.)

1. Stop & Go

I used this with some of my earliest-stage ESL students in Grade 5, and believe it or not, they loved it and it was the start of one of my most successful lessons with them so far this year! I noticed that some of the video examples I found on YouTube suggested that we co-create the action together. This is a great idea, but with this particular group, I needed to initiate. Because they need a lot of intensive support, I regularly withdraw them from class. When I took them out and we were walking to the library, I said “Stop” and ceased walking, and put out both of my hands. I found that I needed to do that, because holding up a single hand made them think/say it was the number 5, or ask for a high-five clap! I used “Go” as the word and the paired action was two index fingers pointed in the direction I wanted them to move. We interchanged “stop” and “go” a few times in the hallway, and then I asked them to “Say” (tapping my lower lip with my index finger) it as well. Each of the three students took turns saying “Stop” and “Go” while all of us obeyed the commands. I heaped praise on them and once we finally made it to the library, I gave them each three tickets (see here for my blog post on my ESL Increasing Oral Communication Initiative).

2. I Like / You Like / We Like To Eat

Confession: when I did this with my Grade 2 ESL students, I didn’t have the physical objects with me. We made our “We Like” rainbow and needed to fill it with writing. In their notebooks, we planned on writing 5 sentences of things we liked and then choosing just one to write a “good copy” sentence on separate paper with pretty Sharpie markers. When I say “We” (not shown in this video), I make a circle-like motion to try and point to myself and the others we are talking about. I use the “thumbs up” action for “like” (even though I know in some cultures, the thumbs-up action can be seen as rude when performed a certain way). When we were brainstorming what we liked, I would confirm if we (as in, the entire group) liked a certain thing by asking, “Do you [point to the person I’m addressing] like [thumbs up] ice cream [miming the licking of an ice cream cone]?” Then I modeled “I [point to myself] like [thumbs up] ice cream [licking an ice cream cone].” The example I’ve recorded here includes an extra action, “eat” (fingers all together going towards mouth, with chewing lip movements if possible).

Even More Questions

As usual, there are still more questions I have. Back in university, I learned ASL (American Sign Language) and was close but never was certified in being Level 1. I wonder how much ASL could (or should) be used in conjunction with TPR. For instance, I know I have actions for “now” (point to my wrist like for a watch and then point down with my index finger in a single thrust)  and “later” (forming my fingers into an L shape and making a arc motion with my wrist and arm) and I think that the “later” sign comes from ASL.  I didn’t include this resource from the British Council for Teaching English but I liked the section on disadvantages. I still wonder how I could use more advanced grammar constructions as part of this approach; the examples provided from this website show more advanced work, but mainly for more advanced single terms (such as “ways of walking”) and I know from my ESL Part 2 AQ that grammar and syntax (things like English verb forms, the way questions are formed using complex verb transformations using auxiliary verbs, pronouns, conjunctions, etc.) can be really difficult for students learning English. 

I’m grateful that I completed this course. Big thanks to my instructor, Laryssa, and my fellow course participants Jennifer, Becky, Meghan and Ashley for their feedback and insightful posts.