Encyclopedia of an Extraordinary School
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
This project was inspired by the memoir Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, which I first encountered through Kelly Gallagher's book, Write Like This. What Gallagher envisioned as writing exercise or short assignment, I saw as something more: a model for the type of writing that students could produce and share with an audience. As a class, we started with Rosenthal's text, reading and discussing it in groups to analyze her style and structure and interpret how she used these elements to create a picture of her life. Using her writing as a model, we explored style, tone, and voice in our own writing, creating encyclopedia-style entries using our school, High Tech High Chula Vista, as our subject (example student entries). Once each student had several drafts started, students took on additional roles - copy editors, illustrators, layout designers, editor-in-chief - to support the writing and publishing of our book. Over the course of two weeks, our classroom functioned like an newspaper, with students writing, editing, formatting, and publishing their work to create a class encyclopedia about our school. After our book was sent to the publisher, we reflected on the process and then shared our work at exhibition, during which several students read their entries aloud to the rest of the senior class.
Check out a pdf copy of our book or purchase a hard copy here.
TEACHER REFLECTION
I am proud of this, my first project at High Tech High Chula Vista, as an example of beautiful student work. Our final product features well-crafted student writing and illustrations that capture their strong feelings of pride about their school. The timing of this project was well suited to graduating seniors, who were primed to look back over their four years, identify what made our school special, and communicate their experience with an audience. Students were excited to share their observations and to see their writing in print, and they took on all phases of the publication process, from editing to layout design. As a teacher and project designer, I learned many strategies that were useful to me in later projects, such as how to create a classroom editorial structure, how to create layouts in Adobe InDesign, and how to scaffold creative writing and editing. Yet, this project was not without its rocky moments. Initially, I struggled to get students motivated to do the challenging work of writing and publishing a book together. My initial methods were heavy handed and relied too much on lowering grades, which alienated some of my best students. However, I was able to be responsive to feedback and transfer some of the responsibility to students, and they responded by taking more ownership over the final product. In the end, students pushed hard to meet our final deadlines and we came together as a group to take pride in our project. We scheduled our exhibition in conjunction with the "Senior Sundown" event at HTH-CV and it was a comfortable setting for students to share their work with their peers. Looking back, I see this as not a true exhibition of the product, as only several students took part in the sharing of the work and we didn't convey to our audience about the learning process that happened in the creation of our book. Overall, this project was a successful first step into project design and execution which provided a solid foundation for my later work.
PROJECT RESOURCES
Project Handout
Project Roles
Writing Rubric
This project was inspired by the memoir Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, which I first encountered through Kelly Gallagher's book, Write Like This. What Gallagher envisioned as writing exercise or short assignment, I saw as something more: a model for the type of writing that students could produce and share with an audience. As a class, we started with Rosenthal's text, reading and discussing it in groups to analyze her style and structure and interpret how she used these elements to create a picture of her life. Using her writing as a model, we explored style, tone, and voice in our own writing, creating encyclopedia-style entries using our school, High Tech High Chula Vista, as our subject (example student entries). Once each student had several drafts started, students took on additional roles - copy editors, illustrators, layout designers, editor-in-chief - to support the writing and publishing of our book. Over the course of two weeks, our classroom functioned like an newspaper, with students writing, editing, formatting, and publishing their work to create a class encyclopedia about our school. After our book was sent to the publisher, we reflected on the process and then shared our work at exhibition, during which several students read their entries aloud to the rest of the senior class.
Check out a pdf copy of our book or purchase a hard copy here.
TEACHER REFLECTION
I am proud of this, my first project at High Tech High Chula Vista, as an example of beautiful student work. Our final product features well-crafted student writing and illustrations that capture their strong feelings of pride about their school. The timing of this project was well suited to graduating seniors, who were primed to look back over their four years, identify what made our school special, and communicate their experience with an audience. Students were excited to share their observations and to see their writing in print, and they took on all phases of the publication process, from editing to layout design. As a teacher and project designer, I learned many strategies that were useful to me in later projects, such as how to create a classroom editorial structure, how to create layouts in Adobe InDesign, and how to scaffold creative writing and editing. Yet, this project was not without its rocky moments. Initially, I struggled to get students motivated to do the challenging work of writing and publishing a book together. My initial methods were heavy handed and relied too much on lowering grades, which alienated some of my best students. However, I was able to be responsive to feedback and transfer some of the responsibility to students, and they responded by taking more ownership over the final product. In the end, students pushed hard to meet our final deadlines and we came together as a group to take pride in our project. We scheduled our exhibition in conjunction with the "Senior Sundown" event at HTH-CV and it was a comfortable setting for students to share their work with their peers. Looking back, I see this as not a true exhibition of the product, as only several students took part in the sharing of the work and we didn't convey to our audience about the learning process that happened in the creation of our book. Overall, this project was a successful first step into project design and execution which provided a solid foundation for my later work.
PROJECT RESOURCES
Project Handout
Project Roles
Writing Rubric