One result of keeping a blog for over ten years is that I have a record of a lot of the things I’ve tried in my classroom over the last ten years, including some of my earliest forays into using backward design in curriculum planning and assessing understanding with Socratic seminars (first ever mention was in my first year blogging; also see this older entry). I still plan using backward design, though I’ve learned that for me, the most important parts of the process are creating the essential questions using the UbD filter. On the other hand, I also have a long record of things I’ve abandoned. Not all of them are bad ideas or didn’t work, but for one reason and another, I no longer found them as useful or as big a priority. In some cases, people find these old posts, typically not regular readers of this blog, and occasionally I’m asked questions about how one thing or another is working out for me.

Case in point? Interactive notebooks. I was really excited about them when I first heard about them. I think they are great in theory, but the problem I had was time to assess what students were doing in the notebooks coupled with frustration that students weren’t really using them to learn as I had hoped. So I gave up on them. As much as I like the idea of them, I found them a bit too unwieldy to manage in practice and my students weren’t deriving enough benefit out of them to make them worth the work for me. Perhaps it was a failing of implementation. If you are using them, and they are working for you, I’d love to hear how you’re making them work.

Another experiment I couldn’t make work for me was Collins Writing. While I get that students work on certain issues as they go and eventually will cover a lot of ground, I never found it feasible to give feedback only a few things. I wonder if Collins Writing is something that might work better for teachers at the elementary and middle school levels than it worked for me.

I don’t really use wikis with my students very much anymore, nor do I keep a classroom site or blog anymore. The biggest reason for this is that the school where I’ve worked the last four years has had a learning management system that will allow for online discussions and posting of assignments. In the past I have tried wikis, blogs, and Nings. The one thing I do need to figure out is publication. Students should share their work. Students in the eighth grade at Worcester Academy each have their own blogs, and I think it’s fabulous. It seems somewhat pointless, however, to duplicate information or assignments from the learning management system to some outside site, especially when my students’ other teachers are all using our learning management system. I would just be making things more difficult for the students. In any case, learning management systems, though they are often closed to outsiders, do allow for easy online extensions of learning.

I’m always surprised at the traction some of my older posts still get. In some cases, I stand by what I wrote way back when, but in others, I have changed my mind about things. It wouldn’t be honest to take those posts down because they do reflect my thoughts and feelings at a different time. If things I wrote years ago are still useful, I’m glad. Today, for instance, here’s a snapshot of the statistics for the most frequently accessed posts on my blog:

Some of these posts are old. Taking the home page or archives out of the equation, the most accessed page today was written in 2008. I still think it’s useful because it should give students an idea of how to understand money in Jane Austen’s books. The next most frequently accessed post was written in 2007. In fact, the most recent post in this list is the one entitled “American Literature: How I Threw Out the Chronology and Embraced the Themes,” which was written last March. The post “What Makes a Good Technology Integration Specialist” is often tweeted or otherwise passed around, but I’m not even a technology integration specialist anymore (I still stand by what I said, though). I wrote it in April 2012 when I was seeking a job in that field, and I considered it something of a manifesto as well as, I hoped, something that would attract a potential employer.

It’s occasionally interesting for me to look over old posts and see how well they hold up (or cringe). I suppose one caveat we should all keep in mind when using anything we find on the web, my posts included, is the freshness date. Some classics never go out of style, but I guess as to the rest, I have to shrug and say, “I don’t do that anymore.”