The Story of Learning

If we think of our schools as libraries filled with the colorful stories of every person who has walked the hallways and classrooms, we might find ourselves asking, “Who wrote these stories? For whom? And what happened in them?” We engage with the children behind the stories, and we become invested in how they end. Too often, though, the stories of our students are reduced to lines of test data instead of being appreciated holistically, read and comprehended with attention to what students know and share about themselves, as people and as learners.

To allow my students to craft and share their own holistic learning stories, I designed a first-quarter ESL literacy unit aligned to Common Core Language Arts standards and modeled after the Faces of Learning project. The purpose of this unit is to empower students by having them (1) investigate themselves as learners and (2) bring their stories to life for our staff and community.

The unit begins with a student self-assessment through an online inventory of multiple intelligences. Because I teach ESL students, I also ask them to rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 6 in terms of how much language they understand as they read, write, speak and listen to English in class. I individually share and discuss with them their scores from our standardized language proficiency test, and they set goals for themselves using a graphic organizer.

After the self-assessment, the next assignment of the unit is to write letters to their core teachers sharing what they learned about their three biggest strengths and offering suggestions for strategies their teachers could incorporate to support their learning. For example, a student who discovered that she had strengths in intrapersonal intelligence asked her science teacher if she could do more independent work in class. A student with strengths in kinesthetic intelligence asked to play more games in class, and a student with linguistic intelligence asked her language arts teacher if the class could write long stories with chapters and do activities to learn new words.

We then move into the foundations of personal narrative. The Faces of Learning website provides mentor texts to kick-start this portion of the unit. We read and analyze multiple stories, looking for narrative text components and identifying the life lesson the narrator learned. To help my students with text structure and the “formula” of writing personal narratives, I may include a different mentor text that is more concrete and accessible to English language learners. After reading, students draft their own stories about learning a life lesson. We then analyze their work, step by step, looking for ways to enhance their writing by incorporating what they’ve learned from the mentor texts about dialogue, descriptive language, inner monologue and so on.

The final step in the unit is to publicize students’ learning stories through a classroom website that includes basic information about multiple intelligences, students’ stories and their pictures. The site is shared with staff in the hope that they will be inspired by the personal stories of our students. I also hope that involving others in this unit empowers more members of our school community to provide learning environments that respond to students’ needs, build on their strengths and teach strategies for overcoming their weaknesses.

Hearing directly from the students themselves will help us reflect on our own practice and hopefully add a few new strategies for enhancing our instruction to meet the diverse needs of our learners. I would like to see this project expanded throughout the building, keeping our bookshelves alive with the colorful stories of all the students who are learning in our school.

Nichole Berg is a middle school bilingual resource teacher in Madison, Wis.