What about meeting the standards?
In an era of “high-stakes testing,” “accountability,” and “meeting the standards,” subjects like physical education, fine arts, and sometimes even social studies and foreign language have been curtailed or even eliminated in favor of drilling for tests. Even kindergarten recess has taken a hit in some districts. It is important to remember that high standards for education did not arise with the No Child Left Behind nor with the earlier state-wide movements toward standards and testing. Good teachers have always had high standards and have assessed their students’ progress by them.
The current educational climate demands that teachers use class time to meet formal standards which have been identified and articulated by statewide committees. Although in an ideal world, Journeys in Film lessons would be keyed to individual state standards, such a Sisyphean task is not feasible. Instead, we have used the compendium of standards produced by the Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning. This organization has synthesized standards produced by the states and by professional teaching organizations to create the excellent McREL Online Compendium of K-12 standards.. Each lesson in the Journeys in Film units was written to meet one or more of the standards and indicators listed by McREL. It is a relatively easy task for teachers to read through the standards listed and identify the corresponding state standards.
What curriculum design framework was used for Journeys in Film lessons?
In their book Understanding by Design and its supplementary workbook, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTigue created a “backward-design” process for curriculum development. The authors recommend beginning the design process with the development of Essential Understandings, main ideas that students should remember long after the details of the class have faded. The next step is to establish the Essential Questions that will guide the lesson and the key knowledge and skills that you wish students to acquire. This is followed by determining the evidence of learning that students should be able to present at the conclusion of the lesson or unit. Only after that does the teacher plan instruction.
This is the format that was adopted by Journeys in Films curriculum writers. At the beginning of each lesson you will find several Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions. This is followed by notes to the teacher to fill in background information, and then by a list of assessment tools incorporated into the lesson. Only then does the lesson provide instructions for the what-how-when of classroom activities.
Is the Journeys in Film program appropriate for students with special needs?
In a word, yes. Slow readers may be a bit panicked at first when they learn they are to see a film with subtitles. However, most students grow accustomed to reading subtitles quickly and soon are even unaware that they are reading. Most subtitles, too, are brief compared with spoken dialogue. Being engaged in following the story of an appealing film gives the reluctant reader an incentive for reading subtitles as well.
You can allay fears a bit by asking your students to tell you about a really exciting movie they have seen and enjoyed recently. After they describe scenes to you, ask if the visual images or the dialogue were more important in telling the story. Remind them that film as a medium has so many other techniques besides words to help advance the story—visual images, sound effects, music, camera angles, etc. All of these will help them understand the story.
If your class is still unable to follow the subtitles, consider having an older student or several students come in to read the subtitles aloud. You might wish to pre-teach vocabulary words that you think the class might have difficulty with. Try breaking the film into several sections. While not the best way to view a film, this may allow your students time to clear up questions and develop their understanding of the characters and conflict so that the subsequent sections are more meaningful.
How do I measure change in student attitude?
Most teachers are comfortable with a wide array of assessment tools beyond the unit test: portfolios, simple observation, individual and group tests and quizzes, rubrics, rating scales, project work, and so on. Measuring change in student attitudes toward other cultures was a priority in developing the Journeys in Film program. Pilot Project Results in 2004-05 demonstrated that participation in the program yielded the following results:
If you wish to measure attitude shifts in your classroom, you might employ a tool such as the Bogardus Social Distance Scale with both pre-viewing and post-viewing administration for comparison.