“Making Curriculum Pop is fizzing with exciting ideas and creative plans for classroom teachers, but it also has a clearly articulated rationale. The LEOs (Learning Experience Organizers) provide a systematic and engaging way to explore the diversity and complexity of media texts with students in a wide range of curriculum areas.”
—David Buckingham, professor at Loughborough University, UK, and author of Media Education: Literacy Learning and Contemporary Culture
Discovering Learning Experience Organizers
One summer when I was in graduate school, Dr. Richard Fehlman took a group of us to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to hear Dr. David Buckingham offer the audience brilliant, inspiring, and practical advice about media literacy. Buckingham’s Media Education was the go-to book in our graduate course as we explored expanding concepts of text and of reading.
And so Buckingham’s praise for Making Curriculum POP: Developing Literacies in All Content Areas (2016) in the epigraph above and on the first page of Goble and Goble’s book added instant credibility and only fueled my enthusiasm for reading and later incorporating the Gobles’ theories into practice in my own classroom. And I have to note that seeing exemplary presentations by the Gobles at the National Council of Teachers of English and at the Iowa Council of Teachers of English though the years only added to the Gobles’ credibility.
In their opening chapter, the Gobles succinctly describe the shifting educational paradigms of the last century and the theory and research behind their Learning Experience Organizers. They contrast their noninterlocking LEOs with traditional study guides and worksheets (p. 20). And if you’ve ever used literature circles in your classroom, these LEOs will be familiar hybrids ready for your immediate consumption. However, these LEOs “are not your daddy’s caddy.” These Learning Experience Organizers have been modified for today’s students and today’s expanding textual experiences.
In addition to the impressive feast of 55 LEOs in Chapter 5, the Gobles include a chapter on designing learning experiences, a chapter with suggestions for modifications, and over 60 pages of impressive “Resources to Make Your Curriculum Pop” (pp. 66–132). Although I don’t have time to describe the magnificence of Chapter 4, the media-rich resources are perfect companions to the Learning Experience Organizers.
Returning to a discussion of the LEOs, the Gobles write:
Using Learning Experience Organizers, or LEOs, creates a highly differentiated instructional practice designed to engage students with any print or nonprint text, including objects and spaces. Instead of using a traditional study guide to search for a text’s “right answers,” students can use LEOs to individually and then collaboratively interact with the text using a variety of specific and open-ended foci. (p. 12)
And later in Chapter 1, Goble and Goble stress the importance of student choice: “Choice is a feature of this type of study guide, as is the opportunity to explore connections and feelings, make predictions, and focus on better responses (as opposed to those that are right or wrong). Noninterlocking study guides—such as our LEOs—incorporate higher-level thinking” (p. 19). Goble and Goble bring Chapter 1 to a triumphant close as they summarize “six interrelated strands of education research and theory” (p. 22) that have guided them as they created LEOs. Because the Gobles’ guiding ideas (pp. 22-8) of
- Constructivism
- Collaborative and Cooperative Learning
- Cultural Studies and Media Education
- Culturally Relevant Teaching/Engaging Students in Learning
- Differentiation of Instruction and Multiple Intelligences
- Literacy Across the Curriculum and New Literacies
- 21st Century Skills
mirror so many of my own guiding ideas, grafting the LEOs into my lessons required minimal changes.
Designing and Developing Digital Learning Experiences
After using key LEOs with the whole class as we read several anchor works in my AP English Language and Composition courses, I had students use specific LEOs to respond to other shorter works in small groups. After multiple discussions and evaluations, I created editable PDFs of several LEOs that my students could use in nonfiction literature circle discussions of their choice books. (And if I had been a more careful reader, I would have noticed the link to PDFs right after the Table of Contents.) I liked how students were able to take more responsibility for their own learning as they chose and jigsawed the LEOs that would work best for their choice books. The LEOs were successful in terms of choice, independence, and critical thinking. And in terms of assessment, I found the Gobles’ metaphor spot on: “Most LEOs are designed for many possible responses, so we often assess these footprints of learning based on process and effort” (p. 51).
After four sessions of nonfiction book circles, I decided to make two design and instructional changes before we used LEOs with choice book again. First, about 5% of my students had problems editing the LEOs. Even after repeated instruction on the workflow, two or three students would inevitably turn in blank PDFs. To improve the workflow, I converted 18 of the LEOs to Google Docs, and I offered these HyperDocs to students as links that automatically copy the file for them. Here’s an example of just one HyperDoc LEO:
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The CONNECTOR’s job is to relate your text to other things you have studied in school, your own personal experience, as well as things outside of school (self, text, world). Make sure you are specific—for example, if you are using a passage from a text, write out the EXACT QUOTE OR PASSAGE in the upper boxes with quotation marks. Please be prepared to share your connections with your group. |
After switching from PDFs to Google Docs, all students easily mastered the process.
The second area that needed change was in assisting students to better choose LEOs and to emphasize that if a LEO is not working (not authentic) for a particular book or for a particular section, skilled readers adjust their response and find a better fit. In addition, I had the students jigsaw LEOs after having read about 25 pages, and this helped students make more informed choices the second time around.
In the end, the HyperDoc LEOs were easy for the students to use, and they gave students voice and choice in their learning. With the Gobles’ solid foundation in theory and their creative genius in the creation of Learning Experience Organizers, my students and I were able to make the curriculum pop!
References
Buckingham, D. (2012). Media education: literacy, learning and
contemporary culture. Cambridge: Polity.
Goble, P. B., & Goble, R. R. (2016). Making curriculum pop: developing
literacies in all content areas. Golden Valley, MN: Free Spirit
Publishing.