hey everybody we're back and i am excited that i get to talk to la donna harrington today she's got such a cool lesson she had so many cool lessons but this is a really amazing one i'm really glad that she's going to get to share it with us so ladnnawhy don't you introduce yourself hi i'm la donna harrington and i'm recently retired high school librarian from milburn township and just a little bit about my work history it includes middle school so and also
a corporate librarian and i worked a couple of years different universities one in indian apples and ohio university and i've been a lecture part time lecture at reckers university in their life a program so that's a little bit about me that's awesome wow i want to say you really get around but i don't know if that's quite the appropriate phrasing there but so i was going to ask you how did you end up going through that winding path and ending up in a high school
so while i was studying to become a class room teacher my campus job was working in the university library and i just fell in love with that kind of work and as my path found me i lived in different states and that was the time before the national board certification so i'd have to start the certification process all over again the classroom teaching positions so m i at that point said you know what i really like libraries and i think that's what i want to do so um fast forward here i am with my
masters from rucker's university that's where i got my degree yea it's a small world so um why didn't you tell us a little bit about this lesson in terms of how did this come about what was the sort of the origin story of this lesson okay so this lesson actually began as an inspiration by my one of my colleagues at school at the high school her name is jenny and she is the a p psychology teacher so this is high
level students that you have to prepare them basically the the classes to prepare them to take the aptest that's the reality so we had these high level students jenny is a mom of two young children and in her activities of picking up kids after school and running in to their different locations and stuff they listen to this wonderful podcast called smash boom best and it's a debating podcast where they mash up funny funky different um venus together so for
since you might have pickles versus honey um and that's the debate topics and they use a lot of personification there's lightning rounds and several different rounds of people get to vote the audience members get to go to their website and vote so jenny was preparing her a p students for their test and they were getting to a unit on neurons and in dorphins and she thought
i at ladon would be really interested in helping me figure out how we can do this smash boom best kind of podcast environment with the students to learn these topics so that's really the inspiration um anybody who wants to try this lesson should certainly go to smash boom best podcast listen to it you'll get a lot of inspiration because it's very fun
um a lot of um like i said personification goes into it so you make your topic um a person but you have to learn about your topic to be able to do that so that's the inspiration i love that i mean i listened to a lot of podcasts and i had not heard of that one before but i've definitely have to get that one in my list because it sounds awesome
it's really fun it's a very fun podcast and i will so i would also mention with the podcast that they if you go to their website they have a educators tab on it so you can you know take advantage of that environment to for educators because they talk about how to set up debates um you know there's a whole curriculum for like three to five three to fifth grade third to fifth grade so um you know anyone who is interested should take a look at that and also listen to the
podcast because that's where you really start getting the idea in the flavor of how this lesson goes i love it and have to say that having a teacher having that relationship with a teacher that they are thinking wow my school librarian can help me with this that really speaks to the culture that you helped to build in that school that's really outstanding
yeah i loved i actually got text message from jenny like at ten o'clock the night she got the inspiration and at eight o'clock the next morning we were implementing the project in the library so it really was a quick let's do this and and it worked and it was wonderful so that's awesome i love it so why don't you walk us through some of the specifics what would you say is maybe the primary objective that students are trying to achieve in this lesson
okay so for our objectives and of course if you're adapting this lesson for any other topics certainly you would look at your topics and your grade levels and things like that to adjust and adapt but for our specific one what we needed was for our students to be able to not only now the different types of the neuro transmitters but also about the
facts of drugs on those nero transmitters including antagonists um and the re uptake of mechanisms so it's like high level thinking that so that was one particular objective that we needed to get the kids to learn these things we also need to need it to them to know um what saratonan is dopamean all these different inhibitors and this was in preparation for their a p test they just have to have that knowledge we also wanted of course for them to use research strategies
and these students had been in with me before and learned a lot of the base background way of doing research i use a research model that i have adapted from my original research model which i call be observant and the a and t at the end is you have to analyze you have to navigate and you have to think and all of those run and cycles so we were implementing that research model as well as trying to get them to use authoritative resources
um we also wanted them to collaborate during their research and their presentation and we wanted them to think critically as they applied their research in a create of environment um lot of different a lot of different pieces and i would also mention that this lesson came right on the hills of the pandemic so we were just returning back to the class room environment excuse me let me get a drink of water here absolutely
so we were just returning to face to face environment um the kids had been away from each other for months people were desperate for face to face and enjoy to laugh again you know um so this i would say that this was just like the perfect lesson to bring kids back in and enjoy each other and while there learning at the same time and they didn't realize they were learning so that was the joy of it
yeah when you can get that opportunity to have get the kids to have fun while also engaging and learning i mean that's that's the goal standard right there and i love that you're you're looking at something that is so serious and so high level but you found a way to i mean you said the podcast that sort of aimed at like third to fifth grade issue
sort of sounds like but you are able to take it and use it in a fun way with these older kids which i mean clearly this is a lesson that's goin t be able be adapted up and down for grade levels and subject areas too actually i would like to make a little correction on that the podcast is great for any age i mean adults will love this podcast the curriculum materials that are on their website is
focused on three to five but anybody will love this podcast wonderful and you learn so many different things you know like i said pickles versus honey or you know jello versus corn starch or you know different kinds of elements so anyway i just wanted to make that little distinction there no i appreciate that so okay we've got our objectives laid out is this a lesson is this like whole class instruction that then breaks into groups sort of sounds like or how does it how does it proceed
okay so i also am a big proponent of guided inquiry design if you know the work of dr leslie maniotis she is the developer and creator of guided inquiry design and um i use a lot of those strategies while teaching so in order to do that goes into steps and i'm not going to get into the full blown please look at lesslyswebsites and she's got several publications out that you can take a look but
lessons begin with an opening and and so we began the lesson with letting the students listen to the podcast and you can do that a variety of ways you can do it as a whole class and the or you could do it as a home work assign and we wanted them to be familiar with that form at so um then from there we moved into pairs we team the students up into pairs um but we do have full class room participation
because each of the rounds that you're doing so you'll have pairs of students that give their declaration of greatness that's the first round and so they have to introduce their particular whether saratonan or some other entity they have to do that m introduction and do a declaration of greatness why are they so great um and then then there's rebuttal so another pair that's teamed up against this pair will do their rebuttal and then you have the full class voting on who they think on that
round so so it's not just individual work it's not just pairing work it's a little bit of combination of everything where we're getting full class participation as well as you know individual pairing up of work so i hope that explains it well enough oh absolutely no that's great so it sounds like the students are are they given the topic that they're going to research or do they get to sort of pick from a pool
well we had we designed it so that we had randomly we had specific entities that the kids have to learn they have to do this so we had the particular items that they would just basically draw out of hat alone and so then one pair would be sarah toni in one pair would be edopamene and and then we would decide whose going up against each other and in the you know the rounds of competition
were there multiple groups working on the same topics but in different rounds like where their multiple dopemene versus sarah toni groups or did they kind of all get their own individual topics i'm just curious everybody got their individual but that also again could be based on the size of your class room the number of pairs what topics you're trying to get them to learn so you would have to adjust that for your own environment so
i mean they would it sounds like it would make a lot more sense if they had separate topics but i could also see it being kind of interesting if there were like head to head competitions between different groups on the same topics to see what kind of differences they can kind of pull out of stuff true that would be very interesting to a definitely yeah i love this lesson there's so many things you can do
we we designed the lesson so that after after they picked their topics the pairs picked their topics then of course they had to have time to do the research on their topics so i i put together i used lib guides in my practice and so i threw together stuff the night before on to the lip guide so that the students would be at seeing authoritative resources as well as our print materials and things that we had available in the library and so that was all set before they came in but again we went
over the research strategies um you know on my lip guide i would also include in a lot of cases good websites that they might access but as well as our data bases and diff things like that we have i mean the district i worked in had a nice support for the library i had great support so i had a lot of really good top level research materials that the students could use which is important when you re doing these kind of very high level research project oh absolutely
what we discovered the kids were so excited about this particular for at that they were working they were conniving to meet each other during the school day in different locations up the work on their topics and they were meeting after school as pairs and you know you know egging each other on because we also told them don't tell what your re
searching either we don't want your opponent to get any save on you right now so they were but they would egg each other like we're going to beat you guys and we're working together tonight so it was a lot of fun a lot of excitement was generated from this lesson yeah i mean how often do you have students conniving to get more school work done you know that's that's the hall mark of a great lesson right there so they get their topics they do
some research once they've had that time together i'm assuming then they're going to go into the structure debate format yes yes and again we used the same voting strategies that's on the website on smashboom webs best website so they have the vote because they have it in their podcasting environment they have um you know the audience members coming to vote on whatever topics they're doing in their podcast so we
it's the same kind of voting strategy we also uh i became the judge for the end because you can really seriously have a tie and there has to be a tie breaker and jennie thought it would be better if i was the judge is opposed to her as the classroom teacher so that i could be a little more less favorable to kids couldn't think that i was favoring one over the other but that would be another way to draw in another teacher to so with this with this lesson if you you know you could pull
in pull in and your custody and pull in you know whoever is you know yeah get more involvement yeah definitely so as the lesson is going along do you find yourself providing them with much guidance in terms of research strategies like because you said you'd kind of already gone over them and you kind of gave them a refresher as they're researching do they get more pointers if they need him or is it pretty much you've got what you need
well they were very excited we spent two days in the library doing the research stuff so they had plenty of time to you know tap into the resources and ask questions if they were struggling with ideas but you know once they're learning their topic they begin creating whatever format they want to to present their their rounds of information so because the debate rounds there is three debate rounds there's the declaration of independence is not declare declaration of greatness that's round one and
then round two is a micro round and round three is the final six so in six words they have to sum up why they should be the best huh six words is the final so and each of the rounds we give them a certain allotted amount of time i can't remember exactly what it was but we gave them a certain amount of time that they could do their declaration of greatness and then m team two would give their declaration of greatness and you have a rebuttal in between those so after one declaration of gray
this the other the pairing does their rebuttal and then team to does their declaration of greatness and then there's time for a rebuttal and all of this is time otherwise you just go crazy or but the kids were after listening to the podcast they knew that oh we have to do something creative so they were making they were writing poetry um they were turning
er um making writing songs so and they didn't know what their micro around the micro around is where you we the teachers would give them like if you're uhsaratonan was going on a blind date what look like and so they would have to come up with that and they only had a few minutes to actually put that together and then we're ready for the debate it wasn't like an overnight thing wasn't you know you have to come up with how this blind date would happen in like five minutes
and what a great way to kind of do that on the fly assessment of how well do you really know this stuff exactly and because there was such engagement by the whole class we got reflections from the students post um lesson and we also got reflections from the students after they took their a b test and um and i mean the students were saying at the end of their apt i never really even had to study for those topics because i just knew i knew that
know so and so was on a blank blind date with and this is what it did you know so it was really a great way to engage students in a real learning environment that they really didn't realize they were learning i guess just having a on yeah i love that and i also love the fact that they can kind of present their information in whatever form it i mean that could really lend to maybe there are students who don't
like to speak in front of a group but they've got options that now they can figure out a different way to bring that information forward oh and they did i mean one student created a t shirt that they came in wearing to as they did their rebottals or as they did their declaration you know we had people doing some art kind of things i mean it was just really we saw everything and that's another thing about guided inquiry design as allowing students the creativity to do their own type
presentation as opposed to defining or you're going to do a report or you're going o do an essay at the end of this particular thing now you open it up and let the students decide how they're going to present their learning so really right again it's good good instruction when you're able to do that giving the kids that ownership in that agency that's outstanding so it sounds like in terms of resources you
did some careful curation and you ere you it sounds like you already had some pretty good access to resources within the library system which is great so you were able to kind of cherry pick out here's the things that students can go looking for but i could also see this being maybe an open web sort of search if you wanted to reinforce those skills if you were so inclined to go in that direction
you could you could extend this lesson for a lot longer you could spend time on teaching the research method you know getting students using high level or whatever resources you have available for them and and then teaching them research strategies how to go about finding things on the open web and those types and spend time doing
ah and then move in to how do we put together debate you could even have you know people writing down their debate topics before they actually got up to present them so there's a lot of ways that this could be really extended we didn't do that because we we had a unit that we needed to get taught and and also it was students that had already you know they're basically seniors and
their juniors are seniors and they're coming in they've already had my instruction several times in different form ats and things so we were really at a point where we could dive in and and really run with the lesson in a very short amount of time now this is an amazing lesson it is absolutely blowing my mind how great it works how many times did you get to actually do this lesson was it just the one time or were you able to come back to it
well i just recently retired so you know so it was once we had this was like my my swan song into retirement but i do know i mean jenny the classroom teacher and i presented this lesson at the new jersey association of school librarians annual conference that was just this past december and she's already my replacement person they've already done it once now they're ready to do it again in the spring for the spring semester so yeah it's right so um and also if you want to know more
about the lesson it is also published in the school library connection journal magazine so you can take a look there for the whole lay out too if you need it perfect that's great um so it sounds like there's a lot of ability to sort of adjust or differentiate the lesson for the students that are involved in the lesson you were working
with very higher end older students but it sounds like you could really do a lot of fine tuning with if you had students with particular needs or students that had particular focus or interest you could really taylor this to them oh i absolutely there's i mean you could break apart like i said you could break apart the research and really spend you know as much time as the classroom teacher will give you on
working through research strategies i know that if classroom teachers get it that the collaboration with the librarian will make their it's easier than then that's the ticket to getting more access to students and i've been very fortunate with my teachers and the situations that i've been in both in middle school and high school that i guess there was a level of trust or a level of enthusiasm one of my favorite things as creative lesson planning i love
doing that and so i think once once you can get your foot in the door with that first lesson and if you're you know give a lot of license to creativity because i really in my first book that i wrote i talk about how problems were solved through play and you you can see that in the kinder garden class room you can sit with kids on the playground you know you're building a bridge with blocks that's a problem how to solve the
problem how do you make it work and it's fun you're enjoying it and you're solving problems so that's always been sort of my i guess backbone to everything i've done in my library class room is i really want to bring play and creativity in so that the problems don't seem like problems it's just something you're excited about finding out about so so yes you can
break this down is what i'm saying i guess that was a long winded way of saying um saying that yeah break it down use it for you know what level of student i do i worked very very closely with my l l teacher which en english language learners and we did full year units and we would break down the level of research to you know but our in product was not really about the research it was about learning how to speak english you know what
we're able to imbed that and i like that terminology of being an imbedded librarian you know that you're just imbedded in their their work in the class teachers work so i love it this is usually the point where i ask what kind of feedback you got from students and staff but you've already told us that the kids were like over the moon about
how well they were able to take in the information and clearly your teachers love it too because even though you have moved on the your teacher collaborator is still working on this lesson and has sort of i'll say indoctrinated your your replacement with this lesson so clearly this is something that went over real big i have to tell you that one of our students his his last name and i'm it's eluding my brain right now but it was very close oh no his first name was wrong and he became known
as sarah ran tone and the whole rest of the year um because they loved it so much and he had done sarah toning so but he was sarah wrong tone and um but i could give you right from the students so this is students voice about the lesson it said jack and i had a ton of fun making the presentation especially the freedom to present our new transmitters but with jokes and other creative elements like a song or a custom design shirt added in it definitely helped me remember sara tone and on
the test in class and on the a p exam as well as other neuro transmitters that were presented and he goes on to tell that till which ones and stuff he said it definitely helped us connect with our class mates creating the atmosphere we have in class nowadays so i mean that to me it almost brought tears to my eyes when we got that reflection because we like i said at the beginning we were just coming out of this pandemic
and to hear how the students had really connected with this lesson and how it made them feel so creative and connected to their less mates and stuff as well as to the topics so it was really dynamic so i love that the lesson is not just building knowledge but it's building community that's powerful that's really powerful low so do you have any advice for folks who might want to do this lesson with their own students anything they should sort of have in mind or be thinking about
um the first thing i would say go listen to the smash boom best podcast go listen to just enjoy it it's it's a very funny um great way to learn about so many different topics i mean i listened to one the other day and i don't i don't know if i should say it on the podcast but the topics were um sneezes versus parts and but you learn all about why biologically why you're sneezing and the other part you know and they had to bring about their declaration of greatness and all that kind of stuff but
in the process they're introducing this very scientific information that you're learning about but in such a fun way and they usually on the podcast they also have like you know celebre yes come on and be the be personification of whoever it is but so that would be my first suggestion to anybody wanting to try this lesson go to smash boom best first listen to it
see all the options that you would have on the different types of topics that you want to bring in to work with and then you know i guess to deter and what level great level what kind of adaptations you might need to make for yourself like i said ours we only did like two days in the library doing the research and putting
everything together and then we did whatever amount of time it took to do the rounds we allowed two days for the rounds but we found that we had we didn't have quite enough time to get it done in two days so because the debates can take a bit of time to and then you have you know the rock is like no soul no you know so there's all of that kind of silliness that goes on with it but it's great so those are the
things that i would suggest you know looking at how you can either flow it down i think a lot of people might not be at the level my eight pacespoons were at sure so you would want to take more time and i think it could be worked in a history class room it could be worked in a science class room you worked in your english class room if you
were working on a certain novel that you're going through and you could pit characters against each other you know so there's all kinds of ways that you could adapt this and make it work for your class room so i'm seeing the same thing in my head i'm just seeing every class every everybody's just doing this lesson because it's so it's so adaptable and useful it's great man so thank you
so much for coming to share this with us because i know people are going to want to run with this i know i want to run with us i'm ready to jump into it so how can listeners connect with you in the future if they want to catch up with where you're at so my twitter account is l d herring l d for la donna and then the the first part of my last name harrington l d herring is my twitter and my email but please make sure you
preface in the subject area smash boom bast or lesson help or whatever as la donna harrington at email dot com so it's my full name in at mail dot com so that's very generous of you that to offer that to everybody appreciate that thank you again so much for bringing this to us i am so glad we got to have this conversation thank you thank you thank you for having me my pleasure