Opal Band's Monster Arc Exploration

Opal Band is home to students ages 13-14 and is led by Phillip.

Going into this arc, many of my students were anxious about the theme of Monster -- not because it’s inherently scary, but that it sounded like it would focus on make-believe, pretend, myths, and legends -- nothing they were particularly interested in. While the topic of Monster lends itself easily to the fictional, there are plenty of real “monsters” in the world to learn about. After a lengthy brainstorming, discussion, and voting session, we arrived at two major areas of interest: horror films, and real-world “monster” problems and the people behind them.

Focusing on horror (especially creature horror) films drew on the student interest and desire to make one, particularly on our fall camping trip. This meant we had an internal deadline and a lot of things to learn about making films before we got there. Right away, we started learning about the scriptwriting process. Students read Masterclass articles on the elements of horror films, the process and stages of going from an idea to a screenplay, how to write a logline, treatment, and script, demonstrating an understanding of this by making reference posters on those topics for our classroom. After learning about loglines and seeing examples from famous films, students generated their own premises for our own films and voted on the most compelling ideas anonymously. The creators of the top three ideas became the leaders of those film groups, consisting of a cameraperson, screenwriter, director, and production/props manager.

With some solid ideas beneath them, students began writing beat sheets -- detailed outlines -- of their film to get down the basic plot points. With only a few days left, students then shifted to making props and costumes -- we knew that our first iteration of these films would be rushed. While filming on the camping trip proved to be too ambitious, we were able to shoot our first iterations shortly after returning. I discovered a new collaborative video editing tool called Kapwing that students quickly learned used to edit their shots into short films.

The results were surprisingly good! After peer-evaluating them using the five elements of horror as a guide, work began on honing our skills before attempting another go. 

Over the next couple of weeks, students studied common camera angles and created their own cheat-sheet of examples and definitions of shots, they revised their beat sheets and began developing the outlines into scripts, we read the script from the Pixar film “Inside Out’ while highlighting the direction of action, dialogue, setting changes, and camera angles and watched how it played out on screen. About halfway through this process, director Keika Lee joined us via zoom to provide feedback on our first iterations and show us a bit of what it’s like to work on an animation, taking us through the process of moving from storyboarding to complete film. After seeing the storyboards on Lee’s film -- and hearing how helpful they were to some of the film groups -- students redoubled their efforts to create more-detailed storyboard versions for the next version of their films. 

While the second iterations proved to me more challenging to film than the first due to an over abundance of very unscary full sunlight and an over-focus on the necessity of getting it right on one rainy day, all three groups were ultimately successful in having a film to show in time for our November 10th end-of-Exploration potluck community event.

As mentioned earlier, our parallel focus (when were not obsessing about films) was in researching, presenting, and argumentative writing. Following a presentation I gave based on an article from The Guardian on the “12 Worst Climate Villains” students were tasked with researching and presenting on some of the people in the article by finding additional sources confirming the article’s claims. 

Following their share-outs, I introduced the basics of the CER (claim, evidence, reasoning) writing framework, wherein an author argues a claim, backs that up with a piece of researched and cited evidence, and follows that up with their reasoning explaining how that piece of evidence supports their claim. Students were given an photograph of an optical illusion wherein a cat appears to be simultaneously going up or down the stairs depending on how you look at it, and had to use the CER framework to claim, using environmental evidence, whether the cat was indeed going up or down. This led to a discussion about outliers, cherry-picking data, and how people can draw two different conclusions given the same evidence.

Next came the challenge, students had to define what a “monster” means to them, then choose one living person who they claim meets that definition and provide evidence and justification for their choices. They needed to come up with three reasons/claims as to why someone was a “monster” and back each up with three pieces of evidence. 

Before formally starting writing, I presented to the class on the general format of argumentative research papers, MLA formatting and citation style, formation of a thesis, and how to properly cite sources in text and on a Works Cited, providing them with colorful reference sheets they used to guide their writing. Following the completion of their first drafts, students evaluated each other’s work by highlighting the various components of each other's papers (thesis, claims, evidence, reasoning) in the same colors from their references to reinforce their own understanding of those components while providing feedback about what might be missing. After incorporating this feedback, students submitted a final draft to me for review.

While we also engaged with a number of other activities, from making an identity-based self portrait, to making Andy Goldsworth inspired sculptures in the Presidio, to digitally designing an advertisement for a favorite book, those these all took place within the first few weeks of school. In addition, we’ve had weekly session with Rob to get feedback and support with our props, costumes, and storyboard. Students have also had near-bi weekly sessions with Dr. Suarez exploring the issue of indigenous rights in Canada by reading sections from the book “How We Go Home” which chronicles the experiences of indigenous women in Canada.