Snapshot is a project that is subtitled A Photo Synthesis because it synthesizes the learning students have done over the school year in regards to decoding photographs. This gradual release of responsibility begins with weekly Friday Photo and evolves to a student-led experience where students select or take a rich photograph and prepare to lead the class in decoding the photograph using the same stages as Friday Photo. Many teachers have adopted this learning experience into their practice because it is high yielding and a meaningful conduit to the world and to our students. You can follow conversations about the images that I and my students have used with #FridayPhoto and #Snapshot.
I love Friday Photo. I have spoken about the power of this project by presenting Decoding Photos in an Insta World (log into Belouga to view) with my students for DigCit Summit. As a result of the impact of that, I was invited to present at The California School Library Association’s Dig Cit Summit. Then, I had a great conversation about this project and the impact it has on student learning with Chey and Pav on a bonus episode of The Staffroom Podcast called Amplify and Inspire with Noa Daniel. These opportunities to share really got me thinking more concretely about the many outcomes of this process including the bevy of curriculum standards and expectations it helps to address. Here are a few things that doing weekly Friday Photo that empowers students to lead the decoding process on their own brings:
Media literacy as creators and critical consumers
Visual literacy
Digital citizenship skills
Communication skills
Inquiry/questioning skills
Research skills
Learning skills: organization, responsibility, autonomy
Social emotional learning skills: empathy, perspective taking, self expression,
Promotes civil discourse and learning from each other
Can be culturally responsive
Promotes student voice
Here is a short video of my class going through the process that was part of our presentation before leading Bruce Reicher's class and others :
My Grade 8’s (though I will do this with my Grade 6’s next year) do Friday Photo each week until February. It is a whole-class experience and part of our class culture to go through 4 stages : describe, analyse, interpret/infer, and evaluate for a photograph that I have prepared and displayed on the Smartboard. Whiteboards work, and I loved using Google's Jamboard throughout remote learning. Using Jamboard for Friday Photo was an even more democratic tool because students didn’t need to wait to be called upon to add their ideas. Everyone could all share and build on each other's ideas without actually speaking. It was an important piece of learning for me and something I will take back to face-to-face learning in the Fall. Every single student adds something to this experience every single week. The easy entry point of describing really helps invite learners into the leasson.
There are prompts on the Decoding Photographs handout that students keep in their Strategies notebooks or in the Strategies section of their Digital Portfolios to help them notice what is in a photograph, raise questions, make inferences and then, after learning more about the photograph, title it in a meaningful way that encompasses the meaning/message in the image. Friday Photo creates a gradual release to a formative assessment and then to Snapshot, where students take a photograph of their own, plan the lesson anticipating what their classmates will see in it, lead the decoding and then share their intention and meaning of the text. I try to assign them this before March/Spring (Mapril) Break so that they can be mindful and capture a moment if they go on a day trip or something further away. Even with most students stuck at home due to the pandemic and our resulting lockdown in Ontario, interesting personal images were shared and many thoughtful texts were deconstructed. Some students even shared images of themselves and unpacked their changes or even their challenges in deeply personal and vulnerable ways. The entire class was so supportive. Here is a gallery of some of the images the students used in their Snapshots
The first part of the Snapshot outline reads: Photographs can tell us so much. We have seen the power of photography throughout Friday Photo as a means to look back through history, capture science, a moment, a feeling/experience, and inform on current issues. Now, it is your turn to take and present a “rich” photographic text to analyze. Unpacking the meaning of a rich text requires several Friday Photo lessons. It helps to ensure that students see what makes something of enough substance from which to build an analysis. Setting students up to lead this is a wonderful and personalizing learning experience, too.
A few adjustments were needed for the Snapshot outline in view of remote learning. I had already made some of them for the previous school year as we went into remote learning for the last 4 months of school. I evolved the rubric including taking out the expectations on oral presentation skills. I learned that students can still lead and own the virtual room. They can say a lot without actually speaking out loud. We go from 100% engagement as students list and describe what they see to a few students ready to synthesize meaning through clever titles that encapsulate messages with double entendres, allusions, and alliterations. The Snapshot was a huge hit in remote learning, and my students could see the value of this year long gradual release and how impacted their daily lives. Here are some of their thoughts (unedited):
I can apply these skills into my everyday life into social media. It can be used on things like Instagram posts, the news and even articles. By using this skills, I can better understand what I see and maybe get the real story by incorporating these skills. It will also help me because I am better at seeing every single detail in whatever I see, and helps me answer my own questions before searching it up or asking someone. Rameen
The value was to know more about current events or important events form the past while also knowing more about how media and all those other factors play a role in making a photo what it is. Felix
The value of learning these media/information literacy and critical thinking skills over the school year is in the future you can apply these skills you've developed. We've learned to analyse images and finding a rich text over this entire school year so it would really help us greatly in the future since we've already developed great critical thinking skills at such a young age. Zoey
Now, whenever I look at a photo, I won't just think "oh this photo looks cool". Instead, I would ask questions in my head like why was this photo taken? or what's the story behind this photo? So the way I view photos will definitely change. Melissa
I think it's good to learn how to look deeply into photographs and how photographs are really important in our life. Zhengtong
Looking critically at a photograph has not only improved my opinions on the photo, but every photo I look at can be rich because of how I think about it. The 4 steps really are now engraved in my brain. Eva
Pictures can be very powerful and teach valuable lessons. Jake
Photographs are great learning catalysts and there are many places where they can be used across the curriculum at all grade levels. As a Building Outside the Blocks Project, it builds skill, autonomy, connection, and community in minimal class time, like all of my BOBs. The decoding photographs process of Friday Photo is inclusive, allowing students to share and hear multiple viewpoints and engage with others in respectful and empathetic ways through the platform we use. It helps my students stay informed by learning to question the validity of digital images and social media posts, develop strategies to analyse accuracy or foster perspective.
It allows them to be engaged with the medium, the possible messages behind it and problem solve and with each other through the process in physical and virtual communities within their class or across classrooms, in unlimited and borderless ways. It helps teachers and students be impactors by inspiring and empowering them through photographs as catalysts from solving real problems in local, global and digital communities. Photographs even inspired my latest children's book, Strum and The Wild Turkeys.
