Not Yielding in the Face of Uncertainty
I
titled my blog “And Not to Yield” from Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”:
…and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Suspecting that my delve
into a workshop model may lead to challenges (see my previous blog), I felt the reminder “not to yield” would be appropriate.
I was right.
My building is on an
intensified block schedule, where I see students daily for eighty minutes for
twenty weeks. Our semester ends on January 17th and then schedules
change and I receive new classes (one of the classes is my third section of
looped sophomore English students, who my co-teacher and I taught in ninth
grade English last year). This means that our end-of-course exam is approaching
on January 10th and 11th.
The State of
Pennsylvania has three end-of-course exams, and most districts give the
Literature exam in tenth grade. The exam has two modules (often given across
two days). Each module (one fiction and one nonfiction) has three readings,
twenty-three multiple-choice items and four constructed responses
(paragraph-length writings).
A good number of my
current students have IEPs with specific learning disabilities in reading and
writing. My co-teacher and I have worked well in meeting needs and working to improve
student abilities, and bolstering independent reading has really encouraged
many of our students to explore novels.
However, with the exam
approaching, I’m getting nervous again. Has their independent writing
assignments (writing a dystopian fiction, creating propaganda posters for their
fictional dystopian government, writing poetry, analyzing and comparing poems,
transforming a scene from their novel to a script form, and then transforming a
scene from Julius Caesar into a
narrative), have I prepared them enough for the test? We just gave part of our
unit test before break (we’ll take the second portion of the test after break).
Students have increased in their ability to focus and work for an extended
period of time, but as we near this graduation requirement (it’s a district
requirement, but the State has continually delayed the year that the State
itself mandates passing the test as a graduation requirement).
As I move toward
portfolios and standards-based grading, I know this work is best for my
students, but a standardized test is still a measure to be reckoned with. I
also will have been utilizing the workshop model for five of my twenty weeks
with students before they take the exam. I hope this transition has not thrown
off our preparedness. We took one short test on poetry that is formatted as the
exam, and have our two-part unit test as well. We do review test-taking
strategies and model appropriate written responses (and worked with students as
they constructed them during our workshop as we studied poetry).
With everything to
consider, here are some “next steps” for me for the New Year:
1. Moving forward into next semester, I may
consider adding one short independent objective test (short cold reading, a
handful of questions formatted similarly to the end-of-course exam, and a
constructed response) every week or so. This will allow us to practice (so the
final exam is not new or foreign). This will provide us some “objective” data
that could help us with daily goals as we work on reading and writing.
2. I had been utilizing Learning Targets (modeled
after Connie Moss’s work) as daily goals. In implementing workshop, I fell away from this.
I would like to reinstate these as unit goals that students will be able to
check in with as they work on their writing. I will blog about this in the
future.
3. In the next semester, I would like to establish
student daily reading and writing workshop goals (and my quick notes from
mini-conferences throughout class) on Google Docs so we have a continuous
running record. Currently, this is done on weekly sheets. It works well, but I
can better have my students align work to learning targets and this will get me
a step closer to developing full portfolios.
Thank you again for
reading my thoughts and process. Although there may be doubts, I have to stick
to my plan, edit as I go along, and be “strong in will to strive, to seek, to
find, and not to yield.”
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