"...and Not to Yield": Explorations in English Education

This year, I began seating students in pods so we could better implement turn-and-talk opportunities during our mini-lessons (rather than asking questions and having students raise hands and answer individually). A couple years ago, I tried having students choose the classroom arrangement . We have had a few exercises where we had students work in their “pods”: reading and responding to short articles, locating examples of literary elements in a text, and working through a sample standardized test. My classroom set-up with pods at the start of the 2019-2020 school year. However, while the turn-and-talk is generally working (as I find best how to facilitate and teach that procedure), the short group work activities have been met with less success. THE CHALLENGES I have found a handful of challenges with pod seating: 1.      Off-Topic Chatter During Mini-Lessons . There tends to be more chatter among groups during our 15 to 20 minutes of mini-lessons. This is where

I have been focusing on implementing a readers-writers workshop in my secondary ELA classroom, utilizing (mostly) independent reading of self-selected novels. Last year, as I taught ninth grade, all of my classes read Romeo and Juliet together, and my Honors class and I also read Antigone together. We read each of these plays over the course of four to eight block periods. This year, my Special Education co-teacher and I “looped” with our students to tenth grade. We decided to review the elements of fiction utilizing Of Mice and Men rather than modeling with excerpts or short stories. Our workshop approach is normally divided as follows: ·        15 minutes of independent reading ·        20 minutes of lecture on a mini-lesson ·        45 minutes of workshop where we can confer with students THE PROBLEM Our students selected novels on the second day of school. We implemented independent reading on Day 3. We wanted students to read in class daily. However, we also wa