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

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 17 th 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 10 th and 11 th . The State of Pennsylvania has three end-of-cou...

It is definitely a good idea that I did not jump in right away with workshops, portfolios, and standards-based grading all at once. I need to make sure I get this workshop stuff down first! While my first two posts reflected on my workshop set-up (30 minutes of reading workshop, 20 minutes of instruction, and 30 minutes of writing workshop) and managing time (student goal-setting and my own flexibility with direct instruction), this post will wrestle with some challenges I faced this week, namely (1) teaching goal-setting, (2) needing to better refocus my mini-lessons, (3) keeping up with outside-of-class reading “homework,” and (4) separating reading and writing workshop. Current Class Structure We are currently looking at drama using Julius Caesar . My eighty-minute block sophomore English class currently runs as follows: 1.       First fifteen minutes of Reading Workshop : Students settle in to read their self-selected leisure reading novel. ...

Time management is nothing new to English teachers, whether it’s fitting reading, writing, speaking, listening, grammar, and vocabulary into our courses or finding time to provide written feedback to our students. The Conference on English Leadership ’s quarterly journal editor, Oona Abrams (@oonziela), recently wrote on “ Tasking Time and Taking Time .” Now that I have shifted to a workshop model with my sophomores (see my initial blog-post), I have new time management challenges that I would like to record and share here as I journey towards a workshop model classroom that embraces conferencing, portfolios, and standards-based learning and assessment. Students’ Self-Management of Time in Workshop Knowing that I could no longer not do workshop (as I felt it was the right pedagogical shift for my students), I jumped in two weeks ago by providing time for (1) leisure reading and assigned poems and (2) a list of specific writing tasks students needed to accomplish by a set deadl...

After much reading, research, and collaboration, I have decided to shift to a workshop model for reading and writing in my high school English classes. While I still am aiming to implement standards-based grading and portfolios (as well as improving conferencing), transforming the instructional model within my classroom feels like the best first step (rather than changing everything at once). In late November 2017, I attended my second National Council of Teachers of English conference and my second Conferenceon English Leadership . I went with the aims of discovering more about these practices (after having read about them the previous year since the 2016 NCTE and CEL conventions), and many other educators shared what they were doing in their classroom. I got some ideas on where to go, but the process is always a bit fuzzy. How do I get to where I want to be from where I am? My goal in this blog is to document my shifts. Previously, while I believe I have found engaging ...