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 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-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.”