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

This obligatory year-in-review blog serves a couple purposes. It serves as a table of contents from the past year, but it also provides some updates on where I currently am with my practice. My blog is meant to record my journey of transforming my teaching practices, so compiling and crafting this current post was helpful to me as I was able to contextualize my journey: it was a lot in one year! A note of clarification as you read on: I teach on an 80-minute, intensified block schedule, so I see my high school students 80 minutes every day for half a school year (and then we switch semesters). Enjoy, and please reach out ( @NAEmmanuele )! 1-7-18 : Writing a Workshop Curriculum . 1-14-18 : (Re)Writing Assessments for Secondary Writing Workshop . I have maintained the workshop and mini-lesson structure elaborated upon here. I no longer utilize GrammarFlip (budgetary constraints) and we have shifted from Wordly Wise (for Vocabulary) to Membean.com. I am still

In my shift to standards-based grading, I knew I needed to address deadlines for assignments. For the majority of my career, I have accepted work beyond its due date without penalty: If it is worth my time assigning, it is worth my students’ time to complete. If I assign a summative task to assess learning, being late does not assess my students’ demonstration of the learning target. I know there is the argument that we are teaching “responsibility” by keeping hard deadlines, but I need to teach and assess my students on their learning in English Language Arts. I can address professionalism through conversation (with students, parents, counselors, or case managers); my school does not have a way to separately assess professionalism and responsibility as some schools do. THIS YEAR: DEADLINES AND REVISIONS This year, now that my workshop procedure is in full swing, I thought I’d relax my deadlines a bit: I’d give a deadline, but I wanted students to know if they needed more tim

As I work to assess my students more appropriate in my workshop environment, I have continually shifted how my rubrics are formatted . After hearing Dr. Connie Moss from Duquesne University ( @DUSchoolofEd ) speak on Learning Targets again at a recent in-service, I began to see how her concept of “student Look-Fors” could better articulate our learning goals in class. “Look-Fors” are the aspects in a learning experience that students can look for in their own work to see if they are on-target to demonstrate their learning. In earlier iterations, I had written Learning Targets with accompanying Performances of Understanding (POU) for each lesson. For example, here is one of my Learning Target and Performance of Understanding from two years ago: I know I can discuss text structure when I categorize examples from the myth of Theseus into the aspects of the Hero’s Journey . The first portion (“ I know I can discuss text structure ”) is the learning target, while the proof (“