A Year in Review

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 working on having students keep a daily work log, but I need to do a better job at following through on making sure everyone is keeping at it.

1-21-18: Implementing a Secondary Reading-Writing Workshop on Day 1.

1-27-18: Getting into a Secondary ELA Workshop Routine. My concern at the close of this blog post was one of timing. My scheduling has become more flexible, which means that I have “lost” some days of certain units. I am current rushing through Romeo and Juliet with my freshmen, but the work we did earlier was worth the adjustment. This is perhaps one of my largest lessons: Flexibility as a teacher means that we cannot do everything, but we must prioritize what is most helpful to our students.

1-28-18: Weekly Student-Authored E-mails Home on Progress. This has been one of my most-read blog posts. See this post for my current approach. Recently, I have asked them to set reading and writing goals, and then follow up on them in subsequent e-mails. This is a worthwhile endeavor but teaching students how to reflect is a progress—some jump right in, and others need more scaffolding and explanation of what reflection looks like. And, for the record, these e-mails are ungraded.

2-4-18: The Specter of Perceived Rigor that Looms Over Learning. I love this personification and metaphor. My students are doing fewer assignments, but the involvement and level of their work has increased. Giving students space and time to learn will result in deeper learning.

2-11-18: Developing Conferences in a Secondary ELA Workshop. Successfully conferring with all students is always a challenge, and I have not yet used audio or video recording as a means of evidence.

2-19-18: Co-Teaching in Secondary Readers-Writers Workshop. I co-teach daily in my Academic English classes, and two to three times a week in my Honors English class. I know that this arrangement allows me some affordances in reaching every student that others do not have.

2-25-18: Scoring, Assessing, and Providing Feedback in Secondary Writers Workshop. My assessment practices are changing at a very fast pace. This post has become antiquated and is updated and more thoroughly explored in this post, with my current approach here.

3-12-18: Student Choice in Classroom Organization. While I allowed students last year to rearrange the room, I did not do so this school year. I do have a chaise lounge, a futon, three camp chairs, and smaller seating area in the back of my room. I ask that students remain in their assigned seats (three rows with an aisle between) during the mini-lesson. However, during independent reading and workshop time, they can move around. I ask students to share the “fun” seating, and they have gotten pretty good at rotating who gets to sit where.

3-25-18: The State of My Readers-Writers Workshop. This gives a rather comprehensive view of my current practices, with the exception that my student e-mails home are no longer done every week, I do not leave typed conference notes, and my scoring rubrics are standards-based now.

4-15-18: Students E-mailing Home. This post establishes my current student e-mail reflection process (and thus is a follow-up to this previous blog post).

8-26-18: Preparing Standards and Learning Targets for Standards-Based Grading in HS ELA. Once my workshop structure was in place, I felt more confidence shifting to a stronger focus on standards-based learning; I lay out my procedure here. This process has worked well for me.

9-2-18: Constructing Standards-Based Rubrics in the Secondary ELA Classroom. This post nicely summarizes my assessment journey in using rubrics (specifically for writing assessments). The final adjustment can be read here.

10-16-18: Letting Go of Stories I Love So Students Can Find Stories They Love. I love teaching certain stories. However, supporting novice readers is not about inculcating them with the stories I love: I must give them options to find the stories they love.

11-13-18: Finding a Reading Workshop within my Writing Workshop. I have a decent writing workshop in place, I provide time and options for student self-selected reading, and I am comfortable in the direction I am headed for standards-based grading. However, I am still working to more fully implement reading workshop methods into my classes.

12-2-18: Qualifying Proficiency Levels with Look-Fors. This post encapsulates my current scoring rubric approach. I do not completely love the format, but it is working nicely. I think a middle column with the look-fors and a column on each side to check off whether a student has met or not met that expectation may help (since highlighting an “I can” statement may suggest a student has achieved that rather than my original intent that a highlight suggests a student must still work on that concept). This continues my other two posts on rubric creation.

12-9-18: Deadlines: Assigned, Extended, or Flexible?. The focus on a workshop and standards-based learning approach demands flexibility in deadlines. However, on an intensified block schedule, I also must ensure my students are not “falling behind” and having to work on too many assessments at one time. this final blog of 2018 explores my thoughts on deadlines.