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

With an organized list of conflated standards and associated learning targets —along with a system for reporting in the gradebook —I now turn to rubrics. However, in a gradeless classroom, I found “rubric” to feel inadequate as a title, since we’re not specifically placing students on a scale. I’ve opted for the title “Feedback Guide.” This will also work into students’ weekly reflections and five-week (mid-quarter and quarterly) reflections and grade pitches . FORMER RUBRICS Originally inspired by Jennifer Gonzalez’s (@cultofpedagogy ) single-point rubric , my former standards-based rubrics looked like the following: As I read a student’s work (the above rubric was for a constructed response analyzing mood), I could put an X in the “I can” or the “I cannot yet” column next to each learning target or add more focused feedback in the form of sentences. Then, in the grade column, I’d assign an A, B, C, or F. My original post on this model can be found here . FEEDBACK GUIDES N...

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 ...

Last week, I blogged about furthering developing my conferencing routine in workshop while combatting the “ spectre of perceived rigor .” This week I wanted to reflect a bit on the role of co-teaching in readers-writers workshop. I have recently shifted to “readers-writers” from “reading-writing” after seeing a post by Amy Rasmussen (@AmyRass), as I think the former now better focuses on my students (who are developing readers and writers) rather than their actions (reading and writing). This week’s post provides some background on my specific context with co-teaching and how it has assisted me in transitioning to a workshop model. MY LIFE AS A CO-TEACHER Before jumping into how my co-teachers and I work in workshop, I wanted to touch base on my experiences as a co-teacher, since I know we have all had varying levels of success in collaboration. I began my career as a Special Education teacher and was paired with a wonder Regular Education English co-teacher. Luckily, we ...