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

This year, I began seating students in pods so we could better implement turn-and-talk opportunities during our mini-lessons (rather than asking questions and having students raise hands and answer individually). A couple years ago, I tried having students choose the classroom arrangement . We have had a few exercises where we had students work in their “pods”: reading and responding to short articles, locating examples of literary elements in a text, and working through a sample standardized test. My classroom set-up with pods at the start of the 2019-2020 school year. However, while the turn-and-talk is generally working (as I find best how to facilitate and teach that procedure), the short group work activities have been met with less success. THE CHALLENGES I have found a handful of challenges with pod seating: 1.      Off-Topic Chatter During Mini-Lessons . There tends to be more chatter among groups during our 15 to 20 minutes of mini-less...

I have been focusing on implementing a readers-writers workshop in my secondary ELA classroom, utilizing (mostly) independent reading of self-selected novels. Last year, as I taught ninth grade, all of my classes read Romeo and Juliet together, and my Honors class and I also read Antigone together. We read each of these plays over the course of four to eight block periods. This year, my Special Education co-teacher and I “looped” with our students to tenth grade. We decided to review the elements of fiction utilizing Of Mice and Men rather than modeling with excerpts or short stories. Our workshop approach is normally divided as follows: ·        15 minutes of independent reading ·        20 minutes of lecture on a mini-lesson ·        45 minutes of workshop where we can confer with students THE PROBLEM Our students selected novels on the second day of school. We implemented ind...

Since implanting a readers-writers workshop, I realized I needed to better help students reflect on their work habits. I enjoyed following discussions online regarding work habits, especially in gradeless or standards-based classrooms where work habits were separate of content mastery reporting. Here is my process and plan to implement the teaching of work habits this year to my sophomore students. GENERATING A LIST I turned to Twitter to seek ideas: What work habits do you try to foster in your Ss? Share ideas with T @NAEmmanuele ! #ProfDev #TeacherEd #SELchat pic.twitter.com/q2MFwKHhpd — Teacher2Teacher (@teacher2teacher) June 10, 2019 With plenty of helpful leads and some ideas percolating, I then came across Mount Desert Island Regional School System’s Middle School Habits of Work Google site. This helped me focus on three habits: respect, responsibility, and perseverance. I edited the last to “work ethic,” and thought I was ready. However, in talking...

During the Spring 2019 semester, I began implementing “community circles” to build classroom culture. Inspired by the work of Monte Syrie (@MonteSyrie ) and his Smiles and Frowns and some readings I had some in sociocultural learning theory, I went for it. This blog will review—first—how my students responded, and then explain my process before concluding with adjustments for this coming year. STUDENT RESPONSE At the end of last semester, I provided a course survey to gauge student responses to our work. My co-teacher and I talk with our students often (as they enter the room, between classes, as we confer during workshop , their bi-weekly-or-so e-mail reflections , etc.), but this was a way for us to get some typed responses to look at. Below is our prompt and some responses The community circle gatherings were new to us this year. What were your thoughts? Should we continue them in the future? What could they be used for? i feel they are good to get to know each ot...

Back in September, I blogged about “ Constructing Standards-Based Rubrics in the Secondary ELA Classroom .” I traced my assessment journey across three stages: Analytic Rubric Holistic Rubric Standards-Based Scoring Rubric Back in January 2019, I shifted my rubric yet again. With a clearer focus of my standards , by that time (and after having taught for another full Fall semester), I knew I needed another shift. I liked scoring on an A, B, C, and F (as bands of grades rather than raw scores or percentages) but differentiating between each level was getting challenging and cumbersome. I turned more fully to Jennifer Gonzalez’s (@cultofpedagogy ) post “ Holistic, Analytic, and Single-Point Rubrics .” More in line with Gonzalez’s listing of success criteria (which also fits with learning targets), my current rubrics focus on what we are asking students to do. Then, I make a professional judgment call on whether it is an A, B, C, or F. THE RUBRIC : I CAN/CANNOT Y...

While I plan to reflect on my current rubrics in an upcoming blog, I wanted to spend some time further debriefing (continuing from my previous post ) on using standards-based learning and grading. In my last post, I articulated the following three goals for next year regarding standards-based learning and grading: ·          Post my core standards (which are amalgamations and simplifications of the Pennsylvania Core Standards for English Language Arts) prominently in the classroom so they are visible (which will help me reference them more often). ·          Include explicit reference to at least one standard in each our e-mail reflections home . ·          As I conference with each student during our readers-writers workshop , I want to begin linking each conversation explicitly to at least one standard and look-for on that assignment’s rubric. The fir...