Surrounded by Professionals

I really enjoyed the NCTE conference last weekend for a number of reasons, but one of the main ones was the fact that I was surrounded with enthusiastic thoughtful English teachers from all over the US. It is good to get out of the BCLA bubble every once in a while and see what issues and questions I share with others, and what teaching ideas I had not even considered. It was refreshing and invigorating to re-think readers workshop and to hear some speakers share how they used popular fiction to teach the skills students would need to use to understand The Oddessy. I had really forgotten the power of sharing best practices. Since this was so exciting, I was really wondering how we could do this more in our own department. After the conference I decided I wanted to find more time to talk to other English teachers about what they were doing in their classes. I'm going to try and take more time to be really present in our meetings, and to start some informal conversations about what is working in everyone's classes rather than constantly focusing on the next little thing I have to do to make it through the day. In that spirit, please share any great ideas or things you have done in your class this year that you see working (or are at least excited about!)

Formative Assessments and Supportive Classroom Climates

This article had some interesting food for thought on assessment

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/LeaderTalk/2009/11/formative_assessments_and_supp.html

High Expectations - on accident

I am just finishing up teaching The Color Purple in my class, and I have seen a very interesting phenomena in my classroom. Because of a time-crunch I had students reading the book WAY more on their own than I had planned for. At the same time I was trying out a reading log system for students to use to select quotes and respond to the book. What I found during this process was that students were thinking about the book WAY more critically than I had ever had students do independently before. I had students selecting quotes from Nettie and making the connection back to Celie's experiance without any prompting from me - this, frankly, amazed me. Now, as I look back, I realize that I assumed, at some level, that students needed me to scaffold for them to get to some of these deep ideas. And, this experiance has shown me, that some students do. However, the students who were struggling with this much independent reading and thinking were the ones who were, honestly, struggling more with the reading itself. As I think about the implications of this, I that if I had spent more time on general reading strategies, and then launched into this way of reading the novel, complete with more student-student discussions, I would have had some very fertile ground for students to develop interesting and insightful ideas. I think that accidentally making them do more on their own, I had higher expectations for them and they responded accordingly. This is the first time, in all the times that I have used the term "high expectations" that I am starting to feel like I can see it and see how it works. Maybe its lame that it took me this long to get to this realization, but it is definitely influencing how I think about my teaching.

High School Literacy - it works!

An Alabama High School Makes Literacy a Schoolwide Job
Literacy Woes Put in Focus

Hey, we're not alone in our AI2-ness!

I thought this article laid out what I think AI2 is trying to do nicely - without the confusing acronyms.
Editorial: Improving Learning One Kid at a Time

Text Sets

This is an interesting idea - I could see how you could adapt it for more sophisticated research, but really give students the experience of finding information using their critical thinking skills.
http://trevorcairney.blogspot.com/2009/09/reading-to-learn-using-text-sets.html

Writing Ideas

Here is a list of interesting writing ideas from the National Writing Project:
30 Ideas for Teaching Writing