From a teaching standpoint, today was a very good day. I handed back the rubrics for my first period class, and we discussed their papers. This class had the overall highest average of all my classes on the first paper, which honestly surprised me a little. Their scores could have been much higher if they would have paid attention and not rushed this paper. After this first paper, I realize I didn't do a fantastic job of teaching in-text citations. I need to cover this again and really make sure I am clear, learn from my mistakes, and do better next time. In the rest of my English 12 classes, we continued to develop our thesis statements. I used a lesson to help develop their thesis statements that I saw demonstrated this summer at the Hoosier Writing Project. It is all based on questions, answers, and discussions of each individual question, and students get feedback from a wide variety of their peers. I chose the modify the lesson a little to fit my classroom better, but it worked out very well. It was another day where I showed them what I wanted them to do, and facilitated what they did. As my friend and colleague Sam and I discussed last week, many times learning best takes place when we as teachers just get out of the way.Show them the door, and let them have the courage to walk through it.
If anyone reads this and wants to know what this lesson was and see the guts of it, contact me and I will share the protocol with you.
No comments:
Post a Comment