This was a short week, but it felt like a long one. On Tuesday I taught both first and second period since Melissa was out for the day. It was a lot of fun to feel like I had complete control over my own classroom and work with students on their annotations. As expected, first period was a little rougher than second. I felt more in the groove during second period and had practiced what I needed to say to direct some of the conversation. I feel like I have developed good relationships with students at this point. They seem to respect me and participated well in our class discussions about the poem Harlem. One of the interesting observations I made during conversations with both classes is the theme that they took from poem. We read and listened to the poem twice and despite the imagery taking a negative tone, many students took a positive tone. After talking with Melissa, we wonder if they took a positive outlook with this poem because we didn’t provide much historical context before reading. Another reason could be because we had recently finished reading Mother to Son which has a more positive message about not giving up on your dreams. The lesson overall did not take up much time which makes me think about the structure of my future lesson plans. Should I take more time when teaching the lesson? Should I include more elements or have students do more group work?
For the remainder of the week we worked on CeESS paragraphs. Thursday was especially tiering as many students were have difficulties writing their paragraphs. I was worried that it was because I didn’t teach them the similes well enough, but we did cover all the similes listed and discussed what each one meant. Looking back at my lesson overall, I could have tried to outline the two themes based on the prompt for the CeESS paragraph. I had students discuss the theme as a group and the theme we came up as a class was that you need to keep pursuing your dreams otherwise they will go bad. I guess this is just one of the moments that you continue with your students’ misconceptions. Another option for some of the difficulty with this paragraph could be related to the similes in the poem. A lot of students seemed to get caught up in the expected meanings behind the similes. They didn’t understand what Hughes was saying about dreams deferred.
We have seen a lot of progress with some of our students writing. There are a few girls that have really improved their writing in the last few weeks and that has been amazing to watch. They are asking questions and double checking their grammar, for the most part. Melissa and I started to have conversations about how I can continue to work one-on-one with students and assist them online when I take over the class in spring. We might work with a tablet so I can still see questions on Go Guardian since students do take advantage of the messaging option. This will be something I might try to explore while I am still in Melissa’s classroom, but sadly our time for fall is ending.
Due to the low grade level scores in our classes, especially first period, Melissa and other teachers are working to create new lessons that will focus on filling the holes in students’ education. Melissa and a few other teachers are implementing one plan where they work on vocabulary and informational text for four weeks. After the four weeks they will reassess students with iReady. Another group of teachers are going to target the students that are far below grade level, replacing some assignments with new ones that target the areas where they need extra help. This will be done in a two-to-three-week span compared to a four. Teachers will then come together and look at how the students progressed to see if one method worked better than another. I think it would be great to tie this work into the themes and characters that are in Raisin in the Sun. This is also an important time though to prep students for the standardized test in spring. Since we are on a block schedule, this will be the only time these students will be able to prepare for the English Language Arts section of the test. Melissa has also come up with a new system for students to track their progress and be a part of their education. If this works the way we want it to, students’ will become more invested in their education.
Comments