Student Intereset Survey + Goal Setting Lesson Plan

So, Monday (tomorrow) marks the first day of the 2007-2008 school year in most counties that I’ve heard of in Georgia.  Monday is also the official start of my first year as a teacher.  I’ve been told horror stories, but I’ve also been given lots of reassurances.  I’m hopeful that if I remain consistent and fair in my discipline plan, I will be able to gain student’s respect.  I’m already looking forward to the days when I have students that will spread the word and allow me to have a reputation that precedes their coming into my class.

I’ve been trying to do a lot of preparation, but it has been difficult.  So far, I can confidently say that I am as prepared as I can be for the first day of school.  I have my syllabi all printed out and I have my Student Information Sheet and Interest Survey ready to go.  My number one goal is to establish myself as a strict authority figure, immediately.  My number two goal is to get to know my students as well as I can, on an individual level, as early as possible.  I created this fairly open-ended interest survey in order to do that.

In addition to going over the syllabus/code of conduct/expectations and all that good stuff, on the first day.  I have my digital camera ready to take pictures of each and every student (although, I will be taking them in groups of 3-4).  I want to be able to have pictures to fill up the bulletin boards.  I figure that it will help me remember their names and make them feel more comfortable in my classroom.  I hope to create a really close-knit community in my classroom, so I’ve been brainstorming ways of doing that.  I think the best way that I have come up with is trying to make students feel, as much as possible, that this classroom is theirs, just as much as it is mine, and to ask for their opinions as much as possible.

On Day 2 I plan on using a Goal Setting Lesson that will enable students to better understand how I formulate goals for their class and help them set goals for themselves, both short and long term.  A lot of the students that I will be teaching are considered at-risk.  Meaning, I suppose, that they are at-risk of not graduating from high school and continuing in the cycle of generational poverty, which is a big problem in this city.  Many of them have no models for goal setting and many of their parents don’t talk about what what they will do five years from now.  So, I am going to try to make this a big part of my classroom and find ways for students to continue to monitor their progress and set new goals.

In Carol Ann Tomlinson’s How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed-Ability Classrooms, she offers an activity that is perfect for extending the ideas taught in the Goal Setting Lesson.  One of her ideas for differentiating is allowing students a day within a unit to set their own goals and come up with a plan, or set of activities, that they are going to engage in to meet their goals for the day.  She calls it Design-A-Day, and many members from my college cohort have had many good things to say about it. 

I’m trying not to bring textbooks in until the second or third week of the school year, so what I start students out with is a diagnostic test so that I know where they stand in terms of ability in all the criteria that they will be tested on.  On that same day, I plan on guiding them again through Georgia’s college preparation website GeorgiaCollege411 and the CollegeBoard website.  We’ll probably have discussions about learning interests, scholarships, tuition, college majors, and post-college opportunities, as well as a short Q&A session about what to expect in and from college life.

On Thursday and Friday I’m going to do a mini-unit based on names.  We will read a vignette from House on Mango Street called “My Name,” in which the main character, Esperanza, gives a very lyrical explanation and description of her name.  Students will discuss the vignette and names and general.  They will end the week by writing their own short vignettes about their name.

Now down to “real” planning . . . . 

I don’t know about all of you teachers out there, but I’m ALREADY exhausted . . .

So I didn’t look hard enough … Lesson Plans for British Literature

I couldn’t leave out the Brit Lit people.  Like I said in the previous post, these lesson plans are based on a set of standards called the Quality Core Curriculum (QCC), which the state of Georgia has already abandoned in the subject area of English Language Arts.  I, however, think that there are still some valuable resources in these pages.  So, if you are teaching British Literature and are looking for some ideas, I would AT LEAST browse here.

For those of you teaching American Literature . . . a gift (I hope)

For my current or future American Literature teachers out there, this link might help you out a little bit.  The state of Georgia has recently finished realigning it’s standards.  (In place of a set of standards that were called QCCs, we now have the GPS, which I find incredibly useful because of how unambiguous and explicit they are in, finally, explaining what it is teachers should be teaching their students in each grade and subject area.  I don’t like too many restrictions when it comes to planning, but it really gives enough guidance to be comforting and leaves enough room for freedom and creativity.  For these reasons, the GPS are quite welcome, as far as I’m concerned.)

Despite the fact that the old standards have been done away with and that these lessons plans have been “deactivated,” there are many, many good ideas within these pages and within these links (to other web sites as well as to lesson plan worksheets).  In the American Literature pages, there are thirteen units with detailed lesson plans, links, worksheets, and ideas for differentiation.  I highly recommend checking it out. 

That means lesson plans for people who teach these novels:

The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and House on Mango Street. 

There are also lesson plans for people who would like resources for:

Native American Literature unit, Colonial American Literature unit, Age of Reason / Rationalism unit, Romanticism unit, American Poetry unit, Realism unit and Modern American Literature unit.

I like a lot of the lesson plans because they try to create plans that require students to use inductive and deductive reasoning skills.  Hopefully you’ll be able to find at least something that you like enough to modify and use for yourself.

I’ve been trying to see if I can find similar pages for World or British Literature.  I’ve yet to find those. 

Of course, GeorgiaStandards.org also provides lesson ideas on that newer site.  Happy Planning!  I’m off to continue rediscovering all the subtle beauties and depths of The Scarlet Letter that eluded me all those years ago, when I first read it in sophomore English.

Beginning the Year

So, it’s the beginning of the year and I’m sure there are many teachers (especially, first year ones, like me) who are scrambling to find productive and engaging activities to start the year off with.  Of all the activities that I have found for beginning the school year, the best one that I have come across is called “The Wright Family Vacation.”  It is a listening activity with a fairly basic procedure.  Students must stand around in a circle, each with a penny in his or her hand, and listen as the teacher reads a passage.  Everytime the students hear the words “left” or “right” in the passage, they are to pass the penny either to the left or the right, accordingly.

The full procedure for this activity may be found, here, in RTF format.  A link to Redkudu’s more recent blog entries can be found to the right, in my blogroll.  The author of this blog has also requested that I add a small caveat explaining that this activity is not her intellectual property, nor is she aware of whom to cite as its creator.

English GACE Test

So, I cannot help but notice that the majority of my visitors come here frantically searching for something related to the GACE (Georgia Assessment for the Certification of Educators) test.  While my experience of the test was that it was not very difficult at all, I did go into it having just completed an English degree and completing an English Education degree.  While I am in no way qualified to talk about other sections of the GACE, I have created, for a friend, a mini-study guide of topics that it may behoove you to be familiar with if you are taking the English portions of this test.

I do want to note that I have no way of knowing what questions will appear in the upcoming GACE tests and what topics will be most prevalent.  The best guides available are still the ones that appear in the preparation materials section of the GACE website.  Familiarizing yourself with the GPS (Georgia Performance Standards) might be another good way for  you to become familiar with the types of skills and material expected to be taught in your content area.  These new standards for English Language Arts, for example, includes a new section dedicated to listening, speaking and viewing.  To go along with that set of standards, the GACE test that I took seemed to include many questions on media literacy viewing strategies, methods of persuasion and logical fallacies.  It is also my experience that you will not be asked questions that pertain to educational psychology or educational theory (except, perhaps, the extremely well-known terms and names, like Vygotsky and contructivism).

With that being said, I encourage you to check out my English GACE Review.  Good luck to all of the future teachers of Georgia who will be taking the GACE over the next few months. 

Rubrics, oh my!

Last week I made a presentation about rubrics. It basically consists of some tips to keep in mind when creating rubrics, as well as some links that might be useful for considering the criteria that you are looking for when grading various types of performance assessments. So, without further ado . . . my rubric one-pager:

Creating Rubrics

1. Determine the assessment criteria (score categories) that need to be demonstrated by student work. (This should, of course, be informed by your unit / lesson goals.)
2. Decide whether an analytical or holistic scoring rubric would best assess student work.
3. Define high and low-level achievement for the assessment criteria (score categories) you have chosen. Include as much detail and as many levels of achievement as is appropriate/necessary for your specific needs.

Additional Tips:
-Try to describe levels of achievement for each score category “using descriptions of the work rather than judgments about the work.” For example, avoid words and phrases like “good” or “fails to.” Be as positive as you can in describing work levels that do not achieve excellence.
-Try to remain consistent in how you format your rubrics throughout the year. The more comfortable students feel with your format, the more likely they will know how to navigate, interpret and consult the rubrics you have so painstakingly created to help them.
-Try keeping rubrics to one page – your descriptions of score categories and levels of achievement should be kept as short and simple as possible.
-Related to the previous tip, try to avoid using difficult language that will only confuse students about what your expectations are and what their goals should be.

http://www.ericdigests.org/2001-2/rubrics.html

Online Resources

There are many Internet resources available to teachers for using and creating rubrics. Remember, though, that no generic or pre-designed rubric will be able to assess the standards that you are setting for your students better than one that you create yourself. Here are some of the best resources online:

Rubistar – A website where you can view rubrics used by other teachers as well as create and save your own.

TeAch-nology – Print pre-designed rubrics that assess everything from notebook organization to classroom participation or generate your own customized rubric.

Rubric Builder – An educator-created site that allows teachers to build their own rubrics and browse through almost 50,000 other rubrics created by other teachers. Currently in its Beta stage, you may encounter some glitches in trying to work with this site.

Tips for Increasing Student Involvement & Responsibility with Rubrics
1. Instead of asking students if they have any questions about the rubric right after introducing it, tell them that part of their homework is to review the rubric and come in with questions the next day. You could also offer some sort of incentive for doing this.

2. Related to tip #1, make it a homework assignment for students to analyze the rubric and create, for themselves, a checklist of the requirements for the assignment. In class the next day, have students get into groups to make sure that everyone’s checklist looks accurate and matches all requirements of the rubric before allowing questions.

3. Right before students turn in their assignments, have them refer back to their rubrics and write reflections on how they think they fulfilled each of the assessment criteria, what was a strong spot, a weak spot, etc.

4. Involve students in determining what appropriate criteria for assessment and evidence of achieving standards might be. Also, involve students in determining how important these criteria are and how heavily each should be weighted.

Ross-Fisher, Roberta L. “Developing Effective Success Rubrics.” Kappa Delta Pi Record 41.3 (2005): 131-5. Academic Search Premier EBSCOhost. GALILEO. University of Georgia Libraries. 01 Apr. 2007 .

An activity that we didn’t get to do because of time restraints was something that I think would go really well in a high school classroom. My presentation group had the idea of getting the class, in small groups, involved in creating a rubric to assess a perfect date. The students would have to come up with essential categories to consider and then descriptors of high, medium and low achievement in each of the categories. I’m not sure exactly how I would structure that in a high school classroom, and I’m sure it would depend on the grade level that I was teaching, but I feel that an activity like that would be a fun way to get students interacting with rubrics and understanding the way they work and the way you, as a teacher, create them.

As we have all finished our student teaching and are pretty much coasting toward graduation, our cohort has divided up into small groups that are giving short GCTE-like presentations about a variety of issues important in the classroom. Look for these ideas in posts to come!

Hope everyone had a great Easter!