Skipping the Syllabus for Back to School
I just finished my first week of back to school! Apologies that I've been a bit quiet this summer. We packed our summer full of activities with my own children, and I tried to lean in to reading for pleasure as much as possible (which has inspired me to teach The Odyssey this upcoming year! More on that in posts to come...).
While I'm currently working out the details of the original introductions and character unit that I had wanted to begin this year with – which has been continuously interrupted by all of the 9th grade/freshman setup type things that get taken care of in English class (does your school do this too?) – I wanted to share the couple of activities that I used this week in case they're helpful to you.
Taking Time to Build Relationships and Connection
First – If you follow Write On With Miss G, I'm pretty sure she came up with (or at least, it's the first place I saw this idea) an Investigate the Teacher activity.
Not only did I find myself quite sick and starting to lose my voice the week before school started, but also did I see my instructional content time disappearing to things like student photos, IT setup, and baseline testing (which is less useful to me than my own pre-assessment). With 30 minute classes after 2 hours of morning homeroom/advisory time, I knew I did not want to hand my students a syllabus and go over it. While I know that would have been okay, I felt like it would've been a waste of my time and theirs, because we would need to practice the rules, rhythms, and routines outlined in the syllabus anyways. Not to mention... my voice was disappearing on me.
Since I'm at a pretty enthusiastic school and I knew other teachers were likely doing Investigate the Teacher as well, I wanted to put my own spin on this idea of students making observations and drawing inferences. Since the intro unit I've been planning is centered around Jung's character archetypes, I shifted into "How to Read a Person".
I'm fortunate this year that this class of freshman seems curious, creative, and responsible - because they pretty much came in, sat down nicely, and I told them I was going to give them the freedom to judge me, and I asked them to walk around the room and note details about me and what they think it suggests about me as a teacher and/or person. And that's what they did!
Evidence gathering, CER, inference making, and descriptive writing. It also gave the students a chance to get up out of their seats. After asking them to share out observations and judgments about me, these are the questions I projected:
It was a lot of fun to see how they participated in full class discussion, AND then I also had a lot of fun reading their inferences, as well.
I could not, for the life of me, figure out why they thought my favorite color could be blue until I realized the blue lanterns I left hanging from a previous teacher were what they were referring to as "has lots of blue things."
The other sweet thing that came as a result, is I didn't realize how taking the time to answer students' questions about you helps start the getting to know you conversation. See below:
Getting to Know Your Students
The nice thing about having students get to know me a little bit first, was then I could turn it around and ask them to share about themselves with me.
If I'm honest, I used to give this in a Google Form, but because I'm trying to establish routines and expectations that convey (we do little Chromebook usage here), I took the questions from that form and put them on paper as an "About Me" survey. I then split the questions into two parts. The first part is quick and I didn't leave a ton of space for students to write. I feel like the downside of not doing the Google Form is students may not put as much information or elaborate, but that's why I tried to keep those questions more to the point "who are the members of your family? What are you responsible for outside of school?". I then took the bigger questions where students have an opportunity to talk about themselves as a student, or an experience, or a goal, or something they're passionate about, or how they're feeling about the state of the world, and offered a question bank for "Part 2 ~ Letter to the Teacher," essentially. I asked students to pick at least 2 questions and to answer them in a letter written to me. My hope is that I'll get a feel for their voice and learn more about them based on their question choices and how much they elaborate.
Pre-Assessing the Essential Skills
Finally, I haven't fully assigned it yet, but I always do a paragraph pre-assessment based on a passage from a text.
I started reading Hampton Heights a few weeks ago and I think it has the potential to be high interest while also quickly offering opportunity for us to evaluate the characters as archetypes (and stereotypes.... and we'll do characterization...). So while I may create a new pre-assessment using a passage from that text, for the moment I actually pulled a pre-assessment using a passage from the opening of The Graveyard Book.
There have been a couple of outlier situations this week where I've been able to give this pre-assessment to a few students as a meaningful use of class time, so it's been nice to have it on hand.
Planning Room Update
I'm working on the archetypes and characterization foundational unit, and I'm hoping it will give us a good common knowledge baseline and a lens through which students can compare/contrast and evaluate characters we read in texts. I noticed BJ Novak's short stories were high engagement this spring, but that students may not recognize the tropes and stereotypes as readily as us millenials do, so I think archetypes is going to be the way to go.
I'll also be teaching Film Studies as a seminar, which will begin in a couple of weeks, so updates coming through that lens soon (one idea I put in the basement of my mind is watching all of the Toy Story movies and discussing what they reflect/show about the time in which it was made).
Find PDFs and links to make copies of the activities I used this week when you're logged in below!