In The Middle, Mostly
I spent my ‘vacation’ mostly in middle school classrooms in Manchester and Mansfield, with one quick trip to Canterbury.
I’ve been doing a lot of classroom observations, as well as some co-teaching and work with students. The observations have been insightful, and working in several schools with different teachers, grade levels, and populations of students has given me myriad perspectives. I’ve also collected great ideas and shared them with all the different teachers I have worked with—a sort of cross pollination.
In Mansfield I have been working with an eighth grade teacher on personal essay. I got to observe a terrific unit using This I Believe, which, if you are unfamiliar, was begun in 1951 by Edward R. Murrow. The website houses thousands of essays and audio podcasts (about 500 words and three minutes long, respectively) from individuals as famous as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Helen Keller, and Eleanor Roosevelt to regular folks. There are over 43,000 essays written by students under 18, alone. And we and our students can submit our essays, too, which is a wonderful opportunity.
As a resource, the This I Believe website is cool enough, but the lesson I observed was even more impressive. At the beginning of the class, an essay that had been assigned the day before was projected onto the white board, and the teacher began by asking the students, “Who wants to teach class today?†Then, one by one, students went to the computer and highlighted passages, discussing them according to concepts they had studied in mini-lessons.
I adapted that idea when I co-taught classes a couple weeks later at Illing Middle School, only this time the teachers and I used either student drafts or mentor texts the teachers had written. One brave eighth grade girl named Mary was the first in her class to volunteer. Not only did she do a great job of working with me to lead her classmates in a discussion of her own draft, but her classmates were insightful, helpful, and kind in their observations and discussion of her vignette.
I’ve also enjoyed the exchange of literature that has grown out of this work. I have been reading many new titles (new to me, anyway) like Bronx Masquerade, Long Walk to Water, and Wonder, and based on my observations of and conversations with the teachers, I have been distributing texts I think are well suited to their interests, like Tom Newkirk’s new book Minds Made for Stories to a couple of teachers at Mansfield Middle School who are interested in writing across the disciplines, or Jeff Wilhelm’s now-classic You Gotta BE the Book to a sixth grade teacher at Bennet Academy who I observed doing some great stuff with creative dramatics, or the NWP’s Writing for a Change to a seventh grade teacher at Illing who is deeply invested in the social justice aspects of his work with special education and ELL students with tough personal histories.
I took a break from PD in middle schools to travel to Vancouver for the Modern Language Association Annual Convention, which normally would be a situation where I work mostly in the field of nineteenth-century American literature, but in this case I got to do some K-12 work, too. Or, I should say, K-16 work. The MLA’s outgoing president, Margaret Ferguson, began and will be continuing a collaboration between and among the MLA, the National Council of Teachers of English, and other professional organizations such as the NWP and the International Reading Association. In large part this effort has emerged from a desire to respond to the Common Core State Standards, and from what I understand, the MLA has gotten interested because the CCSS architects and the people at PARCC and Smarter Balanced, as well as within President Obama’s Department of Education, continue to speak for higher education without actually spending much time communicating or consulting with people within higher education. I may get an opportunity to serve on one or more committees within this collaboration, which is exciting, to say the least.
At this time, all the college educators are just beginning the spring semester, and the secondary educators are in the midst of midterms, and the elementary educators are likely conducting mid-year formative assessments. I welcome everyone to the second half of the year! And it’s just about that time you should consider applying to or recommending a colleague for the Summer Institute. Send me an email!
Comments
Post a Comment