10 Questions To Help You Become A Better Teacher This School Year, part 1

This list came in the letter all staff received on Monday from our principal.

Here is the list.  I thought I'd model the power of keeping a blog by answering each of ten questions.  Since answering all ten questions in depth would take all day, I will be posting one answer each day.

Here's the first installment.

1.  Why are my powerful units this powerful?

Off the top of my head, my sticky-note book report come to mind.  I actually do this in my Lit & Lang 9R class as well as in College Comp 2.

Why is it powerful?  First, it gives students some freedom to select the book they want to read.  For Lit & Lang 9R (and Lit & Lang 9, which I taught two years ago as part of an overload), I tell my kids to select a book that is interesting, at their reading range, and can be finished in 10 class days.  Most kids are honest here.  They know trying to devouring It in that time frame isn't possible.  So they choose what interests them and what they are able to get done in two weeks.  Then I have them create a blog with various pages so they can do all the stuff that the boring old book reports from 20 years ago consisted of, only this way they are doing it in a digital appealing way.  Here are a couple of examples: The Lovely Bones, The Prisoner of Azkaban, and Ender's Game.  They aren't perfect, but I put more blame on me than the students.  I should do a better job scaffolding and modeling the entire assignment.  Which is what I'll try to do this year.

Things are a little different for this assignment in College Comp 2.  I still have students create a blog, but instead of a book report, I have them write a hyper-text research paper on one aspect from the book that they find intriguing.  Or at least that's what my objective was.  But in recent years I see I've moved more toward having them write a more generic type of traditional book report.  Time to move away from that.

For College Comp 2, I have students write down two subjects that they are very interested in.  Then I ask them to write down one topic that they absolutely do not enjoy reading about.  From that information, I choose them a text to read (and they can always opt out of my choice) from my extensive personal collection of non-fiction or from our media center.

Here are some examples - The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson, Enchantment by Guy Kawasaki, and Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher.

Here are a couple Survey Monkey surveys I sent out to all alumni of College Comp 2 to see what they had to say about what they considered to be the most impactful assignment.

 The bottom is a Survey Monkey survey I sent out at the end of spring term to my seniors who were just about to graduate.

In both cases, they voted the Sticky-Note Book report either at the top or close to it.  What I find interesting is how the alumni voted for the career project as being important, yet the seniors who are just about to graduate didn't think it's all that vital.