The Sound of Success

I've read lots of thoughts and research on grouping strategies, but I've never actually assigned my students roles during cooperative learning tasks. Today, I went there.

My seniors are starting a new group project as a culminating assessment for Macbeth. We've done group projects before and I've let them choose groups, I've assigned groups, and I've randomly picked groups. But I've never done role assignments.

Today's assessment dealt with creating movie components a modern-day Macbeth. To start, students had to assign roles for their group members. There were six roles--each role had to be covered and each student had to do at least one. After that, it was up to the student. Here are the roles I decided were most important to our assignment and my class:

• Group Manager (in charge of all group activities and ensuring that all are on task)
• Recorder (responsible for written portions of the project)
• Reporter (responsible for presenting material to the class)
• Materials Manager (responsible for getting materials and also for cleaning up materials)
• Time Manager (responsible for deadlines and ensuring everyone stays on task)
• Encourager (responsible for group morale)

Once students studied the roles, they assigned the roles to their group members and then brainstorm additional responsibilities for each role. As I sat back to watch students get started, conversations were hushed and groups got started immediately. I was able to go from group to group without having to harass people about getting on task or holding their voices down. Students were working. Genuinely working.

At the end of the class period, students had to complete a daily reflection log. This was, perhaps, the weakest part of the assignment. The questions did not really inspire the amount of reflection that I was hoping for. This will need some tweaking for next time.

My seniors still pack up early, no matter what I say. They would much rather complain about a lack of time to complete the assignment then they would work. But they got off to a great start this afternoon. Assigning roles within the groups helped students with self-responsibility.

Monday, Monday

The daffodils are blooming outside my classroom window. Every now and then the sun peaks out from around the clouds. I can imagine how wondrous the air must feel. Spring is definitely here. But do I get to enjoy it? Of course not.

Spring also means the end of the third nine weeks. All of the grading that I've put off is catching up with me. (Of course I keep up with my grading--this is merely make-up work. What teacher doesn't keep up with her grading?!?!?) Students want their grades and they want them now! I simply want to coast until spring break. I got the fever.

The kids have it, too. They are a little more rambunctious than usual. A little louder. A lot slower. The vocabulary that took us one day to do is being stretched to two and three days. They're working, but it's like pulling teeth. They're on task, but they are stealthily dragging their feet. Like I wouldn't notice. I want to drag my feet, too.

Do they know this? Do they know that teachers get spring fever just as badly as they do? Do they know that we would love a free day?

Don't tell them. It would just be more ammunition.

Mentor Sentences

I've been mining my books for mentor sentences to use for writing lessons in English I. I just started a new book by Karen White, The Memory of Water, and it is rife with beautiful sentences. Here are just a few:

For thousands of years, the Atlantic Ocean has beat against the beach of my childhood, its watery fingers stealing more and more of the soft silted sand, grabbing at the estuaries and creeks of the South Carolina Lowcountry, leaving us with the detritus of old forests, battered dunes, and bleeding loss.

I feel this sentence is long and complex. There is beautiful imagery, alliteration, and personification. When discussing this line, I think I would focus on the personification. This will be a hard sentence to use as a model, but there are wondrous words.

I'd never tattled on her. Looking back, I suppose that even then I'd known that her self-destructive behavior would simply find a more dangerous outlet.

The language of these two sentences is not what I would want students to mimic. In this case, the author has used a short sentence followed by a long sentence, which students need to be able to do in order to create rhythmic writing. The simple followed by complex is an ideal pattern for young writers to learn.

So far, using mentor sentences to teach sentences structures and literary devices has been very successful. Students are writing wonderful, diverse sentences and are experimenting with commas and other punctuation styles. The conversations have been ideal. I can only hope that teaching grammar and sentence structure this way, instead of though DOL in which students copy down incorrect sentences, will transfer to their standardized tests and writing samples. I've got my fingers crossed.

Looking for a Few Good Lines

Grammar is one of the hardest things to teach high school students and there are differing opinions on what is effective. I don't know much, but I know that worksheets and rote memorization are not what works. If it did, then high school freshmen would come to us knowing their parts of speech and we wouldn't need to reteach a thing.

But they don't, so we do.

So I'm taking a note from Jeff Anderson's playbook. He was in South Carolina recently and spoke to the teachers of a neighboring district. I didn't get to hear him speak, but I have a copy of Mechanically Inclined and I have friends that had front row seats. So I am incorporating his strategies into my freshmen English class. Please remember that I'm looking for anything and everything to help prepare them for the End of Course exam.

We started incorporating a sentence of the day today. In order to teach sentence structure and punctuation, I'm using mentor texts. My first one was not all that great, but I have every intention of improving. Today, we discussed commas in a series. I used a mentor sentence on the SmartBoard and simply asked students what they noticed. I got some good answers. I got some rotten answers. But I did get the words "commas" and "list." After we talked about the mentor sentence, we wrote a sentence together as a class following the example that the mentor sentence set. Then students wrote their own sentences incorporating the same techniques. They shared their sentences with their neighbor to check for accuracy. I circulated the room to check sentences and all students were 100% right on.

We didn't discuss rules. We didn't label sentence parts or parts of speech. We just looked at a good sentence, albeit not all that creative, and examined what the writer did.

So now I'm on the hunt for good sentences from good writers. I have a little Pat Conroy, a little Sharon Draper...I just need, oh, about 175 more sentences. That's not too much to ask, right?

Using Interest Inventories to Group Students

Most teachers use some sort of learning style/interest inventory at the beginning of the school year. Having students complete the inventory is not the problem--using that information is. I have to admit that I used a learning styles inventory at the beginning of the year, marked the styles for each student next to their name in my gradebook, and promptly went on with my life.

That is not what was intended.

Once we determine students' learning styles, we have to use that information to better their learning in our classrooms. One of the best ways to utilize this information is when grouping students. As we strive for differentiation, learning styles can help group students in two ways--homogeneously and heterogeneously.

Students can be grouped homogeneously by learning styles. Students would be surrounded by other students who learned in a similar manner. This could lead to reflective learning--students could really examine where their strengths are and how they need to address those strengths in class. If assigned a project that allows for choice, the homogeneous group could choose the task that most addresses their style and be highly successful at it. The homogeneous group could work well to strengthen each other.

Students can also be grouped hetergeneously. Students can work with students of varied learning styles in order to address their own weaknesses. Multi-genre projects might be more accessible to students if addressed through a heterogeneous group.

Learning styles are not a new concept by any stretch of the word. I've issued inventories for years. However, teachers have to do something with those inventories. Having students complete them isn't enough. Teachers have to use learning styles to guide their instruction and better student achievement.

Differentiated Instruction

I'm taking a class on differentiated instruction. I am for real serious about this class...I'm not even doing my chapter reflections in groups because I really want to read each chapter myself. I'm so hoping to get something out of this class that I don't have yet.

I've been doing some baby DI this week. We are working on character analysis essays for R&J and students are working with partners while I go around and work with each student on where he/she is. This is baby stuff. It has taken me all year to get my ninth graders to the point where they can work on their own without me. My seniors aren't even there yet.

My goal for my class is to learn how to incorporate DI in every lesson. I'm getting better at addressing students where they are on an individual basis, but I can't run my class with no whole group instruction. That doesn't lend itself well to classroom management.

So how do teachers do it all? How do teachers work in multiple intelligences into every lesson and still meet standards? How do teachers do all this magical teaching and still prepare students for standardized tests? I'm hoping that by the end of April, I'll have all the answers.

Role Reversal: The Teacher as The Student

I've enrolled myself in another graduate class this spring. I feel like differentiation is my weakness and I'm looking for new ways to improve. So I entered the library yesterday as a student.

I witnessed some disappointing behavior. I learned a long time ago that teachers are the worst students. We do things that we would maim students for. But we go ahead like it's no big deal to talk or text or spend more than half the class on the phone. When I was a literacy coach, I witnessed this behavior from the lecturn, so to speak. It is horrifying. If you ever want to feel belittled as an adult, stand up in front of teachers and try to teach them anything. It is the worst feeling in the world. At least with kids, you can write their behavior off as them just being kids. What is the excuse for adults?

So I have modified my meeting behavior. I may not always be paying attention, but I sure do look like I am! And my cell phone stays in my purse. On vibrate. I don't talk to my neighbor, I make eye contact with the presented, and I interject long silences with comments. It's hard to be the "sage on the stage." We all need some good students to make the job a little easier.

Something to think about...

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog. ~Mark Twain