Sixth and Seventh Weeks (Oct 15-19, 22-26)

I'm not certain what happened to the post about the sixth week; it never seems to have made it up. I apologize to loyal readers and will attempt to reconstruct it.

Following the collection of my pre-assessment at the beginning of the week, I promptly began freaking out. The impression I had received when planning the lesson was that all the 10th graders should be familiar with the writing process to the point that they can be expected to complete it on their own. This was not at all the case, as I had discovered by our collaborative faculty meeting during a half-day on Wednesday. These meetings are truly invaluable, as it allowed me to interact with not only my mentor, but also the ESL instructor, the Sp.Ed. instructor, and a literacy-focused instructional facilitator. We were able to draw up a plan that focuses on the free time of my collaborators and highly differentiated instruction. The plan of writing a paper to prepare for a presentation went out the window when we realized that the students didn't know how to write an expository paper.

Thursday began damage control and a new plan that has me teaching the unit not until the end of the seventh week as planned, but until the end of the ninth. This has created a LOT of work, and it has been and will be challenging, though instructive, to keep up with it all. Several lesson plans were created last minute and on the spot. The senior class was turned back over to the mentor teacher a little bit earlier than I would have liked, but it seems necessary to both of us. Rather than have the papers guide the presentations, by alternating days that we work on each, they will inform each other. Hopefully. More on that later. We've been going through each step of the writing process, and each student is working at a pace that works for them and with individualized guidance. Without the ELL and SpEd instructors in the class now and again, I could never pull this off. Have I mentioned they're great? I've been getting as much library time as I can for on-spot research in between, and for presentation preparations.

Upside: Most students use the time very well, and are learning a lot about the writing process and their nations. The individualized instruction works for them. Downside: Some students who have checked out completely, and have not done work all year, do not have an entry point. No matter what I say, or my mentor says, they do not complete any work. Since each step is predicated on the last, and students are working at their own paces, the unit has passed them by. This is really only in one of the two class periods, and there is no real way that they can re-enter the learning process at this time. These students actively avoided doing any research, and so have nothing to write about. They are not invisible, I get on them everyday, but tomorrow, when we have the mobile laptop cart in the room to write rough drafts, I have to come up with something else for them to do. In the past couple days, as I have become fixed on the deadline, they have become more disruptive. I'm not entirely sure what to do about this. I've talked with their other teachers, and similar behavior has been seen in their classes as well. One student's home did not answer the phone on multiple attempts, another has no contact information listed. A couple others do complete work, but can be distracted by the more disruptive students.

I brought these concerns to my mentor, and he shares them . We'll talk more about it tomorrow, but he did encourage me to realize that this behavior does happen, that the failing grades may be a wake-up call for them, and that steps will be taken. Unfortunately, I won't be directly around to see them. At some point, he said, the student has to take on the responsibility to show effort, and my job now is to figure out what parts of this situation are a result of my own planning and actions. "Courage to change what you can, patience to live with what you can't," right?

So:
I think that the plan of modeling an investigation using China and then pushing to investigate other nations was badly chunked. As in, too big. Better to have investigated China as a class, through direct instruction and transparent research methods on my part, and investigated each group's nation as we went through each step. Show them how I researched China to teach them, have them research their own nation. Make a pre-write about China, have them make a pre-write for their own nation. Models of what to do next would have more available in student short-term memory, and by doing a day or two of instruction followed by a day or two of student investigation, I think the planning load would have been greatly lightened. I wouldn't have had to produce so much in so little time on China, and I wouldn't have had to create so much time for them to work on their own. Time that, for those who are less self-directed, has turned into deliberately unused time. I could also have adjusted better along the way, identifying scaffolding needs through increased opportunities for pre/formative assessments.

Lessons of pacing and planning that aids management can only really be gotten through practice, and that's something I have to remember. Part of the difficulty is that I already care so much about these kids, here, now, and I worry constantly about their success. My mentor teacher did chuckle at this, and reminded me that I haven't academically scarred them for life; it's only a few weeks long unit, that there's much more of the year to go, and that I'm welcome to come in and check up on them now and again. I look forward to doing so.