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I really appreciated Amy's approach to her summer school students. It was so clear that she has a fantastic rapport with her students, and I believe that's such an essential part of student buy-in. Students who are failing their courses do fail for a variety of reasons, but so many of those reasons tie back to their relationships with teachers. If a student doesn't see teacher investment in them personally, they're unlikely to care much about your class or course content, especially in the middle of a pandemic that has left so many of our students grieving, overworking, or serving as childcare for others. Supporting students with opportunities like Summer Academy gives them an opportunity to recover and buy in if they struggled during the school year, and it's so much less punitive than simply allowing students to fail and thereby continue to struggle with course content.

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I appreciated both Emily Merritt and Jill West's teaching success stories with grammar. I liked how Emily gave the specific criteria for the days of the week so I may be able to utilize the method as well. I have been trying to think of a way to incorporate grammar into my lessons but usually I run out of time before I am anywhere close to being able to stop and focus on grammar. This would make it a scheduled weekday activity that the students know is already going to be practiced and they will be ready to utilize the learning. I also felt strongly about Jill's sentence symphony idea. That would be ideal to use with a class as a way to differentiate learning. I have found that a lot of my student's are auditory learners and using music could help them understand the concepts better. While I could utilize this in my two smaller classes, I don't see how I would utilize it in my large English IV class.

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I found Marianne's comments to be refreshing and a reminder that in the days that can still seem challenging, we are in "front" of students again.

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I have always hated grammar. I have thought that it is for those people who are elsewhere. Those people are ones who seemed to not be one to have fun with. That being said I really enjoyed the stories of teachers who had success with grammar and the fact that it was bite-sized chunks that would be easy to focus on and through. I am glad that students are able to take that and use it as a bell-ringer activity and get better with their grammar.

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I was super impressed with Emily, who discussed the daily grammar activity and the level of engagement of her students. I also loved Stacy, who talked about the student who was so excited about reading this semester. Both of those examples speak so highly of what those teachers are doing in the classroom. I also appreciate all the teachers who discussed the importance of building those relationships and fostering a positive nurturing classroom environment - Amy, James, and others. Really proud to be part of this team of ELA teachers.

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I like how Jill mentioned incorporating musical instruments in some of her lessons. I love doing cross-curricular work, and when I had English 3 for nearly a decade I would do a micro-unit on spirituals when we studied Frederick Douglass, and students loved it. We would learn the songs and sing together, and I would discuss the pentatonic scale, freedom narratives, etc. with them as we analyzed songs. I would teach them about call and response style singing, which originated in that era, and we would put it into practice together. It was honestly my favorite day in English 3 and the students were so engaged and had a blast every time I did it, plus they were invested enough that they dove into the homework assignment with relish and explored their natural curiosities and researched more about spirituals and their impact on modern music. I greatly miss being able to teach that, but I am inspired to figure out how to work it into my English 1 classes. Maybe through ballads with "The Hunger Games" series, even incorporating snippets of the podcast "Dolly Parton's America" to discuss the roots of ballads? I'll keep tossing around ideas.

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I'm super excited about covering Lois Lowry's novel "The Giver" with my freshmen classes. We began the novel last week and are really digging into it this week and exploring the question of whether a utopia can actually exist. I am also looking forward to finishing up research paper writing with my college class and moving into creative writing analysis and composition. I am always open to having a lesson recorded, but I'm afraid they will be kind of boring for these units. At the end of "The Giver" unit, students will be completing a project where they design their own utopia, so that could be a good lesson for someone to observe if they want.

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In my ENG 111 course we are beginning the research paper. That is always a challenge for students, and it is a challenge for me to get students excited about it. However, they always feel a sense of accomplishment when they learn how not to plagiarize and how to integrate their sources correctly. They also usually enjoy learning something new about a topic they're interested in. I am also excited about a lesson I'm actually teaching tomorrow that is more of a character education - 7 mindsets, Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and The Tipping Point, and Survival Skills are also covered. It just gets students thinking about their lives, choices, mental health, and responsibility for their own future and happiness.

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Cultural Perspective. We will be looking at different writings from different time periods to specifically look at how the reader engages those time periods and use background information to understand why an author focused on what they focused on and why?

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I am excited about starting my Romantics & Transcendentalists unit and incorporating more small group exercises as we progress through that time period (all classes/2nd, 3rd, and 4th).

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My next content text will most likely be either Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or the Canterbury Tales for English IV. English II is beginning the Oedipus Rex play right now and Greek Theatre.

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English II (1st and 3rd block): We're going to cover standards about editing (W4) in the coming days, which is always fun! Students really get a kick out of seeing how their peers interpret their writing, and doing teacher writing conferences helps them really fine-tune their work.

English III (2nd block): We're currently reading The Crucible, and we're hopefully going to have time for some creative projects around character development (RL3, RL5) next week!

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I enjoyed hearing about Mr. Vaught's use of bell ringers for his students at the Oaks. While I have no experience teaching in an alternative setting like the Oaks, I do have students who are more engaged with work, younger siblings, etc. than with school. I would love to have an arsenal of lesson bell ringers, hooks, etc. to help students stay engaged.

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This may not really answer the question, but I really identified with what Amy said about Summer Academy.  I kept nodding while she was talking...I feel like I had the same experience.  Josh Barton and I taught our Summer Academy at HD, and we had a great experience with students.  They were appreciative, eager to succeed, and glad to be a part of a positive experience.  It was like they came alive - because they finally got the attention they were craving and missing during the remote learning time.  Some students we had not even seen all year, and they ate up the attention.  Those same students have expressed to the other students upon their return just how much they felt they learned during summer school.  For me, I got to form relationships with students I had never had any response from during our Canvas-only interaction.  I think maybe a few other students were disappointed that they didn't take advantage of the Summer Academy opportunity.

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I really like what one teacher said (I believe it was Jill or Sarah) about focusing on one student per day to lock in on and make sure that what you are teaching, they are learning and retaining. I really like the occasional check-ins with that student throughout the class period.

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RL.9-10.6 Determine a point of view or cultural experience in a work of literature from outside the United States and compare it with your own point of view or experience. I am excited to be teaching this standard through the novel Siddhartha by Herman Hesse.

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RL.11-12.9 (Analyze how two or more texts from the same period treat similar themes or topics and compare the approaches the authors take.)

For my next literary unit, I am teaching both The Canterbury Tales and One Thousand and One Nights (to introduce a non-Western perspective). We are looking at how historical context (feudalism and Catholic Church de facto central authority vs. Islamic Golden Age) influence how these frame stories were written. 📹 This is more of a unit than a lesson, but I can definitely film some of the most engaging parts of it to share. Class/Period: English IV, 3rd Block

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We are currently studying Canterbury Tales and the King Arthur legend.