I’ve been compiling resources aimed at what I believe to be a big shift in how we “do Language Arts” at the middle and high school level. Several of the teachers I work with are in the midst of looking closely at their own curriculum and overall structure of their classes and we are finding that we need to make some serious decisions about what is we do, and how we go about doing it.
To that end, I went back into my bookmarks and pulled several that I had moved to a list called “For English Teachers” and published them here. This is part sharing, but also part expectation of sharing back with your own ideas and resources. What resources are out there that will help a group of professionals re-structure their curriculum and pedagogy to more accurately meet the needs of their students?
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Jack Jennings: Can Boys Succeed in Later Life If They Can’t Read As Well As Girls?
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Pittsburgh Schools Offer Choice for 12th Graders | Chalk Talk
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The Nuts and Bolts of Setting up Literature Circles | Edutopia
Aguilar does such a good job describing how long this process takes.
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The Future of Reading and Writing is Collaborative | Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning
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11 Sentence Essay Analyzing a Myth | Mrs. Seale’s 9th Grade English Class
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Moving to a new pedagogy is not easy for many district administrators, however, as the Web as a writing space is still primarily an unknown, scary place to put students. But as research is showing, students are flocking to online networks in droves, and they are doing a great deal of writing there already, some of it creative and thoughtful and inspiring, but much of it outside the traditional expectations of “good writing” that classrooms require
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That change is spelled out clearly by the National Council of Teachers of English, which last year published “new literacies” for readers and writers in the 21st century. Among those literacies are the ability to “build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally,” to “design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes,” and to “create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts.” Very little of that kind of work is possible to achieve without expanding the way we think about writing instruction in the context of online social tools.
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“Using online writing tools will allow students to write whenever and wherever they feel inspired, and to be able to speak to an audience that is larger and more important to them than the traditional classroom,” Childers says. “There is a reason why we should constantly be looking for ways to incorporate more innovative writing opportunities into our curriculum.”
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ASCD Express 5.23 – Rethinking Five Paragraphs
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I never missed an opportunity to remind my students that the structure was actually derived from Aristotelian principles of logic. Who better than Aristotle to endorse your lesson plan?
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If we’re always connected to our kids, when do they learn to form their own opinions?
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I finally came to the conclusion that the five-paragraph essay just no longer serves kids in the 21st century.
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And not only were my students complaining that they found the structure too constraining, but so were the very college professors I’d be turning them over to when they graduated.
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Of course, I still have to train my kids how to use the five-paragraph essays for standardized tests, but now more than ever, in this world of Facebook and Twitter, our students need to learn the crucial notion of audience.
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Freedom can be a little scary. Kids sometimes even panic when they are told they can decide how many paragraphs their essay needs. It can be shocking for them to find out that, yes, sometimes a paragraph has only three sentences.
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Chalkdust101 