I love the idea of cumulative sentences; I love the different paragraph shapes we read about in chapter three, and I would like to teach some of these strategies in my classes. But do I have the time? I feel like my classes are so far behind where we should be. This year we adopted a new curriculum called Springboard, which is an excellent program. It’s just so much stuff to teach. We’re still in unit one!
I feel like I don’t have time to talk about student writing in depth or to assign sentence combining exercises. If I were teaching a writing course and not an English Language Arts course, I’d have all the time in the world to teach the cool stuff. I could focus on writing.
The more I learn this semester, the more frustrated I feel that I can’t use the tools in my expanding toolbox.
At your school, do classes meet every day for approximately an hour, or do you have a block schedule, where classes meet three times a week for approximately 90 minutes each session? With a block schedule format, teachers can plan multiple activities within a 90-minute time block. Mini-lessons involving writer's workshop (including sentence-combining exercises) can occur along with classroom study of literature. The more I think of it, even in the traditional one-hour-every-day format, the teacher can juggle a number of helpful writing activities for students -- but it requires creative planning. Of course, I realize that with all of the interruptions and impositions impacting language arts teachers in a public high school, it is often difficult to plan. I too use Springboard materials from the College Board. This time around, I have to use discretion; it's impossible to teach all of the items in every unit and stay on the recommended timeline. But, at least it's good to know that any student exposure to Springboard is an improvement over what students received as curriculum in the past!
ReplyDeleteAt your school, do classes meet every day for approximately an hour, or do you have a block schedule, where classes meet three times a week for approximately 90 minutes each session? With a block schedule format, teachers can plan multiple activities within a 90-minute time block. Mini-lessons involving writer's workshop (including sentence-combining exercises) can occur along with classroom study of literature. The more I think of it, even in the traditional one-hour-every-day format, the teacher can juggle a number of helpful writing activities for students -- but it requires creative planning. Of course, I realize that with all of the interruptions and impositions impacting language arts teachers in a public high school, it is often difficult to plan. I too use Springboard materials from the College Board. This time around, I have to use discretion; it's impossible to teach all of the items in every unit and stay on the recommended timeline. But, at least it's good to know that any student exposure to Springboard is an improvement over what students received as curriculum in the past!
ReplyDeleteWe meet every day for a little less than an hour, so we're always strapped for time. I work closely with my fellow ninth grade ELA teachers. We pace our classes so that we're teaching the same units at the same time. This is our first year teaching Springboard; the district is trying it for two years, and hopefully they will officially adopt it after that. During our Springboard training last summer, the facilitator warned us that our first year would be sort of rocky, because, yeah, there's a lot of material to cover everyday. A lot. What I really want to do is teach one section of composition -- a class devoted to writing. Of course, I'd have to develop my own curriculum and convince admin to add the class. :0
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