Instadigest: October 16 - October 27
In which I strike a balance between creative, constructivist learning and individual accountability
You’ve been on the edge of your seat wondering what has been happening in my 8th grade since our terrible turn two weeks ago. Right? :)
Well, we’ve taken your suggestions and sought balance, and, in the last two weeks, we’ve finished our reading-study of It’s Trevor Noah: Born a Crime. These are the two big changes I made:
We weren’t annotating the whole book — just selected chapters that I plan to use as mentor texts for their personal essay writing. But, I graded all annotations. I spent time sharing awesome annotations and showing them oodles of models, and I saw tremendous growth in the depth of their annotations.
Every class period had individual (graded) work AND more creative, constructivist group work or discussions. I hate (hate!) that individual accountability still equals grades with this particular group of students. It isn’t always that way, but it is definitely that way this year. And maybe that’s just the way it’s going to stay. We’ll see.
Things are better. Their study of the end of the book was definitely more engaged than their study of the beginning, and I do feel like they have improved in their annotation and close reading skills. Now we’ll turn our attention to using the book as a mentor text for personal essay writing, which always naturally lends itself more to individual accountability. Thanks for being along for the ride and for all of your commiseration. :)
Here’s what we did for the last two weeks (a continued spooky story characterization unit and 7th and articulating main ideas in 8th while reading Born a Crime):