Technology Reflections

I had one of those weeks this past week, where I felt that I was not doing a good job of teaching my students. Actually, it had been building for a while and made a turnaround this past week.

In my Reading classes we are in the middle of a novel, Tangerine by Edward Bloor. Great book! This is the third or fourth year that I have taught it and I actually think that I’m doing the best job of it this year. I am finally to the point where I don’t feel like I need to feed every nuance of the book to the kids and it’s OK if we skip discussions on certain parts. Some of the less important parts I am just summarizing for the kids and that allows us time to discuss the more important parts in more detail. I think that because we are in the middle of the book, things were slowing down and I was feeling like we were in a rut. At my school, the Language Arts and Reading Departments switch off reading novels – each reading a novel for half a quarter. That gives each department about 4½ weeks to read a novel. That should be enough time, but with interrupted classes and the varying lengths of books, it just doesn’t always work out perfectly. Tangerine is a lengthy book (about 250 pages) and it has a lot of things going on in it so it typically takes me longer than my allotted 4½ weeks. It’s OK though – I coordinate it with my corresponding LA teacher (luckily there is only one 7th grade LA teacher and I’m the only 7th grade Reading teacher). Last year it took me close to 8 weeks to get through the book. This year I think I’ve got it down to 6 We have a long weekend for kids next weekend (we have an early release day and a teacher work day back to back at the end of each quarter in our district) so I am assigning a bunch of reading for them to do over those days. Then I think I can finish up the book in the next week and a half.

Back to why I feel that my Reading classes are coming out of a rut. I felt as though the kids were not paying attention during class discussions and that it was always the same kids who were responding to the questions. Last year I was trained in Socratic Seminars. This is a great way to discuss any topic – the students really have to think about what they are saying, they have to support their comments with details from the text and – the best part, IMO – they are challenged by their peers. I did them mostly with my 8th grade class last year, but I wanted to have my 7th graders participate this year. I gave them a very short introduction and then let them discuss a question I posed. Of my three reading classes my 1st period class did the best – they were awesome! 3rd period was pretty good and 5th needs some help – they were too giggly to get a good discussion going. Of course it was the first time and I gave them a very short introduction. I will teach it to them again and they will do better. Overall, though – it went very well.

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