Episode 31: Novels We Love and Hate to Teach
This dilemma will be a familiar one for any teacher who has been teaching the same prep for a few…
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How to Create a Structured Reading Assignment: Guided Reading Questions
Initially, we created structured reading assignments to help our AP Literature students come to class better prepared for discussion (“Read the book and come prepared to discuss” was not our finest planning, but we were new to AP!). As we moved toward a flipped classroom model, we used guided reading questions to guide all our students (AP, PreAP/honors, and standard-level) through their texts.
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Short Stories for High School: Focus on Plot Structure
Rather than selecting short stories for high school students that confirm their understanding of plot structure, suspense, and foreshadowing, we found it most effective to challenge students’ assumptions with short stories in which an author’s use of an unusual plot structure directly contributes to our understanding of the work’s theme, as it leads to meaningful discussions and revelations.
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Why Build a Cultural Toolkit with Your Students?
We came to believe we had an obligation to provide our students with what we call a “cultural toolkit.” What authors (for better or worse) once presumed to be a common body of knowledge is increasingly less common: Greek and Roman mythology, the works of Shakespeare, the Bible, and even fairy tales written by the brothers Grimm, not Disney.
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Your Role in a Student’s IEP: Making Meaningful Remarks for Student Performance
We’re sharing the guidelines we’ve developed for our remarks for student performance, both as a result of completing many forms ourselves and from seeing the feedback, useful and not so useful, provided at years of meetings.
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Episode 30: School Grading Systems: Trying to Make Sense of Grades
Traditional grading, standards-based grading, grade floors, it’s all enough to make any teacher’s head spin. What is a student’s grade…
