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…
In the Classroom
-
-
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.
-
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.
-
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…
-
Teaching Writing: Assign a Paragraph, Not an Essay
Shifting how we were teaching writing to prioritize our focus on the paragraph rather than the essay was a gradual one for us, largely because we felt guilty not always assigning full essays, but the more we saw the benefits and the more we saw how we could apply our work with the paragraph to our work with essay structures, the more willing we were to shift our focus.
-
Episode 29: How to Reset for a New Semester
We’ve all been there before. At least once. At some point during the fall semester, the wheels started coming off…
