If you are like many teachers on Facebook and Twitter this summer, you are reading a lot of great PD books about collaboration and technology and new methods and the “best” strategies. Maybe you’ve spent your own money on materials for your classroom library (e.g., color-coded genre stickers, pillows, new books). Maybe you’ve reimagined your seating arrangements to be more flexible (and spent money on new chairs and more pillows). Maybe you’ve made anchor charts or posters with the strategies you intend to teach (and spent money on having bookmarks or post cards made to give to each student). And maybe you’ve already written your syllabus knowing this year you won’t spend the first day reading it. You feel accomplished and ready to start the new school year.
However, if you are like me, you decided at the beginning of the summer that you’d abstain from education PD and reimagine yourself to see if there is a person in there anymore who is someone other than a teacher. In previous years, I had a sort of post edutum depression, wondering just who am I if I don’t have a school to go to each day, if students are not waiting to read and write with me. So if this sounds like you, maybe you spent this summer playing with your kids, tinkering with your former or new-found hobbies, or rekindling the romance with your sweetie. And maybe you joined Teachers Write! with Kate Messner and Gae Polisner (among many other authors) and wrote a novel. (Yes, I did that!)
Whether you are the former or the latter, you are ready to take what you learned this summer about education and about yourself and make decisions about your practice. You have your strategies. You have a happier, healthier self. Now how do you bring that process (the experience of becoming better, smarter, healthier, more conscious), that self-formation experience to your students and their literacy lives? Perhaps you plan to take what you learned this summer and apply it to your favorite books, stories, and writing units. Perhaps in your school, the standards are set; the required readings are set; the sequence of writing projects are set — so, again, you will take what you’ve learned to enhance the prescribed content. Still, you did some amazing becoming over the summer, and will your students have that same experience in your classroom?
I have yet to meet my students for the upcoming school year, so I do not know what they will need, which books they will love, what stories they will write, what questions they ponder about our world. I never have in the fifteen years that I have been a teacher; nevertheless, for the first thirteen of my fifteen years, I planned glorious units with the novels, short stories, and poems we’d read, with the narrative, informative, argument essays we’d write — prompts and all. Still, I thought I was social justice-y teacher. We read multicultural books and stories; we wrote about our beliefs and being change agents in the world. However, I neglected the most fundamental aspect of democracy (not the political democracy, but Dewey’s definition of democracy): choice. So for the past two years of my practice, I have made significant changes to my “plans” by, in fact, planning to uncover rather than cover concepts with and through a student’s choice in what they read and write. I have made the classroom a place of self and community formation (still with a social justice-y lens). I have tried to harness the process of becoming, and choice is at the heart of these plans.
So below, I share some books and writing experiences that, I think, lend themselves to lots of choice while also being rather layered and complex in all the good PD we’ve learned: collaboration, technology, innovation, empathy/compassion, flexible grouping, project-based learning, multimodal. You have your PD ready to go. You are rejuvenated by the choices you made this summer to become as you wanted or needed, so move into your school year offering a similar experience of exploration and choice so that your students — like you– can become.
Reading: If you must teach a specific book or story or poem, make time every day for students to read what they want and however they wish (stick notes, journal, talking, no responses; chair, floor, pillow, slouched). The reading response posts below are rather formative, but encourage students to make it their own.
- Booklist One
- Book List Two (graphic and verse)
- Immigration Books
- Favorite titles for the summer so far: The Memory of Things by Gae Polisner, Angel on My Bike by Sally Hughes, Solo by Kwame Alexander, What Elephants Know by Eric Dinerstein, The Upside of Unrequited by Becky Albertalli, An Uninterrupted View of the Sky by Melanie Crowder, The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl by Barry Lyga, Page by Paige by Laura Gulledge, We Come Apart by Sarah Crossan, The Art of Holding On and Letting Go by Kristin Lenz, The Pants Project by Cat Clarke, Gem and Dixie by Sara Zarr, Goodbye Days by Jeff Zentner, Things We Know by Heart by Jessi Kirby
- Weekly Blog Post Instructions
- Book Comparison Essay
- Book Groups
Writing: If you must teach a specific form of writing in isolation, make time every day for students to write whatever they wish, however they wish. And don’t hesitate to admit (even at the cost of some confusion) that there is narrative, information, argument, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in almost every piece of writing. While I have the writing labeled rather restrictively, each post uncovers the complexity of the process and form.
- Flash Fiction
- Argument
- Narrative
- Poetry (add a number -1 to 30- after the url for daily inspiration)
- Spoken Word
- Free Writing
- Portfolio Assessment