Wednesday, June 18, 2014

First Day of Summer - Eight Hours!

Today is the first day of my summer break. I got up this morning at 7:00, got dressed, poured some coffee and made some breakfast, and went to work. I got to school just before 8:00am and wandered my way up to my classroom. I spent the first hour working on curriculum maps for my Drama I course.

Then from 9 - 10, we met as a department to review all the Common Core standards and make sure that we're covering all of them across the sequence of English classes our students take. We had some good conversations about the standards, how to teach them, how to assess them, and what will be expected of our students when they take the PARCC.

[For those who are interested, the Common Core standards can be found here and sample PARCC assessments can be found here.]

From 10 - 11, I had some varied conversations with teachers of other English classes about how they're going to assess their students' learning, and specifically brainstormed some ideas about how to engage students with reading and comprehending issues of race in Othello. I also had a meeting with the curriculum coordinator about the need to differentiate the assessments in Drama I, which is a performing arts class, from the assessments in Senior Seminar, which is a college prep reading/writing class.

From 11 - 12 I tweaked my 1st quarter benchmark assessment for Senior Seminar and had some pizza with my colleagues.

After 12 I spent an hour on cleaning my classroom and packing everything up for the summer. I had to label all my furniture, figure out which books I needed to take home and which ones I could leave in the building, and put away all the exemplar work I'm keeping for next year.

From 1 - 2 I worked on adjusting the curriculum maps for Senior Seminar because I was still not happy with the sequencing of my units.

From 2 - 3 I spent time brainstorming with the Drama II teacher about how we're going to assess the students in Drama I and Drama II. Then I spent some time helping her think about how she's going to assess students in her Topics in Literature class.

After 3, I did a bit more organizing and started working on my 2nd quarter benchmark assessment for Senior Seminar, signed my time sheet, took the last load of stuff down to my car, turned in my computer, said goodbye to the office staff, and headed out the door.

At this point, this list is what I need to finish in the next two months:

  1. Drama semester 2 curriculum map
  2. Senior Seminar benchmark assessments for 2nd, 3rd, and 4th quarters
  3. Drama benchmark assessments for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th quarters
  4. Rubrics for all of those assessments.
  5. Daily lesson plans for Drama and Senior Seminar quarter 1 (including finding all texts, creating all activities and developing all formative assessments)
  6. Performance tasks and rubrics for Drama and Senior Seminar quarter 1

No comments: