Summer School – Planning
One of my goals going into summer school was to design a course in which skills were clearly assessed and tracked back.
Categories of Objectives/ Standards:
- Reading
- Writing
- Speaking
- Listening
- Media Literacy
- Research
So to this end, I picked objectives that went alongside each of these categories. Then I decided how to assess each of them. Then I worked on building skills for each of them. Often, the way I taught content was to have student interact with the text in skill building activities.
For example:
Goal: Speaking – Students will speak with dynamism using an image that enhances rather than distracts from the speaker’s presence.
Task: Present one image to the text that summarizes the message of The Crucible.
To do this, the student is required to interact with the text, but my feedback to them will primarily be on their presentation speaking goals.
Reflection:
Normally, I’d prefer to really go after the student’s discussion of content in my feedback. I shifted that discussion to the time when the students were choosing their image. Since we did more than one skill-based activity like this, I found student interpretation and analysis grew in response to the activities that we’d done.
It was as though they were learning.
