So when we think about September coming to a close, each of us must reflect on what we did in our instruction in terms of:
1. Norming the class for discipline and clarity of behaviors expected from our students.
2. Personalization in terms of the Circling with Balls cards and any other such activities that we did to get to know the kids as people.
3. Instruction via stories.
In (1) above, John Piazza gets the A grade. He is still focusing primarily on expectations, using the language only secondarily. He has described that process in his classroom twice here in the last few weeks, and at first thought my impression was that he was going overboard with it. Now I don’t think so. Time will tell and he will keep reporting in and we can all follow how that story unfolds, as it is an important one for us in our own yearly planning and how we start the year next year.
In this article I wish to suggest that if we work carefully together as the months roll by, we might even be able to create a kind of yearly plan, in which we create (unbelievably) a kind of curriculum that is actually kind of real. That would be very interesting to see. Something we write for ourselves that we can actually use. What would it look like?
Well, John decided to take August/September and focus on norming and rules, as mentioned above. Some of us, like skip for sure, are Mainely keying in on (2) above, the personalization piece with the CWB cards. Others went right to stories (3), like me (I don’t have any level 1 classes is the reason).
