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Teaching This Year

Since I've been teaching now for eight years, I tend to measure time by the school year calendar. Each year has been different, but I also notice a trend in each year that becomes that year's theme. The theme for year one, for instance, was survival; for year two, correction; and year three, confidence. Having finished the year, I have found that this year's theme is failure. While this sounds negative, it doesn't need to be. Indeed, failure can encourage a person to reevaluate what went right and wrong, and to make changes where needed. Moreover, I have seen successes. Over the past years, for example, I have endeavored first to make my classroom a place of safety for students. This has meant improving in classroom management. For the first time in my career, I can say that I feel as though I have become noticeably effective in this area.

As I have increased as a classroom manager, however, I have also sought to engage my students academically, making our learning relevant. This has been more challenging, but I've grown here, as well. Originally, I wanted to introduce a blog on which students would respond to the nightly reading. However, security concerns (I couldn't assign user names and passwords to students) prevented that. Still, I was able to introduce increased accountability to students to make sure they were reading at home.

This has led to some disappointment. I found that, despite their independent reading, and our work in the classroom with close reading, many students' comprehension did not markedly improve. This shows me that I must increase the variety of strategies I use to engage students with the texts they read; that I must expose them to a wider variety of texts; that I must increase the social aspect of reading, encouraging them to interact with one another about the text; and that I must allow them a greater degree of choice in regard to what they read. As a result, my initial plan is to introduce them to different genres of novels, and allow them to choose a novel within those genres. For class-wide reading-- whether via a novel, short story, news article, or other kind of text-- I plan to use a wider variety of ways to allow students to interact with one another while still employing the comprehension strategies that they will practice from the beginning of the year. I believe this will make students more interested in their reading both in and out of class.

This is not to say there weren't academic successes. I've been able to adapt previous lessons in a way that has helped students see the relevance of language, and in the classroom, I've become more adept at communicating this relevance. As a result, students are more engaged. That engagement is simply not to the point that it could be. The ideal, for me, is to allow students to learn that each possesses unique knowledge that he or she can use to contribute to others. In short, my goal is to make language relevant, and to allow them to feel a sense of power as readers and writers.

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