Calendar and Objectives

This past week, I’ve been working on the calendar. I didn’t plan to, but I also found myself doing the unit objectives as well because, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s a bit difficult for me to narrow my focus. I don’t necessarily think I’m doing too much in the unit (they’re AP seniors), but I am having some trouble tying it all in to a set of objectives. Actually sitting down and writing them helped me make some good decisions on what to do with the calendar. Thinking of a fun activity is great and all, but before I wrote some of the objectives, I kept thinking, “Alright, how can I back this up? How will this prepare them for the goals set up for the unit, week, or day?” So, of course, I sat down to do it once. I just stared at a blank calendar for an hour and got pissed off. I walked away from it and began working on the unit objectives before anything else. This definitely gives me something to ground my decisions in, but the task is still difficult. Even though we are using a real-life classroom that we’ve spent 60 hours in, and we have a general idea of what the students need, already know, can do on their own (homework), it’s hard to thoroughly plan for 2 months of work.

One thing that keeps coming up, and we’ve talked a bit about it since others have presented their calendars in class, is scaffolding and frontloading. I get that saying, “oh, students already know this, so it doesn’t need to be scaffolded,” can totally be a cop out, but what if it’s the truth? I mean, we all are using real-life classrooms that we’ve spent a lot of time in. I have a pretty good understanding of what these students know. Otherwise, what’s the point of even using a real classroom if we’re expected to frontload thesis statement writing… something they did last week? I don’t know if anyone else is finding this problematic, but that’s my .02 on it. If anyone has found a good solution to this, please share! I’m thinking that if the tasks or activities are truly something they are familiar with, maybe reminding them with a journal prompt or bellringer at the beginning of class will remedy this. And of course, the stuff they really aren’t familiar will take much more time and work and will be frontloaded as necessary…

I have made progress with the calendar in spite of all of this, and I’m glad because it seems like one of the most important and defining chunks of the unit. Everything else I create will be based on the calendar and objectives, so it feels good to get it done.

After having looked at the examples of model calendars on blackboard, I think I’ve created a calendar that is structured around (but not identical) to the model Sarah put up with essential questions, skills, content, and assessment. It’s a bit like Brenda’s (if you see this, thank you for sharing, it was an inspiration for my own!) because we’re both doing big final projects that revolve around writing in multiple genres throughout the unit. I haven’t seen her final prompt, but Brenda’s seems a bit more focused on her final being a project, whereas mine would be a portfolio of all of the work they’ve done, plus some new work before the turn-in. When I created the final prompt and rubric last week, I weighed student journals quite heavily because I envision having them write informally in various genres with prompts addressing the goals for the day. Later, we will workshop some of the bigger and more unit-specific genres. Lastly, they will be asked to create 4 new pieces of writing to include in their portfolio/projects. I will also be asking students to write formal, academic papers (analysis and synthesis). I would like to do this in the beginning of the unit, and I call it the heavy part because, even to me, formal writing always seems “heavier” than genre exploration. So, for the first half, the writing content and style is heavy, but for the second half, the overall amount of writing is heavy. So, that’s the bare bones description of my calendar. If anyone else is doing multigenre exploration, I’ll be interesting to see how all of our plans differ! If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear em!

See you all Wednesday!