Panel Discussion - Working outward from student skill sets, planning, and pressures of meeting common core

One of our guest speakers noted the importance of finding what students can do first and working from there. This is one key part of my 432 lesson that I would focus on more if I could go back and change. There was a clear gap in understanding between what I felt students were capable of doing and what their skills actually were in terms of their abilities to analyze texts (in this case, dialogue from The Crucible). This taught me the importance of paying close attention to what skills students DO have, and where they might improve. In turn, this should inform, in part, how assessments are designed so that students have opportunities to apply their skills, yet are also faced with challenges appropriate to their zones of proximal development. (sorry Vygotsky)

I appreciated one of Ryan Dolan's insights on planning. He shared ways in which he has gone from using backwards planning to another form called boomerang planning (I think he invented the name). As deadly as this sounds, I liked it because it seems to give more malleability to the end product in that the minutia of the unit, such as individual lessons and methods, may shape the overlying concepts and essential questions differently than they may have originally been perceived when the planning process began. In short, the end product is not just informing how lessons, methods, rationales are constructed, but these components may also influence and change the end product as well.

One of the scarier sides of teaching, for me, remains how well I will be able to help students meet whatever standards my school's English department seeks to reach through its curriculum. Cynthia's insights helped me realize that I will not be the only one fighting this battle, but that every other teacher I am working with will be concerned with this. Meeting standards is one area in which I will HAVE to collaborate with other teachers, so as to make the task more manageable. One single teacher should not have to feel like he or she is held to meeting ALL of the standards on their own. The Common Core has sets of standards that apply over two years (9-10 and 11-12), which gives teachers more time to help students meet them and enables teachers to work amongst each other to share the work load this comes with.