Making Time to Think about Teaching

In an earlier post today, I wrote about how I'm waking up in the night about teaching.  It seemed to be the first thing I should tackle for self-improvement in 2010.  (Yes, I did get my thank-you and birthday cards written, and I'll write about my health improvement plan tomorrow, so there's more than just this, but still.)

I've been making lots of excuses to myself about why I'm not teaching to the best of my ability.  Yes, I'm busy.  I have other exciting things to work on (wedding) along with sometimes not so exciting things (13-15 page literary analysis).  The truth is, though, that I'm not working very smartly when I'm at school.  I'm wasting lots of my planning time and study hall supervision work time because my mind is moving in too many directions of things I need to complete (do you see a pattern here?), and then I avoid.  In early December, I decided that what I needed to do was to schedule my time for all of these "open" time periods in my day, so I would make it a priority to do some of the things I wasn't doing.  This afternoon, I made a list of all the tasks in an average day/week, and then I placed them in a chart of when I was most likely to be successful accomplishing each of them.  Some of them are daily tasks, or ones that will be best done a couple times a week.

I'm not able to import my chart due to my lack of skill with Blogger (or perhaps Blogger's limitations--I'm not sure), but I feel pretty excited to try it out this week and see if it improves my productivity.  If I find a way to display it, I will.

I'm also excited this week about introducing my students to a Book Pass they lead instead of writing essays this month about their independent reading books.  I've been working with them on writing about their reading, in part to understand their own thinking better, and in part to share their reading with others.  This will make the sharing the most important part, and I look forward to it.  If you're not familiar with a Book Pass, you basically set out high-interest books in small groups of students.  They pass the books on a scheduled timeframe (about 30 seconds) and make a list of the ones in which they are interested so they have an idea for what they'd like to read next.  Asking the students to contribute their favorite books of the semester will ensure the inclusion of high-interest texts.

Finally, I feel prepared to re-visit The Diary of Anne Frank.  I'm working with my students on developing questions more deeply.  We worked on it the week before winter break but it didn't go very well at all, and I was ready to abandon my original idea for something that would go more smoothly.  We had a couple professional development days before we went on break, though, and we read an article about what employers are looking for in our students today.  One of them was the ability to ask questions so they could anticipate problems to solve.  It reinforced the idea that I need to stick with the concepts and skills that I know kids need to learn, even when it isn't easy.  If it was easy, they probably wouldn't need help with it.

I also found a new mantra for the school year, on thingsweforget.blogspot.com:

Sometimes I forget to build foundations for my kids to get to those castles I build in the air.  Sometimes at this time of year, I'm tempted to relax my expectations, and this reminds me to just build better foundations.