Teachers of Significance

Vision of Blended Learning ELA -- White Paper This vision concerns how implement Blended Learning in the High School setting, in an ELA department in particular.   What is Blended Learning?  In a secondary school ELA department, we see the opportunity to focus our work on three modes of interaction, each with several variations ( image link/credit ).  The result, we feel, will be a constructivist learning space, in which teachers and students address literary texts, literacy skills, and real-world problems in a problem-based learning format. The primary educational mode is still face-to-face interaction, even in a blended classroom.  Nothing seems to be quite able to substitute for the caring, insightful, focused presence of a teacher or coach, on hand and engaged with the learner in the content or skill being learned.  In ELA, a discussion of social class in The Great Gatsby benefits greatly from seeing the reactions on classmates' or the teacher's face when comments are

DURING READING STRATEGIES In his book, Subjects Matter, Harvey “Smokey” Daniels identifies a couple of dozen reading strategies to boost metacognition. Here is a short list of some of the during-reading strategies he mentions, and each has a strong research base. Think Aloud Reading Aloud (Pairs) Dramatic Role Play Post-it Response Notes Annotating Text Coding Text Sketching my way through the text Where do you stand? EXAMPLE POST-IT NOTES This week, I chose to use the post-it note activity with the novel, The Things They Carried. Students identified key nouns/objects from the chapter.  In LARGE letters. Students wrote associated feelings with each, noting the importance for the text: around the key objects, they wrote associated connotations. What associations can be made with each? What are the connotations concerned? Students then posted these on the board, and a group of students sorted them and explained what each group has in common (list-group-label) a