Assigned: Learning Goals and Instructional Decisions

Unlike many other second-years, Deb and I have both taught our summer school subject before this session, Deb during last year's summer school and I during the past school year. In preparing an outline of the course, we were able to look over the state frameworks for 8th grade English and pick out the objectives that we knew our students had struggled with. While we couldn't be sure that our students in Holly Springs would have the same problems that mine did this past year and Deb's did last summer, it helped to have some means of narrowing down the maddeningly broad and vague frameworks. (The state frameworks for English are nearly identical from 6th-8th grade). Thus, we'll be spending a lot of time this summer on subject-verb agreement, on following the writing process all the way through, on inferring word meaning from context clues and word structure, on drawing inferences and making predictions based on readings, and on literacy in non-traditional texts (charts and diagrams, forms, reference sources, etc.). For the first week, we chose the objectives that we felt were most fundamental--mostly context clues and word structure, subject-verb agreement, and identifying main idea and details. The first and third are essential for their reading, while the second was one of the most glaring and universal writing issues for my students last year and looks to be equally necessary for these students, given the writing samples we have from the first few lessons.

With the time constraints of a 3-week term and the confusion of having four teachers, we'll need to put as much continuity as possible in our sequencing of the objectives; there's a tendency, I think, to hopscotch around without much sense when trying to fit so much material into so little time. So, for example, I've planned to hit author's purpose and the fact-opinion distinction before we get to persuasive techniques and persuasive writing, and compare-and-contrast writing before figurative language (so that we can teach metaphors, similes, and co. as forms of comparison).

Along with the state frameworks, we have another master to serve, in the form of this EBS assessment business, which is apparently a district or county requirement. In short, the requirement is that--if the majority of our class that is listed as EBS is to pass--we must assess and document their mastery of 80% of the objectives on a list that more or less corresponds to the MS frameworks. But here's the rub: our EBS students all have different objectives that they need to master. So we've also had to focus our objectives on the skills that most of our students need to master to be promoted. Of course, there are objectives that only a few students didn't master during the school year; those we'll cover in remediation outside of regular class periods.

The inductive strategy that I've used is concept attainment. As a Do Now for our first lesson on word structure, I gave every student a set of six index cards; each set was made up of words that had prefixes and others that did not ("possible" and "inaccurate," for example). The students had to come up with some criteria for dividing the words into two groups. Without telling the students to look for prefixes, most divided the words by whether or not they had a prefix. They were able to recognize prefixes without being specifically told to do so and developed a concept of prefixes that we were able to build off of with a more formal definition. Later, when creating a list of common prefixes and their meanings, I had the students find the meanings of the prefixes inductively, by giving them a list of familiar words that used a particular prefix. The students had to induce a meaning of the prefix from the meanings of those known words.