An Epiphany

Our group has been attempting to establish greater uniformity within our Senior classes.

Mr. Corwin has created Think Aloud materials on Joyce's "The Sisters", including an Anticipation Guide and comprehension exercises on transparency. We can all use these.

Mr. Hudson will develop CRISS exercises that will hopefully improve comprehension of the Romantic Poets.

Ms. Alcantara will write a lesson plan involving seat-based student movement to better comprehension.

We also noted that we are truly communicating with our comments posted on our blog.

An Epiphany: We have come to the realization that we don't need to teach exactly the same texts in our Senior classes (although most of them are). As long as we are using similar techniques to aid our pupils' understanding, we will be serving them well.However, we also know that to be equitable, we must carefully select example texts for our Final Test that reflect the skills we've taught. In that way we can use the exact same Final. We assume that it is actually more effective to use example texts that our students have not seen before.

New Meeting

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At our latest meeting, we discussed our efforts to promote our Senior Exit Projects which require our students to produce a multi-media report on a career of their choice. Once again, we have been working on aligning our separate efforts into uniform expectations for all of our classes.

We discussed some of the excellent,positive proposals created by our students.At the same time, we deplored the lack of response from a few students. A major portion of this project is a 1500-word MLA research paper on an issue related to their career. Successful completion of this project is prerequisite for graduation, as well as a preparation for further study. Our group also examined the propriety of such a mandatory requirement for all students.