Post #2

Well, I'm well into my clinical experience and I'm actually starting to teach the classes. Mr. Roush has been helping me a lot and we usually sit down and work out our lesson plans together. I'm going to discuss how we are incorporating 'Cooperative Learning' as a teaching strategy into our lesson plans for the next few weeks. We are working on reading "The Importance of Being Earnest" by Oscar Wilde in class and also incorporating multi-genre writing into it just to change pace a bit. We just finished a unit on Julius Caesar so the kids seem to be really excited about something different and fun. Since we only have one classroom set of the books and we have about 5 different mods doing this same unit, we have to read the play in class. I have been devoting the first 20-25 minutes of classroom time to that, then I use the last half of class to work on creative writing. I am using cooperative learning groups for most of these creative writing assignments. I am trying to be creative about how I break up the groups. The first time we did it, I noticed that some students seemed uncomfortable finding a partner or joining others in a group and I don't want that to ever happen. So now I'm using random ways to divide them in groups. I have had them number off, I have grouped them by their favorite color. That seems to be a fun and neat way to get them talking to each other. I like Marzano's pet suggestion. I may have to use that for my next creative writing project- letters to the editor from the point of view of Jack or Algernon :)

thanks for stopping by...