Post #8

Wow...our days are coming to an end in this class! However, Marzano will always live in my mind :) I have discussed so many ways that we have used Marzano in my 10th grade class at Huntington High School...but Im going to talk about our use of "Similarities and Differences" as a teaching strategy. Fortunately, at this point in the year, my students have done alot of reading. We just finished up a discussion on Dystopia and Utopia. To do this, we compared a couple of pieces of literature that the students had read in the class previously. We used Milton's Paradise Lost, Harrison Bergeron, and the story of Adam and Eve from the Bible to compare different descriptions of what their authors believed to be Utopia's. By drawing on the similarities and differences of the stories, students could use their discoveries to create their own ideas of Utopias. It was a great creative writing excitement and the students really had fun with it!

Post #7

This week Im going to talk about a very important strategy that I think is often overlooked by teachers. In an English class, the theme/characters/setting/plot/etc. are all very important. However, I think its also important that we teach the students how to document these important characteristics of what they read. Summarizing and notetaking are key in the two classes Im working with because we dont have the luxury of sending home the textbooks or reading materials. We do not have enough copies so that all the students can have one for their own personal use. The only way many of the students can study for quizzes or complete homework is by using their notes...and so, they need to learn how to take good ones :) While reading The Importance of Being Earnest, I included double entry journals as a way for students to keep notes as we read. To make sure their double entry journals were adequate for what they needed, we did the first act as a class. I made sure that they wrote the important ideas, facts, quotes and an explanation in their double entry journal and we discussed them as a class. I found it very important to make sure they started correctly; otherwise, it would have been a huge waste of their time and not helpful in their homework or test preparation!

Post #6

Today, I'm going to talk about how we are using a nonlinguistic representations from Marzano in my class...I had to come up with a final project for our multigenre/The Importance of Being Earnest unit. I really wanted to offer some fun assignments that weren't pencil and paper, but still showed that the student understood the text and understood that writing isn't always in the form of an essay! For this assignment, I came up with about 9 options and let them pick 3 and 2 of them I picked for them. There options were: 1) a movie poster 2) a book cover 3) a travel brochure 4) a video diary (confessional) 5) a collage 6) an essay 7) an eulogy 8) a diorama and 9) a 2 voice poem. I was amazed at the choices most of the students made. We had many collages and they were GREAT! The students really showed that they understood the characters of the story and I think they showed it the collage much better than they could have written in an essay. One of my favorite submissions was a video diary. My student did an EXCELLENT job creating a 5 minute diary from the point of view of Jack. I was amazed at their creativity and I think that if you tap into that creativity in the classroom, the students can really enjoy homework!