Mrs. W's Room

We just wrapped up Genius Hour in my seventh grade English class, and there is much to say about that adventure. The Good Stuff Even if I felt like a failure most of the time, there were a lot of good things that came from Genius Hour.  Overall, the students said they loved being able to pick what they learned about. During Genius Hour, the majority of students were engaged in their project.  There were some really great presentations and reflections from my students. I had a few parents thank me for doing Genius Hour because it got their kid working on an interest outside of school. There was a good variety of projects and very few cookie cutter projects. Two students who were initially hesitant to do anything were able to get past their fear of failing and had unique projects. Halfway through the process, I started having students write down a goal at the beginning of Genius Hour and had them reflect on it at the end of class.  This help create a stronger purpose for t

Daniel Pink, author of several novels such as Drive  and A Whole New Mind , spoke in our valley last night. I was somewhat familiar with Daniel Pink's work prior to his speech from skimming Drive (I know...bad English teacher)   and watching his TED talk. I thought it was a great speech and felt I was able to make a lot of connections between my philosophies and struggles, and the studies he's compiled on motivation. His ideas about motivation and rewards are in line with some of the ideas I'm struggling with this year.  In particular, reading ( which I also talk about in this post ).  I'm struggling to answer how we as educators can encourage a love of reading without applying damaging constraints or meaningless rewards. Reading for pleasure is not something that should stop after elementary school, but for some reason it does. I'm still not sure what the answer is, but the next book on my reading pile is The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller, which I'm hopin

My eighth grade class recently asked me about my blog. Then, the memories of determination, reflection, and improvement came flooding back to me. Thank goodness for accountability, right? Since my last post, we've entered second trimester, so I have new class and new faces! Here's the latest. Seventh graders are involved in a poetry unit right now. For their assessment, they are writing a poem, and then writing a literary analysis about the techniques they used in their poems. Should be interesting! I stole the idea from here . Literary analysis is tricky...especially when figurative language is involved. I found this approach to approaching analysis helpful. Sarah Wessling breaks down analysis into three steps: making observations, finding patterns, and drawing conclusions. It's that final step that gives students the most grief, so we've been practicing a lot.  An activity we did to show the different between a figurative meaning and a literal meaning. I