Total Class Engagement

All right, Level II's are slowly winding down as I have only 4 more scheduled class visits. These experiences are going by so quickly and so is this semester. It is so exciting to think that only in a few more short semesters I will be have a class of my own.

This past Thursday I got the privilege of teaching Ms. Danger's 8th grade Language Arts class a lesson over autobiography and biography. In class the students are currently working on a biography project in which they will generate questions, very much like an interview, for another student in class and write up that particular student's biography. The biography encompasses many aspects of language arts and other various district learning goals like writing, editing, revision, and public speaking.

For my lesson I presented the class with a question about what they knew about autobiographies and biographies. We next broke down the two words into their original Greek suffixes and prefixes to further understanding of the two words and to help future reading of like words. After our discussion I presented the class with various autobiographies that were presented in many different formats: graphic novels, epistolary, and chapter books. I swayed the lesson about autobiographies to teach about self-expression and generating quality reflection, after all that is what the authors of the autobiographies.

The night prior to this lesson I went out and bought 12, 70-paged, notebooks, one for each student for their personal journal. The class struggles with writing, their writing feels forced or is completely lacking major details or even quality thought. I assigned the students to write about the 'real you' in their journals for the first time. I emphasized that they were NOT writing for me but for themselves. The goal with the journals was to critically reflect on the events of their lives and how those events shaped them into who they are today. This went so swimmingly and they were all intently focused on writing in their journals for the rest of class. You could hear a pin drop in that room plus 12 pencils and pens diligently writing.

The lesson had a several goals in mind, one to foster expressive writing, critical thinking, develop a relationship between the teacher and student, and help generate questions for their biographies. Not to toot my own horn but it was an awesome lesson. I built an excellent rapport with all of the students in this class. It seems that they actually care what I have to say and give me their respect.