This post is week 6 of 8 in the 8 Weeks of Summer Blog Challenge for educators.

In an earlier post, I wrote a little about how I started at a new school that was also implementing a new ELA 10 curriculum for the first time. We were actually still piloting the curriculum in the first semester, and then we implemented it more fully for second semester. Since everything was so new to everyone, and especially to me as a new teacher to the district, I considered it a good “rough draft” year, but with a lot of room for improvement next year. 

One of the big things about a “rough draft” year is that, for me, it doesn’t feel very cohesive, especially when piloting a whole new curriculum. There’s a lot of “Let’s try this out!” and “This seems interesting!” Usually, there’s far more in a curriculum that comes down from the district than any one teacher can possibly teach in a year, so you really do have to sort through and try things out so that you can make more informed decisions the next year. 

All of that trying-things-out leads to quite a bit of “Wow, that one did not work for me kids” or “That was not the best way to do that.” For example, we started with an excerpt from Candide by Voltaire at the very beginning of the second semester, when we moved from the pilot phase to full implementation. About ⅔ of our students were not included in the pilot, so they had to learn the software that goes with the curriculum as well as the reading routine (first draft reading-skill lessons-second draft reading-writing prompt). 

Starting them off with Candide was like throwing someone who had never seen water before into the deep end of the pool. All four of us ELA 10 teachers felt like our kids collectively did not get it, and it makes sense: Candide is a complex satirical text about a time period they are not familiar with. The theme for the unit is Taking a Stand, and without a deep understanding of the context or of satire, students could not see how or why Candide was in that thematic unit. It didn’t make sense, and it did not feel cohesive. We all agreed to remove that text for next year. The amount of scaffolding it would take for our students to really get it would take up too much time for a short, three page excerpt.

So a lot of the changes I make for next year will be similar to that: pruning things that didn’t work so that I can dig deeper into things that did work.

I also need to keep working on one change that I mentioned in my New Year’s Reflection post, and that is managing student cell phone/electronic device use, or rather, helping students manage their own attention better. We all know cell phones are a part of our daily lives now, and we all know there are times (like in the classroom) where we need to be present and focused, and we need to be able to set our own devices aside. I practice this in my own life by trying to remember to put my phone in another room when I’m playing with my children. That way, I won’t be tempted to check Facebook when the 15th Lego tower of the afternoon starts to lose my attention.

My plan for helping students manage their own attention better is to use a small poster with a red light on one side and a green light on the other. One of my old schools used this symbol, and it did seem to help. The red light signifies that phones should not be seen or heard. It means it’s time to focus and be present in the classroom. The green light means that phone use is allowed for school-related purposes (including putting on some music and headphones if we’re doing some truly independent work). 

I plan on doing a lot of talk around this little poster at the beginning of the school year so that students really understand when and how they should and should not use their phones in class. If we’re doing a mini-lesson, I’ll ask students before I start if they should have their phones out and/or headphones in when we’re taking notes. We can talk about why phones are problematic a those times, and really just develop some norms around cell phone use in class. I hope that helps them start to manage their own attention, because it’s an important life skill that we all need and that too many of us (including myself, at times) lack.