Hello everyone!
This week I started teaching my first unit; it is over The Crucible. It is going pretty well so
far. I started off with some cool pre-reading activities. I walked students
through a discussion over the main themes in the play on the first day and all
three classes did a good job with it. The only issue that I had with that day
was that I was having a rough time getting a variety of students to share their
opinions. Does anyone have any effective methods of picking high school students
to share without making them feel singled out or like they are in elementary
school? I attempted to do an “I do. We do. You do,” type of scaffolding, that
we have read about in the Smag text, during that lesson in order to show them
that it was all about their opinion and that there were no specific or right answers
that I was looking for.
The next day I tried out an activity that I have not seen
before for the The Crucible (I have
been a part of a couple units over The
Crucible through CO-OP), so I have been basing some things off of those
units, but I have been trying to come up with new stuff too. So I had students
read the article “How to Spot a Witch” (a lot of teachers use this article to
give a bit of historical background about the history of the witch trails and
witch hunts in general) and after they got done reading it, I had them create 3
new ways to spot a witch to get them to be creative and have some fun before we
dive into The Crucible. The majority
of students had fun with the activity, but for some reason some of them took
the instruction to be creative as “let’s get off task and talk instead of work,”
so I had to keep on these students to make sure that they kept working. I am
trying to not be a timid person that they can walk all over. I hope that I find
the a way to regain the attention of a class that works well for me because
standing and waiting for the class to notice that I have something to say to
them , while it may work for some people, it is not working out so well for me.
I am trying out all of the tricks and suggestions that all of our classroom
management texts from past classes have written about, but I haven’t found the
best one yet.
On the third day the classes started the play. I was impressed
by reading that the first 2 classes did, but the last class read their parts in
such monotone voices that it put some students to sleep. I do not know how to
get students to be more pumped up and read with enthusiasm…I think that I might
show them a performance of the first act in order to show them how parts should
be read and then maybe they will read with more expression next time. Does anyone have any other suggestions? I also
learned that I need to practice giving more wait-time. The article about not
working harder than your students that we read last week is what got me
thinking and analyzing my use of wait-time and I notice that it needs some
improvement.
I am learning pretty quickly that it is a challenge to make
plays interesting for students who do not enjoy reading or watching plays. I am
attempting to persuade my students who are pretty loud and opinionated to read
the major parts during class, so far most of them have agreed to read every day
and hopefully they continue to do so.
See you all next week in class!
Miss Schmidt
