Category Archives: English

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English Department Full-Day Writing Retreat 2020

Submitted by: Heather Brubaker

On Feb 24, the English Department met with Eve Becker at Teachers College for a full day Writing Retreat. Here were some of the goals of the retreat, from my correspondence with Eve:

  • Protecting substantial time during the day for individuals to write
  • Designing the workshop to work for everyone, whether or not they perceive themselves as writers or have an ongoing writing practice
  • Inviting work on whatever kind of writing feels meaningful: our own projects, writing about teaching, writing student models…
  • Opening space for feedback or sharing that will be low stakes, supportive, voluntary (not the classic workshop / critique model)
  • Emphasizing process and reflection

Eve ran a wonderful day that included some community writing in the morning, a “writing walk” through different spaces at TC, time for teachers to work on a writing project of their choices, a structured, voluntary share, and reflection at the end of the day. All of the exercises were “portable”; they were directly applicable and easily modified for use in a middle or high school classroom context. This was also a great community-building day, we learned about each other through our shared writing and thinking about writing. The department expressed a strong desire to continue working with Eve and to engage together as writers.

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English Department Retreat

Submitted by: Heather Brubaker

Confirming that our full-day Writer’s Retreat for MS/HS English will be:
Friday, January 24th
 
Our facilitator, Eve Becker, has secured space for us up at Teachers College. More specific details on exact timing/location to come.
 
Please note: All teachers should expect not to be at LREI during school hours that day. We are likely to begin at 8:30 up at TC, and to wrap up at 3/3:30pm. Thank you for planning accordingly! 
 
As a reminder, here are the ideas going into the retreat design:
  • Protecting substantial time during the day for individuals to write
  • Designing the workshop to work for everyone, whether or not they perceive themselves as writers or have an ongoing writing practice
  • Inviting work on whatever kind of writing feels meaningful: our own projects, writing about teaching, writing student models…
  • Opening space for feedback or sharing that will be low stakes, supportive, voluntary (not the classic workshop / critique model)
  • Emphasizing process and reflection
Thanks, everyone. Looking forward to it.
Best,
Heather
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The Continuum of Literacy Learning

Submitted by: Faith Hunter

Tomorrow’s faculty meeting is a Department Meeting that will include our learning specialists. We will meet in Elizabeth and Maria’s room promptly at 3:30.
If you are up for a little bit of foundational reading we have attached an article. It would be helpful if you can read even just the first and last two pages prior to the meeting. We will have copies at our meetings and can spend the first 10 minutes debriefing.
Topic:
This meeting is the first in a series of meetings on the topic of Coherence that the curriculum coordinators and I have planned together.
  • We will begin with a focus on literacy.
  • We will examine a description of competencies of effective readers and writers from four year olds to fourth graders.
  • We will introduce a particular tool, The Continuum of Literacy Learning, to ensure consistency and coherence in our approach.
  • We will consider how this tool can help us meet the differentiated needs of our students while ensuring a consistent experience.

We look forward to a productive meeting.

Warm regards,

Beth, Sarah, Charissa, and Faith

 

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English Department 2019-2020 Focus

Submitted by: Heather Brubaker

Doing a professional development “deep dive” around some aspect of subject related progressive practice. This could draw on within department expertise and/or work with an outside consultant.

This year, the English department will focus on our practice as writer/teachers and teachers of writing. We will engage in an immersive day – a writing workshop – with periods of time to write and structured sessions for feedback and reflective work. Faculty can opt to work within one of the three strands below or to move between more than one over the course of the day: creative or personal writing, writing about teaching, or “doing student work” aka actually writing one’s own assignments or others’ assignments (either for the purpose of producing samples, or just to go through the exercise of doing what we ask our students to do). The orientation that we’d will bring to the work is that we are better teachers when we are closer to the practices we are asking our students to engage in, and we’d be seeking the learning from our own process of moving through ideation, generation, feedback, revision etc. After the retreat, we’ll gather later in the year to reflect on how this work has shifted or informed our classroom work. Department members are also seeking, variously: artistic or intellectual sustenance, a reconnection to the work of teacher as public intellectual, the chance to produce high-quality sample writing for use in the classroom.

We will do a full-day retreat (likely in January) and then follow up with a meeting in the spring.

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May English Department Half-Day Retreat

We debriefed how our teaching and planning had been informed by the January work and what we wanted to work on going forward. We spend an hour in “work time” on a curricular project for next year, either individually or in small groups that formed around an interest. At the end of the day, Elizabeth S. shared her findings on Writing Interventions from her doctoral work. 

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4/30/2019 English Department Meeting w/Science

Science and English met together. Our focus was on how we teach students to make observations (and differentiate between observations and inferences). Candace and Calvin led us through a lesson on a poem (a 10th grade lesson) where we shared about one word, one sound, and one image that stood out to us in the poem to keep our focus on observations. I (Kelly) led everyone through a 10th grade physics lesson involving a bowling ball where they had to figure out how to accomplish certain tasks (speed it up, slow it down, keep it at a constant speed, etc). Sherezada shared about non-Newtonian fluids and how students needed to separate observations from inferences and also make higher quality observations. We broke into groups (high school vs middle school) after the shares and continued discussions about what we noticed and what was in common. We started thinking about ways we could make stronger connections for students about how we were working on the same skills in these different classes and how we could reference common language or approaches in both classes.

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January English Department Half-Day Retreat

We did a curriculum review using the “Teaching Tolerance Anti-Bias Framework” and discussed our findings. We shared best practices: Jane shared about building in a service learning component within her Immigration elective and Candace W. talked about the weekly block she’s been using to do identity work with her 6th graders. At the end of the morning, Candace W. ran a “seed” workshop where we jotted down ideas for something we could change or try by the May retreat, inspired by with the work with the framework or the best practices.

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11/13/2018 English Department Meeting Notes

Humanities “summit” – sharing names, introducing new folks. 

English → planning for retreat in Jan/Feb. Decided on two half days, one in January and one in March April. 

Rough itinerary: 

January – defining what it means to teach social justice/activism in the context of a literature classroom, how to adjust for developmental appropriateness, some kind of mapping exercise to identify possibility spaces in the curriculum, sharing of a couple of best practices. 

Spring Day – with a thought partner/group, developing a new unit/assessment for one of the spaces identified in Jan.

ACTION ITEMS: Heather to send Doodle poll with possible weeks for retreats

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2018-2019 English Work Focus

Type of Work Focus: 

      • Documenting the “story” of the preK-12 curriculum  
      • Doing a professional development “deep dive” around some aspect of subject related to progressive practice. This could draw on within department expertise and/or work with an outside consultant

Description of Work Focus: To map the social justice/activism strand in our program as it exists with an eye toward the following: Where are we studying social justice or reading/writing with a social justice lens? Where are we asking or encouraging students to take action or engage in activism? Where are the spots in our curriculum where we aren’t connecting to social justice or activism or could be more deeply invested in that work?

To share specific examples of best practices around reading/writing with a social justice focus and moving from learning to action. The goal in this second step is to apply those practices to places in our curriculum where we need to invent or reinvest in a more social justice/activism-oriented component. Ideally, we’d all emerge from this work with new approaches to a specific unit, project, or assignment that we could implement. 

Schedule for Work: We think a full-day or two half-day retreats would probably work best.