I think the big thing about this day for me was that I didn't realize it was an observation day; had I read the email more carefully, I would have planned something else and saved the vocab quiz for another day. Regardless, you directly observed a couple changes that I made: the students' seating and the length of the quiz. Some of the seating changes I made allowed me to spend the quiz time more productively. Focusing less on individual students' actions gave me more time to think about other things--exactly how I wanted to ask a question, what I planned to do tomorrow, etc. The other change was the length of the quiz. Students had been taking quite a bit of time to complete vocab quizzes--up to 25 or 30 minutes for that number of questions. On the Friday prior to this quiz, I informed students that they would have only 20 minutes to complete it. While most students completed the quiz in only 10-12 minutes, the scores did not suffer.
I admittedly was surprised by the lack of understanding when I told them what their homework would be. Part of that is likely due to me calling the questions for homework "discussion questions." They're used to that term meaning something entirely different from what I was asking them to do. I should have asked for "questions for group discussion" or something similar. That probably would have eliminated nearly all confusion. At the same time, creating an example for them and showing it on the board would have helped, too. I really didn't expect them to need that help, given the work they had been doing in their RRJs.
The review questions/activity--chapter 1-8 quiz questions and apostrophes--basically went as expected. One change I made for sixth period was I put the quiz questions on the SMARTBoard as well, along with 4 options from the quiz itself. That made it a little easier to get students to answer the questions. The apostrophe activity was more lively 6th period, too. They got into a heated debate about the correct answers. It was fun. One thing I didn't like about the activity is that I ran out of time for it. Had the explanation of the questions not taken so long each period, I would've been fine. (But it did.)
The activity that I wanted you to see, involving chapter 13 and the poem "Southern Heritage" by Jason Carney actually turned out to be one of my least successful and most frustrating lessons. It seemed to me that students were given a lot of scaffolding to get them to the ideas that I wanted them to get to, but they never got there on their own. Before showing the video, I told them that the day's lesson was about connecting the messages and ideas from the poem to both chapter 13 and the novel as a whole.
The very basic idea I wanted them to grasp was that each work, TKAM and "Southern Heritage," dealt with issues of racism passed down through family lines and with a man who wanted his daughter to be a better person than all of those who came before her. Even when Dave helped me make modifications to the lesson (having them number the guiding questions and then number the lines in the lyrics where they thought the questions applied, which was really more poetry analysis than I had intended for the lesson), it just didn't work. Somehow that connection was still lacking. Having done literally hours of work to create that lesson (just getting the lyrics right, even after copying them from a source online, took nearly a half hour), it was definitely the most frustrated I've felt. I really don't know how to make that lesson more effective right off the bat unless I turn it into a poetry analysis lesson and follow up the next day with the connection to chapter 13 and the novel. My intention was to use it as a springboard for discussion of 13.
