Planning, Projecting, Pacing

I have a rare gift of a late-start morning, thanks to a doctor’s appointment, so I figured I’d take the time I still have before I head over there to write my slice.

We’re coming off of a long weekend, and I happily spent some time on Saturday planning this week and next’s reading lessons and pacing out unit 2 (nonfiction). The lessons were the first that I’ve planned independent of Ana — huge step! Wow! — and I felt confident finally in how I was writing them. I used all the tools that I’ve acquired thanks to her:

• The recipe for the perfect teaching point (the what + the how)
• The TC learning progression for narrative reading (which I’m kicking myself for not using until now)
• Rubric creation for the final assessment
• Our pacing and planning guide with titles of each session

And once I was done with that, I took a look at the next unit, even though I had many other things to do, because I’m geeking out over teaching it.

To give some background, our school has not had a consistent reading curriculum since I started teaching there, so this year I’m planning out all new units using our power standards and other curricular resources (Shifting the Balance, Jennifer Serravallo, TC units of study) so that they reflect a) what our students need and b) are more digestible for them. This means that much of what I’ll be (and have been) teaching them asks them to raise the level of their reading and interpreting to a point they’ve never been asked before. Which is really hard. But I know they’re capable.

For the nonfiction reading unit, I’m keeping in mind the fact that Adam Fachler highlighted during the Thinking Maps Training of Trainers course I took with him so many years ago: you can’t learn new skills AND new content at the same time. It’s one or the other. So, I’m choosing new skills. Rather than requiring students to read about topics they don’t know much about, I’ll have them choose a topic they “sort of” know about (as Ana said, lol), or really: a topic they know well, but can still learn more about. The goal of the unit will be clear from the get-go: to prepare for a “knowledge fair” where they’ll teach younger students about the topics they’ve researched.

The skills I’ll be focusing on this unit are:

• Note-taking to capture, organize, and synthesize information, using text structure to guide
• Summarizing by identifying main idea and important supporting details
• Writing about reading to teach others

I’m hopeful that this nonfiction unit goes better than nonfiction units I’ve tried in the past. If the projecting and pacing stage is any indication, it’s already going well.