Thoughts on planning and process

Hello everyone,

In my preparation for my return to teaching, I'm at the point of doing the long-term planning for summer school.

The first thing I do is sit down with the calendar and plan out all the fixed dates. Summer school begins on July 7 and ends on August 15. The Mid-term grades are expected on July 24; textbooks are returned on August 14, and final report cards are due on the 15. There is an emergency drill that will take some time out of 1st period on July 17.

I mark all the fixed dates in red ink in my planner, and I try to plan around them in as practical way as possible.

I know that I will need about an hour on July 7 to set up the rituals and routines of my class; students need to know my grading procedures, my rules, important dates, and the overall direction of the class. The final will have to be given on August 13 or 14--I'm not entirely sure how Lincoln does textbook return. I think it could be done in about thirty minutes, which would give us sufficient time to take and grade the final (about 90 minutes). If their return is less efficient than that, I will have to give the final on the day before. I need to finish oral book reports (I can't count on Lincoln's possession and use of the Accelerated Reader) right before the midterm and the final, and they will take two days each time if everyone is ready, so my book reports are due on July 22-23 and August 12-13. Journals and essays are due on Fridays, which means that I need to have at least an hour's worth of independent work on those days for me to grade and return the journals.

Apart from those fixed things, I can start to fill in the blanks with a general structure of my curriculum. In grammar, students need to know clauses and their functions by the end of 10th grade, but they can't understand clauses if they don't know parts of speech and general sentence structure. I don't know how much grammar anyone will know until I give them a diagnostic assessment at the beginning, but I would be surprised if many summer school students are already grammar whizzes, so I'm going to plan to do grammar review of parts of speech and sentence structure for both 10A and 10B, then try to push 10B on to phrases and clauses.

I like to require a descriptive essay as a diagnostic at the beginning of any course. Because it's easy to do and hard to cheat on (they describe something they know personally), it gives me a fairly accurate benchmark of their writing ability. After the diagnostics, I can jump right in to persuasive/expository writing for 10A, and literary analysis for 10B.

It's important for the students to see good models, so I like to do a week of introductory non-fiction, then poetry, then narrative writing in 10A. Larger works (Shakespeare and a novel) in 10B ft the literary analysis requirements.

That's the way I think through a semester plan. I have no detailed lesson plans, yet, and I know that there may be some flexibility required. I'm not quite sure which shorter works I'll use because the textbook (Lincoln uses McDougal Littell) is unfamiliar to me. I'll need to do some reading and decide.

All of the planning took less than an hour, but it has left me pretty confident of my general path for six weeks. It's in pencil, however--life has a way of changing things.

Jeff Combe