It’s my first full weekday of summer vacation, and I am starting to think about the fall. I am teaching one new prep for me (Latin II CP), but other than that, I will be teaching things I have taught before. This is very exciting for me, since I have taught a new-to-me prep every semester since I started teaching (only 4 semesters so far, but still).
I’ve thought about my successes and failures this year. I don’t feel that I’ve had huge failures, and I have definitely done better than I did my first year, but there are many things I want to improve, repeat, toss out, introduce, and more.
Improve
- Classroom management. Still a difficult one for me. Sometimes I think about the person I am now vs. who I was 10 years ago, and 10-years-ago-me (and even 5-years-ago-me) would be stunned to know I am as laid-back as I am now. There are certain things I am not laid-back about (student safety, cheating, and the like), but I am sometimes too chill for my own good. I have to figure out a way to improve my classroom management without losing authenticity.
- Work flow. Hooooo boy. I need to figure something out here. I feel like I have tried every which way of lesson planning, but it still comes down to me planning the night before and making copies the day of. Not a good look. I make intricate lesson plans weeks in advance, but then I don’t follow up on them later. I also need to get a better system of returning graded papers. I like the amount of paperless work I do, but for those things that must be done on paper, I have had such a hard time getting them back to students in a timely way. I will grade them and they will just sit on my desk. Part of this has to do with floating and sharing a room. With my own room and no floating, I could (maybe) have a more dedicated in- and out-box system, but it’s not to be at my current school.
Repeat
- I loved the vocabulary games we did this year, and so did the kids. Word races, VINCO, hot seat, and more. I will definitely be repeating those next year.
- Board work. I will write about my board work routine at some point, but first I have to modify it. This is just a bell-ringer/warm-up, nothing fancy, but I love having something for students to do when they walk into class. Next year, I want to whittle it down, maybe make it digital (maybe not), and make it part of a participation grade instead of a homework grade.
Introduce
- The big one: going mostly-reading method in CP. This isn’t to say that we are doing CI or TPRS, because we aren’t, but we are letting go of most of the drill-type “chartiness” that is present in our grammar-based CPA classes (although we do a lot of reading work in CPA too). I plan to spend a lot of my summer working on how to support literacy for struggling readers in a WL classroom. Many of the plans I have made for the fall for my CP class include working in stations, reading and re-reading stories in multiple ways, and incorporating things like Movie Talks for novelty and vocabulary repetition.
- Along with the big one, and maybe even as big as or bigger than the big one: introducing more spoken Latin. Again, not exactly CI, but doing things like Movie Talks and incorporating more interpersonal tasks.
- Starting a participation component to the grade breakdown. I think I am including at least the following in the grade breakdown, which (if all goes as planned) will comprise 10% of the grade: board work, comprehension/participation checks, and reflection pieces.
I feel like there are at least 5 million other things I want to do differently next year, but these things have been on my mind for the past few days. Hopefully in a year I’ll have another post detailing all the successes and no failures whatsoever (ha!) that I’ll have in this next year.
Looking forward to your reflections for the upcoming year and some ideas you are implementing for the 2017-2018 school year.
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