Well, I guess if I'm making my students blog about their experiences in Brit Lit, I should blog too. I am a part of this experience after all and I'll need to be able to reflect in order to grow (sounds so trite...). My apprehension about blogging is the same of my students: I'm scared to put myself out there, to see my mistakes and to share them with people. But I'm also inspired by my students; some of them have created brilliant posts, full of questions and the desire to be better. Plus, if my students can pull this off, we'll be changing education--not only here at Central, but in other schools as well.
The idea for this class came to me on the ride home from Point Pleasant this summer. I was thinking about how I wanted to approach teaching a British Literature course in only nine weeks. How was I going to cover hundreds of years of brilliant writing in such a short amount of time? I was overwhelmed by the thought that I would be responsible for choosing the three or four texts that might be my students only exposure to British authors. And then it came to me: give the control to them. Just because I love Jane Eyre does not mean my students will, so why not let them choose something they will love?
Earlier this summer, most of my time was devoted to the 1 to 1 pilot program here at Central. This program gives netbooks to students as a way to improve their learning and give them opportunities to reach outside of the classroom. I was prepping another class I had never taught before--Contemporary Lit. Through my conversations with co-workers--Marci Zane, Cathy Stutzman, Mary Woods, and Heather Hersey--I learned more about student-directed inquiry, a concept I loved. And so through my panic over Brit Lit, emerged this amazing idea: allow students to create their own curriculum, their own learning plans, their own assessments. I begin sketching out a rough idea of what I wanted the course to look like--something I'll discuss in an upcoming post.
No comments:
Post a Comment