Teaching Organization Skills

Sometimes teaching organization can feel a little bit like monitoring a New Year’s resolution to exercise more -- you know it’s a good idea, but there’s a dark feeling in the back of your mind telling you it’s predestined to fail.  This activity attempts to teach organizational strategies that better fit each students’ natural approach to organizing.

Organization Lesson

Cris Tovani's advice on providing feedback to students

From last April's "Educational Leadership": Cris Tovani, author of "I Read It, But I Don't Get It" - a great book about the struggles of teaching reluctant readers, shares her current practice in this article about providing effective feedback. She models an interesting, very closely monitored approach to reading instruction. There are elements that I find a bit formulaic, but I expect there are students who appreciate the structure. I couldn't agree more with her thoughts about feedback during the process of learning vs written justifications of grades after the learning.

How I Learned To Be Strategic About Writing Comments by Cris Tovani

Home Reading In High School

During the elementary school years, many families develop home reading habits that sometimes slip away during the transition to high school. While daily home reading may not be assigned and monitored in an explicit way by high school teachers, maintaining a reading habit helps promote student success. Here are some messages to pass along to parents to help them support their teen’s continued reading at home:

1. Be a role model

As your child grows older you can start to read alongside him/her books that you actually enjoy reading. Visit the library together and choose a book that you’re both interested in reading. Take advantage of car rides or meal times to chat about what you’ve read. Questions about why you think something happened in the book, what you think might happen next, and how well the author has captured your interest will promote critical thinking skills.

2. Use screen time

Adolescents can seem to disappear into their online world at times. Use your knowledge of your child’s interests to send online articles / websites to him/her and follow-up with a discussion about the text. Challenge your child to demonstrate his/her understanding of the text with questions about what he/she felt was important in the text. Encourage the student to find articles for you to read and discuss.

3. Introduce nonfiction

Some adolescents demonstrate a strong preference for nonfiction texts over novels. Consider visiting the library with your child and browsing for a topic that he/she finds interesting. Biographies, travelogues, and true life adventure stories are some of the genres that teens enjoy.

4. Set goals

In elementary school many students adopt the habit of reading a specific number of pages each night. In high school homework often flows in waves. Students may have a few days or a week with little work in one class and then a rush of assignments or tests. Setting a reading goal on a weekly basis rather than daily basis and then planning how to achieve the goal taking into account all of the other activities your teen may be involved in is an excellent means to develop organizational skills.

Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows - Vocabulary Lesson

https://youtu.be/Tz1PNIOQsFs

The “Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” is a youtube channel by John Keonig that shares short videos that define and express very particular sorrows that people might feel on occasion.

For the word “lutalica” which identifies the part of your identity that doesn’t fit into categories, Keonig writes,

You tell the world who you are in a million different ways. Some are subtle. Some are not...When you were born they put you in a little box and slapped a label on it. But if we begin to notice these categories no longer fit us, maybe it’ll mean that we’ve finally arrived—just unpacking the boxes, making ourselves at home.

Task

1. Choose a word from our list of important words and create a script for a video that would fully define the word in the style of the “Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows”.
2. Use the attached worksheet for your script.
3. Find or describe images for your video.
4. Ensure that your script demonstrates the success criteria we will describe together for a video of this type (see next page).

Quick Write Idea:

After reading this article what advise would you give to one of the characters in the text you're reading?

Why Attitude Is More Important Than IQ

What's Off Limits in YA Fiction?

YA fiction author Chris Vick set himself some interesting rules to follow when he was including controversial issues in his books directed at teen audiences. I wonder if parents and teens would agree on the rules. And I wonder if the books we use in class demonstrate the rules. Interesting questions for our students...

https://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2016/may/10/teenagers-controversial-issues-fiction-chris-vick?CMP=share_btn_gp

Critical literacy lesson:

Poor Journalism:

"Rise of women teachers 'turning boys off education' as report reveals girls born this year will be 75% more likely to go to university"

This is a great example of really bad reporting. The article's headline reports as fact a claim that is revealed to be completely without merit in the body of the article. An equally accurate headline would have been "Lack of Three Stooges courses turning boys off university".
Challenge students to research the issue and generate accurate claims about gender imbalances in education.
Original article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3586401/Rise-women-teachers-turning-boys-education-report-reveals-girls-born-year-75-likely-university.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490

The Green Book

A great 99% Invisible Podcast
From the 1940s to the mid 60s, the classic American road trip could be a minefield of embarrassment and even danger for african americans daring to use the wrong bathroom, or wanting to be served in a whites only restaurant. This short 99% Invisible podcast shares stories from the time. It makes real the mundane evil of everyday racism. Here's an assignment page with a few discussion questions to support it: https://goo.gl/XHsLXa 

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-green-book/