Treasure Chest of Thoughts

I simply love Google Docs, and I have barely even tapped into its potential. 

This is all thanks to Google Docs‘ and the National Writing Project’s co-sponsoring the Letters to the Next President, which required our utlizing a template and sharing/collaborating (student and teacher)…this part has inspired me!  Online lit circles.  A new way to conduct ”group work.”  Unnamed, unthought of potential.  I really like it.  Yes, I love it!

Here’s my plan:

1. Discuss the “Ladders of Questioning.”
2. “Write beside them” and model this format of question layers.
3. Assign groups, log in to Google Docs, and “share” a worksheet where the groups will develop questions online for a text that supports our current theme.  For example, in Pre-AP English 10’s theme of Who Am I?, they will study John Keat’s poem “A Song About Myself” and in English 11’s theme The Bullying Mentality,  Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess.”
4. During the next class, students will share answers online to self-selected questions.
5. Then?  Not sure…yet!

Know of another interesting feature to Google Docs?  Please share!

This past week, peer teacher Carla James and I hosted our first meeting with seven potential candidates for National Board Certification.  Prior to this meeting, Carla inspired our theme for the year when she suggested we use “Candidate Support Investigators”…of course, a play off one of our mutual favorite TV shows Crime Scene Investigators.

The inspiration for this theme, though, truly lies within the fact that a candidate only passes because he or she provides the “evidence” to sufficiently support each of the four portfolio and six online assessments.

I did not achieve National Aboard Certification until year two.  Why not?  Because I did not provide adequate evidence.  Because I was arrogant, to quote both myself and my friend Carla!  I assumed that because I was an English teacher that I could write, and I write I did.  I just did not provide sufficient evidence as I did not study the “Standards” as one should.

My friend Mrs. James?  Yes, she passed year one, due in part to an impromptu Candidate Support Provider often asking the question we so dislike to hear or see:  “Why?”

Thus, our goal this year, as now official “Candidate Support Providers,” is to question “why” and to inquire continually about the evidence.

Now, I just need to continue taking this proven process into my classroom: that of encouraging my students to think, to answer the question “why,” to provide the evidence: the concrete details and commentary.

I wonder….what if my students received the monetary rewards that National Board Certified Teachers do?  Would they, too, then provide ample evidence? 

True enough, the personal professional development that a teacher receives from this process should be enough. 

True enough, though, the rewards (all of them) are, oh, so nice!