Summer School Goals

Discuss the learning goals and instructional decisions made during the planning of your lessons.

I am teaching 7th grade English in Mississippi. My work was cut out for me. My partner and I came the planning process assuming that students would be suffering from huge difficulties in the basics. As a result we laid out our lesson plans to emphasize the following areas: grammar, mechanics, and reading comprehension. The overall learning goal of the students was to rapidly get them to pick up those skills on the MCT and the state curriculum. Seeing as that goal was an impossible one to accomplish in two and a half weeks, my partner I am put an increased emphasis on exposure and mastery of a smaller set of skills within the realm of grammar and mechanics. We agreed that mastery of the parts speech is the most important.

The instructional methods we decided upon were going to be as basic as the classroom curriculum. The preferred method of instruction was direct, with a heavy emphasis on taking notes for the first few days (because you can’t do anything with grammar unless you know the rules) followed by the rollout of activities and inductive work that played upon the knowledge.

For the first week especially, we wanted to control the environment. The room had to be an environment where the teacher can easily exert control of everything and everybody. I think that a silent classroom is the most desirable one. I want a place where the students are going to be listening to me by default (no other distractions are available) and where I am the visual centerpiece of the room.

The danger of the approach is that our approach became incredibly centered on the second-years in our group. I think that we became the sheriffs very quickly and that students became dependednt on us to be worked incredibly hard and to have an incredbily tough structure, something that our first-years did not offer out of the gate. I am hoping that after the first week ends, the first-years adapt to our hard standards and our desire to pound the basics into these kids before they walk out of the door, something they both need and deserve.