Strategies
From the time that students first enter a classroom, they are asked to give all of themselves to a person they don't know. Young children need to have confidence to raise their hands. They need to feel that intimacy with the teacher and fellow classmates; that intimacy requires trust. It is the teacher's responsibility to initiate a relationship and to establish the level of trust necessary for all parties to accomplish their goals. For the student, those goals are to complete every assignment so they can get good grades and learn as much as possible. The teacher has many goals that depend on the grade level and student population. However, they all want to share the knowledge of their subject matter with the students and help them learn. But how does the teacher initially establish that trust?
The first order of business for this unit will be to establish the trust of the three classes of students that will be assigned to my class. I've been told by other teachers who have either walked by my class or have done a formal observation that in my class the students seem to be a cohesive group that work well together. I think that cohesiveness grows out of a comfort level that is established by structure. Through this structure I've created a safe haven for communication. Students learn the rules and systems of the class on the first day of school and they do not change. I do not get more lenient with the rules as I gain their trust. I also learn their names on the first day of school. It makes them feel important when this person whom they've never met is referring to them specifically, speaking to them as a human being and not just another student. Early in the school year, the students and I establish a rapport and we have an unspoken rule that what happens in our class stays within our class. That doesn't mean that illegal things happen or that we break school rules. It simply means that unless they give permission, work that is created in that classroom is not shared outside of the room. The majority of the time, they are so proud of what they've created that not sharing it would be criminal in their minds. The second element of that unspoken rule is that other teachers will never be responsible for giving assignments in my class. That means I can't be absent. Of course there are times that I can't be there, but I always leave assignments in the same format that they're used to.
Experiential learning is the strategy I've learned that works the best with all writing lessons and in life. If students have the opportunity to see examples of what they're being asked to produce, it lets them know that the task can actually be done. This practice works especially well if the modeling is done during class while they watch. The students also read and analyze similar works completed in prior years to get ideas for their own work, although I try to steer clear of student models that might easily be duplicated.
Many of the strategies that I will use in this unit are those that I've used in prior units and are not unlike those of other teachers of the same subject matter. I have a number of ideas to help my students learn their voices using a mixture of American poets and authors. Our curriculum currently includes writing a poetry anthology. The anthology of old focused mostly on poetic devices and forms. The new anthology will focus more on the poet. While learning to identify the devices and forms will still have their place in the unit, those lessons will not govern the direction. The anthology consists of poems the students write themselves, a couple from classmates that were written during the unit, and poems they've found by published authors that they like.
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