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stack of books

Three Books to Shake Up Your ELA Classroom

I read several books this summer to prepare for the 2022-2023 school year, and I’ve rounded up a few favorites to recommend.

1. Point-Less: An English Teacher’s Guide to More Meaningful Grading (2020) – Sarah M. Zerwin

Alternative grading methods including standards-based grading, going gradeless, and ungrading have gained popularity in recent years, especially in higher education contexts and in response to the pandemic. As NJ-educator Matt Morone warned me this summer, there’s a rabbit hole of online resources on these topics. After getting a bit lost down that rabbit hole, I found Point-Less to be a helpful introduction to alternative grading refreshingly written specifically for an audience of high school English teachers. Zerwin presents her approach clearly and flexibly, encouraging readers to take what works for them and ignore the rest. One suggestion that resonated with me is to have students write reflectively at the end of a semester or school year about their learning, citing their own classwork as evidence of their growth.  [ . . . ]  Read More

We’re the November Classroom of the Month!

Thank you to Six-Word Memoirs for selecting my Honors Modern Fiction and Nonfiction class as their Classroom of the Month! Their feature article describes our use of six-word stories as an ice-breaker activity on the first day of school. (For additional information on this assignment, see “Even Reluctant Writers Will Love Six-Word Memoirs.”)

Here’s some student pieces highlighted in the article. Click the stories themselves to see the full compositions published on the Six-Word Memoirs site:

Her students expressed positivity (“Rainy day or blue skies, smile”) and passion (“She uses a brush to dream”). They told of the importance of standing up for who you are (“Don’t let stereotypes define your character”) and not caring what people think (“Be silly, dance confidently, think later”). They shared stories of both their values (“Brother, Mother, Dad. Family Comes First”) and their backgrounds (“One parent. One Child. One story”, “two coasts, six houses, thousand stories”). Finally, one student summed up how it really feels to be at this stage in life: “Highschool Student — Confused, But Having Fun.” [ . . . ]  Read More