Fearless Writing

Interested in multigenre writing?

Read this excerpt from Tom Romano's recent book, Fearless Writing. He makes an argument for multigenre writing in the face of the common core.

Welcome to our 2013 collaboration blog

Hello everybody. It's Labor Day. That means everyone is relaxing, getting ready for the barbecue tonight. Right? No grading papers today, I think it's a law.

Our first collaboration of the year took place last week (8/26). Teachers were asked to review the department collaboration norms and tailor them to their individual groups. They were asked to discuss a plan for keeping a weekly log and an agenda for the upcoming week.

Check out the pages on the top of this blog. Each collaboration team has its own page (which you can update or I can update). The English 10 and 10H teams have created a Google Doc with notes from their first meeting. Each team should communicate before next week's meeting (9/9) with some sort of plan or agenda.

I hope this helps us organize our work this year. It can even be an easy way to present our collaborative work when it comes time to do the incentive review.

Argument rubric ideas

*Don't mind the picture. It's just my random notes.

Date: Monday, 12/17/12
10th grade teachers present: Jenny, Jake, Kyle, and Diane

Knowing that we are going to discuss a rubric as a department after Christmas (1/7), we wanted to first discuss this in a smaller group. Kyle took notes. Jenny gave specific examples from her recent argument unit. Jake read from existing rubrics (AP and UBSCT persuasive writing). Diane talked about Bloom's taxonomy. A janitor came in and took out the garbage.

Some ideas we came up with:

• We want a simplified rubric
• This particular rubric is not for students
• This rubric is for collaboration ("Hey...Jenny's students earned 100% on organization, how does she teach that?")
• This rubric would have three qualifiers (excellent, average, poor)

This is just a starting point. We will begin discussing this after Christmas (1/7). If you want to add to the discussion over the break, please post a comment below.

Everything's Better When We Co-Llab-Or-Ate! - 10/31/11

We talked more about our Ethnography/Artifact Essay assignment, and what we could consider as an artifact. Randall shared some material he found. We also discussed the Argumentative Essay, and how it would apply to English 11.

English 11 PLC - 10/24/11

Joey was putting together the October newspaper, so we decided to work on our individual Ethnography/Artifact Essays over the coming week. We'll get back together next Monday to discuss what we came up with.

English 11 Way Fab Collab - 10/17/11

We met together as a department for a little over half the time and discussed the Argumentative Essay as created (and very well) by Sarah, Angie, & Randall. Angie put together a proposal which drove the discussion. It outlined potential documents that would apply to 10th, 11th, and 12th grades respectively, as well as a list of potential continued efforts for future wrangling.

As a group we continued the discussion as it applied to English 11.

E11 Collaboration - 10/03/11

Continued looking at and compiling examples to use with the Ethnogrophy/Artifact Paper, and Shauna brought in a great example of how she uses SOAPSTONE with President Obama's Back-to-School speech.

"I have approved this blog post."