assignments ENGL344 Young Adult Literature: Teaching Discussions
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LEE TORDA 310 Tillinghast Hall Bridgewater State University 508.531.2436 ltorda@bridgew.edu www.leetorda.com |
Spring 2020 Office Hours:
I am officially on sabbatical for the Spring 2020 semester. I am not available for face-to-face meetings. On line office hours are available to exclusively to students in my ENGL 344-W01. If you need immediate help, please contact the English Department @ 508.531.1258 ONLINE office hours for ENGL 344-W01: Monday 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM Wednesday 7:00-8:30 PM Sunday 11:00 to Noon (when major assignments are due ONLY) |
Overview
Some of you in this class are very experienced teaching in the classroom or supporting teaching. Some of you have more directly studied pedagogy in your Ed courses. Some of you intend to teach secondary school, but a good number of you want to teach the very young ones. A few of you don't have any desire to teach at all. My point is, you all come to this assignment at different stages in your learning and in your reasons for taking this class. And I know that most of you have not been teachers in your own classrooms, and I'm not suddenly asking you to become experienced in that way. This is really just a place to pay with possible ideas--possible ideas for potential students in future classrooms. It's really a place to play with ideas without all the rules of teaching you learn in Education classes. It's, and I really mean, this, a place to have fun--what could you do in a magical classroom with magical studnets (that's how I plan my classes).
Details
Most weeks, I will have a teaching scenario/test classroom, and I will ask you to consider how you would teach the text we are reading that week. To successfully complete this part of the class, worth 20% of your final grade you will need to do the following:
Assessment
The Teaching Discussion Board is worth 20% of your final grade.
In order to earn a B grade for your 20% you must:
If you do not complete the requirements for a C grade, you will earn an F for that 20% of your final grade.
KEEPING TRACK OF YOUR "A"s & "U"s
Here is how I keep track of your reading journal/book club work & teaching discussion posts: Each week, after I've read through the blog posts and google.doc discussion, I will assign you either an "A" or a "U" ("A" for acceptable and "U" for unacceptable). If you earn a "U" on anything, I will make sure you know and know why and, as stated above, you are welcome to revise that "U" into an A no matter how many times it takes to get it there as long as you've posted by the Sunday deadline.
I don't keep track of the date of the "A" or "U" received, and I don't keep track of what you turn in as a revision of a "U." I just enter marks into my book each week. At the end of the semester, I total up how many "A"s you end up with and that tells me what grade you've earned. So if you post by the deadline for all of the assignments and always get "A" for acceptable, great. If you post by the deadline and get all "U"s but then revise them to "A"s, that will be reflected in my book and you are golden too. If you have some "A"s and then, say, one post you keep getting a "U" on week after week, but you still have enough "A"s to earn you an "A" grade in the end, all those "U"s just don't matter.
But here is the thing: Once I've given you the "A" or the "U", my role is done until next week. I can't tell you which posts you get "A"s on and which you got "U"s on after the fact. All I'll be able to do is tell you where you are at in the "A" column. It's up to you to keep track of a "U" in need of revision.
Some of you in this class are very experienced teaching in the classroom or supporting teaching. Some of you have more directly studied pedagogy in your Ed courses. Some of you intend to teach secondary school, but a good number of you want to teach the very young ones. A few of you don't have any desire to teach at all. My point is, you all come to this assignment at different stages in your learning and in your reasons for taking this class. And I know that most of you have not been teachers in your own classrooms, and I'm not suddenly asking you to become experienced in that way. This is really just a place to pay with possible ideas--possible ideas for potential students in future classrooms. It's really a place to play with ideas without all the rules of teaching you learn in Education classes. It's, and I really mean, this, a place to have fun--what could you do in a magical classroom with magical studnets (that's how I plan my classes).
Details
Most weeks, I will have a teaching scenario/test classroom, and I will ask you to consider how you would teach the text we are reading that week. To successfully complete this part of the class, worth 20% of your final grade you will need to do the following:
- Consider a teaching scenario. I will give you a teaching scenario—a kind of classroom, a kind of assignment, a particular population of students. You will be asked, in 300 words, to talk about how you might teach this text, what makes you worried, what seems exciting about it—the joys and complexities of teaching texts to young people. Post this to the All Class Discussion Board.
- Write and respond to the scenario given the reading for the week. In the true spirit of what I’ve come to see as the standard way people run online classes, you will need to respond to at least one of your classmates. I am hoping that the prompt is interesting enough to engender real and interesting back and forth. Response posts should be between 100 and 200 words. Post this to the All Class Discussion Board.
A NOTE ABOUT WHAT TO THINK ABOUT AS YOU POST: The Book Club Reading journals are only about the fictional texts we are reading. The idea there is to engage in the texts as readers first and not teachers, to value these texts not as YA Lit, but as current literary fiction. Here, the goal is to think about how you might teach that text. That is why I include the theory or supporting scholarship as part of the conversation. That material is meant to help you to think about how and why you’d teach a text, it is meant to help you think about what would be hard about it, what would be exciting about it, etc. Respond with this in mind. - Once a semester, serve as a respondent. For each whole class discussion, I will ask two or three people to serve as respondents. You will need to serve as a respondent only once during the semester. Serving as a respondent once is part of your overall requirement for participating in the whole-class discussion. Your job as a respondent: read through the entire discussion and write up a bulleted list of take-aways from the discussion. In other words, what are the joys, the complexities, the strategies that we came up with in spitballing how to teach the text. Post this to the All Class Discussion Board.
Assessment
The Teaching Discussion Board is worth 20% of your final grade.
In order to earn a B grade for your 20% you must:
- Respond to all but three teaching discussion prompts
- Post an initial prompt of 300 words that addresses the teaching scenario described in that week's prompt
- Respond to at least one of your colleagues with 100-200 words for all but three teaching discussion prompts
- Serve as a Respondent during your assigned week.
- Do all of the things identified for the B grade
- Respond to all but one online teaching discussion board prompts
- Respond to at least one of your colleague all but one teaching discussion.
- Demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the original prompt and a meaningful engagement with your peers when you respond to them.
- Respond to all but four teaching discussion prompts with 300 words that address the teaching scenario described in that week's prompt
- Respond to all but four of your colleagues posts over the course of the semester with 100-200 words.
If you do not complete the requirements for a C grade, you will earn an F for that 20% of your final grade.
KEEPING TRACK OF YOUR "A"s & "U"s
Here is how I keep track of your reading journal/book club work & teaching discussion posts: Each week, after I've read through the blog posts and google.doc discussion, I will assign you either an "A" or a "U" ("A" for acceptable and "U" for unacceptable). If you earn a "U" on anything, I will make sure you know and know why and, as stated above, you are welcome to revise that "U" into an A no matter how many times it takes to get it there as long as you've posted by the Sunday deadline.
I don't keep track of the date of the "A" or "U" received, and I don't keep track of what you turn in as a revision of a "U." I just enter marks into my book each week. At the end of the semester, I total up how many "A"s you end up with and that tells me what grade you've earned. So if you post by the deadline for all of the assignments and always get "A" for acceptable, great. If you post by the deadline and get all "U"s but then revise them to "A"s, that will be reflected in my book and you are golden too. If you have some "A"s and then, say, one post you keep getting a "U" on week after week, but you still have enough "A"s to earn you an "A" grade in the end, all those "U"s just don't matter.
But here is the thing: Once I've given you the "A" or the "U", my role is done until next week. I can't tell you which posts you get "A"s on and which you got "U"s on after the fact. All I'll be able to do is tell you where you are at in the "A" column. It's up to you to keep track of a "U" in need of revision.