We had our first Ben and BuJo club meeting earlier this month (thanks to Faith for bringing cookies!). Here are some of the layouts attendees shared to get you inspired!

 Earlier this school year, I came across a Wall Street Journal fluff piece on a phenomenon described as the "Ben Franklin Circle" - groups of (often) Millennials who gathered to discuss Mr. Franklin's virtues adapted to the modern world. I have often taught the excerpt from Ben Franklin's autobiography where he presents his habits and schedules in American Lit, so the idea wasn't new to me - but the club part was.

Last November, I also jumped on the bandwagon of the Bullet Journalers, also known as BuJo, an analog planner system that is taking the doodling mom racket by storm. I hosted a lunchtime introduction for students in September, and had quite a few show to learn about how the system worked. The result of that initial meeting is the test drive of our own Concordia Ben Franklin Circle, which will meet once or twice monthly to bullet journal and discuss Franklin's virtues - a little doodling and philosophy for our weekdays. Huge thanks to Senior Faith P. who is leading the charge for marketing our new adventure!

At the end of my WWII unit with my freshman World History class, I have a two-day project which launches us into the Nuremberg Trials and the legal ramifications of the trials on international law and medical ethics.  We started with watching the scene from HBO's "Band of Brothers" miniseries where Easy Company discovers and liberates a concentration camp.  We talked about the potential emotions of Allied troops who witness the devastation of Hitler's attempts to conquer Europe through the Final Solution, treatment of prisoners of war and political dissidents, and the cities devastated by bombings.  Briefly we discussed issues with trying those held responsible; where should the trial be held? Who could possibly serve on a jury or as judges?  On what charges can they be indicted?  Is "murder" strong enough?  Which country has the right to prosecute?  How do we handle the different languages?

Students were randomly assigned one of the 22 defendants accused of War Crimes.  We went to the computer lab for two days. They used a tutorial I created on Sophia.org: 

Objective: Students will create a usable resume using templates and their own experiences in preparation for the job market.

I harp on my students to make resumes. I require it as part of my summer reading assignment.  When students whine about needing to get a job, I ask if they have one.  I have a line of students around the hallway who tell me they got a job because of the resume they made in my class.  Many college applications and scholarships require students to have a resume.  Since I teach juniors, I make sure to spend a chunk of time near the end of school putting together resumes.

They use the Google Templates within the slideshow as a base and add their own information.  I edit it with them, since many have never seen a resume before. We talk about the reasons you should have one...even if you think you won't.  A high school kid who applies with a resume - even if the job doesn't call for one - is way more likely to get the job than one who doesn't have one.  For some it's a wake-up call; they tell me that they actually don't do anything except go to school.  When they see the resumes of some of their peers - with whom they are competing for college slots, summer jobs, and local scholarships - it jars them into getting involved.  Overall I believe teaching resumes is an essential component of my class.   

I've always wanted to try Literature Circles in my English classes, and this year I finally got to test them out.  I used this resource I found online as my guide, although I think I will tweak for next year.

I strongly believe that the best way to encourage kids to enjoy reading is by giving them more control over what they read.  I attended a really great professional development session last fall where a few of our middle school teachers discussed YA literature and the greatest difficulty for secondary English teachers - appealing to the boys.  So much of YA literature is geared towards girls, since they read at higher rates.  I wanted to find enough choices for literature circles to encourage my more reluctant readers to get excited.  I am hampered in my quest, however, by the availability of books in our English department book room.  Since I was also sharing books with the other junior English teacher, we had to find enough books to offer a variety to our nearly 200 students, as well as make sure we chose books that we were already familiar with (students are unimpressed when I assign them something I haven't also read).  I gave each class the options and let them list their preferences, then assigned them novels and groups based on that.  Most students got their first choice.  The following is the list of books I selected and my rationale for choosing them, as well as the reception of the students.

This year our English department got two sets of books that I'm very excited about: "Vocabulary for the High School Student" and "Vocabulary for the College-Bound Student" (Levine).  The idea is that the freshmen and sophomore teachers work their way through the one for high schoolers, and the junior and senior teachers each take parts of the college-bound one.  Ideally by the end of high school most students will have dug through all the words in this extensive unit.  They are divided in such a way that students are not learning words by rote memorization, but instead learning processes to decipher words - processes like context clues, Greek and Latin roots, and related words.  The exercises in the book require students to draw on more than just one spelling of one word; they use antonyms, synonyms, and extended thinking.  While we've discovered we could teach an entire year-long class over the book, the material is excellent once we've figured out a way of incorporating it.

DAY ONE
This past month I began the chapter on Greek roots with all my English classes that will continue through April.  In order to add a 'hook' to starting the chapter on Greek roots, I began the first class asking for volunteers.  A student would raise her hand, and I'd turn to the smart board and write her name using the Greek alphabet.  I'd ask for another volunteer, and then write that student's name on the board in Greek. They started to catch on and get really excited: "Do mine! Do Sarah!  Do Ethan!"  I then passed out copies of the Greek alphabet for them to paste in their notebooks.  We talked about how there is no J or F or Y, and they marveled over the different letters.  I took one semester of Biblical Greek at my parochial high school, which is now coming in handy as I recall using the Greek alphabet.  My students are very impressed at my miniscule amount of knowledge.  I then assigned the first word and exercise.

One of the first professional development sessions I ever attended was called "Mentoring Minds," and was sponsored by a company of the same name.  They used the wheels in a Socratic circles scenario, which as a new teacher I had never heard of. After the demonstration I had to have some, and now use them several times a year to great effect in my classroom.  This post explains my use of Socratic circles and the Critical Thinking Wheels, based on Bloom's Taxonomy, in my English classes.

Most recently, my AP English class had their first Socratic Circle of the year as their test grade for The Great Gatsby.  After finishing the book, I pass out the thinking wheels and do a brief lesson on what Bloom's Taxonomy is in terms of different tiers of critical thinking.  This year our school has introduced Data Walks and trained all the teachers on "Student-Friendly objectives," so the most advanced of my students liked this insight into how we, their teachers, think about our lessons.  

The wheels have verbs on the inside, and a window with question stems that spin around.  I gave them some examples of the easier Knowledge/Recall questions: 
What do you recall about Myrtle's death?  
Who is Daisy Buchanan?  

We worked our way to demonstrating the higher-level questions, like:
Predict the outcome if Tom knew Daisy was driving. (Synthesis/Create)
What would you have told the police if you were Nick? (Evaluate)

Students each wrote two questions for each of the six fields, twelve total.  

Lampasas High School is the lone high school in a rural Texas district, about 25 miles from Fort Hood, one of the largest army posts in the United States.  We have about 1000 student enrolled, with 45% categorized as economically disadvantaged and 31% minority (US News & World Report).  I observed in my first year teaching sophomore English that many of our students were disadvantaged when it came to applying to college and the workplace.   Our counseling department, like many schools, was spread thin, especially with Texas' heavy end-of-course testing requirements.  There weren't a ton of resources publicly available to students for college (obviously there is a wealth of information available online, but students didn't even know where to begin looking).  In collaboration with my English department head and our school librarian, I started a series of after-school programming to give students opportunities to help teach and reinforce some of the skills needed for college and the workplace.  

We started in the spring of 2012 with a hiring workshop where we gave interview and application tips for local employers and gave students time to create a resume in the computer lab with one-on-one assistance.  We had around 12 students attend our first little meeting. In the 2013-2014 school year, we labeled our events "Second Tuesdays" and hosted them in our school library on the second Tuesday of every month. I started teaching AP English to juniors in the 2013-2014 school year, and offered extra credit to students who attended.  Many of my AP students were the first in their family to have the opportunity to go to college, and were clueless on the process.   Our 2013-2014 Second Tuesday September event started with how to sign up the SAT and ACT (I had students bringing me cash, not realizing they needed to sign up and pay online).  I had a camera to take pictures of students, since the testing sites require a photo for identification purposes and many of our students do not have access to digital cameras and computers at home.  Over 40 students attended this workshop.