English+Department


 * = A home for resources for Newton South English teachers. =

**From the 1/26 PD Day** My basic summary of where we ended up (you can all edit this document (I think) if you think it should be different than it is):

**Vocabulary**: We reached basic agreement that: 1) We should create a list of 100 stems for each grade level and ask students to learn them. 2) We should expect each teacher to add 100 "everywhere" words to students' vocabulary each year, either from a vocabulary book or from the texts 3) We should work on ourlist of discipline-specific vocabulary (we have such a list for freshman year, which I'l upload here, but not for subsequent years). //Next steps//: Convene a summer workshop to develop the list of stems for each year, ideally so they work in conjunction with some of the words that occur in core books.

**Writing**: Basic agreements: 1) Our sentence-based writing curriculum lays out the core grammar and editing skills we expect students to master at each grade level. 2) Common language across the school on academic vocabulary would aid our teaching of writing 3) Each teacher has a different approach to teaching writing; the "six traits" model comes the closest to achieving a common language around writing instruction (content/ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence structure, conventions). 4) Audience and purpose are also ideas that each student should think of in any piece of writing. //Next steps//: Convene a summer workshop to work through some of the specific questions that still remain (what kinds of literary analysis skills are we shooting for in the senior year? How do we get there). The goal of that workshop will be to revise and "finalize" the 9-12 writing rubric we've been working with for the last year and a half, with the goal of being able to post it, along with model/anchor papers at each level, on our department web site by September 2011. **Poetry**: Basic agreements: 1) Students should explicate a poem each year, with the possible exception of senior year (due to the elective curriculum). The goal of the explication is to deepen students' understanding of, and, we hope enjoyment of, the poem.  2) The poems to be explicated will get increasingly complex as the grades increase. 3) Each teacher has a somewhat different method of introducing students to reading a poem; some common themes emerge, though. Among them: rereading multiple times; looking for patterns; questioning anything that's unclear; making a hypothesis about meaning. //Next steps//: Form a summer workshop to: a) complete the listing of poems teachers use in each grade level (the current list is below, labelled "poems.doc); b) complete the listing of core poetic terms for sophomore (and junior?) years; and c) write a formal three-year poetry sequence document that we can add to our curriculum documents.   ||   ||