Lately, I've felt that I have been complaining more than normal and that the bad days have outnumbered the good. There have been several rough days in a row for this reason or that. Sometimes it's the discipline, sometimes everything that can go wrong, does. It just seems like some days never end.
Then, you get those days when things click, things go so well that you actually leave with a smile on your face. Instead of that headache ridden face. Somedays you leave going, damn, that went way better than I thought.
Today, was one of those days. The writing standard for eighth grade for this quarter is argumentative writing. What eighth grader doesn't like to argue? This is one of my favorite standards to work with. Like last year, I started off by giving the kids a list of topics for them to consider. Things that are popular and "hot topics", they get a chance to choose their own. While they are doing this, they're researching both sides of the topic and coming up with how they feel about it, then we go into making a claim and using evidence to back it up.
This year, after reading The Cult of Pedagogy, I decided to change things up. In the article I read, it said to give them two high interest articles to compare and see which one is producing the better argument. So we did this. They did very well on it. The next step was to play "This or That," where you give students topics and they choose this or that. Well, I decided to make it a little more interesting and got questions that have yes or no answers. This way the students had to pick a side and then respectfully argue their cases.
Yesterday and today we tried it out, only after setting some rules and guidelines on how it was going to look. The students understood that everyone was going to get a chance to talk, if the wanted to, and there would be no interrupting each other. Because my students love to argue, I wanted to make sure they knew they could in our "safe space," but they needed to do it appropriately.
Both days my fifth period class surprised the hell out of me on how well they did with this activity. The kids had so much fun arguing with each other and were respectful, for the most part. It actually was pretty funny when the one question turned so heated that they almost couldn't wait for their turn to rebuttal. They kept trying to speak, but stopping mid sentence to let the other side finish. We were in the middle of a debate on "Should schools have a dress code?" when I had to stop them and reevaluate everything.
The kids were so passionate about this topic and had such great evidence to back up their claims, I decided I had to take a vote. So I asked them, did they want to continue researching the prompts we had been working on, or did they want write proposals and argue this dress code issue. I was shocked the moment I saw every single hand go up for the dress code issue and not their own topics. As a class, they made the unanimous decision to fight for something they all believed in.
In those moments, you have to throw out the lesson plans and go along with the students. It was almost liberating to see them be as passionate as they were. This is when you know their best work and their best writing will come into play because they had the choice and a voice in the decision.
Today was a good day. I cannot wait to see what their voices do in the next few weeks as we write these proposals and argue, the write way.
Love from the girl who now has to change her whole lesson plan so her class can do what they love most, to argue.
No comments:
Post a Comment