Final Course Reflection

            When I first walked into this class on a Monday evening in January, I was both nervous and excited.  It was the first day of the first course I was taking for my Master’s Degree and I didn’t really know what to expect, but I was looking forward to meeting fellow teachers and engaging in academic discourse.  To be honest, on that first day I didn’t really expect to learn very much in this class because unlike my cohorts who were in their first or second year of teaching, I had already been in the secondary English classroom for a decade.  I spent my first three years teaching in the public school system and was in my seventh year of teaching at one of the most prestigious private schools in the county.  Don’t get me wrong, I did not and do not think that I am a seasoned veteran that has nothing left to learn (I did enroll in graduate school to learn and improve as a teacher), but I thought this course would cover very basic secondary English teaching techniques that I would have learned and/or used somewhere along the way.  I was wrong.

            One of the first readings for this course was on backwards planning.  This concept did make a lot of sense to me as I read, but I had not encountered it prior to the reading.  Although the culminating activity (or at least one of them) for my prep school students is typically an analytical essay, I don’t usually know exactly what the prompt will be when I begin teaching a unit. Many times I choose an essay topic based off of a class discussion on the literary work.  I often tailor the essay prompt to each class period.  However, when I implemented the backwards planning strategy in crafting my unit plan for this course, I realized that it really affected my lessons in a positive way.  Every step of my lesson was created with the specific prompt that I had already selected in mind.  I did actually use the lessons that I created for my unit plan in my classroom this semester, although the final analytical essay has not been given yet because it will be a part of the final exam.  I do feel that implementing the backwards planning strategy has already had a positive impact on my teaching and has helped my students to produce better work.

            Another strategy that was new and extremely helpful was Nerd Libs.  While I have used a sentence frame in the past to teach my students how to craft a thesis statement, the Nerd Libs reading provided multiple frames for students to use in analyzing or writing about many different types of texts.  It also explained the reasoning behind the strategy and provided examples for each of the different frames.  I did include this tool in my unit plan in a basic way, but I plan on introducing it earlier in the school year next year and incorporating several different Nerd Libs throughout the school year in order to help strengthen my student’s analytical writing skills.

            One last thing that I learned was to incorporate an overarching theme in my class.  Because I teach secondary English at a college prep school, I do not teach from textbook.  I design the courses I teach based off of the literary selections the school provides, similar to a college literature course.  I do try to associate the works in some way, but reading about an overarching theme made me realize that I could do a better job of connecting the literary selections for my students.  This semester, I did just that with the four independent reading selections for my sophomore American Literature course.  They were Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Richard Wright’s Native Son, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.  I realized that the protagonists in all of these works wrestles with both isolation and alienation so I decided to change my focus on each of these novels.  I taught a compare/contrast lesson on alienation and isolation and then had students identify characters in The Great Gatsby that experience alienation and isolation.  In Native Son, my students looked for examples of the protagonist, Bigger Thomas, feeling alienated or isolated and examined how these feelings directly impacted his actions.  Now my students have begun reading The Catcher in the Rye and they will do the same with Holden Caulfield.  In a couple of weeks when we begin Death of a Salesman, I think recognizing these feelings in Willy Loman (despite his concerted effort to hide them) will help my students sympathize with this character more than they have in the past.  I feel like identifying an overarching theme for these works have not only enhanced my teaching, but also helped my students delve deeper into the characters and relate to them in a more authentic way.

            I really did enjoy this class and I know that I’m walking away from it with strategies that I will use in my classroom for years to come.  I have already seen my students benefit from them and I know that with a little refinement they will be even more effective next year.  I also really enjoyed being in a small class with other teachers who face different challenges than I do.  It made me remember my early days of teaching, taught me to be grateful for what I have, and gave me the opportunity to both teach and learn from my peers.