English Teachers Chat

In our first episode, Daniel Valentin and his special guest Mary Devane talk about the vision, image and excitement around their school's new flexible space. See pictures below of our flexible space: Collaboration is taken to a new level with our glass walls. Fellow teacher Valerie Brunow, utilizing different layouts of L-Space. New shapes. New seating. New ways to think about learning. There are so many ways to configure a single space here in L-Building Daniel Valentin teaches American Wilderness, Ethics, and English 9 at Horace Greeley High School. He is currently reading Pet by Akwaeke Emezi  and listening to Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell. He wants his students to feel empowered through books. Follow him  @DaValentinCCSD

This summer at my school's Literacy.Next professional development I had the pleasure of sitting down with Angela Stockman and talked with her about rubrics and grades. What we discussed was student's anxiety around rubrics. That rubrics set expectations, but students rarely participate in the process. My conversation was clear: students need to have agency in rubric creation. Compared to an ideal world, my rubric isn't quite as progressive as Angela Stockman. My current rubric for students isn't evolving or growing as we are moving through class (although I would like to get to that level eventually). Instead, I set up the expectations of what a rubric is. I created a set of four stations with four boards labeled Not Yet | Beginning | Developing | Deepening. Each board was assigned a different category: Mechanics, Craft, Originality, etc. Round 1: A Good Enough Start For my first class, I put up the words, spent a brief time explaining each of the four stations

The first week of school was met with the usual jitters and excitement. My school had its debut of a gorgeous new renovated space with more glass, nooks, and crannies than I can properly do it justice. It's a flexible space, and the opportunities seem endless. This year, I started my American Wilderness with the Imagine Our Parks with Poems project. The project "...commissioned fifty poets to write poems about a park in each of the fifty states. This project is part of Imagine Your Parks, a grant initiative from the National Endowment for the Arts created in partnership with the National Park Service to support projects that use the arts to engage people with the memorable places and landscapes of the National Park System." My idea was students could canvas a large portion of the United States, seeing various states of wilderness and the state's identity. Using these poems as mentor texts, my hope was students would utilize their Writer's Notebook starting