My Required Blog (Can You Tell?) for EDCI 602, Pt. 1

Basically, my co-teacher (for Algebra I) and I chose our objectives by first coming up with a list of topics (i.e. objectives, but less formally) we felt were most important to cover during the summer school session. Early on, we made our initial list of lesson topics mostly from our experience as Algebra II teachers over this past year, then we compared that list both to the state Algebra I frameworks, a sample exam, and the list of lessons taught for this course in last year’s summer school. We had to do quite a bit of paring down, since our summer school this year is only three weeks, whereas last year we had four weeks. Looking at all these resources, we were forced to make choices, because it is simply not possible to cover the entire exam / framework in just 14 school days of four periods each. We ultimately relied on our experience as teachers to decide how to make these prioritizing decisions, emphasizing areas we feel are within our greatest ability to make the greatest impact, topics such as graphing and general skill with word problems, etc. For instance, because of the ubiquity of student errors when dealing with fractions, negative signs, and so on, we felt it was worthwhile to start off with several lessons of review of these basic (pre-algebra) skills.

From our list of lesson topics, we then assigned each topic to a class period. We combined some topics in the interest of time, and we expanded other topics which, from experience, we thought may require more time investment. We worked this out until we had filled all our 56 times slots. Then on the day before summer school was to begin, we learned that several periods which we thought were going to be taken up by testing were, in fact, not, so we simply decided to put our four newfound spare periods at the end of our schedule, with the objectives to be determined as we feel the need arise.

Because of our rotating teaching schedule, our orders to adhere strictly to the “master” schedule for observation purposes, and the practical concern that teachers should know what and when they are teaching well beforehand, the entire summer school course is mostly planned out pretty rigidly at this point already. However, we have left at least one “review” session before each of our four unit tests, as well as the four “spare” periods (from the non-happening testing, mentioned above), which give us the opportunity to spend more time on problem areas that come up along the way.