Today is a district PD day. I specify "district" in that I get the opportunity to mix and match with other teachers who I only normally get to chat with during these events. Like some others, I struggle each morning there's a PD day (professional development). Here's another day I lose teaching my students, marking my papers, etc. However each time I go I am blown away with the abilities of my fellow teachers, or even my own abilities. I have tools that I can share, or ideas on collaborations that I can now find a partner for. It's brilliant, and of course the exact reason why we have all of these opportunities, right? Just today I was able to meet up with another drama teacher and talk about student created plays, and will even be getting copies of scripts of his. I was with a group of English teachers, thematically organizing novels to create reading groups and lists of new and old books to increase interest and even allow for cross-curricular opportunities. For those non English teachers out there, this is a very fricken cool thing. Books already pre-approved by both teachers and students. That's Christmas for me. Finally I was part of a group where someone talked about a Poetry Smackdown (think March Madness, but with poetry). This is a great way to introduce poetry and create a competitive process in which students utilize a criteria, of their making, to eliminate poems that they don't like, and continually analyze poetry they do like #winning (does this still exist?). With that in mind I'm gonna link a youtube video for some spoken word poetry that we talked about and that I really enjoyed. Hope you do too.
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Keith Miller"I'm sure you've read something about me already, now for you to do some writing" Archives
February 2020
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