I have just confirmed my schedule for next year (though, of course, it’s not written in stone until the school year begins).
I’ll once again be teaching a combined class of Beginning and Intermediate English Language Learners. As usual, it will be one period of English and another period of Geography.
Of course, I’ll be teaching another year of the International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge class. I’ve usually had a number of non-IB Diploma candidates in the class but, this year, I’ve worked even harder to recruit students who might not typically take such an advanced class, so I’ll have even more next year. The mix benefits everyone.
And I’ll be teaching English to two classes of ninth-graders.
Originally, I was going to teach a higher-grade level, my colleague Katie Hull was going to teach ninth-grade, and we were going to do an exciting project of having the older students teach the younger ones many of the life skills lessons found in my books (see The Best Resources On The Value & Practice Of Having Older Students Mentoring Younger Ones).
We’re still doing the project, but the roles have been reversed — now Katie will be teaching the older students, while I’ll be teaching the younger ones. I anticipate writing a lot about our experiment later in 2013 and early 2014.
I’ll be publishing a post soon about some summer writing projects I’ve got up my sleeve but, for now, I’m focusing on finishing the school year and dealing with the task of moving rooms — both Katie and I are moving to another Small Learning Community (see The Best Resources For Learning About Small Learning Communities) that will be emphasizing support to our English Language Learners.
Plus, our annual 100 student trip to San Francisco is coming up in a couple of weeks. May God help us all — especially us chaperones 🙂 !
Larry, on a semi-related note to your post about the coming year’s schedule, the Rancho Cordova school I teach at will begin the IB MYP program next year. I will be teaching 3 6th-8th grade Read 180 classes. Any hints on how to make the IB model work with EL and students with IEPs?
Also, we will not be a school-within-a-school program (IB is moving away from this model at the MYP) level. Any suggestions on how to engage all students with limited resources?
Thanks!
Theory of Knowledge is the only IB class I teach, and that lends itself perfectly for inclusion of all sorts of non-traditional IB students. I’m not familiar with the non-high school IB curriculum, and I’m barely familiar with the other IB classes at our school. From what I can tell, it would be very challenging to integrate your students into those kinds of courses.
Is there a TOK-like IB class for middle school students?
Larry, I envy your knowing what you will teach next year. In my 13 years teaching in US public school, budget issues and other systematic upheavals have more often than not given me less than a week to plan for the coming year.
Mrlane, because of their international nature, IB and MYP programmes do have a useful guide for students learning in a language other than mother tongue, as our ELLs are doing. (Language learners’ issues are quite different from IEP students, so not implying it will help with that.) Here is the pdf:
http://www.asd.edu.qa/uploaded/about/PDF_files/Lang_other_than_mother_tongue.pdf