Hitting the Wall

Yup, I pulled the parachute.

Hard.

After all my grandstanding about the evils of novels, I hit a rough patch with my health and needed to be away from work for a while. I kept designing lessons for while I was away to continue to more hands-on, problem solving approach I have been taking, but it got to be harder and harder the longer I was away and the more uncertain I was if there would be a supply teacher or an on-call teacher in the classroom.

Ha-ha, told you so, I can already hear the comments.

While the hands-on approach is much more engaging for students, and having a thinking classroom produces more expertise, traditional teaching is just so readily understood. Leaving lesson plans for design thinking is very complicated on the receiving end. Having the materials in place, ready to pivot with the classroom and individual needs is hard to leave on paper, as you have to know the students so well.

So, I fell back on old habits, and out came silent reading and novel studies. I mean, I still did it with thinking classroom models in mind and we are working through group novels, rather than a singular class novel. I was able to match students based on interest and appropriate reading levels. And I could still run literature circles where students analyze the book together based on plot, characters, themes, symbols, setting, etc. in discussion with their team members. Nary a chapter question to be seen.

For a time, it was certainly easier. To plan and to direct from afar. But, antibiotics have run through their course and health problems solved, I am back in the classroom and picking up the pieces; I keep hitting that same wall.

How much time have we lost for learning in the classroom because of the novel? At this point it is incalculable. Well chosen and researched short stories would have filled the same role, and I could have individualized the programming even further. We could still work on essay and essay structure, but we could have also had more voices, more stories, more perspectives to include.

Some of my students were just not ready for this format and some of them will never really need to be. For those students going off to post-secondary studies, unless they are specifically taking English Literature, they will not need novel studies or long, complicated analyses.

The question I am struggling with now is how to recover.  We spend so much time a day now with reading, group work, and essay work. We have an excellent, monotonous routine going. My question now is how to recapture the thinking classroom and move them back to being expert learners.