The 2020-2021 school year is already proving to be unprecedented thanks to the COVID-19 global pandemic. With updates and revisions happening each day at multiple levels of the school community, I’ve been trying to not get overwhelmed.
Kidding aside, I’ve been trying to learn as much as I can and implement these ideas into my practice as an educator.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve attended and participated in a few online professional development offerings, including National Writing Project CoLabs with Mike Caufield and Deanna Mascle, Chippewa River Writing Project’s “Preparing for Remote Learning – 2020-2021“, and the Michigan Council of Teachers of English Book Talk about Letting Go of Literary Whiteness.
Here are a few of the big curriculum decisions I’ve made for my practice for the 2020-2021 school year:
- Digital Writers Notebooks
- No COVID-19-related AoWs until October, limited after that
- Adding Critical Race Theory to Literary Theory Analysis
- Reformatting AoWs in Google Docs rather than PDFs
- Streamlining AoW assignments
- Overhauling Reading Bingo unit to incorporate more texts
- Incorporating effective hyperdocs
- Meaningful synchronous learning with Break Out rooms
Soak up the last few moments of summer, if you’re still on vacation. I know I am.