The Year as a Story Arc

I once attended Robert McKee’s Story Seminar (as part of professional development no less), and one of the big takeaways I got from that is how beneficial it is to work out an outline of the big picture before writing individual scenes. To me, a year in teaching is like a story arc, a three-trimester play with a beginning, middle, and end.

Thinking this way about my teaching has helped me make my classroom experience more cohesive and purposeful. No matter what strange or unexpected things my characters do, I know it’s all going to make sense in an overarching narrative. I like to think it also helps students feel like I’m not just making things up as I go along.

I can take the metaphor further. Characters should end up, in the end, different than they were in the beginning. Not only should they have gone on an adventure, maybe picked up some skills along the way, but they should have a renewed sense of themselves growing into maturity. This is only achieved by confronting them with ever-challenging crises. Things only get interesting if the stakes are high and the risks are real. Setbacks may happen, but fate should intervene. I am, after all, going for a comedy and not a tragedy.

The main plot of the year is the students’ engagement with the texts we read. It’s their sinking ever deeper into the transformative power of words, both in others and in their own. It’s entering the conversation started by Scripture and Homer and Shakespeare and countless other readers and writers and poets.

There are subplots in vocabulary, grammar, and technology. And like all good subplots, they reveal the true theme of the year: confidence and maturity in language. Comfort with expression, articulation in communication. Crystallizing for a moment life’s meaning as you have grappled with it so far.

And the climax? The climax of the year, for me, is always Shakespeare. The ultimate unit in Shakespeare always, I believe, tests the furthest and reaps the most.

Finally, one more lesson from this extended analogy: teaching is a daily discipline of creativity. In the end, after you’ve outlined and sketched and planned your heart out, you’ve got to show up every day and make it happen.

Here’s the entire “Plan the Year” series:

1. Figure out the big rocks first
2. Building a Train of Thought
3. Writings on the Wall
4. Week by Week

Dealing with the Block Schedule

My middle school uses a block schedule, which for us means a bi-weekly schedule (there’s a “blue” week and a “yellow” week) in which most classes last for 40 minutes but once a week last for a full hour and once every other week doesn’t meet at all (it gets “dropped”).

It’s difficult to keep in mind which classes are dropped or extended when, so I make a bi-weekly planning template that looks like this:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I make multiple copies of this template and plan a mid-trimester (a little over a month) at a time. Upon penciling in the reading schedule, I quickly found that I had to adjust the amount of time it might take to read a book once I had to work around drop blocks.

Make a General Week-to-Week Strategy

I also realized that I still wasn’t able to fill in every single available space in my template with activities. Nor would I want to; I want to give myself a comfortable level of flexibility.

Instead, I devised a week-to-week strategy. About 20 pages of reading a night, and then a period of review, and then a test or writing assignment. Overlapping, or in addition, to that period of review is a week devoted to a creative project. Present a formal lecture on matters of reading or writing once a week. Dedicate one class a week to vocabulary or grammar. A vocabulary or grammar quiz once every other week. Devote other regular 40 minute blocks to more informal discussion sessions on the reading.

And I came up with a twist for my hour-block classes. In an effort to incorporate more writing and technology into my classes, I’ve decided to come up with a scheme where two or three students every week from each of my classes are given a five-paragraph essay assignment to write. They turn in their essays to me ahead of time so that I can make copies for the rest of their class. During the hour-long class session, we spend part of the time reading these essays silently, and then recording a podcast discussion with the authors about what they wrote.

I don’t always follow this plan, but after I made my strategy I’ve never felt like I don’t have enough to do. And I feel at ease about the balance of objectives I’m trying to pursue.

Meet with Others and Change Your Plans

One of the wonderful things about my school environment is how much collaboration goes on. I meet with the other English teachers of the grades I teach once a week, sometimes to check in on each other’s progress, and sometimes to aggressively plan some activities and deadlines.

The best way that I’ve found to have a strong influence on these collaborations is to come prepared. Those who haven’t made their mind tend to give sway to those that already have. (This has been especially helpful as I have made my case for doing books in a certain order). Having said that, I’m a pretty accommodating guy, and I feel it’s important not to constantly dominate the decisions.

Usually things don’t end up conflicting much with what I’ve already planned. Occasionally, though, I’ve found I had to radically rethink my timeline for things as other teachers move through their units much quicker or slower than you had anticipated. This has not necessarily been a bad thing; it’s forced me to step back and reconsider what areas I’ve not paid enough attention to or could cut out without disrupting the flow of the year.

Much of teaching, after all, is about improvisation. You can set some chords down and get a groove going, but you ultimately have to play it by ear.

Next: Yearly Planning as a Story Arc

So we ended up the last post with this:

A rough sequence of ideas and activities for each of my classes for the entire year.

I then tried typing out a calendar in iCal, but once again, a simpler, less techy, more kinesthetically satisfying method won out in the end:

The desk calendar. Nine months of school. I started by consulting my school web site and internal calendars to determine some of the major events of the year:

• start of school
• holiday breaks
• faculty days (no school for students)
• back-to-school night and parent visiting day
• things like Freedom from Chemical Dependency week where the academic schedule is significantly adjusted
• winter break and spring break
• final exams
• end of school

After writing all that in, I took out colored pads of small post-it notes: blue for 7th grade, yellow for 8th grade. I taped up the large calendars to one of my chalkboards and started posting up the reading schedule assignments for each of the book units of the year in the sequence I had determined before:

I then tacked up my index card ideas in the weekend spots alongside each week (Sunday for 7th graders, Saturday for 8th graders):

…and ended up with a pretty good visual overview of the year. I could see for myself which units I had a lot to work with, and which ones I had a scarcity of ideas for. I could see where I needed to invest more work to make later projects succeed. I could see where there were more opportunities in terms of scheduling and free time. I could see where I was integrating the class themes and where there were threads of skill development. I could get a sense of the ebb and flow of energy of the year.

I actually stood in front of the thing for a good while, just taking it in. It was a bit like doing a chi sao exercise, adjusting to the feel of the year. It was a lot of work, but I ended up feeling more confident, less anxious, better attuned to the purpose and direction of my teaching.

But I wasn’t done yet…

One more thing…

In the last post I described how I relied upon a “file it and forget it” system where I could collect all the ideas and resources I created or came across for each of my book units. I did forget to mention one thing about my system: I also have several folder categories for general items that were about broad curricular concerns (“teaching writing,” “classroom management,” “vocabulary”) that weren’t specific to literature units.

Index cards?!

Summertime is when I take these folders out and finally sift through them and organize the material I’ve accumulated. Not everything that I’ve made a note of will be valuable for the upcoming school year; I have to keep in mind the constraints of schedule, ability, and buy-in from the administration or colleagues. I have to edit some of my whims and blue-sky thinking to a scale and scope that’s reasonable.

Anything that makes the cut gets jotted down on an index card. This is atypical of my normal modus operandi: I like to do as much as I can on my computer. And believe me, I tried. But I ended up resorting to shuffling through index cards because of reasons which should become apparent in a moment.

I used a color-coded system because there’s several parallel objectives I have to meet in the course of a school year: reading, writing, vocabulary, grammar. I also designated an “other” category for things like creative projects, presentations, technology, and small group work.

These color-coded index cards ended up in three stacks. One stack of ideas for my 7th grade classes, another for the 8th grade, and a third stack of ideas that applied to both.

Figuring out the sequence

And now the hard part: determining the sequence of units. One of the things that I really respect about my colleagues is how restless they are with the curriculum. Every year we change the lineup in significant ways; we read new books, we take on different projects, we change the order of our units. We don’t upend everything, though, and I can rely upon some of the previous year’s sequence as a guide. But it’s tough to make decisions about sequence without my colleagues around to collaborate and support those decisions.

It’s worth now to make a tangential note about collaborating with colleagues: being the most prepared generally means that you can set the agenda. Thinking ahead of time about an issue such as the sequence of units and the rationale behind a decision goes a long way in bringing along co-workers harmoniously. Having said that, I always have to keep in mind that the best-laid plans yadda yadda yadda…

Besides my colleagues’ considerations, I have to let a whole host of factors influence which books should be studied in what order:

• The year’s theme and essential questions. Each grade has a theme which gets tweaked every year. I make it a point to really emphasize the theme, since I believe it gives the curriculum more cohesion and purpose. I try, then, to consider how each book we study addresses the theme at different levels of relevance and sophistication.
• Yearly schedule. I have to consider major holidays and breaks and the general ebb and flow of energy over the course of the year. Some units are just better tackled right before winter break. I have to also keep in mind that each mid-trimester allows for about one or one-and-a-half units. I like to finish a unit just before mid-trimester to make sure I have a full academic profile for each student that I can reference when writing report card comments.
• Culminating projects. I have a backward design mentality; I like to determine final objectives up front and then work backwards to determine what I have to teach to get those objectives met. This generally takes the shape of project assignments that get bigger and badder as the year progresses. If I know I want students to be able to do an impressive job with X at the end of the year, I want to think about what they would need to learn and practice earlier on in order to do so.

Use the Force

In the end it’s a matter of getting the right feel for things. I do a lot of “head” consideration initially, but then I gradually give over to a “gut” decision. This is the result:

I hope you can see why I ended up using index cards. It’s more easy and kinesthetically satisfying to manipulate them, especially when you have multiple objectives in multiple classes to keep an eye on. I end up with a rough sequence of discrete, concrete ideas that I want to tackle over the course of the year, balancing out the distribution of activities in vocabulary, grammar, reading, writing, and other stuff. Ultimately, I should feel like there’s a satisfying shape and progression to my curriculum.

This is only a rough draft, though, and I next to take my index card ideas and tack them onto a calendar…

After procrastinating gloriously all summer long, I finally hunkered down at the beginning of August to start making some concrete plans for the school year ahead. It turned out to be a long, involved process that may be worth repeating and tweaking in the future. (I’d love some feedback). Here’s what I did (blog post series!):

Figure out the big rocks first

The metaphor here is that when building, you want to figure out what the materials and resources are that you have available to you, especially the biggest building blocks that you’re going to have to use. My English class is basically built around units of books, and so I begin by defining the basic shape and scope of each of those individual literature units.

What does this mean? Well, I like to organize all my information in DevonThink, which I highly recommend, but one can easily adapt another information repository using a piece of software, or simply file folders — physical or virtual. Prior to digitizing everything on my Mac, I simply had bulging manila folders in a file cabinet. In fact, I haven’t thrown those away yet.

I make a folder for each literature unit that I’ve done, or will do, or may possibly do in the future. Within that folder I include a generic reading schedule for that book, figuring that I generally assign about 20 pages of reading a night. I’ll then do several initial internet searches to see what is out there in terms of resources for the book: author web sites, lesson plans, essays, Sparknotes, whatever. Anything I find useful I clip and add to the folder.

Over the course of time, I’ll add worksheets, activities, projects that I’ve tried out as well as the occasional idea that I haven’t yet tried out. Samples of student work and personal pedagogical reflections sometimes also makes it into the folders. Anything that shows up in my feed or random web grazings that pop out as relevant gets thrown in there. In not too long a time, these little folders will start bulging with a potpourri of possibilities.

The key, I’ve found, is to make it easy to keep this habit of filing relevant information. I resist the temptation to organize the mishmash of stuff beyond the basic categories of book units because I know my tendency to do so obsessively one moment and not sustain that energy to do so the next. Instead, I try to work that tendency to my advantage by making it dead simple to “file it and forget it” most of the time, and then use a manic moment in the summer to sift through the stockpiles. Which is what I’ll cover next…