Classroom Snapshot: Learning Skills

I thought it would be interesting for you, our loyal readers, if we occasionally penned a few lines about the kinds of things we're doing in our classes. Given our ESL situation here at APIS (i.e., we have a lot of ESL students), we've needed to be really flexible with our instruction, and we've also had to turn to a few innovative strategies for keeping the native speakers engaged and interested without letting the English language learners get too lost. Though I imagine this will be of the most interest to our other educator friends out there on teh intarwebs (Shana? Errol? Michelle--both of you?), I hope all y'all layfolk will dig this kind of thing, too.

Anyway, down to brass tacks. (I have to get all my goofy idioms out now--I can't use them yet with my kids!)

A majority of our students came to school last week completely unprepared. I know this is a mantra of whiny teachers everywhere, but at APIS it was particularly true. The parents clamored for weeks for a list of supplies the kids needed for class . . . and then completely ignored it. We had kids come to school last week without pens or pencils, let alone notebooks. (We had this problem at Shaw last year, but for a very different reason . . . You can trust me, if they're in this school, they can afford notebooks and pens!) The idea of note-taking seemed completely foreign to them. And don't even ask about speaking in class!

Apparently, note-taking isn't common in Korean schools (earlier post)--including several of the international schools, which are based on the old British model, which gives the students a lot of independence, but as far as guidance and classroom participation goes, it doesn't offer anything more than the typical Korean school. And speaking up in class? Even less so. Culturally, many of these kids came to APIS completely unprepared to function in an American-style classroom.

That's where I come in. We've been working from some pretty specific standards and benchmarks here at APIS, and we have a lot of material for every class . . . but most of my benchmarks are procedural, whereas most of everyone else's benchmarks are declarative. In other words, most folks are teaching whats and whys, while I'm teaching hows. My very vague and very generally-stated goal for the year is to get these kids ready to read well, and to speak and write coherently about books. Another way of putting it is that I have very few standards, but the standards are very broad. (You'll have to pardon me--when I'm tired I lapse into jargon.)

So I've gone ahead and thrown myself on the proverbial grenade and built my entire first unit for each grade level around basic learning skills: listening, speaking, note taking, test taking, and working in groups. I've been specifically trying to tie these lessons to material from other classes, and my lovely wife has been great about practicing these learning skills with her students in social studies class. It's been an uphill struggle, surely, but my hope is that a few days spent on basic skills (and basic expectations! i.e. "Yes, you should take notes during class!") will help the rest of the year--in every classroom--run much more smoothly. So far, results have been pretty good, though only time can tell just how well the lessons took.

And now, I surrender the floor to you, our loyal readers. Can you think of any learning skills other than the ones I mentioned that fairly clueless middle schoolers absolutely need to know? If you're an edumacator, have you ever found yourself needing to throw a unit like this at 8th graders? How normal is this? (I have no idea!) And finally, a question for everyone: Can you think of any writing topics you really, really enjoyed in middle school or high school? My next unit is on the writing process, and I want to assign a short piece, preferably autobiographical, for the kids to work with throughout the unit.

Thanks for your help!