Yesterday, we had our final high school literacy coordinators' meeting. Due to last minute staff meetings etc. some people had to cancel but we still had a good number of high school teachers (and one administrator) out at Thompson for this meeting. Many thanks to Celia Brownrigg who presented on Graphic Novels. I think we all learned lots. Also Pam Hansen, our high school literacy mentor, led us through an interesting discussion inspired by an article on how different subject area teachers read different disciplines by Cynthia and Tim Shanahan in The Harvard Educational Review. She was aided in this by our new other high school mentor, Jacob Martens, who is a high school science teacher. Due to the loss of my position we decided one way we could cope was to have another mentor take on high school so it is exciting to have someone with a content area background!
As promised here are a couple of great links I discovered yesterday. One is great ning with all sorts of topics of interest for English teachers thanks to NCTE. You can discuss a poem a week, join a Readicide book club etc. It's great. Another useful site is Classroom 2.0 where you can really become tech savvy and there are sorts of teacher friendly resources.
For those of you who would like to access Celia's powerpoint on Comic Novels you can just go to my wiki where I have posted it and other related materials to her presentation. I also have a link to the Shanahan and Shanahan article.
My four years attempting to "understand high school again" have been fascinating. My grand finale will be a high school literacy summer institute where I will attempt to boil everything I have learned down to a day and a half-hmmm...
P.S. I just found a unit on Persepolis in Read Write lesson plans for you.
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