Monthly Archives: February 2012

education (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

This is my first year teaching only 9th graders all year, as in previous years, I’ve been teaching juniors or seniors during the same year as well. Since I’m also on the 9th grade advisory team, this means that I’ve been immersed in this particular freshman class, which luckily happens to be a really wonderful group of girls. Next year, I’ll have a senior course in addition to my freshmen, but this year has been really interesting to me in terms of teaching one prep for multiple sections, and what drawbacks and benefits there are.

As often happens, ProfHacker has come up with a practical pedagogical article that, while written by/for the professoriate, is thought-provoking for high school teachers. Billie Hara writes about teaching multiple sections of a literature survey class and how the different demographics and dynamics of the sections pose some challenges. One of her favorite methods is Think-Pair-Share, which is one of my favorites as well. It’s useful for when you have a group of students who don’t want to talk much, or to encourage reflection in a class where everyone shouts out, or when you have one student who dominates the class discourse. I also like to have students write down their thoughts first and then share, which can serve all of the same purposes, but is also encouraging informal writing, which can often make students more at ease with formal writing when done repeatedly.

Another dilemma she mentions is what to do with pacing when you have one class that is capable of moving faster than the other sections, but for various reasons, you can’t really let them. It would make class planning a lot harder if you have three sections all at different places in a novel, and at the high school level, I don’t want the girls telling each other what happens next or being able to prompt each other with “right” answers for discussions or assessments. The other difficulty is that since my classes are all “regular,” not designated honors classes, I wouldn’t want one section (or their parents) to start wondering why another group was chapters ahead of them, and then believing that there was some kind of invisible tracking going on. I address this most often by differentiating discussion among my sections, making sure that each class hits the key points, but offering more scaffolding to one group while encouraging the next group to push even deeper into analytical thinking.

All in all, I’ve enjoyed my all-9s year so far, as much as I’m looking forward to developing my senior elective on Latin American literature too. I talked on Parents Night this year about how much I love teaching ninth graders, and while I saw some disbelief on some parents’ faces, it’s completely true. I enjoy teaching the kind of compositional and comprehension skills that are ninth-grade appropriate, I get to teach some really great literature, but also, ninth graders are just so much fun. They are still closer to children than young adults, for the most part, so while they aren’t always the most organized group, they are enthusiastic and curious in a way that older students are sometimes careful to hide. The analogy that springs to my mind most often is puppies: they’re tricky to train and they don’t always go where they are supposed to, but they are curious and lovable, excited and affectionate, and it’s thoroughly fun to spend your day with them.

Related articles

• Ninth grader becomes a compost evangelist (thegazette.com)