If you have read previous posts from me, you understand how
successful our ELA teacher has been with her Social Justice projects. You can
look back at my previous posts here. Last year this project took place at
the end of third quarter and into 4th quarter. This year we started the project
early. We began by implementing our discussion groups again when we came back
from Christmas break. We started off well and had some great conversations in
our first couple of rounds with students.
One of our greatest challenges this year was creating
engaging center activities for such a large class. This year’s group consisted
of class sizes ranging from 25-30. Last year’s class was much smaller, and as
such the group as a whole was easier to get focused on the tasks at hand and to
create opportunities for discussion and peer critiques.
We made it through a couple rounds of activities and book
clubs. We even watched our parallel movies that go along with the social
justice topics of choice. The students were active in the discussions and were
beginning to explore options relating to their book trailers as well as their
own PSA projects when Coronavirus held the project hostage. We were unable to
continue forward with much of the digital productions we had lined up for
students which leaves a huge void in what would have been an amazing capstone
project. Ms. Fry, however, has done an amazing job connecting with students
digitally and I know she has encouraged them to think about the issue even
though the entire experience has been placed just out of their reach.
More so, I am excited that we have had so much success over
the last two years. This year, other teachers have found value in what Ms. Fry
has put together and have begun the steps to implement similar structures as
well. In 8th grade, Ms. Hinton had done a tremendous job in engaging her
students in stories of heroism rather than social justice. Students began to
explore what it means to be a hero, created a small scale biography project,
and we're using the skills obtained to start to explore students making
mini-documentaries about local history and local heroes. Unfortunately, due to
the resources available to students, this project as well will have to be
reserved for next year’s students.
The project also made its way into our special education
department as well, in which the students there also began working towards a
goal for both social justice as well as heroism. In preparation, we spent time
expanding our levels for these students. Also, since the class sizes are much
smaller, we also took the time to collect books on like topics so that we could
have engaging book discussions in class from different perspectives but also
gave students the freedom within those topics to choose books of interest. We
were off to a great start prior to being sidelined.
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