What I Plan to Learn This Summer

There's a video I've watched many times this week: the one my daughter posted on Instagram of my youngest grandchild's first steps. Other highlights? Finishing all the required spring term school stuff: turning in grades, documenting unit plans, and writing up my professional development plan. I also read the leveled English edition of Cry, the Beloved Country that I'll be teaching in my high school EFL class in the fall.

At the beginning of the summer, I usually write a post on my planned summer professional reading (here's 2019 and 2018). But since I have a shorter summer than usual, and since I'm teaching new courses which will require more planning than in past summers, and since I'm wanting to explore a number of websites with resources because who knows when we'll have to go to distance learning again, and since with the pandemic-disrupted mail service from the US to Japan making ordering books a risky proposition...I don't have a stack of new books this year. But I do have that professional development proposal I just wrote up, so I'll share that here instead:

Goals:

• Help students increase their ability to read, write, think, listen, and speak in English.
• Grow in my ability to use technology to increase student learning, both to differentiate and to prepare for the possibility of online learning being necessitated again by the pandemic.
• Increase my toolbox of EFL teaching strategies to increase student engagement and learning.

Objectives:

• Plan grammar and mechanics teaching in context in English 6/7.
• Investigate new tech tools and resources and integrate 1-3 into courses.
• Find more resources for increasing student engagement and learning in EFL. 

Activities:

• Re-ead Mechanically Inclined by Jeff Anderson, and incorporate its ideas for teaching grammar and usage in the context of writing into English 6/7 curriculum, documented against the standards/benchmarks, in unit plans developed for the course. (I wrote about this goal last week.)
• Read Teacher’s Guide to Tech 2020 by Jennifer Gonazles, investigate tools/resources found there, and integrate 1-3 into courses.
• Follow conversations on the Facebook group ESL Teachers K-12 and explore resources recommended there, such websites of Larry Ferlazzo and Carol Salva, and incorporate 1-3 new strategies/resources into unit guides for my EFL courses.
• Stay current with best practices in ELA and education by reading, such as membership publications from National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and ASCD.
• Reflect on my own learning and implementation by writing a weekly blog post.

In addition, I continue to learn about the racial conflict in the US, reading So You Want to Talk about Race by Ijeoma Oluo and American's Original Sin by Jim Wallis.

I really have learned a lot this week and plan to learn more. But after spending several hours exploring resources on a couple of websites, when I sat down to write this blog, I stared at a blank screen for an hour. That's my cue that the best practice I need right now is to give myself a little summer vacation and go watch that video of my granddaughter walking again. 

Wishing all of us plenty of rest and learning this summer!