Dan+Kirby

Dan Kirby


 * Kristen Boyette**

1. I am in a fairly diverse classroom of 8th graders in a mostly middle class area. Both of the classes that I teach are about average, however, my CT has informed me that her second period is usually higher performing than her first period. For my ISLA I decided to teach independent and dependent clauses as well as adverb and adjective ones. I thought this would be pretty easy and that after a bit of practice the students would get the hang of it. I was so wrong. We are still trying to work through it and it doesn't seem to be getting any better. We have done worksheet after worksheet, practiced on the Smart Board, and taken quizzes. Plus, I have done mini lessons on each one numerous times but it just doesn't seem to be sinking in. I don't know if it is my teaching, the material, or just that the students don't care about the material. I do, however, feel at least partly responsible.

2. After taking our pretest and having two mini lessons, I gave out worksheets for students to complete. It was two pages each with two sides. One paper had dependent and independent clauses, while the other had adjective and adverb clauses. I walked around the room while they were working on them and helped whoever was having trouble. When I took the papers home to grade, I felt confident that they would have improved from the pretest and preliminary practices. I was saddened and surprised to find that they were terrible. Only a handful of students made A's while the rest failed miserably. Looking at the papers, I saw that most students actually did pretty well on the independent clauses sheet. They could easily find and identify the independent clause within a sentence. But, the dependent clauses sheet was a different story. I was very confused on how they could find the independent but not the dependent. We decided not to grade these sheets and instead I taught the lesson again and did more practice with them. Then, we gave them a quiz. The results were pretty much the same. I am still struggling to decide where to go from here. I will post copies of some papers Monday when I can get a hold of them.

3. Can you think of any ways to help students learn this topic? Does anyone know any ways of doing this that may be more engaging to students than simply doing worksheets? At what point should we start actually giving grades for this work even when the grades are very poor? When should I give my post test? I know that they do not get it and don't think it is fair to test them yet.


 * Kristen Boyette**

**1. What was your original intent or goal for this lesson?** For my ISLA project, I chose to teach my students about clauses. I gave them numerous mini lessons on dependent, independent, adjective, and adverb clauses. We also did a great number of worksheets as practice. Even with all of this, the concepts just did not seem to be sinking in. So, I decided to try something a little different. I found ten lyrics from popular songs that I thought they would know. I made sure each of these had an independent and a dependent clause. I then had students figure out what the song was and who sang it along with identifying the clauses. The intent was to make the concepts more relevant to their lives and get them more excited about learning something that was obviously meaningless to them. **2. Were you successful in reaching that goal? How?** After this lesson, I administered my post test. I was a little worried that the results would be similar to those on all of the worksheets that we had been doing. To my surprise, most students did very well.

**3. What specifically went well with your lesson?** The students were really excited when I introduced this lesson. They immediately got to work and were working feverishly to figure out each lyric. The students all wanted to call out the right answers at the end and seemed to really be understanding more than they had before.

**4. What did not go well with your lesson? Why?** I did have to redirect them a few times to make sure that they were paying attention to the clauses, not just the songs. It also got pretty loud at times but I was able to reign them in fairly easily each time.

**5. What adjustments will you make or did you make during the course of your day to replicate the lesson?** If I were to teach this lesson again, I think I would make the directions and expectations more clear from the very beginning. This way, I hopefully would not have to be redirecting them as much.

**6. How does this lesson find its way into your unit and how well does this lesson scaffold and/or integrate into the next lesson?** This lesson was designed for teaching clauses which helps student see how to create complex and compound/complex sentences. This will help them take their writing to a higher level.

I think the principle I was thinking of the most when I made this lesson was that of the “hook” in the Burke book. I wanted to create something fun and interesting that would hook them into learning something they previously did not care about.
 * 7. What theoretical principle and/or project did you tie to this lesson from your coursework? **

**8. Will you use this lesson again? Why or why not?** I will definitely be using this lesson again. I think it worked really well and could also be used for other grammar/ writing topics. I especially think this would be a good way to teach things like simile, metaphor, imagery, etc.