In a recent post I shared a guest post by a visitor writing about the excellent use of the block schedule format by teachers at St. Gregory. In that same vein I want to share my observations of a terrific 75 minute period I enjoyed last week in the classroom of Corinne Bancroft as she taught 6th grade English.
Sadly, this is all too rare an event, my spending an entire period in a single classroom, but I give credit to Ms. Bancroft for her persistence and warm enthusiasm in encouraging me to visit her classroom.
The 75 minute period was divided into three parts:
- students worked in groups on a project for 35 minutes;
- Ms. Bancroft facilitated a group book discussion for about 20 minutes;
- and students worked individually on their laptops on an essay they were writing for the class while Ms. Bancroft individually conferenced with them for 20 minutes.
Class began with the direction to work in groups on their major end-of-year project, the Gathering Blue project based on the book of the same name. Ms. Bancroft developed this herself, derived from her classroom discussion of reading this YA novel (for more information you can follow the link or see at bottom, where I have pasted it into the post.) (more…)
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