Literary Lunatics and other endeavors

Everyone gets the occasional spark of inspiration. It nags at us until we decide become a person of action, and make it happen. My spark is usually a social studies spark. Being that social studies was my first love, and first credential I tend to favor it over ELA. That's right, it's not very common core of me to admit, but ELA is redheaded stepchild to my US history.  I struggle teaching ELA. I love reading, I love teaching literature units. I just do not love the endless parade of essays. Being that my students this year are creative, and generally willing to think outside the box I have been trying to present new ELA units featuring an array for assessment... Most of which are not the dreaded 5 -10 paragraph essay. (Students rejoice!)


Special thanks to donorschoose, this idea wouldn't have taken flight without their support. 

The Plan: Small reading groups. 3 dystopian novels (the kids are hooked after reading The Giver) Feed (M.T. Anderson), The Maze Runner (James Dashner),  Animal Farm (George Orwell).  I plan to have 6 total groups, meaning that there will be two groups reading the same novel. I want to do this to allow the kiddos to bounce ideas off of each other.

How?: I plan to have the students take one "reading roles". There will be 6 roles for each group of 6 students. I will have a  grammar/vocab facilitator, discussion facilitator, Theme tracker/connector, clarifier, questioner, summarizer, and predictor. These roles will be cycled each week, so each student has the opportunity to hold each reading role. Realistically these roles will cycle through at least twice based on the length of the novels that we are going to be reading. I'm big into the kiddos discussing. The less that I talk, the better. I find that my students are accidentally quite profound often when given the opportunity to think through their ideas and ask each other questions. The students will have socractic/fish bowl opportunities often throughout this unit.
The hypothesis is that this set up will allow them to be accountable for their learning while allowing them the openness they desire to make their own interpretations. (We shall see).

Assessment: Ready for the crazy? My class is a "paperless" class. The majority of all the work done is completed on the district's googledoc set up. Our district just started using hapara, which makes tracking students' google docs easier for teachers (amen!).
The Kiddos will be using their google accounts to complete each reading role they are assigned (one of the 6). This is the formative piece that I will be tracking and checking up on through out our unit. The big deal assessment will be the group google doc presentation featuring a five minute student created video that will be embedded in their google presentation. Our school is STEM themed, so I feel like this shouldn't be as huge a deal as it is. I haven't attempted this type of video based assessment with my students yet. I am pumped to begin!
I have a rubric, and I am going to do my best to get my hand on video cameras. Apparently, somewhere on campus we have flip cams (remember those?)... The students and parents have voiced a willingness to have the kids use their iphones to record the videos.  There are a few really great video editing sites that I will introduce to the kids. Of course, imovie is simple, but there are a few other options that are even more user friendly.  I will talk more about those as we progress through this unit. I plan to allow the kiddos who are super shy to use an audio recording site that will accomplish the same objective as the video. The only thing with the audio option is that the students will need to put together a slide show or animated short to enhance their audio file.

As you can see, I'm already trying to figure out how to make this more creative. I'm sure that my group of 8th graders will be happy to oblige and contribute their own ideas. But right now, this is what their lunatic teacher has come up with. My hope is that while this may bring me to brink of crazy, it will be a great opportunity for my students to learn and share their learning in a new way. 
More to come...