As a Student Success Teacher, I am afforded a lot of opportunities to take in some really excellent Professional Development (PD). One of the visits that really stood out for me was being in a classroom and seeing the JETS approach to delivering Writing and Reading in high school English classes.
I was able to visit both JETS oriented classrooms created by the co-founders Rachel Cooke of Silverthorn CI and Sean Henderson of Runnymede CI.
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| Sean Henderson |
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| Rachel Cooke (holding plaque) |
Rather than being too wordy, I will add a short selection of photos and briefly explain why I think this approach to teaching English/Language is pretty cool and something I will use, once I return to having my own classroom.
Photo 1:
Typically, students get overly enthusiastic about highlighting a text and sometimes do it without fulling understanding what is on the page. Some of the approaches in the JETS classroom have the students ask questions, make comments, or observations about the paragraphs, words, or sentences they may be reading and recording them as short annotations in the margins. Yes, a highlighter can be used but this approach to reading has the students being more engaged with the words on the page.
Photo 2
I am pretty certain this photo comes from the New York Times exercise for developing inferencing skills. I used to have the students record observations and tap into their own experiences to explain what might be happening. The JETs approach has the students annotate on the photo, as you can see in this example.
Although I did not take the photo of the next stage of this exercise, a student went to the board to write out the inferences they made. It was a deliberate combination of Reading and Writing for this learning opportunity.
Photo 3
One of the strategies we often tell students to do is visualize, while they read, to help deepen their comprehension. On this handout, the students are actually tasked with sketching the visualization.
Photo 3
This appears to be an assessment of some of the Reading Strategies that Sean used in his JETs class at Runnymede.
I did have some photos from Rachel Cooke's class but I am not sure where I stored them. I do have one handout which was a form of an assessment based on work they have done on Graphic Novels.
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| In the JETs program, Graphic Novels are seen as excellent starting points for introducing students to Reading strategies in high school. |
Enjoy the balance of your weekend and start to the next work week.
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