Introduction to Curriculum & Best Practices Blog

So this will be my place to share curriculum, best practices and inspirations. On the first day of all my classes, I ask students to fill out a student survey so that I can get to know a little about them. This helps me begin to know my students as individuals, become aware of their resources at home, find out if they divide their time between work and school, and to understand a bit about how they learn. I have used this to develop curriculum around their interests and skill sets. They only fill out what they are comfortable telling me.

Here is the part of my syllabus that lays out a sample unit for any one of my classes. My units are 3-4 weeks long for all my classes. This also shows the materials students need. After trying a few methods, I have decided to use an interactive notebook in the future. So each student must have a composition style notebook where they will keep all written and visual work. Hand-outs will be pasted into the notebook. I like this way of organizing student work so that we may reflect on previous work students have done throughout the year or semester. I will do notebook checks at least once per unit. I will check notebooks randomly so that students maintain complete and organized notebooks at all times.

This is the form we used for Binder/Notebook Check for AVID. For my Social Studies Notebook Checks I will modify this to be class specific.