Jonathan Swift Teacher Prep Work (Due: Monday, March 9, 2009)

This week I asked you to take on the roll of a teacher to plan a class discussion on the excerpt from Swift's Gulliver' Travels, Part 1: A Voyage to Lilliput (pp. 653-659 in your textbook).

As you read the Swift passage independently, I asked you to perform the following steps as though you were working in preparation to teach this section of the text to a class of students:

1) Generate at least four questions about the selection that you have and that you anticipate other readers might have as they examine this text

2) Point to moments in the selection that you have identified as significant and that you would present to a class for discussion

3) Make predictions about what you think students might find difficult as they read this text and make suggestions for possible ways to help clarify these difficulties
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For this week's blog, I'd like you to complete the following:

a) Post a version of the questions you asked, the excerpts you chose (with an explanation of why you selected these), and predictions that you made when you completed your individual prep work for teaching. (You might reference the online textbook at go.hrw.com if you want to quote sections of the text.)

b) Write a short reflective journal entry about the small teacher group work that you started this week. (What was the good, the bad, the ugly about this work? What would you change? What did you learn?)

c) On Monday, you will have more time to work with these small teacher groups. Will you approach this work differently in any way during that planning period? Has your group developed a vision for a way to teach this excerpt? If not, how will you work to do so?