To answer your question about planning curriculum...that was mysterious to me when I first started too. I only had a few lessons during the English Methods class that addressed planning, and I was still confused about planning when I started teaching. But now, I would say I'm an expert. I used to teach Backward Planning at our district to new teachers in BTSA (Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment). Mrs. McKinley also used to teach Backward Planning. She taught me, then I was tagged to take that job over when she moved on.
Teachers start by looking at their year and how many teaching days there are -- public schools have somewhere around 180 teaching days, or forty weeks. I used to plan in 10-week chunks. That's what I worked with during my career. Your situation may be different, but the principle is the same.
So start with some kind of calendar that shows the whole year. You might work with a year-round schedule, or the traditional 10-month schedule; mark the days that both you and the kids are off...holidays, breaks, things like that. You will likely have days that are "student-free" days, where you come in to work but the kids have the days off. These are professional development days; you'll continue to be trained throughout your teaching career. Teachers are in class a few days every year, sometimes in the summer, sometimes during the school year, sometimes after school, and sometimes -- all three.
Anyway, next mark where the quarters end, and when progress reports and report cards are due. The semester report cards go on the transcripts in high school; quarter grades do not go on the transcripts. This will be important to your planning early in the year, and we can discuss this later.
Next, pencil in testing days. Your district will produce some kind of assessment calendar, which will include the big state test and several district tests. Standardized tests are a big part of life for all ELA and math teachers, and science teachers. In addition to state testing, your district will want to collect data on how the kids in your district, in your school, in your classroom, are doing, year-by-year.
And that's how I would talk about testing to kids: we're collecting data to see how you and your peers are doing. It doesn't go into the gradebook. It doesn't impact your grade in any way. We just want to see how you're doing, so please just do your best and then forget about it. I would do everything I could to de-escalate any pressure kids would experience during testing.
Unfortunately, our district would require a "practice" standardized test to see how the kids would do if they had to take the state test today; this process took 3-4 days, and once we got the results, teachers would meet by department and by grade level to discuss where the kids were struggling, and then design instruction moving forward to address the weak spots. This is a rich area for teacher cooperation and collaboration. If you are an ambitious teacher and have a good working buddy who thinks and works like you do, the conversations between you about how your students are doing will really accelerate your growth as a teacher. If you don't have a good working buddy, this "practice test" process will mostly feel empty, just a task to complete. Anyway, put any district tests on the calendar.
Our English Department had two district-wide writing assessments in the school year -- one in October, and another in March or April -- to see what kind of impact our writing instruction was having on our students, and to inform ourselves as writing teachers. I was a cheerleader for, and a designer of this assessment; I found it valuable, and any day my kids sat down to write an essay was a good day in my book. I'll talk about this in detail another time. These writing tests took 3-4 days to complete, and went on the calendar.
All that testing takes many days, and it decreases instructional time with your kids. No teacher likes all the testing. They are one weird way that the voter can impact a teacher's working life; standardized tests may have some benefit outside of the classroom for curriculum development and so on, but there is little benefit for the student that I've ever discovered, perhaps practice in dealing with future high stakes, high pressure situations: college exams, grad school applications, work deadlines. Stressful stuff like that.
Back to the calendar: next, pencil in stuff like Homecoming Week, Choral Tours, or any ASB stuff that will break up the teaching week. Assemblies. Red Ribbon Week. You need to have those on your radar. You don't want anything really critical happening during those busy weeks.
So once you have holidays, report cards, Back-to-School night, breaks, tests, Open House, and ASB events marked, you see your real teaching days. You won't have 180 days anymore.
Then you want to think, "How many formal, multi-draft papers should I collect from students this year?" Let's say four -- one per quarter. This is NOT the only writing you will be doing in class: kids will also write on-demand essays (done in class in one or two class periods, like the district writing assessments); kids will write reflections and prompts in their writing notebooks; kids will write online on your class blog. But you will want at least four multi-draft essays in your plan.
Your district or English department will certainly direct you on this, but you will want to teach several writing domains, something like this: first quarter, narrative; second quarter, argumentative; third quarter, literary analysis; fourth quarter, informational -- or something like that. Mark those on your calendar.
Look at the books and literature that's available for you to work with. Ask yourself, if the first paper I assign is going to be narrative, then what book or collection of stories can we read together to support the teaching of narrative? All of your ELA text books will have lots of narrative stories, and your book room will have school board approved titles like House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, and you will think, OH! Let's read this together, and do lots of narrative notebook writing to practice the form.
I'm going to stop here for now because I have to go do other things. We haven't talked about standards yet, or how this plays out day by day, hour by hour, in the classroom, and things like differentiating your instruction, assessment, feedback, the role of discussion, collaboration with peers in the English department but also in math, science and social science...on and on and on.
It's a fun career. Very complex, very social, very creative.
Have a good day!
