I have sub taught at Coleman High for the period of one full semester, in two different courses, CTE (Career and Technology) and English I-IV. 

This folder holds all of the documents I used in my English courses with a brief description of use.

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Throughout my English stay, I was required to continue preparation for the Texas STARR English tests and had to teach an EOC (Educational Opportunity Center) class to help those who struggled with English and needed extra help in order to be successful at passing the STARR tests.

When starting, I decided to pick up the previous teachers’ English & EOC Syllabus to keep consistency in the classroom, especially since the year was close to being over.

During the regular English class periods, each student would come in to class and immediately begin working in either Odyssey or A+, depending on which class they had been assigned to. Odyssey and A+ are the schools online databases for coursework that is self paced and administered/monitored by each teacher.

To go a little more in-depth, with Coleman High being a alternative high school, every student is placed on their own graduation pace. When students enter my room, they can be assigned to any course within the English department (i.e. English 1A – English 4B, with the # denoting the year and the letter denoting the semester). The max capacity I can hold in my classroom is 15 students (due to only holding 15 computers). When a student finishes a course in any classroom, the assigned teacher submits an “End-of-Course” sheet that gives all the final information of the students assigned class such as their ID#, grade level, course name, section number, and final grade they received. Once that is submitted, the school counselor assigns them another class to get started on. With all the students on their own paces and entering at different times of the semester, is it very hard for a teacher of 15 students in a classroom to stay updated on each individual person and to help “teach” them, just like one would see in a normal classroom setting.

During EOC class periods (which I had two throughout the day), that is where “normal” teaching would most often times be seen.

Keeping all of that in mind, here is how my classroom normally functioned on a day-to-day basis:

At the beginning of each class, I posted the EOC Daily Schedule on the smartboard for all the students to see in order to stay updated in the course. If they missed a day, I made it their own responsibilities to find out what was completed that day and to have it turned in to me as soon as possible in order to get thei daily grade submitted.

In addition, each day we used an EOC workbook that each individual student received at the start of class. Included in the workbook is as follows:

  1. Text Annotation
  2. Word Choice
  3. Analogies
  4. Context Clues
  5. Making Inferences and Drawing Conclusions
  6. Genres and Subgenres
  7. Sentence Structure: Sentence Types
  8. Proper Puncuation Usage
  9. Imagery
  10. Figurative Language
  11. ACE (Answer/Cite/Explain) Review
  12. Expository Essay Review
  13. Hook Ideas and Statements
  14. Writing Thesis Ideas and Statements
  15. STAAR Review Sheet

Aside for what the students experienced every day in EOC, for the normal English classes, I kept a daily excel doc (not posted to ensure the safety and privacy of each student) that tracked their individual student progress in Odyssey. With this, I was able to stay fixated on each students overall progress and grade, ensuring that they stayed focus and on-task.