Getting back in the labs?

The last post I made commented that I was taking some time off from the labs to allow other teachers the opportunity to use them--and boy I couldn't have been more right about the need. What I ended up discovering throughout the month of March is that every teacher in the school was fighting for labs that were simply not available. Two of our four labs were booked up for the SRI electronic reading test, and everyone was elbowing for the other two labs. At the end of the month I needed to get all of my classes into the labs for just a couple of days to type up some documents, but there were virtually no labs available. I was able to get one day for my sophomores, and a few more for my seniors (who really need about 4 days), but with my seniors I had to get the labs for the hours on different days, which basically meant I had 2 different calendars running for those hours. Talk about confusing for me! So it's a good thing that I backed off the labs for that time period.

I hope that I can get in the labs more during this month, though, because I have some more technology based activities that I would like my students to engage in for these units. For example, I plan to have my seniors re-engage in the Career Exploration unit they had been doing during second quarter. When we had done it second quarter, though, I had all the students work in lock-step completing the same assignments at the same time. I think that this semester I will do it in more of a work-shop fashion. I case I had not mentioned it before, my seniors have serious attendance problems--most of my seniors miss at least one day a week, with several of them missing 2-3 days a week. When doing assignments where everyone is working in lock-step this becomes hard to keep everyone informed of what is going on and how to complete assignments. So, I think I want to have this semester be very open ended in terms of what they can explore. I will give them several different topics for exploration and they can then choose when they explore which items. In doing so, each item will have a formal write-up they must create, and the only expectations is that they have the write-ups by a certain date. And although each of these explorations will be very different, the overall goals for these explorations will be the same, and thus, I will be able to use one rubric for all of the assignments.

For example, of the options is to research your career in the news. Where is you career present in the news? Is it in any current events? Have there been any controversies regarding your career in the news? Etc. They will then engage in research related to this topic and complete a write-up. They will be able to use the skills we addressed last semester when we went over valid and reliable sources in research, citations, bibliographies etc. The only problem is that I have a lot of turn-over in terms of students. About 33% of my students are new this semester, so I will need to find some way to do mini-lessons to teach them this info that they missed last semester, or I will need to change the requirements for them slightly. I'm not quite sure how I plan to address this issue yet. I do know, though, that I think they will enjoy this method a lot more because they will get to pick the options that apply to them, interest them, and that are more readily available for their particular career. While I feel that all of this career exploration stuff has involved very authentic research--because this is info they need to know before entering the work force next year--I think this semester will be even more authentic because it provides the students with more options for choice.