AP Vertical Team Meeting 2/15/6

Today, three of us met in my room to discuss integrating strategies from the AP Vertical team guide in order to help transform the way we collectively go about our business.

Today, the topic of discussion was diction. We discussed the following:

• LEAD (Low or Informal Diction, Elevated Language or Formal Diction, Abstract and Concrete Diction, Denotation and Connotation) - This is an acronym the guide suggests for helping students indentify AND analyze diction in a work. We discussed how younger students would be able to handle identifying the level of diction, and the methods we could use to help scaffold them up to the analytical task.
• Vocabulary/Connotation - We acknowledged that connotation is a bit more difficult for younger students, which led us into a general discussion of vocabulary intruction department wide. Many times we have a hard time getting students to recognize and understand complex words, much less the meanings suggested by the words. We talked about the things we do when we "do" vocabulary. We also talked about working to create a vocab list. We weren't sure about the overall setup, but its a discussion we'd like to revisit. More on that later.
• We decided that next Wednesday, February 21st, we will have a working meeting to discuss and develop some semblance of a list of vocabulary words. (We should probably take into account the thematic units being discussed/developed at the lead teacher meetings.)
• We will discuss the section titled "Syntax" from 36-53 for next Friday, February 23rd.

Finally, we hope that more department members will attend these meetings. We are being paid through the grant, and think it is a great opportunity to talk about structuring and improving our instruction. If you can't, try to read along, and comment in the next post titled "Syntax".


(I am adding this note as I will be printing out this post to insert into people's mailboxes. Hey, check out our blog at www.mackenglishdept.blogspot.com! I'm posting any and all department information, so if you don't, you're missing out.)