HUNTERDON CENTRAL REGIONAL HIGH SCHOOL DISTRICT

Kathy Dittrich
“Since my teaching approach has really changed this year, I feel that my strengths fall in getting to know my
students strengths and weaknesses early in the course through diagnostic and formative assessment then
structuring my lessons/class time around those skills. I believe the modeling I have done with the students on
an almost daily basis has helped to reinforce those skills and allow them to take more risks with their thinking
and writing. I also believe that my flexibility and willingness to change direction pretty spontaneously helps
foster an effective learning environment.”
Meg Donhauser
“Like last year, I’m continuing to use formative assessment as a tool to improve instruction and reflection is a
big component of that, I think; doing reflections on blogs or as exit slips has really helped create a dialogue
amongst the class and myself. The Brit Lit blogs are solely about what they’ve learned about learning and how
they’ve grown as individuals and it lets them help each other and learn from each other.”
Erin Drulis
“One of my PDP items this year is to create a student centered environment and implement the writing
workshop into the classroom. I always strive to have the students doing the work during the class daily.
Students are expected to have independent reading material (self selected) to read in class each day. Students
also lead book talks and quick writes as the warm up for the day. In Expository Writing, students present strong
samples of the essay we study and lead a class discussion on the given essay. In freshmen English, students
research pre-reading material, and teach their findings to the class in order to prep their classmates before
beginning a novel. Students in my expository writing class were using the writing workshop approach
everyday.”
Scott Einhorn
A second strength is offering student choice in writing. I had the feature food blog in English II already from
last year, which allows students to craft their own topic that is in any way, either directly or remotely, tied to
what one might eat or drink. In addition to this, I changed a movie review assignment into a “review-anythingyou-want”
assignment and got really positive results. It was definitely more work to cull high-quality
professional models for everything from album and video game reviews to restaurant and theatre reviews, but it
was worth it in the end as students were able to write about what really interested them.”
Cynthia Forck
“I have become more comfortable with making changes to the curriculum than I have been in the past. This
year I have tried to adjust my lessons to “demonstrate flexibility and responsiveness” to new research and
growing trends, especially in English I. For example, this year I incorporated SSR during the first 15 min. of
class and required students to complete at least one independent reading a quarter. The first independent read
had to be a nonfiction work, to give students more familiarity and experience with reading nonfiction. It has
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