Burning Question: What Do I Know?

        My burning question is about the "playbook" of essential strategies for English class that I want to construct with my students this upcoming school year.  In order to help figure out some basics like, "What plays should be included?" I started reflecting on last year to determine what I already know about my question...
        I know that when we focused on building scaffolded strategies to accomplish a goal and then spent lots of time practicing those strategies that kids showed growth. I also know that my kids flourished when they were only trying to navigate one thing at a time. Sometimes it was navigating, "How do I accomplish this task?" with content they were comfortable with. Sometimes it was, "How do I access this idea?" with a task they were comfortable with. But doing both at once was tough for them.
         There's also an element of avoiding determining the prescription before meeting the patients. I can anticipate the skills I think my students will need this year based on my previous years of experience, but I might be surprised by this year's group.  I guess it's just important to choose a starting place and plan to move forward once I know the group and their needs.
          I want to reflect on some of the best experiences from last year, ones where I saw real growth, not only in the skills I recognize as essential but also in the areas where I saw students build confidence and efficacy. I also know that there were some weaknesses that can be addressed through paying close attention to them.
          I won't go into detail about them here, but some of the ideas I am examining are weekly reading responses, incorporating more checklists into tasks, our collaborative debate unit, nanowrimo, and whether or not continuing weekly learning reflections are a useful practice.