What Was the Curriculum Design

Our junior class members were a mix of cultures and languages from predominately one-parent families.

All but one of the students qualified for free lunch, over half of them spoke a language in addition to English at home, 35% of them were speakers of African American Vernacular English, and 15% of them qualified for special education services.

Each of these students had histories of failure, and all of them read significantly below grade level at the start of the school year. As an example, one student was bullied so badly at a previous school that her grade point average for the year was 0.0.

Another student had just emigrated from Nigeria, having lived in a refugee camp for five years and having had no access to formal education. Another student had experienced physical abuse and lived in a foster home.

As we considered the curriculum for the class, we decided to organize the state standards into manageable clusters. For each of the clusters, we identified an organizing theme question that would appeal to adolescents. Some of these were:

What's your life worth and to whom

What are the consequences of your decisions Juvenile justice and injustice, which is it

Racial profiling: What do people think when they look at you

Next, we designed a series of instructional tasks that would ensure student engagement and involvement; support modeling of thinking, language, reading and writing; and promote learner independence.

As a result lessons included teacher think-alouds and a series of instructional tasks such as whole-class jigsaws, reciprocal teaching, book clubs, and online chats through Blackboard, independent reading, poetry raps, and plays. We hoped this model would facilitate student understanding and participation.

We wanted our students to be engaged in the English language arts standards and knew that assigning a whole-class novel would not result in the types of engagement, thinking, and conversations we wanted to experience with them. Accordingly, for each unit, we identified many types of texts students could read and have read to them, including newspapers, plays, poetry, and fiction and nonfiction pieces that were shared either in hard copy or online. Responses to the readings were always shared through oral and written conversations during our 55-minute class meetings.

One day each week, students participated in a book club where they experienced books that were in some way related to the theme within a unit. This is where the conversation about Romiette and Julio occurred. The topic of the unit was Racial Profiling: What Do People Think When They Look at You A sampling of the reading materials associated with this unit can be found in Figure 1.

What Was the Curriculum Design

By: endeavor

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