Tag Archives: american literature

Sep 17 2013
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Accountable Talk, American Literature, Common Core, English III, Instructional Delivery: Plan and Progress, Reading Informational Texts, Teaching, Uncategorized

Transitioning to the American Revolution: Patrick Henry and Ben Franklin

As we move toward the close of the module, we find ourselves looking to the birth of the new nation. For this, we needed to set the stage of the historical settings, so we worked to make it fit.

1. Speech(es) to the (Virginia) Convention and a look at rhetoric.
To start this lesson, students were given a short historical hindsight lesson (notes) with a focus on rhetorical appeal. We reviewed them quickly and I realized students were able to define the appeals without fail but the recognition of them in text was something we would work on throughout the day. Additionally, I wanted them to start evaluating the rhetoric from both perspectives – those who would agree and those who would disagree – and make a call as to whether or not the rhetoric was effective overall.

I modeled this process with the first two sentences from each text.

For this task, the class was divided in to teams. One team focused on Henry’s Speech to the Convention while the other focused on Franklin’s Speech to the Virginia Convention. This worked well to make sure students were an expert on the first text. The neat thing was how the teams were decided…

First, we took a private notecard vote on whether to fight for independence or to try to just get along. Those who voted to get along were assigned to read Henry. Those who wanted to fight were assigned to Franklin.

Once the texts were assigned, the students were given their reading guide. (Find a free copy of the reading guide at http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/HenryFranklin-Speech-to-the-ConventionVirginia-Convention-Reading-Guide-877412)

Students progressed through the reading guide at their own pace and then moved to partner with a person on the opposite text. In the end, student discussion was guided by an author comparison section of the handout right before completion of the writing prompt on comparing author ideas. This wasn’t intended to be a formal essay, but more of a constructed response as we are working hard on developing paragraphs with cited evidence from the text.

Alas, let me know your thoughts so I can work to improve this lesson before the next implementation. It felt a little slighted because there was so much I wanted to get into with the text (and limiting the teacher-talk on such an amazing series of texts was really challenging!).

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Sep 15 2013
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American Literature, Common Core, English III, Instructional Delivery: Plan and Progress, Reading Informational Texts, Teaching, Uncategorized

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

Here’s the news flash – students just don’t care for Puritan Plain Style.

For today’s lesson, I started out with reading the text several times and thinking about what it is that makes his sermon effective. Once again, I wanted to reiterate the elements of breaking down complex sentences, but then I wanted to bring in the rhetoric used in the lesson. I decided to model it after my thinking and have students look at the complex sentences before thinking about the rhetoric which makes the sentence matter.

For modeling, my questions became:
1. What is he saying?
2. How is he saying it?
3. Is he effective in getting his message across?
4. What is it that makes it effective?

For skills, I wanted to look at rhetorical devices, but the first step was looking quickly at ethos, logos, and pathos. I was quite fortunate in that the majority of my students were able to look at a blank triangle and put in the terms. I asked to students to tell me what they remembered, and I didn’t have to go into the detailed lessons reteaching the basic appeals.

At this point, I followed the suggestion of the text and looked at specific rhetorical elements of metaphor, simile, imagery, appeal to fear, and antithesis.

Here, I moved directly through the reading of the text and had students complete the reading guide.

At the end of the lesson, I wanted students to be able to identify and evaluate rhetorical elements in a speech in terms of what the speaker is saying, what he means, and how he wants it to affect the audience. In the end, I’m not sure students were able to get antithesis and implied metaphor.

Fortunately, these skills can be revisited as we move on through the next few readings so the students will be ready for the module assessment in two weeks.

Also, I will post the reading guide and a link asap. It will probably be free and just the reading guide because I’m not ready to post the PPT as I feel it needs some revision. (Link: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Sinners-in-the-Hands-of-an-Angry-God-Text-Dependent-Questions-Reading-Guide-875141)

Suggestions? Let me know.

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Sep 02 2013
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American Literature, Assessments, Common Core, English III, Instructional Delivery: Plan and Progress, Motivating Students, Reading Informational Texts, Teaching

Of Plymouth Plantation… and the inner city attention span

plymouth 1

As we gear up for the new week, the students gear down because they cannot be less interested in Of Plymouth Plantation. Well, they do have one question they seek to answer: What is Americanism? What does it mean to be American? So as they formulate their ideas, we study American Literature. And, this week, we transition from Pilgrims and an active, benevolent God to Sinners and an Angry God. Boy… I can feel the good vibes now!

Since the students completed the Common Core Workshop successfully, I feel confident in their ability to closely read a text, and, thanks to my intense written feedback, the quality of their text-evidence in response to TDQs has increased tremendously. In fact, for many of them, the reading guide worksheet isn’t enough room and they are writing their answers on another page.

The first step in planning this lesson was to think about anticipated difficulties. Thanks to the first sentence, I didn’t have to think very hard. The Puritan Plain Style might have been easy to Puritans, but thanks to the evolutionary writing style of a few hundred years’ writings, those complex sentences even gave me a headache! I began planning with the idea that if the students could break down the complicated structures of the key parts of the paragraphs (or sections), maybe they could understand enough to work through answering some of the text-dependent questions. However… I needed to model this one for the students too.

Thus, a reading guide was created and designed to focus on breaking down complex sentences in terms of 1. Who? What? 2. Action. Then, I divided the excerpts into major sections and created TDQs for those sections. This made the reading guide look long (5 pages), but I wanted each section to have a visual separation from the other sections and then I needed to add some pretty visuals to keep the students happy. You’d be surprised how happy a different font, cute clip art, or shaded boxes can make the students when they are looking at a complex text they wouldn’t have been interested in otherwise.

From there, I created a reading quiz modeled after the FEW samples of multiple choice PARCC questions that have been released. This is a pretty important step because my students are used to teachers giving completion credit rather than accuracy credit. Also, apparently in some classes if most of the students don’t do the work the teacher makes it extra credit for those who did it and does not penalize those who don’t do it. To combat that, mean as it may be, I have the homework for grading and the reading quiz for grading. Students can retake any reading quiz after scoring a perfect score on the homework if they so desire, but this technique has shown students I’m serious about them completing some work outside of class. After all, my job is to prepare them for college.

If you are interested, you may find this lesson plan bundle at http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Common-Core-Of-Plymouth-Plantation-Lesson-Plan-Reading-Guide-PPT-with-KEY-844835

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Aug 24 2013
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American Literature, Common Core, English III, Instructional Delivery: Plan and Progress, Reading Informational Texts, Teaching, Uncategorized, Writing

English III Hybrid TN EOC/CCSS Course: What is it to be American?

cc workshop 1

Ah. The hybrid year. Last year we piloted all that is Common Core while being assess by the TN EOC. Alas, this year we implement Common Core while being assessed by both the TN EOC (with a few supposedly dropped SPIs) and PARCC. Add in that the PARCC assessments are on a yearlong plan while our course is a semester and you have a world of differentiation and 80 hour work weeks. But me… I honestly did not get into teaching to get rich. I got into teaching so I could make a difference and do my part to make the world a better place. So I’ll take it: 80 hour work weeks, Common Core, EOCs, TRIPOD, TVAAS, and whatever else you throw at me. But I’m going to help my students get it even if there is no 15-16 year old of the inner city volunteering to read these texts.

So what’s the spin for buy in? Well, the essential question becomes “What does it mean to be an American?” Now, this isn’t so far fetched – we are American and they call out their freedoms on a regular basis. So I tied in a personal stake: I know a true American.

1. After the boring syllabus review and all that jazz, we watched a video to spark a conversation. (Find this video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75Ku4RhZwC0&list=UUTCWtGoGyBSUHzI9dTw3Q1w) Students felt a connection because I’m not the only teacher at the school with a loved one who died in a very public service-related situation, and they saw those families. Then, we invited them to bring in the picture of anyone they knew who was willing to defend what it meant to be American. From there, a living bulletin board was created.

2. We built in a Common Core Workshop using Prothero’s “Introduction” from his text “The American Bible.” We actually used only an excerpt, but the idea worked very well to introduce students to the power of words. We spent a week with this text, thoroughly modeling the process of close reading, text-dependent questions, and the dreaded writing task. In all, the point was modeling the process, and I gave a tremendous amount of written feedback to each student for every single question. Amazingly the students thought they would get credit if they just wrote something in the answer slots. Amazing. Apparently some teachers do that so often the students expect it as the norm and were genuinely surprised by their grades and the feedback. They could not believe I read, scored, and responded to every single question for every single student. Once I realized they were not used to teachers carefully reading and grading, I intentionally went overboard in providing feedback. I plan to do this intensively for a bit here – as long as I can practically keep it up – until I have them well trained. I can understand having some completion grades, but these guys make it seem as if that was all they ever had for “practice” category work. Unreal.

You can find the PPT and student documents at http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/American-Literature-Common-Core-Workshop-Reading-Info-Text-and-Writing-Task-844323

Interestingly, I found where someone has posted the Introduction for free on scribed. You may access that file at http://www.scribd.com/doc/95184410/American-Bible-Intro-Excerpt.

And with that, it was time to begin the textbook selections.

Welcome to Module 1: Early America to 1800.

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Aug 24 2013
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English III, Instructional Delivery: Plan and Progress, Motivating Students, Pacing, Teaching, Uncategorized, Writing

English III: Early American Origin Myths

Native myths 1

Our class text is Prentice Hall’s Literature: The American Experience edition. After having outdated texts for a rather long time, it is exciting to have texts which are actually designed with Common Core in mind. Unfortunately, there is just not enough time in the semester to read and discuss every text, so we have to sort of pick and choose the highlights of each period which make it into the 18 weeks.

{Now, if you are interested in the outline, you can find the outline of the course modules in my TPT store at http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Stephanie-Kirk-11}

Alas, the first experience our students had with the text was Native American Origin Myths. We spent a total of two days on this task, spending about 75 minutes a day. We are just coming out of an entire week on an informational text in which we painfully modeled every detail of close reading, answering text-dependent questions with evidence, and completion of a writing task, so I wanted to do something to make the lesson as engaging as possible.

Myths covered:
1. On Turtle’s Back
2. When Grizzlies Walked Upright
3. Navajo Origin Myth
4. Cherokee Origin of Fire (not in the textbook but included because this is used for modeling)

What do I want students to know and be able to do at the end of the lesson?
1. Explain the point of an origin myth.
2. Retell the origin myth.
3. Know what archetype is, identify it in text, and compare it across multiple texts.
4. Know what theme is, identify it in text, and compare it across multiple texts.

How will we get there?
We started out the lesson by reviewing common skills of archetypes, theme, and traits of origin myths. Fortunately I built the PPT in a way that if a student could tell me what it was I didn’t have to go in detail about it, but when they couldn’t remember archetypes I had that built in as well. Overplanning for anticipated difficulties is ALWAYS a good practice because it is better to have a plan for if something does not work than to allow instruction to fall apart because the students just didn’t have the knowledge you thought they should have coming into the lesson.
Anyway, I knew having the students all read every myth was going to be dreadful and boring, and there was no way to make sure that fit in the pacing. So I modified and divided the class in three groups to study an origin myth, draft it as a play, perform it, and discuss archetypes and themes across multiple texts. Students also were assigned homework to complete the reading guide and text-dependent questions, and students were held accountable for this with the included reading quiz for the second day.
Before reading I did a short story preview and vocabulary preview activity in which students reviewed the material and told me what they thought about the selection. This is such a change from when the teacher used to tell the students all about what they were going to read before reading it. By doing a story preview in this manner, curiosity increased and I think buy in and participation was enhanced.
While day one was mostly skills and notes to intro the period, we did have time for every student to complete his/her first reading of the text. The way I assigned the texts was in looking at the student lexile with some thought into the text lexile and the layers of complexity of the story. I printed the reading guides and wrote the students’ names on the page. Students were not given any sign of who their group might be until the second day. To round out the first part of the lesson, I had a canned closer of using a post-it note to create a Facebook status or Tweet based on the assigned story. To review the skill itself, I had students use an index card to write a note to an absent classmate to explain the skills reviewed/learned for the day. As I type this it occurs to me I should do that every day and post the best summary as a sort of learning wall in the room. I’ll get on that Monday.
Back to the lesson… students were to complete the next reading of the text and answer the text-dependent questions on the reading guide. To help them remember and hold them accountable I sent a Remind101 message to all parents and students in the class.
On day two, I reviewed what we had done and where we were going to go next. I created a model of exactly what I expected them to do using a new myth. Considering skills I had them tell me what the elements of drama were and what goes on a script. I showed them the myth and my script. Then I used students to help me act out the skit for the class. This was great because it allowed me to show my expectations and it allowed us to discuss the role of performer and observer in the room. I gave the students time and materials, and then they produced a script and acted out the plays. After each presentation, I used questioning to get the students to think through the patterns, characters, and symbols which repeated throughout multiple texts. As an exit ticket, I had the students use constructed response and text evidence from each myth to argue a theme in all texts.

All in all, this was a fun lesson with the students. It was hard letting go of control but the bottom line was that this lesson was probably the first time since I can’t remember when that I didn’t feel I was the hardest working person in the room. I built in character and team building, behavior expectations, and tiered accountability. If I had it to do over again, I would have revised pacing to include a more thorough discussion of theme of each myth and had some sort of reporting out format for the groups to engage the audience in talking about archetypes and themes rather than having to lead it myself. But, judging by the output, the students are good with being able to give a theme. Finding the evidence is something I need to build in future lessons for additional modeling and practice.

From American Literature Module 1: Beginnings to 1800 as featured in my English III course. The text referenced is Prentice Hall’s Literature: American Experience Edition.
If you are interested, these documents can be found at http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Native-American-Myths-Prentice-Halls-Literature-American-Lit-EDITABLEKEYS-843374

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