EXPERIENCE

LITERACY DEVELOPMENT CURRICULUM 

The class that I will be focusing on for my teacher inquiry work is an 11th grade English Language Arts class, at a performing arts focused public charter school, located in Sacramento, CA. In this class, I teach literacy development as it relates to an integrated ELA curriculum, that is, one which prioritizes reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills across modalities and mediums. The curriculum, which has been entirely designed by me, is based on the California Common Core Standards for English, at the 11th-12th grade level. 

Reading and writing skills are built through short formative assignments that culminate in long-form written summative assessments, or essay responses. Formative work ranges from in-class readings and activities, to weekly homework assignments that utilize a choice board method to give students more ownership over which skills they drill. These choice boards ask students to choose between a variety of literacy based activities - from finding propaganda online and analyzing its message, to watching a music video and answering questions on visual rhetoric, to listening to a podcast and posting a response to an online discussion board, to writing brief literary analysis of short passages for practice. The choice board weekly homework is just one example of the tactics I use to develop student literacy in an exploratory way. What I mean by this is that students should feel self-compelled to learn and practice literacy development. By building a sense of ownership over content-related tasks, I hope to help students be more invested in their literacy journey. Additionally, I encourage students to keep track of that journey themselves, by having them do reflective writing assignments and editing activities after each summative writing assessment. 

Speaking and listening skills are built in both formal and informal whole-class discussions, as well as weekly small group work. The seating chart for the class helps to establish and facilitate discussion, since students are sat in rotating table groups of four. I spent around three weeks at the beginning of the school year focusing entirely on community building, as well, so that students would be more comfortable working with each other when we began to introduce our core content. 

On a unitary level, I will begin by teaching this class a unit on rhetorical analysis, where the principal objective will be to analyze spoken, written, and visual rhetoric within the film, American Skin, and then write a rhetorical analysis response on what rhetorical choices were made and how those choices serve or don’t serve the author’s rhetorical situation. We’ll then work on developing research skills and informational writing, by developing a paper that analyzes the historical impact of an American artist, which is a part of a larger cross-curricular capstone project for this school’s juniors. In winter, we’ll begin a poetry unit. Students will work on analyzing figurative language and connecting with implied meanings within texts, beginning with Amanda Gorman’s, “The Hill We Climb”. Students will then have the opportunity to present, orally, either a poem of their own or a recitation of a poem they feel inspired by. In spring, students will work on literary analysis of two different novels, Into the Wild by John Krakuar and Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, focusing on authorial perspective and choices, particularly pertaining to story structure. Finally, juniors will end the year with a short narrative writing unit, to help prepare them to tell their own stories in their college admissions essays the following year.

STUDENT CHARACTERIZATION

There are 31 students in the class that I will focus on. It is one of my larger classes, with the average class at this particular school being around 25. They are all in 11th grade. There are 10 boys and 21 girls. In terms of racial or ethnic backgrounds, 15 students are of Causcasion descent, 6 are Hispanic, 6 are African American, 3 are Asian American, and 1 student is Middle Eastern in descent. All of these students were born in the United States of America. 

Their social-emotional health can be mixed at times. Most of them seem well-adjusted and due to the small size of the school (there are only around 110 11th graders in total) they have strong communal bonds with each other. 28 of these students have gone to school together since the sixth grade. They are, as a whole, supportive and welcoming - something I experienced first-hand as a new teacher. That being said, I’d say I’ve noted approximately 5 students in this class struggling with participating with their peers. Other than those few students though, I have noted that the majority of the class seems rather extroverted, they are lively and talkative. There are no English Language Learners in this class, nor are any of these students recently reclassified. Five students have 504 Plans and 7 students have IEP plans, meaning that nearly half the students in this class have learning differences. Two students have dyslexia and struggle with any written work. Four students in this class have either diagnosed ADHD or ADD. 

It is worth noting that these students are self-identified artists. This school has a strong focus in performing arts, and every student in my class is also enrolled in an art elective - some take multiple. Each student really has their own discipline that they shine in: graphic design, visual art, acting, singing, dancing, and stagecraft. I attribute much of their outgoing nature to this emphasis on creativity and self-expression. These students have strength in terms of their willingness to share their perspective on the world around them, though they sometimes choose to do this in unique ways.

I have noticed, thus far in their literary development, that my students have a strong ability to organize their writing into logical paragraphs. They came into my class familiar with the CER (claim, evidence, reasoning) paragraph structure, which we have expanded on into the CeESS (claim, elaboration, evidence, support, significance) paragraph structure that they will use next year, as the 12th grade curriculum at this school is based on ERWC (Expository Reading and Writing Curriculum). This class has made the jump between the two paragraph structures with little struggle. Additionally, their work completion is decent, with 27 of the students in this class having a passing grade at the end of the first quarter of school. 

They have shown some troubles, however, with making deeper connections between implicit concepts in a text. They can identify the important elements of an author’s rhetoric, or quotes that seem crucial to an author’s message, but they seem to struggle with describing why those linguistic and literary choices are relevant. In other words, they can provide appropriate evidence to answer a prompt, but they struggle to fully flesh out how that evidence supports a claim, and why that support is significant. I believe that they are capable of making inferences, but lack the practice of breaking down their own inferences to glean the unspoken meaning or intentions of a text. Particularly, I’ve noted their struggle with figurative language and keeping track  of rhetorical devices. During our current unit on rhetorical analysis, students have done a great job identifying the pieces of an author’s rhetorical situation, but have struggled to identify what rhetorical choices an author uses within that situation, particularly an author’s use of figurative language. 

The students in this class seem to get overwhelmed and caught up on the academic language, such as understanding the difference between an analogy and allusion. This was demonstrated in a homework assignment, where students were asked to watch a short 3-minute speech from a movie, and then identify within the speech transcript where the speaker used different kinds of figurative language. Even though the students were given a bank of possible figurative language, with definitions of each term, students struggled to accurately identify all the figurative language examples I was looking for them to note in the text. This struggle was further demonstrated during a longer speech activity, wherein students were to watch a 25 minute speech and take notes on the major rhetorical strategies and devices the speaker used to convey their message. Within those notes students needed to explain what effect the identified rhetorical strategies had on the audience and how it served the speaker’s overall purpose. One of the major things I was looking for students to identify was a metaphor used throughout the speech. While about half of the students could identify the metaphor as an important choice, only a couple students could actually meet the learning objectives and articulate how the metaphor might have affected the audience, through an implied meaning. I ended up re-teaching a lesson solely on the metaphor, and students gained more understanding, but I doubt their current ability to replicate that analysis independently.

LONG-TERM LEARNING GOALS

Based on the above strengths and weaknesses I have outlined, I would like students by the end of the year to be capable,when responding to a prompt, of not just asserting useful evidence in support of their claim, but of analyzing why the evidence (ie. the text they’ve chosen to cite) is significant to the author, themselves, and the reader. I want students to aim to understand their own inferences, as they relate to the author’s unspoken intentions or message, and interpret that understanding through writing. If students could analyze a text in this way, it would show significant growth in critical thinking skills and writing skills. To achieve this goal, in relation to the challenges I’ve outlined above, I’d like students to be able to identify figurative language accurately, so that they can focus more heavily on analysis.  I’d also like students to work on interpreting figurative language and symbolism used within the texts they read, with emphasis on translating their interpretations clearly into writing. 

One opportunity these goals present is for students to practice working with unique and imaginative language more, which I think they will connect with due to their creative nature. There is also the exciting opportunity to use Active Literacy Strategies to convey implicit meaning and explore figurative language in new ways with students, which I think many of my extroverted students will enjoy and will be motivated to participate in. I do anticipate a major challenge in terms of increasing students’ writing stamina. They will need to practice and receive feedback through many writing assignments this year in order to steadily improve their analytical writing abilities. This will be tiring at times for them and me, I am sure. Additionally, I feel that increasing students access to academic language (ie. allusion, metaphor, hyperbole, etc.) will present a challenge, as students will need to understand and remember enough of these important content-specific terms, in order to move past identification and into more connective analysis in their writing.