This may be difficult to believe if you’ve only known my work surrounding behavior and SECD, but my first love was teaching English. I taught high school English (9, 11, und 12) for nine years before I pursued my master’s in SPED and found my other love, behavior/SECD.
This year, I picked up a section of English 9, and I have had so much fun teaching ELA again. When the pandemic sidelined education as we know it, losing time with my freshman English class was one of my greatest disappointments.
My years spent in SPED have made me a much, much better English teacher. I’m so much clearer in the way I present materials and am so much better at understanding students’ problems and roadblocks in this subject area.
As we moved to online learning, I wanted to create a unit for my English class that met the following criteria:
1.Was engaging. The material had to be something that high school kids actually wanted to read, or I’d never get them to read at all. I wanted to choose texts that a teenager would actually enjoy reading with a mix of contemporary (read: “still living”) authors and classics.
2. Was flexible. I love teaching novels, but I wanted to set up lessons so that each week’s lesson was a fresh start. Students wouldn’t need to have completed the prior week’s reading to do this week’s work. Each lesson can stand alone, but when put together, reinforce the same skills (one-paragraph lit analysis writing).
3. Included audio for each text. I wanted to encourage kids to listen to the text while they were doing other things if that was the only way they’d have time to access the materials. I didn’t want finding time to read to be a barrier to accessing the texts.
4. Promoted writing skills development. The materials would need to focus on writing skills my freshmen would need to be successful as sophomores: writing good thesis statements, citing evidence from a text, explaining the evidence, then concluding by relating the topic to the real world. Writings couldn’t be too long–just a paragraph.
5. Provided clear, easy-to-access, and consistent formatting. I wanted to create something that was laid out for optimum accessibility and ease of use and that didn’t require learning a new format every week.
I designed this unit, E2E Short Story Lit Analysis Unit, with all of these criteria in mind. I’ve shared the Google Drive folder with you via the hyperlink above. If you open up one of the documents, you’ll find EVERYTHING students would need to complete the assignment: a link to a PDF of the text, a link to read-aloud of the text, background information for the text, a guided writing organizer, and a place to write a final copy (with tips for proofreading). Each document is designed and laid out the same way, which makes it simple for kids to navigate and simple for you to use; just create your own copy of the document, then push it out via Google Classroom (or whatever platform you’re using). The work is 100% aligned to secondary standards, and my own students are enjoying the stories.
The simplest way to understand what I’m talking about is to click the link, access the folder, and snoop through what’s there. These are quality resources that should make your job a little easier. I hope you enjoy them!
