About the Teacher:My name is Gwen Leach. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio and moved to St. Louis where I attended Washington University. I majored in both Anthropology and American Culture Studies, and used both programs to study educational inequality both in America and abroad. I approached that issue through the lenses of education, political science, political economy and sociology. Educational inequity became my passion and consequently drew me to teaching. I am a do-er, meaning that rather than just talking about an issue, I would much rather do something about it. I am excited about both the challenges and rewards I have been offered by being in the classroom as a middle school communication arts teacher, and am eager to continue to devote my life to not merely talking about education and inequities in the educational system, but to doing something about it.
My Mission Statement:As a teacher, it is my job not only to teach the content to the best of my ability, and ensure that students learn the content to the best of their ability, but also to set a high bar for what the limits of those abilities actually are. I am continually learning and growing, as are my students. There is no limit to our individual and collective hopes and dreams.
My Inspiration: “Life is more than living - necessary as it is to earn a living, it is more necessary and important to earn a life: that is to do for the world - its thought, its aspiration, its human value - so much that the world will not always continue to ask if life is worth living.” ~ W.E.B. DuBois
My Work, Part 1 – A Reading Unit:
Rationale:My students live in a world that is not right and is not fair. On a daily basis they live in, and see, examples of injustice. Yet many of them either do not realize that the injustices they see are wrong, or that there is anything that they can do about them. This combination of naïveté and fatalism counteracts the messages that they hear in school about how they can be anything they want to be and do anything they want to do as long as they work hard at it. I want my students to take the initiative in their lives to do something about the wrong that they see, and to truly believe that their efforts are worthwhile. In this unit I plan to inspire students to that end by exposing them to examples of people who have done just that. This unit will take place after the MAP test and therefore many students will be tempted to mentally check out for summer, despite the fact that there are still six weeks of school. I hope that this unit will enable my students to see (and put into practice) the fact that education is not for the sake of passing some test, but rather to empower individuals to change their realities and to change the world.
Summary:
The unit will be based on the following reading passages. These readings will happen as read-alouds, paired reading, and independent reading.
1)Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech
2)President Barack Obama’s South Carolina primary victory speech
3)President Barack Obama’s election night victory speech
4)Excerpts from Yes We Can, the biography of Barack Obama.
5)“Letter from a Concentration Camp,” by Yoshiko Uchida (pg. 518 in textbook)
6)“Alabama, 1963” and “China, 1989” readings in Student Activism packet
7)Selections from Number the Stars by Lois Lowry
8)Passages about student led social justice movements from around the world, throughout history
These readings will serve as a foundation for a unit long discussion about activism, and combating injustice. Students will use the reading and writing skills developed all year (focusing most intensely on those noted below) to engage with these texts in a meaningful way. Students will be guided through the unit with graphic organizers and organized note taking about specific skills, which will allow them to readily see the thematic connections between these texts. To date, our reading has been focused on one text at a time, but this unit will encourage students to bring elements of various texts into conversations with each other. “Given what we know about Dr. Martin Luther King from his ‘I have a dream’ speech, what do you think he would say about the situation in China in 1989?” Students will be pushed to higher level thinking about issues and about texts. This unit will culminate in a writing project where they will share their own dreams about an issue of injustice that they care about, modeled after Martin Luther King’s speech. These speeches will be shared at a “Dream Day” event, where students will practice their public speaking skills.
Objectives:
Read using active reading strategies (R1, R2)
Analyze text features to clarify meaning (R3Ab)
Identify and explain examples of sensory details, figurative language, and basic literacy techniques in nonfiction text (R3B)
Use details from the text to demonstrate comprehension skills (R3Ca)
Use details from the text to paraphrase the author’s stated ideas (R3Cb)
Use details from the text to make predictions (R3Cc)
Use details from the text to make inferences (R3Cd)
Use details from the text to evaluate the accuracy of the information (R3Ce)
Use details from the text to identify point of view (R3Ch)
Use details from the text to determine and/or compare author’s viewpoints (R3Cj)
Length:
This unit will take place from April 19 through May 21, which is a total of five weeks, or 25 classes. Each class period is 76 minutes long.
Materials and Resources:
School:
Laptop computers and printer
8.5x11 paper for final copies of speeches
Teacher:
Classroom set of all readings for the unit
Variety of graphic organizers throughout unit
Students:
Pencils
Notebook paper for notes
Notebook paper for drafts of speech
Means of Assessment:
Students will be asked to think of an example of injustice that they care deeply about, since we will be looking at the stories of individuals who have found issues that they care deeply about and then acted do so something about those issues throughout the unit. The final writing assignment will be to create their own “I have a dream...” speech, modeled after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech, in which they write about what the world would look like if the issue that they care deeply about were resolved, and no longer an example of injustice. This will be a persuasive writing assignment. Students will use a graphic organizer to help organize their thinking. This graphic organizer will guide them with questions such as What are some injustices that you see in your life that you think should change? If those injustices were fixed, what would be different about the world? Why is this an issue that you care deeply about? Why should everybody else care deeply about this injustice? Students will go through all stages of the writing process to create these speeches. At the end of the unit, we will have a “Dream Day” where students will all gather and give their speeches to the rest of the grade, practicing their public speaking skills. Parents and community members will be invited to this “Dream Day.”
Unit 9: Social Justice
6th Grade Communication Arts
Gwen Leach
Teacher Calendar
April – June, 2010
Focus of the Week / Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / FridayI Have A Dream Speech / 19
Introduction to the unit—purposes, things to be covered, brief intro to writing project at the end, discussion of what social justice is, why people do or should care about others (or maybe they don’t—why?) / 20
Become familiar with the text.
-Read through it once silently, noting moments or words of confusion.
-Watch video of speech delivered by MLK while following along. What parts became more/less confusing when you heard it actually presented?
-Use our reference resources to understand the text (dictionary, history textbook, other resources from library) TALK WITH MS. ACKERMAN TO SEE IF SHE HAS IDEAS OF OTHER RESOURCES
-Discuss impressions from the speech. / 21
Go back to the speech, looking this time at figurative language.
-Similes
-Metaphors
-Allusions
-Idioms
What do these figurative language things mean? Why were they used? What do we learn from them? What does figurative language offer us as readers? / 22
Go back to the speech, drawing conclusions from the text about MLK’s mood, theme and the mood and theme of the time, and of the speech itself. Watch speech as MLK delivers it again, this time noting mood of him and of the atmosphere.
What feelings does this rise up in the reader? How do you think it made people feel when they were there listening to it? Is there a difference? Why?
Order copies for Number the Stars week 2. / 23
Go back to the speech one last time, this time working on paraphrasing it. If this was a speech that you were giving, how would you say things differently? What would stay the same? Why would the things that change, change. Lead into discussion of voice in writing.
Number the Stars
FIND OR MAKE CLASS SETS OF NOVEL / 26
Introduction to the novel – model and practice pre-reading strategies. Create pre-reading stations that introduce students to the novel, the author, the time period, the historical context. / 27
Ch 1-3
Connections
Text to self
Text to text (I Have a Dream speech)
Text to world (how is this the same or different from things that you see in your life today) / 28
Ch 4-5
Discussion Day* / 29
Ch 6-7
Discussion Day*
Order copies for apartheid week. / 30
Ch 8-9
Active reading day—in pairs or individually students will read these chapters and complete the sentence leads from Burke, Ch 4 to facilitate active reading.
Number the Stars / 3
Ch 10-11
Discussion Day* / 4
Ch 12-13
Character development focus—as we near the end of the novel, what traits do we see in the main characters/ How did we learn those? Where did they come from in that person? Do you think they were born with that characteristic? For each time you answer no, what led to them becoming that trait? / 5
Ch 14-15
Discussion Day* / 6
Finish Number the Stars (Ch 16-17)
Introduce and begin work on project about the book.
Order independent work week packets. / 7
Mid-Unit project on Number the Stars
Reserve Invictus at library.
Apartheid and South Africa / 10
Read selections from Nelson Mandela biography, getting an idea of what Apartheid actually was to inform discussion the rest of the week. While reading, work on context clues to determine the meanings of unknown words. / 11
Make inferences about the lives of South Africans based on information from texts. Practice making inferences in general. Jigsaw activity—students work with different texts and then end up teaching each other about the various situations they studied (black, mixed, Indian, white) to end with a discussion of how different people experienced different things in the same situation. / 12
Discussion with similarities and differences between apartheid and slavery. Compare and contrast the situations and the key figures of MLK and Mandela. What was the same about those situations? What was different? Work on creating solid comparing and contrasting paragraphs that pull details and evidence from both. / 13
Watch selections from Invictus
Order writing project packets. / 14
Watch selections from Invictus, discussion about the movie—what can we learn about /from their struggles?
Student led movements / 17 18 19 20 21
Students will work through an independent work packet, reading selections about student led social justice movements (focusing heavily on the Civil Rights movement in the United States). This packet will pull together a lot of review of the active reading strategies we have discussed all year: summarizing, predicting, inferring, visualizing, rereading, making connections. It will also ask students to use skills that we have discussed: finding main idea and details, drawing conclusions, evaluating the accuracy of information. When / if students finish the packet, I will have open ended active reading strategy practice sheets for them to apply to the books that they are reading on their own. Thursday they will have a review packet to work through in stations, and then Friday will be the unit test.
I Have A Dream writing project / 24
Work on writing project packet: Introduction to assignment and prewriting
RESERVE LAPTOPS for next week.
Share information with parents and supporters about attending Dream Day. / 25
Work on writing project packet: Pre-writing and drafting / 26
Work on writing project packet: Revising and editing / 27
Work on writing project packet: Typing final draft
Make sure students know that if they are interested in sharing during dream day they need to be ready to share on Tuesday. / 28 NO STUDENTS
Dream day and class wrap up / 31 NO SCHOOL / 1
Finalize typing of rough draft.
RESERVE LAPTOPS for today
In class selections of speakers for tomorrow’s dream day.
Have students who are interested in speaking give their speech to the entire class. / 2
DREAM DAY / 3
Class wrap up, tying up loose ends on the year
*The mastery levels on all of the objectives covered in 6th grade have been very high over the course of the year. Because of that, I think that it is appropriate to begin to show students how all of the various “discrete” objectives we’ve discussed all year are not really discrete at all. They are all interconnected, and after you are confident in enough of the skills, you can really being to get a lot out of the texts that you read. Basically I plan to teach this book differently than I’ve taught other novels before—it will be far more text driven (what comes up as we are reading? How are all of those things connected?) than objective driven (find all examples of cause and effect in this chapter).
Unit 9: Social Justice
6th Grade Communication Arts
Gwen Leach
Student Calendar
Unit Nine: Social Justice
Focus of the Week / Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / FridayI Have A Dream Speech / April 19
Unit Introduction
/ 20
I Have a Dream: Become familiar with the text / 21
I Have a Dream: Figurative Language / 22
I Have a Dream: Mood and Theme / 23
I Have a Dream: Paraphrasing
Number the Stars / 26
Number the Stars: Pre-Reading Activities / 27
Number the Stars: Ch 1-3 / 28
Number the Stars: Ch 4-5 / 29
Number the Stars: Ch 6-7 / 30
Number the Stars: Ch 8-9
Number the Stars / May 3
Number the Stars: Ch 10-11 / 4
Number the Stars: Ch 12-13 / 5
Number the Stars: Ch 14-15 / 6
Number the Stars: Ch 16-17 / 7
Number the Stars: Mid-Unit Project
Apartheid and South Africa / 10
Nelson Mandela and Apartheid Introduction / 11
Inferences about the lives of people of different races under Apartheid / 12
Compare and Contrast: Apartheid and Slavery / 13
Watch Invictus
Congratulations! You finally got your much requested movie day!!! / 14
Watch Invictus
Student led movements / 17
Begin work on student led social justice movement packet / 18
Continue work on student led social justice movement packet / 19
Finish work on student led social justice movement packet / 20
Unit Nine Review / 21
Unit Nine Test
This is your last test of the year! Can you believe that you’re almost a 7th grader?
I Have A Dream Writing Project / 24
Work on writing project packet: Introduction to assignment and prewriting / 25
Work on writing project packet: Pre-writing and drafting / 26
Work on writing project packet: Revising and editing / 27
Work on writing project packet: Typing final draft
If you want to share your speech in the Dream Day, please be prepared to share it in class on Tuesday. / 28 NO SCHOOL
Enjoy your long weekend!
Dream day and class wrap up / 31 NO SCHOOL
Wahoo! / June 1
Finalize typing of rough draft.
In class selections of speakers for tomorrow’s Dream Day. / 2
DREAM DAY
Final papers due today if you did not finish yesterday. / 3
Class wrap up, tying up loose ends on the year / 4
Class wrap up, tying
up loose ends on the
year
Congratulations 7th grader! You have finished your 6th grade year!
I (______)
Have A Dream....
Assignment
Throughout this unit we have talked about issues of injustice that other people have cared deeply about, and then looked at the actions that they took to fix the problems that they saw in the world. Well, now it’s your turn!
Martin Luther King, Jr. saw a problem—not all people in America were treated as if they were equals. He had a dream that one day that problem would no longer exists, and he was excited to tell people about that dream. There are still problems in our world. What problem do YOU see? If that problem went away, how would the world be different?
You will write a persuasive paper sharing your dreams with the world. Because it is persuasive writing, about your dream, you will write to convince the people who are reading it that they should think the same way that you do.
But Martin Luther King, Jr. didn’t just write a paper! He gave a speech! At the end of the year there will be an opportunity for a few people from each class to share their “I have a dream” speech with the whole sixth grade. This is a REALLY cool opportunity to show off your writing!