Reading Workshop Spring 2020
This curriculum project is a 5-week course I am co-teaching during Spring 2020. Due to COVID-19, this class will be delivered completely online. In this course, students will improve their reading and vocabulary skills, expand their content knowledge, and hone their analytical and critical evaluative eyes through reading John Lewis’s trilogy of graphic novels, March, viewing the 2014 historical drama film Selma, and viewing excerpts from the PBS documentary Freedom Summer.
Note: This curriculum project was developed amid a rapidly changing environment. Several significant details, including the length of the semester, the core texts, and the writing outputs, described here in the creative brief changed before this project was finalized.
At the end of the course, students will be able to:
In addition, students will improve their ability to:
These skills are assessed by the Reading ACCUPLACER.
10 “game plans” of lessons that are to be delivered exclusively online using Google Classroom. Each game plan consists of the following areas:
(Note: I anticipate that the content for "Practice" and "Response" will be almost all blank on this submission because my co-teacher is developing these parts of the course. She is not a student in this graduate course, and is still in the process of developing these elements. The one exception is the Response activity for Week Five: Wednesday & Thursday, which is an activity and assessment I've designed around the media literacy objectives of this course.
Due to COVID-19, I am tasked with turning my 7.5 week Spring course, typically taught as an in-person, 4 days/week, 3-hour long class, into a completely online 5 week course. I have designed this course around three core texts:
In addition to these three core texts, we will also view speeches by John Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer, and President Johnson, and excerpts from documentaries produced by PBS, Time, Voices of the Civil Rights Movement, and The Henry Ford Museum.
The primary goal of the class is to build the reading skills of students who are identified as having weaker reading skills, and who are at-risk for not transitioning into college coursework due to their score on the ACCUPLACER, the placement test the college administers. (Students must earn a level 6 in order to take 100-level work; our high school students can’t begin to take college classes until they earn a level 6.)
One supplementary goal of the class is to increase students' content knowledge of this part of American history. I have selected this content for this course because I find my students are typically interested in it; many of them make comments like, “Why didn’t we ever learn about this before?” In addition, all students will need to take a US History course through the community college; this class may serve as a preview of some of the content if they take HST 123: The Twentieth Century or HST 150: African American History, two popular electives. Even if they take a different course, this content is still valuable since learning about this part of history develops their historical schema, and gives them the chance to practice thinking like a historian.
An additional supplementary goal of the course is to provide the opportunity for an exploration of content that for some students, may serve as a window, and for other students, may serve as a mirror. As a mirror, I mean that students may see their own experience reflected in Lewis's writing. As I wrote in my creative brief, "Many of my students make personal connections to the content of the class: approximately one-third of our students (and slightly more in this particular class) are from Middle Eastern countries and/or are Muslim, and have experiences of being stereotyped based on their ethnicity/religion that help them to relate to this content personally." As a window, I mean that through Lewis's experiences, students can learn about and develop empathy for others' lived experiences, and see the power and potential of youth activism for social change.
In addition, due to COVID-19 forcing this semester to move online, I have a third supplemental goal of the course: to build a community of scholars in my class. My students are all working remotely, and I anticipate their need to connect with one another. I want to provide ways for them to do so through my course. As I wrote in my creative brief, "I hope my students remember a sense of community; I hope they will think back to this semester and remember not just what they learned, but also that they felt cared for, connected, heard, and engaged."
Finally, students will practice the habits as critical consumers of media through analysis and comparison of texts in four genres: documentaries, speeches, a film, and a graphic novel trilogy. Students will actively engage in collaborative digital annotation of at least three genres, which will allow them to not only interact with the texts, but also with one another.
(This is the last week of the Winter semester at my school; I will be focused on supporting my students through submitting their final projects and on submitting my final grades.)