The Power of New Books

This year I applied for some grant money and was lucky enough to receive some funds for the reading program at my high school.  I applied to the grant to add books and magazines to the classroom library, which clearly hadn't been updated in quite some time (how many copies of Where the Red Fern Grows can one reading teacher own?).  I bought some class sets of books to get some new units going in Reading Lab, but I also added a lot to the classroom library.  I'm still in the process of ordering books, but every time I get new books in, the student's get so excited.  I really think Krashen has it right when he says that book floods can get students reading.  The students kept talking about how much I was spending on their books and that they had never seen so many new books in one place.  I even had kids calculating out how much they thought I spent (which then led to a discussion about book prices and how undercutting publisher pricing hurts the industry).  I've never seen so many students so excited about something as simple as new paperbacks.  The best part is that some of the students are reading the books and recommending them to me!  I'm so happy that they are excited to read and learn.

 I still have some money to spend.  I'm going to buy a couple more class book sets, but I'm sure I will have more to spend after finishing those orders.  What are some books you would recommend to my 9-12 graders?

LDC Collaboration: Day 2

We accomplished a lot during today's collaboration meeting. We decided to use Task 19 from the LDC model, which asks students to synthesize information from multiple sources. The filled in template task looks like this:

(Essential Question) After reading primary and secondary resources, create a role play that explains the charges brought in your reading.  Support your discussion with evidence from your research.

We decided to pull readings about a couple of different homicide cases.  Students will read about the cases and then decide whether the criminal is guilty, and if so, of what charge.  This task asks students to own the vocabulary as they justify their responses.  I'm very excited to see where the students take this activity.  Ultimately we will have three groups going in the classroom.  I will be available to circulate amongst the students along with the primary content area teacher.  The lesson should happen within the next couple of weeks.

Literacy Design Collaborative: Day 1

Today I met with the teacher who is going to begin implementing Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) within her next unit.  LDC basically breaks down Common Core literacy standards for English Language Arts, Science, and Social Studies and creates teaching tasks that can easily be implemented into curriculum.  These teaching tasks are created to maintain rigor, upholding important aspects of the Common Core.  LDC gives the teachers a template for writing teaching tasks wherein the instructor can select the text and task while guiding the learning by adding an essential question.  These tasks can become modules, which are like your teaching unit.  Multiple modules become courses based on the LDC principals.  For more information on LDC, go to www.ldc.org.

For our first meeting, I gave the teacher some packets on LDC that provide information about the development of this curriculum tool along with the templates for different tasks.  We are focusing on a political science course in the social studies department that most ninth grade students take when entering high school.  I hope to roll out LDC to teachers gradually, starting with teachers who work primarily with ninth graders.  Our first set of teaching tasks will occur during the unit "Introduction to Criminal Law."  This unit focuses on different crimes over a series of chapters of the students' textbook.

After introducing the concept of LDC, I had the teacher select a literacy standard to work into their unit.  During this part of our meeting things were getting tricky.  To start off, the Common Core has identified literacy standards in the back of the ELA standards packet for History, Science, and Technical subjects.  I had assumed we would use one of these standards to think about possible teaching tasks.  However, the standards for Political Science/ Civic Literacy are also described as "literacy" standards, though I'm thinking that this means that students have an understanding of civic responsibility and law rather than the ability to read an engage with texts in the field of social studies.  For this upcoming unit, we selected the following essential concept and/or skill:

     Understand the rights and responsibilities of each citizen and demonstrate the value of lifelong civic action.

This essential concept will ground the general learning targets for the upcoming unit.  We also decided that students will complete an "After Reading" task from the after reading rubric.  Our next steps will include deciding on an ELA social studies standard and selecting a task to begin creating the assessment that will demonstrate student learning.  I think many great things will come of our work with LDC, especially because the content area teacher is so excited to try new things.  Hopefully I can roll out more LDC modules next year with other teachers.