Domain One: Planning & Preparation

In general, my goal in this unit is to have students explore existing power dynamics and the ways in which they influence character motivations, character development, and thematic development. As I was planning, however, I kept thinking about how The Great Gatsby is often hated because readers perceive the characters as one-dimensional and the plot as disconnected from our reality. In thinking about my classroom, I wanted students to dig deeper and make meaning of this book for themselves so that they would neither take this book for its surface plot nor internalize the harmful narratives that this book reminds us exist in our world. In order “to help shift [students’] mindset” from fixed regarding their relationships to English classrooms and the world around them, “dependent learners have to develop their own individual counternarratives” to the things they have been told are true (Hammond, 223). By promoting deep thinking and active engagement with the text, I am not just hoping students will notice and create connection between themselves and the text, but I want them to question messages (such as negative self-talk or negative mindsets about the way the world is) and who passed these down to them, as well as what empowered individuals gain from maintaining supremacy over people who look like my students. In addition to empowering students to develop agency both in their learning and their society, I am largely focusing on “building intellective capacity” by using various “instructional strategies that help move students through each stage” of intellectual development and processing (Hammond, 246). We will be using call-and-response strategies, for example, to help them prioritize listening during instructions so that they can fully utilize independent work time rather than have to wait for the instructions to be repeated. If they can use their work time better, then they will be able to build up endurance for schoolwork that they seem to have lost across virtual education.

In my toolkit, I discuss many tools and methods that we are using in order to prepare students throughout the unit for their summative assessment. In this final project, students are asked to create a presentation in which they explore the idea of the American Dream, how particular characters relate to this idea, and what the dream means to people today. They will be using technology to keep track of the notes that they take throughout the semester, such as Padlet, in which they can track the notes they take by color-coding and sorting them. This will help them once the summative approaches and they want to look through and make sense of the quotes that have stood out to them. In addition, because the use of evidence is highly important, we will be using Glose Education for enhancing close reading skills and annotations. In addition to keeping a digital record of notes, students will be using 3-2-1 note catchers, so that they know exactly what we are reading for on a particular day. Seeing as how “graphic organizers show how information can be visually arranged, helping students to see the big picture of what they’re learning—and the relationships between important chunks of content,” we will be using them as students come to understand the relationships between character identity and the power that they may or may not have (McTighe, 84). We will be “having learners venture a prediction or generate a hypothesis before a lesson” as this has been shown generates “intrigue, [help] students tease out their prior knowledge, and [get] their minds “primed” for new learning” (McTighe, 70). This is part of the 3-2-1 notes, in which students ask themselves a question about the text, but also part of our entry routines in which students will be asked provocative questions that will be their entrance ticket for class and addressed throughout the day’s lesson, and are also a form of pre-assessment to show what students knew before a lesson began. In asking provocative questions to begin class, students will also be ready to answer harder questions, such as what the American Dream means to them, We will also have students practice finding main ideas and creating summaries through 4-2-1 activities, which encourage collaborative learning and processing and have students practice speaking with others, as their summative assessment is a presentation. Finally, we will also use methods to develop argument writing with evidence, like murder mystery activities that engage students in the “process of generating and testing hypotheses … and challenging them to develop and test possible explanations” while showing what clues they believe led them to their conclusions (McTighe, 77-8). Overall, the activities and methods chosen are designed to encourage student growth and engagement as they prepare for a summative that requires them to create text-to-self connections and defend text-to-world claims.