Periods and Movements

Overview: Periods and Movements is a grades 6-12 big idea in the Texts domain. This big idea provides grade-level expectations for honing in on the impact that time periods and historical or literary movements have on texts. While these expectations outline specific objectives, such as numbers of genres, the larger emphasis is on context, which is a cornerstone of the ELA standards framework and connected to many expectations that are located in all domains and big ideas. The overall intent of the Periods and Movements big idea is to ensure that students have awareness of time periods and movements as one important factor of context. For example, if students understand that context encompasses many different factors and that historical events and societal values are two of those factors, they will then draw from the skills and concepts located in other areas of the framework to support their understanding and analysis of the specific impact of time periods (i.e., history) and movements (e.g., common societal values) in the texts that they explore and interpret through reading, viewing, and listening.

When planning for instruction, teachers will find it helpful to focus on how the Periods and Movements expectations plug into the related expectations in other big ideas by leveraging the details of the Periods and Movements expectations to shape and better define the skills and concepts outlined in those related expectations. While characteristics of the specific time periods and genres will be a necessary part of the instruction, committing those characteristics to memory is less important than understanding why history and society matter, how to use the resources available to them to gain information about those factors, and then how to apply that information to understand and analyze texts in order to put them to use to accomplish specific and authentic tasks.

While the Periods and Movements big idea provides an opportunity to ensure a focused study of important factors that influence texts, its form and verbiage may present certain obstacles to instructional planning. The resources on this page are planning tools intended to mitigate some of those obstacles (e.g., illuminating some of the correlated expectations).