Embedded Files
Secondary PD Opportunity: Instructional Strategies for ELD, Newcomer and Sheltered Content Classes
In this unit, students read multiple texts across various genres, tracing common themes & grappling with essential questions relating to nurturing the aspects of our humanity that promote and support empathy, compassion and understanding. In the texts, topics revolve around ways we can manage conflicting emotions, especially when problem solving, and attempting to understand and internalize the ways our decisions and behavior impacts others. The parable Two Wolves, the first text in the unit, begins "There is a battle of two wolves inside us all." The battle is an internal conflict between positive and negative emotions. The wolf you feed is the one that wins, and is the extended metaphor that threads through the unit, and informs the final project.
In this unit, students conduct research and practice evidence based writing to produce arguments that support a claim, leading to a formally structured classroom debate. Students meet in small, heterogeneous research/discussion groups, where they collaboratively conduct research about a relevant topic of their choice in preparation for their formal debate. Teachers are encouraged to invite other teachers, admin and school staff to act as judges.
In this unit, students write rhetorical Précis and conduct literature circles and socratic seminars to engage with the texts and grapple with the essential questions:
To what extent and in what ways has America made--or not made--progress towards racial equality in the last century? How does racism show up today?
What is implicit bias and in what ways does it impact American society?
How can we challenge and change racist systems of oppression?
How can I be an anti-racist ally?
How does art (novels, music, TV, etc.) help us understand and address real life issues like racism and police brutality?
In this unit, students will create a self portrait similar to Frida Kahlo’s “Self-Portrait Along the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States.” Along the way, students will analyze home, and what home means to them, through comparing and contrasting the US and home country through the lens of Frida Kahlo’s life and paintings.
Page updated
Report abuse