English I is a foundational English course designed to prepare students for their futures in the college, career, and/or military arenas. To serve that purpose, students must first acquire a set of critical thinking skills in their high school academic career that will prepare them for future success. The foundations for these skills have already been laid; English I will build upon them in complexity and rigor, pushing students to reflect and grow as both students and global citizens.
To this end, we will spend the school year working through five carefully designed units. See the broad strokes of each unit below to discover what students will be learning.
The first unit focuses on the internal and external pressures that people face. Students will choose one of several book options to hold regular book clubs with: Piecing Me Together by Renee Watson, Ground Zero by Alan Gratz, Peak by Roland Smith, and QB 1 by Mike Lupica. In addition to the student's chosen novel, we will read a whole-class novel together to serve as our mentor text. The novel planned for our whole-class read is Swing by Kwame Alexander.
The goal with Unit One is for students to develop proficiency with identifying big ideas and themes in texts and figure out how to map those ideas and themes to real-world events. Further, students should be able to effectively reason how those big ideas and themes are created with sufficient varied evidence, and they must communicate those reasons and evidence with clarity.
Unit Two revolves around taking texts that are challenging for students in some way and equipping them with strategies to "productively struggle" their way through the text in order to build stamina, problem-solving skills, and confidence as readers and thinkers. To this end, we will be reading a variety of short stories, poems, informational texts, and excerpts from Shakespearean plays to continue to build their skills. These additional texts may include "Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou, "Saboteur" by Ha Jin, "Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid, and excerpts from Romeo and Juliet, MacBeth, and Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare.
With Unit Three, we will enter the third nine weeks of the school year. In this unit, we will turn our attention to persuasive writing. From the Denton ISD curriculum team, "This unit teaches readers to question text, examine sources for author bias, and evaluate what is included, as well as what’s omitted. In addition to analyzing text, students will start to compose arguments that are grounded in the structure of argument, using many of the texts they’ve examined as readers as model texts for how to craft their own arguments as writers." Over the course of six weeks, we will analyze infographics and short reviews, read and annotate articles, and dissect public service announcements in order to craft effective arguments in both short form and essay formats. Additionally, students will work to create their own public service announcements in order to consider and practice rhetorical techniques of persuasion.
In Unit Three, texts will largely depend on student choice and everyday discovey of "in-the-wild" arguments.
In one of the most exciting units of the school year, Unit Four will see book clubs once again become the primary vehicle for textual analysis and understanding. Students will collaborate with peers reading the same self-chosen text from a list of choices provided to them to make meaning, practice previously learned skills, and build confidence as indpendent readers and thinkers. In this unit, students can choose from The Inheritance Games, The Eye of Minds, Where the World Ends, Skyhunter, Wonder Woman: Warbringer, Variant, and Superman: Dawnbreaker. In addition to their chosen book club text, students will read additional fictional, informational, and poetic texts aligned with their chosen novel.
The goal for Unit Four is for students to extend skills built throughout the year to construct argumentative responses, analytical responses, and metacognitive reflections on their reading. Additionally, in Unit Four, we will be preparing for the English I End of Course STAAR exam. Passing the STAAR EOC is a critical component for graduation from a Texas school.
The final unit of the school year is a multi-genre research project. It is designed for the student to have substantial choice in the topic/focus of their project as well as the format and presentation. Students will need to choose at least three different textual genres (short story, persuasive essay, poem, infographic, etc.) to include in their final project, and all artifacts must revolve around the same question/theme/focus, exploring it from a variety of perspectives and angles. Students will be provided assistance every step of the way as they construct their final portfolio showcasing the development of their skills over the course of the year. Ultimately, the multi-genre research project will provide students with crucial research skill practice while synthesizing learning from all the previous units.