The units below offer a representative look at my approach to curriculum design, literacy instruction, social studies integration, and student-centered learning. Across the year, students move through units on identity, research, poetry, democracy, opinion writing, and historical inquiry — each designed to help students build academic skills while also thinking deeply about themselves, their communities, and the wider world.
Together, these units show how I design learning experiences that are rigorous, developmentally appropriate, interdisciplinary, and grounded in students’ real lives. Students read novels, poems, nonfiction texts, historical sources, and opinion articles; write personal narratives, informational books, poems, and evidence-based opinion pieces; participate in book clubs and online discussions; and create culminating projects for authentic audiences.
A major through-line in my curriculum design is a commitment to helping students encounter a wide range of voices, histories, identities, and perspectives. Across units, students explore questions of belonging, culture, race, justice, democracy, freedom of expression, and human dignity. I believe students’ learning is richer when marginalized perspectives and histories are not treated as side notes, but woven meaningfully into the core of the curriculum.
In Unit 1, students explored identity through reading, writing, social studies, family conversations, and personal reflection. They studied many “identity ingredients,” including names, body diversity, family, brain diversity, race, ethnicity, culture, place, values, and social causes, while considering how people are shaped by language, history, community, relationships, and lived experience. The unit was designed to help students better understand themselves and others while practicing the literacy skills needed to express that understanding with clarity and evidence.
Reading instruction centered on a whole-class novel study of Marcus Vega Doesn’t Speak Spanish, which gave students a shared text for thinking deeply about belonging, family, identity, and change. Students learned to read closely by annotating with purpose, tracking characters through their actions, dialogue, and thoughts, and supporting their ideas with page-specific evidence. They practiced using a claim–evidence–reasoning structure to explain their interpretations, noticed patterns across chapters, and studied author’s craft, especially the descriptive language that helps readers create vivid “mind movies.”
In writing, students developed personal narratives that invited readers into meaningful moments from their lives. They practiced using dialogue, internal monologue, action, and vivid vocabulary to show characters’ thoughts and feelings rather than simply naming emotions. They also worked on shaping a clear story arc, using transitions to guide the reader through events, and crafting openings that both hook the reader and establish context.
The unit culminated in an Identity Exhibit, where students selected and created artifacts that represented meaningful parts of who they are. Together, the work in this unit demonstrates my ability to design interdisciplinary learning that is intellectually rich, emotionally grounded, culturally responsive, and developmentally appropriate. It also shows how I scaffold complex topics and higher-order literacy skills in ways that help students think deeply, communicate clearly, and build a stronger sense of community.
In Unit 2, students learned how nonfiction texts are built and how readers can use that structure to understand information more efficiently. They studied common nonfiction text structures — including cause and effect, compare and contrast, problem and solution, sequence, and description — and practiced using text features such as headings, subheadings, tables of contents, indexes, diagrams, charts, captions, and bolded words to locate information and identify main ideas. These nonfiction reading skills became the foundation for students’ research work, helping them navigate sources more purposefully and understand how information is organized for readers.
Students then began a multi-week informational writing project focused on a social studies topic of their choice. During the research phase, they learned how to take notes that would actually support later writing: using bullet points, paraphrasing instead of copying, selecting the most important information, and using arrows, symbols, spacing, and grouping to show relationships between related ideas. From there, students learned to synthesize their research by grouping related notes into subtopics, ordering information logically, and turning bullet-point notes into clear sentences and paragraphs with strong topic sentences and explanations in their own words.
The unit culminates in students publishing informational books in Book Creator, where they apply their understanding of nonfiction text features to the design of their own books. Students learn to make design choices that support the reader’s understanding rather than simply decorating the page. This unit demonstrates my ability to break a complex, long-term project into clear stages — nonfiction reading, research, notetaking, synthesis, drafting, revision, design, and publication — while helping students think like readers, researchers, writers, and designers.
In Unit 3, students studied free verse poetry as readers, writers, historians, and performers. The unit began by challenging students’ assumptions that poetry is random, confusing, or restrictive. Students learned that reading poetry requires a different kind of attention than reading prose, so we practiced rereading poems through five different pairs of “poetry glasses”: Mind Movie, Situation, Language, Form, and Meaning. This gave students a concrete framework for analyzing how poets use imagery, speaker, context, word choice, figurative language, repetition, line breaks, rhythm, structure, and symbolism to create meaning.
During Black History Month, our poetry study centered on six Black poets and connected literary analysis with social studies and history. Students read Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool,” Maya Angelou’s “Harlem Hopscotch,” Lucille Clifton’s “blessing the boats,” excerpts from Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover, and Amanda Gorman’s “New Day’s Lyric.” Alongside these poems, students learned about the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Migration, the 1963 Chicago Public Schools boycott, housing discrimination, redlining, and major historical events that shaped the world of each poem. These lessons helped students see that poetry is not just a form of personal expression; it is also a way to respond to history, make sense of injustice, preserve memory, imagine resilience, and speak into moments of change.
Students then shifted from analyzing poetry to writing their own. Inspired by Kenneth Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams, they completed seven free verse writing exercises, including list poems, poems from new perspectives, “I seem to be / but really…” poems, “I used to / but now…” poems, poems of address, nature poems, and more experimental prompts such as the “Third Eye” and “Poetic Compounds.” Because free verse is flexible, students were able to move through rapid cycles of prewriting, drafting, feedback, revision, and experimentation, learning that strong writing often emerges through risk-taking and iteration.
The unit culminated in poetry recitation and a Poetry Publishing Party. Students studied Poetry Out Loud performances, then built their own recitations “layer by layer,” practicing enunciation, pacing, volume, intonation, facial expression, body language, and purposeful gestures. At the celebration, students performed original poems for classmates and families, shared additional work in small groups, and reflected on the choices they made as writers. This unit demonstrates my ability to integrate literacy, social studies, Black history, creative writing, performance, student voice, and authentic audience into a coherent learning experience that is both rigorous and deeply human.
In Unit 4, students study the U.S. Constitution, democracy, civic participation, and the importance of freedom of expression. Students learn how to form, organize, and communicate their opinions clearly by using graphic organizers to plan their thinking, develop reasons, and select evidence from article sources that supports their claims. Opinion writing instruction emphasizes not only stating a viewpoint, but building a convincing argument by connecting reasons to relevant facts, examples, and details from texts.
Students also practice civic discourse through structured online conversations in Google Classroom, inspired by the New York Times Student Opinion format. In this online forum, students learn how to express their own opinions, respond to classmates’ ideas in kind and thoughtful ways, ask questions, build on others’ points, and disagree respectfully. During this unit, students also participate in Book Clubs, which further strengthen their ability to listen actively, collaborate in conversation, support their thinking with evidence, and learn from peers.
The unit then broadens into a study of the conditions that contributed to the rise of Nazi Germany, helping students think more deeply about why democratic norms, civic courage, and freedom of expression matter. The goal is not only for students to learn about government or history, but to understand that democracy depends on people’s ability to think critically, speak responsibly, listen across difference, and recognize threats to human dignity and democratic life. This unit demonstrates my ability to connect social studies, literacy, digital communication, historical inquiry, collaborative discussion, and moral reasoning into a coherent learning experience.