Why Do I Have to Learn This?

My teacher brain is hardwired to think in terms of units. I recognize the possibility this compulsion may come from leftover remnants of my decades-ago college education where I spent hours creating unit binders.  Seriously, that's no joke! Anyone who graduated college with a teaching degree from "back then" knows I speak the truth.  I left college with dozens of those things! I am not even sure where they are now; probably adding to the girth of some landfill in West Tennessee.  

Maybe creating all those units planted a seed in my teacher soul that has sprouted into what I am today. The units I create today are not the same as they were back then, but they still honor the notion of cohesiveness.  

Last week, my sassy seventh-grade daughter was complaining about having to learn some skill in one of her classes.  She complained, "Why do we have to learn this anyway?"  We've all heard this, right?  It's not an uncommon phrase uttered by students.  They want meaning given to what they are learning.

So, what can you as a teacher do to give meaning to your daily reading instruction?  Think in terms of units.  They are an ideal way to help students make connections between daily engaging, rigorous texts and tasks.  They give students, regardless of grade, an opportunity to apply what they learn to a well-chosen culminating task that gives meaning to the whole unit.  

Let me give you an example of what I mean by explaining the process I went through to develop my most recent unit. 

Eighth-grade students at my school will be reading the graphic novel March Book One by John Lewis in a few weeks.  After I read this amazing book that depicted the struggles of ordinary people during the Civil Rights Movement, I knew our students needed to acquire some basic background knowledge of the this time period.  Without that knowledge, they would miss the meaning of the book.  You can probably already predict where my brain went: a Civil Rights Movement unit.

I began, as I always do, by deciding what the essential question and culminating tasks for this unit would be.  How can my students take what they learn about the Civil Rights Movement and apply it to their own lives?  How can learning about these events have meaning for them? How can I answer the question they most assuredly will ask: why are we learning this?  

The essential question for this unit is "Do you have the power to change America?"  I settled on this unit task: The Civil Rights Movement was a time of great turmoil in America.  Many brave men and women put themselves at risk for what they believed.  Write an essay explaining what you can learn from these men and women.  

After I decided on the end-of-unit task, I searched for informational texts that would help my students get the full meaning of March Book One.  CommonLit is always my go-to site.  It is chocked full of rigorous texts on a variety of topics.  I found five text on this site that would meet my need: 

• The Sit-In Movement - lexile 1020
• Scottsboro Boys - lexile 1190
• Emmett Till - lexile 1070
• Showdown in Little Rock - lexile 1060
• Youngest of the Little Rock Nine Speaks Out - lexile 1150

Next, I searched YouTube for video clips that would help engage students in reading these texts, as well as March Book One.  There are so many to choose from, but I try to keep clips 2-4 minutes long because they are just a springboard to launch students into reading the texts.  I settled on these clip:

• Emmett Till - Legacy (2:16)
• Little Rock Nine (3:41)
• John Lewis Gets in the Way
• Scottsborro Boys   (1:46)
• Rep. John Lewis’ Civil Rights Story Comes to Life in Comics 4:33
• Congressman John Lewis on Civil Rights Movement 3:39

After I gathered all my materials, I reviewed them and decided which ELA standards would be most appropriate to teach these texts. Obviously, a successful ELA classroom incorporates numerous standards a day through discussion, but it's important to have a focus standard that drives your daily assignment. Our daily target for week one of this unit is I can analyze how the author makes connections between events in the Civil Rights Movement.

The next step takes some work. You have to develop daily tasks. It is important to make sure the artifacts of learning from that day show students have achieved the standard. If not, you don't have alignment between your text, task, and standard. I developed 5 different tasks, one for each day, that measured students mastery of the standard as they read the text.

Finally, I focused on one of the most important aspects of teaching: the questions. Questioning is how we push students thinking. Teachers need to put thought into the questions they will use and be intentional about who and when they ask those questions. I always include questions with every plan I create. They focus on helping students make meaning of the text, while giving them practice in applying the standards to the text they are reading. Here are some of the questions I created for this unit:

1. What can we learn about the Civil Rights Movement from this text/section?
2. What challenges do social movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement, face internally and externally?
3. What connections can you make between the events of the Sit-Ins and other things we’ve learned about this week?
4. What is the connection between all the details in the section about ____?
5. How is this text similar from the text we read yesterday?
6. How is this text different from this text we read yesterday?

Taking unit planning step-by-step removes the difficulty and ensures you have standards-aligned instruction taking place everyday in your classroom.  It takes work, but it is time well spent because it give students the answer to "Why do I have to learn this?"

The two-week Civil Rights Movement Unit Plan can be found at my TPT store.  It doesn't have the cutesy clip art that many TPT items include because that's not me.  I believe my time is better spent creating rigorous materials, not cute materials.   It is a google doc that will link you to a plethora of materials in a google drive.