Students analyze the literary features of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool” and then imagine themselves as one of the characters in the poem many years in the future. Partners share their responses and then brainstorm details on audience, purpose, and tone, before students write a first draft of the selected character’s story. Students use a rubric and peer review as they complete polished versions of their work.

In this activity, students will be divided into different roles--bracket makers, seeding committee, or class logo/bracket namers. The activity will span 3 weeks and take about 10 minutes each day, as students debate, support, and choose their picks for the "March Madness" of books, poetry, or short stories (or favorite characters, etc.). Students must discern, defend, and support their picks, offering the opportunity for assessing understanding of the texts.

During this extended unit, students will explore environmental sustainability from a number of different perspectives. They will dive deep into global policies regarding the environment, specifically the dedication of different countries to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Students will review and discuss specific case studies, offering their opinion of certain practices and policies. As a summative assessment, students will create a “Call to Action” project, with the intent of raising awareness and instigating action on environmental sustainability. This unit includes language (objectives, vocabulary, and lesson modifications) that will help the teacher meet the needs of ELL students. These strategies may be helpful for other students, as well.

This four-week unit focuses on the theme of nostalgia. Students will study several genres of literature (poetry, nonfiction, fiction) and write informal and formal analytical commentaries. Students will also do writing about their own childhood memories.

The Paragraph Shrinking strategy allows each student to take turns reading, pausing, and summarizing the main points of each paragraph. Students provide each other with feedback as a way to monitor comprehension.

Students will watch and discuss video clips that show how two men in Chile coped with being prisoners in concentration camps during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Each student will then create a non-fiction picture book that tells the story of one of these men and provides historical context.

Power Notes is a strategy that teaches students an efficient form of organizing information from assigned text. This technique provides students a systematic way to look for relationships within material they are reading. Power Notes help visually display the differences between main ideas and supportive information in outline form. Main ideas or categories are assigned a power 1 rating. Details and examples are assigned power 2s, 3s, or 4s.

In this lesson, students use debate as a tool for discussing the Revolutionary War.

Studying Robert Frost's "Mending Wall," students explore the intricate relationship between a poem's form and its content.

A Seed Discussion is a two-part strategy used to teach students how to engage in discussions about assigned readings. In the first part, students read selected text and identify "seeds" or key concepts of a passage which may need additional explanation. In the second part, students work in small groups to present their "seeds" to one another. Each "seed" should be thoroughly discussed before moving on to the next.

Students examine the state of the print newspaper industry, then debate its future.

In this lesson, students examine the state of the print newspaper industry, then debate its future.

This resource provides a lesson pertaining to a close reading of "A Long Thin Line". Students will complete an analysis using a graphic organizer, review the article using the SOAPStone method and finally repsond to the work in the form of a freestyle writing.

Exploring the use of style in literature helps students understand how language conveys mood, images, and meaning. After exploring the styles of two authors, students will translate passages from one author into the style of another. Then they will translate fables into style of one of the authors.

Students explore the commercial roots of the American Dream and analyze a historical or literary text that supports this philosophy in conversation with an Op-Ed column.

In this lesson, students explore the commercial roots of the American Dream and analyze a historical or literary text that supports this philosophy in conversation with an Op-Ed column.

This lesson, which can be adapted to multiple texts, has students complete literature circles as the final activity in a novel centered around The Great Gatsby.

Students can use the ADDIE Model Template to plan their project-based learning assignment.

In this unit from the Standford University The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute students develop a broader understanding of the struggle for equality from 1868 to the present by exploring first-person narratives from a diverse group of Americans. Beginning with a study of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, students determine the criteria for identifying an event as historically significant. Students then explore the impact of the struggle for equality by interviewing people in their community and utilizing resources such as Toni Morrison’s Remember: The Journey to School Integration, Voices of Civil Rights, a national oral history project by the Library of Congress, and StoryCorps, an independent non-profit project that focuses on oral history collections of individuals’ life experiences.

Students will read, critically analyze and write about a series of poems dealing with 'songs about the American experience."