This lesson provides an opportunity for each student to share his or her learning aloud with the class, as well as to learn from classmates’ research before committing to a position. The students are put into like-minded groups intentionally to encourage them to work together to deepen their arguments.

Students sometimes have difficulty recalling important events in their early lives to write about. This lesson works to resolve this challenge by having students brainstorm as a whole class, in order to benefit from collective recall as they define pivotal moments in their lives. Once items have been remembered, students focus on details of these events by choosing graphic symbols for these moments, people, and places, narrowing their lists to eight to ten items, and then ranking and graphing the items so that the overall connections and patterns are revealed. The graphic life map not only gives students specific events to write about but also includes a graphic for each memory that will help bring the events to life.

This activity emphasizes the importance of teaching reading and writing strategies for students to use with informational text.

This lesson provides an opportunity for students to not only read and view the importance of choosing career choices now, but gives them an opportunity to write about their future career goals and think about the best way to achieve them starting now.

Through multiple lessons, students will explore career choices, set educational goals, and create a media project in which they share information about their chosen career.

Jigsaw is a strategy that emphasizes cooperative learning by providing students an opportunity to actively help each other build comprehension. Use this technique to assign students to reading groups composed of varying skill levels. Each group member is responsible for becoming an "expert" on one section of the assigned material and then "teaching" it to the other members of the team.

In this lesson on the Argo movie official trailer and review article, students will learn about 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis by reading and listening to the text, watching the trailer and working in speaking, listening, reading and writing activities. This resource supports English language development for English language learners.

A six week long Read Aloud plan for the book, The Last Boy at St. Edith's.

The following series of activities for the classroom allow students to explore and interact with poetry by writing letters to poets.

In this lesson, students will use the individual experience of Mary McLeod Bethune to analyze choice, its affects on social equality, and impact on their own life experiences.

In this lesson students examine how imagery is used to represent ideas, themes, periods of history, and make cultural connections to poem, "Still I Rise." Students will reflect through written expression how resiliency is in their lives, school, and community.

In this video from American Masters | Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise, students will explore the Harlem Writers Guild, the oldest African American writers association in the world. Teaching tips suggest asking students to research the Harlem Writers Guild and to think about writing as part of a community.

In this video from American Masters | Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise, students will explore the role of poetry in American politics, compare Angelou and Frost, and consider how Angelou’s poem reflects the challenges and concerns of the time. Discussion questions, teaching tips, and a student handout push students to engage with Angelou’s words and to think critically about her famous work.

In this video from American Masters | Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise, students will learn about the connection between Maya Angelou and Malcolm X and their work in Ghana. Discussion questions and video included.

In this video from American Masters | Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise, students will examine Maya Angelou’s impact on those who knew her personally. Utilizing video, discussion questions and teaching tips, students will analyze and reflect on Angelou’s mentors in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

The students will explore reading strategies using the think-aloud process as students investigate connections between the life and writings of Edgar Allan Poe. The unit, which begins with an in-depth exploration of “The Raven,” then moves students from a full-class reading of the poem to small-group readings of Poe’s short stories (“The Black Cat,” “Hop-Frog,” “Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”). The unit concludes with individual projects that explore the readings in more detail.

In this unit students practice writing to an essential question, using context clues and root words to determine word meaning, close reading with the aid of a glossary, taking notes with graphic organizers, re-reading to answer text dependent questions; and summarizing.

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.

The PQP technique—Praise–Question–Polish—requires group members to take a turn reading their drafts aloud as the other students follow along with copies. This oral reading helps the writer to hear the piece in another voice and to identify possible changes independently.

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.