Rationale
Vertical alignment of skills within disciplines is one of the most noteworthy recent reforms in education.
A Vertical Team consists of a group of teachers from different grade levels in a given discipline who work cooperatively to develop and implement a vertically aligned program aimed at helping students acquire the academic skills necessary for success in the Advanced Placement Program—or any program of study for that matter. An AP Vertical Team necessarily includes middle school participation. The primary goals of a vertical team are: (1) to improve academic performance for all students in earlier grades by introducing skills and concepts needed for success in AP and other challenging courses, and (2) to improve performance and participation in the Advanced Placement Program.3
In the English classroom, a clear understanding of the expected outcomes at each grade level ensures a disciplined transition between grade levels. The communal responsibility implied by this pedagological structure is an essential building block for student development. For example, students must be able to define key literary terms/elements in order to identify and analyze them within varied works. Yet, often students have difficulty at the twelfth grade with such tasks because they lack necessary foundational skills, especially those relating to poetry as a unique genre.
Sadly, the students who end up being challenged by poetry are those enrolled in the class of the "smart students" who commonly "get it". They get everything anyway, don't they? But what of other students who could demonstrate that they would mature into "smart students" if provided the opportunity and specific models for how to critically study poetry at various grade levels. It is a demanding challenge which ultimately requires that teachers focus fundamentally on working collaboratively and continuously across grade levels. But for many students, this does not occur until they find themselves at the mercy of their twelfth grade English teacher who just cannot understand why his or her students "got this far" and do not know—or remember—how to participate in oral and written discourse about poetic texts.
According to current Georgia Department of Education Performance Standards Curriculum Revision Process documentation, in 2005 all Georgia schools will begin to implement new content-based curricula based on new performance standards. In English, the new standards included for grades 9-12 follow a delineated progression in the strands of writing and conventions.4 At the ninth grade level, an expected focus in reading and literature prompts study of literary genres, as students develop initial understanding of both structure and meaning in a work of literature. Students further develop initial understanding of how form affects the meaning and the process of interpretation.
Ninth grade students will engage differences in style and subject matter in poems by a variety of contemporary and canonical poets. They will identify and respond to the aesthetic effects of subject matter (e.g. topic, theme), sound devices (e.g., alliteration, onomatopoeia, rhyme scheme), figurative language (e.g., personification, metaphor, simile, hyperbole), and structure (e.g., fixed and free forms, rhymed and unrhymed, narrative and lyric) in a variety of poems.
At the tenth grade level, expected outcomes require students to identify and analyze elements of poetry and provide evidence from the text to support a sound interpretation. Students will analyze elements of poetry and provide evidence from the text to support understanding. They will analyze the effects of diction, syntax, sound (alliteration, end rhyme, internal rhyme, consonance, assonance), form (lyric poem, narrative poem, fixed form poems to include for example the ballad and sonnet), figurative language (personification, imagery, metaphor, simile, synecdoche, hyperbole, symbolism) and structure of poems as these elements relate to meaning. They will also analyze and evaluate the appropriateness of diction and imagery (controlling images, figurative language, understatement, irony, paradox).
The eleventh grade standards require adeptness in composition that states, explains, and justifies students' interpretation of literary works, using only evidence from the primary text as support. A sample task at the eleventh grade which ultimately builds on the skills from ninth and tenth grades will include a timed, in-class essay that states, explains, and justifies the student writer's interpretation of a literary work, using only evidence from the primary text as support (e.g. characterization, setting, diction, point of view, structure, figurative language, imagery, tone, etc.).
Writing that demonstrates proficient literary analysis by raising the level of critical thinking skills and rhetorical techniques demonstrates adequate performance at the twelfth grade level. A sample task at the twelfth grade includes the student composing an essay that explains and supports or refutes the strategies an author uses to make meaning in a literary text (e.g. diction, point of view, structure, figurative language, imagery, tone).
Hence using the vertical team approach in the implementation of this curriculum unit aligns with the current evolutionary process mandated by the Georgia Department of Education.
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