Classroom Activities and Timing of the Unit
This curriculum unit will be taught in my 11th-grade Advanced Placement English Language class in the second semester. Seniors will have already taken a U.S. history course, and the juniors will be enrolled in either college prep U.S. history or Advanced Placement U.S. History. Depending on their skill level, the unit will occupy five or six weeks in the second semester.
One challenge to teaching this unit so late in the school year is the impending AP English Language exam scheduled for the second week in May. I will need to balance explicit test prep for the exam with the unit’s activities. Because we are on a modified block schedule—we have two block days during which periods meet (evens on Wednesday and odd on Thursday) for 85 minutes—I anticipate designating block periods as test prep days and the remaining three regular schedule days (when I see every class) as unit days.
Week One
I will begin by reviewing the Emancipation Proclamation; Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments; the Reconstruction and Jim Crow Eras; and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. As noted above, I fully expected that by the time I teach the unit, all students will have had a good grounding in these events. This review will allow me to assess students’ knowledge of the events leading up to the passage of the acts and to fill any gaps they may have so that we are all working from the same foundation. This time of direct instruction will also allow students who did not finish the memoirs a few days grace to get them done. I will also introduce Graetz and Shapiro’s theory about the building blocks of successful movements so that students can look for these elements as they read and analyze class reading and the results of their research.
In preparation for week two, students will also be assigned to read and annotate William Lloyd Garrison’s 1854 speech “No Compromise with the Evil of Slavery” and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
Week Two
This will be a busy week. We will begin with a whole-class rhetorical analysis of William Lloyd Garrison’s speech and King’s essay. At 53 minutes run time, the PBS documentary The Murder of Emmett Till will just fit into one class period. It will be helpful to watch it together, especially since the topic of this week’s Socratic seminar or fishbowl on the Civil Rights Movement will include discussion of Reynold’s memoir and Moody’s memoir, in which she cites Emmett Till’s murder as the catalyst for her activism. In the discussion, students will be guided to also examine the Civil Rights Movement’s similarities and differences with current movements.
The school librarian will do a presentation on resources available to students through school subscriptions, and other sources, and methods to keep track of their research results to make creating endnotes and bibliographies easier. I will supplement this presentation with research tips of my own, including those shared by Ian Shapiro during Friday, May 4, 2019, during the May Organizational Session of the Yale National Initiative, including using Wiki as starting point but not a resource, and Google Scholar and JSTOR for scholarly journals. The librarian and I will review ways to evaluate the reliability or bias of search results.
This week, too, students will choose topics and groups, after which they will create a Google Doc to team folder in Google Drive where they will share their research, which they will begin over the weekend for homework.
Week Three
This week will be less structured. Groups will have the flexibility to work in a way that they feel most productive. Groups will be required to meet with me to refine topic and research question, ask clarifying questions and receive other assistance they feel they need to keep them on-track. I will also review format of a research paper (organization/elements of a paper, ways to cite information in endnotes/footnotes bibliography).
Groups will be conduct informal presentations to classmates about their topic and research question, after which their classmates may ask questions and/or make suggestions for further inquiry. Groups will continue workshopping their rough drafts, taking the feedback they receive and using it to inform their revisions.
Their homework will be to continue to research and improve their first draft in google doc with workshop revisions. By Sunday, groups will submit their first rough draft, which I will review and provide suggestions for improvement.
Week Four
This will be another unstructured, check-in week. I will meet with groups to gauge their progress and provide further assistance. They will continue to workshop their second rough draft. This will also be the last week for extensive research. As they wind down their research, they will work on their formal presentations in which each group member has a speaking part.
Week Five
The first part of the week will be dedicated to students putting the finishing touches on their presentations. The latter part of the week will be 10-minute student presentations. At the end of each one will be a Q-&-A session. Based on how many groups there are, one day in week six may be needed to complete presentations.
Week Six
In this final week, students will make final revisions and submit their final research paper. We will also hold a final fishbowl discussion to allow students to discuss not just their findings but also to reflect on what they learned from the process.
Comments: