American Democracy and the Promise of Justice

Appendix on Implementing Standards

In this unit, I will be using a mix of my district’s ELA standards, Common Core State Standards, and WIDA’s English Language Development Standards. The Colonial School District’s ELA standards that I will be utilizing are through reading … challenging informational texts in a range of subjects, students are expected to build knowledge, gain insights, explore possibilities, and broaden their perspective. By analyzing all the news stories about immigration and refugees, as well as researching the history of immigration laws in the United States, students will undoubtedly increase their knowledge about these topics and be able to write and converse about them more fully.

I will be utilizing several Common Core State Standards, including:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.WHST.6-8.1.B: Support claim(s) with logical reasoning and relevant, accurate data and evidence that demonstrates an understanding of the topic or text, using credible sources.³⁸

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.WHST.6-8.2: Write informative/explanatory texts, including the narration of historical events, scientific procedures/ experiments, or technical processes.³⁹

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.WHST.6-8.7: Conduct short research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question), drawing on several sources and generating additional related, focused questions that allow for multiple avenues of exploration.⁴⁰

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.7.1.A: Come to discussions prepared, having read or researched material under study; explicitly draw on that preparation by referring to evidence on the topic, text, or issue to probe, and reflect on ideas under discussion.⁴¹

As students complete their classroom activities, they must meet the above standards in order to participate fully in our discussions and work on their writing projects. In addition to stating opinions and claims that they can support with credible sources, they must be able to transfer that knowledge to their research project/informational writing piece. 

Finally, during the writing process, students will be expected to show understanding of the WIDA English Language Development Standards⁴² of using compound, complex grammatical constructions (e.g., multiple phrases and clauses); a broad range of sentence patterns characteristic of particular content areas; rich descriptive discourse with complex sentences; and organized, cohesive and coherent expression of ideas.