Teaching Situation & Rationale
This unit is intended for fifth-grade students at Marrama Elementary School in Denver Public Schools, located in far northeast Denver. Marrama serves students from prekindergarten through fifth grade. According to the Colorado Department of Education SchoolView data for the 2025-2026 school year, Marrama serves 546 students. The community is culturally, racially, linguistically, and economically diverse; and CDE reports that approximately 46.7 percent of students are identified as English learners, including students in their first two monitoring years after reaching English proficiency; 93.2 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and 12.3 percent receive special education services.[8] School-level family language records indicate that more than twenty languages are represented across students’ households. This linguistic diversity is not a deficit to overcome, but a source of knowledge, perspective, and interpretive strength of the school community.
The students in my classroom come with different reading levels, vocabulary, writing abilities, language experiences, cultural backgrounds, and interests. Some students are ready to debate theme and character motivation with little support and complex literary analysis independently, while others need explicit modeling, visual support, sentence frames, audio supports, partner talk, small-group instruction or repeated opportunities to practice before they can put their thinking into writing. The unit therefore incorporates Universal Design for Learning principles, including multiple ways to access information, participate in discussion, demonstrate understanding, and publish a final product.[9]
The equity learning I have engaged in through district trainings with DPS helps me name why these matter. In the Equity Experience materials, educational equity is framed as liberation and as a continuous commitment to interrogating one’s thoughts, actions, beliefs, and biases.[10] That definition is important for this unit because a curriculum unit about tyranny and resistance cannot only ask students to look at fictional rulers. It also asks me, as a teacher, to look at the classroom systems I create. Who gets to speak? Whose English is treated as academic? Whose silence is misread as disengagement? Whose background knowledge is recognized as knowledge? These are guiding questions to keep in mind during the creation and implementation of this unit.
The Four Pivots, especially the movement from lens to mirror, helps me think about the kind of teacher reflection this unit requires.[11] Instead of only using a lens to examine students, families, or texts, mirror work asks me to examine my own assumptions, reactions, and second thoughts. When a student resists a task, challenges an idea, uses home language, or stays quiet during discussion, I need to pause before turning that moment into a single story and reflect on those moments when bias shapes my assumptions, acknowledge the impact of those assumptions, identify changes in my practice, and commit to more intentional actions that repair harm and support a more equitable classroom community. This becomes part of the hidden curriculum of the unit: If I am asking students to study the concept of power, I need to model how adults can use power with humility and repair.[12]
Zaretta Hammond’s “The Power of Protocols for Equity” gives me a practical way to make this reflection visible in instruction. Hammnond argues that academic conversation is one of the most powerful classroom practices and asks teachers to notice who is doing most of the talking.[13] That question connects directly to this unit because discussions about resistance can easily be dominated by the same confident voices. Protocols help interrupt that pattern by providing time for students to think, talk, listen, and build on one another's ideas. Hammond also reminds educators to let students use the language that is most comfortable for thinking while teaching them to code switch across social, business, and academic registers without abandoning their home and community languages.[14] In my classroom, this is essential.
Intersectionality also strengthens the rationale for the unit. The YW Boston resource explains intersectionality as a framework for understanding how overlapping identities and experiences create different forms of discrimination or disadvantage.[15] For my students, this means I cannot treat “multilingual learner,” “fifth grader,” “student with an IEP,” “immigrant student,” “Latinx student,” or “quiet student” as one simple category. Students live at the intersections of language, race, culture, class, ability, gender, family experience, and personal history. This unit therefore uses literature to discuss power but also uses equitable protocols to make sure students’ own voices are not flattened.
This is why a fantasy novel is a strong entry point. Students can discuss dragons, queens, war, prophecy, confinement, and escape while still practicing the habits of equity: listening, recognizing difference, questioning assumptions, and making room for more than one perspective. The unit also recognizes that there are ethical boundaries appropriate for fifth graders, and historical materials will be summarized and adapted so the discussions can be focused on concepts rather than details. Students will be taught that resistance can be necessary while still producing harm, and that a responsible reader must consider context, means, consequences, and whose voices are missing. Students will not be asked to disclose personal trauma or debate their own identities. Instead, it gives them literary distance and structured protocols so they can practice the language of justice, authority, and resistance in ways that are safe, challenging, and meaningful.
The writing component also supports equity because it provides multiple access points. Students will plan with graphic organizers, rehearse orally, discuss through protocols, use vocabulary charts, draft with sentence frames when needed, revise with peers, and publish in ways that can include illustration, performance, or digital formatting. Research on writing instruction supports explicit teaching strategies, collaboration, feedback, and sustained opportunities to plan, draft, revise, and publish, and it requires sustained practice.[16] In this unit, writing is not only an assignment. It is the place where students claim a character’s voice, examine power from inside a situation, and learn that words carry responsibility. Letter writing gives students an authentic rhetorical situation: someone is speaking to someone else for a reason. It requires attention to the audience, tone, evidence, and desired action. By placing students inside a character’s point of view, the form also supports empathy without demanding agreement. Students can understand why Clay, Tsunami, Glory, Starlight, Sunny, Kestrel, Queen Scarlet, or Peril acts in a certain way while still evaluating the morality and effects of those decisions.
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