Cluster 3: Research to Build and Present KnowledgeArchived

Students will read a passage from Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s The Everglades: The River of Grass and compare the description with the present day Everglades. They will then look at the impacts from the US Army Corps of Engineers project and evaluate whether the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) addresses these issues. 

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will analyze information about various current and ongoing CERP projects and report on the progress that is being made. 

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will read and analyze two poems by John Donne: "Holy Sonnet X" and "Holy Sonnet VI." Text-dependent questions, an answer key, and teacher's help notes are included. As the summative assessment for the lesson, students will write a brief comparison/contrast essay to examine how Death is portrayed across both poems. A rubric for the essay is included, along with a writing organizer to help struggling writers draft a basic essay.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will explore the similarities and differences that exist between modern American culture and the setting of a story or novel that they have read in class. Any story or novel that is set in another society, whether it is a foreign country, a dystopian society, a fictional land, or simply another time period, can be used. The lesson serves as both an assessment of the student's reading comprehension and an activity to help develop skill in writing through the use of brainstorming, a graphic organizer, teacher feedback, and peer review. Two different assignment sheets, organizers, and rubrics are provided to allow for teacher flexibility.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will consider the literary elements Shakespeare uses to communicate King Henry's inability to sleep. As they close read this passage multiple times, students will discover how diction, tone, syntax, and imagery help to convey King Henry's state of mind. Once they have grappled with the text in small groups and on their own, they will bring their discoveries and interpretations together in a final essay. A text marking handout and key, independent practice questions and key, a planning sheet, and a writing rubric have been included with the lesson.

Type: Lesson Plan

This close reading lesson focuses on Mark Twain's comical satire, "Advice to Youth." Students will close read the text three times to analyze Twain's powerful satirical style, as well as the power of nuances. For the first reading, students will focus on academic vocabulary. In the second reading, students will answer text-dependent questions as a guide for their comprehension of the satire. In the third close reading, students will analyze the advice Twain gives, the ways in which his essay critiques society and its behaviors, and how he uses humor, irony, and exaggeration to reveal his advice. For the summative assessment, students will write an argumentative essay in which they make a claim regarding whether or not Twain's advice is still pertinent for the youth of today. Graphic organizers and worksheets, along with teacher keys, and a writing rubric have been provided.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will perform multiple close readings of the well-known "To be or not to be" soliloquy from William Shakespeare's Tragedy of Hamlet. The lesson is appropriate for 11th or 12th grade students who have some familiarity with reading Shakespeare but would benefit from fluency practice with the difficult text, as well as vocabulary building and argumentative writing about literature. The closure and extension activities provide suggestions for taking this study further using other Hamlet (or other Shakespearean) soliloquies.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will research modernism, analyze allusions and images in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," diagnose the character's mental weakness using evidence from the poem, and write him an email about how to improve his state of mind from the perspective of a hypothetical online mental health professional.

Type: Lesson Plan

During this lesson, students will learn about budgets, checking and savings accounts, and interest. They will then have a research activity to focus on their future lives, which they will use to create a budget for their lives after they have finished their education and/or job training. This budget will be created using a spreadsheet or other technology to explore how various factors, such as interest rates, will affect their budget and necessary income.

Type: Lesson Plan

Through an analysis of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," and E. E. Cummings' poem "anyone lived in a pretty how town," students will come to realize the importance of the cycle of life and nature as it pertains to human existence. The three texts come from dramatically different genres, time periods, and settings capturing the essence of a universal theme.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will conduct several close readings of the article "SeaWorld, Activists Make Questionable Claims on Killer Whale Life Spans" by Jason Garcia. For the first close reading, students will focus on selected academic vocabulary. In the second reading, students will analyze the claims made in the article, focusing, in particular, on the validity of each claim made. During the final close reading, students will analyze the argument presented in the article, choose a side, and participate in a Philosophical Chairs discussion.

Type: Lesson Plan

This mini-lesson invites students to think of a literary character as a peer, creating an authentic connection between literature and life. While the lesson uses The Catcher in the Rye as an example, the activities could be centered on the primary character of any novel. Students choose a perspective on the character (from options suggested by the teacher) and work in small groups to identify scenes in the novel that reflect their view. They then select songs appropriate for the character and write a rationale for each song chosen, including supporting evidence from the text. When students present their completed playlists in class, their classmates inevitably make observations that increase everyone's insights into the character and the novel.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students identify and categorize different ways Jonathan Swift and those who have edited his text since its initial publication used semicolons in the essay "A Modest Proposal." They compare these uses with rules for semicolon use as indicated in online guides, theorizing about uses that do not follow the rules. Following this analysis and theorizing, students use what they learn about punctuation and its influence on meaning to write insightfully about their findings, using semicolons as they do so.

Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson is part three of a three-part unit that will explore and analyze how different authors convey American Puritanism. In this lesson, students plan to write and then complete an essay to explore how two different authors and texts portray American Puritanism, Jonathan Edwards in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and Arthur Miller in “The Crucible.”

Type: Lesson Plan

In Part 1 of this three-lesson mini-unit students will practice and apply research skills through a short research project on Native Americans. Students will work in collaborative groups to gather information on Native Americans from specific regions to develop and present a multimedia project based on their research.

Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson is part one of three in a unit that will explore and analyze how American Puritanism has been represented in different texts. The goal of this lesson is for students to analyze the central idea and how the authors' style (figurative language, persuasive techniques) contributes to establishing and achieving the purpose in "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will analyze how Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson each used figurative language to develop a specific tone in relation to mortality. They will also consider how each poet reflected the time periods within which they wrote.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this four-part lesson series, students will delve into the topic of grief through analysis of poetic devices, form, and point of view in poems by Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Students will connect theme to the poets’ viewpoints on the emotions, or the lack thereof, that one experiences during times of pain and loss. Students will read the poems multiple times to seek layers of meaning and write an in-depth analysis.

Type: Lesson Plan

After reading Richard Wright's short novel Rite of Passage, students will demonstrate their understanding of plot, character, and conflict by writing recommendations for the protagonists' future to a juvenile court system judge.

Type: Lesson Plan

Learn how to identify the strengths and weaknesses of sources to use in your writing. In this interactive tutorial, you'll learn to evaluate sources based on their relation to the audience, task, and purpose of your writing. You'll also practice determining whether potential sources are useful, relevant, and authoritative for your specific topic.

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Learn to draw appropriate text evidence to support your written response to analysis and reflection prompts. In this interactive tutorial, you'll be working with excerpts from two of George Orwell’s works: 1984 and “Shooting an Elephant.” You'll practice identifying important evidence in the text to support your own thoughts and ideas.

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Students can practice answering reading comprehension questions with engaging texts on the history of women's athletics. With an account, students can save their work and send it to their teacher when complete.

Type: Student Center Activity

This teaching idea guides students in generating questions for a student led seminar based on their reading of August Wilson's play, "The Piano Lesson". Students will then use their questions to conduct a Socratic Seminar about the play.

Type: Teaching Idea

The goal of this two to three day exemplar from Student Achievement Partner web resources is to give students the opportunity to use effective reading and writing habits to make meaning out of complex text. By closely reading and re-reading the The Gospel of Wealth, and focusing their reading through a series of questions and discussion about the text, students will identify the ways Andrew Carnegie proposes his philosophy for the distribution of wealth and the responsibility of philanthropy. When combined with writing about the passage, students will discover how much they can learn from engaging with a text in the form of a close reading.

Type: Teaching Idea

This text resource from Cornell University includes brief information on the what, why, how, and when of documenting sources in a research paper. The resource provides information on what plagiarism is, when and how to document sources, the difference between primary and secondary sources, and definitions of the following words: documentation, citation, and reference. The resource also provides a quiz to identify whether the writing sample in each exercise uses sources properly.

Type: Text Resource

This tutorial from the University of Maryland University College's Writing Center will help you understand and evaluate three ways to use source material: quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing. The resource also provides guidelines to help you avoid even unintentional plagiarism mistakes. Once you complete the interactive exercises and answer every question on the final quiz correctly, you will receive a printable certificate of completion. Simply click on the hyperlink for the Interactive Version to begin.

Type: Tutorial

This tutorial provides you with step-by-step instructions for all aspects of writing a research paper and includes a comprehensive list of links to various style guides. Quizzes are also provided for self-assessment. Simply click start at the bottom of the home page to begin the presentation. If you want to only use portions of the tutorial, use the scroll down menu from the Jump To section located at the top of each presentation slide.

Type: Tutorial

After gaining skills through analyzing a historic and contemporary speech as a class, students will select a famous speech from a list compiled from several resources and write an essay that identifies and explains the rhetorical strategies that the author deliberately chose while crafting the text to make an effective argument. Their analysis will consider questions such as: "What makes the speech an argument?", "How did the author's rhetoric evoke a response from the audience?", and "Why are the words still venerated today?".

Type: Unit/Lesson Sequence

In order to appreciate historical fiction, students need to understand factual context and recognize how popular culture reflects the values, mores, and events of a time period. Since a newspaper records significant events and attitudes representative of a period, students will create a literary newspaper (8 pages) depicting life of the "Roaring Twenties" utilizing primary source materials from the American Memory collections

Type: Unit/Lesson Sequence

After gaining skill through analyzing a historic and contemporary speech as a class, students will select a famous speech from a list compiled from several resources and write an essay that identifies and explains the rhetorical strategies that the author deliberately chose while crafting the text to make an effective argument. Their analysis will consider questions such as: What makes the speech an argument?, How did the author's rhetoric evoke a response from the audience?, and Why are the words still venerated today?

Type: Unit/Lesson Sequence