Cluster 1: Comprehension and CollaborationArchived

In this lesson, students will listen to a mini-lecture by a history professor regarding two passages included in Thomas Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of Independence but deleted from the final version. Students will then participate in an analysis of the two passages, then write an argumentative essay about the professor's argument.

Type: Lesson Plan

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 look at a typical water conservation plan and analyze it from the viewpoint of various stakeholders. 

Type: Lesson Plan

This is a simulation that allows students to explore how the common usage of a potentially renewable resource can lead to its exploitation. Students will complete an activity, a data sheet, an analysis of the data, and discuss how the concept of the ‘commons' relates to southern Florida's water resources. 

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will listen to a mini-lecture by a history professor regarding two passages included in Thomas Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of Independence but deleted from the final version. Students will then participate in a close-reading analysis of the two passages to understand the professor's argument, explaining it in an essay. The hypocrisy of slavery is the primary theme: Can a people who enslave others validly plead for their own freedom?

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information about Brown v. Board of Education and the struggle for civil rights before and after the case through discussion, music, and video, using reasoning and evidence from class discussions to be inspired to do their part to educate and stop discrimination.

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

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

Huck Finn's moral journey parallels Mark Twain's own questions about slavery. Like the photographers of the nineteenth-century, Twain, a Realist, struggled with how best to portray fictionalized characters, while still expressing truth and creating social commentary. In this lesson, students use a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast Mark Twain's novel and/or excerpts from Frederick Doulgass' narrative to original photographs of slaves from the late-nineteenth century. Then they write an essay to compare the different portrayals, arguing to what extent art can reliably reflect truth. In addition, they will discuss art as social commentary.

Type: Lesson Plan

After reading or viewing a text, students are introduced to propaganda techniques and then identify examples in the text. Students discuss these examples, and then explore the use of propaganda in popular culture by looking at examples in the media. Students identify examples of propaganda techniques used in clips of online political advertisements and explain how the techniques are used to persuade voters. Next, students explore the similarities of the propaganda techniques used in the literary text and in the online political ads to explain the commentary the text is making about contemporary society. Finally, students write a persuasive essay in support of a given statement.

In this lesson, some specific references are made to Brave New World as examples. A text list suggests additional novels, short stories, plays, and movies that will also work for this activity.

Type: Lesson Plan

After reading Act 1 of The Crucible in which 13 of the 21 characters are introduced, students create Trading Cards to describe and analyze an assigned character. Then they explore portraits of Puritans online to assist them in creating a portrait of the character and present a rationale to explain their work of art. A "Portrait Gallery" is set up around the classroom, so the students are able to refer to portraits during later acts and better understand the characters' motives and relationships.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson sequence, students will read and analyze the poem "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks. For the summative assessment, students will compose a fictional narrative from the perspective of a chosen character from the poem. The character will reveal how his/her days spent at the pool hall influenced who he/she is today.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students read, analyze, and discuss medieval English ballads and then list characteristics of the genre. They then emphasize the narrative characteristics of ballads by choosing a ballad to act out. Using the Venn diagram tool, students next compare medieval ballads with modern ones. After familiarizing themselves with ballad themes and forms, students write their own original ballads, which they perform in small groups. Finally, students engage in self-reflection on their group performances and on the literary characteristics of their ballads.

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

Cleaning Up Your Act Model Eliciting Activity (MEA) provides students with a real world engineering problem in which they must work as a team to design a procedure to select the best material for cleaning up an oil spill. The main focus of this MEA is to recognize the consequences of a catastrophic event, and understand the environmental and economical impact based on data analysis. Students will conduct individual and team investigations in order to arrive at a scientifically sound solution to the problem.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will debate several controversial issues such as human cloning, use of performance enhancing drugs in sports, and space exploration in order to determine which they deem more important to society: technology or ethics. After brainstorming a list of issues and cutting it down to 8, students will be given 4 to 5 days to research the issues and prepare for the debate. Students will not know which side they are debating until the debate begins. The purpose of this exercise is for students to carefully consider both sides of issues, as well as alternatives, and to understand the importance of maintaining a healthy balance between ethics and technology.
After the debate,students will write about what they have learned in terms of the issues themselves, their team's performance in the debate, and whether or not their opinion has changed on any issue due to some important point made during the debate.

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 is Part two of this three-part series on the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Through reading and analyzing excerpts from F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "The Offshore Pirate" (1920) in Flappers and Philosophers, students will examine the characterization of Artida and Carlyle and compare the two characters.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will read and analyze the "Narrative of the Captivity" for Rowlandson's use of allusion as it contributes to the meaning of her account. In addition, they will identify and analyze the central idea and supporting details as they contribute to meaning.

Type: Lesson Plan

This is Part one of a three-part series that focuses on passages from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Through reading, text marking, and participating in collaborative discussions, students will analyze the universal themes: “Success can be corrupted by greed,” and “Irresponsibility can lead to destruction.”

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students first complete a survey to establish their beliefs about technology before using a literary elements map to explore the role of fictional technology in a novel such as 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, REM World, or Feed (additional titles that could be used, including short stories, are included within the lesson plan). Next, using evidence from the text, students discuss and debate what they believe the story's author is saying about technology. As an assessment, students will utilize one of the items from the survey that caused the most disagreement in group discussions to form an argument as to why they think the author would agree or disagree with that particular statement on the survey. Students will write a letter to persuade another student in the class who disagrees with their viewpoint. Another group discussion can follow the exchange of these letters.

Type: Lesson Plan

The goal of this four-day exemplar is to give students the opportunity to use the reading and writing habits they've been practicing on a regular basis to discover the rich language and life lesson embedded in Dillard's text. By reading and rereading the passage closely and focusing their reading through a series of questions and discussion about the text, students will be equipped to unpack Dillard's essay. When combined with writing about the passage, students will learn to appreciate how Dillard's writing contains a deeper message and derive satisfaction from the struggle to master complex text.

Type: Lesson Plan

This is the fourth and final lesson in a small unit on the life and works of Phillis Wheatley. Although details are given only for this final lesson, some information is given on the preceding three lessons.

Type: Lesson Plan

Learn how to evaluate a speaker's point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence. In this interactive tutorial, you'll examine Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" and evaluate the effectiveness of his words by analyzing his use of reasoning and evidence. 

Type: Original Student Tutorial

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

This teaching idea is designed to help students analyze grammar pet peeves. Students begin by thinking about their own grammar pet peeves and then read a "Dear Abby" column in which she lists several grammar pet peeves of her own. Students become aware that attitudes about race, social class, moral and ethical character and 'proper' language use are intertwined and that rants such as this one reveal those attitudes. Finally, students discuss the pet peeves as a class while gaining an understanding that issues of race, class, combined with audience expectations, help to determine what is considered 'proper' language use.

Type: Teaching Idea

In this lesson, students are introduced to the definition and characteristics of a dystopian work by watching video clips from The Matrix and other dystopian films. They first explore the definition and characteristics of utopian and dystopian societies, and then compare and contrast the two using a Venn diagram online tool. Next, they identify the protagonist in clips from The Matrix and then discuss how the clips extend and confirm their understanding of a dystopia. Students then view additional film clips and identify which characteristics of a dystopian society the clip is intended to portray. Finally, they explore how they can apply their knowledge about dystopias to future readings.

Type: Teaching Idea

This web resource is a step-by-step guide to using Literature Circles in the classroom. While a specific lesson plan is not included, it is a clear guide for anyone wishing to incorporate this discussion strategy in the classroom.

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

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