The ELA Toolkit

The secondary teacher's toolkit for the English Language Arts classroom.

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Using the Read 180 Workshop Assessment

For those of us that teach Read 180, an intervention reading and writing program, the workshop assessments are a great method for measuring student’s current understanding of the standards within the workshop that your class is in from a formative and summative standpoint. 

We know that Houghfton Mifflen Harcourt has done an outstanding job on the data collecting software in the Read 180 program; allowing us to gather solid data on our students and make necessary changes in the way we go through each workshop unit.

If you are not using these workshop assessments, especially the online administered versions, you are missing out on an effortless and thorough assessment of you Read 180 students. However, there is one thing to look into before you administer your workshop assessment; if you follow the Read 180 lesson planning to the T (like the want you to do), your students will miss out on standards that they will be assessed on in the workshop formative and summative assessments. For example, in the Workshop One Interim Assessment (Level A), students have four questions that assess their ability to summarize. At no point prior to this assessment does the Read 180 lesson plans include students learning how to effectively summarize. 

As much as the Read 180 coaches and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt team want you to follow the program exactly as they want, sometimes injecting your own worksheets into their Real Book work can help keep them on track through the workshop, but also help your students succeed at the workshop assessments and give you more practical data. 

Aside from creating a more linear lesson plan, with backwards planning in mind, this assessment should be used in your Read 180 classroom if you have not been using it already. There is also a useful tool in the Data Manager of HMH Central that automatically displays your class’s average score, as well as how your class did on each standard being assessed. This data calculated itself almost instantly, and it can be a powerful tool to throw up on the projector if there’s time after your assessment. 

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Think-Write-Pair-Share

At some point in your teaching career, whether you are starting out or not, you have heard of the think-pair-share learning method. You pose a question/prompt, students think about their response, they find a partner, and they share their response. 

In secondary ELA you can take this method one step further. Again, you pose a question/prompt, give students time to think and write down that response, pair up, and then share what they had written. Sometimes this works well if you have a set of questions, all equal in rigor, and you have partner #1 complete specific ones and partner #2 complete the rest. Once they have thought about their response and written it down, they must share (or teach!) their partner why they responded the way they did to the questions they were responsible for. Then, of course, have time to share as a while class.

There are many reasons why taking this method one step further is perfect for secondary ELA classrooms:

Students have to manifest their thoughts and ideas on paper without consultation, something they have to do on test like the SATs.

Allows students to take ownership over their own ideas instead of giving them the chance to go shopping around for someone else’s.

The best way for them to completely understand their ideas and the flaws, or successes, that may lie within them is to talk them out (or teach them!) with another classmate.

This exposes students to ideas other than their own that they may need to understand.

Students may run into conflicting ideas that they need to successfully communicate to understand and come to terms with their classmates. Academic debate!

Students will try and relish this time have off-topic conversations with their classmates, so make sure to set clear and concise guidelines to keep the acadmic conversations flowing. If you bring the class together at the end of their partner discussions and make time to let all groups share, this should also keep students responsible for participating. Nothing is more unnerving to them than to have to talk in front of the class and not have an answer.

The think-write-pair-share method of learning can also be a saving grace for your students that suffer from social anxieties. Try and partner these students up with those extroverted students who refuse to blend into the background of the class. This will give your quiet student a more comfortable environment to share their thoughts and answers, while your outgoing student can have all the attention in the world sharing what they come up with. You are able to assess the two students understanding of the topic in a way that is applicable to their social needs.

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The Canvas Generation

Canvas, its present in almost every classroom across the United States. A program that is meant to streamline assignments and assessments, and ease the grading process for teachers with its sync-ability to Skyward has become some teacher’s saving grace and their biggest headache.

This online classroom, the classroom of the future, has so much to offer to teachers:

Paperless worksheets, tests, and quizzes (save the trees!).

No more “my dog ate my homework” excuses.

Accessibility from anywhere at school and at home.

A hub for all the online resources they’ll ever need.

Sorry copy machine, we have won the war! The battle for creating packets has finally ended.

Need we continue? Students are growing up immersed in the online canvas classroom, most having more experience using it than their teachers. Again, canvas is a blessing and a curse. In this post we have put together a list of tutorials and help tools that can make utilizing canvas to its full potential a reality.

Help for Teachers

Canvas Main Website

Canvas Assessments

Getting Started for Teachers

Using Canvas Modules

Help for Students

Canvas Orientation

Submitting Assignments

Creating and Uploading Videos

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Non-English Speaking Students in the English Classroom

The presence of a child of immigration, or a student who is on a visa, is not an uncommon occurrence in today’s classroom. As much as these students are a blessing to have, they also bring the challenges they face with them. Language barriers being a great challenge teachers need to work with in order to set a non-English speaking child up for success. 

It’s important to keep in mind that an ounce of understanding can go a long way, but trading rigor for sympathy is never okay. Understanding where they are coming from and what they face will help you create a connection with the student, and help you better connect when those challenges seem to be getting the better of them. Being able to understand the child’s situation will help you sustain rigor within their lessons. Falling to sympathy is what we naturally want to do, to feel sorry for them and make life easier; we all know making things easier for students does not help their minds grow in any way. By understanding we can find ways to differentiate lessons that can apply to their unique lifestyle and skills while still challenging them to higher thinking.

If a student in your secondary ELA classroom has trouble speaking English that student should already be taking an ELL class which teaches them those basic English communication skills. If they’re already receiving those skills, don’t hold them back from completing that essay or reading that class novel with the rest of their classmates. When presenting your assignments and readings use simple strategies like:

The use of accompanying pictures that they can connect to the topic of the assignment or what you’re trying to communicate. 

Talking with the student after instruction one-on-one to make sure they have any questions that they were too nervous to ask in front of the class.

Partnering them with duel language speaking students if you have any.

Translating their assignments into their native language.

When assessing in a differentiated classroom, you need to consider what is essential within your lesson or unit and focus on those when teaching. As someone who is knowledgable in a subject we want to see every bit of information as important, and need-to-know, but that bias needs to be set aside for students who need differentiation, especially students who face language barriers. All of the information and skills that we think is important may drown a non-English student. Rick Wormeli of Fair Isn’t Always Equal: Assessing and Grading in the Differentiated Classroom talks about a scale of determining essential, highly desirable, and desirable information:

Essential would be those items you consider vital to current growth and future success. Highly desirable refers to those items that are very important to students, but not absolutely necessary. Desirable standards are items that would be great to know but aren’t as important or necessary as the others. (2006).

Again, understanding (not sympathizing for the sake of sacrificing rigor) and presenting what is truly essential to their overall growth are some of the best ways to teach to a non-English speaking student in a secondary ELA classroom.

References

Wormeli, R. (2006). Fair isnt always equal: Assessment and grading in the differentiated classroom. Portland, ME: Stenhouse.

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The Giver & Middle School Curriculum

Most teachers remember being introduced to the mind bending words of Lois  Lowry’s The Giver in high school. We assume the complex utopian themes within the book are more suitable for high school students, but that is not necessarily true.

Teachers that are familiar with the StudySync program (an online liberal arts program developed by McGraw Hill Education to satisfy the curriculums of secondary ELA grades 6-12) have seen The Giver lesson plan available for the 7th grade ELA classroom. While this program only offers an excerpt from the novel and accompanying close reading questions, this novel (based on the StudySync program) can ignite even the laziest of reader’s attention. 

Student’s love thinking that they are learning about ideas and history changing texts like their high school counterparts. They are satisfied, and you will be too to see what StudySync’s take on The Giver lesson plan. With access to the full paperback, or online, novel you can take what StudySync has already done and stretch it to work as its own unit that can cover ELA Common Core State Standards:

Reading: Literature - RL.7.1, RL.7.2, RL.7.4, RL.7.6 Writing - W.7.2.A, W.7.2.B, W.7.2.C, W.7.2.D, W.7.2.E, W.7.2.F, W.7.4, W.7.5, W.7.6, W.7.10 Speaking & Listening - SL.7.1.A, SL.7.1.B, SL.7.1.C, SL.7.1.D, SL.7.6 Language - L.7.4.A, L.7.4.C, L.7.4.D, L.7.6

One thing that you will find when you introduce this novel to a middle school class, especially if it’s based on the StudySync program lesson planning, you will find a renewal of interest in reading (sometimes a discovery of interest!) with your students and a wide coverage of necessary standards that students will need to be exposed to.

If you would like to check out the StudySync program, click to go to their main program webpage.

If you would like to read The Giver with your students, click to go to the free online version of the novel.