In hindsight I realize that every teacher has their strengths, especially in a discipline like English where we teach many "subjects" within one class: reading, writing, discussion, thinking-and all of these in various forms. It was when I was truly able to embrace my "rhetoric" side that I realized I am more of a writing teacher than I will ever be a reading teacher. I tackle both, of course, but my passion lies more in teaching composition skills and reading nonfiction texts than in that world of classic literature that everyone else around me seems to be so intrigued with. This realization inspired me to be more me than I had been before and gave me "permission," if that is really needed, to try a few things differently in my class. The first thing I tackled was creating ways to make the literature (that I also believe needs to be taught to my learners in a rhetoric and composition course) more relevant to skills sets being developed in my course.
So, I took the ideas of UbD, some ideas I saw at a conference, good old-fashioned literature, and rhetoric and tried to mash them together. Here is what I came up.
We start the unit by watching the documentary film Inside Job. This film tells the story of the banking housing market collapse of 2008. Narrated by Matt Damon, it does a good job of simplifying and exploring the actions that led to the collapse and the fallout for everyone involved. We spend time just talking about what it means for our country, for our politics, for our lifestyles, and overall, how it changed the face of our country. While we are watching and discussing in class (about 4 days) the kids homework is to read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The reading consists of normal "literary" tasks such as plotting the setting, symbols, and character development components with textual evidence on a map. Following their reading, we have an old fashioned socratic seminar or inner-outer circle discussion where their discussion contributions and preparedness is a grade. We follow this with a day or two of whole class discussion. In total, we spend between 2 and 4 days exploring the novel as a work of fiction. While we are completing discussions in class, I have assigned the kids a series of nonfiction selections to read at home for homework. These will be used later. On the final day of literary discussion, I leave the kids with one question to take home and write about: What is the cost of pursuing a dream? This is the springboard into our discussions of Gatsby as rhetoric.
In order to get them moving in this direction, we complete a day of whole class brainstorming using Padlet or something similar. After a day or two of discussion and brainstorming, the kids are given their project assignment (summative assessment) for the unit. The assignment is pretty simple: write an op-ed piece which explores your answer to the question and synthesizes a specified number of sources. We commence with a few days of mini lessons on what makes a good op-ed piece and what makes for sound synthesis of sources, and then the kids work for a few days taking the op-ed piece through the drafting process. You can check out the rubric we used for grading the op-ed pieces here.
Finally, the kids present their pieces by having a read aloud. The learners provide feedback to one another via Google forms, and then we vote. The top 20-25 pieces (from the total of about 350 learners) are published into an iBook. This is something we do while we move on to the next unit. Learners put the entire book together by themselves through volunteer editors, layout and design specialists, illustrators, cover artists, etc. While we have not completed the book for the 2015-2016 school year yet, you can check the book from last year here.
As always, you can check out more of my classroom assignments, assessments, and resources by visiting my iTunesU course through the iTunesU app.
