The unit takes into account my students' needs, their specific backgrounds, the curriculum requirements of the New Haven Public Schools, and the characteristics of my school. Demographically, my students come from all possible backgrounds - 69% African-Americans, 15 % White and 16% Hispanics. This year I have a group of five students who are not native speakers and do not have an ESL teacher in the school. Another group of about nineteen students has various special needs. They are included in all my classes, and the Special Education teacher does not co-teach with me. Therefore I have to modify my lessons. About 10% of all the juniors and seniors in my classes excel in both writing and reading, whereas all the others have serious difficulty writing one full page. Despite such problems and discrepancies, I can see effective improvements in the work of both the struggling and proficient students between the beginning and the end of the school year.
Our curriculum goals are to develop an understanding and an appreciation of the variety of texts we analyze. The curriculum also requires students to respond to these texts critically and individually in order to achieve a true independence of thought and to build the character of a productive citizen. It also points out the fact the students need to acquire simple and straightforward strategies both in reading and writing to enhance their abilities to analyze and criticize texts. I also use differentiated instruction by implementing different strategies in the same class according to the specific student's needs. At the beginning of each unit, my students and I determine an essential question that will lead us through various texts. This essential question is important because it helps them understand, analyze, and evaluate the material we cover. It is also a steady reference for the promotion of formal-operational thinking, which is identified by Piaget as the stage at which mental tasks involve abstract thinking and the coordination of a number of variables.
1
When students reach this stage, they explore hypothetical questions, explore and understand individual contributions, discuss and accept different positions, and reflect on the social life of human beings.
My school's core subjects are the visual arts, and each unit must have interdisciplinary connections to dance, music, theater, painting, photography, and videography. The students' talents and their interests play a basic role in this unit by helping them understand, interpret, synthesize, and evaluate. In fact, I know from previous experiences that they easily understand difficult concepts if these concepts are presented and studied first in their art, then identified and analyzed in literary texts. For instance, when I explain the concept of audience and its importance in writing, I require each student to come to class with a sample from his or her art class - music, visual arts, drawing, dance, and theater. By looking at the specific details and by discussing the artist's choices, my students see whom the artist addresses and how he or she does that. At this point, the transition to the written text is easier because each student has understood the meaning and the importance of audience. I have to teach them only the literary devices and conventions the writer uses to address an audience. By following the students' artistic interests, I have an opportunity to accomplish tasks that are normally considered "boring."
Another factor needs to be considered: my students belong to a modern and technological society in which everything is fast. They tend to reject the study of literary texts because they think they are boring and do not connect to their lives. My challenge is to show them how literature reflects issues, values, and themes that are still present in our society. They need to see the connections between a literary text and their world in order to appreciate the text. For this reason the unit is planned around their interests and their stage of development, the zone of proximal development that is "the area where the child cannot solve the problem alone, but can be successful under adult guidance or in collaboration with more advanced peers."
2
In this way, I can have an effective learning segment with a high percentage of proficiency. Moreover, I know my students' lives constantly revolve around the discovery of what love is and should be. This theme recurs continuously in their life, and it is the constant object of their interest. This fact gives me the opportunity to overcome their lack of motivation and to make learning real, not "boring."
I also need to consider two other important matters: thinking and writing. The great majority of my students spend just few seconds thinking. They do not know where to begin, what to think, and why they should ever stop their frenetic life to think. When it comes to writing, they do not have ideas; they do not know what to write and how to write. They respond with just a few words or a few lines because they do not see the details either in the page they read or in an ordinary event. I also notice they do not spend more than a few seconds reading a document, and their reading does not reach its second or third line most of the time. My students usually define a detailed text as "slow" and consequently boring or useless.
Timing is also another important factor for the failure or success of this unit. If I plan to use it too early in the school year, I would not be able to adapt the unit to the specific problems of different students because I would not know each of them well. This unit is set for the beginning of the second marking period because I then know the specific needs of each student and also because they have already seen how to start from a concrete prompt or visual aid and move to more sophisticated or abstract thinking. They have internalized how to respond to an essential question about a literary text, and they have already learned the Socratic seminar method that I deem pivotal for the development of their skills and thoughts.