Introduction to selected lessons in persuasion  (Page 2/6)

Culminating assignment

Students will choose an issue that affects a group of people, possibly people in their community (school, neighborhood, city, region, state, etc.) about which they could speak out. Students will plan, support, structure, and deliver a 4-5 minute extemporaneous speech to their peers on that issue in order to inspire change in their audience's beliefs or actions.

Instructional design of the unit

The structure of this English language arts (ELA) unit is made up of purposely sequenced/scaffolded Design Features (Bartholomae&Petrosky, 1986, 2002; Petrosky, 2006) which apprentice students to patterned, cyclical habits of thinking for the individual texts they study and for their studies across multiple texts. In Lesson 1, the teacher will introduce students to this unit's architecture, which graphically displays the specific work for each design feature as well as the overall sequence of work that they will do.

The unit's key design features:

• a nominal theme or a genre study that focuses a unit of study on big ideas (e.g., Miseducation or Writing and Identity) reaching across all of the texts in the unit
• purposely sequenced rigorous texts appropriate for the students, the nominal theme, and for inquiry studies
• overarching questions that present the big ideas as inquiry questions to reach across and connect all of the texts under study (including the students' writing);
• content that students will learn about while developing their habits of thinking as readers, writers, speakers in literary inquiry and reasoning
• comprehension/sorting questions that allow students to get the gist of a text while sorting out characters, settings, flow of events or ideas
• identifying difficulty tasks that ask students to locate and reread difficult passages to explain and work to untangle the difficulty
• identifying significance tasks that ask students to reread to locate significant moments in a text and to explain why those moments are significant to the text
• guiding questions to pose interpretive tasks for rereadings that take students deeply into discussions of and writings about the individual texts
• writing tasks to invite students to write about texts and to write like the texts (both in the style of the selection and in imitation of an author's sentences and grammatical structures)
• step back tasks regularly placed after key pieces of work (e.g., comprehension questions, identifying difficulty, identifying significance, and so on) that ask students to study their learning by analyzing what they learned and how they learned
• retrospective assignments for capstone work with each text that encourages students' to do two things: (1) rethink/revise papers on the unit's big ideas or overarching questions as they progress through the unit and (2) revisit their studies of their learning by analyzing what they learned and how they learned
• formative and summative assessments that focus on the habits of thinking and big ideas students studied and used in the unit

The unit's pedagogical rituals and routines

Many of the tasks represented in the Design Features require rereadings, as a key strategy for dealing with difficult texts, of the text or passages for particular purposes or with particular questions in mind. We suggest that students apprentice to the lesson tasks by using the unit's embedded rituals and routines. These rituals and routines, derived from research on cognitive apprenticeship, are designed to engage all students as learners in collaborative problem solving, promote writing to learn, make thinking visible, provide routines for note-taking and tracking learning, establish text-based norms for interpretive discussions and writings, and establish metacognitive reflection and articulation as a regular pattern in learning. These cyclical apprenticeship rituals and routines build community when used with authentic tasks through collaboration, coaching, the sharing of solutions, multiple occasions for practice, and the articulation of reflections (Brown, Collins,&Duguid, 1989). The key English language arts pedagogical routines that support students' learning are: