BCTELA

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As one of the Curriculum Coordinators, I am pleased to share that our Curriculum Pack sub-committee has developed new submission criteria that reflect current thinking, research and pedagogy. These criteria are also aligned with the ideas and research presented in the pedagogical considerations section of BC’s new K-7 and draft 8-12 English Language Arts IRPs. We hope that the new criteria will support you, our members, in writing up and submitting units of study for publication.

When you submit a curriculum pack, a member of our committee will provide descriptive feedback to assist you in revising and readying your unit for publication. Once accepted for publication, you are eligible for curriculum resource funds ($400). If you are interested in crafting a unit to be published by BCTELA please be sure to review the criteria below. Please send your unit (or proposal for a unit) to Nicole Widdess at NWiddess@richmond.sd38.bc.ca. Once your proposal or unit has been reviewed, we will be sure to get back to you as soon as possible.

Overview

• Identifies essential questions and enduring understandings

o These are the big ideas/inquiries that will guide the unit and the skills/strategies (including cognitive and metacognitive) that will be used/developed by students

• This overview should demonstrate links to the 2006 K-7 and/or the 2007 Draft 8-12 ELA IRPs m cuts across outcomes from the 3 organizers and 4 suborganizers of the ELA IRP

Assessment

• formative assessment/metacognitive activities

o formative assessment practices that help students learn to analyze and critique their work and to set personalized goals in relation to shared criteria

o offer students opportunities to generate criteria and strategies that are both contextual and meaningful

o a variety of assessment activities, including performance-based assessment

• summative assessment m performance-based assessment that includes detailed rubrics and links back to enduring understandings

Lesson Sequences

• a clear, detailed outline of suggested lesson sequences including m gradual release of responsibility

o assessment-to-instruction m metacognitive activities (e.g. using and/or generating criteria, self-assessment, goal-setting, and reflection)

o reading, writing, and oral language activities

o well-structured lessons that help students connect, process, and transform and personalize texts, concepts, and/or understandings

Diversity Considerations

• suggestions for adapting based on students' individual strengths and needs

• ways to differentiate based on student interests and context (e.g. text choices, variety of output options, variety of instructional modes)

Additional Documents

• performance rubrics

• handouts used in the lessons

• resources used, and suggestions for alternative resources

Reflection

• what worked especially well

• what came before this and after this in the year

• how this unit built on or was able to be built upon by other inquiries/units

Would you like support in developing a unit that integrates strategic teaching, formative and summative assessment, gradual release and the use of diverse texts using learning outcomes from the new IRP? Consider attending the Saturday Institute at our Fall Conference October 25, 2008. The 2008 Conference will be held at the Delta Hotel in Richmond this year. BCTELA Executive members Krista Ediger, Joanne Panas, Leyton Schnellert, and Nicole Widdess will be facilitating an institute on backwards design tentatively called "Designing Units with the End in Mind." A description of this institute follows:

So many best practices...how do you put them all together to create engaging, pedagogically-sound units that will help your students learn what they need to? Come and spend the day with us-learn about inquiry and backwards design, modeling and gradual release, assessment-to-instruction-and put it all together in a framework for a unit you can use. To get the most out of this session, bring a topic for a unit and sample texts you might use, and any brainstorming you might have already done.

The Curriculum Pack sub-committee members are looking forward to a year of learning together as we explore the new English Language Arts IRPs and develop new curriculum packs to support their implementation.

Why spend the entire summer assembling an edition of Update? Good
question. Apart from the collective sigh of relief from the
contributors to this edition (who doesn’t want an extra six weeks to
rework the last draft of a piece?), it gives Krista and I a chance to
sit back and reflect on how the year has gone and what lies ahead. We
have recently done the same together with your BCTELA Executive.

In BCTELA’s effort to better support English Language Arts teachers we
traverse the landscape of adolescent literacy research and practice.
It’s an exciting and daunting task. In this edition of Update, Chelsea
Prince talks of how teachers in her school shared ideas and lessons and
approaches online. Similarly, at our Spring retreat the Executive
looked at the BCTELA website and realized that in this information age
we need something more interactive. How can members access past
editions of Update and get the latest news in the most intuitive way
possible? Stay tuned.

And then there are the new ELA IRPs. Important research-based and
classroom-tested ideas and approaches – pedagogical considerations –
BCTELA members have been exploring for years have found themselves in
the Considerations for Delivery section of the new IRPs. What can we do
as a collective body to support one another in exploring the clearer
focus on oral language, the emphasis on formative assessment, outcomes
specific to cognitive strategies, or ways to design curriculum with
enduring understandings in mind?

BCTELA thinks that initially we can help in two ways. First, you’ll notice
that our Fall conference (see the Check This Out department) is
organized in strands based on the pedagogical considerations section
and learning outcomes of the new K-7 and the draft 8-12 ELA IRPs (the
latter will be posted on the Ministry’s website in September). Indeed,
we have sought out leading educators from across the province to
initiate thoughtful explorations of relevant and innovative practices.
Faye Brownlie will start us off on the Thursday night with a “fireside
chat” exploring interesting and exciting ideas to pay attention to in
the new IRPs. We think that our program for Friday (the provincial
pro-d day) may be the richest we’ve ever assembled with a careful
effort to feature innovative work from around the province.

Secondly, we see the time is at hand to re-envision our Curriculum Packs. Using
the same current research around unit design, formative assessment and
strategies instruction, we are developing updated criteria for
curriculum packs that we hope will better support those submitting
units and, in the end, provide exemplars for BCTELA members that help
to link student learning, practice, and research. See Krista Ediger’s
piece in this edition as an example of a teacher working (with the
support of colleagues) to incorporate these ideas into her planning and
practice.

While BCTELA always strives first and foremost to nurture and address the
questions and needs as they pertain to the teaching of English Language
Arts, we also see how, across the province, more and more English
Language Arts specialists are collaborating with and/or supporting
generalists, special educators, content area teachers (i.e. Math,
Science, Social Studies), teacher-librarians, and applied skills
teachers (e.g. Fine and Performing Arts, Home Economics). When we start
to have conversations about the students we teach and what learning is
in this information age we cannot help but begin to look across the
arbitrary divisions in the school day and see how our goals for our
students can overlap to create more engaging and meaningful curricula.
Reading and writing, speaking and listening, viewing and representing –
the use of language and literacy practices - are crucial to learning
and are present in pedagogy across the disciplines.

In this edition we take some initial steps to draw together underlying
concepts that inform literacy-related practices across the curriculum.
From Sue Schleppe and her colleagues’ inquiry unit in Science, to
Carole Saundry’s work on inferring with text in Math, to Joanne Panas’s
update on “second shot” approaches to literacy instruction for
struggling adolescent readers in Richmond, there is a common underlying
message. When teachers are creative and take different avenues that
support students’ active engagement in creating understandings,
students have opportunities to build content knowledge as well as the
strategies they need to make meaning, link ideas across texts and
contexts, and apply what they know to authentic tasks. Colleagues
working together help one another to model and explain their use of
strategies, and emphasize that the more students understand strategies,
the more likely they are to use them and help students to self-regulate
their meaning-making and application of key concepts and approaches.

Mara Brkich’s piece highlights how dedication to improving students’
literacy skills – particularly higher-level thinking skills – has
significantly more impact at the school level and not just at the level
of the individual teacher. Students build their ability to
self-regulate when they develop and use a repertoire of strategies that
are needed to accomplish complex tasks, and when introduced to similar
thinking skills in different classes and contexts, they have the
opportunity to understand themselves as learners who can apply and
generalize strategies and approaches. When teachers work together to
implement common goals across a school, classrooms, and disciplines,
they build better learners and thinkers.

We do make a difference when we work together to make a difference for
kids. Hopefully, as the Executive focuses on a few key approaches that
can make the biggest difference for members of the Association, you
will feel better supported in making the changes that you feel will
best lead to authentic and meaningful learning for your students.

Leyton for Krista and the rest of the Exec.

As many of you are aware, the Ministry has been involved for some time now in a wholesale revision to the English language arts curriculum for grades 8-12.

The Ministry ignored long-established protocols whereby the BCTF was involved in the selection of curriculum writing team members, and only after a draft curriculum was available was BCTF input requested.

BCTF members participated in a two-day review of the draft curriculum, which took place in October 2006. The input from this broad cross-section of BC teachers then went back to the curriculum writing team.

Teachers who attended the fall BCTELA conference had the opportunity to attend a workshop entitled “Peek Preview of the Draft English-Language Arts Curriculum,” which was conducted by Gail Hughes-Adams of the Ministry and Cass Crest, who had been involved in the last curriculum revision (1995).

Now, the Ministry is inviting input from the public. It is crucial that teachers familiarize themselves with this draft document and have their voices heard. The “window” for feedback is from February to May 2007. Check out the Ministry web site and this link: http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/irp/drafts/

At the school and local level, teachers need to advocate for adequate time and resources to implement this new curriculum, which is slated for September 2007.

Joanne Panas is a coeditor of English Practice. She teaches English part-time at McRoberts Secondary in Richmond, and is pursuing writing, her other passion, on her so-called days off." 

The cover art for this issue is a piece by one of my English 11 students, Rachel Yang. It was part of a unit we did this year around the essential question "How can we make sense of the darkness in humanity?" The specific task for which Rachel did this piece was called "3-Word Thinking." In this task, students chose three words from the following list to define, explain, and explore in terms of its uses, associations, and connotations: violence, conflict, pain, darkness or destruction. For one of the words, they did a mind map; for another word, they wrote a descriptive piece; and for the third word, they created a visual with a written explanation. Earlier in the unit, students had been introduced to an online scrapbooking site (scrapblog.com) and many of them, including Rachel, took advantage of this new skill for the visual part of this assignment.

Explanation of the Visual

Here, Rachel explains the meaning of the images in her visual:

This collage is my understanding of darkness. Darkness means obscurity,  solitude and suffering; but it can also provoke people to seek the "light" they need and bring out the best in others.

Amidst all the dark parts of the background, there is a thin white line in the centre to represent the concept of "although it is hard to find, there is always hope and light around darkness." The man sitting hunched over and the woman with the wine glass and pills are meant to represent darkness manifesting itself in depression and addictions. The figures and silhouette of people holding hands is to show that some people with darkness inside seek therapy from family, friends and other people. It can also represent the reverse-that family, friends and others seek to help the ones who are in darkness. Aside from therapy and seeking others' help, most embodiments of darkness need time to heal, which is represented by the clock. The angel wing on the woman symbolizes that by going through darkness (in this case, addiction) it can bring out the best in others who wish to help those in need.

Humanity's belief in darkness is that it's the opposite of light, that darkness is evil and light is good. The contrast of dark and light throughout the whole collage- notably the title and the yin yang symbol-is to constantly point out the belief of good and evil, and that darkness is necessary to distinguish between good and evil. The bat underneath the ‘Darkness' words is simply to represent society's vision of darkness in bats and vampires; it also added a nice subtle touch to the collage.