Artifact 1C: Standards

 

Middle School Comprehension Portfolio - Louis Stevens III

I have recently begun a new position as a 7^th/8^th grade English language arts teacher at Toledo Preparatory Academy in Toledo, Ohio. TPA is a public charter operated by the parent program Pansophic Learning and Accel Schools. These are common in the Ohio area, with over forty such buildings in the state. The school is rather small, with approximately ninety students per grade, and I am the only language arts teacher for both grades. The achievement level is low, but this is in part due to the effects of arrested development caused by the COVID-19 global pandemic. The school has very little data collected because this is its first year of operation, growing from a simple elementary school. Consequently, much of the demographical information is not available to me. The school has a population that is primarily African-American and many students are classified as social-economically disadvantaged.

Attendance is at times sporadic at my school because the home situation of my students is not always stable, as we are located in a low income community. Typically, my classes consist of about 25 students. For the purpose of this portfolio I will focus on my first 7^th grade group of the day, 7B. This class has 24 students, with 17 girls and 7 boys. I have 3 students on an IEP in this group.

Students in Ohio are tested in language arts once per year in every grade level (3-8), the AIR test or Ohio standard. To prepare students for this assessment, my school has developed a policy mock test for each state learning standard that must be administered every two weeks, called a SPRINT. Data is carefully collected to analyze change in performance for students, points of concern, and determine a student’s understanding of the corresponding standard. These consist of two essay questions and four multiple choice, where the essays are heavily weighted.

A typical TPA lesson plan format with standards-based curriculum

The standard I would like to focus upon is in the craft & structure strand:

RI.7.6 Determine an author’s perspective or purpose in a text and analyze how the author distinguishes his or her position from that of others.

One exercise we will be performing with this standard is comparing texts with similar topics but differing perspectives. The workbook provided for me this year is called Performance Assessment and has a few working examples that include an essay response component to compare and contrast. When I utilize this resource I plan to modify it in a few key ways. Firstly, to reword using kid vocabulary since this will be an introductory strategy and secondly, to include some helpful notes that will help students to identify key words and phrases that indicate author’s purpose or text structure intent. I also would modify in accordance for my SPED students. I would also like to take advantage of electronic resources as a natural progression of this activity. When students demonstrate a beginning understanding of this standard’s skills, I would like to interchange the articles for ones that would hopefully garner their interest better than the workbook prompts such as current events and trends like video games or TikTok.

My goal with this activity is to of course introduce the concept explicitly and with a teacher model. This lesson will be a natural progression of our experiences so far, so the initial scaffolding will be there. I hope to garner their engagement by selecting a passage from our current read “The Stars Beneath Our Feet” by David Barclay Moore and ask them to consider what the author may be trying to get you to feel or picture by using specific language. Ask them to close their eyes and picture the figurative language being used. Is the author trying to entertain? To inform? From there we can review in the following day and begin the aforementioned activity. The first compare/contrast run through will be done with teacher-led examples before releasing the students to try on their own. This is in reference to the strategy of gradual release of responsibility. The next step will be an exercise in small group practice and finally independent practice. Small group exercise will begin with a discussion. My school requires small group time for lessons, and the groups are typically compromised of four students. Independent writing practice also serve as the final step of assessment before I test the students on the subject. My students will be expected to identify elements of a text that support a central idea, identify author’s purpose, and unique cues to the author’s position on a topic. All my activities that are informative will be completed with simple standards-aligned writing prompts that will be collected for data analysis.