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High SchoolMicroCourses Grades 9, 10, 11 & 12MicroCourses are short, grade-specific courses that provide an alternative to the drudgery of textbooks and the excesses of “comprehensive programs.” MicroCourses are focused on critical aspects of the Common Core State Standards in English language arts and support students as they work to gain the knowledge and skills needed for success in college and career. All MicroCourses feature complex texts and are marked by sequences of close reading, text-based writing, and collaborative discussion.

Multi-Unit MicroCoursesMulti-unit MicroCourses are comprised of separate, but related units that ask students to focus on sequences of work carefully designed to help them develop the ability to read, as well as write and talk about, increasingly complex texts. MicroCourse units can be implemented back-to-back or spaced across a semester or a year. Research clearly supports the idea that students need multiple opportunities to learn and practice what they’re learning with different types of texts. MicroCourses provide students with exactly those opportunities.

CLOSE READING: LITERATURE

UNIT 1: Foundations for Inquiry

Grade 9: Foundations for Inquiry (O’Connor and Canin)

These grade-specific studies are designed to establish the tools and practices required for inquiry-based learning. Each study comprises two modules. The first module is designed to help students launch and establish year-long independent reading projects. In the second module, students experience in-depth and integrated cycles of reading, writing, and discussion as they apprentice to the work of making text-based arguments about complex literary texts, an important element of the Common Core State Standards for English language arts in high school.

Grade 10: Foundations for Inquiry (Baxter and Didion)

Grade 11: Foundations for Inquiry (Jones and Hempel)

Grade 12: Foundations for Inquiry (Lahiri and Gordimer)

UNIT 2: Retellings: Authors Talking Across Texts

Grade 9: The Icarus Tales (Ovid, Sexton, Field, and Vonnegut)

These studies bring to life Umberto Eco’s statement, “Books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.” These units are designed to teach students how to analyze how an author draws on and transforms source material in a specific work and how to analyze multiple interpretations of a story, drama, or poem, evaluating how each version interprets the source text. These units are designed around the notion of retellings — the idea that authors draw on and transform stories that have already been told, and in the process, create new meanings. The grade 11 and 12 studies pair the original script with two film versions of each play, including Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire at grade 11 and Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing at grade 12.

Grade 10: The Demon Lover (Bowen and Jackson)

Grade 11: A Streetcar Named Desire (Tennessee Williams)

Grade 12: Much Ado About Nothing (William Shakespeare)

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High SchoolGrades 9, 10, 11 & 12 MicroCourses

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CLOSE READING: INFORMATIONAL & LITERARY NONFICTION TEXTS

UNIT 1: Close Reading of Informational Texts

Grade 9: Reading Intelligence These grade-specific, two-text units carefully scaffold students through cycles of comprehension and analysis work marked by reading, writing, and collaborative discussion about complex informational texts. Students determine the central ideas and arguments and analyze how they unfold over the course of a text. Students also work to describe and understand the language and methods writers employ to develop content. Units culminate in performance tasks in which students compose analytic essays.

Grade 10: Language and Thought

Grade 11: Bias and Assumption in Research

Grade 12: Science Writing for Lay Audiences

UNIT 2: Dealing with Difficulty: Literary Nonfiction

Grade 9: Church and DeTocqueville These units offer students supported opportunities to work with complex literary nonfiction. Composed of two modules, each unit at each grade level provides a valuable excursion into difficulty that gives students practice with the methods proficient readers use when working with complex texts. All units begin with a literary text that scaffolds or augments the work with the second text, a piece of complex literary nonfiction. As with Unit 1, students study the content of the texts and analyze how they are constructed. Students write explanatory essays and text-based arguments.

Grade 10: McPherson and Plato

Grade 11: Winthrop and Ross

Grade 12: Montaigne and Orwell

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High SchoolMicroCourses Grades 9, 10, 11 & 12

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One-Unit MicroCoursesOne-unit MicroCourses engage students in rigorous intertextual work that unfolds over the course of several weeks. These MicroCourses provide a single unit that features extended reading and writing projects that take students deeply into texts, tasks, and topics that are interesting and worthy of sustained attention.

READING AND WRITING REPORTS OF INFORMATION

Grade 9: Tracing Cultural InfluencesThis two-part study is anchored by selections from Hector Tobar’s book, Translation Nation: American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States. The unit is divided into two parts. Part 1 engages students in a cycle of reading, discussion, and writing about an interesting model of reportage. In Part 2, students are guided through a writing process that culminates in the creation of their own research-based informational reports. All of the work in this unit is inquiry-based and places a strong emphasis on reading, rereading, writing, discussion, and collaboration as students work to read and write texts that are complex and insightful.

Grade 10: Models and Methods for ResearchThis MicroCourse begins with a study of two chapters from Susan A. Clancy’s book, Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens, a model of research-based informational report writing that is smart, sound, sensitive, and often very funny. The study is divided into two parts: students’ early work in Part 1 is dedicated to making sense of the chapters; the later assignment in Part 1 builds on those comprehension tasks and positions students to develop text-based arguments about Clancy’s work and to analyze the methods she employs. All this scaffolds the work of Part 2 where students create informational reports based on their own research. Toward the end of the unit, student reports are compiled, distributed, and studied as additional examples of research-based report writing.

Grade 11: Spreading InnovationsThe work in this unit begins with a study of “Slow Ideas” by Atul Gawande. In this article, Gawande works from several examples of innovations in the medical field to make a case for what makes innovations spread. Students study Gawande’s article by moving through a progression of comprehension work followed by a study of his writing methods. Then, students are asked to work in pairs to apply Gawande’s ideas to solve a school or community problem. This task provides students with an opportunity to extend their understanding of Gawande’s ideas about what makes innovations spread by researching and analyzing other innovations – those that spread and those that stalled. Then, students write a research-based paper in which they share their research and analysis and explain what their research reveals about what makes innovations spread. The work in this unit is inquiry-based and places a strong emphasis on rereading, writing, discussion, and collaboration as students work to read and write texts that are challenging and insightful.

Grade 12: How We LearnSelections from Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Anything provide a model and a launchpad for student excursions into the world of acquiring difficult skills. Foer arrived at the finals of the USA Memory Championship as a reporter and a year later returned as a participant where he became the U.S. record holder in speed cards. The first part of the unit is dedicated to completing a tightly focused sequence of close reading tasks: essential comprehension work followed by an investigation of what Foer’s text teaches about learning something difficult and an analysis dedicated to unpacking the methods he employs to craft his report. This work sets up Part 2 where students plan and execute their own learning projects. At the end of the unit, students write their own Foer-like reports, using both primary and secondary source material. The report writing project is scaffolded by a sequence of research “sub-assignments” including careful sentence-level work where students study and experiment with the ways writers provide cues and clues to readers that help them navigate informational texts.

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High SchoolGrades 9, 10, 11 & 12 MicroCourses

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READING AND WRITING ACROSS MULTIPLE TEXTS

Grade 9: Borderlands: Theories and StoriesThe work in this unit is built around multiple texts, including selections from Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Toni Cade Bambara’s short story “The Lesson,” and a class compilation of “borderlands” essays written by students during the unit. Anzaldua’s notion of “borderlands”—those places she describes as “physically present whenever two or more cultures edge each other”—is the central construct of the unit, as well as the touchstone idea that students consider and re-consider as they read and compose arguments about the texts they read during the unit.

Grade 10: Language Matters: Essays and ArgumentsIn this unit, students are asked to read, reread, discuss, and write about essays and arguments on the topic of “bilingualism” by three important American writers: Martín Espada, Richard Rodriguez, and Change-Rae Lee. Work with each text moves through a cycle that begins with comprehension tasks and culminates in an interpretive writing assignment scaffolded by brief preparatory writings and small- and large-group discussions. At the end of the unit, students write their own extended argument in which they synthesize the arguments of the authors they’ve studied and locate themselves in the bilingualism debate using, as Lee does, stories or anecdotes to illustrate and explain their positions.

Grade 11: Writing to Witness, Writing to TestifyThis grade 11 MicroCourse is an invitation to students and teachers to consider a small, yet representative and diverse set of texts that do a particular kind of work. All of these texts have one thing in common: they aspire to do something fundamentally essential and difficult: to stand as what Robert Coles describes as “reports of what was encountered for the eyes and ears of others.” All of the work in Writing to Witness was assembled and arranged to introduce students to the promises and problems of writing that witnesses or testifies. Writing to Witness shares with other Inquiry By Design MicroCourses the aim of helping students grapple with important questions and ideas and become more proficient at the kinds of work people do with texts. It is useful to view the study, then, as a tool for supporting a kind of apprenticeship: an introduction to a kind of writing, and an occasion for leading students to more proficient work in English studies through reading, writing, and discussion.

CLOSE READING: POETRY

Grade 9: Being and Unbeing: A Study of Four Poets

These are grade-level units that center on sets of poems written by poets from different times and traditions. Each unit at each grade level uses a text by one poet as a lens for reading, interpreting, and analyzing other poems and poets. In Being and Unbeing, the study is framed by a short selection from one of e.e. cummings’ Charles Elliot Norton poetry lectures. In grade 10, a selection from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” supplies the lens students use to consider work by three other poets. Both units build on the teaching and learning practices established in the Foundations for Inquiry unit. They are designed to provide students with additional practice in close reading and writing text-based arguments about literature and feature essential close reading work that is required by the Common Core Reading standards in ELA.

Grade 10: Poetry Traditions