Students use persuasive writing and an understanding of the characteristics of letters to the editor to compose effective letters to the editor on topics of interest to them.

In the first bend of this unit, students will closely read multiple perspectives on the “American Dream” in
order to collect information to use and integrate that information into an evidence-based perspective.
Students will examine primary and secondary source documents to make informed decisions about
what information to collect that may inspire their writing about “The American Dream.”

In the second bend of this unit, students will engage in a short-research process to create a draft of
argumentative speech on the “American Dream” with a specific purpose, audience, and tone in mind.
They will use their inquiry research questions from bend one to begin analyzing search results and citing
and gathering relevant, accurate, and credible information.

This unit is centered around an anchor text that may be common among content area teachers in a high school setting. Although this unit may be incorporated into any high-school English class, it is aligned with Common Core standards for 9-10. This unit will primarily focus on informational and argumentative texts, and can be used to incorporate more informational texts (as directed by the Common Core) into English classrooms at the high school level. This unit is best suited to a collaborative model of development in which ELA and content area teachers share an anchor text (The Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and communicate about how to connect diverse skills to common texts and essential questions.

A short quiz on RI.6, using an excerpt from Daniel Defoe's "The Education of Women". The Dale-Chall text difficulty level is 7-8, and the Flesch-Kincaid level is 9.4.

This lesson series introduces students to four key figures in LGBTQ history who made incredible contributions to the civil rights movement: James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Pauli Murray and Bayard Rustin.

In this lesson students use a simple SOAPSTone form (College Board resource) to analyze six aspects of informational texts: subject, occasion, audience, purpose, speaker, and tone.

 Verifying social media posts is quickly becoming a necessary endeavor in everyday life, let alone in the world of education. Social media has moved beyond a digital world which connects with friends and family and has become a quick and easy way to access news, information, and human interest stories from around the world. As this state of media has become the "new normal," especially for our younger generations, we, educators, find ourselves charged with a new task of teaching our students how to interact with and safely consume digital information.The following three modules are designed to be used as stand-alone activities or combined as one unit, in which the lessons can be taught in any order. "Who Said What?!" is a module focusing on author verification. "A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words'' is a module devoted to image verification. "Getting the Facts Straight" is a module designed to dive into information verification. Lastly, there are assessment suggestions to be utilized after completing all three modules.

This lesson focuses on women who are too often overlooked when teaching about the "foremothers" of the movements for suffrage and women's equality in U.S. history. Grounded in the critical inquiry question "Who's missing?" and in the interest of bringing more perspectives to who the suffrage movement included, this resource will help to ensure that students learn about some of the lesser-known activists who, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, participated in the formative years of the Women's Rights Movement.

This lesson is an introduction to the unit, World of Words, in which students will consider the power of words and the relationship between words and actions in human relations.  Throughout the unit, students will study The Tragedy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare and other shorter works to examine the effective use of rhetorical strategies authors use and that students have at their disposal to make their communication (both written and spoken) more effective as well. Image source:  "Words Have Power" by geralt on Pixabay.com.